C.S. Lewis’s Vision of Ecological Hope (in Prince Caspian)

By Robin Bates | Published: September 15, 2026
Pauline Baynes, illus. from Prince Caspian

Wednesday

For its September book, our church group has been discussing Green Worlds of C.S. Lewis: The Ecology of Aslan’s Realm, by member John Gatta. At John’s request, yesterday I led the session on Prince Caspian. 

Upon revisiting it, I was struck by how it can offer us hope in the midst of our despair over Trumpian depredation.

Set hundreds of years after The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian features a tyrant who, after ascending to the throne by killing his brother (think Claudius from Hamlet), then targets his nephew after his queen gives birth to a son. Like Trump, Miraz cares only about his own ethnicity, the conquering Telmarines, and feels no responsibility for the rest of the land. Indeed, he seeks to rewrite history, denying that Narnia was ever home to talking animals and nature spirits.

Caspian’s nurse is therefore banished for telling him stories about ancient Narnia, and his tutor—a mixed race dwarf-human who passes as a Telmarine—can only secretly reveal to him Caspian’s own family history. At one point Lewis tells us that “the sort of ‘History’ that was taught in Narnia under Miraz’s rule was duller than the truest history you ever read and less true than the most exciting adventure story.”

The Telmarines also fear nature, especially forests and open water.

Unlike his uncle and DJT, Prince Caspian believes he has a responsibility to the entire country, not just Telmarines, and longs to reconnect with ancient Narnia. Escaping from Miraz, he chances upon remnants of the old world, and together they fight back. At a critical moment, he blows Susan’s magic horn (see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), calling forth both Aslan and the king and queens from Narnia’s Golden Age (Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy). Lewis here is tapping into that deepest of British myths, the return of the king.

The task of these former monarchs is to set Caspian on the throne. This they do with the help of Aslan, who unleashes an ecological uprising. The trees awaken and play a pivotal role in a key battle, just as Tolkien’s Ents do in the Battle at Helm’s Deep. I’ve mentioned in the past that Lewis here may be borrowing from a chapter in Kipling’s Jungle Books (“Letting in the Jungle”), although a more direct influence is Euripides’s The Bacchae.

Bacchus (a.k.a. Dionysus and Bromios) and his female followers make a direct appearance as Lewis seeks to give full expression to fertility unbounded. With the Greek fertility god Silenus also in attendance, we see grape vines sprouting everywhere:

And all the time there were more and more vine leaves everywhere. And soon not only leaves but vines. They were climbing up everything. They were running up the legs of the tree people and circling round their necks. Lucy put up her hands to push back her hair and found she was pushing back vine branches. The donkey was a mass of them. His tail was completely entangled and something dark was nodding between his ears. Lucy looked again and saw it was a bunch of grapes. After that it was mostly grapes overhead and underfoot and all around. “Refreshments! Refreshments,” roared the old man [Silenus]. 

Just as Euripides’s Dionysus will pull down the prison in which tyrant Pentheus seeks to confine him, so Lewis’s Bacchus unleashes vines that pull down a bridge imprisoning a river god. Vines also pull down an oppressive school teaching Telmarine history, and there are the following moments, the last of which may be inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

They swept on across the level fields on the north bank, or left bank, of the river. At every farm animals came out to join them. Sad old donkeys who had never known joy grew suddenly young again; chained dogs broke their chains; horses kicked their carts to pieces and came trotting along with them — clop-clop — kicking up the mud and whinnying.

At a well in a yard they met a man who was beating a boy. The stick burst into flower in the man’s hand. He tried to drop it, but it stuck to his hand. His arm became a branch, his body the trunk of a tree, his feet took root. The boy, who had been crying a moment before, burst out laughing and joined them.

Reading Prince Caspian as DJT assaults America’s national parks, along with its air and water, helps us imagine a leader who cares about all America, not just himself, and who seeks a connection with both our Enlightenment and our natural heritage. We can also take a page from Trufflehunter the badger, who never loses his faith in a restored Narnia:

Peter leaned forward, put his arms round the beast and kissed the furry head: it wasn’t a girlish thing for him to do, because he was the High King.

“Best of badgers,” he said. “You never doubted us all through.”

“No credit to me, your Majesty,” said Trufflehunter. “1’m a beast and we don’t change. I’m a badger, what’s more, and we hold on.”

For an updated version of Lewis’s vision, I leave you with this poem by Wendell Berry, who passed away last month. (I’ve written about it here https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/berrys-vision-to-save-the-planet/) It too calls for patience:

A Vision
By Wendell Berry

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in their fields.
In the voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into a legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.

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Bunyan’s Nervous Defense of Fiction

By Robin Bates | Published: September 14, 2026
John Bunyan dreaming Pilgrim’s Progress

Tuesday

The theme for our church’s Adult Forum this year is “Narratives That Transform” (partly my idea). We kicked it off with John Gatta talking about his book Green Worlds of C.S. Lewis: The Ecology of Aslan’s Realm, which I followed up with a talk on why the Puritans and their heirs have long been suspicious of stories. I share some of what I said in today’s post.

The suspicion goes back to Plato, but it was taken up with renewed vigor by one Stephen Gosson, who is 1579 wrote that poetry
–is “unprofitable” and a waste of time;
–is untrue (“the mother of lies”);
–is “effeminate”; and
–infects us “with many pestilent desires, with a siren’s sweetness drawing the mind to the serpent’s tail of sinful fancies.” 

