Lucifer Possesses a Plant?

Reading Paradise Lost Herbivorously

But the Devil did have some help, from scientists, as one might have expected, for knowledge through experience (and thus also through experiment?) goes all the way back to the Plant of the Knowledge of Good and Evil:

To create their glowing plants, the MIT team turned to luciferase, the enzyme that gives fireflies their glow. Luciferase acts on a molecule called luciferin, causing it to emit light. (Anne Trafton, "Engineers create plants that glow," MIT News, December 12, 2017)

We thus see that Lucifer is involved in this work of luminescent plants, as the two allusions to his name imply! But all will be for the best, as Mephistopheles tells us:

[Ich bin] Ein Teil von jener Kraft, / Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.
[I am] Part of that power / that incessantly wills to do evil but unceasingly achieves the good. (Goethe, Faust, 1335-6)

But the Devil could be lying . . .

Bulgakov's Fesiya is Goethe's Faust?

Goethe
Distorted Image by An(other) Englishman in Germany

A recent commentator, Thomas, from the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium asked me a difficult question about my novella's dependence on Bulgakov:

You said your "story relies more on Bulgakov's retelling of Goethe's story in his inimitable magnum opus, The Master and Margarita".

Actually I've always been enormously intrigued by Boelgakov's work, and in particular by its relation with Goethe and the Faustian theme. The formal and "superficial" allusions are clear enough, but could you tell me more about the deeper substantive and thematic relation, beyond the central appearance of Satan as such for example, and the love between the Master and Margarete? Thanks a lot for any information on that point.

I don't actually know very much about that, but the question got me thinking:

I'm no expert, and thus offer no depth, but Margarita seems the one bargaining with Satan (Woland) over the Master and his manuscript.

That looks like a reversal of roles, but I'd need to re-read with that in mind to see what is implied by this reversal.

The Master seems oddly un-Faustian, weak-willed and dependent. If there's a Faust in this tale, it would appear to be Margarita, except that she's playing both roles -- Faust and Gretchen.

But you've probably already noticed these things . . .

And he likely had, for he replied:

Thanks for your interesting reaction, Jeffery!

Recently I read in a Boelgakov comment that in the primitive version of the novel, the Master was a certain Fesija, a savant who was concerned with medieval satanic arts, and standing much closer to the Goethean Faust. This figure of Fesija is supposed to have been inspired by the religious philosopher Pavel Florenski (1882-1937), who was arrested in 1928.

Later on the Master became in the first place Boelgakov himself (or maybe Gorki).

Do you know something about these things?

I admitted my ignorance:

No, I knew nothing about those things. Thank you! I'll look into this.

I did as I said I would and looked into this, finding:

In Bulgakov's early versions of the novel the part of the Master was played by Fesiya, a wise man who was interested in the devilry from the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. Fesiya was occupied with demonic powers much more than later the Master, he was much closer to Goethe's Faust. Fesiya was probably inspired by the philosopher Pavel Alexan-drovich Florensky (1882-1937), who was arrested in 1928.

I found that information on the website Master and Margarita, a site I'm familiar with, though I wasn't familiar with this particular page.

See? One really can learn something new each day . . .

"I am chatting with a modern Goethe!"

A recent visitor stopped by on an early blog entry of mine on Derrida (where I claimed that my then-five-year-old son En-Uk believed that nothing exists outside the text), and this visitor made an intriguing, if puzzling remark about recursive stories:

Stories within stories, ok, but telling the story they are told by! That's the inevitable recursion we will always be doomed to . . .

Deeming this an opening to promote myself, I replied:

Here's 'my' story . . .

The visitor took a look:

Waw... Looks great . . . I am chatting with a modern Goethe! Particularly the following comment is intriguing me:

"Hodges very successfully argues that moral choice lies at the center of the problem of the human condition, and he drives home his point -- without metaphysics and without moralizing -- that our situation in the Cosmos is precarious indeed; and that recent progressive claims for the transformation of society and the human race through a postmodern revolution in consciousness are premature, naive, self-deluding, and very possibly self-destructive."

