Trump concluding his remarks at the White House Correspondents Dinner
Monday
Some political commentator (I can’t remember who) recently cited Bertolt Brecht’s “The Solution” when talking about progressives frustrated that people can’t see where their true interests lie. In his poem, Brecht ironically suggests replacing people who let us down with more amenable people. Here’s the poem:
The Solution By Bertolt Brecht
After the uprising of the 17th June The Secretary of the Writers Union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?
The poem, which was not published until after Brecht’s death, was written following East Germany’s uprising of 1953, in which Germans resisted the Sovietization of their country. The uprising failed and it sounds like the Writers Union, which may have had Brecht as a member, tried then to ingratiate itself with the authoritarian regime. While Brecht moved from the United States to East Germany because he was hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee, he called out authoritarianism wherever he saw it.
The mention of the Writers Union brings to mind Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner, where journalists subjected themselves to attacks from a president who makes no secret of his loathing of a free press. Instead of reacting when Trump attacked their CNN colleague Kaitlan Collins, however—he complained that she “never smiles” and compared her to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney—they sat stony faced. By not booing or walking out of the room but simply shrugging—as they also did when Trump fantasized about running for an unconstitutional third term—they normalize appalling behavior.
When the president of the United States openly jokes about flouting the Constitution, that should be a five alarm fire. As historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote recently, Trump and those around him are not simply challenging laws and constitutional provisions. They are acting as if the Constitution doesn’t exist.
I use the word “normalize” because there’s a smart examination of the word in a novel I’m currently reading. In Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This, an internet celebrity comments on how social media is sapping language of its power. At one point she writes,
“Don’t normalize it!!!!!” we shouted at each other. But all we were normalizing was the use of the word normalize, which sounded like the action of a ray gun wielded by a guy named Norm to make everyone around him Norm as well.
Trump supporters and Trump himself accuse anyone who reacts violently to the president of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Instead, they want us all to become Norm when we are in his presence.
Unfortunately, that is just what too many of the correspondents at the dinner did.
One of today’s lectionary readings has Jesus comparing the kingdom of heaven to a “pearl of great price.” The image shows up in a fine Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) poem, and knowing the allusion adds resonance to the poem.
First, here’s the passage. It’s one of a series of metaphors that Jesus uses to capture the process of spiritual search:
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls.Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it. (Matthew 3:45-46)
Elsewhere in the passage Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed, to yeast, and to a treasure buried in a field.
H.D.’s poem is one of a series in her book The Walls Do Not Fall. H.D. belonged to the movement known as Imagism, noted for using images to capture complex emotional states, and in a way Jesus can be seen as an Imagist poet. Following Jesus’s lead, Doolittle starts with a humble object—a seashell—to find her way to that which puts her in touch with the divine, bringing the realm of the numinous—the kingdom of heaven–to earth.
The shell initially conveys how she goes through life with a hard exterior so that she won’t be hurt. This seems necessary because she sees herself as a “flabby amorphous hermit” who can be devoured by sharks or crushed by the weight of the sea. At this point, there seems to be little spiritual in the image, just as there seems little spiritual in a mustard seed or yeast. The poem could well be H.D. grappling with her depression, which was treated by Freud.
However, while she may shut herself off from the world, sometimes with a snap, she has a rich interior life which seems more valuable than anything the world has to offer. That is the spell that is to be found “in every sea-shell.” Therefore, do not be fooled by the hard exterior.
The reference to the pearl reminds us how pearls are created. A grain of sand gets inside the vulnerable oyster, which must build up a defense against this denizen from the world out there. In responding to this assault, the oyster, like the introverted poet, creates something of transcendent beauty, a pearl of great price.
Jesus calls upon us to seek out a comparable beauty. Poetry can be a means of connecting with the kingdom of heaven.
From The Walls Do Not Fall By H.D.
There is a spell, for instance, in every sea-shell:
continuous, the sea-thrust is powerless against coral,
bone, stone, marble hewn from within by that craftsman,
the shell-fish: oyster, clam, mollusc
is master-mason planning the stone-marvel:
yet that flabby, amorphous hermit within, like the planet
senses the finite, it limits its orbit
of being, its house, temple, fane, shrine:
it unlocks the portals at stated intervals:
prompted by hunger, it opens to the tide-flow:
but infinity? no, of nothing-too-much:
I sense my own limit, my shell-jaws snap shut
at invasion of the limitless, ocean-weight; infinite water
can not crack me, egg in egg-shell; closed in, complete, immortal
full-circle, I know the pull of the tide, the lull
as well as the moon; the octopus-darkness
is powerless against her cold immortality;
so I in my own way know that the whale
can not digest me: be firm in your own small, static, limited
orbit and the shark-jaws of outer circumstance
will spit you forth: be indigestible, hard, ungiving.
so that, living within, you beget, self-out-of-self,
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 42nd Installment
I wrap up this memoir with some reflections on what life feels like at 75 and what I foresee going forward.
Sartre writes that, when we die, we become our past, frozen in the minds of those who remember us. At three quarters of a century, I’m not sure that people will see me differently when I die than how they see me now, except for the fact that I will be more infirm. The final years of my father, who died at 90, and my mother, who died at 96, don’t loom as large in my memory as do the years when they were younger. In fact, I divide them into their working and parenting lives when I was a child and teenager; their working lives after I left home; and their retirement lives, which lack the variety of what came before. I see my own life through the same lens: child and adolescent; young married adult before children; working parent; professor whose children have left home; and retiree who life has settled.
All of which is to say, I see myself at this age as having become my past, Sartre’s frozen state, since I don’t see my life changing much going forward. And that’s fine with me.
Although my life has a sameness to it, I don’t find it dull. I play tennis, write my blog, read and listen to novels, do occasional traveling, go to church, correspond with friends and family, and engage in various communal activities. I don’t feel that I need to accomplish more than I am accomplishing, and I don’t fret about missed opportunities. The incessant worry of professors—that we’re not doing as much as we could for our students and that our scholarly work is falling short of expectations—is no longer a part of my life.
