Pam's Taken the Veil

So Pam's taken the veil.

And last night, she was hiding under a blanket to evade Eric's gaze when they were thrown in King Bill's subterranean slammer together.

Did she really have much of a choice?

Ever the style maven, last week's Pam—dressed in funerary black lace with a heavy veil covering her decaying face (“Even when her face is putrefying, she comes up with an outfit for putrefying,” Kristen Bauer van Straten remarked in an interview posted to The Vault)—had to deal with the aftermath of a spell cast on her by possessed witch Marnie that has caused her immortal vampire body to rot.

And this week, it's only gotten worse!

I found it interesting that HBO on Demand's description of last Sunday's episode, Me and the Devil, makes mention of this fact with the phrase, "Pam takes the veil".

What's so intriguing about this verbiage?

Thefreedictionary.com defines this term as the life or vows of a nun.

And when I think of  becoming a nun, one of the first mental pictures that comes to mind is that of a woman retreating from the world and hiding (or being confined) behind the imposing walls of the convent.

Let's take a look at thefreedictionary.com's definition of veil:

veil

n.

1. A length of cloth worn by women over the head, shoulders, and often the face.

2. A length of netting attached to a woman's hat or habit, worn for decoration or to protect the head and face.

3. The part of a nun's headdress that frames the face and falls over the shoulders.

4.

a. A piece of light fabric hung to separate or conceal what is behind it; a curtain.

b. Something that conceals, separates, or screens like a curtain: a veil of secrecy.

v. veiled, veil·ing, veils

v.tr.

1. To cover with or as if with a veil: Dense fog veiled the bridge.

2. To conceal or disguise.

One word in particular is repeated over and over: conceal.

This is significant because it speaks to what a woman must do when her beauty is marred. She must hide, separate, screen herself off. As The Vault interview "Kristin Bauer talks about her 'face-off' states, "Having her skin peel off in ribbons of goo is a massive blow for Pam"; an affront to her vanity.

And for a woman whose priorities include Eric and her appearance (not always in that order), this presents quite the predicament.

Pam: "I can put up with a lot, but fuck with my face and it's time to die!" S4E5 Me and the Devil

To understand why this fate is worse for Pam than, say, her maker's would be, let's take a moment to consider the core difference between the spells the possessed Marnie cast on both vampires.

The spell cast on Eric wiped clean his mind, that part of the self envisaged in Cartesian dualism as being characteristically male. The one cast on Pam disfigured her body, that which is associated with the female; the second-mentioned and therefore lesser valued of the male/female pair of lhierarchical dualisms.

Applying this framework of gendered hierarchical dualisms, the biblical Adam is revealed as a soul type, while Eve is of the flesh (Stone, 1976). In Christian theology, it was asserted that women must become more "like a man" (more "rational" and "spiritual" than is her "nature") to come into relationship with God, who was envisaged as masculine.

Feminist scholar Carol Christ writes that according to poet, essayist and feminist Adrienne Rich, such views have made the body "so problematic for women that it often seemed easier to shrug if off and travel as a disembodied spirit" (1997, p. 148). If only it were so easy for Pam; if only she could escape the prison of her rotting flesh like her ghostly harasser Antonia has. But there can be no such simple solution for Pam. As a woman, she is, as Rich writes, controlled by being lashed to her body - "the carnal flesh to which the elevated mind is shackled" (Sanchez-Grant, 2008, p. 78).

As Sanchez-Grant writes, if the mind is allied with culture and reason, it follows that the body is associated with all that is "other"; if woman is inextricably associated with the body, and the body is regarded as inferior to the mind - then surely woman is the inferior Other.

This theme has run through several of my last posts.

That's why the curse Marnie (under Antonia's influence) uttered, "Corrupt unsanctified corpse who walks behold your true self" is so torturous for Pam; for woman, dualism insists that the body is the true self, the essentialized ground of our being.

Under this logic, had the spell beset Pam's mind as the one cast on Eric did, it wouldn't be so bad.

This sexist construction of gender holds that the [feminine] body is entirely separate from the true inner self.

Intriguingly, under the witch's magic, amnesia Eric has become more endearing - he's playful, gentle, contrite for past offenses; he openly displays emotion and seems perhaps more his authentic self.

You know something? The more I think about it, maybe in his current state amnesia Eric is even more than his authentic self. He seems transcendent, self-sacrificing. Godric-like, even.

And he gets the girl, since he is more attractive to Sookie than when he is cold, cruel and calculating, swaggering "real" Eric.

