I have just returned from a weekend at Carleton College, where I was a member of the committee planning our 50th reunion. (The reunion isn’t until June of 2023 but it’s an elaborate affair, resembling at times an academic conference, so we need a long head start.) Carleton is a very good small college in the Midwest, and as I visited old haunts, the cold October air penetrating my limbs, I was overwhelmed by a flood of emotions.
I’m having difficulty sorting them out. There were fond memories, but I also experienced a sadness and a pain resembling dread. At times I was on the verge of tears. Perhaps I’m feeling my age, I thought, or mourning a lost innocence. But though the world is dark now, it was dark then too, what with the seemingly endless Vietnam War and corruption in Nixon’s White House. To figure out my internal state, I’m turn to poems that seem to capture the emotions.
D. H. Lawrence’s “Piano” was one poem that came to mind as I walked around. Hearing a woman singing, the poet is thrown back to a time in his childhood when his mother was playing the piano as he sat at her feet:
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
Another poem I thought of was A. E. Housman’s “Into my heart an air that kills.” Many of the Shropshire Lad poems are filled with intense longing, but this may surpass them all. The “air that kills” captures some of the pain I was feeling:
Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.
Later, I thought of Dylan Thomas, another master of nostalgia. In his seasonally appropriate “Poem in October,” he remembers being a boy in the summer, before “the weather turned round.” Here are the concluding stanzas:
And the twice told fields of infancy That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine. These were the woods the river and sea Where a boy In the listening Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide. And the mystery Sang alive Still in the water and singingbirds.
And there could I marvel my birthday Away but the weather turned around. And the true Joy of the long dead child sang burning In the sun. It was my thirtieth Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. O may my heart’s truth Still be sung On this high hill in a year’s turning.
I think the Thomas poem gets closest to explaining my emotional state, since Lawrence’s desire to return to childhood isn’t my desire, nor did I ever see Carleton as a land of content. But I do remember times there when “the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide/And the mystery/Sang alive/Still in the water and the singingbirds.” That’s how the world looked when Julia and I would take our sleeping bags and spend warm May nights together in Carleton’s arboretum. Our love has matured and deepened since then—we too will be celebrating 50 years in 2023—but on Saturday, as I walked through the college’s nature preserve, I was hit with the contrast. The youthful intensity, the “joy of the long dead child,” is no longer there.
Thomas’s poem echoes Wordsworth’s Intimation of Immortality, where the Romantic poet wonders, “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” Thomas, meanwhile, hopes that, even though the town may be “leaved with October blood,” summer passion will “still be sung/On this high hill in a year’s turning.”
Don’t misunderstand what I say here. I love Julia deeply and I wouldn’t want our relationship to return to its earlier stages, when there were painful misunderstandings to go along with the euphoric highs. I like the serenity and the mutual understanding we have managed to achieve. But our lives are now leaved with October blood and don’t sing with the intensity of summer. It could well be that my melancholy over the weekend arose from the absence of something that once was but that cannot come again.
This is an updated and expanded version of an October 3, 2012 and a January 23, 2013 post.
In last week’s post about political attacks on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, I added a note about a Texas lawmaker who has compiled a list of 850 books (!) that he wants Texas school libraries to (1) report if they own and (2) justify why. One of those books is John Irving’s Cider House Rules, whose sensitive handling of abortion is what has probably drawn the man’s ire.
Before explaining why banning the novel would be an abomination, here’s the background of Texas’s latest political stunt. According to the Texas Tribune,
A Republican state lawmaker has launched an investigation into Texas school districts over the type of books they have, particularly if they pertain to race or sexuality or “make students feel discomfort.”
State Rep. Matt Krause, in his role as chair of the House Committee on General Investigating, notified the Texas Education Agency that he is “initiating an inquiry into Texas school district content,” according to an Oct. 25, letter obtained by The Texas Tribune.
Here’s what the inquiry involves:
Krause informs districts they must provide the committee with the number of copies they have of each book, on what part of campus those books are located and how much money schools spent on the books, as well as information on any other book that violates House Bill 3979, the so-called “critical race theory law” designed to limit how race-related subjects are taught in public schools.
A number of the books contain information about gender and sexuality and some are about abortion. There are also books about America’s racial history. And then there are the books that I’ve heard of, including
the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Styron novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner and best-sellers that were turned into movies or television series, such as John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, Alan Moore’s dystopian V For Vendetta, and the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Morrison’s novels don’t make the list yet, but since they fit two of Krause’s criteria (they pertain to race and they make students uncomfortable), it may be only a matter of time. Stay tuned.
