Timing is Everything--Season of Mists

This is the written transcript of an audio essay recorded for The Cluttered Desk Podcast.  It is the fourth in a series of reflections on Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

Have I mentioned that Dream once sentenced someone to an eternity in Hell?  It seems like a rather glaring omission, doesn’t it?

Once upon a time Dream of the Endless, our title character and apparent protagonist, fell in love with a human woman.  Nada, the beautiful and accomplished queen of an ancient kingdom, returned his affection—until she learned who he was.  Then, wisely deciding that perhaps it isn’t the best idea for mortals to become romantically involved with eternal and trans-dimensional personifications of elemental human experience, she rejected his offer to make her his queen.  There is no wound to pride quite like the wound of rejected love, and so Dream acted rashly.  He banished her to Hell until such a time as he would forgive her.  This story is alluded to in varying detail throughout the first three volumes of The Sandman, but in the fourth volume, Season of Mists, we finally confront it for the problem that it is.

Season of Mists is a volume filled with finally moments, not the least of which is the opportunity to see the family of the Endless gathered together.  As the volume opens, Destiny, the eldest, calls a family meeting with his siblings—or most of them, at least.  He meets together in his hall with Death, Dream, Desire, Despair, and Delirium.  We are missing only Destruction, who, we learn, has abandoned his realm and cut off all communication with his family.  This family reunion is rich with narrative and thematic significance, but its most important contribution to the story at hand is that it propels Dream on the mission that will give shape to this volume’s narrative.  Goaded on by his sibling Desire, Dream is led to the conclusion that his response to his former lover Nada was perhaps…well, less than magnanimous.  Convicted of his error, Dream embarks on a necessary but terrifying mission.  He will travel to Hell to forgive Nada and set her free. 

Upon arriving in the infernal realm expecting a deadly struggle, Dream finds something quite different.  He finds that Hell is utterly empty.  When he locates Lucifer, first of the fallen of the Host of Heaven and ruler of Hell, things only become more bizarre.  Lucifer has quit.  He is concluding the process of kicking the damned out of the place of their torture, and he seems quite happy to be leaving his position.  As he ushers the souls of the tormented out of the gate, I am consistently reminded of the line from the band Semisonic:  “Closing time.  You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

As the two part ways, Lucifer leaves Dream with a less-than-benevolent gift:  He entrusts the Prince of Stories with the key to Hell.  “Perhaps I ought to have given it to you with my best wishes,” the former monarch of Hell explains.  “I could have told you that I hoped it would bring you happiness.  But somehow…somehow I doubt it will.”  The rest of the volume unfolds from this moment.  Prompted by the new availability of what Death calls the “most desirable plot of psychic real estate in the whole order of created things,” a crowd of hopeful claimants to the possession of Hell meets at the court of the Dream King.  Representatives from the Norse and Egyptian pantheons; as well as the realms of Order, Chaos, and Faerie; all plead their case for their right to possess the key, with two angelic emissaries from the Heavenly realms standing by to observe. 

What unfolds is the most gripping and engaging entry in The Sandman so far, and the plot of this volume will have incalculable ramifications for the future of the series.  I find, however, that Season of Mists is most interesting when considered as a contrasting study of two characters—two monarchs who must decide how they will hold their authority, their responsibility, and their identities. 

The first of these two characters is Lucifer, the erstwhile Lord of Hell.  It is notable that throughout this volume, as well as throughout the series, he is never referred to as Satan or even the devil.  He is always Lucifer, the light-bearer; the name that he bore as the first in power, beauty, and insight among the angels of Heaven.  Lucifer nurses a grudge against Dream stemming from events in the first volume of the series, and it is apparent that his gift of the key to Hell is strategically given as a retributive act.  But, like all trickster figures, Lucifer does not fit so easily into the role of villain.  As he relinquishes his domain, the fallen angel adopts a disposition that, within the thematic world of The Sandman, represents an indispensable form of wisdom.  In his final gestures as the monarch of Hell, Lucifer shows himself to be the light-bearer in a profoundly subtle way—he is one who bears himself lightly. 

As Lucifer tells it, his drive and conviction as ruler of Hell have been fueled by despair and resentment over one simple fact:  That he will never return to the Heaven from which he fell.  But as he continues to narrate the rationale for his abdication, it becomes clear that he has reached a novel conclusion.  Just because he may never return to Heaven does not mean that he must stay in Hell.  “I grew weary, Dream Lord,” he explains, “mightily weary.  And I ceased to care.”  From this newfound sense of apathy, it seems, has arisen a sense of the possibilities that existence would present to him if he let go of what he has always thought himself to be.  “I could lie on a beach somewhere, perhaps?  Listen to music?  Build a house?  Learn how to dance, or to play the piano?”  Lucifer encounters holdouts among the damned, tormented souls who seem to be clinging to their sins as if they were badges, as if they would have no identities without these crimes.  For them he has one simple message:  It doesn’t matter.  You did these things a long time ago, and no one remembers you.  Stop defining yourself by who you have been, and leave this place.  As a final, brutal display of his commitment to moving on, Lucifer submits himself to a brief but painful rite of passage—he has Dream cut off his wings.

The narrative holds out the possibility that this is all an act, all part of an elaborate ploy to get the revenge on Dream that Lucifer has so desperately wanted.  And maybe it is.  But, you see, for the purposes of this story, it doesn’t matter.  Not at all.  Because regardless of his intention, in his final moments as the ruler of Hell Lucifer becomes the sort of monarch that Dream cannot be.  But it is the sort of monarch that Dream must become if he is to transcend himself and his own limitations.

The second of the two characters in question is, of course, Dream.

If Lucifer embodies the possibility available to one who holds oneself lightly, Dream is always encumbered by his own perception of himself and his responsibilities.  He sees every choice that he makes as an inevitable fulfillment of his role as the Lord of the Dreaming.  When someone steals a portion of his power, as John Dee did, he sets right what the other has wrought through misuse.  When one of his creations goes rogue, as the Corinthian did, he punishes that creation and undoes the wrong that has been inflicted.  This is all as it should be, but this unflinching sense of self and duty also dictates that when someone rejects his affections, as Nada did, that person must be punished in a way that is commensurate to the pain that it has caused him.  It is mathematical, and if the equation is balanced according to mathematical principles then there is no further responsibility.  And the equation must be balanced according to mathematical principles.  But at the end of this sweeping drama concerning the ownership of Hell, Dream must attempt an essential gesture of reconciliation—he must apologize to the one he has wronged.  By the terms of the sentencing, it is he who must forgive Nada, but Dream finds the roles appropriately reversed.  It is he who must implore her forgiveness.  When his apology earns him the slap in the face that he deserves, Dream is forced to grapple with the essential enigma of human relationships.  Nothing is mathematical.  Nada forgives him, but this forgiveness is not in response to what he has offered.  It is gratuitous, as grace always is. 

