(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and the citizens of Minnesota.

- [Announcer] This program, brought to you in part by SELCO.

(bright music) - Good evening, and welcome to the ReadingForLife lecture, based on the book "Song of Solomon" by Tony Morrison.

ReadingForLife is a movement of the imagination with the purpose of growing community around a shared love of literature.

The idea is that real community begins and ends with our imaginations and few resources if any, are as vital to the imaginations development as works of literature.

Our presenter tonight is Michael Verde.

Michael graduated with honors from the University of Texas's Plan 2 honors program, earned an MA in Literary Studies from the University of Iowa and an MA in Theology from the University of Durham, England, where he graduated at the top of his international class.

He taught for 15 years at the university and college prep schools level, most recently at Indiana University, and is currently completing his PhD with the focus on literature and religion.

He founded ReadingForLife in 2005.

- Thank you, Julie and everybody for being here.

My goal for us is that we discuss aspects of this novel that be the kind of thing you could not find on Google or in spark notes, et cetera.

In other words, I'm gonna give a little bit of a context, enough of the setting and the plot to get us into the novel.

But my aspiration for us is that we will move into the depths of the novel that don't announce themselves easily, and that would require a kind of attentiveness to language in order to participate in some of the, let's say the communication that is taking place, you could say subliminal, beneath the surface or deep et cetera.

But my goal is that we get to that kind of stuff as soon as possible.

And one of the ways we can do that after I jumpstart us a bit is for you to share whatever questions that you have.

And I am quite confident that implicit in your question will be a thread or two that we can follow to the heart of the novel.

So with that in mind, let's get started.

A way to think about this novel is to imagine that it is the story of a family of dead people.

Well, they are actually not dead, but literally, and by literally I do not mean actually; the word literally means of the nature of letters.

It's the same word for literature; and literary, it has the same etymological roots.

So when we use the word literally to mean like I literally saw it, we're using it in a kind of secondary sense.

The word really means in the nature of letter.

So when I say that this was literally a family of dead people, I mean that their last name was D-E-A-D, of the letters that spelled dead.

So you can imagine if you're reading a novel with the last name of the main family, so to speak is dead, you're probably in a very interesting place imaginatively because either those people are actually dead throughout the whole novel in some kind of way, in which case you have, I suppose, a ghost story, or there is something tantalizing about the name that raises the question, "What constitutes the death that they're in?"

if indeed they're dead in some metaphorical way, and what would it be for people who are dead to come alive?

So, I just with that in mind, wanted to say that this is a story of the main character who is in a family of dead people, who at 32, again, they're a living people, but they're living a kind of death so to speak, it is an unsatisfying kind of life, especially from the perspective of the protagonist whose nickname is Milkman, Milkman Dead.

Now, again, we're having fun with language here.

So we'll just keep an eye on what could be suggestive about Milkman.

But a Milkman Dead.

You got a dead man right there in the main character's name and something about this milk business, any case.

Milkman Dead, whose actual name is Macon Dead, he's the third of a line of Macon Deads.

And they originally got their name after the Civil War, a drunken union soldier who set free the first Macon Deads, he was a slave and he was set free.

And the man who set him free gave him the name Macon Dead because he was drunk and it was an accident, because the man dead wouldn't have known his real name because in those days, the slaves were like chattel to their owners, and they would be listed under a person's book of possessions in the same kind of category as animals.

They weren't, in other words, recognized by name.

And so this moment and his liberation by the union soldier was really the beginning of a kind of new life.

And he receives this name in a half hazard and perhaps, not as denigrating perhaps as having no name at all, but pretty closed if you're named by someone who's drunk and he signed you what would obviously be the most unlikely last name.

This is not the most propitious circumstances for no one who won this.

Any case, our protagonist is the third generation of Macon Deads.

And at 32 in a town, a make believe town somewhere in Michigan, he decides that his life is simply unsatisfying.

He's working for his father, the second Macon Dead, and Macon Dead is a slum Lord.

And Macon Dead's aspiration of the Milkman's father is to move up in the world as high as he can and he sees his opportunity in property, purchasing property that is not of interest to the white community, and then making it a habitat for really working and black people who are on the margins, who have difficulty from time to time to even pay the rent.

And Macon is relentless and merciless is the better word, merciless and extracting rent from his people.

So, the protagonist's family is neither integrated with the black community because they see his father as someone that's somewhat preying on them, nor are they integrated into the white community.

So they're isolated really from having a community.

