Una saves Redcrosse from suicide in the Cave of Despair
Spiritual Sunday
I realize that I have not reported on my Lenten reading project, which was to read as much as I could of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. As it turned out, I only got through Book I and those parts of Books II and III that are in the Norton Anthology. Nevertheless, it proved to be a rich experience, especially when I realized how much C.S Lewis owes to the poem for his Narnia books. More on that in a future post.
Since I was reading the poem for Lenten observance, one thing that stood out was how the Redcrosse Knight—a St. George figure—does penance. I’ve been arguing in some of my Lenten posts that Lent is not a time to beat yourself up for how bad you’ve been but a time to get closer to God. At one point I shared a Madeleine L’Engle poem that opens, “It is my Lent to break my Lent, /To eat when I would fast.” In other words, she’s not going to observe Lent by mortifying her body, which she sees as counterproductive. Rather, she will observe it by attempting to follow Christ’s Sermon on the Mount instructions.
The vision of Lent she’s pushing against, however, is the one that Redcrosse observes, with hot sauce added. In the poem, he has just been rescued from Despaire, where he almost commits suicide. As you read his cleansing ritual, don’t be daunted by the language—while it mimics Chaucer’s middle English, it’s actually closer to modern English, prettied up in the Spenserian style. Una, incidentally, is Redcrosse’s lady fair, who suffers as she witnesses his self-flagellation but nevertheless regards it as necessary:
Book I, XXVI In ashes and sackcloth he did array His daintie corse, proud humors to abate, And dieted with fasting every day, The swelling of his wounds to mitigate, And made him pray both earely and eke late: And ever as superfluous flesh did rot Amendment readie still at hand did wayt, To pluck it out with pincers firie whot That soone in him was left no one corrupted jot.
XXVII And bitter Penance with an yron whip, Was wont him once to disple every day: And sharpe Remorse his hart did pricke and nip, That drops of blood thence like a well did play: And sad Repentance used to embay His bodie in salt water smarting sore, The filthy blots of sinne to wash away. So in short space they did to health restore The man that would not live, but earst lay at deathes dore.
XXVIII In which his torment often was so great, That like a Lyon he would cry and rore, And rend his flesh, and his owne synewes eat. His owne deare Una hearing evermore His ruefull shriekes and gronings, often tore Her guiltlesse garments, and her golden heare, For pitty of his paine and anguish sore; Yet all with patience wisely she did beare; For well she wist his crime could else be never cleare. If that’s what it takes to become clear, sign me up for a different religion.
I don’t know a lot about either Faerie Queene or the Christianity of the time, but if fear of hell played a big role in it, then I can see why one might go overboard to make sure one didn’t go there. To end this post on a more cheerful note—one more in keeping with the Easter season—here’s one describing where Redcrosse hopes he ends up. Since in today’s lectionary readings we finish up the Book of Revelations, it’s more than appropriate. First, the lesson:
In the spirit the angel carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day– and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.
And now for the vision of heaven that a holy hermit shows Redcrosse after he has completed his penance. Like Jacob, Redcrosse sees angels ascending and descending the stairway to heaven
Faire knight (quoth he) Hierusalem that is, The new Hierusalem, that God has built For those to dwell in, that are chosen his, His chosen people purg’d from sinfull guil
With pretious blood, which cruelly was spilt On cursed tree, of that unspotted lam, That for the sinnes of al the world was kilt: Now are they Saints all in that Citie sam, More dear unto their God then younglings to their dam.
Emily Dickinson has written, Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –/ I keep it, staying at Home .” Yes, and some observe Lent by plying their flesh with whips while others with reading books. No ruefull shriekes and gronings for me, thank you very much. We can debate which way gets us closer to God.
A Mary Oliver poem has been making the rounds on twitter and it’s easy to see why. The poet’s image in “Don’t Hesitate” of “whole towns destroyed” brings to mind Russia’s wanton shelling of Ukrainian civilians, leaving us to wonder if any joy is possible. To which fear Oliver defiantly replies, “Still, life has some possibility left.”
On Tuesday I shared an Oliver poem that ended on an unexpectedly dark note so I bookend the week with a poem that ends on a light one. Oliver’s poems tend to veer between depression and ecstasy, but when she speaks of joy, she gives herself into it fully. In “Humpbacks,” for instance, she writes,
Listen, whatever it is you try to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you like the dreams of your body…
And in “The Plum Trees”:
Such richness flowing through the branches of summer and into
the body, carried inward on the five rivers! Disorder and astonishment
rattle your thoughts and your heart cries for rest but don’t
succumb, there’s nothing so sensible as sensual inundation.
But back to “Don’t Hesitate,” our poem for today. While she must acknowledge that “we are not wise, and not very often kind” and that “much can never be redeemed,” she nevertheless counters with the possibility of love and light. So whenever you “unexpectedly feel joy,” don’t hold back, hoarding it the way that one perhaps hoards crumbs, hoping in this way to make the dinner last longer. Instead, dive into the feast, fully and without holding back.
