Man Hands on Misery to Man, or Azula and the Dominoes

“They f**k you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were f**ked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.”

Philip Larkin, ‘This Be The Verse’ (1971)

Well, you know how it is. Sometimes you open YouTube with the aim of amusing yourself for maybe ten or fifteen minutes in between doing other stuff, and you end up taking in an entire hour-long video essay devoted to scholarly psychological analysis of an animated fictional character. We’ve all done it, right?

The animated fictional character in question when this scenario befell me earlier this week was Azula, one of the foremost antagonists featured in Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I have now finished watching, and yes, it deserves the hype, so I do recommend that if you haven’t seen it already, you go and do so before plunging recklessly into the minefield of spoilers that is the rest of this post.¹ As for the rest of you, be not afeared that I might be about to review that entire hour-long video essay in acute detail; I’ll confine my recollection of its contents to only the most salient aspects as regards my own concern in this post.²

 

A magnificent more realistic artistic interpretation of Azula, for which I owe thanks to the talented PkBlitz at newgrounds.com.

Azula, to remind you, is the daughter of the Fire Lord, and is notable for being prodigiously talented at firebending, extremely clever, an utter perfectionist, a master manipulator, power-hungry, sadistic, consistently ruthless, and altogether not somebody you want to be getting between you and your goals for two whole series of an animated drama. In his video essay, YouTuber Hello Future Me attributes many of Azula’s traits and behaviours to her experiences in childhood. In particular, her parents were noticeably rubbish at ‘co-parenting’, that is, raising their children according to one consistent framework of values upheld by both of them. While Fire Lord Ozai encouraged and rewarded the development of power, cunning, and loyalty, his wife Ursa preferred to nurture trust, empathy, and love. Because Azula was so good at firebending, and doesn’t seem to have naturally been very empathic, it was from her father that she received most of the positive feedback she was given as a child; and because kids respond to positive feedback, it was according to the values her father taught her that she came to define her success in life, her worth, even her moral adequacy. Hence the perfectionism and ruthlessness and so forth. Her brother Zuko, on the other hand – not nearly as talented, but a real little trooper who would consistently pick himself up and try again – was more likely to receive positive feedback from his mother, and so ended up internalising something of the value structure she was parenting according to. And, while Zuko also spends the best part of the serial being rather an unpleasant dude, you could tell pretty much all along that there was a redemption arc waiting in the wings for him. Sure enough, he ends the series, having defected to the good guys in time for the final battle, by being crowned Fire Lord and promising to work with the Avatar to build a future based on love and peace – a far cry from his father’s violent imperialistic expansion. Azula, on the other hand, ends it by having a mental breakdown and losing everything she’d ever hoped and striven for.

Hello Future Me concludes: “Azula’s story is a tragedy at heart. Her psychology is the last domino to fall in a long chain of familial abuse, flawed parenting, and emotional rejection.” A tragedy. It wasn’t Azula’s fault that she turned out the way she did; it was an inevitable result of the circumstances that befell her. She can’t be blamed for all the evil she did. She could never have turned out any other way.

This conclusion reminds me of an article I saw in the theatre programme for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.³ It was a friend’s programme I was reading (I’m always too much of a cheapskate to purchase one of my own), so I don’t have it at hand to consult, but the gist of the thing was a compare-and-contrast exercise between Harry and Voldemort. We all know that their similarities are played on through much of the canon: orphans raised by Muggles who eventually find the home they’d never had at Hogwarts, enough Slytherin tendencies for the Sorting Hat to at least suggest it, eventual fixation on magical means of mastering death (Hallows versus Horcruxes). So why does Harry end up our hero and Voldemort his utterly maleficent foe? According to the author of the article, the one vital factor was that first short year of Harry’s life where he was loved and cared for by his parents before they were killed. Voldemort, having been dumped at an orphanage pretty much as soon as he entered the world, never had that. And so the dominoes fell.

 

Kind of interesting that dominoes have become a byword for something that they’re not even actually for if you think about it.

