Today being the shortest day of the year, here’s a Susan Cooper poem noting the centuries-old traditions where people came “singing, dancing, to drive the dark away.” So keep singing and dancing.
The Shortest Day By Susan Cooper
So the shortest day came, and the year died, And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world Came people singing, dancing, To drive the dark away. They lighted candles in the winter trees; They hung their homes with evergreen; They burned beseeching fires all night long To keep the year alive, And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake They shouted, reveling. Through all the frosty ages you can hear them Echoing behind us—Listen!! All the long echoes sing the same delight, This shortest day, As promise wakens in the sleeping land: They carol, feast, give thanks, And dearly love their friends, And hope for peace. And so do we, here, now, This year and every year. Welcome Yule!
Senator Joe Manchin, from the coal state of West Virginia, made sure that America got a lump in its stocking this year. With his announcement that he will be deep-sixing the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan, he will—among other things—set back the battle against climate change. Depressed when I should be feeling the Christmas spirit, I turn to some of my father’s environmental Christmas poems. He too is fatalistic but at least finds some cheer through his light verse fantasies.
But first the news before I turn to them. Here’s what the Washington Post reported on Manchin:
President Biden’s climate agenda suffered a massive setback Sunday after Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) pulled his support from Democrats’ spending bill, potentially dooming the legislation amid warnings from scientists that the world is running out of time to prevent climate change’s most catastrophic effects.
Manchin’s comments on “Fox News Sunday” put at risk a $555 billion package of tax credits, grants and other policies aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions that would rank as the largest clean-energy investment in U.S. history. The legislation’s passage would have helped Biden meet his goal of cutting America’s greenhouse gas emissions in half compared with 2005 levels by 2030.
Without a reduction of that speed and scale, the United States would fall short of the targets it committed to under the 2015 Paris agreement, potentially locking in a future of increasingly destructive forest fires, deadly floods and droughts. Already, record-breaking hurricanes and fires are testing the federal government’s ability to respond to overlapping disasters.
Of course, Manchin doesn’t bear all the responsibility. The fact that no Republican member of Congress is willing to lift a finger to save the planet is a scandal. Do they just not care about their grandchildren?
Anyway, in his last year (2012) my father put together (and my son Darien published) a chapbook of poetry supposedly written by Aurora Borealis (a.k.a. Ms. Santa Claus). In the form of annual Christmas letters, she reports on life at a North Pole experiencing catastrophic warming. My father loved Christmas and, as you will see, he loved children’s books, which he read to me and my brothers until we were in middle school. Both the holiday and the books kept alive his own childhood sensibility in a world that he saw going steadily downhill.
Letter from the North Pole By Scott Bates
Dear Friends,
I was only last year, on Christmas morng, That my husband, Nick, got a global warning That our factory’s foundations were getting shaky— So this year, when our basement turned into a lake, he Went down to the station of the Polar Express To buy us all tickets for a change of address To a possible nice little, tight little island Like maybe Never-Land? Or some high and dry land Where we’d be all together and still get around….
But most of the islands were taken, he found, “So how about Vegas? Or even L.A.?…” Well, thanks…Anyway, With pontoons on the sleigh And the reindeer in rain gear, were were ready to go –As Blitzen said, “with the flow:– To all those developing, damp neighborhoods… And we went! En bateau! Over the slush and the urban sprawl It was splash away! splash away! splash away, all!
But this time next year, If we’re lucky and dry, you’ll undoubtedly hear From us at Floating Island or the Land of Oz…
Yours, Aurora Borealis (Mrs. Santa Claus).
In the next letter, Aurora describes a future which is becoming ever more our own and which Manchin’s decision will accelerate. As New Yorker’s John Cassady puts it,
For the country as a whole, the issue is: How will the nation ever address the enduring market failures, glaring inequality, and big social-safety-net gaps that the Build Back Better plan was designed to tackle?
