A Comic Tweeter in Love with Lit

By Robin Bates | Published: January 13, 2022
English professor Tobias Wilson-Bates

Friday

Tobias Wilson-Bates, my youngest son, is a 19th century British Literature specialist who teaches in the English Department at Georgia Gwinnett College. He is also the funniest member of our family and one who has mastered the art of Twitter. I combed through some of his best literary tweets over the last few months and lament that I must pass up the ones with visuals, which are among his best. You can find him at Tobias Wilson-Bates@PhDhurtBrain.

Some of my favorites are imagined conversations with famous authors or characters. For instance:

Tolkien: I’ve got some great character names, Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf
CS Lewis: Nice! Really getting into the spirit of fantasy!
Tolkien: Right?! Also Sam.

Tolkien (brainstorming): Names are tough, hmm, what would a secretive influential political actor be called who wants to ingratiate himself with a ruler. Something inconspicuous. I’ve got it! Wormtongue!

Gollum: …
Therapist: I see, yes, so, is this “precious” in the room with us right now?

Toby has a lot of fun with the Brontes. For instance, this one on Jane Eyre:

Editor: so it’s like the Bluebeard story but in the end Jane marries Bluebeard?
Charlotte Bronte: yes.
Editor: do you think the readers will like it?
Charlotte: yes. because I will tell them to.

And on Villette:

Editor: I think we need to have a romantic ending
Charlotte Brontë: like, he dies at sea and she gets to run a school however she likes and read all day?
Editor: well
Charlotte: also her enemies suffer enormously

You can kind of see why Anne Bronte is Toby’s favorite Bronte from the following allusion to Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

Anne Bronte: the story needs something exciting
Emily: a ghost?
Charlotte: a mad ghost?
Emily and Charlotte: a mad person disguised as a ghost but there’s also really a ghost!
Anne: look, I’m just gonna make the husband have a drinking problem

At one point Toby gets into a twitter exchange with Liz Miller, who was his dissertation director at the University of California at Davis. Miller is referring to Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s famous thesis that heroines in Victorian novels only have two options, marriage or death:

Liz Miller – Ladies, if he proposes in Chapter Three, wants to marry before the novel is over, and isn’t particularly concerned w/ waiting til novelistic closure to consummate your relationship, either he’s a villain or you’re about to die of consumption.

Toby: Chuckling for the thousandth time of @ecmille1’s observation that getting married before the end of a novel is the worst thing a character can do.

And then later in the thread:

Toby: At this point, if two central characters seem headed towards matrimony, I compulsively check how many pages are left and shake my head sadly if it’s a lot.

Speaking of villainous husbands, here’s Toby in a twitter thread on fairy tales:

Bluebeard is the best fairy tale bc it’s about extreme domestic violence and is so clear in the location and logic that even Disney hasn’t figured out how to sanitize and monetize it.

Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty are all iterations of the same morphological structure that almost always had a rapist king or the woman’s own father intent on raping her and the fairy godmother allowed her to escape in disguise. All profoundly sanitized by Disney.

All that’s left is the phantom of nonconsensual intercourse now romanticized as a kiss that awakens the princess from slumber.

I like how, in another tweet, Toby imagines the eye test in the movie Bladerunner being administered to Victorian authors. In the movie, if the eyes don’t emotionally widen at the question about a turtle getting hit in the road, then it’s a replicant and not a human:

Bladerunner agent using the Voight-kampff test on Victorian authors
Agent: would you kill a child for a greater social good?
Gaskell: little Tom goes first from starvation, then I get both twins with typhus before moving onto the-

To which another tweeter imagined Thomas Hardy’s response:

Thomas Hardy: question: does it *have* to be for the greater good?

And Toby following up on the Thomas Hardy suggestion:

If they suffer through childhood and then die as adults? Or, alternately, what if one of the children kills all the others? Do I still get those points?

In another tweet on Hardy, Toby mentions the very dark George Gissing:

“Nobody in the 19th century is as bleak as Thomas Hardy”
*George Gissing cracks his knuckles menacingly

Here’s an imagined interchange between the author of In Memoriam and the famous author who snatched her husband’s heart out of the funeral fire:

Tennyson: my grief was so great that I —
Mary Shelley: kept his preserved heart in a box!
Tennyson: — wrote a poem
MS: erm, oh, haha, yes, that’s, uh, how we grieve…

And here’s another imagined interchange, this one between the author of Christmas Carol and the noted social realist novelist Elizabeth Gaskell:

Dickens: and when he looked in, he saw the tiny crutch, but Tiny Tim was gone
Gaskell: because the opium wasn’t enough to conceal his collapsing immune system and his smallpox infection was inevitably escalated by chronic malnutrition, right?
Dickens: umm, well

And another Dickens reference:

Scrooge: what day is it, boy?
Boy: tis Christmas Eve 2021
Scrooge: and what is the minimum wage?
Boy: $7.25, sir
Scrooge: wow. This really seems more of systemic issue than something that can be solved with guilt philanthropy
Boy: right??

