#6: the present and the future are the past
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. I told you last month that one was the sixth one, but I’m about 80% sure that this is actually the sixth. I apologize in advance for any future math errors.
Boredom/Horror. The alley between creative writing and scholarship is so dark, you can do anything in there. Obviously, that is incredibly alluring—I find it incredibly alluring—but at the end of the day, you know in your heart that you’re just tricking scholars, who don’t notice you’re stealing all their ideas because they’re so envious of your lyricism, and you’re tricking creative writers, who don’t read books so they hold you in awe and assume everything you say is right. When I attended the Society of Early Americanists conference a couple years ago, all the other creative writers there were extremely serious scholars of Early American Literature, which involves knowing a lot about ships, ship routes, and special old maps that show the ship routes. Since that conference, I’ve tried to write creative scholarship, or scholarly creative things, with the integrity I saw in the creative writers at the conference. It’s hard, though, because I really do love Early American literature, but in order to keep my mind on it, I almost have to make up stuff as I read it, so that I can keep believing that the people I’m reading about were alive as I am. I’ve been working on a scholarly-creative project about the Salem Witch Trials, and as I write and research, I need to keep the door of possibility cracked open to belief—in witchcraft, in the past itself—just like I need to open myself up to the reality that these people lived. Why would you be interested in this at all if you didn’t want to feel that horror, of lives completely overcome by domestic labor, and pulsing alongside that domestic world, messing with it, a ruthless Invisible World with its own rules? Hawthorne pursues this horror, and he’s my guide. He sets the horror of the Witch Trials, of life in Early America, in consciousness (something Henry James learned beautifully from him, and by learning that he pushed American literature forward). In his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne, writer of Romances, says, “The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.” How can you convey that idea when you think and read and write about the Puritans? Like with us, the time in which they lived didn’t belong to them, they weren’t inside it; it was always flitting away. It reminds me of the first line of the gorgeous Frank Bidart poem “Poem in the Stanza of the Rubaiyat’”: "the present and the future are the past."
The far-off past is out of grasp to the extent that we ourselves—like me myself, inside my life—are out of grasp.
Glory. I decided to begin my information-gathering for this Salem Witch Trials thing by reading Stacey Schiff’s book The Witches because I thought it would give me a good general introduction. Huge mistake. I don’t even understand how she takes something so horrible, beautiful, and insane and makes it boring (this will turn out to be about glory, I promise). I’ve noticed this problem in other texts about the Salem Witch Trials. If you think they were such stupid idiots, why bother? Perhaps what bothers me most is the pervasive attitude that, as Enlightened people, we know, clearly, that none of this witchcraft stuff happened—so much so we don’t even need to say it—but (without telling ourselves why) we are going to detail all their claims to reality anyway. If you feel that way, why bother? “Witches had troubled New England since its founding,” Schiff writes winkingly. “They sent forth disembodied creatures, in one case a man’s head connected to a white cat tail by several feet of nothingness—a Cheshire cat centuries before Lewis Carroll. (It should be said that there were a fair number of taverns in the colony. Salem town was particularly well served, with fifteen taverns, or one establishment for every eighty men, women, and children.).” Why “should” that parenthetical about the “fair number of taverns” in Salem “be said”? Does being drunk make multiple people hallucinate the same thing? Who knows, and who cares? the work has been done: these drunken morons’ perceptions, their very reality, has been effectively distanced from ours. Also, the Cheshire cat was entirely a cat, not mixed up with a man—it just disappeared sometimes. Is this reference doing the same work, showing how modern we are that even Carroll’s Chesire cat, “centuries before” these Witch Trials, is off in the far distance for us? Contrast this tone with Increase Mather’s “An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences,” written more or less contemporaneously with the Witch Trials. Mather relays the same incident of the cat-man, in a section titled “A Brief Narrative of sundry Apparitions of Satan until and Assaults at sundry times and places upon the Person of Mary the Wife of Antonio Hortado, dwelling near the Salmon Falls: Taken from her own mouth, Aug. 13, 1683”:
Whereupon the said Mary and her Husband going in a Canoo over the Rover, they saw like the head of a man new-shorn, and the tail of a white Cat about two or three foot distance from each other, swimming over before the Cannoo, but no body appeared to joyn head and tail together; and they returning over the River in less than an hours time, the said Apparition followed their Cannoo back again, but disappeared at Landing.
This is wonderful writing! Literally full of wonders, with careful, descriptive, clear language appropriate to the task of describing those wonders. Another thing Increase Mather does often is say he doesn’t know. Why can’t we say that more often? The said Mary’s trouble began “in June 1682 (the day forgotten) at Evening.” I thought I preferred Cotton Mather (who has even better titles, like “A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning,” his account of Mercy Short’s bewitchment), but I’m developing a real love for Increase. I wish I could see all this better, touch it. I’m going to have to do some kind of art project about the feeling of reaching for Increase Mather’s reality through the centuries, as he reached for this daemon’s reality that bloomed alongside and inside daily life.
The voluminous writing by Increase and Cotton Mather and other people involved on various levels of the Witch Trails, like government officials and ministers, reminds me of something we learned about the Bloomsbury Group in a class I took in college about Virginia Woolf. Robert Milder taught the class, and he told us the Bloomsbury Group has endured in our literary imagination, holding such a secure place in the canon, because they wrote everything down. Woolf was especially expert at that, making the present into the future by writing it. The witchcraft trials are like that. The bid for their literary importance is baked in the cake, because all the legal and literary documents are so comprehensive and beautiful. Like before America was an idea, even, they were writing it.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Recommended: The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter, “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” Nathaniel Hawthorne; The Collected Poems of Frank Bidart, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vols. 1 and 2, “An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences,” Increase Mather, “The Wonders of the Invisible World,” Cotton Mather
Unrecommended: The Witches, Stacey Schiff