When All Around Doubt the Mystery

By Robin Bates | Published: August 14, 2021

Spiritual Sunday

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.

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Worshipping False Covid Idols

By Robin Bates | Published: August 13, 2021

Friday

As I watch the many different reasons people give for not taking protective measures against Covid, I am reminded of Danish responses to Grendel’s attacks in Beowulf. Although the poet, like the medical community, has a proven response, the people instead turn to false solutions, twisting themselves into knots in the process.

To be sure, the poet’s response would not pass muster with Covid-19. “Approach the Lord and find friendship in the Father’s embrace,” he advises. In our case, we have several miraculous vaccines, not to mention an understanding of the benefits of masking, social distancing, proper ventilation, and the like. Yet despite all that, various people set themselves up as modern versions of King Hrothgar’s counsellors, who worship at pagan shrines, vow offers to idols, and pray to killer-of-souls Satan to come to “come to their aid and save the people.”

Our own version of people worshipping false idols to deal with Covid have included: wishing it would just go away; seeing it as a hoax or no worse than the flu; recommending bleach and hydroxychloroquine; counting on the illness to affect just blue state populations, recommending we do nothing other than accept 3 million deaths and develop herd immunity that way (Sen. Ron Johnson’s solution); and imagining that letting individuals decide whether or not they should wear masks or get vaccinated will somehow address the situation by itself. A number of Republican governors seem to be operating on the principle, “What would Trump do?” And this partial list doesn’t begin to go into all the elaborate conspiracy theories.

As the poet recognizes, people do crazy things and think crazy things when disaster strikes. Or in his words, “That was their way, their heathenish hope”:

These were hard times, heart-breaking
for the prince of the Shieldings; powerful counsellors,
the highest in the land, would lend advice,
plotting how best the bold defenders
might resist and beat off sudden attacks.
Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed
offerings to idols, swore oaths
that the killer of souls might come to their aid
and save the people. That was their way,
their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts
they remembered hell. The Almighty Judge
of good deeds and bad, the Lord God,
Head of the Heavens and High King of the World,
was unknown to them. Oh, cursed is he
who in time of trouble has to thrust his soul
in the fire’s embrace, forfeiting help;
he has nowhere to turn. But blessed is he
who after death can approach the Lord
and find friendship in the Father’s embrace.

When I suggested last week that a strong and forceful Beowulfian response may be the way to go—i.e., vaccine mandates—I received several negative responses, none of which offered a credible solution. One reader told me that Covid was “this joke of the flu,” another that the vaccine was a government-Big Pharma plot and was worse than having no vaccine at all–meaning, I guess, that we should go Ron Johnson’s natural herd immunity route, even though the price is millions of deaths. One reader, as an anti-vaccine argument, sent me a list of notable people attacking various vaccines, including the polio vaccine.

I’m not one to worship science, having a sense of both its strengths and its blind spots. But I trust that Dr. Fauci and his colleagues are professionals acting in good faith. In this time of trouble, they are not thrusting their souls in hellfire’s embrace, forfeiting help, but doing the best they can with the knowledge available to them. So far, the vaccines appear to be doing their job. Unfortunately, the unvaccinated continue to threaten our children and, when they themselves get sick, to swamp our hospitals.

In other words, Grendel continues to raid the great hall.

Further thought: Regarding those counting on God rather than vaccines and other health measures to save them, I think of the joke about the man stranded on his roof as the flood levels rise. He turns down help from a rowboat, a motorboat and a helicopter, each time saying that the Lord will provide. He asks God about this after he drowns, to which God replies, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter.” In this case, we’ve been sent life-saving vaccines.

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Tucker Carlson’s Insidious Influence

By Robin Bates | Published: August 11, 2021
Thoden under the spell of Grima Wormtongue

Thursday

When I was a Fulbright scholar in Slovenia in 1994-95, the liberal socialist party had a goal: Sweden by the year 2000. It was an unrealistic goal, but at least it was nobler and healthier than that of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson: he wants America to become Hungary.

