Gerard van Honthorst, Adoration of the Child (1622)
Spiritual Sunday
In today’s Advent poem, Richard Wilbur references a Palm Sunday passage, which is confusing until you realize that both Advent and Lent express the belief that dawn will break following the darkest hour. God will enter the world in the bleak midwinter and Love will triumph over Death come the spring.
Upon Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the Pharisees disapprove of the adulation Jesus receives. There is no silencing the joy the world feels at the prospect of new hope, however. If humans were forced to “hold their peace,” Jesus tells the naysayers, then the stones themselves “would immediately cry out.”
Wilbur’s poem has the feel of a ballad with its repeated fourth line and its simple diction. The poem proceeds through a series of opposites: a simple stable-lamp wakes the sky, straw shines like gold, a barn harbors heaven, a stall becomes a shrine, a child rides in triumph, dull stones pave the roadway to a kingdom.
In the Christmas story, angels appear to shepherds and divinity takes human form in a manger. On Palm Sunday, children sing Hosannah as Jesus rides in on a donkey. As “the low is lifted high” and stars bend their voices, we encounter the promise of worlds reconciled.
A Christmas Hymn
And some of the Pharisees from among the multitude said unto him, Master, rebuke thy disciples. And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. – St. Luke XIX.39-40
A stable-lamp is lighted Whose glow shall wake the sky; The stars shall bend their voices, And every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry, And straw like gold shall shine; A barn shall harbor heaven, A stall become a shrine.
This child through David’s city Shall ride in triumph by; The palm shall strew its branches, And every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry, Though heavy, dull, and dumb, And lie within the roadway To pave his kingdom come.
Yet he shall be forsaken, And yielded up to die; The sky shall groan and darken, And every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry For stony hearts of men: God’s blood upon the spearhead, God’s love refused again.
But now, as at the ending, The low is lifted high; The stars shall bend their voices, And every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry In praises of the child By whose descent among us The worlds are reconciled.
Wilder as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (or Frankenshteen)
Friday
A misogynistic Wall Street Journal column by former American Scholar editor Joseph Epstein has social media in an uproar. As is often the case in such instances, it has also brought out the best in Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri.
Epstein’s editorial opens,
Madame First Lady — Mrs. Biden — Jill — kiddo: a bit of advice on what might seem like a small but I think is not an unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name? ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels a touch fraudulent, not to mention comical.”
Given that many college professors are addressed as “Dr.” because of their PhDs (doctor of philosophy) or EdDs (doctor of education), Epstein appears to be just another man intimidated by powerful women. After all, do such types ever object to men who carry the moniker “Dr.” (say, Dr. Kissinger)? Epstein’s fatuous remarks resemble those previous rightwing attacks on first ladies who have their own careers and ambitions (Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama).
Petri’s approach, common to satire, is to have a persona take Epstein’s stupid statement seriously and run with it. Writing as Dr. Victor Frankenstein, she has the scientist acknowledge that he shouldn’t be referred as “Dr.” Instead, he wants to be know as “monster.” Petri here plays with way we often mistakenly refer to the monster as Frankenstein:
Everyone, everyone! Please, do not address me, Victor Frankenstein, as “Doctor.” Technically, I am that Modern Prometheus, the man whose hubris has set him to steal fire from the gods and seek to create life from a reanimated corpse. Which is to say that addressing me as “Doctor” would be a mistake. I am, clearly, the Monster in this novel.
Employing Epstein’s reasoning, Petri’s Frankenstein demands that he be addressed “in a less respectful way”:
Also, I am not technically a doctor. My whole life people keep addressing me as “Doctor,” erroneously, I think because I am a man, or perhaps because I created life where there was none in a wild fit of hubris and science has yet to determine a good term for someone who does that!
I agree, I do technically possess the kind of knowledge of the natural sciences that might cause someone to be addressed as “Doctor,” and you would think, rationally, that the conversation would stop there. But nothing with me ever stops at a rational bound! I’m Victor Frankenstein! I steal body parts and reassemble them into an enormous being of my own design, I am ignorant in my pride of science, and now, I am writing an op-ed in a major newspaper asking for someone with an advanced degree to be addressed in a less respectful way.
Epstein writes that “no one should call himself Dr. unless he has delivered a child,” leading Petri to write,
I have heard that no one who has not delivered a baby should be addressed as “Doctor” — and all that I have done is to reanimate a grotesque specimen. This is, in a sense, a baby, like when people call their novel or their PhD dissertation a “baby,” but in a stricter more technical sense, it is not a baby. The difference here is that creating a PhD dissertation and unleashing it on the world would make someone else a doctor, whereas creating my creature and unleashing him upon the world made me a Monster. I have rightly won this credential, and I demand to be addressed by it.
