A Russian Poet’s View of Ukraine

By Robin Bates | Published: April 20, 2022
Joseph Brodsky

Thursday

Yesterday’s post on Russia’s refusal to acknowledge Ukraine as its own country discussed poetry’s role in nation formation. In a lengthy twitter thread, scholar Kamil Galeev alerted me to a poem by Joseph Brodsky, Soviet émigré and Nobel Prize winner, that expresses Russia’s refusal. The poem shows me the depth of Russian sentiment better than anything else I have seen.

In fact, Galeev’s twitter thread and Brodsky’s poem make me realize that we must attribute the invasion to Russia as well as to Putin. We in the west have wanted to believe that Putin was misleading his country about Ukraine as a security threat. If only Russians would realize there is no threat, we’ve been thinking, they would oppose the invasion. I now realize that Putin’s hostility to Ukrainian independence predates him and has a long history.

Brodsky wrote his poem in 1991, when the Soviet Union was breaking up and the former “soviet socialist republics” wanted to become their own nations. To capture the distress that Russia felt over “losing” Ukraine, Brodsky imagines Russia as a jilted lover venting his fury. Below I cover the general message and tenor of “On Ukrainian Independence,” but if you want a full annotation of the poem, you can go here.

The poem begins with a reference to a famous 1709 battle in which Russia defeated Sweden’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s a moment of Russia-Ukraine lovemaking that the speaker remembers fondly. If Ukraine now wants to break up, the desire must come from elsewhere: say, from anarchists with their green flag or nationalistic ex-patriates living in Canada. As a sign of their former affection, the poet playfully uses ethnic slurs in his exchange: “Khokhly” for Ukrainians, “Katsapy” for Russians. He dreams of the good times (embroidered Ukrainian towels, sunflowers) and acknowledges some Russian responsibility for the break-up:  “We Katsapy have no right to charge them with treason./ With icons and vodka, for seventy years we’ve bungled,/ In our Ryazan we’ve lived like Tarzan in the jungle.” Which is to say, “Since the Russian Revolution, we Russians have lived in a primitive state (icons, vodka, uncultured backwater), so I can see why you might want to leave us.”

So, like a man putting on a brave face as his mistress drops him, he tries to wish her well:

Away with you, Khokhly, and may your journey be calm!
Wear your zhupans [traditional garb], or uniforms, which is even better,
Go to all four points of the compass and all the four letters.

Then the bitterness simmering beneath the surface comes pouring out, filled with World War II references. Go back to your primitive “huts,” he tells Ukraine, where you can expect to be gang-banged by “Krauts and Polacks.” After all, you no longer have me to protect you. It was nice, he says, “hanging together from the same gallows loop” (the reference here is to Nazi slaughter of Russians and Ukrainians together), but now the beetroot soup we used to share you can eat all by yourself. Oh, and “good riddance.”

His thoughts turn to the Dnieper River, which flows from Russia to and through Ukraine, and he imagines it flowing in reverse. This in turn causes him to imagine two trains passing. Ukraine is a bullet train, speeding into the future and “looking askance” as it nurses its “age-old grievance.” I’m not sure what spitting into the river signifies. Maybe a symbolic letting go?

Except that this lover can’t let go. The more he claims that he’s so over her, the less convincing he sounds:

Don’t speak ill of us. Your bread and wheat we don’t need,
Nor your sky, may we all choke on sunflower seed.
No need for bad blood or gestures of fury ham-fisted,
Seems that our love is up, if it at all existed.

You’re not going to see me cry, he declares:

Oh, gardens and grasslands and steppes, dumplings filled with honey!
We’ve had greater losses before, lost more people than money.
We’ll get by somehow. And if you want teary eyes –
Wait ‘til next time, guys, this provision no longer applies.

Finally, characterizing Ukrainians as murderous fascists, he unloads with one final revenge fantasy. When his ex is on her deathbed, he informs her, she’ll regret her decision. How so? She’ll remember lines from Pushkin, not from Ukraine’s national poet:

God rest ye merry Cossacks, hetmans, and gulag guards!
But mark: when it’s your turn to be dragged to graveyards,
You’ll whisper and wheeze, your deathbed mattress a-pushing,
Not Shevchenko’s bullshit but poetry lines from Pushkin.

Here’s the poem in its entirety:

On Ukrainian Independence

Dear Charles XII, the Poltava battle [1]
Has been fortunately lost. To quote Lenin’s burring rattle,
“Time will show you Kuzka’s mother,” ruins along the waste,
Bones of post-mortem bliss with a Ukrainian aftertaste.

It’s not the green flag, eaten by the isotope,
It’s the yellow-and-blue flying over Konotop,
Made out of canvas – must be a gift from Toronto–
Alas, it bears no cross, but the Khokhly don’t want to.