We know of Gosson’s attack largely because it triggered Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, a powerful rebuttal that argues that poetry is rather the most powerful means to teach virtue. I devote a chapter in my book to Sidney’s essay.

Sidney did not silence the critics, however, which proved a problem for Puritan John Bunyan when he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress. This in spite of the fact that the story of Christian wending his way to the Celestial City would become a staple in Christian education for centuries afterwards. The widow Watkins even uses it on Huck Finn, who  notes that it is

about a man that left his family, it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.

Interesting it certainly is, with images that have become part of our cultural heritage. These include Christian’s pack of sins, the Slough of Despond, the Wicket Gate, the “straight and narrow path,” Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Vanity Fair. It is also, however, a work of fiction, forcing Bunyan to preface it with an extended apology.

Written in verse, the apology begins with Bunyan informing us that he did not start off with the intention to write it. It just came to him as he was writing a more forthright book about the lives of saints:

I, writing of the way
And race of saints, in this our gospel day,
Fell suddenly into an allegory
About their journey, and the way to glory,
In more than twenty things which I set down.
This done, I twenty more had in my crown;
And they again began to multiply,
Like sparks that from the coals of fire do fly.

Claiming that he wrote as a diversion to please himself (in other words, he assures us he’s not taking it seriously), the result was a book that he wasn’t sure what to do with it. Showing it around, he encountered some readers who wanted him to publish and others not. The chief objections were that it was “dark” and “feigned.”

“Dark” means indirect. Protestantism’s insistence on the word of God coming to humankind directly, not in Latin or hidden in figurative language (such a metaphor), meant that even allegory was viewed with suspicion. Meanwhile feigned narrative, as Gosson had noted,  was “the master of lies.” No “telling the truth through lies” for this bunch.

Gosson’s “effeminate” charge also makes its way into Bunyan’s concerns (and remains with us to this day, with far more women than men in book clubs).  “Lacks solidness” is the way that Bunyan’s imagined interlocutor puts it:   

‘Well, yet I am not fully satisfied,
That this your book will stand, when soundly tried.’
Why, what’s the matter? ‘It is dark.’ What though?
‘But it is feigned.’ What of that? I trow?
Some men, by feigned words, as dark as mine,
Make truth to spangle and its rays to shine.’

‘But they want solidness.’ Speak, man, thy mind.
‘They drown the weak; metaphors make us blind.’

Solidity, indeed, becomes the pen
Of him that writeth things divine to men;
But must I needs want solidness, because
By metaphors I speak? Were not God’s laws,
His gospel laws, in olden times held forth
By types, shadows, and metaphors?…

Bunyan responds that the Bible is filled with instances “where the cases/ Do call for one thing, to set forth another.” Not least of these is Jesus’s use of parables to communicate his vision:

I find that holy writ in many places
Hath semblance with this method, where the cases
Do call for one thing, to set forth another;
Use it I may, then, and yet nothing smother
Truth’s golden beams: nay, by this method may
Make it cast forth its rays as light as day….

By the end of his apology, Bunyan is feeling fairly confident. He has written a delightful dream vision and is inviting his reader in:

This book is writ in such a dialect
As may the minds of listless men affect:
It seems a novelty, and yet contains
Nothing but sound and honest gospel strains.
Wouldst thou divert thyself from melancholy?
Wouldst thou be pleasant, yet be far from folly?
Wouldst thou read riddles, and their explanation?
                                                     …[W]ouldst thou see
A man in the clouds, and hear him speak to thee?
Wouldst thou be in a dream, and yet not sleep?
Or wouldst thou in a moment laugh and weep?
Wouldest thou lose thyself and catch no harm,
And find thyself again without a charm?
Wouldst read thyself, and read thou knowest not what,
And yet know whether thou art blest or not,
By reading the same lines? Oh, then come hither,
And lay my book, thy head, and heart together.

To give you a little taste, here’s his account of Satan and his henchmen setting up Vanity Fair:

[P]erceiving by the path that the pilgrims made, that their way to the city lay through this town of Vanity, they contrived here to set up a fair; a fair wherein, should be sold all sorts of vanity, and that it should last all the year long: therefore at this fair are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.

And, moreover, at this fair there is at all times to be seen juggling cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind.

Although Bunyan’s allegory was a hit and although many present-day fundamentalists make use of allegory to teach the Bible (including The Chronicles of Narnia), the suspicion of fiction has never entirely gone away amongst such types. Fear of narrative drives book-censoring groups like Moms for Liberty because they can’t control what readers will take away from the experience. Even seemingly straightforward allegory can sometimes slip their grasp.

Which of course is why people like me are in love with fiction. We love hearing a voice in the clouds, love being in a dream and yet not sleeping, losing ourselves in a story yet catching no harm. Earnest Puritan though he may have been, Bunyan understood the magic of story.

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Another Kafkaesque Deportation Story

By Robin Bates | Published: September 13, 2026

Monday

“Worse than Kafka” wrote Heather Parton (“Digby”) on a recent deportation atrocity, and the facts of the case certainly bear her out. The case, reported in The New York Times, involved a Cuban exile.

After living peacefully in the United States for over 30 years, Roberto Mosquera suddenly found himself imprisoned in Eswatini, a tiny, landlocked country in southern Africa (formerly known as Swaziland). Given that versions of this are happening to hundreds if not thousands of people, I thought it worth refreshing the descriptor “Kafkaesque.”

