Sandy Florians Novella Mourning into Joy - Boxing the Compass - Essay Example

of the Literature of the Bible In this essay, Sandy Florian’s novella Mourning into Joy: Boxing the Compasswill be examined as to how it engages with the Bible’s Genesis from chapter six to nine. The end will be an explanation of how the flood story from Genesis relates to the Florian’s wrestles with the flood in the story. Florian’s Boxing the Compass is a relentless examination with English language in which the author reinvents a different idiom from her previous writings. The story is told in the third-person who traces a woman character in the story as she embarks on a mourning trip. The woman’s trip is recounted from the time she wakes up from her bed, puts on her clothes, leaves her apartment to buy bread, returns to her apartment, prepares tea, does a little writing, takes her bath, leaves and boards a train and rides to her mother’s burial site. The novella presents this simple pilgrimage in a concatenated form in which the main character’s memories of her family, her vision of the Earth’s temperatures and sea level rising and her meditation of time and space are all interwoven into the concept of boxing the compass; the clockwise naming of all angles in the compass in their respective order. In the Bible, from chapter six to nine of the Genesis recounts the story of Noah and the ark. It is a religious story in which the Bible says that a man called Noah lived righteously at a time when other men were wicked. Then God saw the evil nature of man, which made the man to forget God and steer away from God commandments. The Bible records that God had decided to wipe mankind from the face of the Earth using a heavy rain. However, before God could destroy the Earth, he thought about Noah, the only righteous man who lived. God decided to save Noah and use him to preach to people and built an ark. Whoever trusted Noah and believed in God’s word would be saved in the ark when the deluge came. God gave Noah all instructions on how to build the ark and then bring into it two of all living creatures of opposite sex; seven pairs of all clean animals with their food. He also instructed Noah to bring enough food for his family and Noah obeyed everything God told him to do. When Noah had entered the ark, the heavens opened and heavy rain poured for forty days and nights. The deluge flooded the Earth and every high point; thus wiping everything on its face. The only living thing saved was what was on the ark with Noah. For a hundred and fifty days, Noah and all those aboard the ark waited for the Earth to dry out. After one full year, God instructed Noah to come out of the ark, and he immediately built an altar and worshiped his God with burnt offering from ocean animals. However, God promized Noah that never again will he destroy the Earth using floods. He gave Noah a sign of the everlasting covenant as rainbow in the clouds. In the Sandy’s novella, the Bible’s story of the flood is presented as a motif as the main character in the story tries to search for salvation. The writer is mourning the environmental change that has come as a result of man’s actions on Earth. In the Bible story, the Earth and all mankind was to be wiped from the face of the Earth because of their wickedness. They had their hearts corrupted such that they forgot their God and this brought about destruction. Reading Boxing the Compass is an awakening endevour to reconsider that the term Homo sapiens in Latin means “wise man”. The existence of man, who is Homo sapiens, is a finite one like that of other living things. The only time we know a great wiping of life of man was during the Biblical flood. There is no divine favour or an envisioning that has ever attempted to extinct man. In this case, the only reference is the God in the Bible who decided to wipe mankind from the face or Earth but he did not because of his mercy. The novella presents climate change, though in an implicit manner as promising to wipe man from the face of Earth. Like the story of Noah, the climate change, characterized by global warming, is as a result of man’s own deeds. Like the men in the Bible story had the power to reverse their eventual tragedy, man today has the power to change his eventual destiny. It was just in 2010, when Frank Fenner, a microbiologist from Australia hypothesized that Homo sapiens will go extinct within a century (Cheryl 1). He attributed this looming doom to climatic degradation and the wrath of mother Earth. In Boxing the Compass, the writer takes climate change as an event in language. The extinction of the fish species in the ocean, like the extinction of any other species brings about an irreversible absence. This is far much beyond what happened in the story of Noah because the Bible record that when Noah came out of the ark, he honored God by a bunt offering from sea life. It means a large portion of water animals were spared though they were not included in the ark. In the novella Boxing the Compass, the writer presents a case where sea species is going to extinction; then the question is: what do we expect of the living things on dry land? Living species are compared to language in which words disappear as their referents irreversible disappear. Just like the referents of living species disappear and their words fade, so is mourning for the climate change facing the Earth today that threatens to irreversibly wipe mankind from the face of the Earth. Like boxing the compass, the story starts at 0°” to “348°45’ in which Florian states that “This is my empty box” (17). As the writer sets on the extended metaphor of navigation on the sea, she uses Boxing the Compass to trace the memory and the mystery of the way the mind stores and extracts memories in a linear way. As the woman characters sinks in to the tab, she dreams down and out into trickles down the deep sea waters. The narrator compares the sea depths with Himalaya’s heights (Lydick 19). Throughout the story, the woman gives an order “come here, come now” which echoes the immediacy that the issue of climatic degradation requires from the human beings. This is similar to what Noah was commanded to tell men of his time. They were to act with immediacy in the wake of a looming deluge and end of the world. In Florian’s Boxing the Compass, the conception of here and now is inescapably the endeavor of each human being because every man is facing unavoidable and irreversible devastation of familial loss and climate change. Like the loss of the woman’s mother in the story and every years journey’s for her commemoration, so is the loss of habitable places