Clifton Poems for Cancer Sufferers

Van Gogh, Ward of Arles Hospital

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Wednesday

No sooner did we get home to Tennessee after seven weeks in Slovenia then we were on the road again—seriously jet lagged but resolute—to visit a brother in Iowa who is seriously ill. I was worried that I would lose him when I was in Slovenia and so this chance to see him alive and talk to him directly feels like a reprieve.

I’m reposting an essay written seven years ago when someone else close to me was dying of cancer. Lucille Clifton knew whereof she spoke when she wrote these poems.

Reposted from July 5, 2017

Lucille Clifton’s cancer poems mean a lot more to me since I spent several days in a Bronx oncology ward with my friend Rachel Kranz, who is battling ovarian cancer. I promised Joyce A. Asante, her wonderfully supportive nurse, that I would write a post on those poems so here it is.

Clifton became acquainted with the illness when her husband Fred, who didn’t smoke, came down with lung cancer and died at 49. In Next (1987), Clifton writes both about Fred’s cancer and that of other patients she met in the cancer ward. The book gets its title from a two-line poem that reminds us that the bell tolls for all of us:

the one in the next bed is dying.
mother we are all next. or next.

Clifton is struck by how cancer cells appear to “bloom,” normally a positive, life-affirming process. Not in this instance, however:

something is growing in the strong man.
it is blooming, they say, but not a flower.
he has planted so much in me, so much.
I am not willing, gardener, to give you up to this.

The cancer treatment process seems to violate the natural order in numerous ways, most notably by injecting poisonous medicines into the body. Instead of mothers with nurturing remedies, Clifton sees cold God-like doctors administering chemicals to cure the disease. In “chemotherapy,” she cries out that none of it makes sense:

my hair is pain.
my mouth is a cave of cries.
my room is filled with white coats
shaped like God.
they are moving their fingers along
their stethoscopes.
they are testing their chemical faith.
chemicals    chemicals    oh mother mary
where is your living child?
 

In a poem dedicated to 21-year-old “joanne c.,” probably a patient that Clifton met in the ward, Clifton gets at another confusing aspect of cancer: the body is at war with itself. (The Gettysburg reference signals that it’s a civil war.) Also contradictory is cancer’s “murderous cure”:

the death of joanne c.
11/30/82
aged 21

i am the battleground that
shrieks like a girl.
to myself i call myself
gettysburg. Laughing,
twisting the i.v.,
laughing or crying, i can’t tell
which anymore,
i host the furious battling of
a suicidal body and
a murderous cure.

Clifton is struck by how the very word “cancer” can reduce us to a helpless state. In “incantation,” she imagines that an evil magician has transformed the patient into a puppet. Unlike my friend Rachel, who is an exemplary and therefore difficult patient because she demands that every procedure be explained and justified, the patient in Clifton’s poem has surrendered her autonomy:

incantation
overheard in hospital

pluck the hairs
from the head
of a virgin.
sweep them into the hall.
take a needle
thin as a lash,
puncture the doorway
to her blood.
here is the magic word:
cancer.
cancer.
repeat it, she will
become her own ghost.
repeat it, she will
follow you she will
do whatever you say.

Rachel and I were both struck by how many of the hospital’s doctors engage in power struggles and prefer docile patients to questioning patients. Clifton is never one who will do “whatever you say,” however, and she insists that we own our own emotions. In “leukemia as white rabbit,” she draws on Alice in Wonderland to show a patient acknowledging just how “furious” she is.

Alice encounters the White Rabbit and his pocket watch at the start of her adventures and is struck by his obsession with time. Time, of course, being of paramount importance to one who is dying. To set up the poem, here are a couple of the relevant passages from Alice:

[The White Rabbit] came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to himself as he came, ‘Oh! the Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! won’t she be savage if I’ve kept her waiting!’

and

[I]n a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting ‘Off with his head!’ or ‘Off with her head!’ about once in a minute.

leukemia as white rabbit

running always running murmuring
she will be furious    she will be
furious, following a great
cabbage of a watch that ells only
terminal time, down deep into a
rabbit hole of diagnosticians shouting
off with her hair    off with her skin and
i am    i am    i am    furious.

