Beauty and how it passes: "Portrait of Two Young Ladies in White and Green Robes (Unidentified Artist, circa Sixteenth Century)" by Jane Pek, Best American Short Stories 2021

A digression before I even get started

I can't stand almost every movie that's ever been made in which God is a character. In the first place, human beings in those movies never think to ask God good questions, and in the second place, God usually provides a wafer-thin rationale for his actions, the same kind of thin rationales I came to reject when I was a believer. The worst example of this might be Bruce Almighty. At one point, God lets Bruce be God for a while. Bruce grants everybody's wish (to win the lottery). Everyone wins, but because everyone wins, their millions are worth nothing. This is seen as a good justification for why God can't grant everyone what they want. 

There are a million things wrong with that, but let's just pick a few:

1) Bruce grants everyone their wish because he's overwhelmed by their prayers, which come to him in the form of an email flood Bruce can't keep up with. But wouldn't the real God be perfectly able to handle 7 billion prayers at once and not be overwhelmed by them? God didn't actually grant Bruce his powers, only enough power that Bruce would inevitably fail. 

2) God didn't have to let everyone win the lottery, but he could have said, "Hmm, everyone seems to really be struggling to make a living, enough that it gets in the way of them enjoying their lives. I'm going to change things so life isn't like that anymore. Nobody has ever figured out how to make this happen, but I know a way to make it happen, because I'm God." 

3) A lot of people in the real world aren't praying to win the lottery. They're praying their child will survive bone cancer. They're praying their families will be okay after losing a job. They're praying the bombs they hear whistling to Earth don't land on them. They're praying the drug lord who is torturing them--not for information, but just for fun, in a sound-proofed shipping container where nobody will ever rescue them--just kills them and puts them out of their agony. Do you think God might have some kind of prioritized email system set up where he gets to those requests first? Will it really ruin the balance of the Earth to grant those requests? Seriously, God. Get your shit together. 

Okay, now I can talk about this story

This is a story not about God, but about "gods," spirits from Chinese mythology. They don't really let the reader in on a whole lot of secrets about the universe, but they can be forgiven. They're powerful, but not all-powerful. Apparently, these spirts sometimes have to fight with Buddhist monks who have skills in battling spirits. When one of the spirts becomes incarnate, she dies within two years. They're not omniscient, either. It takes the spirit who didn't become incarnate and die nearly 300 years to find a painting she's looking for, the one from the title. 

Pek's story, like "The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains," which appeared in last year's BASS, is a reinterpretation of a ubiquitous Chinese myth, one that spread and took on different forms as it did. Karen Carlson did a good job of posting links to the original versions of the myth, so I'll direct you to her. Like she did in "Nine-Tailed Fox," I think Pek gave us all we needed in the story itself to follow along, so I'll skip going into it. 

Two female spirits, a green spirt and a white spirit (whom I shall irritatingly call "Whitey" and "Greenie"), have been companions for hundreds of years, wandering around China and occasionally interacting with humans and changing history in small ways. Whitey decides she wants to become mortal, marry a man, and have a child. Greenie thinks this isn't a great idea, but Whitey assures her friend that her husband will only live twenty-four years and that after that, Whitey will return to the spirit world. Unfortunately, Whitey dies after child birth, only two years into her human existence. ("You were fucking terrible at being a human," Greenie laments to her departed friend.) So Greenie watches over Whitey's human progeny for several centuries until the last one dies in San Francisco around our current time. 

Greenie's interventions in the human realm help fuel the work of Arthur C. Clarke and Oscar Wilde, neither of whom are named in the story, but there are enough clues to figure out who she means. She also inspires the work of an artist whose portrait of Greenie and Whitey when they were both still immortal later ends up in The British Museum (which does, in fact, still have a lot of world treasures the country stole during its centuries of empire). 

Greenie doesn't mention John Keats as one of the artists she's inspired, but she well could have. The main secret of the universe Greenie has to share with us is similar to the one Keats often played with--that death is what makes life beautiful. Like Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Portrait of Two Young Ladies" is ekphrastic. That is, it is born out of and comments on a work of art. 

I don't know what this urn is, but I bet the British stole it. 

The two spirits, both immortal, have two contrasting attitudes toward immortality and death. This difference is best seen when the two come across a Ming Dynasty historian (another myth being woven into the main myth) who has managed to be granted with the power to stay young so he can complete his history of the dynasty from beginning to end. In his place, the historian's portrait will grow old instead of him. (This is the link to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray). The historian swears when his history is done, he will burn the portrait, because he has no wish to live forever, but Greenie doubts this. 

"You don't think being eternal can start to feel tiring after a while?" Whitey asks. 

"It hasn't yet," Greenie answers, "and we have several hundred years on him."

This helps explain why Whitey chose to become human, even though, as Greenie suspects, she might have known she would die. She finds immortality burdensome, while Greenie does not, even by the end, when she reports that she "did stay after all." 

The portrait aging in place of the human subject is the opposite of what usually happens, something Greenie notes when she talks to a British museum patron after finally seeing the painting again. 

"The ephemerality of beauty is indeed a tragedy," he said, "but surely not in art. The painting will preserve those women's beauty forever." 

Greenie replies, "While they grew old and died...That's even worse. It should have been the other way around."

The British patron's attitude about beauty is very close to Keats' in "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

       Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

       Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

       Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

               Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

       She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

         Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

         For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

         For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

                For ever panting, and for ever young;

As a matter of fact, I'm not totally convinced that Greenie isn't actually meeting Keats in the museum here, while he was on his way from looking at urns. In any event, Greenie rejects this kind of thinking, this finding beauty in the fact that real humans grow old and die while their representations stay evergreen. Greenie doesn't get tired of immortality and finds the representation of immortality in a world where death is possible quite sad. She didn't cry when Whitey died, but she did when she saw the portrait. 

Whitey chose mortality because she saw beauty in death, like Keats and like much of Western art. Hell, like God in one of those movies I hate, a God who will tell us that unless bad things happen, we'll never appreciate the good things. Greenie doesn't buy any of that. She's got Woody Allen's perspective on immortality. "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying." 

Whitey saw beauty in--in an unforgettably evocative phrase--one brief fuse of human life lighting another until everything went dark. Greenie tried to keep that spark going as long as possible. 

If there is a secret the immortals have to share with us mortals in this story, it's that "the cosmos has never noticed what humans do to themselves or to each other." Death and suffering don't happen because God is wise. The only power higher than the spirits is the impersonal "the cosmos," and the cosmos doesn't care. In this cosmos, we can either see ephemerality as beautiful or something to fight against as long as we can. If I had to pick a spirit to come across in my time of need, I'd hope it was Greenie. Greenie isn't a god telling us to accept the way things are; she's a spirit rebelling against the cosmos.