Jo, Nell, Tiny Tim Needed Vaccines

By Robin Bates | Published: December 1, 2024
Harry Furniss, Death of Little Nell

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Monday

Atlantic writer Tom Nichols, once a responsible Republican before Donald Trump drove him out of the party, has wondered whether the United States can be considered a serious nation. After all, why would we deliberately break institutions that are the envy of the world, including those tasked with curing disease.

Deliberate breakage seems to be Trump’s playbook in this area. Why else nominate for Health and Human Services Secretary the notorious anti-vaxxer Robert R. Kennedy, Jr., who is directly responsible for the measles deaths of 83 Samoan children? Why else nominate to head the National Institute of Health Dr. Jay Battacharya, whose proposal to allow Covid to spread in order to develop herd immunity would have resulted in another million deaths. (Instead we opted for masks and social distancing and were rewarded with the miraculous Covid vaccine.) Why else choose, as the top insurance regulator, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has a history of hawking fraudulent medicines.

It appers that Trump aims to make infectious diseases great again.

In few areas has science proved its worth more than in battling illnesses that once claimed a horrific human toll. Following up on Tom Nichols’s observation, I have likened anti-vaxxers and their ilk to children born into wealthy families who take for granted their comfortable lives. Not having to be concerned about smallpox and polio and tuberculosis and cholera and typhus and typhoid and measles and whooping cough and chickenpox and a host of other diseases, they feel free to rail against the measures that have made their comfort possible.

Would they change their minds if they read the many 19th century novels that feature children dying of diseases that science has since found cures for? I like to think that the following heart-rending passages might make a difference.

Little Nell in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop – Tuberculosis

“I have no relative or friend but her—I never had—I never will have. She is all in all to me. It is too late to part us now.’

Waving them off with his hand, and calling softly to her as he went, he stole into the room. They who were left behind, drew close together, and after a few whispered words—not unbroken by emotion, or easily uttered—followed him. They moved so gently, that their footsteps made no noise; but there were sobs from among the group, and sounds of grief and mourning.

For she was dead. There, upon her little bed, she lay at rest. The solemn stillness was no marvel now.

Little Jo in Dickens’ Bleak House – Smallpox

“It’s turned wery dark, sir. Is there any light a-comin?”
“It is coming fast, Jo.”
Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very near its end.
“Jo, my poor fellow!”
“I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I’m a-gropin—a-gropin—let me catch hold of your hand.”
“Jo, can you say what I say?”
“I’ll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it’s good.”
“Our Father.”
“Our Father! Yes, that’s wery good, sir.”
“Which art in heaven.”
“Art in heaven—is the light a-comin, sir?”
“It is close at hand. Hallowed be thy name!”
“Hallowed be—thy—”
The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!

Carol in Kate Wiggins’ The Birds’ Christmas Carol – Tuberculosis

There were tears in many eyes, but not in Carol’s. The loving heart had quietly ceased to beat and the “wee birdie” in the great house had flown to its “home nest.” Carol had fallen asleep! But as to the song, I think perhaps, I cannot say, she heard it after all!

Tiny Tim in Dickens’ Christmas Carol – Possibly rickets, polio, cerebral palsy, or tuberculosis

The Ghost [of Christmas Future] conducted him through several streets familiar to his feet; and as they went along, Scrooge looked here and there to find himself, but nowhere was he to be seen. They entered poor Bob Cratchit’s house; the dwelling he had visited before; and found the mother and the children seated round the fire.
Quiet. Very quiet. The noisy little Cratchits were as still as statues in one corner, and sat looking up at Peter, who had a book before him. The mother and her daughters were engaged in sewing. But surely they were very quiet!
“ ‘And He took a child, and set him in the midst of them.’ ”

Helen Burns in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre – Tuberculosis, although the school itself is experiencing a typhus epidemic

“How comfortable I am! That last fit of coughing has tired me a little; I feel as if I could sleep: but don’t leave me, Jane; I like to have you near me.”
“I’ll stay with you, dear Helen: no one shall take me away.”
“Are you warm, darling?”
“Yes.”
“Good-night, Jane.”
“Good-night, Helen.”
She kissed me, and I her, and we both soon slumbered.
When I awoke it was day: an unusual movement roused me; I looked up; I was in somebody’s arms; the nurse held me; she was carrying me through the passage back to the dormitory. I was not reprimanded for leaving my bed; people had something else to think about; no explanation was afforded then to my many questions; but a day or two afterwards I learned that Miss Temple, on returning to her own room at dawn, had found me laid in the little crib; my face against Helen Burns’s shoulder, my arms round her neck. I was asleep, and Helen was—dead.