Is this an accurate comment?

Not having received a customary notice from Site Meter that a query was awaiting my response, I only happened to notice this comment when I was deep within my blog's inner mechanism deleting spam, so I only then replied:

[S]orry, but I didn't get a notice of your comment with its query:

"Hodges very successfully argues that moral choice lies at the center of the problem of the human condition, and he drives home his point -- without metaphysics and without moralizing -- that our situation in the Cosmos is precarious indeed; and that recent progressive claims for the transformation of society and the human race through a postmodern revolution in consciousness are premature, naive, self-deluding, and very possibly self-destructive."

That was a reader's review, and you asked:

"Is this an accurate comment?"

My belated reply:

I hope so . . . because it sounds good . . . but I don't quite comprehend the praise. That reader must have understood more than I did . . . . Anyway, if you do read my story, I hope it's worth your time and effort.

I hold that same hope for all readers, and you can find out for yourself at this site here, though a site where you will also clearly see that I am no modern Goethe (a remark perhaps meant ironic), but merely one of that great man's epigones . . .

Terrance Lindall: "Satan’s Peculiar Grace" in The Bottomless Bottle of Beer?

Terrance Lindall
'Peculier Grace'?

Wikipedia

My friend Terrance Lindall, artist and intellectual, has prepared a lecture, "Satan's Peculiar Grace," for the 14th Annual WAH Salon Art Club Show, which has its opening reception on January 26, 2013, from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center (WAH Center). In that reception, Lindall will offer a literary analysis of the character of Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost and related literature, as we see here in his preliminary lecture notes:

Literature and art are fecund with the character of Satan. In Faust he inspires a scholar, who, in pursuit of knowledge, seems to be ensnared. In Balzac's The Fatal Skin, Benét's Devil and Daniel Webster, and Stoker's Dracula, we see that Evil incarnate has a peculiar, even attractive grace. Why are stories of these Satanic characters MORE interesting than stories about goodly characters? Milton had that problem. Paradise Lost was far more interesting than Paradise Regained and Dante's Inferno far more compelling than Dante's Paradiso. You can see at the WAH Center on January 26th where we discuss this issue one of the latest works of art revolving around an oily and persuasive Satan. They are my own illustrations for Horace Jeffery Hodges' BOTTOMLESS BOTTLE OF BEER that was just published two weeks ago. Indeed you will see that the devil therein has a peculiar grace as he attempts to ensnare a guileless naif.

Lindall's lecture is farther-reaching than just my story, but he'll have on display some of his illustrations for my story, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, which can be seen in part here and can be ordered here.

The expression "peculiar grace" derives not from Jeffrey Lent's novel of that name, A Peculiar Grace, but from John Milton's Paradise Lost 3.183-4, where God declares:

Some I have chosen of peculiar grace
Elect above the rest; so is my will . . .

Those chosen of peculiar grace have a divinely selected role to play in God's purposes, a theme taken up by Stephen M. Fallon in Milton's Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority, in which Fallon argues that Milton applied the category to himself, considering himself "blameless" and "perfect" (page x). Those of us who are not John Milton might consider this a peculiar pride on Milton's part, a pride shared with Satan, so perhaps Milton really was "of the devil's party," as William Blake suggested.

Lindall draws specifically upon Fallon's book, at least for the lecture title, but takes up the other side of Blake's equation and applies "peculiar grace" to Satan himself, as though Satan has a divinely chosen role to play, a suggestion that leads into such debatable soteriological territory as that of felix culpa (i.e., happy fall).

Lindall seems to play with another meaning of "peculiar grace" with respect to my story. That 'peculiar' grace Lindall refers to wouldn't happen to be an allusion to something that I borrowed from Neil Gaiman, a Shoggoth's Old Peculiar, would it?

The complete lecture notes to Lindall's talk can be read here.