I didn’t much like this way of looking at things when I read it in my borrowed theatre programme, and I still don’t much like it now. Like, that’s it? If you had a messed-up childhood then you’re going to end up being a terrible person and there’s no way round it? Nobody can ever be held accountable for his behaviour, because it’s really all the fault of those who raised him – who probably had messed-up childhoods of their own, and so on and so on back to the beginning of everything? There’s no hope of any better ending to the story? Philip Larkin was right?⁴

Well, let me be generous: maybe the author of the …Cursed Child article just didn’t have enough space to nuance her position properly in her allocated page of the programme. Hello Future Me’s hour of psychoanalysis, on the other hand, gives us a bit more to work with. Consider Zuko again. Although his mother’s positive feedback – as much of it as he got before she mysteriously disappeared⁵ – did foster in him more of an inclination towards her values than Azula ever had, when we meet him, he’s still very much conducting himself under the premise that his father’s values are the right ones. Specifically, he’s single-mindedly devoting himself to tracking down and capturing the Avatar, because the Fire Lord has decreed that that’s the only way he can regain his honour. He really, really wants his honour back – that state of affairs is so heavily stressed that it begins to caricaturise itself – and the fact that he thinks it’s worth so much proves his acceptance and internalisation of his father’s value-system. What really drags Zuko over to the side of righteousness isn’t how his mother parented him all those years ago; based on that alone, a redemption arc of the type the writers give him seems almost inconceivable. What really drags Zuko over to the side of righteousness is what Hello Future Me calls his ‘rescue parent’ – still my favourite Last Airbender character, Uncle Iroh.

Zuko’s Uncle Iroh, assigned to accompany him on his search for the Avatar after an embarrassing defeat at the Earth Kingdom capital of Ba Sing Se nudged him into retirement from leading Fire Nation armies, loves him. Properly loves him. He sticks with him through thick and thin, he takes care of him, he puts his needs first, he defends him, he mentors him, and he continually encourages him to do what’s right rather than what his father expects of him. He tells him that his honour isn’t the Fire Lord’s to give or take from him. He keeps on putting forward those values of trust and empathy and love, and it takes a long time and several false starts, but eventually, Zuko decides that it’s those values he wants to live by. Don’t get me started, though, on how stupendously adorable and uplifting and heart-meltingly Prodigal-Son-esque the whole plotline is, because boy will I gush about it.

Zuko’s trajectory from messed-up childhood to messed-up approach to life would surely have been only slightly different to Azula’s, except that Uncle Iroh stuck his hand between the dominoes before they fell. Hope for a better ending after all? Well, yes, but only up to a point, because where was Azula’s Uncle Iroh? Where was her ‘rescue parent’? “In this sense,” says Hello Future Me, “it was Azula who was left behind, who wasn’t rescued, who wasn’t nurtured, who wasn’t wanted in the same way that Zuko was.” And that’s why he gets a redemption arc and she gets a tragedy. It’s still a pretty bleak picture: no longer, if you had a messed-up childhood you’re doomed to be a terrible person; but still, if you had a messed-up childhood and nobody steps in to rescue-parent you, you’re doomed to be a terrible person. Better, but not great.

 

Hearty thanks to TheIcarusCrisis at newgrounds.com for this very skilled and charming rendering of Uncle Iroh enjoying a cup of tea, as he so frequently is.

Still, if we’re talking about rescue parents – isn’t there someone who rather springs to mind who can step in to rescue-parent anyone?

If I’m allowed to have a favourite doctrine, I think the doctrine of adoption might just be it. “But when the completion of the time came,” writes Paul to the Galatians, “God sent out his son, born of woman, born under law, so that he might purchase those under law; so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you guys are sons, God sent out the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying: Abba, Father! So you are no longer a slave but a son; and if a son, also an heir through God.”⁶ You might not have picked up, incidentally, that he switches from a second-person plural to a second-person singular for that last sentence – not merely, you guys, collectively, are sons, but each of you, specifically, is a son and heir of God. This truth is for you as an individual, O Redeemed and Adopted Reader. Whatever messed-up stuff you may have been through that you thought had had an irreparable effect on who you are, you’re not a slave to it. You’ve been purchased for adoption. God has stepped in as your rescue parent.

