The current lock-down and the general slowing of life gave me the opportunity to attempt to read Milton’s Paradise Lost. (In January, I wouldn’t have thought I’ll be devoting hours reading this classic, but then, if not now, when?).
I haven’t read much of classics, almost nothing of drama and historical, epical poems like these, and I have no reference point to look at these except that of an interested and keen reader approaching a work of art with an open mind and no references to colour things. And as a personal experiment of sorts, I have tried to read it in as unprefaced a way as possible – refraining from reading around and about Paradise Lost and Milton - to give myself a clean, untinted lens to look at it and an empty slate to record it without feeling too encumbered by the weight and opinions which some of such works live under. Add to that, I am a level removed because quite unfamiliar with the mythology and the biblical references, and some of those contexts quite miss me (and I did need to look up some of these).
Given this blank slate reading, writing this I do feel a little like a vandaliser who perhaps does not know or understand the value of what they touch. Still, since some of these works are to work independent of all the aura around them, and that is perhaps how a classic is established, how much it can react with you unfolding its magic without any other aid except the words. And I do react to it, it bothers and ruffles, and I have so many fragmented thoughts and questions. This is my attempt to collect some of those.
In one sentence, it is Milton’s take on events around the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise after partaking of the fruit from the tree of knowledge. As to the exact nature of the Paradise which is lost, and whether Adam and Eve were better off losing it, or whether it was really a Paradise or not is something to perhaps keep thinking about. Something perhaps the poet would have liked us to keep thinking about.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
Briefly, divided in 12 books or episodes, the poem opens in hell, where Satan and the rest of the fallen, ‘confounded’ angels, organise themselves under Satan to find a way to restore their lost glory, and alight on the plan to infest the newly created earth with evil. Satan, fighting his way through hell’s gates, death, sin, and into the deep chaos eventually makes his way to Earth’s shores. In heaven meanwhile, Godhead notices Satan’s arrival and tells of the events to come, and alludes to the fall. To which, the Son offers himself in his love and in lieu of mankind ("Behold me then: me for him, life for life/ I offer: on me let thine anger fall;")
Satan finds his way to Eden and manages to plant a dream in sleeping Eve’s mind before being found and sent away by angels. An angel from heaven arrives in Paradise and relates to Adam and Eve the potential trouble, and gives them context of the three-day heavenly battle that led to Satan’s fall, and eventually to creation of Earth by God’s Son and of Adam and Eve to lord over paradise perpetually in bliss. The angel asks them to be mindful and grateful. With their new understanding, Adam and Eve try to be careful, but Satan, still quite single-minded in his pursuit, takes a serpent form and finding Eve alone, leads her to the apple.
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate.
Earth felt the wound; and nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.
Then follow the registering of the magnitude of the fall in slow degrees. Layered like waves, the realisations crash on the bewildered minds of these two child-like people. Reflected internally in their states of mind, externally in the weather, the retreating angels, the changed world, the eventual understanding of the irreversible sinks in. God’s son comes to judge Satan, Eve and Adam. Satan and the other fallen angels are reduced to serpents, the tree of knowledge takes root in hell and its fruit ash as they attempt to taste it. For Adam and Eve, the judgement is expulsion. An angel, before expelling them, softens the blow by sharing visions of the future which showcase mankind’s future, earthly joys and miseries, diseases, war, famine, flood, Noah’s ark to eventually God’s son's coming to Earth as Christ, and ending with the promise of a second coming.
Although one knows even as one opens the book that their paradise is about to be lost, still, the coldness of the creator, and the loss of these two vulnerable people (of all of humankind, perhaps the most), can quite get one.
They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.
**
(The text - I read from a searchable
version which simplified Milton’s spellings but for early sojourners like me, this itself was a milestone which I am celebrating in this post.)
Reading something like this - lyrical, flowing, quite removed from the cadences of all other conversations and all the real and fictional words and phrases generally mixing and merging and raining around you reveals a never-felt-before reading experience. Quite removed, quite sanctuary like. Requires a dedicated attention and devotion and muting of all other wordly matters around you.
The principal joy of this reading was in the reading aloud, the breathless rolling text, and because you move at speaking pace and not reading pace, and because it is not super easy but difficult enough, and because it is so graphic and full of action, like a movie, it rolls out in front of your eyes engulfing you completely, and presents the gore of hell and yet the politics of it all, and then the dread of the dark and the doom that seems to hit Earth the moment Satan hits the shore, it can drum up dread in air around you.
