A Friendship Stronger Than Fear

By Robin Bates | Published: October 23, 2021
Thomas Matthews Rooke, from triptych of The Story of Ruth (1876-7)

Spiritual Sunday

I had a health scare Friday night and, while it turned out to be a false alarm (!!), thoughts fond and wayward went through my head as I lay in a morphine haze in Sewanee’s hospital emergency room. For reasons I’ll explain, the story of Ruth and Naomi also came to mind..

Some background first. Five years ago, when I was visiting my dying friend Rachel Kranz in a Bronx hospital, I picked up an infection that went to my heart, giving me a case of pericarditis and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart sack and heart muscle). Thinking that I had just pulled a muscle playing tennis—why else would one feel a weight on one’s chest and upper back?—I waited until the following morning so that I could visit my primary care physician.

Three hours after she referred me to the local hospital for an EKG (hers being broken), I was on board a medical helicopter because they thought I was having a full-blown heart attack. (You can read my blog post from my hospital bed here.) Fortunately, all I needed was anti-inflammatory medication. If Julia had been with me rather than down in Tennessee with my mother, she would have insisted I go to the emergency room right away.

Which in fact I did three weeks later when the infection returned. I wasn’t about to get scolded again for my casual concern for my health, and it was fortunate that I made the trip. I can report that my heart has suffered no damage and has been good ever since.

Until, I feared, Friday night, when I awoke in the middle of the night with pressure to my upper back and stabbing pains in my upper quadrant. Fearing a recurrence of pericarditis, we rushed to the emergency room, where I underwent multiple tests. The doctors are still not sure what’s up but think it may be a muscular or skeletal problem associated with my tennis and/or computer use. I need to be careful with both.

While I was in the emergency room, however, I thought of my mortality, which is why Wordsworth’s final stanza in “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” surfaced:

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover’s head!
“O mercy!” to myself I cried,
“If Lucy should be dead!”

In my case, it was “if I should be dead.” I then thought of Julia, which conjured up Keats’s line where he imagines his famous nightingale singing to a widowed Ruth:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
         Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
                She stood in tears amid the alien corn…

That in turn got me thinking of Ruth’s relationship with her mother-in-law Naomi. Famously, the Moabite Ruth chooses to stay with the Jewish Naomi after both have been widowed, even though such a life will be uncertain. As Ruth famously replies after Naomi suggests she return to her parents’ family (Ruth 1:6 KJV) “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God…”

I thought of how Julia loves and cares for my mother and would not leave her even if I died. I am deeply grateful for that relationship, which deepens even further my strong love for my wife. And that reminded me of a Marge Piercy poem I have written about in the past.

Such fond and wayward thoughts can show up when the prospect of heart surgery looms.

The Book of Ruth and Naomi
By Marge Piercy

When you pick up the Tanakh and read
the Book of Ruth, it is a shock
how little it resembles memory.
It’s concerned with inheritance,
lands, men’s names, how women
must wiggle and wobble to live.

Yet women have kept it dear
for the beloved elder who
cherished Ruth, more friend than
daughter. Daughters leave. Ruth
brought even the baby she made
with Boaz home as a gift.

Where you go, I will go too,
your people shall be my people,
I will be a Jew for you,
for what is yours I will love
as I love you, oh Naomi
my mother, my sister, my heart.

Show me a woman who does not dream
a double, heart’s twin, a sister
of the mind in whose ear she can whisper,
whose hair she can braid as her life
twists its pleasure and pain and shame.
Show me a woman who does not hide
in the locket of bone that deep
eye beam of fiercely gentle love
she had once from mother, daughter,
sister; once like a warm moon
that radiance aligned the tides
of her blood into potent order.

At the season of first fruits, we recall
two travelers, co-conspirators, scavengers
making do with leftovers and mill ends,
whose friendship was stronger than fear,
stronger than hunger, who walked together,
the road of shards, hands joined.

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A Mimeo Fable Explains Vax Foes

By Robin Bates | Published: October 21, 2021

Friday

I’ve been struck by how Trumpism, an authoritarian movement that attempted to overthrow the 2020 election and may well be planning to override the voters’ will in future contests, insists on personal freedom when it comes to vaccine mandates. As many have noted, Trumpists support freedom for themselves but not for others, as is clear by their voter suppression efforts and Texas’s abortion bounty laws. My father Scott Bates notes this seeming paradox in a fable he wrote back in the 1970s.