I can testify, from watching Rachel go through the medical system, that “rabbit hole of diagnosticians” is a perfect description. Each department had its own theory of what was wrong with Rachel and what needed to be treated first—after the Emergency Room, she went first to the cardiac ward and then to the oncology ward, which is probably where she should have been from the first.

In the face of institutional anonymity, Clifton has a fantasy of a powerful and positive incantation, unlike the disempowering “cancer” incantation of the doctors. She imagines her mother, clad as a powerful witch, incanting the words she most needs to hear:

enter my mother
wearing a peaked hat.
her cape billows,
her broom sweeps the nurses away,
she is flying, the witch of the ward, my mother
pulls me up by the scruff of the spine
incanting   Live   Live   Live!

Living, to be sure, may not be an option, as it wasn’t with joanne c. In that instance, a dignified surrender will do. The blood as a white flag may be a reference to declining white blood count:

the message of jo

my body is a war
nobody is winning
my birthdays are tired.
my blood is a white flag,
waving.
surrender,
my mother darling,
death is life.

Clifton may, in this acceptance of death, have in mind a poem by Mary Oliver, who was a friend. The influence goes back and forth as Oliver herself borrows Clifton’s image of bones, which appear throughout her poetry as a metaphor for that which is foundational. In “In Blackwater Woods,” Oliver tells us how we should live and how we should die:

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it


against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

To sum up the trajectory of this post, Clifton moves from confusion to anger to acceptance. The acceptance extends not only to the patient but to those left behind. As she imagines Fred sending her messages, she picks up one that is particularly important:

the message of fred clifton

I rise up from the dead before you
a nimbus of dark light
to say that the only mercy
is memory,
to say that the only hell
is regret

Regret grows out of anger, memory out of love. Only one is healthy.

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Trump’s Orwellian Cabinet Picks

From George Orwell, 1984

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Tuesday

I’m struck by how much my attitude to George Orwell’s 1984 has changed over the years. When I first encountered the novel as a bookish teenager, I reveled in it as a stimulating thought experiment. When I served on a college discussion panel in 1984 during the virulently anti-communist Ronald Reagan administration, it struck me as somewhat over-the-top paranoia about the dangers of totalitarianism. Now I see it as an essential resource for combating Trumpism.

The first time I fully realized the novel’s applicability was when newly elected Trump began telling easily disprovable lies, such as that his inauguration was larger than Barack Obama’s. The point of such lying, Orwell points out, is not to persuade people. After all, there’s compelling photographic evidence on crowd sizes. The point is to get you “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” This, the author tells us, is the Party’s “final, most essential command.”

Trump got virtually the entire Republican party to reject the clear and compelling evidence that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and he has ridden their slavish loyalty to a second term in office in 2024. Now it appears that he has come up with another test: will Republican senators support, for cabinet positions, a nominee for the law that is anti-law, a nominee for national intelligence that is anti-intelligence, a nominee for national defense that is anti-defense and a nominee for science that is anti-science. 

I am using paraphrasing here from an excellent John Stoehr essay in his Substack blog The Editorial Page. Stoehr then goes on to quote Orwell, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” 

The plain awfulness of Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, Stoehr argues, is the point. The Senate really will become no more that clay in his hands if if surrenders to (1) an alleged statutory rapist and sex trafficker to be attorney general; (2) a Russian asset to be director of national intelligence; (3) a religious fanatic and Kremlin stooge to be secretary of defense; and (4) an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist as secretary of health and human resources.

There’s another explanation, one not mentioned in 1984, for why Trump has made such awful picks. In addition to them being a test of Senate loyalty, Stoehr writes that totalitarians

fear individual excellence, first because they can’t understand it, and second because excellence threatens their goal of totalizing conformity. They are not humble enough to admit that they are mediocre people but they are arrogant enough to believe they can force the rest of us down to their level. 

Stoerh concludes by quoting Hannah Arendt:

“Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of lifefor any activity that is not entirely predictable,” she said. Totalitarianism “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty” (my italics). 

We’re all waiting to see how low the Senate will go.

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Returning to a Desecrated Shire

Lee, Wood as Saruman, Frodo

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Tuesday

In the past, when I’ve returned home after an extended visit elsewhere, I’ve sometimes recited “The Road goes ever on and on,” just as Bilbo does at the end of The Hobbit. Upon coming back to the United States this time after spending seven weeks in Slovenia, I’m thinking of a different hobbit homecoming.

