For those unsettled by the Biden administration’s stumbles in Afghanistan, it worth recalling that all administrations make mistakes. The question is how well they respond to those mistakes and how much they learn from them. Franklin D. Roosevelt alluded to Dante when dealing with his own stumbles.
The occasion was the president receiving his party’s go-ahead to run for a second term of office. Roosevelt’s first four years had not been entirely smooth sailing: although unemployment had dropped from its 1932 high, when a fourth of its citizens were unemployed, the economy was still not back on track. Roosevelt acknowledged this in his acceptance speech but then gave voters another way to think about things:
Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.
Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Then, in lines which you’ve probably heard, he invoked a spirit of civic responsibility
There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
In Dante’s Inferno, the deepest levels of hell are reserved for those who cold-bloodedly betray their friends. A three-headed Satan sits encased in ice in the fourth ring of the ninth circle, and in each of his mouths he holds the lowest of the low: Judas, who of course betrayed Jesus, and Cassius and Brutus, who betrayed Julius Caesar.
By contrast, there are many souls in Purgatory who, although they did bad things while alive, had enough warm love within them to escape Inferno. While politicians are seldom saints bound directly for Paradiso, there are many who take seriously the difficulties of their constituents and do what they can to ameliorate their suffering.
I saw a liberal commentator asked the other day why he is harder on Trump’s administration than on Biden’s. The reason, he said, is because in Biden he sees someone who is doing his best for the people he serves. Like Roosevelt, he may make mistakes, but he is guided by a spirit of charity. Trump, by contrast, didn’t give a damn about the American public, caring only for himself. “Frozen in the ice of his own indifference” is a good description.
The difference between the empathetic and the self-absorbed is the difference between Purgatory and Inferno.
In W. P. Kinsella’s baseball novel The Iowa Confederacy (Kinsella also wrote Shoeless Joe, upon which Field of Dreams is based), an Iowa amateur baseball teams battles the 1908 Chicago Cubs in a nightmarish 2000-inning exhibition game. Each time a run in scored in the endless extra innings, the other team somehow manages to score a tying run and things continue on. I think there’s a Native American curse involved somehow, but since I read the novel decades ago, I can’t remember for sure. In any event, the Cubs have to put off their regular season since ball players are honor bound not to end a game in a tie. Eventually the teams are pelted by a driving rain, and although they attempt to play through it, everything ends when the entire town is washed away.
I’ve been thinking of Kinsella’s book as I watch America’s “endless war” with the Taliban come to an end. It has had a similarly nightmarish feel to it, although in this case there’s an actual winner. But the book does have one loser, a witness who is wafted back in time to see the game and who passes up a chance at a fulfilling love relationship because he wants to know the game’s outcome. As a result, by the book’s conclusion, he is living an empty, lonely life. Think of him as the presidents—Bush and Obama especially—who could have ended the conflict earlier but did not and who now will be held accountable by history for the prolongation.
Another work that has crossed my mind, although in a reverse way, is A. E. Housman’s superb poem “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries”:
These, in the days when heaven was falling, The hour when earth’s foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and the earth’s foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.
In the case of the Afghan War, it’s not clear who the mercenaries are. America’s professional army? The Afghans who were persuaded to fight for an Afghanistan that few of them really believed in, given that the country is more a collection of tribes than a nation (as we learned when many lay down their arms the moment America said it was leaving). Whoever the war’s mercenaries were, for 20 years they held the sky suspended and preserved the foundations of a fictional country. Girls became educated and everyone experienced unprecedented freedoms. The fighters, meanwhile, took their wages and many are dead
Unfortunately, when they stopped fighting, the heavens fell, the foundations fled, and many feel abandoned by God. Disaster has descended like Kinsella’s flood, and Afghanistan has once again earned its appellation “graveyard of empires.”
Adriaen van Utrecht, Vanitas – Still Life with Bouquet and Skull.
Spiritual Sunday
I would never think of associating Henry David Thoreau with George Hebert, but I’ve come across some poems written very much in Herbert’s spirit in Harold Bloom’s American Religious Poems. Herbert grapples with doubt in many of his poems (for instance, “Denial”), and “Sic Vita” (such is life) conveys its own sense of human frailty. Thoreau dwells upon a bouquet of hastily plucked flowers that will wither quickly because they have been separated from their creator.
