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Friday
“Over 170 million people are under heat alerts from California to Maine,” read a headline in yesterday’s Washington Post, and the news in the rest of the world is just as bad, making descriptions of Milton’s hellall too relevant. It’s as though we are the fallen angels in Paradise Lost, trying to figure out what to do next now that we find ourselves attached with “adamantine chains” to “penal fire.”
One of the proposals sounds, unfortunately, like what climate denialists advocate—which is, to do nothing and hope things get better. Belial, Milton tells us, counsels “ignoble ease and peaceful sloth,” which is about par for today’s Republican Party:
This is now Our doom; which if we can sustain and bear, Our Supreme Foe in time may much remit His anger, and perhaps thus far removed Not mind us not offending, satisfied With what is punished…
Or maybe, Belial adds, we can just accustom ourselves to the “new normal” (my words, not his). Simply by our enduring rising temperatures and conforming to the changed circumstances,
Familiar [will become] the fierce heat, and void of pain; This horror will grow mild, this darkness light…
Belial, at least, acknowledges that the suffering they are undergoing has been brought about by their own actions. That’s a step further than our climate denialists are willing to go.
Or perhaps they are taking comfort in another poem about extreme weather events. Once we’re all dead, as Shakespeare points out in Cymbeline, heat and cold will no longer be a problem for us:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun; Nor the furious winter’s rages, Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages; Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney sweepers come to dust.
Responsibility is called for, however, for those of us who believe we should take care of the earth we have been given. As the angel Raphael points out to Adam in book seven, God’s purpose in creating this heavenly garden has been to provide those humans with the chance to dwell “holy and just” as they “rule over his works, on earth, in sea, or air.” Our job, Adam later tells Eve, is to figure how “best to fulfill the work which here God hath assigned us.”
Returning again to Raphael, he reassures Adam that humans will be “thrice happy…if they know their happiness, and persevere upright.”
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Thursday
Today is the birthday of conservative satirist Hilaire Belloc, which gives me an excuse for sharing one of his Cautionary Verses for Children. When I was a child, I loved and memorized many of Belloc’s darkly comic poems, which mocked the didactic verse intended to instruct people my age. Belloc writes about what can happen to children who stray from their nannies (get eaten by lions), tell lies (are burned in house fires), slam doors (die), eat pieces of string (again, die) or play with loaded guns (get scolded by their parents).
Belloc wrote in the spirit of Lewis Carroll, who also mocked heavy-handed didactic poetry. “How Doth the Little Crocodile,” for instance, is a send up of Isaac Watts’s “How Doth the Little Busy Bee,” which has such passages as the following:
In works of labor or of skill, I would be busy too; For Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do.
Lewis writes:
How doth the little crocodile Improve his shining tail And pour the waters of the Nile On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin, How neatly spreads his claws, And welcomes little fishes in With gently smiling jaws!
Alice is often an inadvertent rebel against the adult world, one who tries to follow—but in the process accidentally mocks or subverts—its rules. Sometimes these rules are capricious, at other times so self-evident that they shouldn’t need explaining. For instance, when Alice encounters a bottle that says, “Drink me,” she hesitates:
It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not”; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked “poison,” it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
In Cautionary Verses, Belloc comes up with his own “nice little histories.” One of my favorites is “Jim, Who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion”:
There was a Boy whose name was Jim; His Friends were very good to him. They gave him Tea, and Cakes, and Jam, And slices of delicious Ham, And Chocolate with pink inside And little Tricycles to ride, And read him Stories through and through, And even took him to the Zoo— But there it was the dreadful Fate Befell him, which I now relate.
You know—or at least you ought to know, For I have often told you so— That Children never are allowed To leave their Nurses in a Crowd; Now this was Jim’s especial Foible, He ran away when he was able, And on this inauspicious day He slipped his hand and ran away!
He hadn’t gone a yard when—Bang! With open Jaws, a lion sprang, And hungrily began to eat The Boy: beginning at his feet. Now, just imagine how it feels When first your toes and then your heels, And then by gradual degrees, Your shins and ankles, calves and knees, Are slowly eaten, bit by bit. No wonder Jim detested it! No wonder that he shouted “Hi!”
The Honest Keeper heard his cry, Though very fat he almost ran To help the little gentleman. “Ponto!” he ordered as he came (For Ponto was the Lion’s name), “Ponto!” he cried, with angry Frown, “Let go, Sir! Down, Sir! Put it down!” The Lion made a sudden stop, He let the Dainty Morsel drop, And slunk reluctant to his Cage, Snarling with Disappointed Rage. But when he bent him over Jim, The Honest Keeper’s Eyes were dim. The Lion having reached his Head, The Miserable Boy was dead!
When Nurse informed his Parents, they Were more Concerned than I can say:— His Mother, as She dried her eyes, Said, “Well—it gives me no surprise, He would not do as he was told!” His Father, who was self-controlled, Bade all the children round attend To James’s miserable end, And always keep a-hold of Nurse For fear of finding something worse.
I love how the “self-controlled” father instantly finds a way to turn the tragedy into a moral lesson.