This drumming up of dread – from this concentrated interaction with words of a poet dead for three centuries, is perhaps one of those unknowingly longed for moments, that a reader seems to be on quest for as they open book after book of stories waiting to unroll and unfold and drum up stuff out of thin air. Things which change you once you know them. And to think that the day before you didn’t even know you were walking headlong into it. And since I need to try to precisely pin this feeling – that unknowing of knowing or looking forward to knowing is a dry fact but the knowing seems to change you.
For me, now these joys await in Shakespeare, of whom I’ve read just a drama or two. This new delightful looking forward to, to all those long poetic texts waiting to be read aloud!
**
Reading a mythological/ historical work like this makes me wonder about how art works and engages us. Any art, be it a poem, a novel, a painting, often creates a new world from scratch and pulls us in, and we try to fit into that world, trying to find characters we can pin affinities on, or empathise with, living through them in their world – all the time suspending our disbelief and living in the book or the art thus playing out in our imaginary vision.
Alternatively, art can engage with us in a third space of sorts, where, it plays off certain established or context-rich words or themes. Say words like 'heaven', 'hell', 'Adam & Eve'. Themes or words which may have lifetime worth of random observations, emotional responses and facts clustering or sedimented around them in the reader’s or observer’s mind. When it operates in that third space, lifting off a new point in the reader’s mind, it seems to interact with much more of a reader than just their imagination. And because it seems to interact with more of the reader, it becomes thought triggering, ruffling, at times, providing answers, and over time, they become classics. And we keep going back to them, perhaps not just to dip again in their beauty, but also, while dipping, since they speak to so much more of us, to find more of ourselves of times past and to uncover some more of our own thoughts thus refracted in their waters.
The artist’s freedom is in playing with the theme, characters, a new lift-off on a shared word, and if the artist’s take on the narrative ruts already established in the reader’s mind is as epic, it becomes the new reference point for history, myth or even superhero fiction. Which is perhaps what happens here. Once Satan seen through Milton’s eyes, difficult to go back.
**
Prior to this poem, my general impression of Satan, or the mental foothold where the poem leaps from in my reader's mind, is the general idea gleaned from popular media that Satan is evil. And so are most mythical/ historical villains which are routinely caricaturised in most popular media. And as we read, we understand that Satan wishes to convert all good to evil, and in multiple ways. But in his portrayal, irrespective of his aims or objects which he seems to be bound to as if his very grain demands it, irrespective of all that, there is a respect and empathy in his detailing which is quite refreshing.
The poet brings him to life as an angel, rebellious, fallen, yet keen to better his and his ilk’s lot, brave, thoughtful, reflective. His portrayal, from his leadership in bringing together the fallen angels, to the assumption of the title of the king of the fallen (
“but who here/ Will envy whom the highest place exposes/ Foremost to stand against the Thunderer's aim/ Your bulwark, and condemns to greatest share/ Of endless pain?”), his political craftery, to his brave journey to find Earth, add nuances to his character, greater than those lent to any other character in the book, and perhaps very few other fictional characters I know of.
But the place which seems to lift him off the page for me, is when Satan, with his seemingly troubled heart, tired and reflective after his long trip from hell, on the shores of earth, with heaven in sight, contemplates his own eventual fall. Not after the battle in heavens, not before creation, but his real fall seems to happen right before Eve’s, when eventually, finally, he embraces evil. Through this reflective phase, later too, sitting atop the tree of life, he continues this long pause of reflection before finally leaping down to action. Perhaps this is here where the storytelling too leaps up to something else.
Yet, not rejoicing in his speed, though bold
Far off and fearless, nor with cause to boast,
Begins his dire attempt; which nigh the birth
Now rolling boils in his tumultuous breast,
And like a devilish engine back recoils
Upon himself; horror and doubt distract
His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir
The Hell within him; for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step, no more than from himself, can fly
By change of place: Now conscience wakes despair,
That slumbered; wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.
Troubled thoughts, troubled heart – caught between what was and what is to be, and almost fallen, fallen but not really, still striving, until takes the plunge down from the tree of life. The transitory moments, the moments that can capture the shifts, the change, between the branch and the ground.
Reading his reflection, I feel that the things that move us the most come from the margins, the edges, or these in-between two states, two spheres, the points of no return, the unknowing and the knowing, the tiny space between those two can hold the deepest and the purest points of feeling. Everything before and everything after is prose and prosaic. It is that pinning, that pining when one is neither this nor that (not because one doesn’t know, but one knows and can’t help it like Satan), the brief dusk, or the moment the sun comes out, right before. These points, these peaking spaces which seem to be the neck of the hourglass, the point where the sand passes through is the point where perhaps some of the best poetry happens. And hence Satan here gets the best lines, and then Adam as soon as he realises what Eve has done. That point, where the recognition of the change has reached the subconscious but not really registered in the conscious, that space and point.
