One morning Karin said that the sign had come to her. He had sent a yellow bunting into her room and it had perched on the picture of Jesus Walking on the Waters and nodded its head three times.
Verily, verily I say unto you, Karin said, many are called but few are chosen.
She put on a white dress and went round all day with roses in her hair and sang hymns and carried on in a very affected way.
The story becomes an examination of the place where art meets both profanation and offering. As one child grows holier-than-thou and starts holding Bible classes in the field for all the cousins staying with the grandparents for the summer, ‘even the ones who couldn’t talk yet,’ the other goes to the most pagan place she can find in the garden, a dark spruce-lined tree circle. There she does the worst thing she can imagine. ‘It was then I made the golden calf’:
It was very difficult to get the legs to stay upright but in the end they did…Sometimes I stood still, listening for the first rumble of the wrath of God. But so far he had said nothing. His great eye just looked down into the arbor through the hole between the tops of the spruce trees. At last I had got him to show some interest…God kept completely quiet. Perhaps he was waiting for me to take out the matches. He wanted to see if I really would do something so awful as to sacrifice to the golden calf and, even worse, dance in front of it afterwards. Then he would come down from his hill in a cloud of lightning and wrath and show that he knew that I existed…I stood there and listened and listened and the silence grew and grew until it was overpowering. Everything was listening.
Offering and sacrifice are at one level a direct request for dialogue, and at another ask the existential question — not so much do You exist, as do I?
EE Cummings is in no doubt about the answer in this sonnet:
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any — lifted from the no
of all nothing — human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
Who’s he talking to, really? Who’s he persuading? The poem is an offering of thanks for the fact that every rhetorical question is its own completed dialogue; it carries its own answer. There’s a loving, curmudgeonly, late poem of Auden’s called Talking to Myself, in which the speaker addresses, throughout, a You with a capital y; this is its last verse:
Time, we both know, will decay You, and already
I’m scared of our divorce: I’ve seen some horrid ones.
Remember: when Le Bon Dieu says to You Leave him!,
please, please, for His sake and mine, pay no attention
to my piteous Don’t’s, but bugger off quickly.
Cummings, of course, will never die, that’s what he’s persuading us of in his sonnet, and persuading his capital You about; it’s a multiple birthday in his sonnet. The crux of Cummings’s offering is the statement of rebirth: ‘i who have died am alive again today.’ For only gods and Gods, traditionally, can grant immortality. Careful, though, for the gods can take as well as give and they have a habit of giving complicated gifts, like shirts which stick to the skin so you can’t get them off without skinning yourself into the bargain, or showers of coins which leave you pregnant by Zeus and get you and your new son thrown into the sea locked in a wooden trunk by your father for defying him, as in the myth of Danaë and Perseus. It’s possible that the gift of wings, one way or another, always involves the net Michelangelo warned us of. But certainly gifts tend to breed gifts — that’s what exchange is — and with any godly luck an old fisherman will catch the wooden trunk in his net, open it up and free the pair to carry on with the story.
And, give or take a bit of give and take, it’s always all about continuance. This is Colette, from The Pure and the Impure (translated by Herma Briffault): ‘Amalia X, that good comic actress of road companies who died at the beginning of the war…if one were to believe her, had not hesitated to leave a sleeping and satiated sultan and go on foot, veiled, through the night streets of Constantinople to a hotel room where a sweet, blonde, and very young woman was waiting up for her…’ In this anecdote Colette sums up almost casually (though Colette wrote nothing without deliberation, without performative poise) the ways that giving the self and telling a good story might not just be related to each other but both have roots in notions of belief, or suspension thereof.
Has giving, since the first gift of the apple, always been a matter involving purity, impurity, issues of permissibility? Here’s a slightly more contemporary French story, from Philippe Lioret’s 2009 film, Welcome, where a young Kurdish illegal immigrant from Iraq, trying to reach his girlfriend in London, gets himself as far as Calais. Twenty-one miles of Channel divide him and his destination, with no way he can smuggle himself in. So he starts taking swimming lessons locally. His French swimming instructor befriends him. The friendship is as illegal as inviting an illegal immigrant into your home is, in Calais, in the year 2009. We are living in times where, very close to home, hospitality is punishable by law.
Boris Pasternak, via his translator Edwin Morgan in the poem The Wedding Party, sees giving the self as the way in which we wed the world, the way we simultaneously free ourselves and commit ourselves:
Life is only a moment, life too is only a dissolving
of ourselves in all others as by an act of giving:
only a wedding’s gladness thrilling up through a window,
only a song, only a sleep, only a slate-gray pigeon.
Casanova puts it this way: ‘the greatest exhilaration to my spirits, greater than all my own pleasure, was the joy of giving pleasure to a woman.’ EM Forster, though, saw it a little more evenhandedly: ‘when human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other.’
Forster’s vision of love here, a combination of generosity and canniness, sounds like what Jan Verwoert thinks of the nature of all offerings in his recent article about the ethics of profanity. Referring to Giorgio Agamben’s 2007 essay In Praise of Profanity, he says:
in antiquity, ritual sacrifice would entail a portion of the sacrificial gift to the gods (e.g., parts of an animal) being returned to the community as a profane share (e.g., free food) to be enjoyed by all, as an earthly thing which retained a trace of the divine. (It’s like true irreverence, which always has love at the heart of it.) So value resides neither in the divine nor the profane but is manifested in the dynamic relation between the two. Capitalist society, Agamben argues, nullifies this dynamic. When there is a price on everything, all is similarly worthy and worthless. The challenge is to revive the free interplay between profanation and veneration through anarchic practices that affect the motion and emotion of meaningful differences coming into being.