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My
current creative
project, other than
spring garden work (oh,
what fun that is), is adapting David Greig’s The Book of I,
published last year by
Europa. Greig is a
prolific and celebrated
playwright from
Scotland, but he had
never written a proper
book before this.
(There is an excellent
review of the book by
Meghan O’Gieblyn
in the March 26 issue
of New York Review of Books.)
The Book of I had an unlikely starting point. Greig, a playwright, was invited to write a thriller on Scottish history for a series of novellas aimed at tourists. He found that the not-usual-for-him format was ultimately freeing, allowing him to delve into an actual historical event: the sacking of the monastery on the island of Iona by Vikings in 825 A.D. in search of a reliquary that contained the bones of Saint Columba.
Greig tells his story
of destruction,
reconstruction and
transformation through
four characters.
Martin is a young monk
who is the only
survivor after the
Vikings slaughter about
a dozen monks,
including the abbot,
who is literally torn
limb from limb by four
horses. The only reason
he survives is because
he hides in the
shitpool of the latrine.
Grimur is one of the
Vikings who attack the
monastery, but he finds
himself pleasantly
overwhelmed by the
sweet mead made by Una,
the wife of the
blacksmith (whom Grimur
has dispatched with an
ax). Thus freed, Una
seems to greatly enjoy
inebriating the man who
did the deed (and whom
she later accepts into
her bed).
Bronagh is a young
woman from wealth who
travels to the island,
once the Vikings have
left and Martin, Grimur
and Una rebuild it as
their home, to become
an anchoress, an
impulse that does not
last for long once she
finds out how boring it
is to be holed up
forever. She goes back
home, only to return to
save the island from a
second Viking attack by
bringing soldiers back
to defeat them, a life
of action she finds far
more religiously
satisfying than
meditating upon stale
psalms in solitude.
The book does have a
relic of a saint (the
finger of St. Columba),
a resurrection and a
ghost, and an
illuminated manuscript
(yes, a Kellsian echo),
but at the very heart
of it is the friction
(heat, light,
conflagration,
illumination) of pagan
and Celtic Christianity
rubbing their bits
together. For Martin,
there is no higher
achievement in life
than to so melt into
God’s presence as
to lose all definition
of self and thus avoid
all struggle with
desire and imperfection
and sin.
Grimur, though tempted
a little by the purity
of such a formless
life, ultimately cannot
cotton to the Christian
revocation of the real
world around them. For
instance, Martin
rhapsodizes about the
miracles that St.
Columba’s finger
made possible, and
Grimur, responds,
“Did he never pick his nose or wipe his arse?”
When Martin, in another
instance enthuses that
God’s love is as
boundless as the sea,
Grimur replies, “The sea has boundaries.” (Greig puts all dialogue in italics, which gives it a strange urgency as it’s read.)
And then there is
Grimur’s
relationship with Una,
who, as her name
suggests, brings into
one body (and her
kick-ass honey mead)
the redemptive energy
of Martin’s God
and the temporal
finitude of
Grimur’s Odin:
“Unlike Martin,
Grimur felt content.
Why shouldn’t he?
He was fed and fucked
and far away from
trouble. Perhaps this
was what Christians
meant by Heaven: a
simple
sufficiency?”
I incline toward the
Grimurian point of
view. At moments, what
Martin considers a gift
of grace from a
bodiless God is simply
a pause in
nature’s constant
effort to kill off all
humans in as many
exotic ways as
possible: a moment of
simple sufficiency may
be enough of a reward
for all of the
existential chaos we
have to endure as
humans slouching toward
death, with no need to
muck it up with appeals
to divinity or destiny.
Greig’s book, in
one of the linkages
that make life strange
and tasty, led me to
think about Henry David
Thoreau – again
– and lo, there
was Ken Burn’s
PBS documentary on the
man. The three-episode
biopic was fine, and
it’s always good
to re-hear
Thoreau’s call to
live life fully and
hard, though, in the
usual Burnsian fashion,
all the good
transgressive edges get
smoothed away. Thoreau
may have
transcendentalized
nature, but it was
never Emerson’s
vaporous initial-capped
Nature, a poor proxy
for the religion RWE
had given up ages ago.
For Thoreau, being in
the muck was critical
to being in your right
mind and body. Spirit
emanated not from
celestial places but
from the sweaty
satisfaction of
building a cabin.
Thoreau may have
thought he was becoming
an elevated being by
sinking himself
eye-deep in a swamp to
swap gazes with a
bullfrog, but he was
actually feeling what
Grimur, deep in
Una’s embrace and
with a horn of honey
mead in hand, was
marveling at: finding a
space of simple
sufficiency on the
solid earth where the
chaos stops and time
shuts up and what is,
is. Heaven enough,
indeed.
I’m very excited
about creating a play
that avoids the
sentimentalized
Christian ethos that
drives so much of our
society’s
narrative scripts (good
guys should win, or at
least the least-worst
bad guy; sin is
punished or at least
good is rewarded;
redemption is
required). The pagan is
sufficient; I hope I
can honor it well.
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