Aslan as Eco Warrior

By Robin Bates | Published: August 26, 2021
Pauline Baynes, Aslan in The Magician’s Nephew

Friday

While researching the imagination chapter in my book, I’ve just come across a wonderful article by my Sewanee colleague John Gatta that links Aslan, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, and the future of the planet. The article’s title is a mouthful—“Not a Tame Lion”: Animal Compassion and the Ecotheology of Imagination in Four Anglican Thinkers”—but I think you’ll like the central idea.

When Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner shoots the albatross, John says, he not only shows his “disdain for animal life in general but a denial of his own shared involvement in the integrity of creation.” The deed, John says, “amounts to a failure of imagination.”

To explain how this is the case, John explains Coleridge’s view of imagination. For him, it is

that vital faculty of mind by which we envision the wholeness of reality, the often unseen web of connections that unifies otherwise disparate elements of God’s creation…. It corresponds to what we might recognize today as an inherently ecological cast of mind.

This cast of mind is the realization that we are much more deeply enmeshed in nature than we may realize. There is no clear dividing line between “human” and “nature,” as becomes ever clearer to us as we see our excessive hydrocarbons triggering killer storms, blistering droughts, record-setting fires, unprecedented heat waves, and alarming sea-level rise. We respond to nature and nature responds to us in myriad ways, many of which we are only dimly aware.

The Mariner’s “death of imagination,” John says,

thus leaves him unable to perceive any creaturely kinship between himself and the animal he thoughtlessly destroys. He is blind to all he shares spiritually and even biologically (including, as we recognize today, a common preponderance of DNA coding) with the albatross.

The logical result of this separation is that he is “plunged into radical isolation and miserable exposure to death-in-life.” Separating oneself from nature is its own punishment, just as, in Dante’s Inferno, the souls punish themselves by cutting themselves off from divine love. They are, say, blown by the winds of ceaseless desire (the adulterous lovers Paulo and Francesca) or encased in permanent ice (those who betray their heart and their friends, like Judas). Whatever short thrill we get from dominating nature—from shooting the albatross—we pay for by finding ourselves lost in an alien and hostile environment. Furthermore, we deprive ourselves of the spiritual sustenance that nature provides.

Just as failure of the imagination leads us into this condition, however, exercising the imagination can restore us to health. The Mariner’s salvation lies in seeing the beauty of the water snakes, which previously he had regarded as “slimy, slimy things”:

Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes
They moved in tracks of shining white
And when they reared, the elvish light
Fell of in hoary flakes.

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 Mariner’s tortuous journey ultimately brings him to the succinctly-stated revelation that he shares with the wedding guest at the end of the poem:

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

John mentions other instances where the imagination has allowed people to step beyond the narrow boundaries of self and seek a kinship with nature. William Wilberforce, best known for his anti-slavery work, also was actively involved in the promotion of animal welfare. According to John, he had many pets, denounced such practices as bull-baiting, and helped found the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

All this is useful background for understanding the significance of Aslan. John notes Lewis’s emphasis on Aslan’s wildness, quoting Mr. Beaver (in Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), “He’ll be coming and going….He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion” and “Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” On the issue of wildness, John cites Wendell Berry’s description of God as “the wildest being in existence.” He also cites the Book of Job, where God references nature and various powerful creatures (starting with whales) to show Job how much more to creation there is than human beings.

If, as John sees it, Lewis attributing “deific and Christological powers to a wild beast” is a “boldly original stroke,” it’s because it takes us out a human-centered version of creation to one encompassing all of nature. This vision is further accentuated by the creation scene in The Magician’s Nephew:

Aslan’s voice surpasses ordinary speech to become wild but beautiful song, as he joins in harmony with other voices to sing the land of Narnia into existence. The author’s poetically stirring account of this creation parallels the Job-author’s evocation of that primal era. “When the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy.”

To be sure, Aslan then anoints a son of Adam and a daughter of Eve as the rulers of this creation. Lewis still awards humans top billing once creation gets started. All the same, Aslan being a lion opens up new possibilities.