In other words, I’m not like Tennyson’s restless Ulysses, mentioned in my last post, who feels that “some work of noble note, may yet be done,/ Not unbecoming men that strive with gods.” I no longer feel the need to prove myself.
Is that a version of the static existence that Ulysses accuses his son of living? Admittedly, I am not out there smiting the sounding furrows so that I can touch the Happy Isles and meet the great Achilles. Nor am I taking on gulfs that could wash me down. I’m not living a heroic life.
Unlike Tennyson’s Ulysses, whose restlessness lands him in one of Dante’s lower circles, Homer’s Odysseus is told he will die in peace. His fate, predicted by Teiresias in the underworld, is not unlike that of my mother, who died in her sleep only a few feet from where I am sitting now:
Then a seaborne death soft as this hand of mist will come upon you when you are wearied out with rich old age, your country folk in blessed peace around you. And all this shall be just as I foretell.
Living in the house where both my parents grew old and died means that I think about my end quite a lot. This house is filled with those memories—of playing Mozart and reading poetry during my mother’s final hours before falling asleep next to her—and I sense that I am walking in their footsteps. To be sure, I know that my children won’t come to live with Julia and me as she and I lived with my mother so the odds are that at least one of us will end our days in a senior center. It’s easier to imagine it all finishing out here.
Yet if my life is quieter and more reflective, it is far from static. My mind feels constantly stimulated by the novels I’m reading and the essays I’m writing. In a way, retirement has allowed me to shut out the distractions that once made my life a never-ending emotional roller coaster, such as that described by John Wilmot:
But we, poor slaves to hope and fear, Are never of our joys secure; They lessen still as they draw near, And none but dull delights endure.
I am privileged in that my experience of retirement, bolstered as it is by Medicare, social security, and a pension and so far marked by good health, means that I can choose to focus on what brings me the most pleasure. Literature thrills me as much now as it ever did, as does the companionship of friends, on the tennis courts and around the table. And then there are our two sons and our five grandchildren. I am filled with gratitude for all of it.
Of course, life being what it is means that that I can’t remain entirely complacent. The threat of autocracy looms and I worry about the world we are leaving our grandchildren, especially when it comes to the climate. I will continue to participate in No Kings marches and vote and make my voice heard through the blog.
Perhaps I shouldn’t assume that life at 85 will look like life at 75. Perhaps there is still some work of noble note to be done. If so, I’ll report on it when it happens and update this memoir.
I promised last week to say more about Terry Prachett’s insights into police going over to the dark side—a not insignificant issue as ICE killings continue to mount—so here goes. First, however, a thought on why Pratchett isn’t taken more seriously as a social commentator, even though I find his thinking to be profound.
I once attended a panel on “Fantasy and Humor” at the annual conference of The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. There a fantasy author—I didn’t recognize him—observed that, while he had won more literary awards than Pratchett, Pratchett was by far the superior author. The reason, he said, is because fantasy enthusiasts have problems mixing fantasy with humor. They prefer the high seriousness of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, not the hilarious wit of Discworld.
I think the same holds true when it comes to Pratchett addressing social problems, especially in the novels featuring Commander of the Watch Sam Vines. Because Pratchett is constantly joking about what the police must do to maintain order in crime-ridden Ankh Morpork, which resembles Dickensian London, we can miss his deeper message. For instance, at times he appears to fantasize about police violence reestablishing the peace, as in the following scene in The Fifth Elephant.
Watchman Detritus, a dim-witted but likable troll, has used his muscle to sort out a bar fight. Concerned, Commander Vines warns him that he must start using tact and diplomacy to keep ancient rivalries between trolls and dwarfs from getting out of hand:
“You have come to der right troll for that, sair,” said Detritus.
“You did push that man through that wall last week, Detritus.”
“It was done with tact, sir. Quite a fin wall.”
Vimes let it go at that. The man in question had just laid out three watchmen with a club, which Detritus had broken in one hand before selecting the suitably tactful wall.
For those cheering Detritus’s use of force, I note that the City Watch also has DEI policies, which make it far more effective than if it were made up only of male humans. After all, it must deal with a multicultural population. Along with the troll there is a female dwarf, a man raised among dwarfs (Captain Carrot), a zombie, a golem, a female werewolf, a female vampire, an “Igor” (think Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein), a gargoyle (Constable Downspout), a gnome, a fundamentalist (Constable Visit-the-Infidel-with-Explanatory-Pamphlets), and Corporal Nobby Nobbs, who needs a certificate to prove that he is human.
Vimes himself has a history of violence—as a child he needed his fists and feet to survive the Ankh Morporkian backstreets on which he was raised–and he shakes his head when the noble Carrot attempts to follow the Marquis of Fantailler Rules in a fight with a rogue werewolf. As Pratchett explains in a footnote,
“The noble art of fisticuffs” mostly consisted of a list of places where people weren’t allowed to hit [the Marquis]. Many peole were impressed with his work and later stood with noble chest outthrust and fists balled in a spirit of manly aggression against people who hadn’t read the Marquis’s book but did know how to knock people senseless with a chair. The last words of a surprisingly large number of people were “Stuff the bloody Marquis of Fantailler—”
[Side note that is of interest to me: This is a reference to the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, formulated by the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, which formed the basis of boxing. If my great-great-grandfather William Scott was, as our family believes, the natural son of Charles William Henry Montagu-Scott, 4th Duke of Buccleuch—after Charles died William would go on to manage the estate of Buccleuch’s best friend, Lord Bunbury–then he would have been second cousin twice removed of the Marquess. Unofficially, of course.]
So far, it appears that Pratchett is appealing to our testosterone-charged manosphere, the one that cheers Trump and Hegseth when they bomb fishing boats and indiscriminate Iranian targets.