Although I’ve associated Belloc with Lewis, there’s another influence that may be more direct. The 1845 children’s classid Der Struwwelpeter (“Shock-Headed Peter”), written by German author Heinrich Hoffmann, terrified me as a child when its images of a scissor man who cuts off the thumbs of children who continuous sucked them or a girl who burns herself up while playing with matches. (Only her cat is upset.) Although his stories are over the top, Hoffman appears to be serious, writing with the design of terrifying children into submission.
It may be that the poem about thumb sucking is actually a warning against masturbation. Whatever the case, the images of the scissor man chasing the little boy haunted my childhood dreams.
And it’s worth reflecting on the presence of sadism, not only in Der Struwwelpeter and Cautionary Verses, but also in Lewis Carroll and in one of Belloc’s most famous successors, Roald Dahl. Terrible things happen to characters in all of these supposedly comic works for children. In Alice, cats eat mice and birds (so Alice informs a collection of mice and birds), a queen orders beheadings, and the walrus and the carpenter devour a group of oysters they have invited to the beach for a friendly walk and talk. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one child blows up like giant blueberry while another falls into a river of chocolate. And of course there’s headmistress Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, who imprisons children in “the chokey” and throws them out of windows.
Rather than turn away in horror, however, children—or at any rate, children who are like I was—are fascinated. They understand such stories and poets are comically satiric, which is one way to handle the conflicting emotions they are starting to have as they learn about violence and death in the world.
In fact, the sadistic thrill they get from bad things happening to literary kids is a way of inoculating themselves. As Hobbes famously theorized, we laugh to proclaim our superiority over those who have some defect or weakness, the weakness in this case being child vulnerability. Children are (in part) Hobbesian creatures, driven by self-interest, and in Belloc they get to relish the demise of children who are both them and not them. If others suffer, maybe we’ll escape.
Of course, when children encounter non-comic versions of child victims, they often sober up. Melodrama tugs at the heart and helps develop empathy. But one must go turn to other kinds of children’s lit to get that. One won’t find it in Belloc.
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Wednesday
Yesterday President Biden announced the establishment of a national monument honoring Emmett Till, the 14-year-old who was brutally murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi and whose death helped launch the civil rights movement. The monument also honors Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who made sure the world experienced the horror of the murder by choosing to have an open casket funeral.
Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is one of many literary works that mentions the lynching. In a barbershop conversation, we see the men of the community attempt to process the event.
As with any discussion, there are multiple perspectives. Freddie, a shrewd operator, blames Emmett for being (as he sees it) stupid. Walter, a character who only appears this once, naively believes that the law will intervene. The others push back.
As protagonist Milkman enters the barbershop, the others are listening to the radio:
It was some time before Milkman discovered what they were so tense about. A young Negro boy had been found stomped to death in Sunflower County, Mississippi. There were no questions about who stomped him—his murderers had boasted freely—and there were no questions about the motive. The boy had whistled at some white woman, refused to deny he had slept with others, and was a Northerner visiting the South. His name was Till.
Railroad Tommy was trying to keep the noise down so he could hear the last syllable of the newscaster’s words. In a few seconds it was over, since the announcer had only a few speculations and even fewer facts. The minute he went on to another topic of news, the barbershop broke into loud conversation. Railroad Tommy, the one who had tried to maintain silence, was himself completely silent now. He moved to his razor strop while Hospital Tommy tried to keep his customer in the chair. Porter, Guitar, Freddie the janitor, and three or four other men were exploding, shouting angry epithets all over the room. Apart from Milkman, only Railroad Tommy and Empire State were quiet—Railroad Tommy because he was preoccupied with his razor and Empire State because he was simple, and probably mute, although nobody seemed sure about that. There was no question whatever about his being simple.
Milkman tried to focus on the crisscrossed conversations. “It’ll be in the morning paper.” “Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t,” said Porter. “It was on the radio! Got to be in the paper!” said Freddie. “They don’t put that kind of news in no white paper. Not unless he raped somebody.” “What you bet? What you bet it’ll be in there?” said Freddie. “Bet anything you can lose,” Porter answered. “You on for five.” “Wait a minute,” Porter shouted. “Say where.” “What you mean, ‘where’? I got five says it’ll be in the morning paper.” “On the sports page?” asked Hospital Tommy. “Or the funny papers?” said Nero Brown. “No, man. Front page. I bet five dollars on front page.”
“What the fuck is the difference?” shouted Guitar. “A kid is stomped and you standin round fussin about whether some cracker put it in the paper. He stomped, ain’t he? Dead, ain’t he? Dead, ain’t he? Cause he whistled at some Scarlett O’Hara cunt.” “What’d he do it for?” asked Freddie. “He knew he was in Mississippi. What he think that was? Tom Sawyer Land?” “So he whistled! So what!” Guitar was steaming. “He supposed to die for that?” “He from the North,” said Freddie. “Acting big down in Bilbo country. Who the hell he think he is?” “Thought he was a man, that’s what,” said Railroad Tommy. “Well, he thought wrong,” Freddie said. “Ain’t no black men in Bilbo country.” “The hell they ain’t,” said Guitar. “Well, he thought wrong,” Freddie said. “Ain’t no black men in Bilbo country.” “The hell they ain’t,” said Guitar. “Who?” asked Freddie. “Till. That’s who.” “He dead. A dead man ain’t no man. A dead man is a corpse. That’s all. A corpse.” “A living coward ain’t a man either,” said Porter. “Who you talking to?” Freddie was quick to get the personal insult. “Calm down, you two,” said Hospital Tommy.
