Review: "I'm Gay" by Eugene Lee Yang

Every single courageous act of coming out chips away at the curse of homophobia. Most importantly it’s destroyed within yourself, and that act creates the potential for its destruction where it exists in friends, family, and society.

—Anthony Venn-Brown, A Life of Unlearning

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Photo by Noam Galai

Eugene Lee Yang of the Try Guys (a foursome who try weird new experiences on YouTube) recently released a coming out video, simply titled I’m Gay. It tells his story wordlessly, through dancing and music, and while ‘interpretive dance’ sounds … well, put bluntly, pretty fucking stupid to anybody who grew up in my generation, this video floored me. I first saw it on Saturday and I’ve already watched it six or seven times, as well as his making-of video. It’s stunning. And I am not the first to observe that, of the possible ways, an intricately designed, visually spectacular internet video of interpretive dance is arguably the gayest way to tell people that you’re gay.

The story is arranged in six scenes, corresponding to the six colors of a typical Pride flag: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Yang tells his archetypal yet fairly complex story with incredible economy—only a single scene (the red) lasts longer than one minute, and every movement is choreographed to communicate its meaning vividly. The best way I can review it is just to describe it, pointing out a few of the symbols that stood out to me. I’ll take the scenes one by one, adding the keywords from the making-of video.

The Red Scene: Nature

This presents Yang in a family setting. A coffee table surrounded by a couch and two chairs sits in front of a red wall, with father, mother standing behind, brother and sister on the couch on either side of Yang; he is dressed in an androgynous red costume representing his different-ness, while his family are in grey, suggesting that they have not yet taken a side, perhaps not recognized a conflict. Childhood, playfulness, and innocence are the salient characteristics of most of the children’s movements. At first their playfulness is not gendered, their mother’s beauty and their father’s rigidity are equal ingredients in all three; but their play soon begins to be an imitation of the same-sex parent—except Yang, who begins imitating his mother more than his father. The camera pulls out more and more, away from the wall, showing that its confines are artificial and belie the real shape and size of the room and that there are large windows letting in bright light further off. When Yang is about to use his mother’s lipstick, his father slaps it out of his hand and hits him; then the family marches offscreen into the next scene.

The Orange Scene: Nurture

A large crowd of people dressed mostly in grey, American clothing (save for Yang, who is in orange-colored clothes that seem to be some variety of hanbok, traditional Korean garb) are marching into a room full of benches. This is stated in the commentary to represent school and work as well, but the primary imagery chosen is that of a church, with a cross-bearing pulpit and two candelabra full of bright orange candles. The main mass of people march in an ordered pattern, sometimes covering their eyes or grabbing their heads as if in pain or anger. Yang’s dancing and leaping become wilder and more joyful as he goes, until one of the grey-clad people stops him, moving his body into a rigid, pious posture like the others, then forcing him to bow and dismissing him. Yang takes a seat in a pew with a toothy smile, and the grey clothes of the others shift to white and black: sides are being taken, opposition expressed. The man behind the pulpit is in white, as are the people on the far side of the aisle from Yang, whose side is in black; the pastor figure begins making violent gestures like a fundamentalist preacher, and the camera zooms in on Yang’s face as he looks away.

The Yellow Scene: Love

This scene is particularly complex in its action. The music shifts suddenly to a lighter passage, building gradually through the scene. Sitting on a bench in front of a stand of trees and sunflowers and golden streetlamps, dressed in a vest and yellow trousers, Yang sees a girl in black dancing. The floor is covered in yellow leaves, as if signifying the organic change that is about to take place. He gets up to dance with her, and they leap and swirl for a while, until he sees another figure, a male, also dressed in yellow trousers. He moves into a pas de deux with him, with acrobatic, extraordinarily graceful movements. At first the two men move away from the girl and she moves more slowly after them. Then the men briefly move back: Yang reconnects with her, and she gives a kindly gesture connecting the two men again. (Yang describes her as representing the genuine ally, helping him discover and accept himself.) The other man lays himself on the ground, catching Yang in a suspended hold and slowly lowering him onto his body. They are about to kiss as the scene changes.