But if Vimes sometimes fights outside the rules, he does so only when necessary and he draws the line at killing. In a conversation with professional assassin Inigo, who has been sent to protect him, he objects to his palm knife:
“This is not a weapon. This is for killing people,” [Vimes] said.
“Uh…most weapons are,” said Inigo.
“No, they’re not. They’re so you don’t have to kill people. They’re for…for having. For being seen. For warning. This is for hiding away until you bring it out and kill people in the dark.
Vimes, we learn, has never deliberately killed anyone. He knows he has a dark side, however, and when he has just managed to subdue a werewolf that has been going for his throat, he experiences the primal fury that may have overcome various ICE agents in Maine, Minneapolis, and elsewhere:
Make them stay wolves, said a little inner voice. The more time they spend on four legs, the less bright they’d become.
A deeper voice, red and raw, from much, much further inside, said: Kill ’em all!
The rage was boiling up now, fighting against the chill.
Time and again, however, we see Vimes suppressing this impulse. The struggle is most acute when, in the later novel Thud!, Vimes is a father who sees his beloved son threatened. In that novel, he is in danger of being taken over by a dwarf curse that unleashes out-of-control rage in whomever it touches. Known as “the Summoning Dark,” it goads Vimes to enact extreme vengeance on those who would harm his loved ones. Here’s the scene where we watch him overcome it:
[Vimes] said: “What are you?”
The entity stirred, like an old fish in a deep pool. It was too tired to flee.
“I am the Summoning Dark.” It was not, in fact, a sound, but had it been, it would have been a hiss. “Who are you?”
“I am the Watchman.”
“They would have killed his family!” The darkness lunged, and met resistance. “Think of the deaths they have caused! Who are you to stop me?”
“He created me. Quis custodiet Ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen? Me. I watch him. Always. You will not force him to murder for you.”
“What kind of human creates his own policeman?”
“One who fears the dark.”
“And so he should,” said the entity, with satisfaction.
“Indeed. But I think you misunderstand. I am not here to keep darkness out. I’m here to keep it in.” There was a clink of metal as the shadowy watchman lifted a dark lantern and opened its little door. Orange light cut through the blackness. “Call me . . . the Guarding Dark. Imagine how strong I must be.”
The Summoning Dark backed desperately into the alley, but the light followed it, burning it.
“And now,” said the watchman, “get out of town.”
The Summoning Dark, goaded by the president, has taken over various ICE agents and spread to a segment of the population, with tragic consequences. Vimes, however, models a heroic alternative. I like what reviewer Andrew Brown wrote of Pratchett after he died tragically at 66:
Pratchett wrote some memorable villains, but his heroes were much more vivid. What makes them so unusual is their unheroic and everyday quality, even when they are being heroic or, if necessary, saving the world. Sam Vimes may be the most fully realized decent man in modern literature. He’s not a saint, but there are some things you know – and he knows – he will never do, and some temptations he will never yield to.
As we witness the assaults on our democracy, we must access our inner Sam Vimes, standing strong while not yielding to overpowering rage.
Periodically I rerun the following climate change essay—last posted on July 20, 2022—because its pessimism becomes truer every year. As wildfires run rampant throughout Canada, Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” takes on new urgency.
Included at the end are links to all the posts I have written on the ongoing catastrophe.
Of course DJT wants to blame anything rather than climate change, which he is supercharging with his attacks on renewables and his support of big oil and coal. The only time he cares about poor air quality is when it comes from abroad.
If, worldwide, we made a concerted effort to dramatically reduce the hydrocarbons we are sending into the atmosphere, we could still stave off the worst. How many more signs does the GOP need before it commits fully to the necessary measures?
Reprinted from July 20, 2022
“Some say the world will end in fire,/Some say in ice,” Robert Frost writes in his well-known poem, and it increasingly appears that all these someones are right. The current heat wave, often accompanied by fires, follows terrifying reports of accelerating glacier melt. According to National Geographic three years ago,
Greenland ice sheet is losing mass about six times faster than it was just a few decades ago, whatever tenuous balance that existed before long since upended. Between 2005 and 2016, melt from the ice sheet was the single largest contributor to sea level rise worldwide, though Antarctica may overtake it soon.
Within the past 50 years, the ice sheet has already shed enough to add about half an inch of water to the world’s oceans, and that number is increasing precipitously as the planet heats. During this summer’s extreme heat wave that parked over Greenland for a week and turned over half its surface ice to slush, meltwater equivalent to over 4 million swimming pools sloughed into the ocean in a single day. Over the month of July, enough melt poured into the ocean to bump sea levels up by an easily measurable half a millimeter.
Frost, who may have Milton’s hot hell and Dante’s cold hell in mind, is writing about relationships, not climate change. As he sees it, the relationship is in trouble whether the partners are fiery passionate or icy cold. Fire is louder and more flamboyant, but the silent workings of cold can be just as deadly:
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
The poem is just as relevant to our current situation, however, where apocalypse is looking increasingly likely.
Speaking of apocalyptic accounts that get at our situation, I have cited two other works in this regard, Homer’s Iliad and C. S. Lewis’s Last Battle. I wrote the following about the Iliad in August 2019 in conjunction with the burning of the Amazon rainforests:
My anger finds some articulation in a horrific scene in The Iliad. Because Hector has killed his dearest friend, Achilles reengages in the war and goes on a killing spree so bloody that the River Scamander reacts in horror. When Achilles clogs its channels with dead Trojans, it rises up in a giant wave and bears down on the Greek warrior.
Because Achilles is beloved by the Gods, however, the iron-working god Hephaistos enters the fray, and his technology is brought to bear. I think of the Amazon’s unparalleled biological diversity as I read what happens next:
Then against the river Hephaistos turned his bright flame, and the elms and tamarisks and willows burned away, with all the clover, galingale, and rushes plentiful along the winding streams. Then eels and fish, in backwaters, in currents, wriggled here and there at the scalding breath of torrid blasts from the great smith, Hephaistos…
And further on:
[The river] spoke in steam, and his clear current seethed, the way a caldron whipped by a white-hot fire boils with a well-fed hog’s abundant fat that spatters all the rim, as dry split wood turns ash beneath it. So his currents, fanned by fire, seethed, and the river would not flow but came to a halt, tormented by the gale of fire from the heavenly smith, Hephaistos.
