Trump Sycophants = Winged Monkeys?

By Robin Bates | Published: August 15, 2022
Witch sics her Winged Monkeys on Dorothy

Tuesday

Yesterday Donald Trump’s niece applied L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz those Republican politicians who have been bashing the FBI while defending Donald Trump for having carried off state secrets. “Remember how aggressively the flying monkeys protected the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz? Then when she melted the fever broke?” she asked, before adding, “It’s gonna be like that.”

In other words, GOP politicians are going to defend the former president to the hilt until, suddenly, they’ll stop.

One shouldn’t be too confident in her prediction given how Trump, time and time again, has retained the loyalty of his followers when all appeared lost for him. Still, I turned to Baum’s book to see what fevers look like when they break.

It’s worth noting just how vicious the monkeys originally are. Think of them as those Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol and who continue to threaten violence. Upon the command of the Wicked Witch of the West, some of them

seized the Tin Woodman and carried him through the air until they were over a country thickly covered with sharp rocks. Here they dropped the poor Woodman, who fell a great distance to the rocks, where he lay so battered and dented that he could neither move nor groan.

Others of the Monkeys caught the Scarecrow, and with their long fingers pulled all of the straw out of his clothes and head. They made his hat and boots and clothes into a small bundle and threw it into the top branches of a tall tree.

The remaining Monkeys threw pieces of stout rope around the Lion and wound many coils about his body and head and legs, until he was unable to bite or scratch or struggle in any way. Then they lifted him up and flew away with him to the Witch’s castle, where he was placed in a small yard with a high iron fence around it, so that he could not escape.

They are fully prepared to destroy Dorothy as well but discover that she is supported by the kiss of the Good Witch of the North. They therefore capture her instead, carrying her off to the Wicked Witch.

After Dorothy destroys the witch, she learns that, by employing her golden cap, she too can command the monkeys. When they are carrying her and her companions back to the Emerald City, she learns their history from their leader. His description of their pre-captivity days may sound—to some members of the GOP—like the good old days before Trump:

“Once,” began the leader, “we were a free people, living happily in the great forest, flying from tree to tree, eating nuts and fruit, and doing just as we pleased without calling anybody master. Perhaps some of us were rather too full of mischief at times, flying down to pull the tails of the animals that had no wings, chasing birds, and throwing nuts at the people who walked in the forest. But we were careless and happy and full of fun, and enjoyed every minute of the day. 

Then they play a trick on the fiancé of a sorceress and become members of the Trump cult captives of the golden cap.

Another group victimized by the Witch are the Winkies, who—like the rest of us—have had to suffer under a tyrannical reign. Here’s what happens after Dorothy frees them:

There was great rejoicing among the yellow Winkies, for they had been made to work hard during many years for the Wicked Witch, who had always treated them with great cruelty. They kept this day as a holiday, then and ever after, and spent the time in feasting and dancing.

Many of us thought we could start feasting and dancing when Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election. It appears our battle with the former president is not yet over.

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Rushdie, a Voice for Reason

By Robin Bates | Published: August 14, 2022
Salman Rushdie

Monday

After Indian novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed Friday, many have reported on something he said in a speech before the PEN Club three months ago. As the New India Express summed it up, Rushdie stated that

 a poem cannot stop a bullet, a novel cannot defuse a bomb, but we are not helpless, we can sing the truth and name the liars. We must tell better stories than the tyrants!

I’m one of Rushdie’s many fans, especially of Midnight’s Children. Today, however, I repost an essay I wrote on Rushdie’s debate with Islamic fundamentalism in his fantasy novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. There we see two medieval Islamic theologians squaring off, Ibn Rushd (a.k.a. Averroes) and al-Ghazali. Rushdie traces much of the religious infighting we are witnessing back to this famous debate, and the issues addressed apply not only to Muslims. It fact, they arise in all debates between Reason and Faith.

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ibn Rushd was a 12th century philosopher who believed that God gave us Reason to understand creation. The 11th century philosopher Ghazali, on the other hand (this according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) saw God rather than natural law as the basis of reality. In other words, the debate was set within Islam between Reason and what Rushdie regards as blind faith.

