A Lovely Poem Celebrating Aging

By Robin Bates | Published: December 11, 2024
Dudley Delffs


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Thursday

My good friend and neighbor, author Dudley Delffs, turned 60 last week and wrote a poem describing what it feels like. As his observations apply to anyone approaching the later years of life, I got his permission to share it here.

Dudley notes that life no longer feels as tempestuous as it did when he was young. “Turning sixty,” he observes, “isn’t the hurricane reaching landfall but angry waves out at sea kicking up.” While we may still encounter disasters, they take quieter and stealthier forms.

Maybe that‘s because we’re less likely to take adrenaline-pumping risks. Turning sixty means resisting “the urgent risk to accelerate on dead man’s curve.” Instead, we become “a steady hand turning the wheel.”  Rather than hitting the brakes on black ice, we “slow down to enjoy the/ ruddy winter sunset beyond a foreground of neon signs and electric lines.”

I’m thinking that those neon signs and electric lines may the the sign of a fatal car crash. But because we too are moving toward death, we make a point to enjoy sunsets and other of life’s small pleasures as we inch forward.

The other images in the poem, some of them deliberate clichés and meant to be seen as such, express similar sentiments. I also hear echoes of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulyssses.” Where Dudley writes, “And there is loss—how could there not be over six decades?—but the wins have surprised you,” Tennyson’s speaker reflects, “Though much is taken, much abides.” And where Dudley writes, “The dimming day is undeniable, but twilight embers ambient gold all around you,” we have Tennyson’s “The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: the long day wanes.”

It’s a lovely reflection to accompany one’s sixtieth birthday. Many happy returns, Dudley.

Sixty
By Dudley Delffs

Turning sixty isn’t the hurricane reaching landfall but angry waves out at sea kicking up.
Not the conflagration incinerating miles of forest but careless sparks catching dry tinder.
Not the loss of organs or limbs but unrelenting turn of letterpress embossing soft flesh.

Not the urgent risk to accelerate on dead man’s curve as much as a steady hand turning the
wheel. Turning sixty isn’t hitting the brakes on black ice as much as slowing down to enjoy the
ruddy winter sunset beyond a foreground of neon signs and electric lines. Turning sixty

isn’t the hard bridle of desire galloping into unspoiled wilderness again and again but a gentle
canter along a trail overgrown by weeds and untamed briers. Not the folly of going all in on
a pair of jacks but the wisdom to fold long before the bend in the river demands greater loss.

And there is loss—how could there not be over six decades?—but the wins have surprised you
just as much, never the lottery but an occasional scratch card to keep you going, a go-bag of
barely enough just in the nick of time. Moments when you kept your appointment with your

self and showed up early. Sixty years smother some dreams and kindle others, revealing what’s
worth killing and what’s worth living for. The dimming day is undeniable, but twilight embers
ambient gold all around you, a gilt frame glimmering, fading slant hope into the darkness.

©Dudley Delffs. Printed with permission of the author

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Nikki Giovanni, R.I.P.

By Robin Bates | Published: December 10, 2024
Nikki Giovanni

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Wednesday

When a great poet dies, as Nikki Giovanni did this past weekend, I always use the occasion to revisit poems I have enjoyed over the years. The two I share today, both personal favorites, reflect two different sides of the African American poet.

The first, “Rosa Parks,” points to her activist side, which was honed in the civil rights battles and the Black militancy movement of the 1960s, earning her the title “the Poet of the Black Revolution.” While the poem celebrates the woman who set off the Montgomery bus boycott while paying homage to Emmitt Till, it also honors some of the invisible members of the Black community—the Pullman porters—who were also important in the struggle for racial equality.

And then there is “Nikki-Rosa,” a poem written in the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker—which is to say, Black authors who were less interested in the Black-White struggle than in relationships within the Black community. The problem with always focusing on the struggle is that it can appear that Whites are central to Black identity whereas, sometimes, we Whites are just irrelevant. And that’s fine.

Both poems focus on aspects of Black life that most outsiders do not see.

Rosa Parks

This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender to the Black Americans in the South so they would know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birthplace of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954 when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “separate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in 1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grandchildren on his knee telling them about his summer riding the rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money, Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unacceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago, where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordinary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama, who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would
there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs. Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system, the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not being able to stand it. She sat back down.

Nikki-Rosa

childhood remembrances are always a drag   
if you’re Black
you always remember things like living in Woodlawn   
with no inside toilet
and if you become famous or something
they never talk about how happy you were to have   
your mother
all to yourself and
how good the water felt when you got your bath   
from one of those
big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in   
and somehow when you talk about home   
it never gets across how much you
understood their feelings
as the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale
and even though you remember
your biographers never understand
your father’s pain as he sells his stock   
and another dream goes
And though you’re poor it isn’t poverty that
concerns you
and though they fought a lot
it isn’t your father’s drinking that makes any difference   
but only that everybody is together and you
and your sister have happy birthdays and very good   
Christmases
and I really hope no white person ever has cause   
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy

Thank you for sharing your passion and your vision with us, Ms. Giovanni. Rest in peace.