In other words, he wants the democracy that for so long has inspired people around the world to become an authoritarian Christian nation that rigs elections, suppresses dissent, and hates diversity and immigrants.

But why settle for Hungary when you could aspire to be Mordor? That’s the challenge thrown out to Carlson by Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri.

Speaking in the persona of Carlson, Petri writes,

I’ve found a place I like even more. My next travel will take me to a land I find infinitely more congenial and consider in even better keeping with the new tendencies of the conservative movement.

I am honored to announce I will be speaking next week at the Mordor Summit in Barad-dur at the invitation of Dark Lord Sauron! This is the future of conservatism, and I’m excited to throw open the Overton Window and let in the nazguls.

The Overton Window is a political science term for the range of political possibilities that politicians feel comfortable espousing. It was once considered extreme to entertain thoughts of overrunning the Capitol. Now Carlson and others are calling the insurrectionists “patriots.”

But even this doesn’t open the window far enough, according to Petri’s Carlson:

We, as I’m always telling my millions-strong television audience, we don’t have real freedom here (whoever wins the election gets to be president, even if I don’t like them), and I often wish we were more like Mordor. I wish that instead of getting to yell at me and try to shame away my advertisers when I said objectionable things, dissidents would simply be trampled underfoot by an oliphaunt. We can’t waste another minute: We have got to replace all our institutions with orcs. The floating eye on the back of the dollar bill can stay.

And further on:

I liked a lot about what was going on in Hungary, but it absolutely pales in contrast to Mordor. Everyone has been so welcoming. The Witch-king of Angmar and I are going to brunch Monday, and then we’re going to appear on a panel together.This is my new spiritual home, and the more I learn about it, the more I find myself unable to bear the noisome sunlight of the United States. Where are our hosts of orcs, all roaring with vitriol for those beyond their borders? Where is our enormous fortress of dark magic surveilling all the subjects of the land? I want to live in a place that seethes with hatred of outsiders at all times and is willing to trade almost any amount of freedom in exchange for that privilege. Also, I love the rivers of molten rock. Very scenic!

Petri doesn’t mention the character that Carlson most resembles, which is Wormtongue. A Saruman sycophant, Wormtongue uses his nearness to power (Fox News in Carlson’s case) to lord it over others. Take away his platform, which occurs a couple of times in Tolkien’s novel, and Wormtongue comes across as no more than a pathetic groveler.

Gandalf releases Rohan’s King Theoden from Wormtongue’s spell with the words, “I bid you come out before your doors and look abroad. Too long have you sat in shadows and trusted to twisted tales and crooked promptings.” And Theoden, when he rides off to his final battle against Sauron, forbids those who urge caution not to speak “the soft words of Wormtongue in my old ears!” He is prepared to be great again, come what may:

Long years in the space of days it seems since I rode west; but never will I lean on a staff again. If the war is lost, what good will be my hiding in the hills? And if it is won, what grief will it be, even if I fall, spending my last strength?

A significant portion of America has fallen prey to Tucker Wormtongue’s poisonous words. May we say of America what Gandalf says of Theoden when he shakes free and prepares to face his people: “Open! The Lord of the Mark comes forth!”

The future of Middle-earth hangs in the balance. 

Further thought: To complete the picture, you can read my post where I compare Trump to Saruman. Sauron in this scenario is Vladimir Putin.

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Poets and Climate Change’s 5-Alarm Fire

By Robin Bates | Published: August 11, 2021
Gustave Doré, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

 Wednesday

I continue to write about the Romantic imagination for my book (Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate), exploring how the movement helped change the way we see nature. As we deal with the dire consequences of climate change—the recent U.N. report should scare the bejeezus out of all of us–I find it useful to review the role that literature can play in spurring us to action.

