Madoff & a Pyramid Scheme Poem

By Robin Bates | Published: April 15, 2021
Bernie Madoff

Friday

I see that Berne Madoff, the financier who bilked his clients of $64.8 billion with an elaborate Ponzi scheme, has died. The occasion gives me an excuse to share this entertaining poem, appearing in Poetry magazine in 2018. “Pyramid Scheme” begins by reflecting on the nature of such schemes but ends up going in a very different direction. At times I lose the thematic thread but hang on for a fun ride.

I suppose that makes the poem itself a pyramid scheme: we think we’re getting one thing but end up with something far different in the end. In this case, however, the money that comes pouring down upon the speaker in the final stanza is the sun’s rays, “which you don’t even have to pay tax on/ because sun money is free money.” Not that the speaker is against taxes—”because i believe that hospitals and education/ and the arts should be publicly funded.” It’s a nice thought to have the day after tax day.

At one point the speaker wonders whether love itself is a pyramid scheme and then hints at the way that this is so. We think everything will be beautiful and then encounter references to screaming arguments and pain. Or shifting to all “curse of the mummy” pyramid movies, the mentions “trapdoors and malaria.” Even the positive allusions to love are conveyed through images of old cartoons. “When i look at you, my eyes are two identical neighborhood houses on fire,” the poet tells his love. “When i look at you my eyes bulge out of my skull like a dog in a cartoon.”

But whatever disappointments or caricatures we get, love is still at the center of things. As we look back at Madoff’s life, it good to remember that what makes our lives rich has little to do with money. For those of us living at the bottom of the pyramid, a golden moment may involve “eating cold pizza on your steps at dawn.” Down here, people learn important lessons from relationships, such as that arguments are not the same thing as honesty and screaming is not the same thing as passion. Madoff made billions and all for what? Did he ever once achieve the happiness the speaker describes at the end of the poem?

When I read the poet’s images of fraudulent millionaires and their get-rich schemes, I think of Henry Vaughan’s image of the miser in “The World”:

The fearful miser on a heap of rust
Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust
His own hands with the dust,
Yet would not place one piece above, but lives
In fear of thieves…

In contrast, Vaughan speaks of seeing “eternity the other night/ Like a great ring of pure and endless light.” For Hera Lindsay Bird, love is at the core, which may amount to the same thing. The image of the two lovers walking down the street “with the grass blowing back and forth” is reminiscent of Archibald MacLeisch’s imagist poem “Ars Poetica,” where love is captured in the image of “the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea.”

Madoff, like all pyramid grifters, lost sight of that. As Bird’s poem makes clear, such people are as one dimensional as a triangle.

Pryamid Scheme
By Hera Lindsay Bird
For RWT

the other day i was thinking about the term pyramid scheme, and why they called it pyramid scheme and not triangle scheme
and i asked you what you thought
you thought it added a certain gravitas, and linked the idea of economic prosperity
with some of history’s greatest architectural achievements
unconsciously suggesting a silent wealth of gold and heat
a triangle is two dimensional, and therefore
a less striking mental image than the idea of a third dimension of financial fraud
which is how many dimensions of financial fraud the term pyramid scheme suggests
but i had to pause for a second at the financial fraud part
because it occurred to me i didn’t know what pyramid schemes really were
i knew they had something to do with people getting money from nothing
like
the person at the top of the pyramid scheme, or more accurately
triangle scheme, acquires a number of investors and takes their money
and then pays the first lot of investors with the money from another bunch of investors
and so on and so forth
all the way to the bottom of the triangle
or pyramid face
which is the kind of stupid thing that happens
if you keep your money in a pyramid and not a bank account
although if you ask me banks are the real pyramid schemes after all
or was love the real pyramid scheme? i can’t remember

maybe it’s better to keep your money in a pyramid than a bank
and i should shop around and compare the interest rates on different pyramids
maybe i should open up a savings pyramid
with a whole bunch of trapdoors and malarias
to keep the financial anthropologists
i mean bankers out
my emeralds cooling under the ground like beautiful women’s eyes

i think this was supposed to be a metaphor for something
but i can’t remember where i was going with it
and now it’s been swept away by the winds of
whatever
but knowing me, it was probably love
that great dark blue sex hope that keeps coming true
that cartoon black castle with a single bird flying over it