This isn’t the only time that Achilles is associated with devastating fire. In an earlier passage, Homer uses fire imagery to capture his slaughter:
A forest fire will rage through deep glens of a mountain, crackling dry from summer heat, and coppices blaze up in every quarter as wind whips the flame: so Akhilleus flashed to right and left like a wild god, trampling the men he killed and black earth ran with blood. As when a countryman yokes oxen with broad brows to tread out barley on a well-bedded threshing floor, and quickly the grain is husked under the bellowing beasts: The sharp-hooved horses of Akhilleus just so crushed dead men and shields. His axle-tree was splashed with blood, so was his chariot rail, with drops thrown up by wheels and horses’ hooves. And Peleus’ son kept riding for his glory, staining his powerful arms with mire and blood.
Achilles may be Iliad’s hero, but Homer fully intends for us to experience the tragedy of what happens. Once the most humane of the Greeks, as Caroline Alexander points out in her superb book The War that Killed Achilles, Achilles has lost all perspective and grinds to dust everything that is human and sacred: Nature is ravaged, bodies are desecrated, and people’s hearts are torn apart. One can plausibly argue that The Iliad is the world’s greatest anti-war work as it exposes the colossal waste of armed conflict.
The war that today’s humans are waging against nature is occurring on an epic scale and is having epic consequences. Unlike in TheIliad, however, reactive nature will dole out consequences that even heavenly fire cannot resist. Our descendants will curse us for the world we have left them.
***
Now on to sea-level rise. Here’s the passage I cited from the last work in the Narnia series, where Lewis rewrites the Book of Revelation:
At last something white—long, level line of whiteness that gleamed in the light of the standing stars—came moving towards them from the eastern end of the world. A widespread noise broke the silence: first a murmur then a rumble, then a roar. And now they could see what it was that was coming, and how fast it came. It was a foaming wall of water. The sea was rising. In that tree-less world you could see it very well. You could see all the rivers getting wider and the lakes getting larger, and separate lakes joining into one, and valleys turning into new lakes, and hills turning into islands, and then those islands vanishing. And the high moors to their left and the higher mountains to their right crumbled and slipped down with a roar and a splash into the mounting water; and the water came swirling up to the very threshold of the Doorway (but never passed it) so that the foam splashed about Aslan’s forefeet. All now was level water from where they stood to where the waters met the sky.
When fire and ice team up, we’re in trouble like we’ve never seen before. As a character tells Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the popular television series by that name,
When I saw you stop the world from, you know, ending, I just assumed that was a big week for you. It turns out I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse.
Prior to October, 2018, I compiled the following annotated list of climate change posts. Several were about climate change denial:
Kingsolver Explains Climate Denial — Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior includes a deep dive into why poor Appalachian whites don’t believe that climate change is happening. Climate Scientists, Our Cassandras–Climate scientists must feel like Agamemnon’s Cassandra as they try to warn the world. Civil War Battle, Image of Climate Denial – Ambrose Bierce’s famous short story “Chickamauga” helps us understand why people ignore the facts about our changing climate. Donne’s Warning about Climate Change – Donne mentions the movement of the spheres in his poem “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” but they are distant, and he makes the important point that we only see the effects of nature that occur right before our eyes, not the larger patterns. Think of Senator James Inhofe bringing a snowball to the Senate to disprove global warming. Tolstoy and Climate Change Denial – We can see that climate change denialists follow in the footsteps of the Moscow aristocrats in War and Peace, who can’t believe that Napoleon will take the city. Out of Denial and into Responsibility – Jack Burden in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men gives us a great description of the philosophy of denial, which he calls “idealism.” By the end of the novel, fortunately, he decides to face up to reality. Obama: A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall – Poet Henry Vaughan decries fools who “prefer dark night before true light,” and Alexander Pope in The Dunciad goes after the dunces who turn their backs on science, intelligence, and logic. GOP Denies a Giant Problem – For another instance of denial, it is hard to top Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians, who refuse to believe that other men like Gulliver could exist. Their philosophers conclude that he must have dropped from the moon. Haiyan, Climate Change, and King Lear – King Lear also closes his eyes to the family and political storms that he has triggered. His most trustworthy counselor advises him to “See better, Lear,” thereby earning banishment. When American Fantasies Are Dangerous – In American Gods, Neil Gaiman gives us a great example of denial: southern slave owners refuse to acknowledge that there has been a successful slave rebellion in Haiti. Melville and Climate Change Denial – Another instance of slave society denial occurs with Captain Delano in Melville’s fine novella Benito Cereno refusing to see the rebellion going on right before his eyes.
Some write about the grim future ahead: Elemental Joy in California’s Wildfires? – Can it be possible that some people are revelling in the consequences of climate change? Will Warm Days Never Cease — Classic poems like Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” suddenly look different as climate change has its way with us. Still Falls the Rain – Hurricane Harvey, exacerbated by human-caused climate change–invites comparisons with the London blitzkrieg, as described by Edith Sitwell. How Will the Future Judge Us for Trump? — Jane Hirshfield has a poem that gets us to look at ourselves from a future perspective, including what we did not do in the face of disaster. Caves of Ice, Prophecies of War – Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” poem came to mind as I heard the catastrophic news about the breakup of arctic ice. Neil Gaiman and the Pipeline Protests — Gaiman’s American Gods should us what will happen to us if we offend the local deities. Our Children Will Reproach Us – Lucille Clifton shows us how our children will view us. Climate Change, Fairies Fighting – Climate change, as described by Shakespeare in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Climate Action Will Lead to Dystopia – Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker is about nuclear holocaust, not climate change, but it captures the same disregard and contempt for future generations that climate denialists are exhibiting. Hydrocarbons Unleash an Angry God – Euripides’s The Bacchae shows how nature responds when we try to impose our will upon it. The control freak King Pentheus is torn apart at the order of Dionysus. This Is the Way the World Ends – Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” sounds as though it was written for climate change. Will the world end in fire or ice? How about both? Will Californians Become the New Okies? – The droughts that climate change is visiting upon California (not to mention other parts of the world) bring to mind the ecological nightmare described by John Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath. The Mariner’s Advice to College Students – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner can be read as an ecological parable—the arrogance that the mariner exhibits by shooting the albatross unleashes “life in death” upon the world.