Cassidy quotes a veteran budget analyst, who says the plan was “probably the most far-reaching in the area of social provision, in improving the lives of tens of millions of people, of any since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in the nineteen-sixties.” Cassidy concludes,
Climate change isn’t going away; it’s intensifying. Neither are child-care needs or exorbitant health-care costs. Most immediately, the expanded child tax credit, which currently aids thirty-five million families, will end this month. “Maybe Senator Manchin can explain to the millions of children who have been lifted out of poverty, in part due to the Child Tax Credit, why he wants to end a program that is helping achieve this milestone,” [White House press secretary Jen] Psaki said, in her statement on Sunday. “We cannot.”
Most of the allusions in “Letter from Oz” are to Wizard of Oz, but the gnome king, a miserly hoarder of wealth, first makes his appearance in Ozma of Oz, the third book in the series. The “born again witch” is Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the socially conservative and anti-feminist organization Eagle Forum. (Schlafly is also the inspiration for Serena Joy in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.) This “death of the American Dream” poem ends with an echo of Yeats’s apocalyptic rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem in “The Second Coming”:
Letter from Oz
Well, we made it to here To the Land of OZ! But we find to our sorrow It’s not what it was…
The Wizard is running almost everything now, But he’s changed from an ally into a wealthy cynic (His brokerage firm is called The Golden Cow); Uncle Henry’s closing the Planned Parenthood Clinic.
Glinda the Good is doing her best To teach her students about terror and decorum As the born-again witch rides in from the West Leading the great dark host of the Eagle Forum.
The Lollipop Kids are running the Missile Defense And directing the Munchkin Rifle Association; The Haunted Forest has been cleared for developments; Auntie Em is packing a Magnum .41.
The Wizard explains that money comes from God. Dorothy’s drinking with the Winkie Fraternity. The cowardly Lion commands the Poppy Squad; While the Scarecrow, in his brand-new SUV
Tours his extensive and lucrative golf estates. The Tin Woodman chairs the Old-Growth-Lumber Committee Winged Monkeys with assault guns guard the gates As the Nome King moves into the Emerald City.
Grim stuff, but the poet’s light touch helps me bear our present moment a little better.
This 1840s engraving of Victoria’s Christmas tree launched the tradition in England
Spiritual Sunday
Tomorrow our Christmas tree goes up—and when it does, I will be spurred on by imagining the response of my grandson Alban when he shows up later in the week. In my grandchildren, I am able to reconnect with fond memories of Christmases long ago.
T. S. Eliot recalls his own memories in “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” a poem in which he distinguishes between “the childish” and “childhood wonder.” The childish he associates with several other attitudes towards Christmas that “we may disregard.” Of these attitudes, I don’t agree with his dismissal of the social attitude, which for me is positive as it involves the family coming together. That’s an integral dimension of Christmas. But “torpid”—which I’m reading as blasé—and “patently commercial”? Absolutely.
As for “childish,” I imagine that he means shallow and immature, as when St. Paul writes, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). All these attitudes Eliot sets up in contrast with the real meaning of Christmas, which is “childhood wonder.” Here the appropriate Biblical quotation is from Matthew 19:14: “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.”
One way to receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he believes, is to recollect the wonder that the Christmas tree held for him when he was a boy. Then, the candle to him was a star and the “gilded angel spreading its wings at the summit of the tree” was an actual angel.” That is the “glittering rapture” he wants to relive. And along with “the first-remembered Christmas Tree” is the childhood delight at everything else associated with Christmas, including “delight in new possessions” and “the expectation of the goose or turkey.”
This vision is set against the danger of a jaded life: “the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,/ The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure.” And to this depressing list Eliot also adds,
the piety of the convert Which may be tainted with a self-conceit Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children…
In other words, the sanctimonious and holier-than-thou believer who is more interested in purity than in wonder. Maybe such people include those purists who rail against the way our Christmases incorporate symbols of other religions—which, incidentally, include Christmas trees themselves, which are pagan fertility symbols, imported into the holiday from northern Europe.
A brief aside: two nights ago, Julia, my mother and I watched The Man Who Invented Christmas, about Charles Dickens penning Christmas Carol. A fun if not a great film that contends Christmas was a minor holiday until the Dickens’s novella (see my post on that here), at one point it shows the Christmas tree just beginning to enter the English scene.