And even if, by contrast, you had an absolutely stellar childhood, you needed him to step in like that. The thing is, Philip Larkin sort of was right; our parents, however good a job they do, do fill us with the faults they have, just by default, because the whole human bloodline, descended from Adam, is governed by sin. We inherit the sinful nature from our parents, and it dooms us to be terrible people. The dominoes fall. But for God our rescue parent, we are destined, as surely as Azula, to end up losing everything at the end of the serial we call the present age. (It keeps getting renewed for new series, you’ll have noticed, and the current one has certainly featured some unexpected twists.) But God loves you so much, brother or sister of mine, that before even the very first episode of the serial aired, he had already written your redemption arc.

God your heavenly Father loves you – properly loves you: “See what kind of love the Father has given us,” writes John in 1 John 3, “so that we might be called children of God; and we are.” He sticks with you through thick and thin: “Everything that the Father gives me shall come to me,” says Jesus in John 6, “and the one who comes to me I will certainly not throw out.” He takes care of you: “If, therefore,” says Jesus in Matthew 7, “you guys, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in the heavens give good things to those who ask him!” He puts your needs first: “Our Lord Jesus Christ … gave himself for our sins,” writes Paul in Galatians 1, “so as to deliver us out of the present age of evil, according to the will of our God and Father.” He defends you: “My Father who has given [my sheep] to me is greater than everything,” says Jesus in John 10, “and no one can snatch out of my Father’s hand.” He mentors you: “[I pray] that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,” writes Paul in Ephesians 1, “the Father of glory, may give you guys a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him.” And he continually encourages to do what’s right rather than what the world, whatever flesh-bound value-system you may have internalised over the years, expects of you. This morning I was reading 1 John 2: “Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him, because everything in the world, the desire of the flesh and the desire of the eyes and the false pretension of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world, and the world is passing away, and its desire too, but the one who does the will of God remains forever.”

God your Father tells you that your honour – the validity and worth and dignity of you as a person and your existence in the world – isn’t anyone’s to give or take from you except his, and he has pronounced you (yes, you, brother or sister, you as an individual) his son and heir, and nothing you do or fail to do could ever change that. We’re all messed up – and some have been through more messed-up stuff than others – but there is nobody that God can’t rescue-parent off that trajectory and into eternal life, because the whole of our purchase for adoption is achieved by Jesus laying down his life for our sins, and not by anything pertaining to who we were before, what we’ve done, or what other people have done to us.

You’re a son of God. You’re not a slave to anything else. Man may hand on misery to man, but, by the will of God, for you, the dominoes fall no longer.

Footnotes

¹ All episodes are available on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/70142405.

² Although please do check the whole thing out for yourself if you fancy it; as you’ll gather from the fact that I finished it, it’s pretty blooming interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4544ZUr_gA.

³ Obviously I’m not going to give you the link for tickets at the moment. But you can still enjoy Imogen Heap’s gorgeous soundtrack: https://www.harrypottertheplay.com/uk/music/.

⁴ ‘This Be the Verse’ is pretty high up in terms of my favourite Philip Larkin poems I’ve read. I also like ‘Aubade’ (depressing but incisive) and ‘Dockery and Son’ (less depressing, if still pretty existential-crisis-y, and really beautifully put together): https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/philip-larkin#tab-poems.

⁵ Apparently the mystery of her disappearance is solved in one of the comic-book trilogies that pick up the story where the television serial left it. The first trilogy is called ‘The Promise’, https://www.waterstones.com/book/avatar-the-last-airbender-the-promise-library-edition/gene-luen-yang/9781616550745, and in completely unrelated news, I have a birthday coming up next month.

⁶ That’s from the fourth chapter of the letter; have the ESV, though this week I did actually bother to write my own translations of the passages I quoted: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gal+4&version=ESVUK. Also, this being my last footnote, since I didn’t manage to clarify this in the main body, I’d like to leave a little note to the effect that I also don’t think that having a messed-up childhood  irreparably dooms someone to end up being a terrible person even by the world’s standards. But that wasn’t my point here, and you know, given that God ordains everything anyway...

