On Finding Patterns

A collection of narrative coincidences

Eve - Anna Lea Merritt, 1885.

I have a tendency to search for meaning in coincidences, even when they don’t make any sense. Some of my best writing comes like an urge, and I felt this as I closed East of Eden in the middle of chapter 24 because I could not believe it happened again, and I needed to make some sense out of it.

Paradise Lost, East of Eden, Leaves of Grass, Poor Things, Hamlet, Wings of Desire. I read and watched all those works in the last few weeks and noticed an unintentional connection between them. In different ways, they all discuss the meaning of life with associations to the bible and epic poetry. They all offer a version of The Fall through life-affirming lenses. At first, the verses, lines, and metaphors I noticed were quite disconnected; as I pieced them together, they formed a pattern pointing out something I already had in mind: what it means to be alive and what makes living worth it. 

Certainly, I was thinking of that precisely because of the works’ philosophical nature, but this is a chicken-or-the-egg problem: were my thoughts influenced by what I was consuming, or was I consuming them influenced by my thoughts? Either way, the thoughts exist. 

Perhaps such issues are too great to have a simple answer, and indeed, the works do not offer an answer due to a self-conscience of its complexity. But they do suggest, beautifully, that being alive in itself is a wonderful thing despite all the miseries (and even because of them). I’m not religious but recently I’ve been reading the bible as a literary background for Paradise Lost, and I finally started to see the obvious influence Milton’s book had on Western civilisation's imagination. Even the biggest atheist among us cannot be free from biblical tales. In fact, Northrop Frye, in his book Fearful Symmetry, said

‘Properly interpreted, all works of art are phases of [the bible’s] archetypal vision… And the greater the work of art, the more completely it reveals the gigantic myth which is the vision of this world as God sees it, the outlines of that vision being creation, fall, redemption, and apocalypse.’ (p.108)

I’m currently in the middle of two book clubs, one discussing East of Eden and Leaves of Grass, the other Paradise Lost. During the discussions, I started to see intersections between them, especially because of the Christological mythology involved; one of the club members recommended Wings of Desire (a wonderful film), and I watched Poor Things last weekend with my sister. I soon realised that every time I read or watched one of these things, I connected with one of the other works and the more I thought about it, the more I was amazed at the ‘coincidences’ involving the themes I was engaged in. I needed clarity because surely there was some common idea obscured by the amount of information and different formats. 

The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve - William Blake, 1826

So what did I read in East of Eden that made me close the book and write? Well, three characters named Samuel, Lee, and Adam were discussing Cain and Abel’s story, and Lee says: 

It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying: ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set’. But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there [...] And I feel I am a man. And I feel a man is a very important thing – maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. (p. 306)

‘But think of the glory of the choice!’ – the greatest argument of man’s free will. That’s Milton’s argument in Paradise Lost, which deals with God’s foresight and the idea of predestination. God knew Adam and Eve would fall from Eden, but just knowing doesn’t mean he made them fall. According to this logic, God created us free so that we could choose to be good and dutiful because if we think about it, every decision we make only has meaning because we chose it; if all human actions were tied to predestination they wouldn't be sincere or meaningful; and if someone doesn’t have a choice to act different from the start, it doesn’t make sense to punish them.

As Scott Elledge comments on Milton’s God, it would have been illogical to make men free to choose and at the same time not free to make wrong choices. Satan fell because he wanted more in desiring to be free from God and providence; so he says those famous words in Book I:

‘The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same, 

[...]

Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.’ (I.254-263)

In the first three lines, Satan is giving us the original version of ‘everywhere you go you take yourself’. But this also strongly reminds me of Hamlet: In Act 2, he tells Guildenstern and Rosencrantz that the kingdom of Denmark is a prison, and Rosencrantz disagrees, to which Hamlet responds:

Why, then ’tis none to you. For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. (II.ii.249)

Satan almost says the same thing, but as opposed to Hamlet, he is determined to make hell his kingdom and not a prison. At least in the beginning, Satan is determined to fight providence instead of searching for the meaning of such fighting as Hamlet does.

In the last three lines, he’s trying to avoid ‘the lap of deity’ Lee mentioned and finds some agency in his damnation by saying ‘in my choice’; to remain in hell as its lord will be his choice and not God’s command. 