Back to Eliot: maybe fearful that he himself has been prone to piety and self-conceit, he looks to Dante’s Divine Comedy to keep him focused on God’s love. St. Lucy is the figure of divine grace who leads Dante out of darkness into light and who, in Paradiso, sits opposite Adam in the celestial rose. The crown of fire that Eliot mentions also points to how various countries celebrate St. Lucy’s Day, years ago on the winter solstice but now on December 13. In Scandinavian countries, a young woman represents Lucy by dressing in white (her purity) with a red sash (her martyrdom) and wearing a crown of candles (which St. Lucy supposedly did to keep her hands free to bring food to Christians hiding out in the catacombs). In short, when Eliot feels too full of himself and loses touch with his childhood wonder, he looks to this figure of grace and light.
Eliot wrote the poem when he was in his seventies and it was one of his last. In it, he imagines living until 80 (he died at 76) and concentrating “the accumulated memories of annual emotion into a great joy.” That joy, he adds, will also be a great fear, by which he means the awe of divinity come to earth. The beginning (Jesus’s birth) shall remind us of the end (when God’s kingdom will come to earth)—which is to say, when we become as innocent as those children who are lost in wonder on Christmas day.
Advent reminds us to cultivate this sense of wonder.
The Cultivation of Christmas Trees
By T. S. Eliot
There are several attitudes towards Christmas, Some of which we may disregard: The social, the torpid, the patently commercial, The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight), And the childish – which is not that of the child For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree Is not only a decoration, but an angel.
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree: Let him continue in the spirit of wonder At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext; So that the glittering rapture, the amazement Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree, So that the surprises, delight in new possessions (Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell), The expectation of the goose or turkey And the expected awe on its appearance,
So that the reverence and the gaiety May not be forgotten in later experience, In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium, The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure, Or in the piety of the convert Which may be tainted with a self-conceit Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children (And here I remember also with gratitude St.Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):
So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas (By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last) The accumulated memories of annual emotion May be concentrated into a great joy Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion When fear came upon every soul: Because the beginning shall remind us of the end And the first coming of the second coming.
In a fine essay on the poem, Casey N. Cep of Paris Review notes that “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” does not seem characteristic of the poet who wrote “The Hollow Men,” The Waste Land, and even the subsequent Christian poems. Instead of internal struggle, this one seems to accept and celebrate “the pretty packages and bright lights of Christmas.” In The Waste Land Eliot writes, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” speaking of (among other things) using fragments of poetry and culture as a defense against the desolation of World War I and modern alienation. Cep writes that “Cultivation of Christmas Trees” seems “almost saccharine when compared to his earlier work” but adds that, by the end of Eliot’s life, “the pains of conversion had waned” so that the poem “conveys the hopeful joy of his faith.”
“Like some fairytale of foliage,” Cep adds, “every Christmas tree tells a story in a season filled with stories, and Eliot is right to hang his argument about innocence on its branches.” The poem, he says, “is not about raising evergreens, but curating our own lives.”
Antony Van Dyck, Venetia, Lady Digby, on Her Deathbed
Friday
For today’s post, I am rerunning the essay I ran on October 3, when the United States hit 700,000 deaths. I’ve changed 700,000 to 800,000 and updated some stats but otherwise made few changes.
The United States hit 800,000 Covid deaths over the weekend and it’s as though we hardly noticed, even as our local county hospital—like hospitals across parts of America—fills up with the unvaccinated. In this pandemic of those who refuse to get a shot, it appears as though certain Americans have “mastered the art of losing” their fellow human beings, to borrow a line from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The One Art.”
I do not count myself amongst them. No fatalist, I am doing all I can to protect myself, my wife, and my 96-year-old mother. I would rage against either of them dying and against getting critically sick myself. But as I look out and see that only 40% of the eligible people in our county are fully vaccinated—and that only 29% in adjoining Grundy County are—I can’t help but think resignation has set in. As the speaker says in the poem, if you learn to accept losing something every day, soon you can resign yourself to losing houses, cities, even loved ones. “Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture/ I love),” she writes, “I shan’t have lied.”
Such a one may think she’s achieved mastery. But when you can write off dead people the way you write off lost keys, it’s a sign that you’ve lost your humanity.