Oh, rushnyks and roubles, sunflowers in summer season!
We Katsapy have no right to charge them with treason.
With icons and vodka, for seventy years we’ve bungled,
In our Ryazan we’ve lived like Tarzan in the jungle.

We’ll tell them, filling the pause with a loud “your mom”:
Away with you, Khokhly, and may your journey be calm!
Wear your zhupans [traditional garb], or uniforms, which is even better,
Go to all four points of the compass and all the four letters.

It’s over now. Now hurry back to your huts
To be gang-banged by Krauts and Polacks right in your guts.
It’s been fun hanging together from the same gallows loop,
But when you’re alone, you can eat all that sweet beetroot soup.

Good riddance, Khokhly, it’s over for better or worse,
I’ll go spit in the Dnieper, perhaps it’ll flow in reverse,
Like a proud bullet train looking at us askance,
Stuffed with leathery seats and ages-old grievance.

Don’t speak ill of us. Your bread and wheat we don’t need,
Nor your sky, may we all choke on sunflower seed.
No need for bad blood or gestures of fury ham-fisted,
Seems that our love is up, if it at all existed.

Why should we plow our broken roots with our verbs?
You were born out of earth, its podzolic soils and its herbs.
Quit flexing your rights and laying all the blame on us,
It is your bloody soil that has become your onus.

Oh, gardens and grasslands and steppes, varenyks filled with honey!
We’ve had greater losses before, lost more people than money.
We’ll get by somehow. And if you want teary eyes –
Wait ‘til next time, guys, this provision no longer applies.

God rest ye merry Cossacks, hetmans, and gulag guards!
But mark: when it’s your turn to be dragged to graveyards,
You’ll whisper and wheeze, your deathbed mattress a-pushing,
Not Shevchenko’s bullshit but poetry lines from Pushkin.

In his twitter commentary on the poem, Galeev writes that

Brodsky sends multiple messages to Ukrainians (called with slur “Khokhly”). He: 1. Tells Ukrainians to go fuck themselves 2. Predicts: “you, scum will be gangbanged by Poles and Germans” 3. Wonders if he should spit in Dnieper in order to make it flow backwards.

Noting that Brodsky called the poem “risky,” Galeev argues that it

correctly reflected attitude of much of Russian society towards Ukraine. After 2014 it became especially relevant and was repeatedly endorsed by the media and authorities like the Russian parliament newspaper.

While I think that Galeev is right about the depth of Russian anger, I think he misses Brodsky’s comic irony. After all, one doesn’t go to a jilted lover for an objective assessment of a breakup. The feelings expressed, especially imagining an unprotected Ukraine raped, are not politically correct, but when are broken-hearted lovers ever politically correct? What I see in the poem is deep grief over the break-up between Russia and Ukraine. They’ve had a long history together and now it’s over.

But in an ironic twist of unspeakable horror, Ukrainian women are indeed being gangbanged because of the separation—only the rapists are not Germans or Poles but Russians. It’s as though the jilted lover, after having vented his grief through revenge fantasies, has become a murderous stalker prepared to enact them in real life.

That Russian media has missed the irony and is quoting the poem to cheer on the stalker—well, that is what we’ve come to expect of the state-owned Russian media. Galeev believes that Russia’s fury over Ukraine is so unhinged that he expects it to resort to tactical nuclear weapons if it can’t hold on to her.

If Brodsky saw this poem as risky in 1991, he would see it even more so now. What his poem shows me is what Galeev has been saying: that the Russian sense of connection with Ukraine is profound and existential. Brodsky, as a former Russian, may well grieve the separation and I imagine that he thinks Ukraine has made a mistake. After all, it has traded Pushkin for Shevchenko. But unlike Putin, Brodsky finds, in poetry, a healthy way to express his grief.

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In Ukraine, a Battle between 2 Poets

By Robin Bates | Published: April 19, 2022
Kharkiv protects a statue of Ukrainian poet Shevchenko, who represents what Ukrainians are fighting for

Wednesday

Three weeks ago, drawing on a New Yorker article and my own knowledge of Russian literature, I speculated that Russia has invaded Ukraine in part for a sentimental attachment that can be found tin various Russian novels and poems. As it turns out, I didn’t know the half of it. Kamil Galeev, a fellow at the Wilson Center, explains that the issue goes much deeper, although poets are still at the heart of it. Galeev’s very long twitter thread identifies Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and Ukrainian Taras Shevchenko as the two main combatants in the struggle over Ukrainian identity.

It all has to do with language. Pushkin is considered the father of the Russian language and Shevchenko of the Ukrainian language. In “On Ukrainian Independence,” a horrifying poem in light of recent events, Joseph Brodsky reveals Russian views. In the eyes of this poet, who fled the Soviet Union and went on to win the Nobel Prize, Pushkin is a true poet, Shevchenko a bullshitter.