I feel as though I’m returning to a country that has been seized by Saruman in my absence. Although the genial Joe Biden is still in charge, we’re about to see Lotho Baggins installed as “Chief,” a new position giving him authoritarian powers. And if Lotho is Trump, then Saruman would be one of his puppet masters, say Vladimir Putin or Elon Musk or Peter Thiel.

The hobbits’ first shock upon their return is to find a hostile reception awaiting them as they pound upon the city gates:

‘Who’s that? Be off! You can’t come in. Can’t you read the notice: No admittance between sundown and sunrise?’

 ‘Of course we can’t read the notice in the dark,’ Sam shouted back. ‘And if hobbits of the Shire are to be kept out in the wet on a night like this, I’ll tear down your notice when I find it.’

Then there are reports of hard-won earnings going to tax cuts for the wealthy “gatherers” and “sharers”:

‘What’s the matter with the place?’ said Merry. ‘Has it been a bad year, or what? I thought it had been a fine summer and harvest.’ ‘Well no, the year’s been good enough,’ said Hob. ‘We grows a lot of food, but we don’t rightly know what becomes of it. It’s all these ‘‘gatherers’’ and ‘‘sharers’’, I reckon, going round counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again.’

Among the new shortages is the Shire’s famous pipeweed:

‘There isn’t no pipe-weed now,’ said Hob; ‘at least only for the Chief’s men. All the stocks seem to have gone. We do hear that waggon-loads of it went away down the old road out of the Southfarthing, over Sarn Ford way. That would be the end o’ last year, after you left. But it had been going away quietly before that, in a small way. That Lotho——’

‘Now you shut up, Hob Hayward!’ cried several of the others. ‘You know talk o’ that sort isn’t allowed. The Chief will hear of it, and we’ll all be in trouble.’

The Hobbits learn more as they go along, including how Lotho done his own version of weaponizing the justice department, which is establishing “the Chief’s men” to go after perceived enemies. One hobbit informs the returning travelers about how the new system works:

 ‘If we all got angry together something might be done. But it’s these Men, Sam, the Chief’s Men. He sends them round everywhere, and if any of us small folk stand up our rights, they drag him off to the Lockholes. They took old Flourdumpling, old Will Whitfoot the Mayor, first, and they’ve taken a lot more. Lately it’s been getting worse. Often they beat ’em now.’

‘Then why do you do their work for them?’ said Sam angrily. ‘Who sent you to Frogmorton?’

‘No one did. We stay here in the big Shirriff-house. We’re the First Eastfarthing Troop now. There’s hundreds of Shirriffs all told, and they want more, with all these new rules. Most of them are in it against their will, but not all. Even in the Shire there are some as like minding other folk’s business and talking big. And there’s worse than that: there’s a few as do spy-work for the Chief and his Men.’

One of the new toughs in town sounds a lot like Steve Bannon, who recently threatened Trump’s enemies with the declaration, “[You] don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity…You deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.” For comparison, check out one of the toughs enforcing the new dispensation:

‘This country wants waking up and setting to rights,’ said the ruffian, “and Sharkey’s going to do it; and make it hard, if you drive him to it. You need a bigger Boss. And you’ll get one before the year is out, if there’s any more trouble. Then you’ll learn a thing or two, you little rat-folk.’

In response Frodo and company, drawing on tradition, arouse the Shire in revolt—“Awake! Awake! Fear, Fire, Foes! Awake! Fire, Foes! Awake!”–and take back their country, disposing of Saruman in the process. Although the country’s wealth has been looted and the environment devastated, in the end the citizens take collective action and restore civil society.

Sadly, our own attempt to raise the Shire was the election and that failed, leaving the “Gatherers and Sharers,” the thugs and the autocrats, in charge. Whether they can maintain power remains to be seen, but we’ll be taking a beating for a while.

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After This Is Over–a Prayer

Albert Bierstadt, Sunset in California

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Sunday

Dan Clendenin’s indispensable blog Journey to Jesus alerted me to this Laura Kelly Fanucci poem. In response to those describing Donald Trump’s victory in apocalyptic terms, Clendenin says the poem—which he calls a prayer—can help us regain our bearings.