The Green Scene: Community

Here Yang appears in an elegant, sequined, deep green drag costume with a large pompadour wig, going down a set of stairs, greeting and embracing other drag queens and women as they head down to a dance floor. Their costumes are in an assortment of rainbow colors, but green predominates, at once dark and lush. The music has become energetic again, and characters dance for a few moments—then a figure in white, shown only from behind, approaches them, his fingers in the shape of a gun: likely a tribute to the mass shooting at Pulse three years ago. The dancers pause; then the outer ring ducks out of sight, then the rest, leaving only Yang visible, his face fearful as he raises his hands as if to stop the shooter, but then arms reach up from below and pull him out of the frame.

The Blue Scene: Hate

This is maybe the toughest part of the video to watch. We see Yang from above, in a crowd of anonymous white-clad people, bloodied and being kicked from every side. He is dressed only in a pair of jeans that are much longer than his legs; he cannot walk, cannot escape. The brutalizers disperse suddenly, and the camera moves down, showing him pulling himself along the ground, a blue dumpster and garbage bags behind him. Suddenly his family reappears: his mother and brother are now in black instead of grey, and his father and sister are now in white. His mother and brother move to help him up, but his father and sister begin fighting them, and before long his family are all fighting each other and slide out of the shot; Yang is pushed onto the ground again as they leave, and lies there, convulsing, trying to get up. Darkly echoing the first scene with the red lipstick, Yang touches the red blood on his mouth as he finally manages to sit up, then stand.

The Purple Scene: Pride

Yang is again in an arresting drag outfit, indigo shading into violet. He rises from the ground, at first with his back to the camera, but he quickly turns, anxious in his beauty. Crowds of people, some in white, some in black, surround him; some of those dressed in black reach out as if to caress or encourage, some of those in white shove or paw him, but most are busy yelling at each other as he slowly walks forward, finally reaching a point beyond the crowd; as he does, the shot switches to a distant and unfocused one that slowly pulls back in to his face. The music climaxes and stops, and we hear the angry arguments behind, but the shot lingers on Yang’s face: uncomfortable, anxious, defiant, the lips moving slightly, the eyes going back and forth uncertainly and then—just a couple of seconds before the scene ends, it all smooths out. Yang’s mouth is set, his eyes steady, his brows un-knotted. A peaceful, self-assured dignity closes the scene.

Credits

The credits play over a final, narrative-less scene. Yang is dressed in a luxuriant robe, apparently an open-breasted version of the shenyi (a traditional Chinese robe for men), silver and turquoise in color with what looks like a tea-green obi (a Japanese garment that’s a little reminiscent of a corset), seated alone in the room from the red scene, now with the encroaching wall removed. He rises, gesturing with the magnificent trailing sleeves that had at first appeared to be a gown; as if in response, six figures from the green scene—one in each color: red, purple, blue, orange, yellow, and green—file in. When they have all taken their positions, mirroring the arrangement of the family from the beginning, Yang sits down again in the center, and the legend For the LGBTQIA+ Community appears on the screen.

This is one of the most powerful and visually captivating short videos I’ve ever seen. I rank it with the music videos for Hunger or Spectrum by Florence + the Machine. I recommend it to anyone with a taste for dance or design, or anyone who cares about LGBT issues. Or really, anybody who’s open to watching it. Hats off to Eugene Lee Yang for a beautiful piece of art.

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Natural Lawyer Jokes, Part II

The lover sees the Lady as the Adam1 saw all things before they foolishly chose to experience good as evil … The phenomenal Beatrice—Beatrice as she is in this fallen world—has for an instant been identical with the real Beatrice—Beatrice as she (and all things) will be seen to be, and always to have been, when we reach the throne-room … Romantic Love is neither necessarily joined to bodily fruition nor necessarily abstracted from it: the way to which the glory invites us may run through marriage or it may not. Unless it were possible—and heavenly—to be enamoured of the glory without desiring the woman, how should we ever grow mature for the life of heaven where that glory in its fullest meridian blaze will clothe every woman and every man, every beast, blade of grass, rock? (‘In the third heaven the stones of the waste glimmer like summer stars.’)