The title of Season of Mists comes from John Keats’s poem “To Autumn.”  For a long time I thought that this was simply an appropriately evocative allusion, helping to strike a particular mood.  I was wrong in this assessment.  As he agonizes over the decision he must make about the ownership of Hell, Dream risks a moment of vulnerability with his servant Matthew the Raven.  “Everything keeps shifting and changing, Matthew.  It’s like treading a path through mist.”  Mist is an evocative metaphor, often standing in for the seasons and situations that obscure from us who we are or what we are doing.  But so often it is the other way around.  So often it is the seeming clarity of our self-perception that hides from us the truth of ourselves and the world of flux through which we move.  Sometimes it is that which we would deem to be solid that is the mist, keeping us from seeing the process of becoming that is the essence of our lives.  This is the lesson that Dream must learn.  This is the lesson that, regardless of his motive, Lucifer would teach him.  Our last glimpse of Lucifer in this volume sees him making good on his promise.  He is sitting on a beach enjoying a sunset, even offering the Creator a grudging acknowledgment of the beauty of the natural wonder that he beholds.  The next time we see him, he will be playing piano in a night club of which he is the proprietor.  Dream, on the other hand, ends this volume beginning an assay into undoing the harm that his self-consistency has caused. 

There is so much more to say about Season of Mists.  There is the evocative collection of meditations on each member of the family when the Endless gathers together.  There is the toast offered by Hob Gadling, the stubborn immortal human.  There is Charles Rowland and the completion of his education.    There is Lyta Hall and her unborn son, Daniel.  There is Loki.  There is so much to say about Loki.  But timing is everything, and for now we will say what is necessary for our time.  For now we will depart with the picture we have painted.  A picture of two kings:  One who lives in a hell of his own making, and one who has begun to realize that you don’t have to stay anywhere forever.        

Timing is Everything: Dream Country

This is the written transcript of an audio essay recorded for The Cluttered Desk Podcast.  It is the third in a series of reflections on Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

“Writers are liars.”

This is not an indictment, nor is it a confession, nor is it a statement of personal belief.  This is a quotation from the first chapter of Dream Country, the third collected volume of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.  This is an odd statement for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it’s spoken from one writer to another. But more to the point, Gaiman chose this line as one the volume’s epigraphs.  For a narrative that is self-consciously concerned with the significance of reading and writing to human life, both individual and collective, this is an odd choice for a flagship quotation.  As odd as it is, however, these words from Erasmus Fry (whose name alone should signal his literary profession) bring into focus one of the central tensions of this volume—indeed, one of the central tensions of The Sandman itself:  The often-tortured relationship between fact and truth.

Unlike most volumes of the series, Dream Country collects a handful of stories that do not cohere into a single sub-arc within the larger narrative of The Sandman.  These disparate stories, however, are united by a persisting concern for the tension between the world that we receive through empirical evidence and the world that we perceive through vision, imagination, and dream.  Each of these stories explores in its own way the potential glories and potential pitfalls of engaging with the world of things through the lens of the creative and imaginative.  Although not all of these stories address this tension through direct reference to writers and writing, two of them certainly do. 

The first of these stories, entitled “Calliope,” opens with a premise that is as familiar as it is believable.  The not-quite-sympathetic protagonist, Richard Madoc, is a writer with a predictable problem.  He has published a first novel to great critical and popular success, but he can’t seem to write another one.  If his plight is familiar enough to be cliché, his solution is far from it.  Through finding and trading an obscure occult artifact, he receives from the aging writer Erasmus Fry a boon that promises to free him from his creative agonies.  He comes into possession of a young, blonde-haired woman who, the reader learns, has been held captive by Fry for the years of his greatest success.  But since this is The Sandman, the young woman is of course not a young woman at all—she is Calliope, one of the nine Muses who have served to inspire the art and imagination of the human race since the ages of antiquity.  Through his subjugation of Calliope, Erasmus Fry has been able to direct her power toward the furthering of his own career, and he now promises Richard Madoc that she can do the same for him. 

Calliope’s presence gives Madoc exactly what he desires.  While she is imprisoned in his home, Madoc enjoys a mercurial rise in status and success, becoming the sort of literary celebrity that few writers enjoy during their lifetimes.  However, Madoc’s success has a cost. Rendered in haunting detail by artist Kelley Jones, Calliope’s body is broken, battered, and emaciated.  The muse becomes a mine for the writer to strip and exploit to his own ends, and her tangible human body becomes his sexual plaything.  When Dream of the Endless comes to free Calliope from her servitude to Richard Madoc, the writer asserts his perceived right through the desperate and violent language of possession:  “But you don’t understand—I need her.  If I didn’t have her I wouldn’t be able to write.” 

There is something strangely confessional about this story.  As Madoc rises to fame, the accolades that he receives are strikingly similar to those that Neil Gaiman himself has received throughout his career.  He is a genre writer, trading primarily in fantasy and horror, whose work receives critical acclaim that generally does not go to genre fiction, even achieving the envious status of “transcending genre.”  His work crosses mediums and is universally admired and respected.  This similarity to Gaiman’s own career only serves to make the dark cautionary lesson more poignantly felt.  Madoc’s muse is no ethereal spiritual presence giving rise to powers of pure thought and imagination.  Madoc’s muse is a female human body from which he extracts his cherished ideas through a violence that has no other name than torture.  I read this as Gaiman’s addressing of a dark and unspoken potentiality within the creative endeavor.  The writer encounters the world, and from this encounter fashions his creation.  But this act of fashioning may subject the world to the writer’s own self-serving ends, and there is an inherent violence to this act.  William Carlos Williams has famously stated that the poet should seek “[no] ideas but in things,” but what if these things must be forcibly altered, even twisted, in order to give birth to the elusive idea?  I may write, but in my writing my muse may see herself not as she knows herself, but as a dark reflection cast back through the mirror of my own perception.

This tension of the relation between the writer and the world is revisited in the third issue of the collection, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”  The familiarity of this title is no accident, as the writer in question is none other than William Shakespeare, and the subject of the issue is his play of the same name.  Shakespeare, we learn, has struck a deal with Dream of the Endless.  Throughout his career he will devote two plays to the subject of dreams, and in return he will get to become William Shakespeare as we know him—a myth, a household name, and an archetype for all writers in the English language.  “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is to be the first of these two plays.  In this issue we encounter Shakespeare as a young and ambitious playwright, carefully leading his theater troupe through an impressive and intimidating debut performance of this play.  This performance will be staged in an open field, and the august audience will be none other than Oberon, Titania, and their retinue—the same fairy-court that the play renders through the conventions of dramatic comedy.  The glowing, wispy work of acclaimed fantasy artist Charles Vess, at once ethereal and earthy, perfectly captures the magnitude of this encounter both through the stunning grandiosity of the fairy-court’s entry into a common landscape and through the thinly disguised panic on Shakespeare’s face as he recognizes the weight of this performance. 