And this young man is not satisfied working for his father.

He's also been raised in relative privileged conditions.

I say relative, relative to the black community, his father has some income.

His mother, who was the daughter of a prominent doctor in the black community, they had set themselves apart financially.

So Milkman has money growing up, and this is not particularly helpful to him with regards to getting to know the black community because he's in a sense feels himself superior to the people around him, and yet is not at home in the white community.

So like his father, he's kind of without community.

Any case, he's pursuing this meaningless job, and decides at 32 that maybe life is elsewhere.

He is beckoned also by the possibility that his aunt and father years ago, years ago before they lived in Michigan, they had an experience with the death of their own father.

In other words, Milkman's father's father was shot by white people, and Milkman's father and his sister witnessed that.

And at some point in trying to find a new life, they run away to a cave.

And in this cave, they discover some gold.

In any case so that when Milkman is running away, he decides he's going to go and find the gold that his father once discovered in a cave somewhere in Danville, Pennsylvania of all places.

And so that's what he sets out to do.

All of that to say, you've got a fairly privileged middle class, let's say, upper middle class in a black community young man who feels somewhat alienated from his own life, who goes south to find that this wealth that he believes exists in a cave, robs at the cave, discover there's nothing in the cave, but in the pursuit of this make believe treasure, what make Milkman comes into contact with are what he calls his people.

This is the community in which his family, his mother and father, or his father were raised and his father's father.

He's around rural people, country people.

And he starts to discover that it feels right to him in some unexpected way.

And the more of his possessions, he only brought a few things, mainly two big suitcases, largely empty, 'cause he was gonna bring gold back, but he had some scotch and a few shirts and maybe some under clothes, but he didn't have a lot, but along the way, towards this cave, he starts to lose even the things that he has.

And at some point, he finds himself down to very, very little.

After he learns that there's no gold in the cave, he thinks that his aunt may have hid it in another location in Virginia called Shalimar, Virginia.

And when he goes to that location, he's moving even deeper into his family's roots, in fact, where his grandfather once upon a time had a farm, and he comes to learn about his family in ways that he never imagined through various sorts of ways, mainly through children singing a song that resonates with a song that he heard his aunt sing from time to time.

And he's able to connect the dots, the words of this song to come to realize one day that they're singing about his great grandfather, as it were.

Okay, with that in mind, let's take the opening scene really.

And it begins with a insurance agent by the name of Robert Smith.

This is the day that Milkman is born.

So when the scene I'm describing now, Milkman is in his mother's womb.

On this particular day, this insurance agent had left a note promising that at 3:00 o'clock, he would fly from the North Carolina Mutual Life building.

He promised that he would fly across Lake Superior.

At 3:00 o'clock, he's at the top of this insurance building with some blue wings, and like Icarus, commits himself to flight, and like Icarus plunges instantly.

I think Icarus may have actually enjoyed a little air time, but Robert Smith had very little air time.

He let leaps from the top of the building, and it's splatter.

This is the opening scene of the novel and this is the day that Milkman is born.

At four years old, Milkman learns that only birds and airplanes can fly.

Previous to that point, he thought people could fly.

And when he learned that people couldn't fly really was the beginning of his increasing disinterest in life altogether.

So that's the stage.

We begin with a scene of a person at the top of a building who's an insurance agent.

And how does an insurance agent make his money?

He makes his money giving people the idea that they can ensure their life through money.

At a metaphorical level, this is precisely what Milkman's father, he has bought into the idea that the ultimate form of freedom in America, and the ultimate form of having some kind of modicum of dignity or respect, is to work your way to the top.

You remember that Jefferson's moving on up or perhaps the self-help book that for years was a best seller "See You at the Top" by Zig Ziegler.

Well, this is Milkman Dead's father, Macon's Dead dream that he is going to rise to the top and that money's gonna be the source of his, that's gonna ensure his life, the meaningfulness of his life, but Milkman, his son has discovered that that particular pursuit has led to a great deal of misery.

His father's not connected with his wife.

He's not connected to his children.

He didn't even want Milkman to be born.

Now that his son's working for him, he has lost, well, I don't know that he ever was convinced that this was the way for success, but certainly, he is not persuaded by the time that he's 32 that this is life that's going anywhere.

So, a way that we can think of Robert Smith jumping off the building is an absolute symbol that if you pursue this dream to its apex, what you're going to discover is emptiness of acuity of meaning that eviscerates the purpose of life.

