The Annotated Nightstand: What Ariana Reines Is Reading Now, and Next

In her excellent recent hybrid prose book Wave of Blood, Ariana Reines, equally thoughtful and desperate, writes of the genocide in Gaza, her mother’s death by suicide, and her own Jewish identity in the face of these personal and collective violences. In Wave of Blood, Reines also describes writing The Rose, which she says “is about the question of the erotic mistake.”

In The Rose, Reines probes (among other topics) fraught romantic entanglements and the undeniable attraction to that which may destroy us (see: her poem “Death Has the Biggest Dick of All”). I have written before of Reines’ work, and The Rose extends her dogged but no-less-compelling pursuit of mystical, ancient, and intellectual interrogation of the pain of existence. Her poems are, as always, tenderly philosophical, embodied, and rapturous.

A recurring figure in The Rose is Medea, the mythical priestess who endures largely due to Euripides’ eponymous play, which takes place in the aftermath of Medea’s betrayal by her husband Jason (of the Argonauts). After Medea had helped Jason steal the golden fleece from her own family, they fled, wed, and Medea bore two sons—only to have Jason nullify their marriage so he could wed a young princess, taking their children with him.

In one of her poems entitled “Medea,” Reines writes, “I want to vomit, die, & change my life in that exact order” (a mood that many of us likely know all too well). Medea’s tale might have ended in her abandonment.

Yet she uses her knowledge of medicinal magic to poison the princess. She murders the children, consigning Jason to an heirless life of torment. For those who engage with Medea superficially, she is the example of the terror of a powerful woman scorned. She is a sorceress, a high priestess, crucial to Jason’s triumph. To the uninformed, Medea is reduced to a vengeful witch.

Not long ago, I watched Sondra Radvanovsky perform Medea at the Met Opera just days before Halloween. In contrast with the play, the opera opens with the usual end of a comedy: a wedding—between Medea’s husband and the new wife he has picked out for himself. A figure shrouded in dark fabric bangs on the door and demands entry. The guards ask her to identify herself.

Radvanovsky clawed the black veil from her head, bellowing, “It is I, Medea!” her name like a curse. An electric thread flew up my spine. Her power, her rage, jolted me from over a hundred feet away.

Maria Callas starred in the challenging operatic role in the 1950s—but Medea wasn’t done with her. Callas was in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s hypnotically iconic film Medea a decade later. Medea is taxing, terrible, undeniable, both as a mythical figure and a role to perform. “She can be serpentine, or what we’ve been calling the Hulk, or a goddess,” Radvanovsky said in an interview. “It’s exhausting.”

Through the centuries, Medea has been a potent counternarrative to how women can contend with abject heartbreak. Rather than accept brutal emotional violence quietly, you can burn the offending man’s life to the ground. At one point, Reines writes of Medea and others like her who were critical to a hero’s success. “All sorceresses who once gave / So freely of their wisdom,” writes Reines, “Will live to meet the day at last— / Because no witch dies / She finally wants her magic for herself.”

In the face of absolute disaster, you can tap into your well of power and command it for your own ends. And this upending the narrative isn’t consigned to romantic encounters. Reines writes of how our world is defined by terrifying violence, conflict, exploitation, and disenfranchisement isn’t one we need merely accept. “This isn’t the kind of poetry // I ever thought I’d grow up to write,” she explains.

This culture
Can lead you to feeling you’re at war all the time, scrolls strapped
To your back, driven out of the monastery in the snow…
I never ever meant to fight.
The fight was almost automatic.
I never meant to do it.

Reines tells us about her to-read pile,

Growing up in Salem I perceived a lot of ambient interest in Wicca, Western Esotericism, and the Golden Dawn—but for whatever reason these strains of magic never really took for me. Magic didn’t start to feel authoritative to me til I went to Haiti; read Ishmael Reed. All my friends in middle school read The Mists of Avalon—I wanted to, I tried, but it just wouldn’t go in. I don’t know if it was the sentences or the vibe or what.

But researching The Rose I found myself drawn into the myths and stories around the conception of Merlin, how his mother had slept, according to legend, with an Incubus—and that brought me, somewhat against my will, back into contact with the traditions of Western Hermeticism. I was trying to work out what it means to give birth to magic, and whether there might be some connection to that and why we are sometimes (often?) erotically drawn to evil.

