William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Holy Women at the Tomb
Spiritual Sunday
I wrote Friday about the anniversary of my eldest son’s death but there’s something else I want to say during this Easter season. In his last year, Justin became a charismatic Christian. He died the Sunday after Easter after having attended, in the space of 24 hours, three services at three different churches, including the Episcopal church he grew up in. Then, just before leaping into the St. River’s River from Church Point–a place where he had gone swimming as a child so it should have been safe, only that day there was a rogue current—he kissed the cross that stands there. Reports tells us that he was bubbling over with joy, as though filled with the holy spirit, so flinging himself into the water had a baptismal dimension to it. What it all means beyond that, I do not know.
I find consolation in the Clare Harner Lyon poem “Immortality, which I am encountering for the first time. It reminds me of the Percy Shelley passage from Adonais that we put on Justin’s gravestone:
He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird; He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone…
Here’s Lyon’s poem:
Immortality
Do not stand By my grave, and weep. I am not there, I do not sleep— I am the thousand winds that blow I am the diamond glints in snow I am the sunlight on ripened grain, I am the gentle, autumn rain. As you awake with morning’s hush, I am the swift, up-flinging rush Of quiet birds in circling flight, I am the day transcending night. Do not stand By my grave, and cry— I am not there, I did not die.
Julia and I remembered Justin by rowing out on the lake by our home and scattering flowers. We also spent some time in one of the coves, reading Mary Oliver poems amidst the yellow irises. We were visited by a deep peace.
Today is the 21st anniversary of the death of my oldest son, who drowned in the St. Mary’s River in a freak accident. My wife Julia points out that Justin, who was 21 at the time, has now been out of our lives for the same amount of time that he was in them.
The memories have dulled over time although, from time to time, certain memories will pierce the haze like brilliant shafts of light. I think of how, after he was born, a line from Sartre’s The Flies came to me. “I’m still too—too light. I must take a burden on my shoulders,” Orestes tells Electra. And further on:
I have done my deed, Electra, and that deed was good. I shall bear it on my shoulders as a carrier at a ferry carries the traveler to the farther bank. And when I have brought it to the farther bank I shall take stock of it. The heavier it is to carry, the better pleased I shall be; for that burden is my freedom. Only yesterday I walked the earth haphazard; thousands of roads I tramped that brought me nowhere, for they were other men’s roads. Yes, I tried them all; the haulers’ tracks along the riverside, the mule-paths in the mountains, and the broad, flagged highways of the charioteers. But none of these was mine. Today I have one path only, and heaven knows where it leads. But it is my path. . . .
And finally:
We were too light, Electra; now our feet sink into the soil, like chariot-wheels in turf. So come with me; we will tread heavily on our way, bowed beneath our precious load.
To be sure, the “precious load” that I had in mind was not that of Orestes. In some ways, I could not have chosen a more inappropriate play since the burden Orestes and Electra have taken on is the guilt of having killed their mother Clytemnestra (for having killed their father Agamemnon). Still, Sartre’s existential point applies. In this play about human freedom, Orestes talks about how truly free individuals take on responsibility, not run away from it. Julia and I deciding to have Justin, whom I often bore on my shoulders, meant that we could no longer walk the earth haphazard.
Of course, if we hadn’t had Justin, we would never have suffered the agony of losing him. The memories of sitting on an embankment of the St. Mary’s River as divers looked for his body—telling myself that it wasn’t him while knowing in my heart that it was—is branded on my mind as though it were yesterday. I vividly recall identifying his body and singing to him a lullaby that I had often sung to him as a child. (“Baby’s boat’s a silver moon…”) And waking up at 2 am later that night staring directly into an abyss of horror.
Today being Arbor Day (the last Friday in April), two tree poems come to mind that I can link with the anniversary. One is from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a poem that obsessed me for two or three months after Justin died. Every day when I came home from the college where I taught, I would randomly open it and lose myself in Tennyson’s sorrowing for Arthur Hallam. Early in the poem, Tennyson identifies with an ancient Yew tree in the graveyard where Hallam lies buried, stuck in sorrow as life goes on around him. “Not for thee the glow, the bloom,” Tennyson writes, finding it impossible to imagine himself ever happy again. Instead, he just watches detached as, around him, flowers bloom, lambs get born, and the sun’s clock “beats out the little lives of men.” The summer suns will not penetrate the gloom that has marked this tree for a thousand years.
Old Yew, which graspest at the stones That name the under-lying dead, Thy fibres net the dreamless head, Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.
The seasons bring the flower again, And bring the firstling to the flock; And in the dusk of thee, the clock Beats out the little lives of men.
O, not for thee the glow, the bloom, Who changest not in any gale, Nor branding summer suns avail To touch thy thousand years of gloom:
And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for thy stubborn hardihood, I seem to fail from out my blood And grow incorporate into thee.