It takes away anything that would make you want to live.

The question is, is there any alternative if our dream of success is in fact a movement towards death, is there another kind of movement that might be towards life?

And this is essentially what Milkman is going to discover in his pursuit of the gold.

Now, this gold is I mentioned was in a cave.

I mentioned the cave and I mentioned this building of the opening scene to give you a kind schematic image related to a vertical line.

So if we think of the very top of the North Carolina Mutual Life building, as something like the Zenni, we can think of that cave where the gold is is something like the opposite.

In other words, if the building is going up, this cave is going down, and at the base of this cave, there's supposed to be yet another pit in which the gold is said to, or thought to be stored.

So you have this notion from the top of a building, a pursuit of success, to the bottom of a cave where the gold would constitute a kind of success, except when Macon Dead III or Milkman reaches a cave where the gold is supposed to be, there is no gold there, raising the question is if there's not success at the top of this American dream that leads to the meaningless of life, I think of Willie Lowman, for instance, the death of a salesman, because in a way, Robert Smith dies the death of a con of a salesman.

If there's no life there, and there's no gold at the bottom of the cave, a big question mark is what constitutes success in this novel?

What would constitute a meaningful life?

The epigraph of the novel says that the fathers may soar, and the children know their names.

You can see there with the building, the Mutual Life building in Robert Smith's Icarus-like plummet to the earth, an attempt to soar, an attempt to fly.

And you can imagine in Milkman's movement down south to discover this gold and coming into contact with his people, so to speak, and slowly learning his own past, that he is coming to know his name in a way that he did not before.

So the parody of his name in other words, adds to the (indistinct) of the novel that he actually does have a name, a name that was not given to him in a pejorative way.

He has a name that relates to nobility.

He has a name that enables him to be kind of a community that he has not known growing up.

And yet there is no physical goal.

So, I'm gonna hit pause at this point, with this particular image in mind, I'm trying to suggest that this novel if we're gonna get to the depths of it, has something to do with how does a person move up so to speak with regards to positive things, how do we feel exhilarated about our life?

How does our life feel like we want to fly in a very promising way?

We're taking flight from gravity.

We're experiencing something that transcends the mundane.

So if we think of movement up in a positive way, how is it that we can move up without becoming Icarus?

How is it in other words that we can reach a kind of flight that doesn't prove to be an illusion, that leaves us at the dead, okay?

How can we pursue a dream that is a real dream that's not eviscerating or desiccating the meaningfulness of a life?

So with that question and kind of on the horizon here, I'm saying this is the main question 'cause I'm connecting the idea that the fathers can soar and the children know their names, meaning that when the fathers take flight, it's not at the cost of the children's identity.

You could think of a man seeking a freedom, and yet leave him behind a swatch of disappointment and despair because he's been the source of the family, he's perhaps the income.

He's certainly been a meaningful part of what constituted a group of people.

And in his absence and movement towards flight, what's left with that group of people it's to pick up the sort of pieces.

So this novel is suggesting that there is a possibility that the fathers can soar without the children being shattered and losing any kind of roots with regards to their own future.

Okay.

So that's just some images.

I try to move us through the plot to some, we can say archetypal symbols that might push our conversation a little further.

I'll hit pause here.

If you've got some thoughts, let's put something on the table and see what we can go with it.

- Well, I'm just gonna share that this is a whole different perspective than I think where our book group discussed this book, I understood that she wrote it in almost in the moments of grief following Emmett Till, and that the story had a lot to do with the struggle and the actual real life of black community, and the challenge, like you're pointing out, the challenge between the, I'll say underworld economy and culture, and the white attempt to be the successful in the white community.

That tension there seemed like a lot of what was going on in the book that just the relationships between the characters, like I can't remember what was that guy's name who ended up killing him in the end, and his group of people that were taking a white life in response to any black life that was taken as sort of a balancing thing.

That sort of pulled us in that direction.

So it's interesting to think about it at in a more like this is more of a 60,000 foot view.

- Well, let's say this, that it's not an either or in other words, Linda, the kind of circumstances that you're talking about socially and historically, those are all actually very, very relevant to the story.

So my response to you, Linda, is we're actually what you were saying, there's all very vital elements of the novel, and what I'm sharing are vital elements of the novel.

And the idea is how do we see the mythological and the historical and the cultural?

And it's something that's is a real question for all of us because we ourselves are pursuing meaning in some way.

