Love Affair in the Garden of Milton

Loss, Poetry, and the Meaning of Unbelief

Susannah B. Mintz

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780807176405
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of Memoir Magazine's Book Prize for Identity/Literature/Grief Love Affair in the Garden of Milton interweaves the private story of a marriage coming apart with readings of John Milton's poetry and prose. Connected essays chart the chaos of loss and the discovery of how a writer can inhabit our emotional as well as our intellectual selves. Inflected by the principles of mindfulness, Susannah B. Mintz's memoir explores how we reconstruct ourselves and find our way back to meaning in the aftermath of trauma.Formally inventive and engaging dynamic philosophical ideas, Love Affair in the Garden of Milton raises questions of forgiveness, desire, identity, grief, and the counterintuitive relevance of literary tradition. This lyric memoir offers readers a sense of partnership, with the author and Milton as companionable guides through the wilds of love and loss.

1

FULLNESS OF TIME

WHEN THE DOG went missing and then was found, it did not make sense as a random event. He’d never run off before—that’s why I let him wander the halls of my workplace, untethered, to call on his friends, human and canine, like an old woman in the midcentury South, or a European flanêur. He was the epitome of good behavior, the very apotheosis of it. But that day, something unintelligible occurred, some impulse or spark that I could not understand but that he pursued, out of the building and into the woods, where snow was on the ground and the temperature that night would dip toward zero. That he was rescued, four days later, running for the life of him toward home, along a busy byway, still wearing the blue-and-red argyle sweater I’d put him in on that Wednesday, now soaking wet but with no other sign of wear, wonky knees pumping him north, seemed nothing short of miraculous.

Over the days, weeks that followed, as the story took hold, this was its pith: the two frigidly cold days, worst of the winter, followed by six inches of snow, followed by a morning of wet rain—we’d always begin with the weather. The dozens of friends and strangers who came out to search. My estranged husband who drove fifty-two hours from LA to New York when I emailed to say, Jack is missing, this is that emergency you said you’d come back for, the two of us tracking an Etch A Sketch of paw prints across campus where students were studying for finals. One woman showed up with her electric grill when we decided, because a stranger had texted me so, that the smell of cooking bacon was a sure-fire trap for terriers. I had never fully appreciated the expression “it takes a village”; then I walked up to a man I’d never seen before slogging through snow with a big black Lab, in search of a dog he didn’t know was mine. This isn’t how it ends, I would think, the story of Jack, not after everything that had happened. It would have made no sense.

I might have gone out of my mind, speaking of nonsensicalness, had I been able to feel at all through the elusive sightings and near-misses and maddening phone calls at dawn from someone who’d just spotted him running toward the dorms or chapel. Emails and posts to the Facebook page one of my sisters made to “Help Find Jack” numbered in the hundreds; people clamored for updates; I was writing the story as it happened, and that was a way of embedding meaning into something that felt intolerable, because I didn’t think I could stand one more loss. My husband and I had been separated for over a year; we adopted the dog together; words like lost and missing were freighted with history. Meanwhile there was freezing to death and starving to death and getting hit by a car or eaten by a stoat. And then, on the fifth day, two cars going in opposite directions converged on a little dog in a blue-and-red sweater. Someone slammed on the brakes. Someone stopped traffic. Someone yelled at her husband to get that dog! Two men ran into the trees in knee-deep snow; a sweater snagged on a fence; one of them emerged minutes later with Jack bundled up in his coat. I didn’t know him either.

There were lessons to be learned in all of this, about community and perseverance and help, to say nothing of knowing, as now I do, how to get a frightened dog to approach you when the 99 percent of his DNA that is wolf has reverted to the wild. Wild instinct saved him, surely; is it also what made him run? I don’t understand why he did it, and I don’t understand how he lived. His tracks were spotted miles apart. He weighs ten pounds; it was the dead of winter. Then he was in my arms again, wrapped in a blanket, without a scratch. Alien abduction seemed as likely as anything. What I do know is how strong the impulse is to make something of this story—to make this into story. You say miracle, I say the intrepid grit of dog, we’re both putting a spin on the thing.

