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Sunday
John Donne, who believes that God loves for us to use our imaginations—especially when we engage in playful paradoxes and witty wordplay—brings the full power of his intelligence to celebrate St. Gabriel’s visit to Mary, supposedly on or around March 25. (After all, March 25 is nine months before December 25.) In Donne’s poem “Annunciation,” the paradoxes include:
–Jesus “cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear”; –Jesus “cannot die, yet cannot choose but die”; –Jesus is at once son and brother to Mary; –Mary is her “Maker’s maker” and her “Father’s mother”; –in the darkness of her womb she has light: –cloistered in the smallness of that womb is immensity
Donne also has fun with the double meaning of the word “conceived”: God conceived that this moment would happen (“In the beginning was the Word”), which led Mary to conceive the baby Jesus. And the poet goes crazy with the word “all” in the first two lines.
Annunciation By John Donne
Salvation to all that will is nigh; That All, which always is all everywhere, Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear, Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die, Lo! faithful Virgin, yields Himself to lie In prison, in thy womb; and though He there Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He’ll wear, Taken from thence, flesh, which death’s force may try. Ere by the spheres time was created thou Wast in His mind, who is thy Son, and Brother; Whom thou conceivest, conceived; yea, thou art now Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother, Thou hast light in dark, and shutt’st in little room Immensity, cloister’d in thy dear womb.
I’m struck by how Donne’s sonnet (iambic pentameter with an abba-cddc-efef-gg rhyme scheme) can’t easily accommodate words like “salvation” and “immensity”– just as Mary’s mortal womb can’t contain Jesus’s immortality.” Donne at once locks his subject into a tight verse form and has his subject explode the container.
The lesson? God is always bigger than our attempts to reduce Him/Her/It to the measure of our understanding. When people attempt to employ God to advance their own narrow agendas, God won’t play along. After all, God is “that All, which always is all everywhere.”
Channeling Evita and Mussolini, Trump poses in the Kennedy Center
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Friday
Much has been made—and some comfort found—in the fact that the Trump-Musk administration resembles the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Inadvertently inviting a reporter into a high-level meeting discussing battle plans for an about-to-be-launched attack is only the latest example of many.
It’s less comforting to learn, however, that the same could be said of Adolph Hitler’s administration. As Tom Phillips’s recent book HUMANS: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up observes, Hitler was actually “an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clown show.”
Phillips points this out to counter our impression that the Nazi machine was ruthlessly efficient. In actuality, it resembled what we’re currently seeing from Trump:
[Hitler’s] government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was actually in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would often end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans. His “unreliability had those who worked with him pulling out their hair,” as his confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl later wrote in his memoir Zwischen Weißem und Braunem Haus. This meant that rather than carrying out the duties of state, they spent most of their time in-fighting and back-stabbing each other in an attempt to either win his approval or avoid his attention altogether, depending on what mood he was in that day.
Phillips notes that there is debate amongst historians about “whether this was a deliberate ploy on Hitler’s part to get his own way, or whether he was just really, really bad at being in charge of stuff.” He himself concludes that, “when you look at Hitler’s personal habits, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a work-shy narcissist in charge of a country.”
What Germany’s elites failed to realize, however—and what many Americans failed to realize—is that just because you’re incompetent doesn’t mean that you can’t take over a country.
Furthermore, although lazy idiots, Trump and Hitler knew/know how to put on a show. In my book Better Living through Literature I talk about Jonathan Gottschall’s Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, which looks at Hitler’s genius in this area. Gottschall examines “how he used story in his rise to power, and how he suppressed countervailing stories”:
Starting off with the Fuhrer at 16, Gottschall says that Hitler’s megalomania was triggered by Richard Wagner’s opera Rienzi and that he relied on Wagner ever after. The opera tells a story about a populist hero who rises to power and then is betrayed by his former allies and dies in a glorious last stand. In other words, Wagner’s work operatically fed both Hitler’s megalomania and his narcissistic self-pity. Gottschall argues that Hitler essentially “ruled through art, and he ruled for art.” Citing Frederic Spotts’s Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, he notes that Hitler’s goals were more “broadly artistic” than military or political. According to Spotts, “Hitler’s interest in the arts was as intense as his racism; to disregard the one is as profound a distortion as to pass over the other.”