As the players give their performance, something astounding happens:  Their audience becomes enraptured.  The impressive power of Shakespeare’s work is perfectly articulated through the wonder of Puck, who is brilliantly rendered by Vess as the demonic hobgoblin that Shakespeare’s text suggests him to be.  “This is magnificent,” the fairy exclaims, “and it is true!  It never happened, yet it is still true.  What magic art is this?”  These beings who are magical in their essential nature become the privileged witnesses of a different kind of magic—the magic of the writer’s ability to portray a type of truth that transcends concrete fact. 

This accolade serves to distinguish William Shakespeare from the opportunistic Richard Madoc, but Gaiman’s treatment of the subject does not neatly exculpate Shakespeare of the darker potentialities of relating to one’s world through the imagination.  Among the actors in Shakespeare’s troupe is his son Hamnet.  In a particularly poignant exchange, Hamnet confesses to his friend Tommy the grief that his father’s professional disposition has caused him.  “He’s distant,” the young man explains.  “He doesn’t seem like he’s really there anymore.  It’s like he’s somewhere else.  Anything that happens he just makes stories out of it.  I’m less real to him than any of the characters in his plays.”  William Shakespeare has achieved something remarkable—he has entranced an otherworldly audience through the perfectly human medium of storytelling.  The cost of this endeavor, however, is emblemized through the neglect experienced by his son.  Shakespeare has no battered and tortured muse imprisoned in his home, but Hamnet’s pain suggests that the cost of this success may be just as insidious as that of Richard Madoc’s.  Gaiman wisely refuses to resolve this tension, instead letting the ambiguity it presents lend strength to the story’s impact.  Hamnet’s complaint does not diminish the grandeur of the fairy-court’s applause, but neither does this applause erase the boy’s heartbreak.

Though not explicitly about writers, the remaining two stories in this collection address the volume’s central tension from equally unique perspectives.  In “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” an aging female cat implores the others of her species to wake up and see the world in which they live, a world in which they are the subjects and playthings of a tyrannous humanity.  She shares with them a story, told to her by Dream himself, of a time when the roles were reversed and cats were the lords and ladies of the earth, towering in size and power over the human beings who catered to their every whim.  This order, according to the story, was undone when a single human being spread a message grounded in the liberating power of the imagination.  “Dreams,” this visionary declares, “create the world anew every night.  Do not dream the world the way it is now, in thrall to our masters and mistresses.  Dream a new world…”  Cats, she asserts, can now do the same.  This is the language of revolution, and it is met with the same conservative skepticism with which such language is usually received.  In the darkest of these stories, “Façade,” a forgotten DC Comics super-hero called Element Girl is stymied by the perception that her physical deformity cuts her off from communion with other human beings.  This perception is reinforced at every turn by the tacit messages she receives from her culture; messages asserting that beauty, intelligence, success, and connection are the only truly valuable markers of a meaningful life.  In the face of such persisting ideology, Element Girl’s only avenue of escape comes through a chance encounter with Dream’s sister Death, signaling the end of her life as she knows it.  Through these two stories Gaiman simultaneously asserts the liberating potential of the imagination and avoids the naïve belief that this liberation comes easily.  

As episodic as this volume is, it bears witness to a crucial turn in the narrative of The Sandman.  Within these pages, Dream himself begins to undergo the agony of self-reflection and change that growth demands.  Until this point Dream has existed within the narrative as an efficient and vindictive god, intervening in the affairs of mortals to set right what their fallibility has thrown off course.  Throughout these pages, however, there are subtle signals that Dream is beginning to grapple with his own fallibility.  This is most keenly observable in his interactions with William Shakespeare.  Upon meeting with the bard before the performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Dream announces to Shakespeare the death of his friend and fellow-poet Christopher Marlowe.  “Why did you tell this to me now,” a grief-stricken Shakespeare asks.  “This news could have waited.  Marlowe was my friend.”  Dream can only confess that here he is out of his element:  “I did not realize it would hurt you so.”  Will responds with incensed incredulity:  “You did not realize?  No, your kind care not for human lives.  Dark stranger, already I half-regret our bargain.” 

Dream grapples with these words throughout the performance of the play, and he articulates his tortured thoughts to Titania of Faerie.  By the terms of their contract, Shakespeare’s stories “will live for an age of man; and his words will echo down through time.  It is what he wanted.  But he did not understand the price.  Mortals never do.  They only see the prize, their heart’s desire, their dream…But the price of getting what you want,” Dream concludes, “is getting what you once wanted.”  This, it seems, is among the confounding mysteries of the human heart and mind.  If we are bound by the limitations of our spatial and temporal contexts, even the visions and dreams by which we move forward from those limitations may serve as the markers of what will inevitably be left behind.  We may desire and we may achieve, and we may wake one morning to find that those achievements hold us as fast as did the shackles we escaped.  We may renounce and we may let go of what we have and who we are, and we may wake one morning to reckon what we have lost.  Timing is everything, and there is no stopping the flow of time.  We know this, but how could we not? Like many of Shakespeare’s most insightful protagonists, we’ve reckoned time, we know what’s coming for us. The irony, of course, is that Dream, the architect of our stories, doesn’t. But he will. Time, you see, it’s coming for him too.

Timing Is Everything: The Doll's House

This is the written transcript of an audio essay recorded for The Cluttered Desk Podcast.  It is the second in a series of reflections on Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

A significant portion of the action in The Doll’s House, the second volume of Neil Gaimain’s The Sandman, takes place at a serial killers’ convention.

This is exactly what it sounds like.  It is a professional convention for serial killers, complete with lectures, panel discussions, and a dance party.  The panel discussions are particularly interesting.  In these forums, groups of serial killers, or “collectors” as they name themselves, discuss the most relevant issues facing those who practice their trade.  In a panel on “Women in Serial Killing,” a young woman who calls herself Dog Soup champions the need for female collectors to break with the traditional iconography in which they have traded.  There are too many murderous nurses and black widows, she argues, and serial killing needs more unique and autonomous personas in order to become properly progressive.  At the panel on religion and serial killing, a mightily bearded man pounds on the table as he declares himself to be a loving God, freeing his children from their lives of suffering by ending their mortal journeys.  Each of these collectors, it seems, has a mission and vision that give meaning to their brutal work.  All of this takes place at a hotel convention center, subtly disguised as a “Cereal Convention.”  As in what you eat in a bowl, covered with milk, for breakfast. 

This sounds like a strange cross between a horror movie and a stand-up comedy routine, and that is in many ways how it reads.  This is one of the hallmark’s of Gaimain’s writing, and it begins to flower in this volume of the series.  If Preludes and Nocturnes exhibits an occasional awkwardness in its ambiguity of genre and tone, those same qualities mature into a skillful and whimsical fluidity in this second volume.  It is a testament to Gaiman’s abilities as a storyteller that, in this volume, the reader can simultaneously experience the Cereal convention as both a comedically ridiculous idea and as a textual space for exploring the darkest and most unsettling corners of the human mind.