The poem sounds more like someone dealing with forgetting than with losing fellow human beings. Maybe Bishop is describing someone with early onset Alzheimer’s or an addiction (Bishop herself suffered from alcoholism). But the poem still applies to those denying Covid. At the end of the poem, the poet must forcefully remind herself to “Write it!”–in other words, interrupt the sweetly flowing rhythm and rhyme of losing and acknowledge that what she’s witnessing actually is a disaster. Because she has allowed losing to creep up on her, she has become numb to the catastrophe that’s staring her in the face.
800,000 deaths and counting is what disaster looks like. Write it!
The One Art Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
My dear friend and former colleague Jackie Paskow has just alerted me to a couple of books that sound a bit like the book I’m just completing. This can either be a good thing (“Great, my topic is of interest to people!”) or a bad thing (“Oh no, others have gotten there first!”). In reading Louis Menard’s New Yorker review, however, I’ve concluded that my book is different enough that it still has a chance in the publishing world.
The two books are Roosevelt Montas’s Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation and Arnold Weinstein’s The Lives of Literature: Read, Teaching, Knowing.
Menard describes such books as follows:
The genre, a common one for academics writing non-scholarly books, is a combination of memoir (some family history, career anecdotes), criticism (readings of selected texts to illustrate convictions of the author’s), and polemic against trends the author disapproves of. The polemic can sometimes take the form of “It’s all gone to hell.” Montás’s and Weinstein’s books fall into the “It’s all gone to hell” category. Other books that fall within the genre, Menard says, are Hiram Corson’s The Aims of Literary Study (1894), Irving Babbitt’s Literature and the American College (1908), Robert Maynard Hutchins’s The Higher Learning in America (1936), Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep (2014). All these works, Menard says, complain that “higher education has lost its soul,” to which he adds, “It’s a song that never ends.”
Whether or not higher education has lost its soul, it’s true that the purpose of the university has flipped. Menard explains this as follows:
In the old college system, the entire curriculum was prescribed, and there were lists of books that every student was supposed to study—a canon. The canon was the curriculum. In the modern university, students elect their courses and choose their majors. That is the system the great books were designed for use in. The great books are outside the regular curriculum.
The so-called great books courses, then, have been devised to address this new reality. They are, as Montas puts it, “pointedly countercultural,” aiming to balance out the “knowledge factory” that colleges have become. But given that this seems a perfectly reasonable thing to ask of literature, why are these guys complaining? As Menard points out,
At this point, great-books-type courses—that is, courses where the focus is on primary texts and student relatability rather than on scholarly literature and disciplinary training—are part of the higher-education landscape. Few colleges require them, but many colleges happily offer them. The quarrel between generalist and specialist—or, as it is sometimes framed down in the trenches, between dilettante and pedant—is more than a hundred years old and it would seem that this is not a quarrel that one side has to win.
As I was reading the review, one point stood out since it sounds like what I aspire to, both in my teaching and in my blog. Here it is:
In a great-books course of the kind that Montás and Weinstein teach, undergraduates read primary texts, then meet in a classroom to share their responses with their peers. Discussion is led by an instructor, but the instructor’s job is not to give the students a more informed understanding of the texts, or to train them in methods of interpretation, which is what would happen in a typical literature- or philosophy-department course. The instructor’s job is to help the students relate the texts to their own lives. (emphasis mine)
So do Montas and Weinstein do this? How much into the weeds of their students’ lives do they go? Regular readers of this blog know that I’m willing to go fairly far. Over the past 12 years I’ve given numerous examples of my students using great books to sort out vital life questions, from confronting war trauma and processing sexual abuse to seeing teammates commit college vandalism (this latter in an essay on Rime of the Ancient Mariner). If Montas and Weinstein include such exploring in their books, more power to them. But according to the Menard review, they stay at a more abstract level, preferring to talk about the examined life:
What humanists should be teaching, Montás and Weinstein believe, is self-knowledge. To “know thyself” is the proper goal. Art and literature, as Weinstein puts it, “are intended for personal use, not in the self-help sense but as mirrors, as entryways into who we ourselves are or might be.” Montás says, “A teacher in the humanities can give students no greater gift than the revelation of the self as a primary object of lifelong investigation.”