Don’t Hesitate By Mary Oliver
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
I never would have anticipated that a host of literary issues would arise from a horrific conflict, but so it has been with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia has one of the world’s great literary traditions—it rivals that of Great Britain’s—but it comes with a cost.
The cost is the suppression of other languages. Guilty of language chauvinism, Russia apparently has been ruthless in imposing its language on others. Some of the chauvinists, as a recent article in Literary Hub reveals, have been great authors.
“We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then all would have been lost,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in his 1959 study, Gogol. He continued: “When I want a good nightmare, I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume….” What he calls the “Little Russian dialect” is none other than the Ukrainian language, which is about as close to Russian as Spanish is to Italian.
Author Askold Melnyczuk observes that Nabokov wasn’t alone but has been joined by countless Russian writers and intellectuals. This has me rethinking my recent interpretation of Joseph Brodsky’s poem “On Ukrainian Independence,” where the speaker describes the Ukrainian poet Shevchenko as a “bullshitter” when put up against the immortal Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. I argued for a distinction between the speaker and Brodsky, imagining that Brodsky was channeling the voice of a Russian chauvinist rather than expressing his own thoughts. While this might still be the case, I’m now wondering whether Brodsky himself doesn’t agree.
Ukraine certainly doesn’t regard Shevchenko as a bullshitter. Melnyczuk observes,
Ukraine is the only country I know of that was dreamed into existence by a poet. Born a serf in 1814, Taras Shevchenko was freed from slavery by the efforts of fellow artists. The painter-poet then took on himself the mission of telling the story of the indigenous people of Ukraine in their native tongue. For this the Russian empire punished him with decades of exile and imprisonment—this despite the fact that he wrote his prose in Russian. His Ukrainian-language poetry, however, had the effect of solidifying and fortifying the indigenous people’s sense of themselves. Ever since, poets have held a singular importance for the culture.
Actually, as I noted on Monday, Slovenia might be another such country. But set that aside. Melnyczuk says that, although Ukraine isn’t the only neighboring republic that has had Russian pushed down its throat, it has long been a particular target. First, two years after the abolition of serfdom in 1863, there was a ban on Ukrainian publications. Then, in 1876, Tsar Alexander
outlawed all publications in Ukrainian, including books imported from abroad. The policy also rendered illegal theater productions and performances of songs in Ukrainian. Russia feared that the indigenous peasant population might began to demand human rights and undermine Russia’s imperial claims.
Things then got particularly nasty in the 1930’s under Stalin in what Melnyczuk calls Ukraine’s “aborted Renaissance”:
In 1930 some 260 writers actively participated in the country’s literary life. By 1938 only 36 remained on the scene. Surveying the fates of the missing speaks volumes about the leitmotif of that decade: Of the 224 MIAs, 17 were shot; 8 committed suicide; 175 were arrested or interred; 16 disappeared without a trace. Only 7 died of natural causes. Belorussian culture was similarly decimated and thwarted by Stalin.
“The crime for which writers and intellectuals in former Soviet republics were punished,” Melnyczuk writes, “was that they dared aspire to autonomy and cultural independence.”
Russia is, of course, not the only country that has imposed its culture on others. France, England and others did so as well. Frantz Fanon, the legendary author of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), notes how the soft power of culture complements the hard power of state violence. Looking at how Europe colonized Africa, Fanon notes,
Every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture, which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior, to recognize the unreality of his “nation.”
As a result, imported culture overwhelms native culture, which becomes “more and more shriveled up, inert, and empty.”
What Fanon says about national culture in general applies to literature. As African children are brought up reading, say, the French tragedies of Corneille and Racine, little is left of indigenous culture other than “a set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress, and a few broken-down institutions.” In these “remnants of culture,” Fanon says, “there is no real creativity and no overflowing life.” For instance, old folktales that grandparents tell their children, while they may survive, cannot address the issues of the day.
Fanon then goes on, however, to talk about a “literature of combat” in which a new sense of nation arises. Combative literature “calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation,” Fanon says. As such, it “molds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours,” thereby opening up “new and boundless horizons.” Such literature Fanon characterizes as “the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space.”
Such literature includes folk art, and Fanon notes that in Africa, the authorities, from 1955 on, began to systematically arrest storytellers. After all, the stories they told conflicted with the official colonialist narrative.