Reveling in the thought of Ukrainians (whom he describes as fascists) regretting their choice to leave Russia, Brodsky predicts that they will turn to the Russian poet, not the Ukrainian, when they’re on their deathbeds:

God rest ye merry Cossacks, hetmans, and gulag guards!
But mark: when it’s your turn to be dragged to graveyards,
You’ll whisper and wheeze, your deathbed mattress a-pushing,
Not Shevchenko’s bullshit but poetry lines from Pushkin.

Galeev explains that Brodsky, like many Russians, believes that Ukrainians are actually Russians and that Ukraine is a farce. He observes,

What is interesting here is not so much the supposed superiority of Russians over Ukrainians. It’s the politicization of literature, specifically of poetry. Which poet you admire and quote is not neutral politics-wise. It’s the most important political question ever.

Galeev’s explanation is long and intricate but basically it comes down to the relationship between the Russian language and the Russian state. When Catherine the Great was attempting to homogenize all East Slavic Territories in the 18th century, the question arose as to which version of Russian it should impose.  Before Pushkin, Russia didn’t have a single literary standard. After Pushkin, it did:

Pushkin created the modern Russian language in a sense that he created that version of Russian that would be later imposed by the authority of the state. That’s why he became the most impactful Russian author and why modern Russians can hardly read pre-Pushkin literature.

Having chosen Pushkin’s Russian to impose on Belarus and Ukraine, Russia could not tolerate a Ukrainian alternative. By showing that Ukrainian could also produce great literature, Shevchenko presented an existential threat.

Galeev sets forth the two men’s different views towards the Russian imperial tradition. First Pushkin, whose words are chilling:

Pushkin was super hawkish. During the Polish rebellion of 1830 he wrote: “We can only pity the Poles. We are too strong to hate them and this war will be the war of annihilation or at least it should be” “Poles should be strangled, our slowness is painful”

Pushkin celebrated the genocides of the Caucasian war: “I’ll sing about you, the hero, Oh Kotlyarevsky, the scourge of Caucasus ! Wherever you went like a storm Your advance like a black plague, Destroyed, exterminated the tribes”

Pushkin accepted Russian imperial identity as his own identity. He fully endorsed Russian imperialism and any criticism of it triggered him. Consider his poem “To the slanderers of Russia” against the French politicians who supported the Polish rebellion of 1830.”

According to Galeev, there are currently Russian movie stars who are reading Pushkin aloud as a justification for the current invasion.

Shevchenko, on the other hand, pushed back against Russia’s imperial ambitions:

While Pushkin celebrated Russian militarism, Shevchenko criticized it. He sympathized with the mountaineers fighting against the Russian conquest, lamented the losses of Russian conscripts. While human misery meant nothing to Pushkin, it was highly important for Shevchenko

In the two poets, Galeev writes, one finds very different visions of individualism. For Pushkin, fulfillment lies in subordinating yourself to the Russian state:

Consider how Pushkin advertised the benefits of the Russian rule:

Submit, Cherkes! Both West and East
May soon share your fate;
When the time comes, you’ll say arrogantly:
Yes, I’m a slave but a slave of the Tsar of the World!”

Understandably, Shevchenko was not impressed:

No wonder Shevchenko mocked Pushkin so mercilessly. For a holder of Ukrainian cultural memes, Russian cultural memes looked absolutely disgusting, more like a zombie creed than as a human culture. For Shevchenko Russian empire was the evil to be destroyed

Galeev concludes that cultural uniformity is the real goal of the current war. “The problem with Ukraine,” he writes, “is that it exists.” This view is so deeply embedded in many Russians that they are willing to countenance the absolute destruction of the country to achieve that unity.

When the city of Kharkiv surrounds a thirty-foot statue of Shevchenko with sandbags, it is protecting more than just a statue.

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Kesey, Spokesman for Reactionary Men

By Robin Bates | Published: April 18, 2022
Nicholson as McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Tuesday

Last week my mother and I visited our local CVS and got our fourth Covid shot, which means that we are now doubled vaxxed and double boosted. As I strode out, feeling empowered and immune, a scene from Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest came to mind.

It’s the pose that McMurphy strikes after going through a series of electroshock treatments. Despite the toll they take on him, he appears as confident and arrogant as ever. As narrator Chief Bromden reports, McMurphy claims the treatment supercharges his sexual powers:

They gave McMurphy three more treatments that week. As quick as he started coming out of one, getting the click back in his wink, Miss Ratched would arrive with the doctor and they would ask him if he felt like he was ready to come around and face up to his problem and come back to the ward for a cure. And he’d swell up, aware that every one of those faces on Disturbed had turned toward him and was waiting, and he’d tell the nurse he regretted that he had but one life to give for his country and she could kiss his rosy red ass before he’d give up the goddam ship. Yeh!