It is not easy to replicate, because by nature such points are few and defining. But if captured, they sum up the past and the future and in them reveal the nature of things, be it what Satan stands for, or the point and the pointlessness of the rest of it all. The point of the rest of it all is to just arrive at this point hence the pointlessness.
**
Given that an act of rebellion triggered the whole chain of events eventually leading to the Paradise being Lost, the politics of heaven is quite central to this poem.
On one end, as the poem opens, we have these fallen angels in hell who had sided with Satan when Satan decided to question and rebel against Godhead’s power over heaven, now gathering, assessing and consolidating their remaining forces under the charismatic political maneuvering by Satan.Played out like one of Shakespeare’s Roman parliament/ political arena, the angels strategise, debate, each with quite nuanced, detailed arguments to consolidate their resources to be able to fight again, or to revenge, or to somehow dilute and lessen God’s power and authority.
Reading through this opening section in hell, and the subsequent ones played out in heaven, the realisation that hits one is that the ‘want’ of the fallen was somehow more intense, more interesting and more dramatic, and more closely felt/ observed by the poet, or lends itself better to empathy, and hence is better felt than the monotonous, unchanging bliss, or the perpetual ‘have’ of the remaining angels in heaven. Because of their strong need to change the unacceptable place they find themselves in, and the high-stake situation, there is a lot more motivation and movement, in the dynamic and leaping lines of the fallen than the relatively placid, stable, and hymn-like sections of heaven’s angels.
But the starkest, strangest point, that perhaps ruffled and intrigued me the most is around Godhead and his way of operating. Just going by the lines spoken by him through this poem, and the way there is so much of his effort mainly directed towards establishing a perpetual, uncontested reign of heaven, and the Son, makes you pause and wonder at almost each of his lines, and makes you want to contest and argue about the godliness of such a God thus emerging from these lines, so wrought with human failings and full of human-like aspirations.
Son, thou in whom my glory I behold
In full resplendence, Heir of all my might,
Nearly it now concerns us to be sure
Of our Omnipotence, and with what arms
We mean to hold what anciently we claim
Of deity or empire: Such a foe
Is rising, who intends to erect his throne
Equal to ours, throughout the spacious north;
Nor so content, hath in his thought to try
In battle, what our power is, or our right.
Let us advise, and to this hazard draw
With speed what force is left, and all employ
In our defense; lest unawares we lose
This our high place, our sanctuary, our hill.
One then wonders about what brings it about. Perhaps a human drama, proximate to Milton in time or place, projected on the Gods for dramatic effect and to engage the common denominator in human-like prejudices and petty politics. Perhaps.
The initial battle in heaven itself where God’s decision to let the angels on both sides war it out and wear themselves out for two days before asking his Son to go with all of God’s forces and establish a final, glorious victory pushing out Satan and his co-conspirators to hell, in the context of the subsequent events, seems to feel like a power-play, a very human historic drama.
For thee I have ordained it; and thus far
Have suffered, that the glory may be thine
Of ending this great war, since none but Thou
Can end it. Into thee such virtue and grace
Immense I have transfused, that all may know
In Heaven and Hell thy power above compare;
And, this perverse commotion governed thus,
To manifest thee worthiest to be Heir
Of all things; to be Heir, and to be King
By sacred unction, thy deserved right.
The Son shines in the battle, but beyond the battle too, in the way creation and the loss of paradise comes about, it begins to feel as if, all that was just a second act to establish the son as –
“Heir, and to be King/ By sacred unction, thy deserved right.” Creation, with the forbidden fruit in the middle of paradise seems to sing loud and clear the pre-ordained fall, forever since blamed on Eve, to be eventually retributed by the Son, because although he is and will be immortal in that universe, he chooses to come in mortal form on Earth to help save humanity. The Son seems to be the saving grace in heaven, who seems to offer himself out of immense love and mercy more becoming of a God.
This fall, this loss and this letting be picked up, and praise the Lord all the more for it, this, in a foreordained, and foreknown universe with a God who seems to have designed everything, eventually, ridiculously build to the realisation that all this so that the Godhead can retain heaven’s supremacy.
And when you look at things like that, it just makes you turn away from the God thus portrayed. Makes you wonder how poor our imagination of trying to portray the absolute. Not the poet’s fault. He builds a take on the long-held narrative.
