An MLK Poem for Juneteenth

By Robin Bates | Published: June 18, 2024
Poet Margaret Walker

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Wednesday – Juneteenth

In observance of Juneteenth, the now official holiday celebrating the ending of slavery in the United States, here’s a powerful Margaret Walker poem expressing appreciation for Martin Luther King. First, however, I share a strange connection that my hometown of Sewanee, Tennessee has to the events that transpired in Texas back in 1865.

I grew up surrounded by Kirby-Smiths, who were descendants of the last Confederate general to surrender to Union forces. Our obstetrician, our surgeon, my seventh-grade English teacher, and one of my best friends were all descendants. There was even a Kirby-Smith monument in the middle of town which, mercifully, was finally renamed—and the plaque taken down—a few years ago. First branded a traitor and then receiving a pardon, Kirby-Smith came to Sewanee to become a math professor at the newly opened University of the South.

 Kirby-Smith had surrendered in Galveston on June 2, 1865, and it was in Galveston 17 days later where Major General Gordon Granger arrived to inform the slaves that they were all free. Although Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, news traveled slowly in those days. Kirby-Smith had been in fact cut off from the rest of the Confederacy ever since Ulysses S. Grant captured Vicksburg in 1863, which meant that parts of Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, and western Louisiana became their own department, known as Kirbysmithdom.

Our featured poet today was born in 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1963, in response to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, she wrote the following in which she compares King to the Hebrew prophet Amos. As King was well aware, social justice was Amos’s central mission, and the prophet didn’t hesitate to call out anyone who trampled on the poor. At one point in her poem Walker quotes from his angry words:

You have sold the righteous for silver
And the poor for a pair of shoes.
My God is a mighty avenger
And He shall come with His rod in His hand

Even if you don’t know about Amos, you’ll recognize the line that shows up in King’s speech. It was a line that buoyed oppressed Israelites in Amos’s time and it has buoyed millions ever since it was delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:”Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Here’s the poem:

Amos, 1963
By Margaret Walker

Amos is a Shepherd of suffering sheep;
A pastor preaching in the depths of Alabama
Preaching social justice to the Southland
Preaching to the poor a new gospel of love
With the words of a god and the dreams of a man
Amos is our loving Shepherd of the sheep
Crying out to the stricken land
“You have sold the righteous for silver
And the poor for a pair of shoes.
My God is a mighty avenger
And He shall come with His rod in His hand.”
Preaching to the persecuted and the disinherited millions
Preaching love and justice to the solid southern land
Amos is a Prophet with a vision of brotherly love
With a vision and a dream of the red hills of Georgia
“When Justice shall roll down like water
And righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Amos is our Shepherd standing in the Shadow of our God
Tending his flocks all over the hills of Albany
And the seething streets of Selma and of bitter Birmingham.

King’s speech was delivered almost a century after Texas slaves learned they were free, sad evidence that the arc of history, while it may bend toward justice, bends with excruciating slowness. Walker, however, is heartened to see it bending.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

The Right’s Love Affair with Assault Rifles

By Robin Bates | Published: June 17, 2024
Stallone as Rambo

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Tuesday

“The Supreme Court just effectively legalized machine guns,” read the Vox headline while Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote, “Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court have decided that more Americans must die in mass shootings because they have a quibble over the word ‘function.’” At issue was a 6-3 ruling by the Court’s rightwing justice overturning a Trump-era ban (!) on bump stocks.

In 2017 a Las Vegas killer carried out America’s deadliest mass shooting in its history (which is really saying something) after using a bump stock to convert his rifle into a super deadly weapon. He killed 58 people and wounded over 500 in mere minutes.

I think of a poem that my father wrote years ago critiquing the NRA. Due to corrupt leadership, the NRA is now only a shadow of its former self, making the poem somewhat dated, but the organization succeeded in its major mission, which was getting the GOP to internalize its fanaticism. It even got the rightwing members of the Supreme Court to sign on.

Referring to a 1986 law banning machine guns, liberal Justice Sonia Sotamayor lambasted her colleagues for using an “artificially narrow definition” to “hamstring[ ] the Government’s efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.” She predicted “deadly consequences.”

I’m reposting my father’s poem, along with my previous commentary. He was familiar with toxic masculinity, having seen instances of it when a soldier in France and Germany during World War II.