Here’s one I like:

Dickens (staring into the camera): $1 million dollars by midnight tonight or I add another character.

Moby Dick makes an appearance from time to time:

Ahab: guys, guys, I, uh, wanna apologize about that whale business
Crew: whew!
*scattered applause
Ahab: from now we’re Bitcoin mining and investing in crypto!!!
Crew: Noooo!! *screams, *sound of bodies hitting the water

Here’s another, which every teacher will relate to:

*nailing a gold doubloon to the wall “to the first one that sees the end of the semester!”

Here’s an interchange between Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous characters:

Dr. Jekyll: chain me here to end this madness!
Utterson: I shall!
Dr. Jekyll: also, just a small note, under no circumstances should you call him Dr. Hyde. That’s my credential!

Sometimes Toby imagines himself in the conversations:

Patient: doctor, I’m feeling depressed
Me: read Samuel Beckett’s Endgame
Patient: wait a second, what kind of doctor are you?!
Me: *smoke bomb!

And another with a similar ending:

Me: not all books are novels!
Student: how do you define the novel?
*the student looks up to find the classroom empty. wind whispers through the open window.

And then there are a number of stand alone observations, witty and smart both:

Charge of the Light Brigade is a poem about a lot of people dying for no reason that gets people excited about the prospect of dying for no reason. Like if Eye of the Tiger were a song to get you excited about being eaten by a tiger.

The more I think about the terrible fates of everyone on Odysseus’ crew, the more I think the Lotus Eaters had it right.

Will never not be impressed by Samuel Johnson saying the canon is made up of the works that have stood the test of time, while writing prefaces for a publisher to convince people that the works the publisher owned were in fact the canon.

Among its many interesting features, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair combines the author’s prodigious ability to skewer character flaws against the background of social class with an almost childish naïveté about how debt and empire function.

Make William Blake part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you cowards!

In response to the Virginia student who complained about Toni Morrison’s Beloved giving him nightmares—put in an ad, this incident helped Republican Glen Youngkin win his gubernatorial race—Toby made a point I make in my book. Sometimes literature is not supposed to be comfortable:

Begging the media to do interviews with Reader Response theorists. Literally an entire field ready to tell you about how having nightmares from reading Beloved is not a “bad” response.

To an article entitled “The Easy Seven-Word Phrase Every Woman Needs to Know to Exit Uncomfortable Conversations,” Toby responded with a line from Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’

And finally, looking at the medium of Twitter itself:

Twitter is a lot like being a grad student bc it’s a lot of watching people have intense conversations about things you have only heard of in passing.

Toby doesn’t only write about literature. Since he’s the father of four, there’s a lot about parenting, and also about student debt, the state of academe, Covid, politics in general, and other interests of his. I’ll end with a tweet about my two oldest granddaughters because—well—they’re my granddaughters:

Was a bit confused this morning until my kids explained that they call words written in cursive “curse words”

Shades of Art Linkletter, for those of you old enough to know who he was.

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Rogers, Covid, and Atlas Shrugged

By Robin Bates | Published: January 12, 2022
Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rogers lauding Atlas Shrugged

Thursday

I see that Novak Djokovic has joined the company of those elite athletes who are intent on extending the Covid pandemic.  Like Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rogers, Djokovic thinks he is justified in playing fast and loose with the truth when it comes to vaccinations. While Rogers misled people into thinking he’d been vaccinated, Djokovic assured Australian authorities he hadn’t been traveling, when in fact he’d been flying around the world—as well meeting sans mask with various reporters and fans, even though he knew he had Covid.

From a literary point of view, Rogers interests me more since he recently revealed his favorite novel. In light of his behavior, I should have been able to guess that he is a fan of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

I’ve written multiple times about Rand (for instance, here and here) so I won’t go into detail. The novel’s hero John Galt thinks that rules are for wusses and that real men pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. At one point he declares, “I swear—by my life and my life of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” The successful entrepreneur is a combination of victim complex (“They don’t appreciate me”) and revenge fantasy (“The world’s going to fall apart when I’m gone and then they’ll be sorry”). Blogger John Rogers has delivered one of the great indictments of Atlas Shrugged, noting how it appeals to stunted fantasies:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

I can somewhat understand how premier athletes like Rogers and Djokovic are aided by megalomanic, Galt-like illusions of their superiority over others. That supreme confidence—which comes to their aid when even the least little smidgen of self-doubt could result in defeat—also leads them to shrug off their responsibilities to lesser mortals. It took such confidence for Djokovic to overcome two match points, with Roger Federer serving, to win Wimbledon in 2019.  If the world falls apart when Rogers and Djokovic shrug, well too bad for the world.

I contrast them with Lebron James, who—as much of a health nut as Djokovic—was also initially hesitant about taking the vaccine. James changed his mind, however, when he realized that getting the shot would protect the people that he loved. Because thoughts about others balanced out his focus on himself, he became a model to be followed rather than a pariah.  