And to that extent, we are going to be telling ourselves a story that gives our life an ending.

In other words, we could just step back from these characters for just a moment and imagine our own situation.

Here is we know that we have a certain amount of time on this journey of velotears in our mortal coil.

We can see perhaps a lot of things around us that are not satisfying.

What are our opportunities with the time that we have to experience something like the happiness that we said we are deserved to pursue?

What will constitute that sort of joy for us?

What kind of ending do we see and what are the means by which we are pursuing it?

Are we pursuing it like Milkman Dead's father by abolitionist and acquiring everything that we could possibly materially to set ourselves apart, to distinguish ourselves from our own community, to have a sense of identity by being superior to others?

Or are we perhaps despair of the American dream have become embedded, and have even perhaps imagined ways to take justice into our own hands.

That's a fairly, less likely ending, or have we just in a sense, resigned ourself to the fact that life is really largely a losery, and that there's nothing particularly satisfying very long, and we're just trying to make the best of it until time runs out?

That would be another...

I mean, Henry David Thoreau said most men lead lives of quiet desperation.

That would be a particular way.

But if you imagine that there is something almost like giving up a story at all.

In other words, even if you're taking justice into your own hand with a seven day club, that's at least a story.

Robert Smith is gonna fly, that's at least a story.

Given up entirely is no narrative really whatsoever.

So, those are sort of our options.

We can just give up the idea that there's meaning, or if we don't, what story is going to be the story of our life, what is the myth, so to speak, that we're going to live by?

Because in the absence of a myth, we're gonna be living a meaningless life.

In other words, I'm suggesting that the way we make meaning is through narrative, and narratives always have a structure.

And although they'll be resonating with what's going on let's say in the empirical world, there is another dimension of every story that's resonating, and what I'm suggesting is the mythological or archetypal world.

So, we're both talking about the same story.

We're just talking about it from different angles.

- Do you think that based on what you're saying, that the author is prescribing a better way to go in terms of creating your story following your family's mythology, because Milkman is...

He only starts to really grow in my view, as a human being, he's kind of a jerk until he hits the road.

He's a real loser.

He has no real values that amount to anything, until he starts pursuing his family history.

And the thing that I thought was really interesting and I couldn't quite get my hands around it, was the song that he kept hearing, because I don't know if there's a link to that in another literary area in the Bible or wherever that might be in another part of a cultural wrinkle there.

But it seemed like here's a hint, you know, Milkman, here's a hint, are you hearing that song?

And it's like off into the woods he goes.

And even at the very end, I'm not remembering exactly, but it's almost like he's hearing a song at the end when he is like, it's not like he dies, it's like he flies away.

Am I remembering that?

- Well, first of all, let me say, I wish I would've used your line that he was a jerk and a loser till he hit the road.

That would've been a far pittier way for me to introduce the plot, because you said what I said in far more economical terms, I think that's a wonderful way to think about it.

So you can think of someone that's a jerk, a little bit lost, then hits the road.

And then the question is, what is this road hitting business?

How does that relate to the song that somehow liberated him from his being a jerk?

What is the connection sort of there?

So let me suggest this, because we were talking about ways to move up that were not a losery and that did not end in the kind of plummet of the descend that Robert Smith or Willie Lowman or any number of people.

I mean, how about the people at the collapse of Enron that threw themselves or that committed?

So you can think of lots of people who went the end of the run, so to speak, when it all came to not life was not worth living.

So that's a fairly understandable source of collapse.

Let's just put it that way.

So, let's think of a way that you could rise, that is not a collapse.

And I wanna go back to this notion of a song because a song has a rhythm, a music has a movement, and music exists in time, except that it is not clock time.

In other words, you can imagine that a musician takes time and gives it a certain form that in a way defies clock time.

In fact, you could say you get caught up in a performance and time disappear in many ways.

In other words, I'm suggesting that the arts are to become creative is a way to move up, so to speak.

In other words, you're lifting yourself off a kind of just bearing terrain of nothingness.

You are investing, let's say, as his great grandfather did, or his grandfather, you're investing into land, you're bearing seeds, you're tilling the land and things are coming up out of the ground.

These are things that you can actually eat that are nourishing.

So I'm trying to suggest that there are ways of imagining moving up, that actually are sustainable and that sustain other people.

And I am connecting the arts and what is created out of the arts.

For instance, you can say of an artist that he or she had a body of work.

And about this body of work, we can say that when the artist passes on biologically, that their body of work remains is vital, that other people take sustenance from it.

