This week braids my epic. Today I bought a new phone just like my old phone when my old phone died, set a photo of Tyler Meier’s windowbox flowers as wallpaper, then sat in a sunporch by flowering squash, reading Paradise Lost.
To weight their ends, epics break–or braid back–in the middle. We don’t get the chronological beginning of the Odyssey until Odysseus, fed and comfy, starts recounting at Nausicaa’s table. Raphael the angel stops to tell a story-stopping story halfway through Paradise Lost, relating Satan’s (pre-Book I) armed revolt before Earth’s creation.
So we learn that, in that battle’s heat, the “Arch-Fiend” (whom the reader can feel Milton come, here and there, to like) and his armies fire cannons into Heaven, then have Heaven’s mountains dropped Looney Tunesishly onto them. And–I’d always wondered how–Satan, heavenly-sword-wounded, doesn’t just die. His (like any angel’s) body’s
ethereal substance closed,
Not long divisible, and from the gash
A stream of nectarous humor issuing flowed
Sanguine, such as celestial Spirits bleed“
Yet soon he healed
–which is gross (humor!). But it’s alright, since angels simply heal and, as they please, “limb themselves, and colour, shape, or size / Assume, as like them best, condense or rare.” It all grows back better.
The epic author’s practical-rapturous moments–Milton relating angels’ bleeding, eating and excretion; Alice Notley‘s long, long sectional parade of sidekicks for Alette; Homer’s lists of ships and anatomically-precise death; James Merrill‘s Mirabell-spirit pausing to fill in for his Ouija-readers where UFOs come from–set the epic apart from the long lyric; they’re facts the epic storyteller seems to have to include, the ones that don’t sing and maybe needn’t. They’re the shopping list, or the glimpse of the graffitist’s face. They’re moments I love! As for a fictional character, I the reader am happy for another person’s indulgence, sympathetic without necessarily sharing. And as with the braid-back, the fact-aside takes on an instructive significance; I learn to love the author slantedly, for her or his chosen inclusions, as into the work, I’m reminded, I take my solitary way.
Stay tuned next week for an interview with a hero. And hey, a journal named Super Arrow (their motto, get it?, is “beyond what’s required”) seeks assignment-shaped submissions of fiction, creative non-, 600+ dpi art, poetry, and even music. The assignment: submit 180 degrees from your style, proclivity and obsession. I plan on submitting an existentially-assured decaffeinated 1,000-page romance novel set in an electricians’ retirement home, whose plot twists are driven by technical jargon. See you on the other side of braid.