Because of his interest in art, Hitler, along with his chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels, paid special attention to literature, targeting books they claimed were “un-German in spirit.” His ban, however, worked as an indirect compliment, as Bertolt Brecht observes in his poem “The Burning of the Books.” By consigning to the flames such writers as Heinrich Mann, Brecht, Ernst Glaser, Erich Kastner, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Heinrich Heine, and Thomas Mann, the Nazis implicitly acknowledged, as Gottschall puts it, that “ink people are among the most powerful and dangerous people in the world.”
I thought of Gottschall’s book and Hitler’s fixation on culture as I watched Trump assume directorship of the Kennedy Center and pose, Evita-like, from the upper balcony. (He may also have been channeling Mussolini.) If everything is about showy narratives, then it makes sense that he would become excited over staging musicals. (Apparently he wants to bring back Evita, Cats, and Phantom of the Opera.) We saw this in his first administration when he fantasized about Red Square-style military parades, worried about his hair getting wet when visiting Normandy Beach cemeteries, and criticized his chief of staff General John Kelly for inviting a disabled vet to sing the national anthem. His policy positions may be an inch deep, allowing subordinates to dictate his agenda, but he knows how to spin a narrative.
Because Hitler had similar skills, he was able to launch a war that led to between 70 and 85 million dead. Trump will never achieve that level of “success,” but between his Covid response, his attacks on USAID, his order to halt funding childhood vaccinations abroad (a program that has reportedly saved 18.8 children’s lives since its inception in 2000), and his support for Russia in the Ukraine conflict, he’s tallying an impressive number of deaths on his own.
But hey, if he can lord it over our cultural institutions, it will all have been worth it. Unlike Evita, however, he will not be cried for when he falls.
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Thursday
In a conversation I had last week with author Maggie Thrash, I learned that dystopian science fiction, long a bestselling genre, is less popular these days. The major reason makes sense. Why read dark warnings about the future when the future is here, when George Orwell’s 1984 appears to be an operations manual for the current administration and Handmaid’s Tale is a step away from becoming reality?
I mention this latter example in light of terrifying developments regarding female reproduction. I recommend subscribing to Jessica Valenti’s free substack blog Abortion, Every Day if you want a full rundown. There you can read about women being arrested for miscarriages, Texas midwives being charged with felonies, and pregnant women dying of sepsis when they could have received life-saving abortions. The situation worsens by the day.
In today’s post, however, I want to focus on those people who are being disappeared, a development reminiscent of Kafka’s Trial. The Guardian has an account of a Canadian entrepreneur who, for two weeks, found herself in ICE custody and then two private prisons after she entered the country legally. Fortunately Jasmine Mooney, as she notes in the article, is one of the lucky ones, thanks to various support systems she could draw on.
Others have not been so fortunate. Many of the Venezuelans sent to the notorious El Salvador prison have little legal recourse, even though they are not in fact gang members (apparently ICE has been misinterpreting their tattoos). These misidentifications haven’t prevented the State Department under Marco Rubio from cheering their horrific treatment. The U.S., it appears, is several steps into our version of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem, “First they came for the communists.”
At the very end of Kafka’s Trial, we watch as K is disappeared. I won’t get into K’s psychological drama here, how he’s so beaten down that he practically accedes to his execution. Rather, I focus on the fact that he’s innocent of all wrongdoing. For no reason at all—certainly no reason that anyone in the book gives—he has been singled out to be killed.
In a scenario that is becoming increasingly common in the States, two men show up at K’s door and, without any explanation, escort him out:
[T]hey took his arms in a way that K. had never experienced before. They kept their shoulders close behind his, did not turn their arms in but twisted them around the entire length of K.’s arms and took hold of his hands with a grasp that was formal, experienced and could not be resisted. K. was held stiff and upright between them, they formed now a single unit so that if any one of them had been knocked down all of them must have fallen. They formed a unit of the sort that normally can be formed only by matter that is lifeless.