The conversation continues as to whether the law will hold the men accountable. As it happens, the cynics will prove correct: even though the murderers talked openly about their crime, the jury still set them free. Our knowledge of this makes the subsequent discussion darkly ironic:
“I’m serious now,” Hospital Tommy went on. “There is no cause for all this. The boy’s dead. His mama’s screaming. Won’t let them bury him. That ought to be enough colored blood on the streets. You want to spill blood, spill the crackers’ blood that bashed his face in.” “Oh, they’ll catch them,” said Walters. “Catch ’em? Catch ’em?” Porter was astounded. “You out of your fuckin mind? They’ll catch ’em, all right, and give ’em a big party and a medal.” “Yeah. The whole town planning a parade,” said Nero. “They got to catch ’em.” “So they catch ’em. You think they’ll get any time? Not on your life!” “How can they not give ’em time?” Walters’ voice was high and tight. “How? Just don’t, that’s how.” Porter fidgeted with his watch chain. “But everybody knows about it now. It’s all over. Everywhere. The law is the law.” “You wanna bet? This is sure money!” “You stupid, man. Real stupid. Ain’t no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair,” said Guitar. “They say Till had a knife,” Freddie said. “They always say that. He could of had a wad of bubble gum, they’d swear it was a hand grenade.” “I still say he shoulda kept his mouth shut,” said Freddie. “You should keep yours shut,” Guitar told him.
At this point the conversation turns to personal experiences of how the men have coped with racism. Some of the men turn to comedy, knowing (as Jews have also known) that sometimes laughter is the only way of handling a reality that is stacked against you:
The men began to trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they’d witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves. A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness.
We later learn that many of the men in the shop, including Guitar, are members of “the Seven Days,” a group that kills an innocent White for every innocent Black who is killed by Whites. In imagining the group, Morrison is exploring what happens when murderous violence responds to murderous violence. Angry though she herself is—the Seven Days is a dark wish fulfillment—she realizes that such violence can spiral out of control. In fact, by the end of the novel Guitar is not only going after Whites but after fellow Blacks who don’t see the world exactly as he sees it.
In fact, his shooting of Milkman’s aunt Pilate, who earlier put on a black mammy act to spring him and Milkman out of prison, shows the hatred ideologues have for people who find other ways to deal with oppression. His attempt to kill Milkman grows out of the paranoid delusions that his violence has brought on.
Toni Morrison uses her novel to find a balance between angry Black separatism and identity-denying Black assimilation. Milkman finds out who he is by connecting with and claiming his rich Black heritage, which in turn shows him a way forward. There are good reasons why Song of Solomon is Barack Obama’s favorite novel.
These days, the struggle is between those who want to erase this heritage and those who want to honor it. Although racists have demolished three previous signs indicating the spot where Emmett Till’s body was retrieved from the river, a New York sign company has created and installed a fourth sign, bullet proof and monitored, that appears here to stay. And although figures like Florida governor Ron DeSantis are attempting to rewrite this country’s racial past—in his case by having his Education Department essentially claim that slavery was like an unpaid internship or a skill-building program (!)—others are setting up national monuments so that we will never forget. As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said Monday night, “It’s good to remember it’s not just the authoritarian right that is ascendant as a global trend. It is also ‘resistance’ to authoritarianism that can be a global trend.”
Maddow concluded, “The fight back is ascendant too. Resilience matters.”
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Tuesday
Back in 2010 I blogged on how Robert Oppenheimer was a fan of the devotional poet George Herbert. I had just read a biography co-written by my Carleton classmate Kai Bird, who turned up this fascinating fact. Now that Kai’s book has been turned into a Christopher Nolan biopic, I’ve learned about another 17th century poet that Oppenheimer liked. Apparently, in settling upon “Trinity” as the code name for the detonation of the first atom bomb, the director of the Manhattan Project was alluding to the John Donne sonnet “Batter My Heart, Three-Person’d God.”
[Side note about Kai Bird: When I was news editor of Carleton’s student newspaper, he would send us dispatches about unrest in Pakistan, where he was studying. Running his articles on atrocities directed against what was then East Pakistan, we billed Kai as our “correspondent in Pakistan,” as though we had multiple foreign correspondents.]
In American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Kai and Martin Sherwin relate a story about a dinner party involving Oppenheimer, theologian Reinhold Neibuhr, and diplomat George Kennan, the architect of the Soviet containment doctrine. Discovering that Kennan did not know Herbert’s poetry, Oppenheimer apparently introduced him to “The Pulley.” Here’s the poem:
The Pulley By George Herbert
When God at first made man, Having a glass of blessings standing by; Let us (said he) pour on him all we can: Let the world’s riches, which dispersed lie, Contract into a span.