John Galt doesn’t acknowledge the many ways that society contributes to the success of people like him. Nor, according to reports, did Ayn Rand. According to Gene Bell-Villada’s excellent book on her, Rand received all kinds of aid from others, even though she proudly proclaimed, “No one helped me, nor did I think at any time that it was anyone’s duty to help me.” Bell-Villada details this aid, including (I quote from one of my earlier posts),

her mother’s jewels that financed her trip to the United States; the free room and board, money and reference letter she received from her American relatives; the subsidized housing she got at the Hollywood Studio Club; to… The list goes on and on, all the way to the cancer surgery that would have bankrupted her had it not been for Medicare.

I’m willing to grant that Rand’s novel contributes to Rogers’ preternatural calm when 250-pound linebackers are bearing down upon him. But I also think of those whom he influenced who have ended up in ICU wards and on ventilators.

Does he just shrug?

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The Fearsome Georgia Bulldogs

By Robin Bates | Published: January 11, 2022
Bull’s-eye and Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist

Wednesday

Congratulations to the University of Georgia for winning the national football championship Monday night, holding back Alabama’s “Crimson Tide.” In other words, they did what King Canute was unable to pull off. (Let me know if you get this reference, which I explain below.) I’ve written in the past about Alabama’s impressive run of championships (here), applying the Lord Byron’s line, “Roll on though deep and dark blue ocean roll,/Ten thousand ships sweep over thee in vain.” Saying something about the Georgia Bulldogs is a little tougher.

That’s because I can’t find any literary references to bulldogs. Now, I have a personal story about one: when I was growing up in Sewanee in the 1950s, a bulldog named Hrothgar (Beowulf alert!) roamed the campus, sometimes entering classrooms and once my family’s apartment. I guess he felt that every mead hall was his. There are stories of classroom doors being slammed left and right when professors heard Hrothgar’s snuffling in the hall. I also remember Hrothgar being painted purple once (Sewanee’s team color) during Homecoming weekend. Anyway, it was years before I learned that he was named after a fictional Danish king.

But back to Georgia. The closest I can get to a bulldog in literature is a bull terrier. They’re not the same but indulge me because this dog, like the team, is truly fearsome. His name is Bull’s-eye and he belongs to the brutish Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist. Sykes at various times uses Bull’s-eye to terrify Oliver. In one episode he serves as an accessory in the boy’s kidnapping:

“Give me the other [hand],” said Sikes, seizing Oliver’s unoccupied hand. “Here, Bull’s-Eye!”

The dog looked up, and growled.

“See here, boy!” said Sikes, putting his other hand to Oliver’s throat; “if he speaks ever so soft a word, hold him! D’ye mind!”

The dog growled again; and licking his lips, eyed Oliver as if he were anxious to attach himself to his windpipe without delay.

“He’s as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn’t!” said Sikes, regarding the animal with a kind of grim and ferocious approval. “Now, you know what you’ve got to expect, master, so call away as quick as you like; the dog will soon stop that game. Get on, young’un!”

Bull’s-eye wagged his tail in acknowledgment of this unusually endearing form of speech; and, giving vent to another admonitory growl for the benefit of Oliver, led the way onward.

At another point Nancy, Sykes’s lady friend who assists in the kidnapping, unexpectedly reveals a soft side as she protects Oliver against the dog:

“Keep back the dog, Bill!” cried Nancy, springing before the door, and closing it, as the Jew and his two pupils darted out in pursuit. “Keep back the dog; he’ll tear the boy to pieces.”

“Serve him right!” cried Sikes, struggling to disengage himself from the girl’s grasp. “Stand off from me, or I’ll split your head against the wall.”

“I don’t care for that, Bill, I don’t care for that,” screamed the girl, struggling violently with the man, “the child shan’t be torn down by the dog, unless you kill me first.”

And then there’s the scene where Bull’s-eye actually goes after his master, which Dickens observes doesn’t happen often:

Dogs are not generally apt to revenge injuries inflicted upon them by their masters; but Mr. Sikes’s dog, having faults of temper in common with his owner, and laboring, perhaps, at this moment, under a powerful sense of injury, made no more ado but at once fixed his teeth in one of the half-boots. Having given in a hearty shake, he retired, growling, under a form; just escaping the pewter measure which Mr. Sikes levelled at his head.

“You would, would you?” said Sikes, seizing the poker in one hand, and deliberately opening with the other a large clasp-knife, which he drew from his pocket. “Come here, you born devil! Come here! D’ye hear?”

The dog no doubt heard; because Mr. Sikes spoke in the very harshest key of a very harsh voice; but, appearing to entertain some unaccountable objection to having his throat cut, he remained where he was, and growled more fiercely than before: at the same time grasping the end of the poker between his teeth, and biting at it like a wild beast.

This resistance only infuriated Mr. Sikes the more; who, dropping on his knees, began to assail the animal most furiously. The dog jumped from right to left, and from left to right; snapping, growling, and barking; the man thrust and swore, and struck and blasphemed; and the struggle was reaching a most critical point for one or other; when, the door suddenly opening, the dog darted out: leaving Bill Sikes with the poker and the clasp-knife in his hands.