Yes, I felt something like this for much of the year after Justin died, sullen and stubbornly hanging on and feeling distanced from the flowering season that was upon us.
A very different tree poem captures where I am now, however. In “The Sycamore,” Wendell Berry describes a tree that, while it has been wounded many times, has as a result “risen to a strange perfection/ in the warp and bending of its long growth”:
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose. It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate. It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
Like Tennyson, Berry identifies with his tree, but in this case he accepts the nails that have been driven into him (alert: Christ image), the hack and whittles, the lightning burns, the illness that will one day kill him. Rather than feeling removed from life and death, he sees them shaping him.
Langston Hughes, looking back at the tormented history of African Americans, once wrote, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” Berry is saying something similar.
The Sycamore
In the place that is my own place, whose earth I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing, a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself. Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it, hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it. There is no year it has flourished in that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it that is its death, though its living brims whitely at the lip of the darkness and flows outward. Over all its scars has come the seamless white of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection in the warp and bending of its long growth. It has gathered all accidents into its purpose. It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate. It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable. In all the country there is no other like it. I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by. I see that it stands in its place and feeds upon it, and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.
I was not wrong when, in the week after Justin was born, I voiced the feeling that I had been too light before. Because I sank deep into his life, however, I experienced unbearable pain when he died. For a while, I felt like Tennyson’s yew tree, old before my time and cut off from the rest of creation. Now, 21 years later, I can see that all the joys and all the sorrows have been gathered together into some mysterious purpose. Like the sycamore, I see that I stand in this life, that I feed upon it, and that this life feeds upon me. This is the indwelling principle that I would be ruled by.
Henry Gibbs, Aeneas and his Family Fleeing Burning Troy (1654)
Thursday
Some political-cultural fights never go away, it seems, and we may be seeing a return to battles fought in the early 1990s. Apparently Princeton professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta has attacked Greek and Roman classics as “instrumental to the invention of ‘whiteness,” generating a passionate defense of these works from University of Chicago classicist Shadi Bartsch.
I’ll have to return to Peralta’s New York Times piece in a future post since, at present, I don’t have a subscription to the paper and will need to visit the library. But because Bartsch’s article appears in the Washington Post, to which I do have a subscription, it is the subject of today’s essay.
First, however, a note on my own entry into the fray. If I maintain a blog entitled Better Living through Beowulf: How Great Literature Can Change Your Life, it is largely because I agree with Bartsch that the classics should not be surrendered to the right. Conservatives attempted to appropriate them for their own ideological ends when Lyn Cheney and William Bennet ran the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush years. That may have been when the phrase “dead white men” took root, either as an epithet or a flag to rally around. At the time I fought a double battle, both against leftwing purists who wanted to excise older authors from the curriculum (although honestly, there weren’t that many of such people) and conservatives who wanted to turn the classics into a shrine where one blindly worships. I didn’t realize that there are some today who want to revisit those battles.
Bartsch believes a battle cry has sounded, however, and responds with “Why I Won’t Surrender the Classics to the Far Right.” First she complains how the alt-right misinterprets the past for its own purposes:
The alt-right has no compunction about appropriating antiquity for its own ends — as can be seen images from the Jan. 6 Capitol invasion, as some rioters wore Greek helmets and carried flags with the phrase “molon labe” (“come and get our weapons”). This distorted reference to the Spartan stand against the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 B.C. reflects the supremacist belief that the Spartans saved “the white race” from barbarians.
Bartshch acknowledges that, yes, many classical texts “have been used to justify and support ideologies and actions we condemn today, from defending slavery to suggesting women are lesser creatures than men.” She even challenges herself with the question, “Wouldn’t it be better for us to use texts without tainted legacies and not risk seeming to condone the stories’ content or the history of how the texts were used?” Then she trots forth her defense:
That approach ignores a basic fact: Times change, and so does the way we read. In antiquity, Virgil’s “The Aeneid,” an epic poem written in 19 B.C. about the foundation of Rome, was understood as praise of the emperor Augustus. In the Middle Ages, readers took it to be an allegory of the life of the Christian everyman. In the 20th century, Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini put it to use as a foundational text for the third Roman Empire. During the Vietnam War, the poem was interpreted by antiwar readers as a manifesto against imperialism and warmongering.
While some conservatives today might read The Aeneid as “a celebration of the West’s hegemonic history”—after all, Aeneas, “claiming to be on a divine mission, attacks the native peoples of Italy and wins, eventually leading to the growth of the Roman Empire”—Bartsh points out the poem has other dimensions as well:
When I read “The Aeneid,” I don’t see an endorsement of colonization. I find in it what I am primed to find as a politically liberal Westerner in the 21st century. I find problems with its “heroic” protagonist and his search for a homeland: Aeneas causes carnage in his “divine” quest to become king; he even sacrifices people alive. I read the poem as a warning about the power of propaganda to veil the abuse of power.