I did some research into the poem and learned that Branson Alcott, father of Louis Mae, read the poem at Thoreau’s funeral. In one way, this seems appropriate: while we may droop here on earth, the poet is reassured that “I was not plucked for nought” but was brought by a “kind hand” to a “strange place.”
I find the poem to be more ambiguous than that, however. First of all, it ends on a down note (“while I droop here), to be ambiguous. When Thoreau says that God will replenish the stock with “more fruits and fairer flowers,” is he saying that he will return to the original garden? Or just that God will keep sending “more fruits and fairer flowers” to perish here, like a callous general sending his men into cannon fire? The reference to God as a “kind hand” argues against this, but still I wonder.
Or is Thoreau hinting at the vegetation cycle of life here, which can differ from Christianity’s eschatological vision that we are headed toward an end point? As in, “we may be part of the stock that is thinned, but God/nature will keep sending replacements.” This view is reassuring if one sees oneself as part of “the perfect whole” (as Thoreau’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson does in “Each and All”), but less so if one focuses on oneself as an individual, as Thoreau seems to do in the last line.
In puzzling over this ambiguity, I think of how Thoreau’s vision contrasts with a Henry Vaughan poem that “Sic Vita” also reminds me of. Talking of being placed in “life’s vase,” and therefore having a brief time to live, Thoreau writes of being set in glass while still alive. Vaughan mentions a different kind of glass–glass to help us see better–in the concluding stanza of “They Are All Gone into the World of Light”:
Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill My perspective still as they pass, Or else remove me hence unto that hill, Where I shall need no glass.
Vaughan seems confident that he will see God face to face, like those before him who have gone before him, and his poem ends on a high note. Thoreau’s glass, however, separates him from that which replenishes life rather than giving him a sense, however vague, of divinity. He’s not climbing a final hill but drooping.
Anyway, Thoreau’s struggle for meaning is striking with its organizing metaphor of plucked flowers. Let me know what you think.
Sic Vita
By Henry David Thoreau
(“It is but thin soil where we stand; I have felt my roots in a richer ere this. I have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself”
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers)
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.
A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I’m fixed.
A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.
And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.
Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they’re rife.
But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life’s vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.
That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.
Charles Francois Jalabert, Oedipus and Antigone or The Plague of Thebes
Friday
The end of American engagement in Afghanistan has an element of Greek tragedy to it. The plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides often deal with the tension between inevitability and human choice. Just as Oedipus is going to suffer his fate regardless of what he does, it appears that the Taliban was always going to triumph in Afghanistan, regardless of what the allied forces did.
To be sure, there are points in Oedipus’s journey where he could have acted otherwise: he could have refrained from killing a man in what may be the earliest recorded case of murderous road rage (he doesn’t realize the man is his biological father). America could have refrained from attacking Afghanistan in the first place, using less dramatic measures to retaliate for 9-11. Or it could have made its point by overthrowing the Taliban government for having supported Abu Bin Laden and then withdrawn. Instead, it thought it could set up some form of democratic rule.
Likewise, if Oedipus, in his good-intentioned pride, hadn’t assumed there was something he could do about the plague, then he would never have learned about his parentage. To be sure, the plague would have continued on, given that his violations of patricide and incest taboos have caused it, but inaction would have kept the his sins hidden. It is because he believes he can handle the problem besetting his city—just as Americans thought that they could win the “war on terror” while saving Afghans from Sharia law to boot—that he gets into trouble..
Athenian audiences, knowing the story in advance, watched as Oedipus beats helplessly against a fate that is inevitable. If the play tied them into emotional knots, leading to Aristotle’s famous catharsis, it’s because of the intolerable contradiction: they simultaneously believed that something could have been done and that nothing could have been done.
So it is with our current case. Three presidents allowed an unwinnable war and an unrealizable project to go on and on, like the Theban plague, because they didn’t want to be blamed for exposing America’s helplessness, as Biden is being blamed. It certainly may be true that Biden could have handled the withdrawal better—we can debate about that—but I suspect that his critics’ major grievance is that he’s exposing them. If the foreign policy establishment doesn’t scapegoat the president, it will have to admit it screwed up royally, that the project was a fool’s errand from the get-go. Teiresias’s words to Oedipus apply equally well to them: “You have your eyesight, and you do not see.”