In a way I’m still researching The Rose, even though technically I’m not writing it anymore: good and problematic teachers, martyrs, marriages, cliques, magic, the erotic, cultural theft, the romance of escape. Is there something in the soul of love that wants to face its antithesis, and somehow transmute it? Maybe that’s my fantasy. Maybe that’s my hope.

*

Orlando Reade, What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost

Reade’s book was a Sawanee Review staff pick. Kate Bailey writes there,

What in Me Is Dark is a difficult book to categorize. You might see it described online as “experimental nonfiction,” or a “hybrid” of criticism, biography, and personal writing. I think this is part of its appeal….Structurally, the essays swivel between what could be described as an A plot—the connection between Milton and the biographies/writings of each subject—and a B plot—the major events of Paradise Lost itself (recapping and analyzing plot points, from the opening in Pandemonium, to Satan’s flight through Chaos, to Adam and Eve in the bower, and so on).

The subjects and excerpts are addressed in chronological order; the first essay places Book I of the poem alongside the oldest secondary source featured, Thomas Jefferson’s commonplace book. If at first I found the back-and-forth between subject and poem to be slightly jarring, even arbitrary, I came to appreciate how my mind was being pushed to make meaning out of the relationship between A and B: Reade is constantly asking his reader to re-examine the poem through the eyes of each figure and the lens of their lived experience.

Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada

As I’ve mentioned, my favorite thing about an older book is finding a contemporaneous review. While this one in the New York Times certainly feels dated, its author (the novelist Jerome Charyn) clearly loves it, calling Flight to Canada “a demonized Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as it is “a book that reinvents the particulars of slavery in America with a comic rage. Reed has little use for statistical realities. He is a necromancer….Time becomes a modest, crazy fluid in Reed’s head, allowing him to mingle events of the last hundred and fifty years, in order to work his magic.”

Charyn continues,

Flight to Canada could have been a very thin book, an unsubtle catalogue of American disorders. But Reed has the wit, the style, and the intelligence to do much more than that. The book explodes. Reed’s special grace is anger. His own sense of bewilderment deepens the comedy, forces us to consider the sad anatomy of his ideas. ‘Flight to Canada’ is a hellish book with its own politics and a muscular, luminous prose. It should survive.

Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil (trans. Alastair Hamilton)

In the sole interview with Bataille about his collection Literature and Evil, the interviewer Pierre Dumayet asks if literature and evil are inextricably linked, as the title may suggest. Bataille says yes, indeed, they are (!). “Maybe it’s not very clear at first,” he explains, but “if literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring. This might seem surprising. Nevertheless, I think that soon it becomes clear that literature has to deal with anguish and that anguish is based on something that is going badly—something that no doubt will turn into something very evil.”

The role of the reader is key to Bataille. “When you make the reader see that or, at least, [they are] in front of the possibility of a story with an evil ending for the characters he is concerned about….When the reader is in that unpleasant situation, the result is a tension that makes literature interesting.”

You can watch the nine-minute interview with Bataille here.

William Shakespeare, Stephen Orgel (editor), The Sonnets

I realize I am late to this party but holy hell can we talk about the covers for the Pelican Shakespeare series? They are by the artist Manuja Waldia, and feel simultaneously connected to her fine art—and not. If you want a gorgeous print of Prospero from The Tempest from the artist herself, grab one!

Though it has been a very long time since grammar school, I doubt I will give much insight into Shakespeare or his sonnets—or sonnets in general—that you haven’t absorbed through osmosis or that one determined teacher.

John Hollander in his introduction to this collection pushes back against the age-old rumor that Shakespeare didn’t write these plays and poems, roundly calling them “snobs” who believe “William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could not have written the plays because he could not have had the training, the university education, the experience, and indeed the imagination or background their author supposedly possessed.”

Chögyam Trungpa, The Truth of Suffering and the Path of Liberation

The Tibetan Buddhist Trungpa is known for many things: bringing Vajrayana (aka Tantric) Buddhism to the UK and North America, developing Shambhala Buddhism, and founding Naropa University (where he brought Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs to teach). Like many cultural giants and leaders of religious movements, he has his fair share of scandals that are difficult to square with his teachings and cultural impact.

But, as Claire Dederer argues—about artists, yet it applies—how to contend with that is all more soupy than it seems. Trungpa began studying monastic pursuits at the age of five and was ordained as a monk before he was twenty. He fled Tibet in 1959, when the people’s uprising failed and the Chinese Army occupied his monastery. Through the ’60s and ’70s, Trungpa lived, studied, and worked at Oxford, Scotland, and the United States.