I’ve visited the issue regularly in this column but I look today at the origins of poetic warnings. The 18th century’s scientific and technological breakthroughs, which allowed allowed humans to control nature in unprecedented ways, also led to a separation. It’s easier to regard Nature as an object of Romantic reflection, after all, when it’s not starving, freezing, or otherwise killing you. Poets picked up on our growing separation from nature early, with William Blake talking of “dark Satanic mills” befouling England’s “green and pleasant land” and Wordsworth lamenting that we are out of tune with nature because “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is particularly illuminating because it foregrounds the interaction between environmental poet and public. In the poem, an apparently mad prophet enters the scene and tells a compelling story about our alienation from nature. The story is so powerful that the young man he picks out as his audience “cannot choose but hear.”

Caught up in the excitement of exploring new lands that marked the age, the mariner sets out on a journey to the southern hemisphere. This apparent openness to new experience, however, is contradicted by an act of domination: the Mariner gratuitously kills a wandering albatross that the sailors have befriended. Having thereby announced his separation from the natural order, he experiences a spiritual sterility:

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

Living a nightmarish death-in-life with his heart “as dry as dust,” the Mariner finds himself unable to pray. The albatross, meanwhile, has been hung around his neck, both as a punishment from his shipmates and a sign of the internal weight he is carrying. He is saved, however, by the sudden realization that he has a kinship with even the foulest of Nature’s creatures. In this transformation, the slimy things become marvelous creatures moving in shining tracks:

Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

Having had this epiphany, he feels compelled to share his insight with others:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land;

I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.

In this particular instance, he has chosen a callow youth to hear what he has to say, a member of a wedding party who is intent on drinking and carousing. The mariner’s message has a Sunday school simplicity to it:

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Were he to deliver the message without the narrative or the poetry, however, it would fail to impress and we could not expect a change in behavior. It is the poetic imagination that draws the young man and holds him transfixed:

He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

We also learn that the Mariner’s story has had an impact:

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom’s door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

In exploring humans’ relationship with nature, the Romantic poets increased our awareness of what it means to be human. In the rich tradition of nature literature that has followed, along with the exciting field of ecocriticism, our thinking has moved beyond daffodils and storms (Wordsworth, Byron) to what ecocritics call an “earth-centered approach.”

As a result, we no longer makes simple distinctions between the environment and culture, between “the natural” and the human, but examine how they are inextricably linked. If today we have an ever-growing list of authors using the full powers of the imagination to address the challenges of a rapidly changing environment—Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, and Margaret Atwood come immediately in mind—it’s because poems like Rime of the Ancient Mariner showed the way.

Literature alone won’t save us, of course. In the five-alarm fire we are confronting, we need all hands on deck, civic leaders, scientists, academics, activists, business leaders, military leaders, etc.  The fate of our species hangs in the balance. But poets too have an important role to play, conveying the urgency in ways that other forms of rhetoric may not. May it lead all of us to rise sadder and wiser men and women.

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Plantations that Bury Their Black Past

By Robin Bates | Published: August 9, 2021
Walnut Grove Plantation cemetery

Tuesday

A Literary Hub article by author LaTanya McQueen, whose horror novel about America’s slave past comes out this month, brought to mind a Lucille Clifton poem. That’s not surprising since both authors had the same experience visiting southern plantations.

McQueen was researching for her novel When the Reckoning Comes, in which a black woman who has fled the segregated south returns for the wedding of her one white friend, who is getting married at an old plantation. Together they find themselves encountering ghosts from the plantation’s bloody past.

The south’s bloody past was not mentioned in McQueen’s plantation tour, however:

I spent the summer of 2016 visiting plantations across the south in attempt to learn more about Leanna’s life. While I’d read about plantations, I felt I needed to see these places in person to get a true sense of them. I’d mapped out a plan to visit plantations in Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and to end with the trip trying to find the Bedford Brown House, the plantation Leanna Brown lived on in North Carolina. I ended up visiting plantations in some of these states, not all of them, because what I found after a while was the same story at each of them. There was little, if any, mention of slavery. Instead, I listened to stories about the owners, often told to me by guides dressed in period costumes as they gave their little narratives about the plantation owner’s family history. Tour guides dressed in period costumes told me details about the architecture of the houses and not the backbreaking work that went into building them. While I learned a lot about the wealth of the plantation owners, I rarely learned about the work involved in slave labor, especially on sugar plantations that had some of the highest mortality rates. There was a complete erasure of what made these places exist in the first place.

