Ahab & Trump, Two Master Demagogues

By Robin Bates | Published: February 11, 2021
Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab

Friday

My Americanist colleague John Gatta has found unsettling parallels between the demagoguery that incited Trumpists to invade the Capitol and Melville’s Captain Ahab enlisting his crew in his revenge quest. After watching repeated footage of Trump’s speech during the Senate trial and then rereading the Moby Dick chapter, I can report that John is spot on. Both Trump and Ahab are masters at manipulating crowds.

In this drama, first mate Starbuck would be those Republicans who attempt to resist the former president. As it turns out, the first mate proves no more effective than Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney.

Ahab, mystifying his three mates, assembled the entire crew on deck and holds what we could call an Ahab rally. The captain begins with a dramatic silence, which has the effect of focusing everyone’s attention.

When the entire ship’s company were assembled, and with curious and not wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men…

Just as Trump employed call and response tactics to pump up his audience (“Who’s going to pay for it?” “Mexico!”), so does Ahab. The effect is to excite those in attendance, pulling them into the speaker’s orbit:

“What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?”

“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.

“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.

“And what do ye next, men?”

“Lower away, and after him!”

“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”

“A dead whale or a stove boat!”

More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each other, as if marveling how it was that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.

At this point, Ahab goes for a prop, giving his audience something tangible to hang on to:

But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:—

“All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?”—holding up a broad bright coin to the sun—“it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D’ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul.”

While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him.

Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”

“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.

Ahab goes on to describing losing his leg to Moby Dick, immersing them in his inner drama. He has everyone but Starbuck in the palm of his hand:

“[I]t was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,” he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”

“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: “A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!”

“God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless ye, men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog.

Only a smattering of Republican members are openly declaring that they have larger responsibilities than gratifying the ego of a single man. Ahab’s first duty should be to the commercial enterprise and the Pequod’s owners, just as Trump’s should be to responsible governance and the Constitution. Starbuck attempts to remind Ahab of his proper mission:

I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”

At this point Ahab goes epic, sounding a little like Macbeth, a little like Milton’s Satan, a little like an existential figure from Sartre or Camus, as he voices the vengeful rage that gives his life purpose:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.

Then, in a little two-step that is also used by Trump—rile up the crowd but then defuse the critics by telling them it’s all just theatre—Ahab makes a feint towards conciliation:

But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go.

Ahab follows this up, however, by playing the trump card that the former president also employs: I must be right because I have the public behind me:

The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! 

Ahab interprets Starbuck’s subsequent silence as acquiescence. He does not hear him say, under his breath, “God keep me!—keep us all!”

Ahab’s egotistical quest takes the ship of state—to use the Longfellow metaphor employed Wednesday by one of Trump’s lawyers—and runs it into disaster, causing the death of everyone on board. Unfortunately for us, Republican attempts to save us from the same fate have heretofore resembled that hurricane-tossed sapling.

While the impeachment trial may not put an end to Trump’s noxious influence, if enough Republicans follow Starbuck’s lead and stand up to him, they can at least dampen it. That’s what’s at stake.

Further thought: In Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of a Nuremberg rally, the director at one point shows Hitler giving a little smirk directly after delivering a particularly effective line. We see that smug satisfaction, the joy in manipulating an audience, in Ahab and Trump as well. Ahab says, in a passage that Melville actually introduces with a stage direction,

(Aside) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.

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Justice First, Then You Can Sail On

By Robin Bates | Published: February 10, 2021
Gordon Grant, U.S.S. Constitution

Thursday

Poetry began and ended the first day of Donald Trump’s Senate trial, and it may be significant that both poems were written during a time of factionalism reminiscent of the present day—which is to say, in the years leading up to the Civil War.

In his opening prayer, Senate Chaplain Barry Black quoted the well-known lines from James Russell Lowell’s “The Present Crisis.” Furnishing the words to a once popular hymn, it impressed me as a member of the Otey Parish children’s choir–as in, “Wow, the church really means business.” Here’s the stanza from which Black quoted, with the lines he used bolded:

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,           
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;       
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,  
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,      
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.    

