May 31, 2024
We are told we should not want things; we should not be possessive. In Leonard Cohen’s song “Bird on a Wire,” a beggar, “leaning on his wooden crutch,” admonishes the singer: “You should not ask for so much.” On the other hand, a “pretty woman leaning in her darkened door” cries to him, “Hey, why not ask for more?” And there we are: caught between guilt and desire. In 1976, the psychologist Erich Fromm in a best-selling book titled To Have or to Be, sided with the beggar. We are so conditioned that we say unthinkingly, “Yes, yes, I know, I shouldn’t be such a mindless capitalist consumer.” But in fact the question bears thinking about.
In the first place, to be a bit mischievous, what in the world would it mean to say, “I choose to be”? Doesn’t that sound a bit, well, peculiar? The only person who ever asked himself, “To be or not to be” was thinking about suicide, which is the wrong context. As a matter of fact, there is another Shakespeare play that makes a case for asserting that to have is to be. King Lear gives up his crown and his property—namely, England—to two of his daughters, keeping only a retinue of 100 knights. The daughters, however, tell him that he doesn’t need 100 knights, so, in a humiliating ritual, they begin reducing the number—to 50, then to 25, until finally, “What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five?” upon which the other sister says, “What need one?” (2.4, Bevington edition). Lear’s Fool has already tried, with his oracular jokes, to get Lear to see that his very identity, his substance, is disappearing: “I had rather be any kind o’ thing than a fool. and yet I would not be thee, nuncle. Thou has pared thy wit o’ both sides and left nothing in the middle. Here comes one of the parings,” meaning one of the daughters (1.4.182-85). He goes on to say, “now thou art an O without a figure” (1.4.189-90), a zero without a digit. When Lear asks him, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” the Fool replies, “Lear’s shadow” (1.4.227-28). Lear’s identity seems to be bound up with what he possesses, and the more he loses, the closer he is to becoming “nothing,” a word repeated relentlessly throughout the play. When his daughters tell him he does not need his knights, Lear cries out:
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady; If only to go warm were gorgeous, Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st, Which scarcely keeps thee warm. (2.4.266-72)
Only the animals own nothing. Even a beggar has a few “superfluous” belongings. If the only criterion is need, why wear a gorgeous gown, which in fact is not even warm?
The speech is startling, if only because it pushes back against the conditioning of centuries of Christian asceticism. The Puritans of Shakespeare’s time agreed that gorgeous gowns are “superfluous,” dressing in simple, somber clothes. We are not to be attached to the things of this world. Throughout the Middle Ages, people in religious orders took vows of poverty in imitation of the Son of Man himself, who had nowhere to lay his head (Matthew 8:20). In fact, Jesus says in the full quotation, foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests—animals do have possessions. But we should not. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. You can’t take it with you. The underlying assumption of Christian asceticism is that possessions are indeed somehow part of our identity in this world—but we should be trying to lose that identity, for it is a sinful one, that of the “natural man” or self, spoken of by Paul. Our real self, the “spiritual man,” is not of this world. We should die to this world, and we should also die to our natural self.
There is a strange paradox here. We think of possessions as acquired extras, as add-ons. But perhaps they are “properties” in another sense. A diamond has the properties of brightness and hardness. Here, a “property” means part of the diamond’s essential nature. In addition to King Lear, there are other places where dis-possession is a terrible diminishing. It is exactly what God allows Satan to do in the Book of Job: systematically subtract from Job everything that he has except his life. Job loses everything, not only his wealth but his sons and daughters and even his health. How much can you lose before you no longer exist? One of the most ancient myths we have, at least 4000 years old, is contained in the Sumerian text “Inanna’s Descent to the Netherworld.” In this extraordinary poem, the queen Inanna descends level by level into the underworld. At each level, she is required to remove an item of her dress and regalia. When she arrives at the bottom, she is naked and dead. There are happy endings: Inanna is eventually reborn, and Job is restored to his prosperity. But there is also a glimpse of a frightening possibility. We assume there is an essential self, an irreducible core. But what if, when all the layers of the onion have been peeled away, there is only what Lear feared to discover: nothing? Yeats’s image for this is the unwinding of a mummy cloth. I think it is why the image has always haunted me of Claude Rains in the film version of The Invisible Man unwinding the bandages around his head—but there is nothing there.