The men escort K to an abandoned quarry, where they prepare for the execution:
After exchanging a few courtesies about who was to carry out the next tasks—the gentlemen did not seem to have been allocated specific functions—one of them went to K. and took his coat, his waistcoat, and finally his shirt off him….[Then he took him under the arm and walked up and down with him a little way while the other gentleman looked round the quarry for a suitable place. When he had found it he made a sign and the other gentleman escorted him there. It was near the rockface, there was a stone lying there that had broken loose. The gentlemen sat K. down on the ground, leant him against the stone and settled his head down on the top of it….Then one of the gentlemen opened his frock coat and from a sheath hanging on a belt stretched across his waistcoat he withdrew a long, thin, double-edged butcher’s knife which he held up in the light to test its sharpness. The repulsive courtesies began once again, one of them passed the knife over K. to the other, who then passed it back over K. to the first. K. now knew it would be his duty to take the knife as it passed from hand to hand above him and thrust it into himself. But he did not do it, instead he twisted his neck, which was still free, and looked around. He was not able to show his full worth, was not able to take all the work from the official bodies, he lacked the rest of the strength he needed and this final shortcoming was the fault of whoever had denied it to him.
And finally this:
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.
The “like a dog” thought points to how he has been stripped of his humanity and reduced to such a state that he sees himself as an animal. When a society starts descending to that level, we are in Nazi territory. Throughout the novel, K has attempted to do everything society has instructed him to, only to end up here. The allegorical “K” stands for all of us.
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Wednesday
It’s not every day that one comes across a public allusion to Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens’s sixth novel, so my literature scholar’s heart leaped when a Washington Post columnist described a Trumpian pronouncement as “Pecksniffian.”
I’ll explain what the descriptor means in a moment but first see if you can figure it out for yourself by reading this passage from Trump’s executive order (probably penned by a subordinate) banning trans individuals from the U.S. military:
[A]doption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.
To which the Washington Post’s Monica Hesse responded,
Hoo boy, we could do a whole column just on that one Pecksniffian paragraph — but it turns out maybe we don’t need to, because earlier this week a federal judge blocked the order. It was full of “illogical judgments based on conjecture,” the judge wrote, calling the government’s arguments “totally, grossly misleading.”
Webster’s Dictionary defines “Pecksniffian” as “unctuously hypocritical; pharisaical,” and the idea of Trump attempting to take the moral high ground on any issue at all, especially with regard to the military, is indeed hoo-boy laughable. Pecksniff is a particularly slimy Dickens villain who puts on sanctimonious airs as he runs an “architectural school.” I use quotation marks because the education is worthless, a means for Pecksniff to rob his pupils of every cent they have. (Sounds like Trump University.) Dickens’s sarcasm goes into overdrive as he describes the man:
It has been remarked that Mr Pecksniff was a moral man. So he was. Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr Pecksniff, especially in his conversation and correspondence….He was a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept than a copy book. Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there; but these were his enemies, the shadows cast by his brightness; that was all.
Pecksniff, it turns out, knows as much about architecture as Trump knows about governing (or, for that matter, business):
The brazen plate upon the door (which being Mr Pecksniff’s, could not lie) bore this inscription, ‘PECKSNIFF, ARCHITECT,’ to which Mr Pecksniff, on his cards of business, added, AND LAND SURVEYOR.’ In one sense, and only one, he may be said to have been a Land Surveyor on a pretty large scale, as an extensive prospect lay stretched out before the windows of his house. Of his architectural doings, nothing was clearly known, except that he had never designed or built anything; but it was generally understood that his knowledge of the science was almost awful in its profundity.
Like Trump, Pecksniff is a genius when it comes to conning people out of their money:
Mr Pecksniff’s professional engagements, indeed, were almost, if not entirely, confined to the reception of pupils; for the collection of rents, with which pursuit he occasionally varied and relieved his graver toils, can hardly be said to be a strictly architectural employment. His genius lay in ensnaring parents and guardians, and pocketing premiums.
What is most grating about Pecksniff, however—and what is grating about Trump’s executive order—is the sanctimoniousness. When John Westlock, one of Pecksniff’s former pupils and now an adult, returns to accuse him of fraud, Pecksniff magnanimously forgives him:
‘No, John,’ said Mr Pecksniff, with a calmness quite ethereal; ‘no, I will not shake hands, John. I have forgiven you. I had already forgiven you, even before you ceased to reproach and taunt me. I have embraced you in the spirit, John, which is better than shaking hands.’