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How to Live under Authoritarianism

By Robin Bates | Published: December 9, 2024
Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert

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Tuesday

One of my favorite bloggers is Greg Olear at Prevail because he periodically applies literature to current events. Recently he alerted me to a great lyric by Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, who gives us advice about how to handle dictatorial regimes. He knows whereof he speaks, having lived in Poland under first Hitler and then Stalin and the Soviet Union. We may well need his guidance in the coming years.

In “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” Herbert begins by setting the parameters of what we are to do when authoritarians control our lives: we must be like Jason and the Argonauts, who sought the golden fleece. Unlike the Greek myth, however, the fleece is described as “nothingness,” which captures the major theme of the poem: Herbert is counseling us to do what is right, even if it doesn’t achieve the results we want. The quest is more important than the attainment.

This is important as we see many already bending the knee to Donald Trump, despite the uncertain attainments to be gained in doing so. These include multiple figures in the corporate media, who are “obeying in advance,” thereby violating historian Timothy Snyder’s #1 rule about dealing with dictator wannabes. Herbert counsels us to “go upright among those who are on their knees” and also “among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust.”

I’m thinking that the backs are turned to avoid meeting our eyes—“eyes one dare not meet,” T.S. Eliot writes in “The Hollow Men”—while those toppled may be past tyrants. The important thing is to maintain one’s moral compass.

You were saved from corruption, Herbert informs us, “not in order to live” but in order to bear witness. He tells us to

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important

As the poem progresses, Herbert calls for anger and scorn to be directed at “the informers executioners cowards” who insult and beat down others. And although the oppressors may ultimately throw lumps of dirt as our caskets are lowered into the earth while rewriting our biographies to remove our critical comments, Herbert assures that winning is not the end goal. Nor should we forgive because “it is not in your power/ to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn.”

By this point in the poem, Herbert realizes he runs the risk of counseling us to become self-righteous judges so he shifts. “Beware however of unnecessary pride,” he says, and then, as a humbling exercise, he advises us to “keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror.” He even questions (like Moses) why he himself has been called to deliver the message. “Weren’t there better ones than I,” he asks.

Since perpetual anger can hollow out even the most committed idealists, turning them into dry and bitter souls, Herbert reminds to focus on life’s tiny blessings:

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak

light on a wall the splendor of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

And then Herbert tells us again that the journey is not ultimately about attainment. It’s about holding on to our humanity as we cross the desert.

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

In many ways, this is not a comfortable poem. In fact, whether through mockery or through violence, the “informers executioners cowards” will punish those who take principled stands. Herbert ends with an image of cold skulls and of heroes who, while they died heroically, nevertheless died. Hector and Roland were killed while fighting in hopeless battles while Gilgamesh learned that immortality is out of his reach:

and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

So is life a kingdom without limit or a city of ashes? Fortunately for us, the marching orders are the same in both cases. In the end, Herbert tells us what we must do to live a meaningful and authentic life:

Be faithful Go

Here’s the poem in its entirety:

The Envoy of Mr. Cogito
By Zbigniew Herbert
Trans. by Bogdana and John Carpenter

Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

let your sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards—they will win

they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak

light on a wall the splendor of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

Be faithful Go

Olear tells us that Robert Haas wrote that Herbert was “an ironist and a minimalist who writes as if it were the task of the poet, in a world full of loud lies, to say what is irreducibly true in a level voice.” It wasn’t easy to do so in the years of German and Soviet rule, but Herbert didn’t sign up for easy.

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Apologies for Press Handling of Gaza

By Robin Bates | Published: December 8, 2024
Ammiel Alcalay

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Monday

An artist friend who lives in Assisi, Lani Irwin, alerted me to Ammiel Alcalay’s “My Apologies,” a poem about the horrific killing that never seems to stop in Palestine. I have Israeli and Jewish friends who are as horrified as the rest of the world at how Israel’s leaders are perpetrating slaughter in their name. They are far from the only ones to believe their democracy has been hijacked by authoritarian wannabes.

Alcalay is the son of Sephardic Jews who immigrated to the United States from Serbia. In his poem apologizing for how America is enabling the slaughter, he cites the important Iraqi poet Bulunda al-Haidari, who wrote his own poem entitled “My Apologies.” Reading the first apologies poem allows us to better understand Alcalay’s follow-up.