In other words, there are ways of achieving something that defeats death, that is not a losery.

And I am connecting it with this notion of a song, to hear how the spirit communicates, to hear that say in a song or a poem is very different than hearing the kind of illusions that we get through TV commercials, or through other kind of stories that are actually feeding on us and not feeding us.

Anything that uses language that is manipulative, for instance, is ultimately exploiting to a certain extent, is trying to feed on you.

It probably want your income at the cost of perhaps compromising your sense of self or confidence.

How many commercials work by making us feel insecure about our bodies, and then offer us a product that if we purchase it, we'll feel good about ourselves and that people will love us?

This is a kind of way that we would participate in this dream of moving on up that's actually feeding on us.

Let's take Hagar Pilate, Pilate who is Milkman's aunt and his father's sister, Pilate, Pilate Dead.

If we wanna think about that, how do you pilot someone out of death?

How do you be a pilot that moves out of death?

If any case, Pilate's granddaughter, whose name Hagar, before she ends up essentially committing suicide, she looks in the mirror, she's despaired because Milkman was her lover, the love of her life and he has flown away, and she can't imagine life without Milkman, but at the sort of abyss of her despair, she picks up a mirror, looks in it and decides that she's going to kind of mount up an effort to make herself beautiful so that Milkman would love her, and she takes what resources the family has economically.

She goes to these stores and just laps up these clearly mainstream, you could think of white products that somehow symbolize beauty, and she just goes whole hog, trying to make herself beautiful, only to become increasingly really despondent and it leads to her death.

In other words, I'm making a comparison between songs that are born of the imagination without manipulative attempt, the kind of songs we think of as poetry or the kind of songs that feed us.

I'm contrasting that with the kind of messages that come through commercials or that come through political sort of propaganda.

I'm thinking of things you.... Really, pornography, propaganda.

These are the kinds of ways that language is used to feed on people.

And I wanna contrast that use of language with what a song might be offering or a poem, or in this case, even a novel.

In other words, a way of using language, that it lifts someone's spirit, and doesn't give them a manipulative mythology, but gives them a fertile story that he or she can identify and live with.

So that's how I'm trying to connect the dots a little bit, that what Milkman is discovering in this song and in the song that's about his great grandfather flying away.

In a sense, what he is discovering is the spirit of his own genuine identity.

So if we can think of Hagar losing her identity to the white world of beauty, you can think of Milkman as finding his identity in another message, in another source of reality that is lifting him up.

Is that helpful a little bit, that in discovering this song, he's finding a place to look to see, this actually reflects me and the image that it gives back, it nobles me.

The image that it gives back feeds by spirit.

I'm a part of these people.

I'm living now in this story, and this story is a fertile one.

In other words, there's something about a song that makes it artistic in its form.

And there's something nourishing in the arts, that give us an alternative diet, so to speak, than the diet that might be offered to us from the mall or other places.

- I was just thinking about "Song of Solomon" and the biblical text Song of Solomon and the connection to the title and the musical nature of kind of the thread of Milkman's redemption through the novel and how that is.

Like, it's been a really long time since I read Song of Solomon Biblical edition, but it's inverse, correct?

And so, like- - Inverse, meaning what?

- It's in a more poetic form than like (indistinct).

- Oh yeah.

No, I thought you the word inverse.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, sorry.

Yeah, verse, you should.

- In space verse.

- Yeah.

- So like the idea that the reference to the biblical text is also a biblical text that's written in verse, it's one of the more like sensual texts in the Bible, right?

So it's a very unique book in the Bible to choose for.

And there are a lot of biblical names in Tony Morrison's "Song of Solomon."

So I think there's a lot of playing around with themes of little bits of hedonism versus sin and pleasure and all of those themes, and whether or not we can escape, basically our flawed fragile human condition.

And are we ever able to approach anything that would be essentially freedom in our limited physical human format?

- Okay.

So real quick.

Christie's put something really cool on the table.

She suggested, listen, the Song of songs, which is considered one of the writings of the Tanakh or the Hebrew Bible, one of the collection of writings is an unusual sort of book in the Bible.

It's not about the law.

It doesn't concern even Proverbs or wisdom.

It is an exchange between a calmly and thought to be a black woman, could be that the person is black, or it could be that as she suggests that her skin is made sunburn through hard labor.

In any case, it is this woman known as the Beloved, speaking to the man that she loves, who is a shepherd, and they go back and forth really with some lyrical expressions of desire, and even of ecstasy, often comparing each other to natural or physical things.

