Fascinating Feat

'Paradise Lost' Embedded in Middletown Man's Memory

You could understand being captivated by the title.

Or even by the blind poet who penned it.

But to memorize all 12 books of the epic poem in iambic pentameter, to commit the entire 100,000 words and 10,565 lines of "Paradise Lost" to memory, and then to recite them in public over a period of three days, well that's going above and beyond the call of the lark.

On Dec 7, 8 and 9, Middletown resident John Basinger will perform "Paradise Lost" in its entirety in the auditorium named after him at Three Rivers Community College in Norwich. Memorizing the poem, which John Milton finished in 1667, took Basinger eight and a half years. Reciting it will take him three days.

But if the expectation is that the only person who would desire to memorize "Paradise Lost," not to mention perform it, would be a fusty, wizened old pedant with a sour mien and soporific delivery, Basinger would fail the test. Mr. Chips, he isn't.

At 67, John Basinger, a lanky man with an orange marmalade beard, crinkled khakis, heather gray T-shirt, brown leather jacket and black baseball cap, bounds, sockless, into the Athenian Diner in Middletown. From the canvas rucksack he has slung over his shoulder, he produces two battered volumes of "Paradise Lost." But "battered" does not do his "working volume" justice. It is bloated; it is torn; it is underscored; it is highlighted; it is taped; it is tattered. It looks as if it has been through the spin cycle of a Maytag and left to dry in a wheat field. This is nothing, Basinger says. "You should have seen the one I lost on an airplane."

For 20 years, John Basinger taught speech, theater and sign language at Three Rivers College in Norwich. But when he retired in 1993, he saw a landscape of possibilities before him. This man whom his wife first spied singing and clicking his heels on a Middletown sidewalk, did not turn to whittling. He did not turn to fishing. He did not turn to gardening.

He turned to the magnum opus of a grim-visaged Cromwellian who penned the epic poem of good and evil, God and Satan, sin and salvation.

"Well, some people might turn to this or that," says Basinger in his mirthful Midwestern twang. "It's something of a lark."

Something of a lark that has occupied him for one or two hours every day for the past eight years. "Paradise Lost" was the toy that this slim, Tigger-like professor emeritus turned to in the supermarket while he was waiting in line with a loaf of raisin bread. He trifled with it in the car, while stuck in traffic. He recited it in lines of 21, recoiling back again to the beginning and appending five more lines, before returning again to the beginning and doing it all over again. He began to see pictures of the page of text before him. It might have driven his wife crazy had he not recited it while massaging her feet, sending her off into an epic dreamscape.

Basinger is not a man with a photographic memory. He's not somebody who is know for remembering things. The whole saga grafted itself into his marrow not because he has some secret trick or arcane mental faculty, but because, as he says, "I just worked like hell." Ask Basinger why this poem, or why this author, or why this fossil from, as Basinger describes him, "The oldest, deadest white man" in English literature, and Basinger feigns ignorance. "I think this is God's sense of humor, or his punishment, for not memorizing my Bible verses as a boy." But Basinger's blithe riposte belies a circuitous life of coincidences and contradictions that has circled back, however ironically, to the beginning.

Basinger grew up as a devout Mennonite in Minnesota, where his histrionic demeanor and verbal fluency led friends and family to presume that he would follow God's call to the pulpit. "There you are a bright young man with the gift of gab, and there was this sense that I'd naturally progress to the ministry," says Basinger. He might have done so if he hadn't had something of a "spiritual crisis" when he was studying science in Chicago in 1954. As he mirthfully describes it, "I heard the call, and I said ‘no.'"