Like Rushdie, I’m in the Ibn Rushd camp. In the Episcopal Church we sometimes say that, when we enter church, we don’t check our brains at the door. God gave us this great gift to use it. Or as the Internet Encyclopedia puts it,

Ibn Rushd strived to demonstrate that without engaging religion critically and philosophically, deeper meanings of the tradition can be lost, ultimately leading to deviant and incorrect understandings of the divine.

Of course, we must guard against the sin of pride, as John Wilmot warns us in Satyr against Reason and Mankind. We can become too full of ourselves if we don’t let God guide us. (See Frankenstein.)

In Rushdie’s fantasy, jinn awaken the corpses of Ibn Rushd and Ghazli, who debate from their crypts. The rational Ibn Rushd opens the debate:

“Let us think of the human race as if it were a single human being,” Ibn Rushd proposed. “A child understands nothing, and clings to faith because it lacks knowledge. The battle between reason and superstition may be seen as mankind’s long adolescence, and the triumph of reason will be its coming of age. It is not that God does not exist but that like any proud parent he awaits the day when his child can stand on its own two feet, make its own way in the world, and be free of its dependence upon him.”

The faith-based Ghazali pushes back:

“As long as you argue from God,” Ghazali replied, “as long as you feebly try to reconcile the rational and the scred, you will never defeat me. Why don’t you just admit you’re an unbeliever and we can take if from there. Observe who your descendants are, the godless scum of the West and East. Your words resonate only in the minds of kafirs [African blacks]. The followers of truth have forgotten you. The followers of truth know that it is reason and science that are the true juvenilia of the human mind. Faith is our gift from God and reason is our adolescent rebellion against it. When we are a;dult we will turn wholly to faith as we were born to do.”

Rushd counters that time is on his side:

“You will see, as time goes by,” said Ibn Rushd, “that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates. It may take a thousand one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God’s truth.”

Once Rushd starts talking about the future, however, Ghazali feels on familiar ground:

“There,” said Ghazali,. “Good. Now, father of many bastards, you begin to speak like the blasphemer you are.” Then he turned to matters of eschatology, which, he said, was now his preferred topic, and he spoke for a long time about the end of days, with a kind of relish that puzzled and distressed Ibn Rushd.

And further on:

For what the living call life is a worthless triviality when compared to the life to come.

There are fundamentalist Christians who also believe this, making Ibn Rushd’s puzzlement relevant to more than just Muslims. As Ibn Rushd complains to the good jinn Dunia, Ghazali

believes that God has set out to destroy his creation, slowly, enigmatically, without explanation; to confuse Man into destroying himself. Ghazali faces that prospect with equanimity, and not only because he himself is already dead. For him, life on earth is just an anteroom, or a doorway. Eternity is the real world.

It so happens that Ghazali has released a dark jinn from a bottle and told him to instill fear in humans. Doing so, he believes, will bring them to God:

“Teach them,” Ghazali said, “Teach them the tongue of the divine Just-Is. The instruction should be intensive, severe, even, one could say, fearsome. Remember what I told you about fear. Fear is man’s fate. Man is born afraid, of the dark, of the unknown, of strangers of failure, and of women. Fear leads him towards faith, not as a cure for fear, but as an acceptance that the fear of God is the natural and proper condition of man’s lot. Teach them to fear the improper use of words. There is no crime the Almighty finds more unforgivable.”

“I can do that,” said Zummurud the Great. “They’ll be speaking my way soon enough.”

“Not yours,” Ghazali corrected him, but only mildly. When one was dealing with a Grand Ifrit one had to make certain allowances for his vast egotism.

Ghazali, however, has underestimated how much damage a fear-inducing jinn can do. In the book, he has literally let the genii out of the battle. Like many fundamentalists, Zummurud will indeed set himself up in place of God. In fact, he horrifies Ghazali when he manifests in the terrorism of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups:

As Ghazali would soon discover, however, sending the most potent of the dark jinn down the path of extreme violence could have results that alarmed the sender. The student soon surpassed the master.