Reprinted from Oct. 3, 2017 (slightly amended)

I share today the angriest poem my genial father ever wrote, which takes America’s leading gun organization to task. In “Ballad of the National Rifle Association,” he unloads on the gun group for the ways that it exploits white male anxieties. The poem was “triggered” by a gun ad in Gun World that guaranteed “shooting satisfaction.”

“Ballad” is a complex mixture of fantasies and fears, combining macho displays of supremacy, erotic dreams of manly sexual performance, and various emasculation anxieties. Stanza two is filled with power rape fantasies (“Whang her bang her get your action”).

At one point my father imagines Hollywood scenarios of protecting virginal daughters while cleansing the world of urban “putrefaction.” In this drama, which one sees in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the virginal daughters are the longing for a lost innocence while putrefaction is the black Other that makes anxious whites feel small and fearful. Donald Trump, of course, plays on fears of threatening African Americans (for instance, his description of urban neighborhoods as “hell holes”), and, right on cue, after the Las Vegas shooting Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders mentioned Chicago violence as a reason not to enact gun control measures.

The poem’s deep dive into the psychology of gun fanatics also examines revenge fantasies against chaotic nature and against parents—which is to say, against the fathers who mock their sons’ sensitivity and the mothers whose sensitivity they both long for and hate (because it makes them feel vulnerable). “Pistol Pentheus” is Euripides’s uptight control freak in The Bacchae, who tries to assert his manhood and is torn apart by his Dionysus-crazed mother. There is also an Oedipal reference to shooting the castrating father before he shoots you and adds your “skin” to his collection.

The utopian vision of a new Jerusalem is a power fantasy designed to override anxieties: a militarized America is very good at “winging rockets,” whether at enemies or at the moon. (“It’s natural the boys should whoop it up for so huge a phallic triumph,” W. H. Auden wrote about the moon landing.) My father’s ballad was written in the 1990’s but is impressively prescient given how commonplace apocalyptic language has become among many Christian gun-toting enthusiasts.

My father writes the poem in a southern accent. Having spent most of his life in southern Tennessee, he saw up close how susceptible poor Appalachian whites are to NRA fear mongering. The poem appeared in his collection The ZYX of Political Sex (Highlander Research and Education Center, 1999) so expect the language to be explicit.

Incidentally, Lucille Thornburgh, to whom the poem is dedicated, was a longtime union activist.

Ballad of the National Rifle Association
By Scott Bates

In memory of Lucille Thornburgh, dedicated worker for social justice, who liked this poem.

“For your shooting satisfaction . . .”
–from an ad in Gun World

Pistol small arm handgun gun
Trooper Trailsman Frontier Scout
Smith & Wesson Remington
Combat Cobra Knockabout
Browning Sheridan Colt Snap-Out
Single-six and Double-action
TOP PERFORMANCE SUPER CLOUT
Give you shooting satisfaction.

Pistol short arm peter prick
Rod avenger redmeat dong
Johnnie joystick reamer dick
Dummy fixer hicky prong
Swinging sirloin two feet long
Have a similar attraction
Every boy can be King Kong
With a shooting satisfaction.

Pistol-heist her hunt her down
Line her up and ream her right
Ride her home get off your gun
Shag her shoot her up tonight
Jump her hump her out of sight
Whang her bang her get your action
Fill her full of dynamite
For your shooting satisfaction.

Pistol Po-lice save your pity
For the dirty rotten hood
Gun him down in Inner City
Like they do in Hollywood
Save your daughter’s maidenhood
And pulverize the putrefaction
Trash him baby trash him good
For your shooting satisfaction.

Pistol Pentheus git yer maw
Afore she tears you limb from limb
Beat yer pappy to the draw
And incidentally get him
The sonavabitch who wants yer skin
To add it to his rug collection
Blast yer pappy Jungle Jim
Fer yer shootin’ satisfaction.

Pistol Patriot shoot your wad
The world the moon your mouth your brother
Build Jerusalem by God
Winging rockets at each other
Love your country like a mother
Love your enemy dog-fashion
Love your neighbor till he smother
In your shooting satisfaction.