The keynote speaker for this convention is a figure called The Corinthian.  It’s abundantly clear that the Corinthian is a paramount inspiration for the other collectors, who speak of him and to him with an admiration that is colored by terrified awe.  What these other killers don’t know, however, is that the Corinthian is not one of them at all.  He is a literal nightmare from the world of Dream, and he has used his master’s absence (detailed in volume one of the series) as an opportunity to slip from his domain and satisfy his urges through the sport of seducing and murdering unsuspecting humans.  At first glance, the Corinthian is a tall, slender man who wears sunglasses day and night, indoors and outdoors.  It is when the Corinthian removes his sunglasses, however, that his nature becomes apparent.  Where his eyes should be, the Corinthian has instead two small, additional mouths lined with vampiric, razor-sharp teeth.  It is through these mouths that he eats the eyes of those he has killed. 

When Dream of the Endless discovers this convention and makes his presence known, interrupting the Corinthian’s smugly triumphant keynote address, he chastises his creation before punishing him by unmaking him.  “You were my masterpiece, or so I thought,” he says.  “A nightmare created to be the darkness and the fear of darkness in every human heart.  A black mirror made to reflect about itself everything that humanity will not confront.”  The Corinthian was created by Dream to embody the worst potentialities of every human being, those things that must be hidden or erased if we are to consider ourselves by any conventional definition to be good.  In the hungry maws of the Corinthian’s eyes we were to see the potential by which each of us may objectify others and consume them, if only metaphorically, for our own pleasure or sense of well-being.  This is meant to be trauma, an unmaking of our self-conceptions that would help to keep us honest.  Instead, the Corinthian has given the collectors the inspiration of the self-constructed narrative.  The collectors place themselves within stories of their own devising, stories that justify and legitimize the brutality of their actions.  In these stories, they are messiahs, gods, visionaries, and heroes. 

After unmaking the Corinthian, Dream deals with the other collectors by stripping them of these narratives.  He is the Prince of Stories, and he can do this. 

Until now you have all sustained fantasies in which you are the maltreated heroes of your own stories.  Comforting daydreams in which, ultimately, you are shown to be in the right.  No more.  For all of you, the dream is over.  I am taking it away.  For this is my judgment on you.  That you shall know at all times, and forever, exactly what you are.  And you shall know how little that means. 

Dream has learned from his sister the necessity of death, and he has learned that for time-bound subjects a true estimation of what we are necessitates the death of what we think that we are.  This death, for the collectors, ends in a dispersal of their horrifying fraternity, a centrifugal event that sends them out alone into the darkness, never again to step from it in self-assured cruelty.

Later on in The Doll’s House, there is a contrasting moment of convergence, a centripetal gathering of human minds and souls that is cut short in the same way as the Cereal Convention:  By the intervention of Dream. 

Although Dream of the Endless is the titular character and apparent center of The Sandman’s narrative, the true protagonist of The Doll’s House is very certainly human.  Rose Walker, a young woman just entering her twenties, finds her life submerged in what can only be described as the strangeness of a Neil Gaiman story.  Her grandmother, Unity Kincaid, has awakened from sleeping for most of the twentieth century (again, a story detailed in the first volume), ushering Rose into a starkly unexpected reconfiguration of her family identity.  The search for her missing brother Jed has led her on a journey in which she has encountered witches, has been accompanied by a person who is actually a place who is actually also (somehow) the late British novelist G.K. Chesterton, and has found herself unwittingly staying in the same hotel where a serial killers’ convention is taking place.  As strange as all of this is, however, the most powerful blow to Rose’s conception of her identity and her reality comes with the realization that she, while very much a human being, is also something beyond this.  She is a dream vortex. 

Dream defines a dream vortex like this:  “A mortal who, briefly, becomes… the center of the dreaming.  The vortex, by its nature, destroys the barriers between dreaming minds; destroys the ordered chaos of the Dreaming…Until the myriad dreamers are caught in one huge dream…Until all the dreams are one.  Then the vortex collapses in upon itself.”  When this collapse occurs, Dream goes on to explain, the minds of the dreamers collapse with it, and the fabric of the Dreaming is damaged beyond repair.  He knows this because once he failed to stop a dream vortex from reaching its fulfillment, and, in his words, “a world was lost.”  To prevent this, when a dream vortex arises, Dream must eliminate it.  He must kill Rose Walker. 

Rose is saved from this fate by the substitutionary intervention of her grandmother, Unity Kincaid.  But before the issue is resolved according to the exacting demands of the Dream King, we get to see the initial flowering of the dream vortex, the beginning of the convergence of disparate dreamers.  It is terrifying and beautiful.  As Rose begins to assume her identity as the dream vortex, the walls between dreamers begin to break.  We see this process through the dreams of Rose’s housemates.  Each is caught in his or her own dream, and each dream either fulfills or emblemizes the unspoken longings of each of their lives.  Ken has money and power.  Barbie is a princess on a quest to save a magical realm.  Chantal is in a relationship with a sentence.  Zelda is a little girl looking for intimacy and nurture in a haunting gothic landscape.  Hal finds love in the same relationship where, in waking life, he finds only rejection.  As the dream vortex embodied in Rose Walker becomes active and aware, these dreamers begin to cross over into one another’s dreams.  They begin to see one another in ways that can only occur when one individual crosses into the dreams of another.  They begin to see one another as the embodiments of hopes and fears and desires and despairs that none of them could ever articulate in waking life.  These expressions belong to the surreal, intimate purity of the dream-life of the individual, and through the action of the dream vortex something begins to happen that could never happen otherwise.  One person may now cross over into the dreaming of the other person and see them as they are there.  Rose joyously realizes the wonder of this anomaly and its liberating possibility, and she poises herself to push it as far as it will go:  “…it would be so simple,” she says, “to create one huge dream…”  But then Dream intervenes, and it is all over. 

I want to challenge Dream at this point.  Why can there not be one huge dream?  Why must the remedy be dispersal or isolation, as seen at the Cereal Convention?  Why must convergence be avoided?  I am trapped in my own dreams.  I cannot escape the archetypes by which I understand myself, the stories by which I make sense of my life.  I can’t escape my own dreams.  And maybe this in itself is not so bad, but there is something further.  These dreams cannot be articulated.  At the last, the vital core of what I call my own identity is something that no precision of presentation will ever show to any other person, if indeed I can even see it myself.  The dream vortex fixes this, remedying the loneliness of essential individuation by moving it, miraculously, toward essential unity.  Why can there not be one huge dream?  I know, I heard the thing that you said about worlds collapsing and all that.  But what if this collapse is ok?  What if the only thing that is truly collapsing is a worldview in which we must constantly control, guard, and treasure our own ideas about who we are?  What if this is what it looks like to let go and take your sister’s hand?