To which, my instant response is, “What’s wrong with using literature in a self-help sense?” I agree with Menard when he rips them apart for their vagueness:
And if, as these authors insist, education is about self-knowledge and the nature of the good, what are those things supposed to look like? How do we know them when we get there? What does it mean to be human? What exactly is the good life?
Oh, they can’t say. The whole business is ineffable. We should know better than to expect answers. That’s quaint-thinking. “The value of the thing,” Montás explains, about liberal education, “cannot be extracted and delivered apart from the experience of the thing.” Literature’s bottom line, Weinstein says, is that it has no bottom line. It all sounds a lot like “Trust us. We can’t explain it, but we know what we’re doing.”
Menard also criticizes the two for seeing themselves superior to the other disciplines:
A class in social psychology can be as revelatory and inspiring as a class on the novel. The idea that students develop a greater capacity for empathy by reading books in literature classes about people who never existed than they can by taking classes in fields that study actual human behavior does not make a lot of sense.
And then, taking Montas and Menard down another peg, Menard concludes:
The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight. Reading Weinstein and Montás, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works of literature, must be the wisest and most humane people on earth. Take my word for it, we are not. We are not better or worse than anyone else. I have read and taught hundreds of books, including most of the books in the Columbia Core. I teach a great-books course now. I like my job, and I think I understand many things that are important to me much better than I did when I was seventeen. But I don’t think I’m a better person.
While I agree with Menard that lit professors are not “the wisest and most humane people on earth” and appreciate his not wanting to be holier than thou, I take issue with his concluding statement. I think that great literature can make you a better person, in part by plopping us in the middle of big issues and showing us what comes of good choices and of bad choices. While literature is not the only way to teach empathy, it is a particularly powerful way to do so, as various psychological studies have shown. Some social psychologists I know use novels in their classes for just this reason.
As far as whether literature can make you a better person, many great thinkers have argued that it does and have explained how. In my book, I profile some who have done so, including Aristotle (but not Plato), Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, W.E.B. Du Bois, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, F. R. Leavis, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Allan Bloom, Wayne Booth, and Martha Nussbaum. What may distinguish these figures from Weinstein and Montas—I don’t know for sure, not having read the latter—is their specificity. They show how literature mixes it up with everyday life.
Do I think that only literature can do this? Certainly not. But I think it is a particularly powerful tool that imparts knowledge in a way not accessible to other disciplines and other arts. While I don’t believe in making a quasi-religion out of great literature, I think that people miss out on a great way of improving their lives when they don’t read it.
Mia Brett, legal historian for Editorial Board, has written a fascinating (albeit somewhat disjointed) article linking America’s history of chattel slavery to the anti-abortion movement. It caught my eye because it helps me understand some of the rightwing hatred of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
The article argues that American Whites have been focused on controlling Black female bodies all the way back to 1662, when Virginia passed a law
that made race and enslavement an inheritable condition through the mother. This law became the basis of the American racialized chattel system of slavery. It also clearly linked racial construction and the continuation of white supremacy to reproduction. Enslaved Black women would produce enslaved Black children while white women would produce free white children. The race of the fathers did not matter.
This law became even more important when importing slaves from Africa became illegal, making Black female reproduction the only way to generate more slaves. Women were sometime raped by their owners, sometimes forced to breed with fellow slaves.
In reaction, Brett notes, abortion became a way for enslaved Black women “to not only control their own reproduction, but also resist the slave system.”
After the Civil War, white supremacists became obsessed with the idea that they would be replaced by people of color (replacement theory), an obsession that continues today with figures like Fox’s Tucker Carlson. As a result, such people did not want white women aborting pregnancies and, through miscegenation laws, they tried to ensure that those babies were not of mixed race.
Obsession with Black reproduction also was to surface amongst such people as Ronald Reagan, who attacked “welfare queens” for supposedly having babies just so they could collect checks. I have personal knowledge of how, in the 1970s, even Minnesota Democrats (I suspect they’re now Trump supporters) were calling for the forced sterilization of urban Black women.
There’s an apparent contradiction here, however. You’d think that conservatives would be for abortions in this case. And in fact, abortion was not a big deal with mainstream conservatives at the time. That’s why Row v Wade passed the Supreme Court fairly easily with a 7-2 vote.