Some authors provide useful advice for climate activists: Kingsolver Tries to Save the Planet – Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior directly takes on the issue of climate change as it shows disruptions in the migratory patterns of monarch butterflies. Most usefully, Kingsolver shows various constituencies that must learn to talk to each other if we are to address the issues. To Save the Planet, Scientists Must Protest — Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior shows why climate scientists cannot simply retreat into their labs. Being Right on the Climate Is Not Enough – Along these lines, Ibsen’s Enemy of the People has important lessons for climate activists: if you want to change people’s minds, avoid self-righteousness. Climate Change: Signs of Witchery – Leslie Marmon Silko, a Laguna Pueblo writer, vividly captures environmental devastation in her novel Ceremony but also has her protagonist discover a healthier way of living in the world. Climate Hope Shines in Dark Times – Madeleine L’Engel has a wonderful Advent poem that I shared after the world gathered in Paris this past December to combat climate change. Despite the grim forecasts, we experienced a glimmer of hope.
I’m trying to figure out what I think of a comparison that Trevor Potter, the Republican former chair of the Federal Election Commission, has made between DJT and Herman Melville’s most iconic character. “It does feel a little like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick,’” said Potter after the president pressured him to resign while firing the two Democratic members of the commission, whose job it is to assist election boards around the country. Potter elaborated,
He is just fixated on his claim that he didn’t lose the 2020 election. Armchair psychiatrists can say he doesn’t like losing, he can never admit he lost anything. But it’s clearly become an important part of his psyche and in some ways an important part of this administration.
I hesitate about making the comparison because Ahab’s obsession with the whale that cost him his leg is elevated by his madness, somewhat like King Lear, on whom Melville partially based him. By contrast, DJT is just monumentally petty. Ahab at least is a competent sea captain, even if he loses sight of his main mission, whereas DJT is an incompetent bumpkin whose frail ego has never been able to admit that Hillary Clinton received more votes than he did, that Barack Obama drew more people to his inauguration, that Joe Biden won in 2020, or that his razor-thin win over Kamala Harris was anything other than a blowout victory.
Ahab at least acknowledges that Moby Dick bit his leg off.
Both men, however, feel emasculated by their defeats and can’t stop obsessing how they feel diminished. Both, furthermore, bring about the destruction of their respective ships (ship of state, in DJT’s case). Melville is fairly clear that the Pequod is a metaphor for America, with its multicultural crew, its industrial might (the ship functions as a processing factory), and its frontier spirit. But whatever democratic spirit exists within the crew—I think of Ishmael’s friendship with Queequeg and of the fellow feeling engendered by squishing sperm with his fellow crew members—is put at risk by the authoritarian who rules over them.
Neither authoritarian, however, could indulge his mania if he didn’t have compliant underlings, although Ahab’s three mates at least have some excuse. To function well, a ship must have a strict hierarchy, which is spelled out so minutely that third mate Flask, who can only begin eating after his fellow officers have sat down and who must be done before they get up, barely has time to feed himself. Trump’s subordinates, by contrast, have sworn an oath to the Constitution, not to the president, and have the responsibility of impeaching him (in Congress’ case) or invoking the 25th Amendment (in his Cabinet’s case) should he imperil the enterprise.
Yet even Ahab knows he must get buy-in, or at least non-resistance, from the crew and from his three mates. He achieves the first with Trump-like drama:
Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.
Like Trump, Ahab possesses the power to enroll the mob in his personal vendetta:
“Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”
“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: “A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!”
First mate Starbuck, by contrast, is harder to win over. In fact, he is horrified at what Ahab is doing:
“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
Ahab’s manic energy, however, overwhelms Starbuck not unlike how Trump has overwhelmed the Republican Party. “They think me mad—Starbuck does,” he says to himself, “but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!” For his part, Starbuck, again like far too many in the GOP, believes he can’t fight such madness and gives up, saying to himself,
My soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man! … I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.
Authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder has observed that we are experiencing “super power suicide.” Just as Ahab’s mad quest results in the destruction of the ship and the death of all but Ishmael, so Trump is determined to destroy the climate, the rule of law, the electoral process, and the world order. In the face of that, there’s only so much that the Starbucks and Ishmaels amongst us can do.
That being said, had the three mates and the crew all worked together, they could have stopped Ahab. The same is true of the American public.
Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump
Monday
As a France fan, I felt for Argentina as I watched the World Cup final: like the French squad, the Argentinians learned how Spain’s superb midfield can suck the life out of any attack, no matter how potent. It didn’t matter that, in the course of this tournament, Kylian Mbappé and Lionel Messi smashed through World Cup scoring records. Once they confronted the Spanish it was like (here are the two literary examples that came to mind) they were trapped under Sylvia Plath’s bell jar and crushed by the torture stones in Arthur Miller’s Crucible.
I’ll get to those passages in a moment. First of all, however, earlier in the tournament Argentina had me thinking of a different literary work. Its late game heroics reminded me of how Mac the Knife wriggles out of trouble time after time in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera.
Mac is the charismatic highwayman and charming bigamist at the center of the 18th century musical, which Bertolt Brecht later appropriated for Three Penny Opera. He escapes the hangman’s noose twice in Gay’s play, although the second time requires a miraculous reprieve.