Unlike the Georgia Bulldogs, however, Bulls-eye comes to a bad end. After Sykes, in a strange turn of affairs, accidentally hangs himself in an attempt to escape, the dog fatally seeks to rejoin his master:

A dog, which had lain concealed till now, ran backwards and forwards on the parapet with a dismal howl, and collecting himself for a spring, jumped for the dead man’s shoulders. Missing his aim, he fell into the ditch, turning completely over as he went; and striking his head against a stone, dashed out his brains.

Many in the past have dashed out their brains—metaphorically—against Alabama’s fabled teams. Not this time.

Canute episode: Legend has it that the 11th century English king Canute, piously worried that his courtiers were worshipping him as a god, had them place him on the beach. When, despite his commands, the tide kept rolling in, he had made his point that earthly power is vain compared with God’s supreme power.

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Confession Time: “Never Have I Ever”

By Robin Bates | Published: January 10, 2022
Sir Frank Dicksee, The Confession

Tuesday

Sewanee has asked me to teach a “Composition and Literature” class, so tomorrow, for the first time in two years, I’ll be getting to know a new class. For a fleeting moment, it crossed my mind to give them a twitter questionnaire—“Never Have I Ever”—that has gone viral. I quickly realized, however, that I really shouldn’t be asking about their sex lives and drug use. So scratch that.

Still, I share it here, along with my own answers, so as to introduce new aspects of myself to readers of this blog. I promise that there’s a literary tie-in.

The questionnaire asks you to assign yourself a point for each of the activities you haven’t done. After that, it’s up for debate what the score means. If you get a high score, does it mean that you’re a boring person who hasn’t lived life to the fullest? If a low one, that you’re reckless and irresponsible? Maybe but not necessarily.

Anyway, feel free to take the test and tell me your score, as I will tell you mine (along with elaboration):

Instruction: Assign yourself one point for each one of the following activities you haven’t done:

1. Skipped school
2. Gotten drunk
3. Had a one-night stand
4. Taken drugs
5. Appeared on television
6. Gone skydiving
7. Fired a gun
8. Been on a cruise
9. Sung karaoke
10. Met a celeb
11. Skinny dipped
12. Smoked a cigarette
13. Broken a limb
14. Gotten a body piercing
15. Gotten a tattoo
16. Received a ticket
17. Gotten arrested
18. Gone ziplining
19. Been in a limo      
20. Ridden a horse

Okay, so even though I’m a fairly buttoned-down person, I got a five, and the score would have gone lower if I’d ever sung karaoke (weird that I haven’t) and were a woman (in which case I would probably have pierced my ears). The other three are skydiving, smoking a cigarette (ugh!), and getting a tattoo. Since the last two are fairly minor, I’m not that far from a 1.

But lest I sound like a swinger—okay, so I probably don’t—I probably should mention that I only smoked pot once, which was right before seeing Casablanca (it was my first time) as a junior in college. All the way through the film, my foggy mind kept asking, “Isn’t someone supposed to say, ‘Play it again, Sam?’” Of course, no one does. When I emerged from the film, I was so angry that pot had messed up my first encounter with this classic that I vowed never to indulge again. Indeed, intellectual capacity is so important to me that anything that messes with it (like drugs) I regard with horror.

Same with getting drunk, which I did at a Carleton beer ball game my senior year. I had a terrific headache the following morning and kept gagging into the phone when my saintly Victorian grandmother (born 1886) called. (Fortunately she didn’t hear it.) So again, never again.

The one-night stand happened at Carleton but we didn’t go all the way, so maybe that doesn’t count. Although the so-called sexual revolution may have been underway, I was a lowly foot soldier.

More striking was getting arrested, which I did along with 80 fellow Carleton and St. Olaf students and professors. The occasion was the 1970 Kent State shootings, and we blockaded the Minneapolis induction center with the full intent of getting peacefully arrested. And so we were. Paul Wellstone, my political science professor and later a senator, was one of our group.

I fired a gun as a high school student at Sewanee Military Academy as part of their ROTC program and never again after that. I skipped school once, but that was on senior day at SMA, when the whole class skipped. (I stayed at home working on an essay.) I broke my leg playing wiffle ball (I leaped into a cedar tree to catch a ball) so that’s not exactly an instance of bold risk taking.

I’ve ridden a horse once, in Yellowstone, and went ziplining with Julia three years ago in the Smokies (because we’d never done it). I loved the ziplining and look forward to doing it again.

The television story is the most interesting of the lot. When I was in newly-liberated Slovenia in 1995, I was asked to read Walt Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain” as part of their Victory in Europe (VE) celebration. (I describe that experience here). The poem was chosen because Jimmy Carter sent it to Yugoslavia when Tito died. So that was really cool.

