All Feavorous Kinds

Aside from that one time infant Miltonista's intenstines decided to digest themselves (or something like that--I've never quite gathered what happened with any clarity, but the scar remains), and from that one time college sophomore Miltonista was hospitalized for four days after contracting pneumonia as a camp counselor, I've never had anything like a near-death experience. But it doesn't take much to trigger my moribund instinct. Several years ago, I was bitten by a squirrel (probably the lesser of the two squirrel stories in my life). I was relieved when the doctors told me I didn't need a rabies shot, but for the next week or so, I thought about what it'd be like if I were the second person in the U.S. to contract rabies from a squirrel bite. (It didn't help that I vividly remembered having watched a 20/20 segment about rabies as a child. Once you start exhibiting symptoms, you're doomed.)

Recently, I've been holed up inside, suffering from nothing more exotic or exciting than the common cold. But now that I'm starting to perk up, I can muster up some resentment at having wasted my time and at having been more than a little bit uncomfortable for the last several days. My thoughts wandered to Adam's first vision of illness in Book 11:

Immediately a place
Before his eyes appeard, sad, noysom, dark,
A Lazar-house it seemd, wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseas'd, all maladies
Of gastly Spasm, or racking torture, qualmes
Of heart-sick Agonie, all feavorous kinds,
Convulsions, Epilepsies, fierce Catarrhs,
Intestin Stone and Ulcer, Colic pangs,
Dæmoniac Phrenzie, moaping Melancholie
And Moon-struck madness, pining Atrophie
Marasmus and wide-wasting Pestilence,
Dropsies, and Asthma's, and Joint-racking Rheums.
Dire was the tossing, deep the groans, despair
Tended the sick busiest from Couch to Couch;
And over them triumphant Death his Dart
Shook, but delaid to strike, though oft invokt
With vows, as thir chief good, and final hope.

When I was teaching my Milton course last semester, I was startled by these lines--I had never noticed before how the gross bodily nature of the descriptions churn with a vitality that might even exceed some of the descriptions of Hell but, by the same token, come close to being too laughably grotesque. I suppose I noticed these lines because I had had a bit of an accident over the summer--nothing, ultimately, that was too catastrophic, but was scary at the time and had put me in one of my moribund funks. I've learned that incidents like that expand my capacity for empathy, occasionally to absurd levels. And these lines become, for Adam, an occasion for empathy:

Sight so deform what heart of Rock could long
Drie-ey'd behold? Adam could not, but wept,
Though not of Woman born; compassion quell'd
His best of Man, and gave him up to tears.

These strike me as curious lines; they tow a kind of very familiar weeping-as-effeminate-weakness topos while, at least to my ear, creating the undeniable impression that this weeping is gracious and wholesome. I'd like to think that this ambivalence is at least a partial reversion of the pat formula that precedes this scene: "What miserie th' inabstinence of Eve / Shall bring on men." A little later, Michael tows the party line again when he declares that gross illness befalls those who "serve ungovern'd appetite . . . a brutish vice, / Inductive mainly to the sin of Eve."

I actually think I'd like the world better if diseases were handed out in contrapasso fashion, that my cold was produced by some mildly unruly bacchanalia. Too bad shit don't work that way.

The day before the presidential inauguration (cause for genuine if cautiously optimistic jubilation), Miltonista finds himself thinking somewhat dark thoughts. It's not just the tanking economy (if you haven't done so already, double check your credit card APRs! Miltonist was shocked the other day to find that his had skyrocketed to usurious levels!) and all the other woes at home and abroad. What also weighs heavily on my mind is the question of how ecumenical this spirit of excitement about our new president really is. Or, to put it more simply, what about those 58 million people who voted for the other guy and his stupid running mate? Even more troubling is the twenty-five or thirty percent of the populace who still approve of the current president. Sure, I suppose that's a low enough number to merit some righteous we-told-you-so indignation. But that still represents tens of millions of people who are deluded or willful or bitter enough to think Bush has been doing a good job.

The central crisis in Milton's political thought is still our own: a commitment to liberty and representative government can easily clash with deep-seated, carefully formed convictions when the citizenry doesn't seem to abide by them. This might initially seem like a banal by-product rather than a true crisis: we all have different convictions and democracy will inevitably frustrate all of us at some point. Those on the Left, the Right, in between, and beyond can all share the lived experience of absolutely knowing your own convictions to be the right ones, of knowing that the other side is wrong, and of watching as your own side loses (or wins by 53%).

But part of the deeper crisis of democracy is a rift between political action and knowledge. Adherence to democracy seems to demand at least some level of relativism: yes, I am given the right to cling to my own convictions passionately, but I recognize that you, too, believe in your convictions, and I must respect your right to uphold them. And if 53% of the populace votes against my convictions, I will not go out and try to kill 3.5% of the populace that disagrees with me. (I realize that here, I'm probably straying away from Milton and toward Zizek). But what room does that leave not only for maintaining but also acting upon non-negotiable convictions?