But back to abortion. Texas’s new law incentivizing people to sue abortion abettors and collect the $10,000 fines levied has essentially ended abortions in the state, taking us back to pre-Roe v Wade times. The Guttmacher Institute reminds us what it was like back then:
Estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. One analysis, extrapolating from data from North Carolina, concluded that an estimated 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions occurred in 1967.
One stark indication of the prevalence of illegal abortion was the death toll. In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women—nearly one-fifth (18%) of maternal deaths recorded in that year. The death toll had declined to just under 1,700 by 1940, and to just over 300 by 1950 (most likely because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion). By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200, but illegal abortion still accounted for 17% of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year. And these are just the number that were officially reported; the actual number was likely much higher.
Abortion plays a significant role in the Irving novel, which has sympathetic characters on different sides of the debate. On the one hand, there is obstetrician, orphanage director, and illegal abortion doctor Wilbur Larch, who doesn’t originally set out to perform abortions but begins doing so when he sees that women are determined to have them regardless. He knows that he can at least abort their fetuses safely.
Then there is Homer Wells, the orphan he raises to be his right-hand man. Under his tutelage, Homer becomes a superb doctor—better than Larch himself—but he leaves Larch after learning about the abortions. His moment of crisis occurs when, trying to save the full-term fetus of a mother who has been stabbed, he and Larch discover that it has been stabbed as well. Gazing upon the dead body, Homer decides that fetuses at all stages of development are babies. The developmental stages as presented in Gray’s Anatomy suddenly look different to him:
Homer Wells had seen the products of conception in many stages of development: in rather whole form, on occasion, and in such partial development: in rather whole form, on occasion, and in such partial form as to be barely recognizable, too. Why the old black-and-whit drawings should have affected him so strongly, he could not say. In Gray’s there was the profile view of the head of a human embryo, estimated at twenty-seven days old. Not quick, as Dr. Larch would be quick to point out, and not recognizably human, either: what would be the spine was cocked, like a wrist, and where the knuckles of the fist (above the wrist) would be, there was the ill-formed face of a fish (the kind that lives below light, is never caught, could give you nightmares). The undersurface of the head of the embryo gaped like an eel—the eyes were at the sides of the head, as if they could protect the creature from an attack from any direction. In eight weeks, though still not quick, the fetus has a nose and a mouth; it has an expression, thought Homer Wells. And with this discovery—that a fetus, as early as eight weeks, has an expression—Homer Wells felt in the presence of what others call a soul.
This perspective prompts Homer to break with the man he loves, although he doesn’t condemn him:
He wasn’t blaming Dr. Larch, either. Homer felt there was nothing as simple as anyone’s fault involved; it was not Larch’s fault—Larch did what he believed in. If Wilbur Larch was a saint to Nurse Angela and to Nurse Edna, he was both a saint and a father to Homer Wells. Larch knew what he was doing—and for whom. But that quick and not-quick stuff: it didn’t work for Homer Wells. You can call it a fetus, or an embryo, or the products of conception, thought Homer Wells, but whatever you call it, it’s alive. And whatever you do to it, Homer thought—and whatever you call what you do—you’re killing it. He looked at the severed pulmonary artery, which was so perfectly displayed in the open chest of the baby from Three Mile Falls. Let Larch call it whatever he wants, thought Homer Wells. It’s his choice—if it’s a fetus, to him, that’s fine. It’s a baby to me, thought Homer Wells. If Larch has a choice, I have a choice, too.
His choice is to abandon obstetrics, for which he has a genius, and go work on an apple farm. He refuses to yield, even when Larch sends him letters attempting to persuade him to return. Larch writes,
If abortions were legal, you could refuse—in fact, given your beliefs, you should refuse. But as long as they’re against the law, how can you refuse? How can you allow yourself a choice in the matter when there are so many women who haven’t the freedom to make the choice themselves? The women have no choice. I know you know that’s not right, but how can you—you of all people, knowing what you know–HOW CAN YOU FEEL FREE TO CHOOSE NOT TO HELP PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT FREE TO GET OTHER HELP? You have to help them because you know how. Think about who’s going to help them if you refuse.” Wilbur Larch was so tired that if he had allowed himself to go to sleep, the bark would have grown over his eyes.