Ibn Rushd is given one last chance for a counterargument, and it is a version of Rushdie’s comments at the PEN Club:

The enemy is stupid. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.

It can be hard to hold on to that idea in the face of terrorism, including Friday night’s stabbing. That Rushdie continues to make public appearances, even with a fatwa hanging over his head, shows that he is willing take chances in order to get the word out. Since he appears to have survived the attack, I suspect we’ll hear a lot more from him, even with evil jinn goading on people who wish him dead.

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Our Guide: The Light that Burns Within

By Robin Bates | Published: August 13, 2022
St. John of the Cross

Spiritual Sunday

I know it’s rather late in life, but I’m finally dipping my toes in the poetry of St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic famous for “the dark night of the soul.” It is in our darkest moments, spiritual guides tell us, that we find ourselves able to shed distractions find our way to God. Old identities are annihilated to make way for new.

John may have composed “On a Dark Night” when he was being imprisoned and tortured for his efforts to reform the Carmelite order. Although there’s no reference to literal imprisonment in the poem, John describes finding a secret ladder, down which he climbs disguised. His only light is “the light that burned in my heart.”

But because it leads him to reunite with Christ the beloved—the imagery appears to be taken from The Song of Solomon—the night becomes “more welcome than dawn”:

On a dark night
By St. John of the Cross
Trans. By Ken Krabbenhoft

On a dark night,
afflicted and aflame with love,
O joyful chance!,
I went out unnoticed,
my house lying silent at last.

In darkness and secure,
down the secret ladder, disguised,
O joyful chance!,
in darkness, and shielded,
my house lying silent at last,

one joyful night,
in secret: no one was watching
and I saw no other thing,
my only light and guide
the light that burned in my heart.

That same light led me
more surely than the noonday sun
to where one was waiting,
the one I knew would come,
where surely no one would find us.

O you my guide, the night,
O night more welcome than dawn,
night that drew together
the loved one and the lover,
each transformed into the other!

On my blossoming breast,
kept untouched for him alone,
there he fell asleep,
and I caressed him
while boughs of cedar stirred the air.

On the ramparts
while I sat ruffling his hair,
the air struck my neck
with its gentle hand,
leaving my senses suspended.

I stayed; I surrendered,
resting my face on my Beloved.
Nothing mattered.
I left my cares
forgotten among the lilies.

I love the tenderness of the imagery and am also struck by the unexpected reversal: the speaker is comforting Christ, not (as is customary) the other way around. Ultimately, however, there is no difference between the loved one and the lover. It is as though, in rendering himself vulnerable, Jesus is providing the speaker with the comfort that comes in comforting.

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Merrick Garland as Birnam Wood

By Robin Bates | Published: August 11, 2022
Malcolm prepares Birnam Wood attack against Macbeth

Friday

There’s been a Macbeth sighting in the public news recently. Reporting on the FBI descending upon Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to seize illegally pilfered documents—a story that gets more interesting by the hour—former special agent for the FBI and now Yale lecturer Asha Ramgappa said that Attorney General Merrick Garland was employing a Birnam Wood approach. My instant response: “That’s really cool!”

It’s a perfectly applied allusion. Macbeth believes he will never have to account for his crimes because a supernatural apparition, conjured up by the witches, has informed him of the following:

Be lion-mettled, proud; and take no care
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are:
Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.

Macbeth feels as invulnerable to accountability as Trump, After all,  

Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root?

Meanwhile Malcolm, like the FBI, is plotting his stealth attack—although the FBI at least let Trump’s Secret Service detail that it was coming (not to mention sending an earlier subpoena). Nevertheless, stealth from better than a full frontal assault, and stealth has been Garland’s M.O. He aims to catch Trump off guard:

Let every soldier hew him down a bough
And bear’t before him: thereby shall we shadow
The numbers of our host and make discovery
Err in report of us.

