As we watch the macho posturing of Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth following their insane attack on Iran, more than ever we need poets like Wilfred Owen. From the vantage point of the World War I trenches, Owen saw the ruinous effects of nationalistic jingoism. In “Dulce et Decorum Et” he talks of those who are “ardent for some desperate glory,” which pretty much sums up Hegseth. Here’s a recent instance of his rhetoric:
Death and destruction from the sky all day long. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.
In the preface to his posthumously published poems Owen wrote,
This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honor, dominion or power, except War. Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry. The subject of it is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
In one poem Owen takes the story of Abraham and Isaac and, after changing the ending, applies it to Europe’s leaders. It fits our own leaders only too well.
The Parable of the Old Man and the Young By Wilfred Owen
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went, And took the fire with him, and a knife. And as they sojourned both of them together, Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father, Behold the preparations, fire and iron, But where the lamb for this burnt-offering? Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps, and builded parapets and trenches there, And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son. When lo! an angel called him out of heaven, Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, Neither do anything to him. Behold, A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Owen is spitting with anger in that concluding couplet.
When given a choice between sacrificing ego (“the Ram of Pride”) and sacrificing sons, the current leaders of Israel, America, and Iran will choose sons every time.
Today’s post is repurposed from one written on August 19, 2017
Military.com reported Friday that certain commanders are painting the current attacks on Iran as “rooted in Christian biblical prophecy”—which means it’s time to revisit what the Bible says about Satanic temptations. I turn also to Milton’s dramatic reenactment of Satan tempting Jesus in Paradise Regained.
First, here’s the report:
A complaint shared by an anonymous non-commissioned officer to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) claimed that non-commissioned officers were told that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that President Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” as originally reported by journalist Jonathan Larsen. Between Saturday and Tuesday afternoon, MRFF logged more than 200 similar complaints across 50 installations encompassing every branch of the military, its founder, Mikey Weinstein, told Military.com.
Matthew’s temptation story kicked off the season of Lent two Sundays ago:
Again, the devil took [Jesus] to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written,
‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”
Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him. (Matthew 4:8-11)
In Milton’s version, Satanshows Jesus the capital of the Roman Empire, tempting him in ways that would appeal to Trump and to Christian nationalists like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth:
The city which thou seest no other deem Than great and glorious Rome, Queen of the Earth So far renowned, and with the spoils enriched Of nations. There the Capitol thou seest, Above the rest lifting his stately head On the Tarpeian rock, her citadel Impregnable; and there Mount Palatine, The imperial palace, compass huge, and high The structure, skill of noblest architects, With gilded battlements, conspicuous far, Turrets, and terraces, and glittering spires.
He doesn’t mention White House ballrooms and triumphal arches but, if he were talking to Trump, he would have.
Then Satan contends that, by expelling a “monster from his throne”—think Ayatollah Khomeini in the present case—Jesus can obtain absolute power:
This Emperor hath no son, and now is old, Old and lascivious, and from Rome retired To Capria, an island small but strong On the Campanian shore, with purpose there His horrid lusts in private to enjoy; Committing to a wicked favorite All public cares, and yet of him suspicious; Hated of all, and hating. With what ease, Endued with regal virtues as thou art, Appearing, and beginning noble deeds, Might’st thou expel this monster from his throne, Now made a sty, and, in his place ascending, A victor-people free from servile yoke! And with my help thou may’st; to me the power Is given, and by that right I give it thee. Aim, therefore, at no less than all the world; Aim at the highest; without the highest attained, Will be for thee no sitting, or not long, On David’s throne, be prophesied what will.”
Actually, this is not a bad description of Trump golfing at Mar-a-Lago, not to mention what we’re learning from Trump’s “horrid lusts in private,” which he’s ordering the Justice Department to redact from the Epstein files.
Jesus is not interested in such power, however, but with the Devil who drives such people (“what if I withal/ Expel a Devil who first made him such?”). When “my season comes to sit,” he informs Satan, it shall be “as a stone that shall to pieces dash/ All monarchies besides throughout the world”:
Know, therefore, when my season comes to sit On David’s throne, it shall be like a tree Spreading and overshadowing all the earth, Or as a stone that shall to pieces dash All monarchies besides throughout the world; And of my Kingdom there shall be no end.
So no, God hasn’t appointed Trump to unleash holy hell upon Tehran. And if Hegseth and his Armageddon commanders think otherwise, it’s because they have fallen for Satan’s temptation.
Somewhere in my mid-forties—I think the year was 1998—I had the epiphany that led to Better Living through Beowulf. While I can’t claim that I heard the voice of God, there were similarities with what happened to young Samuel in one of my favorite Biblical stories:
Samuel was lying down in the house of the Lord, where the ark of God was.Then the Lord called Samuel. Samuel answered, “Here I am.” (Samuel 3:3-4)
Two God calls later, Samuel answers, “Speak, for your servant is listening,” at which point he learns that he is to convey an important message.