I mean that her sort of neck is like the Cedars of Lebanon.

I'm giving a silly example, but those are the kind of metaphors that are at play.

What's interesting about the book, many interesting about Song of Songs in the Bible, is that it could be understood is entirely an exchange of poems related to Carnell and romantic love, or as some exponents of the Bibles, Hebrew, Jewish, or Christian suggest that it's an allegory about God's love for Israel or God's love of the church.

What I think Christine, you were putting on the table is what does this bodily stuff, this sensual stuff have to do with the kind of happiness that we were talking about, and what does this bodily stuff have to do with taking flight?

Because one of the things that Milkman discovers and what he determines made Pilate so special.

And Pilate is responsible for Milkman being alive because his father, and perhaps to a certain extent, his mother were attempting to abort him.

But because of her intervention, really his father didn't want him to be born.

Because of Pilate's intervention, Milkman survives and is born.

Milkman, you might say, at his rebirth, Pilate is present.

In other words, it's Pilate's presence that saves Milkman's life because when Guitar tries to shoot him, he actually hits Pilate.

So what I'm suggesting is that Pilate has twice given Milkman his life.

And what Milkman comes to believe is that in Pilate's life, he understood what it meant to soar without ever leaving the ground.

In other words, it's through Pilate that he cracks this kind of conundrum.

How is it that I take flight without leaving other people?

How is it that I find freedom without leaving in my path, people that I've abandoned, which was the case for his great grandfather?

How can I not be a slave, but not leave other people behind that are still in a state of bondage?

Okay.

So, what's so great about this is because it challenges us to think that the body is not an impediment to ascent, very much within at least Orthodox Christian traditions.

There's been a real sense that the body is a source of sin, and that anything related to moving up had something to do with getting outside of the body or getting outside of the body's desires, that is those desires that keep us down.

This novel is suggesting perhaps that there is a kind of love that leads to ecstasy that absolutely includes another body.

In other words, that it would be impossible to even take flight in a genuinely liberating way if you don't attempt this journey with another human being, including bodily.

We can think, in other words, just the most obvious example of the con ecstasy that people experience in moments of making love for instance, there are two people who are in a sense, ecstatically relating to each other, that is they're getting outside of their own ego, that's what the word ecstasy means, ectasis, to get outside of one self.

They're getting outside of their ego boundaries and finding each other in a common ground that bonds them to each other, makes two out of one, bone of bone, flesh of flesh.

But if it is genuinely making love, you're doing this in a way that neither person is being exploited by the other.

In other words, in the let's say a superficial model of success, moving on up means that there are people who are beneath you.

In other words, it's a zero sum game, a dog eat dog world.

One of us is gonna make up, one of it isn't.

And a lot of, I mean, think about high school and junior high, how much of all that social pyramiding involved putting people down or putting them in their place?

Well, I'm suggesting that the opposite of that, of two people wrangling over who's gonna be top or bottom in a hierarchy, the opposite of that would be two people coming together in such a way that it no longer made sense to think in terms of superior or inferior, and that the experience of this kind of marriage, and you can think of this romantically or you can think of it as platonically as between two friends, as you can imagine is suggested in the way Milkman and Guitar come together in the end.

Guitar had been trying to kill Milkman because he thought Milkman was stealing the gold.

But then when he shoots, it hits Pilate, he puts the gun down.

And that is when Milkman leaps towards Guitar.

The idea is the two of them are going to come together, but there's not gonna be a gun involved now.

So I'm suggesting that the kind of ecstasy that you could experience centrally is not only in a romantic context, this could happen between two friends.

You could also imagine this growing beyond two people into an entire community of people.

Ideally, that's what a healthy community would be, people who are able to get outside of their own egos to form a condo body, a social body in which everyone has a meaningful place without other people being subordinated to their place.

What I wanna say is that the "Song of Songs" is really challenging the idea that has found root in certain ideological understandings of Christianity, that our body is somehow dirty or a source of a sin.

It is after all in the Jewish nutrition when God creates man and woman, he says about them that it was very good, that it was God who made the human body, that it was God in the Christian tradition that takes the form, a human body and the form of Christ takes on a human body.

In other words, there's another tradition within Christianity in which the body is not an impediment to salvation.

In fact, there is no real resurrection in the Judeo Christian tradition that doesn't involve the body, that is a resurrected body.