Bartsch gives one other instance of a classic episode that can be reinterpreted. In The Iliad Thersites, “the ungliest man below Ilion,” is beaten for insulting Agamemnon:Bartsch observes:
Mostly, he echoes what the heroic Achilles has said earlier (Agamemnon keeps all the good stuff for himself). But Odysseus beats Thersites with a scepter until he collapses. The ruling class has asserted its place.
“Or has it?” Bartsch then asks:
A century ago, readers of The Iliad would comment that Odysseus gave the troublemaker just what he deserved. Today, I’d ask: Why does Homer include this voice of blame within the epic at all? What does it mean that the scepter bestowing the right to speak is used as a weapon to silence? What are the social implications of equating ugliness with low social status?
Bartsch then turns to Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) argues that
marginalized peoples should reinterpret the same texts that their oppressors use and transform them in their own service. Disconnecting the classics from elite education is entirely possible today: These texts are available in translation to basically anyone with access to the Internet or a library.
While I heartily endorse Bartsch’s defense of the classics, I am a little troubled that she doesn’t explain why they have leant themselves to such a wide range of interpretations. She makes it sound as though anyone can pick up The Aeneid and see anything that he or she wants to see—as though literature is no more than a Rorschach test.
I would have liked her to add that the classics have withstood the test of time because they offer a breathtaking vision of what it means to be human. Homer and Virgil capture us in our full complexity. That’s why it’s possible to read The Iliad as both a pro-war and as an anti-war work: at the same time that it conveys warrior ideals, it also shows (to quote Wilfred Owen in “Strange Meeting”) “the pity of war, the pity war distilled.” Achilles is both a glorious hero and, when in the grip of vengeful rage, a monster. (Owen’s “when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels” may allude to Achilles.) The same is true of Odysseus when he slaughters the suitors and the handmaids.
Our greatest writers, regardless of their demographic make-up, give us such rich pictures of ourselves that they never march comfortably under anyone’s ideological flag. They can never be reduced to a political slogan. The best we can do is listen to them carefully and let them teach us about life.
As I revise my forthcoming book on Does Literature Make Us Better People?, I have been working my way through Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Nussbaum is my favorite contemporary philosopher, in large part because of the respect she accords literature, and I have a chapter devoted to her in my book. She is one who takes direct issue with Plato’s contention (in The Republic) that poetry and philosophy must inevitably quarrel.
Nussbaum sides with Aristotle against Plato because of the way Aristotle relies on Greek tragedy to understand how to live in the world. As she put it,
Aristotle has a high regard for tragedy. Both in the Poetics itself and in the Politics discussion of the education of young citizens, he gives it a place of honor, attributing to it both motivational and cognitive value….[H]is rejection of the Platonic external “god’s eye” standpoint leads him to turn, for moral improvement, not to representations of divine non-limited beings, but to stories of good human activity.
Aristotle, Nussbaum believes, thinks that “a detailed account of a complex particular case will have more of ethical truth in it than a general formula.” Therefore “the concrete and complex stories that are the material of tragic drama” are vital in helping us understand human beings.
By viewing Aristotle’s Poetics as a direct answer to Plato’s attack on poetry (even though Aristotle never mentions Plato in it), Nussbaum provides me new insight into Aristotle’s project. For instance, I now understand why it’s important the Aristotle regards plot as more important in tragedy than character.
For Plato, character is primary. The most important thing is for a person to be good, and being good involves attaining “rational self-sufficiency.” To a good person, external circumstance shouldn’t matter. He or she will rise above external pressures, just as Socrates rose above his execution, calmly drinking the hemlock while philosophizing with his students. Most Greek tragedy, on the other hand, focuses on how people buckle, even when they are good. This is what Plato objects to:
Plato informs us in no uncertain terms that the poets “speak wrongly about human beings in matters of the greatest importance” when they show the lives of good and just people being seriously affected by adverse circumstances.”
In Plato’s ideal society, Nussbaum points out, “[p]oets are to be forbidden to tell this sort of story and commanded to tell the opposite.” Or as Socrates puts it, “We must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State.”
Nussbaum continues,
The great tragic plots explore the gap between our goodness and our good living, between what we are (our character, intentions, aspirations, values) and how humanly well we manage to live. They show us reversals happening to good characters but not divine or invulnerable people, exploring the many ways in which being of a certain good human character falls short of sufficiency.
If, like Plato, you are only interested in a person’s goodness, then “you will not want to give [tragedy] a place of honor in a scheme of public instruction.” However, “Aristotle’s belief that the gap is both real and important illuminates his anti-Platonic claim that tragic action is important and a source of genuine learning.”
