Woolf and On Board Lit Conversations

By Robin Bates | Published: July 26, 2021
Tissot, Gallery of the H.M.S. Calcutta

Tuesday

My recent reading has given me a case of emotional whiplash as I’ve moved from two Jo Nesbo serial killer mysteries to Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. I decided to give Nesbo a try after reading about “Nordic noir” so I randomly googled practitioners of the form and came up with the Norwegian author. I’ve read The Snowman and The Leopard and am now sorry I did so.

Switching over to Voyage Out, one of the few Woolf novels I haven’t read, was surreal. After having watched various women get tortured in gruesome ways, along with men proving their manhood, I needed something to wash the sadism and misogyny out of my mind. So I turned from dick lit to chick lit. Except that Woolf isn’t chick lit.

My initial impression is that nothing is happening. To be sure, I’m still in the early chapters, but cultivated Brits having random conversations as they boat around the Mediterranean is a long way from killing people with spiked balls that explode in the mouth and dissecting them with red hot wire. Where’s the plot, I found myself wondering.

After Woolf reprogrammed me to accept her leisurely pace, however, I felt at home. I especially enjoy a conversation about literature between Clarissa Dalloway and a young musician she has met on board ship. Clarissa has just interrupted Rachel while she is practicing the piano, and Rachel clears a chair for her to sit down:

She slid Cowper’s Letters and Wuthering Heights out of the arm-chair, so that Clarissa was invited to sit there.

“What a dear little room!” she said, looking round. “Oh, Cowper’s Letters! I’ve never read them. Are they nice?”

“Rather dull,” said Rachel.

“He wrote awfully well, didn’t he?” said Clarissa; “—if one likes that kind of thing—finished his sentences and all that. Wuthering Heights! Ah—that’s more in my line. I really couldn’t exist without the Brontes! Don’t you love them? Still, on the whole, I’d rather live without them than without Jane Austen.”

Lightly and at random though she spoke, her manner conveyed an extraordinary degree of sympathy and desire to befriend.

“Jane Austen? I don’t like Jane Austen,” said Rachel.

“You monster!” Clarissa exclaimed. “I can only just forgive you. Tell me why?”

“She’s so—so—well, so like a tight plait,” Rachel floundered.

Rachel’s comment reminds me of what Charlotte Bronte said about Pride and Prejudice when reviewer George Lewes held it up to her as a model. Although Lewes wrote a positive review of Jane Eyre, he was put off by what he saw as its melodrama, especially the gothic parts involving the mad woman in the attic. Bronte responded that essentially Austen doesn’t have enough melodrama:

I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers—but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy—no open country—no fresh air—no blue hill—no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.

And in another letter:

The Passions are perfectly unknown to her.

There is something Austen-esque in Clarissa Dalloway, which she attributes to being older. She remembers being drawn to Adonais, Percy Shelley’s passionate elegy on Keats, as a young woman:

“Ah—I see what you mean. But I don’t agree. And you won’t when you’re older. At your age I only liked Shelley. I can remember sobbing over him in the garden.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night,
Envy and calumny and hate and pain—

you remember?

Can touch him not and torture not again
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain.

How divine!—and yet what nonsense!” She looked lightly round the room. “I always think it’s living, not dying, that counts.

I shudder to think how Shelley, who lived life at the stretch and who once wrote, “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed,” would respond to Clarissa’s next observation:

I really respect some snuffy old stockbroker who’s gone on adding up column after column all his days, and trotting back to his villa at Brixton with some old pug dog he worships, and a dreary little wife sitting at the end of the table, and going off to Margate for a fortnight—I assure you I know heaps like that—well, they seem to me really nobler than poets whom every one worships, just because they’re geniuses and die young. But I don’t expect you to agree with me!”

She pressed Rachel’s shoulder.

“Um-m-m—” she went on quoting—

Unrest which men miscall delight—

“when you’re my age you’ll see that the world is crammed with delightful things. I think young people make such a mistake about that—not letting themselves be happy. I sometimes think that happiness is the only thing that counts. I don’t know you well enough to say, but I should guess you might be a little inclined to—when one’s young and attractive—I’m going to say it!—everything’s at one’s feet.” 