The sad output of all the political actions in heaven is the perpetual bad name that Eve lives with. Almost everything brought down to that one action. And repeated often in heaven and Earth as a lest-you-forget reminder. But all the events that eventually lead to it and the reasons of laying out of past (Satan’s fall) and future(Son as Christ) seem to be forgotten or overlooked in the ease of pointing the finger at Eve’s judgement. As if that was the trigger! As if she even had the luxury of choosing or not choosing the apple!
A creation mired in political reasons and hurtling towards judgment.
This portrayal of God and the general fragile nature of the way Creation and fall came about stays one of the most distressing things in the poem. Since the apple, everything dipped deep in shades of trespass, guilt, wrongdoing, which since the humanity still seems to seek some sort of forgiveness for and still awaits judgement. A sad loss for humanity, to have only such a narrow, instructing, injunctive, judging god to contemplate, who creates and then punishes a fragile transgression in seeming perpetuity.
Add to it this forbidding of seeking knowledge, and the angels’ admonishments to Adam and Eve to stay within their station, and not question the beyond, again highlights the poverty of our imaginations in creating such a finite sort of god. One shouldn't perhaps say such things as one knows little, but it feels too complicated and unbeautiful and against the very grain of simplicity and koan like beauty of what we do understand of the universe, it seems more a human projected on divine drama to make sense of the living and the joys and losses and the emotional range of being human, and I should perhaps read it like that.
As to the almighty or the absolute, if anything, I would hope and think that whichever higher power or forces left us here in this floating spacetime, and gave us this gift of consciousness, one of the most beautiful things we can do is contemplate on the beauty and wonder of it all and seek and attempt to know and to understand.
**
In Milton’s take on this story, one of the most painful
episodes is right after Eve and Adam eat the fruit and before they have been
judged, even as Eden and the Earth and sky were changing and losing hospitality,
there is this big loss of hospitality, of accord, of mutual regard and understanding between Adam
and Eve. Together perhaps they could have created their little Eden wherever,
but in the state described in book X, they seem to lose peace and paradise even
in paradise.
He came; and with him Eve, more loath, though first
To offend; discountenanced both, and discomposed;
Love was not in their looks, either to God,
Or to each other; but apparent guilt,
And shame, and perturbation, and despair,
Anger, and obstinacy, and hate, and guile.
Leading me again to the question whether Eden was really the
paradise that was lost?
**
An observation - there are not many females in the poem. Eve, and Sin. And a few more who come up during vision session and are regarded with an admonishing eye. As to Eve and Sin, it feels like they both seek a room of their own of sorts. Initially sin, when she rues her fall and since then, the continuous series of hourly birth of monsters ("
These yelling monsters, that with ceaseless cry/ Surround me") , and then Eve, who even before tempted by the serpent to the apple, felt stifled in Paradise, and sought some space of her own. A morning where she prefers to work apart from Adam saying:
If this be our condition, thus to dwell
In narrow circuit straitened by a foe,
Subtle or violent, we not endued
Single with like defense, wherever met;
How are we happy, still in fear of harm?
Quite an interesting take by the poet – whether needed to be done to let the serpent find Eve alone, or by design, it seems to sum up the lot.
**
Note to Self: There are still many thoughts and fragments that need working through (esp around Eve, the space sci-fi nature of this story, the beautiful metaphors all through, the science of 1600s, and a lot more), but I wish to read Paradise Regained, and really keen to read a few other poetic dramas and hence need to close this for the moment.
Perhaps why we call them classics. One book can keep revealing, if we care to keep looking.
This post can also be read as a 'why we read' post. We read because of all this above. Things which we didn’t think we had to say or that troubled and triggered and then eventually, things which we didn’t think we were thinking but as if these poems, these books give you little ropes and buckets to bring up stuff from your subconscious and lay them out and examine them at peace, one by one, and hence, examine yourself. Such joys and pleasures, where else?
They need to be admired, like flowers, which are in full bloom in April where I live. Almost every tree laden with scores of blooms, branches drooping, overwhelmed, flowers all over the footpaths and grassy patches. And one can’t walk there without thinking of Yeats’ “I have spread my dreams under your feet;/ Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”. Every gaze presents an eyeful of flowers. Every few steps one needs to stop to admire one of those open-faced beauties closely. You look at their perfection, their tender curving opening blossoming and even as they blossom, the edges of the petals already turning dark, already dying. You stand there enchanted until the business of living pulls you out, you run to catch-up, just until the next flower that beckons and tugs at something in you, and you stop and stare again.