Even the way Apostle Paul talks about the body of Christ, it's a spiritual body, but it involves the material body.

I'm trying to make a contrast between a spiritual body, which is a body that is found love with another body, and a bodiless soul, because that's the other idea that we get to heaven and we're on a cloud and we're playing a harp, okay?

That our soul has gone to heaven.

We've somehow been free to this human body, but in our soul's in heaven, I'm suggesting that that is really not a Christian tradition.

That is really coming from Plato.

That's a Greek tradition of a soul that ascends after death.

In the Judeo Christian tradition, there is no ascension that doesn't involve the resurrection of the body, which means the body is not left behind.

And I'm stressing that because this is of the essence of this novel.

How do you achieve freedom without leaving a body behind?

You know that Pilate goes back to the cave where she believes she's killed, where her brother killed this white man in self defense.

And she believes that her father has been enjoining her to take and carry those bones around with her.

Since she feels responsible for that person's death, her father, she imagined tells her that you can't leave a body behind.

So she has been living with these bones in a sack everywhere she goes, because it somehow freed her mind to just have that body with her.

What I'm getting at is how do you take flight without leaving a body behind?

And the Song of Songs that you mentioned gives a poem that tells us two people that are taking flight in a very central way without leaving the body behind.

And that's really what this novel is coming to terms with.

Think of in the, I don't know if it's white or black or whatever, but think of the "Malboro Man", think of the "Fonts."

Think of a lot of country music.

I loved you, but I gotta get back on the road.

I gotta hit the trail.

I can't stay, this is a kind of common male fantasy, right?

And then I'm sure that there's versions of that.

In fact, Tony Morrison says there's versions of that in the black community of the slave who took flight and went back to Africa.

What she suggested is that perhaps there is another way of taking flight, that doesn't involve people being damaged, or being used, or being exploited, that actually does achieve the kind of liberation you're never gonna find out west disconnected from the rest of your body.

Another way of saying this is that Pilate is instrumental in wedding bodies to each other, that this is something of the role that she plays the way she's piloting these dead people or attempting to out of a living death, is by enabling them to bond with another person and experience the ecstasy of genuine love, that it is love that enables us to move up in a way that doesn't disappoint us by being an illusion.

In fact, in the eighth chapter of the Song of Songs, I actually have the verse that I think is very much inspiring this novel, at least this would be partly, my guess, "For love is as strong as death, it's jealousy unyielding as the grave."

Think of Hagar, for instance.

"It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame."

But here's the central point that it is love, that is as strong as death.

It's only love that's gonna get us from this building across Lake Superior.

If we think of Lake Superior mythologically, you can think of it as what the ferryman takes us across, right?

It's the water between life and death.

The only thing strong enough to get us across that body that we could think of is death, would be love, that it is on the wings of love that we take flight.

And that seems to be very resonant with this novel.

Not only does Milkman learn that he had exploited Hagar and came to terms with it.

In other words, when he begins to find his own identity, he also experiences something painful about that, because he gets real clarity in the kinda way that he has been living here before.

And in order to really, let's say, grow out of what he was before in this living death, he would have to see without flinching, all of the things that he was doing to take advantage of other people.

And he comes to terms that are not merciful on himself, that he had never really loved Hagar, that he had used her body.

This, in other words, the flight that he takes, the rebirth also involved a death, the death of his illusion, that he deserved things.

This is what Milkman said himself, that all his life, he felt that he deserved certain things.

And now that he... Once he come to terms with his real identity, he saw that everything had been a gift to him outta mercy, not that he deserved it, that the love that had been bestowed on him was not something that was owed him, it was given freely.

And so, as he comes to terms with that, he, I'm suggesting is achieving the psychic conditions and emotional conditions that will enable him to wed another person in a non exploitative way.

In other words, he was never going to be able to really love if he didn't come to terms with how he really hasn't loved and had been fooling himself.

So another way of saying this is that Robert Smith tried to fly by getting to the top of the pyramid of success, and that his father, Macon Dead tried to fly by getting to the top of the pyramid of success.

But in the attempt to move up, his father alienated himself from every other body around him because he wanted to put himself above it.

So he reached the top, but he was disconnected from the body of his people.

That's the paradox.

He made it to the top, and death of a salesman, Willie Lowman wants to die the death of a salesman.

The salesman's name is Dave, single man.

The man who Willie Lowman wants to emulate is a single man.

He made it to the top, but he could not wed other people.