First, here’s from the New York Times’ report:

As he stepped out of the American military cargo plane, Roberto Mosquera still couldn’t tell where he was or why he had been taken there. When federal immigration agents forced him onto a secret flight 30 hours earlier, it was a hot July afternoon in Texas. Now, after traveling thousands of miles, he felt a cold winter’s morning in the air

Apparently, when he was in his twenties Mosquera was in a gang and shot a rival gang member in the leg. He couldn’t be deported then because Cuba didn’t accept exiles. Instead, he cleaned up his life, becoming a specialty plumber and a born-again Christian. He also married and had four daughters. The United States only required him to check in with the authorities once a year.

Then, in June, he entered Kafka’s world. Showing up at the immigration office to renew his work permit, he found himself arrested and taken first to Krome Detention Center, “a notorious holding facility for deportees in Miami,” and then to El Paso, Texas. After that he and four others were flown to Eswatini, at which point they were forced inside a metal cage that was fitted onto a transport truck.

The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, was proclaiming him and the others to be “depraved monsters” who were “so uniquely barbaric their home countries refuse to take them back.” He has been in that prison for over a year now with no charges and no method of appeal.

In The Trial, K is arrested without being informed what for. The first inkling he gets that anything is amiss is when, instead of his landlady bringing him his breakfast, a strange man enters:

There was immediately a knock at the door and a man entered. He had never seen the man in this house before. He was slim but firmly built, his clothes were black and close-fitting, with many folds and pockets, buckles and buttons and a belt, all of which gave the impression of being very practical but without making it very clear what they were actually for. “Who are you?” asked K., sitting half upright in his bed. The man, however, ignored the question as if his arrival simply had to be accepted.

Like Mosquera, K is never informed what he is being charged with:

“No,” said the man at the window, who threw his book down on a coffee table and stood up. “You can’t go away when you’re under arrest.” “That’s how it seems,” said K. “And why am I under arrest?” he then asked. “That’s something we’re not allowed to tell you. Go into your room and wait there. Proceedings are underway and you’ll learn about everything all in good time.”

When K presses for answers, the agents toy with him, just as ICE agents are toying with people across the country:

“We don’t answer questions like that.” “You will have to answer them,” said K. “Here are my identification papers, now show me yours and I certainly want to see the arrest warrant.” “Oh, my God!” said the policeman. “In a position like yours, and you think you can start giving orders, do you. It won’t do you any good to get us on the wrong side, even if you think it will–we’re probably more on your side that anyone else you know!” 

And further on: 

[K] slapped his hand down on his papers and said, “Here are my identity documents.” “And what do you want us to do about it?” replied the big policeman, loudly. “The way you’re carrying on, it’s worse than a child. What is it you want? Do you want to get this great, bloody trial of yours over with quickly by talking about ID and arrest warrants with us?”

Like many of us these days, K discovers he doesn’t recognize the country he thought he knew:

What sort of people were these? What were they talking about? What office did they belong to? K. was living in a free country, after all, everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home. He was always inclined to take life as lightly as he could, to cross bridges when he came to them, pay no heed for the future, even when everything seemed under threat. But here that did not seem the right thing to do.

The rest of the novel is more of the same, where all that K thought was solid melts into air. By the end, he has been so jerked around as to be utterly stripped of his humanity. When, on the last page, two burly men show up, take him to a quarry, and execute him, he thinks of himself as an animal:

But the hands of one of the gentleman were laid on K.’s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesight failed, K. saw the two gentlemen cheek by cheek, close in front of his face, watching the result. “Like a dog!” he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.

DJT, Stephen Miller, and the Department of Homeland Security are turning us into Amerika. The shame will outlive this administration.

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Rosh Hashanah: The Light You Seek Hides in Your Belly

By Robin Bates | Published: September 13, 2026
Marc Chagall

Sunday – Rosa Hashanah

I traveled all day yesterday, returning from a funeral in Iowa, so I am reposting an old essay.

Reprinted from Sept. 22, 2022, slightly amended

Judaism’s celebration of the Jewish new year—which is to say, the anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve—began yesterday. The Ten Days of Repentance, beginning with Rosh Hashanah and culminating with Yom Kippur, are a time for reflecting on our lives, mending our ways, and seeking the forgiveness of those we have wronged.

Jewish poet Marge Piercy has written one of the best Rosh Hashanah poems that I know. On the Rosh Hashanah for which Piercy wrote the poem, the moon was dark, which gave her a powerful image to work with. This moon is a “black zero of beginning,” a chance to “void yourself of injuries, insults, incursions.” In our hollowness we “hunger,” like the moon, to be full.

The days of repentance provide Jews with a chance to begin anew, to set out with a clean slate and a firm foundation. “Go with empty hands,” the poet tells us, “to those you have hurt and make amends.” The old moon may have died, but that only means that it is early, not late. Now is the time of growth, “a time to/ turn inward to face yourself, the hidden twin of/ all you must grow to be.”

And if we forgive—forgive the dead year that has come up short and forgive ourselves for the same—then what we truly desire will “push through our fingers.” As with the dark moon, our inner light awaits, and if we open ourselves to it, it will come streaming from our eyes. Like the moon, we “will wax in new goodness.”

Head of the Year
by Marge Piercy

The moon is dark tonight, a new
moon for a new year. It is
hollow and hungers to be full.
It is the black zero of beginning.

Now you must void yourself
of injuries, insults, incursions.
Go with empty hands to those
you have hurt and make amends.