On the one hand, although written in the trenchant tones of abolitionist Christianity, the sentiments seem unexceptional enough. The senators have a momentous decision before them.

On the other, there’s no question about how Lowell would have responded to the white supremacists who, at the direction of the president, stormed the Capitol. The poem as a whole is filled with slavery images, and while many of these are metaphorical, their frequency indicates that Lowell has the literal oppression of slaves on his mind. Here’s a sample stanza:

Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood,  
Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,       
Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,
Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;—    
Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?     

If the GOP doesn’t vote against a president who embraces racists, fascists, and anti-Semites, the Lowell would see them choosing the evil path.

 The Biblical goats/sheep allusion, incidentally, is to Matthew 25:31-46, which has become a touchstone passage in battles between rightwing white evangelicals and liberal Christians, with the latter asking why fundamentalists support a president who tears children from their parents and strives to strip the needy of health care. The Biblical parable involves a king visiting his people and making judgment:

Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

The goat side is the evil side in this drama:

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

 In the other poem, Trump’s defense attorney concluded his case against the impeachment trial by citing stanzas from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Building of the Ship,” also written pre-Civil War.” The lawyer, attempting to reclaim the mantle of Lincoln for the GOP (since Lincoln liked the poem), essentially accused Democrats of factionalism for bringing Trump to trial in the first place. “This trial will tear the country apart, perhaps like we’ve only ever seen once in history,” he proclaimed.

In other words, by attempting to hold the president accountable for what happened on January 6, the Democrats are the fractious ones. Why can’t they just overlook the storming of the Capitol and “sail on.” The lawyer was in tears (“the moistened eye, the trembling lip”) as he punctuated his peroration with two passages from the Longfellow poem.

First this one:

Sail forth into the sea, O ship!
Through wind and wave, right onward steer!
The moistened eye, the trembling lip,
Are not the signs of doubt or fear.

And then this one:

Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o’er our fears,
Are all with thee, — are all with thee!

Poetry, well used, packs a punch, whether for good or for ill. As one twitter wag commented, however, “If my lawyer read a poem and then cried, I would just assume I’m getting life in prison.”

The devil apparently can cite verse as well as Scripture for his purpose. Patriotic poetry, the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Further thought: David Corn of Mother Jones notes that another line from the Longfellow poem–a call for the country to “prevail o’er angry wave and gust”–“could well justify the proceedings at hand.”

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Impeachment and the Scarlet Letter

By Robin Bates | Published: February 9, 2021
Dimmesdale on the scaffold

Wednesday

This past Monday, when my Dante Discussion Group was comparing The Divine Comedy to Paradise Lost, I recalled a passage that applies to Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. Watching Satan make his way toward Eden, omniscient God tells his angels what will happen once Adam eats the forbidden fruit. “Die he or justice must,” he says sternly.

In other words, as hard as this is for some Republicans to grasp, justice requires accountability. Trump must face consequences for his behavior or justice dies.

Trump struck at the very foundations of our democracy when he sought to overturn the election and assume dictatorial powers. Adam, meanwhile, violates the foundational contract with God, attempting to take on god-like powers himself. Here’s what God has to say on the matter:

Man disobeying,
Disloyal breaks his fealty, and sins
Against the high Supremacy of Heaven,
Affecting God-head…

What must he do to “expiate his treason”? God says there is only one answer:

To expiate his Treason hath naught left,
But to destruction sacred and devote,
He with his whole posterity must die,
Die he or Justice must…

Fortunately for humankind, there is a way out. God’s son will take on the sin himself, thereby giving humans a second chance. To achieve this second chance, however, humans must be genuinely repentant, as Adam and Eve prove to be. By contrast, it’s a point of pride with Trump never to say he’s sorry.

Following our Dante discussion, John Gatta, an Americanist, mentioned that he had been thinking about mobs in Hawthorne after reading my blog post on mob action in Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” He mentioned the people who gather around Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale at the end of The Scarlet Letter.