When Birnam Wood begins to move, Macbeth goes into the same kind of denial we are seeing from Trump and his faithful followers. They just want to hear good news, not the truth. Although to their credit, they probably won’t hang truthtellers from trees until they starve to death:

Messenger
As I did stand my watch upon the hill,
I look’d toward Birnam, and anon, methought,
The wood began to move.
MACBETH
Liar and slave!
Messenger
Let me endure your wrath, if’t be not so:
Within this three mile may you see it coming;
I say, a moving grove.
MACBETH
If thou speak’st false,
Upon the next tree shall thou hang alive
Till famine cling thee.

I’ve compared Trump to Macbeth multiple times (for instance, here), but I haven’t focused on who or what would take him down. The unassuming Garland, who resembles the unassuming Malcolm, works for me.

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School in August?! Blake Appalled

By Robin Bates | Published: August 10, 2022
Edward Henry Potthast, Children Playing at the Seashore

Thursday

My four Georgia grandchildren began school this week, which for much of the world sounds outlandish. Who outside of the United States starts school in the heart of the summer?

William Blake would certainly disapprove. Check out his “School Boy”:

I love to rise in a summer morn,
When the birds sing on every tree;
The distant huntsman winds his horn,
And the skylark sings with me.
O! what sweet company.

But to go to school in a summer morn
O: it drives all joy away;
Under a cruel eye outworn.
The little ones spend the day.
In sighing and dismay.

Ah! then at times I drooping sit.
And spend many an anxious hour.
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learnings bower.
Worn thro’ with the dreary shower.

How can the bird that is born for joy,
Sit in a cage and sing.
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing.
And forget his youthful spring.

O! father & mother if buds are nipped,
And blossoms blown away.
And if the tender plants are stripped
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and cares dismay.

How shall the summer arise in joy
Or the summer fruits appear,
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy
Or bless the mellowing year.
When the blasts of winter appear.

This isn’t Blake’s only poem involking the tragedy of birds in cages. In “Auguries of Innocence,” which is a set of Blakean proverbs, he writes,

A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.

Blighted minds, Blake fears, will grow up to become blasted adults. Best to have children sing with the summer skylark.

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The Suggestiveness of Peaches

By Robin Bates | Published: August 9, 2022

Wednesday

Periodically I share comic tweets from my youngest son’s twitter feed because I find them to be hilarious. The above image is Toby repurposing an image (or meme) that has been bouncing around the twitterverse. If you don’t pick up on the literary allusions, I explain them below.

In posting it, I’ve given you the punchline without the set-up. Since the joke in such twitter humor lies in how successfully one hijacks the original image for one’s own purposes, here’s the original image so that you can compare:

The original drew a lot of twitter criticism because it trades in stale gender stereotypes of women caring for others and men caring only for themselves. Furthermore, the cartoonist’s sense of women’s moral superiority rubbed a number of readers, not only men, the wrong way. The two figures have essentially been reduced to caricatures.

Toby’s repurposing not only makes the cartoon funnier—at least for literature nerds—but more complex. The woman’s new response (as I’m sure many of you know) references Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, the man’s T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Rossetti’s poem is a wild phantasmagoria involving forbidden fruit, which is a stand-in for (I simplify here) casting off all sexual restraint. Its fairy tale mysteriousness makes it one of my all-time favorite poems. Here’s are “the goblin men” tempting Laura and her sister:

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries–
All ripe together
In summer weather—

Laura gives in to temptation, buys, indulges, and then loses all joy in life. Fortunately, her sister—who heroically resists goblin temptation—sacrifices herself, thereby saving Laura. The poem is a rich exploration of sexual repression and sublimation.

In Eliot’s poem, meanwhile, the socially insecure and uptight Prufrock, attempting always to be perfectly proper, occasionally imagines (but does no more than imagine) taking a daring action. One of these actions involves eating a peach:

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

Apparently parting his hair behind in the bohemian style and walking casually and freely upon the beach (in flannel trousers, no less!) are fairly daring for Prufrock, who normally dresses in the height of fashion. (Example: “My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, /My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin.”) Eating a peach, especially given Rossetti’s poem, hints at sensuality. Might he too shake off all restraint and, like Laura, indulge his repressed desires?

