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.
The other day I read an eye-popping Politico article (well, eye-popping for nerds like me) comparing Donald Trump to Antipope Benedict XIII, the last of the Avignon popes. Benedict lost his French support in 1398, escaped capture in 1403, and then held on and even regained some legitimacy before dying in 1423 (!). As I read the piece, I thought of how Dante handles Boniface VIII, the pope largely responsible for the Rome-Avignon schism a hundred years earlier.
If Antipope Benedict is like the Trump who has just left office, Dante’s Boniface is like the Trump who opened up a schism in the GOP, prompting many formerly loyal Republicans to dream of their own version of an alternative Avignon papacy.
Michael Kruse’s article opens as though it were about Trump, even though Benedict is the actual subject:
The ousted leader refused to relent to reality.
Set against a backdrop of avarice and inequality and persistent sickness, distrust and misrule, the leader exploited and exacerbated societal unrest to seize and flaunt vast power—doing anything and everything he could to try to keep it in his grip. He resisted pleas for unity and calm. He tested the loyalty of even his most ardent and important establishment supporters. He was censured and then toppled. Still, though, he declined to consider even the smallest acquiescence. Besieged and increasingly isolated, he faded as he aged—but he never yielded. Some people believed he had no less than the blessing of God.
The Trump parallels suggest foreboding possibilities for our own future:
He tried to exert control from a fortress of a palace in a separate seat of power—propped up by a stubborn type of papal court, retaining sufficient political capital to pressure heads of states to pick sides, bestowing benedictions and other benefits and if nothing else gumming up earnest efforts to allay divides. Weary, irritated leaders, both religious and royal, “said, ‘You’re out, you’re out, you’re out,’” [Medieval scholar Joëlle] Rollo-Koster told me, “and he said, ‘No, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in.’”
And then there’s this:
Manipulative and unabashed, he worked to cling to the trappings of power, sapped the sway of his counterpart popes and complicated attempts to mend the crippling split in the Roman Catholic Church called the Western Schism. Monarchs, clerics and other popes, his most potent adversaries, tried diplomacy, force and outright excommunication, ultimately stamping him a heretic—but they could never make the uncompromising Benedict altogether disappear. And there was an unexpected twist to Benedict’s intransigence, one Trump’s many high-ranking opponents would do well to heed: The harder and longer he held out, the more he was seen by some as a victim or a martyr, abidingly admired precisely because of his obstinacy and unwavering audacity.
Dante lambastes corrupt churchmen throughout the Divine Comedy, but Boniface VIII is his favorite target. Although Boniface was not yet dead in 1300 when the poem is set, he is mentioned by a number of souls in Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. For instance, the corrupt Pope Nicholas III, suffering hellish torments for using the papacy to build a fortune, initially thinks that Dante is Boniface and is confused. After all, he knows that Boniface won’t die until 1303, when he will be captured and beaten up by French forces:
“Are you there already, Boniface? Are you there already?” he cried. “By several years the writ has lied. And all that gold, and all that care –
are you already sated with the treasure for which you dared to turn on the Sweet Lady and trick and pluck and bleed her at your pleasure?
Nicholas has been inverted and stuck into a hole dug into rock, with only his legs protruding. His feet are on fire.
From every mouth a sinner’s legs stuck out as far as the calf. The soles were all ablaze and the joints of the legs quivered and writhed about.
Withes and tethers would have snapped in their throes. As oiled things blaze upon the surface only, so did they burn from the heels to the points of their toes.
“Master,” I said, “who is that one in the fire who writhes and quivers more than all the others? From him the ruddy flames seem to leap higher.”
To talk to the former pope, Dante must descend a level, where a hole in the side of the rock face allows conversation. He learns that, when Boniface dies, Nicholas will be pushed further into the hole as Boniface takes his place.
The punishment, as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Lord High Executioner puts it, fits the crime. As the latest in the apostolic succession that began with St. Peter (“the rock”), Nicholas and Boniface should be standing upright, their heads enveloped in a haloed glow. Instead, they have turned everything upside down. Dante compares the hole to a baptismal font, and the flaming feet are an inversion of the Pentecostal flames that marked the arrival of the Holy Spirit. In other words, when churchmen put money before God, they receive a grotesque parody of divine grace.