Okay, now for the literary part. When I first read the “met a celeb” question, I didn’t think I had. But then I recalled that I had had poet Lucille Clifton as a colleague for 15 years. Not only that but, because she invited all her friends to campus, I met and had dinner with Allen Ginsberg, Mary Oliver, Amiri Baraka, and Philip Levine. I have also been to intimate poetry readings with Joy Harjo, Amiri Baraka, Toi Derricotte, Robert Haas, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, W.S. Merwin, Mark Doty, Carolyn Forché, Li-Young Lee, and Naomi Shihab Nye. And a large reading with Toni Morrison. Sadly, I was out of the country on sabbatical when Denise Levertov came. So if poets count as celebs, I’ve met celebs.

On the other hand, my counting poets as celebs may make me as uncool as my various tepid transgressions. My relatively low score, in other words, is not like other low scores.

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Refusal to Mourn? Just the Opposite

By Robin Bates | Published: January 9, 2022
Firemen administer to a victim of Sunday’s Bronx fire

Monday

Because there were nine children among the 19 people who died in yesterday’s horrific Bronx fire, Dylan Thomas’s “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” came to mind. I’ve written about the poem before but I’m repurposing that post to apply to the tragedy.

The conflagration appears to have been caused by a malfunctioning space heater, and the fire is being described as one of the worst in the city’s history. Another 12 inhabitants are still in area hospitals, with 63 having been injured in all.

As Thomas intends, readers are initially horrified by the sentiment expressed in the poem’s title. The poet uses this strategy to get us to focus on the victim.

That’s because normally, when we hear of a tragedy, we fit it into a recognizable category. In doing so, we remove some of the sting, but in the process we also distance ourselves from it. While not exactly dehumanizing the victims, we check a kind of mourning box and then move on.

At the risk of appearing heartless, the poet rejects this approach. He wants us to rethink our conventional responses to how we react to “the majesty and burning of the child’s death”:

I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Keep in mind that Thomas is referring to a tragedy that dwarfs the Bronx fire tragedy. Almost 40,000 Londoners were killed by the London Blitz during World War II, with another 50,000 seriously injured. One of these was the girl mentioned in the poem, who comes to stand in for everyone.

How does “a grave truth” murder “the mankind of her going”? Perhaps fatalistically pointing out that we will all inevitably encounter the truth of the grave diminishes the death. So does a conventional elegy, which is sure to mention her innocence and youth. As we read the poem, we find ourselves struggling to put into words what is beyond words.

The poem’s final line also resists comfortable containment as it can be read two ways. Does “After the first death, there is no other” refer to Christianity’s vision of eternal life? Christian language can be found throughout the poem, including in the “stations of the breath” (cross) that we use to articulate our grief. Or does it express atheism’s belief that when we die, we just die?

The opening stanzas don’t make it any clearer. With images of our making and our final silence, Thomas could be referring to the Book of Genesis and Revelation. But maybe not. In any event, our own momentous life cycle—momentous at least to us—is just as momentous for this girl.

Despite the title, I sense that both the child and all who died along with her are indeed mourned. I find something comforting in her being with those who have gone before, as well as with nature in its eternal cycle. The Thames may not mourn, but we do. As with other great elegies (I think especially of Shelley’s Adonais, where he mourns Keats), we watch the poet struggle with meaninglessness. As with other great elegies, this one doesn’t allow this unnamed girl to slip easily from memory once we have put in the requisite mourning.

As I say, Thomas’s poem gets me to think more fully about all those who have died in the Bronx fire.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Burning, of a Child in London
By Dylan Thomas

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

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Fable of the Third Christmas Camel

By Robin Bates | Published: January 8, 2022
Tissot, The Magi Journeying

Spiritual Sunday – First Sunday in Epiphany

I repost today an Epiphany poem by my father, one of my favorites, along with my previous notes on it. Epiphany is when Christians celebrate the entry into the world of the radical new idea that love is more powerful than death. To call the idea counterintuitive is a spectacular understatement. Fear can rule our lives, which is why we need constant prayer and worship to rekindle our faith. The notion that love can trump death didn’t originate with Jesus, but he embodied it so powerfully that it caught on.

Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar, the three wise men, stand in for the greater world. They also represent mystical wisdom. Perhaps we could say that the shepherds who came to see the infant Jesus have the simple faith of the heart whereas the magi have the higher wisdom of the head. (This is how Auden sees it in a poem I have posted on in the past.) Neither is complete without the other.

In the past I have written about T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” where one of the kings recalls the moment, years ago, when he saw the Christ child. He remembers that the journey to Bethlehem was hard but worth the suffering. Since that time the vision has clouded over, and he is “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their gods.”

Today’s poem, considerably lighter, takes the vantage point of one of the camels. Rather than lamenting the loss of belief (a nonstop Eliot theme that eventually becomes tiresome), the poem tells us to be good community citizens. Regardless of where we live and what we do, we can live in love and service. That, the camel tells us, is how Christ’s love manifests itself in the world.