In “The Recalcitrant Piece of Mimeograph Paper,” a sheet of paper defiantly resists attempts to impose text upon it, using arguments reminiscent of many who refuse to get Covid vaccine shots. For all his advocacy of individual rights, however, the sheet has succumbed to cultish groupthink by the end of the poem. While my father was targeting leftwing groups when he wrote it, authoritarians are pretty much the same, whether right or left. Instead of spouting The Communist Manifesto, as the mimeograph sheet does, today’s anti-vaxxers quote QAnon, Fox News, and stuff circulated on Facebook.

A note on the vaccine mandates before I share the poem: all advanced nations require various public health measures to protect their populations. Without them, our society would be ravaged by numerous lethal diseases and other ills. Only because children are required to receive multiple vaccines are they able to attend school safely, with the few families who resist vaccines parasitically rely on everyone around them to protect them.

As far as the poem’s imagery is concerned, those of you who grew up in the photocopy and digital ages should feel lucky that you never had to grapple with mimeograph machines, which were messy and a real pain. To update the poem, imagine “the recalcitrant piece of mimeograph paper” as a sheet in your printer that refuses to respond to your “print” command.

The Recalcitrant Piece of Mimeograph Paper
By Scott Bates

A Sheet of Mimeograph Paper refused to go through the machine
No no it cried
Set me apart
Must I serve as fodder for a Mimeograph Moloch
Reduced
To the docile conformity and blank imbecility of my sheeplike compatriots
My purity sullied
My innocence destroyed

Will you track up my candor with your muddy feet
No no I protest
I refuse
Let me be crumpled into cabbage

Peeled into carrot strips
Abandoned with the used kleenices holey hermit sacks outcast chewing gum wrappers and all the other paper pariahs of your so-called civilization
Before you tattoo my backside with the decadent artifacts of a worn-out bureaucracy

They fed it through the machine
It came out blank
They fed it through again
Inexorably

At last it spoke
Dear Sirs it said
Pursuant to your request of long standing
And in full cognizance of the numerous difficulties involved
I am authorized to inform you at this time
You have nothing to lose but your chains

 Further thought: Another way to read the poem is that the sheet has been driven to communist rebellion because of society’s failure to recognize personal characteristics that are integral to a sense of self. When my father wrote this poem, I remember some leftwing protestors carrying signs that said, “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate,” a reference to computer cards and to an IBM society that they feared was destroying all individuality (“the man in the gray flannel suit”). In that case, the state would bear some of the blame for what happens to the sheet.

Does some vaccine resistance stem from a similar dynamic? Perhaps. But the stakes are too high to mess around in this case. Resisters put everyone around them at risk, not only themselves. Their vaunted individuality in this case begins to resemble narcissistic self-absorption, or a toddler saying no to a parent who knows better. Furthermore, many do not realize they are being shaped by rightwing talking points. True individuality involves critical thinking, not reactive stances. In short, whatever society’s sins, the sheet of mimeograph paper cannot be excused for going full-out authoritarian.

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Literature, the Best Medicine

By Robin Bates | Published: October 20, 2021

Thursday

I’ve just come across a fine article in the Guardian, written twelve years ago, about “the reading cure.” In an extensive discussion, Blake Morrison recounts various instances in which the classics have come to the aid of patients suffering from various mental and physical ailments.

One key figure in process is Jane Davis, who has founded an organization that sets up “shared reading groups” for different constituencies. Morrison reports (this in 2008),

Under the umbrella of Jane Davis’s “Get into Reading” scheme, there are now around 50 groups like this across Merseyside: groups in care homes, day centers, neurological rehab units, acute psychiatric wards, cottage hospitals, sheltered accommodation and libraries; groups for people with learning disabilities, Alzheimer’s, motor-neuron disease, mental health problems; groups for prisoners, excluded teenagers, looked-after children, recovering drug-addicts, nurses and carers; groups that are small – no more than 10 – so there’s a sense of intimacy.