By invoking the passage, I don’t mean to inflate the importance of this moment (although it wasimportant to me). I use itonly to capture how clear and momentous it felt. I awoke in the middle of the night, grabbed my notebook, and wrote steadily for two or three hours, something I never do. My life’s mission, I concluded that night, was to teach the general public (as opposed to other literary scholars) how literature can improve our lives. Starting with Beowulf, I would take major works from the British literary canon—my primary literary interest—and demonstrate how. My teaching, meanwhile, would be oriented similarly.
I’ve written about the only previous time that such a nighttime revelation came to me. While an undergraduate at Carleton and writing a Medieval history essay about Beowulf, at 3 in the morning I suddenly saw how the monsters in the tale represented the very real dangers threatening Anglo-Saxon society. As they listened to the tale, warriors were given powerful images of the troll violence that could well up in their companions (and in them as well) and of the dragon senility that could seize their kings. Literary fantasy, in other words, could provide people with invaluable tools for understanding and negotiating their challenges.
Although my nighttime vision in 1998 seemed clear, it took years for me to figure out what forms it was to take. Since self-help books were big in the 1990s (I suspect they still are), I initially envisioned writing about literary narrative as self-help. The book that emerged over the next ten years featured one big issue that each of my chosen works could address, along with accompanying exercises. This particular problem had a major problem, which I’ll touch on in a moment, but I start with sharing the table of contents and some sample exercises:
Better Living through Beowulf: How the Early British Classics Can Guide You beyond Terrorism Fears, Relationship Anxieties, Consumer Emptiness, Racial Tension, Political Cynicism, and Other Contemporary Challenges
Introduction: Harnessing the Power of Literature Chapter 1 – ANGER & FEAR: Using Beowulf to Subdue Your Inner Demons and Find a Lasting Peace Chapter 2 – DEATH: Using Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Transform Your Fear of Dying into a Deep Joy Chapter 3 – MARRIAGE: Using Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to Save Your Relationship Chapter 4 – SOUL: Using Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to Escape Your Private Hell Chapter 5 – GENDER: Using William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to Discover Alternate Selves Chapter 6 – RACE & CLASS: Using Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko to Negotiate Difficult Friendships Chapter 7 – INJUSTICE: Using Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and “Modest Proposal” to Keep Fighting the Good Fight Chapter 8 – BEAUTY: Using Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock to Reach beyond Star Worship and Touch the Star Within Chapter 9 – COURTSHIP: Using Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Find Your Soul Mate
As for exercises, for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I suggested that each of the hunted animals represents a different way to approach death (and to approach life) and invited readers to think through their own responses. The Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale, I contended, can provide insight into why couples quarrel and how to work through differences. Rape of the Lock provided a workshop on dealing with sexual harassment while I approached Pride and Prejudice as a marriage manual (“Four Bad Reasons to Get Married”).
To write the book, I had to reprogram my mind and write as I once had for newspapers. I still remember how the first essay I wrote in graduate school, a three-page essay in which I had 17 (!) paragraphs, elicited the professor’s wry comment, “Did you used to be a journalist?” With such prodding, I learned to master compound complex sentences, nuanced and qualified assertion, scholarly jargon, and all the rest, and here I was having to revert to an earlier prose style. It was not easy to do.
I found an agent for the book and for a while had high hopes. After a year with no success, however, the agent dropped me, sending me to small presses. I finally found one and was all set to begin working with them when the world-wide 2008 crash occurred. My book was one of the (very minor) casualties.
In retrospect, I’m not sorry. There was always something not entirely right about using the language of self-help to talk about literature. At times I felt inauthentic in how I was discussing Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Austen. Further, I’m not sure that people actually use self-help books in the way I was imagining. How many go through proffered exercises to change their lives?
To be sure, America’s self-help tradition suggest that we should be able to do so. Think of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack and of the “general resolves” of Jay Gatsby. The tradition may grow out of the Calvinist tradition, and dissenter Daniel Defoe created a character in Robinson Crusoe who is obsessed with self-improvement, with heaven and hell hanging in the balance. But Crusoe fails to achieve many of his general resolves and, like the rest of us, lives a life that takes many unexpected twists and turns. Literature doesn’t change that state of affairs.
Furthermore, literature is not a carpenter’s tool that can be directed to a single project but something more diffuse and wide-ranging. Whereas different people wielding a hammer will use it more or less the same, that’s not true of a novel, poem, or play. Sometimes readers will not even realize that the work has influenced their behavior until years later.
In any event, as I was feeling the disappointment of a 10-year project going up in flames, my son Darien, who was in marketing, informed me that I should establish a “platform.” Publishers would take me more seriously, he pointed out, if I could assure them that a ready audience existed for the book. He suggested that I start a blog and helped me set up a website.
I barely knew what a blog was but, once I began blogging, a new world opened to me. I was exhilarated by the instant contact with readers: no longer must I wait years for an article or a book to reach an audience. Furthermore, in its fragmentary form a blog was truer to the reading experience than my book had been: I wasn’t limited to a single theory about what a particular work means to readers but could just report on a range of responses, starting with my own. I could also share what the works meant to my students (always with their permission, of course), which meant that it became a pedagogical tool: they could see their work from an outside perspective, always useful. Meanwhile, I profited by regularly reflecting on my courses.