I can also report that my conservative aunt and uncle were, at the time, strong supporters of Planned Parenthood. Thinking back, I now suspect it was because they wanted to control Black reproduction—just as, at the time, Black Panthers brandishing firearms prompted many conservatives to support meaningful gun control.
All that has changed, of course. Now the right is united against abortion, including Black abortion. But even when people have changed their positions, the underlying obsession with controlling women’s bodies has remained the same. This may explain why Beloved gets attacked.
At first glance, it just seems that many Whites don’t want controversial novels about race. But there are other controversial books about race on the AP list, most notably Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Richard Wright’s Native Son. In the latter, a Black man inadvertently smothers a white woman and then cuts off her head so that he can stuff her body in a furnace. I haven’t heard many calls for that book to be banned.
What may most disturb White readers of Beloved is not the vicious whipping of a pregnant Sethe but the scene where the nephews of her slave master suckle her. “They stole my milk,” she reports years later to the man who loves her. The lashing occurs after she reports the act to her mistress, the slave master’s sister.
One can see why the nephews would take her milk. Their uncle is a grim sadist with no softness, and some deep part of them longs for mother tenderness. And because of the dynamics of slavery, they can force Sethe to mother them. Obsessed with Black fertility, they demand it for themselves.
After she escapes, Sethe doesn’t have an abortion but she takes the next logical step: to keep her family from being taken back into slavery, she kills her new-born daughter and tries to kill her other children. There’s a terrible logic to the act: she exercises the only power she has to fight back against a hideous institution. In one way, the act saves her—she is so obviously mad that her master doesn’t reclaim her—but the daughter (named Beloved) comes back to haunt her for decades.
In other words, Sethe rebels against a system that uses her fertility against her. No wonder the right has turned the novel into a cause celebre.
The horrendous tornadoes that hit Kentucky and adjoining states over the weekend are only the latest warnings we have received about the perils of climate change, causing me to turn to the Book of Revelations. Or rather, I turn to an allusion to John’s apocalyptic work that appears in an apocalyptic Advent poem by my nature-loving father. The poem has some local references as well as religious allusions, which I’ll go into after the poem:
Mountain Lion By Scott Bates
Herman Gudger had just shot a three-pronged buck Down in Lost Cove last December when he happened to glance up And there on the rim of the bluff above him
On a rock ledge watching him intently and slowly Waving his tail stood a mountin lion Herman was so startled he forgot he had a gun
And besides he said later he Wouldn’t of shot him noway He knew cougars was mighty scarce these days
The mountain lion turned and loped off into the woods Herman generally drinks a good deal Saturday night And goes to meeting Sunday at the Jump-Off Baptist Church
THE LION OF JUDAH WILL BE A DEVOURER OF NATIONS
HE WILL COME TO JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD
Out of Egypt In the senescence of the year Came Jesus ben Panthera
Jump-Off Baptist Church is an actual church, located two miles from our home. We are also walking distance from a bluff that overlooks Lost Cove, recently acquired by the University of the South so that it could preserve the old growth forest found there. Herman Gudger was, I believe, a local mountain man. We see white-tailed deer daily and, while I’ve never seen a mountain lion in the vicinity, my mother did once.
Now to the poem’s other allusions. Jesus, descended from Judah’s line, was seen by early Christians to be “the lion of Judah,” who would come at judgment day to judge the living and the dead. He would come at a dark time (thus the Advent symbolism), and legend had it that, like Moses, he would come out of Egypt. The early anti-Christian writer Celsus, however, claimed that Jesus was not fully Jewish but actually the son of a Roman centurion named Panthera, calling him “Jesus ben [son of] Panthera.” My father, playing with the pun, connects Panthera to the Lion of Judah to Herman Gudger’s mountain lion.
The poem’s local references take on new meaning in the context of my father’s poem. Jump-Off Church already has apocalyptic associations—we jump off this vail of tears into eternity—and Herman is a sinner who drinks on Saturdays but seeks forgiveness and redemption on Sundays. His meeting with the divine, however, comes in the form of a mountain lion, which he encounters while spiritually lost (he’s in Lost Cove). It’s not clear whether Gudger is legally hunting, but the lion appears in the poem as a judgment on how humans are treating nature. Herman, to his credit, at least acknowledges that he has come face to face with something transcendent.