It is not too late. It is early
and about to grow. Now
is the time to do what you
know you must and have feared
to begin. Your face is dark
too as you turn inward to face
yourself, the hidden twin of
all you must grow to be.

Forgive the dead year. Forgive
yourself. What will be wants
to push through your fingers.
The light you seek hides
in your belly. The light you
crave longs to stream from
your eyes. You are the moon
that will wax in new goodness.

Further thought: The moon imagery reminds me of the opening interchange between Theseus and Hippolyta in Midsummer Night’s Dream. The two are to be married on a night with a new moon, and Theseus complains that waiting an extra four days for the old moon to die is like a young man waiting for someone to pass so that he can step into his inheritance. “How slow this old moon wanes,” he laments.

In a beautiful image, however, Hippolyta tells Theseus to anticipate the new moon:

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

That new bow will propel them into married life. Or as Piercy puts it, into “all you must grow to be.”

Past Posts about the High Holy Days
–Emma Lazarus: Rosh Hashanah and the American Dream
–Lucille Clifton – Running into a New Year 
–Alicia Ostriker – Poems for Judaism’s High Holy Days 
–Grace Schulman May God’s Love Be Taught at Last in Jerusalem 
—Rachel Barenblat–Rosh Hashanah: How to Keep It New
—Enid Shomer–How Rosh Hashanah Is Like Swimming
—Marge Piercy–Let My Words Turn into Sparks
—Yehuda Amichai–Theoretically, a Season for Everything
—Emma Lazarus–High above the Flood and Fire Ye Held the Scroll
—Kadya Molodowsky–Blowing for Hope in the Face of Darkness
—Alicia Ostriker–Entering the Days of Awe
—Muriel Ruykeyser and Denise Levertov: Rosh Hashanah – A Stirring of Wonder
—Marge Piercy: Rosh Hashanah – Weave Real Connections
—Lucille Clifton: On 9-11 Firemen Ascended Jacob’s Ladder
—Rashani: Blowing for Hope in the Face of Darkness
—A Ninth Century Prayer for Yom Kippur
—Adrienne Rich’s Yom Kippur Thoughts about Conflict 
—Jane Kenyon: Thirsting of Disordered Souls
—Rashani: Out of Darkness, Sanctified into Being 
–Stanley Kunitz: Live in the Layers, Not on the Litter 
—Philip Schultz: Believe in the Utter Sweetness of Your Life

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9-11: Waves of Anger, Fear Circulated over the Earth

By Robin Bates | Published: September 10, 2026

Friday – 25th Anniversary of 9-11

I’m currently in Iowa for a funeral so, to commemorate 9-11, I’m reposting a two-year-old essay on W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939. It was written while Joe Biden was still president but seems even more relevant now, especially the lines

The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Two years ago I optimistically talked of turning the page on Trumpism. In more ways than I ever imagined, the “unmentionable odor of death” continues to offend our September nights.

Reposted from September 11, 2024, slightly revised

I recently came across an article that references W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” which reminded me that many people turned to it 23 years ago on this day. Auden was writing about something even more momentous, the day that Hitler set off World War II with his invasion of Poland. We see the poet floundering as he grasps for hope, just as we were floundering in 2001.

First, however, let me explain the recent reference. Tufts history professor David Ekbladh uses Auden’s phrase “low dishonest decade” to make the point that our situation in 2024 may be closer to Auden’s than we think. Just as authoritarianism was on the rise in the 1930s, so we today are also seeing assaults on democratic rule. “To a critical eye,” Edbladh writes, “the world [today] looks less like the structured competition of that Cold War and more like the grinding collapse of world order that took place during the 1930s.” He fears that we too may be heading towards liberal democracy’s demise.

On this happy note, I turn to what people experienced on that September day 25 years ago. To capture his own feelings, Scott Simon of National Public Radio read for his audience the following excerpts from Auden’s poem:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.
…

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
…

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Poet Eric McHenry, writing about the poem nine days later in Slate, noted that poetry is meant for occasions like this. When we get “nothing but cant from public figures and TV personalities,” he wrote, “people crave language that’s as precise as their pain.”

Simon leaves out some of Auden’s historical passages. One of them alludes to the Greek historian who recorded the catastrophic rise of those demagogues that brought an end to Athens’ democratic experiment:

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Having just finished watching Trump debating Kamala Harris, I have to say that “elderly rubbish” sounds about right for dictators (or at least this wannabe dictator). “Habit-forming pain,” meanwhile, is another way of capturing how we’ve managed to normalize him, the way that abused women normalize her husband’s violence.

McHenry also notes Auden’s reference to “blind skyscrapers” that “use their full height to proclaim/ The strength of Collective Man.” To the hijackers, the Twin Towers seemed to signal America flexing its muscles before the world, which is one reason why they chose them. In bringing them down, they undermined Americans’ easy self-confidence—just as, in recent years, Trump has undermined our easy confidence in democracy’s guardrails:

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream.
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

In the face of Hitler’s invasion, Auden resolves to “show an affirming flame.” Following 9-11, America too came together (although, granted, not with positive results as George W. Bush used our euphoria over new-found unity to steer us into an insane and unjust war). Today, we can once again refuse to surrender to “negation and despair.” Looking back over last night’s presidential debate, with Harris on the offense and Trump in a defensive crouch, there’s hope that (to use one of her expressions) we might finally be turning the page on Trumpism.