Ok, so Dream of the Endless isn’t on hand to offer a response.  But from somewhere, probably from my own head, I hear it anyway.  Timing is everything.  Or, more precisely, time is everything.  Or, even more precisely still, human beings are finite.  No matter what glimpses we may get in dreams or, if we are so fortunate, in waking life of the transcendent, we are limited in space and limited in time.  We are locked in the spaces of our own bodies, the dreamscapes of our own minds and imaginations, and the moments in which we are situated one after another.  There is only a certain number of places that I can be in one day.  There is only a certain selection of words I may use to give voice to what I am.  There is only a certain number of things that I can be—and this number does not include you, any more than your number includes me.

Perhaps there is a tragic loneliness to this conclusion.  But perhaps, also, Dream is reminding Rose Walker (and, by proxy, the reader) that it is only from within this essential limitation that the human subject may transcend the particular limitation of a particular moment.  As T.S. Eliot puts it in his poem “Burnt Norton”:  “Only through time time is conquered.”  A seed can only grow in time.  It is only in time that we may meet Death and take her hand, and it is only in time that we discover what happens next.  Gaiman’s Sandman is populated by beings whose narratives are not bound by a conventional sense of time and space, but it is also filled with human characters who are held fast by these limitations.  After six months of solitary brooding on the trauma of her experience, Rose Walker goes forth to rejoin the world with this declaration:  “Six months is long enough to feel sorry for yourself, isn’t it?”  The immediate transcendence of the dream vortex is not allowed, but the experience of finitude allows for its own gestures of liberation.  In time, Rose may move.  And her movement may be motion forward.  Rose Walker stands in for all of the time-bound readers of The Sandman.  A rose that can only grow from one moment to the next.  A walker who makes her way forward one trudging step at a time. 

Timing Is Everything: Preludes and Nocturnes

This is the written transcript of an audio essay recorded for The Cluttered Desk Podcast.  It is the first in a series of reflections on Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

“Timing is everything,” some say.  As with most truisms, I believe this one should be taken with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of context.  But as I reflect on my experience with Preludes and Nocturnes, the first collected volume of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, I must admit to a certain truth hiding within this easy cliché.

As a young comic book reader, awash in super-hero stories, I was captivated by what I read about The Sandman in the comic review magazines I purchased every month.  Here, it seemed, was a story woven more from the fabric of literature and elemental myth than the often confounding and cumbersome continuities of super-hero comics.  Instead of soap-operatic stories of costumed heroes shamelessly emoting while they beat one another up (stories that I loved, and still love, on their own terms), here was an ethereal fantasy full of whimsey and music.  In my late teens, when I finally deemed myself worthy of passing the “Suggested for Mature Readers” disclaimer that appears on the cover of each single issue of the series, I picked up the first volume and attempted to begin the journey into Gaiman’s opus.  I was not ready for what I found.  Here was the Lord of Dreams freed from his long imprisonment full of bitterness and spite, wreaking merciless vengeance upon those who had wronged him regardless of their agency in the crime.  The stories that followed were dark—much darker than anything that I had encountered so far—replete with horror and murder and a certain vindictive spirit that I had no way of mapping onto my own experience of the world.  This was too much for the parameters of my comfortable, fragile life.  And so I put it away.

But timing is everything.  Just a few years later, as I graduated from college, I also found myself for the first time encountering pain and loss in a way that shook me to my core and called into question every cherished belief that I held about the world and about myself.  And, almost by happenstance, I came back to my old discarded copy of Preludes and Nocturnes and found a story that spoke uniquely to this new experience in a way that no other had.  I understood, in a way that I could not before, that the darkness of this volume was the darkness of human pain.  Having come into awareness of my own capacity for the spite and resentment that are born of loss, the Dream King’s cruel gestures of revenge made sense, and this sense made these gestures more chilling than they were when I had no grounds for relating to them.  But it was also this honest and visceral resonance that persuaded me to continue into this narrative.

Gaiman himself, in the afterward to this first volume, confesses that revisiting these stories forces him to admit that he finds many of them “awkward and ungainly,” and I certainly see where this self-critique comes from.  The Sandman is, ultimately, a meditation on the significance of stories and dreams, on how they shape and are shaped by the individual’s attempts to live a coherent and meaningful life, but these opening chapters give few hints at this beautiful and heartbreaking endeavor.  There is a persisting sense that the author hasn’t yet fully decided on the direction or the genre that the project will take.  There is an unmistakable grounding in the DC Comics universe, something that will gradually diminish as the series progresses.  There is also a pervasive atmosphere of somewhat pulpy horror.  This is not completely out of synch with the rest of the series, but it does give some of these stories a grim tone that is more than a bit dissonant with the later chapters.  I have in recent years recommended this series to as many friends as I could, and for each of them who sees it through to the end, there is an equal number who get stalled out in these opening chapters, the opening to a story that is still at this point obscure, disorienting, and more than a little terrifying.  And I understand this.  So much so that I have sometimes suggested skipping this opening volume, replacing it with a synopsis before moving on to the grander offerings that are to come.  But now, as I return to this volume in a similar state of emotional vulnerability and personal darkness, what I see in these pages is something far different.  Something indispensable to the work that is to come. 

This time it is in the darkest corners of this volume that I find the necessary light for moving forward into the series.  In the past I have given potential readers of The Sandman a definitive strategy for navigating Preludes and Nocturnes.  Skip most of it, I would say, and focus instead on issue four, “A Hope in Hell,” and issue eight, “The Sound of Her Wings.”  I would routinely advise squeamish readers to skip over the three-issue arc toward the end of the volume consisting of the stories entitled “Passengers,” “24 Hours,” and “Sound and Fury.”  These stories revolve around Dr. Destiny, or John Dee as he names himself in these pages, a low-grade DC comics super-villain.  At the beginning of these pages Dee is rotting away, forgotten by continuity, in Gotham City’s Arkham Asylum, though he finds the means to break from this prison and wreak upon the world the chaos that his heart desires.  The chapters that detail this reign of terror and its intersection with the Dream King’s journey are horrifying in a way that I have often found gratuitous.  But upon returning this volume again I see in these terrifying entries some of the most important articulations of the themes that Gaiman will carry to brilliant fruition as his epic unfolds. 

In “Passengers,” the first of these three stories, John Dee waxes philosophical on the nature of dreams to a poignantly doomed woman named Rosemary.  “People think dreams aren’t real,” he says, “because they aren’t made of matter, of particles.  Dreams are real, but they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and plans and lost hopes…”  This last entry is key.  As The Sandman unfolds, we will learn that dream is synonymous with story, with the narratives that we use to give our lives meaning and context in a world that resists both of these at every turn.  These stories, Dee holds, are born of the rupture that occurs when hope is lost, when the idealizations of our hopes are dashed against the absurdity of the cosmos in which they play out.  They are, so often, desperate attempts to exert control when we have none. 