On Chris Hayes’s podcast Why Is This Happening?, Yale historian Tim Snyder, an expert on Russia and Ukraine as well as the author of the influential On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, recently spoke of Russia’s long history of cultural genocide. Russia, Snyder said, doesn’t acknowledge the existence either of the Ukrainian language or of Ukraine itself. To support his contention, he discussed a statement that appeared on Russia’s official state news agency site on April 3rd, just a few days after the discovery of the mass murders by Russian soldiers in Bucha.” Melnyczuk quotes Snyder in her article:
The Russian handbook is one of the most openly genocidal documents I have ever seen. It calls for the liquidation of the Ukrainian state, and for abolition of any organization that has any association with Ukraine. Such people, “the majority of the population,” …more than twenty million people, are to be killed or sent to work in “labor camps” to expurgate their guilt for not loving Russia. Survivors are to be subject to “re-education.” Children will be raised to be Russian. The name “Ukraine” will disappear.
But Ukraine can’t disappear if it has a vital literature, and Melnyczuk notes that “dozens of presses are rushing out translations of work by Ukrainian writers, whether they’re written in Ukrainian, Russian, Belarussian or Crimean Tatar.”
It’s ironic that the same language that has given us Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, and Akhmatova should also be used to silence indigenous authors. And indeed, there has always been this push and pull in liberation movements: should Chinua Achebe write in Igbo or Salman Rushdie in Urdu, thereby limiting their readership—or should they write in the colonizers’ language, which expands their scope? By writing in English, Achebe was able to speak to much of Africa and Rushdie to all of India, but they gave up something in the process.
In his interview with Hayes, however, Snyder made an important point. Ukrainians have no difficulty moving between languages, which means that multiple literatures are available to them. Their multicultural nation is far more vibrant than monocultural Russia.
Which means that Gogol writing in Ukrainian might not have the nightmare that Nabokov feared.
Two years ago, not realizing that the PBS Sanditon series was going to experience a second season, I expressed my dissatisfaction. When Charlotte doesn’t marry either of the two very attractive prospects available to her (for her part, Austen never gives us more than one attractive bachelor per heroine), I speculated, “Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to capture the disappointment we feel over Austen’s own unfinished ending.”
It’s not that I was demanding a traditional marriage plot. I would have been more than happy with a bildungsroman (growth story). To elaborate, feminist Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in an influential book, sees the marriage plot warring with the bildungsroman in much of 19th-century women’s fiction, with the marriage plot invariably winning out. Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre may flirt with the bildungsroman, she observes, but in the end the marriage plot wins the day, with the protagonist dwindling from hero to heroine. Jane Eyre may undergo remarkable growth in the course of Charlotte Bronte’s novel but, on the last page, she is triumphantly proclaiming, “Reader, I married him.” Elizabeth, meanwhile, must curb her satiric tongue—what we love best about her—once she is engaged to Darcy. A pretty good joke at his expense*, one that could prod him to grow, never sees the light of day.
My problem with season #1’s conclusion was that Charlotte appeared to be heading back to an obscure life in the country, where she would be unable to exercise her powers in any way that we could see.
But now that there has been a season #2, and with a season #3 on the way, I’m more forgiving. We are getting the marriage plot after all, with all the perils that go with it. And who knows—Charlotte may end up as a hero rather than a wife in the end. Or perhaps she will be an equal partner with a husband. After all, that architect from season #1 is still around while Charlotte has good design ideas and admirable drive. I could imagine them as joint partners, something like Dorothea Brooke and Ladislaw in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
I noted in my previous post that, since Jane Austen didn’t complete Sanditon, the filmmakers aren’t bound to a specific ending. In the first season, as I observed in my post, they mostly rearrange previous Austen characters and plots. Part of the fun for Janeites like myself is recognizing when they do so. In fact, I called them out as I watched the series with my wife and mother, and they—perhaps because they are Janeites themselves or perhaps because they were being nice—didn’t complain.
For instance, I noted that Charlotte starts out as a Catherine Morland type (from Northanger Abbey), and that her relationship with Sydney Parker has an Elizabeth-Darcy vibe. The filmmakers have also drawn a lot from Mansfield Park, with Edward and Esther Denham at one point resembling the Crawfords. Lady Denham, meanwhile, echoes various tyrannical widows, like Mrs. Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility and Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. Like Mrs. Ferrars, Lady Denham has control of her estate and can disinherit if she chooses (and in fact does so).
Season 2 continues with some of this rearranging. Charlotte’s sister is invited to Sanditon like Fanny Price’s sister to the Bertram household, although the two have more in common with Elinor and Marianne from Sense and Sensibility. Sense and Sensibility may also have inspired some of the backstory of Mr. Colbourne, the estate owner who (spoiler alert) does not, in the end, propose to Charlotte: just as Colonel Brandon’s first love runs away from his brother, whom she is pressured to marry, so Colbourne’s first wife runs into the arms of the unscrupulous Captain Lennox, before returning to her husband to give birth and die. (It doesn’t, however, appear that her tomboy daughter will suffer the fate of Colonel Brandon’s ward, who is seduced and ruined by Willoughby.)
