EPIPHANIES


        There is vulgar triumph (“success,” the “bitch goddess”) and epiphanous spiritual victory as almost everybody used to know.  It is symbolized by the appearance of light every day and seasonally, in “    THE TRAGEDY OF NATURE” (Mallarmé, in The Antique Gods), recalling that Greek tragedy always ended in a theophany, the appearance of a god, as Gilbert Murray proclaimed, or the equivalent: the “All is well” at the close of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonna.”
        Spiritual victory requires the tragic total repudiation of ego in death typically or, second best, a humbling psychic death, as in Goethe’s Werther, Mallarmé’s Igitur.  Whence the utter self-effacement of a Rimbaud abandoning his literary genius, a Tolstoy rejecting his work at the end of his life, the eclipsing retreat of a Salinger.  This is authentic atonement, a sort of Yom Kippur or supreme Catholic “confession”: “The cost is not less than everything” (T. S. Eliot).
        Abraham’s ordeal on Mount Moriah, Christ’s death on the cross are our Judeo-Christian archetypes of the two moments: psychic death and full death followed by spiritual resurrection.
        In comedy, the triumph is not posthumous but in earthly time.  The atonement typically is in the struggle of the suitor to be worthy of a woman through arduous struggle or quest—“She loved me for the dangers I had passed” (Othello)—and the self-effacingly humble act of kneeling when proposing, hiding behind a proffered bunch of flowers.  Comedy usually is consummated in marriage, Northrop Frye wisely commented.  
        Dante’s “diving comedy” is more tragically other-worldly; “comedy” is derived etymologically from a term for “celebration,” explaining Dante’s dubious use of it.  George Steiner thought that Christianity, as in Dante, deviated by its optimism from true tragedy, but that, we have seen, is wrong both because Greek tragedy ended in spiritual victory and Christianity, as in Kierkegaard’s “existential” version, can be tragic as anything.  But true Christians, and Jews, are as rare as a Kierkegaard.
        Approximations to the full spiritual victory are the best expressions of Judeo-Christian culture, even in sports of the past.  Baudelaire’s admiration of the soldier and the priest (in his Intimate Journals) is thoroughly modest.  He also admired, elsewhere, artists like Delacroix but that is closer to his own ego.  The remoteness, as René Girard noted, is of the essence here, and is clearest in the lifetime fealty of great men to women like their mothers, Goethe’s “eternal feminine” closing Faust II.  The (misplaced and transient) homage of Goethe and Beethoven to Napoleon is much to the point.  I prefer Churchill and McCain.
        In a staggering ego-bound (brain-fetishizing) late culture, ours, we do well to honor a Churchill, an FDR, a John McCain, or any gallant soldier in Iraq or elsewhere.  It cleanses our psyches and abets survival.
        Conversely, the refusal to acknowledge military honor is a dangerous sickness, a blind spot one sees in otherwise distinguished friends, including some excellent poets.  That blindness—denial—is self-protective: their functioning is menaced as when a stronger rival genius comes too near.  Proust and Joyce had nothing to say to each other when they met.  Joyce “froze” when Mallarmé’s name came up, according to Samuel Beckett—he likely adored him too much.  Richard Wilbur, our paragon poet, translated Mallarmé at my behest, but stubbornly clings to an invented Mallarmé who lacks, like Poe, (unlike Wilbur) attachment to “the things of this world.”  Baloney: he’s very close to Keats, whom he hailed, in poetic sensuality.  Just read The Afternoon of a Faun (e.g. “from grapes I sucked the clarity”).  A certain blindness is necessary to insight: that is Paul de Man’s insight in his best book.  The extreme version of this is death as the black backing that lets us see in a mirror, according to Thomas Sebald.  The refusal of spiritual victory culminated in the all-threatening vulgarity of Nancy Pelosi replacing victory with a “solution.”  Duh.  
        “There is no solution” (Sinclair Lewis, in It Can’t Happen Here), thinking of fascist and communist problem-solving schemes leading to mass-murder.
But there is sacred/natural moral clarity like Lincoln’s, clear as the fresh light of a spring morning.