The groups read substantive material:

The educational backgrounds vary widely but there’s no dumbing down in the choice of texts – The Mayor of Casterbridge, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Rebecca, Great Expectations, Adam Bede, Jane Eyre, Of Mice and Men, Kes, even Robert Pirsig’s The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance among them. The usual pattern is for a complete book to be read aloud, cover to cover, at weekly sessions, which for a group spending an hour a week on a Dickens novel can mean six months devoted to a single work. Nobody is pressured to read aloud, but if and when they do the boost to their confidence can be striking.

The article is filled with wonderful stories of literature alleviating suffering:

For Kate, who has suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis for 30 years, the answer is clear: “Reading pushes the pain away into a place where it no longer seems important. No matter how ill you are, there’s a world inside books which you can enter and explore, and where you focus on something other than your own problems. You get to talk about things that people usually skate over, like ageing or death, and that kind of conversation – with everyone chipping in, so you feel part of something – can be enormously helpful.” Others say the same: “I’ve stopped seeing the doctor since I came here and cut down on my medication”; “being in a group with other women who have what I had, breast cancer, didn’t help me, but talking about books has made a huge difference.”

And further on:

Medical staff tell stories of the remarkable successes they’ve seen: the neurological patient who sat in a group saying nothing for months, then after a reading of George Herbert’s poem “The Flower” (“Who would have thought my shrivelled heart/Could have recovered greenness?”) launched into a 10-minute monologue at the end of which he announced “I feel great”; the brain-damaged young man whose vocabulary significantly increased after he joined a book group; the husband caring for his disabled wife whose exposure to poetry has proved not just a respite but a liberation. To outsiders, the outcomes might seem small, but to the staff and patients concerned they’re huge breakthroughs.

Herbert’s poetry is noteworthy for its relentless honesty. The Anglican rector isn’t afraid to acknowledge when he feels dry and barren, when he cannot feel God’s presence, which only serves to make his own breakthrough moments both authentic and powerful.

And then there’s this:

One particularly successful initiative has been reading poetry to and with dementia patients, some of whom have lost all sense of who and where they are but can recite the words of a poem learned at school 70 years ago. As Get into Reading worker Katie Peters describes it: “One lady was shouting and swearing at anyone who approached, and when I mentioned poetry told me in no uncertain terms to go away. But as I sat and read poem after poem, she visibly relaxed, her mood changed completely and she happily chatted about the poems to other residents.

The article has given me some new slogans, like “prose not Prozac” and “literature not lithium.” And “a talking cure in the presence of Keats, Dickens or Shakespeare rather than a physician or psychiatrist.” I’ve also learned that D. H. Lawrence one said, “One sheds one’s sicknesses in books,” which reminds me of Leslie Marmon Silko’s conversation with a Laguna Pueblo elder at the beginning of her novel Ceremony:

I will tell you something about stories,
[he said]
They aren’t just for entertainment.
 Don’t be fooled.
 They are all we have, you see,
 all we have to fight off
 illness and death.
 You don’t have anything
 if you don’t have the stories.

Morrison’s article has also alerted me to a Renaissance work I need to check out. Apparently, Thomas Puttenham in The Art of English Poesie argues

that the poet must “play also the physician and not only by applying a medicine to the ordinary sickness of mankind, but by making the very grief itself (in part) cure of the disease”. What Puttenham meant was that the writer should use “one dolour to expel another”, the sad cadence in a line of poetry allaying the burden of pain or depression in the reader, “one short sorrowing a remedy of a long and grievous sorrow”.

Morrison reports that there’s a study in Alabama—unfortunately he doesn’t say more—demonstrating that “depressives treated via bibliotherapy had less chance of relapse than those given medication.” He also mentions a 2004 Arts Council report indicating “the positive effect of the arts and humanities in healthcare, among them inducing positive physiological and psychological changes in clinical outcomes, reducing drug consumption, shortening length of stay in hospital … and developing health practitioners’ empathy.’”

The article concludes that the therapeutic power of literature lies partly in how it

doesn’t just echo our own experience, recognize, vindicate and validate it – it takes us places we hadn’t imagined but which, once seen, we never forget. When literature is working – the right words in the right place – it offers an orderliness which can shore up readers against the disorder, or lack of control, that afflicts them.