I’m tickled by the image of unleashing one’s dissertation upon the world. I can testify that, while one pours everything one has into writing it, few people want to read it. Dissertations are designed to prove that one has mastered the discipline’s discourse, and to do that you must read all primary and secondary materials relating to your subject (all footnoted), synthesize and apply the relevant debates and theories, and add your own contribution. It’s academe’s version of lawyers passing the bar exam.
It’s not easy for anyone to earn a doctorate, and the academic landscape is strewn with uncompleted dissertations, earning people the derogatory moniker AbD (All but Dissertation). While some snobbism is directed against Education Departments (Biden has an EdD), most are no less rigorous than English or philosophy departments. To be sure, a few schools issue cheap doctorates, just as a few law schools issue cheap degrees, but Biden’s University of Delaware is a respected institution.
As an aside, I noticed that many of my students started calling me “Dr. Bates” rather than “Professor Bates” or “Robin” once my hair turned gray. (I used to tell them to use whatever moniker they felt comfortable with.)
Back to Petri, who goes on to refer to Christopher Marlowe’s most famous creation:
They say, too, that it is alarming and wrong to call anyone “Doctor” who could not save you if there were a medical emergency. (That is why people who have degrees in literature or education or who are professors have to refer to themselves as, say, Mr. Faustus.) Could I save you? I cannot even save myself! No, I must perish on this ice floe. It is the only way!
Technically, I guess you could say that Faustus is a medical doctor since he has saved whole cities from the plague. He is more known for his intellectual and scientific breakthroughs than for his medical contributions, however. Medieval and Renaissance Europe, following Aristotle’s footsteps, didn’t specialize as we do, and Faustus studies philosophy and theology along with medicine. Those medical professionals who, centuries later, came to be called doctors borrowed the term from the universities.
By the end of Petri’s column, it’s not clear who is a greater monster, Dr. Frankenstein or Joseph Epstein. Both are in the running:
I understand when people get mad and say that actually “Monster” should be reserved for people who transform during full moons or write dismissive op-eds about women’s educational credentials. But I think it should be applied to me. And I am a Monster, so you must listen.
Further note: Stories are coming in from Epstein’s former students at Northwestern, where he was a visiting professor on the basis of his essays. It sounds like his sexism was not limited to Wall Street Journal editorials.
And yet another thought: Another reason why Petri’s invocation of Frankenstein is appropriate: author Mary Shelley, despite being the author of a groundbreaking work, has also been the subject of attempts to diminish her accomplishment, with some giving credit to her famous husband.
Tobias Wilson-Bates, my English professor son, and reader Letitia Grimes have both alerted me to E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909), a science fiction novella that perfectly captures our world in the age of Zoom, Skype, and Facetime. Because humanity has lost its connection with nature, it is no longer able to live on the earth’s surface and retreats to underground bunkers, where people communicate thanks to “the Machine.” Anticipating Facebook, Forster notes that one might have thousands of “friends” without ever meeting anyone face to face.
Early in the story, Vashti’s son Kuno, living on the other side of the world, requests a visit, which makes no sense to her given the way the world works. Those who have just experienced a Zoom Thanksgiving and anticipate a Zoom Christmas will understand why the following passage is circulating on social media:
“I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or isolated. I have something particular to say.”
“What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not send it by pneumatic post?”
“Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want——”
“Well?”
“I want you to come and see me.”
Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.
“But I can see you!” she exclaimed. “What more do you want?”
“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”
Kuno desires secrecy because he has violated the Machine’s rules by entering the outside world, meaning that he almost surely faces expulsion. Unlike his mother, he longs for a connection with nature:
“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn’t say anything against the Machine.”
“Why not?”
“One mustn’t.”
“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other.”I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”
Many teachers and professors will relate to Vashti’s interactions with her students. Note especially the short attention span:
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre-Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primæval as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musicians of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas. Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.
As the story unfolds, even respirators are abandoned so that no one has firsthand experience with the real world. Although this cuts scholars off from nature and the actual sites where history has happened, they find ways to rationalize, asserting that first-hand contact with reality is overrated. Although they remind me of those Republicans who have their own set of “alternate facts” (to quote Kellyanne Conway), it’s also true that intellectuals have a way of spinning their disciplines to make up for things they don’t know:
“Beware of first- hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element –direct observation.