Possession and property are often condemned on moral grounds, which may be religious or social. Religiously, worldly goods make us worldly, and so are not good after all. Socially, property is theft, as the anarchist Proudhon said. In this light, possession is a zero-sum game in which the more you own, the less is available for me. But arguments about possessions and possessiveness cannot be decided without taking into account some powerful unconscious factors that influence the moral arguments from beneath, so to speak. To understand those factors, we can begin by dividing possessions into three categories: food and drink, territory, and what we can call treasures, meaning external goods.
It may seem odd to speak of food and drink as possessions, but, unless you are Marie Antoinette, they are necessities and not luxuries, and are therefore the objects of some of the most powerful possessive urges. To say that someone is “starved” for something like attention implies that it is a life-and-death matter. Freud and Jung had their bitter falling-out over the question of sexuality. For Freud, sex was not just the primary drive but in a sense the only drive: all human activities are sublimations, or rechannelings, of libido. Jung said that there are other, equally powerful drives, and the one he tended to use as an example was the drive for food. There are grounds for this in Freudian theory itself. The first object of desire is the breast. Freud saw this as the first sexual union, which is not wrong because human behavior is, in psychoanalytic lingo, “overdetermined,” that is, driven by more than one impulse at the same time. But the desire of baby for breast is also hunger. The first human instinct is to suck. It is such a powerful impulse that the first stage of human development is the “oral phase,” the one in which everything automatically goes into the baby’s mouth. The motive for suckling is nourishment, but it is more than that: a desire to eliminate the otherness of the object by taking it in and in-corporating it, which means taking it into the body. Food is not only ingested, taken inside—it actually is assimilated into and becomes part of the body, part of the self. The protein of yesterday’s hamburger (or, in my case, of yesterday’s plant-based substitute) is now part of my muscle tissue. In fact, eating accomplishes what sexuality cannot: it eliminates the alienation of the subject from the object by subsuming the object. Which is why sex is so oral: not just kissing and oral sex but all the imagery of sexual desire as hungering and devouring, whether directly or with the eyes.
There is a potential element of aggression in this, as in all desire, of greed leading to predatory behavior. Men are the usual aggressors, but are subject to compensatory fears of being devoured by the female. Hence the bizarre myth of the vagina dentata, the vagina as a mouth with teeth, and nervous jokes about the woman as praying mantis devouring her mate. Behind such folklore is the archetype of the Terrible Mother, who may be imaged as a female monster who swallows her children back into her body again. In undisplaced myth, men may also be devourers. In Greek mythology, Ouranos and Kronos, Zeus’s grandfather and father, devoured their offspring, or tried to. Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother is devoured by the big, bad wolf, who has to be cut open to release her. Hell itself devours people: medieval art represented the mouth of hell as a monster’s mouth, with fire belching between sharp teeth. At the very bottom of Dante’s hell, Satan chews eternally upon the bodies of the three worst sinners: the betrayers Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot. Our horror of cannibalism is our fear of being reduced to a violated object subsumed into another’s body. The torture-porn franchises like Saw and Hostel are based on the horrified fascination of watching human beings turned into butchered meat, and Jeffrey Dahmer procured for himself a dubious fame by actually eating his dismembered victims. It is not a new obsession, but runs all through mythology and literature, including the recurrent image of killing the children of one’s enemy and serving them to him as meat pies. Hansel and Gretel defeat a witch who wants to eat them by shoving her into her own oven: bake or be baked. Vampires hunger for blood, the very substance of life, which makes them immortal. All these are demonic images of incorporation, of possessing through taking in and digesting into oneself.