Envoy

Pistol pirate cool tycoon
Do us all a benefaction
Go take a flying fuck at the moon
For our shooting satisfaction!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Eating Intentionally and Ethically

By Robin Bates | Published: June 16, 2024

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Monday

A former colleague at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Jennifer Cognard-Black, is out with a beautiful new anthology entitled Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically. As the book jacket announces, the essays “seek to understand the experiences, cultures, histories and systems that have shaped their eating and their ethics.”

In her introduction, Jennifer and her collaborator Melissa A. Goldthwaite say that their selections have been guided by four ethical principles. These are protecting and helping others, seeking to do no harm and to limit pain and suffering, respecting rights of choice and self-determination, and furthering justice, “which includes fairness, equitable distribution, and recognition of both need and contribution.” The essays range “from factory farming and the exploitative labor practices surrounding chocolate production, to Indigenous foodways and home and community gardens.”

The book opens with a Naomi Shihab Nye poem that beautifully captures the spirit of the writers. By intermixing food with its natural and cultural setting, “Truth Serum” goes to the heart of ethical eating. When one is intentional and mindful in making one’s food choices, Nye tells us, sorrow lifts in small ways.

Truth Serum

We made it from the ground-up corn in the old back pasture.
Pinched a scent of night jasmine billowing off the fence,   
popped it right in.
That frog song wanting nothing but echo?   
We used that.
Stirred it widely. Noticed the clouds while stirring.
Called upon our ancient great aunts and their long slow eyes   
of summer. Dropped in their names.   
Added a mint leaf now and then   
to hearten the broth. Added a note of cheer and worry.   
Orange butterfly between the claps of thunder?   
Perfect. And once we had it,
had smelled and tasted the fragrant syrup,   
placing the pan on a back burner for keeping,   
the sorrow lifted in small ways.
We boiled down the lies in another pan till they disappeared.
We washed that pan.

I think of how Salman Rushdie once described literature as a “no bullshit zone,” an essential antidote to the non-stop lying and gaslighting we get from various political figures. Nye has a place for those lies on her stove: she boils them down “in another pan till they disappeared.”

A recipe  that includes night jasmine, frog song, a mint leaf now and then, “a note of cheer and worry,” and an orange butterfly “between the claps of thunder”–and that is watched over by “ancient great aunts and their long slow eyes of summer”–will stand up to a lot of bullshit.

Jennifer’s book aims to do the same.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Lose Yourself Inside This Soft World

By Robin Bates | Published: June 15, 2024
Vincent Van Gogh, The Haystacks

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Sunday

As we move into the summer holidays, here’s a Mary Oliver poem reminding us that learning doesn’t have to stop at the end of the school year. Her mission in life, as she sees it is

to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.

Oliver talks about herself as a good scholar, taking lessons from nature’s daily presentations. And those presentations don’t have to be exceptional, fearful, dreadful or “very extravagant.” She can learn all she needs from “the ordinary,/ the common, the very drab.”

The poem reminds me of William Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned,” where the poet tells us to turn from our books and go for a walk in the woods. He informs us,

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Oliver’s use of “needle in a haystack” is interesting. Normally, we think that looking for such a needle is a hopeless task, but for Oliver, the haystack is a world made of light, meaning that every day she finds something in it that “kills me with delight.” “What I was born for” she essentially tells us, is to participate in the wonder of God’s creation. Prayers are made out of grass.

Mindful

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for
– to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

The phrase “what I was born for” may be taken from, and a response to, a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a nature-loving poet that I suspect Oliver admires. The phrase memorably shows up in “Spring and Fall” where Hopkins asks Margaret why she is weeping in the presence of autumn’s leaf fall: “Márgarét, áre you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving?” He concludes that she is thinking of her eventual death, observing, “It is the blight man was born for,/ It is Margaret you mourn for.”

Rather than focusing on the blight of death, however, Oliver focuses on “the untrimmable light of the world.” As she sees it, death won’t trim life’s candle because the world is bigger than any individual. Nor did Oliver ever have the experience that Hopkins predicts for Margaret: “Ah!  ás the heart grows older/ It will come to such sights colder.” Up to the very end, Oliver described herself as “a bride married to amazement,” a phrase that appears in “When Death Comes”:

 When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

And the conclusion:

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

There’s no doubt that Oliver would endorse an old rabbinical saying: “There’s only one question God will ask us when we meet him after death: ‘Did you enjoy my creation?’” As she advises in “In Blackwater Wood,”

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the times come to let it
go,
to let it go.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

The GOP Has Learned to Love Big Brother

By Robin Bates | Published: June 13, 2024
John Hurt as Winston Smith in 1984

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Friday

In a move that MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace compared to an arsonist returning to the scene of the crime, Donald Trump yesterday journeyed to Washington to address GOP Congress members for the first time since January 6. On that day, many of those now applauding Trump had cowered behind barricaded doors after he sent his supporters rampaging through the Capitol. As Wallace noted, while arsonists may enjoy revisiting their handiwork, normally the victims don’t themselves decide to celebrate the man who set their house on fire.