Dante is so infuriated by such corruption that he excoriates Nicholas (and by extension Boniface) in the way many of us would like to excoriate Trump for violating his oath of office and sacrificing America to his greed and ego:
Maybe — I cannot say — I grew too brash at this point, for when he had finished speaking I said: “Indeed! Now tell me how much cash
our Lord required of Peter in guarantee before he put the keys into his keeping? Surely he asked nothing but ‘Follow me!’
Nor did Peter, nor the others, ask silver or gold of Matthias when they chose him for the place the despicable and damned apostle sold.
Therefore stay as you are; this hole well fits you — and keep a good guard on the ill-won wealth…
And were it not that I am still constrained by the reverence I owe to the Great Keys you held in life, I should not have refrained
from using other words and sharper still; for this avarice of yours grieves all the world, tramples the virtuous, and exalts the evil.”
Dante goes on to compare Nicholas to the Whore of Babylon (in the Book of Revelation) before concluding,
Gold and silver are the gods you adore! In what are you different from the idolator, save that he worships one, and you a score?
There’s no question about what Trump adores. Unfortunately, like Antipope Benedict, he still commands enough allegiance from Trump idolaters to cause problems for the country he once swore to honor and protect.
Addendum: Sewanee English professor Ross MacDonald, a member of our Dante Discussion Group, pointed out that Nicholas’s inversion is also a grotesque parody of St. Peters’s crucifixion. So as not to imitate Jesus, Peter asked to be crucified upside down. Again, the contrast between Peter and his successors could not be more stark.
Philip Dawe, Tarring and feathering of British customs officer (1774)
Monday
Following the January 6 insurrection designed to pressure GOP Congress members to overturn the election (and perhaps to capture and even kill Democratic members), historians have been looking back through history at instances of mob vilence. These include everything from the Boston Tea Party to southern lynch mobs aiming to overturn the effects of the Equal Rights Amendment. James Madison, author of the Federalist Papers, worried that such “factionalism” would overwhelm rational decision making, and many of our constitutional safeguards were designed to counter the threat.
When I think of literary depictions of mob action, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” comes to mind. Set in pre-revolutionary America, the story features a young man (Robin) who, seeking expanded opportunities, goes to the city to profit from the patronage of Major Molineux, a British-appointed colonial governor. Instead he encounters a mob in action.
Hawthorne sets the stage in the opening paragraph:
After the kings of Great Britain had assumed the right of appointing the colonial governors, the measures of the latter seldom met with the ready and general approbation which had been paid to those of their predecessors, under the original charters. The people looked with most jealous scrutiny to the exercise of power, which did not emanate from themselves, and they usually rewarded the rulers with slender gratitude for the compliances, by which, in softening their instructions from beyond the sea, they had incurred the reprehension of those who gave them. The annals of Massachusetts Bay will inform us, that of six governors, in the space of about forty years from the surrender of the old charter, under James II, two were imprisoned by a popular insurrection; a third, as Hutchinson inclines to believe, was driven from the province by the whizzing of a musketball; a fourth, in the opinion of the same historian, was hastened to his grave by continual bickerings with the House of Representatives; and the remaining two, as well as their successors, till the Revolution, were favored with few and brief intervals of peaceful sway. The inferior members of the court party, in times of high political excitement, led scarcely a more desirable life.
It so happens that Robin arrives in the city at the moment when his kinsman will be similarly overthrown. No one informs him of what is about to happen, however, so he wanders through a welter of confusion until encountering the story’s climactic scene:
A mighty stream of people now emptied into the street, and came rolling slowly towards the church. A single horseman wheeled the corner in the midst of them…In his train were wild figures in the Indian dress, and many fantastic shapes without a model, giving the whole march a visionary air, as if a dream had broken forth from some feverish brain, and were sweeping visibly through the midnight streets. A mass of people, inactive, except as applauding spectators, hemmed the procession in, and several women ran along the sidewalk, piercing the confusion of heavier sounds, with their shrill voices of mirth or terror.