It’s traumatic for liberals as well. We thought that a trillion dollars and the world’s most powerful military could save women and girls from fundamentalist patriarchy and are now paying emotionally for our arrogance.
Further thought: The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin recently pointed to how Americans want to have reality both ways:
It is also exasperating that a new Reuters-Ipsos poll shows 61 percent of Americans want a total withdrawal from Afghanistan, but 50 percent want to send troops back in to fight the Taliban. (Even worse, 68 percent say it was going to end badly no matter when we pulled out, but 51 percent wanted to leave troops there for another year.) Logic and consistency are not voters’ strong suits.
Incidentally, I see that John Stoehr of the Editorial Page makes a similar point to my own. “Biden’s ‘mistake’ wasn’t about Afghans,” he writes. “It was about ‘allowing’ Americans to see the profound failure of America’s elites.”
As Haiti’s horrifying death count continues to rise from its latest earthquake, I return to a post I wrote eleven years ago following the island’s last big earthquake. I rerun it today with no changes other than the dates. As the old grandmother says in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, “It seems like I already heard these stories before…only thing is, the names sound different.” The original essay was entitled, “Responding to Unspeakable Horror.”
Reprinted from January 14, 2010.
No work of literature can begin to address the trauma that Haitians are currently experiencing in the wake of their devastating earthquake. But then, literature can never do justice to human tragedy. In the face of such inexpressible suffering, the poet gropes around in the dark, occasionally making utterances that some, in their agony, find consoling.
The French philosophe Voltaire captures our feelings of meaninglessness in his satire Candide, which was in part a response to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, tsunami, and resulting fires that leveled the city.
Before the earthquake, Voltaire had been inspired by the discoveries of science (especially Newton’s) and by the notion that the universe was run by a benign deity. In this deistic vision, God was seen as having given us Reason so that we could penetrate the mysteries of life and perceive a higher order working its way through apparent chaos.
Voltaire’s views were shaken by the earthquake. He would go on to mock his former position through the character of Pangloss, who insists, despite a series of catastrophic events, that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Or as Alexander Pope expresses it in Essay on Man, “whatever is, is right.”
Instead of viewing this optimism as a wisdom that sees beyond tragedy, Voltaire exposes it as a blinkered dogmatism and, perhaps, a form of psychological denial.
I do not believe we can find higher meaning in the Haitian earthquake, even though we may go searching for it. It confronts us as an auto wreck confronts Karl Shapiro in his poem by that name:
But this invites the occult mind, Cancels our physics with a sneer, And spatters all we knew of denouement Across the expedient and wicked stones.
Confronted with the horror, Shapiro is saying, the superstitious mind reaches for occult explanation. That’s because rational or scientific explanation seems absurd. In fact the mind, confronted with the final unraveling, arrives at the conclusion that life is meaningless. We cannot make sense of what has happened. All lies splattered; the stones, pure materiality, have triumphed. In Haiti these stones lie piled above the dead and dying.
But if we cannot find higher meaning in the earthquake, if we cannot understand why people suffer, we can at least assert meaning by reaching out to them. Those gestures of aid are God in the world. We must each do what we can to help.
Friend and reader Valerie Hotchkiss has alerted me to a new book that is very much in the spirit of this blog. Times Literary Supplement recently reviewedLiterature and Transformation, by one Thor Magnus Tangerås, which does a deep dive into the healing powers of literature. Apparently Anthem Press will be coming out with a new series on “Bibliotherapy and Well-Being.”
Reviewer Joshua Pugh says that bibliotherapy is “having a moment,” what with National Health Service’s “books on prescription” and “the novelist Ann Cleeves’s funding of ‘reading coaches’ in the northeast of England.” Pugh says that traditional literary scholarship, by contrast, is suffering through an identity crisis:
Can books change our lives? Thor Magnus Tangerås tackles this momentous question in Literature and Transformation, the first volume in Anthem Press’s new series on “Bibliotherapy and Well-Being”. The term “bibliotherapy” was coined in 1916, but the basic idea is almost as old as reading itself. The earliest known library, belonging to Pharaoh Ramses II, is said to have borne the inscription, “the house of healing for the soul”. Now there is a burgeoning field of research supporting the view that reading can heal us, and projects putting it into practice. From NHS “books on prescription” schemes to the novelist Ann Cleeves’s funding of “reading coaches” in the northeast of England, bibliotherapy is having a moment:
Many academics, myself included, agree with Tangerås that there is “something missing from, or taken for granted in” our way of reading: eager for scholarly rigour, we’ve said too little about our feelings…. The raw experience of reading – intuitive emotional reaction – is thought to belong instead to journalism.