Further thought: Auden later disavowed the poem and refused for the longest time to allow anthologies to include it. For instance, in retrospect he thought the line “We must love one another or die”–which he coined when he was desperately looking for solace–was hopelessly naive. After all, we are going to die anyway. But to defend the poem against the poet, there are different ways of dying, one of which is forgetting that love is always an option. McHenry makes the good point that Auden was frustrated that language, even the language of poetry, couldn’t do justice to the moment.

The frustration is common amongst great poets. As Shakespeare has Theseus say in Midsummer Night’s Dream (he’s being generous about the wretched play the wedding party is watching), even “the best of this kind are but shadows.” And if Shakespeare, who did in fact write “the best of this kind,” is dissatisfied, what help for the rest of us? His point, however, is that no artistic creation can live up to vision a poet has in his or her mind. What’s important is that Auden’s poem brought deep comfort to us at a time when we needed deep comfort. At that moment, his dissatisfaction with his creation was irrelevant.

Or as Theseus notes in a follow-up observation, “And the worst are no worse if imagination mend them.”

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Caste in India and the U.S.

By Robin Bates | Published: September 9, 2026

Thursday

Of the non-fiction books that have impacted me the most over the past ten years—there haven’t been many since I normally stick to novels—Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents leads the list. For the first time in my life I understood why racism persists in America, despite Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, and the many, many African Americans one sees in sports, entertainment, and public life.

Wilkerson contends America has an unacknowledged caste system, which she compares to India’s treatment of the untouchables or Dalits and the Nazis’ systematic discrimination against the Jews. With this in mind, I have found myself particularly attuned to mentions of caste in the Indian novels I have been reading. These include A Fine Balance, by Indian Canadian author Rohinton Mistry, and Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things.

Mistry’s account of the Dalits dramatizes for me what we are seeing in this country. I’ll share passages in a moment but first some words on how America’s caste system works. 

Every immigrant group, upon entering America, is tacitly invited to see themselves as superior to African Americans, and not a few accept the invitation. Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White is one study of the process, but certain Eastern Europeans, Asians (South, East, and Southeast), Mexicans, Central and South Americans, West Indians (most notably Cubans but not only Cubans), and even Africans have also attempted to buy in.

A former Ethiopian student who lived with us recently told me a revealing story. When he was working in the campus coffee shop, he had both white and Black friends amongst the staff. At one point, however, an otherwise kindly white worker informed him that one of his Black friends was an “n-word.” In other words, seeing that he was missing a distinction that helped define who she was, she set out to instruct him. Fond of him, she thought she was doing him a favor by inviting him to join the in-group. 

In the same conversation—we were dining with him and his wife in Washington, D.C.—we learned about a Trump supporter in the Ethiopian community who had become impossible to talk to. Among other things, this woman characterized longtime African Americans (i.e., the descendants of slaves) as shiftless and lazy. She was sure that Trump would distinguish her from these others because she saw herself as a hard worker.

MAGA, of course, has its own opinions on the subject. Certain high-profile influencers have gone after J.D. Vance’s Hindu wife, and on Elon Musk’s X there is currently debate about whether Jews can be considered white. While Musk himself says that Jews “look extremely European in every way” to him, he adds that DNA testing is needed to know for sure. 

Our caste system is 300+ years old so I can only imagine how entrenched it is in a country like India. In Mistry’s novel we get a glimpse into how Dalits were taught their place in a small village in the early part of the 20th century:

For walking on the upper-caste side of the street, Sita was stoned, though not to death–the stones had ceased at first blood. Gambhir was less fortunate; he had molten lead poured into his ears because he ventured within hearing range of the temple while prayers were in progress. Dayaram, reneging on an agreement to plough a landlord’s field, had been forced to eat the landlord’s excrement in the village square. Dhiraj tried to negotiate in advance with Pandit Ghanshyam the wages for chopping wood, instead of settling for the few sticks he could expect at the end of the day. The Pandit got upset, accused Dhiraj of poisoning his cows, and had him hanged.

We also learn how the class distinctions are passed on to the next generation:

Thus Dukhi listened every evening to his father relate the unembellished facts about events in the village. During his childhood years, he mastered a full catalogue of the real and imaginary crimes a low-caste person could commit, and the corresponding punishments were engraved upon his memory. By the time he entered his teens, he had acquired all the knowledge he would need to perceive that invisible line of caste he could never cross, to survive in the village like his ancestors, with humiliation and forbearance as his constant companions.

At one point, when Gandhi is campaigning for freedom from British rule, Dukhi hears members of the Indian National Congress speaking out against the caste system. “How can we even start to be strong,” says one, “when there is a disease in our midst? First we must be rid of this disease that plagues the body of our motherland.” He continues,

What is this disease? you may ask. This disease, brothers and sisters, is the notion of untouchability, ravaging us for centuries, denying dignity to our fellow human beings. This disease must be purged from our society, from our hearts, and from our minds. No one is untouchable, for we are all children of the same God. Remember what Gandhiji says, that untouchability poisons Hinduism as a drop of arsenic poisons milk.

Speaking to a Muslim friend, Dukhi says, “I wonder if the zamindars in our villages would ever clap for a speech about getting rid of the caste system,” to which his friend replies, “They would clap and go on in the same old way. The devil has stolen their sense of justice, nah—they cannot see or feel.