The horseman leading the procession is a “double-faced” figure that Robin has previously encountered. One can interpret the red as revolution and the black as nihilism:
One side of the face blazed an intense red, while the other was black as midnight, the division line being in the broad bridge of the nose; and a mouth which seemed to extend from ear to ear was black or red, in contrast to the color of the cheek. The effect was as if two individual devils, a fiend of fire and a fiend of darkness, had united themselves to form this infernal visage.
In the final scene, revolution and nihilism have combined in this attack on the government:
The leader turned himself in the saddle, and fixed his glance full upon the country youth, as the steed went slowly by. When Robin had freed his eyes from those fiery ones, the musicians were passing before him, and the torches were close at hand; but the unsteady brightness of the latter formed a veil which he could not penetrate. The rattling of wheels over the stones sometimes found its way to his ear, and confused traces of a human form appeared at intervals, and then melted into the vivid light. A moment more, and the leader thundered a command to halt: the trumpets vomited a horrid breath, and held their peace; the shouts and laughter of the people died away, and there remained only a universal hum, allied to silence. Right before Robin’s eyes was an uncovered cart. There the torches blazed the brightest, there the moon shone out like day, and there, in tar-and-feathery dignity, sat his kinsman Major Molineux!
He was an elderly man, of large and majestic person, and strong, square features, betokening a steady soul; but steady as it was, his enemies had found means to shake it. His face was pale as death, and far more ghastly; the broad forehead was contracted in his agony, so that his eyebrows formed one grizzled line; his eyes were red and wild, and the foam hung white upon his quivering lip. His whole frame was agitated by a quick and continual tremor, which his pride strove to quell, even in those circumstances of overwhelming humiliation.
It was only through luck and the heroic actions of a few individuals that America didn’t see some of its own leaders suffer comparable fates. As it was, five people died and 140 officers suffered injuries, including one who lost an eye.
A particularly disturbing element of the story is that Robin, like many who attended the Trump rally preceding the Capitol attack, gets caught up in the excitement–it seems a frolic–and all but joins the mob:
The contagion was spreading among the multitude, when, all at once, it seized upon Robin, and he sent forth a shout of laughter that echoed through the street; every man shook his sides, every man emptied his lungs, but Robin’s shout was the loudest there. The cloud-spirits peeped from their silvery islands, as the congregated mirth went roaring up the sky! The Man in the Moon heard the far bellow; “Oho,” quoth he, “the old earth is frolicsome tonight!”
In our case, Madisonian checks preserved our republic, although only barely. Reason did in fact prevail as Congress voted to uphold the election results and Joe Biden became president. On the dark side, far too many Republicans voted the way the mob wanted them to, despite the non-existence of voter fraud. One shudders to think what would have occurred had the entire election come down to a single state and had Republicans had a majority in the House.
Hawthorne’s story is interesting because he doesn’t romanticize the energies that led to the American Revolution. He doesn’t go into the details of what galvanized the mob (he deliberately avoids “a long and dry detail of colonial affairs”). Rather, he leaves us with the same question that confront us: what does one do after witnessing a mob at work?
Robin’s first instance is to run back home where everything is familiar. “I begin to grow weary of a town life, Sir,” he says, addressing a gentleman who has served as a guide. “Will you show me the way to the ferry?”
The man, however, refuses to do so, telling him, “Some few days hence, if you continue to wish it, I will speed you on your journey. Or, if you prefer to remain with us, perhaps, as you are a shrewd youth, you may rise in the world, without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineux.”
It is up to Robin, just as it is up to us, to figure out how to negotiate the uncharted waters that lie before us. Thanks to Trump and the new GOP, we can no longer take for granted customary democratic safeguards, just as Robin cannot rely on Major Molineux. We must rise in the world looking to our own resources.
Maybe that’s an overly grim assessment since, for the most part, the courts have remained committed to the rule of law, various Republicans have told the truth about the elections (but paid a price in doing so), and the armed forces have remained loyal to the Constitution. The mob isn’t calling all of the shots.