I expected to go to these plantations where I’d be told the history of my ancestors, and what I got instead was a proliferation of tourist attractions meant for the white gaze.

Clifton makes the same observation with simple but powerful directness in “at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989.” I’ve heard her tell the story of how, in her visit, it was only when she asked about some rocks in the cemetery that she learned that they were slave grave markers:

among the rocks
at walnut grove
your silence drumming
in my bones,
tell me your names.

nobody mentioned slaves
and yet the curious tools
shine with your fingerprints.
nobody mentioned slaves
but somebody did this work
who had no guide, no stone,
who moulders under rock.

tell me your names,
tell me your bashful names
and I will testify.

the inventory lists ten slaves
but only men were recognized.among the rocks
at walnut grove
some of these honored dead
were dark
some of these dark
were slaves
some of these slaves
were women
some of them did this honored work.
tell me your names
foremothers, brothers,
tell me your dishonored names.
here lies
here lies
here lies
here lies
hear

I love that final imperative. Like McQueen, Clifton has been hearing lies. But she’s also telling her readers to listen carefully because, if they do, they will hear those forgotten slaves speaking. And once one hears, one can testify.

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Chaucer Was No Sexist or Anti-Semite

By Robin Bates | Published: August 9, 2021
19th century portrait of Chaucer

Monday

Reader and contributor Sue Schmidt recently alerted me to an essay defending Geoffrey Chaucer with which I thoroughly agree. Apparently some believe that “the father of English poetry” was a rapist, racist and anti-Semite and want to drop him from the canon. In her defense, Jennifer Wollock counters that he was actually remarkably enlightened for his age. “My decades of research show he was no raunchy proponent of bro culture,” she writes, “but a daring and ingenious defender of women and the innocent.”

I long ago came to a similar conclusion from teaching the Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale, which I find to be centuries ahead of its time with regard to women’s liberation. To be sure, I was giving the work more than the author credit for this—sometimes a work can be more liberated than its author—but Wollock has convinced me that Chaucer the man was fully in the Wife’s camp when he has her articulate a vision of egalitarian marriage.

I’ll talk more about my own views in a moment. First, here’s Wollock’s summation of the charges:

It’s true that Chaucer’s work contains toxic material. His “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” in The Canterbury Tales, his celebrated collection of stories, quotes at length from the long tradition of classical and medieval works on the evils of women, as mansplained by the Wife’s elderly husbands: “You say, just as worms destroy a tree, so a wife destroys her husband.”

Later, “The Prioress’s Tale” repeats the anti-Semitic blood libel story, the false accusation that Jews murdered Christians, at a time when Jews across Europe were under attack.

What the critics get wrong, Wollock says, is confusing Chaucer with his characters. She attributes some of the confusion to Chaucer having been a former spy and therefore expert in indirection. He knew how “to express dangerous truths not accepted in his own day, when misogyny and antisemitism were both entrenched, especially among the clergy.”

Rather than “an exponent of toxic masculinity,” Wollock says, Chaucer “was actually an advocate for human rights”:

My own research shows that in the course of his career he supported women’s right to choose their own mates and the human desire for freedom from enslavement, coercion, verbal abuse, political tyranny, judicial corruption and sexual trafficking. In The Canterbury Tales and The Legend of Good Women, he tells many stories on such themes. There he opposed assassination, infanticide and femicide, the mistreatment of prisoners, sexual harassment and domestic abuse. He valued self-control in action and in speech. He spoke out for women, enslaved people and Jews.

“Women want to be free and not coerced like slaves, and so do men,” the narrator of “The Franklin’s Prologue” says.

Chaucer was equally advanced when it came to Judaism, Wollock says:

As for Jews, Chaucer salutes their ancient heroism in his early poem The House of Fame. He depicts them as a people who have done great good in the world, only to be rewarded with slander. In “The Prioress’s Tale” he shows them being libeled by a desperate character to cover up a crime of which they were manifestly innocent, a century after all Jews had been brutally expelled from England.

