Choose Life: The Poisoned King & Deuteronomy
A blow to the head, vol 3: on the second volume in Katherine Rundell's *Impossible Creatures* series.
[Franz Kafka asked, “If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading it for?” These posts are about the blows to the head I’ve received recently. Check out the first post in the series, which as also on Katherine Rundell, and the second, on architect Liu Jiakun.]
Friends, I hope you’ve been well. Forgive the delay in posting. I haven’t quit; just needed a break to work on other projects and refill my imagination. I plan to resume a more normal cadence of posts here, more or less immediately.
This one will be short. It’s been a dark time for my state (Minnesota), as it has been for our country. But there is always cause for hope and joy, provided you know where to look. One good place to look is in the books of Katherine Rundell. Thanks to a couple nights of poor sleep, I’ve just finished the second book in her Impossible Creatures series, entitled The Poisoned King, and it brings not only great delight and imagination, but also a balm—an antidote—for our world, suffering from destructive and chaotic violence.
I was surprised to discover that this new book is an extended reflection of sorts on Deuteronomy, that great meditation on law and life, particularly chapters 30–32. Here are a couple passages from Deuteronomy that will help set the stage. From chapter 30:
See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.
But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.
This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him.
Second, from chapter 32:
Their wine is the poison of serpents,
And the cruel venom of cobras. […]
Vengeance is Mine, and recompense;
Their foot shall slip in due time;
For the day of their calamity is at hand,
And the things to come hasten upon them.’
I’ll give you a few quotations from the book so that you can see what I mean, letting the words speak for themselves and trusting that you can see the connections— both to Deuteronomy and to our sorrowful moment (a few of the quotations are edited slightly to avoid spoilers):
To dare is to lose one’s balance, one’s footing in the world. Not to dare is to lose everything worth having.
Argus protected every living thing that passed through the garden. He refused to kill even the snails. “We’re entangled in life,” he said. “All that lives is sacred.”
At one point, the protagonist has a vision of herself exacting a just, murderous revenge on her enemy, then suddenly glimpses what this revenge does to her in the course of her life:
The act of killing... had entered her blood. It had entered her heart. Any could feel it: the presence of death, and its power over her. It was pitiless. It was inside her body forever. Her hatred... had not been healed by his death. Her revenge had yoked them together forever. She hated him still. It had seeped into her soul. Hatred was a poison. It had poisoned him, and it would poison her.
She wanted nothing to do with death. She wanted nothing to do with endings. She wanted beginnings—new ideas, new plans, new joys, new truths, new futures. These things would not reach her across the gulf of killing.
And finally, a passage from near the book’s end:
Life: they were surrounded by life—death’s insistent and glorious opposing twin. Life burred, called, thrummed around [her]. The air was full of cries and rustles, sweet noise, the soft breathing of living things. It kicked the residual fear... out of her body: the burgeoning life of the place. Joy was coming, as certain as the harvest.
To be clear: I’m not arguing Rundell is herself religious, or that her books are “Christian” in any simplistic sense. I’m not interested in such labels or claims. I'm just saying this book is Christian in the fullest, richest, and best sense: it touches on the deepest truths of who we are and why we’re here.
I’ll bookend these quotations from the book with lines from another source of inspiration for it, T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”:
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
If you’re in need of hope, I hope you’ll go read Impossible Creatures.