So strength first made a way; Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honor, pleasure: When almost all was out, God made a stay, Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure, Rest in the bottom lay.
For if I should (said he) Bestow this jewel also on my creature, He would adore my gifts instead of me, And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature: So both should losers be.
Yet let him keep the rest, But keep them with repining restlessness: Let him be rich and weary, that at least, If goodness lead him not, yet weariness May toss him to my breast.
As both biography and film make clear, Oppenheimer was a brilliant and conflicted individual. Along with being one of the world’s leading scientists, he was also a Renaissance man, at one point learning Sanskrit and reading the Bhagavad Gita in the original. (This enabled him, after witnessing the first atomic explosion, to quote Krishna, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”) He had a restless intellect that never stopped.
That’s why he was drawn to the restless Herbert. “The Pulley” is a poem about what it takes to “pull” us to God, the nature of a pulley being that we must descend to rise. While Herbert appreciates God’s generous gifts to humans, he can’t understand why he has difficulty opening his heart to God. He even seems to blame God for making him this way. Why has God given him a restless mind that obstructs his desire to surrender to the divine? Intellectually he knows what he should do, but he can’t love God with all his heart, soul, strength and mind, as Jesus counseled. I sense that he feels like a bird beating itself against a mental cage.
Herbert laments his restlessness in other poems as well. In “The Collar,” for instance, he describes himself as raving and growing fierce and wild. One can see such restlessness in the Nolan film, which finds powerful images for conveying Oppenheimer’s inner state. While sometimes we see him gazing with wonder at the pulsating universe, at others we see him driven almost mad by the power he sees in exploding stars, where the gravitational pull is so strong that it can swallow light. Sometimes he fears that the chain reaction he is seeking will ignite the atmosphere and end all life on earth.
In Herbert’s case, “The Pulley” ends with consolation. Maybe, the poet figures, he will wear himself out so much that he will fall at last, exhausted, into God’s arms. Maybe then he will find “the peace that passeth all understanding,” to quote from the Anglican liturgy. If he can’t find peace through his strength, beauty, wisdom, and honor, perhaps he will arrive there through fatigue.
The gifted Oppenheimer understood Herbert’s struggle, even if, as a secular Jew, he didn’t embrace the poet’s vision of atonement with God. Fully aware that his own brilliance was not leading him to inner peace, he appreciated Herbert for voicing his condition. Perhaps he was soothed by the poet’s vision of final rest.
One encounters similar restlessness in the poem that led to his “Trinity” designation. In “Sonnet XIV” Donne, an intellectual poet if there ever was one, is despairing that his Reason can’t save his heart from being taken over by irrational dark forces:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp’d town to another due, Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end; Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain, But am betroth’d unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Oppenheimer may not believe that it is Satan who has captured the citadel of his heart (Donne writes that he is “betroth’d” unto God’s enemy). But the scientist does know that “Reason” is not saving him, meaning that he needs tough love to batter the enemy that is swarming over his defenses. He knows that, to borrow from Bacall’s line to Bogart in the movie The Big Sleep, “Sugar won’t work. It’s been tried.”
One can see the connection he draws between a three-person’d Trinity that batters and the most powerful human-caused explosion the world has ever seen. Did Oppenheimer really desire for the bomb would batter the world with god-like force? Was there some part of him that thrilled when he quoted Krishna’s “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”? Perhaps, momentarily, the answer to both questions is yes. After all, he saw that it would take supreme force, not rational negotiation, to stop the Nazi slaughter of his people. But scientific Reason, of which he was a master and upon which he relied to guide his life, failed to quell his inner turmoil.
I’m not convinced that Oppenheimer is a great film—the director often gets lost in the weeds—but Nolan’s depiction of this turmoil explains why Oppenheimer would have been drawn to 17th century metaphysical poetry. At few times in literary history has Reason been more at war with itself.
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Monday
As I was reading about the life of legendary singer Tony Bennett, who passed away Friday, I had a shock: some of his World War II experiences, along with their aftereffects, sounded a lot like my father’s. Scott Bates died ten years ago and I’m regretting that I can’t ask him about this.
According to a Washington Post article, Bennett was a member of the army regiment that liberated a Landsberg, Germany concentration camp, which was a subcamp for Dachau. Bennett later wrote,
“I’ll never forget the desperate faces and empty stares of the prisoners as they wandered aimlessly around the campgrounds…[T]hey had been brutalized for so long that at first they couldn’t believe we were there to help them and not to kill them.”
Although my father didn’t liberate a concentration camp, he did see Dachau three days after the U.S. army freed the prisoners. One of his jobs in the summer of 1945 was to take Germans through the camp to show them what their country had been doing, proving to them that the camps were not just American propaganda.
The Bennett story that most hit home with me, however, was an officer’s reaction when Bennett tried to take a Black friend, an old high school buddy, to a Thanksgiving meal for servicemen. The Post has his story:
The pair got as far as the lobby of the building the Army was using as a mess hall when they were berated by an irate officer. In the segregated military of the day, the two men were not allowed to be seen with each other at a military function, never mind share a meal together.
