What Country, Friends, Is This?
Or, Epiphany in Summer
To get to where I’m writing this, you have to take an escalator down from the Jiantan MRT platform to the street. At first, the concrete headers block your view. They are gray and cold looking. So is the platform. So are the escalator steps rolling downward. This particular liminal space lasts only a few seconds, but they’re important ones. You go down into the gray. And as you descend, the world opens up. Color returns: the green of trees, the red and green of turnstile LED signs. The white on red of Mandarin characters on signage. The pink of people’s clothing. There’s all kinds of movement and light. Turnstiles. Traffic. The sky.
What country, friends, is this?
That is the question Viola asks in Twelfth Night just after she washes ashore, shipwrecked and alone, certain her twin brother Sebastian has drowned in the storm that landed her upon this particular beach. Hers is not a tourist’s question. It is the question of an emergency migrant, someone who has arrived in a place where the signs are unfamiliar, where the language does not belong to her, where even her name might be dangerous. A place where she has to put on a disguise just to survive.
I’ve been turning over the question the last several days in one part of my brain as I think about what it means to be here. As I walk the streets of Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Chiayi and the mountains above it. On trains. At temples. At churches. In storefront restaurants and museums. Another part of my brain is working on a distant production of a Shakespeare play whose shores I’ve visited several times and which I’d sometime like to return to as a seasoned visitor more than a guest. There are times these last few days I’ve felt like I’m at the end of the world. I’m not of course. One thing about traveling to a place like this is that you learn very quickly that what you thought was the edge is the center. This was reinforced in a sermon I heard last week, where the thoughtful preacher observed that if you go to school in Taiwan, Asia is at the center of the map, but if you go to school in the Gulf Coast of the United States, there’s a different center. And very quickly we can think the world revolves around us. I hope those days are over.
I am writing this from Taiwan, on the fifth of July. It’s the day after American Independence Day. And the day after the passage of yet another bill that pours money into the machinery of a police state. Opinions vary about the ethics of that decision. But regardless of your politics, it's hard to ignore the message: this bill, hoists an "unwelcome" sign above our doors and at our shores.
Twelfth Night is a play that understands that kind of disorientation. The story opens in mourning. Viola is grieving her brother and her father, who died before the play begins. Olivia, too, is grieving her dead father, as is her household. Even Orsino, the Duke who rules Illyria, opens the play with words of longing and death. "That strain again! it had a dying fall," he says, describing music as something that might help his desire decay. Everything in Illyria dies, maybe. Even the music. Illyria was a real place on the Balkan coast and has no apparent connection to what its name sounds like to my ear: il — not; lyria — musical. The etymologists will disagree, I’m sure, but the name feels true enough to me. This is the land of no music. Or bad music. Or dying music. It’s a place of mourning with a coastline that looks like home to me. And it’s been stormy lately.
Nearly every character enters the story at some version of a low point. Viola and Sebastian are dead to one another. Olivia, mourning her father and brother, is dressed like Hamlet: in customary suits of solemn black. Feste is full of gallows humor. Toby is an abusive drunk. Illyria is drowning in every possible way. The end is near. The title Twelfth Night refers to the final night of the Christmas season, the eve of Epiphany. A moment not of beginning, but of ending. A time to turn out the lights and clean up what remains. Party’s over. Button up and get back to work.
That ritual sensibility carries theological weight as well. Epiphany is not only the celebration of the magi arriving at the manger. It also marks the baptism of Christ in the River Jordan. Baptism, in that context, becomes a kind of spiritual death and resurrection. It is a drowning and a re-emerging. In the winter in my part of the world, the end of the Christmas season is an invitation to hunker down for a couple of months in the dreary weather. It is descent into something gray and lifeless in the hopes of it clearing up into something lively and colorful once time has passed.
That cycle of death, burial, and resurrection is all over Twelfth Night in a beautiful and messy way. And part of the mess is that the party this year was never a party to begin with. The play’s Christmas celebrations were dampened by bad news and the death of family. The melancholy that comes at the ends of seasons and vacations and other liminal happenings doesn’t quite happen in Twelfth Night. By the end of the play, the downward movement becomes an outward movement. We see recovery. Celebration. Falling in love. Some of us finding ones we’ve lost. We have to experience the burial in order to appreciate what happens next, maybe.
I keep circling back to Viola’s question: What country, friends, is this?
It’s a question I’m asking here in Taiwan as I accumulate steps and ride escalators downward into new life. And it’s a question I’m asking about home in the United States that, both from a distance and in an up-close mirror, looks foreign. Hostile. Unrecognizable on the one hand, and on the other hand, a reflection of the darkness that’s always been there.
The party is over. The epiphany, if it comes, will come later.
As I write this, there is a typhoon approaching the coast of Taiwan and a tropical storm off the coast of North Carolina’s Cape Fear, where I can say I am from these days, a place known for its shipwrecks and pirates. Both are perfect scenes for a production of Twelfth Night. Twin storms. One might take you home. The other could leave you soaking from a kind of baptism on a street corner in a strange land. The question is whether we might know what land we belong to when the ocean between us quiets again.
I imagine I can know. But I have to go down to find out.