—C. S. Lewis, Arthurian Torso pp. 116-118

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Continuing in my analysis of Dr Feser’s paper, I have again come across a total, categorical disagreement. Let’s start with his allusion to The Four Loves:

C. S. Lewis usefully distinguishes Eros from Venus. Venus is sexual desire, which can be (even if it shouldn’t be) felt for and satisfied by any number of people. Eros is the longing associated with being in love with someone, and no one other than that one person can satisfy it. Obviously Venus can and very often does exist without Eros. Eros typically includes Venus, but it not only focuses Venus specifically on the object of romantic longing, but carries that longing to the point where Venus itself, along with everything else, might be sacrificed for the sake of the beloved if necessary. … As Lewis wisely notes, it is an error to think that Venus without Eros is per se morally suspect. … Eros is too unstable and outside our control to think it essential to the moral use of Venus. Sometimes mere affection (which, like Venus itself, can be felt for any number of people) has to suffice to civilize Venus.2

So far, so good, and a sound reminder to our culture, which is (I think) more Eros-crazed than sex-crazed, and that irrespective of Christian belief. As Lewis points out through the mouth of his devil Screwtape, the fact that we think marrying for the sake of preserving chastity and raising a family is low, as compared to marrying for love, is a symptom of how far from the idea of marriage as a sacrament we’ve really come.

But then Feser takes a turn in his argument in which I absolutely cannot accompany him.

Like Venus, Eros is natural to us. It functions to channel the potentially unruly Venus in the monogamous and constructive direction that the stability of the family requires. Of course, a respect for the moral law, fear of opprobrium, and and sensitivity to the feelings of a spouse can do this too, but unlike Eros the motivations they provide can all conflict with the agent’s own inclinations, and are thus less efficacious. … Venus and Eros, then, considered in terms of their natural function, might be best thought of not as distinct faculties, but as opposite ends of a continuum. Venus tells us that we are incomplete, moving us toward that procreative action whose natural end … requires the stability of marital union for its success. Eros focuses that desire onto a single person with whom such a union can be made and for whom the Erotic lover happily forsakes all others and is even willing to sacrifice his own happiness. Eros is the perfection of Venus; mere Venus is a deficient form of Eros. … ‘Consummate love’ … combines all three of the basic kinds of love—commitment, the intimacy of friendship, and the passion that begins with mere infatuation but develops into something more stable. It is difficult to achieve, but is commonly regarded as definitive of the best marriages.3

The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli, 1486

A credible theory; but, as a student of history, a poet, and a lover,4 I firmly assert that it’s all wrong. To begin with, Eros does have a tendency—probably even a predominant tendency—to fix the lover’s desire upon a single beloved. But this tendency does little else to govern Venus, and as a rule Eros (in its ‘chemically’ pure state, without the governance of a well-formed conscience) has no interest in any moral law whatever. Among the passions, none (except maybe religious passion!) shows a stronger tendency to resemble the Unfettered archetype. So to describe its natural direction as ‘constructive’ is, in my opinion, special pleading.

Then there’s the observation that principle, shame, and decency can all serve the same purpose Dr Feser assigns to Eros, but that they may conflict with the person’s inclinations. What, and Eros can’t? My life is the very story of Eros conflicting with others of my own inclinations. And I am sure I’m not the first edition of that story. It isn’t clear to me that Eros even tends to streamline one’s motives, let alone that it was designed to do so.

Thirdly—and this is a lesser point, but it’s important, given the claims made by Neo-Scholasticism for what shows something to be natural—it must be pointed out, as a matter of historical record, that romantic love was not regarded as a dignified or spiritual phenomenon until the twelfth century, at least in Christendom and its Euro-Levantine predecessors5—except, in Greece and later in Rome, for homosexual Eros. To revere romantic love, that fanatical, self-abasing, inconstant, reckless, and involuntary phenomenon, was as ridiculous to our Christian ancestors of the early Middle Ages as it was to their pagan ancestors of the classical era. Nor, until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was the romantic tradition linked to marriage even by Romantics; for the Troubadours who originated the tradition of courtly love, adultery was of its essence.6 The idea that Eros is shown by actual human habits to be naturally directed toward marriage is an artifact of a long and localized cultural development—or, more bluntly, pure moonshine.