Francis A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

“The Hermetic books are a series of revelations about the nature and destinies of gods and men,” writes J. Bronowski in NYRB, “and they are supposed to have been disclosed by the Egyptian gods to a priest who came to be called Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Three Times Great, after the god of wisdom. The Hermetic books in general, and the Corpus Hermeticum in particular, take their name from this Egyptian priest.”

Bronowski goes on to say

Yates’s lucid analysis of the Hermetic books helps particularly to clarify the change in attitude to them between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the Middle Ages, the Hermetic books had been treated as recipes for magic, and read in secret….In one of these passages, Hermes describes how the Egyptians brought the statues of their gods to life by drawing spirits into them. In the other, Hermes foretells that the religion of his time will come to an end, and will be ousted by a religion which despises the natural world.

Dion Fortune, Mystical Qabalah

The jacket copy calls of The Mystical Qabalah “An occult classic.” It goes on:

The Qabalah could be described as a confidential Judaic explanation of the paradox of “the Many and the One”—the complexity and diversity within a monotheistic unity. Whereas the Old Testament outlines the social and psychological development of a tightly knit “chosen group” culture, the supplementary Qabalah provides a detailed plan of the infrastructure behind the creative evolutionary process.

The Mystical Qabalah devotes a chapter to each of the ten schematic “God-names,” the qualities or Sephiroth which focus on the principal archetypes behind evolving human activity: the Spiritual Source; the principles of Force and Form; Love and Justice; the Integrative principle or the Christ Force; Aesthetics and Logic; the dynamics of the Psyche; and, finally, the Manifestation of life on Earth in a physical body.

Gregg Bordowitz, Some Styles of Masculinity

“Some Styles of Masculinity is an edited transcript of a series of lecture-performances that began as a commission to the 2018 exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at the New Museum” writes Nick Bennett writes in The Brooklyn Rail.

Each iteration of this performance (and the book itself) addresses three characters played by Bordowitz: the rock star, the rabbi, and the comedian. Bordowitz presents a construction of masculinity based on his own upbringing: from a queer kid in Queens in the 1970s wearing mascara like Lou Reed on the cover of his album Transformer, to a thirteen year-old with a nascent sense of himself as a feminist grappling with “the smell of dozens of men in heavy clothing, packed into a poorly ventilated room, sweating as they pore over leather-bound scripture,” to a person that has been living with AIDS for over thirty years (“To still have AIDS and still be alive is a cosmic joke. Next time, I’m going to begin the show with that joke. There’s nowhere to go from there but up, right?”).

Mary McCarthy, The Group

“McCarthy may have insisted that her girls were simpletons, but far from treating them with pity and disrespect, she often uses them to critique the snobbery and hypocrisy of self-proclaimed intellectuals and radicals,” writes Apoorva Tadepalli in The Point and published here at Lit Hub. But, like a magpie in front of a shiny object, I have to go after the review from the ’60s, when The Group came out.

Thomas Rogers seems to attempt to lampoon McCarthy but (to this reader) instead lifts her way, way up in his review in The Commentary.

Miss McCarthy is very good at showing how the life and feelings of women are mixed up in things, particularly those things—clothes, furniture, food, etc.—which make up the domestic routine. Yet, the proliferation of such detail has the effect of robbing her characters of freedom, as though they were all prisoners in a Cartesian universe, enmeshed in those great chains of causation that lead from the First Cause to each tiny effect. This is the style, then, of a writer on whom nothing is lost and for whom everything figures.

Yup!

Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages

Parallel Lives came out in the ’80s and tracks the marriages of five couples. Rose tells of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. “During that first wave of seventies feminism, merely telling women’s stories was a political act, and deeply refreshing. All information about women was a gift,” says Rose in an interview with Sheila Heti in Granta. “It quickly became clear that the biographies of women by men, however well done, did not hit the particular nail on the head women wanted to have hit.”

I love a tidbit Rose shares that the book was supposed to be about *six* marriages.

I had planned to include the Darwins, but I left them for last, and by the time I got to them, I just couldn’t do any more. To some extent, the research and writing of the first five marriages had been like researching and writing five individual books. I just ran out of energy. It’s a shame, in a way, because the Darwins’ marriage would have been the only ‘happy’ or conventionally successful marriage, a marriage with children and a strong family life.