HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY, SEVERUS! (Else what is fandom for?)

(In case you’re wondering: Because I love traitors and hate children. You can imagine how this makes my work for IMAPP both easier and harder, respectively.)

mood: heh

music: eh (I reread Liberty/License, and now I have “Horse with no Name” stuck in my head)

THIS IS NOT A LOVE SONG: Some interesting stuff at MarriageDebate. We’re talking about love; I’m quoting “Dark Harbor” and the court of the Countess of Champagne. Other things of note include a remote area of China with “no husbands, no fathers“; campus conservatives who see same-sex marriage as a rejection of the sexual revolution; a fantastic piece by a Unitarian who asks what Unitarians can do besides supporting the right to marry and the right to divorce; Andrew Sullivan and marriage and “outsiderdom“; and our question of the week, which is this:

WHAT ABOUT THE RISKS OF BARRING SSM?

In most current discussions of same-sex marriage, supporters of gay marriage focus on the present–couples denied benefits or social support–while opponents focus on the future–the risks and harms of fundamental changes in our understanding of marriage and family life.

But as some SSM proponents, most notably Jonathan Rauch, have pointed out, nothing stands still. Even if Massachusetts’s court ruling is overruled by amendment, even if no state so much as flirts with gay marriage in the future, our understanding of marriage is not going to get stuck in 2005 (thank God), nor will it return to 1950 or 1880 (thank God). Rauch and others argue that failing to enact same-sex marriage will teach children that cohabitation (by gay couples) is a-okay, and that sex and marriage can rightfully be separated. They predict that some, maybe even many, heterosexual couples will shun marriage as a discriminatory club. (Some people already do this.) And they predict that without same-sex marriage we won’t just have marriage and not-marriage; we’ll have a bewildering array of quasi- and pseudo- and kinda-sorta-not-really-marriages, like domestic partnerships and civil unions and “well, we had a commitment ceremony at our synagogue, but obviously we’re not married” and individualized contractual arrangements.

Are these predictions right? For opponents of same-sex marriage, would preserving marriage turn into a pyrrhic victory? What do these predictions imply about human nature, American values, and political trade-offs?

As always, email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com with any comments.

“AFTER MAKING LOVE WE HEAR FOOTSTEPS”: Neat piece in Touchstone on bioethics and the President’s Council thereon. (Here’s a piece I did on ditto.)

…Back in Being Human, though, I ran across a provocative poem by Galway Kinnell. Titled “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” it describes a small boy who sleeps through all nighttime disturbances except his parents’ quiet lovemaking, which wakes him and sends him running into their bed to snuggle and sleep. I wanted to affirm the poem’s warmth toward the “familiar touch of the long-married,” as Kinnell puts it.

But I was disturbed that the poet thought it sweet, even good, that “habit of memory” propelled the boy “to the ground of his making,” in between his parents. It seemed almost disgusting to think of a third person involved, even only proximately, with sex; making love is for two people, between two people. And yet, thinking further, I started to question my own reactions: Why wouldn’t there be a mysterious connection between making love and a child? That, after all, is the pattern of human reproduction–intimacy between two lovers becomes parental love. Babies follow sex.

What is more, I have begun to suspect that God’s design for procreation, as in so many other areas of life, might contain hidden blessings. In the poem, the parents’ lovemaking grows deeper, infused with new affection and wonder, with their son’s appearance: “In the half darkness we look at each other and smile and touch arms across his little, startlingly muscled body.” The son, too, benefits by the stability and love of his family, “his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.”

Do we miss some of the good gifts of marriage, sexuality, and family by stripping out the procreative mystery of sex? The poem portrays a family flourishing through connections that are greater than themselves; its spirit is one of awe and gratitude, the very opposite of the need for control we so often require.

more

IF YOU PRAY: All three of my clients tonight were moving toward marriage–or they’d just arrived there, as my last client got married today! So if you pray, could you please pray for FR, Latasha, and J and I (the newlyweds)? Thanks!

LYING IN THE GUTTERS, LOOKING AT THE STARS: Comics reviews. (In the Shadow of No Towers, The Golem’s Mighty Swing, and Y: The Last Man v. 1 to be reviewed soonish.)

Daredevil v. 10: The Widow. Ooh, more on Daredevil’s marriage, plus some neat stuff with the Black Widow, whom I’d pretty much ignored when she appeared fleetingly in other comics I’ve read. Here, she’s fun, and Alex Maleev draws her really well. She looks Russian, at least to my uncultured eyes. (Maybe that’s a low bar. Whatever. She’s easy on the eyes, looks like her proper ethnicity, and looks nothing like the other women in the book. That’s much, much better than most superhero artists do.) I did like this, although it’s slight (which complaint will be a theme of this set of reviews), and you definitely shouldn’t start here if you’re looking to get into Bendis and Maleev’s very cool run on Daredevil. It’s probably the weakest volume so far, but that’s still quite good if you’re following this storyline. (You want to start with Underboss. It’s a nice long storyline that mixes hard-boiled with spiraling superhero insanity. Great character work from both writer and artist. Beautiful pictures. Fun for New Yorkers, I should think.)