i don’t know where this poem ends
how far below the sand
but it’s still early evening
and you and I are a little drunk
you answer the phone
you pour me a drink
i know you hate the domestic in poetry but you should have thought of that before you
invited me to move in with you
i used to think arguments were the same as honesty
i used to think screaming was the same as passion
i used to think pain was meaningful
i no longer think pain is meaningful
i never learned anything good from being unhappy
i never learned anything good from being happy either
the way i feel about you has nothing to do with learning
it has nothing to do with anything
but i feel it down in the corners of my sarcophagus
i feel it in my sleep
even when i am not thinking about you
you are still pouring through my blood, like fire through an abandoned hospital ward
these coins are getting heavy on my eyes
it has been a great honor and privilege to love you
it has been a great honor and privilege to eat cold pizza on your steps at dawn
love is so stupid: it’s like punching the sun
and having a million gold coins rain down on you
which you don’t even have to pay tax on
because sun money is free money
and i’m pretty sure there are no laws about that
but i would pay tax
because i believe that hospitals and education
and the arts should be publicly funded
even this poem
when i look at you, my eyes are two identical neighborhood houses on fire
when i look at you my eyes bulge out of my skull like a dog in a cartoon
when i am with you
an enormous silence descends upon me
and i feel like i am sinking into the deepest part of my life
we walk down the street, with the grass blowing back and forth
i have never been so happy

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How Tragedy Made Greek Lives Better

By Robin Bates | Published: April 14, 2021
Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer

Thursday

I’ve been having difficulty revising the Aristotle chapter in my book Does Literature Make Us Better People? A 2500-Year-Old Debate and so am using today’s post to sort through some of the ideas. Although Plato has very definite ideas on how literature can be bad for us, Aristotle—even though he obviously disagrees—doesn’t do so directly. This confused me for a while until I saw an article in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Thought, where Derek Barker and David McIvor observe that

the Poetics never explicitly ascribes a political purpose or teaching to tragedy, a surprising omission for a thinker who was centrally concerned with politics and familiar with the civic context of Greek theater.

This led me to do some research into the civic context of Greek theater. One of the experts, classicist Edith Hall, has some enlightening things to say. For instance, in Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, she asks the question,

Why would Aristotle, a serious thinker whose objective was understanding the world in a way that would produce the best possible human community, spend so much time thinking about the fictional stories enacted in the popular theater?

Her answer:

The only explanation is that he was personally convinced that such entertainment had the potential massively to enhance the emotional and moral life of both individual spectators and the community as a whole.

While uplifted by the thought, I find this a bit vague. Luckily Hall then goes on to spell it out a bit more (but in way that Aristotle doesn’t):

Athenian drama was designed not only to enthrall its spectators but to train them in the cognitive, moral and political skills they needed to run a healthy city.

Hall is able to speak authoritatively on this because of her splendid book Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun, where she does a deep dive into Greek theatre. In it she makes several suggestive observations. After talking about the immense “quality of attention” and “breathtaking” responsibilities required of those who sat on the Athenian Citizens’ Council, she notes,  

Greek tragedy offers a training in decision-making. From the Persian Queen’s request for advice from her elders on how she should react to her dream and the omen she has seen in Persians, to Iphigenia’s articulation of her limited alternatives (i.e. whether to die willingly or unwillingly) in Iphigenia in Aulis, the corpus of fifth-century tragedies offers many characters engaged in deliberation, both in soliloquy and in dialogue.

She observes that, of the three major tragedians, the one for whom “deliberation as a mental process” was particularly important was Sophocles, who it so happens was “the only tragedian amongst the ‘big three’ who himself held important public office.” It’s not accidental, then, that his tragedies are often

precipitated by the inability of a character in a quandary to listen to good counsel, to discount bad, or simply to spend sufficient time considering potential outcomes: Oedipus fails to hear Tiresias, neither Ajax nor the Atridae demonstrate much ability to anticipate the consequences of their actions, and Creon substitutes bluster for deliberation when faced with cogent arguments framed by both Antigone and Haemon.