The GOP’s 180-degree turn—from condemning the attack to supporting Trump as he calls the insurrectionists “warriors” and promises to pardon them—recalls Winston Smith’s turnaround at the end of 1984. It’s always worth revisiting that passage because it reveals the lengths to which people will go to sell out their honor, integrity, dignity and core principles.

After relentless pressure from Big Brother, Winston finally surrenders, and his reward is a profound sense of relief. Orwell invokes Stalin’s notorious show trials, some of which ended with his victims embracing their own deaths, as he writes that Winston

was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.

Trump has provided GOP lawmakers with absolution for their previous sin of doubting him (although he will needle them about it from time to time), and for this they are profoundly grateful. The more they fought him, the more his current forgiveness feels like a gift. Whether we call this cult behavior or Stockholm Syndrome or brainwashing, we are witnessing it daily. The novel concludes with Winston drinking gin in a café and gazing up adoringly at Big Brother’s enormous face:

Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Winston at least has an excuse: either he embraces his authoritarian leader or rats chew off his face. What excuse for Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Nancy Mace, Mitch McConnell, and all those others who were at the Capitol that day?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

O Is for Dirty Oil Men

By Robin Bates | Published: June 12, 2024

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Thursday

Today is my father’s birthday—he died 11 years ago at 90—so in his honor I’m sharing one of his poems. Looking back, I’m so glad that he lived long enough to see the election of Barack Obama and somewhat relieved that he didn’t witness the rise of Donald Trump. He would have had poems for the occasion, however, including today’s poem on oil barons.

The poem appeared in his 1982 collection ABC of Radical Ecology, representing (you guessed it) the letter O. Even though we’re hearing of wonderful developments in the world of renewables—there are apparently days in California now when solar and wind-powered generators produce all the energy needed and then some—Big Oil has not given up the fight. If we increasingly hear about billionaires flocking to Trump, it’s because he making offers like the following:

Donald Trump dangled a brazen “deal” in front of some of the top US oil bosses last month, proposing that they give him $1 billion for his White House re-election campaign and vowing that once back in office he would instantly tear up Joe Biden’s environmental regulations and prevent any new ones, according to a bombshell new report.

According to the Washington Post, the former US president made his jaw-dropping pitch, which the paper described as “remarkably blunt and transactional,” at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago home and club.

In front of more than 20 executives, including from Chevron, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, he promised to increase oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, remove hurdles to drilling in the Alaskan Arctic, and reverse new rules designed to cut car pollution. He would also overturn the Biden administration’s decision in January to pause new natural gas export permits which have been denounced as “climate bombs”.

A follow-up story calculated that Trump’s deal would save the oil industry $110 billion in tax breaks.

This news comes a year after we learned that, as long ago as 1959, oil companies knew that burning fossil fuels was contributing to climate change and yet kept it secret. .

OZ in my father’s poem is ozone, and it’s worth noting that the international effort to protect and rebuild the ozone layer has been one of environmentalism’s more significant victories. (There’s still some ozone depletion but nothing like what we were suffering in the 1980s when this poem was written.) If the world accomplished this, maybe there’s hope yet.

Unless, that is, Trump and the dirty oil men get their way.