While it's true that he must hide in Sookie's house for fear his vulnerable state may make him an easy target for anyone gunning for him (i.e. the witches, Bill, etc.) Pam must truly hide behind a mourning shroud - lamenting the death of her "true" self since the face a woman shows the world is how she is judged.

This connects to Sam Trammell's uneasiness at his character's yelling "damn, you're ugly" at a female bar patron as he crashed into Merlotte's fresh off his bender; hung over, agitated, and over-the-top belligerent. In my post on Dragon * Con 2010 I noted that it seemed Mr. Trammell sensed the egregiousness of assailing a woman's appearance, since aside from impugning her sexuality (i.e. labelling her as promiscuous, a whore, a "dyke", etc.) it's is one of the most cutting attacks someone can level at a female in our culture.

And here's a (depressing) dose of reality: Nearly half of men questioned in a recent poll of 70,000 people said they would ditch a partner who gained weight, compared to only 20 percent of women. Talk about how the body "feeds" identity, how a woman's "corporeal experience" influences her overall experience (Sanchez-Grant, 2008)!

Pam's own maker has made constant reference to how he could never harm Sookie because she is so beautiful. Where you suprised that in last night's I Wish I Was the Moon Eric recoiled only slightly from Pam, that he didn't all-out reject her ruined visage?

She has become the dreaded Rotting Goddess.

Hecate, She who repels. "A hideous hag and flesh-eating ghoul, her skin pallid and decaying, her robes a shroud...the repository for all the dark and fearsome forces of the feminine divine" (Ward, 2006, pp. 152-153).

She is Rot. Ooze and decay may have no place in the life of the disembodied [rational, male] mind, yet the messiness of birth, sex, and death - the cycle of embodied life - refuses to disappear. This is Hecate's realm. To exhume Her is to face the death aspect of the Goddess and the fusion of need and fear She arouses.

According to Ward (2006), the fear we projected of the Rotting Goddess onto witches long ago we now put onto ordinary women. He writes:

I get a flicker of something vile when I contemplate the image of the Rotting Goddess. She viscerally repels me, yet draws me, as if she holds a secret for me inside her fetid mouth, a flicker of truth about men's revulsion towards feminine flesh. I remember a friend of mine - he was only in high school at the time, and yet he understood this all too well - he told me he had found an easy way to break up with a girlfriend after he no longer wanted to be with her. When they started making out he said he would keep his eyes open, and he would just examine her, as if through a microscope. He would stare at the glistening pores, pimples, blackheads, the creases, hairs, erupting moles and folded skin. He would feel nauseated, and that would be the end of his attraction for her. In my 20s, in India and Thailand, I learned Buddhist techniques for eliminating sexual desire that followed much the same course. I was instructed to imagine a woman's body split up into five heaps of skin, nails, hair, teeth and internal organs, or to visualize a woman as nothing but sacks of blood and pus and shit. Feel sexual desire for that? Thus men learn that it is to treat women like dirt (as matter, not Mater) and break their spell over us.

WOW.

Perhaps, in her current spellbound state, Pam can teach us about how men at large have been socialized to see women.

References

Christ, C.(1997) Rebirth of the goddess.  New York: Routledge.

Sanchez-Grant (2008).  The Female Body in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 9, #2, 77-92

Ward, T. (2006). Savage breast: One man’s search for the goddess. New York: O Books.

And is he dark enough? Enough to see your light? IMAGES OF HOLISM IN TRUE BLOOD

And is he dark enough? Enough to see your light?

~ Accidental Babies by Damien Rice

Rebecca will be so proud of me, quoting her beloved Damien. But really, I couldn't resist. I've been plotting and scheming for a way to best to use these lyrics for quite a while in relation to Sookie and Bill, and since it's last call for this idea around holism I brewed up during Season 3, I figure it's now or never!

Here's my thought process. Much ado has been made about how they are just far too different for their love to ever work; she's mortal, he's vampire; she's of this era, he's of one long bygone. And perhaps, most importantly...

SHE IS

  OF THE

                                                   LIGHT

AND HE IS

  OF THE

                         DARK

Remember when Sookie first met Claudine? How during an out of body experience Sookie's soul, or consciousness arose from the hospital bed where her body lay hooked up to life support and followed a trail of flower petals out the door and into an alternate, liminal plane where fairies romped amidst the tombstones of Bon Temps Cemetery?