New Fiction: Story by Horace Jeffery Hodges, Illustrations by Terrance Lindall

First Sip

Terrance Lindall

A few days ago, I announced an upcoming publication of my story, "The Bottomless Bottle of Beer," a Faustian tale of more than fifty pages of text, which will first appear in an anthology, then later as a novella accompanied by another fifty interspersed pages or more of illustrations, of which you can read the first several paragraphs at that blog entry announcement. One commentator asked about the concept behind the story and the process of writing, so I explained:

I was enjoying a beer after exercise last January and had the abrupt thought that a bottomless bottle would be great.

I then was struck by the further thought that this could make a great temptation story. The Faustian plot was an obvious one.

When I had time in February, I wrote about 50 pages in two weeks and had the entire story. I read it to a friend trained in law because I needed advice on the courtroom scene, and he helped me rework the terminology.

I've spent some time -- when I wasn't busy with student papers -- proofreading and sharpening some points, partly due to good advice from friends.

The story is a cautionary one, of sorts, that questions scientism and postmodernism, but with humor. I try to work in a lot of allusions to other works with similar themes concerning deals with the devil -- or other such arrangements.

There are verbal echoes of Milton's Paradise Lost, Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, Goethe's Faust, Gaiman's "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar," and many other stories. I've put these there to be noticed, but I don't have citations since this isn't scholarship, but a creative, intertextual work.

Most of all, I try to tell a good story.

Readers will have to be the judge of that, naturally, and the story won't available until later this year, but the video of text and illustrations (8.5 minutes) is still available, along with another video that continues the story (3.5 minutes)! Incidentally, the videos contain plot spoilers, but if one ignores the text and focuses upon the images, the videos can be safely watched.

Take a look, for Terrance Lindall's illustrations alone are worth your time!

Kaye Blegvad's Master and Margarita Series

Manuscripts Don't Burn

But they do inflame . . .
Kaye Blegvad

A few short days ago, in blogging on homesickness -- or my lack thereof -- I borrowed an illustration from the New York Times drawn by Ms. Kaye Blegvad. Because I am always careful to give credit, but also because I use these occasions as learning experiences, I not only linked to Ms. Blegvad's website, I took the opportunity to look around there, and I discovered there a shared interest in Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, one of my favorite works of literature. As Ms. Blegvad writes:

Damn, what a book.

Adding:

A couple of drawings inspired by it.

Followed by an image of the cat called "Behemoth" and the woman known as "Margarita." These are found on her blog entry for October 13, 2011, which can be visited by clicking on "writes" above (or here below). Three other images from the novel can be seen by clicking on Manuscripts Don't Burn, a famous line from the novel.

In a few weeks, I'll be blogging on a 'manuscript' -- not really handwritten, of course -- that I've been working on that is preoccupied with Bulgakov's novel, Milton's epic poem, and Goethe's drama, for I draw connections among these three as well as with a few other 'daemonic' texts, though I swear to remain firmly aligned with the better angels of our nature.

Meanwhile, click over to Ms. Blegvad's site and browse around . . .

Mephistopheles as Bearer of 'Sad' Tidings in Faust

Mephistopheles

Samuel Ramey as Mephistopheles in Faust

(Image from Samuel Ramey)

When I attended Herr Martin's two-semester German course at Baylor on Goethe's Faust, I thought of myself as somewhat of a Faustian type in my search for knowledge, but one of my assignments was to play the role of Mephistopheles, so I had to memorize his lines in Part I, Scene 12, not all of which I fully understood at the time, but in re-reading them now, I catch all of the nuances . . . I think. Be that as it may, here is Mephistopheles toying with a woman whose husband has abandoned her, leaving her behind as a 'grass widow'. Mephistopheles pretends to bring news of her husband's death and the report of his last words:

Mephistopheles

Ich stand an seinem Sterbebette
-- es war was besser als von Mist --
von halbgefaultem Stroh. Allein er starb als Christ,
und fand, daß er weit mehr noch auf der Zeche hätte.
"Wie," rief er, "muß ich mich von Grund aus hassen,
so mein Gewerb, mein Weib so zu verlassen!
Ach, die Erinnrung tötet mich!
Vergäb’ sie mir nur noch in diesem Leben!"