Then stand up and take a couple of bows to those guys grinning at him while the nurse led the doctor into the station to phone over to the Main Building and authorize another treatment.

Once, as she turned to walk away, he got hold of her through the back of her uniform, gave her a pinch that turned her face red as his hair. I think if the doctor hadn’t been there, hiding a grin himself, she would’ve slapped McMurphy’s face.

I tried to talk him into playing along with her so’s to get out of the treatments, but he just laughed and told me Hell, all they was doin’ was chargin’ his battery for him, free for nothing. “When I get out of here the first woman that takes on ol’ Red McMurphy the ten- thousand-watt psychopath, she’s gonna light up like a pinball machine and pay off in silver dollars! No, I ain’t scared of their little battery-charger.”

As I reread the scene, I thought of Jack Nicholson playing McMurphy in Milos Forman’s film version of the novel. In his Oscar-winning performance, Nicholson vibrates with life energy, seemingly impervious to anything that the medical bureaucrats can do to him.

Unfortunately, rereading Kesey’s novel also reminded me of just how sexist and racist it is. A domineering woman and Black security guards emasculate the white male inmates (oh, and Chief Bromden), leaving it up to McMurphy to fight for white masculinity. Seen that way, the book would be more aptly applied to the latest cause taken up by Fox’s Tucker Carlson: the collapse of testosterone levels in American men.

The collapse is actually world-wide and may be attributable to rises in male obesity, but Carlson, of course, attributes it to liberals and the Democratic Party. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports on Carlson’s “documentary”:

There’s the usual racist fearmongering: After the trailer shows several fit White bodies, the first Black body to appear is obese (as President John F. Kennedy intones that “there is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children”), and an image from a street riot is used to convey “weak” America. There’s obsession with gender and sexuality: A shirtless man throws a javelin that turns into a flaming rocket; a man squeezes a cow’s udder; and other men, several also shirtless, exercise, fire a gun, wrestle, flip a tractor tire, swing an ax, swallow raw eggs and, of course, stand naked in front of red lights.

There’s the Trump right’s celebration of masculinity as aggression rather than chivalry or gentlemanliness, a notion promoted lately by Sen Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka. In the trailer, words appear on the screen over President Biden stumbling on Air Force One’s stairs and Democratic senators kneeling in tribute to George Floyd: “Good times made weak men; weak men made hard times.”

Although Kesey was a forerunner of the counterculture, his 1962 novel also anticipates the rightwing reaction to the advances made by women and people of color later in the decade—a reaction that would eventually propel Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980. We can also see in Kesey the white male resentment that would fuel Trump’s candidacy, not to mention the current GOP’s anarchistic embrace of a politics of chaos. In McMurphy’s rebellion, women and Black men are to be put in their proper place.

Of course, it’s just an act of bravado that has McMurphy claiming that electroshock will light up his lovemaking. Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, uses his documentary to endorse claims that “red light therapy” will increase testosterone levels. He’s touting junk science but when has that ever stopped Fox pundits?

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The Fascist Right Goes for Sendak

By Robin Bates | Published: April 17, 2022
Images from Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen

Monday

When do we start attaching the word “fascist” to America’s authoritarian Christians? From jailing a woman for a self-induced abortion (although the charges have been dropped) to attacking school libraries for possessing The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Handmaid’s Tale and Cider House Rules to firing teachers for purportedly teaching Critical Race Theory to supporting Donald Trump’s coup attempt to, now, attacking public libraries, there appears to be no limit to how far these people will go. If democracy obstructs their vision of establishing God’s kingdom on earth, then goodbye democracy. One of the latest casualties of their efforts is Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, one of my children’s favorite books when they were growing up.

A Josh Dawsey article in the Washington Post about a Texas library tells the story. Apparently someone wrote to the Llano library complaining of “pornographic filth”:

“It came to my attention a few weeks ago that pornographic filth has been discovered at the Llano library,” wrote Bonnie Wallace, a 54-year-old local church volunteer. “I’m not advocating for any book to be censored but to be RELOCATED to the ADULT section. … It is the only way I can think of to prohibit censorship of books I do agree with, mainly the Bible, if more radicals come to town and want to use the fact that we censored these books against us.”

On her list of 60 objectionable books were books

 about transgender teens, sex education and race, including such notable works as Between the World and Me, by author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, an exploration of the country’s history written as a letter to his adolescent son. Not long after, the county’s chief librarian sent the list to Suzette Baker, head of one of the library’s three branches.

“She told me to look at pulling the books off the shelf and possibly putting them behind the counter. I told them that was censorship,” Baker said.

