Writing on Pearl

Below is the paper that I gave at Kalamazoo back in May. I remain, as I mentioned in my last post, deeply grateful for the opportunity to present on Pearl and for the wonderful feedback I received on the paper while I was there. That said, I've honestly never found a paper as emotionally exhausting to write as this one, and the process has actually given me pause about my ideas for a second project. Writing about Pearl as I did a couple of years ago was more cathartic than anything else, and as a result I starting toying with the idea that my next project (once I get my manuscript for this first book together) would focus on the ways in which grief and mourning are depicted in Middle English literature. I can definitely see myself writing more on the topic at some point. At the moment, however, I don't think I'm in the right place or time. So much has happened since I wrote that earlier post on Pearl, and the additional losses I've experienced have made the process of writing about the poem much harder than I  anticipated.

I also found myself writing the bulk of this paper in April, which has become a terribly hard month for a variety of reasons. My father-in-law passed away on April 3rd (which also happened to be Easter Saturday) back in 2010, and so both the anniversary of his passing and Easter weekend itself are very painful. What is more, the due date for the first pregnancy that I lost (the one that I mentioned in my earlier post on Pearl) would have fallen in April, and so I always tend to find myself slowing to a kind of crawl during this month because of the weight of all of these anniversaries. Fortunately, I've survived enough of these Aprils to know what's coming and what to expect, which is why I found myself more than a little bemused by my choice in topic for this particular paper. I know that my rationale had been to write on it because it was the next logical step (i.e. use conferences as I've used them in the past: to vet ideas for larger projects), and so for that reason I'm glad that I took this leap and struggled through the writing process. It reminded me in a big way of how important it is to choose my large projects wisely and to make sure I can sit with them for a long, long time. I know for a fact that I haven't arrived at that juncture with this particular topic quite yet, but maybe — in a few years' time — I'll find myself there.

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Pearl's Poetics of Grief

“[T]here is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve -- even in pain -- the authentic relationship. Further more, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain” (Bonhoeffer, 238)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer penned these words in a letter to Eberhard Bethge — his student, close friend, and confidant — while imprisoned and awaiting his execution for his role in the attempted assassination of Adolph Hitler. I have thought quite frequently about this passage over the past few months as I prepared this talk.  Pearl, at its core, wrestles with the same themes of pain and absence born of grief that Bonhoeffer describes, and the poem ultimately argues for a similar conceptualization of loss — that it is impermanent, and that joy can be found through the suffering that comes with loss.  

       But Pearl, as many scholars have articulated, hones in on the spiritual problems of excessive grief, and many have seen the dreamer as someone who has forgotten himself in the midst of his pain. In focusing on the absence of his beloved pearl, he has forgotten both God and the possibility of salvation.  His forgetfulness, in this reading, belies a kind of foolishness similar to the self-indulgent grieving of Olivia in Twelfth Night, for which Feste chides her: 

Feste: Good Madonna, why mournest though?

Olivia: Good fool, for my brother’s death

Feste: I think his soul is in hell, Madonna.

Olivia: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

Feste: The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul being in heaven. . . . 

(Act I, Scene V, 357-60)

In similar way, the Pearl maiden chides the dreamer for making the same kind of error. Corey Owen has observed, however, that this criticism may not extend to the narrator we encounter in the poem, who seems — especially at the beginning and end of the poem — to be reflecting on his past experiences and mistakes. Moreover, the configuration of the Pearl maiden has long contributed to arguments that the poem is either an elegy or an allegory, and scholars such as Daniel Kline have stressed how the allegorical approach and related attempts to universalize the Pearl maiden and the narrator’s grief diminish the personal pains and experiences so poignantly conveyed in the narrative.

I want to offer up two interpretive possibilities in complement to these established readings. The first is that the author simultaneously personalizes and universalizes the child — as well as the grief experienced by narrator/dreamer — in order to actualize the instructional potential of the poem. I am suggesting, in other words, that these dual impulses  in the poem are not mutually exclusive, as some scholars have worried they might be, but are rather deeply complementary. The second possibility — one that lies at the core of Pearl’s poetics of grief — is that the poem invites its readers to simultaneously criticize and sympathize with dreamer. While the poem presents the dreamer as an excessive griever, the state of abjection formed by his immeasurable grief gives rise to the dream vision itself. In this way, the poem stresses not only the dangers of emotional excess, but also the seeming inevitability of this part of the grieving process and the potential it offers for growth and revelation. These two, dual aspects — the sympathetic/critical and the personal/universal — cooperatively present an atemporal and metacritical model of the grieving process. This model meshes criticism of the griever’s “category mistakes” with the rueful acknowledgment that, as fellow human beings, we are only separated from the narrator “in degree, not in time,” — to borrow from Arthur Bahr’s recent paper on Patience —  bound as we are to the same experiences and constraints of earthly existence.

The poem begins with the establishment of the narrator’s fallen state caused by his excessive and – as he will learn – misguided grief. The very first word, “perle,” introduces us to the object of the narrator’s affections and of his grieving and, to borrow from Sarah Stanbury, to the poem’s “central object and symbol” (31, n. 1). The centrality of the pearl is made very clear in these opening stanzas, especially in their conclusions: the first two stanzas end with the phrase “that [or my] privy perle withouten spot” and the third through fifth stanzas end with “that [or my] precious perle withouten spot.” Each stanza, however, ultimately provides deeper insight into the dreamer’s bereaved state. We learn of the pearl’s disappearance in the first stanza, and the other four go to great lengths to depict a man fixated on his pearl’s assumed “imprisonment” in the earth, this awareness causing him intense pain. In this nearly exclusive focus on the earth and related images of rot and decay, the dreamer literalizes his inability to think beyond his earthly cares and losses and perceive the broader, spiritual implications of the loss that so pains him. Pained as he is, however, he cannot keep himself from thinking about her as we see in the final lines of each stanza, and it is these meditations on his lost pearl that ultimately serve as an access point for the dream vision itself. 

This rhythmic iteration of the Pearl’s simultaneous presence and absence overshadows the grief of the narrator and hint at the limitations of the griever’s perspective.  As Sarah Stanbury illustrates, the term “privy” — and to a lesser extent, “precious” — not to mention the repetition of the phrase “my perle” at the end of each stanza — emphasizes the possessive attitude that the dreamer takes towards his pearl. The phrase “withouten spot,” by contrast can mean not only that the pearl is blemish-free but that it also has no one place/spot to call home; and as an aside, it also could easily tie into Boethian conceptualizations as well, where the dreamer himself has essentially – to paraphrase the famous line from the Consolatio, forgotten who he is. He has lost the object that gave him a stable sense of identity, and has, in this sense, lost his own spot. This very line, then, hints at the mystical abode of the Pearl maiden described in the proceeding sections while simultaneously pointing towards the flawed perspective of the dreamer. 

I say dreamer, and not narrator, because I think it is important to acknowledge the presence of two “versions” of the speaker we meet in the poem. As Corey Owen has argued, the poem offers us two different personas: the dreamer in throws of grief and the narrator who writes of his past experiences. With this in mind, I would like to offer that the outset of the poem, and even the depiction of the dreamer himself, should potentially be viewed through this more sympathetic lens. The narrator, as Owen observes so well, has had time to process and manage his grief — to exit out of his abject state thanks to the vision and the lessons learned in the dream world.  Thus, while the opening lines serve as a critical reflection on the fallen state of the dreamer, that reflection does not necessarily need to be divorced of sympathy — of the awareness that his suffering may well be a mirror to our own.