In other words, the original rock stars were groupies for their fans.

As I’ve written about several times before, both in contemplating homoeroticism and in commenting on poetry, I think the basic function of Eros is something quite different, which C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and above all Charles Williams wrote about.7 Returning to The Four Loves, it’s easy to forget the initial threefold division that he sets up, which cuts across the four: namely, the loves of need, gift, and appreciation.

Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: ‘We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.’ Need-love says of a woman, ‘I cannot live without her’; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection—if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.8

This appreciative love, Eros-as-awe if you will, is not primarily directed toward union with the beloved. It is not a way of possessing, nor even of giving, but of seeing; it is contemplative, where need-love is (usually) penitent and gift-love is active. All three have their place. But contemplative Eros will not be directed to an end other than contemplation. Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me; and he would not.

Of all the loves [Dante] had known … [his love for Beatrice] is the one which, with will and judgment assenting, he declares to be a revelation of divine truth. It is not the febrile anguish of the death-Eros, in which possession forever mocks desire; nor yet the simple and affectionate exchange which does not look beyond possession. … It is a love whose joy—and therefore its fulfillment—consists in the worshipful contemplation of that which stands over and above the worshipper. True to its origins in courtly love, it finds its entire happiness in being allowed to do homage to an acknowledged superior.9

I don’t deny that Eros-as-need and Eros-as-gift exist, and of them, Dr Feser’s evaluation might possibly be accurate. But those experiences are so irrelevant—I almost said, so alien—to Eros-as-awe, they’re nearly as different from it as they are from the other loves. I’m tempted to say, oxymoronically, that need-Eros and gift-Eros aren’t even Eros.

I won’t quite go that far in fact. When defied, language has a way of avenging itself. And I’ve studied enough Greek mythology to be wary of invoking the wrath of any of the gods, let alone such potent deities as Eros and Apollo. But I will say that Eros is an essentially different thing from conjugal love, and that it’s not psychologically or morally necessary to have both for the same person, nor both at the same time—nor, indeed, to have either one at all. I think conjugal love is more a matter of storgê (governed by the virtue of justice) than of Eros necessarily.2 I therefore disagree entirely with Dr Feser’s assertion that ‘it is hard to see how marriage and family as institutions could survive unless Erotic and consummate love were generally honored … and approximated at least to some significant extent in most marriages.’ Marriage and family existed for a minimum of centuries in Euro-Levantine culture before marital Eros was honored by anybody.

But all this is actually quite consistent with a Thomistic metaphysic—consistent, if not perhaps very characteristic of its proponents. Then again, we had to wait seven hundred years between Dante and Charles Williams: philosopher-kings are plentiful and may be bought in bunches at any bookstore, but the philosopher-poet, the visionary of ‘the feeling intellect,’ the scholar of Romantic Theology, these are rare men.

This should conclude the erotic digression; my analysis of Dr Feser’s work will continue in a subsequent post.

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1Charles Williams (and Lewis in discussing Williams’ work) often refers to unfallen man, of both sexes, collectively as ‘the Adam.’ Since the Hebrew ’adham does simply mean ‘human,’ generically, there is a linguistic case to be made for this. Williams himself may have derived the habit from his all-important doctrine of the Coïnherence of humanity (what could inadequately be summarized as the mutual inter-animation of mankind), or from his magical training as an adept of the SRIA.

2Neo-Scholastic Essays, pp. 392-393; the famous ‘four loves’ written of by Lewis, derived from the various Greek words translated ‘love,’ are storgê, philia, erôs, and agapê, which roughly equate to familial affection, friendship, sexual love, and unconditional love.

3Ibid., pp. 393-394.

4Or at any rate, as one who has been a lover.