His friend wants Dukhi to send his two sons to him to apprentice as tailors, which would be a radical departure. Dukhi resists until his young sons are punished for entering a school. He has their thrashing explained to him:

Your children entered the classroom. They polluted the place. They touched instruments of learning. They defiled slates and chalks, which upper-caste children would touch. You are lucky there wasn’t a holy book like the Bhagavad Gita in their cupboard, no sacred texts. Or the punishment would have been more final.

The punishment prompts Dukhi to take up his friend’s offer, even though he loses his own livelihood in this departure from custom. His sons do in fact become tailors, entering the world to become part of the book’s subsequent plot.

I know that the fortunes of the Dalits have changed significantly since that time. Yet, as in America, despite legal protections discrimination still continues.

To switch novels, I think of the way that police treat a Dalit character (Velutha) in The God of Small Things. When a Christian Syrian woman has a relationship with Velutha (the action is set in 1969), the police track him down and beat him to death. They appear driven, not by individual will, but by thousand-year-old “love laws” that dictate “who should be loved, and how. And how much.” Roy tells us that the book’s twins, who have befriended Velutha and who witness his murder,

were too young to know that [the police] were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilizations fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of the powerlessness.

Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.

Men’s needs.

Describing the killing of Velutha as “history in live performance,” Roy says that the police “were exorcising fear”:

Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot,…the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn’t tear out his hair or burn him alive. They didn’t hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didn’t rape him. Or behead him.

After all they were not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak.

If one realizes that America’s own caste system goes this deep, it explains a lot about our politics. So what if Democratic policies benefit workers and farmers while GOP tax cuts benefit only the wealthy. MAGA Republicans are deeply grateful to Trump for his birther lie about Obama and his assault on Diversity, Inclusion and Equity. They love that he hates the people they want to feel superior to.

It helps explain why his poll numbers aren’t even lower.

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Steinem, Rich, Atwood, and Men in “Walls of Iron”

By Robin Bates | Published: September 8, 2026
Gloria Steinem

Wednesday

Yesterday, using poems by Adrienne Rich, I discussed how Gloria Steinem helped free women from myths that entrapped them in confining identities. Today, turning again to Rich and also to Margaret Atwood, I show how Steinem did the same for men like myself.

For a vivid exemplar of a man trapped in a corrosive male myth, one need only look at our Secretary of Defense (or “Secretary of War,” as Pete Hegseth likes to call himself). By performing the caricature of the manly man, Hegseth hides his insecurities. Real men don’t abuse women, blow up fishing boats and Iranian weddings, fire generals who disagree with them, and do push-ups on national media. The amount of energy expended on reassuring oneself takes a mental toll.

I’ve written several posts on this anxiety, which often shows up in comedy. Fear of being labeled a cuckold, of being a man who can’t satisfy or control his wife, is a running joke in Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Cavalier poets, and Restoration comedy. As Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu pointed out in the 18th century, a woman needed only to hint that she was unfaithful for a man to fall apart: the husband might appear to have the power but it didn’t take much to shatter it. (See my post on her “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband.”)

In “The Knight,” written in 1951, Rich shows the inner toll that maintaining a manly façade exacts. As I noted in a previous post on the poem, Rich shows the inner misery of men who are obsessed with maintaining the image of themselves as heroic knights. The first stanza captures how they want to be seen, the second shows how they feel inside, and the third wonders what it will take to free them of the metal/mental trap in which they have caged themselves:

The Knight

A knight rides into the noon,
and his helmet points to the sun,
and a thousand splintered suns
are the gaiety of his mail.
The soles of his feet glitter
and his palms flash in reply,
and under his crackling banner
he rides like a ship in sail.
 
A knight rides into the noon,
and his only eye is living,
a lump of bitter jelly
set in a metal mask,
betraying rags and tatters
that cling to the flesh beneath
and wear his nerves to ribbons
under the radiant casque.
 
Who will unhorse this rider
and free him from between
the walls of iron, the emblems
crushing his chest with their weight?
Will they defeat him gently,
or leave him hurled on the green,
his rags and wounds still hidden
under the great breastplate?

Wearing “nerves to ribbons” is probably a reference to military ribbons, worn to signal prowess. (Donld Trump once confessed, “I’ve always wanted to get the Purple Heart.”). These are the emblems “crushing his chest with their weight.” When Hegseth’s cosplay comes to an end as he is hurled to the ground (as he will be), will he still seek to hide his rags and his wounds? Will he still try to maintain his metal mask? 

As a sensitive boy who grew up not playing football in football mad Tennessee (I was born in 1951), I recognize the pressure. I even had my sixth-grade teacher call me “a sissy.” Fortunately, I was supported by my bookish, birdwatching father, who had successfully resisted similar pressures when he was growing up. Nevertheless, one could not be a boy during the 1950s without being aware of the expectations. 

Therefore, this Margaret Atwood poem meant a lot to me when I encountered it in the early 1980s. It’s the first of the poet’s “Circe/Mud” poems, in which the Homeric island goddess critiques the macho ethic that drives Odysseus:

Men with the heads of eagles
no longer interest me
or pig-men, or those who can fly
with the aid of wax and feathers

or those who take off their clothes
to reveal other clothes
or those with skins of blue leather

or those golden and flat as a coat of arms
or those with claws, the stuffed ones
with glass eyes; or those
hierarchic as greaves and steam-engines.

All these I could create, manufacture,
or find easily: they swoop and thunder
around this island, common as flies,
sparks flashing, bumping into each other,

on hot days you can watch them
as they melt, come apart,
fall into the ocean
like sick gulls, dethronements, plane crashes..