John concludes by asking why we think that God’s incarnation in the world has to necessarily be human. He even wonders how the Christian vision would handle the possibility of non-human life on other planets. Then he observes that Lewis starts to grapple with these very questions in his science fiction. While “Lewis the essayist and rational apologist might hesitate to speculate about such issues, Lewis the imaginative fiction writer was arguably more adventurous, a mental traveler disposed to visit lands as strange as Narnia if not stranger still.”

That last observation takes me back to a talk I heard by Rob MacSwain, editor of the Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis who teaches at Sewanee’s School of Theology. After saying that Anglicans/Episcopalians are not as theological as other denominations (say, Catholics and Lutherans), MacSwain immediately qualified his assertion by noting that they do theology in other ways. Instead of engaging in systematic thought, they use poetry and literature to explore metaphysical issues. MacSwain noted as examples John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and of course C.S. Lewis. My friend’s article makes clear how even a children’s series can be part of that exploration.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Anti-Maskers Seized by a Fury from Hell

By Robin Bates | Published: August 25, 2021
Master of Gruninger Workshop, Fury Allecto Maddens Queen Amata

Thursday

My Dante discussion group, now a Virgil discussion group, made a Covid connection when discussing how a fury from hell upsets a sensible political settlement in The Aeneid. It’s a reminder that, no matter how rational a certain course of action may be, human perversity is always lurking to undermine it.

King Latinus of the Latins has received a prophetic dream that he should marry his daughter Lavinia to a stranger who has just shown up on Italy’s shores—which is to say, to Aeneas. The ultimate result will be an empire unlike any the world has ever known.

So far, so good. Indeed, if this were to play out, the Aeneid would have to end at Book VII. Instead, we get another five books of bloody warfare between the Latins and the Trojans. That’s because Juno, ever determined to thwart Aeneas, enlists the fury Allecto to disrupt Latinus’s plans:

               From the dark underworld
Home of the Furies, she aroused Allecto,
Grief’s drear mistress, with her lust for war,
For angers, ambushes, and crippling crimes.
Even her father Pluto hates this figure,
Even her hellish sisters, for her myriad
Faces, for her savage looks, her head
Alive and black with snakes.

Allecto immediately goes into action, working first on Amata, Latinus’s queen. In the scene, I think of those fury-possessed parents who, after a Tennessee school board meeting where health care professionals advocated a school mask mandate, went after them, shouting, “We know who you are,” “We will find you,” and “There is a place in hell for you guys. There is a bad place in hell and everybody’s taking notes.”

Here’s how Allecto enters their hearts of such people:

                                           Now the goddess
Plucked one of the snakes, her gloomy tresses,
And tossed it at the woman, sent it down
Her bosom to her midriff and her heart,
So that by this black reptile driven wild
She might disrupt her whole house. And the serpent
Slipping between her gown and her smooth breasts
Went writhing on, though imperceptible
To the fevered woman’s touch or sight, and breathed
Viper’s breath into her.

After Latinus refuses to abandon his plan, the infected queen becomes a raging Karen:

Finding Latinus proof against this plea
And holding firm, while in her viscera
The serpent’s evil madness circulated,
Suffusing her, the poor queen, now enflamed
By prodigies of hell, went wild indeed
And with insane abandon roamed the city.

To this point, Turnus doesn’t seem to care that Lavinia will be marrying Aeneas, not him. That’s because he hasn’t been riled up yet by inflammatory Facebook posts. In fact, when Allecto shows up in his dream, taking the form of an old woman (her Facebook avatar?), he initially dismisses her:

                                But old age, mother,
Sunk in decay and too far gone for truth,
Is giving you this useless agitation,
Mocking your prophet’s mind with dreams of fear
And battles between kings.

Being a reasonable Republican lasts only so long, however. It doesn’t take much for Allecto to infect Turnus as she has infected Queen Amata:

“I come to you from the Black Sisters’ home
And bring war and extinction in my hand.”

With this she hurled a torch and planted it
Below the man’s chest, smoking with hellish light.
Enormous terror woke him, a cold sweat
Broke out all over him and soaked his body.