The same happens in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, but instead of choosing to be the King of Pandemonium, the angel Damiel chooses to be human. The angels, in all their immortal wisdom, are not free to make mistakes. They envy humans because they can take a leap of faith: Adam and Eve decided to risk their lives out of curiosity, love, and ambition, but the outcome would be obvious to any angel. So they stay put. It’s what Damiel says to his angel-friend Cassiel: 

It's great to live by the spirit, to testify day by day for eternity, only what's spiritual in people's minds. But sometimes I'm fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel a weight grow in me to end the infinity and to tie me to earth. I'd like, at each step, each gust of wind, to be able to say ‘Now. Now and now’ and no longer ‘forever’ and ‘for eternity.’ [...]  to be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal, by the line of a neck by an ear. To lie! Through one's teeth. As you're walking, to feel your bones moving along. At last to guess, instead of always knowing. To be able to say ‘ah!” and ‘oh!’ and ‘hey!’ instead of ‘yes’ and ‘amen.’ 

Freedom is perhaps the biggest theme of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, alongside the body and its senses. This poetry collection is the most life-affirming thing I’ve ever read; Whitman relishes so much in life that it’s annoying sometimes. But good annoying. Just as Damiel longs for those simple physical experiences, so Whitman glorifies them in human experience: 

I believe in the flesh and the appetites
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me
is a miracle 
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or
am touch’s from. (Song of Myself, 24). 

But with the acceptance of free will comes a huge burden: the sole responsibility for our lives and our actions. This is one of the hardest things in growing up – a theme dealt endearingly and absurdly in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, a frankensteinesque female bildungsroman about Bella Baxter, a woman with a transplanted baby’s brain. In a breakthrough moment, she says, ‘I am finding being alive fascinating’; we see through her curious eyes the wonders of discovering the world and experimenting with the senses. Similarly, we see humanity through the angel's perspective in Wings of Desire – Damiel has so much yearning for life that he prefers to deal with mortality rather than live forever without being part of it. And so he decides to take a leap of faith.

Wings of Desire - Wim Wenders, 1987.

---

Milton’s poetry has epic characteristics: it begins in medias res; it concerns heavenly and earthly beings and the interactions between them; it contains themes common to epics, such as war, nationalism, and origin stories; and it uses devices such as epic similes, catalogues of people and places, and invocations to a muse. This last one is perhaps the most basic and identifiable aspect of an epic, and it’s also present in Leaves of Grass and Wings of Desire:

Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, 
Sing Heav'nly Muse
(The opening lines of Paradise Lost)

***

Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia, 
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts, 
That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus wanderings
(Song of the Exposition, 2)

Whitman is calling the muses to help him sing of the new world (America), and thus sing of a new epic, a modern one. In Wender’s film, there’s an enigmatic elderly character who also calls to the muses, but he seems nostalgic – in the film, we see him lamenting over a lost Berlin before the war, and he is the only living memory of the past:

Tell me, muse, of the storyteller who has been thrust to the edge of the world, both an infant and an ancient, and through him reveal everyman. With time, those who listened to me became my readers. They no longer sit in a circle, but rather sit apart. And one doesn't know anything about the other. I'm an old man with a broken voice, but the tale still rises from the depths, and the mouth, slightly opened, repeats it as clearly, as powerfully. A liturgy for which no one needs to be initiated to the meaning of words and sentences. (Homer the aged poet in Wings of Desire)

Back in East of Eden, Samuel (the wisest of men and one of my favourite characters of all time) tells Adam and Lee: 

Two stories have haunted us and followed us from our beginning. We carry them along with us like invisible tails – the story of original sin and the story of Cain and Abel. And I don’t understand either of them. I don’t understand them at all but I feel them. (p. 267)

Later, Lee replies: 

No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true for us. What a great burden of guilt men have! (p. 269)

After piecing all that together, I think Samuel is right. The greatest stories seem like a retelling of the one great story: about man’s fall from grace. The tone may vary, but it is there tormenting us in the corner of our thoughts – the hereditary guilt of being alive. However, it seems that being alive is so great of a gift that if we allow ourselves the pleasure, it may overcome the guilt. We know now that we are self-determining beings, that’s the consequence of free will. As Whitman said: 

We consider bibles and religions divine – I do not say they are not divine, 
I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still, 
It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life, 
Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth,
than they are shed for you.
(A Song for Occupations, 3).