But no sooner has Prufrock mentioned stepping outside his comfort zone than, like earlier in the poem, he retreats back into it. Victorian sexual repression appears to be alive and well in Eliot’s 1915 poem. No sensual encounters with mermaids for him.

So look how Toby’s repurposing has made the original cartoon more interesting. Rather than a woman boasting her moral superiority over her selfish husband, we have a couple each wrestling with marital frustrations in very human ways. Both appear to worry that aging is robbing them of their youthful vitality and imagine doing something wild and forbidden. Perhaps each is contemplating an affair.

Perhaps they’ll never act upon their fantasies but instead, in Thoreau’s phrase, continue to live lives of quiet desperation. In any case, a peach is operating very much as it does in both Rossetti’s and Eliot’s poem, triggering thoughts that otherwise lie hidden beneath the surface. The woman may not be as different from her husband as she thinks.

Suddenly we have the kind of drama that D. H. Lawrence famously takes on, say in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Li-Young Lee’s seasonally appropriate “From Blossoms,” which owes a lot to Rossetti (and to Mary Oliver as well) also comes to mind:

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward   
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

There are few taste sensations more delectable than a fresh peach from Georgia, Toby’s home state. If you come across one, dare to eat it.

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The Ballad of Bathtub Gin

By Robin Bates | Published: August 8, 2022
Antti Faven, Moonshiners

Tuesday

The post I was writing for today has fallen apart rather late in the day so, as a last minute measure, I share a very witty parody—written by my father—of Rudyard Kipling’s “Gunga Din.”

The original poem, while it has a wonderful rhythm, is somewhat problematic. It’s about a British soldier realizing, somewhat patronizingly and sentimentally, that the regimental water boy is a worthy man in his own right. You can read the whole poem at Poetry Foundation but here’s enough of it to set up the parody:

You may talk o’ gin and beer   
When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,   
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter   
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.   
Now in Injia’s sunny clime,   
Where I used to spend my time   
A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen,   
Of all them blackfaced crew   
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din,   
    He was ‘Din! Din! Din!
‘You limpin’ lump o’ brick-dust, Gunga Din!
     ‘Hi! Slippy hitherao
      ‘Water, get it! Panee lao,
‘You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din.’

And here’s the last stanza, where Gunga Din is killed while bringing water to the speaker, who has himself been shot:

E carried me away
To where a dooli lay,
An’ a bullet come an’ drilled the beggar clean.   
’E put me safe inside,
An’ just before ’e died,
‘I ’ope you liked your drink,’ sez Gunga Din.   
So I’ll meet ’im later on
At the place where ’e is gone—
Where it’s always double drill and no canteen.   
’E’ll be squattin’ on the coals
Givin’ drink to poor damned souls,
An’ I’ll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!   
      Yes, Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!   
   Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,   
      By the livin’ Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

My father’s poem was written in a place and at a time where illegal Appalachian moonshine was the only alcohol one could buy locally, Franklin County, Tennessee being a dry county in the 1950s and 1960s. To meet the inevitable demand, some converted their bathtubs into stills, just as today the same kinds of people have turned their bathtubs into meth factories. Here’s the poem:

The Ballad of Bathtub Gin
By Scott Bates

You may talk of Scotch an Rye
When you’re drink’ on the sly
An’ you feel you ain’t got nothin’ much to lose;
But when it comes to liquor
You’ll never get there quicker
Than on good ol’-fashioned rotgut, homemade booze!

Now in Frisco’s foggy clime
Where I used to spend my time
Indulgin’ in the gentle arts of sin,
Of all the local brew
The most potent stuff I knew
Was that belly-bustin’ beverage, bathtub gin!

Refrain
It was gin! gin! gin!
You super-saturated Mickey Finn!
Hey, gimme another slug!
Wipe the sawdust off the plug!
Takes the ring right off the bathtub, bathtub gin!

But they carried me away
To where a jacket lay,
A double-vested job with strings to lace ’er;
An’ when they got me tied
I ’eard ’em say aside,
“ ‘E should’ve taken Draino for a chaser!”