 “When This Is Over” provides timely reminders including, most importantly, our potential “to become better for each other because of the worst.”

When This is Over
By Laura Kelly Fanucci

When this is over,
may we never again
take for granted
A handshake with a stranger
Full shelves at the store
Conversations with neighbors
A crowded theater
Friday night out
The taste of communion
A routine checkup
The school rush each morning
Coffee with a friend
The stadium roaring
Each deep breath
A boring Tuesday
Life itself.

When this ends
may we find
that we have become
more like the people
we wanted to be
we were called to be
we hoped to be
and may we stay
that way — better
for each other
because of the worst.

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Zadie Smith in a Postcolonial World

Zadie Smith

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Friday

In my last Postcolonial Literature class at the University of Ljubljana—Julia and I return to the United States tomorrow—I introduced the students to Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time. The novel made a good bookend to the six weeks I have spent with the students.

We began the course by examining how authors like H. Ryder Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad exoticized, orientalized, demonized, and demeaned other cultures. Two groundbreaking theoretical works, Edward Said’s Orientalism and Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, showed us how (1) the colonizers framed the Other for their own benefit while (2) often getting the colonized to look down on their own culture and even their own bodies. What is needed, Fanon declared, is a “literature of combat” that helps form a new national consciousness.

From there we moved on to works by the colonized. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus exposed the colonialists’ project while pushing towards a new consciousness, as did, to a lesser extent, Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Thing and Salman Rushdie’s  Midnight’s Children.

 Then there are writers who have found ways to hybridize clashing cultures to form a third option that draws on the strengths of each. Leslie Marmon Silko in Ceremony explores how to preserve the integrity of the Laguna Pueblo nation within White America while pointing out ways that America desperately needs the Pueblo vision for its own health. Going back in time, I also looked at the 14th century Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight through a postcolonial lens, examining how a Christian culture that had turned against the body in the wake of the Black Plague needed to reconnect with the Green Man, a pagan fertility god that Christianity had never been able to expel, if it was to regain a fruitful relationship with nature.

Some of the authors we read, such as Adichie and Rushdie, don’t only criticize the colonial project but also look at problems that have arisen in postcolonial society. Roy, meanwhile, observes that India has had problems, especially its caste system, that predate colonialism by centuries.

And then there is Zadie Smith, who shows how the colonized, in returning to the motherland, are upsetting traditional distinctions. The new national consciousness here does not involve the former colonies but England itself.

A very funny chapter in Swing Time captures this new reality. In it, the narrator describes working in a crappy pizza parlor after graduating from college. The restaurant is run by an Iranian named Bahran and staffed by immigrants from all over the world, including Republic of the Congo, Somalia, and Bosnia. Narrator Fern, like Smith herself, is Anglo-Afro-Jamaican.

Bahran is one of those immigrants whose longing to belong to the privileged Anglo demographic is so transparent that he is a figure of self-parody. When he claims that polo is his favorite sport, his staff explodes into laughter. Fern observes

a flamboyant, comic rage that expressed itself in a constant obscene teasing of everyone around him—racial, sexual, political, religious teasing—and which almost every day resulted in a lost customer or employee or friend, and so came to seem to me not so much offensive as poignantly self-defeating.

Thinking at first that Fern is Persian because of her nose, Bahran is solicitous and complimentary. When he discovers her mother is from Jamaica, however, he turns on her, telling her that her people “don’t pay, or they fight, or they drug dealers. Don’t give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth.”

Because she needs the money, however, Fern tells us she “couldn’t afford to be offended.”

Tensions are turned up a notch when the restaurant television begins showing Wimbledon matches involving Ben Shelton, a mixed-race American tennis player. Fern reports,

As it happened, I hadn’t been following Shelton had never heard of him really before [Somalian] Anwar pointed him out, but now I did follow him, along with Anwar I became his number-one fan. I brought little American flags to work on the days of his games…Together we cheered Shelton, danced around the place at each successful point, and as he won one match and then another, we began to feel like we, with our dancing and whooping, were the ones propelling him forward, and that without us he’d be done for. At times Bahram behaved as if he believed this, too, as if we were performing some ancient African voodoo rite. Yes, somehow we put a spell on Bahram just as much as Shelton, and as the days of the tournament passed and Shelton still refused to be knocked out I saw Bahram’s many other pressing worries…all slip away until his sole preoccupation was ensuring we did not cheer for Bryan Shelton, and that Shelton himself did not get to the Wimbledon final.