The parents in Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, leaving Mary an orphan – Cholera

The Mem Sahib wrung her hands.
“Oh, I know I ought!” she cried. “I only stayed to go to that silly dinner party. What a fool I was!”
At that very moment such a loud sound of wailing broke out from the servants’ quarters that she clutched the young man’s arm, and Mary stood shivering from head to foot. The wailing grew wilder and wilder. “What is it? What is it?” Mrs. Lennox gasped.
“Someone has died,” answered the boy officer. “You did not say it had broken out among your servants.”
“I did not know!” the Mem Sahib cried. “Come with me! Come with me!” and she turned and ran into the house.
After that appalling things happened, and the mysteriousness of the morning was explained to Mary. The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies. The Ayah had been taken ill in the night, and it was because she had just died that the servants had wailed in the huts. Before the next day three other servants were dead and others had run away in terror. There was panic on every side, and dying people in all the bungalows.

These 19th century authors, faced with child death, railed against those who could have made a difference. Here’s Bronte:

When the typhus fever had fulfilled its mission of devastation at Lowood, it gradually disappeared from thence; but not till its virulence and the number of its victims had drawn public attention on the school. Inquiry was made into the origin of the scourge, and by degrees various facts came out which excited public indignation in a high degree. The unhealthy nature of the site; the quantity and quality of the children’s food; the brackish, fetid water used in its preparation; the pupils’ wretched clothing and accommodations—all these things were discovered, and the discovery produced a result mortifying to Mr. Brocklehurst, but beneficial to the institution.

And Dickens in Bleak House after Jo has died of smallpox:

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.

Do we want to return to those days? Or would we like this instead?

Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father.

Which America is going to win out, Bad Scrooge or Good Scrooge? Tiny Tim’s life hangs in the balance.

Added nbote: Apparently there are further problematic health nominees that I missed when I wrote this essay. Thanks to David Corn of Mother Jones, I’ve learned to the following succinct tweet from Dr. Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine, surgery interventional cardiologist, and CNN medical analyst. Corn added the names in brackets:

If a new pandemic comes to the US next year we’ll have an NIH director [Jay Bhattacharya] who advocated for letting COVID burn through the US, an HHS Sec [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] who believes in raw milk but not vaccines, an FDA commissioner [Marty Makary] who said COVID would be over by 4/2021, and a CDC director [Dave Weldon] who supported the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism.

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When the Light Knocks on the Door

By Robin Bates | Published: November 30, 2024
William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World

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First Sunday in Advent

Gwendolyn Brooks’s “truth” is a wonderful poem with which to kick off the dark but hopeful season of Advent. It reminds me a little of T.S. Eliot’s observation (in The Waste Land) that April is the cruelest month. Easier to remain in a vegetative state, Eliot observes—“Winter kept us warm, covering/ Earth in forgetful snow, feeding/ A little life with dried tubers”—than engage in the difficult process of growth, with its complications of memory and desire.

For her part, Brooks talks about dreading rather than greeting the sun, even though we have been weeping and praying for the sun “all though the night-years.” Having spent “so lengthy a season with shade,” she writes, we are startled when

we wake one shimmering morning to
Hear the fierce hammering
Of his firm knuckles
Hard on the door.

Often, when we talk about the Advent hope and the Christmas promise, we fail to mention the courage that it takes to hope. Brooks writes it is so much sweeter to “sleep in the coolness of snug unawareness” that, as a result, we may shudder and flee when the sun makes its presence felt.

truth
By Gwendolyn Brooks

And if sun comes
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?

Though we have wept for him,
Though we have prayed
All through the night-years—
What if we wake one shimmering morning to
Hear the fierce hammering
Of his firm knuckles
Hard on the door?

Shall we not shudder?—
Shall we not flee
Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter
Of the familiar
Propitious haze?

Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes.

If this were a John Donne poem, I would suspect the author of punning on “sun.” And indeed, though Brooks described herself as “non-religious,” there seems to be religious imagery throughout, especially in the image of the sun hammering on the door. In St. Paul’s Cathedral in London there is a William Holman Hunt painting of Jesus knocking at a door with no handle, meaning that it can only be opened from within. Or in a related albeit reversed use of door imagery, Jesus assures us in Matthew 7:7, “Knock and door will be opened to you.”

Opening a door and knocking on a door are simple actions. When life-changing light is involved, however, they require strength of mind.

Further thought: I’ve thought of a related poem by Lucille Clifton, who was a friend of Brooks. In “the light that came to lucille clifton” the poet writes,

but the light insists on itself in the world;
a voice from the nondead past started talking,
she closed her ears and it spelled out in her hand
“you might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.”