And yet, how can we call it demonic when it is the basis of human life, of all life? Joseph Campbell observes that some cultures, in some ages, have recoiled from the knowledge that, of necessity, life lives on other life. I wonder whether eating disorders are not, on a deep level, rooted in such a repudiation. However, sex is optional, food is not. The best we vegetarians can do is try to limit our voraciousness to that which is not sentient and does not feel pain. Both sexual desire and hunger are possessive. The impulses may be controlled through conditioning, even repressed altogether, but at the heart of them is a selfish—or at least self-interested—“I want!” Religion distrusts them: lust and gluttony are two of the Seven Deadly Sins. At night, after I put out food, I hear the raccoons squabbling over it like children on a playground, even though there is enough for all. It is not just greed, though, but fear of not getting enough. That fear is in all of us, and is the cause of what Abraham Maslow called “deficiency motivation,” or “d-motivation.” His famous hierarchy of needs at first glance seems like such an obvious concept. But Maslow explicitly stated that what it implies is that self-actualization can only be reached through successive fulfilment on the lower levels. It is deficiency motivation that is selfish, but transcending it can only be through fulfilment, not through deprivation or renunciation. In Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot says that “In order to possess what you do not possess, / You must go by the way of dispossession.” The hierarchy of needs implies that, seemingly to the contrary, generosity and “selfless” behavior are only possible for those whose basic needs have been gratified.
Blake, with his usual talent for being provocative, claims that “’More! More!’ is the cry of a mistaken soul. Less than all cannot satisfy man.” We are immediately uncomfortable: he sounds like Ivan Boesky saying, “Greed is good.” After all, Jesus rejected all of Satan’s temptations—not just the earthly kingdoms but even bread. We do not live by bread alone. No, but we do live by bread, and hunger can make people ruthless. So can fear of hunger. No doubt Marie Antoinette was never hungry in her life, but her callous indifference to the peasants’ starvation is a conditioned defense of an elite social status that ensures for her a supply of bread. There is always the anxiety that there may not be enough, and I must have mine. In his way, Maslow is as provocative as Blake, and ultimately both are saying the same thing. If you want a healthier and more beautiful plant, water it and give it sun. If you want a healthier and more beautiful human nature, give it what it needs.
Rich people always want the clergy to preach sermons to the poor telling them it is virtuous not to want things—thou shalt not covet. But the more desperately needy they are, they more they will covet. Moreover, the more anxious they are about maybe not being able to get what they think they need, the more peevishly, even viciously self-centered they will become. I think this goes a long way towards explaining the sour, nasty behavior in this country right now. In many ways, the economy is booming. But a year of rampant inflation, which came out of nowhere and seems irrational, even if economists claim otherwise, has made millions of people afraid that they will no longer be able to survive. Often such anxiety focuses on the price of gas, but it is significant how often you read people on discussion boards saying they are afraid they will no longer be able to buy food. There are of course genuinely needy people, but much of the anxiety is neurotic, not reality based. However, it is an anxiety about possession.
There are ideal versions of incorporation through eating, however, the Eucharist being the most obvious. “Take and eat, for this is my body, this is my blood.” Most Christians do not really think about the imagery of their central sacrament. If they did, they might decide it won’t bear thinking about, especially if they are Catholic and are told that doctrine demands that they take it literally. But by now the meaning should be clear: God is taken into the self and actually becomes one with the worshipper, an intimate relationship that is rightly called “communion.” God is possessed, but we may also be possessed by being assimilated into a larger body, and once again a common metaphor for this is eating. In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine, like the rest of the Middle Ages, reads the Song of Songs or Canticle of Canticles allegorically rather than literally (because if you did that, it would be erotic, and God forbid). Coming to the passage where the lover says to the beloved, “Thy teeth are as flocks of sheep, that are shorn, which come up from the washing, all with twins, and there is none barren among them,” rather than thinking that the lover needs to work on his courtship skills (your teeth are like sheep?), Augustine says instead, “Nevertheless, in a strange way, I contemplate the saints more pleasantly when I envisage them as the teeth of the Church cutting off men from their errors and transferring them to her body after their hardness has been softened as if by being bitten and chewed” (35).