5I am ignorant of the romantic traditions of Indic, Oriental, Polynesian, Amerindian, and African cultures, indeed I don’t even know if there were any. I mean, I expect there were, since all men have roughly similar impulses regardless of what they do with them. But what I’m writing here, I only know to be true of the web of cultures spanning the Morocco-Iceland-Russia-Arabia region.

6I’m oversimplifying here, but not for the reason you’d probably think. Courtly love was expected to be directed to a Lady whom you weren’t married to, and who was almost certainly married to somebody else: you, the lover, were a poet, and your beloved was a noblewoman you desired to glorify. (The element of social superiority was key in the development of courtly love; fossilized aspects of it survive even now, as when a man kneels to propose.) There were two ‘schools’ of courtly love: one considered the apex of courtly love to be enjoying one’s Lady sexually; the other considered sex to be kind of beside the point (whether opposing it on moral grounds, or just artistically indifferent), because it viewed love’s true consummation as the adoration of the Lady’s person. The former school gave us poetry like The Romaunt of the Rose; the latter, poetry like The Divine Comedy.

7All three of them, Williams especially, would shake their heads and sigh if I neglected to mention here that Dante and Wordsworth were their great ancestors in this tradition of romantic theology. Milton, Donne, Blake, and just possibly Austen may belong on the list as well.

8P. 17.

9Dorothy Sayers, Introduction to the ‘Purgatorio,’ p. 43.

The Poems of Charles Williams, Part Three: The Beatrician Vision

The Beatrician experience may be defined as the recovery (in respect to one human being) of that vision of reality which would have been common to all men in respect to all things if Man had never fallen. The lover sees the Lady as the Adam saw all things before they foolishly chose to experience good as evil … The great danger is lest he should mistake the vision which is really a starting point for a goal; lest he should mistake the vision of Paradise for arrival there. He must follow this road till it leads him to the Byzantine precision. … The Beatrician experience does not usually last … The glory is temporary; in that sense Beatrice nearly always dies. But a transitory vision is not necessarily a vision of the transitory. … The phenomenal Beatrice—Beatrice as she is in this fallen world—has for an instant been identical with the real Beatrice—Beatrice as she (and all things) will be seen to be, and always to have been, when we reach the throne-room at Byzantium. The precise moment at which the phenomenal Beatrice loses her identity with the real one is a repetition of the Fall …

—C. S. Lewis, Arthurian Torso, “Williams and the Arthuriad,” pp. 116-117

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I’ve written a little already about Williams’ Arthurian cycle, contained in the two volumes Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars. I’d like to continue my analysis, turning now to his doctrine of romantic love as expressed there.

Doctrine is not too strong a word. Williams was a thoroughgoing Neoplatonist, and considered every earthly good a ‘preparatory form’ of the universal Good, i.e. God. The two ways of communion with God—renouncing earthly goods, like the hermit, or embracing them, like the husband—must both acknowledge their reality and objective good-ness. The hermit may renounce them in his preference for the final reality, but he must not condemn or despise them; the husband may embrace them in legitimate delight, but must not content himself with them as though they could finally deserve his whole worship or satisfaction. And, as many works have been written on ascetic theology, so Williams wrote on romantic theology: the way of the affirmation of images, as asceticism is the way of the renunciation of images.

The Romantic Way experiences its object in a certain mode. This can be a person (like Beatrice for Dante, or in a quite different way, Frodo Baggins for Samwise Gamgee), or a thing (like nature of Wordsworth, a favorite reference point of Williams); its key quality is that all goodness is understood through it and in relation to it. It is a kind of temporary theophany.

Tristan and Isolde [or Iseult], Herbert Draper, 1900

Williams describes Sir Palomides, a Saracen knight who joined the Round Table, meeting Queen Iseult of Cornwall between her husband, King Mark, and her lover, Sir Tristram, and falling in love himself:

I saw the hand of the queen Iseult;

down her arm a ruddy bolt

fired the tinder of my brain

to measure the shape of man again;

I heard the king say: ‘Little we know

of verses here; let the stranger show

a trick of the Persian music-craft.’

Iseult smiled and Tristram laughed.

