“Don't Look Back” (or, “Remember Lot's Wife”)

“Or la femme de Lot regarda en arrière, et elle devint une colonne de sel.” [...] L’oubli est nécessaire à la société comme à l’individu. Il faut savoir oublier pour go?ter la saveur du présent, de l’instant et de l’attente, mais la mémoire elle-même a besoin de l’oubli: il faut oublier le passé récent pour retrouver le passé ancien [Sylvie Germain, in éclats de sel, 1996].

Albeit shortly and anonymously mentioned in the Torah, in the Gospels and in the Koran, Lot's wife is a so impressive character, that with difficulty we could forget her. Nevertheless, there is an apparent contradiction between the words pronounced by the angels in Genesis 19:17, “Don't look back”, and those of Jesus in the Gospel according to Luke 17:32, “Remember Lot's wife”. How can we not look back, into the past at least, and remember Lot's wife at once? So, we are turning back toward her who is turned back, lost in her vision. Through her gaze, somewhat we get involved in that uncertain vision too.

Furthermore, necessarily memory is selective. Be it intentional or not, this selection is constitutive part of our cultural identity. With all the more reason, a so defined Platonic reminiscence ought to be selective, in accordance with an ideal and good oriented criterion. Was Lot's wife scarcely spiritual, or too materialistic, in gazing back at her sinful and unlucky city of Sodom? Was this her own sin, because of which she “became a pillar of salt”? Let's go on, searching for a plausible answer, especially in art and poetry.

In iconography, often she was depicted as the detail of a statue of salt, in landscape paintings representing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, in the rear of her husband and their two daughters who fly away without gazing back in compliance with the warning angels. Also when she is portrayed in the foreground, or with no background at all, mostly she is depicted with her head turned backward. So we can't see, or may discern hardly and partly, her face. This is the case of a 1878 sculpture, by the English artist William H. Thornycroft, in the Victoria & Albert Museum at London. On the left of this artwork, above we can watch a 2005 statue by the Canadian sculptress Andrea Yermy, located outside the Baycrest Hospital at Toronto. The third image is “Study for ?Lot's wife?”, by John P. Russell (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; 1886). Here, we begin to discover her visage and expression, such as imagined by the Australian author so many centuries after.

As it can be intuited, often the figure of Lot's wife has worked as the subject for illustrations, in publications with biblical contents. For instance, the image reported above is that of an etching by the Texan painter and illustrator Marvin Hayes, from his book God's Images: the Bible, a New Vision, published in collaboration with the poet and writer James L. Dickey (Birmingham, Alabama: Oxmoor House, 1977; and New York: Seabury Press, 1978). At last, there it's possible to admire an imaginary frontal portrait of the wife of Lot, while looking into the distance and in direction of the viewer, as if we were inhabitants of her town doomed to annihilation. Better than curiosity or incredulity, what we may read in that gaze is anxiety, regret, pity (and, perhaps, some of our same questions). Behind her, an escaping Lot and daughters are details in the background. So far now, that she can be sure, they are going to survive the dreadful calamity.

Even before than in traditional religions, not seldom too bound by conventional interpretations even when they strive to be open to one ethical progress, a pensive “rehabilitation” of Lot's wife occurred through that lay religiosity, which at times permeates poetry and makes it leaven. In this case, a female contribution isn't casual. Lot's Wife was composed by Anna A. Akhmatova, in 1922-24. In these verse, the Russian poetess imagines not an angel but the inner voice of a nostalgic self, suggesting the wife of Lot her fatal gesture. Was it a dramatic deceit, it wasn't a divine punishment. Rather, that was made by her conscience to herself. Below, the poem is translated from Russian, by Tanya Karshtedt:

?Holy Lot was a-going behind God's angel,/ He seemed huge and bright on a hill, huge and black./ But the heart of his wife whispered stronger and stranger:/ “It's not very late, you have time to look back/ At these rose turrets of your native Sodom,/ The square where you sang, and the yard where you span,/ The windows looking from your cozy home/ Where you bore children for your dear man.”// She looked – and her eyes were instantly bound/ By pain – they couldn't see any more at all:/ Her fleet feet grew into the stony ground,/ Her body turned into a pillar of salt.// Who'll mourn her as one of Lot's family members?/ Doesn't she seem the smallest of losses to us?/ But deep in my heart I will always remember/ One who gave her life up for one single glance.? (such as expressed by Akhmatova, Lot's wife's homesickness may be well illustrated with the na?ve painting “Lot's Wife Looks Back [Burning]” by the British artist Albert Herbert, private collection; 1991).