In other words, rather than endorsing the Prioress’s anti-Semitic story, he is using her words and actions, along with the other pilgrims’ reactions, to expose the danger of their lies.

“Few authors have ever been more outspoke about man’s inhumanity to women,” Wollock concludes. And as for the charge that he raped and abducted a young woman, Wollock notes that the evidence is sketchy at best, and unlikely given other things we know about him.

My own reading of the Wife of Bath bears Wollock out. When I first encountered her in graduate school, one of the leading scholars of the time (D.W. Robertson) believed that Chaucer ascribed to the misogyny that the Wife is attacking, but from the first this struck me as wrong.

As I saw it—and see it still—Chaucer creates a character who is so much bigger and more vibrant than the attacks that sexist monks were leveling against women that she exposes their smallness and pettiness. Her counterarguments may be wild and incoherent at times, but they have the effect of reducing their case against women to rubble.

In addition to that, she tells a fairy tale in which, by the end, a rapist knight learns that the only way to a good marriage is to listen—really listen—to your partner. The knight has spent a year listening to women as if his life depended on it because it does: if he doesn’t figure out what women most desire, he will be executed for the rape. Chaucer, who himself was a superb listener, knows that paying attention to people is the ultimate form of acknowledgement, and he sympathizes with the Wife’s desire for R-E-S-P-E-C-T from the men in her life. He can hear the painful longing beneath her bravado, even if none of her five husbands can.

By penetrating into her own innermost desires, Chaucer gives us one of the most three-dimensional characters in all of literature. Which means that we too, as readers, are expanded as we listen to her. When a medieval character challenges still-existent sexism, you know you are in the presence of a great author. 

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Spiritual Lessons from a Happy Hypocrite

By Robin Bates | Published: August 8, 2021
Max Beerbohn, Lord George Hell in “The Happy Hypocrite”

Spiritual Sunday

My Sunday post comes to you late today as I was visiting grandchildren in Georgia for the past two days, but as a result I am able  to cite a literary allusion in today’s sermon by our rector Rob Lamborn. In response to a passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, which I had been selected to read to the congregation, Rob talked about Max Beerbohm’s short story “The Happy Hypocrite.”

Paul’s letter (Ephesians 4:25-5:2) is chock full of good advice on how to live:

Putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

According to St. Paul, Rob said, if we change our behavior, our hearts will follow. Get thieves working honestly and sharing with the needy and they will end up good. To this end, he quoted from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity:

The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.

The observation is borne out in “The Happy Hypocrite,” in which we see Lord George Hell’s transition to George Heaven. At the beginning of the story, he is a thoroughly dissolute Regency rake:

Lord George Hell. I will not trouble my little readers with a long recital of his great naughtiness. But it were well they should know that he was greedy, destructive, and disobedient. I am afraid there is no doubt that he often sat up at Carlton House until long after bedtime, playing at games, and that he generally ate and drank far more than was good for him. His fondness for fine clothes was such that he used to dress on week-days quite as gorgeously as good people dress on Sundays. He was thirty-five years old and a great grief to his parents.

George’s conversion begins when he attends a operetta and falls in love with the actress Jenny Mere. Leaving his mistress La Gambogi, he goes to Jenny and proposes marriage, only to be rejected:

“I can never be your wife,” she said, slowly. “I can never be the wife of any man whose face is not saintly. Your face, my Lord, mirrors, it may be, true love for me, but it is even as a mirror long tarnished by the reflexion of this world’s vanity. It is even as a tarnished mirror. Do not kneel to me, for I am poor and humble. I was not made for such impetuous wooing. Kneel, if you please, to some greater, gayer lady. As for my love, it is my own, nor can it be ever torn from me, but given, as true love must needs be given, freely. Ah, rise from your knees. That man, whose face is wonderful as are the faces of the saints, to him I will give my true love.”