Because of her son’s urgency, Vashti visits him and hears his assessment of the Machine. Through Kumo’s critique, Forster all but predicts the Internet:
Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops—but not on our lives. The Machine proceeds –but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.
By the end of the story, the Machine is starting to fail. Rather than question it, however, people adjust, a testimony to humanity’s ability to normalize whatever is happening. Over the past four years, we too have been lowering the bar as to what we expect from our leaders:
Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the moldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. All were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged.
The entire society collapses by the end of the story, but Vashti’s son, who has seen the upper world, holds out hope that humans will reconnect with nature. In Kumo’s sense of wonder, we see the world as it might appear to someone who has spent far too much time in front of a computer screen. The only remedy to their Machine-governed existence, he tells his mother, is
to tell men again and again that I have seen the hills of Wessex as Ælfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes.
So the sun set. I forgot to mention that a belt of mist lay between my hill and other hills, and that it was the color of pearl.
In short, tear yourselves away from your devices and go take a walk in nature. Also, once it’s safe, spend time in the company of others.
Further thought: Forster’s novella reminds me of neurobiologist Darcia Navaez’s book Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality, which I’ve written about here. Navaez talks about the toll that being separated nature takes on us–physically, psychologically, and spiritually–and of the healing that comes from reconnecting. In other words, he advocates Zumo’s searching.
Navaez looks at some of America’s great nature writers as he makes his case, including Emerson, Thoreau, Wendell Berry, and Mary Oliver. The following passage sums up his book:
When I try to take into account humanity’s fullest capacities, it leads me to an alternate view of the current human condition, and it reveals a pathway out of our predicament. We can learn to restore our balance when we find ourselves falling into a bracing self-protection yet again. We can re-enter a circle of inclusion with one another and with our companions in the natural world. Humanity’s telos or fulfillment is in companionship with the natural world. It is our nature to be engaged and communally imaginative with Life. How we set ourselves up to support our human essence is vital. How we transform ourselves is the story to tell.
MSNBC’s brilliant Chris Hayes came up with the perfect poem for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It was written by Bertolt Brecht after the Soviets put down an East German popular uprising in June of 1953.
Brecht at the time was living in East Germany, having fled there from the United States following Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts. Prepared to call out abuses of authority wherever he encountered them, Brecht this time directed his attacks against communists.
Here’s Wikipedia’s description of the uprising and its suppression:
It began with a strike action by construction workers in East Berlin on 16 June against work quotas during the Sovietization process in East Germany. Demonstrations in East Berlin turned into a widespread uprising against the Government of East Germany and the Socialist Unity Party the next day, involving an estimated more than one million people in about 700 localities across the country. Protests against declining living standards and unpopular Sovietization policies led to a wave of strikes and protests that were not easily brought under control and threatened to overthrow the East German government. The uprising in East Berlin was violently suppressed by tanks of the Soviet forces in Germany and the Kesemierte Volkspolizel [the militarized East German police] while demonstrations continued in more than 500 towns and villages for several more days before dying out.
Brecht noted the irony of the supposed people’s party cracking down on the people:
The Solution
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
A similar irony is at work in our case. Trump forfeited the confidence of the people but still expected the people to vote for him. When they didn’t, he looked for ways to “dissolve” the Biden votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona, which gave the president-elect his 306-232 electoral win. In the eyes of Trump and his GOP enablers, democracy and the Constitution should be respected only when Republicans are elected.
Fortunately, it doesn’t appear that the military will be sending in tanks to keep Trump in office. In all probability, Biden-Harris supporters will not have to take to the streets, and I don’t anticipate seeing 10,000 people being detained and around 40 executed. Still, it’s worrisome that the GOP leaders have become, like the Secretary of the Writers Union, apologists for autocratic behavior.
Here’s a Robinson Jeffers poem that I find particularly comforting at an historical moment that seems both the worst of times (Covid, economic collapse, rise of white nationalism) and the better of times (a vaccine on the horizon, a mature adult to be our next president). Staying focused on the big picture, the poet tells us, helps us negotiate our less-than perfect circumstances.
When Jeffers talks about delusional dreams, he could be talking about either rightwing dreams of a white Christian state or leftwing dreams of “universal justice or happiness.” Those who are so deluded may, in their frustration, opt for “open violence.”