Next thing we know, he’s storming a school board meeting. Or a state capitol. Or the U.S. Capitol. Virgil goes wild with his epic simile:

Then driven wild, shouting for arms, for arms
He ransacked house and chamber. Lust of steel
Rage in him, brute insanity of war,
And wrath above all, as when fiery sticks
Are piled with a loud crackling by the side
Of a caldron boiling, and the water heaves
And seethes inside the vessel, steaming up
With foam, and bubbling higher, till the surface
Holds no more, and vapor mounts to heaven.
So, then, in violation of the peace,
He told the captains of his troops to march
On King Latinus…

As for Latinus, he reacts the way that Trump reacts when his supporters go insane. He retreats into self-pity and inaction–which is to say, into his own Mar-a-Lago:

”For me, I’ve earned my rest, though entering haven
I am deprived of happiness in death.”

He said no more, but shut himself away
And dropped the reins of rule over the state.

Meanwhile, the death count rises.

After refusing to stand tall against Covid during his presidency, Trump tried momentarily to advocate vaccines at a recent Alabama rally, only to reverse himself quickly following boos. Real leaders make tough and principled decisions. Fake leaders fold when Allecto seizes their followers.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Dr. Watson Returns from Afghanistan

By Robin Bates | Published: August 24, 2021
Rathbone and Bruce as Holmes and Watson

Wednesday

Washington Post columnist David von Drehle recently reminded me where I first encountered a mention of Afghanistan since it’s the same place where he learned of it: in “one of the most famous opening chapters in literary history”:

I was 11 years old, and my new book introduced a young English doctor. Sent to an outpost of the Empire, he was hurried ahead to the front lines of a persistent war. He united with his assigned unit in Kandahar, and nearly died in combat when his shoulder was shattered by a bullet.

The book was a Study in Scarlet, and the chapter is famous because it describes Dr. Watson’s meeting with Sherlock Holmes. As I look over the Arthur Conan Doyle novel, I see there are other Afghanistan references that will resonate with those war veterans who continue to suffer ill effects from the conflict. “The campaign brought honors and promotion to many,” Watson tells us, “but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster.” Because his health has been “irretrievably ruined” and he has little money, he jumps at the chance when a friend mentions a potential roommate:

“I should like to meet him,” I said. “If I am to lodge with anyone, I should prefer a man of studious and quiet habits. I am not strong enough yet to stand much noise or excitement. I had enough of both in Afghanistan to last me for the remainder of my natural existence. How could I meet this friend of yours?”

Afghanistan is mentioned upon Watson’s first encounter with this man:

“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.

“How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”

Holmes later reveals how he knows this:

“You appeared to be surprised when I told you, on our first meeting, that you had come from Afghanistan.”

“You were told, no doubt.”

“Nothing of the sort. I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind, that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, ‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.’ The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.”

The relevant point for us is that our own Afghanistan vets also return indelibly marked by the experience.

Other than Watson, my first real literary encounter with Afghanistan was M.M. Kaye’s bestseller Far Pavilions. Given how many people perceived the fragility of Afghan government and the chaos that would follow an American withdrawal, the book is only too relevant.

In the book, the disaster is far worse as a British blunder costs the lives of 969 British and Indian soldiers after they are ambushed by Afghan rebels. The character who foresees this happening is Ashton, who is born British but, because he loses his parents, is raised Indian. He therefore has a foot in each world.

Ashton goes on to join the Corps of Guides when he discovers his English parentage. Because he knows the language and the customs of the local populace, he can clearly see when his superiors are making stupid mistakes.

His special knowledge causes him great internal anguish. Should he blindly obey orders even when he knows they will lead to disaster? If he ignores his place and speaks up to his commanders, telling them the truth, will it even make any difference? As it turns out, he does warn the commanders about the trap, pays a price for doing so, and is ignored anyway. A massacre results.

Our own specialists either didn’t speak up or, like Ashton, were ignored. There’s a significant distance between the book and America’s involvement, however. If our withdrawal is chaotic, it’s a chaos engineered in part by the previous administration. If the book were to have followed what happened in 2021, previous British officers would have made a special deal with the Afghan rebels to strengthen their hand, making the subsequent ambush more likely to succeed.