So now I’m getting’ bored
In the Alcoholic Ward
An’ I’m getting’ tired o’ watchin’ my D.T.’s;
But when they treats me rude
I just dreams o’ getting’ stewed,
An’ they can give me trouble all they please!

So it’s gin! gin! gin!
Though they put me in this moldy storage bin,
I know that when I die,
I’ll be really ridin’ high
’Cause I’ll get a swig in Hell of bathtub gin!

–Yes, it’s gin! gin! gin!
What a pandemonic pickle I’ll be in!
By the devils that distill you
And the poor damned souls that swill you,
You’re the hottest hooch in Hades, bathtub gin!

Did you have fun? I pick up some rebellion in the poem: my father came from a teetotalling family—his grandfather moved to Evanston, IL because it was home to the national headquarters of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union—and the most I ever saw my grandmother stray was a dash of brandy in the Christmas pudding once a year. They were scandalized when my father, their darling youngest son, returned from World War II drinking, smoking and (maybe worst of all) having voted for Roosevelt.

I’m not sure why my father sets the poem in San Francisco—maybe because it scans better—since the fog he refers to applies equally well to Sewanee, Tennessee. In any event, moonshiners were local celebrities when I was growing up.

Not that my father partook. The stuff, after all, could render one blind. He drove to Chattanooga to get the beer and wine, which was all he ever drank. In his poem, however, he gets into the spirit of the illicit manufacture of “good ol’ fashioned rotgut, homemade booze.”

Further note: Franklin County is no longer dry so now enterprising souls have switched from moonshine to the far more harmful meth. In fact, we are now known as “Meth Mountain,” and a dentist friend, who runs a free dental clinic on Tuesdays, says he spends pretty much all his time pulling meth teeth.

Yikes, that’s a downer way to end today’s post.

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Loving Lit, the Road to Well-Being

By Robin Bates | Published: August 7, 2022
William Worcester Churchill, Woman Reading on a Settee

Monday

I’ve been listening to Amor Towles’s novel Rules of Civility, which has a protagonist that is an enthusiastic novel reader. I share today Katie comparing Dickens to a morning cup of coffee. The passage is set up by an account of what that first cup meant to her father, who is reminiscing on his deathbed:

Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee.

“Only decades later,” Katie says, “would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice.” Here’s her explanation:

Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane—in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath—she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger. What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be treated lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.

Then we get to Dickens:

In retrospect, my cup of coffee has been the works of Charles Dickens. Admittedly there’s something a little annoying about all those plucky underprivileged kids and the aptly named agents of villainy. But I’ve come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.

The day that lit stops giving me that special jolt will probably be the day I’m ready to pack it in.

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Jesus: Like a Sage Resolved to His End

By Robin Bates | Published: August 6, 2022
Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper

 Spiritual Sunday

In 1904 the great mystical poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote “The Last Supper” after seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s painting. I like how he helps me see the picture anew: Rilke contrasts the grounded Jesus (“like a sage resolved to his end”) with the worried disciples (“they flutter anxious”) but also notes how alone he feels.

The disciples are understandably concerned about the news he brings them. In Rilke’s analogy, he has delivered a shotgun blast into their midst and they, like frightened birds, flutter anxiously around as they “try to find a way out.”

But there is no way out. Jesus is “everywhere like a twilight-hour” with night coming on inexorably. Fortunately, after night, the dawn.

The Last Supper
By Rainer Maria Rilke

They are gathered, astounded and disturbed
round him who, like a sage resolved to his end,
takes himself away from those he belonged to,
and who alien past them flows.
The only loneliness comes over him
that reared him to the doing of his deep acts;
now again will he wander through the olive grove,
and those who love him will take flight before him.

He has summoned them to the last supper
and (as a shot scatter birds out of the sheaves)
he scatters their hands from among the loaves
with his word: they fly across to him;
they flutter anxious through the table’s round
and try to find a way out. But he
is everywhere like a twilight-hour.

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