 “Death,” as David Aers remarks in his article on Pearl, “is a massive challenge to human identity. The disclosure of an utter powerlessness framing our will to control others, our environments, and ourselves. Death shatters networks in which human identity is created and sustained: we mourn, inevitably, for ourselves and the unwelcome reminder of the contingency of all that gives us a sense of identity, the reminder of the precariousness of all that we habitually take for granted” (56). This powerlessness is vividly depicted in Section 1 of the poem. The narrator describes the pearl as falling “thurgh gresse to grounde” (10), her color now “clad in clot” and marred by the “moul” (the earth) (22, 24). He, in turn, is frozen, chilled by a grief “that does bot thrych my herte thrange / My breste in bale bot bolne and bele” (17-18). He observes, or at least suggests, that he knew better than to despair but could not help himself: 

A deuely dele in my hert denned

Thagh resoun settle myselven saght.

I playned my perle that ther was penned

Wyth fyrce skylles that faste faght.

Thagh kynde of Kryst me comfort kenned

My wreched wylle in wo ay wraghte (51-56)  

The first fifty lines of the poem capture, in striking and startlingly accurate detail, the excruciating pain — both physical and emotional — that come with the loss of someone precious to you. These last lines, in particular however, lend credence to Owen’s assertion that the narrator speaks with greater wisdom than the dreamer, because they describe the very solutions to the problems faced by the dreamer — solutions that the dreamer cannot see because of his fixation on the earthly. 

Nevertheless, his forgetfulness, and the despair from which it is born, is not necessarily cause for criticism.  The opening of the poem, for instance, in its description of a garden and of a private moment of agony, seem to evoke Christ’s moments of apprehension in the garden of Gethsemane. And just as the angel visits Christ to strengthen him, so too does the Pearl maiden visit her father to help him recontextualize and manage his grief. A further similarity appears when we examine lines 1 (“Perle plesaunte to prynces paye”), 1164 (“Hit was not at my Prynces paye,”), and 1176 (“Now all be to that Prynces pay”). In the first, we have a reference to secular princes — to the earthly — and the pleasure that men take in the animate and inanimate objects of their affection. In the lines that follow, we are informed that the narrator’s problems stem from his inability to accept Christ’s (the Prince’s) will, manifest in the loss of his child. By the end of the dream vision, however, the narrator is able to contextualize his inability to cross the streambed and be with his beloved pearl. He is able to come to terms with his loss and his suffering in ways convergent with that of Christ in the garden.

In the gospel of Matthew’s account, for instance, Jesus tells Peter and Simon that: “My soul is sorrowful even unto death: stay you here, and watch with me” (Matthew: 26:38, Douay). He then falls to the earth “upon his face” before asking “My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.” In Luke’s version, an angel comes to Christ him to give him strength before he returns to his disciples. The narrative arc of Pearl mirrors Christ’s actions in the garden almost exactly: we have a man consumed with despair, “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” who falls to the ground in a state of abjection and/or supplication. He receives divine counsel and strength, and is able to face the world and his unfortunate circumstances with a resoluteness he did not have before.  

Considering the dreamer/narrator as a figure modeling Christ’s spiritual journey in Gethsemane doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to jettison the idea that the dreamer is flawed. That would be ill-advised, I think, especially given the number of times that the Pearl maiden has to chastise the dreamer for misconstruing his and her circumstances. As Sarah Stanbury has observed, the very structure of the dialogue is rooted in the narrator’s repeated category mistakes and “acts of passionate misreading.” In this way, the narrator/dreamer certainly differs from Christ in the garden, given that Christ, from the very start of that episode, understands that God’s will must be done. At the same time, reading Pearl alongside the biblical narratives of Gethsemane allows for a more sympathetic approach; it invites readers into an awareness that even their creator suffered tremendously and was occasionally overwhelmed in the face of his suffering. With that being the case, how could we fault a man for being overly consumed with grief over the loss of his loved one? Moreover, while the dreamer might not be able to accept God’s will at the outset of the poem, he is clearly able, or at least beginning to be able, to do so at poem’s end. 

Certain critics have expressed dissatisfaction over the “pat” way in which the poem concludes, or have seen it as an unresolved ending, where the narrator tries to convince himself of his improved state more than anything else. I would offer, however, that by keeping the image of Gethsemane in mind, the conclusion of the poem becomes all the more whole/wholly satisfactory. The dreamer wakes because his desire to be with the Pearl maiden gets the better of him yet again, but unlike the opening of the poem, which finds him unable to accept spiritual comfort, the dreamer – upon waking – sighs and says: “Now al be to that Prynces paye” (1174). He observes, in both the previous stanza and the one that follows this line, that rushing across the waters was not to God’s liking, which is why the dream vision ends; he even elaborates in lines 1189-94 that he might have been granted a more extended vision of the afterlife if “to that Prynces paye hade I ay bente / and yerned no more then was me gyven.” The dreamer finds himself afflicted with a “longeyng hevy” because of his removal from the dreamscape, but he is now able to cling to his renewed understanding of God’s will and to a certain acceptance of his powerlessness in the face of it. To return to Aers’ observations about death and identity disruption, death no longer holds the same fears for the dreamer. Whereas at the outset he saw the Pearl as the one imprisoned, by the end of the poem he is able to rejoice — however wistfully — that she has escaped the “doel-doungoun” in which he and all humans are consigned to dwell. He realizes, in other words, how deeply he had misread the circumstances that gave rise to his grief. In this way, the narrator completes a similar metaphysical and meditative journey that Christ undergoes in the garden, and exits with a greater ability to trust in God’s will. The poem, as a result, simultaneously acknowledges the problematic state in which the dreamer finds himself at the outset of the poem (i.e. abject and excessive grief) and the fact that such a state is inevitable if one lives long enough in the world. The solution, as offered by the poem, is the meditative journey exemplified by Christ and imitated by the narrator — a movement from a state of abject grief and despair to one of acceptance and spiritual perspective.

The conclusion of the poem, especially its description of the dreamer’s aborted attempt to ford the river, makes very clear that the dreamer (and even the more spiritually mature narrator) hasn’t escaped his grief entirely. It is still something with which he will have to contend for as long as he continues to exist in the world. And it is here, in these passages before and after the dream vision that the poem invites readers to simultaneously universalize and personalize its narrative.  Whereas Chaucer, Langland, and Gower often give specific names (however emblematic) to their dreamers and their narrators, the dreamer here is given no such specificity, and the same goes for the Pearl maiden. This allows readers to either read the poem as a personal narrative of one man grieving for a daughter or to understand it as a universalizing meditation on loss. The powerful description of grief, however, has caused some — Daniel Kline in particular — to argue against the universalizing of the child and of the situation the poem describes. To Kline, “purely symbolic” readings of the Pearl maiden “rob. . . her of her individual life. The poem [as he argues] attempt[s] to restore her particularity” (120). Kline is particularly invested in reconciling this reading with the fact that the dreamer doesn’t recognize the Pearl as his pearl when he first sees her. He argues rather convincingly that the lack of recognition is both a sign of pathological grief and of his inability to see the maiden as a “subject in her own right.” 