Note how, like Trump, Pecksniff casts himself as the victim. Westlock will have none of it:
‘As to your forgiveness, Mr Pecksniff,’ said the youth, ‘I’ll not have it upon such terms. I won’t be forgiven.’
‘Won’t you, John?’ retorted Mr Pecksniff, with a smile. ‘You must. You can’t help it. Forgiveness is a high quality; an exalted virtue; far above your control or influence, John. I will forgive you. You cannot move me to remember any wrong you have ever done me, John.’
‘Wrong!’ cried the other, with all the heat and impetuosity of his age. ‘Here’s a pretty fellow! Wrong! Wrong I have done him! He’ll not even remember the five hundred pounds he had with me under false pretenses; or the seventy pounds a year for board and lodging that would have been dear at seventeen! Here’s a martyr!’
Just as Trump talks of “humility and selflessness required of a service member,” Pecksniff pushes his sanctimoniousness up a notch:
“Money, John,” said Mr Pecksniff, “is the root of all evil. I grieve to see that it is already bearing evil fruit in you. But I will not remember its existence. I will not even remember the conduct of that misguided person”—and here, although he spoke like one at peace with all the world, he used an emphasis that plainly said “I have my eye upon the rascal now”—”that misguided person who has brought you here to-night, seeking to disturb (it is a happiness to say, in vain) the heart’s repose and peace of one who would have shed his dearest blood to serve him.”
Yes, Pecksniff and Trump are bullshit artists of the highest order and neither ever experiences the least bit of remorse. The difference is that, in the final chapters, Pecksniff is a groveling bankrupt, with the terms “hang-dog,” “scoundrel,” and “ghoul” applied to him by the wealthy benefactor who makes all things right. Even Tom Pinch, for twenty years a loyal Pecksniff apprentice and assistant, eventually sees through him. By contrast, Trump continues to flourish and nothing appears to shake the faith of his followers, despite him corrupting everything he touches.
Still, kudos to Hesse for making the comparison. I just wish I had Dickens’s confidence of someone stepping in to restore order and dispense justice.
Heinrich Dahling, Odysseus Killing the Suitors (1801)
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Tuesday
This past weekend, when Julia and I were visiting our grandchildren in Georgia, we discovered that Esmé, Etta, and Eden have all fallen in love with the new musical version of The Odyssey. It’s a dark show but, then again, it’s a dark story. As I listened to them talk about it, I thought of the difficult position in which Telemachus finds himself. It’s not unlike what Congressional Democrats and principled Congressional Republicans (if there are any left) are undergoing at the moment.
While, like Telemachus, they reside in the king’s palace and supposedly have power, they are actually in thrall to a group of thugs who are busy ransacking the place and gobbling up the wealth.
I’ve written in the past about how the words that Odysseus uses to summarize the suitors could be applied to Trump, Musk & Company. Odysseus delivers the assessment after throwing off his beggar’s disguise and addressing them directly:
You yellow dogs, you thought I’d never make it home from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder, twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared bid for my wife while I was still alive. Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven, contempt for what men say of you hereafter. Your last hour has come. You die in blood.
Before Odysseus returns, however, Telemachus must figure out other ways to resist. If he shows himself too bold, they will kill him, and indeed they attempt to ambush his ship as he returns from a voyage. We therefore watch him thrashing around impotently, somewhat like Democrats Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House.
Telemachus, who at this point is 19 or 20, turns to the general populace for help, calling for a counsel of the island’s elders. Appealing to their sense of what is right, he describes what the suitors are doing to his property:
No; these men spend their days around our house killing our beeves and sheep and fatted goats. carousing, soaking up our good dark wine, not caring what they do. They squander everything. We have no strong Odysseus to defend us…
Then he admits his impotence:
and as to putting up a fight ourselves— we’d only show our incompetence in arms. Expel them, yes, if I only had the power; the whole thing’s out of hand, insufferable. My house is being plundered: is this courtesy? Where is your indignation? Where is your shame?