Given that I’m in the final stages of writing a book that makes a version of this same point, I can only applaud. I’m also struck, given that I’ve just finished writing a chapter on John Stuart Mill, that literary scholarship’s crisis sounds a bit like one the utilitarian philosopher went through. He was so caught up in analysis that he lost touch with his emotions and needed the poetry of William Wordsworth to reconnect. Pugh writes,
Many academics, myself included, agree with Tangerås that there is “something missing from, or taken for granted in” our way of reading: eager for scholarly rigour, we’ve said too little about our feelings…The raw experience of reading – intuitive emotional reaction – is thought to belong instead to journalism.
Pugh says Tangerås differs from other academics because he lets readers “speak for themselves, sharing their thoughts about how books have moved them.” (I note in passing that I’ve been doing this myself for over 30 years, but not having written about it, the world doesn’t know.) The reviewer gives us a taste of what emerges:
First we meet Veronica, whose discovery of Lady Chatterley’s Lover encouraged her to break free of a failing relationship. Next up is Nina, whose rereading of her childhood favourite, Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka, inspired her to pursue her vocation and become a musician. Life-changing reading, Nina reminds us, can span a lifetime; circling back to a book decades later can be as powerful as a first encounter. Then there is Esther, for whom the Norwegian poet Inger Hagerup’s “Episode” – written while Hagerup and her husband were having difficulties – triggered new insights into her parents’ “terrible marriage”. Jane, meanwhile, was deeply moved by Doris Lessing’s Shikasta, a book which shook “the very basis of everything I thought I was”, imbuing her life with a new sense of “purpose”. Finally, for Sue, two key lines from Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Buried Life” – “But hardly have we, for one little hour, / Been on our own line, have we been ourselves” – sparked newfound direction after a suicidal depression. Of these writers, Arnold and Lawrence are firmly ensconced in the English canon (itself, after all, partly Arnold’s invention), and their books have long been viewed as life-affirming and life-improving. But canons can feel like top-down prescriptions, imposed by those who know better than us which books are “good” for us. Tangerås instead paints a bottom-up picture of literary value – one in which prestige matters less than personal experience.
Then, because Tangerås is a trying to formulate a “new and precise tool for exploring the elusive experience of reading,” he comes up with special terms:
Ultimately, he distils from his interviews a new theory of “reading by heart” – a mode of reading which is “heartfelt”, or deeply internalized, and which inspires transformative “changes of heart”. His technical term for it is lexithymia, a play on a concept from psychology: where alexithymia denotes a difficulty in identifying or describing emotions, lexithymia, Tangerås claims, is a contrasting “capacity to engage the heart in contemplation”.
Both reviewer and author are careful to distance themselves from a utilitarian agenda where literature is chiefly valuable because it is therapeutically or socially useful. They’re worried that literature will be reduced to something instrumental:
Self-help, at its least helpful, is simplistically instrumental: you diagnose a problem, and then buy a book to provide a solution. The life-altering moments captured in Literature and Transformation are not about means-end efficiency. Nor are they easily assimilable to the agendas of governments or university officials who push for proof of literature’s “usefulness”. What this book touches on is more authentic, and even, as its author unabashedly states, “spiritual”. It’s about what happens when two minds meet – which is, after all, the essence of both reading and psychotherapy. Whether on the page or the couch, such encounters can change us in ways we never imagined.
If this sounds as though Pugh and Tangerås are trying to have it both ways—helpful but not bureaucratically or self-helpy helpful, therapeutic but not narrowly therapeutic—I can report from my own research that literary theorists have been dancing around the issue of usefulness since the time of Plato, who wanted only useful poetry in his Republic. And then there was the Roman poet Horace, who wanted poetry to simultaneously instruct and delight. And Sir Philip Sidney, who essentially said that a spoonful of cherry-flavored poetry helps moral instruction go down. And Percy Shelley, who said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. And Matthew Arnold, who saw requiring that everyone read poetry would usher in a new Renaissance. And Brecht, who saw literature as a hammer to shape reality. And on and on.