The scene is as follows: After capturing Mac a second time, the prison authorities prepare to hang him instantly and his fate seems sealed. At this point, however, the play goes meta—the movie Wayne’s World does something similar—as someone watching it begs the beggar author to change the ending:
Player. But, honest Friend, I hope you don’t intend that Macheath shall be really executed.
Beggar. Most certainly, Sir.—To make the Piece perfect, I was for doing strict poetical Justice.—Macheath is to be hang’d; and for the other Personages of the Drama, the Audience must have suppos’d they were all either hang’d or transported.Player. Why then, Friend, this is a downright deep Tragedy. The Catastrophe is manifestly wrong, for an Opera must end happily.
Luckily for Mac, there’s a quick fix:
Beggar. Your Objection, Sir, is very just, and is easily remov’d. For you must allow, that in this kind of Drama, ’tis no matter how absurdly things are brought about—So—you Rabble there—run and cry, A Reprieve!—let the Prisoner be brought back to his Wives in Triumph.
I’m aware that certain people—most notably the Egyptian coach, whose team was up two goals on Argentina with 11 minutes left in regular time—think that the fix has been in for Messi’s team. And certainly we have seen top-down reprieves in this tournament, most notably with the U.S.’s Florian Balagon. But just as we can’t help rejoicing when Mac pulls off yet another miraculous escape, so most neutral advisors revelled in the artistry of Messi, who whether with a goal or an assist saved Argentina time after time.
The magic ran out against Spain, however, as Messi, like the French attackers before him, had no room to maneuver. Expertly maintaining ball control while breaking up most of Argentina’s passes, the Spanish were like the torturers squeezing the life out of Giles Corey:
Proctor: Then how does he die?
Elizabeth, gently: They press him, John.
Proctor: Press?
Elizabeth: Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay.
Plath’s novel, about the mental breakdown of a college-age woman, has its own graphic account of suffocation. The novel, I’m fairly certain, borrows its central metaphor from a famous Joseph Wright painting, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump. In it, a scientist methodically pumps out the air to prove something (what? that birds need air to breathe?) while the spectators demonstrate a range of emotions. I identify most with the woman who can’t bring herself to look and with the child who gazes in horrified fascination. An objective scientist might have seen Spain’s performance against France and Argentina in the same light: a masterful imposition of will on a previous vibrant life form.
Here’s Plath taking the metaphor and applying it to her protagonist:
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
And
If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
And:
I sank back in the grey, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn’t stir.
For much of their time against Spain, France and Argentina felt as though they couldn’t stir but were stewing in their own sour air. The Spanish press crushed the life out of them. They were trapped in a bad dream.
In today’s post I cannibalize from several previous posts on Denise Levertov’s poem about Jacob’s dream of a stairway to heaven. Anthropologist Marcel Eliade, in his theory of “the sacred and the profane, talks about those sacred spaces in which the boundary between the earthly and the spiritual is porous. Jacob’s Bethel is one such place. Here’s the account as it appears in the Book of Genesis (28:10-19a):
Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the LORD stood beside him and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place– and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel.
My former colleague Dana Greene, in her biography of Levertov, sees the poet exploring basic themes in “The Jacob’s Ladder.” Whereas the angels barely feel the stone steps—and for the poet, the stone steps are a significant detail—a man climbing “must scrape his knees, and bring/ the grip of his hands into play.”Dana writes that, in Levertov’s view, poets have a responsibility to engage with the world and issues of social justice. This means acknowledging both joy and suffering.
Our task, when faced with this reality, is to “strive to make a bridge between them,” an effort in which we invariably “fail or we almost fail.” To allow oneself to be nurtured by joy while resisting being destroyed by suffering, difficult though it may be, is what it means to be fully human. Here’s the poem:
The Jacob’s Ladder
The stairway is not a thing of gleaming strands a radiant evanescence for angels’ feet that only glance in their tread, and need not touch the stone.
It is of stone. A rosy stone that takes a glowing tone of softness only because behind it the sky is a doubtful, a doubting night gray.
A stairway of sharp angles, solidly built. One sees that the angels must spring down from one step to the next, giving a little lift of the wings:
and a man climbing must scrape his knees, and bring the grip of his hands into play. The cut stone consoles his groping feet. Wings brush past him. The poem ascends.
Note that the poem is also about poetry, with the stairway a transcendent poem. It must be built with the tool that we have, which is imperfect language. Rather than directly expressing radiant and evanescent angels, the poet must deal with sharp angles. The doubting night gray of the sky testifies to the challenge he or she faces.
As in many of Levertov’s poems—I think particularly of her poem on Doubting Thomas–we experience the divine only after struggling with doubt. People are not angels and the rocks we use for building may scrape our feet. Nevertheless, just as Jacob, his head pillowed on a rock, sees a stairway to heaven, so does our rock have “a glowing tone of softness.” The poet feels the light brush of angel wings as the poem ascends.
I pick up at least two other poems that Levertov may be alluding to. In “The Altar,” George Herbert talks about the paradox of a hard stone altar being a means of opening his own hard heart to God. (See my post on “The Altar” here.)
A HEART alone Is such a stone, As nothing but Thy pow’r doth cut. Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame To praise thy name.
The other is Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” which has an image of a ladder. The poet laments the end of his youthful romanticism, which once gave him marvelous poetic images (his circus animals). Now, however, he feels trapped in his own grimy and mundane reality.
Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
The miracle is that, out of this unpromising material, Yeats constructs the ladder that is his poem. For those wrestling with doubts about whether transcendence exists, look to the miraculous existence of poetry and be reassured.
Another Jacob’s Ladder Poem: Lucille Clifton turned to the stairway to heaven story two days after the 9-11 attacks. In it she imagines New York firemen climbing a Jacob’s ladder of their own. By heroically sacrificing their lives in an attempt to save others, they achieved their own kind of transcendence.