Haidari, a Kurdish poet from northern Iraq who was forced into exile by Saddam Hussein, helped modernize the Arabic literary tradition. According to biographical notes on the All Poetry website, what distinguished Haidari’s poetry and “makes it so brilliant” is the way that he uses his intimate knowledge to express the impact of political violence and the sorrow of living in exile.

In Haidari’s “My Apologies,” the poet expresses his sadness at how Hussein has destroyed the nation that produced The Arabian Nights. “We used to have a sea, shells, pearls and the hour of birth,” he laments. (I’m thinking “hour of birth” refers to Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of civilization.) While the Hussein’s television propaganda (a.k.a., “the newsreader”) proclaims the country’s mythical greatness, Haidari sees the truth: “There is no sea in Baghdad”—only “burnt up shadows of the midday sun”:

My Apologies
By Bulunda al-Haidari

My apologies, my honored guests,
The newsreader lied in his last bulletin:
There is no sea in Baghdad
Nor pearls
Not even an island,
And everything Sinbad said
About the queens of the jinn
About the ruby and coral islands
About the thousand thousands flowing from the sultan’s hand
Is a myth born in the summer heat
Of my small town
In the burnt-up shadows of the midday sun
In the silent nights of the exiled stars.
We used to have
A sea, shells, pearls
And a polished moon
And fishermen returning in the evening;
We used to have,
Said the newsreader’s last bulletin,
An innocent, dream paradise;
For we, my honored guests,
Lie to be born again,
Lie to stretch in our long history
The myth told by Sinbad –
We used to have
A sea, shells, pearls
And the hour of birth.

My apologies, my honored guests,
The newsreader lied in his last bulletin:
There is no sea in Baghdad
Nor pearls
Not even an island.

In his own “My Apologies” poem, written this year, the American-born Alcalay apologizes for America’s own newscasters, calling them “the petty stenographers of the crooked rulers.” I’ve written about how the corporate media sane-washed Trump, and Alcalay sees them as having done the same with (in his words) “the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Palestine.”

“Everything they say and write is a lie,/ about law and freedom, about equality/ and justice,” Alcalay writes before pointing out “the rubble of the bombs we make and sell” and “the silent cries of limbless orphans.” It’s an angry poem, driven to fury by his disillusion with an America that is betraying its ideals. His fury may be compounded by his Jewish anger at Israel’s own betrayal.

It’s a disillusion I remember experiencing as a college student during the Vietnam War.

Unexpectedly, however, Alcalay’s poem draws on al-Haidari’s original “My Apologies” to end on a note of hope. To read the first poem is to understand the concluding punch of the second.

My Apologies
By Ammiel Alcalay
after Bulund al-Haidari

To the hostages of our policies, my apologies—
the petty stenographers of the crooked rulers
in the once fancy now crumbling cities
of our fading Empire lied then.
They lied then and they lie now.
Everything they say and write is a lie,
about law and freedom, about equality
and justice, in the rubble of the bombs
we make and sell, in the silent cries
of limbless orphans, in the night
lit by white phosphorus and the
relentless sound of buzzing drones.
They tell us we used to have things of
value, even things we ourselves made,
and that it was a place like no other.
All I know is that Sinbad once sailed
to Gaza and so to Gaza he’ll sail once again.

In other words, don’t abandon your belief in mythic renewal.

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Notre Dame: Two Arms Raised in Prayer

By Robin Bates | Published: December 7, 2024

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Sunday

Thanks to an extraordinary restoration effort, the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris opened its doors this week for the first time since the catastrophic fire five years ago. Back then I wrote a post on how Victor Hugo saved the cathedral in the 19th century with his novel Notre Dame de Paris, a.k.a. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831).

Théophile Gautier, the poet who popularized the cry “art of art’s sake” (“l’art pour l’art”), wrote a paean to the cathedral in the 19th century that captures much of its mystery. While it’s too long to share in its entirety—you can go here to read the whole thing—I have chosen a few of my favorite stanzas.

Gautier begins the poem by telling how, when feeling hemmed in by mundane life—by a world so small and stifling that he feels he can touch the horizon with his finger—he visits the cathedral at sunset. Note how he carries a copy of Hugo’s book when he does so:

Weary of this dead calm where faded in advance,
Like water that falls asleep, our years languish;
Tired of stifling my life in a narrow living room,
With young fools and frivolous women,
Exchanging banal words without profit;
Tired of always touching my horizon with my finger.

To make me whole again and widen my soul,
Your book in my pocket, at the towers of Notre-Dame;
I have often gone, Victor,
At eight o’clock, in summer, when the sun sets,
And its tawny disc, at the edge of the roofs it touches,
Floats like a big golden balloon.

Set against the darkening sky, Notre Dame seems to raise its twin towers to God before falling asleep:

As, for its good evening, in a richer hue,
The day that flees covers the holy cathedral,
Outlined in broad strokes on the fiery horizon;
And the twin towers, these stone canticles,
Seem like the two great arms that the city in prayer,
Before falling asleep, raises towards its God.