Human Target: Living in Amerika. Hrrrrmmm. Apparently this was the volume where the central conceit (Christopher Chance can impersonate anyone, anyone at all, thus his identity is breaking up under the pressure of the alternate identities he’s assumed for his job) started to wear thin for me. First story is utterly predictable and lame, lame, lame. (I generally can’t guess plot twists. Thus, if I can guess your plot twist, you have failed.) Second story is okayish but nothing special. Third story is supposed to be a lark, and is fun enough while it lasts, but again, no. Skip this. Go for Human Target: Final Cut instead, which I really liked. (Also, yet again this book is choked with captions. Please stop spelling everything out!)

Planetes v. 4. Aw, I love Planetes. Humanistic sci-fi manga; combines Golden Age wonder of space with contemporary political and existential sense of limits and loss. This was probably my least favorite volume so far, as a good chunk of it relies on this lame “kids are innocent of the compromises and sellouts of adulthood!” theory that I find dishonest about childhood, destructive of leadership, and harmful to people (and, in this case, animals) around the “innocent” characters. The ending, however, suggests that the next (and last) volume of the series will complicate this storyline. And, as always, Planetes has a keen sense that people bring our problems and our politics with us into space. Well worth your time, though you should start at the beginning.

The Pulse v. 1. Jessica Jones gets a column at the Daily Bugle. If that makes you say, “Uh, what?”, then you are definitely not the target audience here. If, instead, you squeal, “Oooh! Is J. Jonah Jameson in this? What about Ben Urich?”, then this comic will gladden your fangirl heart. I loved it. I’m in love with J. Jonah, and I don’t care who knows it. This is a lightweight piece–and all the women look exactly the same, thank you, Mark Bagley, you can go home now–but it’s got Jessica Jones! And J. Jonah Jameson! And it’s about journalism! (And I feel like I’m on the “J” page from Animalia.) Anyway, I’m a complete sucker for journalism stories, and JJJ is my third-favorite superhero comics character ever (after Cyclops and Daredevil), and Brian Bendis is doing perfectly serviceable Bendis dialogue (nothing special by his standards, but better far than most of what you’ll read). I’m practically petting the darned thing.

I will note that there’s a lame moment where one journalist character thinks of her job as “bringing people together” or some such. (Can’t be bothered to look it up now.) That’s not what journalism mostly does. I’m wildly idealistic about journalism, but what it mostly does, when it’s at its best, is divide people. It points out the truths people would prefer to ignore, and forces choices that societal comity requires us to avoid. The truth has rarely brought people together in the past; why should we expect it to do so now?

OK, off soapbox. I’m very fond of The Pulse, but honestly, it’s not a great comic and if you don’t swoon for journalism, Jessica, or Jonah, you should pass it by.

The Ultimates v. 1: Super-Human. I’ve said before that I don’t really get the point of the Avengers. This comic plays up the “ill-suited group of messed-up characters have to work together” angle, but with much added cynicism and angst, so I am still left cold. Bruce Banner’s character made precisely no sense. I did like Tony Stark, solely because he was an oasis of angstlessness. Dunno. A lot of the “updating” felt rote and “Saturday Night Live”-level cheap to me. New X-Men did a better job with the strains-of-leading-crazy-people thing, and Ultimate X-Men, while significantly stupider than Ultimates, was also more up-front in giving its readers their explosions amid the soap operatics.

When will the next Sleeper book come out??? I’m dyin’ here, people. (Or Finder! Go read yourself some Finder!)

MARRIAGEDEBATE has a lot of cool stuff up that I keep forgetting to link here. So, some stuff:

A “right not to become a parent”?

bad advice

“Marriage is one way to recognize who is family, but…”

Awesome piece on “today’s Manicheans” from–I kid you not–the National Catholic Reporter. Cats and dogs, living together, next on Fox…

Donor-conceived children talk about their experiences

“Nordic family ties don’t mean tying the knot”

And a meaty, intriguing report: “What Next for the Marriage Movement?” Lots of very specific suggestions and areas where further work and research and discussion is needed. I’d love it if you all would take a look and let me know what you think.