In The Company We Keep, theorist Wayne Booth differentiates great literature from popular literature on the grounds than the former prompts us to desire better desires. It expands or (as Lisa Simpson would say) embiggens us. I don’t feel embiggened by Nesbo’s Nordic noir whereas, in Voyage Out, I watch people’s faltering but genuine attempts to imagine something bigger than themselves.

Woolf doesn’t get the blood pumping in the same way as Nesbo. I find her fiction ultimately more invigorating, however.

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Read Lit to Feel Better about Your Job

By Robin Bates | Published: July 25, 2021
John Stuart Mill

Monday

I’m currently looking into the work of John Stuart Mill, the great 19th century British philosopher who looked for ways to merge his utilitarian philosophy with the arts, especially literature. Utilitarians judge actions by the extent to which they bring about the greatest good to the most people. How literature enters into the discussion is not at first evident.

Except that, when he was a young man devoting himself to liberal causes, Mill hit a wall that plunged him into a deep depression. (I’ve written about that here.) While he could see that his cause was good—Mill advocated for broadening the British electorate, raising working wages, improving gender relations, and protecting free speech—something important seemed to be missing. That something missing was beauty, and Wordsworth came to the rescue. Mill tells us in his autobiography how the poet pulled him out of his depression:

What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed… I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this…

Years later, when he had been named rector of Scotland’s University of St. Andrew’s, Mill talked about the importance of the arts, including poetry, to a well-rounded education. In today’s post I look at what he says in his inaugural address.

After singing the praises of math and the sciences, he turns to the arts. While he’s not quite ready to put them on the same level as those other disciplines, they are nevertheless essential:

There is a third division, which, if subordinate, and owing allegiance to the two others, is barely inferior to them, and not less needful to the completeness of the human being; I mean the aesthetic branch; the culture which comes through poetry and art, and may be described as the education of the feelings, and the cultivation of the beautiful.

Mill acknowledges that society accords the arts little respect. This has been especially the case with the so-called “fine arts” of painting and sculpture, which has been seen as

little more than branches of domestic ornamentation, a kind of elegant upholstery. The very words “Fine Arts” called up a notion of frivolity, of great pains expended on a rather trifling object—on something which differed from the cheaper and commoner arts of producing pretty things, mainly by being more difficult, and by giving fops an opportunity of pluming themselves on caring for it and on being able to talk about it.

The lack of respect extends even to poetry, Mill complains, despite its being “the queen of the arts.” Even though Shakespeare and Milton are praised, poetry is “hardly looked upon in any serious light, or as having much value except as an amusement or excitement…”

Among the culprits, Mill targets “commercial money-getting business,” which regards as “a loss of time” whatever does not contribute  to profit. The businessman he characterizes as one

whose ambition is self-regarding; who has no higher purpose in life than to enrich or raise in the world himself and his family; who never dreams of making the good of his fellow-creatures or of his country an habitual object…

If we wish such people to practice virtue, Mill says, we must find a way to get them to experience virute as”an object in itself, and not a tax paid for leave to pursue other objects.” If we want them to develop an “elevated tone of mind” and see that there is more to life than mere self,” we can call on poetry, which instills in us lofty or heroic feelings while also “calming the soul.” Poetry, he says,

 brings home to us all those aspects of life which take hold of our nature on its unselfish side, and lead us to identify our joy and grief with the good or ill of the system of which we form a part; and all those solemn or pensive feelings, which, without having any direct application to conduct, incline us to take life seriously, and predispose us to the reception of anything which comes before us in the shape of duty.

Mill then names names:

Who does not feel himself a better man after a course of Dante, or of Wordsworth, or, I will add, of Lucretius or the Georgics, or after brooding over Gray’s “Elegy [Written in a Country Churchyard]” or Shelley s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”?

After mentioning the other arts as equally worthy of respect, Mill returns to the topic of beauty in general, including the beauty of nature:

[T]he mere contemplation of beauty of a high order produces in no small degree this elevating effect on the character. The power of natural scenery addresses itself to the same region of human nature which corresponds to Art. There are few capable of feeling the sublimer order of natural beauty, such as your own Highlands and other mountain regions afford, who are not, at least temporarily, raised by it above the littlenesses of humanity, and made to feel the puerility of the petty objects which set men’s interests at variance, contrasted with the nobler pleasures which all might share.