“Here is the trap you are in,” Dr. Larch wrote to Homer. “And it’s not my trap—I haven’t trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you’re trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims and so are you.”
To graphically make Larch’s point, the book gives us an instance of a woman who is dying after stuffing things up her vagina in a failed self-abortion attempt:
Dr. Larch bent so close to the speculum, he had to hold his breath. The smell of sepsis and putrefaction was strong enough to gag him if he breathed or swallowed, and the familiar, fiery colors of her infection (even clouded by her discharge) were dazzling enough to blind the intrepid or the untrained. But Wilbur Larch started to breathe again, slowly and regularly; it was the only way to keep a steady hand. He just kept looking and marveling at the young woman’s inflamed tissue; it looked hot enough to burn the world. Now do you see, Homer? Larch asked himself. Through the speculum, he felt her heat against his eye.
Despite the letters, however, Homer styas away. This leads to one final letter from Larch, who deliberately overdoses on ether because he knows he is dying from his addiction to it:
1. YOU KNOW EVERYTHING I KNOW, PLUS WHAT YOU’VE TAUGHT YOURSELF. YOU’RE A BETTER DOCTOR THAN I AM—AND YOU KNOW IT.
2. YOU THINK WHAT I DO IS PLAYING GOD. BUT YOU PRESUME YOU KNOW WHAT GOD WANTS. DO YOU THINK THAT’S NOT PLAYING GOD?
3. I AM NOT SORRY—NOT FOR ANYTHING I’VE DONE (ONE ABORTION I DID NOT PERFORM IS THE ONLY ONE I’M SORRY FOR). I’M NOT EVEN SORRY THAT I LOVE YOU.
Homer returns to take up Larch’s practice after he himself performs an abortion on a girl who has been raped by her father. In this case, since his son is in love with the girl, he has direct experience with the conflict between an abstract stance and a particular case. After that, he plays a double game. On the one hand, there is what he tells the board that hires him:
On the matter of abortions, [Homer] surprised the board by the adamant conviction he held: that they should be legalized, and that he intended to work through the proper channels toward that end. However, [Homer] assured them, as long as abortions were illegal, he would rigorously uphold the law.
On the other, he privately performs abortions for women who come to him for help. The book tells us,
Sometimes, when he was especially tired, he dreamed that abortions were legal—that they were safe and available, and therefore he could stop performing them (because someone else would do them)…
Moral rules, about which many can disagree when it comes to abortion, must never jettison individual circumstance altogether or they risk succumbing to an inhuman purity. In such instances, morality becomes more about the ideologue’s desire for certainty than a compass to help us negotiate the shoals of human complexity. Or as Charlotte Bronte says in the epigraph that opens Cider House Rules,
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
I have been reporting on my responses to Thor Magnus Tangeras’s important new study Literature and Transformation: A Narrative Study of Life-Changing Reading Experiences (Anthem, 2020) and today note a startling turn his argument takes. In the process of analyzing five readers who had life-changing encounters with books, at one point he shifts to religious language, describing their experience as “an evolving and deepening devotional transaction.”
The language doesn’t come out of nowhere. Earlier, Tangeras has turned to American psychologist William James’s study of religious conversion to understand how transformation happens. For James, the key concept is surrender. Just as book lovers surrender to the world of the book, so do religious devotees surrender themselves to God:
When surveying the history of the different narratives of Christianity, [James] finds a gradual circling in of one particular experience: the crisis of self-surrender and the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the individual in his forlornness. ‘The crisis of self-surrender is the turning-point in two different senses: The critical point around which James’s investigation turns, and the point where the life of the individual is transformed from egocentricity to allocentricity, from forlornness to redemption: ‘In such a surrender lies the secret of a holy life.” Crisis-surrender-redemption is at the heart of James’s phenomenology of transformation and constitutes his narrative of narratives.
There are a number of thinkers who talk about surrendering to a work of literature. One of my favorites is phenomenologist Georges Poulet, who dramatically describes absorption or immersion in a book as follows:
As soon as I replace my direct perception of reality by the words of a book, I deliver myself, bound hand and foot, to the omnipotence of fiction. I say farewell to what is, in order to feign belief in what is not. I surround myself with fictitious beings; I become the prey of language. There is no escaping this takeover. Language surrounds me with its unreality.
Tolstoy too weighs in on the phenomenon, noting that we are “infected” with an author’s ideas and emotions and declaring, “The stronger the infection, the better is the art as art.”
