Lifeblood

Prairie Rose

William Shakespeare wrote a play called Titus Andronicus, a blood-steeped play which is seldom read, seldom performed. Scholars have, in fact, questioned the authorship based on the difference in style and content compared to his other plays. One said, “. . . this play is a perfect slaughter-house and the blood makes appeal to all the senses. It reeks blood, it smells of blood, we almost feel we have handled blood—it is so gross.)ⁱ

We’ve all seen gruesome portrayals in film, read them in books and felt the hair bristle on our necks with the horror. Agnes and I have been watching the Doctor Blake Mysteries on Britbox as a diversion and we’ve developed a patter that goes something like this: a woman walks down a darkened hallway, knocks on a door and says, “Miranda . . . Miranda? Are you there?” And I say, “She’s dead.” And as the woman opens the door, Agnes says, “Now! Scream!” And scream she does; it seldom misses. Seems that scenarios like “She didn’t drown; he threw her already-dead body into the canal” are entertainment we can’t get enough of.

The fact that murder-mystery has become the most popular kind of series to stream on TV may be indicative of something in us, but what is that something? Perhaps it’s relief akin to the laughter with which we respond to someone slipping on a banana peel and falling: relief that it wasn’t us who fell. Or it’s a need to acknowledge—subconsciously perhaps—that awful things can happen to people but they’re not happening to me right now. If I imagine a real murder of a loved one in my living room and the investigator a local RCMP, and the arrest of a neighbour and a trial, none of that smacks of entertainment whatsoever. 

Perhaps turning such gruesome tragedy into a fiction happening elsewhere and to total strangers provides a kind of psychological release.

Or perhaps its Freudian sublimation, “an unconscious process whereby an instinctive urge is transformed so that it is more socially acceptable.” Maybe we do sublimate our aggressive urges borne of a sense of having been wronged or undervalued, and/or our desire to expose as charlatans people we don’t like by living through these impulses with a dastardly criminal, a masterful detective.

The lives we live are more chaotic than orderly, and when seemingly-unrelenting chaos leads to anxiety and stress, we long for someone or something to make the ducks line up—properly and predictably. Fiction can do this for us; it can assure us in advance that the Mounties will get their man, evil will be punished and good will prevail. Now that’s order! Whether experiencing happy endings vicariously, habitually, is good for the soul or not, I leave to others to debate.

How gruesome can a fiction become before it tilts toward the gratuitous, the pandering to those who can’t get enough of gunshots and knife cuts and pools of blood? I remember a quip in high school that could qualify as bumbling-teens’ testing of borders: “Blood and gore all over the floor, and me without a spoon!” It’s possible that artists create and consumers consume dark material as a “whistling past the graveyard” defense mechanism. Horror is not so horrible if you joke about it, or alternately, immerse yourself so deeply in it that it becomes commonplace.

Deuteronomy 28 is not an ordinary history, thank God. If you haven’t studied it recently, I’d suggest steering clear of it, especially the last two-thirds. The imagery will make your skin crawl. Imagine a principal getting up in front of a general assembly at the beginning of a school year and saying something like this to the students: “You’ve been given a list of all the rules of the school and if you obey all these rules all the time, your stay here will be good. The cafeteria will keep you well fed, teachers will give you high marks and you’ll have long and enjoyable recesses. But if you don’t, I will break your legs, tear your arms off, see that you get an F- in every subject and what’s more, students from the school down the street will be invited over to make fun of you, steal everything you have and then kill and roast you over a bonfire for their supper.”

That, basically, is the tone of the warning from God delivered by Moses as the Israelite armies are preparing to annex the West Bank of the Jordan River militarily. Gerald Gerbrandt is the Deuteronomy scholar in our midst and I had to miss his presentations in February so I have to imagine what his take on this chapter would be. Context, I would think, is critical. Not so much the context reigning as Moses delivers the dire warnings, but the context in which the narrative was written and first read. Narratives are generally written in the tone, syntax, diction and imagery that will be understood by the reader as the author imagines him/her. Deuteronomy 28 definitely hammers home the point that the community’s success, its prosperity, its happiness are highly integrated with the nation’s adherence to the rules of justice laid down in Chapter 27 and previous. Christians today make the same point, but oh, they make it much differently; it’s not the same context, after all.

I was very aware of audience when writing Isaac Janssen, M.Div. Some readers have told me they find the dialogue surprisingly raunchy in spots; I would not have included those passages if I’d written it in 1960, but our 21^st Century context includes a liberalization, a frankness in conversation that can’t be denied and will definitely be reflected in the creative work of artists and authors working now.

I’m fascinated by the possibility that writings like Deuteronomy 28, Titus Andronicus, Pride and Prejudice, Psycho, even news archives can teach us much about the developing, changing, contexts in which they were created.

***

As regards those plays, narratives, poetry and visual arts that go back, back into earlier contexts, the question of the sanctity of human life always surfaces for me. Battles won even though 10,000 soldiers had to die to regain a sovereign’s honour, a girl raped and murdered in Act 1 of a play, a man kidnapping his own daughters and killing both them and himself, a president bargaining with the lives of citizens in defense of an economy. Only the living continue on stage while for those sacrificed, all futures are lost and gone.

Perhaps our context needs to take a look at how it values human life, beginning first with its depiction in the arts and entertainment worlds. It’s my conviction that if human life and consciousness are not extraordinarily valuable, not sacred, then nothing is. Extinguish human life and all meaning dies with it. Viktor Frankl, Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, based his entire existentialist mental-health therapy on the individual’s search for meaning . . . and the ability or failure to find it. Surely the value of life falls under the category of “searching for meaning.”

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Perhaps the tide of illness and death that is COVID 19 is a tide we really must ride, must let it bear us to a better place; you can’t arrest a tide, can’t gain anything by railing against it.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.” (Julius Caesar IV, iii, 218-224)

iClark, W.G. & Wright, A. editors. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Volume 1. Nelson Doubleday, Inc. p.1

iiBrutus here is urging that his camp go into combat full-bore because an advantage (tide) exists for potential victory. “Tides” form the concrete end of a remarkable metaphor; they’re uncontrollable, powerful and if a ship were to be launched, how better to launch it than on the outgoing swell of the tide. The timing missed, the departed tide will leave the ship stranded in the shallows and mud.