Marthe, weinend

Der gute Mann! Ich hab’ ihm längst vergeben.

Mephistopheles

"Allein, weiß Gott! Sie war mehr schuld als ich."

Marthe

Das lügt er! Was! Am Rand des Grabs zu lügen! (Goethe, Faust I 2951-2961)

Here's my attempt at a loose translation:

Mephistopheles

I stood at his deathbed
-- hardly better than manure --
of half-rotted straw. He died alone as a Christian,
and found that he still had accounts to settle.
"Alas," he cried, "I hate myself to the depths,
leaving my work and wife the way I did!
Ah, the memory kills me!
If only she would forgive me in this life!"

Marthe, crying

The good man! I've long forgiven him.

Mephistopheles

"God only knows, she was more at fault than I."

Marthe

What? He lies! On the brink of the grave, and lying! (Goethe, Faust I 2951-2961)

The lying is all from Mephistopheles, naturally, for he was not truly present at the husband's deathbed -- nor can one be sure that the man has died -- but I had great fun playing the role. The other students thought that I made a particularly good devil. Well, hell, I'd had a lot of practice at that.

Re-reading this passage and what follows brought back many memories. Three other students and I did the entire scene, lines 2865-3024, which taxed my powers of recall and perhaps thereby explains why I only clearly remember the student who played Margarete, a cute little person who was also funny and laughed about the monads of Leibniz -- not to be confused with the gonads of Leibniz, though it's a common error. Apparently, she'd read a selection in an upper-level German course and found monadology hilarious in its absurdity. I'm not sure that she was of a philosophical mind, but she was fun to be around.

I wonder what she did with her life . . .

Goethe's Faust: Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum.

Mephistopheles in Faust's Study - Eugène Delacroix

(Image from Word Search with Adair Jones)

A few days ago, I quoted lines 2038-39 in the first part of Goethe's Faust:

Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

I offered this translation:

Grey, dear friend, is all theory,
And green the golden tree of life.

I then explained:

The original promise in the Garden of Eden was that eating from the Tree of Knowledge would make one god-like, and perhaps it did, but that proved unsatisfactory for the scholar Faust, as the first scene of him in his study makes clear, for he decries the futility, the sterility, of all the scholarly knowledge that he has accumulated.

Mephistopheles therefore offers 'fruit' from the Tree of Life, presumably, the experience of living life to its fullest. He happens not to be speaking to Faust at the moment that he makes this offer in these particular words (for he's chatting with a student at the time), but that's also what he offers Faust in return for Faust's soul.

To add a few points to that . . . Mephistopheles was disguised as Faust in this scene in order to meet with one of Faust's students and offer 'academic' advice, which is what he has done above. I decided to find the passage in Faust, which is how I came to know the precise line numbers above, and I read on to discover that scarcely nine lines later, Mephistopheles writes the following, possibly contradictory advice for the student in line 2048:

"Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum."

The line is from Genesis 3:5 in the Latin Vulgate. The King James Version has:

"Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."

Mephistopheles then advises, in lines 2049-50:

Folg nur dem alten Spruch und meiner Muhme, der Schlange,
Dir wird gewiß einmal bei deiner Gottähnlichkeit bange!

This translates somewhat as follows:

Only follow the old proverb and my cousin, the snake:
You'll surely become anxious sometime through your God-likeness!

If this knowledge is theoretical knowledge, then Mephistopheles has contradicted his earlier advice about partaking of the "golden tree of life" rather than partaking of "grey . . . theory." Of course, he could simply be speaking this way to confuse the student whom he's misleading. Or he might mean that knowledge from the tree of knowledge is really experiential knowledge, knowledge gained by living life to its 'fullest' -- and thus be speaking consistently. I have previously noted this in John Milton's Paradise Lost:

A distinction has been drawn between an abstract, conceptual knowledge of evil and a concrete, experiential knowledge of evil.