To be sure, Hall is forced to admit that Greek tragedy often indicates that “much about human life…cannot be controlled even by the most competent of deliberators,”  which is a problem with her argument. On the other hand, “with more careful thought, many of the great catastrophes of myth could have been averted even at the last minute, or, at the least, their consequences in terms of collateral damage ameliorated.” So there’s that.

Ultimately, she concludes that Greek tragedies are still suggestive of a “self-confident, optimistic, and morally autonomous Athenian democratic subject.”

I think what it boils down to is that the tragedies helped Athenians negotiate the tangled issue of human control—as in, how much control do we have over what happens to us? If we have no control—if our lives are entirely in the hands of fate—then there’s no drama. At the very least, we think we can have some control (think of Oedipus). Otherwise, life feels intolerable. The tragedies captured audiences in their fragile condition, leading to emotional catharsis. People felt pity for the tragic figures, feared the same could happen to them, and had a good cry over the experience.

Hall speculates that Aristotle deliberately set up his school close to the Athenian Theatre of Dionysus so that it would be within easy walking distance for him and his students. She says she

can imagine Aristotle walking at dawn with Theophrastus and their students, along with many other Athenian citizens and resistant, to attend the tragedies and comedies in the city-wnter sanctuaries and theaters of Dionysus, and excitedly analyzing them as he strode back home to the Academy at nightfall.

One of his many achievements, she notes, was to be “the first thinker ever to work out arguments for the edificatory potential of stories and enacted entertainments.”

Better living through Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, in other words. I’ll have more to say on Aristotle in a few days.

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Doonesbury, the Bard, & Trump

By Robin Bates | Published: April 13, 2021

Parolles exposed as a fraud in All’s Well That Ends Well

Wednesday

Doonesbury applied Shakespeare to current affairs in an imaginative way in Sunday’s strip. B.D. overhears his wife Boopsie involved in an on-line bashing (or so he thinks) of a certain ex-president. Here is what he hears:

“I want to hear the outrage.”

“A most notable coward! An infinite and endless liar! An hourly promise-breaker.”

B.D. explodes, shouting, “The trial’s over! He’s off twitter! He’s gone! Why is everyone still obsessing over the former guy.”

Only it so happens that he’s overhearing an acting workshop, with the participants acting out a scene from All’s Well That Ends Well.

Here’s the passage, which describes the loathesome Parolles, a supposed friend of the count who is eventually exposed as…well, one of the Count Bertram’s friends says it best:

Believe it, my lord, in mine own direct knowledge, without any malice, but to speak of him as my kinsman, he’s a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality worthy your lordship’s entertainment.

Once B.D. realizes he’s hearing Shakespeare, he wonders, “How could he be so spot on?” Which is another way of saying (in the words of Ben Jonson), “He was not of an age but of all time.”

The parallel proves even more apt when one dives into the play. Parolles, whose name is taken from the French word for words (paroles), is essentially a bullshit artist. A kind of Falstaff figure, he all but takes over the play, so much so that 19th century productions were sometimes staged under the name “Parolles.” Like Falstaff (and Trump), he talks a better battle game than he delivers, proving an actual coward on the battle field. As the admirable Helena remarks, “You go so much backward when you fight.”

On the other hand, he talks endlessly about penetrating virgins. Helena, who has her heart set upon Bertram, is nice to him only because he is Bertram’s good friend (“I love for him for his [Bertram’s] sake”). While she (unlike Bertram) sees him for what he is, she nevertheless expresses admiration for how well he carries off his fraudulence:

And yet I know him a notorious liar,
Think him a great way fool, solely a coward;
Yet these fixed evils sit so fit in him,
That they take place, when virtue’s steely bones
Look bleak i’ the cold wind: withal, full oft we see
Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly.

If Parolles were virtuous, he would look “bleak i’ the cold wind.” Who wants “cold wisdom” when they can have “superfluous folly”? I think of Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn complaining recently about how boring Joe Biden is:

The president is not doing cable news interviews. Tweets from his account are limited and, when they come, unimaginably conventional. The public comments are largely scripted. Biden has opted for fewer sit down interviews with mainstream outlets and reporters. Invites the question: is he really in charge?

To which Andrew Feinberg observed,

Senator Cornyn appears to be under the impression that presidents are only “in charge” if they spend their time erratically tweeting about what they see on cable news and calling into TV shows.