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My Childhood Love for Krauss/Sendak

By Robin Bates | Published: November 28, 2024
Illus. from Krauss and Sendak’s A Very Special House

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Friday

Back in September the New Yorker ran an article on a children’s book author that had a big impact on my life. Ruth Krauss, with a significant assist from illustrator Maurice Sendak, understood my child’s sense of humor as no author had before. Thanks to Adrieene Raphel’s piece, I now understand why.

The two books I remember the most are A Hole Is to Dig and A Very Special House. Raphel  notes that Krauss “pioneered a method that now seems intuitive: portraying the world from the perspective of a child’s imagination.” She observes,

The psychologist Arnold Gesell observed that children are, essentially, pragmatists, and Krauss’s great achievement was to take this logic to its extreme, conjuring a concrete vision of the world using the child’s imagination: “Toes are to dance on; eyebrows are to go over your eyes.” She collected the phrases from kindergartners in Rowayton, Connecticut, where she lived, and from four- and five-year-olds at the Bank Street School, in New York City…. Krauss was evoking consciousness itself, as found in the way a specific group of people deployed language.

I remember thinking hilarious the line “a tablespoon is to eat a table with,” with the joke punctuated by a Sendak cartoon of a boy with a broad smirk. I always felt that he and I were sharing the joke together.

The sense that I had found a kindred soul in Krauss/Sendak continued with A Very Special House, which I enjoyed even more. In this house, everything is topsy turvy: chairs are for climbing on, doors are for swinging on, walls are for drawing on, the bed is for bouncing on, the shelf is for sleeping on, and…but you get the point:

There’s a bed that’s very special
and a shelf that’s very special
and the chairs are very special
–but it’s not to take a seat–
and the doors are very special
and the walls are very special and
a table very special where to put your feet feet feet.

To this house the narrator brings home

a turtle
and a rabbit and a giant
and a little dead mouse
—I take it everywhere—
and some monkeys and some skunkeys
and a very old lion which…
is eating all the stuffing from the chairs, chairs, chairs.

This entourage unleashes chaos in the very special house:

They and I are making secrets
and we’re falling over laughing
and we’re running in and out
–and we hooie hooie hooie—
then we think we are some chickens
then we’re singing in the opera then
we’re going going going ooie ooie ooie.

Turn the page and there are no longer line breaks after the actions, capturing the undifferentiated confusion:

Oh ooie ooie ooie ooie
ooie ooie ooie—we’re
sprinkling cracker crumbs under all the cushions and that lion’s keeping snoring—going snore snore snore—and the monkeys are all dancing with a special monkey-feeling—like they’re leaving little feetprints on the ceiling ceiling ceiling—and I’m hopping and I’m skipping and I’m jumping and I’m bumping—and Everywhere is music—and the giant spilled his drinking and it went all down the floor and the rabbit ate a piece out of my very best door and Everybody’s yelling for more More MORE.

And where is this very special house? The narrator tells us as the book nears its end:

I know a house—
it’s not a squirrel house
it’s not a donkey house
–just like I said–
and it’s not up on a mountain
and it’s not down in a valley
and it’s not down in a hole
and it’s not down in our alley
and it’s not up in a tree
or underneath the bed–
oh it’s right in the middle—
oh it’s ret in the meedle—
oh it’s root in the moodle of my head head head.

Krauss and Sendak, in other words, validated my five-year-old imagination, which could go wild places that the dull adult world wouldn’t understand. The first-person-narration, which must have been new to me, helped form this special bond.

A third Krauss work that I grew up with her The Carrot Seed, which was illustrated by her husband Crockett Johnson. A small boy defies the naysayers in his family, who all tell him that his carrot seed will fail, by producing a carrot. And not just any carrot but one so large that it must be carted in a wheelbarrow. In other words, he refuses “to conform to the logic of others.” Raphel asks,

Is his care an act of defiance? Optimism? His perspective carries an almost existential force: if you plant a carrot seed, he believes, a carrot must come up. And so it does.

Johnson, meanwhile, wrote his own defiant children’s literature, such as Harold and the Purple Crayon, which “championed the power of children’s imagination over the lure of bourgeois rationalism. He was also the author of the fabulous cartoon strip Barnaby, in which Barnaby has an unusual fairy godfather–the cigar-smoking, chubby leprechaun Mr. O’Malley–whom only Barnaby can see. The strip was a major influence on Calvin and Hobbes.