Perfectly Normal, Thank You Very Much

“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)

I’m currently reading the first Harry Potter book in Latin.¹ Yes, fine, take a moment now to groan at the surpassing excess of my nerdiness, but you know, I’ve got to keep my Latin going somehow, given that I don’t use it at work or devotionally the way I do my other ancient languages, and since a good friend was kind enough to gift me a copy of Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis at the end of last year, I’ve been very much enjoying picking it up at intervals and slowly working my way through the opening chapters. Slowly, because my Latin might be good but it’s not that good, and of course there’s a great deal of unfamiliar vocabulary to contend with in a book set several centuries after Latin ceased to be a living language. Some of my favourites among the author’s coinages include birotula automataria ‘motorbike’ (literally ‘two little wheels acting of themselves’), Ferriviae Subterraneae Londoniensis ‘London Underground’ (literally ‘underground carrying ways of London’), Pedibus Suspensis per Tulipas Eamus ‘Tiptoe Round the Tulips’ (literally ‘we go through the tulips with hesitant feet’), fasciculus frustrorum fragilium ‘crisp packet’ (literally ‘little packet of brittle bits of food’), and sorbillum glaciatum transatlanticum ‘knickerbocker glory’ (which I am really struggling to literally translate; ‘frozen transatlantic sippable thing’ is about as close as I can get).

 

Look, here it is! Such a better cover than the original one...

Still, being forced to read slowly for linguistic reasons has its advantages in that it grants the brain a little more time to mull over the information it’s taking in; often when I read a compelling novel, I find myself devouring the words on the page so quickly that I’m not even registering half of them, so the contrast provided by my progress through Harrius Potter… is not an unwelcome one. I haven’t even got as far as Harry’s entrance into the weird and wonderful world of witchcraft and wizardry yet; at the moment, he still exists in the utterly mundane middle-class realm of Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four, Privet Drive – perfectly normal, thank you very much, and anything that doesn’t fit into that mould can be shoved into the cupboard under the stairs and never spoken of in polite company.

Here’s the thing, though: much as the Dursleys are relentlessly given over to the business of convincing everyone in their acquaintance of how entirely and unshakably normal they are, it really isn’t very normal, having agreed to adopt your orphaned nephew, to despise him, neglect him, and generally treat him as some shameful burden undeserving of the attention, affection, and gifts so liberally lavished on his cousin. In fact, the Dursleys’ single-minded pursuit of total, uninfringed normality leads them to do all sorts of things that are decidedly abnormal. On the car ride to the zoo for Dudley’s birthday trip, for instance, when Harry casually mentions that he had a dream about a flying motorbike, it would have been far more normal for Mr Dursley to have made some mild remark to the effect that that was an interesting dream, than to do what he actually did, which was nearly crash the car, then turn entirely round and yell animalistically in Harry’s direction that motorbikes don’t fly. Later, when Harry’s Hogwarts letters start showing up in ever-increasing numbers, Mr Dursley’s behaviour spirals further and further from anything that could be described as ‘normal’. He sleeps in the hallway to stop Harry sneaking down to seize the next letter when it arrives; he takes a day off work in order to spend his time blocking up the letterbox; he takes another day off to construct yet more elaborate post obstructions; and eventually he compels his entire family to leave the house, with five minutes’ notice and the intention of bunkering down in some remote place where the letters won’t be able to reach them. They end up in a tiny, dilapidated hut on a rocky offshore island,² Mr Dursley being positively gleeful that a storm is predicted that night. ‘Perfectly normal’? Hardly. And we’re given some charming little details that embroider that picture of abnormality all the more: Mr Dursley is so wound up by the whole business that he attempts to use a piece of fruitcake as a hammer, that he jumps at the slightest noise; on the car journey, he continually doubles back on himself, stops in various random secluded locations before deeming them insufficiently remote, and even starts muttering to himself about the need to shake the mysterious letter-senders off their trail. Dudley’s reaction captures the thing beautifully: “Daddy’s gone mad, hasn’t he?”