The cathedral’s famous flying buttresses Gautier accurately compares to a crab or a spider:

The blossoming nave, between its thin ribs,
Seems like a giant crab moving its claws,
An enormous spider, like networks,
Throwing to the front of the towers, to the black side of the walls,
In aerial threads, in delicate meshes,
Its tulles of granite, its lacework of arches.

Meanwhile, the stained stained-glass window, lit up by the setting sun, suddenly blooms like “a hundred magical flowerbeds”:

In the lead diamonds of the diaphanous stained glass window,
Fresher than the gardens of Alcine or Morgane,
Under a warm kiss of sun,
Strangely populated by heraldic monsters,
Suddenly a hundred magical flowerbeds bloom
With azure and vermilion flowers.

And then there are stone statues and stone carvings of gargoyles, dragons, basilisks, and other fantastical creatures, along with “myriads of saints”:

Mastiffs howling at the end of the gutters; tarasques,
Wurms and basilisks, dragons and fanciful dwarves,
Knights conquering giants,
Bundles of heavy pillars, sheaves of columns,
Myriads of saints rolled into collars,
Around the three gaping porches.

Lancets, pendants, warheads, slender clovers
Where the crazy arabesque hangs its lace
And its goldwork, crafted with great labor;
Gables with open holes, jagged spiers,
Needles of crows and angels surmounted,
The cathedral shines like an enamel jewel!

In the second part of the poem, Gautier recounts ascending the dark and narrow winding staircase to the top of one of the towers, something I have done five or six times in my life. Coming out of darkness into the blue, Gautier reports experiencing a “sublime vertigo.” He’s not the only poet to have had this reaction. In a poem comparing mounting the stairs to France groping through dark times, English poet Daniel Gabriel Rossetti writes,

As one who, groping in a narrow stair,
Hath a strong sound of bells upon his ears,
Which, being at a distance off, appears
Quite close to him because of the pent air:
So with this France. She stumbles file and square
Darkling and without space for breath…

Here’s Gautier: 

But what is this? when in the shadows you
Follow the slender staircase with countless spirals
And you finally see the blue again,
The void above and below the abyss,
A fear seizes you, a sublime vertigo
As you feel so close to God!

As under the bird that perches there, a branch
Under your feet that it flees, the tower quivers and leans,
The drunken sky totters and waltzes around you;
The abyss opens its mouth, and the spirit of vertigo,
Lashing you with its wing in sneering acrobatics
And makes the guardrails tremble at the front of the towers…

Gautier looks down at Paris from the high perch—the poem predates the Eiffel Tower and so is the highest building around—and says it is like seeing the core of a volcano:

Oh ! your heart beats, dominating from this peak,
Self, puny and small, a city thus made;
To be able, with a single glance, to embrace this great whole,
Standing up there, closer to the sky than to the earth,
Like the gliding eagle, seeing within the crater,
Far, far away, the smoke and the lava which is boiling!

Although the city is far away, still it’s a glorious sight. Remember, he’s seeing all of this at sunset:

How big it is! how beautiful ! the frail chimneys,
With their smoky turbans crowned at all times,
On the saffron sky trace their black profiles,
And the oblique light, with bold edges,
Throwing rich fires on all sides
In the mirror of the river enshrines a hundred mirrors.

As in a joyous ball, a young girl’s breast,
In the light of the torches lights up and sparkles
Under the jewels and finery;
In the light of the sunset, the water lights up, and the Seine
Cradles more jewels, certainly, than the queen ever
wears on her collar on great days.

The poet shifts in the third and final part, however. Beautiful though Paris is, it doesn’t compare with the cathedral. In fact, everything “sags and dies” when Gautier descends:

And yet, as beautiful as it is, O Notre-Dame,
Paris thus dressed in its robe of flame,
It is only so from the top of your towers.
When we go down, everything metamorphoses,
Everything sags and dies, nothing grandiose anymore,
Nothing left, except you, whom we always admire.

The poem concludes with Gautier lambasting Paris’s architectural taste. Like the British Pre-Raphaelites, he prefers medieval gothic (“Dantesque dress”) to Greek classical and other more recent architectural movements, finding it to be more spiritual. In his punchy final stanza, he goes so far as to say that Notre Dame surrounded by these “profane porticos,” “coquettish parthenons,” and “courtesan churches” is like “a chaste matron in the middle of whores!”

Who could prefer, in his pedantic taste,
To the serious and straight folds of your Dantesque dress,
These poor Greek orders which are dying of cold,
These bastard pantheons, copied in the school,
Antique thrift store borrowed from Vignole,
And, none of which outside can’t stand up straight.