While I agree with these arguments, I would like to offer, as I wind this paper to a close, that the poem is even more generous than Kline asserts. Kline writes movingly of the awful loss of his third child — through a tragic late-term miscarriage — in the same article, driving home how important it is to remember and honor the particular circumstances of a person’s grief. This is why it’s generally a terrible idea to tell a grieving person, when they’re in the throws of bereavement, that you understand how they feel. The simple fact of the matter is that you can’t know how they feel, even if you’ve experienced an equivalent kind of loss, because you are not them. By the same token, I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all been comforted by the stories of others in times of sorrow. When we experience loss and grief, as I wrote some time ago, we’re given the opportunity to enter into a “strange and beautiful communion with all who have (and all who will) endure” painful losses. This is why, perhaps, the dreamer begins his journey in a state of self-inflicted isolation at the outset of the poem, but ends it with an allusion to the spiritual and communal body of Christ: “That in the form of bred and wyn / The preste uus shewes uch a day / He gef to uus to be His homly hyne / And precious perles unto His pay” (1209-12).  The repeated emphasis on the first person plural in these lines resituates the narrator’s grief into the larger communal Christian body, one that the dreamer can now see himself rejoining. The dreamer completely isolates himself in his grief at the outset of the poem by relying to an extreme degree on the deeply personal circumstances of his loss. The end of the poem, however, shows him beginning to see the value in balancing the personalizing impulses of grief with a sense of universal or communal awareness of the suffering of others. I say beginning, because we are left at the end of the poem with an occluded vision of the narrator’s successful reentry into that communal Christian body, and I like to think that this is because the poet is trying to present his readers with a portrait of grief that Is genuinely open to interpretation – similar to how Patience ends with the unclear overlapping of God’s and Jonah’s voices — and still somewhat in flux. The narrator/dreamer still has a long way to go, but he at least has gotten to the point by the end of the poem where he can say the right words. These words and lines are, in fact, practically ripped from the pages of penitential literature, and my sensing is that the poet ends Pearl in this way to drive home the need for communality. By saying these words — ones said and written by so many others before him — the narrator enters into that “strange and beautiful” communion with his fellow pilgrims on the road. 

Just as the narrative arc of Pearl mirrors that of Christ’s agony in the garden, so will the lives of its readers inevitably include similar moments of pain and loss. Pearl challenges its audience, however, to remember that while the initial, isolated state of the narrator might be excessive, those very kinds of raw states can give rise to revelations that will allow us to more peaceably abide in the world. Pearl reminds us that even the most abject can rescue himself from despair — that, to draw on Patience, no one is unworthy of God’s love and forgiveness. These states are deeply painful and problematic, but the poem ultimately shows that wisdom can, in fact, spring from them as well. Pearls of great price, indeed.


N.B.: All images are taken from The Cotton Nero A.x. Project. 

Bibliography: 

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. Edited by Gerhard Ludwig Müller and Albrecht Schönherr. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996—.

Aers, David. “The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl.” Speculum 68 (1993): 54-73. 

Garrison, Jennifer. “Liturgy and Loss: ‘Pearl’ and the Ritual Reform of the Aristocractic Subject.” Chaucer Review (2010): 294-322. 

Kline, Daniel. “The Pearl, A Crayon, and a Lego.” Essays in Medieval Studies 15, 1998. 

Pearl. Ed. Sarah Stanbury. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001.

Kalamazoo 2013: A Pilgrimage

I wrote most of this from about 36,000 feet above Newfoundland – a fitting starting point, I think, since I was returning to the U.S. from Norway by way of Iceland (after attending a conference on medieval Scandinavian literature, no less).

I had a long a fruitful journey during the month of May, and I’ll try to do some of it justice over the course of a few posts. These posts are a bit delayed because I came back from Norway with a fever and raging laryngitis and have spent the better part of the past week recouping! I’m doing much better now though, and will be loading several posts throughout the next week or so now that I'm capable of lucid thought. This first one will focus on Kalamazoo, which was certainly the busiest Congress I’ve ever attended. I presided twice, organized and participated in a performance session, and presented a paper on Pearl. There were lunches, dinners, and outings aplenty, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

I’d been feeling severely run down prior to the trip. The lack of full-time work has been stressful, especially since my husband’s start-up had to let him go earlier this year, and there were a series of personal tragedies right around that time that made life painfully confusing and heart-breaking. Whenever tragedy has truck in the past, I’ve looked to my work to feel some sense of purpose or control, but the screeds against graduate school, the humanities, etc., the rise of MOOCS and for-profit institutions (and attitudes), and the at times oppressive amount of uncertainty surrounding my own future really dampened my ability to feel and hold onto a sense of purposefulness. As a result, I came to Kalamazoo feeling more than a little beaten down and adrift. More and more though, I’ve come to see the journey to Congress, and the experience of it, as a sort of pilgrimage. One that comes just at the right time — just as I’m starting to lose my sense of why I do what I do. I am so profoundly glad that I made the journey this time, because it renewed more of my enthusiasm and my sense of purpose than I’d ever hoped to win back in such a short span of time.

For starters, this was a ‘zoo of serendipitous encounters. I’d been so busy (between the end of the semester hustle, visiting family, and prepping for two conferences) that I’d only made contact with just a few of the people I’d hoped to see at this conference. Somehow though, I happened to be at the right places at the right times, because I managed to bump into just about everyone! The conversations may have only lasted a couple of minutes in some cases, but it meant the world to see familiar faces from grad school and past conferences and at least get a brief moment to reconnect.

The serendipity also extended into new meetings as well. Thanks to a chance encounter at one of many dinners out, I received sage advice about approaching publishers about my book project. Inspired, I spent time Saturday and Sunday chatting with publishers and had several encouraging conversations along the way. While there aren’t any guarantees, I’ve got a clear sense now of who to send materials to once I’ve got them completed, and that’s a great place to be (especially after having felt so stagnant for the past couple of months). I also had an absolutely marvelous time at the BABEL meet-up at Bell’s Brewery. I joined the working group in the Fall of last year because I’ve enjoyed following the playful, experimental, but always meaningful work that BABLErs produce. I also joined because I’d been feeling adrift since moving away from my tightknit community at Rochester last year, and joining an energetic cohort like this one seemed like a wise move as I transition into this new and liminal stage of academic life.  My schedule at the Congress had kept me away from the meeting and the sponsored sessions thus far (alas!), and so I felt all the more drawn to the gathering in spite of the late hour (I think I got there around 11:30pm after having gone over my paper which I was presenting the following morning). An array of wonderful exchanges ensued, and a nascent project even emerged by way of a conversation about bears, idiot tourists, and lava. I’ll keep things cryptic for now, but I’ll hopefully be able to post more about said project in the near future. In the meantime, I’m struck with a profound sense of gratitude for all of the people I met and reconnected with at this conference. Their generosity — in their advice, their sharing of ideas, their collaborative spirit — overwhelmed me in the best sense of the word, and I’m deeply grateful for the renewed energy and enthusiasm they helped instill in me in such a short span of time.

The sessions I attended also went a long way towards renewing my enthusiasm. It’s always a delight to be surrounded by people as vibrantly excited as you are about a particular topic, and that enthusiasm really shone in the sessions I was able to attend and in which I had the pleasure of participating. The first one I attended was “Romancing Islam,” and I was deeply impressed with Bonnie Erwin’s masterful connection between the mechanics of othering in Ferumbras and in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing: a connection that hinges on the desire for the familiar Other (in both cases, a Muslim Other by way of convenient branding). I was also very glad to see an Early Modernist on the panel. Dennis Britton spoke on the allegorizing of Islam in the Faerie Queene, and made a compelling case for the influence of contemporary proto-ethnograpic writings on Spenser’s portrayal of the (Islamicized) figures Wrath and Lust. He also convincingly argued that moments of conversion in Book II (where these figures regularly appear) are not only absent but “actively denied.” In this formulation, the Saracens are made to be incompatible in ways strikingly convergent with those seen in medieval romance. His presence on the panel and the inclusion of Spenser alongside medieval texts invited both the speakers and the audience in the Q&A session to get out from under the pressures of periodization and to talk across the (often fictionalized) divide between the Medieval and Early Modern periods. I joked on Twitter earlier in the year about creating an anti-Greenblatt panel for K’zoo called “Interswervist Aesthetics,” but it was lovely to see much of what The Swerve seems to advocate effortlessly elided in the conversations that came out of this session.