Of course, my unpublished book gave me a lot of ready material for the blog, and much of it has found its way into my daily posts. I also should note that, as blogs go, Better Living through Beowulf is neither the most scholarly nor the most casual. There are medieval experts who know far more about Beowulf than I will ever know and use their blogs to share their expertise. (While my own specialty is the British Restoration and 18th Century, I became a generalist by virtue of teaching at a small liberal arts college.) My blog is of limited value to them.
But my intense engagement with a wide variety of works has given me a different kind of expertise, which is useful for (1) general readers interested in literature (including those who may have had bad experiences in college literature classes) and (2) high school language arts teachers who are looking for ways to engage their students with the works. From the first, these were my intended readers, and they in fact make up the bulk of my audience.
I’ll recount in a later post how I came to write my recent book. I’ll just note that it emerged out of the blog in that, instead of focusing on a single way that literature changes lives, I have looked at what thinkers over the millennia have said about literary impact. They too diverge greatly, starting with Plato, who thought that Homer could lead young men astray, and Aristotle, who believed the great Greek tragedians provided valuable leadership advice. If one really wants to do justice to literature’s transformative potential, it’s best to share as many reading experiences as possible.
While Donald Trump has yet to satisfactorily explain why he’s launched a war with Iran, we’ve gotten one possible rationale from Secretary of State Marco Rubio: Trump knew that Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu was going to begin a war and figured that, as Israel’s ally, U.S. forces would be targeted. The bombing was to forestall those anticipated attacks. Are you clear now?
In addition to a war of choice being in blatant violation of international law, it’s also proof that we have Rufus T. Firefly in the White House.
Firefly (Groucho Marx) is the president of Fredonia in the late 1933 comedy Duck Soup. Tensions have arisen with neighboring Sylvania, leading to high stake negotiations. The following internal monologue by a paranoid leader is painfully on the mark for our present circumstances:
Firefly: I’d be unworthy of the high trust that’s been placed in me if I didn’t do everything in my power to keep our beloved Freedonia in peace with the world. I’d be only too happy to meet with Ambassador Trentino and offer him on behalf of my country the right hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure he will accept this gesture in the spirit of which it is offered. But suppose he doesn’t. A fine thing that’ll be. I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept. That’ll add a lot to my prestige, won’t it? Me, the head of a country, snubbed by a foreign ambassador. Who does he think he is, that he can come here, and make a sap of me in front of all my people? Think of it—I hold out my hand and that hyena refuses to accept. Why, the cheap four-flushing swine, he’ll never get away with it I tell you, he’ll never get away with it. [Trentino enters] Firefly: So, you refuse to shake hands with me, eh? [slaps Trentino with his glove] Trentino: Mrs. Teasdale, this is the last straw. There’s no turning back now! This means war! Firefly: Then it’s war! Then it’s war! Gather the forces. Harness the horses. Then it’s war!
There are other lines in the film that are similarly relevant. Trump, when he disparaged fallen warriors as “suckers” and “losers” to White House chief of staff John Kelly, may have been channeling the following Firefly remark:
You’re a brave man. Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you’re out there risking your life and limb through shot and shell, we’ll be in here thinking what a sucker you are.
And then there’s this moment, which brings to mind Kuwaiti friendly fire downing two American jets. Like Trump, Firefly wants to give himself a medal for his performance:
Firefly: Where’s my Stradivarius? Officer: Here, sir. Firefly: I’ll show ’em they can’t fiddle around with old Firefly! [he pulls a tommy gun out of his violin case and opens fire] Firefly: Look at ’em run! Now they know they’ve been in a war! Roland: Your Excellency! Firefly: Hahahahahaha, they’re fleeing like rats! Roland: But sir, I’ve got to tell you… Firefly: Remind me to give myself the Firefly Medal for this! [he fires again] Roland: Your Excellency, you’re shooting your own men! [Firefly fires again] Firefly: What? Roland: You’re shooting your own men! Firefly: Here’s $5, keep it under your hat. [holds out his hat to take the $5 back] Firefly: Never mind, I’ll keep it under my hat.
The Iran invasion is like a mash-up of Duck Soup and 1984, which is to say, between comic ineptitude and authoritarian horror.Just as Trump invades Venezuela one day and Iran the next (with Cuba perhaps waiting in the wings), Oceania alternates between warring with Eurasia and with Eastasia. The reasons are as murky as those Trump has offered the American people:
At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
When Winston attempts to awaken Julia to this insanity, her response is not unlike those Americans who feel beaten down by Trump’s incessant assaults on the truth:
In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. “Who cares?” she said impatiently. “It’s always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.”
At one point in 2012, Trump predicted that Barack Obama would start a war to distract from his domestic challenges. Although Obama did not in fact do any such thing, we’ve learned by now with DJT that everything is projection and often prediction. It’s also how Big Brother uses supposed war victories to distract from food shortages:
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grams to twenty.
In our case, Trump may be using foreign adventures to distract from rising inflation and his involvement in a pedophile ring.
All of this is so grim that we could use a little comedy. I therefore end with a song sung by President Firefly:
If any form of pleasure is exhibited, Report to me and it will be prohibited! I’ll put my foot down, so shall it be… This is the land of the free!