But, as with Robin, the way forward is a lot murkier than we once thought.
If you feel at all discouraged by skyrocketing Covid cases or rising rightwing terrorism or (fill in the blank), here’s a wonderful poem about St. Jude, patron saint of impossible causes. Joseph Awad, a Lebanese-American, knows as an impossible cause when he sees one. “Once beautiful Beirut,” he laments, has been “bloodied by Christian, Jew and Druze” and “weeps like a wound just under the world’s heart.”
St. Jude, one of the twelve disciples, may have been martyred in Lebanon. Awad doesn’t know what impossible acts he performed, but he is “beginning a novena [series of prayers]” to him.
When something seems impossible, don’t stop praying.
For Jude’s Lebanon
It is said he was a relative of Jesus, That his apostolate Was to the land we know as Lebanon, That he gave his blood for Christ. What wonders did he perform To win the Barnum & Bailey blurb, “Patron saint of the impossible.”
I’m beginning a novena to St. Jude.
His lone epistle opens lovingly: “Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ And brother of James, to the called Who have been loved in God the Father And preserved for Christ Jesus, Mercy and peace and love Be yours in abundance.”
I’m beginning a novena to St. Jude.
He had a poet’s way with words. Evil, sensual men he called “Wild waves of the sea, Foaming up their shame, Wandering stars for whom The storm of darkness Has been reserved forever.”
I’m beginning a novena to St. Jude.
In Lebanon there is loud lamentation. Beirut, once beautiful Beirut, Bloodied by Christian, Jew and Druze, Weeps like a wound just under the world’s heart. Pontius Pilates in world capitals Wash their hands, pronouncing solemnly, The situation is impossible.”
Trump and Trumpism have proved so abhorrent that new liberal-conservative alliances have formed amongst those concerned about the future of our democratic republic, and I suddenly find myself applauding people I’ve disagreed with for years, such as Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot, William Krystol, Steve Schmidt, Kurt Bardella, Joe Scarsborough, Michael Steele, Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens, and others. Above all, I admire David Frum, a conservative with integrity with whom one can have respectful conversations. I only recently learned that he’s a huge fan of Marcel Proust, to whom he owes some of his most profound insights.
In 2010 Frum quoted the following Proust passage in response to comparable political shifts going on at the time:
In the days of my early childhood … no ‘good’ house would ever have opened its doors to a Republican. … But, like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed to be immovable, and composes a fresh pattern. Before I had made my first Communion, ladies on the ‘right side’ in politics had had the stupefaction of meeting, while paying calls, a smart [ie fashionable] Jewess. These new arrangements of the kaleidoscope are produced by what a philosopher would call a ‘change of criterion.’ The Dreyfus case brought about another …. Everything Jewish, even the smart lady herself, fell out of the pattern, and various obscure nationalities appeared in its place. The most brilliant drawing-room in Paris was that of a Prince who was an Austrian and ultra-Catholic. If instead of the Dreyfus case there had come a war with Germany, the base of the kaleidoscope would have been turned in the other direction, and its pattern reversed. The Jews having shewn, to the general astonishment, that they were patriots also, would have kept their position, and no one would have cared to go any more, or even to admit that he had ever gone to the Austrian Prince’s.
Frum then identifies a few of the shifts he’s witnessed:
We see these kaleidoscope twists continuing into our own day. Feminists turn into anti-pornography activists and make common cause with the religious conservatives they once despised. Pro-lifers engage with end-of-life issues and find alliances with Naderite critics of for-profit medicine. One-time anticommunists are jolted by 9/11 into transferring their admiration from anti-Soviet mujahedeen to anti-jihadist secular Muslims.
And then the kaleidoscope twists again, and again old alliances and relationships mutate into strange and unexpected forms. A town like Greenwich, CT can drift from ultra-Republican in 1985 to super-Democratic in 2005. John L. Lewis’ Appalachia is the only part of the country to become more Republican between 2004 and 2008.
