Though today is Cinco de Mayo, I find myself moved to write a bit about the more ancient festival of Mayes daye the thrydde. For reasons any regular reader of this blog will appreciate, the past week was a somewhat gloomy one for me. In the midst of life we are in death. True enough, but so also is the converse. In the midst of death we are in life, and on Monday I was jolted from my thoughts about a dead friend by a telephone call from a living one from with whom I had not talked in at least a year. My belief in signs and portents is based absolutely in concrete empirical experience, and I have long since ceased to be embarrassed to acknowledge providential serendipities. Just as there are themes to carefully wrought works of literature and music, there are themes in life, sometimes discernible in its quotidian episodes.
The caller was Joe Trahern, meaning Professor Joseph B. Trahern of Knoxville, a retired English professor like myself, an expert in Old English literature. But Joe somehow failed to meet the first requirement of a quiet academic life, which is to convince your colleagues that you are so organizationally maladroit that it would be folly even to think about having you run anything. That is, he failed to conceal his formidable administrative skills and wound up with major administrative positions first at the University of Illinois and then at the University of Tennessee. Joe and I first met each other in the autumn of 1961 in graduate school and have been friends ever since. My wife and I were married in June of 1962 There were comparatively few people at this event—the ceremony was conducted in a small side-chapel of a large parish church—and of those few only three or four are extant today. But Joe was not merely there. He acted as photographer
Joe has a resonant southern voice, and though I had not heard it in a long time, I recognized it immediately. What I did not at first grasp was what he was talking about. “Do you know what day it is?” he asked. That seemed to me a pretty soft pitch. It was Monday, but he had something else in mind. “It’s May the third. Bad day for lovers.” It’s fairly rare for me to be in an on in-joke, but this one dawned on me with instant pleasure. What Joe was referring to is a somewhat obscure detail in the poetry of Chaucer. On no fewer than three occasions does Chaucer go out of his way to identify the date of May Third with the highly ambiguous fortunes of his literary lovers. In his classical epic Troilus and Criseyde, May the third is a day upon which Pandarus, supposedly so aloof and worldly wise in the game of love, falls victim to Cupid’s archery “for all his wise talk”. This is a calendrical invention not to be found in Chaucer’s rich source materials. Then, in the “Knight’s Tale,” the mini-epic with which he begins the Canterbury Tales, the red-hot lover Palamon, in the seventh year of his captivity, makes a successful jail break on May the third, with resulting violence equal to that in the Iliad, and roughly animated by the same sexual passions. Finally, in a mock-heroic moment of the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale”, the most profound exploration of chicken sex in world literature, the passionate rooster Chaunticleer is grabbed by the fox on May the third.
But it was not simply the fact of an arcane calendrical aberration to which Joe was referring. There is data, and there is the interpretation of data. What Joe was specifically invoking was the interpretation of the data offered by D. W. Robertson, the great scholar with whom both of us had studied. Robertson was sure that the idea of May the third was being used by Chaucer, master of moral allegory, for its ironic resonances with the Christian festival of the Invention of the Cross, or Holy Cross day, May the third. Bad day for lovers, indeed, at least for a certain kind of lovers. One of the central illuminating ideas I learned from Robertson’s approach was that the great humanistic poets of the European Middle Ages, poets like Dante and Chaucer, were conscious and artful in their contrasts and comparisons of ancient love as presented in the classical tradition of Virgil and Ovid and in the Christian theological tradition of Saint Augustine.
Both traditions were founded in a complex symbolic and mythological fabric. The word invention in the “Invention of the Cross” is used in its now mainly obsolete Latin sense. It means finding. According to a legend wholly independent of the Bible, in the year 326 Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, found and unearthed the actual cross on which Christ had been crucified. This archaeological coup considerably advanced the bourgeoning relics industry and helped shape its course for the later Middle Ages. The whole Legend of the Cross is very beautiful and very complex, and its elements can be found widely spread over the history of European pictorial and literary art. It was believed that the original skull of Golgotha (Golgotha meaning “the place of the skull”) was that in the burial site of Adam. The wood from which Christ’s cross had been fashioned, after a certain amount of complex recycling, had come from the “Tree of Life in the middle of Paradise”. So there was an actual arboreal, archaeological material evidence of Saint Paul's typology of the Old Adam and the New (For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.) The Cross, like the man who died upon it, has been raised to life from the earth in which it had been buried. This idea has its explicit development, among other places, in the extraordinary Old English poem usually called “The Dream of the Rood” or “Vision of the Cross”.
Some of Professor Trahern’s own scholarly work deals with a somewhat similar myth. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Old English poem about the “Arabian bird,”—that is, the legendary phoenix. The moral interpretation of the animal kingdom—what in the later Middle Ages is usually called the “bestiary tradition”—actually began in classical Antiquity, in fact probably even earlier. The extraordinary thing about the mythical Arabian bird, of course, was its mode of reproduction. It was not exactly immortal, because after a typical life of five hundred years or so it did die. But it then self-immolated, and from the ashes emerged—a new phoenix! So here we have another ancient poetic image of death's redress by life renewed or revived.
None of these literary or theological issues became explicit in our fairly extensive conversation, which was devoted mainly to catching up with two traditional topics: the good old days, and a current family update. Joe’s first wife, also a good friend of ours for many decades , died some years ago; and he is happily remarried to a widowed old friend. I still hope that we might one day meet her. His daughter Sarah, uncannily the spitting image of her late mother, is the CEO of the Country Music Association. If there is a bigger deal in Nashville, I’d like to know about it. So I hope you can see that May the third, though it might have been an iffy day for Chaunticleer, was a very good day for me.
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