The last man nearly ruined this place, He didn’t know what to do with it. If you think this country’s bad off now, Just wait till I get through with it!
The Marx Brothers came out of a tradition of dark Jewish humor that helped this relentlessly persecuted people to psychologically handle pogroms and other forms of oppression. Duck Soup, however, missed its moment as Depression-era America in 1934 was looking for more optimism, such as Shirley Temple, Ginger Rogers, and Fred Astaire. Although arguably the Marx Brothers’ greatest film, itdid poorly at the box office and probably would have fared better in 1931 and 1932, when the public was finding its rage and disillusion captured in violent monster and gangster movies. The cynicism of Duck Soup would have fit right in.
We today, on the other hand, can make 1984 references for only so long before becoming thoroughly demoralized. Black comedy was made for such moments.
The photo that accompanied the Atlantic publication of Nabokov’s “Cloud, Castle, Lake”
Wednesday
Professors with PhDs are very smart in certain narrow areas and very dumb in many others. For some of us, the stupidity extends to timeshares. Indeed, because we prize ourselves for our thinking abilities, we can be particularly vulnerable to fast talkers.
Thirty years ago Julia and I purchased a timeshare from Fairfield (later taken over by Wyndham), thinking of the affordable vacations that would be available to us. Little did we know that we had committed ourselves to a lease that we would be stuck with for the rest of our lives, along with rising maintenance fees. Even worse, death itself wouldn’t release us from our unsellable deed. Our sons would inherit it and the fees.
To save them from the dead hand of the past, Julia and I paid an exorbitant amount of money to Wyndham to escape the lease. For those of you who have never bought a timeshare, my advice to you is (1) thank your lucky stars you escaped and (2) resist all offers, no matter how enticing.
If my knowledge of literature didn’t save me from embarking on the purchase, it has at least provided me with literary friends in similar predicaments. I think of those duped by Herman Melville’s confidence man, by Mark Twain’s King and Duke, and by Gogol’s Chichikov (in Dead Souls). And then there are those trapped in a morass of officialdom, such as K in Kafka’s The Trial.
The work that resonates the most with me, however, is Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” published in The Atlantic in 1941. In it a man on a pleasure trip chances upon the place of his dreams. Rather than allowing him to fulfill his desire to spend the rest of his life there, however, the vacation management company intervenes and plunges him into a bureaucratic nightmare.
At first glance, our stories appear to start differently. Vasili Ivanovich doesn’t want the pleasure trip he wins through a charity raffle but decides to go after learning about the difficulties of declining. When he tries to sell his ticket at “the office of the Bureau of Pleasantrips,” he is told that to do so
he would have to have special permission from the Ministry of Transportation; when he tried them, it turned out that first he would have to draw up a complicated petition at a notary’s on stamped paper; and besides, a so-called ‘certificate of non-absence from the city for the summertime’ had to be obtained from the police.
We, by contrast, were more than ready to travel. We thought that a free weekend in Williamsburg, Virginia and a free visit to the historic site there were worth sitting through a timeshare pitch.
Then again, we didn’t realize that, had we failed to show up for the pitch, we would have had to reimburse Fairfield for everything. Although the company had a gentler way of getting us to comply than Pleasantrips, the results were the same. The tactic worked especially well on Julia and me because, like Vasili, we like to be agreeable.
Both Vasili and we thought we were free agents as we set off on our trip, not realizing that the organizers in each case had their ways of getting us to follow the mob. Vasili is subjected to peer pressure and bullying by his fellow train passengers whereas we, always with inducements, attended special group sessions in which everyone was encouraged to enthuse about past vacations. Slowly but inexorably we found ourselves being drawn in and buying more points.
To Vasili’s surprise, all the torment proves to be worth it for he finds the place he has always dreamed of. First we learn of his fantasies:
[H]e began to imagine that this trip, thrust upon him by a feminine Fate in a low-cut gown, this trip which he had accepted so reluctantly, would bring him some wonderful, tremulous happiness. This happiness would have something in common with his childhood, and with the excitement aroused in him by Russian lyrical poetry, and with some evening sky line once seen in a dream, and with that lady, another man’s wife, whom he had hopelessly loved for seven years—but it would be even fuller and more significant than all that. And besides, he felt that the really good life must be oriented toward something or someone.
Then, miraculously, his dream is fulfilled:
[A]fter another hour of marching, that very happiness of which he had once half-dreamt was suddenly discovered.
It was a pure, blue lake, with an unusual expression of its water. In the middle, a large cloud was reflected in its entirety. On the other side, on a hill thickly covered with verdure (and the darker the verdure, the more poetic it is), towered, arising from dactyl to dactyl, an ancient black castle. Of course, there are plenty of such views in Central Europe, but just this one, in the inexpressible and unique harmoniousness of its three principal parts, in its smile, in some mysterious innocence it had,—my love! my obedient one!—was something so unique, and so familiar, and so long-promised, and it so understood the beholder, that Vasili Ivanovich even pressed his hand to his heart, as if to see whether his heart was there in order to give it away.
Vasili determines to live there for the rest of his life.