and animal species. The memories can never go away soon and the mourning is finite provided the process of loss and destruction is finite. The daughter’s grief for her deceased mother is interwoven with her meditations on the ocean life undergoing degradation due to climatic change. The story of Noah and that of Boxing the Compass approach their truths differently but with a common end. For example, the writer of Boxing the Compass combines science and fiction to bring out her motif. In trying to understand the way memory works in our mind the narrator explains that the memory of a human being is too deep like the depths of the seas in which the woman in the story sinks in her dream. Exploring the memory, she analyses, is like exploring the history of the Earth and its fragile evolution. The writer argues that “we do know that 200 million years ago, the super continent, Pangaea, broke into parts that drifted across the Earth and opened the mouths of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans…” (18). She further explores the principle that most scientists hold regarding the creation of Earth, which contradicts the Bible creation story that takes break in the time of Noah and starts afresh after the floods. She equates the placements of Earth’s elements with the memory elements by declaring that “the principles of the Plate Tectonic Theory are that the interior of the Earth is made up of two major layers, the lithosphere of crust and of mantle and the asthenosphere of molten magma” (23). Florian goes on to expound that “the lithosphere is then composed of eight major plates that ride on top of the asthenosphere and move in relationship to one another at one of the convergent, divergent, or transform boundaries” (23). In this case, Florian equates this complexity of the Earth with the complexity of the memory and the mind that stores and retrieves it. Combining this exploration of memory’s nature and scope with the story of mourning the mother and the intimations of the oceans, the terrible fragility of the mother Earth as sustainer of life, the writer brings her message home (Lydick, 21). This way she sets readers in a fit of unavoidable mourning in Boxing the Compass. In the genesis story, God entered a covenant with Noah that he will never destroy the Earth with water again with a rainbow as a reminder. In Boxing the Compass, the writer explores unavoidable reminders of a looming catastrophe that threatens to wipe humans and other living things off the face of the Earth. The signs are already visible as ocean life and animal species continue to disappear as well as their referents. The self seeking that God sought from people in the time of Noah is the self seeking that the mother Earth is demanding from the contemporary man. This self seeking is what Florian tried to weave into the real practical emotional life of a woman. Boxing the Compass analyzes that to observe memory is to experience self, to be outside self, and know self. The novella presents the climatic degradation as irreversible, but there is hope of restoration. Unlike the life of a mother that is lost forever, never to come back but in the woman’s memory, the extinct species are irreversibly gone although what is already remaining can be retained and preserved. God told Noah that those who accept and change towards God will be saved. The same way, self seeking reverses the divergent boundary which is equated to “two people walking away from each other and finally separating” (23) in Boxing the Compass. The reverse of the situation is equated to “the transform boundary” which is like “this woman walking toward you right now” (23). The way readers can navigate the complex story of self, other, and history is provided as a clockwise reading of the thirty-two compass points in which memory navigates. The compass is usually used by sailors of ships when in sea. As God was like the director of Noah when the ark was floating on water in the flood story, so is the compass useful in the current situation. The compass is the reader’s direction that comes from self evaluation, evaluating others and not only tracing the history of events, but predicting the possible outcomes of their actions. The looming impossibility, however, of the reversibility of the current climatic degradation can be drawn from the flood story. When Noah was called to come of the ark, he sent a dove to check whether the Earth had dried off. The dove came back in the first instance and he was sure the dove lacked somewhere to perch. After some time, he sent another done and it did not come back. He was sure that it had found some resting place and could not return. In Boxing the Compass, the writer captures this motif of the dove as the only hope remaining; but the hope is gone! Florian mourns that “…the only thing she sees…is the face of the dove dead on the sidewalk, like the face of a mother all out of true, like the shape of a brother buried in a box (33). The dove, like the mother and the brother, is irreversibly gone, but who cares; apart from the woman who shares some memories with the gone species. Although humans share a limited memory of a common person, they all share a common memory of the dove. The dove is in the memory of every human being unlike the woman’s mother and brother who only matters probably to her and a few close relations who knew them. In conclusion, Boxing the Compass presents climate change as a unifying factor, a battle that one person may not win without the cooperation of others. The way the woman navigates emotionally through the deep sea waters, she begins to understand her placement within her familial lineage. This is an awakening that every human must come to; to understand their place on ecosystem as well as their role in conserving it. Noah understood his place in saving the world species and his family and friends who accepted God and cooperated with him. The same cooperation is needed to save the mother Earth from climate change and global warming that threatens to wipe the Earth and all it contains. Florian does not present nostalgic feeling but the solution of the woman in the story is found through a sense of sweetness drawn from the past and the future; which should be achieved here and now. Works Cited Cheryl, Jones. “Frank Fenner sees no hope for humans.” The Australian, June 16, 2010 . Florian, Sandy. Mourning into Joy: Boxing the Compass, referred here as “Boxing the Compass. Las Cruces, NM:Noemi Press, 2013. Print. Lydick, Kelly. Swirling Memory, Magnetic Force: A Review of Sandy Florians Boxing the Compass. Las Cruces, NM:Noemi Press, 2013.Print. Read More