The greatest children’s literature often privileges a child’s perspective over that of adults, with Lewis Carroll’s Alice books being the best example of this. As a child, I felt not only delighted by these narratives but empowered.

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All Which We Behold Is Full of Blessings

By Robin Bates | Published: November 27, 2024
The Wye River

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Thursday – Thanksgiving

When it comes to poetic treatments of gratitude, few supersede William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” Indeed, I’m surprised I haven’t used it for a Thanksgiving blog post in the past. In any event, for those of us feeling down about the current state of the world, the poem calls us to a “cheerful faith that all which we behold is full of blessings.”

In the poem, Wordsworth has returned to a picturesque spot on the Wye River that he visited five years previously. This visit is far different, however, since earlier he came to find a refuge in nature. After all, at 23 he’d just had a tempestuous experience in France, what with the beginning of the Reign of Terror and his liaison with Annette Vallon, with whom he had a child. As he describes his previous visit to the Wye, he was

                             more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.

In his earlier visit, he was also not particularly reflective. He describes the kind of person he was and his particular relationship with nature as follows:

                                For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite…

It is a far more reflective Wordsworth that visits the spot five years later. Although he still revels in nature, he now realizes that nature’s “beauteous forms” will feed his soul in the future.  His expression of gratitude is why “Tintern Abbey” works for me as a Thanksgiving poem.

Memories of the Wye River’s “steep and lofty cliffs,” he reports, nourish him when he feeling lonely and depressed:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration…

The poet speculates that these “sensations sweet” have helped shape the best part of him, leading to “little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love.”

But that’s not all the memories do. Wordsworth writes that, when his mind wanders back over the Wye visit and other such encounters with nature, he sometimes experiences a mystical feeling of oneness with the cosmos:

Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

Realizing that he may be leaving the reader a little behind here—not all of us have mystical moments upon recalling a nature walk—Wordsworth pulls back a little. Even if his own out of body experiences be but “vain belief,” he says, these memories will still help us through depression and hard times:

                                                       If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,
         How often has my spirit turned to thee!

Wordsworth is not done yet, however. In the poem’s final section, Wordsworth lets us know that he’s not alone. His younger sister is with him—he gets added delight from looking at the scene through her eyes—and he imagines that the scene will also nourish her in the future. No longer thinking only of himself, he is even more grateful that these memories will bolster someone he deeply loves. Again he references the world’s harshness as he describes the healing process:

                      Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

Today is not the day to spell out our own versions of evil tongues, rash judgments, sneers, unkindness, and dreary encounters. Nor is it a day to dwell on “solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,” which the poet also foresees as possibilities within his sister’s future. Rather we, like William and Dorothy, can be grateful for how, through our encounters with natural beauty, our memories can become “a dwelling-place for all sweet sounds and harmonies.” Wordsworth reminds us that our most precious memories—the ones we are most grateful for—are those that include someone we love.

Which is the perfect message for this holiday that celebrates family.

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Kipling’s Warning to Empires

By Robin Bates | Published: November 26, 2024
Rudyard Kipling

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Wednesday

How can a country featuring the world’s most powerful military and boasting an economy that is “the envy of the world” be so bent on self-destruction? Is this how empires die? Certainly, there are many Americans willing to turn their backs on the reasons for America’s success, including its vibrant immigrant culture, its constitutional democracy that allows marginalized groups (including women) to flourish, and its robust judicial system, which has an impressive history of ferreting out corruption. Like spoiled rich kids who take their advantages for granted while ignoring the reasons behind their wealth, MAGA Americans are prepared to throw it all away in what perhaps can best be described as a White supremacist temper tantrum.

I think of the poem that Rudyard Kipling wrote for the jubilee 50th year celebration of Queen Victoria’s reign. While certainly prone to writing poetry that celebrated empire—e.g. “The White Man’s Burden”—in “Recessional” Kipling takes an unexpectedly somber tone. Rather than sing praises to an empire upon which the sun (as the saying had it) never set, he talked about the dangers of what could happen if Great Britain lost its way.

As I read “Recessional,” I think of the many ways that America has lost its way in the past. And while it has shown an amazing ability to self-correct after violating basic principles, the question is whether it can continue to do so. That Americans chose to reelect a man who represents, in every conceivable way, the negation of the American promise poses special challenges.

When Kipling speaks of the “God of our fathers, known of old,” he is thinking of Christian values, but for our purposes of today’s essay I turn to our own holy documents—which is to say, those that establish and refresh our Constitutional democracy: the Declaration of Independence, the amended Constitution, the “Gettysburg Address,” the Emma Lazarus lines on the Statue of Liberty, the Seneca Falls Declaration, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and others. If we ever forget those, we may indeed become—as Kipling warns—like Nineveh, Tyre, and other empires that once were great but now are no more.