O Is a Dirty Oil Man

O look out for the
Oil Barons the Omnipotent
Outrageous and Obnoxious
Owners of the O so delicate O-
Zone

Officious
Oligarchs of Order and
Ordure they would
Obliterate
OZ
for an Ocean of
BUZZ
business busyness bossiness booziness

Olympian
Overbearing
Opinionated and
Omniversou they are also
Obsolte
(but they don’t know it yet)

O look out
for the
Oleaginous
Oil-powerful
(they think)

Lizards of Ooze

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

On Lear and Turning 73

By Robin Bates | Published: June 11, 2024
William Dyce, King Lear and the Fool in the Storm

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Wednesday

Today I turn 73, a number that has special significance for me since in 1973 I both married Julia and graduated from Carleton. To celebrate, I’m sharing this fun poem on retirement lessons taken from King Lear. Although I retired six years ago, David Wright’s poem applies to aging as well. To love the play (as I do) is to appreciate the poem, especially its humor.

Lear’s problem is that he wants to abandon the cares of being king while surrendering none of a king’s privileges. To engineer this, he has come up with a “still untested pension plan.” An insecure control freak, he also tries to engineer the love of his daughters, which backfires spectacularly.

For the first 13 lines of his poem, Wright suggests things that Lear could do, and not do, to make his post-retirement life better:

“Lines on Retirement, after Reading Lear”
By David Wright
for Richard Pacholski

Avoid storms. And retirement parties.
You can’t trust the sweetnesses your friends will
offer, when they really want your office,
which they’ll redecorate. Beware the still
untested pension plan. Keep your keys. Ask
for more troops than you think you’ll need. Listen
more to fools and less to colleagues. Love your
youngest child the most, regardless. Back to
storms: dress warm, take a friend, don’t eat the grass,
don’t stand near tall trees, and keep the yelling
down—the winds won’t listen, and no one will
see you in the dark. It’s too hard to hear
you over all the thunder.

At this point in the poem, however, Wright changes direction. “But you’re not Lear,” he tells us—or himself—and then suggests a different approach to the storm.

But you’re not
Lear, except that we can’t stop you from what
you’ve planned to do. In the end, no one leaves
the stage in character—we never see
the feather, the mirror held to our lips.
So don’t wait for skies to crack with sun. Feel
the storm’s sweet sting invade you to the skin,
the strange, sore comforts of the wind. Embrace
your children’s ragged praise and that of friends.
Go ahead, take it off, take it all off.
Run naked into tempests. Weave flowers
into your hair. Bellow at cataracts.
If you dare, scream at the gods. Babble as
if you thought words could save. Drink rain like cold
beer. So much better than making theories.
We’d all come with you, laughing, if we could.

Wright is reminding us that we’re all going to die. “No one leaves the stage in character,” he notes, with “the feather, the mirror held to our lips” referring to Lear having to acknowledge Cordelia’s death. The storm that is coming is the final storm so “don’t wait for the skies to crack with sun.”

Rather, learn to love whatever time you have left, even if you are experiencing some version of cataracts and huricanoes blowing, cracking, drenching and drowning with “sulphurous and thought-executing fires” (to quote from Lear’s storm-defying rant). Since Lear’s useless orders to the storm can be seen as an attempt to persuade himself he’s still in control, Wright suggests taking another tack. “Feel the storm’s sweet sting invade you to the skin,” he advises, “the strange, sore comforts of the wind.”

In fact, open yourself fully to old age. Instead of trying to get those around you to tell you exactly what you want to hear, “embrace your children’s ragged praise and that of friends.” In fact, forget about dignity:

Go ahead, take it off, take it all off.
Run naked into tempests. Weave flowers
into your hair. Bellow at cataracts.
If you dare, scream at the gods. Babble as
if you thought words could save. Drink rain like cold
beer.

The ”weaving flowers” is what Cordelia reports of her now-insane dad:

Alack, ’tis he! Why, he was met even now
 As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud,
 Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,
 With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckooflowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
 In our sustaining corn. 

Lear’s tragedy is that, by thinking he could have everything, he lost everything. Maybe that’s what Wright means by “making theories.” So since such planning doesn’t work—and wouldn’t even if Lear were far more careful than he was—then why not let it all hang out? Carl Jung, who feared that the figure of the wise old sage could become stultifying, talked about how an old fool could release new life energies. So did W.B. Yeats in his Crazy Jane poems. Wright may have this in mind when he says, “We’d  all come with you, laughing, if we could.”