While he gets their sympathy, however, that’s all he can get and he ends by feeling sorry for himself:
And in hot anger now he threw the staff to the ground, his eyes grown bright with tears. A wave of sympathy ran through the crowd, all hushed…
Those assembled are too cowed to come to his aid, just as Congress is cowed by Trump, Musk and MAGA. When the old men witness what appears to be an omen and interpret it–a pair of fearsome eagles could represent Odysseus and Telemachus wreaking vengeance upon the plunderers—the suitors will have none of it. Eurýmakhos, for instance, responds to the interpreter in words reminiscent of Trump threatening to send people who criticize him to El Salvador’s notorious prison:
You should have perished with him— then we’d be spared this nonsense in assembly, as good as telling Telemakhos to rage on; do you think you can gamble on a gift from him? Here is what I foretell, and it’s quite certain: if you, with what you know of ancient lore, encourage bitterness in this young man, it means, for him, only the more frustration he can do nothing whatever with two eagles— and as for you, old man, we’ll fix a penalty that you will groan to pay.
The same thing happens when another of the old men, Mentor, speaks up to complain about the assembly’s inaction. First, Mentor:
I find it less revolting that the suitors carry their malice into violent acts; at least they stake their lives when they go pillaging the house of Odysseus— their lives upon it, he will not come again. What sickens me is to see the whole community sitting still, and never a voice or a hand raised against them—a mere handful compared with you.
To which another suitor, Leókritos, points out that, even were Odysseus to return, he wouldn’t stand a chance against the young men. It’s like Trump saying that, even if the courts rule against him, he’s the one that has all the power:
“Mentor, what mischief are you raking up? Will this crowd risk the sword’s edge over a dinner? Suppose Odysseus himself indeed came in and found the suitors at his table: he might be hot to drive them out. What then? …he’d only bring down abject death on himself against those odds.
Having laid out the situation, Leókritos then essentially tells the assembled old men to get lost—”Now let all present go about their business”—on which note all “were quick to end the parley.” Telemachus may have called the meeting but the suitors end it and return to the house of Odysseus.
Unfortunately, we have no Odysseus to come save us. But we can learn from him the importance of being strategic. Odysseus figures out who he can count on as allies and whom he should see as enemies. He also figures out which venue gives him the greatest chance of success.
And in the end, he overcomes the odds and reestablishes legitimate rule. No wonder my grandchildren like the story.
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Monday
Among the many dispiriting responses to Donald Trump’s fascist takeover of America is the way that previously responsible people have been groveling before him. One of the latest is the law firm of Paul Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, who have caved in to the president’s shakedown as one surrenders to a mob boss. Until I read a William Kristol column in the Bulwark, however, I didn’t know that Rudyard Kipling has described this behavior in his poem “Dane-Geld.”
As the Associated Press describes it, Trump’s recent attack on Weiss is the latest in a series of actions targeting law firms whose lawyers have performed legal work that Trump disagrees with. In this instance, his presidential order
threatened the suspension of security clearances for Paul Weiss attorneys as well as the termination of any federal contracts involving the firm. It cited as an explanation the fact that a former Paul Weiss attorney, Mark Pomerantz, had been a central player in an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office into Trump’s finances before Trump became president.
Weiss, fearing that his law firm would be driven out of business, offered Trump $40 million in pro bono services, at which point Trump withdrew his threat. Kristol titled his account of the capitulation, “Paul Weiss Pays the Dane Geld,” a reference to Kipling’s poem:
Dane-Geld By Rudyard Kipling
IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation To call upon a neighbor and to say:– “We invaded you last night–we are quite prepared to fight, Unless you pay us cash to go away.”
And that is called asking for Dane-geld, And the people who ask it explain That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say:– “Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”
And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we’ve proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation, For fear they should succumb and go astray; So when you are requested to pay up or be molested, You will find it better policy to say:–
“We never pay any-one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that plays it is lost!”
At the moment, Trump is Kipling’s “armed and agile nation” to Weiss’s “rich and lazy nation.” Weiss has been instructed to “pay up or be molested,” along with the promise that his firm will be safe once they do so. Fat chance, say both Kipling and Kristol. Paying the Dane-geld is letting the Dane know that he can keep demanding. “If once you have paid him the Dane-geld,” the poet points out, “You will never get rid of the Dane.”
Knowing this, progressives, liberals, and traditional Republicans like Kristol are begging those in leadership positions—whether they be heads of law firms, universities, media companies, or Senate Democrats—not to buckle under. They understand too well that “the end of that game is oppression and shame,/ And the nation that plays it is lost!”