I search instead for the others,
the ones left over,
the ones who have escaped from these
mythologies with barely their lives;
they have real faces and hands, they think
of themselves as
wrong somehow, they would rather be trees.

I’ll let you decide which of the macho postures can be best applied to Hegseth and Trump. Many of them the president is explicitly using on his AI-generated Truth Social posts these days, which often feature eagles and the president as either George Washington, General Patton, or a superhero with supernatural powers (Green Lantern, for instance). Rather than setting the two men apart, their he-man act just makes them as common as flies as they “swoop and thunder/ around this island…sparks flashing, bumping into each other.” Atwood is familiar with Rich’s “Knight,” and her men disintegrate in similarly spectacular ways (“melt, come apart,/ fall into the ocean/  like sick gulls”). The reference is to Icarus, who thought he could soar as high as the sun, only to find out otherwise. 

How might Circe create or manufacture such creatures? Perhaps by fluttering her eyelashes and feigning helplessness? Atwood criticizes women who are complicit in the charade. “You can have this water,/ this flesh, I abdicate,” she writes in another of the Circe poems, before concluding,

I watch you, you claim
without noticing it,
you know how to take.

I wouldn’t say that I escaped the male mythology with barely my life. As I say, having a father who honored my bookish sensitivity helped. Nevertheless, I sometimes did feel a little wrong. And yes, I love the image of a strongly rooted, life-affirming tree.

So thank you, Gloria Steinem, for understanding how female liberation leads to male liberation.

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Feminism’s Deep Dive into the Female Psyche

By Robin Bates | Published: September 7, 2026

Tuesday

Today I honor Gloria Steinem with two Adrienne Rich poems that get at her contributions to American women. Tomorrow I’ll returning to Rich, along with Margaret Atwood, on what Steinem meant to American men like myself.

Building on the work of Betty Friedan, Steinem understood women’s anger at their status as second class citizens. One sees this hidden anger in Rich’s poem “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” written in 1951:

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Jennifer may appear to be fluttering and weak, weighed down by her patriarchal marriage. In her imagination, however, she is a prancing tiger. Art reveals sides of ourselves that we dare not acknowledge even to ourselves.

Steinem’s goal was to release the tiger. “I am woman, hear me roar,” as the Helen Reddy song put it.

To release it, however, significant inner exploration was required. Women had to identify the myths that mastered them. “Diving into the Wreck,” perhaps Rich’s signature poem, shows a woman doing just that.

The poet imagines divers exploring the wreck that is our subconscious. The myths defining women go back thousands of years and are reinforced daily by everything from social expectations to cultural tropes to media images. Having done her homework, which perhaps includes reading Steinem, Rich is ready to do a deep dive into herself. It’s a dive that she will be doing alone, and it will be awkward because she’s not accustomed to such self-examination:

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

The ladder, the first step to self-exploration, has always been there waiting. She just hasn’t thought to use it before now. Descending it feels alien, as though she’s a crippled insect. She’s not even sure where myth ends and reality begins:

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

Once the exploration begins in earnest, she experiences intense anxiety (“I am blacking out”) but also inner strength (the mask “pumps my blood with power”). Her true inner self has things to teach her if she works with it rather than fighting against it:

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

So enthralled is she by what she sees—perhaps she is learning of other women who have preceded her—that she momentarily forgets why she is there. The goal is for she herself to live her life differently.  To do that, she must figure out both “the damage that was done” and the treasures—the inner resources—that “prevail”:

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

There are many stories—many myths—that have led this woman to become a “drowned face always staring toward the sun.” The sun is male patriarchy while the wreck is Aunt Jennifer, “worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty”:

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

In this exploration, Rich steps beyond rigid gender demarcation, acknowledging that she has both a female and a male side. And despite damage to the inner compass that is supposed to guide us towards psychic health, we still “find our way back to this scene.”

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

It doesn’t matter whether cowardice or courage has sent women into this self-exploration. Their challenge is to rewrite the book of myths, creating new stories in which their names will appear. 

Gloria Steinem played a major role in women discovering the silver, copper, and vermeil cargo hidden within.

Further thought: I particularly like what Margaret Atwood had to say about the poem in a 1973 New York Times book review. Tomorrow I will share at Atwood poem in which she conducts her own attack on male myths:

The wreck she is diving into . . . is the wreck of obsolete myths, particularly myths about men and women. She is journeying to something that is already in the past, in order to discover for herself the reality behind the myth, “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” What she finds is part treasure and part corpse, and she also finds that she herself is part of it, a “half-destroyed instrument.” As explorer she is detached; she carries a knife to cut her way in, cut structures apart; a camera to record; and the book of myths itself, a book which has hitherto had no place for explorers like herself.

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For Labor Day, a Labor Strike Novel

By Robin Bates | Published: September 6, 2026

Monday – Labor Day

For Labor Day I share a passage from Rachel Kranz’s Leaps of Faith, one of the best labor novels I know. (Full disclosure: I’m not entirely objective as Rachel was my best friend before she succumbed in her early sixties to ovarian cancer.) The novel’s title reflects Rachel’s approach to life, which was to have faith in the struggle for—well, for whatever one puts one’s mind to. 

Leaps of Faith has several planes of action, all of which present significant challenges: a working-class actor trying to make a living in New York; his boyfriend suddenly discovering he must become a father to his 11-year-old niece; a director striving to run a small experimental theater company (as Rachel did); and a union organizer attempting to organize a strike against a city university.