It all comes to a head when Shelton, in the third round, comes up Karim Alami, an Arab player from Morocco. The atmosphere in the pizza parlor becomes electric:

Their match was to start at two. Bahram arrived at one There was a great feeling of anxiety and anticipation in the place, delivery boys who were not meant to come till five came early, and the Congolese cleaner began working through the back of the kitchen at unprecedented speed in the hope she would reach front-of-house—and therefore the television—by the time the game began.

Through the match, Bahram chain-smokes Gauloises cigarettes and offers a running commentary that “had as much to do with eugenics as backhands and lobs and double faults.” This includes delineating the differences between Arabs and those from Sub-Saharan Africa:

The black man, he informed us, he is instinct, he is moving body, he is strong, and he is music, yes, of course, and he is rhythm, everybody know this, and he is speed, and this is beautiful, maybe, yes, but let me tell you tennis is game of the mind—the mind! The black man can be good strength, good muscle, he can hit ball hard, but Karim he is like me: he think one, two step in front. He have Arab mind. Arab mind is complicated machine, delicate. We invent mathematics. We invent astronomy. Subtle people. Two steps ahead. Your Bryan now he is lost.

“But,” Fern reports,

he was not lost: he took the set seven-five and Anwar took the broom away from the Congolese cleaner—whose name I did not know, whose name no one ever thought to ask—and made her dance with him, to some highlife he had going on the transiter radio he carried everywhere.

The euphoria does not last, however, as Shelton loses the next set 6-1, leading to a Bahran attack on Black Africans in general. “Wherever you go in world,” he tells Anwar, “you people at bottom! Sometimes at top White man, Jew, Arab, Chinese, Japan—depends. But your people aways lose.”

Meanwhile, with the score 2-1 sets in favor of Shelton, the game goes into a fourth set, at which point

we had stopped pretending to be a pizza place. The phone rang and no one answered, the oven was empty, and everybody was crammed into the small space at the front. I sat on the counter with Anwar, our nervous legs kicking the cheap MDF panels until they rattled. We watched these two players—in truth almost perfectly matched—battling towards an elongated, excruciating tiebreak that Shelton then lost, five-seven. Anwar burst into bitter tears.

And then, in a passage that my Slovenians and one Macedonian appreciated as it features a former countryman from the Yugoslav days,

“But Anwar, little friend: he have one more set,” explained the kindly Bosnian chef, and Anwar was as grateful as the man sitting in an electric chair who’s just spotted the governor through the Plexiglas, running down the hall.

When Shelton wins the fifth and deciding set, the reaction is electric:

Anwar turned his radio up full blast and every kind of dance burst forth from me, winding, stomping, shuffling—I even did the shim-sham. Bahram accused us all of having sex with our mothers and stormed out.

He then, however, figures out a way to salvage some self-respect. Recall that, up to this point, he has been unloading on Shelton and his employees for their African heritage. Now he plays the one card he has left. Showing Fern a photo of Shelton as she is taking phone orders, he says,

“Look close. Not black. Brown. Like you.”
“I’m working.”
“Probably he is half-half, like you. So: this explains.”
I looked not at Shelton but at Bahram, very closely. He smiled.
“Half-winner,” he said.
 I put the phone down, took my apron off and walked out.

Shelton, in other words, is Black until it serves a racist agenda to categorize him as White.

I share these extended passages because they get at the heart of Smith’s vision, which is that citizens from the former colonies are transforming the motherland, turning it into a vibrant but bewildering new entity in which traditional distinctions are overwhelmed and new alliances are formed.

Of course, this is also leading to the rise of rightwing nationalism in many nations, along with immigrants who dream of joining those in power. In the United States, over the decades, we have seen various groups seeking to join the upper echelons of our caste system and become “White,” including the Irish, the Scots, the southern Italians, the Greeks, the Poles, and so on. In our recent election, it appears that certain Mexican Americans, in spite of Donald Trump depicting them as “rapists and murders,” were willing to vote for him. Trump also drew more support than expected from South and East Asians. How many Bahrams do we have, one wonders–which is to say, how many are willing to denigrate the descendants of Black Africa in order to become acceptable to White America? What are they willing to sell out to achieve acceptance?