He contrasts this with “misery memoirs,” which he says “invite readers to be prurient rather than to identify, exaggerate where no exaggeration is necessary, and are too clamorous to grant the space to contemplate and withdraw.”

I like the idea of literature being less clamorous than other forms of writing. On the other hand, I wouldn’t go overboard in following Morrison’s literature prescriptions, jettisoning your anti-depressive medications for a good book. (Sometimes prose and Prozac, literature and lithium, would be wiser choices.) Morrison mentions the successes but not the failures. Still, literature definitely does have a role to play in healing.

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Pushing Back Against Lit’s Detractors

By Robin Bates | Published: October 19, 2021
Edvard Munch, Andreas Reading

Wednesday

Everyone knows that an essay needs a good thesis to be good. The same is true of a book, and although I have a complete manuscript of my book Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate, I keep tinkering with my rationale for writing it. Here is my latest effort, which gets closer to the matter than anything I’ve written previously. The passage follows several memorable reading stories that I have included to demonstrate that literature matters:

Striking though these stories are, they are not unusual. Indeed, people have been having life-changing encounters with literature, oral and written, since families sat around campfires in prehistoric times. If STEM enthusiasts think they can sideline literature now, it’s partly because those responsible for sharing it with the public downplay or overlook its transformative potential. Think how differently literature would appear to people if they saw it helping us reconfigure damaged relationships, articulate life goals, deal with suffering, counteract oppression, and much, much more. In fact, what if they thought of literature as a personal improvement plan, designed by some of the world’s greatest minds and specially customized to their specific needs. At the cost of no more than a few hours of focused attention, you can receive a special program that knows you better than you know yourself—that intuits what you most desire and points the way towards a rich and fulfilling life. Book lovers already sense that literature can provide these services, but what if our educational and cultural institutions spread the word to everyone?

Instead, too many contemporary scholars treat literature as a specialized discourse, cut off from the rest of life. As this serves to marginalize literature, it’s easy for others to marginalize it as well. This is not how great thinkers of the past have seen it, however. Plato, Aristotle, and many who have followed have seen literature as a powerful change agent—usually for good although occasionally not—and they did so because they themselves felt transformed by literary encounters. Plato theorized about poetry’s life effects because he was shaken to the core by The Odyssey, and the same was true of Aristotle with Oedipus, Sir Philip Sidney with The Aeneid, Samuel Johnson with King Lear, Percy Shelley with Dante’s Divine Comedy, John Stuart Mill with Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with Balzac’s Human Comedy, and Sigmund Freud with Oedipus and Hamlet. If these works had an outsized impact on them, they figured, then literature must be a force to be reckoned with.

While their writings on literature are well-known–most of the works treated in these pages appear in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism–for the most part scholars have not focused on what these thinkers have to say about literature’s life-changing potential. My hope is that, by gathering the thinkers together and showing how each makes a compelling case for literature improving our lives, I strengthen the arguments against those who would relegate literature to the sidelines.

For those engaged in literary study, this book will serve as an overview of the debates, a fascinating subject in its own right. But for the average person and even the casual reader, the question of how literature affects us is no less important. It matters when we hear a book has been censored in our child’s school. It matters when the liberal arts come under attack, when schools are told to focus more on writing than on literature, when the classics are declared irrelevant. It matters when you yourself decide which books to read in your limited spare time, including what is lost when you settle for lesser lit. What are you depriving yourself of when you confine yourself to formulaic genre fiction or when you read no literature at all? The thinkers you encounter here have seen versions of all these situations.

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Literature for Transforming Lives

By Robin Bates | Published: October 18, 2021
Harold Knight, The Reader

Tuesday

As I continue to work my way through Thor Magnus Tangeras’s Literature and Transformation: A Narrative Study of Life-Changing Experiences, I am getting a clearer sense of my own book project. Tangeras makes intense reading experiences the foundation for his study, interviewing subjects who have had such experiences and then seeking to map out the psychological processes involved. I too put significant literary encounters at the core of my book, although in my case I turn to what leading thinkers throughout the ages have said about what these encounters mean and what they accomplish.

I’m also interested in more than literature’s psychological effects. Assessing literature’s impact on history involves other tools that analyzing sit-down interviews.