Frum concludes his essay with the following gem:
The great lesson Marcel Proust tries to impart is the mutability of human life. That lesson applies to politics too. Coalitions combine, separate, recombine. Nothing remains unchanged, no matter how solid it may seem. Or, as Proust concludes at the end of Swann’s Way: “Houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”
As I noted in Tuesday’s post, profound insights occur when political scientists draw on literature. Frum is another case in point.
The GOP has long mastered the art of Catch-22 but it may just have surpassed itself. Before I turn to the incident I have in mind, Heller’s definition is in order:
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
I have written about how, following the Las Vegas mass killing, the GOP said that a regulatory fix rather than legislation was needed to control bump fire stocks used by mass killers. The problem: they wouldn’t grant the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) the authority to regulate bump stocks. Nevertheless, House Speaker Paul Ryan sounded oh-so-reasonable about it.
And then there are the anti-abortion TRAP laws. In some states, abortion doctors are forced to have medically unnecessary admitting privileges at local hospitals which then–perhaps because of religious affiliation or political pressure–don’t grant them admitting privileges.
Mitch McConnell’s latest is a doozie. He doesn’t want to be seen as letting Donald Trump off the hook for inciting open sedition but he also doesn’t want to alienate Trump supporters. What does he do? First, as Senate Majority Leader, he refused to reconvene the Senate before January 19 to conduct Trump’s trial. Then, turning the Constitution into a Catch-22 document, he voted for a GOP motion contending Trump’s trial is unconstitutional because he’s no longer in office.
As New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait sarcastically sums up the effect of McConnell’s maneuver,
Nobody is defending the insurrection. It merely happens to have taken place during a wormhole in the calendar in which a president can violate the law with complete impunity. They would like very much to hold Trump accountable, but the founders designed the Presidential Crime Wormhole, and we must respect their wisdom.
Wormhole or Catch-22, it all comes down to one thing: those who have the power can make rules which, while they give off the aura of being even-handed, are in reality just designed to screw the rest of us.
Errol Flynn as Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises
Wednesday
Here’s a literary citation that reminds us of the usefulness of an extensive literary background when writing about politics. Attempting to assess Donald Trump’s future, New Yorker’s John Cassady turns to Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
[S]omeone asks Mike Campbell, the troubled Scottish war veteran who is engaged to Lady Brett Ashley, how he ended up bankrupt. “Two ways,” Campbell replies. “Gradually, and then suddenly.” Campbell’s interlocutor goes on to ask what brought about his collapse. “Friends,” Campbell says. “I had a lot of friends. False friends. Then I had creditors, too. Probably had more creditors than anybody in England.”
We’ll get a chance to see, during the upcoming impeachment trial and then in the ensuing months, how many of those who supported and enabled the president are false friends. Given that most of them, like their leader, are purely transactional, we’ll recognize their falsity only to the extent that Trump’s influence declines. Unfortunately, given that the it will probably be perceived self-interest rather than principle that decides. But it’s clear that economically, Trump’s creditors are beginning to kick back.
And further on:
[I]n the week since Trump incited a mob of his supporters to attack the Capitol, he and his businesses have suffered a series of blows. Key corporate partners have abandoned him; some of his fellow-billionaires have spoken out against his sedition; Deutsche Bank has let it be known that it doesn’t want anything more to do with him; and Twitter stripped him of his following. When Trump leaves the White House, next week, he may have his eyes on planning a return to the political stage, but surely his first priority will be stabilizing his business empire—if he can manage it.
If the corporate shunning of Trump persists and expands to other businesses owned by him, it could do immense damage. Trump’s hotels and resorts, such as the Trump National Doral, in Miami, depend on big businesses to fill their ballrooms and function spaces. They also rely on wealthy individuals to book the tee times, hotel rooms, and weddings that provide daily revenues. His condo developments cater to wealthy buyers. Other Trump ventures, particularly his licensing deals around the world, are even more dependent on the enduring appeal of the Trump brand, which is now in question.
Trump and Campbell have one other thing in common, which is their fragile masculinity. The resemblances end there, however, as Campbell has contempt for medals (whereas Trump longs for them), is self-deprecating (enough said on that score), and drinks heavily (whereas Trump doesn’t drink at all). Also unlike Trump, he’s a good companion (when he’s doesn’t get too drunk) who wears his humanity on his sleeve, especially in his longing for Lady Ashley Brett.