Regardless of what profession we end up in, we must cultivate “these susceptibilities within us,” seeking out “opportunities of maintaining them in exercise.” If we have dull jobs, then it’s even more important to seek out art, which will show us how we are ennobled by “useful and honest work—which, “if ever so humble, is never mean but when it is meanly done…”

And there’s more. “He who has learnt what beauty is,” Mill says, “if he be of a virtuous character, will desire to realize it in his own life—will keep before himself a type of perfect beauty in human character, to light his attempts at self-culture.” To which end Mill cites Goethe, who believes that the Beautiful adds something essential to the Good:

 Now, this sense of perfection, which would make us demand from every creation of man the very utmost that it ought to give, and render us intolerant of the smallest fault in ourselves or in anything we do, is one of the results of Art cultivation. No other human productions come so near to perfection as works of pure Art.

Beauty, Mill concludes,

trains us never to be completely satisfied with imperfection in what we ourselves do and are: to idealize, as much as possible, every work we do, and most of all, our own characters and lives.

In short, if you want to excel in your job and find meaning in your life, read literature.

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Walking on Life’s Turbulence

By Robin Bates | Published: July 24, 2021

Spiritual Sunday

Mark Jarman has a simple but powerful poem about today’s Gospel reading, which is about Jesus walking on the water. Here’s the passage from John 6: 16-21:

When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. But he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.

Jarman’s poem is entitled “Matthew 14,” which is Matthew’s version of the event. The major difference between the two versions is Peter attempting to follow Jesus’s example but sinking. At this point, “Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. ‘You of little faith,’ he said, ‘why did you doubt?’”

Matthew 14

     Always the same message out of Matthew.
The water Jesus walks on is life’s turbulence.
     He calms our trouble and lifts us up again.

To walk on water? That’s what’s puzzling –
     that feat of anti-matter, defeat of physics,
those beautiful unshod feet of cosmic truth

    for whom the whole performance is child’s play.
And unless one becomes as a little child
     the kingdom’s inaccessible by any route.

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The Olympics Owe a Debt to Poetry

By Robin Bates | Published: July 22, 2021
Simone Biles

Friday

The following essay ran eleven years ago during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Simply replace what I say below about skaters with gymnasts. And hope for less uncertain times.

Reprinted from February 27, 2010

I sense a supernatural presence as I watch skaters, in groups of four, dart in an out of the line while miraculously staying upright.  I gaze in awe as skiers fling themselves down dangerously steep slopes at breakneck speeds, all the while making cuts that put them virtually horizontal to the ground.  When a skating couple moves in perfect synchronicity across the ice, time stands still.  For all the garbage associated with the Olympics– the politics of choosing a venue, the commercialism, the drugs, the judging controversies—one just has to see a skier or snowboarder doing flips in the air to forget everything else.

The sights rivet us in part because they let us know that it is possible, even if only for a few seconds, to transcend our earthly realm.  When, in The Odyssey, Odysseus picks up a discus and sends it flying, it makes sense that the goddess Athena would be there applauding the effort. Here’s the passage:

He leapt out, cloaked as he was, and picked a discus,
a rounded stone, more ponderous than those
already used by the Phaiakian throwers,
and, whirling, let it fly from his great hand
with a low hum.  The crowd went flat on the ground–
all those oar-pulling, seafaring Phaiakians–
under the rushing noise.  The spinning disk
soared out, light as a bird, beyond all others.
Disguised now as a Phaiakian, Athena
staked it and called out: “Even a blind man,
friend, could judge this, finding with his fingers
one discus, quite alone, beyond the cluster.
Congratulations; this event is yours;
not a man here can beat you or come near you.”
(trans. Robert Fitzgerald)

Until reading an article in Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature, I didn’t realize that literature has played an important role in defining the modern Olympics.  In a 2008 article authors Jeffrey O. Segrave and James G. King compare the writings of Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, with passages in European literature since the Renaissance. The article is a bit dense—you can read it here –but it’s got great examples.  Literature had been so successful at associating the games with a perfect balance of mind, body, and spirit, Segrave and King point out, that Coubertin’s vision seemed obvious to people.

To cite one of their examples, here’s a passage from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part III.  Henry is seeking to rally his faltering troops with the image of winning Olympic honors:

Yet let us all together to our troops,
And give them leave to fly that will not stay,
And call them pillars that will stand to us;
And, if we thrive promise them such rewards
As victors wear at the Olympian games.
This may plant courage in their quailing breasts;
For yet is hope of life and victory.