In the next chapter of this arc, “24 Hours,” Dee takes over a 24-hour diner and bends its patrons to his sadistic whims.  The waitress on duty, a woman named Bette, harbors a secret life through which she gives meaning to her menial job.  She is a writer.  When her shifts end, she goes home to write stories about the people in her life, the people who visit her diner.  Her great pride is that in these stories she always “makes them happy.”  She takes joy in the fact that she, unlike so many writers, knows where a story should end.  “She’s realized the real problem with stories,” the narrator tells us.  “If you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.”  By finding the right place to end the stories, Bette keeps her characters from the necessity of confronting their own inevitable deaths.  Bette’s stories are well-intentioned attempts to give to her patrons what she believes that they need—but these needs always exist according to the mandates of her own ethical framework.  The lesbian couple, in her stories, are married off to nice men who will take care of them.  The marital frustrations of her high-class patrons are washed over by her will to believe that they must, despite all rumor and appearance, be happy.  This is as much an attempt at control as is her pointed refusal of mortality.  Death is Dream’s older sister, and in Gaiman’s story she will not be denied.  When John Dee takes over the diner, systematically forcing each of its patrons to reveal their dirtiest secrets before he compels them to murder one another, he is in effect exercising this same will to control, only bent toward darkness.  The reader is left to wonder how fine the line is between these two approaches to shaping the world through which we move.   

Although Dream, the titular Sandman, is portrayed throughout this arc as a struggling monarch vying for control of his own realm, this very question of narrative control will become the engine of his character arc throughout the series.  This arc comes into sharp relief in issue eight, “The Sound of Her Wings,” when Dream encounters the figure whose presence Bette’s stories would seek to deny—his older sister Death.  The Sandman is ultimately a postmodern allegory centered on a family who personifies the most primal of human experiences (Destiny, Death, Dream, Desire, Despair, Destruction, and Delirium, who was once Delight), and this issue is the first picture the reader is given of this narrative.  The chapter begins with Dream expressing his ennui in the face of his recent experiences to his sister Death.  In this narration, even the early revenge he takes upon his initial captors is figured as cold comfort.  In an effort to provide some fuller comfort, Death invites Dream to go with her for the day on her perennial mission—ushering the souls of those who have died out of life and into what happens next.  During this outing, Dream is reminded of the words by which an old poet praised his sister and her gift to the human race: 

Death is before me today
Like the recovery of a sick man
Like going forth into a garden after sickness.

Death is before me today
Like the odor of myrrh
Like sitting under a sail in a good wind.

Death is before me today
Like the course of a stream
Like the return of a man from a war-galley to his house.

Death is before me today
Like the home that a man longs to see,
After years spent as a captive.

In making space for his sister, Dream recognizes what this poet attempts to capture.  He recognizes the inevitability of her presence, and the promise that her gift brings to the mortal.  Langston Hughes states in his ode to Death that “change is thy other name.” This is the reality with which Dream must grapple throughout the remainder of the saga.  The rigidity of control and the harsh idols that we make of our own conceptions of our identities are the forces that keep us locked in the moments of our defeat and despair.  Death’s gift is that she ushers us out of these moments into the terrifying and mysterious liberation of what lies beyond.  If dream becomes synonymous with story in The Sandman, then death becomes synonymous with change.  And Dream’s narrative will be one that leads him to acknowledge that even the best of stories must make a place for change.  He can only rule his domain with integrity if his sister is also welcome there. 

After confessing the awkwardness that he finds in many of these early tales, Gaiman goes on to affirm them as the seeds of the story that will unfold from them.  I think this holds true.  The Sandman is a dark tale, demanding that its readers make space for their own deaths as they follow their protagonist’s attempts to do the same.  It is befitting that such a story begins by showing us why things must change, why the continuation of life is only made possible by the relinquishing of control that is the death of ourselves as we would fashion ourselves.  This is a dark wisdom, but it is the only wisdom that leads to light.  These opening chapters set the stage for a long meditation on improving our stories by letting go and moving on.

Mirrors

They will tell you about the haunted mirror right away.

They know that you know about it.  They know that it is the reason bookings for that particular room keep their otherwise struggling hotel afloat.  But still they must, as a precautionary measure, advise you that the room you will be staying in has a haunted mirror. 

You will nod your thanks, take your one small bag (for no one ever stays in this room longer than one night), and board the elevator in the lobby.  The elevator will take you up the necessary number of floors before it stops to let you out.  You will exit the elevator, look at your key card (though you don’t need to, for everyone knows the number of this room), and make your way to the door.  You will open the door.  Once inside you will set down your bag, find an angle on the bed from which you cannot see your reflection in the mirror, and begin to stare at it. 

It doesn’t look haunted at all, at least if the markers of haunting are age and decay.  The silver of its frame glitters as if newly polished.  From your angle you can tell that the glass has been cleaned lovingly by some unfortunate soul, or one who is fortunately blind.  You can see the opulence of the mirror, and you understand why everyone’s eyes would at first be drawn to it. 

But you know what will happen if you get up from the bed and stand in front of it.  Everyone knows. 

You will at first see only your familiar reflection, showing back to you whatever expression you have shown to it.  Your smile or your frown, your bright eyes or dull, your hands on hips or snug in your pockets—all of this will come back to you just as you expect. 

The change will at first be small, starting at your mouth.  You will see in your reflection a sudden grin that you did not will to be on your own face.  At first this will be a grin of mischief, as if you and your reflection are in on some spectacular joke.  Slowly, though, you will find yourself cut off from this grin.  Slowly, it will seem as if your reflection is holding from you some devilish secret that you cannot root out.  Then, as the grin begins to expand, you will see teeth that are not yours—teeth that are sharp and animal, perfect for tearing into warm meat or soft flesh.  As the grin begins to widen, the mouth will begin to move and from it will start a procession of noises.  They will be the noises of a beast, and they will rise and rise until you find yourself staring at your own face caught in a frenzy of howls, a crescendo of gnashing teeth and savage, bloodthirsty cries. 

If you wait out this show of beastly histrionics, if you do not run screaming from the room to seek the sunlight outside, sunlight that will offer you no warmth, you will find, at the end, that your reflection calms itself and comes to rest staring directly into your eyes.  But your eyes in the mirror will not be the eyes that you know, of whatever brown or blue or gray that they have worn since your birth.  They will be bottomless inky wells, pits of darkness in which there is no glint or glimmer, swallowing all the light from windows or lamps.  These ocular abysses will tell you that your most cherished thoughts—that you are decent, that you do your best, that you are capable of love—are lies that you can no longer peddle to yourself or to the world.  And you will despair.

Everyone knows about this mirror.  Everyone talks about it.

No one talks about the other mirror, the one on the opposite wall.  Few can wrest their gaze from this mirror long enough to notice that other one.

If the first mirror draws all eyes to itself through its pristine opulence, this other one escapes notice through its simplicity.  A small wooden frame surrounds a glass that is foggy, as if all the polishing of a careful hand could only lift its obscurity enough to cloud whatever is reflected by it in a faint mist. 