One way in which the play diverges from our own reality is that, after he is exposed, Parolles falls out of favor and, by the end of the play, is groveling to retain a place at court. Trump, who has been exposed multiple times, still has Republicans making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to pay him homage.

In the play, Bertram is guilty of Parolles’s irresponsible use of words, using them to weasel out of his forced marriage to Helena. Only at the end of the play does he recognize her worth and settle into responsible adulthood. It’s a bit like the ending of Henry IV, Part II where Hal decides to become a responsible king and casts off Falstaff. “I know thee not, old man,” he famously says.

If we see this as an allegory for our own situation, it’s what we want from the Republican Party. They must their infatuation with their bullshit artist—not to mention empty words generally (Fox News, shock radio jocks)—and settle into responsible governance with the opposition party (Helena). Until they do so, our realm will continue to totter.

Then again, if we are lucky, maybe one day we will be able to look back at this polarized time and say, “All’s well that ends well.”

Further thought: While All’s Well That Ends Well isn’t Shakespeare’s best, I have a soft spot for it as I saw Judy Dench perform the count’s mother in a production in Stratford-upon-Avon’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre. As such, she’s in alliance with daughter-in-law Helena against her son Bertram. I remember one scene where she packed a tremendous amount of power into a tiny hand gesture—I felt thrown back in my seat—as she dismisses Bertram when he’s throwing a temper tantrum. At that moment I got why Dench is one of the most admired actresses in British history.

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Read Jabberwocky for Covid Protocol

By Robin Bates | Published: April 12, 2021
Tenniel, the Jabberwock

Tuesday

My son Tobias Wilson-Bates, a Victorianist who teaches English at Georgia Gwinnett College, blew up twitter the other day when he applied a poem from Alice through the Looking Glass to post-Covid-vaccine protocol. The high volume response testified to the love people have for Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” which I have shared at the end of today’s post.

Incidentally, I remember reading the Alice books to Toby when he was small. Later he wrote part of his dissertation about how Carroll’s satire of standardized education is related to the 19th century’s fascination with time. (You can read an account of it here. ) Now he has gone even further and taken Alice to twitter.

Toby tweeted,

Being vaccinated does NOT mean you can gyre and gimble in the wabe. REMEMBER that the borogoves are STILL all mimsy. And the mome raths outgrabe.

The tweet brought out the best in the twitter-verse:

–Ah, but you can – if you have had the Astra Zeneca twice, and if you wait three weeks. Roll on Saturday, 17th April next. Gyring and gimbling like you’ve never seen before. The wabe will never be the same again!
–Of course it doesn’t! What do I look like? A BANDERSNATCH?! (TWB replay: More like a jubjub bird.)
–Ran out of wabe halfway through the lockdown. (TWB response: You might still be able to outgrabe if you show up early in the day.)
–You burbled snicker-snack you! Oh wait…Mmmm Snickers, it’s a totally tasty snack. Carry on awesme vaccinated beamish boy, just may sure you chop that Snicker-snack with vorpal blade in half & share with me! Callooh callay! O Frabjous day! I am vaccinated too!
–I understand not gyring; that’s just being reasonable. But to gimble is my passion and cannot be denied. You can tell the wabe I’ll double-mask if that’ll make it feel safer.
–Oh I’m gyring all right, or my name isn’t Brillig! I’ll gimble like no one’s ever gimbled when I’m sufficiently frumious.
–Ah Jabberwocky. Still makes more sense than an anti-vaxer.
–And there’s still a damned good chance that the snark is a boojum.
–I am definitely going to continue being ware of the jabberwocky, but then I’m known for being antisocial and will frequently shun the bandersnatch as well as the jub-jub and others
–This only applies to the current vaccines but the new vorpal jab let’s you gimble all you want
–I’ll just be over here reading this thread and chortling by the Tumtum tree, as one does
–Come to my arms, my beamish boy
–Indeed, better to pause a while in uffish thought.
–But I can shun the frumious second mask and go with just the one. Callooh! Callay!
–What if I upgrade my Vorpal Sword with a Snicker-Vax
–Come into my arms, my beamish mRNA, I chortled in my joy!
–I thought gyring and gimbling were restricted to slithy toves only.
–Come to my arms my beamish boy…but 6 feet away, please!
–Make sure to socially distance as you galumph back!

