This has been a phrase that comes to mind every time I think on the degeneration—oh what’s the best word? Deterioration? Suppression? Subversion?—of Western civilization and its culture. This is especially true when there are inflection points where the culture takes a turn for the worse.
When they instituted gay marriage, and when I realized we had lost that argument, what I muttered was, “Because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.” When schools and universities replace classic Western literature, music, and art in their curriculum with that of feminist or of some alternative culture just to be balanced, and so a student today reads maybe one Shakespeare play instead of a panoply of the greatest writer of the English language, I mutter, “Because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.” When I see society enacting legislation or living by some agnostic understanding of “following the science” devoid of values and foundational principles, I mutter, “Because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.”
I use the phrase in more than just abstract references. I use the phrase when I see the physical destruction of Western culture. For instance, when the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burnt down a few years ago, I again lamented, “Because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.” The cathedral represented so much of the achievement of Western culture, the beauty of the Roman Catholic faith, and the institutions that the Western world was founded upon. The burning was bitter, and it was my heart.
The very first time I can recall using the phrase was in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The collapse of the Twin Towers right in my home city of New York had me experience a cluster of emotions: anger, futility, loss. It was bitter and it was linked to my heart.
What I am trying to emote is an acknowledgment that Western culture has crossed a Rubicon and has been stripped of what made it great, what made it special, and what made it part of one’s identity. Roger Scruton, the British conservative philosopher, said something akin to our culture being our home. Well, home is where the heart is. If you realize your home has been desecrated and destroyed, the realization is bitter. And so that leitmotif expresses the bitterness of what we have become and what, to some degree, I am powerless to change.
So where did I get this quote? I couldn’t really tell you how it became a leitmotif in the concerto of thoughts circling through my head, but I doubt I thought it up myself, especially since Joyce Carol Oates titled a novel, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. Her novel came out in 1991, a good ten years before I started using the phrase, so it is probable I picked it up from hearing that title.
I have never read this novel, and until I looked it up recently, I had no idea what it was even about. I have never read any Joyce Carol Oates novels. Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart is about a white girl and a black guy who are linked as children by some event and grow up differently in the 1950s and 60s with the Vietnam War as a backdrop. It has all the elements of a very liberal storyline, and while I’m not going to characterize it positively or negatively without having read it, what I am sure of is it’s probably not my cup of tea. I assume from the title that there is some sort of bitterness in the lives of the characters as a result of the historical events which shape their lives. Of course, I don’t really know, and perhaps I should read the novel someday, but at over 400 pages, I’m not exactly in a rush.
After mentioning that phrase to a friend recently after the latest desecration to our culture—the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team honoring a drag show of transvestites who dress up as religious nuns and insult Christianity—I decided to Google the expression. I found that Joyce Carol Oates was not the originator of the phrase. It came from a poem by another writer, Stephen Crane, well known for his novel The Red Badge of Courage, a truly classic novel, and for an assortment of short stories, two of which are among the greatest of American literature, “The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel.” He is not known for his poetry, and frankly, I never read any of it. Apparently, his poems are very short, to the point, and aphoristic. Here is the poem from which the phrase originates.
In the Desert
By Stephen CraneIn the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
I have to admit my first reaction to the poem was not positive. It doesn’t have very much poetry in it, other than the alliteration of “h” and “b” consonants. The imagery is not even pleasing: a creature—we don’t even know what kind of creature, but I envision some degenerated humanoid—squatting, which has the association of one in the middle of a bowel function. And he is holding “his heart in his hands,” a rather vague image because it’s actually impossible to do so and still be alive. To compound the vagueness, he is eating his own heart.
My next question was, why is this set in the desert, emphasized with the poem’s title? It does seem to have the feel of a Biblical allusion, and being in the desert is common in both the Old and New Testaments. The Israelites wandered for 40 years in the desert after crossing the Red Sea, Christ was tempted in the desert, and John the Baptist lived in the desert. The desert is a place of isolation, and perhaps this creature has removed himself from society to wallow in his bitterness. Indeed, bitterness and isolation seem to echo Job’s lament: “Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul” (Job 7:11).
The poem seemed to have more depth than my first reaction. So what did it mean with the culmination of “Because it is bitter, and because it is my heart?”
In time, I began to associate this humanoid creature with Gollum, the fictional character from J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Gollum, once a hobbit, through his obsession and lust for the magical ring devolves into a sort of bestial creature living in swamps and caves in a stew of compulsion and obsession. In the poem, this creature too lives away from society consuming his bitter heart, and the surprise twist is that he enjoys the bitterness.
And so, here now, with the additional meaning from Crane’s poem, is an expansion in meaning to my leitmotif. Yes, one can get bitter over the devolution of one’s precious culture, but that bitterness can infest one’s soul, and lead to one’s own devolution. Because it is bitter, and because it is my heart must also be tempered. We are not in control of everything, or even of most things, and like Job must eventually leave it up to God.
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