We see Tangeras also looking to frame reading as a quasi-religious experience when, in reflecting upon one of his readers, he compares what she is doing to the Medieval practice of Lectio Divina, where religious figures would see themselves tasting and digesting the Scriptures to inscribe them on their hearts. Speaking of his subjects, Tangeras says that
at some point these readers unreservedly give themselves over to, and surrender to, the experience, and become fully involved, body, heart and mind. Furthermore, in this evolving and deepening devotional transaction, these readers are deeply moved. The experience of a panoply of feelings that traditionally have straddled aesthetic and religious domains – such as wonder, awe, tenderness, jubilation and faith – come into full awareness. When this happens, the expanded affect-consciousness allows for an altered sense of self in which the crisis can be resolved.
Tangeras’s thoughts here arise in part from his analysis of a reader reporting on how Matthew Arnold’s “Buried Life” pulled her out of a severe depression. Here’s an excerpt from the poem:
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us—to know Whence our lives come and where they go. And many a man in his own breast then delves, But deep enough, alas! none ever mines. And we have been on many thousand lines, And we have shown, on each, spirit and power; But hardly have we, for one little hour, Been on our own line, have we been ourselves— Hardly had skill to utter one of all The nameless feelings that course through our breast, But they course on for ever unexpress’d. And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well—but ‘t is not true! And then we will no more be rack’d With inward striving, and demand Of all the thousand nothings of the hour Their stupefying power; Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call! Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne As from an infinitely distant land, Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all our day. Only—but this is rare— When a belovèd hand is laid in ours, When, jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear, When our world-deafen’d ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caress’d— A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. A man becomes aware of his life’s flow, And hears its winding murmur; and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
And there arrives a lull in the hot race Wherein he doth for ever chase That flying and elusive shadow, rest. An air of coolness plays upon his face, And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes.
And here’s some the conversation that Tangeras had with his subject about the poem’s impact:
Thor: ‘And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.’ So that line there is to me what the authentic self would be, wouldn’t it? Sue: Yes. ‘A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast.’ Bolt. Shot. Back – I’ve never really understood what a bolt shot back means, but it sounds so … right. I think it’s like, I imagine it to be a shock, a shocking awakening. Like a sort of an aha moment, a sitting up moment. Or a … it was like a bolt was shot back somewhere in my breast, Thor: It seems you have a clear felt sense of what that means.
Sue: Yeah, I think I’ve got a felt sense of it, but I would find it a bit hard to describe as well. ‘And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again’, that’s that awakening of the deepest part of yourself, the bit of you that just … if things aren’t used, or noticed, they can just sort of fade away, can’t they? So a lost pulse is like something that’s there, but it’s getting weaker and weaker because it’s not ever attended to. Hmmm, so it’s not putting something new into him, it’s not putting within, he’s reawakening something that is there already, it’s always there.
And elsewhere:
Sue: …but something about just that very first bit of this poem, it felt like it changed everything really. Thor: It changed everything? Sue: Well, it felt like it just changed everything, that suddenly I was awake to this possibility of what poetry might do. I mean it did feel that big actually, yeah… [Since then] I’ve grown tremendously, and I can’t imagine my life without poetry now, you know. I don’t even want to think about my life without poetry now. So yeah, I just think it was the most magical, amazing stuff.
And finally:
Sue: I keep on using the work impact, it’s had a really significant impact, definitely. Has it changed my life? It has really, because it’s opened me up to the power of the written word, so in that respect it has really. I don’t know if it’s saved my life, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, I mean, I think my life was already on a sort of upward trajectory by the time I read it….But the poem has really helped me. I love it, because – I mean I love it for itself and I think it’s a great poem – but it also has a special resonance for me in that it opened something up in me. Something that I will always carry with me. So I don’t think of it so much as saving my life, I think of it more as, I don’t know, reminding me of something important, getting back to sort of excavating something ‘from the soul’s subterranean depth’.
When we become immersed or absorbed in a great poem or story, soul work is going on, which is why “devotional transaction” seems right. Arnold, interestingly enough, thought that poetry would one day replace religion as the mauor way values were instilled in the population. While reading literature may not be a religious act, it it is definitely a spiritual one.
Gustave Doré, Life-in-Death playing dice with Death
Friday – Halloween Edition
Reposted and reworked from October 31, 2013
Have you ever thought of Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a Halloween poem? Along with its gothic elements, it has at least one stanza that describes the trick-or-treating experience of timid children.