* * *

WHEN MILTON’S EVE wakes up in the Garden of Eden, her first impulse is to follow “a murmuring sound / Of waters” to a pool that seems to her “Pure as the expanse of heaven” (4.453–54, 456). Full of wonder about where and what she is, she bends down to look, and what she sees in the water determines everything that happens next, from the poise and grace of her bearing to the revolutionary act of eating the apple. A face appears “within the watery gleam” that seems “another sky” (461, 459); Eve is taken aback, it’s taken aback, and then both faces lean toward each other “with answering looks / Of sympathy and love” (464–65). In that instant Eve is her own mother, conferring the gaze of recognition upon her infant; she is an infant discovering a face in a mirror she doesn’t know is her own. She is a lover returning her beloved’s validating regard, and a woman who, in her very first moments of awareness, turns to the world in a spirit of profound reciprocity. She sees sympathy and love in the pool because that’s what she brings to it.

For years scholars read this gesture as the poet’s not-so-subtle way of rendering incipient narcissism in his first-of-women (he was well-versed in classical myth, after all), but I think it’s Milton at his proto-psychoanalytical wisest, anticipating by centuries the theory that the grooves of selfhood are laid down in our earliest experiences of attachment. The poem makes it clear that Eve’s curiosity is less about who she is than where she is. “I . . . found myself reposed,” she says (450), emerging into self-consciousness and inclined to figure things out for herself rather than to cry out (as Adam later does) for instruction or companionship. Eve’s problem isn’t sinful self-regard; it’s that she comes into a world ill-equipped to manage a woman so content to be alone because she finds creative potential everywhere. The story of paradise is not about being expelled from it but about trusting others to be there when you come home, even if, say, you suddenly go walkabout—which is what Eve effectively does in book 9, walking off to garden alone because she believes (just like her poet-creator) that without being tested we are never truly free.

I am far from alone in reading Milton’s Eve as magisterial in her courage, a self-sufficient woman whose relationship to all things heavenly is one of bristling annoyance at constantly being pulled away from the pursuits that please her and defined in terms of roles, as helpmeet to Adam and mother to mankind. Of course Eve would eventually have tired of an image with whom she couldn’t fully connect; equivalence is not the same as reciprocity (to say nothing of the importance of touch in any affective bond). Her truest pleasure through most of the poem comes from tending the garden, because paradise is a milieu best defined as doing what one does, an intersubjective space in which creatures of all kinds simply are themselves, and find ways of responding to each other without debt or coercion. I wasn’t thinking about John Milton when Jack the dog wandered off one day, but I’ll admit that like a petulant Adam I did take it personally. His bolting seemed so purposeful, a rebuke perhaps of how much I had come to depend on him, those alert black eyes trained on me, that profound animal intelligence at my side all the days and nights of being suddenly no longer or not-quite married, an anguish I had never felt before.

Yet I know that his leaving had nothing to do with me (can I say the same of my husband?), and that his survival was pure self-determination. You tuck your tail over your nose and find a place to burrow against the cold. This is how I choose to understand it, that 99 percent of your DNA knows exactly how to handle the situation when you look up and think, shit, how did I get here? The trick is trusting your imaginative instincts.

WHEN I REALLY fell in love with Paradise Lost (if you discount the massive transferential crush I had on the man teaching it), it was writing about the gorgeous lyric intensity of book 7, which recounts the creation of the world. If there’s one book in the epic that sounds positively intoxicated with its own poetic exuberance, it’s this one, where an unfettered use of language has mountains “upheav[ing]” into the sky (7.286), a “tawny lion, pawing” to free himself from “grassy clods” (463–64), elephants throwing “earth above them” as they “upheav[e] / [their] vastness” out of the ground (468, 471–72), birds “ruptur[ing] forth” from eggs (419), and seas “swarm[ing]” with “fry innumerable” (400). What book 7 performs for us is a mind so completely immersed in its medium that it seems temporarily to have forgotten what it’s supposed to be writing about, which is another way of saying that despite the patently human core of Paradise Lost, this account of animal, vegetal, mineral aliveness may be the best poetry of the poem.