The poem begins by acknowledging the “far-flung battle-line” of the British empire, whose awe-inspiring hand holds dominion over the palm trees of the south and the pine trees of the north. “Be with us yet, lest we forget,” he begs:

God of our fathers, known of old,
   Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand
   Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

In contrast to the tumult of war and the shouting of the victors, Kipling sets up a humble and a contrite heart. If America is given special wealth and power, its purpose should be to serve humankind—to serve democracy world-wide—rather than to prop up vainglorious ego:

The tumult and the shouting dies;
   The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
   An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
   On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Kipling goes on to mention the dangers of being “drunk with sight of power.” There’s a touch of imperialistic racism in the phrase “lesser breeds without the law,” but the point is otherwise good. If we put our trust in armed might, in “reeking tube and iron shard,” then we are but building dust on dust.

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
   Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
   Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
   In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
   And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

What tears my heart with Trump’s reelection is the sense that there is so much good that we could have done with our power that will now be wasted and even turned to active destruction. Both we and the rest of the world will pay a severe price.

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The Power of Parental Reading

By Robin Bates | Published: November 25, 2024
Frederick Warren Freer, Mother and Child Reading

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Tuesday

I must be deliberately vague in this first paragraph as people I care about want me to keep the personal parts private. All I can say is that reading a beloved children’s story to an invalid can sometimes have restorative powers. I have first-hand knowledge that this is true.

There are two aspects to this. One is the book itself and one is the act of love involved in the reading. I’ve heard that music can touch patients who seem otherwise beyond our reach—we played Mozart’s Magic Flute to my mother in her final hours when she seemed oblivious to all around her—and I’m wondering if hearing the stories we cherished as children has a similar effect.

I suspect it would work on me because I have such deep recollections of my father reading to me and my three brothers throughout our childhood. We didn’t have a television, my parents figuring that stories and poems were much richer than anything appearing on “the boob tube.” After a sit-down family supper each evening, therefore, we settled down on the couch, getting a chapter each.

If it was a book we agreed on, that meant multiple chapters. Our books included The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Doctor Doolittle, The Jungle Books, Huckleberry Finn, E. Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers, The Chronicles of Narnia, and on and on. Then, after we had brushed our teeth and gotten into bed, each of us also got a poem of his choosing. Our lives were saturated with literature.

I raised my children the same way (again, no television), sometimes with the same books, sometimes with new arrivals. For instance, while I of course read Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, we also ventured into Lloyd Alexander’s Taran series, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, and any number of Roald Dahl novels.

When we visit our grandchildren, reading aloud leads to instant bonding since my two sons have continued the practice. I’m so accustomed to reading to boys, however, that I’ve had to make an adjustment for my granddaughters, who have different tastes (although they too love Narnia).

I think when we are read to as adults, we return to a world where we felt safe, cared for, and loved. Those memories bolster and restore. As novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson observes, “The broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health.”

I bring in Robinson because it’s her birthday today. In her essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books, she talks about the power of joining the broader community of fictional characters:

I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of—who knows it better than I?—people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season.

Robinson concludes, “I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.”

Here’s one last Robinson quotation about this community:

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across the millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility.

Or as Emily Dickinson puts it, “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.”

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Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Gilead Guardian

By Robin Bates | Published: November 25, 2024
Moss in Handmaid’s Tale

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Monday

I suppose it’s not uncommon for writers to regret leaving things out of recently published work, and I have two regrets about Better Living through Literature. In the chapter on postcolonial literary theory, I wish I had included Edward Said along with Franz Fanon since the author of Orientalism has a lot to say about how literature can influence (often negatively) our view of other cultures.  I also wish I had included Handmaid’s Tale as a work that has impacted history.

Like George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s novel provides a compelling lens through which to process the workings of authoritarianism, to which it adds insights into toxic masculinity. The novel’s power was enhanced by the riveting television adaptation, which gave rise to the iconic red cloaks and white bonnets employed in protests around the world. Even without this extra boost, however, the novel would have made its mark.

To be sure, just as “no lyric has ever stopped a tank” (to quote poet Seamus Heaney), so no novel can prevent a coup. Nevertheless, Handmaid’s Tale has proved a boost to women’s resistance movements everywhere, which is why various MAGA-run school boards and libraries have been banning it. Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, one of our go-to experts on the nature of tyranny, makes excellent use of the novel by applying it to Trump’s current nominee for secretary of defense.