Wyndham has large photos of clouds, lakes, and local landmarks in its sales offices. And if you want castles added in, perhaps you’ve seen those ads for Viking River Cruises on National Public Television. One of Wyndham’s favorite questions is “where do you dream of visiting?” which encourages the kind of fantasizing that Vasili engages in.
Unfortunately, in Vasili’s case reality sets in. His group leader will not let him remain:
You are taking a pleasure trip with us. Tomorrow, according to the appointed itinerary,—look at your ticket,—we are all returning to Berlin. There can be no question of anyone—in this case you—refusing to continue this communal journey.
In our case, we too wanted to leave the group, and what we were then subjected to reminded me of Vasili’s fate. “What if we stopped paying our maintenance fees,” I said at one point, at which point it was pointed out that we could lose our house. Nor would death save us as our will would go into probate. While I admit that Vasili has it worse, I identify:
“If necessary we shall carry you,” said the leader grimly, “but that is not likely to be pleasant for you. I am responsible for each of you, and shall bring back each of you, alive or dead.”
Swept along a forest road as in a hideous fairy tale, squeezed, twisted, Vasili Ivanovich could not even turn around, and only felt how the radiance behind his back receded, fractured by trees, and then it was no longer there, and all around the dark firs fretted but could not interfere. As soon as everyone had got into the car and the train had pulled off, they began to beat him—they beat him a long time, and with a good deal of inventiveness. It occurred to them, among other things, to use a corkscrew on his palms; then on his feet. The post-office clerk, who had been to Russia, fashioned a knout out of a stick and a belt, and began to use it with devilish dexterity. Atta boy! The other men relied more on their iron heels, whereas the women were satisfied to pinch and to slap. All had a wonderful time.
At the end of the story Vasili, “much changed,” resigns from his job, telling his boss that “he had not the strength to belong to mankind any longer.”
Wyndham’s tactics are softer–more Brave New World than 1984 or The Trial—but they often achieve the same ends. Thankfully I am not as broken as Vasili is but, God almighty, it has been painful!
Perhaps you’ve heard the expression, “If it seems too good to be true, it is.” Believe it.
Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel in the hockey locker room
Tuesday
A friend asked me recently how I get my ideas for this column, and I thought I’d try to answer by making the question the subject of today’s blog post. In the process, I share my mixed feelings about the U.S. men’s hockey team, recent winner of an Olympic gold medal.
We process the world through our past experiences, so for one who has spent his life with his nose in books, it’s natural to see the world as literary narrative and poetic image. Given that many of the texts I cite are world treasures, there is potential for profound insight.
Once I link a news item or life incident to a particular text, the words begin to work their magic. While I often don’t know where the connection will take me, time and again I am impressed with the knowledge that ensues.
Making the initial connection is often the difficult part. Fortunately, sometimes someone else makes the connection for me. An essay mentions Milton or Voltaire or Yeats or T.S. Eliot or Tolkien, at which point I’m off and running. But sometimes an image or phrase hovers just outside my consciousness so that hours or even a full day go by before I can pin it down. This happened with the aftermath of the hockey victory.
This was a great year for the Americans as both the men and the women triumphed over the nation that owns the sport. Both victories occurred in overtime. Applying a culinary metaphor, I savored them both.
I thought of the “savor” metaphor, however, only after I tasted the bitterness of what happened next. The sense of biting into something foul was so visceral that I knew I had encountered the image somewhere. It took me several frustrating hours before I recognized the source.
In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the unnamed narrator (let’s call him IM) has just moved to New York after getting kicked out of college. When a middle-class Black man in the south, he differentiated himself from lower class Black men (what he calls “Field Niggerism”), but in Harlem he suddenly finds himself freed from these social expectations. He can buy, without apologizing, a buttered yam, which like chitterlings, mustard greens, pigs’ ears, pork chops, and black-eyed peas are the the fare of the unrespectable. He savors the taste as I savored the U.S. victories. First, there’s the anticipation as he encounters a street vendor selling them:
The yams, some bubbling with syrup, lay on a wire rack above glowing coals that leaped to low blue flame when struck by the draft of air. The flash of warmth set my face aglow as he removed one of the yams and shut the door.
And then the taste:
I took a bite, finding it as sweet and hot as any I’d ever had, and was overcome with such a surge of homesickness that I turned away to keep my control. I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom — simply because I was eating while walking along the street. It was exhilarating. I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about what was proper. To hell with all that, and as sweet as the yam actually was, it became like nectar with the thought.
Yet this momentary freedom gets him reflecting on how his likes and dislikes have been foisted on him. Much of his life, he realizes, has been wasted by accepting “accepted attitudes.” Suddenly the yam doesn’t taste so good:
Yet the freedom to eat yams on the street was far less than I had expected upon coming to the city. An unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth now as I bit the end of the yam and threw it into the street; it had been frost-bitten.
After the nectar of the hockey victory, an unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth. First there was FBI director Kash Patel chugging beers in the after-party celebration. Then it was Trump believing he had to denigrate the American women’s team in order to celebrate the win. “I must tell you,” he told the men when phoning in and inviting them to his State of the Union address, “we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that.” After that he added, “I do believe I probably would be impeached.”