The same kind of connectivity seen in this session extended into the one over which I was delighted to preside. The papers knitted together incredibly well, and I was thrilled by how — despite the focus on a the editing of a single manuscript — each paper had something unique to offer to the conversation. Joyce Coleman focused on the images in the manuscript, specifically those attached to Pearl, and persuasively argued that the illustrator sought to draw parallels between the dreamer/narrator of the poem and Narcissus as he appears in illustrations of Roman de la Rose. Kelsey Moskal asked that we try to find a way to avoid “sterilizing the manuscript reading process” by finding ways to acknowledge the subtle but significant markers, details, and ordination found in the manuscript itself as we produce critical editions. Elias Fahssi stressed the power of exploratory reading, and how faithful reproductions of the text assist in that process. Finally Arthur Bahr challenged our uses of punctuation when it comes to a poem like “Patience,” observing that the quatrain marks in the manuscript are important specifically because they are so difficult to interrogate. He argued that the marks, while not being puncti, suggest a certain kind of pause, which seems especially apt in this poem given its stress on the length of time it “takes humans to perform God’s will.” The inclusion of these marks, then, link readers to Jonah, reminding us that “we are bound in time, differing from Jonah only in degree, not in time.” In the end, Bahr offered up the possibility that we needn’t punctuate definitively, especially when it comes to a poem like “Patience” that seems to be playing with the kinds of pauses produced by such marks.

The conversation that sprang from these four papers was wonderfully lively, and we discussed, among other things, the ways in which we might reconcile all of these various needs and emphases when trying to produce accessible critical editions.  More than anything, I think the session really drove home the sacrifices that inevitably get made when trying to prepare these texts for modern readership, and it was gratifying to see so many people engaged in a discussion of how we can serve both the reader and the original text. To that end, I was very happy to hear later on at the conference that Kelsey and Elias will be taking on more active and official roles in the Pearl Poet Society — as contributors to the fantastic Cotton Nero A.x. Project, and in light of their illuminating papers, I can hardly imagine a better team!

I’ll save a discussion of the session in which I presented — “New Perspectives on Pearl” — for my next post (one that will include the actual talk), but all I’ll say for now is that I was tremendously grateful for the experience and for the feedback received both prior to and during the session itself.  I’m starting to experiment with ideas for a later project (once I get this first book off and away. . . god, if it were only so easy!), and I was so glad, as a result, to have this opportunity to present my nascent ideas for that potential work. More on that later though!

The last session I attended was BABEL’S Blunder panel, and what a delight it was! In some respects, the papers couldn’t have been further apart — with topics ranging from blunder in Beowulf, to the cruelty/inanity of blind peer-review evaluations, to the poetics of scribal blunders, to the poetics of our own conference papers/sessions, to the inception of Fumblr — hands down one of the most humanizing academic blogs I’ve yet encountered. I was struck by the beautiful discursiveness of these presentations, by their verve and energy, by their braveness. Those qualities extended into the lively conversation/debate that followed, one that focused for a time on the perils of blind peer-review. Eileen Joy made a particularly innervating statement about the problems with the current review system, problems that were made painfully clear in Maggie Williams and Nancy Thompson's presentation: that reviewers forget all too often that they’re dealing with human beings who have struggled hard to produce the work that they’re tasked with reviewing. If we are in the business of the humanities, she argued, then we need to start treating each other more humanely. This does not, as one person in the crowd worried, mean that we have to pull our punches when we review, or that we – as receivers of criticism – shouldn’t have a thick skin. Rather, as I offered in tandem with others, we owe it to ourselves (if we are really going to pride ourselves in our mastery of language) and to those whose work we review to write both effectively and humanely. Ultimately, I think that double-blind peer review can be essential to fair treatment in the realm of publishing (people are, for instance, presumably less likely to be discriminated against for a variety of unfair reasons), but as so many of the audience members and presenters stressed, it’s often rather easy to tell who is reviewing your work or who authored the piece you are reviewing. As such, the question remains as to how helpful this set-up actually is, especially when it seems to give so many people license to behave rather unhelpfully (not to mention rather poorly) because they can hide behind the mask of anonymity.

No Congress would be complete without a fair share of levity, and so it was all too fitting that I capped everything off by attending the Pseudo-Society with a merry band of friends. The papers were hilarious, and I especially loved the fact that they so freely poked fun at the conventions of the academic conference. It’s always good to be reminded not to take yourself or what you do too seriously, and the pseudo-society’s “talks” did a more than decent job of reminding us of that!

All in all, this was certainly one of the most fruitful and fulfilling conferences I’ve ever had the pleasure to attend, and I’m already looking forward to next year. As I’ve said throughout this post, attending the conference did a tremendous amount to boost my spirits and enthusiasm for what I do. It helped to remind me, in a series of truly profound ways, that I have made good decisions about my career (no matter what the screeds might say), and that while my life might be precarious and under a variety of intense pressures, it’s also full of electric opportunity. And so, in closing, I’d like to say thank you — a thousand times over — to all of the wonderful people at this conference who helped remind me of that.

When Giants Walked the Earth: Jurassic Park, The Legend of Albina, and Inherited Topography

Having recently been to see Jurassic Park in 3D, I have felt a renewed enthusiasm for dinosaurs. Kate's delightful post on "Deadline Anxiety and Dinosaurs" further reminded me of the wonders of the classic film. At the same time, I was working on a paper about the legend of Albina for Plymouth's 34th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum, which led me to connect the two in my mind. Let me start with a recap of each story:

Jurassic Park is a tale about scientists who figure out how to bring dinosaurs back through the magic of DNA. Chaos ensues.

The legend of Albina (or, sometimes in Middle English, Albin) gives an origin story for the name Albion. Albina is a princess from Greece (or perhaps Syria) who plots with her many sisters to murder their husbands and is thus exiled on a rudderless ship. Fate intervenes, and the women land safely on an unnamed, uninhabited island at the edge of the world. Albina calls the mysterious land Albion after herself and goes about setting up a home there. Mating with incubi, Albina and her sisters produce giant offspring and populate the island with their monstrous progeny. The giants rule the island for 800 years, and then Brutus shows up from the wreckage of Troy. He kills the giants and renames the island Britain for himself. He tames the wilderness and cultivates the land. From the wood and stones of the island, he fashions a New Troy that we call London.

On the surface, I will admit that these two stories have little in common. A modern warning story about the dangers of unexamined scientific exploration and a medieval mytho-historic explanation for the name Albion might seem, quite literally, worlds apart. And yet fortune has thrown them together in my mind, and I'd like to humor myself by thinking about possible connections.


The edge of the world seems like a good place to stop Like dinosaurs, the giants of the Albina story walk the same land that we inhabit. The only thing that separates us from these frightening and yet fascinating forebears is time. Though we're not descended from them -- both dinosaurs and giants have been extinct since prehistory -- we have inherited their realm. As Jurassic Park opens, paleontologists in Montana are digging up fossils. The ease with which they dig up these fossils has been making paleontologists chuckle and children look optimistically at their toy shovels ever since the film opened. The image of these fossils, hidden away by the sands of time and yet still just below the surface of our landscape, connects these ancient bird-lizards to our own countryside. Time may separate us from the dinosaurs, the movie seems to indicate, but only by a couple feet of dust. Their bones lie under our feet, and our land was theirs first.