“This officer took out a razor blade and cut my corporal stripes off my uniform right then and there,” Bennett wrote. “He spit on them and threw them on the floor, and said, ‘Get your ass out of here!’”
Bennett was reassigned from Special Services to Graves Registration, where he dug up the bodies of American soldiers killed in combat for reburial in military cemeteries. The experience “was just as bad as it sounds,” he recalled.
My father, meanwhile, used to tell me about being teamed up with an African American and a white southerner when he was serving as an MP (military police) in Munich. It was there that he had his first first-hand encounter with southern racism (my father was from Evanston, IL), directed against a man my father liked and respected. Tensions arose amongst the three of them as they carried out their job, and my father refused the alliance that the White man wanted to form against the African American. If anything, the two of them held the southerner at a distance.
According to the Post, Bennett’s war experience shaped both his views on racial equality. In the 1960s he became a civil rights activist and later an outspoken critic of South African apartheid:
In 1965, his friend and singer Harry Belafonte asked him to walk in a civil rights march planned by King in Selma. Bennett accepted without hesitation.
“I kept flashing back to a time twenty years ago when my buddies and I fought our way into Germany,” he wrote in his autobiography. “It felt the same way down in Selma: the white state troopers were really hostile, and they were not shy about showing it.”
My father too became a civil rights activist, working with our local NAACP chapter to integrate Tennessee schools, including instigating a legal action on behalf of his children (I was 11 at the time) directed against the Franklin County Board of Education.
My father and Bennett also shared strong anti-war views. Bennett reports, “My life experiences, ranging from the Battle of the Bulge to marching with Martin Luther King, made me a life-long humanist and pacifist, and reinforced my belief that violence begets violence and that war is the lowest form of human behavior.”
In addition to helping integrate both our county school system and the University of the South at Sewanee, where he taught, my father was also a lifelong member of the War Resisters’ League, several times editing their yearly calendars and producing the anthology Poems of War Resistance.
Reading about Bennett gave me a clearer sense of how the war shaped my father, who in turn shaped my own view of the world. I conclude today’s post with a poem my father wrote about his World War II experience in response to my son Toby (“Mike” in the poem) asking him about those years. I note that my father rejected the appellation “the greatest generation” and his use of quotation marks in the title indicate sarcasm:
“The Greatest Generation” By Scott Bates
“What was the Second World War like?” I am asked by my youngest grandson, Mike, Who has just remembered that he has To write a paper for his English class And hopes his grandfather will tell him a story Like Private Ryan, full of guts and glory. “That’s easy,” I answer—I am the One Who Was There, the Expert, the Veteran– (Who has read in the paper, by the way, That thousands of vets die every day), “It was boring, mostly,” I say, “and very Gung-ho.” I think. “It was pretty scary. And long. And the longer it got, the more idiotic It seemed.” I stop. “It was patriotic.”
How to tell the kid the exciting news That we survived on sex and booze. And hated the Army and hated the War And hoped They knew what we were fighting for . . . . And I remember my buddy, Mac, Who got shot up in a tank attack, And Sturiano, my closest friend . . .
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Sunday
As yesterday was Mary Magdalene’s Feast Day, I share a Rilke poem about the woman who was both a follower of Jesus and a wealthy patron. Over the centuries, for problematic reasons, Christians have conflated her with the adulterous woman whom Jesus saved from stoning and the sinning woman who bathed Jesus’s feet with tears. There is no question that she was one of the women at Jesus’s tomb, however, and in “The Pieta,” which appeared in Rilke’s Magdalene sequence, he has her cradling the crucified Christ. The poem may have been inspired by Rodin’s “Christ and Mary Magdalene” sculpture, which itself is a play on Michelangelo’s famous sculpture.
In Rilke’s version, the cradling is sensual, not motherly. Magdalene at last gets what she has wanted—to hold Jesus in her arms—but the crucifixion has also robbed her. She wants Jesus for herself exclusively and so bridles at how he has given his love to the whole world. “Your heart is open to the passerby:/ none should have entered there, save only I,” she laments jealously.
Death and sexual passion become bound up together in Rilke’s haunting vision. The poem is tender, heartbreaking, and perhaps somewhat disturbing.
The Pieta By Rainer Maria Rilke
So once more, Jesus, I behold your feet, feet that long since my pitiful hands laid bare, to wash them,—then they seemed a boy’s, I thought; how they stood tangled in my covering hair, like a white wild thing in the briers caught.
For the first time, this night of love, your sweet and never-cherished limbs are mine to know. I never warmed them with my body’s heat,— now I may only watch them, thus brought low.
But look, your hands, your wasted hands, are torn: Beloved, not by me, with passion’s thorn. Your heart is open to the passerby: none should have entered there, save only I.
Now you are tired, your mouth, that tired flower, has no desire for my mouth of woe.— When, Jesus, Jesus, O when was our hour? Strangely together to our doom we go.