Instead, he studied science and mathematics, and might have progressed to teaching those subjects if a fellow Wesleyan student hadn't needed a cast member for a high-school dramatic production. Thinking of it brings swirls of laughter from Basinger, who now sees the image of his twentysomething self emoting in front of 750 high school students both ludicrous and seminal. After the performance, he was smitten and began a career teaching theater, which included a longtime involvement with the National Theatre of the Deaf. "One hears the call to serve the Word in official ways," Basinger says wryly. "Having turned away from the call the first time, I have returned to it in a different capacity." He picks up a piece of rye toast flecked with marmalade. "The arm of the Lord is long," he says, smiling.

But the story that Milton tells of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from The Garden of Eden has eerie parallels to Basinger's own life. His youth, he says, was a landscape of proscribed behaviors and prohibitions that were as palpable as Milton's acutely visual story.

So when Basinger turned away from that Mennonite faith he felt a sense of relief. But his choice of "Paradise Lost" as a self-imposed mission naturally brings up questions of whether that moment was, in a way, his own Paradise Lost. "I affirm and swear, that all the time I worked on this, I simply was chewing at the task," he says, "objectifying it. I have never ever talked before about it in personal terms. It has now, since I have mastered it, become more personal."

He says his spiritual crisis, or awakening left him both relieved and encouraged. "I was turning away from what had been my life in the direction of I didn't know what. At the time, it was a feeling of ‘oh, oh, now what?'

That would be a way of describing what happened to me. It meant going from a clear path to a vast unknown. It was a Paradise Lost in a manner off speaking."

But that's far from the way Adam and Eve confront the brutally unfamiliar landscape that awaits them after their expulsion from the Garden. Milton's poem, the last half of which was composed while he was blind, is essentially an oral work. It was the last epic poem published before the development of the novel, which, in a sense eclipsed not only such poetry, but our ability to retain such epics in memory.

"Milton meant ‘Paradise Lost' to be heard," Basinger says. "And what happens as you perform it is that it becomes like a piece of music. ‘Paradise Lost' is meant to be heard. The fact that it's not heard is a disservice to the work."

Listening to Basinger reciting scraps of the poem reveals something of how he managed the feat. As he recites the beginning, "Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit/Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste/Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,/With loss of EDEN, till one greater Man/Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat," Basinger's five spindly fingers tap out a rhythm on the Formica diner table. The iambic pentameter has a measured, soothing texture. And the characters - Adam - the paragon of virtue, Eve - the beautiful but conniving woman, Satan - bewitching enchanter - are as real as they are familiar.

"We have all met him in one form or another," Basinger says of Satan. "Someone who is really smart, sensitive, has a great deal of self-awareness. He's got all of this enormous virtue and things that would naturally have us gravitate to him. His fault is that he overreached. Great as he was, he attempted to be greater. Hubris. It was pride, really."

In the end, "Paradise Lost" is not one man's story, but humanity's story. "This is such a marvelous work because it completely transcends Christianity. It speaks to the whole business of how we, as decent people move through the vicissitudes of life and move to what makes us better. The only thing that could possibly happen to a child to save it from the loss of innocence is that we come to know how to live as people. We have to live with the shame of what we've done, the distress of having done things to other people. It has to allow us to assume that we don't throw it all away. That we hold onto some piece of it. We have to accept that there is a something in the universe that is drawing us toward, toward--" Basinger holds out his hands, palm up and tilts his head inquisitively. "Toward what? We don't know. That's the power of it."

An excerpt of the work follows:
They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Some natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow,
Through EDEN took their solitarie way.

Tracy O'Shaughnessy is associate features editor of the Waterbury Republican-American in Waterbury, Conn.. She has worked as a columnist and features writer since 1994. Born in Lexington, Mass., she graduated from American University, studied at Georgetown University and received her master's degree at Wesleyan University this year. Her columns and arts writing have won awards from many sources, including The Society of Professional Journalists, the Scripps-Howard Foundation, the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors and the New England Associated Press News Executives Association. She has received the Wilbur Award for her columns on religion and the Clarion Award for her columns on women. She is married to the writer Alan Bisbort and has a new son, Paul James. She lives in Cheshire, Conn.