On the other hand, Trump is very much like the father (Rick) in a John le Carré novel I’m reading at the moment. (A friend recommended A Perfect Spy to me after le Carré’s recent death.) Here’s a recollection written by Rick’s son, who refers to his childhood self as Pym. It describes Rick and his black market activities during World War II (which Rick escaped as neatly as Trump escaped Vietnam):
Rick’s superiority was manifest in everything he did. In the way he dressed even when we were very broke, his clean laundry and clean shoes. In the food he required and the style to eat it in. The rooms he had in the hotel. In the way he needed brandy for his snooker, and scared everyone into silence with his brooding…
Meanwhile we traded. What in, Pym never rightly knew and nor do I now. Sometimes in rare commodities, such as hams and whisky, sometimes in promises, which the court called faith. Other times in nothing more solid than the sunny horizons that sparkled ahead of us down the empty wartime roads.
Rick also makes a fortune at one point with a fraudulent insurance scheme, using his charm to sell policies to the elderly. At another point he gets money for buildings during the war (but gets caught when one of the buildings proves to be undamaged).
I thought of Trump steaks, Trump University, and Trump presidential promises. Rick’s weakness for horses also reminds us of Trump’s longing to be the owner of a football franchise.
Supposedly le Carré modeled Rick on his own father. After four years of Trump, we know he knows whereof he speaks.
With American democracy under threat, I’ve been teaching civics-through-poetry to my eight-year-old grandson, so of course we had to look at “The Hill We Climb,” the Amanda Gorman poem that galvanized the nation during the inauguration.
I like what Washington Post’s Karen Attiah had to say about Gorman’s reading. As important as Biden’s speech was, Gorman’s poem drove home the hope many of us were feeling:
[S]he was not a luxury. The purifying power of poetry has existed as long as humans have wielded words. And for women especially, as [poet Audre] Lorde said, poetry “is a vital necessity of our existence.” Biden’s inaugural words about unity and coming together were good and helpful and presidential. But it was Gorman’s truth that was the necessary one.
Necessary for Black women in America. In a country that so loves to profit from our political, cultural and emotional labor, Gorman reminded those of us who live at the intersection of sexism and racism that we do not have the luxury of settling for hollow #BlackWomenWillSaveUs platitudes. Not when this country is unable to save us from discrimination, police brutality or dying in childbirth.
I was struck how readily Gorman rose to the challenge of occasional poetry (poetry written for a special occasion), which used to be common expectation (and income source) for poets in centuries past but has fallen out of fashion. She succeeded in part by channeling the voice of previous African American orators and poets. Her “we will rise” refrain, for instance, echoes both Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (“this nation will rise up”) and Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.”
America as a city on a hill, of course, has a long tradition, stemming back to John Withrop’s injunction to build a civilization where “the eyes of all people are upon us.” John Kennedy invoked the image shortly after being elected, as did Ronald Reagan. Gorman’s focus is on climbing that hill, climbing having its own rich history within the African American community, from the Negro spiritual “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder” to Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son.” Hughes’s poem concludes,
So boy, don’t you turn back. Don’t you set down on the steps ‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard. Don’t you fall now — For I’se still goin’, honey, I’se still climbin’, And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
And then there’s the late Naomi Long Madgett’s “Midway,” which I wrote about recently https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/mountains-loom-before-me-and-i-wont-stop-now/and which concludes with the line, “Mighty mountains loom before me and I won’t stop now.”
In Gorman’s poem, my grandson particularly liked the lines,
[B]eing American is more than a pride we inherit, it’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it, that would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy, and this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can periodically be delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.
He also felt inspired and personally challenged by the closing lines:
[W]hen the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.
Think of how much we want young people to encounter this idealism.