In short, the Dursleys’ obsession with demonstrating to the world how perfectly normal they are, thank you very much, is the very thing that leads them to behave in such a fashion as to prove themselves thoroughly abnormal. They are so fixated on the result that they should come across as normal, that they are prepared to do all manner of abnormal things in the hope of achieving that result. By striving after the façade of the thing, they forfeit the thing itself. And I do wonder whether this doesn’t apply to most, even all, qualities that we might hold to be virtues worth striving after. I mean, I’ve personally always taken ‘normal’ as an insult rather than an aspiration, but what about other adjectives we might want people to associate with us? What about ‘courageous’ or ‘strong’ or ‘brilliant’?

Well, devoting oneself to coming across as courageous isn’t a courageous thing to do; it’s not courageous to be afraid of something so flimsy and unthreatening as other people’s opinions. And devoting oneself to coming across as strong doesn’t evince strength, because strength doesn’t need to rely on the fickle external condition of other people’s opinions. And devoting oneself to coming across as brilliant – here’s the one that cuts closest for me personally – couldn’t, in actual fact, be more stupid, because real brilliance seeks truth and knowledge regardless of whether or not it aligns with other people’s opinions.

Not to mention, devoting oneself to coming across as righteous is a sure-fire method of proving one’s unrighteousness: “Be on your guard not to practise your righteousness in front of people, so as to be seen by them; otherwise, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven,” and all that.³ Which is a section of scripture I feel I mention disproportionately often on my blog, but then, also one I feel bears the repetition. It’s easy to laugh at the Dursleys and their obsession with coming across as normal, their terror of that façade being shattered if their neighbours should ever somehow find out about their wizarding relatives – but when I think about how much I too am governed by a desire to present myself as having some desirable quality or other, I can see rather more of myself in them than I’d like.

And this is serious business. To strive after the façade of the thing is to forfeit the thing itself; to practise righteousness in front of people is to lose any recognition of righteousness on that count in the eyes of the one whose opinion on the subject actually matters. I’m not saying our status as righteous in Christ is under threat, just to be clear; if you believe that he’s borne your sins and paid for them and irrevocably gifted you his perfection in exchange, then he has, end of. Indeed, it’s only on that foundation that I’m able to exhort you to strive for righteousness at all; without Christ, that would be an entirely futile endeavour. So, having been given what we have, whyever would we devote ourselves to the pursuit of a thing for which there is no lasting reward, a thing the world could have given us anyway, the mere appearance of righteousness? Wouldn’t it be so much better to be governed by pursuit of the thing itself, rather than the façade of it? Wouldn’t it be so much better to seize the opportunity we now have, to attain, however imperfectly in this life, to actual righteousness?

This is a conversation I’ve been having with myself a fair bit lately. I’m so done with living like Mr Dursley, in pursuit of the appearance of the qualities I esteem, rather than the reality of them, and so doomed never to truly attain to the latter. It is staggering, having explicitly made the decision and pleaded God’s help in implementing it, how many times a day I catch myself thinking, oh, but I can’t or I must do that, otherwise so-and-so will think such-and-such about me. And perhaps it’s just me who’s so governed by the desire to come across a certain way, but I doubt it; I dare you to try noticing it in yourself. In this as in everything, though, the best and only weapons we have are the gospel and the scriptures and the presence of God’s Spirit in us – and so I read and I pray and I preach to myself, that my identity is wholly in Christ and nothing else matters, not really. My Father declares me righteous – though only at the cost of the blood of his Son – and that’s the most desirable quality I could ever hope to attain to. I have the real thing, and have only to grow into it; and the less I concern myself with pursuing the mere façade, the more I shall, indeed, grow into it.

Footnotes

¹ If you didn’t know such a thing was obtainable, I hasten to assure you it most certainly is: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/J-K-Rowling/Harry-Potter-and-the-Philosophers-Stone-Latin--Harrius-Po/16438978.

² ‘Hut on the Rock’ is the name of one of the tracks on the soundtrack album for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child; whatever you might think of the play itself, I enthusiastically recommend the score (written by Imogen Heap, drawing heavily on her own earlier work) if only as good background music for studying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3QDBgSoUuA&list=OLAK5uy_m-1B7M6sXjAr4Wf5OTzq9aiYKrbkjEcJE&index=7.

³ Matthew 6 – but you knew that, right? https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+6&version=ESVUK