While we should resist that call, however, we can’t opt out of engagement altogether. His advice to “choose the least ugly faction” is another way of saying, “choose the lesser of two evils” or “do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
The important thing is “to keep one’s own integrity,” which involves being merciful and uncorrupted and not wishing for evil. And if we feel overwhelmed by our “pitiful confusions,” “drown[ing] in despair when [our] days darken,” Jeffers says we should recall “organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty/ of the universe.”
The Answer
Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams. To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before. When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential. To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled. To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history… for contemplation or in fact… Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.
I was alerted to the poem by Maria Popova’s luminescent blog Brain Pickings, which notes Jeffers’s importance to the environmental movement. Jeffers elaborated on what he meant by organic wholeness in a letter to a nun:
It is a sort of tradition in this country not to talk about religion for fear of offending — I am still a little subject to the tradition, and rather dislike stating my “attitudes” except in the course of a poem. However, they are simple. I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that here is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation.
“The parts change and pass” alludes to Shelley’s Adonais, which grapples with the tension between the one and the many, the eternal and the mortal:
The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.
That last line pulls one up short, especially as the United States just hit 300,000 Covid deaths. Focusing on “the divine beauty of the universe” cannot be an escape from ugliness in the world.
Think of it instead as a vision that will help us undertake the hard work needed to confront the darkening days.
This Amy Collier New Yorker piece, entitled “How Dating During a Pandemic Is Like Being in a Jane Austen Novel,” is perfection. Although humorous, it may also inadvertently explain why we are drawn to Austen romances. What the relationships face in obstacles, they gain in intensity.
Collier explains her comparison through a series of bullet points:
It’s a long, drawn-out affair, composed of public meetings.
The main characters lead quiet domestic lives.
The whole town feels invested in your behaviors.
You regularly inquire about the health of each other’s family members.
Strict manners and customs of the day, built around a moral duty to society, dictate your interactions and lead to amusing mishaps.
Clever planning is involved.
Includes many brisk walks.
Gossip helps edify listeners by determining what is and isn’t acceptable, and who has violated social conventions and decorum.
Romantic encounters are very weather-dependent.
There’s gonna be tea at some point.
You inform your friends—who lead tranquil lives full of cooking and evenings at home—of recent romantic developments through vividly written correspondence.
Much of the romantic relationship is epistolary, too.
Eye contact and subtle gestures play an important role.
You and your prospective future husband barely touch.
I have no way of knowing whether the Covid pandemic has caused a return to old-fashioned courtship, but it certainly prompts us to reflect upon the effects of delayed gratification. In a world where everything is built for speed and convenience, the slowness of Jane Austen’s relationships is part of their attraction.
In his essay-novel Slowness, Czech author Milan Kunderareflects on what we have lost:
Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: “They are gazing at God’s windows.” A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.”
Kundera contends that our emphasis on speed changes the very nature of sexuality:
The religion of orgasm: utilitarianism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion, the only true goal of love-making and of the universe.
The fact that Austen’s relationships are drawn out for months or even years (especially in Persuasion, her most romantic novel) only increases their intensity. John Fowles reflects upon “the interesting ratio…between the desire and the ability to fulfill it” in the French Lieutenant’s Woman, which is set in Victorian England:
[W]e may believe we come off much better than our great-grandparents. But the desire is conditioned by the frequency it is evoked: our world spends a vast amount of its time inviting us to copulate, while our reality is as busy in frustrating us. We are not so frustrated as the Victorians? Perhaps. But if you can only enjoy one apple a day, there’s a great deal to be said against living in an orchard of the wretched things; you might even find apples sweeter if you were allowed only one a week.
So it seems very far from sure that the Victorians did not experience a much keener, because less frequent, sexual pleasure than we do; and that they were not dimly aware of this, and so chose a convention of suppression, repression and silence to maintain the keenness of the pleasure.
Fowles asserts that the Victorians, perhaps because they did not have sex constantly thrown at them, were “far more preoccupied with it than we really are.” He adds that they “were certainly preoccupied by love, and devoted far more of their arts to it than we do ours.”
To be sure, we have the internet, not to mention far less reserve, which means that our Elizabeths do not have to rely for happiness on a chance encounter at Pemberley with their Darcys. Freudian sublimation, explained in Civilization and Its Discontents, can be overrated. But if we are going to be kept apart from our loves, it’s nice to know that there is an upside.