Although Dimmesdale climbs the scaffold and confesses his sin, revealing a scarlet “A” that has somehow appeared on his chest, there are those in the audience that refuse to see it. John noted that we are seeing such denial amongst Trump’s defenders:

It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have removed their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that there was any mark whatever on his breast, more than on a new-born infant’s. Neither, by their report, had his dying words acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any, the slightest connection, on his part, with the guilt for which Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter.

Instead, these “highly respectable” witnesses (sarcasm alert) weave intricate theories that allow Dimmesdale to escape accountability. They say he must have just been speaking metaphorically, lumping himself in with all sinners. Surely he couldn’t have been actually admitting to adultery:

According to these highly respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying,—conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already among saints and angels,—had desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man’s own righteousness. After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind’s spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike.

This leads Hawthorne, as it should lead us, to reflect upon cultic loyalty:

Without disputing a truth so momentous, we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale’s story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a man’s friends—and especially a clergyman’s—will sometimes uphold his character, when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained creature of the dust.

Trump, who never confesses to any failing whatsoever, is of course no Dimmesdale. He is as far from being a holy soul as it’s possible to be, despite his holding up a Bible in front of a church. Nevertheless, as with Dimmesdale, his crimes are as clear as the mid-day sunshine. We have witnessed him pressuring election officials and state legislators to overturn electoral votes, and we saw him on television inciting a mob to attack the Capitol and pressure a Republican Congress and vice-president not to certify Biden’s victory.

If we were to compare him to a Scarlet Letter character, I nominate Chillingworth. Trump is as vindictive as Hester’s husband and Dimmesdale’s tormentor, although Trump’s grudges are more visceral and less guided by a malign intelligence.

Incidentally, there’s another use for Chillingworth in the impeachment proceedings. I see that Trump’s legal team is accusing Democrats of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a phrase first used against Democrats opposing George W. Bush and then against Republicans opposing first Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton. I think some of the accusations are more legitimate than others, but for a literary description of the phenomenon, check out Hester’s cuckolded husband.

Chillingworth is so obsessed with his grievance against Dimmesdale that he makes it his lifelong missing to torture him. Now that’s derangement! This also means, however, that his fate becomes linked with the preacher’s, so that Dimmesdale denies Chillingworth his reason for being when he publicly confesses:

Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place, almost immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale’s death, in the appearance and demeanor of the old man known as Roger Chillingworth. All his strength and energy—all his vital and intellectual force—seemed at once to desert him; insomuch that he positively withered up, shriveled away, and almost vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun. This unhappy man had made the very principle of his life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge; and when, by its completest triumph and consummation, that evil principle was left with no further material to support it, when, in short, there was no more Devil’s work on earth for him to do, it only remained for the unhumanized mortal to betake himself whither his Master would find him tasks enough, and pay him his wages duly.

To keep from being a Chillingworth, focus on policy differences and justice, not on humiliation and destruction. Regardless of one’s beliefs, one is not deranged as long as one keeps the eyes on the higher principles at stake.

In other words, strive for the stance God assumes with Adam and don’t let ego gratification drive your opposition.

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A Poem Overshadows Super Bowl

By Robin Bates | Published: February 8, 2021
Amanda Gorman delivering Super Bowl poem

Tuesday

Unless you were a Tom Brady fan or geographical loyalties to Tampa Bay, you had to look elsewhere for thrills during Sunday’s Super Bowl. Who would have predicted that, for many of us, a poem would be the event’s main highlight?

Amanda Gorman’s Super Bowl poem isn’t at the level of the one she read at Joe Biden’s inauguration, in part because it features far less imaginative word play and intricate symbolism. To be sure, she once again drops rhymes, half-rhymes, and internal rhymes into her free verse format, and she has some of her characteristic alliteration, as in,

Let us walk with these warriors,
Charge on with these champions,
And carry forth the call of our captains!

Titling her poem “Chorus of the Captains” in the context of a sport events was a nice touch. And, once again, her delivery was magnetic. As the poem’s purpose was to honor front-line workers, it did its job just fine.