The poem is filled with spooky images. To begin with, there are the two dice players aboard the skeleton ship who are competing for the mariner. The winner, “Life in Death,” has a great Halloween get-up:
Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man’s blood with cold.
And then there are all those corpses—the mariner’s former crew mates–who are reanimated to man the ship. Think of them as the living dead:
The loud wind never reached the ship, Yet now the ship moved on! Beneath the lightning and the Moon The dead men gave a groan.
They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes; It had been strange, even in a dream, To have seen those dead men rise.
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on; Yet never a breeze up-blew; The mariners all ‘gan work the ropes, Where they were wont to do; They raised their limbs like lifeless tools— We were a ghastly crew.
The body of my brother’s son Stood by me, knee to knee: The body and I pulled at one rope, But he said nought to me.
The mariner’s description of how the corpses creep him out is very much like how a child on Halloween imagines monsters behind every tree:
Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.
So, are you scared now? But wait a moment, I have something even more frightening. What if Coleridge’s LIFE IN DEATH is actually a metaphor for debilitating depression? What if, after such a promising opening to his voyage, Coleridge is in the grip of a mental breakdown which makes all the world around him seem dead and sterile. “The very deep did rot,” he says at point. He feels so hopeless that even praying is beyond his grasp. As he will explain it later,
Oh wedding guest, this soul hath been Alone on a wide, wide sea: So lonely ’twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be.
Luckily, for kids going out trick-or-treating, they get to return to a safe home after flirting with fright. In the poem, meanwhile, the monsters turn into something positive. Just as the sea snakes change from “slimy things” to “happy living things” that are stunningly beautiful, so the corpses are revealed to be “a troop of spirits blest” who make beautiful music and then light up the landscape as shining seraphs.
Inspect a monster closely enough and you will find a beautiful soul somewhere within.
First it was caravans, then it was wokeness, then it was Critical Race Theory, and now it’s Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Apparently, Republican candidates have one play and one play only for winning elections: scare your voters by pointing at people of color.
Morrison’s novel, which won her both a Pulitzer and a Nobel, is being used as the closing argument by Glen Youngkin, Republican candidate for Virginia governor. Apparently eight years ago the son of Republican activist Laura Murphy, then a high school senior, claimed to have had nightmares because of the book. What emerged out of his mother’s complaint was a bill that parents could exempt their sons and daughters from reading books with explicit sex scenes. While the bill was passed by the State Assembly, it was then vetoed by Governor Terry McAuliffe, who is running again this year. According to a Washington Postarticle on the controversy, the Beloved bill (as it was called) “would have made Virginia the first state in the nation to give parents that opt-out power.”
Youngkin is now using McAuliffe’s veto to turn voters against him. He is also playing on McAuliffe’s assertion that parents shouldn’t be telling teachers what to teach. Youngkin has framed this as McAuliffe wanting “to silence parents because he doesn’t believe they should have a say in their child’s education.”
In a Youngkin ad, Laura Murphy is seen saying, “When my son showed me his reading material, my heart sunk. It was some of the most explicit reading material you can imagine.” McAuliffe has replied that “Youngkin’s closing message of book banning and silencing esteemed Black authors is a racist dog whistle designed to gin up support from the most extreme elements of his party–mainly his top endorser and surrogate, Donald Trump.”
I consider Beloved to be one of America’s greatest novels—up there with The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby—but set that aside for the moment. I’ll say first that the Virginia situation is very familiar because I once found myself battling a school superintendent over another Morrison novel, Song of Solomon, in which some of the same dynamics were in play.
I write about the incident here but to sum up the highlights, a high school English teacher who was a former student of mine paired up Huckleberry Finn and Song of Solomon in an AP class, an inspired coupling given that both are coming-of-age novels involving young men grappling with race in America. (Indeed, Morrison admires and has defended Huckleberry Finn.) A student objected to three pages of explicit trash-talking between the protagonist Milkman and some country folk, who are testing his manhood. (Milkman passes the test and is accepted by the group.) The student’s mother photocopied the offending passages and took it to the county’s superintendent of schools, who decreed that St. Mary’s County school teachers could no longer teach the book in their classes.
I went to talk to the superintendent but was palmed off on two of her assistants. In our conversation, I noted (1) that parents should be thrilled that such a book as Song of Solomon was being taught as it is about a young man finding purpose in his life; (2) that they were sending a terrible message to the African American community by banning a work by the first African American author to win a Nobel prize; and (3) that if they banned Song of Solomon today, might they not ban Beloved tomorrow?