There is an implied criticism in the poem of the kings for not having stuck it out with the Christ child–that’s why the camel has to slip away–so perhaps the poem does echo Eliot’s. We once were in touch with divinity before returning to our normal lives.

Then again, as I said, we all of us lose the vision and must rediscover it. Again and again.

You’ll probably recognize the Biblical allusion in the final stanza but, in case you don’t, it’s Jesus’ assertion (Matthew 19:24) that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.” “Effendi” is Arabic for “Master.”

Here’s the poem:

Fable of the Third Christmas Camel
By Scott Bates

(Editor’s note: The following poetic fragment, evidently an overlooked scrap of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was recently discovered near Jerusalem, stuck to the bottom of an empty bagel can. We offer here an approximate translation into modern English of this invaluable historical document.)

I went all the way
But on the return trip
I gave the caravan
The slip

One desert night
Quit Balthazar
With all his frankincense
And myrrh

And headed out
Across the sand
It was dawn when I came
To this strange land

And found this family
Living here
Without a camel
Because they were poor

So I stayed with them
Carried their hides
Gave all the kids
Free camel rides

Sat with the baby
Worked with the man
Sang them ballads
Of Ispahan

Carried the water
Pulled the plow
Loved my neighbor
Who was a cow

I like it here
I’m staying with them
As I wanted to stay
In Bethlehem

With that other
Family I knew
Which proves Effendi
That passing through

The eye of a needle
Is an easier thing
For a camel
Than a king

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Satan’s Attempt to “Own” God

By Robin Bates | Published: January 6, 2022
Stanhope, The Temptation of Eve

Friday

Yesterday, in my comparing January 6 with Satan’s rebellion in Paradise Lost, I concluded by contending that Satan adopts an “own the libs” approach to fighting God. I elaborate on that today.

Right now, the GOP (with the exception of a few governors and local officials) has basically relinquished the responsibility of governing to the Democrats. The logical follow-up is that, once one does that, one basically devolves to a teenager taking shots at one’s parents. One scores points if one gets them angry. They may think they’re superior but, if one unhinges them, then one shows who is boss.

That’s the strategy that Satan comes up with in Book II. Banished to hell, his angels debate on what to do next, the three proposals being (1) fight God again, (2) lie low and hope God forgets about them and (3) build their own counter kingdom in Hell. The first of the options is hopeless, however, and the second and third fail to satisfy Satan’s thirst for revenge. He therefore has second-in-command Beelzebub provide a fourth option: Satan will seek out God’s new creation (humans) and corrupt them. The satisfaction he and his fellow devil will get from this is (wait for it!) God’s joy will be interrupted and the fallen angels can rejoice at having disturbed Him. That’ll teach Him!

Beelzebub explains the effects as follows:

                                           This would surpass 
Common revenge, and interrupt his joy
In our confusion, and our joy upraise
In his disturbance…

For perspective, let’s remind ourselves what the angels have given up by rebelling against God. First, they no longer experience “beatitude past utterance”:

About [God] all the sanctities [holy beings] of Heaven
Stood thick as stars, and from his sight receiv’d
Beatitude past utterance…

Later, we see the good angels experiencing a deep joy as their beings are filled with God’s “ambrosial fragrance.” And then there’s the singing:

                     their gold’n harps they took,
Harps ever tun’d, that glittering by their side
Like Quivers hung, and with preamble sweet
Of charming symphony they introduce
Their sacred Song, and waken raptures high;
No voice exempt, no voice but well could join
Melodious part, such concord is in Heav’n.

Satan, by contrast, offers his followers a different kind of intoxication: they get to feel wronged and then to salve their wounds by hurting someone else. Sadism provides its own kind of satisfaction, as Satan reveals in a later book:

For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts.

For Satan’s forces to repent and return to God, they would have to admit that they were wrong to follow him in the first place—and to admit having made a mistake is a blow to the ego. They’d rather suffer and then assuage their suffering with the pain of another rather that give themselves over to goodness.

In our case, goodness would be committing oneself to the Constitution. I suspect that Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two Republicans who have joined with Democrats to investigate January 6 and who have consequently been exiled by the GOP, are more at peace than those who continue to grovel at Trump’s feet.

As a reward for their groveling, however, the ex-president provides them various sadistic thrills. So there’s that.

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Milton’s Satan and the Jan 6 Insurrection

By Robin Bates | Published: January 5, 2022
Gustave Doré, Paradise Lost, Battle in Heaven

Thursday – Anniversary of Capitol Insurrection

My faculty discussion group is discovering that it’s an eye-popping experience to be discussing Paradise Lost on the anniversary of the Capitol insurrection—which is to say, when Donald Trump sicced rioters on Congress to pressure Vice President Mike Pence and Republican members of Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. I’m writing a two-part essay on the parallels. In today’s post, I look at the ringleaders, in tomorrow’s the followers.

I’ve written in the past about how Milton’s depiction of Satan function is a study of narcissism, which it why Satan-Trump comparisons are so apt. Rereading Books I and II, however, have revealed more comparisons than I had realized. For instance, Satan has the same love of outward show that Trump does. Think of the gold-gilded palace that the fallen angels build in Hell as his version of Trump Tower.