In writing the poem, Clifton undoubtedly had in mind the slave spiritual “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder,” a dream of escaping harsh circumstances:
Thursday, 9/13-01
the firemen ascend like jacob’s ladder into the mouth of history
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 41st Installment
Today I look back at the friendships in my life that have revolved around reading. While most of you will not know the specific individuals I name, you undoubtedly have versions of them in your own lives.
As Jane Austen illustrates in Northanger Abbey, sometimes reading provides powerful ways to bond, and that has been true throughout my life. In third grade my best friend Chris Mayfield introduced me to The Silver Chair, and I recall standing with our arms outstretched and asking Aslan to whisk us off to Narnia, as Eustace and Jill do in the book. A little bit later, the Hardy Boys connected me with Tommy Camp, who had over 30 of them, bought with money from selling vegetables from his family’s garden. Although formulaic and badly written, they allowed us to imagine having adventures as friends (or, to use the author’s word, “chums”). The House on the Cliff was my favorite.
Despite the role that books played in my friendships, however, reading also pulled me away from people, ushering me into what my dissertation advisor Paul Hunter termed, “the loneliness of the long distance reader.” I read while others played Little League, went swimming and caving, and engaged in various group enterprises. What bonding occurred was with my father, who read to us every night. Reading also gave me and my two brothers (later three) a collective identity that set us apart. Being a “Bates boy” meant, above all else, immersion in books.
My best friend in high school was Victor Roggli, just retired from the Duke Medical Faculty, who beat me out for valedictorian and with whom I teamed up for senior literature projects. Teacher Will Solie wanted us to find novel ways to explore the books he assigned, so for Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment I set up as a Freudian analyst while Victor, as Raskolnikov, processed the reasons why he murdered the old pawnbroker. (I recall explaining the workings of the id and superego to him as he lay on a couch moaning about his bloody sock.) For Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, Victor played the Buddha while I was a pilgrim searching for the path to enlightenment. Solie also had us compile our own reading lists, and Victor inspired me by reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace over spring break.
I majored in history rather than English at Carleton College and so didn’t engage in the English students’ intense group study sessions as they prepared for comprehensives. Although I did meet Julia through her poetry group, it wasn’t until graduate school that literature became again for me a collective endeavor.
Emory’s graduate teaching assistants had a lounge in which we shared teaching ideas and studied together for the Master’s exam. We had a white board on which we played such literary games as “which author and which character in literature would you most like to have as a partner.” (I believe I chose Aphra Behn and Dorothea Brooke.) Once we compiled a list of “graduate student qualifiers,” which was a rhetorical move that we likened to a wolf rolling over and defusing the aggression of a rival by showing the white of its belly. Fearing that we would trigger aggression in our graduate school professors if we too definitively asserted a claim, our qualifiers included “one could argue” or “it is not beyond the realm of possibility to speculate.”
My closest friend in those years was Norman Finkelstein (the poet, not the pro-Palestinian activist), who was the star of the department. We were both interested in how literature could change the world and read together various Marxist thinkers, especially members of the Frankfurt School, to arrive at theories as to how this could happen. The dense prose of authors such as Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, and Lyndon LaRouche proved challenging, but because we saw ourselves on a mission, we plunged in, working through the ideas. Although our intellectual interests would later diverge—I went in a more utilitarian direction while Norm became interested in Jewish mystical traditions–our years together created a permanent bond.
For a while, St. Mary’s College of Maryland felt like a continuation of graduate school. I was part of an unusually large group of new faculty, and we were excited by the idea of teaching at a public liberal arts college, with its vision of making a liberal arts education accessible to first generation college students. My best friend in those early years was Hans Lofgren, our literary theory and 19th American Literature specialist, and together we plunged into the work of Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton, two of the leading literary Marxists theorists of the day. We set up weekly study sessions—no mean feat as our teaching duties were heavy—and Hans helped me bring rigor to my thinking. Hans was invaluable in helping me write my first major academic article.
My heart was broken when Hans was denied tenure—he wasn’t yet the well-published scholar he would later become at the University of Gothenberg in his native Sweden—and I never fully recovered my initial idealism about St. Mary’s.
Alan and Jackie Paskow were also hugely influential colleagues, Alan in philosophy and Jackie in German and French. Alan was interested in the phenomenology of art, which is to say, the impact that art (in his case, literature and painting) has on how we perceive and interact with the world. How is it, he asks in his book The Paradoxes of Art, that fictional characters such as Hamlet and Anna Karenina matter to us and emotionally affect us. I too was exploring these questions, albeit from the perspective of reading outcomes.
We talked of these matters when Alan was dying of cancer at 70. I remember watching sunsets with him on his dock and sharing with him Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. If the poem has particularly vivid images of nature’s cycle of life and death, it is because the protagonist knows he only has a year to live, and Alan talked about the experience of seeing each season for the last time.
At Alan’s request, about 15 or so of his fellow faculty gathered for monthly salons (as we called them) to talk about art, the meaning of life, and other existential matters. Alan was reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as his final reading project, and he shared his thoughts. We were aware at the time how extraordinary these gatherings were. Like Socrates, Alan turned his death into a teaching opportunity.
Alan’s wife Jackie, meanwhile, was one of several female colleagues—Andrea Hammer was another–who introduced me to feminist literary theory, and we read Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic. From Jackie and Andrea I learned that works that I thought I knew can appear different to women readers.
Andrea also introduced our department to “process writing,” which moved us out of the old rhetorical approaches to writing (where one started with forms, say, a comparison-contrast essay) and instead focuses on the steps, often non-linear, that produce writing. Between new ways of seeing literature and new ways of teaching, these were heady times.
Other faculty friendships opened up later. One was with my favorite tennis partner, Bjorn Krondorfer in the Religious Studies department, who introduced me to Bibliodrama. I learned that participants interacting as different characters or sometimes even objects can open up new Biblical interpretations. Twice Bjorn and I tried out the method on literature, once with Hilda Doolittle’s “There is a spell in every seashell,” once with Andre Dubus’s novella Adultery. We shared the results in an English Education article.