Nussbaum concludes her book with a deep dive into Euripides’s tragedy Hecuba, where her Plato-Aristotle contrast is dramatically played out.
In the play, the former wife of Priam is now Agamemnon’s slave. Prior to Troy’s overthrow, Hecuba entrusts her young son Polydorus to King Plymestor of Thrace, but after Troy loses the war, Plymestor pockets Polydorus’s treasure and throws the child into the sea. Hecuba learns of this through a dream where Polydorus speaks to her. Also, his body washes up on the shore. To add to Hecuba’s woes, her daughter Polyxena is to be sacrificed to provide Achilles with a bride in the underworld.
Polyxena seems to live up to Plato’s ideal, refusing to fall on her knees before the Greeks but heroically accepting her death. As she puts it,
Odysseus, I see thee hiding thy right hand beneath thy robe and turning away thy face, that I may not touch thy beard. Take heart; thou art safe from the suppliant’s god in my case, for I will follow thee, alike because I must and because it is my wish to die; for were I loth, a coward should I show myself, a woman faint of heart…The name [of slave] makes me long for death, so strange it sounds; and then maybe my lot might give me to some savage master, one that would buy me for money,–me the sister of Hector and many another chief,–who would make me knead him bread within his halls, or sweep his house or set me working at the loom, leading a life of misery; while some slave, bought I know not whence, will taint my maiden charms, once deemed worthy of royalty. No, never! Here I close my eyes upon the light, free as yet, and dedicate myself to Hades. Lead me hence, Odysseus, and do thy worst, for I see naught within my reach to make me hope or expect with any confidence that I am ever again to be happy…
And then to her mother:
Mother mine! seek not to hinder me by word or deed, but join in my wish for death ere I meet with shameful treatment undeserved. For whoso is not used to taste of sorrow’s cup, though he bears it, yet it galls him when he puts his neck within the yoke; far happier would he be dead than alive, for life of honor reft is toil and trouble.
Her death, which occurs offstage, is also heroic. As a messenger reports,
And she, hearing her captors’ words took her robe and tore it open from the shoulder to the waist, displaying a breast and bosom fair as a statue’s; then sinking on her knee, one word she spake more piteous than all the rest, “Young prince, if ’tis my breast thou’dst strike, lo! here it is, strike home! or if at my neck thy sword thou’lt aim, behold! that neck is bared.”
So far, Plato’s ideas have predominated and even Hecuba seems reconciled, saying, “[Y]et hath the story of thy noble death taken from the keenness of my grief.”
The play isn’t over, however. When Hecuba learns that Thracian king Polymestor is visiting, she plots revenge. Pretending not to know that he has killed her son, she lures him and his two young sons to a tent under the pretense of telling him where more Trojan treasure can be found. There she kills the sons and stabs out Polymestor’s eyes. In other words, this good woman becomes a monster. As Nussbaum notes, “Mother-love, formerly the central prop of this woman’s thought and character, has been transformed in the change to revenge…Revenge takes over the entire world of value, making its end the one end.”
Nussbaum notes that many see the play lacking unity and falling into two separate parts. (The Wikipedia entry thinks this as well.) It is unified if one sees it in the light of the Plato-Aristotle dispute, however, with the first half going to Plato, the second to Aristotle, with Aristotle getting the last world. Platonic purity is possible only for the young:
Polydorus dies too young, before he has had a chance to become and to act well. Hecuba dies too old, in the grip of revenge. Only Polyxena, through good luck, finds a time between nurture and disillusionment and dies a noble character. In the tragedies of Euripides it frequently seems that the good die young. This, however, is not the result of special divine malevolence. It is because if they had not died young they would in all likelihood not have remained good. To live on is to make contact in some way at some time with the possibility of betrayal….[T]he encounter with betrayal brings a risk of defilement: the risk of ceasing to look at the world with the child’s free and generous looks; of ceasing, in the Euripidean way, to be good.
Plato, Nussbaum says, wants to cut off the risks of ceasing to be good with his rational self-sufficiency. Nussbaum counters, “Inside the Aristotelian or tragic conceptions, [such risks] cannot be closed off.” We can only truly love, only truly be fully human, if we acknowledge the world’s instability. What both Aristotle and Greek tragedy show us, Nussbaum writes, is that
there is in fact a loss in value whenever the risks involved in specifically human virtue are closed off. There is a beauty in the willingness to love someone in the face of love’s instability and worldliness that is absent from a completely trustworthy love. There is a certain valuable quality in social virtue that is lost when social virtue is removed from the domain of uncontrolled happenings….And in general each salient Aristotelian virtue seems inseparable from a risk of harm. There is no courage without the risk of death or of serious damage…no true commitment to justice that exempts its own privileges from scrutiny. This willingness to embrace something that is in the world and subject to its risks is, in fact, the virtue of the Euripidean child, whose love is directed at the world itself, including its dangers. The generous looks of such a child go straight to the world with love and openness; they do not focus upon the safe and the eternal, or demand these as conditions of their love. It is this quality of loving affirmation that both Euripides and Aristotle…, wish, in their different ways, to hold before us as an adult way of being excellent.