The face that you see in this mirror will not at first seem to be your own.  In fact, you will have difficulty making it out.  Man or woman, young or old, full of joy or full of sorrow—at first it will seem to be none of these things distinctly, or it will seem to be all of these things at once.  On this face, whether it wears a smile or a frown or a look of blank attentiveness, you will, however, see something very clearly, though you won’t at first be able to name it.  It may look like pity, or it may look like longing, but whatever it is, it is different from the grin you saw in the other mirror in one way.  It is inviting, it wants to bring you in, to enfold and envelope you in its immensity.

As you gaze at this mirror, though the clouds in the glass remain, you will find that the face reflected in it grows clearer.  It will become your face, but not your face.  It will become your face wrapped and enfolded in this other face, the faint one, which will itself become clearer and clearer.  And if you look closely, you will see that the other mirror, the silver one, is also reflected in this mirror.  But through this reflection you will not see the monster that wore your face when you stood in front of the silver mirror.  You will instead see the same face, the one that gazes at you from the simple wooden mirror, reflected back upon itself in an infinity so large as to swallow up the room.

If you gaze at this mirror, you will leave the room to walk out into the sunlight.  The sunlight will warm you, the blue sky will pierce you, and everything that you see will rush to greet you, embrace you, and call you by a name you never knew you had.

The strange thing about the second mirror, though, is this:  It will only show you these things if you have first looked into the haunted mirror.

Two Fires

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

       -T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

The Spirit comes as a fire.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus imparts the Holy Spirit to his followers with a breath, perhaps as the breath you would feel when a lover or friend whispers a gentle, intimate secret into your ear.  In the book of Acts, the spirit descends upon the apostles at Pentecost as a fire, wild and loud, bright and brilliant.  The dove of peace comes with wings aflame, terrible and awesome.

Fire is light.  As the chosen people traveled to the Promised Land, the fire moved in front of them by night to illuminate the way forward from slavery to the new life of holy community.  A campfire may call us back to friends when we have wandered off into darkness.  The flame of a candle casts out the shadows in the corners of our rooms.

Fire is heat.  It may call the desperate fisherman from his boat to be warmed on the shore.  It may relieve us from the cold in our bones when we walk through the doorway of a welcoming home.  It may dry our drenched clothes after an unforeseen walk in the rain.

Fire transforms.  It takes a meager offering and turns it into a pleasing aroma to the Lord.  In the kitchen, fire applied to the fruit of the earth awakens new flavors to be savored by the hungry tongue.  When the breath of life has left us, fire may change us into ash, ushering us back to the earth from which we came.

Fire burns.  While the breath of life is in us, it scorches and scars the skin, bringing pain and demanding a balm.  Fire strikes at our vulnerability and tenderness, producing the agony of passion and the grief of injury. 

Fire is many things.  Fire destroys a moment and ushers us into the next one.  Fire is the Spirit of the Lord Jesus.

***

Several weeks ago, in the heart of Lent, I sent myself on pilgrimage by embarking on a silent retreat to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.  I had scheduled the retreat in December, and I had no way of knowing where my life would be when the time for the journey came.  When it arrived, I was grappling with an ending and facing the darkness of where the road would take me in the days ahead.  The silence of my small room and of the monastery grounds, broken only by joining the monks in the offices of prayer, was a quiet and motionless ocean with no visible shore.  There was no future but the moment, and the moment was a persistent flame on my skin.

I decided to fill the hours of the first full day of this silence by hiking the trails in the woods of the monastery grounds.  I had a particular destination.  In the time since my previous visit to Gethsemani in 2015, I had heard of something that I didn’t have the opportunity to see those few years ago—the statues.  Hidden in the surrounding woods, I had learned, were statues depicting Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and the sleeping disciples whose weak flesh could not match their willing spirits to stay awake with their master.  After the morning offices of prayer I set out on the hiking trails, knowing what I sought but having no idea how to find it.  Maps I had consulted were not much help, and so I found myself wandering the wooded trails, looking for some markers that would tell me how to get where I was going.  When I found no such markers I opted simply to continue, to walk and to take the turns that whimsey dictated when the path forked or branched off.  The only plan now was to keep moving.

And I found them.  It was at just the point when I was thinking of turning around, rationalizing that I had two more days of unfilled time and profound silence and so should work on getting better bearings and try again.  At about this moment, though, I saw that the path was preparing to leave the woods for an open expanse between the trees.  “I’ll just walk up to the clearing,” I thought, “and see what I can see.”  The most notable thing that I saw when I entered the clearing was a sign that simply read “Statues,” with an arrow pointing me in the right direction.  The path took me in and out of woods and clearings, but from there on always offered signs to point the way until it came to the edge of a larger area of forest where I found the Gethsemane statues.

They were amazing.  But I was even more transfixed by something off to the side of the path, just before the entrance to this section of woods.  It was a statue of Jesus, standing upright, with the robes over his chest pulled back to reveal his flaming Sacred Heart.  It was the typical Valentine’s Day-style heart symbol with tongues of fire shooting out from the top.  Behind the figure of Jesus was a clear and perfect view of the meadows and rolling hills of the landscape beyond.  And, as I stood and gazed at the Savior’s face and his burning heart, I prayed the most dangerous prayer I have ever prayed in my life.

Oh, Lord, break open my heart.  Split it like tinder so that it may be ignited with the flame of your love.  May I catch fire, so that all around me might catch fire.

Had I known what I was asking for in this moment, I would not have prayed this prayer. 

***

He stands before you exposing his heart, but it is your own face on which his gaze if fixed.  In his eyes are two equally brilliant fires.  They are compassion and challenge.  Compassion for where you are, for the fire that eats at your own heart and disfigures your own face.  Challenge that you not shrink back from this fire, that you not know it for the fire of hell, but to know it in all its refining power, calling you beyond this moment and into the eternal moment of his Kingdom.  Neither fire diminishes the other, and neither is present without the other.  There is no compassion without this challenge, but there is no challenge without this compassion. 

His hands fold back his robe so that you can see his burning heart.  These hands bear the scars of nails, the scars of his own agony still visible though the radiance and peace of his love lack for nothing.  The fire of his heart burns brightly, but does not destroy.  It calls the heart to life and warms it eternally.  This heart cannot grow cold.  And this fire reaches out to your own heart, to find any tender place where it might catch.

This fire is my fire, he says.  From this fire was born all that is, and without this fire there can be nothing.  It is the fire of innumerable stars, of the suns and the moons.  It is the primordial fire of creation.  It gave birth to your world and to your life.  It is the fire of your agony and the fire of your joy, and to know either of these things you must know the other.  You must hold them both.  You must love them both.  This is not the fire of perdition.  The only perdition is to flee from this fire, to avoid catching it and to avoid spreading it.  Without this fire, there is only cold and there is only dark.  This fire is my fire.  This fire is my love.  And you must know its heat if you will know its light.

Behind him are unfamiliar hills, rolling on into the distance.  There is no path to mark the way through them, but they are brightened by rain and the brilliance of the sun.

Nations and Kingdoms: Some Inconclusive Thoughts on Patriotism, Freedom, and all That

This reflection has been composed gradually over the past week—before, during, and after July 4.