At the center of Literature and Transformation are five extended interviews with readers whom Tangeras either encountered haphazardly or found through sending out a call. In this course of the book we encounter

–Veronica, who used Lady Chatterley’s Love to break free from a dead-end relationship;
–Nina, who used Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka to break through mental barriers and become a successful musician;
–Esther, who used Norwegian poet Inger Hagerup’s “Episode” to understand and thereby come to terms with her parents’ dysfunctional marriage;
–Jane, who used Doris Lessing’s novel Shikasta to escape a debilitating depression and embark on a new career; and
–Sue, who used Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Buried Life” to, again, escape depression.

Because psychology, as a social science, likes to nail things down, Tangeras wants to spell out every step in the change process. His operating principle appears to be that, when readers have a powerful encounter with a work of literature, they integrate it into their self-narrative. Or as Tangeras puts it,

the expanded affect-consciousness allows for an altered sense of self in which the crisis can be resolved. Thus, in being moved new movement is created: that which was stuck is loosened, that which was frozen melts, that which was in the dark is brought into light and so on. Such transformations of the subject’s sense of self does not mean that life becomes easier or free from suffering, but rather that, as the muddled, restrictive, unclear or shallow self-experience is given greater depth, clarity, connectedness and openness, a renewed vitality and sense of direction becomes available to the subject.

Not everyone integrates literature in the same way, however. Therefore, Tangeras tries to categorize (1) the different ways that different readers engage with a work, (2) the different ways that readers perceive themselves being moved by a work, and (3) the different shapes the reader’s crisis may take, whether it involves “stuckness, restriction, despair, confusion or isolation.” In the reader stories featured in the book, different readers have different breakthroughs depending on the multiple factors involved.

While Tangeras is thought-provoking, I find myself often preferring the explanations his subjects give for the significance of their reading experiences over his intricate psychological analysis. In other words, I prefer a humanities approach to a scientific one. For instance, when Veronica reads the following passage from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I like how clear she it about how it starts her on her road to splitting with her husband. Connie is Lady Chatterley:

Connie really sometimes felt she would die at this time. She felt she was being crushed to death by weird lies, and by the amazing cruelty of idiocy.

Veronica says that Connie’s subsequent twists and turns allowed her to recognize her own back and forth, where she broke off the relationship, then went back, and then broke it off for good. In the novel, Connie has her own back and forth after she meets the gamekeeper Mellors. As Veronica explains,

So in the book [her marriage] goes from that being enough, to her then meeting Mellors. And the way that he almost changes something inside her, the way that her feelings then sit. Her emotions sit differently within her stomach and she reacts to things differently. There’s a part where she’s almost become a bit of a zombie, everyone’s quite worried about her and it looks like she’s quite ill and her sister comes along to intervene, to take her away. And again, that was something that I could connect with. With all the other emotions that were happening, I fell into a depression, so I had that sort of fuzziness around me where I was just getting through and could do my day-to-day stuff, but just felt quite numb, to the outside world.

And further on:

I think it was when I finished the book, and was just digesting it. And then the feeling arose: OK, I know what I need to do now. This is something different, I feel differently now.

Even though Veronica wouldn’t spit up with her partner for another six months, she said the novel got the ball rolling:

I remember there being a real kind of crystallising moment for me, thinking if I can want this [freedom] for a fictional character, then surely I can want it for myself. And that it shouldn’t just be, pardon me, a fantasy or like a ‘maybe one day’, or ‘I’ll get there in the end’. I realised that if I was going to make any changes, then it would have to be by my own hands, by my own doing. There wasn’t going to be a wonderful man to whisk me off and make me feel differently about myself, it had to come from me and from within. And it helped me find that, I’m not saying straightaway, but it certainly gave me the spark to make me to want to go and find it for myself and see what that would look like. It wasn’t for a few months afterwards that I decided to terminate the relationship, but the decision for me internally had been made, that this wasn’t good enough and that I had to do something. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was at that point, but my willingness to tolerate the status quo sort of evaporated, and something solidified in me about wanting to make a change.