We are currently in the middle of Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights (Dec. 10-18 this year). While I won’t contend that Mary Oliver’s “Poppies” is a Hanukkah poem, it features Hanukkah sentiments when it says that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,
when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
In her poetry, Oliver never underestimates the power of darkness, described at one point in “Poppies” as a “cold, black, curved blade” that nothing can stop. The last stanza reminds me of an e.e. cummings poem that also pits darkness against the vibrancy of life while concluding with a defiant challenge. In “Buffalo Bill’s defunct” cummings asks,
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death
Oliver, meanwhile, concludes,
and what are you going to do— what can you do about it— deep, blue night?
“Not much” seems to be the implied answer. Or as the evangelist John puts it, “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. Here’s the poem:
The poppies send up their orange flares; swaying in the wind, their congregations are a levitation
of bright dust, of thin and lacy leaves. There isn't a place in this world that doesn't
sooner or later drown in the indigos of darkness, but now, for a while, the roughage
shines like a miracle as it floats above everything with its yellow hair. Of course nothing stops the cold,
black, curved blade from hooking forward— of course loss is the great lesson.
But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness,
when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive. Inside the bright fields,
touched by their rough and spongy gold, I am washed and washed in the river of earthly delight—
and what are you going to do— what can you do about it— deep, blue night?
By uniting an image of baptism with an allusion to earthly delight, incidentally, Oliver connects spiritual transcendence with sensual pleasure. She may have in mind Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” a triptych whose first and perhaps second panel celebrate such pleasure. Oliver regularly uses sensual ecstasy as a means of connecting with the divine, whether through poppies, honey, lightning humpbacked whales, blackberries, or countless other natural phenomena.
Thoor Ballylee, Yeats’s symbol for cultural and spiritual stability
Friday
Fintan O’Toole’s recent New York Review of Books article on “Democracy’s Afterlife: Trump, the GOP, and the Rise of Zombie Politics” had a lead that was sure to catch my attention. Seamus Heaney and William Butler Yeats, he believes, can be used as social and political barometers:
It is an infallible law that if Seamus Heaney is the Irish poet of choice, things are looking up, but if W.B. Yeats is in the air, they look ominous. Joe Biden at the National Democratic Convention in August created great expectations with Heaney’s “once in a lifetime/…longed-for tidal wave/Of justice.” But there is no blue tsunami. Instead, we must turn, fretfully, to Yeats: “We are closed in, and the key is turned/On our uncertainty.” That key was always in the hands of Donald Trump. It has been obvious for many months that his strategy for retaining power would center on the generation of a force field of radical indecision. As Barton Gellman put it in The Atlantic, “He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all.”
A month after Biden’s decisive victory, Trump continues to keep much of the country locked in uncertainty. The most recent instance is Texas, with the support of 17 red state legislatures, petitioning the Supreme Court to throw out the results in four states that Biden won. There are several words for such an attempt to overturn a free and fair election. Coup is one of them, secession another. And then there’s treason.
Last month I looked at the Heaney poem to capture Biden’s optimism. I turn now to Yeats’s poem for a more pessimistic view.
The passage appears in “The Stare’s [Starling’s] Nest,” found in Meditations in Time of Civil War.” The masonry of Yeats’s beloved Ireland appears to be coming apart, allowing starlings to invade. By pleading to honeybees to make a home in the cracks where birds have nested, the poet is searching for sweetness in a bitter time.
The Stare's Nest by My Window
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
Yeats has described the uncertainty he was experiencing when he wrote the poem:
I was in my Galway house during the first months of the civil war, the railway bridges blown up and the roads blocked with stones and trees. For the first week there were no newspapers, no reliable news, we did not know who had won nor who had lost, and even after newspapers came, one never knew what was happening on the other side of the hill or of the line of trees. Ford cars passed the house from time to time with coffins standing upon end between the seats, and sometimes at night we heard an explosion, and once by day saw the smoke made by the burning of a great neighboring house. Men must have lived so through many tumultuous centuries. One felt an overmastering desire not to grow unhappy or embittered, not to lose all sense of the beauty of nature. A stare (our West of Ireland name for a starling) had built in a hole beside my window and I made these verses out of the feeling of the moment.
The United States is not experiencing bloodshed, at least not yet. Many power-hungry Republicans, however, are attempting to unleash chaos. To borrow from the poem, Trumpism has encouraged them to indulge in fantasies, and their hearts have become progressively brutalized in the process. They find more substance in their enmities than in love.
Once we believed our courts would banish uncertainty, but 50+ court defeats for Trump’s lawyers have not caused Republican legislators to declare Biden the winner. For those putting confidence in our institutions, I recommend an eye-opening article by a Sri Lankan, who cautions that we could experience something like what he went through in his island nation. That he quotes Yeats is a sign of his pessimism.