But in many ways, Gorman’s presentation was bigger than the poem itself. As the Washington Post, quoting poet Toi Derricotte, noted, Gorman

has taken an art form that felt inaccessible to some and made it universal. “She seems to have awakened the spirit of poetry the way I think it was intended to be, to be a voice of the people.”

Columbia English professor Sharon Marcus, meanwhile, told that Post that “we’re overdue for a poetic mega idol”:

“There have been celebrity poets for a long time. It’s more unusual to not have a celebrity poet — to have long periods of time where there aren’t celebrity poets — than to have celebrity poets,” said Marcus, who is also the author of The Drama of Celebrity:

Take Walt Whitman. (“A very celebrated, well-known persona. People knew what he looked like.”) Take Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (“Nobody reads him now, I mean his big poem, ‘Hiawatha,’ is like a nightmare of stereotypes about native peoples,” Marcus said, but he was “known around the world.”)

“The poet has always been this figure of not just writing, but speech and rhetoric and oration,” Marcus added, and there have “always been links between poetry and politics.”

So, she wasn’t surprised to hear of Gorman’s Super Bowl performance.

“Poets used to be kind of like rock stars,” she said, and “who performs at the Super Bowl? Rock and pop stars.”

Here’s the poem:

Chorus of the Captains

Today we honor our three captains
For their actions and impact in
A time of uncertainty and need.
They’ve taken the lead,
Exceeding all expectations and limitations,
Uplifting their communities and neighbors
As leaders, healers, and educators.
James has felt the wounds of warfare,
But this warrior still shares
His home with at-risk kids.
During Covid, he’s even lent a hand
Live-streaming football for family and fans.
Trimaine is an educator who work nonstop,
Providing his community with hotspots,
Laptops, and tech workshops
So his students have all the tools
They need to succeed in life and in school.
Suzie is the ICU nurse manager at a Tampa Hospital.
Her chronicles prove that even in tragedy, hope is possible.
She lost her grandmothers to the pandemic,
And fights to save other lives in the ICU battle zone,
Defining the frontline heroes risking their lives for our own.
Let us walk with these warriors,
Charge on with these champions,
And carry forth the call of our captains!
We celebrate them by acting with courage and compassion,
By doing what is right and just.
For while we honor them today
It is they who every day honor us.

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Keeping the Super Bowl in Perspective

By Robin Bates | Published: February 7, 2021

Monday

In observance of Super Bowl Sunday (I write this not knowing who won), I am repurposing a Super Bowl post from nine years ago when American households faced a dilemma very similar to one found in the Tom Robbins novel Skinny Legs and All (1990). In addition to being very funny, Skinny Legs has a great reflection on importance Americans attach to football’s championship game.

The conflict in America in February, 2012 was between the Super Bowl and a season finale of Downton Abbey. Just as Eli Manning was driving the Giants down the field for the come-from-behind win over the undefeated New England Patriots—a drive that included David Tyree’s immortal helmet catch—Downton Abbey was just wrapping up its season. For some, the conflict was excruciating.

In Robbins’s novel, the conflict is just as excruciating, pitting as it does the Super Bowl against a belly dancer. I can’t begin to do justice to this whacky, bawdy, and immensely enjoyable work, but to set up the scene quickly, a remarkable middle eastern dancer is so moved by a painting by protagonist Ellen Cherry Charles that she agrees to do the fabled dance of the seven veils:

This is the room where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with history’s tragic glitter, where Delilah practiced for her beautician’s license, the room in which Salome dropped the seventh veil while dancing the dance of ultimate cognition, skinny legs and all.

Each of the seven veils represents something that keeps humans from happiness, including politics, religion, money, and fear of sex.

The dance occurs in an Israeli-Palestinian restaurant, co-owned by a Jew and a Muslim, that is located across the street from the United Nations and that is periodically bombed by fundamentalist Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Reading Skinny Legs in 1990 was my first introduction to the unhealthy union between end-of-days Christians and Israeli nationalists.