Captain Lennox, meanwhile, has some of Wickham’s debt issues in Pride and Prejudice, although in the end he is far more malicious, resembling Mr. Eliot in Persuasion. Mr. Eliot, like Lennox, has eyes for the heroine (whose desires point in another direction), and, like Mr. Eliot, he ruins (or attempts to ruin) other people. Meanwhile, the West Indian colony of Antigua, which appears in Mansfield Park, continues to play a role: Georgia, mixed-race heiress and ward of Sydney Parker, is still with us. Sydney, meanwhile, takes a trip to Antigua (like Sir Thomas Bertram), where he dies of yellow fever.
But for all that, the series is also moving in a very Victorian direction. This Sanditon, for instance, has a far more positive view of the governess profession than Jane Austen ever did. It’s more Bronte-esque than Austen-esque. Here’s how Jane Fairfax in Emma, perhaps speaking for Austen, tells Mrs. Elton how she sees the profession:
When I am quite determined as to the time, I am not at all afraid of being long unemployed. There are places in town, offices, where inquiry would soon produce something—Offices for the sale—not quite of human flesh—but of human intellect.”
“Oh! my dear, human flesh! You quite shock me; if you mean a fling at the slave-trade…”
“I did not mean, I was not thinking of the slave-trade,” replied Jane; “governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies. But I only mean to say that there are advertising offices, and that by applying to them I should have no doubt of very soon meeting with something that would do.”
Sanditon’s Charlotte, on the other hand, sees the job as a possible future and means of independence. As I recall, on her way to Mr. Colbourne’s estate she first encounters his dog before meeting him on horseback, which is how Jane Eyre first meets Rochester. Edward Denham, meanwhile, has turned into a Wilkie Collins-style villain (I’m thinking of The Woman in White) as he secretly feeds her opium to convince her and the world that she needs to be locked up in a madhouse. There’s also something Dickensian about the woman he impregnates, who ends up running away from her child.
By the end of season #2, it sounds as though Charlotte, now twice crossed in love, is considering marrying a neighboring farmer. This of course cannot stand as the filmmakers are unlikely to go in a Thomas Hardy direction. There’s far more energy to be found in resort towns, like Sanditon and Bath.
I have no problems with the televised Sanditon. Austen herself was moving from a classical 18th century sensibility to a more Romantic one in her late fiction, with Anne Elliot—in her last completed novel—marrying a risk-taking captain rather than a landed squire. Sanditon, meanwhile, was venturing into the very un-Austen territory of real estate. Who knows where the author would have ended up?
*Elizabeth’s joke: Austen tells us that
Elizabeth longed to observe that Mr. Bingley had been a most delightful friend; so easily guided that his worth was invaluable; but she checked herself. She remembered that he had yet to learn to be laughed at, and it was rather too early to begin.
Peter von Cornelius, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1845)
Tuesday
I seem to be writing about one catastrophe after another these days. Last Tuesday it was Mariupol, followed by the likely repeal of Roe v Wade, which was followed by another post on Russian atrocities, before the week ended with news that America had just registered one million Covid deaths. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are certainly making their rounds, and to make sure they don’t miss anything, I turn today’s post over to climate change, as seen by Mary Oliver.
The four horsemen, as I’m sure you know, are War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. So I’ve covered War, Death and Pestilence, and I could note that Famine is riding hard in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and could come to other parts of the world with the interruption of the Ukrainian wheat harvest. In their collaborative novel Good Omens, fantasists Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett feature the four horsemen, only they have replaced Pestilence with Pollution on the grounds that that latter poses more of a threat, especially with advances in modern medicine. While the grave threat that carbon emissions are posing to the future of the planet makes the swap understandable, it’s worth noting that the novel was written before the Covid pandemic.
Oliver gets the tone just right in her poem “On Traveling to Beautiful Places.” As is customary with her, she looks out at nature and captures a sense of wonder.
Then she throws in a kicker.
On Traveling to Beautiful Places By Mary Oliver
Every day I’m still looking for God and I’m still finding him everywhere, in the dust, in the flowerbeds. Certainly in the oceans, In the islands that lay in the distance Continents of ice, countries of sand Each with its own set of creatures And God, by whatever name. How perfect to be aboard a ship with Maybe a hundred years still in my pocket. But it’s late, for all of us, And in truth the only ship there is Is the ship we are all on Burning the world as we go.
Ljubljana statue of Slovenian national poet France Preseren
Monday
I wrote recently about the significance of national literatures in the war between Russian and Ukraine (here and here). While many Russians regard the Ukrainian language with contempt—why read the “bullshit” of Ukrainian poet Shevchenko when you could be reading the Russian master poet Pushkin, the speaker in Joseph Brodsky’s “On Ukrainian Independence” says mockingly –a national poet like Shevchenko helps establish the credibility of the language and thereby the nation. That’s why the Ukrainian city of Karkhiv has a large statue of him in its central square, which is currently covered by sandbags to protect it against Russian missiles.