One thing I appreciate about Tangeras is his distinction between literature as self-help and literature as exploration. The transformative experiences he describes are of the latter sort:

It is not a case of self-help reading, in which the reader has identified a problem, and then looks for an apt source that will provide a solution. Instead, what transpires is that, over and beyond the initial motivation for picking up the book – whether it was by obligation or serendipity, through titillation, after recommendation or by association with a pleasurable state – at some point it turns into an I–-Thou encounter; at some point these readers unreservedly give themselves over to, and surrender to, the experience, and become fully involved, body, heart and mind. Furthermore, in this evolving and deepening devotional transaction, these readers are deeply moved. The experience of a panoply of feelings that traditionally have straddled aesthetic and religious domains – such as wonder, awe, tenderness, jubilation and faith – come into full awareness.

Elsewhere he mentions the role of serendipity—one just happens across the book that one most needs. I’ve sometimes described this as the book seeming to find you, almost jumping off a shelf into your hands. Literature is often most powerful when it catches you by surprise–“surprised by joy,” as it were–and having a book prescribed detracts from that experience. It’s a problem that both Tangeras and I have with bibliotherapy. But that’s a subject for a future post.

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Blessing the Boats at St. Mary’s

By Robin Bates | Published: October 17, 2021
A replica of the Dove, which landed in St. Mary’s City, MD in 1634

Monday

Yesterday I mentioned Lucille Clifton’s poem “blessing the boats (at st. mary’s).” As I explain below, it was written while Lucille was a colleague at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. I find it a miraculous poem:

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back         may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

The title refers to the Blessing of the Fleet that occurs every October at St. Clement’s Island, Maryland. It commemorates the blessing of the Arc and the Dove in England, which set off with the first English settlers in Maryland in 1633. They landed at St. Clement’s five months later. A modern replica of the Dove is pictured above.

At St. Mary’s College, however, we take the poem to refer to us. After all, we are a campus defined by our waterfront on the St. Mary’s River. There are almost always boats on the river and we have long had one of the top sailing programs in the country. This poem is inscribed on the wall of our campus center so that students will see it on their way to the dining hall.

In this way, the poem serves to put a frame around the St. Mary’s educational experience. For it is not, of course, only about boats. It is about people venturing into the unknown and about other people, those who love them, letting them go. The adventurers may be fearful and they may be passing beyond the lip of our understanding, but they can rest assured that they will have the wind of love—of their parents, teachers, and friends—supporting them. Those who are waving from the shore ask only for a momentary kiss and then accept that our children and students will be focused on the horizon and on the “water/ water waving forever.”

The image of waving, incidentally, reminds me of the penultimate paragraph in the James Baldwin short story “Sonny’s Blues” where Sonny’s fellow jazz musicians are trying to entice him back into music after a prison stint for heroine. Sonny’s brother sees how hesitant Sonny is about playing again but also notes how the band leader is assuring him that all will be well:

He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing–he had been there, and he knew. 

In Lucille’s poem, I love the image of the wind, a divine spirit that propels and that will be with the sailors always. I also enjoy Lucille’s word play in “love your back.” The “your” sounds like Black dialectic for “you,” pointing to confidence that love will remain even when the one who loves is absent. But it also functions as a possessive pronoun—you can go forth confident because we have your back.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what the “this” and the “that” are. What counts is our wide-eyed openness to the

Monday

Yesterday I mentioned Lucille Clifton’s poem “blessing the boats (at st. mary’s).” As I explain below, it was written while Lucille was a colleague at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. I find it a miraculous poem:

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back         may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

The title refers to the Blessing of the Fleet that occurs every October at St. Clement’s Island, Maryland. It commemorates the blessing of the Arc and the Dove in England, which set off with the first English settlers in Maryland in 1633. They landed at St. Clement’s five months later. A modern replica of the Dove is pictured above.

At St. Mary’s College, however, we take the poem to refer to us. After all, we are a campus defined by our waterfront on the St. Mary’s River. There are almost always boats on the water and we have long had one of the top sailing programs in the country. This poem is inscribed on the wall of our campus center so that students will see it on their way to the dining hall.