O you! masons of the century, atheist architects,
Brains, thrown into a uniform mold,
People of the ruler and the compass;
Build boudoirs for stockbrokers,
And plaster huts for men of mire;
But houses for God, no!

Among the new palaces, the profane porticos,
The coquettish parthenons, courtesan churches,
With their Greek pediments on their Latin pillars,
The shameless houses of the pagan city;
It seems, to see you, Our Christian Lady,
A chaste matron in the middle of whores!

It was in this spirit that the cathedral was restored, often with materials that were the same as those destroyed and with original tools as well. Gautier could well have been pleased with the results.

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Wicked, a Parable for Our Time

By Robin Bates | Published: December 5, 2024

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Friday

Julia and I attended Wicked early this week, and while I’m not a great fan of musicals, I was still entertained. The movie sent me back to the book, The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which I once taught in a fantasy class and which is even darker and more disturbing.

As many have noted, the film is particularly timely given how we’ve just elected as president a man whose central election strategy is scapegoating vulnerable populations. In Wicked, it’s the Wizard of Oz who scapegoats, with one of his victims a literal goat (Dr. Dillamond). In Oz as in Narnia, there are talking and non-talking animals—“animals” and “Animals”—but the Wizard figures the best way to consolidate power in his rebellious country is to single out all animals.

In a science class attended by future witches Elphaba and Glinda, Dr. Dillamond reports on the Wizard’s new measures:

[T]he Wizard of Oz had proclaimed Banns on Animal Mobility, effective several weeks ago. This meant not only that Animals were restricted in their access to travel conveyances, lodgings, and public services to travel conveyances, lodgings, and public services. The Mobility it referred to was also professional. Any Animal coming of age was prohibited from working in the professions or the public sector. They were, effectively, to be herded back to the farmlands and wilds if they wanted to work for wages at all.

Dr. Dillamond, who has been researching genetic differences between Animals and humans and discovering that they are small and inconsequential, pays a price for his truth-seeking: the Wizard’s henchmen cut his throat. (As I say, the book is darker than the movie.)

In a scene that also shows up in the film, we see his replacement prepared to dissect a lion cub to determine whether it is animal or Animal. “This is a very young cub,” Elphaba objects from her desk. “Where is its mother? Why is it taken from its mother at such an early age? How even can it feed?”

As she learns more stories about such discrimination and abuse, Elphaba becomes a passionate Animal rights advocate. At first she lobbies the Wizard to retract the Bann and then joins a terrorist organization that seeks to assassinate him.

Of course, as a person of color Elphaba is also the subject of discrimination and scapegoating. (In the opening scene, we see the community celebrating her death.) It’s one reason she identifies so passionately with the persecuted Animals. But in her fight, she goes into some dark places, engages in some actions that backfire, and ends up being labeled evil and marginalized. By the end, she is so hollowed out and suicidal that she can’t recognize goodness when it finally shows up.

I’m not entirely clear what Maguire’s point is, other than perhaps an illustration of W. H. Auden’s observation that “Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.” Oh, and that people are more sympathetic once they are given backstories. In any event, when Dorothy shows up, asking for forgiveness and fully prepared to hand over the silver slippers, Elphaba is utterly confounded. Here’s Dorothy:

Would you ever forgive me for that accident, for the death of your sister; would you ever ever forgive me, for I could never forgive myself!

And Elphaba’s response:

The Witch shrieked, in panic, in disbelief. That even now the world should twist so, offending her once again: Elphaba, who had endured Sarima’s refusal to forgive, now begged by a gibbering child for the same mercy always denied her? How could you give such a thing out of your own hollowness?

She was caught, twisting, trying, full of will, but toward what?

In her confusion, Elphaba accidentally catches her dress on fire, leading to Dorothy’s frantic attempt to save her with the fatal bucket of water.

It’s an unsatisfying ending and, despite Maguire’s wonderful imagination, an unsatisfying novel. I’m not sure that it provides special insight into the nature of evil other than that good people, under relentless pounding, can become wicked, or at least very confused.

There’s one Elphaba insight, however, that may help us better understand Trump’s hold on his followers. For years I’ve had the fantasy that they would one day awake to see what a bad man he is and throw him off. But what if they are drawn to him because he’s bad.

What if they find evil entertaining because it gives them an illicit thrill to which they’ve now become addicted. Maybe they get a charge out of his grabbing women by the pussy and by his calls for cops to rough up suspects, for rally attendees to punch out protesters, and for the military to shoot demonstrators in the legs. Maybe a sadistic streak is activated when they hear about border agents tearing immigrant children from their parents or Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s razor wire tearing people as they attempt to cross the Rio Grande. For many people, watching angry voters swarming over the Capitol was the best television ever.