Pete Hegseth, Snyder says, “has two ideas about what the armed forces are for: a site to express Christian Reconstructionism and gender ideology; and a means to defeat other Americans inside America.” Gender ideology is more important to Hegseth, Snyder says,

 than the world itself, let alone the security interests of the United States.  He wants us to believe that the two are the same thing: that women in uniform prove the existence of a Leftist plot to destroy America.

With the looming threat of Hegseth heading the military, Snyder reminds us that Atwood’s plot also involves a few men who wish to oppress women. Their Christian Reconstructionist coup, which they present as God’s law, succeeds in supplanting the United States with Gilead.

If Hegseth were to be confirmed, one of his first targets would be Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as Chief of Naval Operations and the first woman ever on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hegseth has contended that “to create a society of warrior women you must separate them first from men, and then from the natural purposes of their core instincts.” To which Snyder responds,

This is pure gender ideology.  He is just making this up.  Women who have seen combat have not been separated from men or their instincts.  They are sometimes traumatized.  As are men.  Armies fight with women when and because it works.  Women can kill men and then raise children and, historically speaking, have done so. 

Thinking of Ukraine Snyder adds, “They are doing so right now.” 

Hegseth’s Christian views, meanwhile, are as authoritarian as his gender views. The Constitution, he believes, is (in Snyder’s summation)

subordinate to a broader unwritten Covenant with God, the meaning of which is of course known to him personally.  He thus opposes the constitutional structure of the United States as it figures in the actual text.

Asserting that America’s founders separating church and state opened “the gates of Mordor,” Hegseth believes that constitutional patriotism is bad since it can (in his words) “untether us from the timeless truth.” “Without God, America is not America,” he contends, blaming what he sees as America’s malaise on “the diminished role of Christ’s Kingdom in America’s founding.”

“As is always the case,” Snyder responds sarcastically, “God’s law turns out to mean what Hegseth and his friends say that it means.”

The Yale historian points out that there is one other similarity between Hegseth and Gilead’s guardians:

In the novel…people very much like Hegseth come to power, oppress women, and turn the armed forces into domestic shock troops who fight a civil war…[T]he notion that women are just objects goes hand in hand with the idea that the real fight for American soldiers is against other Americans. 

Trump too has talked of purging the armed forces while Hegseth once fantasized about civil war should Joe Biden be reelected:

America will decline and die. A national divorce will ensue. Outnumbered freedom lovers will fight back. The military and the police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice. It will not be good. Yes, there will be some sort of civil war.

Would this man resist a Trump order to invoke the insurrection act against peaceful protesters?

Interestingly, Snyder draws on the novel to end his essay on a partially positive note:

Misogyny is not the elevation of masculinity but its collapse, both as morality and as politics. Although the richness of Atwood’s story is in the exposition of a modern patriarchy, I find it important to note that Gilead, the Christian Reconstructionist state, does not endure for long. 

Earlier in the essay Snyder observes that Gilead is never able to fully control all its former territories, and we’re currently seeing efforts by blue states to protect their populations from MAGA fundamentalists. So perhaps Trumpism will indeed just be a temporary phenomenon. Unfortunately, it can do a lot of damage in a short period of time.

Let your members of Congress know that Hegseth is unacceptable. A warning, however: If you compare him to Gilead’s guardians, some in the GOP might regard that as an endorsement.

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Jesus as the Flame within the Flame

By Robin Bates | Published: November 23, 2024
Unknown Greek artist, c. 1600

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Sunday

Today is “Christ the King Sunday,” which is “a feast in the liturgical year which emphasizes the true kingship of Christ” (Wikipedia). I have problems with the metaphor of Christ as king– I suspect Jesus himself would have balked at the description–but if I understand it to mean that Jesus functions as our supreme guide and inspiration, then it somewhat works. Poet Malcolm Guite makes it clear that he sees Jesus as such in “Everything Holds Together,” a sonnet he wrote for the festival.

Sadly I missed Guite when he visited Sewanee this past month as I was in Slovenia. He is one of my favorite religious poets and I would have loved to have met him. In his sonnet he invokes a God that runs the gamut from galaxies to quarks. (I love how stellar sparks of light become “secret seeds that open every spring.”) Eucharistic Prayer C in the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer has a line that I love and that may have contributed to the poem:

At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home. By your will they were created and have their being.