My visit didn’t do any good and, as far as I can tell, teachers are still forbidden from teaching Song of Solomon in St. Mary’s County schools. I haven’t heard about Beloved.
Back to the novel. Beloved is about an escaped slave who, to save herself and her children from being taken back into slavery, kills her eldest daughter and attempts to kill the others. That daughter comes back to haunt her, breaking up her family and driving her half crazy.
The novel, in other words, really is the stuff of nightmares—but then, much of literature is. Slavery was such a horrifying institution that it sometimes caused people, Blacks as well as Whites, to do dreadful things. When I wonder what traumatized Laura Murphy’s son, however, I wonder if what most oppressed him was race oppression making Whites look bad.
For although there are some good Whites in the book, there are some awful ones as well. For instance, there’s a scene where the slaveowner’s sons force Sethe, who is about to deliver, to suckle them with her breastmilk. When she informs on them to her horrified mistress, she is beaten so badly that a permanent tree pattern appears to be etched into her back. As she recounts the episode,
“After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em. She had that lump and couldn’t speak for her eyes rolled out tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.”
“They used cowhide on youds?”
“And they took my milk.”
“They beat you and you was pregnant?”
“And they took my milk.
We are living in a society right now where anything racial that makes certain Whites feel uncomfortable is a cause for offense. We’ve seen videos of police being called on Black birdwatchers, on Black picnickers, on Blacks standing in their front yard and Blacks entering their apartment complexes. Ahmaud Arbery was shot for jogging, Trayvon Martin for returning from the store.
And it’s getting worse. Increasingly we’re seeing parents complain when their kids are taught Civil Rights history, while Texas history books have begun to soft pedal slavery. It seems inevitable that people would get around to Toni Morrison sooner or later.
Literature, after all, packs a wallop. And just as Edgar Allan Poe (in the words of Harold Bloom) dreamt America’s nightmares, so Morrison dreams its racial traumas. African Americans no less than Whites continue to bear the scars of slavery. One imagines Morrison quoting one of her own literary models, William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
If we were truly concerned about raising young people right in this country, English teachers would explain to parents how their children benefit from reading challenging novels like Beloved. Kids are tougher than their parents think and well able to rise to the challenge of difficult material, but to involve the entire community in the education of the young would be to avoid some of the conflicts that we are encountering.
Unfortunately, we are so polarized, and so many Whites are see mere discussions of race as threatening, that I’m becoming pessimistic that such conversations could ever happen. If that’s the case, then we’ll continue to have racial fear-mongering in our politics. And if Beloved is targeted today, other African American classics that remind us of our dark past will find themselves on banned lists tomorrow.
Added note: To make clear the slippery slope we have entered, just today a Texas lawmaker has released a list of 850 books that he wants school districts to investigate, with more to come. As NBC News reports,
A Texas Republican lawmaker has drawn up a list of 850 books on subjects ranging from racism to sexuality that could “make students feel discomfort,” and is demanding that school districts across the state report whether any are in their classrooms or libraries.
State Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth, also wants to know how many copies of each book the districts have and how much money they spent on them, according to a letter he sent Monday to Lily Laux, deputy commissioner of school programs at the Texas Education Agency, and several school district superintendents.
Krause, who chairs the state’s House Committee on General Investigating, also directed the districts to identify “any other books” that could cause students “guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
Toni Morrison isn’t on the list yet but could well be included under “any other books” once the censors get started. The NBC News article mentions some of the fiction that has been included:
Along with the letter, which was first obtained by The Texas Tribune, Krause appended the book list that includes well-known titles like the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Styron novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner and best-sellers that were turned into movies or television series, such as John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, Alan Moore’s dystopian V For Vendetta, and the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
The leaves in Tennessee’s Southern Cumberland Mountains are currently in full-change mode, sending me to a poem by my father that I’ve shared in past. Enjoy!
Yesterday, after seeing a Sewanee student production of Hamlet, I compared Claudius’s successful coup to Donald Trump’s attempted one. Today I’m thinking of the play again after having read a Washington Post article about political turmoil in a polarized Montana town. Not only are the adults fighting about today’s hot button issues but, over the past 16 months, nine of their teenagers have committed suicide, including three since the beginning of the school year. Hamlet’s own suicidal thoughts help us understand what may be going on.