I can assure my loved ones that, having reached 73, I’m not going to start running around naked in the rain and weaving flowers into my hair. But I also have no illusion that I am some fount of wisdom that everyone should revere. I’m just someone stumbling through old age trying to make sense of things. And working to appreciate “the storm’s sweet sting.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

An Ent Sighting in New Zealand

By Robin Bates | Published: June 10, 2024
The Northern Rātā or walking tree

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Tuesday

Here’s a fascinating article that I somehow stumbled upon, maybe through Spoutible (which I now use instead of Twitter). The headline says it all:

100-foot ‘walking tree’ in New Zealand looks like an Ent from Lord of the Rings — and is the lone survivor of a lost forest

The article goes on to elaborate:

An unusual northern rātā tree that looks like it is striding across an empty field has been crowned New Zealand’s Tree of the Year. The giant plant, which looks strikingly similar to an Ent from The Lord of the Rings, is centuries old.

The strange tree, which has been nicknamed the “walking tree” because it looks like it’s striding across a field, is a northern rātā (Metrosideros robusta) — one of New Zealand’s tallest flowering tree species that can live for up to 1,000 years.

After reading the story and looking at the photo, I had to go back and check out exactly how Tolkien’s Ents walk. Here’s what I found:

Holding the hobbits gently but firmly, one in the crook of each arm, Treebeard lifted up first one large foot and then the other, and moved them to the edge of the shelf. The rootlike toes grasped the rocks. Then carefully and solemnly, he stalked down from step to step, and reached the floor of the Forest. At once he set off with long deliberate strides through the trees, deeper and deeper into the wood, never far from the stream, climbing steadily up towards the slopes of the mountains. Many of the trees seemed asleep, or as unaware of him as of any other creature that merely passed by; but some quivered, and some raised up their branches above his head as he approached.

And then there’s this detail that caught my attention:

All the while, as he walked, he talked to himself in a long running stream of musical sounds.

This put me in mind of a book written by a biology professor here at Sewanee, David Haskell’s The Songs of the Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors. Looking at the different sounds connected with a variety of trees, Haskell describes such communication systems as the following, which involves a balsam fir:

This network of communication also includes leaves. There plant cells not only sniff the air to detect the health of neighbors but also use airborne odors to attract helpful caterpillar-eating insects. Sound plays a role in this communication. When a leaf senses the vibrations of a caterpillar’s moving jaws, those chewing sounds cause the leaf to mount a chemical defense against the insect. Leaf cells therefore integrate chemical and acoustic cues as they sense and respond to their surroundings.

The article mentioning that the rātā is “the lone survivor of a lost forest” leaves us to wonder whether it is searching for the lost Entwives. Treebeard recalls his last encounter with his own love:

Very fair she was still in my eyes, when I had last seen her, though little like the Entmaiden of old. For the Entwives were bent and browned by their labor; their hair parched by the sun to the hue of ripe corn and their cheeks like red apples. Yet their eyes were still the eyes of our own people.

Once, he says, the land of the Entwives

blossomed richly, and their fields were full of corn. Many men learned the crafts of the Entwives and honored them greatly; but we were only a legend to them, a secret in the heart of the forest. Yet here we still are, while all the gardens of the Entwives are wasted: Men call them the Brown Lands now.

That’s what the Ents discovered when they went in search. The passage may owe something to the fields of Flanders, scorched by World War I, which Tolkien witnessed first hand:

We crossed over Anduin and came to their land; but we found a desert: it was all burned and uprooted, for war had passed over it. But the Entwives were not there. Long we called, and long we searched; and we asked all folk that we met which way the Entwives had gone. Some said they had never seen them; and some said that they had seen them walking away west, and some said east, and others south. But nowhere that we went could we find them. Our sorrow was very great. Yet the wild wood called, and we returned to it. For many years we used to go out every now and again and look for the Entwives, walking far and wide and calling them by their beautiful names. But as time passed we went more seldom and wandered less far. And now the Entwives are only a memory for us, and our beards are long and grey.

So we now know what the Ents look like when they go out searching. The longing for a bygone era brings to mind a line by the World War I poet Wilfred Owen: “Now men will go content with what we spoiled.” But the wilderness that has been lost is, at least, recalled by elves in a song they have written about the Ents and Entwives. Here’s an excerpt:

Ent: When Winter comes, the winter wild that hill and wood shall slay;
When trees shall fall and starless night devour the sunless day;
When wind is in the deadly East, then in the bitter rain
I’ll look for thee, and call to thee; I’ll come to thee again!