Of course, there’s plenty of blame to go around, starting with George W. Bush and continuing on with Barack Obama. Also, give Donald Trump credit for his determination to withdraw and Joe Biden for continuing the process. When we investigate what happened, we must be clear-eyed, not narrowly partisan.

I conclude today’s post with a poem that my father, an ardent birdwatcher, wrote in the early days of the war about the birds of Afghanistan. Through contrasting the natural world with the disasters created by humans, he expresses his longing for an unspoiled world of great natural beauty.

Yet the two worlds are not entirely separate. The Steppe Eagle may be able to ignore the puffs of explosives below him (he’s much more interested in a herd of ibex), but sandgrouse glean in the minefields, russet sparrows move into the emptied houses, and crows and vultures feed on the human dead. The tragedy of the war is captured in images that are all the more powerful for being only indirectly referred to.

The poem brings to my mind a powerful scene in Three Kings, the 1999 David O. Russell/George Clooney movie about the first Persian Gulf War. A woman war reporter, tough as nails (she has to be), breaks down when she encounters a pelican trapped in the oil spills caused by Saddam Hussein blowing up the Kuwaiti oil stations. Seemingly inured to human suffering, she can’t take the sight of innocence desecrated. She is recalling her own childhood innocence and mourning its loss.

A couple of notes on the poem. The “great game” in the first line echoes the phrase, made famous by Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, referring to the battle between east and west. (Here the great game seems also to be the conflict between humans and nature.) The gyrfalcon freed from the falconer, meanwhile, is an allusion to Yeats’s great poem “The Second Coming,” which predicts cataclysmic apocalypse “stalking towards Bethlehem to be born.” As Yeats writes, “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” which has certainly proved to be the case in current day Afghanistan.

Finally, the “old man of the mountain” was a ruler of an Islamic sect in the 11th century who would get his followers high on hashish and send them out to assassinate his enemies (the word “assassin” comes from hashish).  Today it’s not hashish but opium that helps finance the Taliban.

In my father’s elegiac vision, the riches of the orient seem to be a thing of the past.

The Birds of Afghanistan
By Scott Bates

“Hardly anyone has been birding in war-torn Afghanistan for 20 years. . . . Around 460 species of birds have been recorded there, a good record for a land-locked and largely arid country.” Nigel Wheatley, Where to Watch Birds in Asia, 1996

The Great Game of Winter plays in the Hindu Kush

A black-eyed, swarthy-faced, hawk-billed Steppe
Eagle sits on a cliff at fourteen thousand feet
Like Hasan Ben Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain.
He ignores the puffs of smoke in the hills below
And watches a herd of Ibex forage
In the drifts of whirling snow.

Bands of Snowfinches feed on juniper berries.
Siberian Cranes wing southwest over Mount Zebak.
Snowcocks call in the high meadows of Badakshan.
Millions of Teal and Pelicans swim and dive in Hamun-i-Puzak.
(Flowerpeckers, Sunbirds, and Spiderhunters
Have left on vacation for the Indonesian jungles.)
Flocks of Painted Sandgrouse glean with impunity
In the minefields. Russet Sparrows in the east
Move into empty villages. Ravens chat on broken towers.
Carrion Crows and Bearded Vultures enjoy a holiday feast.

A Gyrfalcon soars
Freed from her hood and her falconer.

The Steppe Eagle swings down the Khinjan pass,
Circling down where once Marco Polo went
Amidst the riches of the Orient.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Frozen in the Ice of Indifference

By Robin Bates | Published: August 23, 2021
Gustave Dore, Satan encased in ice

Tuesday

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

An Endless Game, an Endless War

By Robin Bates | Published: August 22, 2021

Monday

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.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Here I Bloom for a Short Hour Unseen

By Robin Bates | Published: August 22, 2021
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.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

The Afghan Debacle, a Greek Tragedy

By Robin Bates | Published: August 19, 2021
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.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Haitian Earthquake Redux

By Robin Bates | Published: August 18, 2021
Devastation from 2021 Haiti earthquake

Thursday

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Bibliotherapy Is Having a Moment

By Robin Bates | Published: August 17, 2021
Ulisse Caputo

Wednesday

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 reviewed Literature 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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments closed