To be sure, Hamlet is no teenager but a young man of about 30. That being said, he can come across as a precocious adolescent, and this was reenforced by Dakota Collins’s superb performance. Through him, Hamlet was androgynous, super sensitive, and somewhat innocent. As a result, I understood much better why he would be so affected by the machinations of those running society and could imagine those Montana school children being similarly affected. As the Post article observes,
No one knows exactly what led the teenagers to end their lives. But people here are thinking: What if the adults in the Flathead, with all their anger, have provided a terrible example for the children?
“We’re such a highly wounded community right now,” said Kyle Waterman, a gay city councilman who received training this year in making a citizen’s arrest in case he feels physically threatened. “It’s been hard to show people we’re here for our kids.”
Now put yourself in Hamlet’s situation. Thinking his father has everything in hand, despite a war with Norway, Hamlet feels free to go away to college. When he returns, however, everything has been turned upside down, with his uncle suddenly his king and stepfather. Claudius and Gertrude want him to shrug off his father’s death and adapt to the new reality but, even before he learns of the “murder most foul,” he wants to erase himself from reality. He even contemplates self-slaughter as everything seems “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable”:
Things, of course, go from bad to worse once Hamlet Sr.’s ghost reports the murder. Already fragile, Hamlet is pushed over the edge. Whatever idealism he had has been shattered, as we see in his discourse with his former friends Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern:
I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me…
As Hamlet figures out that his friends have been set up to spy on him, and as he detects Polonius setting up Ophelia to spy on him as well, he feels less and less able to trust anyone or anything. His mother’s behavior has prompted him to wonder about Ophelia (“frailty, thy name is woman”), and the visiting actors’ ability to feign tears over imaginary characters (“What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?”) only furthers his sense of unreality.
Sensing himself half mad, Hamlet once again thinks upon death in his most well-known soliloquy:
Given his active imagination, however, even death doesn’t seem a simple solution. His reasoning, fortunately, has the virtue of forestalling a suicide:
Faced with conflicting pressures, Hamlet becomes increasingly erratic and high-strung. Like a teenager, he vacillates between crippling self-doubt and precipitous action. Late in the play he reflects upon death once again as he muses upon the skull of a man who played with him as a child. Only at the end of the tragedy does everything become clear to him.
Did those Montana teenagers have a version of Hamlet’s confusion? Did reality to them seem unstable because of the way that adults were behaving? Between Trump unleashing America’s id and a world-wide pandemic affecting every aspect of life, there’s plenty to point to. When the instability of adolescence comes up against adults who are unwilling or unable to provide the necessary support systems–when grown-ups act like teenagers, in other words–tragedy seems inevitable.
I attended an impressive student production of Hamlet yesterday—the lead, played by a female student, was magnificent—and was struck early on by Claudius’s insistence that everyone move on quickly from old Hamlet’s death. It reminded me of the GOP wanting to move on quickly from the January 6 insurrection.
The motives are even roughly the same. Just as the GOP wants us to forget Donald Trump’s attempted coup, so Claudius wants Hamlet to move on from his own successful one. In his opening speech he says essentially, “Well, it’s too bad that old Hamlet is dead but, what can you do, we have get back to business.”
Business, in this case, is marrying Hamlet Sr.’s queen and taking over the throne. Or as he puts it, when discretion (practicality) fights with nature (mourning the dead), go with discretion. Claudio gets squirrelly in his language since he knows that it looks bad marrying Gertrude two months after her husband’s death. He therefore advocates balancing “wise sorrow” with “remembrance of ourselves” (as if he ever stopped remembering himself). This new dispensation therefore finds “mirth in funeral” and “dirge in marriage”:
Gertrude enables the situation. Unlike the GOP, she is genuinely unaware of Claudius’s coup—Republicans can’t claim her innocence, having been in the Capitol when Trump stirred up a mob to pressure Mike Pence—but she sounds a lot like them. To a despondent Hamlet who is shocked at the turn of events, she claims that these things just naturally happen and must be accepted:
In other words, stop thinking about the past and look forward—which is to say, look forward to me as king.
The GOP wants us to stop looking at the past insurrection so that they can plan for a future coup, one complete with voter suppression measures and Republican takeover of state election boards.
