[carringtonrj] Body of Osiris

[Percy]

I'm starting a thread for carringtonrj's Body of Osiris.  I find this story gets me thinking about the state of humanity today and asking all sorts of interesting questions along the lines of -- what is the current state of humanity and where are we going as a society?  

 

I figured I'd start dropping some thoughts into a thread here and if anyone wants to discuss them, or introduce their own discussion topic, I'll do my best to jump in and contribute.  

 

One of the main characters in the story is Professor Sarah Headstone and we get to know her in Chapters 2 and 3 by reading excerpts from a blog she maintained in the early part of the 21st century.  Her blog records thoughts about her "Enthusiasms" and her enthusiasms are a survey of the humanities.  Paintings, literature, music.  Understanding human nature, human interests, human interactions by looking at the humanities.

 

Many of the enthusiams were unfamiliar to me and I assume will be unfamiliar to other readers.  For convenience, I've provided links to them here in the order they appear in the story and with the dates form Headstone's blog. 

 

Venus As A Boy – Posted 12^th March 2009

 

By This River – Posted 23^rd April 2007

 

Master and Man – Posted 12^th August 2006

 

Sumer is icumen in – Posted May 1^st 2012

 

Spem in alium – Posted 2^nd February 2017

 

Chardin – Posted 31^st March 2009: ‘The Ray-Fish’, ‘The Fast Day Meal’.

 

Petruschka – Posted 24^th August 2012

 

Kind of Blue – Posted 23^rd January 2015

 

Carrington – Posted 12^th July 2011: ‘The Lovers’,  ‘Crookhey Hall’, ‘Green Tea’, ‘Self-portrait’,  Max Ernst , ‘House Opposite’ , ‘Plain Chant’ , ‘Bird Pong’,‘The Giantess’, ‘And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur’; ‘Temple of the Word’; ‘Litany of the Philosophers’, ‘The Labyrinth’, ‘Crow Catcher’

 

Roseberry Topping – Posted 7^th February 2008

 

The Rattle Bag – Posted 2^nd Sepetember 2007

 

Seraphita – Posted 18^th December 2011

 

If I had to pick a favorite from this list, I think it would be Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.

Edited November 27, 2013 by Percy

[Percy]

I've made it through Chapter 8 - Conversations.  This is a pivotal chapter in the story for Mary Ryan and Sarah Headstone, but I want to know what people think of the narrator at this point.  Does the narrator have an agenda beyond their stated one of wanting cultural history to again be a respected area of study?  

 

S/he tosses in a lot of asides in this chapter.  The thrust of the opinon statements seems to be that human society of the narrator's time (some indeterminate point in the future) is better for having a "cleansed" and "calibrated" system for establishing human relations.  There is no longer innuendo, unspoken angst or confusion in personal relationships.  The narrator re-iterates a few times that the method of the future is the preferred method.

 

I wonder if s/he really does believe that or if s/he is just saying that's what s/he believes?  After all, s/he finds the correspondence between the two women "sweet" and "poignant."  Is the narrator covertly trying to get students of the future to question whether society has left behind, forgotten, scrubbed out something essentially human?  How can the students of the future understand a work like "Kind of Blue" without experiencing a certain angst or sweetness or poignancy in their relations with others?  Of course, this future hasn't been clearly described in the story, only hinted at, but I'm finding the narrator's motives more and more curious as the book progresses.

Edited November 27, 2013 by Percy

[Aditus]

It is the narrator who controls the story. S/he chose what we know about Headstone and Ryan. I find myself more and more interested in them. I want to argue with them, which is strange for me. Who argues with the narrator of a fictional story?

If this is an official project, do the authorities frown upon their occasional approval with 'the old ways'? So many questions still unanswered.

[Percy]

I know exactly what you mean about wanting to argue with the narrator!

 

I have read through the "Espionage" chapter and I can’t help thinking that the narrator is taking a romantic view of our world even as s/he disavows “some weird nostalgia for those troubled times.”  There’s sort of a reverse pastoral being written here.  Not that there’s reference to nature, but the future is posited as a simpler, straightforward sort of life where the truth is apparent. The past is a miasma of obfuscation and complexity, particularly in terms of human relationships.  

 

On the one hand, I want to shake the narrator and say, “Yeah, the disparity in our world really does suck and there were/are people living lives of true misery.  Don’t even think about romanticizing this era, you learned twit.”  

 

On the other hand, I have no desire to race toward their “pacific, more sane era.”   This makes me uncomfortably ask myself if I derive a sort of satisfaction in the struggles of the present day.  Do I want peace on earth, good will towards men or not?  

 

Truth be told, the narrator does stop short of presenting the early 21st century as an idyll.  S/he seems to be struggling with the same questions the reader is left with. What is truly valuable about our present age?  Why is it valuable?  What can we learn from our conflicts and misunderstandings?  If we don't want a future free from conflict and misunderstandings then what sort of future is an ideal future?