As such, he stands in dramatic contrast to the hunters D. H. Lawrence meets in his own “Mountain Lion” poem. In this one, the hunters have in fact killed a mountain lion, triggering Lawrence’s contempt for foolish humans as well as sorrow for the animal:
_Qué tiene, amigo? León_– He smiles, foolishly, as if he were caught doing wrong. And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn’t know. He is quite gentle and dark-faced. It is a mountain lion, A long, long slim cat, yellow like a lioness. Dead. He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly. Lift up her face, Her round, bright face, bright as frost. Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears; And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays, Dark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face. Beautiful dead eyes.
Lawrence is so furious that he wants the hunters—and all humans who are like them—dead:
And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion. And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two of humans And never miss them. Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost face of that slim yellow mountain lion!
I can think of one other mountain lion reference in literature, this one in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. There a mountain lion saves the protagonist from imprisonment, leading off his captors and so allowing Tayo to escape and complete his mission. Earlier, the mountain lion has come upon Tayo at a moment of despair when, again, his mission is in peril. The lion’s appearance, then as later, helps Tayo to continue on. It is a mystical moment (as with Herman Gudger) and Tayo offers up a prayer:
The mountain lion came out from a grove of oak trees in the middle of the clearing. He did not walk or leap or run; his motions were like the shimmering of tall grass in the wind. He came across the meadow, moving into the wind. Tayo watched it with his head against the ground, conscious of pine needles tangled in his hair. He waited for the mare to shy away from the yellow form that moved toward them; but the horse was upwind and did not stir. The eyes caught twin reflections of the moon; the glittering yellow light penetrated his chest and he inhaled suddenly. Relentless motion was the lion’s greatest beauty, moving like mountain clouds with the wind, changing substance and color in rhythm with the contours of the mountain peaks: dark as lava rock, and suddenly as bright as a field of snow. When the mountain lion stopped in front of him, it was not hesitation, but a chance for the moonlight to catch up with him. Tayo got to his knees slowly and held out his hand.
“Mountain lion,” he whispered, “mountain lion, becoming what you are with each breath, your substance changing with the earth and the sky.” The mountain lion blinked his eyes; there was no fear. He gazed at him for another instant and then sniffed the southeast wind before he crossed the stream and disappeared into the trees, his outline lingering like yellow smoke, then suddenly gone.
In all three accounts, the mountain lion provides a way of judging fallen humanity and offering the world hope of redemption. Passing bills to reverse climate change is the least we can do.
And if we fail, the Lion of Judah—Jesus ben Panthera—will condemn us. So will Tayo’s animal guide. Do will Lawrence.
“The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold” in parts of the American south this past weekend, leaving death and destruction in its wake. And unfortunately, God didn’t intervene this time, as God does in Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib.” As a result, Mayfield, Kentucky and other communities in the area suffered devastating tornado damage.
Eight years ago I applied L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz to Oklahoma’s horrendous tornadoes, which killed 26 people and injured 212 others. The death toll from the recent tornadoes far surpasses those numbers. Baum drew his own inspiration from the tornadoes that struck the drought-stricken midwest in the 1890s, a condition caused partly by seasonal cycles and partly by poor farming practices. Our own tornadoes are likely caused by climate change as air from an unseasonably warm December hit a cold front.
Sadly, climate change promises more landscapes like the one in which Dorothy grows up:
When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.
Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.
The tornado strike seems in keeping with the landscape:
From the far north they heard a low wail of the wind, and Uncle Henry and Dorothy could see where the long grass bowed in waves before the coming storm. There now came a sharp whistling in the air from the south, and as they turned their eyes that way they saw ripples in the grass coming from that direction also.
Suddenly Uncle Henry stood up.
“There’s a cyclone coming, Em,” he called to his wife. “I’ll go look after the stock.” Then he ran toward the sheds where the cows and horses were kept.
Aunt Em dropped her work and came to the door. One glance told her of the danger close at hand.
“Quick, Dorothy!” she screamed. “Run for the cellar!”