Segrave and King conclude:

We suggest that references in literature to the ancient games, especially during the 18th and 19th centuries, created a favorable and generally unified perception of the Olympic games that obtained across time and impacted upon a European consciousness in such a way that Coubertin’s ideas about an internationalized and indeed Hellenized form of the games did not seem at all alien or problematic. From the moment in English literature in 1595 that the dramatist Thomas Kyd first proclaimed that athletes competed in the games in order “to grace themselves with honor,” the Olympics have been eulogized in prose and extolled in verse as a dignified, noble, and indeed honorable form of sport, one that serves as the quintessential and most hallowed model of all, especially with an attendant moralism and enlightened, non-materialistic ideology. . . . [T]he games have endured in history as instantiations of excellence, grandeur, enlightenment, and transcendence, the most sublime expression of sport . . .

And then, to acknowledge that literature also had a hand in some of the negative sides of the Olympics, especially in their early days, Segrave and King add that works referring to the Olympics frequently had “connotations of noblesse oblige that were at the same time masculinist, socially elitist, and steeped in a traditional Anglo-Saxon hegemony.”

But that aside, literature has recognized, within the idea of the Olympics, something that goes deep into the human spirit.  For a few precious moments, watching this event or that, we get to step out of ourselves and imagine ourselves as gods.

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Imagination’s Transformative Power

By Robin Bates | Published: July 21, 2021
Joseph Severn, John Keats

Thursday

My Sewanee colleague John Gatta, who has been reading my book manuscript, has noted a significant omission: given that Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate is about the transformative power of literature, why don’t I say anything about imagination? After all, as the Romantic poets saw it, this was the major source of literature’s power.

He’s absolutely right so I’m devoting today’s blog post to some preliminary discussion for an additional chapter. In my chapter on Samuel Johnson, I talk about how, borrowing a metaphor from Hamlet, he discusses how Shakespeare held a faithful mirror up to nature. Romantics scholar M.H. Abrams famously pointed out that the Romantic poets moved from a mirror to a lamp metaphor. In addition to revealing the reality that is there, poets also shine the light of their souls to illuminate the world.

I’m particularly interested in the two connections with the world that, according to poet William Wordsworth, the imagination makes possible: with common people and with nature.  In a world in which we feel locked inside our individual selves and alienated from natural world, the imagination reconnects us with something bigger than ourselves.

Elsewhere in the book I talk about how various theorists believe literature can free us from “false consciousness” (Marx and Engels), the prevailing “horizon of expectations” (Hans Robert Jauss), what passes for “common sense” (Antonio Gramsci) or the reigning “world view” (Bertolt Brecht). These are all “soft power” ways (Joseph Nye) that those in authority use to maintain power. The imagination, however, helps us see beyond these “mind forg’d manacles” (to cite William Blake’s “London”) to new human possibilities.

Great poetic imaginations do not do this on a superficial level but, in Wordsworth’s words, help us “see into the life of things” (Tintern Abbey).

I find myself returning to philosopher John Stuart Mill, whom I encountered in a college ethics class. Although a utilitarian who believed in finding ways to do the greatest good for the greatest number, he found the utilitarianism of a figure like Jeremy Bentham to be sterile, a kind of ethical algebra. It’s as though one needs to be a passionless accountant to distribute society’s resources (not that they ever get evenly distributed). A literary example of a utilitarian is Gradgrind in Hard Times, who sees everything in terms of social utility and regards fantasy and the world of the circus as pointless. When he was a young man being raised by a utilitarian father, Mill had a mental breakdown and it took poetry to pull him out.

Poetry, as Mill saw it, can change our hearts and minds as mere rational self-interest cannot.  Thus, although imagination and poetry seem to take us out of the world—this is certainly Gradgrind’s view—it actually allows us to engage more effectively with it.

I’m particularly interested in how it helps us imagine a freer and more egalitarian society and a healthier relationship with our natural environment. As an example of the first, there’s the poetry of Walt Whitman, whose soaring free verse in Song of Myself helps show America how to live up to the vision expressed in The Declaration of Independence. Whitman bestows humanity on everyone, including escaped slaves, Native Americans, backwoodsmen, and other marginalized populations. Seeing himself as standing in for America, Whitman memorably declares, “I contain multitudes.” Whitman doesn’t only show what a diverse and multicultural society looks like. Through his imagination, he sweeps us up so that we feel the power and excitement of such a society.