Similarly, the Albin story imagines British history beginning with monstrous creatures: a murderous woman, a mother of monsters. The image of a man called Brutus pulling himself from the carnage of his fallen city and making his way to an island on the edge of the world was widely recited in medieval England. The story usually begins with Brutus landing on the island, finding it populated with barely-human giants, and conquering the land by dispatching of these unpleasant natives. Surely this is a colonial fantasy, in which the colonizer need not feel guilt for taking over a new land because the inhabitants can be discounted as less than human. The versions of this story that insert the Albina legend in the beginning, however, shift the reader's perspective. In these texts, we follow not Brutus but Albina to the island; we sit with the giants on the shore as Brutus sails up to claim the land and rename it for himself. Brutus may kill these giants, Brutus may remake the landscape into his own version of civilization, but the story still begins with Albina and her larger-than-life children. They stomp around, and their movements undoubtedly shift and mold the topography, carving out lakes and valleys and mountains with their rumbling steps. The wilderness that Brutus discovers when he arrives on the island still lurks beneath and beyond the streets and buildings he commissions. The people who live in the London of the 14th century (or today) may not be able to trace their ancestry back to Albin or her outsized offspring, but the chronological and topographical link is nonetheless inherent in the narrative. In The Short English Metrical Chronicle, readers are told that Albina landed "here" and on "this land" (307, 306). There is never any doubt in the text that her location, even before it has a name, is the reader's location as well. We can kill off the monsters, the legend seems to tell us, but we can't escape their influence. The island may be Britain, but it is Albion as well. As with the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, only time stands between us and the monsters from whom we inherited our earth.


What is this strange, four-wheeled creature? Jurassic Park increases this uneasy sense of chronology with a particularly 1990s fable in which technology can bridge the gap between past and present. Dinosaur DNA, with a little frog DNA thrown in for good measure, initiates a shocking confrontation with the past. As with the story of Saint Erkenwald speaking to a long-dead judge (see my Titanic post for more on that), our paleontologists can see the bones they've studied come to vibrant life. I was speaking with some fellow medievalists recently about how Jurassic Park is a fantasy for anyone who studies the past. We can collect our evidence, we can imagine how it must have been, but we know that there's always a little bit of guesswork, a little bit of our own time and place getting in our way. The centuries are, despite our best efforts, an unpassable obstacle to full engagement with past people and places and events. When Doctors Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler (played by Sam Neill and Laura Dern, respectively) gaze in wonder at the living versions of the fossils they have studied for so many years, it's hard not to feel a sympathetic twinge. When Alan Grant murmurs gleefully "They do move in herds," I can't help but think that I would make similar comments if I got to view a performance of the medieval York Cycle or a production of Shakespeare at the original Globe. And when the doctors pet and hug a living triceratops, the tactile interaction means that they are literally touching a creature of the past. The new 3D version enhances these interactions and confrontations by making the dinosaurs appear to pop out of the screen toward us as we watch. The years have been kind to these dinosaurs, and they appear more real than ever. Yet these dinosaurs, made from prehistoric DNA, are still born here and now. They're still in a contemporary landscape, no matter the efforts put into recreating a proper habitat (maybe this is why that triceratops is so ill). The bit of modern frog DNA making up each one means that, even on a genetic level, they are modern creatures even as they are ancient ones. The closest we can come is still imperfect. Still, ultimately, dangerous in its imperfections.

Even as time in Jurassic Park is both then and now, place is both real and imagined. We may recognize the Montana badlands, but Snakewater is a fictional Montana city. The backstory of this fossil paradise is that it was originally an island. In other words, a fictional place was once a fictional island, subsumed into the middle of the modern-day United States. The park itself is built upon a fictional island as well, Isla Nublar (meaning something like "clouded island" or even "obscure island"), just off the coast of Costa Rica. As with Snakewater, Isla Nublar is given a specific location in relation to real geography (and, of course, was filmed in a real place that we may visit if we wish), and yet it is imaginary. Off the coast of the known lies the land of the film, connected to the world we know and yet always separate from it.

Albina is given a much more specific location in that she lands where the reader now stands. Her time at sea may exist in a geotemporal shadow realm, but before and after she travels we can point to her on a map. As I mentioned above, she lands "here." And when Brutus comes to the island, the city he builds is the city we now call London. Her island is not ours -- it is a mythic wilderness ruled by overly-ambition women and their overly-corporeal descendants. They are vanished into the past. Their imaginary bones are dust, and we cannot simply dig them up in our backyards. Yet if their bones are dust, even the dust of legend, then that dust makes up the story of the modern island. Albion both is and isn't Britain.


Not as cuddly as you might think The monsters of our past (the monstrosity of the past?) is both frightening and fascinating. (For a detailed examination of this paradox, see Monster Theory, especially Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's sixth thesis: "Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire" (16).) Albina may create giants from her lust, forging progeny with an incubus to populate the island, but her desire isn't totally disconnected from our own readerly desire. Albin and her giants and her alien-familiar wilderness are tantalizing fictions of British chronology. Similarly, dinosaurs maintain the capacity to terrify and attract us. When I was four or five, I received a blow-up Tyrannosaurus Rex for Christmas. Obsessed with T-Rex, I was delighted with this gift. I couldn't wait for my father to blow up the toy so I could exist in an imaginary dinosaur world with my T-Rex friend. Yet when night came, I was suddenly panicked because I knew that a T-Rex prowled in my house. I begged my father to deflate it for the safety of everyone involved. For the next several days, we repeated this pattern. By day, I loved my T-Rex; by night, I wanted him annihilated. Finally, my dad, exhausted from blowing up a four-foot-tall dinosaur day after day, said I could choose special days to play with my T-Rex, but that it couldn't be everyday. The terror induced by the T-Rex and velociraptors in the film is not the only reason it has been so popular. Yes, we love to be afraid of dinosaurs, but we also just love dinosaurs. The tender moments of the film in which characters lovingly pet peacefully plant-eating dinosaurs are there for a reason. Whether we would hide from T-Rex in a bathroom or wave a flare at her to distract her from the children, we know that she is deadly. The way that Dr. Grant revels in frightening an obnoxious child with a description of the velociraptor's hunting style at the beginning of the film gets echoed in the famous last words of Robert Muldoon (played by Bob Peck) as a velociraptor leaps toward him: "Clever Girl!" He admires her for outsmarting him even in his last breath.

An aspect of the monsters of the past that makes us love and fear them is that they can't really be controlled. Albina's father sends her away on a rudderless ship, a punishment which is surely a death sentence. A punishment which robs her of narrative control as she floats powerlessly around the world. Yet she manages to claim a land for herself, to attach her name to that land and to become a part of a nation's history. Even as she and her sisters consider their position as an island full of women, they find a way to reproduce, monstrous and unnatural as that way is, producing as it does children who are both more and less than humans. Brutus may tame the land by killing Albina's monster-children, but they haunt British chronicles nonetheless.