Indi Samarajiva describes the aftermath of a 2018 coup attempt in Sri Lanka, involving a defeated party that refused to step down. In our country, people have laughed at attempts to overthrow the election results, what with Rudy Giluliani’s Four Seasons Landscaping press conference, his trickling hair dye episode, and Trump lawyer Sidney Powell threatening to “release the kraken.” In Sri Lanka, the losing side resorted to chili powder:
Two years ago, I lived through a coup in Sri Lanka. It was stupid. The minority party threw chili powder at everyone in Parliament and took over by farce. Math, however, requires a majority and the courts kicked them out. They gave in. We’d been protesting for weeks and yay, we won.
The victory, however, was illusory:
I didn’t know it at the time, but we had already lost. No one knew — but oh my God, what we lost. The legitimate government came back but it was divided and weak. We were divided and weak. We were vulnerable.
The instability set the stage for the 2019 Easter bombings four months later, which killed 267 people. Samarajiva spells out the connection in graphic terms:
Your Republicans have set forces into play they cannot possibly understand and certainly cannot control. And they don’t even want to. To them, chaos is a ladder.
This is the point. You have taken an orderly system balancing a whole lot of chaos and fucked with it. I don’t know how it’s going to explode, but I can promise you this. It’s going to explode.
This is precisely why we have elections, and why both sides accept the results. To keep the chaos at bay. The whole point is that you have a regular, ritual fight rather than fighting all the time. Once one side breaks ritual then you’re on the way to civil war. Once you break the rules then chaos ensues. What exactly happens? I don’t know. It’s chaos….
What I can tell you — what anyone who’s experienced this can tell you — is that it’s going to be bad. I didn’t know that churches and hotels would blow up on Easter Sunday, but I know now. I’m trying to tell you in advance. You’ve opened up a Pandora’s box of instability. All kinds of demons come out.
I have lived through a coup. It felt like what you’re feeling now. Like watching something stupid and just waiting for it to go away. But it doesn’t go away. You can forget about it, but it doesn’t go away.
There’s a ticking bomb at the heart of your democracy now. Your government, the very idea of governance is fatally wounded. Chaos has been planted at its heart. I don’t know what this chaos will grow into, but I can promise you this. It won’t be good.
It is at this point that the writer turns to poetry:
You have fucked with chaos and soon chaos will fuck with you. To quote Yeats,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned…
The center in America’s case should be the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the rule of law, and 240 years as a democratic republic. Recent history, however, has taught us that processes we thought were written in stone were actually just norms that someone like Trump casually violates. We can no longer confidently assert that the center will hold.
I pray for Heaney’s tidal wave of justice rising up but fear we get Yeats’s slouching beast instead.
Yet even Yeats, despite his vision of crumbling masonry, does not give up on optimism altogether. In his notes on “The Stare’s Nest” he reports that, after all the explosions, fires and deaths, “a strange thing happened”:
I began to smell honey in places where honey could not be, at the end of a stone passage or at some windy turn of the road, and it came always with certain thoughts.
What with Trump and the current GOP shaking America’s foundations, cracks are appearing. Pray God that we can shore up those cracks with honey.
African American poet Naomi Long Madgett has just died at 97. Her poem “Midway,” published in 1959 when the Civil Rights movement was heating up, inspired many.
I can imagine this past summer’s Black Lives Matter marchers thrilling to the poem, with its bouncy rhythm. Note how you first have to speed up the tempo in many of the lines, only to slow down in the second half in a way that emphasizes the message “I’ve come this far to freedom and I won’t turn back,” she begins, while concluding, “Mighty mountains loom before me and I won’t stop now.”
If you want a lift, chant it out loud. And don’t stop now.
I’ve come this far to freedom and I won’t turn back I’m climbing to the highway from my old dirt track I’m coming and I’m going And I’m stretching and I’m growing And I’ll reap what I’ve been sowing or my skin’s not black I’ve prayed and slaved and waited and I’ve sung my song You’ve bled me and you’ve starved me but I’ve still grown strong You’ve lashed me and you’ve treed me And you’ve everything but freed me But in time you’ll know you need me and it won’t be long. I’ve seen the daylight breaking high above the bough I’ve found my destination and I’ve made my vow; So whether you abhor me Or deride me or ignore me Mighty mountains loom before me and I won’t stop now.