And then there was this twitter thread as responders responded to each other:

–Bullshit. I’ve got a fucking vorpal sword.
–Vorpal swords don’t stop viruses. How many times do I have to say this?!
–One two, one two and through and through, the Pfizer jab went pinch and pack
–*nods* the vaccine will not protect you from the Jabberwock; even after the second dose; make sure you wear a mask, continue to social distance, and keep your vorpal sword nearby

As a number of people remarked, it was altogether brillig.

For those who need a refresher, here’s Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
     Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
     And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
      The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
      The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
      Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
      And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
      The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
      And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
      He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
      Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
      He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
      And the mome raths outgrabe.

Alice’s response reminds me of when I’ve taught The Waste Land:

“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, ever to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.)

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Covid Dreams of Seaside Cliffs

By Robin Bates | Published: April 11, 2021
Claude Monet, Cliff Walk

Monday

Now that I’ve received my second Covid shot (I had no reaction whatsoever, incidentally), I’m starting to imagine traveling again, something Julia and I haven’t done in over a year. For instance, we haven’t seen our four grandchildren in Buford, Georgia all that time, even though they are less than four hours away. That’s what makes this Christina Rossetti sonnet the perfect poem for this week.

My English professor son, their father, tweeted it out with the comment, “Rossetti throwing serious quarantine vibes.” Yes, most of us have been in various stages of quarantine for the past year. I suspect that most of us have been, at one time or another, “sick of where I am and where I am not.”

The poem is particularly applicable to those living in Sewanee, which is noted for its heavy fogs. I’m wondering if Rossetti’s fog is mental, however, since something is keeping her from venturing out to picturesque places (cliffs, cresting waves, a pebbly strand) which are “quite within my reach.” Maybe she is locked in a depression. “I am sick of self, and there is nothing new,” she laments.

But something external has reached in and “set me dreaming.” Out of this dreaming comes a beautiful poem.

How fares it, Friends, with you?

From Later Life
17

Something this foggy day, a something which
  Is neither of this fog nor of today,
  Has set me dreaming of the winds that play
Past certain cliffs, along one certain beach,
  And turn the topmost edge of waves to spray:
  Ah pleasant pebbly strand so far away,
So out of reach while quite within my reach,
  As out of reach as India or Cathay!
I am sick of where I am and where I am not,
  I am sick of foresight and of memory,
  I am sick of all I have and all I see,
    I am sick of self, and there is nothing new;
Oh weary impatient patience of my lot!—
    Thus with myself: how fares it, Friends, with you?

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Wounds, Sacred Place of Mutual Compassion

By Robin Bates | Published: April 10, 2021
He Qi, The Doubt of St. Thomas

Spiritual Sunday

Some of the best sermons I have heard have been about “Doubting Thomas,” today’s Gospel reading.  I think it’s because we all recognize ourselves in Thomas, who can’t bring himself to believe without seeing physical evidence. I think of an observation that Anne Lemott makes about doubt:

The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

In this poem by Father Chircop, which I encountered on a “Global Christian Worship” website talks about our hunger for tactile certainty. The real gain we get from touching Christ’s wounds, however, is that, in doing so, we touch our own. Wounds become “the sacred place/ of mutual compassion,/ and the springboard to an intimate song/ of communion and possibility,” the poet tells us.

The passage reminds me of a Hemingway passage that I wrote about recently and that Joe Biden cited when remembering the half a million Americans who have died from Covid and honoring those who loved them: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Here’s the poem:

Invitation
By Father Philip Chircop SJ

Stand in our midst
again, today
enter the circle of our fears
penetrate the darkness of our doubts
meet us where we are

May we listen your sung Shalom:
‘Peace be with you … Peace be with you’.
May we see your hands and your side.
May we feel the warmth
of your holy breath
softening the hardened clay
from whence we come.

Invited,
curious like a little child,
we place our trembling hands
not only your wounds
but on ours too,
and on the lovely
brokenness of others

breathing in, forgiveness
breathing out, forgiveness

wounds becoming the sacred place
of mutual compassion,
and the springboard to an intimate song
of communion and possibility
crafted in the heart:
‘our Lord, and our God.’

