rivendellrose | waxing poetic and geeky

Have you ever seen the children's book "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie"?

This is its pseudo-academic cousin, 'If You Give an English Major a Literary Reference.'

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I know. I'm a freak. But this is one of the creeeeeeepiest poems I've read (which, after my poetry class a few years ago, is saying quite a bit...), and my brain nearly asploded (exploding, except with more confusion and fannishness) when it was quoted at the end of B5 season 1.

(Can I talk about anything else lately? I'm not sure. Apparently I was being dead serious when I said that this show was going to take a little while to digest. Forgive me for ruminating in your general directions.)

When this reference originally came up, I thought it was silly. "Sure," thought I - "go ahead and try to convince people that Delenn's transformation is going to be something terrifying." I, spoiled on that whole thing by virtue of my old habit of reading all of whatever sci-fi magazines I picked up, not just the parts about shows I actually watched, wasn't at all tricked. Or at least that's what I initially assumed. Because that exact quote, yeah, it's pretty damned foreboding:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Not something I'd normally associate with a benevolent and (largely) peaceful figure like Delenn. But that's just the cited phrase - what if we consider the rest of the poem in context? The first eight lines are certainly appropriate to the situation that's beginning to appear at that point in the series. Pretty soon, there really will be anarchy - Clark ascending to the presidency, Night Watch... and of course the "blood-dimmed tide" of the Centauri's Shadow-driven war. "The best" in terms of the series are presumably 'our people,' the crew and associated, or more generally humans and Minbari, who seem to be set up as the more general 'us' of the series. It's interesting to note that the Minbari in particular "lack conviction" - the Grey Council, at least, is aware of the coming Shadow war and refuses to act despite Delenn's efforts to wake them. ("Wake them"... oh, nuts, it's another Tolkien reference. Ents. Alas. But will the ents march to war here? Not especially... too bad, that) In any case, 'our people' not only do not know what's coming, but it will take a good while for the implications to come to them, and for their spirits to be steeled against the choices they msut make. And in this early moment of the series, it's hard to think of anyone more "full of passionate intensity" than Clark, and good old Mr. Morden. A revelation is indeed at hand, though of what, at that point, was still a mystery.

But... the second coming?

In a way, yes.

I could read this in a few (not entirely mutually exclusive) ways. First, let's remember that Delenn is the One. Or maybe she's one third of the One - that bit is a little complicated. (For writing penned by an atheist, this whole show wanders off into waters that, to my mind, are deeply entrenched in Catholicism.) In any case, one could read her transformation as the second part of the arrival of the One to the station - the first was Sheridan, the second Delenn, the third Sinclair. In another, related sense, Delenn is a second coming of Valen... who has also made his second appearance. Or his first, depending on how you read the timeline. Does the story start a thousand years ago with Valen, figuratively begetting Sinclair (his former self, who without Valen's notes wouldn't have known what to do to prevent the Shadows from destroying both the past and the future)? Or is Sinclair the beginning that begets Valen, as the chronological life of Sinclair-the-person would have it?) Another possibility is that, as the second (sort of - again, the timeline is really screwing with things, here) person to use the transformation-thingy, and also by virtue of her heritage, Delenn is literally a Second Coming that will bring together Humans and Minbari... again, literally, given her son, David.

(Total side-note: I don't know why, but I get seriously creeped out whenever I think about that kid. Something about his mere existence in the shadowy future of the serious just scares the hell out of me. I think it's the fact that yeah, Sheridan and Delenn are these amazing, semi-religious figures of legend... but what's it going to be like for a kid growing up with all that expectation? People are quite literally going to be expecting him to be all that and a case of the non-alcoholic beverage of their choice, and it's just not going to be pretty. That's gotta mess with a kid, even one with as awesome a mother as Delenn. Also, in all the little bits of the future that we've seen, we've yet to hear anything about him except that he exists. We never see him, he sure as heck wasn't with his mother when she tottered in to defend Sheridan's good name... where is he? What's he doing? That kind of shadowy-ness always makes me really nervous about a character. Why do I get the sense that it's going to be a case of two rights making a horrible, terrifying wrong? Did I get accidentally, subconsciously spoiled on something, or am I just paranoid?)

Moving on, then. Next passage.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

Spiritus Mundi - the spirit of the world. Appropriate in reference to someone whose spiritual beliefs are effectively animism on the grandest scale, casting the universe itself as both creator and created, splitting itself up into pieces in order to understand and experiment with itself. I love that image, by the way. Just lovely, and I'm so tempted to adopt it into my explanation of how I vew the universe - I'd always thought of it as both creating and created of itself, but... that's just a stunning way of expressing the whole thing. Anyway. "Desert" here is a lifeless distance... space itself, the ultimate desert in which nothing can live. "Lion body and the head of a man," of course, references the sphinx, and I could go one of two ways with the interpreation here. One direction, the most obvious perhaps, is to read the sphinx as being Delenn. This is particularly appropriate if we follow the Greek tradition of the Sphinx, which is always female. Although traditionally a symbol of death and destruction, the image was also an ancient Assyrian guardian of temple entrances, or an Egyptian representation of the king as the incarnated sun god. More to the point, the sphinx is a perfect image of dual nature (human/animal, human/god, and, in this case, Human/Minbari), and also of philsophical questions pertaining to the nature of the self. In the story of Oedipus, the sphinx poses a riddle ("What animal is that which in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?") to everyone who passes, and kills those who fail to answer correctly ("Man," who walks on all four as a baby that crawls, on two feet as an adult, and when elderly walks with a cane). The answer requires self-knowledge and awareness of mortality and the passage of time, all of which will come into play in Delenn's progress as a character.

The question of self-knowlege, however, and of the question as a challenge without the answer to which the questor will be killed by the interrogator, brings up another possibility for the symbolic identity of the sphinx in Babylon 5's mythos. Soon after Delenn's transformation comes the arrival of the quintessential inquisitor for the series, Sebastian, who torments Delenn with only one question - "Who are you?" He is an avatar of 'gods' (the Vorlons), and is also, by his former savagery in Victorian London, a melding of human and bestial natures. And surely he is the best example in the series of a "gaze blank and pitiless as the sun." If Delenn fails to succeed at his test, either she will die or he will 'kill' her ambitions and hopes for the universe by declaring her unworthy of the task at hand.

The "shadows of indignant desert birds," in this case, cannot help but call to mind the wheeling, dark shapes of the Shadow vessels, and surely they would be indignant at this Second Coming who will eventually defeat them, had they known.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The darkness, in this case, is a clear reference to the Shadows, who have come again after their long sleep. The twenty centuries (in the original meaning presumably referring to the time since the death of Christ) here seem to indicate toward the thousand years of peace enjoyed by the Minbari after Valen, again returning us to the idea of Delenn as the second coming of the One and the silence of the Shadows after their defeat at that time. "Vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle..." at this point, I'm a bit lost. Okay, so the Shadows are this reading's equivalent of the anti-Christ (I always have the hardest time remembering that's what the last few lines refer to - for some reason, my mind never makes the shift, and I think it comes out that the second coming itself is the bad thing. Oops.) but beyond that...?

Thoughts? Questions? Slaps up-side the head for taking all of this too damned seriously?

Speaking of seriously, many eternal thanks to anybody who actually made it through all of that. ♥