Notes Towards Day 16 (Thurs, Mar. 15): An Easter story?

From Greek Orthodox Easter

I want to suggest that this story, of continuous re-birth, is Cal's story--
and with it, to suggest that literary stories may differ from scientific ones,
in that the new do not replace (though they may alter and update) the old.
We acknowledge our historical roots, in a way that science's stories,
with their emphasis on replaceability, do not.
(And where are the social scientists on this spectrum?)

Back to the archetype....

"The cultural evolution of his story began w/ the blind Greek prophet
Tiresias who was given second sight. Tiresias is (among other things)
a prototype for Chris.

"And I Tiresias have foresuffered all/
Enacted on this same divan or bed"
(T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, ll. 243-244).

When you travel like I did, vague about destination and
with an open-ended itinerary, a holy-seeming openness
takes over your character. It's the reason the first
philosophers were peripatetic. Christ, too" (488-489).

Christ is "open" and "peripatetic." He is also all-seeing:

From Travel in Sicily

In his 3 a.m. interview about the novel, Eugenides was asked,
"If you would pick an image that reflects the spirit of Middlesex,
what would it be?"

the only...visual artifact that I had to the book was actually the interior
of a Greek Orthodox Church. They are very gaudy in many respects,
iconography on all of the walls. There's a lot of activity in the same
way there's a lot of activity in Middlesex and in all of the characters.
There are very bright spots and there's also many dark spots where
you have the lamps swinging, smoking and a litany of pray....
There usually is also a dome, and across the dome you'll find the
Christ Pantocrator, who's transcendent, looking down on the
partisans and on creation. In a way, I think my narrator as a
Christ Pantocrator. So, the idea of something very colorful
and swirling with light, with a dominant intelligence screening
over, was the image that I had in my mind....


From Le christ Pantocrator

From Travel Guide to Turkey

What does it do to the story, if you read it as an Easter story?

Remember the moment when Milt receives his reprieve as a signalman?
He was to report to the Naval Academy at Annapolis.
On the admissions test, Milton had scored a ninety-eight.
Every Greek drama needs a deus ex machina (196).

Is this a deus ex machina, or did he engineer it himself?

Maybe the two differ only in the distance from which we view them?


From Soamo Gallery