In Jurassic Park, modern science and technology may seem to contain and control the past even as they resurrect it, but the monsters of the past defy such efforts. The opening scene, in which a velociraptor manages to kill a worker even in the most carefully planned situation, indicates for us from the first moments of the film that modern knowledge has met its match. When we are told later that the velociraptors methodically test each section of their fence for weakness, it's clear that they do not take well to their high-tech cage. Dr. Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) sums up the dangers of such attempts at containment when he states that "the kind of control you're attempting simply is... it's not possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh... well, there it is." In this speech, monstrous vitality is life itself, that which breaks free of control and simply finds a way. Everything on Isla Nublar is an attempt at control, down to the jeeps which can't be steered (am I going too far to compare these to medieval rudderless ships, outside of their riders' control and yet firmly on the track of fate?). The designers of the park may have automated the vehicles, but it never occurred to them that riders could (or would) simply open the jeep doors and step outside. Given all of these hints, we're not terribly surprised when we see a dinosaur egg in the wild. Despite the careful breeding of only female dinosaurs, we learn that these dinosaurs, made partly with frog DNA, can switch sexes in order to reproduce. Like Albin and her sisters, the dinosaurs manage to procreate even when denied the normal means of doing so. They can neither be kept in cages nor kept from expanding their population.


At least Skull Island had King KongWe might say that the real monster of the film is human greed, but this very greed is predicated on human desire to encounter dinosaurs. The monsters can only menace us because we bring them back in order to do so. John Hammond (played by Richard Attenborough) speaks with wonder of creating a park in which people can see and touch real dinosaurs, and he says plainly that "this park was not built to cater only for the super-rich. Everyone in the world has the right to enjoy these animals." But his wonder at scientific possibility, in the real world, translates into the chaos that characterizes the film from the opening scene. We never believe that things are going to go well, even as we also to want to see and touch the dinosaurs.

I am not saying that Jurassic Park is a modern-day Albina myth, nor that either Michael Chrichton or Steven Spielberg had considered or even read the obscure medieval tale when they created first book and then movie of this modern story. Rather, I suggest that attempts to engage with the past, or to imagine how that engagement might take place, may partake of the larger-than-life. The past is monstrous in that it is both wholly other and wholly familiar, in that it is distant and yet part of us, in that the here and now will inevitably become the past. The past, whether we understand it or not, will always swallow the present. The giant lurks just beneath the surface of our modern world, unattainable and yet tempting us with possible proximity. Albina, giants, dinosaurs, titans -- all are creatures of the past both consumed and consuming. And, yes, I would probably visit Jurassic Park, even knowing what I know. Who could resist?

Deadline Anxiety and Dinosaurs: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Work-Bombs

I began this weekend feeling triumphant.

Working draft of an article?

Check!

Application sent off for a Postdoc?

Check Check! 

But then . . .

I remembered that before the end of April I'll have to complete the following:

1) A conference paper on Pearl

2) A conference paper on Parcevals saga

3) A reading and parts list for the Malory Aloud session at K'zoo.

4) Another application . . . or two . . . or three.

5) An enormous pile of grading, all due before K'zoo.

6) Revisions of the aforementioned article.

Not to mention: continued Old Norsing, teaching, working on the book, working on the critical edition, blogging, etc.

After compiling that to-do list early this morning, I spent a few moments feeling like this guy:

As a result, I may have looked a bit like this as I ate breakfast:

Once I collected myself, I spent some time trying to figure out how I could avoid feeling like this:

Or like this:

as I move into the coming weeks. 

I think it's safe to say that we all have similar moments of panic and/or despair (or a hybrid of the two: "panespair," perhaps?), and that we all try hard to avoid getting to the point where we're in constant reaction mode. What works for me when faced with these kinds of situations is a combination of humor (mostly of the self-depricating variety -- hence this post), exercise, a fair dose of procrastination (hence this post), the fervent assemblage of a battle plan, and then a series of quasi-valiant efforts to adhere to said plan. So far, so good: the panic is abating, and the to-do list is looking a bit more conquerable.

Nevertheless, I know that given the amount of things on that list, I'll likely finish out the month of April kind of like this:

I know at some level that I find myself in these situations not because I'm incapable of managing my schedule but because I know I can get through them and be better for having done so. It's an idea, anyway. This isn't to say, however, my modus operandi is optimal by any stretch. I still have a lot of work to do. I would prefer, on most days, to feel more like this:

than like this:

What I can do, in the meanwhile, is try to trust that I know what I'm doing. Easier said than done at times, but I have a feeling it will help. Especially when the deadlines do this:






N.B.: Many thanks to Buzzfeed for compiling the gifs and giving me the initial inspiration for the post!

Calling all Northern Arthurian Enthusiasts!

The New Chaucer Society has published the CFP for its upcoming conference in Reykjavik (July 16-20), and I am already counting the days before I can hop on a plane and revisit Iceland — one of my favorite places on the planet.

This conference promises an array of exciting threads, and several of them focus on intersections between Scandinavian cultures and those of Continental and Insular medieval Europe. I'm going to be organizing and presiding over a session entitled "Northern Arthurs," and I'll provide the description here for easy reference:

This panel will explore the literary treatment of Arthur and his knights in the cultures of the North, a subject that Geraldine Barnes has identified as "ripe for further investigation within the fields of medieval translation, cross-cultural relations, and the reception of Arthurian narratives." Following the work of Marianne E. Kalinke's edited book The Arthur of the North, the panel seeks to inspire additional research in this area by addressing questions like the following: how does a study of the riddarasögur -- Scandinavian versions of Arthurian narratives -- offer up new perspectives on both the literary culture of the North and on the pervasiveness of Arthurian materials? How do such narratives reflect and adapt to their cultural surroundings? What does the transmission of such texts -- indelibly tied as they are to the traditions of continental and Insular Europe -- reveal about the intersections of Scandinavian, Continental European, and Insular traditions in the late Middle Ages?

If you, or anyone you know, are interested in submitting a paper proposal on this topic, you can reach me at lknorako@gmail.com. I'll be accepting proposals through June 1st and would be delighted to hear from you. One of the many wonderful aspects of NCS is its active inclusion of graduate students, and I am hoping very much to include at least one grad student (if not more) in the session.

On a related (and important!) note, I also want to mention an upcoming conference in Oslo (23-25 May, 2013) entitled "The Arthur of the North." Paper proposals are due to the organizers by March 1st, and you can find all of the relevant details here. Marianne Kalinke — who has played a consistent and pivotal role in this emerging sub-field of Arthurian studies — will be one of the plenary speakers, as will David Wallace and Raluca Radulescu. All in all, it promises to be an exciting gathering, and I am looking forward to hearing all of the new ideas and conversations that will doubtless emerge.

Mischief Managed, Part the First

The new year has definitely gotten off to a fast start! I've started my new part-time job as a lecturer at Notre Dame de Namur University, reviewed and sent off the copy-edited version of my Isumbras article, and am currently making plans to head to Norway in May for a conference called "The Arthur of the North" (more on that in a future post). Things look like they'll be getting busier from here on out as well: somewhere in the next few months I'm planning to send off an article on Middle-English Mongols for review, write a conference paper on instrumental grieving in Pearl, and get a book proposal together. There's also a third-degree black belt test in March and competing to be done at Regionals, where I'll be making my first appearance as a member of the Northwest kata team. Also, I'm still working away on Old Norse and editing various sections of my ongoing Crusades Project (my dreams these days consist of reduplicated vowels and Templars).

I regret that in the midst of this (busy but exciting) maelstrom I've neglected In Romaunce, but I'm vowing to get back on the horse. I've got a lot of working drafts, and I have plans (glorious, nefarious plans) to pull them out of my head and plunk them down into Blogger more consistently from here on out.