And when progressives, liberals, and traditional Republicans complain, that makes it all the more delicious. Trumpists love watching their leader make these “elites” squirm.

I got this insight into Trump’s popularity when Elphaba, at the time a student at Shiz University, is discussing the nature of evil with her roommate Glinda. Struck by Glinda’s observation about how boring preachers sometimes enliven their sermons by turning to evil, Elphaba finds interesting connections between

evil and boredom. Evil and ennui. Evil and the lack of stimulation. Evil and sluggish blood.

I first came across the idea that boredom can become toxic from an article by an 18th century British Lit scholar about the 1747 novel Clarissa. Samuel Richardson’s runaway hit features an angelic heroine whom her family loves to torment. I was baffled by all the ways they choose to punish her when she resists marrying an old, rich, ugly suitor until Frederick Karl suggested they are motivated by boredom. Messing with sweet, dutiful Clarissa adds variety to their otherwise empty lives.

The Marquis de Sade picked up on their sadism when he made Clarissa the model for his novel Justine, where for several hundred pages we watch the innocent heroine get tortured in multiple ways. Literally tortured, that is, not just browbeaten and locked in her room.

While surely not all of Trump’s supporters are stimulated by his sadism, I suspect a fair number are, including some of his so-called Christian supporters. Why settle for the boring competency of the Biden-Harris administration when you can get this instead?

A Reader’s Comment (Lory):

Yes, Maguire’s book is unsatisfying, and it’s unclear what the point is in the end — although it starts out with an impressive imaginative verve, it didn’t follow through for me. It’s interesting that the story has been given another life through the wildly popular stage version, though I also found that unsatisfying. Clearly something in it strikes a chord in the wider culture, and you bring out some of the themes and issues well.

I’ve lately become fascinated by the idea of the dysregulated nervous system, which most of us have to some degree. In me, it led to migraines and psycho-emotional disturbances, in others, it could lead to the “evil as a remedy for boredom” pattern. What you call boredom could be due to a shutdown or muffling of our healthy emotional life, a defensive strategy formed by childhood experiences. Trump’s childhood and family were certainly dysfunctional enough for that, and I have to wonder about the history of his followers — including some of my own loved ones.

They want a leader who hates what they hate, who gives them permission to cast out and destroy. But the scapegoat is not their real enemy, they’re too frightened to confront that, because it is within. What can give one the courage to make that turnaround and face the inner demons? I know what helped me, but not everyone has my opportunities and advantages. I can only keep wondering and praying for help in our affliction.

My response: This is very interesting, Lory. I feel confirmed in my own feelings of dissatisfaction but am even more interested in what you say about boredom. I reminds me a little of the theories of Alice Miller, who looked at the prevalence of emotional child abuse experienced by followers of Hitler. Facing up to one’s inner demons always strikes me as a vital step toward restoring inner balance.

Last night I participated in a discussion group applying the ideas of French philosopher René Girard to Wiked, focusing above all on his theory of scapegoating. The speaker looked especially at “No One Mourns the Wicked,” “What Is This Feeling?” and “Popular.” Of course, the songs don’t show up in the book. If I think of the book as an exploration of what happens to the psyche of one who has been scapegoated–and who doesn’t entirely have the inner strength to resist–it makes more sense. To the end, Elphaba is obsessed with the silver slippers, which her father gave to her sister. This sibling jealousy destroys her in the end.

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Note to Trump: Time for Real Work

By Robin Bates | Published: December 4, 2024
Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners

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Thursday

Marge Piercy’s “To Be of Use” informs us what real governing and being in service to the people looks like. We got this from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for the past four years. How much will we get from Donald Trump and J.D. Vance?

To Be of Use
Marge Piercy

The people I love best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shadows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

The challenges of governing don’t lend themselves to reality television. Can we get real work out of the White House and Congress rather than incessant posturing and never-ending bullshit? We’re about to find out.

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Defeating Dragon Despair after Harris Loss

By Robin Bates | Published: December 3, 2024

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Wednesday

In my 2008 book How Beowulf Can Save America: An Epic Hero’s Guide to Defeating the Politics of Rage, I used the poem’s monsters to understand the intense anger that was driving–and that continues to drive–American politics. Beowulf, I believe, provides powerful insights into grief, with both Grendel’s Mother and the Dragon serving as figures for destructive grieving.

We can grieve as much for the death of a cherished ideal as for a person. I believe that rightwingers grieving over an America they thought they were losing—a White, Christian America—fueled Tea Party rage against Barack Obama while leading to the ascendency of birther Donald Trump. Meanwhile, many on the left also thought they were losing their country when it reelected a rapist felon who had attempted a coup. The challenge is to keep such grieving from damaging both others and ourselves.

Grendel’s Mother and the Dragon represent two different kinds of destructive grieving. Grendel’s Mother is its active form. When the troll’s son is killed, she lashes out indiscriminately, assuaging her own hurt by hurting others.