In subsequent action, Judge Ron Cunningham, who heads the governing body of Llano County, took it upon himself to become an official censor:

Cunningham, a two-term judge who was once part of the security detail for then-Gov. George W. Bush, acted quickly on the complaints. He strode into the main library a few weeks later and took two books off the shelves — Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen— because some parents had objected to the main character in the story, a little boy, appearing nude — and It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health, a sex education book for parents and children ages 10 and up, that includes color illustrations of the human body and sex acts.

He also ordered librarians to pause buying new material and to pull “any books with photos of naked or sexual conduct regardless if they are animated or actual photos,” emails reviewed by The Washington Post showed.

According to the Post article, Cunningham had previously questioned “whether public libraries were even necessary.”

When my three sons were small, we read Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen so many times that we all have lines we still remember and will quote at a moment’s notice. These include “Milk in the batter, milk in the batter, we make cake, and nothing’s the matter,” and “I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me. I’m Mickey!” The story is a wild dream in which Mickey one night falls out of his bed and out of his clothes, landing in the batter of the night cooks. Just as they’re about to push him into the oven, he fashions an airplane out of the dough (which I guess makes him a “doughboy” to make the World War I pun), flies up to the top of a giant milk bottle, and delivers the milk the bakers need.

So yes, he’s naked for parts of the book, which is part of the pleasure. If you’ve had kids, you know there are times when, early in life, they love to run around naked. It’s a sensuous book, filled with touch, taste, sights, smells, and wonderfully rhythmic language. Mickey is also a confident kid who, after escaping being devoured by someone else’s project, asserts his autonomy at the end: he crows like Peter Pan atop the milk bottle before sliding down and back into bed, having made everyone happy. It’s wild and crazy Sendak, on a par with Where the Wild Things Are and Outside Over There.

Here’s the thing: my kids, now parents themselves, were not corrupted by the book. They are the kind of people you want running your businesses (Darien) and teaching your kids (Toby). Between them, they have five children of their own, to whom they have read In the Night Kitchen and who are themselves well on their way to developing into integrous individuals. The only sickos around are those repressed fundamentalists who see perversion everywhere.

Oh, and guess what. Suzette Baker, the head Llano librarian who warned about censorship, has been fired. Meanwhile, this has happened:

“God has been so good to us … please continue to pray for the librarians and that their eyes would be open to the truth,” Rochelle Wells, a new member of the library board, wrote in an email. “They are closing the library for 3 days which are to be entirely devoted to removing books that contain pornographic content.”

[Lelia] Green Little [member of a local anti-censorship group] said little is known about what administrators did during the time the libraries were closed. The book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a work about systemic racism by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson, has mysteriously vanished, and the fate of several other works remains unknown, she said.

We are currently witnessing, in Vladimir Putin, a graphic example of how the authoritarian mindset works: it will go for Chechnya and then Georgia and then Belorussia and then Crimea and then the Donbas and then Kyiv and Mariupol and Odessa. Fascists push and, when they sense a lack of resistance, push some more. In America, fundamentalist Christians may start with critical race theory and transgender individuals and abortion but, before long, they are attacking any mention of America’s slave past and all LGBTQ rights and birth control itself. They will use the system when it benefits them and violate the system when it doesn’t. They, no more than Putin, can be placated because, as they see it, they answer to a higher call than the American Constitution and the needs of a multicultural democracy.

Public schools and public libraries are just the opening salvo. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

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Out of Black Ponds, Water Lillies

By Robin Bates | Published: April 16, 2022
Van Gogh, Water Lillies

Spiritual Sunday – Easter

It has become somewhat of a tradition with this blog to share a Mary Oliver lyric every Easter. That’s because suffering followed by grace is a regular theme in her poetry. In “Morning Poem” every dawn is a resurrection following the ashes of the night.

Before turning to it, let’s look at that miraculous morning when, in John’s account, Mary encountered the risen Jesus at the tomb (John 20:11-17):

But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, and seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him. And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master. Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God. (John 20:11-17)

In “Morning Poem,” resurrection—the kingdom of God on earth—is ready to hand if only we open ourselves to it.  This vision is available to us even if, like Oliver, we suffer from depression—even if

your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead.

We may fight against the happiness that is there for us, just as we may fight against prayer. Perhaps we resist because we fear we are setting ourselves up for disappointment. But Oliver is reassuring. Deep within us, she says, there is “a beast shouting that the earth/is exactly what [you] wanted.” And we know this is true because, inexorably, the black ponds produce—as if in answer to a prayer—blazing water lilies:

Morning Poem
By Mary Oliver

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches–
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead–
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging–

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted–

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

Let the joy of new creation surge within you on this Easter day. The lillies are blazing, whether you pray or not.

