A Higher Order of Creation (Part 2 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 14 May 2014.

It seems like we also have a few women who have to deal with families and faith in the face of spacey, absentee dads.

We can stretch those issues of women who deal with abandonment problems further if we think of Linda and Will, since Linda, instead of getting kids and a family with Will, gets an alcoholic who won't marry her and saddles her with caring for Arthur. We also might have Steffi, who has to tend to all of Farthington's "children," becoming him in that process.

I don't have the words for this yet, but maybe the thematic issue we're running into here is a sort of fallen vision of heaven, that somehow in the male mindset there is a failure to be present in grace.

Maybe men see their visions of their personal heavens as being utopian escapes...freedoms from work for which a man must work really hard. The resulting patterns are obsession and abandonment, where the female characters live in the moment more and engage with people as they are. Heaven isn't a far-off destination with an entrance fee of hard work and the reward of irresponsibility; it's an eternal moment, eternal presence, eternal relationship. We're in it now in the sense that an unborn child is in the world.

A few other thoughts. There are few female tragic heroes. I think that's because hubris is more of a male thing. The order of creation grows from simple to complex, not that either word can do justice to God's creation.

The most like God comes last, and that is the woman.

The only person born without sin after the fall who isn't Jesus is a woman. I really do believe women are a higher order of creation than men are. Look at the way Jesus treats men compared to women.

There are no female "whitewashed tombs" (Mt. 23:27).

I don't think there is a single encounter in the gospels when the few harsh words he has for a woman don't end with a sweet, loving relationship and conversion on the woman's part.  Few of the encounters with men end that way.  The men want to fight to protect Jesus, to kill him, to discredit him, to learn his tricks, to run away. Men generally want to know what to do where women want to know what to be in the gospels.

I love St. Dismas, the good thief, because he sees himself and Christ clearly while the other thief is ticked at his own and Jesus' inability to change reality. He wants an escape plan, both literally and existentially. It's that typical male pattern of obsession and abandonment: work hard to escape. He wants to do, where St. Dismas wants to be, and he consequently enters Heaven before the apostles, if "before" can be spoken of in Heaven.

The last thought: I am a big fan of T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi," especially that second to last stanza in which all sorts of images from the story of Jesus' life are scattered randomly in the background of the magi's quest, decontextualized and just part of the existential fabric of a life's mission.  A similar thing is happening with The Odyssey in Mad Men: characters are floating in and out of the story. It's not so much a retelling or recontextualizing of The Odyssey as it is a concept that life is The Odyssey and we're all living different and even conflicting aspects of it all the time.

Eliot's "

So these two texts are really informing my approach to archetype and keep me from worrying too much about stereotype and cliche.