Literature does the same for the natural world, as countless poems and stories in literary history have demonstrated. Some works demonstrate the cost of being alienated from the natural world (Euripides’s The Bacchae, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us”), others the gifts that it imparts. Given that how we interact with nature in the upcoming decades will determine the fate of humankind, I should have a chapter on how literature can help us negotiate this particular challenge. Perhaps there’s a good essay by Wendell Barry that has thought through these issues more systematically than I have.

Obviously, much more to come. Please write in with any suggestions you have.

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On Jan. 6, 2021 Grendel Stormed Heorot

By Robin Bates | Published: July 20, 2021
Heorot before Grendel’s arrival, as envisioned in the film Beowulf

Wednesday

As I prepare a Beowulf talk I will be giving at a summer lecture program in Monteagle, Tennessee, I’m thinking about the discord the ensues when empires find their power waning. While I’m no political scientist, I’m wondering if there is some identifiable cycle in which (1) national success leads to (2) a sense of entitlement accompanied by complacency which in turn results in (3) internal turmoil. Has something like that happened with the United States? It seems to occur in Beowulf.

I start with something a Chinese student attending St. Mary’s College of Maryland wrote in a composition class of mine in 1981: “In the brief but glorious history of the United States…” It startled me because, while I had never thought about it before, it rang true. Here was someone from a country 5000 years old looking a country that had only recently celebrated its 200th birthday.

Even if America’s glorious history has been brief, it’s still longer than the four-generation dynasty described in Beowulf. The poem begins by lauding Shield Sheafson, a foundling who rises to glory. He is succeeded by Beow, who is generous and “well-regarded,” and by Beow’s son Halfdane, a “fighter prince” who “held sway for as long as he lived.” Although Halfdane’s son Hrothgar is king when Grendel strikes, initially it appears that he will be carrying on the glorious tradition:

Friends and kinsmen flocked to his ranks,
young followers, a force that grew
to be a mighty army.

As leader of most powerful nation around, Hrothgar looks to memorialize his nation:

So his mind turned
to hall-building: he handed down orders
for men to work on a great mead-hall
meant to be a wonder of the world forever;
it would be his throne-room and there he would dispense
his God-given goods to young and old—
but not the common land or people’s lives.
Far and wide through the world, I have heard,
orders for work to adorn that wallstead
were sent to many peoples. And soon it stood there,
finished and ready, in full view,
the hall of halls. Heorot was the name
he had settled on it, whose utterance was law.

Unlike a certain ex-president, Hrothgar also pays the contractors who have done the work:

Nor did he renege, but doled out rings
and torques at the table.

The mead-hall is more than a place to dispense rings to faithful followers. It’s also a warning to other countries not to mess with the Danes. And indeed, as Denmark is the reigning superpower in the region, no one dares to. The danger, rather, comes from domestic terrorism.

Because that’s what Grendel represents. I’ve written multiple times that Grendel is the resentment that eats away at a society from within. In America at the moment, we see this as the destructive effects of white grievance. Ever since the end of the Cold War, the United States has seemed invulnerable to foreign attack and, in fact, is one of the most prosperous countries on earth. In spite of this–or perhaps because of it–its citizens have turned against each other.

Seeing the situation in this light, we can find parallels between the resentment-crazed Grendel who storms Heorot and the resentment-crazed Trumpists who stormed the Capitol on January 6. For 10 years Hrothgar, despite his power, is helpless. The one silver lining is that Grendel at least cannot touch the king’s throne, with the poet telling us “the throne itself, the treasure-seat,/ he was kept from approaching.” America has got to hope that the January 6 insurrectionists and those members of the GOP who are now trying to whitewash the event are not damaging the underlying democratic principles to which the Capitol Building is a monument.