There’s one significant difference between Claudius and the GOP: he at least feels remorse for what has been done. Try to imagine Trump giving a speech like this, with murdering the Constitution substituted for murdering his brother:
In other words, there’s no shuffling when God is looking on. The GOP, by contrast, apparently believes it can, with impunity, shove by justice to seize “the wicked prize itself,” buying out the law in the process.
There’s one other political parallel I noted in the play. Just as Trump finds easily manipulable people to do his dirty work (including storming the Capitol), so Claudius finds Laertes. Stoking the young man’s rage, Claudius gets him to partake in a rigged sword fight, complete with a poisoned blade and poisoned refreshment. The ploy works but it also backfires so that, by the end of the play, all the principles are dead, and a foreign power stands ready to take over.
Message to Republicans: Trumpism make get you what you want in the short run, but in the end you will take down American democracy. Various foreign adversaries will applaud.
Thomas Matthews Rooke, from triptych of The Story of Ruth (1876-7)
Spiritual Sunday
I had a health scare Friday night and, while it turned out to be a false alarm (!!), thoughts fond and wayward went through my head as I lay in a morphine haze in Sewanee’s hospital emergency room. For reasons I’ll explain, the story of Ruth and Naomi also came to mind..
Some background first. Five years ago, when I was visiting my dying friend Rachel Kranz in a Bronx hospital, I picked up an infection that went to my heart, giving me a case of pericarditis and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart sack and heart muscle). Thinking that I had just pulled a muscle playing tennis—why else would one feel a weight on one’s chest and upper back?—I waited until the following morning so that I could visit my primary care physician.
Three hours after she referred me to the local hospital for an EKG (hers being broken), I was on board a medical helicopter because they thought I was having a full-blown heart attack. (You can read my blog post from my hospital bed here.) Fortunately, all I needed was anti-inflammatory medication. If Julia had been with me rather than down in Tennessee with my mother, she would have insisted I go to the emergency room right away.
Which in fact I did three weeks later when the infection returned. I wasn’t about to get scolded again for my casual concern for my health, and it was fortunate that I made the trip. I can report that my heart has suffered no damage and has been good ever since.
Until, I feared, Friday night, when I awoke in the middle of the night with pressure to my upper back and stabbing pains in my upper quadrant. Fearing a recurrence of pericarditis, we rushed to the emergency room, where I underwent multiple tests. The doctors are still not sure what’s up but think it may be a muscular or skeletal problem associated with my tennis and/or computer use. I need to be careful with both.
While I was in the emergency room, however, I thought of my mortality, which is why Wordsworth’s final stanza in “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” surfaced:
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide Into a Lover’s head! “O mercy!” to myself I cried, “If Lucy should be dead!”
In my case, it was “if I should be dead.” I then thought of Julia, which conjured up Keats’s line where he imagines his famous nightingale singing to a widowed Ruth:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn…
That in turn got me thinking of Ruth’s relationship with her mother-in-law Naomi. Famously, the Moabite Ruth chooses to stay with the Jewish Naomi after both have been widowed, even though such a life will be uncertain. As Ruth famously replies after Naomi suggests she return to her parents’ family (Ruth 1:6 KJV) “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God…”
I thought of how Julia loves and cares for my mother and would not leave her even if I died. I am deeply grateful for that relationship, which deepens even further my strong love for my wife. And that reminded me of a Marge Piercy poem I have written about in the past.
Such fond and wayward thoughts can show up when the prospect of heart surgery looms.
The Book of Ruth and Naomi By Marge Piercy
When you pick up the Tanakh and read the Book of Ruth, it is a shock how little it resembles memory. It’s concerned with inheritance, lands, men’s names, how women must wiggle and wobble to live.
Yet women have kept it dear for the beloved elder who cherished Ruth, more friend than daughter. Daughters leave. Ruth brought even the baby she made with Boaz home as a gift.
Where you go, I will go too, your people shall be my people, I will be a Jew for you, for what is yours I will love as I love you, oh Naomi my mother, my sister, my heart.
Show me a woman who does not dream a double, heart’s twin, a sister of the mind in whose ear she can whisper, whose hair she can braid as her life twists its pleasure and pain and shame. Show me a woman who does not hide in the locket of bone that deep eye beam of fiercely gentle love she had once from mother, daughter, sister; once like a warm moon that radiance aligned the tides of her blood into potent order.
At the season of first fruits, we recall two travelers, co-conspirators, scavengers making do with leftovers and mill ends, whose friendship was stronger than fear, stronger than hunger, who walked together, the road of shards, hands joined.