And this is the source of his ultimate despair, that there is nothing up there if we've left our body behind, and our body includes the other people in our life.

This is a very, it's very spiritual, but it's suggesting that the spiritual is not in conflict with the material or the bodily.

So let me give you an example of a primary concern of the body is food.

The spiritual expression of the bodily desire for food would be food for the spirit.

We can think of that as food for thought.

For instance, what are the things that feed my imagination?

Because my imagination needs a diet.

This is where, Linda, the stuff about the songs starts to come in too and how this relates to poetry and how this relates to the novel, how these works of art feed my imagination, the way this bread feeds my body.

But it's not other than the body, it's the fulfillment on the body on another plane.

Another way of saying this at the bodily level, we have a desire for sex, but if we add our imagination and we add consciousness, then the fulfillment of this bodily desire for sex is what we would call making love.

So that we're not just going through a physical source of transient pleasure.

We're taking that desire, and we're allowing it to be the flame or the fire that burns away our ego so that we can connect with another person, and together co-create something that will be eternal, that won't disappear when our physical body does.

In other words, it's the heat of the body that I'm suggesting enables the fulfillment of the spirit, that they're not in conflict with one another.

And you could see where this would make sense that a woman author or anybody, it wouldn't have to be necessarily a woman, but you would have to be in touch with your body and to appreciate how much of your life was bodily.

And I think it is very easy for certain people, I don't wanna make stereotypes, but I'll just say myself, to live from the neck up, to be disconnected from your body in many ways.

Well, if you probably, if you bear children and you live as intimately with the monthly rhythms that you do, it's probably not as easy to forget the reality of your body.

If you're living with it in that sort of intimate way, and I'm suggesting that Tony Morrison has offered a rereading of what constitutes the spirit, that includes the body in this spiritual fulfillment, and doesn't achieve success at the cost of the body.

This is some of the deep things, but going back to Linda's point, you can see that these ideas are not disconnected from the historical and social world, because we're all living right now in an historical and social world.

And I'm guessing we're all trying to pursue happiness, and we're doing it by some kind of image of what that happiness would look like.

And if we have bought in to storylines that happiness is me on my horse alone, riding off into the sunset, and I'm trying to replicate that on my Harley Davidson, or I'm trying to do that in the political world by being at the front of the parade, if that's the myth I'm living by, then this novel should constitute a cautionary tale, that where you're gonna end up, buddy, is at whatever you think of at the top, and when you get there, you're gonna find that you're up there entirely alone, and that everything that was meaningful in your life, you have compromised sacrifice and exploited.

And now you're looking back on just a valley of shattered people, or what is the song by Nick, is it Nick Cage, any case Johnny's cash made a great version of it, of hurt of all of the people that I have hurt in my life.

And now the only way I feel anything is by injecting this morphine or this heroin into my vein.

That's an example of someone trying to be in touch with his or her body and feeling ecstasy, but doing it in a way that at the end of the rush leaves you empty and closer to death than you were before.

Is there in other word, something like drugs that doesn't take our life away.

And I'm proposing that the symbol of a song, which could symbolize the arts, would constitute a kind of drug that doesn't feed on us.

You could imagine young people in, let's say secondary school, who are embobbing these messages of success from the marketplace, and you don't have to be a Marxist and you don't have to be a down with America person to appreciate that many things have a economic ulterior motive, that there are a lot of things that people are trying to sell us that, they're doing so and misrepresenting, or trying to undercut our confidence so that we think we have to self medicate, that you don't have to be down with life to be aware that there are many manipulative voices out there in the world that are giving us images of success that will actually lead us to where it led Robert Smith and where it led Macon Dead.

You could imagine these high school people also being introduced to a world of literature where all of a sudden, they're reading something and they feel something in them start to get excited.

Imaginatively, it starts to resonate.

They can feel something, okay?

Well, now what we have is two potential myths competing for this young person's life.

We have two, a song and a commercial, a poem and propaganda, and both of those messages are sort of trying to receive, you could call it, buy in, except that would be a very mercantile way to think of it.

You could think of another term which would be incorporation or ingestion.

Both of these stories are trying to get inside of you.

One, to take something out and leave you a shell, and one, to become one with you and to give you energy and strengths to grow.

This is why ReadingForLife, as Julie mentioned, is a movement towards community because it's an idea that the arts give us an alternative way of imagining what it means to make it to the top, for instance.

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- [Narrator] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and the citizens of Minnesota.