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Passover Originated in Poetic Vision

By Robin Bates | Published: April 14, 2022
Domenico Feti, Moses before the Burning Bush

Friday

As Passover week comes to an end, here’s a Passover poem, recommended to me by my best friend from graduate school, poet and literary scholar Norman Finkelstein. In the past, I’ve shared Norman’s own Passover poem, which you can read here. This year he suggested the title poem from the collection Mountain, Fire, Thornbush by Harvey Shapiro, for whom Norman is the literary executor. Here it is:

Mountain, Fire, Thornbush
By Harvey Shapiro

How everything gets tamed.
The pronominal outcry, as if uttered in ecstasy,
Is turned to syntax. We are
Only a step from discursive prose
When the voice speaks from the thornbush.
Mountain, fire, and thornbush.
Supplied only with these, even that aniconic Jew
Could spell mystery. But there must be
Narrative. The people must get to the mountain.
Doors must open and close.
How to savor the savagery of Egyptians,
Who betrayed the names of their gods
To demons, and tore the hair
From their godheads
As lotus blossoms are pulled out of the pool.

The poem seems to be about how an encounter with the divine evolves to the Passover narrative. The encounter occurs when Moses hears God’s voice from a burning thornbush. The “pronominal outcry” (pronominal meaning “relating to a pronoun”) is God’s assertion, “I am that I am.” Shapiro describes this as an ecstatic outcry—divinity announcing itself as a fiery assertion—but what starts off as poetic images (mountain, fire, thornbush) becomes a collection of words (syntax) and then meaning in the form of discourse.

In other words, a poetic sense of the divine gets translated into language. Even an aniconic Jew like Moses–I think “aniconic” means literal minded and non-metaporical—senses mystery in those powerful images. In any event, that divine spark eventually leads to the exodus narrative: God calling upon the Israelites to rebel against the “savagery of the Egyptians,” to close their doors behind them (with all the door imagery that one finds in the Passover seder), and to journey to the mountain and freedom.  Savoring Egyptian savagery is an unexpected twist to the poem but maybe it’s a reference to how the Passover narrative, to be compelling, needs a good villain.

In his opening declaration that “everything gets tamed,” Shapiro also seems to hint that something gets lost in the translation. The poetic ecstasy of encountering the divine dwindles to a story.

Does this convey a disappointment with the Passover seder? Is it no more than a demon, an icon, when compared with that initial thornbush moment? Is pulling lotus blossoms out of the pool a version of separating them from the life source? I confess to not really understanding the last four lines and would like help.

Yet it seems to me that, even if something is lost or betrayed following that initial encounter with the divine, not everything is lost. The Passover narrative retains at least an echo of the ecstatic meeting with God that birthed it. Tradition, after all, always starts off as poetic vision.

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Jane Austen, Fountain of Youth

By Robin Bates | Published: April 14, 2022
Jane Austen

Thursday

Apparently there’s a new book out by an 89-year-old, one Ruth Wilson, that is right up my line: The Jane Austen Remedy: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book can change a life (Allen and Unwin, 2022). A recent article by Wilson in The Guardian (credit to Rebecca Adams for the alert) gives us some insight into her thinking. There she writes,

Thanks to a rereading of Jane Austen’s fiction I have experienced a rejuvenation of spirit and energy that has transformed my life. Re-reading for the sheer pleasure of Austen’s language and characters when I experienced some depression in my 60s initiated a process that became more serious as I continued to re-read the novels in my 70s and became more and more curious about the relationship between reading, learning and the imagination.

In the process of writing The Jane Austen Remedy, Wilson said that she experienced

waves of exhilaration while my level of wellbeing soared beyond anything I had previously known. While writing the memoir, reading, writing, and rereading occupied my days and gave them added meaning.

I love the way she sees reflecting on what she reads and rereads to be an integral part of the process. To be sure, Wilson wasn’t entirely surprised. She reports that she has been

a “reading and response reader” since childhood, feeling my way into books and emerging sometimes as a different person; often a happier one, having experienced the sweetness and usefulness of literature described by the Roman poet Horace.

She then quotes Louise Rosenblatt, an early reader response theorist with whom I should be more familiar. I totally buy what Wilson takes from Rosenblatt:  

From the beginning I was reading in spirals, a concept devised by the reading theorist, Louise Rosenblatt. She imagines a series of arcs as readers shift their attention from the words on the page to their own reservoir of experiences and memories; then back to the words before continuing with a deeper sense of engagement.

In the literature assignments I give my students, I use a sandwich rather than a spiral analogy but the idea is the same: use the two slices of bread (the introduction and conclusion) to introduce and conclude the personal associations triggered by the work, I tell them, while using the ham and cheese portion to explore the work. It’s important to keep the parts of the sandwich somewhat separate, I add, because one needs to give each its own voice. One doesn’t want to make the work a subset of the life or the life a subset of the work; there must be a dialogue between the two. Once there is, however, remarkable insights almost always emerge.