I saw how poetry can be entwined with nationalism at first hand when I spent two Fulbright years in Slovenia, once when it was one of Yugoslavia’s six republics (in 1987-88) and once when it was a newly independent country (in 1994-95). I remember being struck, when I visited the first time, by how many streets and buildings were named after Slovenian authors. Indeed, a statue of France Prešeren, Slovenia’s national poet, overlooks the downtown center of Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital.
I write about Slovenia today because yesterday it, like much of Europe, celebrated Victory in Europe Day or VE Day. (Russia celebrates Victory Day today.) I got a close look at Slovenia’s regard for poetry when, in Slovenia’s 1995 VE celebration, I was one of six readers from five allied nations (along with a Slovenian teenager) chosen to read poems from their native lands. I enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame standing atop a 20-foot scaffold, where I read Walt Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain” to a national television audience. I recount the story here so will just note the significance of the organizers choosing to conclude the celebration with poetry. Earlier, Slovenians had been treated to a performance by the national orchestra; to Slovenia’s famed mountain climbers scaling the nearby skyscrapers; to planes flying overhead; to Slovenian concentration camp survivors parading around; and to Slovenia’s famous white Lipizzaner horses being trotted through. Poetry, however, got the last word.
Looking at one of France Prešeren’s sonnets, one gets a sense of why he—and Slovenian writers generally—are so important to Slovenia’s sense of nationhood. Writing at a time (1834) when Slovenia was very much part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Prešeren sees himself as a modern Orpheus. After all he, like the mythical Greek poet, lives in a mountainous country inhabited by “wild folk.” But if Slovenes are to go beyond regional infighting and see themselves as one people, they need a poet that will “speak with song of native strain” and “remind us of lost pride of race.” If such a poet does so, then
Our people in one nation then combined Would see that feuds no longer did increase. His strains would bring the rule of joy and peace, Where tempests roar and nature is unkind.
Here’s the entire sonnet, which appeared in Wreath of Sonnets and has been translated by Vivian de Sola Pinto:
Above them savage peaks the mountains raise, Like those which once were charmed by the refrain Of Orpheus, when his lyre stirred hill and plain, And Haemus’ crags and the wild folk of Thrace.
Ah, would, to cure the dearth of these our days, An Orpheus dowered with song of native strain Were sent to us that all Slovenes might gain Fresh fire to set their frozen hearts ablaze.
His words might kindle thoughts that would remind Us of lost pride of race; discord would cease; Our people in one nation then combined
Would see that feuds no longer did increase. His strains would bring the rule of joy and peace, Where tempests roar and nature is unkind.
I believe the Slovenian dialect in which Prešeren wrote became the official language, just as Pushkin’s Russian became official Russian and Dante’s Italian official Italian. Chaucer, meanwhile, showed the English what could be accomplished by writing in London English.
The United States felt its own need for a national literature early in the 19th century. How can you be regarded as a legitimate nation unless you produce your own authors? (Hence the importance of figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman to the young republic.) Nor must one be an emerging nation to use one’s authors for political purposes. Britain has sometimes wielded Shakespeare like a club, proof of its superiority, and France has done the same with Victor Hugo, Germany with Goethe, Italy with Dante, and Russia with Tolstoy.
I don’t approve of using literature in such a way since I think it detracts from what the authors are saying. When we idolize them (the worship of Shakespeare is called bardolatry) they become static and dead rather than dynamic and alive. It’s as though officialdom, by putting them on a pedestal, seeks us from getting too close. But at least we read them and, once we have done so, we can bridge that distance and develop our own intimate relations with them.
Today being Mother’s Day, here’s a Thomas Merton poem about the moment that Mary learned she was to be a mother. At that moment, the poet tells us,
Speech of an angel shines in the waters of her thought like diamonds, Rides like a sunburst on the hillsides of her heart.
And is brought home like harvests…
The joy at the prospect of birth, however, contrasts with the dark world that the child will enter. While Mary is focusing on life,
The farmers and the planters Fear to begin their sowing, and its lengthy labor, Where, on the brown, bare furrows, The winter wind still croons as dumb as pain.
If they were strictly logical, how many mothers, looking over the world’s brown landscape, would forgo having children? What youthful mother, W.B. Yeats asks in “Among School Children,”
Would think her son, did she but see that shape With sixty or more winters on its head, A compensation for the pang of his birth, Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
Fortunately for us, mothers focus on the possibilities of spring rather than on the uncertainties of winter. That leap of faith keeps us all going.
Aubade: The Annunciation By Thomas Merton
When the dim light, at Lauds, comes strike her window, Bellsong falls out of Heaven with a sound of glass.