It is easy to believe in a natural possessive urge in the areas of sexuality and food, but do human beings have any sort of innate territorial drive? Sex and eating are necessary for survival of the species and the individual, but why should anyone need to possess land? Most people have not been landowners historically. As it turns out, this has been an enormously controversial subject in the social sciences. In 1966, Robert Ardrey published a book called The Territorial Imperative, whose thesis is indicated in its title. The degree of resistance to that thesis is suggested by the fact that anthropologist Ashley Montagu edited two volumes of essays attacking it. Ardrey was trying to understand the reason for human aggression, and traced it back to the animal drive to establish and defend territory. Around the same period, Jane Goodall was living with chimpanzees in the wild, and by doing so debunked many false notions about them. But in later years, it was proved that chimpanzee society was no peaceable kingdom. They may not be as aggressive as baboons, but chimps fight wars. And just recently, the idea that another primate species, the bonobo, solves problems by making love, not war—having sex to resolve conflict—has been challenged. What upset people about Ardrey’s book is that it suggested that human nature, especially male human nature, is innately violent. Hardly a new idea, of course. Poets have been comparing human aggressors to lions and tigers and bears for many centuries. The name “Beowulf” probably comes from “bee wolf,” in other words, bear. The Viking berserkers identified with bears and worked themselves up into frenzies in which, psychologically, they actually became bears.
But why aggressive over land? It’s true that the idea at first is slightly mystifying. Hamlet watches bemusedly as two armies clash over, as he says, a piece of land too small to hold the contending armies. And yet, whether or not Ardrey’s theory is “scientific,” how many wars have been fought over land claims asserted with fanatical intensity—including, to point out the obvious, the two ongoing wars of great and immediate concern to the West? They say that Putin’s obsession with Ukraine arises from an almost religious fanaticism about restoring the land of the old Russian empire. And Israel exists because of the Zionist belief that God himself granted a Promised Land to the Israelites—notwithstanding the fact that the land, then as now, was already inhabited. Right-wing Israelis are not merely being greedy—this is far more than a dispute about real estate. Woody Guthrie gave us the song “This Land Is Your Land.” I used to read suggestions that it become our national anthem in place of the unsingable thing we have now—which originated in a war over territory, as a matter of fact, since the War of 1812 was a continuation of the American war of independence in which England claimed our land. But people like Buffy Saint-Marie pointed out that Indigenous people might have a problem with that, given that “this land” was their land until the white man systematically and violently took it from them over centuries—right up to the events in the 1920’s on which Martin Scorsese’s recent Killers of the Flower Moon was based. There are of course utilitarian reasons for greed over land. The white men in Scorsese’s film want the oil that is under the land, and real estate developers want more developments. Some land is strategically valuable, either as a buffer zone against invasion or as a point from which to launch an invasion. But, as with food, unconscious factors may be at work intensifying possessiveness about territory.
Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” probes into the subliminal factors underlying territoriality. The speaker’s neighbor is mending an old New England stone wall, mindlessly repeating a phrase he learned as a child, “Good fences make good neighbors.” When the speaker wonders to himself why good fences make good neighbors, his unconscious produces an image of the neighbor as an “old stone savage armed.” What is a wall? A wall marks off the border between mine and thine. Mythologically, a wall demarcates a temenos, a space set off as sacred, belonging to a god. But a city, for example, may be a type of temenos, its walls enclosing those who belong and excluding those who don’t. Underlying issues of ownership are issues of identity, which depends on a distinction between self and not-self. We speak of “personal space,” as if we exist inside a protective temenos and feel threatened when anyone invades it. Ursula K. LeGuin’s distinguished science fiction novel The Dispossessed is about an anarchist community on an alien planet, a community that has abolished private property. But on its opening page is the image of a wall, and that image moves through the novel whose hero, a theoretical physicist of genius, spends his life trying to break through figurative walls and barriers.