Discussing the poem in light of the Capitol Hill seditionists, Alban and I found comfort in Gorman’s confidence in the future. (Alban said, “Wow!” while watching a video of her delivering “The Hill We Climb.”) We also looked at the poem’s style. While written in free verse (no regular rhyme or rhythm), it does have a few rhymes (the best ones are often female, such as “inherit,” “repair it,” and “share it”), along with puns and alliteration. I challenged Alban to find the largest alliterative cluster, which he did (“to compose a country committed/ to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man”).
I’ve only found prose transcriptions of the poem—none laid out on the page as it will be in Gorman’s forthcoming collection—so what I share here is my approximation.
The Hill We Climb By Amanda Gorman
When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it, somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished.
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one. And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect, we are striving to forge a union with purpose, to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.
So we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another, we seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: that even as we grieved, we grew, even as we hurt, we hoped, that even as we tired, we tried, that we’ll forever be tied together victorious, not because we will never again know defeat but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one should make them afraid. If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in in all of the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare it because being American is more than a pride we inherit, it’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it, that would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy, and this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can periodically be delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith, we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us, this is the era of just redemption we feared in its inception we did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour but within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves, so while once we asked how can we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us.
We will not march back to what was but move to what shall be, a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free, we will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, our blunders become their burden. But one thing is certain: if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left, with every breath from my bronze, pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one, we will rise from the golden hills of the West, we will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution, we will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states, we will rise from the sunbaked South, we will rebuild, reconcile, and recover in every known nook of our nation in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful, when the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.
Hyppolite Flandrin, Dante Speaks to the Souls of the Envious
Monday
As we look ahead to President Biden’s challenges, the major one may be reactionary resentment. Although it is clear that we need high levels of federal spending to address Covid needs and skyrocketing unemployment, right on cue the GOP is throwing up roadblocks. After running up the deficit with profligate tax cuts for the wealthy, Republican legislators are declaring that America can’t afford to help those in need.
I’m wondering whether Dante’s Purgatorio offers a credible case for optimism. On the second terrace (cantos XIII-XV), we encounter formerly resentful souls who have seen the light.
Dante doesn’t underestimate the power of resentment and neither should we. It has proven noxious throughout U.S. history, possessing as it does both an economic and a racial component. Since immigrants, upon arriving, witnessed African Americans at the bottom of the social scale, they came to see a caste system as part of the American Dream. Success meant that you at least rose higher than they did, which meant that black success could be experienced as threatening. After all, if African Americans do better than you, then you are a failure, which is why many regarded the Obama presidency as an existential threat. The resentment directed toward the first black president was something to behold.
Even our country’s successes have been built on the back of this resentment. Whites have embraced government programs as long as Blacks have been excluded, as was the case with both Roosevelt’s Social Security and the post-World War II GI bill. Johnson’s anti-poverty and affirmative action programs and Obama’s Affordable Care Act fueled backlash.
Resentment, which is inextricably bound up with envy, is not just a lower class vice. The very wealthy can be resentful, as we saw with Trump’s envious resentment of Obama. Some of the GOP’s billionaire backers appear maddened by it. They resemble Dante’s wealthy Sapia of Siena.
Sapia tells Dante that, when alive, her “heart conceived more joy from others’ loss than my own gain.” For instance, she rejoiced when her own countrymen were conquered by the invading Florentines:
Beaten they were, and fled in bitter rout; And there thrilled through me, when I saw the chase, Such glee as till that hour I’d tasted not.
The passage reminds me of Envy’s self description in Doctor Faustus:
I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt. I am lean with seeing others eat. O, that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone! then thou shouldst see how fat I would be. But must thou sit, and I stand? come down, with a vengeance!
Better to burn everything down than learn to read and collectively increase food production.
Guido del Duca is similarly resentful:
And in my heart such envy used to burn, If I’d caught someone looking pleased with life, Thou wouldst have seen how livid I could turn.
Looking back, he wonders–as Biden must wonder–why humans turn against each other instead of working together in partnership:
I reap the straw whose seed I sowed so rife; Why, why set heart on things which must forbid All partnership, O human race at strife?