Her arm exposed on the board, between

Mark and Tristram sat the queen,

but neither Mark nor Tristram sought

the passion of substantial thought,

neither Mark nor Tristram heard

the accent of the antique word.

… Blessed (I sang) the Cornish queen;

for till to-day no eyes have seen

how curves of golden life define

the straightness of a perfect line,

till the queen’s blessed arm became

a rigid bar of golden flame

where well might Archimedes prove

the doctrine of Euclidean love,

and draw his demonstrations right

against the unmathematic night …1

In Iseult’s body, Palomides sees the logic of the universe. Her arm exhibits the Logos to him, the Word of the Father, and to that extent he is momentarily converted: God-made-flesh is a beheld and believed reality.

But neither vision nor belief lasts. The former passes, and the latter is forsaken with it. We experience the fall, the loss of the glory, with a renewal of terror:

In the summer house of the Cornish king

suddenly I ceased to sing.

Down the arm of the queen Iseult

quivered and darkened an angry bolt;

and, as it passed, away and through

and above her hand the sign withdrew.

Fiery, small, and far aloof,

a tangled star in the cedar roof,

it hung; division stretched between

the queen’s identity and the queen.

It’s too familiar. How many couples have we known who’ve broken up, even by the violent, organic schism of divorce, because one or the other is no longer in love? How many times have we ourselves met someone who used to be enchanting, and found them suddenly vacant of that radiance? The contrast is a shock, sometimes to the point of being actively disgusting.2 And Palomides, lacking either habitual grace or the theology of romantic love to guide him through the occlusion of the glory, pursues what little he still perceives:

Relation vanished, though beauty stayed;

too long my dangerous eyes delayed

at the shape on the board, but the voice was mute;

the queen’s arm lay there destitute,

empty of glory …

Cœlius Vibenna over the dead

cast the foul Chthonian spells,

on ghost and bone and what lingers else;

… the Pope in white, like the ghost of man,

stood in the porch of Lateran;

and aloof in the roof, beyond the feast,

I heard the squeak of the questing beast,

where it scratched itself in the blank between

the queen’s substance and the queen.3

None of the knights of the Round Table have been able to capture the Questing Beast. Palomides, who being still unbaptized is not yet eligible for the Table, decides to do so—he becomes obsessed with it.

I determined, after I saw Iseult’s arm,

to be someone, to trap the questing beast

that slid into Logres out of Broceliande

through the blank between the queen’s meaning and the queen.

Having that honour I would consent to be christened,

I would come then to the Table on my own terms …

But things went wrong; Tristram knocked me sprawling

under the tender smile of Iseult; my manhood,

chivalry, and scimitar-play learned from the Prophet,

could not gain me the accurate flash of her eyes.

Once I overthrew Lancelot by cheating at a tourney,

whence, enraged, fleeing, I was taken by pirates;

Lancelot freed me—he rode on to Carbonek;

did I smile when I heard that he my saviour was mad?

For bees buzzed down Iseult’s arm in my brain;

black gnats, whirring mosquitoes …

and I thought if I caught the beast they would cease certainly.

… There would be nothing but to admire the man

who had done what neither Tristram nor Lancelot did.4

Smarting under the loss of Iseult before he has even gained her, and unable to conceive the Dantean road of love as intellectual adoration without carnal consummation, Palomides has attempted the egoïst’s compensation of proving his worth before conceding that worth to others; and, though baptism is oriented to God, in Christendom it is inevitably a concession to one’s fellow Christians as well.

So the Questing Beast is met in the blank between / the queen’s substance and the queen—i.e., in the moment when the meaning of the beloved and her person are perceived as horribly separate—because it is a symbol of ‘the conversion of the Godhead into flesh,’ the theory of the Incarnation which the Athanasian Creed specifically disclaims. It is an attempt to reclaim the Beatrician vision by force: an attempt to make love operate entirely in terms of appetite.