Toto jumped out of Dorothy’s arms and hid under the bed, and the girl started to get him. Aunt Em, badly frightened, threw open the trap door in the floor and climbed down the ladder into the small, dark hole. Dorothy caught Toto at last and started to follow her aunt. When she was halfway across the room there came a great shriek from the wind, and the house shook so hard that she lost her footing and sat down suddenly upon the floor.
Of course, Dorothy has a far happier ending than that experienced by the citizens of western Kentucky and eastern Tennessee and northern Arkansas. In Oz, according to allegorical readings of the novel, America’s problems get sorted out.
In this reading, which I’ve written about before, the Wicked Witch of the East is the East Coast banks, which were keeping farmers’ mortgages high by insisting on the country retaining the gold standard. As populist presidential candidate Williams Jennings Bryan memorably thundered,
If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
The Wicked Witch of the West, meanwhile, is the drought conditions. In Baum’s American fairy tale, pioneer woman Dorothy joins arms with agriculture (the scarecrow), industrial workers (the tin woodman) and Bryan (the cowardly lion) to restore America to its former glory.
One must be careful about pushing the allegory too far, but Wizard of Oz starts out very grim until Dorothy, demonstrating America’s fighting can-do spirit, triumphs over adversarial conditions and a conman chief executive to restore the country to its former condition—which is to say, a country that can dream of a better future. When Dorothy returns home, the farmhouse has been rebuilt, Em folds Dorothy in her arms, and Dorothy says, “I’m so glad to be at home again.” For the moment, the darkness that opens the book has lifted.
Now it’s not an economic catastrophe that threatens us but a climate catastrophe. Once again we’re seeing extreme weather events, and while some of them are again happening out west (the West Coast drought and wildfires), every part of the country has been hit. In other words, we have a Wicked Witch of the West-East-North-South. And of course, there’s also the rest of the world.
So let’s rethink the Wizard of Oz as a fairy tale about saving the planet, not just America. Let’s say that the Wicked Witch of the East is the fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists in Washington. Imagine that the climate disasters that are devastating us only stiffen our resolve. Although, for a little while, we are tricked by a conman who ascends to power through hot air, ultimately the various sectors of society unite to defeat the climate destroyers.
Yes, Wizard of Oz was written as a fairy tale. As Baum writes in his forward, “It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.” But fairy tales, as fantasy author Neil Gaiman tells us, can simultaneously be fantastical and true. As he puts it,
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
So imagine that the dragon of climate change, now that we’ve named it, can be beaten. It’s a dream to aspire to.
Gerda melts Kay’s frozen heart in Andersen’s The Snow Queen
Spiritual Sunday
I’ve recently been drawn to Madeleine L’Engle’s Advent poems, including “The winter is cold, is cold.” It’s not only the winter that is cold, the speaker makes clear, but her heart as well. One thing that keeps it frozen is closing it down so it won’t be hurt.
Opening ourselves up to joy is to render ourselves vulnerable. Better, we think, to shrink from the wound and look for happiness that is
We won’t find peace that way, however, given that the peace we desire comes only “when it’s not sought.” In her references to a knight encased in “ancient suits of mail,” L’Engle may be borrowing an image from Adrienne Rich’s “The Knight,” where a man finds himself similarly entrapped.
Therefore, the speaker asks God to help her forget the cold world and reach for God’s warmth, which she characterizes as “purifying fire.” Once she does so, the coldness in her heart will melt so that it will beat once again.
The winter is cold, is cold. All’s spent in keeping warm. Has joy been frozen, too? I blow upon my hands Stiff from the biting wind. My heart beats slow, beats slow. What has become of joy?
If joy’s gone from my heart Then it is closed to You Who made it, gave it life. If I protect myself I’m hiding, Lord, from you. How we defend ourselves In ancient suits of mail!
Protected from the sword, Shrinking from the wound, We look for happiness, Small, safety-seeking, dulled, Selfish, exclusive, in-turned. Elusive, evasive, peace comes Only when it’s not sought.
Help me forget the cold That grips the grasping world. Let me stretch out my hands To purifying fire, Clutching fingers uncurled. Look! Here is the melting joy. My heart beats once again.