While we may long for “another simpler or purer world,” Nussbaum concludes, “the Aristotelian argument, which continues and refines the insights of tragedy, reminds us that we do not achieve purity or simplicity without a loss in richness and fullness of life.” Goodness is fragile but that means we must commit ourselves to it all the more.
I am far from having done justice to Nussbaum’s ideas but, as a literature professor and literature lover, there’s one thing above all that I carry away from her book: her penetrating insights arise, not just from intellectually engaging with a genius like Aristotle, but by plunging into the richness of great literature. For her, poetry and philosophy do not quarrel with but rather sustain each other.
As I am in the throes of revising my book Does Literature Make Us Better People?, I’m sharing one of the chapters today rather than spending the time to write a blog post. The book has a series of short chapters on how thinkers over the ages have addressed the question. Enjoy.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BCE), author of the most important theoretical work about poetry to emerge from the Roman empire, lived an eventful early life. The son of a freedman, he fought with Brutus and Cassius against Mark Antony and Augustus as a young man, saw his family farm confiscated, and then later reconciled with Augustus after the latter became Caesar. Eventually Horace was rewarded for his odes and satires, many of which would become poetic models for centuries afterwards. Harry Eyres, who in Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet explains how the poet is an indispensable guide for the Slow Movement, says that Horace remarkably managed to “carve out a space for lyric poetry in a pragmatic, increasingly instrumental and money-driven society.”
To the question of whether literature makes us better people, it is clearly the intent of Horace’s poetry to do so. Many of his poems are concerned with how to live a good life—he’s the author of “carpé diem” or “seize the moment”—and he often counsels taking “a middle way.” The value of his Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry) for our purposes is that he directly addresses how poetry contributes to this endeavor. This 476-line poem, which for 1500 was regarded as an indispensable guide for practicing poets, recommends maintaining a balance between poetic delight and poetic utility.
The tension between delight and usefulness never goes away, with some people worrying that literature is spoiled when it is yoked to a serious agenda and others worrying that literature is frivolous when it is not. We’ve noted that, for Plato, the divide is so great that poets must be banished altogether from his republic, but Horace contends that we don’t have to choose. While he acknowledges that there are some poets who “wish either to profit or to delight,” the best poets “deliver at once both the pleasures and the necessaries of life.”
Horace sets up as, as opposites in the profit-delight tension, “the tribes of the senior” on the one hand and “the exalted knights” on the other. The first—call them grumpy old men—frown on anything that is not edifying whereas the latter—high spirited young men—“disregard poems which are austere”—by which he probably means preachy and moralistic. Earlier in the poem he talks about what happens with such young men as soon as they shake free of their guardians:
The beardless youth, his guardian being at length discharged, joys in horses, and dogs, and the verdure of the sunny Campus Martius; pliable as wax to the bent of vice, rough to advisers, a slow provider of useful things, prodigal of his money, high-spirited, and amorous, and hasty in deserting the objects of his passion.
If you want to get through to such minds, Horace says, set aside long-winded advice and “superfluous instructions.” This is not to say, however, that the poet should abandon education altogether. Entertain your audience but in a way that sticks close to truth. The poet “who joins the instructive with the agreeable,” Horace declares, “carries off every vote.”
Later theorists will second Horace’s advice. In his Defense of Poesie (c. 1580), poet Sir Philip Sidney says that those who “despise the austere admonitions of the philosopher, and feel not the inward reason they stand upon” may nevertheless “be content to be delighted” by poetry. Therefore, the poet can use beauty to lure them into goodness, “ere themselves be aware, as if they took a medicine of cherries.” In his Battle of the Books (1704), meanwhile, satirist Jonathan Swift characterizes Horace’s dual property of literature as “sweetness and light” and conveys the idea through the symbol of the bee, who makes both honey and wax (used for candles).
Even after asserting that delightful poetry can be used for practical ends, however, Horace still imagines (probably correctly) that, despite his arguments, skeptics still exist who will be “ashamed of the lyric muse, and Apollo the god of song.” He therefore leaves his delicate balancing act and brings out his big guns, piling up one poetic accomplishment upon another.
The legendary poet Orpheus, he says, “deterred the savage race of men from slaughters and inhuman diet”—Orpheus supposedly taught cannibals how to subsist on fruit—and tamed tigers and “furious lions.” Amphion, another figure from Greek mythology, built the walls of Thebes with his music (“was said to give the stones motion with the sound of his lyre”).