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Sunday
Today’s Old Testament reading recounts Moses’s encounter with the burning bush. Elizabeth Barrett Browning makes wonderful use of the episode in Book 7 of her long narrative poem Aurora Leigh.
To set you up for it, here’s the passage from Exodus:
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Following this initial encounter, God proceeds to instruct Moses about his exodus mission.
Aurora Leigh is a young woman’s first-person account of her life, including her writing endeavors. In the book she is writing, she is determined to capture truth, which is that the natural world is infused with God’s spirit. The artist who separates nature from spirit, she says,
Tears up the bond of nature and brings death, Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse, Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men, Is wrong, in short, at all points.
Then, in a passage that blows me away, she invokes Moses’s burning bush:
Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries, And daub their natural faces unaware More and more, from the first similitude.
Then, to again punctuate art’s purpose,
Art’s the witness of what Is Behind this show.
For another artistic rendition of the burning bush episode, here’s a poem by one Michael Lewis that appeared in Modern Reformation.He too reveals “what Is behind the snow” as he charts Moses’s path from “majestic Pharaoh” to the far more powerful beauty of God:
Sestina of the Burning Bush By Michael Lewis
The sun is high, the land brilliant and beautiful this morning as I tend the flock, the whole camp behind me, the land before, the burning heat upon me. The sheep are grazing, and awful thoughts consume me; thoughts of the glory I left behind, of the majesty
of the city I grew up in. The majestic Pharaoh looms large in my mind: his beauty, his power, his knowledge, his glory. And now my thoughts turn to another, the whole event drowning me, and the awful reality of his death, and my soul burns
in agony. The pain is short as a light burns my eyes; the light is distant, but majestic, and though the flame wavers, an awful feeling rises from within. The beauty of the light draws me forward, and I am wholly enchanted by its purity, by its glory.
Thoughts of my past filter away in the glory of the bush, a fire within but not burning and not consumed. This must be holy ground. A voice from within the bush, majestic and great, calls my name, “Moses,” and the beauty overwhelms me. “Moses,” the voice, awful
and tender, calls me forward, to the awe-filled presence of the flame. “This is my glory, this is what you have longed for, my beauty.” I press onward, toward the flame, the burning bush that speaks my name, and the majesty which I yearn for. “Moses, this is holy
ground, take off your sandals; for I am holy.” My bare feet are against the awful heat from the flame of the bush of the majesty of the Lord. I look behind me, to the glory surrounding me, all from the burning bush, resplendent in all God’s beauty.
“Moses, I am holy,” the glory speaks, and the awful presence of the burning bush is replaced with majesty, and His beauty.
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Friday
Several months ago Mel Endy, my former dean and colleague, sent out this Wendell Berry poem, which helps explain for me some of the “lonely, eager hate” that we are seeing from Trumpists. As grim as the poem may seem, I find it uplifting in the way it grounds me in my core belief that love is “the only world; it is Heaven and Earth.” It also points to the emptiness of those define their lives by resentment:
Sabbath Poems, #4 By Wendell Berry
Hate has no world. The people of hate must try to possess the world of love, for it is the only world; it is Heaven and Earth. But as lonely, eager hate possesses it, it disappears; it never did exist, and hate must seek another world that love has made.
The poem reminds me of Satan’s soliloquy in Book IV of Paradise Lost. Gazing down at Eden and then up at the sun, Satan recalls the good old days when he was God’s archangel. It is his betrayal of his better self that fuels his anger. Addressing the sun, he tells how he “hate[s] thy beams,”
That bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above thy Sphere; Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down Warring in Heav’n against Heav’ns matchless King…
While ruminating, he realizes that it is resentment of God’s love that fuels his anger:
Ah wherefore! he deservd no such return From me, whom he created what I was In that bright eminence, and with his good Upbraided none; nor was his service hard. What could be less then to afford him praise, The easiest recompence, and pay him thanks, How due! yet all his good prov’d ill in me, And wrought but malice…
In the end, he embraces his hatred, even though he knows it is making him miserable:
Me miserable! which way shall I fly Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep…
Trump has followers who, even as his policies make their lives harder, would rather suffer and hate than accept people unlike themselves. Their inner misery propels them to destroy worlds that love has made. Or as Satan says elsewhere in the poem, “For only in destroying I find ease to my relentless thoughts.”