For academically minded left-leaners (or, for that matter, for Milton himself) one option is, for lack of a better word, elitism. In The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, a text that reacts to the English hurtling back toward monarchy, Milton suggests that one of those ways might be "to well qualify and refine elections: not committing all to the noise and shouting of a rude multitude, but permitting only those of them who are rightly qualified to nominate as many as they will." The reference to the "rude multitude" will strike us as jarring, crabbed, outdated. Elitism should not be the right answer. But doesn't this response actually only serve as evidence of the crisis described above? Yes, the rhetoric of the rude multitude isn't very nice, but what does it mean to live in a society in which being qualified intellectually or desiring intellectual qualification in our leaders almost automatically carries the stigma of being an elitist? Let's be frank: is there a way to diagnose the fact that those who still approve of Bush are deluded or wrong without lapsing into that position of knowledge that we often label elitism?

For me, one of the most vein-popping moments of the presidential debates was when McCain tried to poke fun at Obama for being eloquent. The audacity of any American who aims for eloquence! (All of this points to the other deep crisis in any representative government: what happens when voters can't seem to choose candidates based on merit, or when charisma and/or single hot-button issues overshadow merit? Thank god we have a president-elect who combines charisma with knowledge and skill, but for every Obama there's a Reagan or a Ventura or a Schwarznegger.)

Of course, Milton wasn't just some simple, pig-headed dogmatist. For all of his polemical feistiness, Milton clearly realized that political action requires finesse and provisional alliances. But what we'll witness tomorrow when Rick Warren delivers the opening prayer--what we've already witnessed in the angry writings about his presence at the inauguration--is the obnoxiousness of maintaining those alliances, of pandering to people who we believe to be wrongheaded. But democracy demands just this.

I left my liver in San Francisco

I'm sure that MLA 2008 has already been relegated to cultural oblivion, but I promised that I'd write about it and write about it I shall. My memories are quickly becoming a hazy mess--especially when it comes to that one night when I indulged in a dozen too many drinks. (Hearty apologies to Flavia's friends, who apparently thought I was insane when I was, in fact, blind drunk.)

First, the fun, social stuff. I hadn't been to San Francisco for the better part of a decade. I'd always had fond memories of the place, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly this time around, but I was surprised at how I'd somehow conveniently forgotten about the myriad panhandlers in the city. Some were creative and funny (I couldn't help but smile when I passed the guy who asked for a contribution to the "United Buy a Negro a Hamburger Fund"). Most were unobtrusive. But a few were really aggressive. I shared with my MLA roommate how the experience made me feel like a complete bourgeois asshole ("They should really do something about all these panhandlers!"). 

And in the spirit of sounding like a complete bourgeois asshole, I'll add that I enjoyed some amazing food in San Francisco. Had two wonderful and relatively inexpensive meals at Sakana, and some downright cheap, yummy food in the Tenderloin. The real lowlight was at the aptly named Sushi Man, where one sole sushi chef took an hour to get our decent but unmemorable food out to us (even though the place was mostly empty).

The real highlight, of course, was hanging out with great friends--some of whom I only get to see a few times a year. This kind of interaction might lead to binge drinking (multiple outings to the Chieftain, a quasi-dive "Authentic Irish" pub next door to our hotel), but cirrhosis is a small price to pay for some serious bonhommie, no?

Miltonista is sorry to report that he certainly didn't live up to his name when he missed the first two Milton panels. But he did make it to the panel on Lycidas on the final morning. John Rogers started off with a pretty lively talk; especially illuminating was his discussion of St. Peter's speech that erupts from the heart of the poem. Doug Trevor followed with a talk about the figure of Damoetas, and Jeff Dolven filled in for an absent Gordon Teskey. The session left Miltonista feeling pretty frisky, so he went to the seventeenth-century panel. Unfortunately, two of the talks were more or less repeats of talks delivered at the Milton Symposium in London: Paul Stevens on the topic of nationalism and Catherine Gimelli Martin on Milton's view of Venice. Christopher Warren gave a fine talk that was related to but considerably different from the talk he gave at the Symposium--he spoke about the legal status of early modern diplomats, and related such concerns to figures like Raphael and Michael in Paradise Lost.

To be perfectly frank, Miltonista originally envisioned much more elaborate summaries of and responses to some of the talks mentioned above. But see above re: alcohol's effects on the hippocampus. Happy in the haze of a drunken hour, &tc.--maybe next year, I'll have to write my MLA field report as the event unfolds.