Edited December 6, 2013 by Percy

[Percy]

Finally was able to catch up on some of my reading yesterday…spoilers here and my comments focus on the chapters Stories of Osiris and Love.

 

This Stories of Osiris chapter was echoed in some ways by the later chapter titled Love.  I interpret the Osiris myth as a statement about the unending search for love and how humans experience love.  In the myth, particularly as told by carringtonrj in this story, we can see the evidence of familial love, the love from platonic friendship, sexual love that is a straight, male-female relationship as well as a queer love in a romance between two women.  Then there’s the love of a ruler for her people, a love that seems sincerely returned.  There’s love that’s gone missing, that’s been thwarted by interference from others, and cannot be recovered.

 

So the themes of love in the myth become represented in the actual relationships between the women in the story.  Headstone and Ryan’s relationship is a deep friendship but is also a relationship where one is in a position of power over the other.  The love is worshipful from Ryan at first, although that gets flipped and it’s Headstone who later prostrates herself to Ryan.  Headstone’s relationship with Fell as well as Ryan is subject to outside forces. Both disintegrate under the interference from events outside the relationship, making Sarah Headstone the story’s most tragic heroine.  There’s the complex relationship between Mary Ryan and Sarah Beadekker.  It is simple enough for Ryan, but becomes enormously complicated for Beadekker who is engaged to a man and yet becomes emotionally involved while she seduces Ryan as part of her clandestine operations for the U.S. government.

 

The parallels continue.  The women are searching for truth and clarity and love.  They are searching for the truth behind the organization dubbed The Body of Osiris which Ryan’s thesis asserts was an organization promoting a type of love – love of humanity's fineness, love of that which is transgressive in its beauty.  The myth itself, as Isis searches for the parts of Osiris’ body, is really a search for love.

 

The beauty of these chapters is how carringtonrj suggests that humans always have been and always will be seeking love.  Even our narrator, living in a time where it’s suggested that people have their emotional lives all the way together, seems to be seeking an understanding of love and desire.  This human quest is not limited to romantic or sexual love.  All facets of love are always being sought, instinctively, by man, woman, all of us. Truth, beauty, giving and receiving adoration, is the unending quest of humanity, a desire so huge it can never be totally satisified.

Edited December 25, 2013 by Percy

[Percy]

Stylistics – Here is a dense chapter in the story.  In my imagination, when students of English Lit encounter chapters like this in a story, they squee and go all fangirl over the author.  Carringtonrj prompts us into a close reading of Mary Ryan’s fictional, and fragmented, thesis on the organization The Body of Osiris.  The thesis is itself comprised from a close reading of fragments of historical texts and, if I’m not mistaken, Carrington has mixed in for us some real, actual authors with some that have been invented for this story.  

 

While academically interesting, towards the end of the chapter I decided to take a step back and then another and another.  I wanted to stop looking at the leaves on the trees and look at the forest instead.  Mary Ryan in her thesis is trying to determine who might have been part of The Body of Osiris.  Who was admitted to their membership and who was not?  We’ve all been part of such a process, haven’t we?  Even without intending to, we become part of groups or are excluded from them. 

 

[Here you get to join me in some self-indulgent meandering.]  Imagine, for instance, if someone in a couple centuries were to look back and try to define the queer community.  It’s a community that is always in flux, isn’t it?  Externally, it seems clear who is in and who is not.  If you are gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered, you are part of the community, right?  And yet, within this community there is a constant shuffling of who is considered part of it or who is not. 

Gay men and Lesbians are in the LGBT community but if individuals have remained in the closet, some would argue those individuals do not make up the community.  Is the fact of being gay enough, or do you get admitted by some other act of participation, by being out about being queer?  For that matter, should transgender folks be considered part of the queer community?  I mean some of them transition and go on to live lives that are indistinguishable from that of straight people so while they are trans, they are also straight with all the privilege attendant to that. Are they really like us other queer folk?  Same thing with bisexuals who are not is same-sex relationships – are they in or out of the queer community?  What about straight allies or people who are questioning their orientation or gender?  Are they part of the queer community or not?

 

So what is the style of being queer?  How is queer measured?  How have those styles and measurements changed from generation to generation?  It struck me that Mary Ryan was trying to pin down in her thesis answers to similar types of questions about The Body of Osiris.  In the absence of a membership list, she focused in tighter and tighter on authors and texts, examining the cell structure and the DNA to determine who was connected to The Body and who was not.  But she’ll never be able to define the Body by that sort of examination alone.  At that level of an individual, there is always going to be evidence for both sides because individuals are full of duality and contradiction.  She’ll always need to be zooming out, looking at the whole of the Body, to understand it.  Like most groups, they are better defined in broad terms, not specific terms.

 

I love the way this whole story gets me thinking…really a dense, meaty piece of writing. Delicious.