The Sacred Sweat of the South

The heat wave finally hit Finland. The days feel like winter will never come again, not to this baked and sweltering land. And even if we know how the story ends, it's nice to pretend for a little while that one will never again need all that protective armor against the freeze. Oh well...

Incidentally, I'm just reading Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, a bestseller from a few years ago. With its setting in the scorching equal rights summer of 1964 in South Carolina, the current weather fits the experience perfectly. I'm about 3/4 through the book, but I can already say it's been a good ride. Not only does it do well in the "entertaining summer reading with Big Themes woven in" genre, it also evoked in my mind a whole subgenre of literary and cinematic works where the human drama unfolds beneath the Southern sun and the paradox-filled culture and history of Dixie. Tennessee Williams, of course, but the slightly Hollywood-ized version of the South even more: To Kill a Mockingbird, Fried Green Tomatoes, The Color Purple, Steel Magnolias, Driving Miss Daisy, Mississippi Burning, Cool Hand Luke, Body Heat, True Blood and Wise Blood and so on and on; stories of passionate people, both good and bad, white and black, whose endeavors and fates are given a somehow deeper, mythical sheen with all that sweating, the hazy golden sun, the warm nights alive with the endless song of the cicadas, the droopy trees, the old houses with peeling paint, and always a faint threat of violence in the air.

It's as if there was something in the South's atmosphere that makes the characters in these fables larger than life, their wisdom deep, their anger terrifying, morals all Old Testament and catharses all Greek tragedy.

North Carolina is as far South as I have ever travelled in the USA, so I can't comment on the fact and fiction side of things on the issue. But I'm grateful for the narrative traditions the Mythical South has generated. Especially in deep winter it's comforting to transport to a place where the heat does go on and all finales are grande.