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Thursday – First Day of Spring
I celebrate our official entry into spring with Thomas Gray’s lovely “Ode on the Spring,” which is striking for its sensuous imagery. Novelist and essayist Iris Murdoch, who has observed that literature “is concerned with visual and auditory sensations and bodily sensations,” asserts that “if nothing sensuous is present, no art is present.” Gray’s poem is chockfull of visual and auditory sensations.
In the ode the poet is seated under an oak tree with his poetic muse—which means that he’s being poetically reflective—and concluding that he’s in exactly the right place. Far from “the ardor of the crowd” (or “the madding crowd,” as he calls it in his famous “Elegy on a Country Churchyard”), he sees how small the great are and how poor the wealthy. To borrow from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29,” he scorns to change his state with kings.
As peaceful as he is feeling, however, Gray is a depressive, which means he can’t stay content for long. After a few moments of basking in the shade and listening to a nearby stream (he compares himself to a reposing cow), he begins reflecting upon mortality. Gray, after all, is a poet who looks at an Eton rugby match and focuses on the rainstorm that is about to interrupt it. (“Alas, regardless of their doom, the little victims play,” he laments in one of the darkest passages in literature.) In this case, he thinks about how short-lived will be the busy insect life that is creeping and flying about him.
At first, everything is lovely. “The insect youth are on the wing,” he exclaims, “Eager to taste the honied spring.” The very next thought, however, is how evanescent this all is. The various bugs may “flutter thro’ life’s little day,” he writes, but soon everything will come to an end: they will leave their “airy dance…in dust to rest.” Needless to say, he applies the observation to humans as well.
What he has missed, however, is how this gay and colorful assembly is living fully in the moment. “We frolic, while tis May,” the bugs inform him, a carpe diem reminder to focus on the present rather than the future. The contrast with his own life reminds him that he himself has little of color or sweetness. He is a “solitary fly” who lacks a “glitt’ring female.” “Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone,” he glumly concludes about himself.
So much for the peace that he has found earlier in the poem.
The images of the poem, however, offset his gloomy self-assessment. How can one possibly be somber when spring is busting out all over, releasing insects to “float amid the liquid noon,” skim lightly “o’er the current,” or show off “their gaily-gilded trim/ Quick-glancing to the sun.” While Mary Oliver, in her own close observation of insect life (a grasshopper), also reflects upon mortality (“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”), she lets the amazement of the moment overwhelm any darker thoughts. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do,” she writes in lines that have become a maxim for living, “with your one wild and precious life?”
So go seek out Gray’s tree or Oliver’s field of grass, throw yourself down, and lose yourself in the moment. You can worry about death at some other time.
Ode on the Spring By Thomas Gray
Lo! where the rosy-bosom’d Hours, Fair Venus’ train appear, Disclose the long-expecting flowers, And wake the purple year! The Attic warbler pours her throat, Responsive to the cuckoo’s note, The untaught harmony of spring: While whisp’ring pleasure as they fly, Cool zephyrs thro’ the clear blue sky Their gather’d fragrance fling.
Where’er the oak’s thick branches stretch A broader, browner shade; Where’er the rude and moss-grown beech O’er-canopies the glade, Beside some water’s rushy brink With me the Muse shall sit, and think (At ease reclin’d in rustic state) How vain the ardour of the crowd, How low, how little are the proud, How indigent the great!
Still is the toiling hand of Care: The panting herds repose: Yet hark, how thro’ the peopled air The busy murmur glows! The insect youth are on the wing, Eager to taste the honied spring, And float amid the liquid noon: Some lightly o’er the current skim, Some show their gaily-gilded trim Quick-glancing to the sun.
To Contemplation’s sober eye Such is the race of man: And they that creep, and they that fly, Shall end where they began. Alike the busy and the gay But flutter thro’ life’s little day, In fortune’s varying colours drest: Brush’d by the hand of rough Mischance, Or chill’d by age, their airy dance They leave, in dust to rest.
Methinks I hear in accents low The sportive kind reply: Poor moralist! and what art thou? A solitary fly! Thy joys no glitt’ring female meets, No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets, No painted plumage to display: On hasty wings thy youth is flown; Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone— We frolic, while ’tis May.