Previous Doubting Thomas posts
R. S. Thomas: Reach Out Like Thomas in the Darkness
Malcolm Guite: Touching the Wounded God
Denise Levertov: A Vast Unfolding Design Llit by a Risen Sun

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Lit & Nature Light Up Same Parts of Brain

By Robin Bates | Published: April 8, 2021
Shen Zhou, Poet on a Mountaintop

Friday

In revising the neuro-criticism chapter of my book Does Literature Makes Us Better People?: A 2500-Year-Old Debate, I came across a New York Times article published nine years ago that somehow I missed. Annie Murphy Paul’s “Your Brain on Fiction” reports on results that I’ve heard about but never seen close up. According to studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, the brain “does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.”

There are implications here for both poetry and fiction. Poetry first. Here’s one of the reported findings on metaphor:

Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.

The same thing apparently happened to the motor cortex when people encountered references to action.

Poetry, of course, makes its home in figurative language. I’m wondering if, since the poems with the most compelling metaphors get us closest to the actual nature of things, whether the brain burns the brightest when it encounters them. (The study didn’t say.) In any event, psychologists now say that, when we read a poem, it’s as though we’re in the actual presence of something that is making us feel or hear or smell or taste or see.

Incidentally, Percy Shelley says something very much along these lines in his Defence of Poetry. Language in its beginnings is barely one step removed from experience:

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. 

Fiction is similarly powerful. To quote again from the article,

Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.

And that’s not all:

Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, performed an analysis of 86 fMRI studies, published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology, and concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers.

And:

Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”

I’ve written posts (for instance, here) on more recent psychological experiments that have verified these findings. In one Theory of Mind study, David Comer and Emanuele Castano had subjects read quality fiction, popular fiction, and non-fiction. There was a noticeable rise in the scores from the quality fiction—meaning that the better the literature, the better readers were able to understand other people.

Or as Paul concludes in her article:

These findings will affirm the experience of readers who have felt illuminated and instructed by a novel, who have found themselves comparing a plucky young woman to Elizabeth Bennet or a tiresome pedant to Edward Casaubon. Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.

But then, you never had any doubts, right?

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Shots That Signal a Promising Future

By Robin Bates | Published: April 7, 2021
Lin-Manuel Miranda as Hamilton

Thursday

Okay, so I may no longer be young, scrappy and hungry—I’m 69 going on 70—but as I received my second Moderna vaccination shot yesterday (!), I couldn’t help but think of Alexander Hamilton’s shot in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical:

I am not throwin’ away my shot
I am not throwin’ away my shot
Hey yo, I’m just like my country
I’m young, scrappy and hungry
And I’m not throwin’ away my shot

If Hamilton has been so popular, it’s in part because we long for its revolutionary optimism and wonder if we can ever get back to it. After all, we now live in a country where one party refuses to govern while convincing its voters that the last election was stolen. We watch as even common sense legislation can’t get passed except through an arcane measure called “reconciliation,” and then only some of the time. It’s difficult to believe that we’ll do anything other than continue to fumble along.

Oh for the days when we could dream of a glorious future:

I’m a diamond in the rough, a shiny piece of coal
Tryna reach my goal my power of speech, unimpeachable
Only nineteen but my mind is older
These New York City streets get colder, I shoulder
Every burden, every disadvantage
I have learned to manage, I don’t have a gun to brandish
I walk these streets famished
The plan is to fan this spark into a flame
But damn, it’s getting dark, so let me spell out my name
I am the A-L-E-X-A-N-D-E-R we are meant to be

A colony that runs independently…

And:

[B]ut we’ll never be truly free
Until those in bondage have the same rights as you and me
You and I
Do or die
Wait ’til I sally in on a stallion
With the first black battalion
Have another shot…

Our (vaccine) shots, however, are at least giving us a fighting chance. The fact that we have vaccines at all–and therefore the possibility of a return to normal–means that we shouldn’t give up on hope altogether.

I approach the future more cautiously than I did when I was young and was participating in protest marches against segregation and the Vietnam War. I allowed myself to feel hope again when Barack Obama won the presidency, and it was just four years ago when I was still taking our democracy somewhat for granted. I feel far more chastened now.