God can become too small when invoked in ideological battles. As Anne Lamott has wisely said, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” If, on the other hand, we see ourselves created in God’s image, then the ego falls away and the immensity of the universe opens within us and before us. Our defensive boundaries crumble in the presence of a God that is not only bigger than we think but bigger than we can think. Here’s the poem:

Everything holds together, everything,
From stars that pierce the dark like living sparks,
To secret seeds that open every spring,
From spanning galaxies to spinning quarks,
Everything holds together and coheres,

Unfolding from the center whence it came.
And now that hidden heart of things appears,
The first-born of creation takes a name.
And shall I see the one through whom I am?
Shall I behold the one for whom I’m made,
The light in light, the flame within the flame,
Eikon tou theou, image of my God?
He comes, a little child, to bless my sight,
That I might come to him for life and light.

In his letter to the Colossians (1:15), Paul uses the phrase, “eikon tou theou tou aoratou,” meaning “the express image of the invisible God.” In other words, if Christ is described as king, it is because he came as close as anyone ever has (or so Christians believe) to grasping, articulating, and living out our divine potential. Jesus connected, in ways unfathomable to us, to that which holds everything together, to the “hidden heart of things.” Or, to borrow from Dante, to “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

In Guite’s words, Jesus is “the one through whom I am” and “the one for whom I’m made.” Light in light and flame within flame, Jesus comes as “a little child to bless my sight.” He does so that we might, in turn, come to him “for life and light.”

Becoming subjects of a king is one way of expressing this journey. I prefer Guite’s images, however, which see us as a light in the light that is in the light and as a flame within the flame that is within the flame.

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Dreams of a Sex Strike

By Robin Bates | Published: November 21, 2024
Ilus. from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata

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Friday

The election of an adjudicated rapist, along with such gloating from Trumpists as “your body, my choice,” has certain American women turning to the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata. Or at least they’re citing a South Korean movement that is following the strategy set forth in the play.

According to a Rachel Triesman NPR article, a South Korean movement known as 4B or the 4 No’s (bi means “not” in Korean) calls for the refusal of (1) dating men (biyeonae), (2) sexual relationships with men (bisekseu), (3) heterosexual marriage (bihon) and (4) childbirth (bichulsan). Triesman reports,

Interest in the 4B movement has surged in the days since the election, with Google searches spiking and the hashtag taking off on social media. Scores of young women are exploring and promoting the idea in posts on platforms like TikTok and X.

In Aristophanes’ 411 BCE comedy, the women of Greece launch a sex strike to bring an end to the years-long Peloponnesian War (431-404). We hear about female frustrations from Lysistrata, an Athenian woman who becomes the movement’s leader:

Lysistrata: All the long years when the hopeless war dragged along we, unassuming, forgotten in quiet,
Endured without question, endured in our loneliness all your incessant child’s antics and riot.
Our lips we kept tied, though aching with silence, though well all the while in our silence we knew
How wretchedly everything still was progressing by listening dumbly the day long to you.
For always at home you continued discussing the war and its politics loudly, and we
Sometimes would ask you, our hearts deep with sorrowing though we spoke lightly, though happy to see,
“What’s to be inscribed on the side of the Treaty-stone
What, dear, was said in the Assembly today?”
“Mind your own business,” he’d answer me growlingly, “hold your tongue, woman, or else go away.”
And so I would hold it.

Determined not to remain passive anymore, Lysistrata teams up with the Spartan Lampito to take action. It’s not easy, however, as women love sex just as much as men do. Lysistrata learns early on the challenges ahead:

Lysistrata: We must refrain from every depth of love….
Why do you turn your backs? Where are you going?
Why do you bite your lips and shake your heads?
Why are your faces blanched? Why do you weep?
Will you or won’t you, or what do you mean?
Myrrhine: No, I won’t do it. Let the war proceed…
Calonice: Anything else? O bid me walk in fire
But do not rob us of that darling joy.
What else is like it, dearest Lysistrata?

Lysistrata stands firm, however, and outlines strategies to make the strike more effective:

Lysistrata: By the two Goddesses, now can’t you see
All we have to do is idly sit indoors
With smooth roses powdered on our cheeks,
Our bodies burning naked through the folds
Of shining Amorgos’ silk, and meet the men
With our dear Venus-plats plucked trim and neat.
Their stirring love will rise up furiously,
They’ll beg our arms to open. That’s our time!
We’ll disregard their knocking, beat them off–
And they will soon be rabid for a Peace.
I’m sure of it.

The danger of forced sex—what we call marital rape—is mentioned, but Lysistrata has a plan for that as well:

Calonice: But if they should force us?
Lysistrata: Yield then, but with a sluggish, cold indifference.
There is no joy to them in sullen mating.
Besides we have other ways to madden them;
They cannot stand up long, and they’ve no delight
Unless we fit their aim with merry succour.