Prayers fly in the mind like larks, Thoughts hide in the height like hawks: And while the country churches tell their blessings to the distance, Her slow words move (Like summer winds the wheat) her innocent love: Desires glitter in her mind Like morning stars:
Until her name is suddenly spoken Like a meteor falling.
She can no longer hear shrill day Sing in the east, Nor see the lovely woods begin to toss their manes. The rivers have begun to sing. The little clouds shine in the sky like girls: She has no eyes to see their faces.
Speech of an angel shines in the waters of her thought like diamonds, Rides like a sunburst on the hillsides of her heart.
And is brought home like harvests, Hid in her house, and stored Like the sweet summer’s riches in our peaceful barns.
But in the world of March outside her dwelling, The farmers and the planters Fear to begin their sowing, and its lengthy labor, Where, on the brown, bare furrows, The winter wind still croons as dumb as pain.
The once unthinkable happened yesterday and we barely noticed. Indeed, you might not know what I have in mind were it not for my headline, but here it is in black and white: on May 5, 2022, the United States passed the mark of a million Covid deaths.
Struck by our seeming indifference, a Baruch College theatre history professor composed a twitter thread about Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros. It’s a good connection to make.
Ionesco wrote his play to capture the herd mentality that can take over a society so that, well, the unthinkable becomes normalized. The particular “unthinkable” he had in mind was rising fascism—also only too relevant in this day and age—but it applies to all situations involving mobthink. Caplan sums up the plot:
[O]ne by one, an entire town of people suddenly transform into rhinos. At first, people are horrified but as the contagion spreads, (almost) everyone comes to accept that turning into a rhinoceros is fine.
Caplan was led to her observations when, walking around New York City, she realized that virtually no one was wearing a mask, even though Covid continues live and well in the country. As she puts it,
Over the last few weeks, as mitigation measures drop, millions of Americans who were previously cautious about Covid (and millions more who never were) have decided that it’s time to move on and pretend that it’s 2019 again.
Bars and restaurants are packed with unmasked people, mask mandates hardly exist anywhere and are no longer tied to infection rates, the new CDC map makes it look like everything is under control, and we seem to have all collectively decided that Covid is “over.
And then she points to the reality:
The idea that we can live with Covid WITHOUT any mitigation measures and expect things to turn out ok (both for individuals and as a society) is a lie. We are watching an astounding mass delusion unfold in real time.
Caplan is particularly concerned about the possibility of contracting Covid repeatedly and reports that even 5% of the vaccinated are getting it. With Covid, meanwhile, comes the possibility of long Covid, which can have devastating effects. I can testify that one of my students this past semester has long Covid—she contracted it abroad very early in the pandemic—and although she bravely soldiers on, it has been making her life miserable.
Caplan notes that she feels like Berenger, who by play’s end is the only human left. Telling people she’s going to keep taking precautions, she says,
feels a little like Berenger’s monologue at the end of the play, where he declares his intent to remain human to a herd of rhinoceroses who no longer understand him. The contagion has already spread, and nobody is listening anymore.
“You’ll get used to it, you know,” Daisy (the love interest) tells Berenger. “It’s the wisest course to take,” his co-worker Dudard agrees. “Well, I can’t get used to it,” Berenger insists. “I wonder if one oughtn’t to give it a try?” Dudard replies. Then, he becomes a rhino.
Later, as more and more of their friends get infected, Daisy begins to change her mind about the value of staying human. “Those are the real people,” Daisy says, about the rhinos. “They look happy. They were right to do what they did.”
“We’re the ones who are doing right, Daisy, I assure you,” Berenger insists. “It’s the world that’s right – not you and me,” Daisy tells him. And then, she becomes a rhino too.
Caplan observes that she has accepted that, in all likelihood, she and her family will get Covid at some time or other. The goal, she says, “is to delay infection for as long as possible. The fewer times we catch Covid, the better.”
And she adds,
People who are trying not to get Covid aren’t “anxious” or “not moving on.” We’re looking at the facts and we’re reasonably concerned. Eliminating an opportunity for a 5% chance of developing serious heart, lung, or brain problems is worth a lot.
Which brings her back to Berenger:
Like Berenger in Rhinoceros, it feels very lonely to be caring about any of this right now. The world has moved on. But it’s the world that’s wrong, not those of us who see this for what it is.
Speaking for myself, I must admit to have gotten casual about wearing a mask. In some ways, I can get away with it since I live in a bubble. Both Sewanee the college and Sewanee the town required masking up until this past March; my students have all been vaccinated; and I myself have been twice vaxxed and twice boosted. All this has led me to become complacent.
Caplan’s Ionesco allusion, however, reminds me that I’ve got to be willing to look weird to others—i.e., put on a mask—when I enter venues that are less protected. My 96-year-old mother, even though fully vaccinated, would have real problems were she to contract a breakthrough case. And I myself am 70.
In other words, don’t let the rhinos of the world dictate your own health choices.