And indeed, Heorot still standing after Grendel’s forages is like our own Capitol standing after the insurrection: the rebels may have desecrated it but they haven’t ended what it stands for. Here’s Grendel’s version of their insurrection:

The hall clattered and hammered, but somehow
survived the onslaught and kept standing:
it was handsomely structured, a sturdy frame
braced with the best of blacksmith’s work
inside and out. The story goes
that as the pair struggled, mead-benches were smashed
and sprung off the floor, good fittings and all…

Unfortunately, we can’t look to Beowulf for a hopeful future as the survival of Heorot is only temporary. The peaceful transfer of power that Seith Sheafson, Beow and Halfdane were able to bring about ends with Hrothgar’s death. In a coup that is only alluded to obliquely in the text, the regent Hrothulf (Hrothgar’s nephew) kills one of Hrothgar’s two young sons and seizes power. The other son, who has escaped, comes back to kill Hrothulf. Amidst all the fighting, the great hall of Heorot burns to the ground.

Hrothgar’s warning to Beowulf after he has killed the Grendels could also apply to arrogant superpowers. In stage #1, the king and his kingdom are riding high:

It is a great wonder
how Almighty God in His magnificence
favors our race with rank and scope
and the gift of wisdom; His sway is wide.
Sometimes He allows the mind of a man
of distinguished birth to follow its bent,
grants him fulfillment and felicity on earth
and forts to command in his own country.
He permits him to lord it in many lands . . .

The first sign of trouble comes when the king starts to take all these gifts as his due. He thinks he is rich because “the whole world conforms to his will,” not because he has inherited a situation built by people “with rank and scope and the gift of wisdom.” In America’s case, it’s living comfortably in a society–and an infrastructure–built by earlier generations:

. . . until the man in his unthinkingness
forgets that it will ever end for him.
He indulges his desires; illness and old age
mean nothing to him; his mind is untroubled
by envy or malice or the thought of enemies
with their hate-honed swords. The whole world
conforms to his will, he is kept from the worst . . .

Arrogance, and with it discontent, continues to grow. The passage notes the imperceptible gradualness of the change.  Instead of seeing himself joined with the country in a common enterprise, the king gradually finds himself resenting others. The “devious promptings of the demon start” as he imagines them eyeing “his” possessions:

. . . until an element of overweening
enters him and takes hold
while the soul’s guard, its sentry, drowses,
grown too distracted.  A killer stalks him,
an archer who draws a deadly bow.
And then the man is hit in the heart,
the arrow flies beneath his defenses,
the devious promptings of the demon start.
His old possessions seem paltry to him now.
He covets and resents; dishonors custom
and bestows no gold; and because of good things
he ignores the shape of things to come.

In the end, Hrothgar says, the king will reap what he has sown:

Then finally the end arrives
when the body he was lent collapses and falls
prey to its death; ancestral possessions
and the goods he hoarded are inherited by another
who lets them go with a liberal hand. . . .

This warning will reappear in the course of the poem. For instance, the so-called “last veteran,” seeing his once glorious nation having become a shadow of its former self, buries himself (along with all his country’s treasure) in a funeral barrow. It is into this barrow—think of it as a dead monument to past greatness—that the dragon moves. This monster, which I interpret as depression, overtakes a society that is incapable of moving into the future. Instead it hoards the wealth it has accumulated, refusing to share. If anyone threatens to redistribute that wealth, it erupts in anger, burning down everything around it. Otherwise, however, it just hunkers down in its cave.

This is the dragon that Beowulf encounters at the end of his life. The question is whether he will be able to defeat the dragon and redistribute the treasure or whether he and his society will all go down together. This is the challenge for the United States as well: either we will become more and more mean-spirited and dragon-like, lamenting the end of past greatness without striding heroically into the future. Or we will build back better, modeling for the world a multicultural democracy while leading the fight against climate change and autocratic regimes.

I honestly don’t know if, in our case, Beowulf will be able to defeat the monsters of resentment and depression. I know, however, that we will be called upon to be heroic.

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Using Brecht to Explain U.S. Gun Laws

By Robin Bates | Published: July 19, 2021
Goya, Third of May, 1808

Tuesday

We are once again seeing a rise in American gun deaths, accentuating once again the insanity of our gun laws (or lack of them). The last time we had meaningful bipartisan regulation was in 1967 and the reason for that says a lot about our country. The bill that then California Governor Ronald Reagan signed targeted the Black Panthers, who were carrying guns as they engaged in “copwatching.” When Whites open carry, by contrast, the GOP cites the Second Amendment.

The situation is admirably captured in Bertolt Brecht’s play The Exception and the Rule.