But I don't know if Mephistopheles knows enough of Milton's Paradise Lost to play with this concept in this way.

"Grey is all theory . . ."

Mephistopheles and Faust

Bewitching Students

(Image from Wikipedia)

On our hike a few days ago up Bulamsan, one of the many mountains in and around Seoul, Sun-Ae and I took a break on a ridge leading up to the mountain and sat under a roofed platform beside the path to rest, sip water, gaze down at Seoul, and talk about various things.

My wife has a doctorate in German literature, and we met in Germany, so we both know a bit of German literature, and when she made a reference to Goethe's Faust, the line about striving and satiation, I caught her point and exclaimed:

"Verweile doch, du bist so schön!"

We discussed what was meant by Faust saying to the moment:

Remain, you are so beautiful.

To say those words to a moment of satisfaction, in the desire that it remain, that one might no longer strive for change . . . that would have been Faust's undoing, his damnation to hell, based on the particular pact that he'd made with Mephistopheles.

I know Faust fairly well. In fact, I read all of Faust, in German, when I was 21, in Mr. Martin's class at Baylor University. He taught a two-semester, upper-level seminar on Faust and invited me to take the class even though my German wasn't very good because he knew that I liked literature. I didn't understand very much at the outset, but I learned a lot, and still remember a few lines. For example, as my wife and I discussed the contrast between our scholarly life in books and our outdoor life hiking up the mountain, I cited Mephistopheles:

"Grau . . . ist alle Theorie . . ."

That led to a fuller citation:

Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

Suddenly, I was struck by the deeper meaning of the lines. Mephistopheles is contradicting Satan, ostensibly, anyway. Here's the translation:

Grey, dear friend, is all theory,
And green the golden tree of life.

The original promise in the Garden of Eden was that eating from the Tree of Knowledge would make one god-like, and perhaps it did, but that proved unsatisfactory for the scholar Faust, as the first scene of him in his study makes clear, for he decries the futility, the sterility, of all the scholarly knowledge that he has accumulated.

Mephistopheles therefore offers 'fruit' from the Tree of Life, presumably, the experience of living life to its fullest. He happens not to be speaking to Faust at the moment that he makes this offer in these particular words (for he's chatting with a student at the time), but that's also what he offers Faust in return for Faust's soul -- though Mephistopheles only wins if Faust utters those fateful words:

Verweile doch, du bist so schön!

Faust eventually utters the words, but he states them subjunctively -- if I correctly recall -- and they mean the opposite of their literal meaning, anyway, in the sense that he uses them, for he addresses a moment of striving, not satiation.

Or so we discussed, before continuing on our hike, and you can now see why I married the right woman for me . . .

Germane Shaggy Dog Joke?

Super Shaggy Dog

(Image from Funny Dog Site)

There was once a poor man named Vere who wanted to be a dog, for he thought that even a dog's life would be better than the one that he had. As he obsessed on this thought, he wished with such longing that his very wish came true. He was transformed into a dog. A shaggy dog. A very shaggy dog. A very, very shaggy dog. A very, very, very . . . well, you get the picture.

Although to be a dog had been Vere's fervent wish, his life was not truly better. He no longer needed to worry about paying taxes, but there was still death to feel anxious about. To stave off death, he had to eat, but as a dog without a home, he had to be scrounging around for his next meal.

Stray dogs being forbidden in the city, Vere was soon picked up by the authorities and caged. Because his coat was so dirty and matted, he was subjected to the indignity of having it shorn. Furless, he shivered in his cold cage, snarled at his keepers, and even bit at them whenever they came near.

A few days of this, he was weary of a dog's life and longing for his old life back. He longed with such fervor that his wish again came true. He was transformed back into a man.

Finally, Vere was satisfied with his life, and reflecting at that moment on his misery as a shorn, aggressive dog, he said to himself:

"Vere, while a dog, you bit so shorn!"