A couple of weeks ago, someone tweeted out, “Russia doesn’t have an army. It has an armed, uniformed, barbarian horde,” to which Macolm Nance, a former member of the Armed Services who has become an expert on authoritarian skullduggery, tweeted back, “That’s why we call them Orcs.” It was the first time I had heard that particular designation but, the more I read up on Russia’s approach to military conflict, the more apt the allusion appears.
Nance, incidentally, has put his money where his mouth is and is now in Ukraine fighting the Russian Orcs.
One of the military experts that I follow on twitter—I can’t remember which one—recently made the comment that armies that exhibit self-discipline perform far better than armies that don’t. In other words, if your men are raping women, looting stores and stealing washing machines, and executing civilians, they will actually perform less effectively in the field than armies that adhere to a code of conduct. Of course, all armies will have people who commit atrocities, as America knows well, from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam to the Abu Ghraib abuse of prisoners during the Iraq War. But with those war crimes, there were some attempts at accountability—not just for humane reasons but because, when members of the armed forces are held to standards, they operate at a higher level.
Of course, Donald Trump doesn’t believe this—that’s why he pardoned a notorious American soldier that a military tribunal had found guilty of killing innocent Iraqi civilians—and Vladimir Putin doesn’t either. In their eyes, the best way to fight is to intimidate through brutality. But sadism will not put steel in one’s spine the way that fighting for one’s freedom will. Russian rapists are proving no match for Ukrainian patriots.
I remember a general observing during the Iraq War that the Geneva Conventions are not for the enemy but for ourselves. While acknowledging that some of the enemies did not observe the conventions, he said Americans still should because it keeps them tethered to their moral bearings. I vaguely remember him invoking Joseph Conrad’s famous novella as he talked about getting lost in one’s inner “heart of darkness.” A code of conduct gives one something to stop the slide.
The Russian army has a long history of atrocities, as a recent article in The Hill reports. These include the slaughter of Prussian civilians in the first year of World War I; the execution of 21,857 prisoners of war, including approximately 10,000 Polish officers, in the infamous Katyn Forest massacre in 1940; the rape of two million German women at the end of World War II; the killing of 1.3 million Afghan civilians during the Soviet Union’s Afghanistan War; and (under Putin) the slaughters of Chechens, Syrian Kurds, and now Ukrainians. In fact, it was accounts of Soviet armed forces that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to come up with Orcs in the first place.
There are two centers of evil in Tolkien’s Middle Earth: Sauron and Saruman. While the trilogy is not to be read as a political allegory, the historical events of the time are clearly influencing Tolkien, with Sauron and his Nazgul having affinities with Hitler and Saruman and his fighting Orcs resembling Stalin and his armies. In other words, applying the Orc label to the Russian invaders of Ukraine is simply going full circle to the source of Tolkien’s imagination.
Tolkien reports getting the word “orc” from Beowulf. His own Orcs are super goblins who call themselves the Uruk-hai, and we get our closest look at them when they capture Merry and Pippin. They have Saruman’s white hand on their shields and an S-rune on their helmets (their version of the Russian Z). When we see them sparring with Sauron’s Mordor goblins about what to do with the captive hobbits. it brings to mind the uneasy Soviet-German alliance that preceded World War II:
‘Aye, we must stick together,’ growled Uglúk. ‘I don’t trust you little swine. You’ve no guts outside your own sties. But for us you’d all have run away. We are the fighting Uruk-hai! We slew the great warrior [Boromir]. We took the prisoners. We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand: the Hand that gives us man’s-flesh to eat. We came out of Isengard, and led you here, and we shall lead you back by the way we choose. I am Uglúk. I have spoken.’
‘You have spoken more than enough, Uglúk,’ sneered the evil voice. ‘I wonder how they would like it in Lugbúrz. They might think that Uglúk’s shoulders needed relieving of a swollen head. They might ask where his strange ideas came from. Did they come from Saruman, perhaps? Who does he think he is, setting up on his own with his filthy white badges? They might agree with me, with Grishnákh their trusted messenger; and I Grishnákh say this: Saruman is a fool. and a dirty treacherous fool. But the Great Eye is on him.
‘Swine is it? How do you folk like being called swine by the muck-rakers of a dirty little wizard? It’s orc-flesh they eat, I’ll warrant.’
Although they are fierce fighters, the Uruk-hai don’t have the discipline of the Riders of Rowan who, somewhat like the Ukrainians, know the terrain and know how to inflict maximum damage while minimizing their own losses. Here’s an excerpt from the battle:
[Pippin] saw that riders away eastward were already level with the Orcs, galloping over the plain. The sunset gilded their spears and helmets, and glinted in their pale flowing hair. They were hemming the Orcs in, preventing them from scattering, and driving them along the line of the river….