Rather than disavowing usefulness, I find it more useful to see (with Horace and the others) instruction and delight caught up in a dynamic tension. The best literature has always been both without surrendering to either.
One other thing I get from the review: this may be the right time for my own book.
I share today a good article about the value of literature in a world where far too many people agree to believe in preposterous fabrications. Author Brian Castleberry, writing for Literary Hub, talks about the prevalence in America of cognitive dissonance, which he defines as
our ability to believe in two contradictory ideas at once and the struggle this creates, namely, the tension as we try to form perceptions to fit what we want to believe about the world and ourselves, even when we rationally know we’re wrong.
Trumpism, Castleberry says, has been engaging in cognitive dissonance on steroids. Or as Castleberry puts it,
The Trump years were like a big-budget theatrical production of cognitive dissonance, mainly because many of us were only in the audience, watching the process work on nearly half the country, powerless to stop it. At each stage of his nomination, election, and presidency, we were asked to believe increasingly impossible things in order not to see what was right before our eyes. I say “we,” but again, not really all of us—one of the most significant changes in these past years is that a major political party stopped talking to Americans in general, and instead only talked to their Americans, wrapping those self-selected folks in patriotism for going along with the demanding wackiness of the storyline. From the beginning, in order not to face consequences for their lack of preparation, their criminal and near-criminal behavior, their open flirtation (if not outright use) of a foreign power’s meddling in the election, a conspiracy had to be born. The “deep state” gave way to “Obama spying” and eventually to straight-up “Dems are blood-sucking child molesters.”
There’s a storytelling dimension to what is going on, which as a fictional author Castleberry recognizes and which he uses his own storytelling to examine:
I’ve grown more aware of how people are predominately shaped by narratives and often by misconceptions, and that we almost always act out of a sense that we’re doing the right thing, no matter how vile. Analyzing the fault lines between what a character thinks they’re doing and the real effect they’re having on others has become central to my process.
And here’s where fiction can come to our rescue:
Fiction has the power to help us dismantle the garbage ideas that maintain our society’s cognitive dissonance. Good fiction (of whatever genre) shows us something about being human, how we connect to one another, how we fit in history, and how we wrestle with the forces around us. It has the ability to strengthen reality, to reaffirm what we actually see in front of us, to foster empathy. It doesn’t answer questions so much as it leaves one asking more questions. Rather than shutting down thinking, it demands that we participate in both thinking and creating.
Castleberry mentions some of the contemporary authors he believes are writing such fiction:
When I consider debut books I’ve admired from this last disastrous year, by writers like Megha Majumdar, Asako Serizawa, Kelli Jo Ford, Michael Zapata, and Dantiel W. Moniz (or forthcoming collections from Farah Ali and Ye Chun), I’m heartened by how writers of vastly different aesthetic approaches can be working on the same wide-ranging project. These are writers interested in the dynamics of power, trauma, and grace. They see how history weaves through our present. And they dig past our surface-level thinking to seek what fiction is made to discover: truth.
Castleberry’s article brings to mind a Salman Rushdie article I blogged on three years ago. Also thinking of Trump, Rushdie wrote that great fiction helps us maintain our bearings against an onslaught of lies:
[A]s far as writers are concerned, we need to rebuild our readers’ belief in argument from factual evidence, and to do what fiction has always been good at doing—to construct, between the writer and the reader, an understanding about what is real. I don’t mean to reconstruct the narrow, exclusive consensus of the nineteenth century. I like the broader, more disputatious view of society to be found in modern literature. But when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most.
Perhaps a silver lining of our times is that people will turn to literature as they realize how much they need to be grounded in what is real. Truth is the pearl that rich men cannot buy, William Cowper asserts in The Task. We need it at times like these.
In celebration of a school year that is beginning or has begun, hopefully with the health of the students prioritized, here’s a poem by Scottish poet and former British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. Unlike many school poems (check out my post on this one by William Blake), “In Mrs. Tilscher’s Class” is overwhelmingly positive. One dreams of school being like this.