Recall how, as a shadow swiftly enveloped the heretofore sunny scene, Claudine fearfully declared, "The dark approaches"? Next came her hasty retreat - remember how she paused to warn Sookie, "He (Bill) will steal your light" and, in response to her protestations that Bill is not like that, to admonish Sookie, "Don’t let him take it from you, promise me!” before slipping below the surface of her light pool escape hatch?

Can you feel Descartes' influence?

I know, I know, it's a silly reference to glamouring (you know how Bill generally says, "can you feel my influence?" when he's working his powers of persuasion) and perhaps an even sillier insinuation that a 17th century French philosopher would have anything at all to do with True Blood.



 René Descartes (1596-1650)

Or, maybe this Descartes thing isn't so silly after all; let's unpack it a little, shall we?

We are living in a time of profound disconnection and extraordinary dissonance; a time in which the vestiges of what Professor Emeritas of Rutgers University Bruce Wilshire points out as a Baroque era (particularly Cartesian) conception of reality and our place in it still holds sway. This framework highlights “self as scientific knower, self as self-sufficient individual and as ego, self as master manipulator of objects” (p. 37). It is connected to the famous mechanistic theory of nature that requires us to perform an immense abstraction from our own bodies and the world. 

Cartesian science believed that in any complex system the behavior of the whole could be analyzed in terms of the properties of the parts. Remnants of Caresian dualism remain in contemporary consciousness: self cut off from other, mind from body or matter, human from animal, present from past and future (Wilshire, 1990). Some examples of other heirarchical dualisms (the first-stated member of the pair is considered as superior, the second-stated as inferior Other) that trickle down to us today include Hegel and Rousseau's public/private, male female, eason/nature; Plato's reason/body, reason/emotion, and universal/particular.

These dualisms are seen as totalizing, meaning that they are thought to exhaust the alternatives within the parameters in question (Wilshire, 1990). What does this mean? According to theoretical physicist Basarab Nicolescu (p. 26, 2002), classical logic is founded on three axioms:

1. The axiom of identity: A is A
2. The axiom of noncontradiction: A is not non-A
3. The axiom of the excluded middle: There exists no third term (3rd term = "T"); T is at the same time A and non-A

In other words, something is what it is - absolutely. Classical logic renders it impossible to consider day as night, black as white, life as death...

...feminine as masculine (Nelsan Ellis told the crowd at Dragon * Con 2010 that Alan Ball's vision for Lafayette to embody both the feminine and the masculine originally threw him for a loop; even Eric's metrosexual vibe may appear suspect to some)  

    or dark as light...

No, no, no...that would be repugnant to the prescribed order! That's why Bill entering the land of fairie is seen by Claudine as such an aberation...dark simply cannot be light!

According to dualistic thinking the two obviously must cancel one another out - they cannot occupy the same space.

We've got to let old Descartes off the hook at least a little bit for this schismatic, fractious worldview; even Wilshire (1990) prudently avoids holding him wholly culpable for the pervasiviness of dualistic  influences which have given rise to the divisive and isolating trends that have dominated much of modernity: xenophobia, racism, sexism, etc. He implies that the genesis of the patriarchal period around 2500 B.C.E. set the movement towards rigid, rationalistic thought in motion and that definition as negation (if it's this it can't be that) has its roots in Aristotelian philosophy. 

Wilshire (1990) cites the great circles and mounds of Neolithic Europe as evidence of the integral thought patterns that were alive in our dim past, long before the shift to the dualistic modes that dominate today.

Stone Age Orkney Island neolithic womb-tomb earthen structure

These earthen structures were temple observatories constructed around 3000 B.C.E. They anticipate field and relativity theory in the sense that space and time were seen as interdependent. Human reality was experienced as being interdependent with space-time; the human life cycle nested within the Cosmic. Within the vast, pregnant-seeming bellies of the mounds people reawakened to their own possibilities as they observed the regenerative course of Nature through the deaths and rebirths of the seasons and the movements of astrological bodies (Wilshire, 1990). "Human birth and death were just two ritual acts in the great sprial of life" (Ward, p. 88, 2006).

Newgrange spirals

Hypogeum spirals

   

Another vision of our realty has been set forth in the last century through systems thinking; a “new” way of thinking in terms of connectedness, relationships, and context that recalls the worldviews of these indigenous and ancient goddess oriented civilizations. Quantum physics in which subatomic particles are not seen as “things” but as interconnections among things; Gestalt psychology which is characterized by its “hunger for wholeness” that sees the existence of irreducible wholes as a key component of perception (Capra, 1997), and deep ecology which seeks to expand the notion of self beyond the confines of the ego and personal history, and to extend concepts of self-interest to include the welfare of all beings (Macy, 1991) are part of the systems thinking zeitgeist. 