For their part, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, despite being mixed race, did not choose to become Black, despite Trump’s claims. America’s caste system is such that they were inevitably “cast” into that identity. To their credit, they embraced it and became inspirational figures. But race continues to be a major force—maybe the major force—in American political life.

Which is why courses on Postcolonial Literature are so vital. The entire world is experiencing cultural explosions such as those described by Smith, and writers everywhere are exploring them. Teaching this class, which was made up of straight-up Slovenians, hyphenated Slovenians (Serbian-Slovenian, Sudanian-Slovenian), and Erasmus students from Germany, Belgium, Macedonia, and Turkey, made this clearer than ever to me.

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Art Takes Us into a Luminescent World

Alan Feltus, Self-Portrait

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Thursday

Julia and I are just back from a wondrous visit with artist friends in Assisi. Alan Feltus and Lani Irwin, accomplished painters whom we first met when we all lived in southern Maryland, relocated to Italy in 1987 and never returned, raising their two sons as bilingual citizens of the world. I report on the visit here because their immersion in the world of the visual arts has given me perspective on my own immersion in the world of literature.

Fascinated by how people use art in their daily lives, Alan and Lani are constantly combing flea markets for items that people have decorated in their longing for beauty. Often these are humble household objects, farm implements, photographs with homemade frames, and tiny shrines to saints.

Along with these are dolls and old toys, fossilized shells, Italian tiles, stuffed animals, religious icons, woven baskets, clocks, hand-painted pottery, parts of musical instruments (which will never play but which Alan loves for the visuals), Pinocchios of all sizes and shapes, animal skulls and bones, antique photos, carpentry tools, tiny human figures, folded paper cranes, mannequin hands, wooden balls, parts of games, and many, many metallic owls. Sometimes the objects on the walls and in the cabinets show up in Alan and Lani’s paintings.

These anonymous artists have applied their talents in ways that few will ever see, bringing to mind the passage from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,”

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
         Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
         The short and simple annals of the poor.

 Alani and Lani marvel at all the different ways that people speak beauty into the world. To borrow from Gray, they do not allow these flowers to “blush unseen”:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
         The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,
         And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Along with the items are paintings and photographs, some by Alan and Lani, some by their sons, some by friends. There are also old photographs of anonymous persons, many with fascinating expressions. Rescued from flea market shoeboxes, they get a second life on the walls of the Irwin-Feltus house.

Along with the house, Julia and I benefited from the Feltuses’ artistic immersion when we went out walking. Sometimes we were in holy places with gorgeous paintings and frescoes, such as the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. But Alan also pointed out interesting iron work on railings and the stonework on wall facings where windows or doors had once been. His curious and creative eyes took in everything.

I realized that I use literature in a similar way. Although I don’t make art, I constantly apply the poems and stories that have moved me to the surrounding world. As a result, it’s as though the world is filled with resonance and infused with meaning. Both the visual and the written arts enhance reality and reveal its luminescence.

Lani Irwin, Memento
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Rushdie on Dreams That Refuse to Die

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Wednesday

Donald Trump’s recent victory has given me new insights into Midnight’s Children, which I taught last week in my Ljubljana Post-Colonialist Literature class. Salman Rushdie’s novel about a dictatorial leader bringing to an end India’s dream of a multicultural democracy seems all too applicable.

Yet curiously I have found some solace in the work, especially in the narrator’s faith in the next generation. The children of Midnight’s Children, he says, won’t be led astray by naïve dreaming, he says as he accuses himself of a sentimental idealism that couldn’t withstand the blows of power politics. More on that in a moment.

First, however, a word on our own sentimental idealists. I’m struck by a Jonathan Last article in the Bulwark that Biden could either have been a ruthless politician or a consensus builder and he chose the latter. As Last puts it,

Joe Biden was given the choice of betting liberal democracy on structures and the levers of power, or on the innate goodness of the American people. He put his entire chip stack on the American people and lost.

