Marc Chagall, “Song of Songs”
Spiritual Sunday
Two weeks ago I shared one of the great Biblical celebrations of love, from Paul’s first letter to Christians living in Corinth. Today I look at an author who takes Paul’s spiritual love and expands it to include erotic love.
In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, one of the daughters bears the name First Corinthians. She owes her name to a family tradition of letting the Bible fall open, dropping one’s finger on the page, and bestowing the word that emerges as the daughter’s name. This practice leads to First Corinthians’ aunt being named Pilate (“Not like no riverboat pilot. Like a Christ-killing Pilate,” the scandalized midwife protests.) and why Macon Dead’s two daughters are named Magdalena Named Lena and First Corinthians. When the aging First Corinthians lands her first job, as a maid, her employer explains that she hired a woman with indifferent skills because of her name:
Michael-Mary was so charmed by the sound of “Corinthians Dead,” she hired her on the spot. As she told friends later, her poetic sensibility overwhelmed her good judgment.
By bestowing the name First Corinthians, Morrison can enlarge upon Paul’s ideas. Song of Solomon, the title itself a Biblical allusion to the book that explosively combines divine and erotic love, is about First Corinthians and her brother Milkman breaking free of the soul-deadening household of Macon Dead. Milkman’s roots quest, which concludes with him finding identity and purpose to his life, is the major focus of the book. But First Corinthians’ journey is significant as well.
Throughout her childhood she lives terrified by her father and confined by the smallness of her mother. Her French major at Bryn Mawr, designed to make her refined and marriageable, only serves to drive away suitors, who prefer practical wives:
These men wanted wives who could manage, who were not so well accustomed to middle-class life that they had no ambition, no hunger, no hustle in them. They wanted their wives to like the climbing, the acquiring, and the work it took to maintain status once it was achieved. They wanted wives who would sacrifice themselves and appreciate the hard work and sacrifice of their husbands. Corinthians was a little too elegant.
Seeing herself condemned to a narrow and loveless existence (think of Paul’s vision of a life without Christ), Corinthians rebels and scandalizes her family, first by finding her job as a maid and then by falling in love with Porter, their yardman.
It’s not easy to break with one’s past, however, and she hedges the relationship. Porter finally demands, as he is dropping her off one evening, that she commit to him or find someone else:
I don’t want a doll baby. I want a woman. A grown-up woman that’s not scared of her daddy. I guess you don’t want to be a grown-up woman, Corrie.
In other words, to use Paul’s words, she must put aside childish things.
In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot quotes a passage from Wagner where the dying Tristan looks in vain for Iseult’s ship: “desolate and empty the sea” (“Oed’ und leer das Meer”). This captures the life prospects that First Corinthians suddenly sees looming before her and she freaks out. Running back to the car, however, she discovers that Porter has locked it and is refusing to respond to her knocking on the window. In one of the most dramatic love scenes one will find anywhere, Corinthians surrenders all pride and dignity:
In a panic, lest he shift gears and drive away, leaving her alone in the street, Corinthians climbed up on the fender and lay full out across the hood of the car. She didn’t look through the windshield at him. She just lay there, stretched across the car, her fingers struggling for a grip on steel. She thought of nothing. Nothing except what her body needed to do to hang on, to never let go. Even if he drove off at one hundred miles an hour she would hang on. Her eyes were shut tight with the effort of clinging to the hood, and she didn’t hear the door open and shut, nor Porter’s footsteps as he moved around to the front of the car. She screamed at first when he put his hand on her shoulders and began pulling her gently into his arms. He carried her to the passenger’s side of the car, stood her on her feet while he opened the door and helped her ease into the sea. In the car, he pressed her head onto his should and waited for her soft crying to wane before he left the driver’s sea to pick up the purse she had let fall on the sidewalk. He drove away then to number 3 Fifteenth Street…
Corinthians goes on to experience lovemaking for the first time in her life, a necessary step to her becoming a grown-up woman.
I know this is not the love commitment that Paul has in mind. Indeed, Paul is nervous about carnal love. And yet, in a way, it is fully within the spirit of Paul’s love. Corinthians’ life can now take on meaning and purpose.
Don’t devalue earthly love when talking of celestial love. They are bound up together.