Because a reader changes over time, that means the insights will also change upon rereading a work. Wilson shares some instances of this happening. For example:

Vivian Gornick, novelist and literary critic, recalls her responses to the novel Sons and Lovers at different ages: reading D. H. Lawrence’s coming-of-age story in her late teens she identified with Miriam, young Paul Morel’s virginal girlfriend. In her thirties, following a failed marriage and the discovery of her own sexuality, she identified with Paul’s erotic mistress. And later still she identified with a more mature Paul, the male protagonist who learns the value of self-scrutiny and embarks on a quest for self-knowledge.

Wilson notes that this has happened with her as well. As a result of reading and rereading Jane Austen’s novels, she reports that they

have offered me the richness and complexity required to help me re-assess where I am in my life, the quality of my relationships past and present, and the values at stake in my life choices.

For instance, here’s how the meaning of Pride and Prejudice has changed for Wilson over time:

When I read Pride and Prejudice at the age of 15, I read it as a domestic comedy; I loved the Bennet sisters because they were lively and, for all their bickering, they were having fun. The girls bore with their mother’s nerves and tolerated their father’s sarcasm without giving way to resentment. That helped me as an adolescent.

Rereading the same novel in my 30s when I was assailed by ambivalent feelings about where I was in my life I put my attention elsewhere. I paid serious attention to the nature of intimacy, considering whether prudence should override passion as Mrs Gardner counsels her niece Elizabeth; or whether I could reconcile myself to Charlotte Lucas’s view that happiness in marriage is a matter of chance.

At the age of 90 (almost!) I reread, ponder and console myself with Elizabeth Bennet’s words, “till this moment I never knew myself.” This is the moment I have been waiting for.

In my case, my favorite Jane Austen novel keeps changing. Early on, it was Pride and Prejudice and then it was Persuasion. Currently it is Emma, partly because I find it a more profound exploration than, say, Pride and Prejudice of how, even when (in our arrogance) we screw up, we can recover if we remain in integrity.

While I don’t think I’ll ever list Mansfield Park as my favorite, my appreciation for Fanny Price has steadily grown over the years.  

One reason I love Continuing Education courses is that elderly students have a far different take on works than do young adults of college age. As a result, I too learn new things from the works.

And then there is the way that works mean different things to readers from different epochs. Reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss eloquently captures this phenomenon in the following passage:

A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period. It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue. It is much more like an orchestration which strikes ever new chords among its readers and which frees the text from the substance of the words and makes it meaningful for the time…A literary work must be understood as creating a dialogue…

The dialogue, we learn from Wilson, can have you feeling young at 89.

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Who Has the Real Problem with Sex?

By Robin Bates | Published: April 12, 2022
Peters and West as Othello and Iago

Wednesday

It’s a fairly reliable rule of thumb that those people most obsessed with sexual perversion are those most associated with it. Recently, members of the GOP, taking their cues from QAnon cultists, have been charging Democrats with being soft on pedophilia, if not being actual pedophiles. Yet many more prominent Republicans have been associated with pedophilia than Democrats, starting with the former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert and Florida Representative Mark Foley. We could also mention Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, who closed his eyes to trainer abuse when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State, and Donald Trump, who would wander through the backstage dressing rooms of the Miss Teenage beauty pageant and who spoke sympathetically about how his friend Jeffrey Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” And then there is Alabama judge and Senate candidate Roy Moore, with his long history of hitting on teenage girls.

Oh yes, and there’s also GOP firebrand Lauren Boebert, who is married to a man who, at 24, exposed himself to two young women in a bowling alley. (Lauren, who was 17 at the time, was present when this happened but that didn’t prevent her from later marrying him.) And let’s not pass over those Republican legislators in my home state of Tennessee, who came very close to passing a pathway to marriage without minimum age limits, relaxing guardrails that were in place to protect minors from predatory behavior and abuse. Only public outcry has gotten them to back off.

I thought about this as I was teaching Othello recently. Republican hypocrisy—or projection—alerted me to Iago’s own obsession with sex. On Monday I examined why Iago hates Othello to the degree that he does, chalking it up to “ressentiment” or resentment. But his sexual hang-ups may enter into the dynamics as well.

Consider Iago’s obsession with Othello’s sexuality. Early in the play, he rouses Desdemona’s father by saying that “an old black ram is topping your white ewe” and that “your daughter [is] covered with a Barbary horse.” If this isn’t stopped, Iago warns the father, “you’ll have your nephews [grandchildren] neigh to you; you’ll have coursers for cousins and gennets [donkeys] for germans [close relatives].”