In this way, the poem serves to put a frame around the St. Mary’s educational experience. For it is not, of course, only about boats. It is about people venturing into the unknown and about other people, those who love them, letting them go. The adventurers may be fearful and they may be passing beyond the lip of our understanding, but they can rest assured that they will have the wind of love—of their parents, teachers, and friends—supporting them. Those who are waving from the shore ask only for a momentary kiss and then accept that our children and students will be focused on the horizon and on the “water/ water waving forever.”

The image of waving, incidentally, reminds me of the penultimate paragraph in the James Baldwin short story “Sonny’s Blues” where Sonny’s fellow jazz musicians are trying to entice him back into music after a prison stint for heroine. Sonny’s brother sees how hesitant Sonny is about playing again but also notes how the band leader in assuring him that all will be well:

He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing–he had been there, and he knew. 

In Lucille’s poem, I love the image of the wind, a divine spirit that propels and that will be with the sailors always. I also enjoy Lucille’s word play in “love your back.” The “your” sounds like Black dialect for “you,” pointing to confidence that love will remain even when the one who loves is absent. But it also functions as a possessive pronoun—you can go forth confident because we have your back.

In the end, it doesn’t matter where we sail from or to. What matters is our wide-eyed openness to the journey.

The poem has been read several times at St. Mary’s commencements. Indeed, our ceremony is set up in a way that conforms with the idea in the poem. When our students first come to St. Mary’s, we greet them in a convocation where they have their backs to the St. Mary’s River. Then the chairs are turned around during the graduation ceremonies, and the students can see the river beyond the speakers’ platform.

In the end, it doesn’t matter where we sail from or to, this or that. What matters is our wide-eyed openness to the journey.

The poem has been read several times at St. Mary’s commencements. Indeed, our ceremony is set up in a way that conforms with the idea in the poem. When our students first come to St. Mary’s, we greet them in a convocation where they have their backs to the St. Mary’s River. Then the chairs are turned around during the graduation ceremonies, and the students can see the river beyond the speakers’ platform.

Every time I reread the poem, I think of the many students I have taught, sailing out into unknown waters. While most I never see or hear about again, I love them all, just the same.

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The Lesson of the Falling Leaves

By Robin Bates | Published: October 16, 2021
Ilya Ostroukhov, Golden Autumn (1887)

Spiritual Sunday

Lucille Clifton has written some wonderful poems about letting go, which are impressive given the multiple tragedies she faced, including the untimely death of her husband. One is “the blessing of the boats,” which I’ve written about multiple times (including here). Another is “the lesson of the falling leaves,” which is all the more powerful because it is short and succinct, proceeding through a series of simple declarative sentences.

The poem reminds me of the concluding stanzas of Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods.” The two women were friends, and I’ve encountered a number of their poems that seem to be in conversation with each other. In this case, I think Clifton’s poem came first but I’m not sure. “Blackwater Woods” concludes,

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

So here’s “the lesson of the falling leaves”:

the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves

If you think of the lyric as the leaves fall around you, you will find yourself in agreement.

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Bertie Wooster Bungles the Catch

By Robin Bates | Published: October 14, 2021
P.G. Wodehouse on the cricket field

Friday

I owe today’s post to my mother’s weekly poetry column in the Sewanee Messenger. As today is the birthday of P.G. Wodehouse, legendary creator of the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves series, she had me delve into Wodehouse’s poetry. We decided on the following poem, which sounds very much as though it features the inept Bertie. The poem is doubly relevant as America is currently in the throes of the baseball playoffs.

To be sure, this Bertie lookalike is playing cricket, not baseball, but both sports involve catching fly balls. Or not catching them, in this case.

Missed
By P.G. Wodehouse (10/15/1881)

The sun in the heavens was beaming,
    The breeze bore an odour of hay,
My flannels were spotless and gleaming,
    My heart was unclouded and gay;
The ladies, all gaily apparelled,
    Sat round looking on at the match,
In the tree-tops the dicky-birds carolled,
    All was peace — till I bungled that catch.
 
My attention the magic of summer
    Had lured from the game — which was wrong.
The bee (that inveterate hummer)
    Was droning its favourite song.
I was tenderly dreaming of Clara
    (On her not a girl is a patch),
When, ah, horror! there soared through the air a
    Decidedly possible catch.
 