The patrons of the restaurant are thrilled at the prospect of Salome’s dance as the dancer has developed an immense fan base. Unfortunately, there’s a catch: she will be dancing exactly at the time of the Super Bowl.  She can’t do otherwise as the stars, not she herself, decide. In other words, a brutal and overly commercialized sport is contrasted with the prospect of world peace.

Here’s Robbins:

Conflicts flared almost instantaneously. On the one side, there were those for whom the legendary Dance of the Seven Veils had taken on the proportions of fabulous personal fantasy—romantic, erotic, opulent, mysterious, resonant with long-lost exotica, secrets of the Bible and secrets of the East: they would have crawled ten kilometers on a carpet of dog poop and razor blades to witness it, were it the genuine article; and with this devastating nymph who called herself Salome, there was no question of authenticity. On the other side were those for whom the Super Bowl was the most anticipated event of each and every year, the culmination of five months of thrills, endless statistics, ego boosts, and severe disappointments; a major holiday, if not the major holiday, a day when routine and care were suspended; when they nation, the world, came together as one; a festival that cut cross national, racial and religious boundaries; a ritual during which no time existed except the artificial time on the game clock, a symbolic battle in which only token blood was shed and for the duration of which the grip of death on the human psyche was relaxed and put aside: Issac and Ishmael’s still had the biggest, sharpest television screen in midtown Manhattan, and this group had every intention of watching the game on it.

A few people think they’ll be able to move between both, but they are wrong. It’s one or the other. At the end of the novel, a Christian fundamentalist—today he would be a Trump supporter—attacks the dancer but is shot by a policeman who has become a Salome enthusiast.

Those who see the dance have life-altering revelations while those who watch the Super Bowl just watch the Super Bowl. I won’t say that those who watched Downton Abbey nine years ago had their lives changed, but it’s impressive that, during the football game, there was only a 10 percent drop-off from regular PBS viewership.

It’s okay if you watched the Super Bowl yesterday. Just keep it in perspective.

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Finding Spirit in Everyday Objects

By Robin Bates | Published: February 6, 2021
Van Gogh, Still Life with Earthenware, Bottles, and Clogs

Spiritual Sunday

I’ve been reading a Jane Hirshfield article in Poetry Foundation where she selects and comments on 22 examples of “spiritual poetry.” The subject was challenging, she says, because she finds all poems to be spiritual:

The root of “spirit” is the Latin spirare, to breathe. Whatever lives on the breath, then, must have its spiritual dimension— including all poems, even the most unlikely. Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams: all poets of spiritual life. A useful exercise of soul would be to open any doorstop-sized anthology at random a dozen times and find in each of the resulting pages its spiritual dimension. If the poems are worth the cost of their ink, it can be done.

It so happens that my friend Sue Schmidt recently sent me a Hirshfield poem that makes her point. If we pay attention, we will find light in even small everyday objects. It is up to us to meet that light “completely”:

Each time,
the found world surprises—
that is its nature.

If we pay attention, we will find ourselves saying what lovers from time immemorial have said: “What fools we were, not to have seen.”

Meeting the Light Completely

Even the long-beloved
was once
an unrecognized stranger.

Just so,
the chipped lip
of a blue-glazed cup,
blown field
of a yellow curtain,
might also,
flooding and falling,
ruin your heart.

A table painted with roses.
An empty clothesline.

Each time,
the found world surprises—
that is its nature.

And then
what is said by all lovers:
“What fools we were, not to have seen.”

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Austen Has Some of Lit’s Best Mean Girls

By Robin Bates | Published: February 4, 2021
Chancellor as Caroline Bingley

Friday

Ellie Eaton at Literary Hub, https://lithub.com/who-are-the-mean-girls-in-literature/

who says she still bears scars from mean girl encounters from her prep school days, has compiled a list of some of her favorite literary mean girls. I recognize two of them and have added several of my favorites.

I’ve found it useful, in thinking of examples, to distinguish those mean girls who occupy privileged positions atop the social pyramid from those who are trying to scale its heights.  Sense and Sensibility’s Lucy Steele can be excused, or at least understood, in a way that the execrable Fanny Dashwood cannot.