Entwife: When Winter comes, and singing ends; when darkness falls at last;
When broken is the barren bough, and light and labor past;
I’ll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again:
Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain!

Both: Together we will take the road that leads into the West,
And far away will find a land where both our hearts may rest.’

See this both as a lament for the environment we have destroyed but perhaps, also, as a spur to reforestation efforts.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Dostoevsky’s Near Death Experience (NDE)

By Robin Bates | Published: June 9, 2024


Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Monday

A dear friend who, as an early Covid sufferer, had a near death experience, recently sent me a Scientific American article about NDEs. My friend spent a month on a ventilator and, at a moment when doctors had all but given up on her, she had vision that she can recall vividly to this day. I cite the article here because it draws on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot for a description.

Neuropsychologist Christof Koch notes that there’s uniformity amongst NDE reports:

NDEs are not fancy flights of the imagination. They share broad commonalities—becoming pain-free, seeing a bright light at the end of a tunnel and other visual phenomena, detaching from one’s body and floating above it, or even flying off into space (out-of-body experiences). They might include meeting loved ones, living or dead, or spiritual beings such as angels; a Proustian recollection or even review of lifetime memories, both good and bad (“my life flashed in front of my eyes”); or a distorted sense of time and space.

Koch says that NDEs can be both positive and negative:

The former receive all the press and relate to the feeling of an overwhelming presence, something numinous, divine. A jarring disconnect separates the massive trauma to the body and the peacefulness and feeling of oneness with the universe. Yet not all NDEs are blissful—some can be frightening, marked by intense terror, anguish, loneliness and despair.

One can see how narratives of heaven and hell have grown out of NDEs. Indeed, religious people often use them as confirmation. But as a scientist, Koch doesn’t search for metaphysical explanations and notes that there are other experiences—he calls them NDE-lite—that resemble NDEs. One of these involves epileptic fits, also known as complex partial seizures:

These fits partially impair consciousness and often are localized to specific brain regions in one hemisphere. They can be preceded by an aura, which is a specific experience unique to an individual patient that is predictive of an incipient attack. The seizure may be accompanied by changes in the perceived sizes of objects; unusual tastes, smells or bodily feelings; déjà vu; depersonalization; or ecstatic feelings.

Koch says that the last items on the list feature in what are clinically known as Dostoyevsky seizures because the author—who suffered from severe temporal lobe epilepsy—describes them memorably in The Idiot.The novel’s protagonist is the Christ-like Prince Myschkin:

During his epileptic fits, or rather immediately preceding them, he had always experienced a moment or two when his whole heart, and mind, and body seemed to wake up to vigor and light; when he became filled with joy and hope, and all his anxieties seemed to be swept away forever; these moments were but presentiments. As it were, of the one final second (it was never more than a second) in which the fit came upon him. That second, of course, was inexpressible. When his attack was over, and the prince reflected on his symptoms, he used to say to himself: …”What matter thought it be only disease, an abnormal tension of the brain, if when I recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life?…I would give my whole life for this one instant.

Koch says that neuroscience is now able to induce these ecstatic feelings, which Dostoevsky described 150 years ago, by

electrically stimulating part of the cortex called the insula in epileptic patients who have electrodes implanted in their brain. This procedure can help locate the origin of the seizures for possible surgical removal. Patients report bliss, enhanced well-being, and heightened self-awareness or perception of the external world. Exciting the gray matter elsewhere can trigger out-of-body experiences or visual hallucinations. This brute link between abnormal activity patterns—whether induced by the spontaneous disease process or controlled by a surgeon’s electrode—and subjective experience provides support for a biological, not spiritual, origin. The same is likely to be true for NDEs.

Just because science can duplicate the experience does not mean that they don’t have a mystical aspect, however, just as our possession of Richard Dawkins’s “God gene” doesn’t disprove the existence of God. All we know is that the more we delve into the natural world—including the brain—the more amazing it appears, a constant unfolding. Genius authors like Dostoevsky, whose creativity also defies scientific understanding, open up windows into this infinitely complex universe.

Sigmund Freud, who founded psychoanalysis, credited literature–especially the plays of William Shakespeare and the ancient Greek tragedians–as having provided him with his most profound discoveries. First literature paves the way, then the scientific mind scrambles to catch up.

Yet another argument for a liberal arts education.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed