In My Beginning Is My End: An Element of LDS Stories

The Beginning

A few weeks ago, this post got passed around a little corner of Substack:

Wayfare

Mormon Literature Is Arriving: And it’s time for literary critics to catch up.

The two poems I liked best were both in “Canto V: This is the Place,” in Let Me Drown With Moses. The poems are “Up Rock Canyon (Wars)” & “Provo, 2010”.

The first poem is about an 1850 battle in Rock Canyon in Provo, Utah. The battle was between LDS Pioneers & a local Indian tribe. The second poem is about Rock Canyon in 2010. It replaces the LDS Pioneers with the BYU Cougars, and the defeated Indian tribe for the Utah Utes football team (at the time in the Pac-10). When read together the poems contrast current Rock Canyon (sledding, dates, temple visits) with an ancient battleground.

I often think of these poems whenever I’m on a hike somewhere in Utah and come across a random plaque or historical marker.

Societies Built on Societies

The theme that I do love, in which I am very interested, is that of the old getting replaced by the new. Things being built on top of one another. The cycles of civilization. Thats a big theme in the Book of Mormon and the Book of Deuteronomy. Civilizations built on civilizations.

…they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead.

This is, you know, Shelley’s Ozymandias, which got picked up by Breaking Bad and Watchmen.

It’s Richard McGuire’s Here, which was later adapted into a movie by Robert Zemeckis. I didn’t see the movie. I think my brother liked it. Here’s some images from the graphic novel:

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is all about this:

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

All these things remind me of this great picture I saw on reddit years ago:

What a great picture. New stuff built on top of old stuff. People in the new stuff trying to understand the old stuff. Trying to make sense of it all.

The Interview

In addition to reading that James Goldberg article on the Wayfare Substack, I also watched this video on his YouTube channel:

It’s him talking with Melissa Leilani Larson about literature made by and for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.1 I’m about as aware of Melissa as I am of James, I suppose.

Melissa and I both wrote screenplays that Garrett Batty turned into films. She wrote Freetown, which I really enjoyed. I wrote Out of Liberty. She also wrote the screenplay for Jane and Emma – a movie which came out at the same time as Out of Liberty. That film has a title card, right at the beginning of the movie, that I think about every once in a while. Here’s a screenshot of that:

This is a wild title card. I don’t know if she wrote it. Or, a producer. Or, the director. I have no idea who stuck it in the movie.

It’s quite the thing to state at the beginning of a Historical Fiction film. Imagined. Inspired by. Limited record. There are a lot of “real” things going on in the film. And, a lot of not real things. All mixed up together.

It reminds me of Moby-Dick and the idea of presenting the truth. What is a whale? Is the most realistic portrayal of a whale a 1:1 recreation? Is a piece of art with the highest fidelity actually an understatement of the facts? Is it an exaggeration of them? To get to the emotional or subjective truth of what a whale is, do you have to move beyond the objective reality? Seems dangerous. But, maybe necessary? Maybe not.

In a way, the Jane & Emma title card is pretty similar to the image I posted above of the ruins, framed by the metal and transparent plexiglass overlaid with a line drawing of what the ruins could have looked like anciently. It’s an acknowledgement of a limited record and an acknowledgement of the imagination being used to fill in the blanks. But the recreation is not as painterly as the painting of the whale in The Spouter’s Inn.

Video Games, Old Films & Podcasts

Years ago, for some reason, I was Googling whether or not there were any video games that had been built around, or based on, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. It seems like a pretty nerdy thing to do, now that I look back on it. Video games & poetry.

But, I found one! Home is Where One Starts, whose title comes from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

And, it turned out, Home is Where One Starts (a very small, indie game made by one person), was made by David Wehle, who was (is? I don’t know) a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

So, maybe “In my beginning is my end,” is an important element of LDS Art or stories? Obviously, Zemeckis, Eliot, McGuire, and Shelley aren’t members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. So, it isn’t that this is a theme which is unique to LDS stories. But, maybe an important part of them? It does fit into larger theological themes and spiritual ideas of the church.

Family history & ancestry matter a lot to us. Joseph Smith taught: The greatest responsibility in this world that God has laid upon us is to seek after our dead. The prophet says, “They without us cannot be made perfect;” for it is necessary that the sealing power should be in our hands to seal our children and our dead for the fulness of the dispensation of times.”2

The prophet Spencer W. Kimball said, “From time immemorial the Lord has counseled us to be a record-keeping people.” Keeping a journal or a diary is allowing someone at the end to look back to the beginning. It facilitates the action.

The 1993 church film “The Mountain of the Lord,” is about the construction of the Salt Lake City Temple. It opens with a title card emphasizing the use of records in its creation:

But, again, you can’t say this is a uniquely LDS thing. The Mountain of the Lord title card is not so different from the ones that open up Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Those title cards, and intercut video clips, also emphasize that the film was pulled from the actual records of Joan’s trial. They also emphasize the importance of records.

There was a great Tetragrammaton podcast with Angus Fletcher that talked about these ideas:

Towards the end of the podcast, Angus talked about how people who can think about the past, and understand the past, have less anxiety and less stress. Looking toward the future often causes anxiety. And, the further you look into the future, the more anxiety you get, because the future is unknown. And, the distant future is an unknown of unknowns. That’s a lot of anxiety.

Looking into the past allows you to place yourself into a narrative context. It helps you understand yourself. It helps you move forward with more hope and less fear. He said it something like that.

But, this reminds me of one of the complaints that James & Melissa noted in that video I posted earlier. They noted that some people believe LDS art is too optimistic. It is too positive. There’s not enough “authenticity” and “reality.” I assume, this could mean, some people think “there’s not enough anxiety and stress and messed up people,” in LDS Art.

Perhaps, this a consequence of “In my Beginning is My End” being a theme of LDS art. Perhaps being so familiar with one’s past, and one’s history, and spending a lot of time putting it into a narrative context, does make you less anxious. Maybe it does, like Angus says, make you more well adjusted. This, of course, presents a problem for drama. Drama needs conflict, tension, faults, and maybe a little anxiety, to work. Got to have something to overcome and work through.

Cyclicality also presents another problem for modern audiences, which is that they expect endings. They expect beginning, middles, and ends. They want a story with tension, and this overcome, and starts & stops.

A Popular Solution

Perhaps a fix for this is having the theme “In My Beginning is My End” be more than just a theme. Maybe it is a story element. Maybe it is the elixir with which the hero returns to the Ordinary World.

This idea almost gets back to one of the main points of Hadestown. Hadestown is a musical about the myth of Sisyphus & Orpheus. It’s set up to be cyclical—it’s pagan. The story you watch is linear, until it isn’t. It turns out it’s a continuous loop. And, the point of the story becomes its cyclical structure. The end of Hadestown is the beginning of Hadestown. Literally. In its beginning is its end. A continuous loop.

But, the cyclical aspect of the story is used as a story element. It is used as instruction to the audience who is dealing with the sorrow of seeing Sisyphus taken back to the underworld. The audience is emotional about the story’s end result. Because they view it linearly. The play’s silver lining, it’s redemptive aspect, is a cyclical twist. It is a, “Hey. It’s gonna’ be okay. We’re just gonna’ tell the story again. And, Sisyphus & Orpheus will be back together for a little bit longer. And, then they’ll be separated. But, don’t worry. We’ll just tell the story again, and they’ll be back together for a bit.”

I know Hadestown has been a popular play performed out here on the Wasatch Front for the last 3 years. I feel like every high school, junior high, and community theater has put it on recently. Perhaps its popularity is related to its LDS audience enjoying the theme of “In my beginning is my end?”

(As an aside, here’s one of my favorite songs from the play):

I’ve read that before Zoroastrianism, time was largely thought of as cyclical. The seasons. The moon. The stars. All that stuff is cyclical. It was pagan. But, Zoroaster taught that there were three times: Creation, Mixture, and Separation — a beginning, middle, and end. The Abrahamic religions offer the same view of time. Time is linear. So, unlike the seasons, and the story of Sisyphus & Orpheus, time doesn’t just repeat itself over and over again. It moves on and progresses towards a final event.

A Possible Solution

Another possible way of using the theme of, “In my beginning is my end,” comes from the great talk by Elder Dale G. Renlund from a BYU Devotional in 2021.

In this talk he says:

“Repeatedly” means that we cycle through the elements in the doctrine of Christ throughout our lives. “Iteratively” means that we change and improve with each cycle. Even though we cycle repeatedly, we are not spinning in circles like on a merry-go-round without upward motion. If that were the case, the experience would be dizzying and unproductive. Instead, as we cycle through the elements of the doctrine of Christ, we arrive at a higher plane each time. This ascent provides new vistas and perspectives and brings us closer to the Savior. And we eventually return to the presence of our Heavenly Father as an heir to all that He has.

Elder Renlund combines the cyclical, iterative aspects of life, with its linear aspects. He combines the two shapes: a circle and a line, into one: a spiral, going around a mountain. The road goes around and around, but also direction up, higher and tighter. Elder Renlund’s story shape is both cyclical & linear.