Another close friend was David Finkelman, who taught the “Abnormal Psychology” classes for the psych department. The way that David lived for his students was inspiring, and twice we team-taught a course we called “Madness in Literature.” Every week we featured a work dealing with a different disorder (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden for schizophrenia, Syliva Plath’s Ariel for bipolarity, Lolita for pedophilia, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony for PTSD), and I was impressed with the succinct way that David summed up the major features of each condition. We learned that, for all its scientific aspirations, psychology benefits from humanistic approaches as well.
David would later marry one of Julia’s and my closest friends, head of the Education Department Lois Stover. As an expert in Young Adult Literature, Lois opened my eyes to the importance of young adult novels in helping teenagers sort through their pressing concerns. And not only teenagers: Lois gave me Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia after Justin died, which comforted me.
If these friends had all remained in the St. Mary’s area, we would probably have retired there, but most of us scattered. Lovely though St. Mary’s City is, there is no there there (as Gertrude Stein would say)—just an archaeological dig, the college, two churches, and various housing developments—prompting us to move to Mayberry-like Sewanee, Tennessee. Sewanee is what AARP calls a NORC or Naturally Occurring Retirement Community, and we have been making new friends while here.
One important literary friendship has been with John Gatta, who occupied the office next to mine when I was teaching introductory courses for Sewanee. An expert in early American literature, including the Puritans and environmentally conscious authors such as Henry David Thoreau, John is interested in ecocriticism and ecotheology, and we have supported each other’s books.
We also set up a faculty discussion group that has been meeting weekly. First set in motion by our desire to understand better Dante’s Divine Comedy—we found another retired faculty member who could lead us in our exploration—we had so much fun that we decided to branch out. Other English faculty and retired faculty joined our group, and so far we have discussed (in addition to Dante) The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Hamlet, King Lear, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, Paradise Lost, Absolom and Architophel, Rape of the Lock, various Wordsworth and Coleridge poems, Walden, Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Middlemarch, The Glass Menagerie, and other works that I’m blanking on at the moment.
One important friend I haven’t yet mentioned, although Julia and I met her in college, was fellow history major Rachel Kranz. Blessed (and, in her eyes, sometimes cursed) by a genius level IQ, Rachel would go on to work for Minnesota Public Radio, aid in the unionization of Columbia University’s work force, and become a superb ghost writer, while also writing a novel and directing Off-Off Broadway plays, some of them her own. Rachel was my news editor on the Carletonian, and we also studied together the challenging works of Marxist political theory assigned us by Carl Weiner. A brilliant editor, Rachel helped me flesh out key ideas in my dissertation and then to shape my first major film article. Later, Rachel gave me invaluable feedback on my book How Beowulf Can Save America.
Although we became estranged for a short while, I remember traveling to New York to renew our friendship and reading a draft of her novel Leaps of Faith on the subway. I was so enthralled that I almost missed my stop, and I provided reader reactions to both this novel (published by Farrar Straus) and the next (The Long Waves). The latter unfortunately never saw the light of day as Rachel died of ovarian cancer.
Over the years, I spent hours and hours on the phone as Rachel used me to process the things going on in her life. Like me, Rachel saw novels and drama as essential to the health of our society (Bertolt Brecht was her favorite author), and we talked constantly about their social import. We didn’t always agree—for instance, she was more critical of Jane Austen’s use of the marriage plot than I was—but always I knew that she would uncover depths upon depths.
Years ago, when I saw Barbara Streisand in the movie The Way We Were, I thought of Rachel. Their intelligence, political commitment, and passion are similar, and Rachel had the same impact on writers and actors that the Streisand character has on screenwriter played by Robert Redford.
Rachel’s death hit me like a hammer blow. I was with her in a Bronx hospital the week before she died—in fact, I picked up a serious infection in the hospital, which led to pericarditis and myocarditis—and saw her, even at this late stage, trying to generate an idea for a book series. She was such a force that no one could believe it when she finally passed on.
In The Long Waves, which was 90% completed, there’s a psychic (Rachel had some psychic abilities) who carries the weight of America’s past colonial sins on his shoulders. Warren is heir to a wealthy Connecticut family who traces his strange aversion to sugar—it makes him violently ill—to his family’s Jamaican sugar plantations. Like Warren, Rachel felt acutely the weight of the world’s past injustices, and one reason why she had difficulty finishing her novel is because she could never reconcile herself with her inability to do more. Her “big baggy monster” of a novel (as Henry James would describe it) insisted on exploring every crime of humanity it came across.
At her memorial service, I read the final paragraph of the novel, which dazzles me the way the end of Great Gatsby dazzles. Warren is suddenly overwhelmed by a vision of the whole as all the themes of the novel come together:
And it comes so suddenly, it’s like the crack of a whip, that surge of energy that almost knocks me down. The machines that made their dresses, and the men who made the machines. The trees cut down to make the drums, and the axe that swung against each tree. The blood that flows like money, the money that dazzles like light. You’ll never be free of it, he says, and I say, I know. And piece by piece the world comes to life around me—It burns, it burns, this living world—useless, amputated, angry, bereft, joyous, pulsing, here—
All of Rachel’s righteous anger and all of her delight in life are bound up in those words.
I conclude with a friend who was instrumental in the book I published two years ago, just as Rachel was a key aid in previous publications. I met Rebecca Adams thanks to a friend I met through this blog, and at a time when I lost my way on my book, she saw its promise and offered to help. It’s hard to imagine the book having been completed without her. In addition, Rebecca guides a group of us in a weekly lectio divina session, where we discuss Biblical passages and explore various life issues.
Tennyson’s Ulysses at one point says, “I am part of all that I have met.” The converse is true with me: all that I have met are part of me. Each of these friendships has opened up incomparable richness. Or as Ulysses puts it,
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move.