George thereupon resorts to the obvious solution, buying a saintly mask from a mask store:

The disguise was done. When Lord George looked through the eyelets of his mask into the mirror that was placed in his hand, he saw a face that was saintly, itself a mirror of true love. How wonderful it was! He felt his past was a dream. He felt he was a new man indeed.

The ploy works and Jenny promises to marry him. To be worthy of her, he changes his ways:

And in his heart Lord George made a good resolve. He would put away from him all his worldly possessions. All the money that he had won at the clubs, fairly or foully, all that hideous accretion of gold guineas, he would distribute among the comrades he had impoverished. As he walked, with the sweet and trustful girl at his side, the vague record of his infamy assailed him, and a look of pain shot behind his smooth mask. He would atone. He would shun no sacrifice that might cleanse his soul. All his fortune he would put from him. Follard Chase he would give back to Sir Follard. He would sell his house in St. James’s Square. He would keep some little part of his patrimony, enough for him in the wood with Jenny, but no more.

The two get married–he pretends his name is George Heaven–and rthey etire to a small house in the woods. George’s life has never been happier:

He cherished his true penitence for the evil he had done in the past. The past! That was indeed the only unreal thing that lingered in his life. Every day its substance dwindled, grew fainter yet, as he lived his rustic honeymoon. Had he not utterly put it from him? Had he not, a few hours after his marriage, written to his lawyer, declaring solemnly that he, Lord George Hell, had forsworn the world, that he was where no man would find him, that he desired all his worldly goods to be distributed, thus and thus, among these and those of his companions? By this testament he had verily atoned for the wrong he had done, had made himself dead indeed to the world.

 His jealous mistress, however, tracks him down and, to expose him to Jenny, tears off his mask:

“Doff your mask and I am gone.”

George made a step of menace towards her.

“False saint!” she shrieked, “then I will unmask you.”

Like a panther she sprang upon him and clawed at his waxen cheeks. Jenny fell back, mute with terror. Vainly did George try to free himself from his assailant, who writhed round and round him, clawing, clawing at what Jenny fancied to be his face. With a wild cry, Jenny fell upon the furious creature and tried, with all her childish strength, to release her dear one. The combatives swayed to and fro, a revulsive trinity. There was a loud pop, as though some great cork had been withdrawn, and La Gambogi recoiled. She had torn away the mask. It lay before her upon the lawn, upturned to the sky.

And then the marvel:

La Gambogi stared up into his face, and her dark flush died swiftly away. For there, staring back at her, was the man she had unmasked, but lo! his face was even as his mask had been. Line for line, feature for feature, it was the same. ‘Twas a saint’s face.

Jenny approves and they live happily ever after:

So he took her in his arms, as though she had been a little child, and kissed her with his own lips. She put her arms round his neck, and he was happier than he had ever been. They were alone in the garden now. Nor lay the mask any longer upon the lawn, for the sun had melted it.

In short, fake it til you make it. And do not waste time bothering that you started off insincere.

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What To Make of a Diminished Biles

By Robin Bates | Published: August 6, 2021
Simone Biles

Friday

Of the many stories in the 2021 Olympics, perhaps none caught the attention of American audiences more than that of Simone Biles. The incomparable gymnast who was expected to sweep the gold medals found herself beset by the “twisties,” a condition where a gymnast loses air awareness during a routine. Although a shadow of her former self, however, Biles was still able to come back and win a bronze medal on the balance beam.

The final line from Robert Frost’s poem “The Oven-Bird” comes to mind: What are we to make of a diminished thing?

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Yes, Simone Biles 2021 is to Simone Biles 2016 (and Simone Biles 2017, 18, 19, and 20) as mid-summer is to spring. One to ten, to use Frost’s scoring system. The highway dust is over all.

Or as Frost puts it in another poem that makes reference to Adam and Eve’s fall,

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

In this case, gold sank to bronze.

Yet there is something deeply moving about the oven-bird as he reminds us of our mortality. Percy Shelley writes, “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed,” and as Biles fell and stumbled, she somehow became more real. I therefore found myself thinking also about Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea tetralogy, where she grapples with falls from perfection.