Once again titled Lot's Wife, a monologue by the Nobel prize for literature Wislawa Szymborska sounds more critically radical. Yes, the wife of Lot might have had trifling motives for gazing back, even more futile than a vain curiosity or a culpable disobedience. Yet, the Polish poetess adds, above all there was some ingenuous, all too human, hope “that God had changed His mind”, by renouncing any destruction and condescending to her intimate wish and prayer. This time, Lot's wife is feigned to speak in first person: “They say I looked back from curiosity./ But I could have had reasons other than curiosity./ I looked back from regret for a silver bowl./ From distraction while fastening the latchet of my sandal./ To avoid looking longer at the righteous neck/ of Lot my husband./ From sudden certainty that had I died/ he would not even have slowed his step./ From the disobedience of the meek./ Alert to the pursuit./ Suddenly serene, hopeful that God had changed His mind.”

“Our two daughters were almost over the hilltop./ I felt old age within me. Remoteness./ The futility of our wandering. Sleepiness./ I looked back while laying my bundle on the ground./ I looked back from fear of where next to set my foot./ On my path appeared serpents,/ spiders, field mice, and fledgling vultures./ By now it was neither the righteous nor the wicked – simply all living/ creatures/ crept and leapt in common panic./ I looked back from loneliness./ From shame that I was stealing away./ From a desire to shout, to return./ Or just when a sudden gust of wind/ undid my hair and lifted up my garment./ I had the impression they watched it all from the walls of Sodom/ and burst out in loud laughter time and time again./ I looked back from anger/ To relish their great ruin.”

“I looked back for all the reasons I have mentioned./ I looked back despite myself./ It was only a rock that turned back, growling under foot./ A sudden crevice that cut my path./ On the edge a hamster scampered, up on his two hind feet./ It was then that we both glanced back./ No, no. I ran on,/ I crept and clambered up,/ until the darkness crashed down from heaven,/ and with it, burning gravel and dead birds./ For lack of breath I spun about repeatedly./ If anyone had seen me, he might have thought me dancing./ It is not ruled out that my eyes were open./ It could be that I feel, my face turned toward the city.” (translators, Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire; Princeton University Press, 1976).

In the painting also but paradoxically entitled “Lot's Wife”, by the German-born artist Anselm Kiefer (Cleveland Museum of Art; 1989), the figure of the wife of Lot is absent at all. What we are given to see is an alleged vision by her, so modernized that this tragic landscape, like an updated waste land, is crossed by several railroad tracks going on till they get lost in the distance. Inside that burning desolation, what we may perceive or guess is a new disaster. Yet, this is neither natural nor supernatural. Unfortunately, it's one of those which have troubled the 20th century, and which have been acted or suffered by human beings. In particular, the railroad tracks remind us of the cattle trains transporting Jews to the extermination camps during World War II, in the territories occupied by Nazi invaders. Nonetheless, such an empty scenery can be evocative of analogous events, as well.

Actually, let's read these lines from Rails, by another Russian poetess, Marina Tsvetaeva, translated in 1971 by Elaine Feinstein: “The bed of a railway cutting/ has tidy sheets. The steel-blue/ parallel tracks ruled out/ as neatly as staves of music.// And over them people are driven/ like possessed creatures from Pushkin/ whose piteous song has been silenced./ Look, they’re departing, deserting.// And yet lag behind and linger,/ the note of pain always rising/ higher than love, as the poles freeze/ to the bank, like Lot’s wife, forever...”. Written in 1923, this poem already foretells that long period of persecutions, deportations, detentions and capital executions, which under Stalin's dictatorship will strike heavily both Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva or their relatives and friends, until and beyond the suicide of the latter.