He tries to defeat Tristram and so win Iseult’s love, but is beaten himself; he tries to triumph over Sir Lancelot, the finest of Arthur’s knights, so salvaging his ego, yet he can do so only by cheating, and is then rescued by him—the secret and the public humiliations coïnhere. Neither erotic consummation nor knightly glory is available to him any more. And in pursuing the Questing Beast at all, Palomides rejected the possibility of erotic love as a way of the soul: renouncing carnal enjoyment of the beloved, but remembering the vision of her identity and simply rejoicing in that beauty, maintaining faith in the queen’s substance even when it is obscured by the queen.

This may sound like a fantasy, but minds like Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and Dorothy Sayers all accepted it. The idea that sex is, for a lover, kind of beside the point (however licit and fun it might be) goes right back to the troubadours. They didn’t all agree, but there were those among them for whom the simple contemplation of glory in the beloved was the essential end of courtly love, and everything else was icing. A culture like ours, in which egalitarianism and sexual satisfaction are the basic standards of happiness, is almost unable to believe that somebody could feel that way.5 But the poets and their commentators tell us that it was a real phenomenon—the Divine Comedy is about that very thing—and facts don’t have to be likely or even comprehensible.

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1The Coming of Palomides ll. 35-48, 55-64.

2The disgust may be reasonable: romantic love is no respecter of persons, and can be felt for someone who is, in their phenomenal identity (i.e. the person we meet), ghastly. The next poem in Taliessin, ‘Lamorack and the Queen Morgause of Orkney,’ deals with just such a love—even in the throes of his devotion, Sir Lamorak doesn’t consider Morgause beautiful or good, but he is overpowered by the experience of her nonetheless. But this disgust may also be a mundane result of suddenly seeing the flaws we had formerly missed or deliberately ignored in the excitement of eros; or, it may be an expression of the horror of suddenly lacking the vision of glory that had inhered in the beloved, perhaps mere moments ago.

3The Coming of Palomides ll. 65-69, 76-78, 81-86. Cœlius Vibenna was an Etruscan noble and a friend of Romulus; the Etruscans were notorious sorcerers, and introduced divination by entrails to Rome. Chthonian is a reference to Vibenna’s magic (from the Greek χθών chthōn, ‘deep earth, under-soil’)—gods such as Hades, Persephone, Hecate, and the Furies were chthonic.

The Questing Beast, also called the Blatant Beast or Beast Glatisant in some Arthurian sources, is an interesting, difficult symbol. It is usually depicted similarly to the ancient Egyptian serpopard. The names blatant and glatisant come from archaic words meaning ‘yelping’ or ‘barking’ (glapissant in Old French, while blatant is related to the word bleat). I think the interpretation I’ve provided here is accurate, but I’m sure others are possible.

4Palomides Before his Christening ll. 9-14, 17-26, 28, 31-32.

5‘How are these gulfs between the ages to be dealt with by the student of poetry? A method often recommended may be called the method of The Unchanging Human Heart. … Just as, if we stripped the armor off of a mediæval knight or the lace off of a Caroline courtier, we should find beneath them an anatomy identical to our own, so, it is held, if we strip off from Virgil his Roman imperialism, from Sidney his code of honor, from Lucretius his Epicurean philosophy, and from all who have it their religion, we shall find the Unchanging Human Heart, and on this we are to concentrate. … But how if these [“lowest common multiples”] are not really the most important elements in the actual balance of the poem we are reading? Our whole study of the poem will then become a battle between us and the author in which we are trying to twist his work into a shape he never gave it …

‘Fortunately there is a better way. Instead of stripping the knight of his armor you can try to put his armor on yourself; instead of seeing how the courtier would look without his lace, you can try to see how you would feel with his lace; that is, with his honor, his wit, his royalism, and his gallantries out of the Grand Cyrus. I had much rather know what I should feel like if I adopted the beliefs of Lucretius than how Lucretius would have felt if he had never entertained them. … To enjoy our full humanity we ought, so far as is possible, to contain within us potentially at all times, and on occasion to actualize, all the modes of feeling and thinking through which man has passed. … For the truth is that when you have stripped off what the human heart actually was in this or that culture, you are left with a miserable abstraction totally unlike the life really lived by any human being.’ From C. S. Lewis’ Preface to ‘Paradise Lost,’ pp. 62-64.