First I thought of Ged, the apprentice wizard in Wizard of Earthsea. Recognized early as a wizard with much potential, Ged is enrolled in a wizarding school. While there, however, he is baited into a dangerous wizarding contest—he opens a portal to the world of the dead—and almost dies. The chief wizard of the school sacrifices his own life to give Ged his, but afterwards the wizardry that came so easily and naturally to Ged must be learned the hard way.

I thought of Ged’s labored progress as I saw Biles struggle to win a bronze medal, foregoing the fabled dismount that bears her name for a safer move. For his part, when Ged finally returns to his classes, he is no longer the star:

The boys he had led and lorded over were all ahead of him now, because of the months he had lost, and that spring and summer he studied with lads younger than himself. Nor did he shine among them, for the words of any spell, even the simplest illusion-charm, came halting from his tongue, and his hands faltered at their craft.

Eventually Ged does regain some of his powers—and an Olympic bronze medal is nothing to be sneezed at—but it’s not the same:

Thenceforth he studied the high arts and enchantments, passing beyond arts of illusion to the works of real magery, learning what he must know to earn his wizard’s staff. The trouble he had had in speaking spells wore off over the months, and skill returned into his hands: yet he was never so quick to learn as he had been, having learned a long hard lesson from fear.

The darkness that Ged has unleashed into the world is his own shadow side, and I wonder if Biles has been striving for ever new heights of excellence to keep her own darkness at bay. Biles hinted at the scars left by the sexual abuse of the gymnastics medical coordinator Larry Nassar, now in prison. Ged, fleeing from his darkness, is able to come to terms with it only when he faces up to it and calls it by its name, which is his own. At that moment it loses its power over him. Perhaps Biles needs to do the same.

As to what exactly this would entail, perhaps Tenar in the next book of the tetralogy offers a model. In Tombs of Atuan Tenar, not unlike some gymnasts, is taken from her family at an early age and brought up to be the high priestess of an ancient religion known as the Powers of the Earth. Yet even as she is worshipped, she is the virtual puppet of the priestesses who, like USA Gymnastics, run the show. If Tenar is to be her own person and live her own life, she must break free of them, which she does with the help of Ged.

Which means that she is longer a worshipped princess. To be sure, she could live an aristocratic life in the port city of Havnor, but she instead chooses to go into the country, where she marries a farmer and has children. Her life there is simple but she achieves a depth that would not have been possible as a princess.

I’m not saying that Biles should do exactly the same although some kind of retreat seems advisable. But as with both Ged and Tenar, we see new potential in her as a result of her travails. Like tennis player Naomi Osaka, she is learning to speak to issues of mental health, which run rampant within the athletic community. She is holding USA Gymnastics to account so that future gymnasts will not be subjected to abuse, and she proved to be a good teammate, getting out of her teammates’ way so that they could shine on their own.

There are other ways to be a wizard and a priestess. What initially seemed to be a diminished thing can still dazzle.

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Beowulf Would Favor Vaccine Mandate

By Robin Bates | Published: August 5, 2021

Thursday

Right now the United States is wrestling with whether schools, businesses, sporting organizations, and other public entities should require its workers to be vaccinated and for people using their services to show proof of vaccination. Certain Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’s Greg Abbott, putting Trumpian politics over health, are trying to make it illegal to do so. In a particularly crazy move, DeSantis is forbidding those petri dishes known as cruise ships to require vaccination.

So what would Beowulf do?

I found myself asking that question after reading an illuminating column by political journalist John Stoehr of the Editorial Board on mandates and the authoritarian personality. Those liberals who fear rightwing blowback against vaccine mandates, Stoehr says, don’t understand authoritarians. While uninterested in reasoned dialogue, they do respect forceful action:

Some among us, liberals mostly, appear to believe that a federally enforced vaccine mandate would backfire. This is not unreasonable. After all, the authoritarian holdouts who are prolonging the covid pandemic in this country tell us time and again they will resist getting vaccinated because their individual rights and freedom demand it.