The walls are social, but often intellectual as well. Whatever may be true of old stone savages, no place is more territorial than the academic world, as Shevek learns when his supervisor, a second-rate mind, steals his theories and claims them as his own. Academics actually speak of “turf”—your specialization is your turf, and more narrowly your specific research topic, and academic “turf wars” can get savagely bitter. Ironically, the uproar over Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative may have been partly a turf war. For Ardrey was not an anthropologist. He was a Hollywood screenwriter who turned to science writing. In academia, it is your credentials that give you ownership of a subject matter. Ardrey was an amateur, which does carry with it the risk of naiveté. But he was also poaching, intruding on ground that did not belong to him. If you think this is exaggerated, you probably have not spent much time in academia. A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession explores the multiple meanings of the word, including biographers’ sense of ownership of their subjects, akin to the possessiveness of fans who feel they own celebrities and have the right to tell Taylor Swift, for example, whom she may date.
This academic way of thinking has influenced, in fact helped create, the concept of “appropriation,” the idea that one’s native culture or identity is a territory that is off limits to outsiders. The same type of thinking informs the opinion that novelists may not write about Mexican American culture unless they are Mexican American. Richard III may only be played by actors with disabilities, Othello only by actors who are Black. These notions may be driven by feelings about who gets excluded, or about who gets published or hired, but their basis is a sense of ownership. Outside of academia, lawyers dispute “intellectual property rights” in fields ranging from entertainment to information technology.
Traditionally, of course, property was physical, with land ownership practically defining the aristocracy. The undisplaced mythical version of this is what Northrop Frye calls the “royal metaphor,” which identifies the king’s body with both the land and its people. The king is the land personified. That the Fisher King in the Grail legend has a wound that will not heal, and that his land has become a Wasteland are two ways of saying the same thing. We know that Shakespeare’s Richard II is a neurotic because he attempts to take the royal metaphor literally. When he lands back in England to deal with an insurrection, he “bends and touches the ground,” the stage direction says, and addresses the earth, commanding it to send spiders, nettles, and adders to attack his foes (3.2). The earth fails to cooperate, but, as with all metaphors, the fact that it is not literally true does not necessarily mean it is false. The aristocracy are the landowners, their land often having been granted to them by the monarchy, and an identification with their estates is part of their traditional conservatism. The peasants work the land, but do not own it, and the middle class of merchants and artisans substitutes other forms of ownership—money and, when capitalism comes around, the “instruments of production.” In the United States, the southern plantation owners attempted to imitate the English estates, but, having no peasants, employed enslaved people instead, declaring that some human beings were property. Even in the act of founding the first modern democracy, the Founding Fathers were conservative enough to grant the right to vote only to property owners. Disposing of an estate after the death of its owner has always involved the risk of bitter battles over an inheritance. Ownership of a large estate may generate ambivalence: possession of that much land can seem faintly undemocratic. Yet people eagerly follow the news when a Hollywood star buys or sells some multi-million-dollar mansion.
Another problem fueling the present discontent is the housing crisis. Buying a home has become next to impossible for those of modest income. Despite attempts to convince people that single-family or single-occupant homes are environmentally wasteful, home ownership has always been a middle class dream. The home may be a status symbol, but the cliché that “A man’s home is his castle” means something more. A home is a family’s temenos: it is where the family is grounded psychologically as well as physically, especially if the estate has been in the family for generations. My deep affection for and identification with the small house and property where I have lived for going on 20 years enables me to understand the real feeling, beyond aristocratic flattery, in Ben Jonson’s 17th century poem “To Penhurst,” dedicated to the estate of Sir Philip Sidney’s brother, a poem which created the minor genre of “country house poems.” “Thou art not, Penhurst, built to envious show,” the poem says in its first line. Penhurst is modest, as estates go, but it is a peaceful pastoral retreat, and is also associated with an ideal of hospitality that was a traditional aristocratic value. Its “liberal board doth flow / With all that hospitality doth know; / Where comes no guest but is allowed to eat.” The poem ends by saying:
Now, Penhurst, they that will proportion thee With other edifices, when they see Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else, May say, their lords have built, but thy lord dwells.
That distinction between merely building and dwelling is akin to Erich Fromm’s distinction between having and being.