The women then all repeat the following oath after Lysistrata, which they follow up by sacrificing a bowl of wine:

Lysistrata:  SO, grasp the brim, you, Lampito, and all.
You, Calonice, repeat for the rest
Each word I say. Then you must all take oath
And pledge your arms to the same stern conditions–
To husband or lover I’ll not open arms
Though love and denial may enlarge his charms.
But still at home, ignoring him, I’ll stay,
Beautiful, clad in saffron silks all day.
If then he seizes me by dint of force,
I’ll give him reason for a long remorse.
I’ll never lie and stare up at the ceiling,
Nor like a lion on all fours go kneeling.
If I keep faith, then bounteous cups be mine.
If not, to nauseous water change this wine.
Do you all swear to this?
Myrrhine: We do, we do.
Lysistrata: Then I shall immolate the victim thus. (drinks from the bowl)

For all their resolve, however, the women have difficulty denying their sexual cravings. Lysistrata must remain vigilant to keep them in line:

Lysistrata: What use is Zeus to our anatomy?
Here is the gaping calamity I meant:
I cannot shut their ravenous appetites
A moment more now. They are all deserting.
The first I caught was sidling through the postern
Close by the Cave of Pan: the next hoisting herself
With rope and pulley down: a third on the point
Of slipping past: while a fourth malcontent, seated
For instant flight to visit Orsilochus
On bird-back, I dragged off by the hair in time….
They are all snatching excuses to sneak home.

In the following interchange with a couple of these women, sexual innuendo involving female anatomy ranges wild and free:

1st woman: I must get home. I’ve some Milesian wool
Packed wasting away, and moths are pushing through it.
Lysistrata: Fine moths indeed, I know. Get back within.
1st woman: By the Goddesses, I’ll return instantly.
I only want to stretch it on my bed.
Lysistrata: You shall stretch nothing and go nowhere either.
1st woman: Must I never use my wool then?
Lysistrata: If needs be.
2nd woman:  How unfortunate I am! O my poor flax!
It’s left at home unstript.
Lysistrata: So here’s another
That wishes to go home and strip her flax.
Inside again!

Eventually all the women sign on, however, and some even engage in effective guerilla tactics, such as teasing their husbands and then running away at the critical moment. The playwright conveys the resultant desperation of the men by having them carry long poles, which bulge conspicuously under their tunics. Soon they are having conversations such as the following, which once again feature non-stop innuendo:

Chorus: Here come the Spartan envoys with long, worried beards.
Hail, Spartans how do you fare?
Did anything new arise?
Spartans: No need for a clutter o’ words. Do ye see our condition?
Chorus: The situation swells to greater tension.
Something will explode soon.
Spartans: It’s awful truly.
But come, let us with the best speed we may
Scribble a Peace.
Chorus: I notice that our men
Like wrestlers poised for contest, hold their clothes
Out from their bellies. An athlete’s malady!
Since exercise alone can bring relief.
Athenians: Can anyone tell us where Lysistrata is?
There is no need to describe our men’s condition,
It shows up plainly enough.
Chorus: It’s the same disease.
Do you feel a jerking throbbing in the morning?
Athenians: By Zeus, yes! In these straits, I’m racked all through.
Unless Peace is soon declared, we shall be driven
In the void of women to try Cleisthenes.

In the end, it is clear to all that everyone should be making love, not war. Those of our own citizens who fantasize about dominant men and submissive women would benefit from this vision where everyone gets what he or she wants. At the end of the play, joy reigns supreme:

Lysistrata: In the end, Earth is delighted now, peace is the voice of earth.
Spartans, sort out your wives: Athenians, yours.
Let each catch hands with his wife and dance his joy,
Dance out his thanks, be grateful in music,
And promise reformation with his heels.
Athenians: O Dancers, forward. Lead out the Graces,
Call Artemis out;
Then her brother, the Dancer of Skies,
That gracious Apollo.
Invoke with a shout
Dionysus out of whose eyes
Breaks fire on the maenads that follow;
And Zeus with his flares of quick lightning, and call,
Happy Hera, Queen of all,
And all the Daimons summon hither to be
Witnesses of our revelry
And of the noble Peace we have made,
Aphrodite our aid.

Although tragedy lays claim to more literary glory than comedy, the latter, with its emphasis on sex and the body, articulates a powerful life force that will not be denied. To be sure, Lysistrata did not bring an end to Athens-Sparta hostilities, and I’m skeptical of the long-term effectiveness of the 4B movement. But such comic drama, by providing the powerless with a voice, can bolster their spirits and keep them going in the face of oppression. Throughout human history, comedy has always played this vital social role.

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