I think of the ending of Great Expectations where two bruised souls, who have been to hell and back, come together possibly to start anew. Estelle can’t imagine a future but Pip, ever the optimist, can. As he famously puts it,

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

I’m Pip at the moment. America has been under assault—I even compared Donald Trump to Miss Havisham at one point—but I believe we can start making our way back to our founding ideals. We haven’t entirely used up our shot.

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Indecipherable Texts of a Magic Spell

By Robin Bates | Published: April 6, 2021
Henri Lebasque, Young Boy Reading

Wednesday

The novels of Haruki Murakami are my comfort food. Currently I’ve returned to 1Q84, the novel that first turned me on to the Japanese novelist, and have come across a passage I blogged about five years ago. I’m rerunning that essay today as the passage pretty much sums up the rationale for this blog. Maybe Murakami’s bookishness is what initially hooked me.

The passage involves a math teacher who is also an aspiring novelist. Tengo loves both math and literature, but whereas math helps him escape from life, literature provides him with potential solutions for his problems. As Murakami puts it, a novel for Tengo

was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. At times it lacked coherence and served no immediate practical purpose. But it would contain a possibility.

Here’s the passage:

The world governed by numerical expression was, for him, a legitimate and always safe hiding place. As long as he stayed in that world, he could forget or ignore the rules and burdens forced upon him by the real world.

Where mathematics was a magnificent imaginary building, the world of story as represented by Dickens was like a deep, magical forest for Tengo. When mathematics stretched infinitely upward toward the heavens, the forest spread out beneath his gaze in silence, its dark, sturdy roots stretching deep into the earth. In the forest there were no maps, no numbered doorways.

In elementary and middle school, Tengo was utterly absorbed by the world of mathematics. Its clarity and absolute freedom enthralled him, and he also needed them to survive. Once he entered adolescence, however, he began to feel increasingly that this might not be enough. There was no problem as long as he was visiting the world of math, but whenever he returned to the real world (as return he must), he found himself in the same miserable cage. Nothing had improved. Rather, his shackles felt even heavier. So then, what good was mathematics? Wasn’t it just a temporary means of escape that made his real-life situation even worse?

As his doubts increased, Tengo began deliberately to put some distance between himself and the world of mathematics, and instead the forest of story began to exert a stronger pull on his heart. Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape. As soon as he closed their pages he had to come back to the real world. But at some point Tengo noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of mathematics. Why should that have been? After much deep thought, he reached a conclusion. No matter how clear the relationships of things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution. That was how it differed from math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. Depending on the nature and direction of the problem, a solution could be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that suggestion in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. At times it lacked coherence and served no immediate practical purpose. But it would contain a possibility. Someday he might be able to decipher the spell. That possibility would gently warm his heart from within.

Murakami gives us an instance of this narrative magic at work. Tengo grows up not knowing what has happened to his mother. His father, meanwhile, is a man of limited imagination who forces Tengo to accompany him on Sundays when he is collecting fees for Japanese National Television. (Having a child with him makes people more likely to pay up but Tengo hates it.) The boy draws on Oliver Twist to make sense of it all:

My real father must be somewhere else. This was the conclusion that Tengo reached in boyhood. Like the unfortunate children in a Dickens novel, Tengo must have been led by strange circumstances to be raised by this man. Such a possibility was both a nightmare and a great hope. He became obsessed with Dickens after reading Oliver Twist, plowing through every Dickens volume in the library. As he traveled through the world of the stories, he steeped himself in reimagined versions of his own life. The reimaginings (or obsessive fantasies) in his head grew ever longer and more complex. They followed a single pattern, but with infinite variations. In all of them, Tengo would tell himself that this was not the place where he belonged. He had been mistakenly locked in a cage. Someday his real parents, guided by sheer good fortune, would find him. They would rescue him from this cramped and ugly cage and bring him back where he belonged. Then he would have the most beautiful, peaceful, and free Sundays imaginable.

Stories worked this way for me only it was my gender, not my parents, that puzzled me. Because I had more in common with girls than boys, the books that riveted me were those featuring gender ambiguity, like Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Land of Oz, and, when I reached middle school, Twelfth Night. They seemed to offer up solutions, only just beyond my grasp.

Indecipherable texts of a magic spell.

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