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Friday
The recent New Yorker has an article—”The Tyranny of the Tale”—on the way that story telling is being sold as “the solution to everything.” Like Peter Brooks in Seduced by Story: The Uses and Abuses of Fiction, about which I’ve written multiple posts, Parul Sehgal notes, while storytelling is often touted as a powerful change agent, often it can work as a cage.
His complaint appears to be that “story supremacists” don’t acknowledge the downside. Instead, he says, they say we must “be spoken to in story” for the sake of “comprehension and care.” By using this tool, these advocates say, we can save “wildlife, water, conservatism, your business, our streets, newspapers, medicine, the movies, San Francisco, and meaning itself.”
Story, Sehgal continues, “has elbowed out everything else, from the lyric to the logical argument.” He draws on various academics that I have written about in the past (Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens, Jonathan Gottschall in The Storytelling Animal) as he surveys the claims:
All sorts of studies are fanned out in defense: we are persuaded more by story than by statistics; we recall facts longer if they are embedded in narrative; stories boost production of cortisol (encouraging attentiveness) and oxytocin (encouraging connection). We are pattern-seeking, meaning-making creatures, who project our narrative needs upon the world.
For Sehgal, this is a problem. For instance, the “unruliness of life” is “ill-served by story and its coercive resolution” because, by forcing reality into our storytelling agendas, we miss much. He cites Plato’s suspicion about story (I’ve also written about this), how it seduces us away from reason. For instance, Sehgal says, story supremacists may stress the importance of religious narratives but, in doing so, they miss the other ways that sacred texts communicate. For instance, “Religious texts were delivered as often in riddles as in parables; much of the Quran is non-narrative.”
And then there’s this:
Classics of ancient literature do not always evince story in a conventional sense: Gilgamesh is woven out of speeches; Beowulf scarcely has a causal plot. For centuries, Scheherazade’s stories, collected as The Arabian Nights were excluded from the canon of Arabic literature precisely because they were stories, classified as khurafa—fantasies that were fit only for women and children, that sat in the shadow of poetry, the revered genre of the time.
It is here where we begin to see the problem with Sehgal’s argument. First, I’ve never once met anyone who said that Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and Arabian Nights are not stories, whatever else they might be. The authors he cites approvingly–he mentions Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan, Muriel Spark, and practitioners of the nouveau roman (say, Alain Robbe Grillet)—are all, at one level or another, storytellers. It is in Sehgal’s use of the qualifier “conventional sense” that we can see where he has gone astray: he is conflating all narrative, from great literature to simple “problem presented-problem solved” stories. Just because stories have multiple dimensions to them doesn’t mean they aren’t stories.
Take Beowulf, for instance, which not only contains multiple stories but even features bards telling stories, along with the stories they tell. True, the epic sometimes jumps around and can seem disjointed. For instance, we have the story of the last veteran, then we jump to the dragon moving into his funeral barrow, then we learn that the dragon has been roused to anger upon having had a cup stolen, then we jump to its burning down Beowulf’s hall, then we see Beowulf looking back and seeing his life as one meaningless death after another (with each death presented as a story), then he is fighting the dragon. So okay, this isn’t a straightforward narrative. But the whole coheres when you realize that the storyteller is grappling with the problem of Beowulf getting old and in danger of becoming a dragon. The story, one realizes, is not unlike the story of King Lear, who at one point warns, “Come not between a dragon and his wrath.”
Beowulf is a complex story while the problems with story that Sehgal points to are those associated with predictable, formulaic, and one-dimensional stories. And it’s true that such stories can be very damaging indeed. Demagogues, for instance, have always used stories to get their way. Donald Trump’s story is always a variation of “X is trying to victimize me.” Mein Kampf is Hitler’s life told as a story. Boring and predictable though such stories may be, for narcissists they never get old. But that doesn’t mean they should be lumped in with all stories.
Sehgal also makes the mistake of thinking that only 20th story authors have become suspicious of story. But from the novel’s very beginnings in the 17th century, authors have probed the nature of narrative. Cervantes gives us a hero crazed by story (1605) and then, in the second volume (1615), introduces characters who have read the first volume and are interacting with Quixote and Sancho Panza with that knowledge. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) is essentially a novel about someone reflecting on how to tell his story, and Henry Fielding spends the introductions to the 18 books of Tom Jones (1748) exploring what exactly he as a novelist is up to. And as for straying from straightforward plot, a novel like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) at one point gives us three different price structures for pawning off one’s baby. (Moll selects option #2.)
I also take issue with Sehgal separating story from other ways of conveying truth. Every form of writing, even the most fact-based and scientific, has a story to it. When I was running a summer faculty writing group at my old college, which I did for a number of years, my question to my fellow writers was always, “what’s the story of this piece?” I saw colleagues in psychology, philosophy, religious studies, history, math and other subjects recognize that thinking of their research in terms of storytelling gave them ways of organizing their material. They usually didn’t foreground the story, instead presenting their data points in ways that were appropriate to their field. Still, they found that seeing their project as a narrative was wonderfully clarifying.
It’s true, as Sehgal and Brooks note, that narrative can be abused. This is true of anything that is powerful, including religion, love, marriage, the law, etc. Great stories take us into deep places while shallow stories can do considerable damage.