But a national mandate, or a patchwork of state and local mandates, as is usually the case in the United States, will have the opposite effect. I have no doubt about it. The authoritarians among us certainly seem exceptionally strong. After all, they are willing to die before “giving in.” In fact, they are exceptionally frail and weak. They will cave almost instantly under the weight of the authority of government and civil society.

In other words, if you believe that vaccine mandates and vaccine passports will stop the spread of Covid, forcefully call for them. Otherwise, you’re fighting a losing battle.

Beowulf’s victory over Grendel appears to bear Stoehr out. I’ve written many times (for instance, here) how Grendel is the archetype of resentment or grievance, a malcontent who feels he is not being given his due. Many of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 were Grendels whose rage, from the outside, appeared impressive. Here’s Grendel storming the Danes’ major government building and seeking out his own Mike Pences and Nancy Pelosis:

Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open
the mouth of the building, maddening for blood,
pacing the length of the patterned floor
with his loathsome tread, while a baleful light,
flame more than light, flared from his eyes.
He saw many men in the mansion, sleeping,
a ranked company of kinsmen and warriors
quartered together. And his glee was demonic,
picture the mayhem: before morning
he would rip life from limb and devour them,
feed on their flesh.

As the Danish and Geat warriors discover, when you flail away against Grendel with passionate swords, he just appears stronger. After all, you are admitting to him that you find him powerful:

Time and again,
Beowulf’s wariors worked to defend
their lord’s life, laying about them
as best they could with their ancestral blades.
Stalwart in action, they kept striking out
on every side, seeking to cut
straight to the soul. When they joined the struggle
there was something they could not have known at the tie,
that no blade on earth, no blacksmith’s art
could ever damage their demon opponent.
He had conjured the harm from the cutting edge
of every weapon.

What does work, however, is a cool head, firm resolve, and a strong grip. Beowulf defeats Grendel by reaching out and grabbing the monster by the hand. Recognizing steely determination, Grendel transforms from bully into coward. Panicking, he ultimately tears himself free of his own arm, thereby sustaining a mortal wound, and runs home to his mother. He literally falls apart.

I think of Grendel’s defeat as I watch a number of the January 6 insurrectionists in court. Their once defiant words have yielded to whining about jail and the harshness of American justice. Many are now blaming Donald Trump for having misled them.

In the poem we see a similar response from the Danish warrior Unferth, a human Grendel, who confronts Beowulf when he first strides into the Danish hall. Like an Obama birther, Unferth is furious at the attention this upstart is receiving:

                                 Beowulf’s coming,
his sea-braving, made him sick with envy:
 he could not brook or abide the fact
 that anyone else alive under heaven
 might enjoy greater regard than he did…

Unferth, however, folds like a cheap suit when Beowulf, confident in himself and his mission, points out his failures:

The fact is, Unferth, if you were truly
as keen and courageous as you claim to be
Grendel would never have got away with
such unchecked atrocity, attacks on your king,
havoc in Heorot and horrors everywhere.
But he knows he need never be in dread
Of your blade making mizzle of his blood
Or of vengeance arriving ever from this quarter—
From the Victory-Shieldings, the shoulderers of the spear.
He knows he can trample down you Danes
to his heart’s content, humiliate and murder
without fear of reprisal.

We might note that these Republican governors are also allowing Covid to trample us down to its heart’s content, without fear of reprisal. Beowulf then makes a promise that he goes on to keep:

But he will find me different.
I will show him how Geats shape to kill
in the heat of battle. Then whoever wants to
may go bravely to mead, when morning light,
scarfed in sun-dazzle, shines forth from the south
and bring another daybreak to the world.

If Stoehr is right and we were to bring Beowulf fortitude to Covid, everyone with any kind of authority would be mandating vaccinations where they can and requiring vaccination passports for schools, work places, and anywhere else where people congregate. The Unferths will complain but, if Stoehr and the Beowulf poet are correct, they will capitulate. And they’ll have the added bonus of not contracting a deadly disease.

And all of American society will go bravely to mead—which is to say, to bars—and enjoy the sun-dazzle after a long night of Covid darkness. Are we ready for this?

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