Sod's Brood,
be me fear!
Recently, dhalgren
asked each of us at sod's brood to write a brief introduction to the
site, explaining what it meant to us.
When dhalgren first
asked if I would be interested in helping form an online community of
seekers and sojourners, I was reading James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
When it came time to decide on a name for our community, I went to a
notebook in which I was writing down Joycean phrases and words that
struck my imagination. One of the first I had written was "sod's
brood."
Note to creative
writers: whether you understand much of the book or not (I don't claim
to myself), Finnegans Wake is a treasure trove of words, names,
and odd expressions.
The expression comes on the second page, or page four in the standardized
editions scholars use.
What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods!
Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax
Kóax Kóax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh! Where the Baddelaries
partisans are still out to mathmaster Malachus Micgranes and the Verdons
catapelting the camibalistics out of the Whoyteboyce of Hoodie Head.
Assiegates and boomeringstroms. Sod's brood, be me fear! Sanglorians,
save! Arms apeal with larms, appalling.
The passage is
part of the epic, incantatory opening of the book. Joseph Campbell,
in one of his books on Joyce, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words,
passes over the entire passage as "a paragraph about early wars"
(204). Part of the wealth of the Wake for scholars is that what one
scholar passes over, another can write a book about.
As I read it, "sod's
brood" is on the one hand a curse, and on the other a reference
to the 'hero" of the story "Bygmester Finnegan of the Stuttering
Hand" (4). In Shakespeare and other earlier writers, one can find
the curse "God's body." In Hamlet, Act II scene ii,
Hamlet curses at Polonius, "God's bodykins, Man." Another
variation on the curse was "God's blood" or "God's wounds,"
usually rendered in Shakespeare as 'sblood and 'zounds, respectively.
In Shakespeare's day, these were genuinely powerful curses and using
them in drama would have been the equivalent of using "fuck"
and its infinite variations in modern film. Maybe foul language was
one reason the Puritans closed down the playhouses during the religious
and political revolutions of the seventeenth century.
Joyce's variant
of the curse is interesting because it retains both its original context
and adds another layer on top of it.
"Sod": turf, a section of grass-covered surface soil held
together by roots. Also, a regular fellow, a "poor sod" (Finnegan
is the ultimate "poor sod"). Also, a sodomite. Also, to damn,
as in "Sod off, yer bugger!"
"Brood": offspring. When used verbally, "to brood,"
it means to think deeply.
Putting it all together, "Sod's brood": offspring of the soil
and of God, deep thinkers torn between the material existence of our
lives and our search for the spiritual; we are the damned, but for the
Grace of God. And maybe damned still. We live in a place of fear and
trembling, between Faith and Doubt. I believe, Lord, help thou my unbelief!
However, sod's brood is not only the members of this small community
struggling with our earthly and our heavenly natures. Sod's brood is
all of humanity, created as we are of God and the earth (Adam was fashioned
from clay). But on the strictly local level of this confederacy of websites,
hosted at sodsbrood.com, we are a few humans who have decided to seek
together.
In the past, such
people as us might have formed a literary or social commune, or else
a cult. Just kidding: one man's cult is another man's denomination.
Down through history, from the seventeenth century to the modern era.
people who have not found the answers they seek within the traditional
confines of civil society have exited themselves from it, either symbolically
or in reality. One might think of William Blake and his wife in their
garden, reading the Bible together...naked. Or one might think of the
radical Christian and political reform movements of seventeenth century
England, such as the Diggers and Levelers, with whom the subject of
my thesis, John Milton, was in conversation. Even the Puritans were
once a radical response to the conservative Anglican church of the day.
The Levelers are my particular favorite, however, because of that group's
emphasis on the universal equality of man, government by constitution,
and the abolition of monarchy and privilege. To say they and their founder,
John Lilburne, were in advance of their time is to understate the truth.
Perhaps we at sods
brood are not quite so ambitious, or radical. There are, after all,
a number of political and religious conservatives among our group. However,
the concept of this kind of community itself is radical, since it is
based on an idea ungraspable before, say, 1996: the idea of a community
of people who never, or rarely, meet; a community which exists in only
theoretical, imaginary space. Similar communities were not unknown in
the Dark Ages of the pre-nineteen-nineties; after all, writers and artists
have always gathered in salons, schools, and colonies. The difference
is, in the past, these communities existed in real space and were predicated
on writers and artists meeting, at least occasionally, in order to remain
in conversation with one another.
Moreover, considering the instantaneity of communication in our era,
the potential for collaboration and influence is much greater than in
the past. Walls between people are crumbling, and our notions of community
are expanding to include people who live many hundreds of miles away,
people with whom we would otherwise never have any association. Viewed
in this way, it is appropriate to use a quote from Finnegans Wake
for the title of our group. In FW, the links between words, people,
history, and literature are infinite. Life is the same way, if only
we could see it. The six degrees of Kevin Bacon is a humorous way of
expressing the relation between all of humankind; sod's brood is a (somewhat)
serious attempt at the same thing, the expression of relation. In this
way we seek not a "separate" peace, but a peace in togetherness.--A
Pilgrim's Digression.