So the problem is not that story is omnipresent. That has always been true. The problem lies in distinguishing between stories that reveal truth and those that aim to deceive and harm. A literary education helps students tell the difference.
Additional thought: Deepjeet, a longtime reader, responded to this post with the following useful comment:
My opinion is this – storytelling is being used as a panacea to all problems. I work in startups where story telling is being used as a replacement for lousy business models. It’s like Arabian nights where everyday CEO spins a yard to live another day. However the precaution is also in a story – that of the boy who cried wolf many times only to be stranded when he really needed help.
I absolutely love the application of Scheherazade, who in this scenario becomes an incessant spinner of bullshit. This makes me realize that the New Yorker article didn’t go far enough in showing the various ways that storytelling can be abused. But as Deepjeet notes, storytelling can also function as a corrective. Aesop is one of the many storytellers who can hold us to account in such instances. To cite another at random, King Lear shows us the disasters that can befall us when we allow self-indulgent, wish-fulfilling narratives to guide our political decisions.
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Thursday
Have you ever had a poem that first entranced and then, when you looked at it closer, disappointed you? What are we do with powerful images that are morally dubious? I have in mind Patrick Kavanagh’s “On Raglan Road,” also a popular song. It swept me away when I encountered it on our April trip to Ireland but now really bothers me, in part because the song itself is hypnotic.
“On Raglan Road” is about an aging poet who falls in love with a young woman and then vents his fury when she drops him. Why did he waste his poetic genius on “a creature made of clay,” he wonders.
The poem is based on real people. Kavanagh, when 40, met a 22-year-old medical student, Hilda Moriarty. While she admired his poetry, she didn’t return his romantic feelings and, a year later, married someone younger. Kavanagh used the poem to strike back. Here it is:
On Raglan Road By Patrick Kavanagh
On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue; I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way, And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge, The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay – O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.
I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say. With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May
On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay – When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.
The signs for new love are not propitious and the poet even senses he may even “one day rue” falling for the “snare” of “her dark hair.” Nevertheless, he decides to take the plunge anyway, grandly telling himself that, if grief comes, then let it come. He appears to us less grand by the end of the poem.
When Kavanagh writes, “I said, let grief be a fallen leaf,” I thought of Archibald MacLeish’s line in “Ars Poetica” about how grief can be captured by “an empty doorway and a maple leaf.” As Kavanagh sees it, the risk is worth it because his love feels like the dawning of a new day.
Unfortunately for him, the path they take trippingly is at the edge of a deep ravine where can be seen the “worth of passion’s pledge.” In other words, the ravine is filled with the bodies of people who have discovered, after having had passion pledged to them, that the pledge was worthless. Whether Moriarty ever pledged her love to Kavanagh is up for debate—she says not—but he feels betrayed.
In their brief relationship, he says, he gave her inestimable “gifts of mind” and “poems to say.” Once it was over, however, she made a point of walking the other way whenever she saw him (“on a street where old ghosts meet”), leaving him to his bitter reflections. Or so goes the story in the poem.
Rejection by a love object is an ancient story, one which many poets have voiced. I think, for instance, of Shakespeare’s sonnet 147, which concludes, “For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,/ Who art as Black as hell, as dark as night.” If “Raglan Road” bothers me more than Shakespeare’s dark lady sonnets, it may be on account of Kavanagh’s sleazy innuendo. A Substack essay (author unknown) helps me piece this together.
The essay points out that, by noting that the Queen of Hearts is making tarts, he is hinting that she is a loose woman. This implication is reenforced by the reference to Dublin’s Grafton Street, which apparently had a reputation as a street for female sex-workers. It’s not enough for Kavanagh to express his disappointment; he must slime the woman as well.
It’s worth noting that the tarts allusion was originally even more sexually suggestive, accusing Moriarty of fake or “synthetic” sighs and describing her eyes as “fish-dim.” Before being changed, the line read, “Synthetic sighs and fish-dim eyes, and all death’s loud display.”
Meanwhile the mention in the rewritten line to the poet “not making hay” means, for farmer poet Kavanagh, not doing productive work—which in his case is writing poems. In other words, this siren has seduced him away from his calling and, to add insult to injury, has not properly appreciated the gifts he has bestowed upon her.
The Substack essay helpfully annotates the image of an angel losing his wings. The book of Genesis speaks of the “immortal and spiritual sons of God” becoming mortal men after they took to wife corporeal women:
[T]he sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years (Genesis 6:3-4, King James version).
In short, Kavanagh sees himself as a higher order angel while Moriarty is a mere creature made of clay. Rather than making heavenly music with him, she has clipped his wings. And done it at the dawning of his love, no less.
Now, I agree with Kavanagh that poetry is a heavenly gift, and it’s certainly the case that idealized muses have led to some great poems. One thinks of Fanny Braun for Keats and Maud Gonne for Yeats, with the latter telling the poet that he should be happy she has rejected him because
you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.
Kavanagh’s heartbreak has led to a potentially great poem in this instance. It’s just that I find distasteful his sense of entitlement and his need to smear Hilda Moriarty to make himself feel better. It reduces a grand love into something petty.