By killing Hrothgar’s best friend Aeschere, she chooses her target well, causing the king to sink into despair. Hrothgar is in danger of becoming a dragon king, moaning, “Rest, what is rest, sorrow has returned.”

Although Hrothgar (with the help of Beowulf) snaps out of it, we encounter numerous kings in the poem who do not. Throughout the poem, there are instances of kings and warriors in the grip of dragon depression, withdrawing into mental caves and abandoning all worldly responsibilities.

One king mentioned in the poem, Hrethel, retreats to his bed and never gets up again after losing his eldest son. There is the “last veteran,” who retreats into a funeral barrow, which becomes a dragon’s lair. Beowulf himself (as I interpret the final battle) is in danger of becoming a dragon king: late in his life, after a long and successful reign, he looks back and sees nothing but one meaningless death after another. In a struggle with his internal dragon, the question becomes whether he will lose to the monster or emerge a king.

In 2008, many on the right became increasingly open to the idea of violence. America saw an explosion of gun sales, along with an unprecedented rise in hate crimes and politically motivated mass shootings. And of course there was January 6.

As I look at Democratic responses to Kamala Harris’s defeat, I see some who are drawn to a Grendel’s Mother response and want to transfer their own hurt to one of their own whom they consider responsible: Harris herself, Joe Biden, Democratic officials, wokism, neoliberalism, etc. As many have noted, such critics often have their pre-set narratives, blaming those who didn’t take their advice in the election.

Note, however, that there’s far less talk of actual violence—and less condoning of actual violence—from angry Democrats, in part because the party comes down harder on hate speech within its ranks than does the GOP. Democrats don’t flirt with the left equivalents of White supremacists, the Proud Boys, the KKK, and modern-day Nazis, nor do they post family Christmas photos of everyone wielding an AK-47. For the most part, Kamala Harris supporters are more likely to suffer from dragon depression than fantasies of troll violence.

In my book I note what it takes for Beowulf to kill the dragon. Notably he can’t do it alone but requires the help of his nephew to defeat the beast. Suffering alone is itself a dragon trait: we think that we can protect ourselves from hurt by pulling into our caves and developing thick, scaly defenses. In reality, these are just cover for raging inner fire and a poison that runs in our veins.

So while our impulse may be to retreat into our disappointment, a healthier response is to find a community and engage in positive action. When we do, as nephew Wiglaf discovers, a cave of wonders opens up.

[Wiglaf] saw beyond the seat
a treasure-trove of astonishing richness, 
wall-hangings that were a wonder to behold,
glittering gold spread across the ground, 
the old dawn-scorching serpent’s den
packed with goblets and vessels from the past…

And he saw too a standard, entirely of gold,
hanging high over the hoard,
a masterpiece of filigree; it glowed with light 
so he could make out the ground at his feet
and inspect the valuables.

Although Kamala Harris’s campaign came up short, it revealed that millions of Americans—close to half of those who voted–are hungry to celebrate freedom and joy. Reliving those moments and building on them is better than snarling bitterly in a dark and lonely place.

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Eliot’s Hollow Men and Trump’s Enablers

By Robin Bates | Published: December 2, 2024

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Tuesday

With Donald Trump’s nomination of sycophant Kash Patel to head the FBI—arguably his scariest pick given Patel threats against Trump’s perceived enemies–the incoming president continues with his plans to  “destroy the institutions of the democratic American state and replace those institutions with an authoritarian government whose officials are all loyal to Trump” (Heather Cox Richardson). Since Republicans hold the Senate, which is responsible for confirming presidential picks, we will soon get a good sense of whether the GOP caucus is indeed made up entirely of hollow men (and women).

I thought of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” after reading a blog essay by authoritarianism expert Ruth ben-Ghiat. The New York University history professor points out that authoritarians like Trump hollow out institutions by “voiding them of any values and professionalism beyond loyalty to the leader.” In the process, they also hollow out their followers:

Strongmen need to bring everyone around them down to their level of corruption and depravity. To show their loyalty, elites compete to be the most sycophant and self-abasing, doing anything the leader asks, no matter how criminal, and going along with the inevitable escalations of violence and corruption. 

By pledging support to a brutal demagogue, ben-Ghiat continues, “you are sooner or later required to betray not only your compatriots, but also yourself.”

The key event in Trump’s rise, ben-Ghiat believes, is the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which our current day fascists regard as “the foundational moment of the New Era of Trumpism.” By refusing to acknowledge what all the world witnessed on that day, Trump supporters have twisted themselves into elaborate contortions. “If authoritarian history is any guideline,” ben-Ghiat writes, “Jan. 6 could become a holiday one day.”