Like Trump, Satan and the angel Mammon have a thing for gold. We learn that there’s plenty of gold in Hell, which Milton informs us is the proper place for it:

            [W]ith impious hands [Hell’s angels]
Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth
For Treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Opened into the Hill a spacious wound
And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire 
That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.

Out of these so-called riches of the earth emerges a palace, designed by the angel Mulciber. Think of him as the Satanic version of Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect. Or, for that matter, whoever Trump’s architect is:

Anon out of the earth a fabric huge
Rose like an Exhalation, with the sound
Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices sweet,
Built like a Temple, where pilasters round
Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid
With golden architrave; nor did there want 
Cornice or frieze, with bossy sculptures grav’n,
The Roof was fretted gold. Not Babylon fretted gold.
Nor great Alcairo [Cairo] such magnificence
Equal’d in all their glories…

In this hall, Satan presides over what he claims is a parliament but which is democratic in name only since, from the first, the fix is in. Satan knows exactly what result he wants to get from the proceedings.

Sewanee’s very smart Renaissance specialist Ross McDonald, who is leading our discussion of Milton, pointed out the gyrations Satan goes through to retain his leadership position. If he contradicts himself, well, when have autocrats ever been consistent? Their goal is to remain in power, and they will say whatever is necessary to achieve that end.

It is a natural fact, Satan tells the fallen angels, that I am your leader, although he then says that it is a matter of free choice that we should aspire to things higher. Rationalizing the fact that his leadership has ruined their lives, he assures his troops that, though they fell, their defeat will only make their future glory that much greater. Furthermore, he claims that he is to be admired because taking leadership is a heroic sacrifice as he will be the most likely angel to capture God’s attention.

Earlier Satan has come up with an elaborate defense for his defeat. Since there’s no way our magnificent fighting force could have lost, he tells his angels, God must have been hiding his full strength from us. Who could have known God would trick us in this way? So it’s God’s fault, not mine, that we were lured into the hopeless rebellion.

The contorted logic reminds me of a rightwing commentator for Breitbart, John Nolte, who argued that the organized left uses reverse psychology to trick people into refusing the “Trump vaccine,” thereby killing them off. So it’s actually the left’s fault, not that of right’s political and thought leaders, for the covid debacle.

In Milton’s parliamentary session, we hear from various angels who have their equivalents in our own situation. The parallel isn’t exact, of course, since Satan has lost whereas, on January 6, Trump was still in the White House. But just as there was General Michael Flynn, who wanted Trump to invoke the insurrection act, and Steve Bannon, who was consorting with the Proud Boys and wanted outright confrontation, in Paradise Lost we have the angel Moloch. “My sentence,” he thunders, “is for open war: Of wiles, more unexpert, I boast not.”

Apparently one cause of contention amongst Trump coup plotters was whether to be openly confrontational or more subtle. Figures like Peter Navarro and Roger Stone, apparently, thought the attack on the Capitol actually undermined their plan to send election certification back to the state legislatures. Sneaky chicanery, on the other hand, might have worked.

Of course, just as Satan’s rebellion is doomed to fail, so, in the eyes of establishment Republicans, were Trump’s efforts. Rather than break with Trump and stand with the Constitution, however, most in the GOP have behaved like smooth-talking Belial.

Even while he claims to hate God just as much as Moloch does, Belial is a realist. Satan and the angels, he says, would have no chance in another battle. (If he were to say they have a snowball’s chance in Hell, he would be speaking from firsthand experience.) His counsel, therefore, is to lay low and hope that God forgets about them–which is what most Republicans want the public to do about the events of January 6. For that matter, most Republicans hope to escape Trump’s attention as well:

I think of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham when I see Belial described:

On th’ other side up rose
Belial, in act more graceful and humane;
A fairer person lost not Heav’n; he seemed 
For dignity composed and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow; though his tongue
Dropped manna and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low; 
To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds
Timorous and slothful: yet he pleas’d the ear,
And with persuasive accent thus began.

Most GOP members are not necessarily this persuasive, but they are just as callously pragmatic. If the party can’t win without Trump, Graham said at one point, then Trump it is, whatever one thinks of him. Milton sums up Belial as follows:

Thus Belial with words clothed in reason’s garb
Counseled ignoble ease, and peaceful sloth,
Not peace…

Satan wants neither of these options, however. Knowing that he can’t beat God in open warfare but rejecting inaction because it doesn’t feed his desire for revenge, he chooses instead to irritate God. In other words, to use current parlance, he wants to own the libs. I’ll discuss this further in tomorrow’s post.