Of course, poets are human like the rest of us. It’s just that the best poems about rejected love manage to transcend our smallness. As Gonne points out, poets can use their pain to achieve further insight. In the Shakespeare sonnet I referenced above, for instance, the Bard is exploring and even mocking his own blindness; he’s aware that his furious outburst is as much directed at himself as at the woman and he senses it may even be overdone. Indeed, in other poems to the same lady he acknowledges that he lives in denial (e.g., “When my love tells me she is made of truth,/ I do believe her, though I know she lies”).
I see none of this higher-level processing at work in Kavanagh’s poem. Just hurt feelings and naked resentment.
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Wednesday
As Trump daily sounds more like Mussolini and Hitler—and as the GOP and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation sign on to his expressed plans to invest all power in an authoritarian (Republican) president—New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat becomes essential reading. I recommend subscribing to her daily essays (you can get the shorter versions free) for her insights on authoritarianism. In her most recent post, the author of Strongmen talks about the importance of self-care as we push back against Trump’s efforts to turn us into Victor Orban’s Hungary.
Before going further, here (according to a recent New York Times report) is what Americans face:
Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.
Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.
I write about Ben-Ghiat’s latest essay here because she cites an exiled Chinese dissident recommending Sisyphus as a model for how not to burn out while fighting for democracy. The man’s allusion brings to mind Albert Camus’s famous essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.”
“I would say my personal hero is Sisyphus,” the exiled Chinese dissident artist Badiucao remarked when I interviewed him in Feb. 2022. Facing continual Chinese government efforts to shut down his shows abroad, he takes inspiration from the Greek mythological figure who was eternally rolling a large stone uphill. “It seems like what I’m doing is always censored and taken down, constantly being threatened. But the very action of an individual who keeps trying in the right direction, has its own value, regardless of the result.”
But because pushing that giant stone day after day is exhausting, Ben Ghiat adds, we need to attend to self-care. That’s because
fighting for democracy is taxing on the body and the spirit. It can be difficult to show up day after day to protest or work on lawsuits, legislation, or voter registration without knowing what the outcome of your efforts will be. This is where hope factors in, as well as the self-regard that comes from knowing you are doing the right thing.
Camus acknowledges the exhausting part but adds that the labor is also what gives our lives meaning. He sums up the story as follows:
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
There are different versions of Sisyphus’s crime, but Camus focuses on one in particular. Sisyphus has persuade Hades to temporarily return him to the world of the living to see to a domestic matter. Instead of immediately returning, however, he decides to stay:
But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.
This love of life is important and, according to Camus, never leaves him, even when he is undergoing his incessant toil. Like other existentialists, Camus sees us living in an absurd universe—which is to say, in a godless universe where our suffering and dying make no sense—while Sisyphus is “the absurd hero” who refuses to surrender to this reality (say, by committing suicide). Instead, he looks to himself to find meaning, regardless of the consequences:
He is [the absurd hero], as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.
Camus imagines Sisyphus committing himself wholeheartedly to the task of pushing the rock up the slope:
[O]ne sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
For Camus, the key moment is the descent, which is the hour of consciousness. If one is pushing against an authoritarian regime that appears as immutable as the rock, then it is when the activist is pausing to reflect upon his struggle that “he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”
Camus does not underestimate the challenge. The boundless grief can be “too heavy to bear,” he says before adding, “These are our nights of Gethsemane.” And yet, he contends, “crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.”
To elaborate on this point, he shifts to Greek tragedy, especially Oedipus. After he is crushed by the gods in unimaginable ways, the Theban king asserts this freedom. He is no longer the plaything of blind fate because he accepts his condition and acts freely. We see him doing this in both Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus, and it is the sequel play that Camus cites, writing,
[B]lind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.” Sophocles’ Œdipus…thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
Here’s the passage, which occurs when Oedipus is about to be driven from a sacred grove dedicated to the furies:
Oedipus: Daughter, what counsel should we now pursue? Antigone: We must obey and do as here they do. Oedipus: Thy hand then! Antigone: Here, O father, is my hand.
Oedipus’s conclusion that “all is well,” Camus says, is a sacred remark, which echoes in
the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
To cite another example, I think of Agave at the end of Euripides’s The Bacchae. She has just, under Dionysus’s spell, torn her own son apart for having insulted the god. But whereas Dionysus is a one-dimensional presence—“I am a god. And when insulted, the gods do not forgive”—she has the force of suffering humanity. She doesn’t lapse into paralysis but reaches out to both her father and her dead son, saying to the latter,
I wash your wounds. With this princely shroud I cover your head. I bind your limbs with love, flesh of my flesh, in life as in death, forever.
Remember that, in today’s post, for the god-decreed rock we are substituting authoritarianism, which activists must incessantly push against. Their reward is discovering that their fate rests in their own hands. As Camus puts it, “All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him.” And he concludes,
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
The fight for democracy is enough to fill our hearts. Ben-Ghiat just wants to make sure that, as we walk down that slope, we find ways to restore ourselves before we start pushing again.