I’m sure I’ve left out some obvious candidates so please feel free to send in your favorites.

Starting first with Eaton’s list, she is spot on with Caroline Bingley from Pride and Prejudice and Rebecca from Daphne de Maurier’s novel of that name. About Bingley she writes,

Snobbish, meddling, and two-faced, Caroline Bingley is the original mean girl. In Austen’s beloved novel of manners, when Caroline—an elegant, well-educated woman with a fortune of twenty thousand pounds—finds herself in danger of being sidelined by Elizabeth Bennett, she does what any villainess would do, freeze her out. Patronizingly cordial to Elizabeth in person, as soon as the eldest Bennett’s back is turned Caroline sticks the knife in. “She had no conversation, no style, no taste, no beauty,” she snaps, the 19th Century equivalent of trash-talking. Though Caroline’s snubbing of the Bennett sisters ultimately fails to keep Elizabeth and Darcy apart you have to admire her back-stabbing ambition.

I note that maybe the cattiest line in an Austen novel refers to Caroline. At the end of Pride and Prejudice, after Elizabeth has achieved the ultimate revenge for all of Bingley’s slights, Austen makes an observation that refers back to when Caroline was lobbying her brother to find a home close to Pemberley:

The darling wish of his sisters was then gratified; he bought an estate in a neighbouring county to Derbyshire, and Jane and Elizabeth, in addition to every other source of happiness, were within thirty miles of each other.

Not only does Caroline fail to land Darcy, but she’ll have to watch her rival enjoy the spoils of her victory.

Even worse that Caroline Bingley, however, has got to be Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

–Rebecca from Rebecca

Eaton says the following about Rebecca:

In du Maurier’s gothic classic a young bride marries a widower and is transported to a Cornish mansion where she attempts to fill the shoes of her glamorous predecessor. Even from the grave the eponymous Rebecca manages to outshine du Maurier’s meek narrator (only ever referred to as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter). Hedonistic, irreverent, licentious, Rebecca’s ghostly presence snakes menacingly around the novel, slowly tightening her grip.

–Fanny Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility

I find Fanny Dashwood far worse than Caroline Bingley because she does more active harm (although Caroline uses subterfuge to separate Jane from her brother). Fanny pays for her villainy, however (even though she doesn’t know it) by having to tolerate constantly the whims of her mother (Mrs. Ferrars) while engaging in incessant battles with her sister-in-law Lucy Steele. All this while Elinor and Marianne live blissful lives with two good men.

Oh yes, and Mrs. Ferrars competes with Lady Catherine de Bourgh as the worst of the elderly mean girls.

–Mrs. Elton from Emma

Mrs. Elton is a social-climbing mean girl although not one that does much harm. She gets under Emma’s skin in part because she is her double. This reveals that Emma herself has mean girl potential, although in the end she rises above it. Far meaner in Emma is a woman we never meet: Mrs. Churchill, who thankfully dies, thereby removing herself as an obstacle to Frank and Jane’s marriage.

–Isabel Thorpe from Northanger Abbey

Isabel is a self-absorbed social climber but, other than jilting Catherine’s brother (thank goodness), doesn’t do active harm. She’s useful to Catherine until Catherine finds more a more substantive female companion in Elinor Tilney.

–Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair

Becky is such a naked social climber that it’s hard to condemn her too much. Also, at the end she does the heroine—who’s a bit of a drip—a good turn.

–Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre

Anyone who complains about governesses in the presence of a governess fits this category. Blanche is an empty fraud and Rochester recognizes her as such.

–Cordelia from Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye

Cordelia is the quintessential bully. She is so mean that, upon the novel’s publication, some feminists that had lionized Handmaid’s Tale weren’t sure that the author was still one of them. More interested in truth than in ideology, Atwood cautioned us that women have dark sides no less than men. Cordelia’s threat level diminishes as the narrator grows up and sees her as the insecure lower-class female that she is.