With that in mind, let’s turn to Eliot’s poem. Its description of the hollow men could apply to those spineless Republicans who, while fully aware of Trump’s depravity, attempt to walk quietly so as not to draw his attention:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion…

Eliot proceeds to draw a contrast between these people and “lost violent souls” such as Guy Fawkes and Heart of Darkness character Kurtz (the two figures mentioned in the poem’s epigraphs). The Catholic insurgent Fawkes attempted to blow up Parliament in a 1605 plot while Kurtz goes rogue in the Congo, sloughing off the restraints of civilization as he engages in various unnamed acts of barbarism. As bad as these two men are, Eliot finds the hollow men even worse. At least Fawkes and Kurtz take bold action.

If we see Trump as one of the lost violent ones—he has certainly shown himself capable of violence, calling for protesters to be shot in the legs and siccing his supporters on the Capitol–then to judge him as less contemptible than spineless GOP legislators raises an interesting ethical question: Who is worse, the tyrant or those who enable the tyrant?

In rationalizing Trump’s actions, GOP legislators behave like Eliot’s scarecrow, donning multiple disguises and “behaving as the wind behaves”:

Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves

Eliot compares the hollow men to the souls in Dante’s limbo who, having lived lives of neither infamy nor praise, are condemned to spend eternity on the banks of death’s river without ever crossing over. Among them are the angels who, in the celestial battle between Satan and God, chose to sit it out. “This blind life of theirs is so debased,” Virgil tells Dante, “they envious are of every other fate.”

Eliot says that the hollow men cannot meet the eyes of “those who have crossed/ With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom.” I wonder if those who have enabled Trump can meet the eyes of those who courageously stood up to him, principled Republicans such as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. For their part, those with principles think of the sell-outs—if they think of them at all—as “the hollow men, the stuffed men.”

What eats away at the hollow men is the memory of a time when they believed in constitutional democracy. Now, they catch only glimpses of the great American experiment that was once at the foundation of their political identity:

Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

These reminders of former beliefs are so painful that they want to avoid proximity with the righteous. “Let me be no nearer/In death’s dream kingdom,” Eliot imagines them saying, and then,

No nearer-

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom.

Presumably these legislators once entered Congress with a vision of making the world a better place. Now, however, they feel as though they are in a sterile desert worshipping stone images (which is not a bad description of Trump worship):

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this in Paradise, the hollow men wonder—which in our framework is like asking, “Is this the high-minded life of service they once dreamed of?” There was a time when they trembled with tenderness at the thought. Now they kiss Trump’s ring:

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

The new reality of Trump’s party is stark and grim:

In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

There is one last hope for hollow men, Eliot then says: there is still a chance to ascend to the “multifoliate rose” of Dante’s Paradise. I think of those Republicans who, after years of kowtowing to Trump, finally tore themselves away. The eyes that “reappear” in Eliot’s next verse are those who have seen the light:

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

Unfortunately, Eliot’s hollow men appear unable to respond to that hope, engaging instead in sterile and juvenile activities:

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

What then follows in the poem is a series of steps that people could take were it not for “the shadow.” This shadow is not Donald Trump because that would remove agency and responsibility from the hollow men. The shadow is the inner block, the fear or the cynicism, that keeps them from living up to their potential. They are fully capable of doing what is right but choose not to.

The steps they could take, always aborted by the shadow, are

–having an idea and making it happen (“the idea and the reality”);
–having a desire and fulfilling that desire (“the motion and the act”);
–conceiving of an idea and bringing it forth into the world (“the conception and the creation”);
–having a feeling and acting upon it (“the emotion and the response”);
–having sexual desire and proceeding to orgasm (“the desire and the spasm”);
–having power and using that power to create something (“the potency and the existence”);
–having an ideal but abandoning it because they fear disappointment (“the essence and the descent”).

At this point in the poem, Eliot quotes a line from the Lord’s Prayer—”for thine is the kingdom”—which is a longing to bring God’s kingdom of love, peace, justice, and mercy to earth. But the hollow men are so, well, hollow that they can barely get the phrase out, much less the entire prayer. They can also barely speak the line, “For life is long,” an acknowledgement that there’s still plenty of time to get things right. By the end, they can barely articulate fragments:

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

And the result for America? A transformation of our multicultural, constitutional democracy into a fascist regime. It happens, not in an apocalyptic blaze, but through one small surrender after another. Or as Eliot puts it,

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The good news is that the world hasn’t ended yet. For all of Eliot’s pessimism, principles that have lain dormant may yet be activated. The Senate chose not to make Trump toady Rick Scott their leader, and it deep-sixed the nomination of pedophile Matt Gaetz for Attorney General. Meanwhile, Trump resistance will still show up as the voices in the wind’s singing. The “perpetual star” of our democracy has not altogether faded.

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