*****

In the meanwhile, I thought I'd share one of what I hope will be several retrospectives on graduate school -- at long last, I might add, because Kristi's been gently nudging me to post this entry for months now. Last year was a time of many transitions -- from grad student to graduate, from Rochester to the Bay Area – and these changes happened so quickly that it took me quite a while to get used to it all. There are times I still have to pinch myself to make sure I’m actually living here in California, and to make sure I'm really, truly done with graduate studies. The uprooting process is often a hard but exhilarating one and I've found myself thinking a lot of late about the past seven and all that I experienced along the way.  I've also been thinking a bit about Harry Potter.

Like the students at Hogwarts, I spent seven long years studying things many consider arcane and unusual (medieval beaver castration, anyone? anyone??), and each year presented its own unique adventures and challenges. Granted, there are many fundamental differences between my experiences and those of Harry Potter and his cohorts. For starters, there was no Voldemort to be found in my graduate program save for my own rampant neuroses and insecurities, which I battled along the way.  I had neither a penseive nor a time-turner, and dear GOD how I longed for both as I prepped for exams and finished my dissertation, the latter of which was (not-so-affectionately) code-named: FELL BEAST. A hippogriff would've been nice too, Rochester's wind chill notwithstanding. Nevertheless, age differences, magic, and nemeses aside, I certainly identified with parts of Harry's journey from his first year through his seventh. And so, I think I'll devote a little bit of time to each of my years in graduate school over the course of a few posts. My main hope is that some of these stories and experiences might be helpful to others out there who find themselves on a similar path. And while I've left a considerable amount unsaid for various reasons (some stories are best kept secret or, at most, kept between good friends), my other hope is that this post accounts, at least in part, for the major shifts and experiences I had along the way. 

Prologue: The Owl Arrives

I knew after my sophomore year at the College of William and Mary that I wanted to go to graduate school and study medieval literature. By this point, I was already familiarizing myself with all variations of the "What in the #*$! are you going to do with that?" question that all medievalists are asked at regular intervals (my evolving answer is a blog post for another day, I think). This realization didn't come overnight, but was rather the product of a tumultuous freshman year in which I realized, among other things, that I did not want to major in biology. I'd come to William and Mary with vague dreams of becoming another Jane Goodall, but after crawling my way to the finish line of that first year (during which I often felt that Admissions made some sort of clerical error in accepting me), I spent much of the summer trying to figure out what I actually wanted to do and what I enjoyed. Part of that process involved trying out environmental research in the Virginia wetlands, which typically found me, at two or three in the morning, assisting a graduate student in his research by recording bird sounds, all the while sinking lower and lower into swamp mud. I am, and always will be, an outdoorsy type, but I realized very quickly that I like having the option of doing my work outside. And so, I decided to go back to the drawing board and take classes that simply interested me and then decide what career I would try to pursue. I had always loved my English classes growing up and had been an avid reader for as long as I could remember. I decided, as a result, to try my hand at English once again, but by the time I'd reached this decision in the middle of the summer, very few courses were still open. One of these just happened to be a medieval literature course taught by John Conlee, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I fell in love with medieval literature through this course, and registered for every single medieval or early modern class I could get my hands on for the rest of my time at W&M. Highlights included Phil Daileader's brilliant class on the crusades (which I owe no small amount of thanks, since it laid the groundwork for my research in grad school), Adam Cohen's seminars on Gothic architecture and manuscript illumination, and John Conlee's unforgettable Celtic Literature seminar. I fell so completely in love with medieval literature that I went on to accidentally double major in Medieval and Renaissance Studies because I took so many elective courses in those areas. 

I wanted to keep my options as open as possible as I moved into my senior year, however, and I also felt the need -- excited I was about the idea of graduate school -- to take a hiatus from academia and make very sure that pursuing a PhD was something that I truly wanted to do. I applied for high school and middle school teaching positions at various local schools, and eventually landed a job teaching a mix of history classes at a small private school in Williamsburg. To save money, I moved back in with my folks, and I still can't thank my parents enough for making sure that I actually ate during that first year of teaching. Much as I enjoyed working with my students, I quickly found myself missing medieval studies. And so, I applied to PhD programs in the Fall of that year (2004), a process that was, as so many of you know already, both intensely stressful and anxiety-inducing.  Handling all of this work on top of seven course preps was overwhelming at times.  I remember almost falling asleep in karate class (while standing and punching, no less) because I was averaging about 3-4 hours of sleep a night. My planning periods were often spent frantically studying for the odious GREs or the even more odious English subject test. During the months building up to THE EXAM, I day-dreamed about ceremoniously burning my flash-cards and demon-dancing around the flames once I was done; in truth, I'm pretty sure that the first thing I did after taking that inane brutalizer was sob into my car's steering wheel (I was parked, don't worry). Added to which, the first several letters I received from grad programs were rejections, and with each one my spirits sank more and more. Rationally, I knew that the rejections weren't personal. I knew that my professors and my family believed in me and that I should believe in myself. But receiving those thin envelopes, one after another, began to wear me down, and I started to resign myself to the fact that this dream might not happen for me.

I think, more than anything else, that this entire process of applying to graduate school began to teach me how to handle situations that were, in the end, utterly out of my control. Before I even heard from The University of Rochester, I had to figure out a way to accept the fact that I had done everything I could to get myself to graduate school, but that it might not be enough. And if that was the case, that it was no true reflection on me as a person. I'm not going to say that I completely understood or accepted this process of letting go at this stage of my life (or that I even have it figured out now), but it is something I actively worked on as I endured the challenges of graduate school and of life in general (it's certainly something I've been thinking about since the posting of the MLA job list back in the Fall). Over time, I'd come to realize that I could learn a lot from rejection and the fears that it produced. Among other things, experiences like this would teach me that while it's important to reach for these kinds of goals, it’s equally important to avoid relying on them for self-worth (this is something that I still have to remind myself of on a regular basis).

UofR, as it greeted me on that initial visit.

One day though, after all of these rejections, a larger envelope arrived in the mail, and it was from the University of Rochester. I had informally visited the University back in December, and everyone there had greeted me warmly and made me feel incredibly welcome, even though I hadn't even applied yet. I vividly remember Russell Peck showing me around Rush Rhees library, Alan Lupack introducing me to the Rossell Hope Robbins Library (what would become my second home during graduate school), and Thomas Hahn (who would later become my advisor and mentor) taking the time to meet with me and introduce me to the program. I left the University that day with a full and hopeful heart, as well as directions from Dr. Peck to the waterfall in city center, which I dutifully and enthusiastically followed (see evidence below).

A picture of said waterfall!

Out of all the schools that I applied to, Rochester was the place that I really wanted to attend, especially after that visit, and I remember as clear as day the vivid excitement of receiving their acceptance letter a few months later. I journeyed up to Rochester after celebrating Easter with my family and had the good fortune to meet many of the people who would become my closest friends.

Several months later, I found myself -- with considerable help from my Marine dad, my mother, and my boyfriend (now husband) -- cramming all of my belongings into my tiny Ford Focus, and driving off to meet my future.  

Year One

Like any graduate student, I learned many lessons and faced an array of challenges during my first year. I arrived so excited about returning to academia and, as I often joked in those first few months, to being able to get “paid to read.”  While I knew that the glamour would inevitably wear off, after a year of prepping seven different classes -- none of which were in my academic field -- I was eager to become a student again and have the opportunity to teach in a different environment.