–Zenia from Atwood’s Robber Bride

It’s hard to think of a better mean girl since Zenia, after befriending each of three protagonists, steals their male friends, appearing to do so simply because she can. In Zenia’s defense, however, she does each of the three women a favor. Each of them is a bit of a doormat and Zenia prompts them to develop a spine and assert themselves. Zenia also brings them together so that, in opposition to her, they develop female solidarity. In the end, each needs to tap into her inner Zenia, and when Zenia mysteriously disappears at novel’s end, it’s as though she has served her purpose and is no longer needed.

In writing about literary mean girls, it’s apparent that they generally serve as important foils to the heroine . Sometimes  they are there just to highlight the heroine’s virtues, but in the best cases they point to areas where the heroine needs work.

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Honoring Those Who Oppose Dictators

By Robin Bates | Published: February 3, 2021
Otto Rene Castillo

Thursday

Today I share Otto Rene Castillo’s “Distances” in honor of the unbelievably brave Alexi Navalny, Russian leader of the opposition to Vladimir Putin, and to the equally brave demonstrators who are supporting him. The Guatemalan poet and activist would himself die in 1966, fighting against the brutal Guatemala regime, perhaps the worst in the world at that time. Castillo was first tortured and then burned alive.

I suspect that Castillo wrote the poem when he was in East Germany trying to figure out how to overthrow the government (thus “the bitter December air”). Friendship sometimes seems our only consolation when “the dictatorship is strong” and we are “desperate and pained.”

Distances
by Otto Rene Castillo

Under the bitter December air
a friend says
“I’m disillusioned. Everything goes
so slowly. The dictatorship is strong.
I’m desperate and pained
by the calvary of my people.”

And I, sensing his anguish, the gray
and noble sadness of my friend,
knowing his fight
to keep on fighting,
do not say: coward or go to the mountains
or lazy or pessimist,
rigid, poor devil.

I only put my arm around his shoulder,
so the tearing cruelty of his cold
be less.

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Facing the Cold

By Robin Bates | Published: February 2, 2021
Harington as Jon Snow in Game of Thrones

Wednesday

As much of the country is pounded by snowstorms, I turn, as I often do at such moments, to the images of wintry misery found in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Sir Gawain is venturing out to keep his rendezvous with the Green Knight, who is to be found somewhere in the Welsh wilderness.   The elements add the finishing touches to Gawain’s misery:

And if the wars were unwelcome, the winter was worse,
When the cold clear rains rushed from the clouds
And froze before they could fall to the frosty earth.
Near slain by the sleet he sleeps in his irons
More nights than enough, among naked rocks,
Where clattering from the crest the cold stream ran
And hung in hard icicles high overhead.

Medieval literature doesn’t go directly into psychological states, but it gives us images that let us know how Gawain is feeling:

With many birds unblithe upon bare twigs
That peeped most piteously for pain of the cold.
The good knight on Gringolet glides thereunder.

Gawain could be one of those birds, cold and filled with self-pity.  At the end of his rope, he prays to the Virgin Mary for help.

I read the images of the cold and lost Gawain cold as symbolic of an existential crisis.  He knows he is only days away from his death at the hands of the Green Knight, and the poet has used this wintry mix to get at his feelings of desolation.  

As if in response to his prayers, a magnificent castle appears to Gawain.  In this castle he will meet (as I interpret them) the Lord of Death and the Lady of Life.  In response to his despair they will (1) affirm that death is in fact inevitable but (2) remind him that life offers up many delights.  How should Gawain handle his depression about dying?  Live fully in life’s sensuous present.

One could argue that Gawain has a “mind of winter,” to quote Wallace Stevens, and that Nature is trying to shake him up.  If the knight steps out of his self-denying mindset and acknowledges that he does in fact love his life (by accepting the lady of the castle’s green sash), Green Knight Nature will give him a bit more time to enjoy it.

In short, look through the sleet and snow to the green life that beckons beyond.  “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” Percy Shelley asks.

We hope that the question is rhetorical.

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