According to activist, systems scholar and progenitor of The Work that Reconnects Joanna Macy (1991), a dramatic shift is occurring in our time from notions of linear, unidirectional causality to perceptions of dynamic interdependence where phenomena affect each other in a reciprocal or mutual fashion. This new-old picture, or likeness of reality that is emerging in our times - which was the prevailing metaphor for the Cosmos and human’s place in it in Neolithic civilization - is the ideal that Wilshire (1990) says might be embodied in contemporary life, if we are inventive and resolute enough.  

Returning now to True Blood, might the scene below in which Sookie and Bill join forces to help Tara throw off Maryann's possession be an expression of the integral - the light and dark, female and male unified - a vision that can help synthesize the fragmentary aspects of the self and culture into a meaningful whole?

On their own, neither Sookie nor Bill were able to break Maryann's hold on Tara. Only together were they able to help her return to reality.

Scholar and midwife Arisika Razak (1990) proposes that birth is our major metaphor for life and coming into being, a universal and central aspect of human experience that can serve as the nucleus around which we can build a paradigm of positive interaction and functioning - and a model for physical, emotional, an dspiritual transcendence.


Transdisciplinary theorists' calls for a non-dual vision of reality are pregnant with allusions to birthing. Nicolescu offers, "In my view, the 'death of man' is after all a necessary stage in history, one that anticipates our second birth (p. 74, 2002). He links the evolution of humanity with the evolution of he universe, and suggests that a new type of human (remember the idea of the eco-individual in my last post?) homo sui transcendentalis is in the process of being born. Of this new type of human, Nicolescu says, "He is not some new man but man reborn (p. 74, 2002). Also on p. 74, Nicolescu states that the process of his (new man's) birth involves transgression, originally meaning "to pass to the other side, to cross" - "crossing from one level of Reality to another, or from one level of perception to another". Morin and Kern (p. 18, 1992) hypothesize, "It, starting from a paradigm of complexity, a new method can be born, can take flesh, can advance, make progress, then it would be able perhaps to start a revolution everywhere.


Let's apply this birthing imagery to the scene above.     

When I rewatched it recently I noticed how, as Sookie stared into Tara's "dark, empty" saucer eyes trying to make a connection, she said to a desperate Lafayette, "it's not her, she's gone". Unable to penetrate Maryann's control over Tara, Sookie turned to Bill for help. He counseled, "you have to go further into her mind than you ever have before". Sookie tried again, and was only able to grasp quick flashes of Tara's experiences with Maryann. Bill decided glamouring Tara may help, suggesting, "if we leave her like this who knows what harm may come to her...or to us".


Crouching in front of Tara as Sookie cradled her from behind, Bill's attempts at glamouring began as gentle cajoling but became a labored affort. At first, it seemed to me like Bill was taking the role of a priest performing an exocrism but the more I thought about it, I see this scene as a birthing. Together, Sookie and Bill - Sookie in the position of mother, Bill as midwife, bringing Tara across the "something I can't cross - an abyss" (Sookie to Bill)  - the chasm neither of them could span alone.

Duality working in concert. The spell is broken. Tara is whole again.

What do you think?

Have you noticed any other images of holism in True Blood  - anything that for you communicates the truth of the Tejo-Bindu Upanishad: To direct the mind towards the basic unity of all things and to divert it from the seizing of differences; therein lies bliss? 

Please use the comments section below to share your thoughts!

~ Rachel

References

Capra, F. (1996). The web of life: A new scientific understanding of living systems. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Macy, J. (1991). Mutual causality in Buddhism and general systems theory: The dharma of natural systems. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Morin, E., & Kern, A. B. (1999). Homeland earth: A manifesto for the new millennium.  Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Nicolescu, B. (2002). Manifesto of transdisciplinarity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. London, UK: Routledge.

Razak, A. (1990). “Toward a Womanist Analysis of Birth”. (pp. 165-172). In Reweaving the world: The emergence of ecofeminism”. Diamond, I. & Orenstein, G.F. (Eds.) San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.

Ward, T. (2006). Savage breast: One man’s search for the goddess. New York, NY: O Books

Wilshire, B. (1990). The moral collapse of the university: Professionalism, purity, and alienation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.