The third category of possession we may call “treasure,” though a more down-to-earth label for it is simply “stuff,” our earthly possessions, as they say, our “valuables.” Our ambivalence about possessions tends to focus on our stuff, beginning with our literal treasures, if we have any. Here again what is interesting is the psychological underpinnings. Psychoanalysis has shown what literature already knew, that miserliness has unconscious associations with the other end of the alimentary canal. After the oral phase, children go through an anal phase, which can result in the tendency to be “anal retentive.” Earlier ages did not need depth psychology to understand that avarice is a neurotic compulsion, and is in fact the opposite of hedonism. Misers deny themselves not only luxury but even necessities, and can take penny-pinching to an insane length, as Spenser shows in his representation of Avarice:
His life was nigh vnto deaths doore yplast, And tired-bare cote, and cobled shoes he ware, Ne scarse good morsell all his life did tast, But both from backe and belly still did spare, To fill his bags, and richesse to compare… (The Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 4)
Misers are hoarders, and hoarders are different from collectors—although the line between the two is fuzzy, and I am laughingly aware that I am defending myself as a collector. Reason not my “need” for owning 22 guitars and an entire houseful of books, CD’s, and DVD’s. These are chosen with discrimination and they are used and enjoyed. That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it. Hoarding, though, is indiscriminate, a kind of panic fear of letting anything go. If there are no riches, a hoarder may hoard string, plastic containers, old newspapers. The latter makes me wonder about the reluctance to give up the past. I once cleaned out the office of a colleague who had died, and discovered that she had been a secret hoarder. She kept student essays never picked up from 1988, announcements of meetings from 1993, composition textbooks 30 years out of print. Her whole career was preserved as if the office were a gigantic scrapbook.
One of the traditional images of possessiveness is that of the dragon sitting on his hoard, a strange greed made all the stranger in that dragons have no use for treasure, either to spend it or to show. But avarice is a mental disorder that can seize anyone. It seizes the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, who recovers the dwarves’ riches from the dragon Smaug who guards them, only to become a hoarder like the dragon, leading to a war that results in his death. Avarice is a double compulsion: first, never to relinquish, but, second, ever to acquire more, not for what riches can do but for their own sake. This is anything but quaintly old-fashioned moralism, for the social crisis of our time has been produced by avarice, which has deliberately deregulated capitalism for the sake of greater profits, resulting in an extreme income inequality that has led to a social unrest that may end democracy itself. The 1% have more than they can ever spend, yet they undermine the entire country trying to get more. typically in the form of supporting politicians who will give them tax cuts (although they already pay less than the middle class, and sometimes no taxes at all). Thus they utterly repudiate the old virtue of the rich: generosity. A few, like Bill Gates, attempt to follow the pattern of older robber barons and become philanthropists in their old age. But more of them are like the Koch brothers, who are willing to spend their wealth only for extreme right-wing causes that they feel will prevent any efforts to keep the rich from becoming ever richer. Older ages would have held them in contempt. In Beowulf’s time, the lord acquired treasures, but dispensed them liberally to his men and was loved and honored for it. Some cultures are designed so that the wealthy maintain their prestige only by giving wealth away through such devices as potlatch. Instead, our age admires people like Donald Trump, who accrues wealth through conning people and outright criminal activity, who will not even pay contractors who do work for him.
What is the answer to this problem? One choice is to possess as little as possible, not for religious reasons but because possessions are baggage and only weigh you down. Thoreau’s Walden is the secular gospel of this way of life. Property “grounds” you, but there is an intoxicating freedom in leaving it behind, as in Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road.” After all, runs the argument, you are eventually going to be dispossessed anyway. In fact, every minute we live is a dispossession, for minutes, unlike money, cannot be hoarded, even if some of the super-rich are trying by having themselves cryogenically frozen until science discovers a cure for mortality—hoarding themselves, essentially. But until that happens, on some cryogenic day in hell, we are candles in the act of being consumed.