HAMLET: If in King Lear the tragic sidekick’s role is restricted by the larger story, in Hamlet his role expands to become the central story. In creating Hamlet, and shoving him into the role of a revenger, Shakespeare thrusts his new type of marginal character onto the center stage. Hamlet’s character is in many ways an extension of Mercutio; he has a similar ironic view of the world, the same sense of being on the margins (he, unlike Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes, does not seem to know the title of his play), and the same dilemma of a vigorous intellect facing the physical reality of death. At the beginning of the play Hamlet clearly sees himself in Mercutio’s role, as the ironic commenter on the fringes of the Danish court, his separation from the spies and speechmakers around him made more obvious by his mourning clothes. His first words, “A little more than kin and less than kind” (I.ii.67), would have made Mercutio grin with their mixture of bitterness and ironic humor. Like Mercutio, he never loses this sense of humor, whether explaining to Horatio that Claudius and Gertrude married immediately after old Hamlet’s death so that “The funeral baked meats” could “coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (I.ii.187-8) or mocking Osric’s position at court by calling him “spacious in the possession of dirt” (V.ii.101). Like Falstaff, he uses his wit and imagination as a defense against Claudius’s schemes and surveillance, as when he befuddles Polonius by calling the old man a “fishmonger” (II.ii.190). His wit, like that of his predecessors, also acknowledges the danger underlying its humor; Hamlet’s answer to Polonius’s question, “Will you walk out of the air, my lord?”, is “Into my grave?” (II.ii.224-5)–an entirely justified and not only ironic response. He does not see himself as a marginal figure separate from the play’s center; he, like the Fool, Mercutio, and Falstaff, has too much at stake to be a Thersites-like griper or malcontent. Unlike those characters, however, he wants to fill the role of the hero, and knows that he cannot. Throughout the play he compares himself to his models of heroism, whether on the stage or the battlefield, and he never measures up; this self-image as tragic sidekick rather than tragic hero becomes part of his conflict.

The treatment of death in Hamlet fits better with Mercutio or Falstaff’s opinions of it than Romeo or Hal’s. Although through most of the play Hamlet is caught up in considerations of the metaphysical aspects of death, toward the end he begins to take a far less abstracted view of death; it becomes not “sleep” or “The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveler returns” (III.i.72, 87-8), but simply the end of the body and the mind, inevitable and ignoble. The wit which he shares with the tragic sidekicks serves him well when he finally must come to terms with the reality of his own approaching death; he comes in Act V not only to the calm fatalism of “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come” (V.ii.234-6), but also the appreciation of the physical comedy of death in the graveyard scene. The play’s grim ending accords with Hamlet’s disillusionment with the idea of the “noble death.” Although there is an ooutward appearance of justice and symmetry, with Laertes killed “as a woodcock to mine own springe” (V.ii.336) and Claudius dead by “a poison tempered by himself” (V.ii.360), the audience does not leave feeling that justice has been served and Hamlet has died defending his father’s honor against the usurper. Fortinbras’s final summation of Hamlet’s character gets him completely wrong, saying that he would “have proved most royal” and that “the soldier’s music and the rite of war/Speak loudly for him” (V.ii.444-6). Fortinbras, attempting to cast Hamlet as a tragic hero, erases the true picture of Hamlet as a brilliant, humorous man tormented by his inability to act as a hero, his lingering on the margins of his own tragedy.

In moving the marginal character to the center of the play, Shakespeare makes explicit the criticisms of both tragic form and heroism which are implicit in the creation of the Mercutio-Falstaff archetype. By forcing a character who cannot play the tragic hero’s role into the tragic hero’s story, Shakespeare points out the artificiality of more typical tragedies; he throws the play off balance, calling into question the assumptions underlying other tragedies. In Hamlet, pursuit of abstractions like heroism and revenge leads only to meaningless deaths, from the mistaken killing of Polonius to the carnage which ends the play. Hamlet, knowing that his actions will have consequences, must untangle the possible results of his actions and weigh their justifications in a way that the tragic hero can simply avoid; he can never assume that he is in the right. He even admires Fortinbras, who is much more of a hero-type than he is, praising the other prince’s “spirit with divine ambition puffed” (IV.iv.52). When he compares his own inaction and confusion to the player who “But in a fiction, in a dream of passion” (II.ii.579) can take heroic action while he cannot, Shakespeare makes the audience understand both his anguish and the falseness of his model. In Hamlet heroism itself becomes entirely theatrical: even a murderer like Claudius can wrap himself in kingly glory; even a thoughtless warmonger like Fortinbras can seem valiant. Shakespeare both connects heroic ideals and theatrical pretense, and places their “un-theatrical” (one of the play’s paradoxes is that its central character insists that he is not an actor) and un-heroic opposite at the center of the play. In this way he overturns the audience’s view of the hero even more profoundly than he did with Mercutio and Falstaff, who eventually had to move aside so that the hero could emerge.