As an American citizen, I struggle with July 4^th.  I struggle with July 4^th because I struggle with patriotism.  I struggle with patriotism both as a manifest reality and as an idea.

I know that there are other notions of patriotism than “my country, right or wrong.”  I know that there is an actual, active, and vital tradition of defining patriotism as loyalty and obedience to the ideals that a nation supposedly embodies as opposed to the nation itself.  But, even when it’s framed that way, I still have a problem with patriotism.  I struggle with patriotism and its representative holiday always, even when I like the president and feel kind of okay about the shape of the country.  Neither of those things are the case right now, and so my nausea is a little more pronounced this year, but that’s a small matter.  I would feel at least a bit of this anyway.

Even if patriotism is framed as loyalty and obedience to principles instead of the nation, I still struggle with the notion precisely because of those two ideas—loyalty and obedience.  The core of my struggle is that I am a Christian, and as such I have placed my loyalty and obedience elsewhere.  I briefly did some teaching in a few public high schools recently, and I always found it a surreal and troubling experience when I was asked to lead my class in the pledge of allegiance to the American flag in the mornings.  I would pray the Lord’s Prayer aloud with my congregation each week for gathered worship and on my own in my private time of devotion, affirming my citizenship in the kingdom of Christ “on earth as it is in heaven” before any other group, organization, or system.  I was always irked by the persisting thought that it was either one or the other, that I needed either to affirm my loyalty to the reign of God in the kingdom of Christ or to the visible powers of the governing bodies of my geographical home.  And the fact that a sizable and visible portion of American Christians seem to feel no such tension only made this all the more irksome.  Think of all the common phrases—faith and family, God and country—that imply an inseparable link between one’s spiritual identity and one’s national or familial identity.  Think of all the patriotic services that go on in so many churches with so few eyes batted or brows furrowed. 

Given these dispositions of mine, it should be no surprise that I always wince a little at the word freedom.  If I’m in the right mood, all the things that I’ve been told about this abstract noun over the years begin replaying in my mind, only in a sardonic, mocking, and slightly slurred voice (you know the one):  Freedom isn’t free.  It’s more important than life itself.  It’s what we as Americans have that no one else in the world has in the right way or to the right degree.  It’s why the terrorists hate us.  More thoughtful and principled reflections on this word might state that freedom is a right that comes with responsibility; that freedom is given up when one breaks the law or fails to earn one’s keep.  On the other hand, I have often had such questions as “why did you throw all five of those cheeseburger wrappers out the window of your car” or “why did you drink three two-liter bottles of soda today” answered with “because this is America, dammit!”  Freedom, for some, means that I can do whatever I want whenever I want to, and anyone who tells me that maybe I shouldn’t do whatever I want whenever I want to needs to get their head out of their ass and mind their business.

My own church congregation does nothing in our services to commemorate this national holiday, and I am grateful for that.  This past Sunday, however, one of our hymns did offer a reflection on this word freedom and how it might be understood for a person of Christian faith.  The hymn is a setting of the canticle of Zechariah, found in the first chapter of Luke.  The music and text adaptation are both the work of a friend of prodigious musical ability and theological insight.  The text adaptation frames verses 74-75 of this chapter of Luke as a comment on “true liberty,” which is “to be holy, to be righteous, in His sight throughout our days.”  Freedom, in Zechariah’s song, is the freedom to be holy.

To a Christian, to be holy is to be like Christ.  To increase in holiness is to be transformed into the image of Christ.  And St. Paul gives a sweeping and lyrical explanation of what this might mean in the Christ-hymn in his letter to the Philippians (2:5-11):

                   Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
     he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.

 Therefore God also highly exalted him
    and gave him the name
    that is above every name,
 so that at the name of Jesus
    every knee should bend,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
 and every tongue should confess
    that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

There is so much going on here that my head is spinning and singing.  The second half of this hymn declares in no uncertain terms that Jesus Christ is the authority to which every person and every nation, every citizen and every governing body, will finally answer.  For a Christian, this should make pledging allegiance to anyone or anything else extremely uncomfortable at best.  But Paul has just held up the mind of Christ to his audience as the pattern of their transformation, what their freedom to be holy allows them to approach.  And the first half of this hymn tells us that this mind is a mind that knows its position of privilege and relinquishes it for others.  It is a mind that relinquishes privilege in order to exist in solidarity with the slave.  It is a mind that does not place its own safety and well-being above that of others, but instead voluntarily gives up its own life—not even as a fighter or as a warrior, but in complete humility.

All the talk of freedom that happens around this time every year here in the U.S. makes me so uncomfortable because it usually takes a tone that is drastically different from the tone of this hymn.  Freedom, according to many of the voices that I hear, means the ability to protect and safeguard my own rights and my own way of life.  It means the ability to deny others what they want or what they need when those things cause me discomfort.  It means the ability to wield one’s beliefs and convictions as a sword against those whose beliefs and convictions I find abhorrent or inconvenient.

So what am I saying here?  Am I saying that I hate my country?  No.  I find the land on which the United States has grown up and the cultures made up by the people who inhabit it to be endlessly fascinating, endearing, and inspiring.  The history of my nation is a sweeping story that engages my mind and my heart, and it is a story in which I cannot help but situate myself.  The ideals that undergird our political system—that power only works when shared and kept accountable, that every individual should have the right and the ability to realize their place in the whole—are inspiring and noble even if they have often been articulated and embodied by deeply flawed leaders and thinkers.  Even if they have not yet been realized.

Am I saying that I have attained the mind of Christ, or have disciplined myself to learn the freedom to be holy in all my ways?  No.  I see the very ills that I decry in our contemporary American notions of freedom so clearly because I know them to be a part of my own history and my own patterns of living.  Not only am I knowingly and unknowingly complicit in the ills of our social machine by which the oppressed are marginalized, ignored, or trampled upon; I am also guilty of pushing away friends and family, the very people that I am not habitually blinded to, for the sake of my own convenience.  I, too, often live as if freedom means I can do whatever I want whenever I want to, regardless of who may be hurt in the process.

I am simply saying that I want to understand freedom as entering into the holy free-flow through which I am emptied of myself—my privilege, security, and well-being—so that others may be filled with a measure of these very things.  So that, thus emptied, I might be filled again not by pulling myself up by my bootstraps but through receiving the same free-flow of grace.  When I think of this freedom, it includes freedom from the things that I think I want and need so that I might be transformed through experiencing a will other than my own. 

I don’t know a way forward in this.  I don’t have a concluding statement about how to redeem the notion of patriotism or come to a better understanding of how my objective identity as a citizen of the United States does and should relate to the other identity that I claim as more foundational and to which I do pledge allegiance.  But maybe the closest thing I can muster to patriotism is the faint hope that even nations can repent, can free themselves of their own self-conceptions and realize that power and privilege can be given up.  But, again, I also hope that I can learn to embody these things in my own smaller way.