We might wonder what has captivated the author’s attention so totally as to distract his intellectual purpose, except that would be entirely wrong, because the lesson of book 7 is that what Adam ruefully refers to as Eve’s “strange / Desire of wandering” (9.1135–36) is precisely how we find our way to truth, which Milton describes elsewhere as the scattered body of Osiris. Everything wanders in Milton’s ethical universe, and there’s nothing wrong with deviating from the straightaway if you do so with considered intentions—which makes the point of all the biotic brio of creation, with its emphasis on arriving into existence knowing just what to do, a model of existential integrity. It’s not about getting there but about being here, in Milton’s world, occupying with unexpectedly Buddhist mindfulness an environment that abounds with creatures happily occupied in doing just what it is that they do.

This kaleidoscopic nature, chock-full of self-sufficient beings also deeply attuned to each other, forms a vital philosophical backdrop to the human story of Adam and Eve. Milton understood that to achieve the fullest self-expression, we need the emotional resilience to be able to play. The psychology of his work is suffused with acts of reaching toward the object-world for what might transform us (“she pluck’d,” he writes of Eve, and “she ate” [9.781]). That is the rich dialectic of self-experiencing. We pursue a sound, a smell—call it scent of ripe apples, or squirrel! (if you’re a dog)—wherever curiosity takes us, and we find ourselves in that unknown, altered and renewed. This is why contentment is rendered, in the final moments of the epic, as a state of being wholly at peace with oneself as is.

WHEN JACK CAME back, and I could safely ponder what it had all meant—when I could turn off the flashlight and try to imagine him sniffing his way atop a crust of snow in pitch-black woods, without my heart stopping—when I could lean into meaning instead of guarding myself against the threat of grief, I felt only bafflement. I’d let out the lead and watch him script a baroque curlicue from one side of the road to the other, ueys and figure-eights and punctuation marks of pee. But it spelled nothing I could read. So wondrous was his return unscathed that to deny a spiritual dimension in the whole escapade just seemed churlish, and at least one friend who knows of my unbelief insisted that my faith in Jack proved I have a soulful side. I think it’s a question of framing. Did Jack get lost so that I would learn something I needed to know? There was a moment one night, home alone and numbed on Xanax and whiskey, when I wondered if the grand gesture of a man driving cross-country through the limits of fatigue to get to me and not once getting mad at me for losing our beloved pup would be the thing to reunite us. And later, when he was there and the dog was there and I remembered why we weren’t together anymore, I wondered if that was the lesson, that Jack got lost to give me courage, to remind me of the strength that comes from knowing exactly what to do to care for yourself, no matter how harsh the conditions. Running for home, against every conceivable odd: could there be anything more symbolic?

But maybe Jack just got out, and then something else happened, and then something else (an email saying I was about to contact a lawyer)—a series of events, this-then-that, rather than this-so-that. Milton staunchly denied a deterministic universe. But that doesn’t mean Jack wasn’t trying to get home, fed up with eluding Campus Safety and foraging for rabbit scat and pizza crusts. It doesn’t mean Jack wasn’t looking for me. I want to be in that world, in fact, one that has shape but not design, where to behave intentionally is not the same as obedience and does not require the metaphysical operations of what else. I can choose to believe that Jack is a marvel of a dog and be a heretic in the truth, as Milton advocates in one of his political tracts, for eschewing doctrinal compliance.

There’s something about amazement that in stunning us quiet seems then to impel us toward narrative arc. It’s never enough to say what happened, without context or point. Mustn’t we do more than shake our heads and shrug at the sheer unbelievableness of life? Aren’t we supposed to honor it, the sorrow and joy, by giving it a frame? There’s no denying Jack as a good story. I could commodify Jack, if I had that kind of imagination or initiative, if I knew how to parlay the good story into a children’s book, a Broadway play, a movie, a line of merch (think t-shirts, stuffed toys, the bobble-head dashboard terrier). It made no sense that the local paper never got in touch for the feel-good headline of the holiday season. Relatives of my colleagues from coa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Fullness of Time
• 2 I Choose Happenstance
• 3 Into the World before Us
• 4 Mindful Milton
• 5 Paper Cranes
• 6 Umbrian Holiday
• 7 Wild Work
• 8 Bargain the Universe
• 9 Unhanded
• Dedications
• Works Cited