Today is the day that Australia and New Zealand remember their war dead, it being the anniversary of World War I’s Battle of Gallipoli. An expeditionary force made up of many Australians and New Zealanders landed at the Turkish Dardanelles on April 25, 1915, and the subsequent campaign would cost both sides a combined 250,000 casualties before the Turks emerged victorious. Just a few months ago we thought such carnage was behind us, only to see World War-style horrors return to the world stage.
Following another 1914 battle, this one where the Germans defeated the British at the Battle of the Mons, Laurence Binyon wrote “For the Fallen.” The fourth stanza is frequently quoted at occasions like Anzac Day:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
While I love that stanza, the rest of the poem has sometimes struck me as romanticizing death in battle, the way that Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” romanticizes it. (I express some of my reservations about such romanticizing here). I’ve always been more drawn to the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who exposes it. In his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” for instance, he refers to the poetic line of the Roman poet Horace—“Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country”—only to call it a lie. If you could see a man dying of poison gas, he tells the reader,
you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
The Ukrainians defending their homeland, however, has me thinking differently. Just because we acknowledge the horrors of war does not mean that we should close our eyes to combat heroism. “Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes,” says Galileo in Brecht’s play of that name, but when the times are indeed unhappy, we must honor those who step up. I find myself thinking of those brave souls defending Mariupol against impossible odds. When tyrants strike, brave acts are called for, and that’s what Binyon’s poem honors.
So here’s to all those who fall “in the cause of the free.” As Binyon puts it, “they are known as the stars are known to the Night,” and “to the end, to the end, they remain.”
For the Fallen By Laurence Binyon
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, England mourns for her dead across the sea. Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit, Fallen in the cause of the free.
Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres, There is music in the midst of desolation And a glory that shines upon our tears.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young, Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted; They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
They mingle not with their laughing comrades again; They sit no more at familiar tables of home; They have no lot in our labor of the day-time; They sleep beyond England’s foam.
But where our desires are and our hopes profound, Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight, To the innermost heart of their own land they are known As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust, Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain; As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, To the end, to the end, they remain.
Added note: I just discovered that Rupert Brooke died on his way to Gallipoli, being felled by an infected mosquito bite on April 23, two days before the landing. His well-known poem “The Soldier” contributes to the romanticization that I have always been wary of. And yet, in the current situation, I can imagine it bringing solace to those Ukrainians battling the Russian invaders.
Goodall, The Ploughman and the Shepherdess: Time of the Evening Prayer (1897)
Spiritual Sunday
My dear friend Sue Schmidt alerted me to this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, who is the daughter of a Palestinian Muslim father and an American Christian mother. “Different Ways to Pray” is a reminder that God is bigger than any of the rituals we devise to get in touch with the divine. When we confuse religious practice with God, we get into trouble. Sometimes, Nye reminds us, talking with God is like talking with goats and involves laughter:
Different Ways to Pray By Naomi Shihab Nye
There was the method of kneeling, a fine method, if you lived in a country where stones were smooth. The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards, hidden corners where knee fit rock. Their prayers were weathered rib bones, small calcium words uttered in sequence, as if this shedding of syllables could somehow fuse them to the sky.
There were the men who had been shepherds so long they walked like sheep. Under the olive trees, they raised their arms— Hear us! We have pain on earth! We have so much pain there is no place to store it! But the olives bobbed peacefully in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme. At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese, and were happy in spite of the pain, because there was also happiness.
Some prized the pilgrimage, wrapping themselves in new white linen to ride buses across miles of vacant sand. When they arrived at Mecca they would circle the holy places, on foot, many times, they would bend to kiss the earth and return, their lean faces housing mystery.
While for certain cousins and grandmothers the pilgrimage occurred daily, lugging water from the spring or balancing the baskets of grapes. These were the ones present at births, humming quietly to perspiring mothers. The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses, forgetting how easily children soil clothes.
There were those who didn’t care about praying. The young ones. The ones who had been to America. They told the old ones, you are wasting your time. Time? — The old ones prayed for the young ones. They prayed for Allah to mend their brains, for the twig, the round moon, to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.
And occasionally there would be one who did none of this, the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool, who beat everyone at dominoes, insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats, and was famous for his laugh.
There’s no better way to begin Earth Day than with a poem by Wendell Berry. In “Enriching the Earth,” the Kentucky poet meditates upon his different contributions to the cycle of life. The clover and grass seeds that he sows are destined to grow and die, just as the winter wheat is designed to be plowed back into the earth to enrich it. (“The cut worm forgives the plow,” William Blake tells us.) By stirring into the ground “the offal and the decay of the growth of past seasons,” the farmer has “mended the earth and made its yield increase.”
Berry himself is not exempt from this cycle. If, as a younger man, he actively aided the earth in the cycle, as he grows older he finds himself receiving more than giving. “When the will fails so do the hands,” he says, “and one lives at the expense of life.”
But that’s okay because he is preparing for a time when he will serve the earth in yet another way. He may be “slowly falling into the fund of things”—“all this serves the dark,” he writes— but rather than fearing this, he discovers that the thought of his body one day “entering the earth” only intensifies his engagement with nature. As he puts it,
And yet to serve the earth, not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness and a delight to the air, and my days do not wholly pass.
In other words, he lives fully in the moment as the air around him seems to expand.
And when the final moment comes—when the days do in fact pass—the aspect of ourselves that is “the heaviest and most mute” will enrich the earth in its own way. At this point, we will enter fully into the song of creation.
Enriching the Earth By Wendell Berry
To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds of winter grains and various legumes, their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth. I have stirred into the ground the offal and the decay of the growth of past seasons and so mended the earth and made its yield increase. All this serves the dark. Against the shadow of veiled possibility my workdays stand in a most asking light. I am slowly falling into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth, not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness and a delight to the air, and my days do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service, for when the will fails so do the hands and one lives at the expense of life. After death, willing or not, the body serves, entering the earth. And so what was heaviest and most mute is at last raised up into song.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