The first several weeks were a complete blur, but there was one particular meeting with Tom Hahn that I would never forget.  He talked to all of the first years about the ins and outs of the program and about what we could expect from our first year. In particular, he spoke about the so-called “imposter complex” — something I had never heard of before, but with which I became all too familiar. In essence, he warned us gently that at some point we would inevitably come to fear that we were the “weakest link,” that everyone else in our year was smarter and more capable than we were, that eventually we would be “found out” for the pseudo-intellectuals that we felt ourselves to be. He explained that these perceptions, which are utterly inaccurate, come about because we care so very much about what we're doing. He also said that the complex is a product of the very work that we do. In essence, we spend our time as literary scholars-in-the-making creating an intricate and highly polished lens which we use to view and scrutinize the texts that we encounter. He warned us of how easy it can be, especially with all the pressures of graduate school and of life in general, to swing that lens around onto ourselves.

I took this meeting and his words very much to heart, and even though there were many points during my graduate career where I forgot his advice, his words were ones easy to come back to and easy to use as a way of diagnosing the various anxieties that cropped up along the way.  I remember feeling like an imposter for much of my first year, especially once the honeymoon phase was over and the hard work truly began.  I felt more than a little like I did in my biology classes my first year in college, realizing that I needed to find new, more complex ways of digesting even the texts I though I knew well. 

This lesson became abundantly clear at the end of spring semester, when I turned in a paper on Sir Isumbras to my medieval romance professor. I worked hard on it, but when I handed it over I knew it was far from my best work.  Predictably, the feedback that I received was harsh and rightfully so, but I took it upon myself to prove (to both the professor and myself) that I could do good work. Ironically enough, this near-disaster of a paper would go on to become the raw material for my first accepted article publication (due out this October), for an array of conference papers, and for my dissertation. For these reasons, and more, being taken to task and forced to rearticulate my ideas and make them better was quite honestly the best thing that could have possibly happened to me at the end of that year. I didn't know that at the time, however. All I knew was that I had affirmed a lot of my own anxieties about being an imposter. I ended that first-year certainly feeling like one, but I'm glad to say that the intensity of that feeling did pass thanks, in no small part, to the marvelous friends I made throughout that first year.

I'm not going to name names here out of respect for everyone's privacy, but my dear friends will (I hope!) know who they are, and I also hope that what I will say here and elsewhere in these posts will give them some idea of how much I cherish them. To start, I owe a great deal to the person I lived with for much of my first year. She remains one of my dearest friends, and she taught me so much (more than she knows, I think) about how to survive graduate school as a woman, and how to live as unapologetically as possible.  She also taught me that what you intend your words and actions to mean matters far less than how those words and actions are received by others. It was a hard lesson to learn, and I cannot thank her enough for it. 

I also became friends with someone who has been my “brain twin” since our first year. We have endured many of the same experiences and hardships on our journey through the program, and having a partner in crime -- not to mention someone willing to prank our advisor and hide an array of gnome candles in his office (true story) -- has been such a comfort and a gift.  Moreover, I had the serendipitous experience of sitting next to none other than Kristi (whose name I feel I can mention, since she is my other partner in crime and co-blogger) at a prospective student dinner when she came to visit Rochester after being accepted into the program. We connected instantly over our shared interests, academic and otherwise, and I knew I'd found another kindred spirit. 

Letchworth State Park, 2006.

These friendships and others helped me to step away from grad school when I needed a respite.  Some of my fondest memories of that year, in fact, involve hiking in freezing weather in Letchworth State Park with the aforementioned brain twin; occasional stitch&bitch gatherings; and Scrubs marathons (complete with sinfully good pizza, cheap beer, and matching Rochester hoodies) with my roommate. But the stresses of that year were still tremendous and foreign. One thing I learned very quickly, as a result, was how important it was for me to have things to do outside of the program as a way of clearing my head. Karate, more than anything else, was that activity, and it was something I couldn't sacrifice no matter how little time during the week I had.  I had to scale back the number of trainings I attended, but I went as often as I could. There was something so intensely gratifying about stepping onto that floor a few times a week and leaving all of the troubles and worries behind me for the hours that I trained. As my sensei has always told me, if you can do that, the world tends to seem more manageable after training, and I certainly found that to be true. 

Letchworth State Park is also Narnia, apparently.

I also had to figure out really quickly what my priorities were, what I valued the most, what I couldn’t live without. I had always known and believed that my relationships with my family and with my husband (boyfriend at the time) were the most important things in my life, but it’s amazing how distance and a host of stressors can make it hard for someone to remember as much.  These relationships suffered in that first year in no small part part because of how mono-focused I became on my own struggles, and they took a while to mend.  Experiencing all of the resulting turmoil, however, really pulled me up short.  It made me realize that if I wanted to succeed in graduate school without sacrificing my relationships with my loved ones, I had to make sure I devoted enough time to them.  It was a simple but hard-earned lesson, and it’s one that I have never forgotten.  It’s not something that everyone will understand, however, and I was accused on at least one occasion of treating graduate school as a nine to five job, as if my refusal to sacrifice everything in my life for the sake of my degree was a sign of weakness or a lack of conviction.  I have always said, in response to this kind of detraction, that my successes are due to the fact that I strive to maintain a particular kind of balance (strive being the operative word). What creates equilibrium in my life is not going to be what creates equilibrium in another’s, but I have found myself the happiest and the most productive when I'm able to balance a variety of seemingly contrastive interests. For me at least, when I treated my graduate studies more as a nine to five job and less as a monastic calling, this equilibrium came more easily. I did better work and was less crazed and off-kilter in the doing of it. 

The frozen Genesee.

To those of you who might be feeling similar pressure to treat grad school as an all-consuming vocation, all I can recommend is that you keep the balance that you know you need in your life.  Nurturing a relationship that turned into a marriage, creating and maintaining friendships, keeping up with karate, getting up from my work to play with my cats, even taking up new hobbies on occasion (Icelandic horseback riding? Why not?!) absolutely allowed me to finish strong in the face of heavy odds. I’m not saying that you need to do any of these things to be fulfilled while in grad school, nor am I saying that they're marks of success.  They were (and are) simply aspects of my life that I cherished and that brought me joy amidst the chaos. I held on to them as a result, and if I have any advice to give on this score it would be to do just that: to keep the things that bring you joy firmly in your talons as you work your way through grad school.  This lesson, more than anything else, is what I took away from my first year, and it's something I carried with me into the next six.

Those years, however, are blog posts for another day!  I will, however, close on a few bright notes, because while the first year was a challenging one, it was also a time of great discovery and excitement.  I travelled to Iceland with my boyfriend for Spring Break, with no idea that the rollocking adventure would inspire a series of poems, a burgeoning love of photography, and a series of research projects. I began to uncover my fascination with all things crusades-related. I saw more snow in a season than I'd ever seen in my entire life and -- even with the frigid walks from Park Lot to the library, the nose-hair freezing, and the need for asinine number of layers -- my inner child never really got tired of it (until April, perhaps). I learned to be truly grateful for sunshine because it appeared so rarely. I fell in love with city's murder of crows that swarmed around campus every afternoon. And, last but not least, I adopted my two cats, Minerva and Bjorn, who -- among their many talents -- managed to keep me from taking life so awfully seriously throughout my time in the program.

The first year was, in the end, a long shake-up and transition. Success -- as someone once said to me, and as I've said to many others in turn -- laid in survival, in simply making it to the finish line more or less in one piece (shreds of dignity being optional). And in remembering to nurture the things in my life that truly mattered.

Reykjavik, 2006.

Did I mention I loved the snow?