Rachel put her faith in a better future to the test when she left her job as a reporter at Minnesota Public Radio and became an administrative assistant at Columbia University so that she could assist with efforts to form a union.  While no one gave those efforts any chance given Columbia’s stiff resistance, the workers in fact prevailed by means of a very risky strike. As one of union members working with the clerical workers later recalled:

The strike, a culmination of five years of organizing, and its settlement were a clear victory for the 1,100-person, 80% female, 50% minority unit. It also demonstrated that women can be organized, Blacks and whites can work together not only for material gain but also to combat racism, and that strikes, led by the workers themselves, are still an effective weapon -even in the hands of service employees.

Throughout the process, Rachel worked tirelessly and never gave up hope, even when many around her did.

The novel provides a fictionalized account of those now-unionized employees eight years later. Once again they are considering a strike, this time to get a better contract. Union representative Rosie must walk a fine line between those who are fiery but unrealistic and those who are overly cautious. In a meeting early in the novel, we see the challenges she faces when she faces the workers:

“What I’m trying to say is that I don’t have any illusions about what we’re up against. They’re a monster, OK, they’re a giant. They’re the third largest landlord in the city of New York. Their budget is in the millions. Their trustees run the city. We all know that, but OK, we can remind ourselves once in a while.” I laugh, and a couple of people laugh with me, the way that some women do, just to stay in sympathy. “I remember,” I say, “writing those facts over and over and over again, one newsletter after another, when we were still trying to get the union Because in those days, if you don’t mind my saying so, it seemed really hopeless—only about three other private universities were even organized, and who were we to think we could organize this—leviathan? This behemoth?” OK, that was a bit much.

I lean forward on the podium, focus again on their faces. “The point being,” I say, “that we won. The point being, they only look unbeatable. The point being, we beat them. For the past eight years, every single contract we’ve gotten has been better than the one before. Every single contract, we’ve won something that they didn’t want us to have. Every single contract has made our lives better—OK, not as much as we’d like, not as much as we deserve—but better, definitely better. Am I right?” A few nods. Some people muttering to neighbors, which I welcome, actually. Let them disagree. If they wake up, they can think about what I’m saying, and then they will agree. Or at least we’ll be talking on different terrain.

When Rosie gives a realistic assessment of their present situation, it’s Rachel recalling her own experience:

“Now we’re at a very difficult point in the process,” I say. “Those of you who have been through it before know what I mean. There’s always this point, this space of time, when winning just looks impossible. When it looks like they’re so big and we’re so small.”

Rosie knows it’s important to acknowledge how hard the service staff have been working:

I fix my gaze on Tony, sitting in the front row. Patrice, next to him. Elena, next to her. “Look at you!” I say suddenly. “I have to say it, people, you are amazing! You’re working eight hours a day, sometimes ten, night shifts, weekends—and month after month after month, you’ve kept this going. You go to negotiations at night, and meet with your buildings on your lunch hour, and make phone calls to get people out for rallies, and answer all those questions everyone’s always asking, right? ‘Why isn’t the union doing anything?’ “Why is it taking so long?’ ‘Why don’t we have a contract yet?’ Am I right?” This does get a laugh, because yes, this is exactly what they’ve been going through, and they didn’t think we knew.

“And you’re starting to wonder yourselves, why it’s taking so long, and why we’re not making more progress. And you look at their negotiators, who are paid full-time to be at these meetings, who get to go home and sleep late the day after an all-night session, when you have to be back at your desks at 9 a.m. sharp; you look at their negotiators, who have MBAs and law degrees and really expensive suits…”

Then she provides the morale boost:

The point being, people, that if we let them psych us out, we’re going to act from a position of weakness. And I want us to come from strength. I want us to look around this room and see the incredible strength we represent, the way we’re all here together, all different types of jobs, all different races and backgrounds, male and female, gay and straight—when do people ever come together like this? This is what freaks them out. This is what blows their minds, because they can’t believe that here we all are, tougher, on our own time, these stupid little secretaries and file clerks and xerox operators, from their point of view, because—until we don’t show up Monday morning—they have no idea of the work we do, am I right?” This gets nods, agreement. “And they can’t understand how we can be holding out so long, how we don’t just cave.”

To be sure, this is only the first step in a long and very complicated process, during which mistakes are made. Rachel does a deep dive into union politics—which is not always pretty—and to the different personalities of the university work force. In the end, however, the workers get most of what they ask for:

[I]t’s a great offer. Not perfect, but better than I’d ever have expected. And the irony, of course, is that every single thing we did to get it was pretty much by mistake. We went on strike against the recommendation of the union; we rejected Olympia’s most divisive proposal by only one fucking vote; and then we had a resounding unanimous vote to continue the strike, which is probably what did convince Olympia to back down—but that only happened because I made probably the worst mistake of my organizing career, taking the proposal to the members like that. So was I wrong to trust the members? You tell me. 

The last we see of the workforce, they are standing together and singing “Solidarity Forever.” 

Rachel’s favorite writer was Bertolt Brecht, and at the beginning of the union section she includes his poem “The Learner” to capture the uncertainty of the change process:

Those to whom I had entrusted the letter
Threw it away. But those I paid no attention to
Brought it back to me.
Thereby I learned.

What I ordered was not carried out.
When I arrived I saw
It was wrong. The right thing 
Had been done.
From that I learned.

The change process is messy, whether it involves getting a new union contract or building a coalition to win elections. Often what is required is a leap of faith.

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