Other poets taught people civic responsibility; created a sense of the sacred; regulated sexual behavior (“prohibit[ed] a promiscuous commerce between the sexes”); taught civilization how to conduct marriages; designed cities; and established laws. Homer and the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, meanwhile, “animated the manly mind to martial achievements with their verses.” Nor should we forget that oracles deliver their pronouncements in poetry and that poetry can be used as a guide to life and a way to praise princes. Oh, and one final thing: think of the delight we take in attending a play at the end of a long day of tedious work. Case closed.
Whether Horace actually believes that the strains of a lyre can shift stones, his encomium to poetry points to the power he senses in it. He knows that he himself is moved and then marshals a host of examples to prove that poetry works on others as well. He will not be the last to trumpet poetry’s practical accomplishments in response to accusations of frivolity—we’re about to see Philip Sidney take up his cause and run with it—but he was the first theorist to expressly argue that literature could be simultaneously serious and delightful, at once a practical tool and a joy unto itself.
Delving into Plato’s suspicion of poetry for my book project (Does Literature Make Us Better People?) recently has me thinking of the conspiracy theories that are driving rightwing crazies. Liberals like me gaze astonished as QAnon believers talk about cannibalistic, pedophile Democrats stealing the election, but Plato long ago warned about the power of stories to circumvent rational thought and undermine good governance. Current political developments prompt me to at least revisit—if not to accept—Plato’s proposal that poets be banished from his ideal republic.
Before delving into the philosopher, however, here’s what Haruki Murakami says about conspiracy believers in 1Q84, a novel that explore alternative realities and a disturbing religious cult. (The title echoes George Orwell’s 1984.) A wealthy dowager who runs a home for battered women, speaking about how this cult rapes little girls, makes an observation that explains the relative success of QAnon, Trump, and others of their ilk:
People have been repeating the same kinds of fraud throughout the world since the beginning of time, using the same old tricks, and still these despicable fakes continue to thrive. That is because most people believe not so much in truth as in things they wish were the truth. Their eyes may be wide open, but they don’t see a thing. Tricking them is as easy as twisting a baby’s arm.
Trickery is all the more powerful when cast as a story. Jonathan Gottshall, in his book The Story Telling Animal: How Stories Makes Us Human, talks about how the ready availability of stories is creating social havoc:
There’s an analogy to be made between our craving for story and our craving for food. A tendency to overeat served our ancestors well when food shortages were a predictable part of life. But now that we modern desk jockeys are awash in cheap grease and corn syrup, overeating is more likely to fatten us up and kill us young. Likewise, it could be that an intense greed for story was healthy for our ancestors but has some harmful consequences in a world where books, MP3 players, TVs, and iPhones make story omnipresent—and where we have, in romance novels and television shows such as Jersey Shore, something like the story equivalent of deep-fried Twinkies.
Gottschall concludes
I think the literary scholar Brian Boyd is right to wonder if overconsuming in a world awash with junk story could lead to something like a “mental diabetes epidemic.”
This isn’t a totally modern phenomenon. Cervantes’s famous protagonist, of course, gets lost in a world of stories and finds himself unable to distinguish between fact and fiction. Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey warns about her heroine Catherine Morland losing perspective from her immersion in Ann Radcliffe’s gothic thrillers. While Catherine doesn’t take a gun and go searching for a Hillary Clinton child trafficking ring in the basement of a local pizza establishment, her hold on reality has become tenuous. Fortunately for her, she has reality-grounded Henry Tilney to set her right.
But what if, not only Radcliffe novels, but Facebook posts, radio shock jocks, and Fox News were all shouting the same nonsense. Are we confident that Catherine would not conclude, at some point, that she should engage in a Regency-period equivalent of storming the U.S. Capitol?
Which brings us back to Plato. It has long been a mystery why this most poetic of philosophers should have such a deep suspicion of poetry. The Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney, finding poetry under attack by a Plato-citing Puritan, writes in his Defense of Poesie,
[M]y burthen is great, that Plato’s name is laid upon me, whom, I must confess, of all philosophers I have ever esteemed most worthy of reverence; and with good reason, since of all philosophers he is the most poetical.
Sidney goes on to say that, if Plato “will defile the fountain out of which his flowing streams have proceeded,” then he must be examined closely, which is what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks.
My conclusion is this: If Plato wants to banish poets from his republic, it’s because of his passion for poetry, not the opposite. Anything that has this much power over him, he figures, must be handled the way one handles a wild lion. Perhaps he can manage things okay, but can other people?
Plato’s love for poetry, especially Homer, is particularly evident in the final book of The Republic, Plato’s extended reflection on the elements needed for a perfect society. After declaring that “all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers,” Plato follows up,
[A]lthough I have always from my earliest youth had an awe and love of Homer, which even now makes the words falter on my lips, for he is the great captain and teacher of the whole of that charming tragic company; but a man is not to be reverenced more than the truth, and therefore I will speak out.