A few of the riders appeared to be bowmen, skilled at shooting from a running horse. Riding swiftly into range they shot arrows at the Orcs that straggled behind, and several of them fell; then the riders wheeled away out of the range of the answering bows of their enemies, who shot wildly, not daring to halt. This happened many times, and on one occasion arrows fell among the Isengarders. One of them, just in front of Pippin, stumbled and did not get up again.
Night came down without the Riders closing in for battle. Many Orcs had fallen, but fully two hundred remained. In the early darkness the Orcs came to a hillock. The eaves of the forest were very near, probably no more than three furlongs away, but they could go no further. The horsemen had encircled them. A small band disobeyed Uglúk’s command, and ran on towards the forest: only three returned.
Later, having escaped the Orcs, Merry and Pippin watch the end of the battle from afar:
Then with a great cry the Riders charged from the East; the red light gleamed on mail and spear. The Orcs yelled and shot all the arrows that remained to them. The hobbits saw several horsemen fall; but their line held on up the hill and over it, and wheeled round and charged again. Most of the raiders that were left alive then broke and fled, this way and that, pursued one by one to the death.
Later, in the Battle at Helm’s Deep, it will be the men from Rowan–along with Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas–who are besieged. I have thought about this battle while watching the Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol. Here’s an excerpt:
Brazen trumpets sounded. The enemy surged forward, some against the Deeping Wall, other towards the causeway and the ramp that led up to the Hornburg-gates. There the hugest Orcs were mustered, and the wild men of the Dunland fells. A moment they hesitated and then on they came. The lightning flashed, and blazoned upon every helm and shield the ghastly hand of Isengard was seen: They reached the summit of the rock; they drove towards the gates.
Then at last an answer came: a storm of arrows met them, and a hail of stones. They wavered, broke, and fled back; and then charged again, broke and charged again; and each time, like the incoming sea, they halted at a higher point. Again trumpets rang, and a press of roaring men leaped forth. They held their great shields above them like a roof, while in their midst they bore two trunks of mighty trees. Behind them orc-archers crowded, sending a hail of darts against the bowmen on the walls. They gained the gates. The trees, swung by strong arms, smote the timbers with a rending boom. If any man fell, crushed by a stone hurtling from above, two others sprang to take his place. Again and again the great rams swung and crashed.
Éomer and Aragorn stood together on the Deeping Wall. They heard the roar of voices and the thudding of the rams; and then in a sudden flash of light they beheld the peril of the gates.
‘Come!’ said Aragorn. ‘This is the hour when we draw swords together!’
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that the Ukrainians at Mariupol will survive, despite their bravery. There are no tree-like Ents to come to their rescue. I wonder if, in the interludes between fighting, they have conversations resembling the one that Sam has with Frodo when they are expecting to be swallowed up by the erupting Mount Doom after having destroyed the ring:
Slow rivers of fire came down the long slopes towards them. Soon they would be engulfed. A rain of hot ash was falling.
They stood now; and Sam still holding his master’s hand caressed it. He sighed. ‘What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven’t we?’ he said. ‘I wish I could hear it told! Do you think they’ll say: Now comes the story of Nine-fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom? And then everyone will hush, like we did, when in Rivendell they told us the tale of Beren One-hand and the Great Jewel. I wish I could hear it! And I wonder how it will go on after our part.’
If they expel the Russians and reestablish their country, Ukrainians will indeed tell the tale of Mariupol for generations to come. It may be scant consolation for those who are about to die but, as it is for Sam, it’s consolation nonetheless.
Further thought: My friend Sue Schmidt reminded me of this passage from Lord of the Rings. I don’t think Orcs are responsible this time but certain Sauron allies. Still, it’s an example of using atrocities as a psychological strategy:
Soon there was great peril of fire behind the wall, and all who could be spared were busy quelling the flames that sprang up in many places. Then among the greater casts there fell another hail, less ruinous but more horrible. All about the streets and lanes behind the Gate it tumbled down, small round shot that did not burn. But when men ran to learn what it might be, they cried aloud or wept. For the enemy was flinging into the City all the heads of those who had fallen fighting at Osgiliath, or on the Rammas, or in the fields. They were grim to look on; for though some were crushed and shapeless, and some had been cruelly hewn, yet many had features that could be told, and it seemed that they had died in pain; and all were branded with the foul token of the Lidless Eye. But marred and dishonoured as they were, it often chanced that thus a man would see again the face of someone that he had known, who had walked proudly once in arms, or tilled the fields, or ridden in upon a holiday from the green vales in the hills.
In vain men shook their fists at the pitiless foes that swarmed before the Gate. Curses they heeded not, nor understood the tongues of western men; crying with harsh voices like beasts and carrion-birds. But soon there were few left in Minas Tirith who had the heart to stand up and defy the hosts of Mordor. For yet another weapon, swifter than hunger, the Lord of the Dark Tower had: dread and despair.