Later, in a curious comment, Iago tells us that he hates Othello because he has slept with Iago’s wife Emilia. We have no evidence that this has in fact occurred. It sounds much more like a classic case of projection, with Iago so obsessed with Othello’s sexuality that he imagines it entering his own bedroom:

For that I do suspect the lusty Moor
Hath leap’d into my seat; the thought whereof
Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards…

There’s also the strange story Iago invents about Cassio’s dreaming. As evidence that Othello’s former lieutenant is cuckolding him, Iago gives the following account:

I lay with Cassio lately;
And, being troubled with a raging tooth,
I could not sleep.
There are a kind of men so loose of soul,
That in their sleeps will mutter their affairs:
One of this kind is Cassio:
In sleep I heard him say ‘Sweet Desdemona,
Let us be wary, let us hide our loves;’
And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand,
Cry ‘O sweet creature!’ and then kiss me hard,
As if he pluck’d up kisses by the roots
That grew upon my lips: then laid his leg
Over my thigh, and sigh’d, and kiss’d; and then
Cried ‘Cursed fate that gave thee to the Moor!’

What’s striking about this is not so much that Iago has invented it but that he indulges in such graphic details. It’s as though he’s fantasizing. The point of the story—that Cassio is in love with Desdemona—almost gets sidetracked by Iago’s description of what Cassio is doing to him physically.

If one adds to this Iago’s anti-women diatribes, along with his mistreatment of his wife Emilia, one begins to wonder if his hatred against Othello stems from a frustrated homoerotic attraction: perhaps he is in love with Othello and feels betrayed by the Moor’s marriage to Desdemona and his preference for Cassio. Maybe the “cursed fate” in Iago’s story of Cassio’s dream is not the Moor taking Desdemona from Cassio but of Desdemona taking the Moor from Iago. It’s like the way that Olivia takes Sebastian from Antonio in Twelfth Night.

To explain Iago’s extreme hatred of Othello, consider that hate often burns hottest when it starts off as love. In any event, while Iago complains about others being obsessed with sex, it appears that he is the real obsessive.

Which also appears to be the case with the GOP. Nor should we be surprised. It makes sense that the party that talks most about childhood innocence–that accuses Democrats of killing unborn babies, running global child trafficking rings, and giving overly lenient sentences to those who download child porn–is the party that has the bigger problem with actual pedophiles.

Additional thoughts: I should make it clear that pedophilia isn’t confined to Republicans. There are undoubtedly pedophiles amongst Democrats and Independents as well. But Democrats are better at policing their ranks. There is also a link between fascism, with its insistence on purity and control, and pedophilia.

As regards Iago’s possible homosexual tendencies, it should be clear to regular readers of this blog that I’m not saying that homosexuals are more likely to be evil than heterosexuals. (We don’t make Macbeth stand in for the latter.) Evil can be found across the gender preference spectrum. It is true, however, the sexual repression can breed monsters. On a historic note, men sleeping with men in Shakespeare’s time was not the big deal it became in later times. Some of the world’s greatest love sonnets (Shakespeare’s) were written by one man to another.

 

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Dancing in the Face of Darkness

By Robin Bates | Published: April 11, 2022
Degas, The Star (1878)

Tuesday

Because the news is so dark these days, here’s a Jane Kenyon poem that may pick you up. Gazing at the evening sun as the world prepares to sink into night, the poet flashes back to a childhood memory. At this moment between light and dark, she remembers an ecstatic moment when, wearing a yellow dress, she made a perfect circle as she whirled around in “the ochre light of an early June evening.”

And even though she was a child, she sensed that she would need to hold on to this memory in order “to live and to go on living” when sorrows beset her. Kenyon certainly faced such sorrows, wrestling with depression and then dying of leukemia at 47. Yet the poem declares that, in that ecstatic moment, she grasped that sorrow would never “consume my heart.” She grasped this truth even as it was happening:

Evening Sun
Jane Kenyon

Why does this light force me back
to my childhood? I wore a yellow
summer dress and the skirt
made a perfect circle.
Turning and turning
until it flared to the limit
was irresistible….The grass and trees,
my outstretched arms and the skirt
whirled in the ochre light
of an early June evening.
And I knew then
that I would have to live,
and go on living: what sorrow it was;
and still what sorrow ignites
but does not consume
my heart

The poem, written in 1983, reminds me of a Lucille Clifton poem written a decade later. In Clifton’s case, an elusive sun once more plays a supporting role, helping her recover from the trauma of sexual child abuse at the hands of her father. Only after he died, she writes, did she remember how one can catch a glimpse of the sun even in darkness. “Only then,” she writes,

did i remember how she [the moon]
catches the sun and keeps most of him
for the evening that surely will come;
and it comes.
only then did i know that to live
in the world all that i needed was
some small light and know that indeed
i would rise again and rise again to dance.

Although the evening invariably comes, the heart doesn’t have to surrender to it.

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