Plato explains that, while people in other professions know their specialties first-hand, “poetical imitations”—or fictional representations—are second hand. We go to a statesman, not Homer, to lead our country, and we go to a general, not Homer, to conduct a battle. Plato here is like those parents who insist that their college-age children major in something practical rather than (shudder!) the arts.
Yet for all the ways that he denigrates Homer and the great tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides), Plato keeps referring to their power. For instance, there’s this:
The best of us, as I conceive, when we listen to a passage of Homer, or one of the tragedians, in which he represents some pitiful hero who is drawling out his sorrows in a long oration, or weeping, and smiting his breast—the best of us, you know, delight in giving way to sympathy, and are in raptures at the excellence of the poet who stirs our feelings most.
Plato contrasts two possible responses to this: the manly rational response (good) and the womanly emotional response (bad). Real men, he essentially says, don’t cry. Oh, and they also philosophize:
But when any sorrow of our own happens to us, then you may observe that we pride ourselves on the opposite quality—we would fain be quiet and patient; this is the manly part, and the other which delighted us in the recitation is now deemed to be the part of a woman.
We come to realize that what Plato most fears is passion. If we haven’t sufficiently trained our “reason,” we will give way to “weeping and lamentation”:
If you consider, I said, that when in misfortune we feel a natural hunger and desire to relieve our sorrow by weeping and lamentation, and that this feeling which is kept under control in our own calamities is satisfied and delighted by the poets;—the better nature in each of us, not having been sufficiently trained by reason or habit, allows the sympathetic element to break loose because the sorrow is another’s; and the spectator fancies that there can be no disgrace to himself in praising and pitying anyone who comes telling him what a good man he is, and making a fuss about his troubles; he thinks that the pleasure is a gain, and why should he be supercilious and lose this and the poem too? …And so the feeling of sorrow which has gathered strength at the sight of the misfortunes of others is with difficulty repressed in our own.
If you allow poets to guide you, Plato warns, you will let “pleasure and pain,” not “law and the reason of mankind” rule your lives:
[W]e are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.
Watch out for that honeyed muse!
Socrates refers then to the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” which is essentially a quarrel between reason and emotion. But since (as Plato sees it) philosophical reason is the way to truth, then poets must be banished—not in spite of our love for them but because of our love for them. We must cut them out of our lives the way we give up a cherished lover who is not good for us:
If her defence fails, then, my dear friend, like other persons who are enamoured of something, but put a restraint upon themselves when they think their desires are opposed to their interests, so too must we after the manner of lovers give her up, though not without a struggle.
Finally, to clinch his argument, Socrates puts love of poetry in the same category as love of money and power:
[W]ill anyone be profited if under the influence of honor or money or power, aye, or under the excitement of poetry, he neglect justice and virtue? [my emphasis]
Recall that his discussion began with what we can now call the honeyed call of conspiracy theories. Where I—and for that matter Aristotle—diverge from Plato is calling for Reason and Passion, not Reason or Passion. In my view, the greatest literature (including Homer and the great tragedians) gives us full scope to exercise both our rational and our emotional side.
But I appreciate Plato’s warning because there is plenty of stories out there that invite us to set aside critical thinking and immerse ourselves in an emotional bath. Plato responds to literature at such a gut level that he is more aware of the dangers than those who feel less deeply. Thus we literature lovers must take him seriously, even as we voice our disagreements.
I just stumbled on this lovely Denise Levertov poem about the Emmaus dinner, inspired by a Diego Velazquez. Sometimes entitled The Kitchen Servant, sometimes The Servant Girl at Emmaus, it is striking because it focuses, on the waiting maid rather than Jesus and the disciples, whom one can see in the background. Often our way into sacred stories is through incidental characters, who are easier to relate to.
I’ve posted in the past about Levertov’s magnificent poem about Doubting Thomas. This witness has no doubts.
The Servant Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by Velázquez)
She listens, listens, holding her breath. Surely that voice is his—the one who had looked at her, once, across the crowd, as no one ever had looked? Had seen her? Had spoken as if to her?
Surely those hands were his, taking the platter of bread from hers just now? Hands he’d laid on the dying and made them well?
Surely that face—?
The man they’d crucified for sedition and blasphemy. The man whose body disappeared from its tomb. The man it was rumored now some women had seen this morning, alive?
Those who had brought this stranger home to their table don’t recognize yet with whom they sit. But she in the kitchen, absently touching the winejug she’s to take in, a young Black servant intently listening,
swings round and sees the light around him and is sure.