Before explaining how, let’s take a quick look at recent statistics. According to Gun Violence Archive, in 2021 there have so far been 24,305 gun-related deaths, 13,200 of them suicides. There have also been 370 mass shootings and 16 mass murders. In all, 171 children have died and 674 teens. For the rest of the grisly statistics, check out the website.

These figures don’t capture the racial dimensions of the issue, especially the fact that the “stand your ground” laws only apply to Whites standing their ground; that police are far more likely to use deadly force against Blacks than against Whites; that Whites can walk with impunity carrying automatic rifles whereas people call the police on Blacks just for making them uncomfortable; that only Muslims and people of color are labeled terrorists, not White Americans; and so on. One of the clearest expressions of the double standard has come from rightwing Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin in remarks about the Capitol insurrection:

“Even though those thousands of people that were marching to the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned,” Johnson said during the radio talk show The Joe Pags Show. He was discussing his recent comments downplaying the danger that day and he has said he “never really felt threatened.”

“Now, had the tables been turned — Joe, this could get me in trouble — had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned,” Johnson continued.

Brecht’s work explains the double standard.

Like many of Brecht’s plays, Exception and the Rule is a parable about class relations. A merchant who must cross a desert in order to make a fortune kills his porter after mistaking a helpful gesture as a hostile move. Although the porter has offered him some of their dwindling water supplies, he thinks that man is attacking him and shoots him. Despite this, the judge in the subsequent trial exonerates him, ruling, “In the circumstances as established it was inevitable that he should believe himself threatened.”

We can see the verdict coming when the judge is questioning the merchant. Similar reasoning led a jury to free the killer of Trayvon Martin, the young teenager on his way back from a store:

What you mean is that you were right to believe that the porter must hold something against you. So you did indeed kill someone who might well be harmless, but only because you could not have known that he was harmless. It happens sometimes with our police. They shoot into a demonstrating crowd, a harmless crowd, but they shoot because they can only believe that these people are going to drag them off their horses and lynch them. These policemen shoot out of fear. And their fear is that of the reasonable man. What you mean is that you could not have known that this porter was an exception to the rule.

Merchant: One lives by the rule, not the exception.

The reasoning is reiterated in the judge’s ruling. Even though the judge concludes that the porter was indeed engaging in a kindly act, he finds against his widow:

The merchant belongs to a different class from that of the porter. He could only anticipate the worst. He could not credit that the porter whom he had ill-treated, as he himself has said, would offer him an act of friendship. His common wit told him that he was in the greatest danger. The isolated nature of the area must have caused him great anxiety. The distance from the police and the restraint of the law would encourage his servant to demand his share of the water. The accused therefore acted in justifiable self-defense regardless of whether he was actually threatened or merely believed himself to be threatened. In the circumstances as established it was inevitable that he should believe himself threatened. The case is therefore dismissed; and the widow’s claim fails.

Brecht’s message is that is that it doesn’t matter how nice a worker or a merchant is because classism is systemic. Political action therefore is the only solution.

People sometimes wonder why gun laws don’t work for both sides in America, why Blacks can’t stand their ground or open carry with the same impunity as Whites. The play shows us why. In a majority White society with America’s racial history, it would not be reasonable (in the eyes of a white judge and white jury) for Blacks to feel threatened by Whites. After all, Whites aren’t threatened by Whites. Only shooting someone out of unreasonable fear should be punished.

It’s why one often sees police talking down Whites with guns while shooting 12-year-olds Black boys with water pistols, Black men who innocently pick up a gun from a store shelf, and Black men who calmly inform them that they have a registered firearm in their glove compartment. And why juries invariably give these police officers a pass.

When a jury does convict, as it did in the case of Derek Chauvin, murderer of George Floyd – well, that’s just an exception to the rule.

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Borges’s Deep Grasp of Memory

By Robin Bates | Published: July 18, 2021

Monday

The blog Literary Hub recently shared a fascinating excerpt from Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering, where author Scott Small contends that Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges anticipates significant neurological breakthroughs in his short story “Funes the Memorious.” He grasped before science did that forgetting is cognitively beneficial. If we didn’t forget, we couldn’t generalize.

Small explains how this works:

No matter how routinized our lives, the continuous alterations to existing memories are vital for us to adapt to our rapidly shape-shifting worlds. Just as the most elegant home remodeling is often a combination of construction on top of demolition, the brain’s optimal solution for behavioral flexibility turns out to be a balance between memory and active forgetting.