I heard in a stupor the bowler
    Emit a self-satisfied ‘Ah!’
The small boys who sat on the roller
    Set up an expectant ‘Hurrah!’
The batsman with grief from the wicket
    Himself had begun to detach —
And I uttered a groan and turned sick. It
    Was over. I’d buttered the catch.
 
O, ne’er, if I live to a million,
    Shall I feel such a terrible pang.
From the seats on the far-off pavilion
    A loud yell of ecstasy rang.
By the handful my hair (which is auburn)
    I tore with a wrench from my thatch,
And my heart was seared deep with a raw burn
    At the thought that I’d foozled that catch.
 
Ah, the bowler’s low, querulous mutter
    Points loud, unforgettable scoff!
Oh, give me my driver and putter!
    Henceforward my game shall be golf.
If I’m asked to play cricket hereafter,
    I am wholly determined to scratch.
Life’s void of all pleasure and laughter;
    I bungled the easiest catch.

Incidentally, Wodehouse got the name of Bertie’s incomparable Butler from a cricketer he once happened to see play, one Percy Jeeves. Percy never knew that his name would become immortal as he died in the Battle of the Somme. We can be confident that neither he nor his literary namesake would have bungled the catch.

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Tough Lives Need Poetry’s Toughness

By Robin Bates | Published: October 13, 2021
Fred Gardner, Poor Student (1934)

Thursday

I’m currently reading Thor Magnus Tangeras’s Literature and Transformation: A Narrative Study of Life-Changing Reading Experiences, thanks to an alert from Oberlin librarian Valerie Hotchkiss. Given that I’ve just finished my own book on literature’s life-changing potential, I found myself strangely defensive when I first started it. Had he beaten me to the punch in talking about the impact of literary immersion?

Thinking about it further, however, made me realize that this is all to the good. When the world is starting to wake up to your ideas, that’s the best time to publish.

I also appreciate it how Tangeras is introducing me to others who have written on the subject that I’ve missed. I share some their observations today and will discuss the book more in upcoming posts.

Although I have heard about novelist Jeanette Winterson’s autobiography, I haven’t read it and and so didn’t realize the degree to which literature came to her rescue. Winterson was raised to be a Pentecostal Christian missionary but came out as a lesbian at 16 and left home. At a time when she was “confused about sex and sexuality, and upset about the straightforward practical problems of where to live, what to eat, and how to do my A levels,” she read T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. The play turned her upside down, especially the lines,

This is one moment,
But know that another
Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.

Winterson says the “unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable.” She goes on to comment,

I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot book helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it’s irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.

And elsewhere:

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

Tangeras writes that reading helped Winterson

feel belonging, gave her access to new experiences and helped her deal with hardship: “I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground…Literature is common ground.”

Tangeras also notes that literature helped author Rachel Kelly negotiate dark times. In Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me – My Journey through Depression, Kelly describes how reading poetry

helped her conquer two serious episodes of depression: “It’s no exaggeration to say that poetry proved a lifeline.” She drew strength from the ability of Gerard Manley Hopkins to celebrate the healing powers of nature, and George Herbert’s “Love (3),” which functioned as an antidote to the negative stories that dominated her mind at the time.

Literature and Transformation has put me on to some other great quotations as well, including this one from philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method:

The work of art is not an object that stands over against a subject for itself. Instead the work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that changes the person who experiences it.

And:

In the experience of art we see a genuine experience induced by the work, which does not leave him who has it unchanged.

And then there’s Czech literary theorist Jan Mukarovsky, who in the following passage writes about the arts in general but in ways that apply to literature:

The work becomes capable of being closely connected to the entirely personal experiences, images and feelings of any perceiver – capable of affecting not only his conscious mental life but even of setting into motion forces which govern his subconscious. The perceiver’s entire personal relation to reality, whether active or contemplative, will henceforth be changed to a greater or lesser degree by this influence. Hence the work of art has such powerful effect upon man not because it gives him – as the common formula goes – an impression of the author’s personality, his experience and so forth, but because it influences the perceiver’s personality, his experiences and so forth.

In his book, Tangeras sets out to figure out how exactly this influencing works by sharing five extended conversations with readers about their life-changing experiences with specific works. Then, turning to the specialized language of psychology, he looks for patterns in their accounts. More on Tangeras’s book to come.

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