In other words, those who are woke will victimize me if I say that you deserve more public accolades than than your female counterparts. To which most of the hockey players cheered.
The last bitter taste was seeing the team then used as a prop in Trump’s hate-filled speech, which among other things blamed bribery, corruption, and lawlessness on the Somali community and on African immigrants in general. The team’s borrowed valor, in other words, was used to bolster white nationalist jingoism.
Applying Invisible Man to Trump is appropriate since the man, as much as anyone, looks through people rather than seeing them. He has a “peculiar disposition of the eyes” (to quote IM) that renders them invisible. In his inhumanity, Trump demonizes everyone who disagrees with him, especially (but not only) women and people of color. Ellison’s remarkable novel explores the impact that such blindness has on Americans, white and Black both.
So that’s one way that I generate posts for this blog.
I’m traveling at the moment so, in response to America’s preemptive (and therefore illegal) war against Iran, I’m reposting an essay on Louis MacNeice’s poem “Brother Fire,” which I wrote in March of 2011 when anticipating that Barack Obama would bomb Libya, which he in fact did a little over a week later. I’ve also included a short poem by David Krieger which, while about the 1945 atom bomb, also captures how our president has fallen in love with unleashing devastation upon populations. Iran’s high civilian death toll, including over a hundred Iranian children so far, he never acknowledges.
Here’s Krieger’s poem:
When the Bomb became our God We loved it far too much, Worshipping no other gods before it. When the bomb became our god We lived in a constant state of war That we called peace.
Now for the post anticipating the bombing of Libya, reposted from March 10, 2011:
As I watch Muammar Qaddafi turn his air force against his own people, I am trying to imagine conditions on the ground. I asked my father for literature describing the experience, he having once undergone a bombing himself. It occurred in 1944, a month or two after the D Day invasion of Normandy, when the Germans sent an aerial counterattack against Avranches in the battle of the Falaise Gap. My father and other American troops were stationed in a hotel, and although everyone else went down to the cellar, he remembers curling up in an upstairs room. He didn’t want to be buried in the rubble if there were to be a direct hit. (The Germans were trying to bomb a bridge a mile away but, bombsights being notoriously bad in those days, anyone could have been hit.)
My father reminded me of a poem by Irish poet Louis MacNeice, who witnessed firsthand the German bombing of London in which over 40,000 civilians were killed. In my father’s eyes, “Brother Fire” is one of the great antiwar poems, in part because it captures the bombing so vividly, in part because it makes the point that we and our enemy are not that different. “Oh enemy and image of ourselves,” MacNiece says to the flames as they “slaver and crunch away/ The beams of human life, the tops of topless towers.”
One other note: MacNiece describes an almost anarchistic joy as he watches the fire swarm up “city blocks and spire.” Apparently he was not alone. Other Londoners reported being caught up in an excited camaraderie as together they watched their city burn. This may have occurred as well during the 1944 Allied bombing of Germany, which some feel actually lengthened the war by stiffening the resolve of the German people.
Here’s the poem:
Brother Fire By Louis MacNeice
When our brother fire was having his dog’s day Jumping the London streets with millions of tin cans Clanking at this tail, we heard some shadow say, “Give the dog a bone”–and so we gave him ours; Night after night we watched him slaver and crunch away The beams of human life, the tops of topless towers.
Which gluttony of his for us was Lenten fare Who Mother-naked, suckled with sparks, were chill Though dandled on a grill of sizzling air Striped like a convict–black, yellow and red; Thus were we weaned to knowledge of the Will That wills the natural world but wills us dead.
O delicate walker, babbler, dialectician Fire, O enemy and image of ourselves, Did we not on those mornings after the All Clear, When you were looting shops in elemental joy And singing as you swarmed up city blocks and spire, Echo your thought in ours? Destroy! Destroy!
In his note on “Brother Fire” in his Poems of War Resistance from 2300 to the Present (Grossman 1969), my father notes the London blitzkrieg was in part a response to England’s own strategic bombing of Germany in May of 1940. This is not to say that the bombing of London was in any way justified, any more than the revenge bombing of Dresden (which Kurt Vonnegut experienced as a prisoner of war) was justified. The fire described by MacNiece is a “dialectician” because, when the dogs of war are unleashed (to quote Julius Caesar), an infernal dialectic is set into motion. We are initiated into–weaned into–knowledge of some inexorable Will that seeks our death and yet still manages to enroll us in its urge to “Destroy! Destroy!”
“Topless towers,” incidentally, is a reference to the most well-known passage from Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, a play about the dream of unfettered power. “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burned the topless towers of Ilium,” Faustus asks in wonder upon seeing the ghost of Helen of Troy.
As an Irishman, MacNeice had seen a dark side of England. Although he bucked certain Irish revolutionaries when he embraced the English cause during World War II, he didn’t believe in England’s moral superiority.
And this is why I believe that we must not enter Libya’s war, even though part of us wants to protect those being slaughtered—just as people wanted to protect the Iraqi people from Sadaam Hussein. I remember reading in 2003 a wise piece by Chilean Ariel Dorfman urging the U.S. not to invade Iraq, even as he spoke of the horrors of Hussein from the vantage point of one who had suffered under Chile’s fascist dictatorship. Such an invasion, he predicted, could result in far more devastation than that which it was designed to alleviate. He proved to be remarkably prescient.