I made a similar argument several years ago about Obama, who got rolled by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s scorched earth opposition to his presidency, even when Obama was willing to compromise on Republican initiatives. McConnell broke with tradition by stonewalling most of Obama’s judicial appointments, including his Supreme Court replacement, and then he blocked Obama’s attempt to do something about Russian election interference. At the time I compared Obama with a gullible Othello who thinks that, because he himself has risen within the system, that race is not an issue.

Saleem makes a similar miscalculation when he realizes that the extraordinary children born between midnight and 1 on India’s liberation day can be instrumental in achieving a unified nation. As the child who has the telepathic power to bring them all together, he commits himself to a “loose federation of equals, all points of view given free expression.”

And at first, the nation appears to support Saleem’s view of things. Talking of the letter that his family gets from the prime minister, he reports,

Newspapers celebrated me; politicians ratified my position. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: ‘Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.’

From the first, however, there is the problem of violence. While Saleem, having been born on the stroke of midnight, is the presumed leader of Midnight’s Children, the thuggish Shiva, born only seconds later, makes his own impact. Rushdie, by showing that Saleem and Shiva’s lives are inextricably intertwined (a midwife switches the two of them at birth), makes the point that nation building and violence are never altogether separate. When Saleem mentions the prospect of consensual democracy to Shiva, he gets in response “something resembling a violent snort”:

 “That, man, that’s only rubbish. What we ever goin’ to do with a gang like that? Gangs gotta have gang bosses. You take me-“ (the puff of pride again) “I been running a gang up here in Matunga for two years now. Since I was eight. Older kids and all. What d’you think of that?’ And I, without meaning to, “What’s it do, your gang-does it have rules and all?” Shiva-laughter in my ears… “Yah, little rich boy: one rule. Everybody does what I say or I squeeze the shit outa them with my knees!”

And in truth, consensual democracy is difficult, as Saleem discovers as he tries to organize the 538 children:

We were as motley, as raucous, as undisciplined as any bunch of five hundred and eighty-one ten-year-olds; and on top of our natural exuberance, there was the excitement of our discovery of each other. After one hour of top-volume yelling jabbering arguing giggling, I would fall exhausted into a sleep too deep for nightmares, and still wake up with a headache; but I didn’t mind.

In his struggle with Shiva for ascendancy, for a while Saleem is like the traditional politicians who used to run the GOP: while they used to own the party, Saleem is the one with the telepathic power to connect the Midnight Children.  At one point he has the following interchange with his alter ego:

‘You can’t run the Conference; without me, they won’t even be able to listen to you!’

And he, confirming the declaration of war: ‘Rich kid, they’ll want to know about me; you just try and stop me!”

‘Yes,’ I told him, I’ll try.’

In the end, Shiva prevails. Named after the Indian god of destruction, he evolves from street thug to military hero to government enforcer. In this last position, his violence receives official sanction as “the Widow,” based on Indira Gandhi, declares the same kind of state of emergency that Trump wanted to unleash on Black Lives Matter protesters. The Widow uses these new powers to clamp down on her opposition and to institute a system of mandatory sterilization. As her target is India’s multicultural democracy, she regards the Midnight Children as a threat and sends out Shiva, who is one of their number, to root them out.

Shiva tracks down Saleem, who reveals names and addresses under threat of torture. All the children are subsequently castrated, which strips them of their special powers, and without their carnivalesque diversity, India becomes the monochrome nation that fascists dream of.

I know this is all terribly grim so here’s the comfort I promised you. Saleem is married to Parvati-the-Witch, whose name is taken from the archetypal mother goddess in Hindu mythology. Like the goddess, Parvati gives birth to a large-eared child, named Aadam Sinai in the book but clearly meant to evoke Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god of intellectual thought and new beginnings. Aadam Sinai, Saleem hopes, will succeed where he himself has failed.

To be sure, young Aadam—born at Midnight on the night of the Widow’s emergency declaration— is not Saleem’s biological child but Shiva’s, the macho war hero who has gone through India impregnating women. That’s how it is in Hindu mythology as well, with Shiva, the god of creation as well as destruction, being the father of Ganesh. But rather than regarding this as a bad sign, Saleem figures it will make the next generation tougher:

We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already, he is stronger, harder, more resolute than I: when he sleeps, his eyeballs are immobile beneath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not (as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams.