Yet, as I have indicated, I am not fully satisfied with the defensive posture of traveling light. There are genuine pleasures in possession, and in fact “property,” perhaps surprisingly, is one of the “primary concerns” around which Frye organizes Words with Power. We cannot live, he says, directly in nature like the animals, but instead have to construct a protective envelope that we call civilization and culture, which consists of all the possessions, from clothes and houses to science and the arts, that both protect us and give life pleasure and meaning. Following Maslow’s lead, we may wonder whether the good life is found neither in denial nor in excess but rather in a new kind of possession. As with many cutting-edge discoveries, this is also ancient wisdom, for that new kind of possession was anciently called Temperance, expounded by, among others, two great writers of the Renaissance, Spenser and Milton. In Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene, Sir Guyon is the Arthurian knight of Temperance, whose symbol is the scales of balance, balance between denial and excess, asceticism and profligacy. It is difficult keeping that balance in a corrupted world. Sir Guyon is led into the Cave of Mammon, because hoarders tend to hide out in caves (with their cloacal connotations of “filthy lucre”), at the bottom of which is the Garden of Proserpina, with tempting golden fruit. Guyon resists successfully for three days and nights, though the ordeal of going without food or sleep for that long causes him to faint. The symbolism may seem obscure, but is actually incisive. Proserpine is queen of the underworld, and possessiveness is a withdrawal from life into a dark, protective womb that is really a tomb. But Proserpina, or Persephone, is trapped there because she ate three pomegranate seeds. Sir Guyon’s rejection is qualified: he is not rejecting worldly goods and pleasures altogether, but must refuse to touch a single thing offered within the context of selfishness and greed, thus avoiding Proserpina’s fate.
Milton picked up this crucial distinction from Spenser in Paradise Regained. In the Temptation, Christ must reject every single gratification offered by Satan, from food to Classical learning, not because they are bad in themselves but because they are being offered by Satan, and accepting them would be equivalent to signing a contract, the same contract that Faust signs with Mephistopheles. Christ, after all, enjoyed eating and drinking, and no one knew and loved Classical learning more than the poem’s author. In Paradise Lost, Milton the Puritan is in fact the great celebrant of pleasure: the pleasure of sex in the marriage of Adam and Eve, the pleasure of lunch and conversation when the angel Raphael comes to visit. In fact, Raphael tells them, we angels like sex and lunch too. And Adam and Eve have their country estate, the Garden, which, like my own little estate, takes work to keep up. Milton’s masque Comus affirms Temperance against the excesses of its villain Comus, not as self-denial but as a disciplined gratification that leads not only to health but to social justice:
If every just man that now pines with want Had but a moderate and beseeming share Of that which lewdly-pampered Luxury Now heaps upon some few with vast excess, Nature’s full blessings would be well dispens’t In unsuperfluous even proportion… (768-774)
Goethe’s Faust makes a deal with the devil: he will be granted whatever he asks for. Yet Faust in a life of 100 years never possesses a single thing: his name means “fist,” the fist of eager grasping, yet the minute he grasps something, it becomes valueless to him. It is exactly when you stop striving for it that you may possess it, whatever “it” happens to be, including life. Faust finds that out literally in the last minute of his life, when he achieves a sense of fullness, of plenitude, and says, “Stay, thou art so fair.” In that moment, according to the contract, he dies, but the devil is cheated, for that moment is what Blake calls the one minute of the day that Satan cannot find, because it is not in time at all, or rather is both in and out of time. Such moments do not only come at the end of life, but they do happen. Maslow called them peak experiences, and they are experiences of fulfillment, of consummation, of a different kind of possession, that of the world in a grain of sand. Ironic thinkers dismiss such moments as mystifications, perhaps because they have never had one. Possession is nine tenths of the law, but the law is based on lack, on deficiency, and, as Shylock shows in The Merchant of Venice, the law by itself leads to a hard-hearted, hard-headed, tight-fisted attitude where I demand what is mine, mine, mine. Beyond law, however, is grace, and grace makes us gracious, like a generous lord, bestowing what we have to give in all directions, finding that what we give is, like the loaves and fishes, like love itself, miraculously not depleted.
Reference
Augustine. On Christian Doctrine. Translated by D.W. Robertson. The Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill, 1958.