Not so strangely, the archaic or atemporal tale of Lot's wife almost seems to require to be faced with a historical context, moreover a dramatic or catastrophic one, for acquiring or recovering its full problematic significance. Even as a salt pillar or statue, the archetype of the wife of Lot no longer appears fabulous or absurd then. On the contrary, by her crystallized gaze she points at the absurdity of any destruction or catastrophe, when it's produced or just pretended to be produced as an unnatural event. No reliable palingenesis – be it religious, social or political; be it revolution, or rather involution – is worth a cost like that. Still now, or today more than ever, that sounds to be Lot's wife's main message.

The Italian writer and artist Carlo Levi is better known as a realistic novelist, than as a painter. Exceptionally, one of his artworks is symbolic. Dated 1972, this etching is biblically titled “Lot's Wife”. There, not only she is depicted while looking back, before turning into a pillar of salt. In front of her, we can discern her vision. According to a Kabbalistic tradition, that's the dark side of the Shekhinah or divine presence, represented by Levi like a huge face with a monstrous expression. Carlo wasn't a Kabbalist. In a psychoanalytic way, he means that sometimes we may mistake for an epiphany of the Being what's a projection of our bad conscience or of a subconscious fault complex, susceptible to “petrify” us anyway.

More in general, a so called “Lot's wife complex” may happen to block and paralyze our existential becoming or psychic development. Then, we run a risk to remain trapped within a morbid nostalgia for the past, unable to gaze at a renewed future, especially when a traumatic break has made that past irrecoverable in part or in its integrity. It's true, on the other hand, a well balanced remembrance of the past ought to be a fertile and hopeful ground for a re-foundation of the future or reconstruction of a broken existence. This thematics is broadly related by the Canadian and Austrian-born Monique Bosco to the topic of exile or migration, in her 1970 novel La femme de Loth. At least, we must recall a 1954 precedent: Lot's Wife by Maria Ley-Piscator, who had to escape from Nazi Germany in 1936 (a fictional life of Lot and his wife, which narrates how she looked back at the burning Sodom, in order to define better herself existentially and even participate in divine justice).

By the way, literary examples of male authors inspired by the story of Lot's wife aren't lacking. Let's mention La statue de sel by Albert Memmi, partial autobiography of a Tunisian Jew lived at the times of French colonialism, published in 1953 with a preface by Albert Camus. Or, far more recently, Elie Wiesel's “Lot's Wife”, in his 2003 collection Wise Men and Their Tales, where the understood historical background grows that of the Holocaust or Shoah. Reliably, the most moving defence of the wife of Lot may be read in the 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, by the North-American writer Kurt Vonnegut, set in Dresden during the Second World War: “And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”

As usual, the title of the above etching by Diane Victor, dated 2008, is “Lot's Wife”. Yet, the emblematic scene there represented isn't usual at all. The message especially contained in the afore mentioned novel by Dominique Bosco, referred to the phenomena of exile or of a forced migration of individuals and peoples, grows more and more general. It gets extended to the African continent, and to analogous situations or recurrent events, in that which once was defined “Third World”. In the iconic work of the South-African artist, the connotation of a civil denunciation is so evident, that it doesn't require further comments.

Last but not least, let's focus on the angelic figures. The print below on the left (from Figures de la Bible, illustrated by Gerard Hoet and others, published by Pierre de Hondt, The Hague, 1728; p. 20) shows Lot and daughters fleeing from Sodom. His wife is visible in the background, already transmuted into a statue of salt. According with a conventional iconography, let's notice, they aren't alone. Two handsome youths escort and guide them. Albeit depicted without wings, they are the angels of the biblical narration. Indeed, they don't seem much impressed by the tragic destiny of Lot's wife or of her sinful, unlucky city.

On the right, let's observe another lithograph, by the North-American painter and printmaker Benton Murdoch Spruance (1948; a painted version of it also exists, in a private collection). No doubt, this is a Surrealist-styled artwork, where a winged female angel in the foreground, and a headless, armless womanly sculpture in the middle background, are represented. If this statue stands for Lot's wife after her transmutation into salt, most likely that angel symbolizes the voice of her nostalgic and compassionate self, such as we have read afore evoked in the verse by Anna Akhmatova. May a female shaped angel suggest different feelings and choices, from those suggested by male ones? Anyhow, for sure the wife of Lot didn't look back only. Her gaze was turned inward as well. Moreover, what depicted in the far background resembles the mushroom of an atomic bomb. The eyes of this modern Lot's wife didn't look so much at a remote past, as rather at a recent one.