Neurobiology, Small says, has been able to study this further since discovering that there are two distinct molecular mechanisms, one for memory and one for forgetting.

In “Funes the Memorious,” a young man has a fall from a horse that leaves him paralyzed. But it also appears to have turned off (neurobiology would now say) his mechanism for forgetting. As a result, he remembers everything:

We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table.; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negor the night before the Quebracho uprising.

This leaves Funes, however, without the ability to generalize. As the narrator explains,

He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front).

Funes observes at one point that “I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world.” And because this is so overwhelming, he confines himself to a small dark room, usually without light, to lessen the stimuli and achieve a certain degree of sameness. And even this environment presents him with challenges. The narrator observes,

To sleep is to turn one’s mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot in the shadows, could imagine every crevice and every molding in the sharply defined houses surrounding him. (I repeat that the least important of his memories was more minute and more vivid than our perception of physical pleasure or physical torment.).

Small observes that Borges’s short story is an illustration of

how literary insight into the workings of the mind often predates scientific knowledge, Borges recognized that memory needs to be balanced by normal forgetting in order for a person to cognitively generalize. Without forgetting, young Funes could not generalize from one sensory experience to the next….Without forgetting, Funes found that his only respite from life’s constant fluctuations was to routinize his life and to minimize sensory overload by banishing himself to his dimly lit, quiet, and never-changing bedroom.

Borges also anticipated breakthroughs into autism. Dr. Leo Kanner, now considered the father of child psychiatry, was to conclude that children with autism differ from others because they are “overly fixated on parts.” Small mentions several of his examples:

Charlie, for example, would lash out if the dining room table was not set identically each night. His family was allowed to sit down to eat only after the silverware had been reset precisely as he remembered it. Susan became transfixed by and anxious about a new crack in a wall so minuscule that it had gone unnoticed by the rest of the family. Richard’s inflexibility was most evident during his bedtime routine, which he insisted follow an exact, repetitive sequence of events.

Contrast this with the way that most people operate:

Most of us will walk by a familiar and fully stacked bookshelf and scarcely notice if a single volume was missing or has been transposed with another. Seeing the forest for the trees, or in this case the bookcase for the books, is what psychologists sometimes call generalization: a cognitive ability that allows us to extract general patterns from component parts, to synthesize and integrate parts into a unified whole.

Like Funes, children with autism insist on sameness because otherwise everything seems to be changing all the time and the chaos overwhelms them. They can’t forget the way others do.

Small concludes that recent neurological breakthroughs and recent studies of autism are bearing out Borges’s observations:

Researchers investigating the new science of forgetting have shown that the implicit assumption underpinning Borges’s science fiction was right: we depend on our normal forgetting to cognitively generalize. More than just validating Borges’s assumption, science is beginning to explain why and how forgetting is required for healthy cognition. Scientists who investigate animal models have relied on research in mice and flies to validate and explain Borges’s insight. But clinical scientists investigating autism have contributed to the broader understanding of how our minds benefit from forgetting, of how forgetting helps us to cognitively engage our ever-fluctuating worlds.

Aristotle wrote that literature is truer than history. Apparently it is also giving biology, neurobiology, and psychology a run for their money.

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i thank You God for most this amazing

By Robin Bates | Published: July 17, 2021
Monet, Palm Trees at Bordighera

Spiritual Sunday

I’ve only recently discovered e. e. cummings’s Christian poems and am impressed. In “i thank You God for most this amazing,” the poet has taken his distinctive style of idiosyncratic capitalization, punctuation, line spacing and word order and applied it toward capturing the glory of God.

Note how, following every semi-colon and colon, he doesn’t leave a space, as though he is breathless with excitement. And how the best word he can think to characterize God is “yes”:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

The last two lines may refer to Matthew 13: 13-16, where Jesus explains why he too must be creative in order to convey God’s word to others. In his case, he uses stories:

This is why I speak to them in parables: “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: “ ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’ 

But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.

Cummings may also have in mind Bottom’s own riff off of the Matthew’s passage (in Midsummer Night’s Dream) as he tries to capture his dream, something else that is beyond expressing:

The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. 

God may defy our attempts to capture him in language, but those attempts can bring out the best in us.

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