Darnella Frazier, who filmed the Floyd murder, felt guilty for not doing more
Friday
Of the many memorable moments in the Derek Chauvin murder trial, one in particular stood out to me: Darnella Frazier, the 17-year-old who filmed George Floyd’s death, telling the court, “It’s been nights I stayed up apologizing and apologized to George Floyd for not doing more.”
Frazier wasn’t the only witness who felt guilty, even though her filming and their testimony was the most any of them could realistically have done, given that there were four policemen surrounding Floyd. They might find comfort in Lucille Clifton’s “poem with rhyme in it,” which addresses the issue of guilt.
I have come to realize that guilt is often a revolt against feeling powerless, and what could make us feel more powerless than not being able to stop someone from coldly and deliberately killing another before our very eyes? If we feel guilty for our inaction, it is because we tell ourselves there’s something we could have done. As bad as guilt feels, it’s better than acknowledging that we were, in fact, powerless.
In Clifton’s “poem with rhyme in it,” she describes how Blacks live in a world controlled by Whites, which pretty much describes the current imbalance of power between White cops and the Black populace. The Whites in this world live alienated existences, she tells us. While Clifton believes that we can sense things through our hands—she writes frequently of hands and once, when we were colleagues, took my hands in hers to sense the energy flow—she sees Whites having “cut off their own two hands”–which is a way of saying they are disconnected from life. They have created a toxic environment (think of our militarized police, our rampant gun culture, our runaway defense budget), essentially salting the ground.
And yet, despite this, African Americans often feel guilty for things that happen. Again, I can report that I witnessed Clifton feeling guilty for what happened to her children and to her community.
In this poem, however, she steps back and takes a larger view. “i have listened this long dark night/ to the stars,” she tells her fellow African Americans, and “they say it is not our fault.”
So Darnella Frazier, we thank you for courageously standing your ground and shooting the footage that led to Chauvin’s conviction and may result in major police reform in this country. You did more than enough.
And as for the death you witnessed—it was not your fault.
poem with rhyme in it
black people we live in the land of ones who have cut off their own two hands and cannot pick up the strings connecting them to their lives who cannot touch whose things have turned into planets more dangerous than mars but i have listened this long dark night to the stars black people and though the ground be bitter as salt they say it is not our fault
This past weekend, to celebrate my mother’s wedding anniversary—she and my father had been married 65 years when he died—we went out of the Sewanee Inn to celebrate. Everyone in our party of eight had been vaccinated (although we still wore our masks when we entered and the tables were six feet apart), and the occasion was joyous.
Yet even as a bright new day beckons, millions of Americans—mostly Republicans—are resisting the vaccine. Even as we’ve been handed this path back to normality, they’re essentially saying they want to remain in the throes of the pandemic. A James Joyce story from Dubliners comes to mind.
In “Eveline,” a young woman living a very hard life is suddenly presented with an exit. A man who has fallen in love with her wants to marry her and take her to Buenos Aires. The story shows her wrestling with the decision.
She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side of the question. In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her. O course she had to work hard, both in the house and at business. What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement….
But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would be married—she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence. She knew it was that that had given her the palpitations… [L]atterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother’s sake. And now she had nobody to protect her….Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday nights had begun to weary her unspeakably.
Frank, the man she will marry, is like a post-Covid world—which is to say, a breath of fresh air. He introduces her to a whole new way of living:
He took her to see The Bohemian Girl and she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him. He was awfully fond of music and sang a little. People knew that they were courting and, when he sang about the lass that loves a sailor, she always felt pleasantly confused. He used to call her Poppens out of fun. First of all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him. He had tales of distant countries.
Weighing on her mind, however, is a promise she made to her mother on her death bed. Apparently the phrase “derevaun seraun” is garbled Gaelic although interpretations include “the end of pleasure is pain” and “the end of the song is raving madness”:
As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother’s life laid its spell on the very quick of her being—that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled as she heard again her mother’s voice saying constantly with foolish insistence:
“Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!”
She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.
Those Republicans who are refusing vaccinations are under their own spell. They’ve been living in an alternative reality for so long, bashing science for so long, that they can’t accept this miraculous way out when it is offered.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are like Frank calling out,
“Eveline! Evvy!”
He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.
It’s worth noting that Eveline behaves like a victim of abuse. The father who beats her seems more real to her than the fiancé who promises her a better life. “Sometimes he could be very nice,” she recalls. In our case, the abusers are Donald Trump, cynical GOP politicians, and a cynical Fox News.
On National Public Television news segment recently showed life in Israel following its successful vaccination program. Using vaccination passports, Israelis were working out in gyms and dining in restaurants. Life looked like it used to be. Thinking of how our vaccine resisters seem intent on blocking that prospect for the rest of us, a passage from Henry Vaughan’s “The World” comes to mind:
O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night Before true light, To live in grots and caves, and hate the day…