Indeed, both the Iraqi people and the U.S. (and its allies) have paid a high price for the Iraqi War. In addition to all the loss of life and money, the U.S. has lost moral authority. As Washington Post columnist Annie Applebaum points out, the Middle Eastern revolutionaries are not clamoring for U.S. assistance (some neoconservatives argue otherwise) because they fear a repeat of Iraq. Furthermore, the American tolerance for torture and indefinite detention has eroded our credibility even more.
War is never a neutral tool that can be wielded dispassionately. Every time we engage in bloodshed, we are in peril of losing our moral compass. O enemy and image of ourselves. The U.S. should, by all means, marshal all the non-military resources it has against Qaddafi. Sending planes or troops into the conflict, however, could once again pull us into the elemental joy of brother fire.
What has occurred in the 15 years since: Rather than answering the hopes of the Arab Spring, the 2011 intervention failed to establish democratic rule. Instead, Libya has witnessed the rise of jihadism so that it finds itself in perpetual civil war. The concluding lines from William Blake’s “The Grey Monk” come to mind:
The hand of Vengeance found the bed To which the Purple Tyrant fled; The iron hand crush’d the Tyrant’s head And became a Tyrant in his stead.
I have been reading through Arnold Benz’s Astronomical Psalms for a Vast Universe (Crossroad, 2025), a series of poetic reflections by an astrophysicist expressing his wonder at the diverse features of the universe. As Benz says in his introduction, “Aristotle considered wonder to be the origins of science and a motive behind all great questions,” and then notes how, through his amazement, he participates “in the cosmic performance.”
The book reminds me of one of my favorite passages from the Prayers of the People, Eucharistic Prayer C, where someone from the congregation will read, “At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.”
To this the congregation responds, “By your will they were created and have their being.”
In this spirit Benz writes that, “while God’s presence is not susceptible to scientific demonstration, my personal perception of reality does hint at something or someone beyond what can be scientifically observed.” His verses, he says, echo “the ancient literary genre of the Psalms.” As such, they “aim to link the present-day universe story told by science with a faith-grounded response.”
In one of his poems he writes,
A quintillion is a million trillions. A trillion is a million millions. I can calculate these numbers, I can write them, but I can’t imagine them. Space where galaxies dwell, and where physical laws apply is unimaginably vast. Is there a Presence in it or behind? It must be unimaginably larger. Is this God?
One of my favorite of his poems is “Energy,” which gives you a sense of the whole:
The universe is unfathomably lavish with energy.
Consider the solar atmosphere: Swirling hot gas, sets magnetic fields in tension like spiral springs. When the tension becomes too great, energy bundles explode. Within minutes, a magnetic eruption releases a hundred million times more energy than the largest atomic bomb, ten thousand times more energy than all power plants on earth can produce in a year.
Or: Massive stars explode as supernovae, hurling energy into space every second somewhere in the universe billions of times that of a solar eruption.
Or: Two black holes merge with a hundred times more energy than a supernova; space-time shakes throughout the whole universe: A gravitational wave.
We humans, insatiable in our hunger for energy, have access to only the tiniest share of the cosmic abundance, like a nutshell full of water compared with all that’s in the sea.
We need energy to live. Are we entitled to energy? No, it is given to us freely from an unfathomably prodigious source.
For this we give you thanks, gracious God!
The book is a powerful response to those who see science and religion at odds. It addresses in a deep way how we can be at the same time infinitesimally small and yet somehow connected with divinity.
My father and me during a Fulbright year in France (1952)
Friday
I’ve mentioned my father frequently in these Friday recollections but thought I’d write today about when I finally started to slip out of his orbit, which didn’t happen until my forties. Previously I had worshipped him, which meant to finding separation was difficult. I think of the observation that Athena, in the guise of Mentor, makes to Telemachus in The Odyssey:
Telemachus, you will be brave and thoughtful if your own father’s forcefulness runs through you. How capable he was, in word and deed! Your journey will succeed, if you are his. If you’re not his son by Penelope, I doubt you can achieve what you desire. And it is rare for sons to be like fathers: Only a few are better, most are worse.
Perhaps Tennyson had this passage in mind when he wrote “Ulysses,” in which the Greek hero regards his son as an unimaginative bureaucrat rather than a wild and exciting adventurer:
This is my son, mine own Telemachus, To whom I leave the scepter and the isle,— Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil This labor, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
The truth is that my father was a remarkable man. A translator during World War II, he ended up in Munich in 1945, where he conducted Germans on required tours of Dachau. When he returned to the United States, he finished up his education at Carleton College, earned his Ph.D at the University of Wisconsin, and had a stellar academic career as a world-class scholar, specializing in the poetry of French modernist poet Guillaume Apollinaire. He also gained a reputation as an accomplished poet of light verse; created eye-catching paintings that involved nails, hinges, and other forms of hardware; and played his own small role here in Sewanee in the Civil Rights, feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements. He was a major mover in a landmark civil rights case, funded by the NAACP, in which four Black families and four white sued our county school board for failing to comply with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. We won the suit—I was one of the plaintiffs—and for years afterwards the NACCP advertised the case as one of its signature accomplishments.
