Godric's Garden

I was on a trip this past weekend for an old friend's wedding in Pittsburgh and could not resist listening to some of Deathly Hallows on CD during the drive and so, having neglected to locate which bag I put my German pocket dictionary in when running late for work tonight I just grabbed Deathly Hallows and have been reading some from where I left off on the CD version and am basically up through getting back to the tent with the wand broken after Godric's Hollow. The person I work tonight with is on break for only an hour, which leaves me too pressed on computer time to write anywhere near an dequate post on this ... but this material is so dense in these chapters I am not sure I could write a thorough and clear exposition without a WHOLE lot more time to work it out. So I am just going to jot my thoughts rapidly. So, I will just say this: I am not sure this material can be thoroughly "exposited" at all in the first place, merely feeble attempts made at expositing it ... but I do not think that makes it any less real. This is merely to say that this is the type of material where, sometimes, discursive "reasoning" breaks down and the only way to express it is ... to put it in story form. The first thing right off the bat is to make one point overly clear: I am NOT accusing Harry and Hermione of a sin - I am saying I think the imagery here points to exactly how dangerous the material is ... perhaps a danger very necessary to risk, but nonetheless a VERY big danger (just like, as Harry points out to Dumbledore in the "King's Cross" chapter, investigating the hallows is not a sin like making Horcuxes, but as Dumbledore points out to Harry ... it is very dangerous). Some of this fits best with my angle on the debate JKR2 and I were having on a Harry-Hermione "possibility" in Ron's absence (or as I put it in that comment in the thread on the "Home Away From Home" post, there being a difference/variance/alienation between Hary and Hermione in that for him a relationship with Hermione was still definitvely out of the picture owing to his feelings for Ginny, but for Hermione, while it may not be concretely "in the picture" it is not definitively out of the picture the way it is from Harry's side). Returning to that image of Harry and Hermione disguised as muggle middle-aged man and wife (in other words, here is a realm where those nice little "shipper" questions connect up with larger themes by way of providing the "couple image" for the entry into a larger image source, the fall in the Garden of Eden): -A couple is in a graveyard that is sort of like a garden of snow and grief, pain of loss felt in cold midnight after going "deeper and deeper" into the graveyard. - The couple is then attacked by a snake who is the agent of a liar. The snake's "tactic" is "division" - speaking a language that only one understands, thus speaking only to one of them (with a great, and I think legitimately feminist, take on the situation by having it be the man to whom the snake appeals/speaks ... this is all on the level of image though: mechanically the sole goal of Naginni and voldy is to kill Harry, whereas in the Genesis story the goal is the seduction of the couple as a unit and thus the race) -The lure is "identity," and the guise it takes is "objective historty" - the snake hidden within the body of the historian Bathilda Bagshot. This is the central point ... identity: "In the day you eat of it you will be like gods, knowing good and evil." Harry only picks up on the "excuse" of looking for the sword from Hermione (DH 318 ... when she says something like "it's very likely it is there" he says "what's there?") ... Harry's real motivation is pinning down his identity through pinning down his history (as well as the role of Dumbledore and Dumbledore's history in those things). This is at the existentialist core of the works, just as these chapters are at the center of Deathly Hallows. In PS/SS Dumbledore told Harry that people have wasted away before the mirror of Erised, living in dreams, in Harry's case of what was lost in the past, and forgetting to live in the present. In CS Dumbledore tells Harry that it is our actions and choices that make us who we are, more than the "nature" we come to the table with (in other words, to translate it into Thomistic language, potentiality is not the same thing as actuality, potency is not the same as act) ... Here we see exactly how dangerous this all is, we see the snake hiding in the "historian" - the near death from trying to pin down a "static identity" - to pin down "material truth" as definitive. - In Genesis, the couple goes from being "naked (arumim) and not ashamed" to being naked and ashamed, by way of the cunning (arum) of the serpent in getting them to eat of a tree, ultimately resulting in the "alienation" of the curses in the second half of Genesis 3. In these chapters of Deathly Hallows, the wood of the tree is broken exposing the magical core, breaking the wood and making the phoenix feather, in a way, naked (the wand breaking, the symbol breaking ... but this is transformable, transfigurable - just as the symbol of the veil in the Temple is rent, but precisely at the moment when Christ, whom the Phoenix symbolizes, is naked and broken on the cross, but from this comes the mystery Hermione speaks of: "It doesn't mean defeating death in the way the death eaters mean it, Harry ... It means ... you know ... living beyond death. Living after death." [DH 328]). The result of the breaking of the wand/symbol in the attack of Voldemort's snake? "Her face glazed with tears, Hermione handed over her wand, and he left her sitting beside his bed, desiring nothing more than to get away from her" [DH 349] and "but never, until this moment, had he felt himself to be so fatally weakened, vulnerable, and naked" [DH 350]. Anyway, just some rambling food for thought. Merlin the Meandering PS Further thoughts on the "homecoming" theme as having a much broader range to it in the books - a range that includes the themes of "leaving home" ("for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife") ... Re-Read the language of Harry's thoughts upon realizing he has to leave Grimmauld Place because of Yaxley being taken there ... "Gloomy and oppressive as the house was, it had been their one safe refuge: even, now that Kreacher was so much happier and friendlier, a kind of home. With a twinge of regret that had nothing to do with food, Harry imagined the house-elf busying himself over the steack and kidney pie that he, Ron and Hermione would never eat." (DH 271). And for the other great house-elf, Dobby, "homecoming" meant death at the hands of Bellatrix and her dagger. Also, on what I would call "legitimately borrowed images" - borrowed with utmost artistic integrity - "tips of the artistic hat" as it were - when Yaxley tags along to #12 Grimmauld place, can anybody say "Jadis' escape from Charn on the coat-tails of Polly Plummer and Diggory Kirke in The Magician's Nephew"?