These dreams, recall, are those of a unified India. Because he has both Saleem and Shiva within him, Adam will be more practical as he goes fulfilling the dream that both of his fathers were born into:

I understood once again that Aadam was a member of a second generation of magical children who would grow up far tougher than the first, not looking for their fate in prophecy or the stars, but forging it in the implacable furnaces of their wills. Looking into the eyes of the child who was simultaneously not-my-son and also more my heir than any child of my flesh could have been, I found in his empty, limpid pupils a second mirror of humility, which showed me that, from now on, mine would be as peripheral a role as that of any redundant oldster…I wondered if all over the country the bastard sons of Shiva were exerting similar tyrannies upon hapless adults, and envisaged for the second time that tribe of fearsomely potent kiddies, growing waiting listening, rehearsing the moment when the world would become their plaything.

I hesitate to automatically ascribe hope to the next generation since people are always doing that, with mixed results. But I do see where both my boomer generation and my sons’ millennial generation grew up believing that the long arc of history was finally bending toward justice. Now my five grandchildren, whose ages range from twelve to six, will grow up with rights being taken away, climate change accelerating, and an authoritarian lording it over them. Like Aadam Sinai, they may not be as complacent as their parents.

It’s not only the faith that Saleem has in the next generation that consoles me. There’s something powerful in Rushdie’s concluding message that fighting the good fight never ends. To be sure, at first it looks grim as we see Saleem, like India, cracking apart as he is swallowed by a large crowd. (What this cracking looks like he never makes clear—it seems more metaphorical than biological.) In this mass of humanity made up both of dreamers and destroyers, he sees the novel’s version of Donald Trump:

[F]rom another direction… I see a mythological  apparition approaching, the Black Angel, except that as it nears me its face is green its eyes are black, a center-parting in its hair, on the left green and on the right black, its eyes the eyes of Widows; Shiva and the Angel are closing closing…

But even as the end closes in, we learn that the dreamers will continue on. Though they lose time and again, their resistance will not end:

Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, all in good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.

Even if the upcoming years reduce untold numbers to voiceless dust, there is something heartening in the idea that the dreamers won’t give up. To be sure, such dreaming does not allow us to live or die in peace. The children of the Declaration of Independence and Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” will always be restless in the face of authoritarian rule. That restlessness, however, is their soul salvation.

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The Courage to Find Hope Within

George Frederic Watts, Hope

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Tuesday

I’ve been traveling today and just have time to share this recent poem about hope, which John Stoehr of the Substack blog Editorial Board alerted me to. I suspect that the author had Emily Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is that thing with feathers” in mind when she wrote it. I hope you find it as bolstering as I did.

The Courage to Find Hope Within
By Nicolee Grant

I keep thinking
About these words:

‘Abandon hope all ye
who enter here.’

I saw them somewhere.

I am transfixed by one word.
“Hope.”

It plays over and over
In my mind.

I see glares. I see hatred.
I see fear. I see abuse.
I see cruelty.
I see indifference
In light of suffering.

Yet still I hope.

I don’t want to abandon hope.
It is all I have.
It is what tells me
Today will be better
And if not,
Then maybe tomorrow.

So, despite the glares,
I stare straight
Forward and smile.

Despite fear and hatred,
I will pray for the
Courage to love.

Despite abuse,
I will be a conqueror.

Despite cruelty,
I will welcome
And wilfully surround
Myself with kindness.

Despite indifference,
I will hold hope
Close to my bosom

For it is hope
That makes me know

Our blinders can be removed.

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Soldiers: Citizens of Death’s Grey Land

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Monday – Veterans Day

When Siegfried Sassoon talks about soldiers as dreamers, he knows what he’s talking about since he experienced trench warfare in the first World War. Today we honor all those who have encountered humankind at its worst.

Dreamers
By Siegfried Sassooon

Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows.   
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.   
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win   
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,   
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain   
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.

Readers may think, as they begin the poem, that the soldiers are dreaming of great deeds in battle. In “Dulce in Decorum Est,” fellow World War I soldier Wilfred Owen writes of “children ardent for some desperate glory.” But Owen calls out the lie behind such dreaming while Sassoon, in his quieter poem, shows us what soldiers really want.

It is what we should all dream of.

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