When I say “world class scholar,” incidentally, I’m not exaggerating. During his life, he was offered multiple positions, including at Indiana University, one of the premier public universities for foreign language study. He also once set Apollinaire world on its head with his original research into some of the poet’s more obscure poems. How was I to compete with all that?
As a child, I realized early on that I would never draw as well as he did—I got C’s in first grade penmanship—and I stopped writing poetry (except for occasional doggerel) after my efforts were mocked by fellow poets in high school. (I wrote a poem inspired by the fairy world in Midsummer Night’s Dream, which they saw as evidence that I was a fairy.) But I aspired to be the kind of literary scholar that he was.
Only I never succeeded. For one thing, I never fell in love with library research the way that he did. In some ways, this form of academic scholarship jumped a generation as my son Toby, also a literature professor, is far more accomplished than I am. For years, I felt an academic failure.
Where I differed from my father is that, where he loved to pontificate, I preferred to listen. I was far more attuned to my students’ concerns than he could ever be. Although we were both successful teachers, both winning teacher-of-the-year awards at our respective colleges, we taught in different ways, with him more of a lecturer, me as more of a counselor. This became clear to me when we co-authored an article on Citizen Kane, which was his favorite movie.
As we were exchanging ideas, I fell in love with the following account of why the movie meant so much to him:
When I first saw Citizen Kane with my college friends in 1941, it was in an America undergoing the powerful pressures of a coming war, full of populist excitement and revolutionary foreboding. But cynical Depression kids that we were, we had little hope for salvation through armed uprising. Nor did we believe any longer in America’s self-proclaimed values. Nevertheless, those values were still part of us, and it was America’s blind self-destruction that we instinctively recognized in the shattering experience of watching a little wooden sled go up in flames. From the moment the huge lips opened and said “Rosebud,” to the sled’s final immolation in the furnace of our desires, we were both thrilled and terror-stricken. It was the flaming consummation of sex and politics that we had been looking for in movie theatres all our young lives. We somehow knew that we had experienced our own flaming love-death and that it had taken place in the tragic heart of our country. Welles and Mankiewicz had revealed, in two short hours of perception, how energetically Miss America had been raped of her dream, of her promise, of her rose; and then how she had dutifully prostituted us, her own bastard children. We no longer had a place we could call home. Pessimistically, and yet with the hope of finding some sort of transcendence through great eschatological events, we let ourselves get drafted into the army…
He followed up these observations with some fantastic research: looking through the Welles collection at the Indiana University library, he came across Welles’s previous undiscovered adolescent diaries. You will recall that the reporter in the film is searching for the meaning of “rosebud,” Kane’s last word, and my father discovered that the diaries are filled with references to roses. Then I discovered that roses were also big in the life of publisher William Randolph Hearst, upon whom Kane is based. We figured we could add some insight into the meaning of the symbol.
My father generously told me I could frame the article however I wanted. As I started to write it, however, I started running up against some generational differences. Essentially my father was a modernist for whom the desecrated rose—blasted innocence—was central to his identity whereas I was more of a post-modernist, seeing the rose as a metaphor that Welles was manipulating. (Welles himself described rosebud as “dollar book Freud.”) As much as I tried, I couldn’t get our two interpretations to jell.
My solution, finally, was to explore why the film meant so much to him and people like him (since he wasn’t the only viewer in 1941 and 1942 to be blown away by the film). With this approach, I could both honor him and acknowledge that I myself had a different perspective and different set of concerns. Our college president and English professor Ted Lewis thought that I had used the article to gently kill my father—my Oedipal moment—and perhaps there was some of that. It felt more, however, as though I was forging my own distinctive identity.
It took me this long to stop using his career as my measuring stick. Only in my forties did I realize that the kind of teaching and scholarship he did didn’t interest me that much, in large part both seemed too detached from life. I was much more of a utilitarian in my approach to literature (even though I hated Jeremy Bentham when I encountered him in college). In this way, I was more my mother’s son, who kept our family grounded as my father went off on his intellectual flights.
I was learning that it was okay to be the Telemachus in Tennyson’s poem.
Yet I don’t want to deny that, in many ways, I am also my father’s son. It could be said of Scott Bates what poet Lucille Clifton once said of me when we were colleagues: “as if words only matter in the world they know.” Although this was truer of my father than it was of me, there are ways I too get lost in abstractions. I think of what Mentor/Athena says to Telemachus in a follow-up comment to the one above:
But you will be no coward and no fool. You do possess your father’s cunning mind, So there is hope you will do all these things.
I’m proud that I possess my father’s cunning mind and am grateful for the gifts that he gave me. He worked his work, I mine.
When I began blogging in 2009, I was able to express my gratitude by regularly sharing his poems, some of which are really fine. He, meanwhile, became my #1 fan and told everyone he knew about the blog. Up until 89—he died at 90—he held on to his keen intellect and held forth at dinner gatherings and with friends. When we gathered to honor his memory with poems and stories, Sewanee’s Convocation Hall was packed.