Maybe I should qualify that slightly as there are slight disturbances in the otherwise calm surface of the school. I’m not sure exactly why Duffy mentions Brady and Hindley, given that they were two mass murderers who sexually assaulted and killed five kids from 10-17 years of age around Manchester in the 1960s. Maybe the story floats around, faded but still present, like the smudge left by someone trying to erase a mistake.
And then there are the frogs propagating and your parents having sex, which becomes even more frightening and disgusting because Mrs. Tilscher, who will talk about everything else, won’t talk about this. Withheld knowledge takes on a force of its own, filling the air with electricity, and one feels oppressed and out of sorts under the “heavy, sexy sky.” No wonder the child is “impatient to be grown.” Children long for knowledge, which they hope will banish their fears.
Meanwhile, a thunderstorm is prepared to unleash upon them the full force of adulthood. Better to dream of traveling up the Nile and visiting exotic foreign lands:
You could travel up the Blue Nile with your finger, tracing the route while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery. Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswân. That for an hour, then a skittle of milk and the chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust. A window opened with a long pole. The laugh of a bell swung by a running child.
This was better than home. Enthralling books. The classroom glowed like a sweet shop. Sugar paper. Colored shapes. Brady and Hindley faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake. Mrs Tilscher loved you. Some mornings, you found she’d left a good gold star by your name. The scent of a pencil slowly, carefully, shaved. A xylophone’s nonsense heard from another form.
Over the Easter term, the inky tadpoles changed from commas into exclamation marks. Three frogs hopped in the playground, freed by a dunce, followed by a line of kids, jumping and croaking away from the lunch queue. A rough boy told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared at your parents, appalled, when you got back home.
That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity. A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot, fractious under the heavy, sexy sky. You asked her how you were born and Mrs Tilscher smiled, then turned away. Reports were handed out. You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown, as the sky split open into a thunderstorm.
Duffy may be alluding to Thomas Grey’s “Ode to a Distant Prospect of Eton College” in that last image. There the poet, who is sitting on a hill watching students play, can see what they cannot: an approaching thunderstorm. Before it strikes, they are carefree and gay:
Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed, Less pleasing when possest; The tear forgot as soon as shed, The sunshine of the breast: Theirs buxom health of rosy hue, Wild wit, invention ever-new, And lively cheer of vigour born; The thoughtless day, the easy night, The spirits pure, the slumbers light, That fly th’ approach of morn.
This, however, is followed by one of the grimmest stanzas in English literature:
Alas, regardless of their doom, The little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come, Nor care beyond to-day: Yet see how all around ’em wait The ministers of human fate, And black Misfortune’s baleful train! Ah, show them where in ambush stand To seize their prey the murth’rous band! Ah, tell them they are men!
I remember, in first grade, singing “School days, school days, dear old golden rule days.” The nostalgia in the song confused me then and now I understand why. Like “In Mrs. Tilscher’s Class,” it was written by adults remembering back.
Today being the Feast of the Virgin, the anniversary of Mary being assumed into heaven (so tradition has it), I share this Carl Phillips poem. In it we see Mary thinking back to the moment many years before when was visited by the angel Gabriel.
Or that’s what she believes happened. Others are skeptical. After all, isn’t the reality we know the only reality there is? When Mary awakes, she acknowledges that “morning was what it had always been.” She may feel “marooned in the air,” but the world around her slowly comes back into focus, nicking the blooms of suggestion.
How is one to believe in mystery when everyday items appear as they have always appeared (“every seam or pocket slowly retrieved”). Likewise, what she hears is what she has always heard, “the clubbed foot of routine, no voices, no clatter of dreams.” Her father delivers a kind of verdict as he spits into the yard. By his and everyone else’s standards, her vision is an unseemly desire to touch godhead.
Yet her being “no mystic” adds credence to the vision. Despite everything, “I saw what I saw.”
Visitation by Carl Phillips
When it was over, they told me that the creak of wings folding was only the bed, that shutters
do not clap of themselves. Morning was what it had always been, any woman marooned in the air, the nicked blooms of suggestion, in the lamp, in the lemonwood stool, every seam or pocket slowly retrieved,
were the usual ones, what everyone knows. Father spat into the unswept yard below, as if it too were an unseemly desire,
and passed through the door.
I am no mystic. I know nothing rises that doesn’t know how to already. In my ears, only the clubbed foot of routine, no voices, no clatter of dreams: but I saw what I saw.