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Wanted: An Elegy to Mourn Covid Victims

By Robin Bates | Published: January 4, 2022
Jules Charles Boquet, Mourners

Wednesday

In these days of Covid horror when over 800,000 Americans have died—a number impossible for the mind to grasp—a couple of Washington Post writers are telling us that we need poetic elegies. After asking “what cultural forms and expressive practices can bear these absent lives with us into the future?” David Sherman and Karen Elizabeth Bishop make a case for this ancient poetic genre:

Elegy is where we figure out how to do this work. Elegiac poetry helps us hold vigil over the dying and bear the dead to a resting place. The form has long offered symbolic versions of these defining human acts, surrogate ways to fulfill existential obligations when we are rendered passive and mute by another’s death.

The writers mention Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”—they could also have mentioned his “O Captain, My Captain”—and note how the poet grapples with unanswerable questions. “O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? / And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?” the poet asks in the first of the poems. Sherman and Bishop observe,

Whitman wrote these lines fora slain president and a nation devastated by civil war. In a pandemic, when a flood of statistics threatens to swallow the singularity of every death, contemporary elegies — about the dead, for the dead, in place of the dead — offer us new ways for our grief to work its way past silence. Elegy performs an essential caretaking, both intimate and public, of our dead. Poetry is a labor of survival.

They then turn to a poem that poet Nick Laird wrote about his father when, cut off from family, he was dying in a hospital. I recommend reading the poem in its entirety—you can find it here–but below are some of the key passages:

… This morning
the consultant said your father now is clawing
at the mask and is exhausted and we’ve thrown
everything we have at this. It’s a terrible disease.

And:

On Sunday they permitted us to Zoom
and he was prone in a hospital gown
strapped to a white slab.
The hospital gown split at the back
and the pale cold skin of his back was exposed.

He lifted his head to the camera
and his face was all red, swollen,
bisected vertically by the mask,
and we had to ask Elizabeth the nurse
to say his words back to us –
he sounded underwater –
it’s been a busy day but not a good day.

And:

When I phoned the hospital this afternoon
to say goodbye, though you were no longer lucid,

Elizabeth the nurse held the phone against your ear
and I could hear your breathing, or perhaps the rasping

of the oxygen machine, and I said what you’d expect.
I love you, Dad, and I want you to keep on fighting,

but if you are too tired now, and in too much pain,
then you should stop fighting, and let go, and whatever

happens it’s okay. I love you. You were a good father.
The kids love you. Thank you for everything.

Then I hung up. And scene. Impossible to grieve
and not know the vanity of grief. To watch one

self perform the rituals that take us. Automaton
of grief, I howled, of course, by myself

in my office, then sobbed for a bit on the sofa.

The poet then has some words about the significance of elegies:

An elegy I think is words to bind a grief

in, a companionship of grief, a spell
to keep it safe and sound, to keep it

from escaping.

Sherman and Bishop observe that, because covid makes touch impossible, Laird

labors to make sure his father is seen and his death de-sequestered. The poem struggles with how to be present from a distance, how to witness the ravages of the pandemic from the inside out. In this final gift of elegy, his father is isolated, but not alone, as he drifts into death’s cold waters.

Elegies, the writers note, are often addressed to the one who has died, “as if they might help us make sense of their absence and our own, now uncanny, survival.” But they add that the form of address is meant for others to overhear. We “inhabit this space alongside the poet,” they point out, meeting in “a fertile borderland between being and nonbeing, or a time zone between is and was.” Later in the piece they say that elegiac language “is a territory that the living and dead inhabit together.”

Unlike the death of Lincoln or Laird’s father, covid presents a special challenge since it involves mass death. Whitman spoke to a grieving nation and Laird attempts to sort out his own individual grieving, but how speak of mass death?  Sherman and Bishop point out one way when they cite South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon (trans. Don Mee Choi) attempting to pen a response to the hundreds of school children who died in the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster. The poet, they report,

hallucinates impossible rites of commemoration: “a four-ton bronze bell with a thousand names of the dead engraved on it dangles from the helicopter / The helicopter flies over a tall mountain to hang the bell at a temple hidden deep in the mountains,” or “A thousand masks float on the thousand rivers of the north, south, east, west.”

As a result, Hyesoon’s imagination

inscribes the sky, water and land with their absence, remaking and remapping the world in their wake. Her poetry teaches us about the combination of imagination and courage we need to create commemorative spaces for the millions who have died, and are dying, of covid.

While elegy cannot, of course, change the fact of death,

somehow we are stronger in both knowing that the terms of death are nonnegotiable and still insisting, on the page and in our voice, on negotiation. … Poetry helps us gather the remains of the dead, even across great distance, and offer them a place.

This was certainly true in my case. After I lost my son, I rummaged through a number of the world’s great elegies, such as Lycidas and In Memoriam, before settling on a passage from Percy Shelley’s Adonais to post on Justin’s gravestone. The poem is Shelley’s elegy to the poet John Keats. Here’s the passage I chose:

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone…

The Washington Post authors are right: elegies have an immense power to address our grief. Some of the craziness that we are seeing in America right now might stem from the covid pandemic. Will a poet arise from the ranks and help us collectively mourn our covid dead the way Whitman helped the nation mourn for Lincoln?

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