|
There is relief in finally admitting a long-evaded truth. After talking with my friend, I was relieved that I could start letting go of my myth of privilege. Expecting myself to rise above the common struggle with money is a heavy burden. I was surprised that self-knowledge didn't bring revulsion but acceptance. I became more open to what life was trying to teach me. I started to think about how I could enter other contexts without defensiveness. But it takes more than Bank Lady. Poe is a genius for understanding that the human desire for control dies hard. The gift of this story is that it ends with all-encompassing death. Defensiveness always loses to unity. In my life, since "accepting" this truth, I have again become defensive and avoided truth. Presenting this story to our Folio Club as "objective" literary criticism and avoiding the personal insights I write of here was sobering. But every time I realize what I'm doing, I'm reminded that Death can bring freedom. This response is so consistent as to be hopeful. The word of this story for me is not to change my defensiveness, but to recognize it as part of myself. Then the walls of horror I build around myself become openings to hope in a Universe calling me to let go and live. Are you willing to be sponged out, erased,cancelled made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing, dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change. The phoenix renews her youth only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down to hot and flocculent ash. Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest with strands of down like floating ash shows that house is renewing her youth like the eagle, immortal bird.- D.H. Lawrence |
hen Death
finally joins the group, almost as a summation of all the hints, Bettina
Knapp suggests he represents "a very real need for integrating
the temporal forces that it personifies." This doesn't happen for
Prospero; he dies a sterile death of denial. A common feature in Poe's
stories is that a breakdown of old consciousness is needed for new life.
The 
removed the illusion, not from the protagonist but from those willing
to read this tale deeply. We have the chance to accept the strange truth
that only when the light in our life meets the murkier limits that life-giving
consciousness emerges. In this way we begin to experience that death
gives way to rebirth instead of just decay. 