The envious in Purgatory have had their eyelids wired shut, a sign that they cannot see God’s mercy and generosity. Aglauros, a jealous sister in Roman mythology who was turned to stone when she denied Mercury access to her sister, describes this limited vision:
The high heavens call you and about you wheel, Showing eternal beauties to invite you; But all you see’s the earth beneath your heel,
And therefore doth the All discerning smite you.
If your envy means more to you than God’s gifts, you create your own hell.
I promised some optimism so here it is. These souls are in Purgatory, not Inferno, which means that they aren’t absolutely stuck in their resentment. Static though our politics may seem, people are capable of moving to a better place. Sapia shifted when a celebrated hermit beyond the reach of envy “showered his holy prayers upon me.”
Expressing remorse for resentment will get you to Purgatory, but opening yourself to the Angel of Generosity will get you to Paradise. This angel is so dazzling that the pilgrim Dante at first must shade his eyes:
So, from before me, on these eyes of mine Such a reflected brilliance seemed to smite That they shrank promptly from the blinding shine.
“O my dear father, what is this so bright, No effort serves to screen it off,” said I, “And moving toward us, if I guess aright?”
Virgil explains that it takes time to embrace generosity:
Full soon, to look on beings such as this Shall be to thee no burden, but a cause Of all thy nature can endure of bliss.
Like many resentful Americans, Dante is not there yet. How, he wonders, can we get more by sharing? What did Guido del Duca mean by “partnership”?
Virgil explains that he must think beyond material possession. I love his bellows metaphor:
You set desire where sharing with one’s fellows Means that each partner gets a smaller share, Wherefore you sigh, and envy works the bellows.
Did but the love of the most lofty sphere Turn your desires to take the upward way, Your hearts were quit of all the fearful care;
Because the more there are who there can say “Ours,” the more goods each has, and charity Burns in that cloister with a larger ray.
For a while, Dante still fails to get it:
How can it be that, when a greater throng Divides the goods, there is more wealth for each Than if a few possessed them all along?
Virgil tries again:
Because once more thy mental reach Stops short at earthly things, thy dullard mood From truth’s own light draws darkness black as pitch.
If the envious were only to see the “infinite and unexpressive” generosity of God, Virgil explains, then they would no longer be stuck in themselves. The scales—or in this case, wires—would fall from their eyes.
The beauty of one who is “lavish of self”—who gives generously—is so dazzling that envy is swept aside. “All fires it finds it feeds,” Virgil says and then explains that, with more acts of charity, more people experience God’s love. Enamored souls function as mirrors to each other, multiplying the love:
The more enamored souls dwell there at once, Ever the better and the more they love Each glassing each, all mirrors and all suns.
A major theme of the Divine Comedy is that Virgil, representing Reason, can only take Dante so far. Divine love, represented by Beatrice, must clinch the insight. Once Dante opens his heart to love, Virgil tells him, the earthly cravings that feed envy will fall away:
Now, should my words thy hunger not remove, Beatrice shalt thou see, and she’ll speak plain, This and all cravings else to rid thee of.
And indeed, when Dante catches a glimpse of Beatrice, he is thrown into a “trance of ecstasy.” He finally gets in his heart what Virgil has been trying to communicate to his reason.
How does this apply to our moment in history? Well, the United States is a wealthy nation and has the capacity to share its resources. It could enact universal health care and affordable college and affordable childcare and a living minimum wage. It could subsidize those who are currently unemployed due to the pandemic. It could be generous.
This will mean the wealthiest amongst us giving up some of what they have. (They can afford it. Our current level of income equality matches that of the Gilded Age.) Virgil tells Dante that moving from “mine” to “ours”–what the GOP is calling socialism–leads to a far richer life than our internecine struggles.
Sapia of Siena gets a glimpse of this life before she dies, which is why she is in Purgatory. If, in a Biden administration, Trump supporters get a glimpse of the Angel of Generosity—of how much richer life can be when one’s eyes aren’t wired shut—then we all can start imagining a collective future together.
Further thought: Colleague John Reishman in our Dante discussion group points out that, because their eyes are wired shut, the envious can only get along through cooperation. They, like we, must learn to acknowledge how much we need each other if they are to move on to Paradise.
