Vincent Van Gogh, Autumn Landscape with Four Trees
Thursday
Here’s a poem to welcome in October. For Mary Oliver, autumn is a time to hunker down and reflect, a dramatic contrast with the expansive energies she associates with spring and summer.
Song for Autumn
Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for
the birds that will come–six, a dozen–to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
stiffens and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its long blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And in the evening
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.
Long-time reader and valued conservative critic of this blog William McKeachie has just alerted me to a very useful article on Heart of Darkness by William Bray, a retired U.S. Navy captain and the deputy editor-in-chief of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine. While Bray voices some of my own reservations (and Chinua Achebe’s) about Conrad’s one-dimensional depictions of Africans, he says that the novella “confers a special benefit to military leaders.” Such leaders, Bray contends, “will find Heart of Darkness a helpful and enjoyable aid in navigating the complex ethical and moral terrain of warfare in two important ways.”
First, the work acts as a cautionary tale about foreign incursions that are not firmly grounded upon higher principles. Second, it shows what can happen to armed servicemen and women when such is the case.
Before elaborating, Bray takes a slight detour into Kipling’s infamous poem “The White Man’s Burden,” talking about how good intentions can go horribly wrong when a country inserts its military into the affairs of others. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow owes his post to an aunt, who is thrilled with the idea of bringing European Christianity to darkest Africa, and this is Kurtz’s initial intent as well. Bray notes that America’s own version of this is its perceived “moral obligation to vanquish tyranny and advance democracy abroad.” He adds that “[b]oth successful foreign ventures and tragic misadventures have sprung from this well of idealism”:
The democracy promotion agenda has been derided by many on the left as neocolonialism and on the right as naïve adventurism — different in nature from the rapacious European 19th-century version but still either fundamentally corrupt or just plain stupid and wasteful.
I find both positions extreme and simplistic. Nevertheless, neither should be thoughtlessly rejected any more than one should uncritically hold faith in American exceptionalism.
Using the novella to probe the reasons we intervene leads Bray to Conrad’s second important insight. The author shows the negative impact of an ill-conceived or mercenary mission upon our servicemen and women, especially when that mission goes on for years. Higher ideals are important because troop morale rests “in no small way on belief in the purpose of the mission”:
When the troop members stop believing in it, they stop trusting the leaders that sent them into harm’s way, and — as happened in Vietnam — the mission suffers, and there are long-lasting political and societal consequences.
Thus, Heart of Darkness is an important caution about “misplaced or disingenuous foreign adventurism” that fails to command belief. Kurtz from this perspective operates as a cautionary tale:
Kurtz was not a criminal or a degenerate when he arrived in the Congo. He was an idealist who believed European civilization was a force for good in the world. He studied the native people and wrote a 17-page report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Kurtz was raised in high society and went to the best schools. It was not until he was long in the jungle and an unwitting tool of a most unholy engine of avarice that his “savagery” gained the upper hand. What happened to Kurtz? Marlow comes to learn that Kurtz had, at some point, scribbled “exterminate all the brutes!” at the end of his report to the Society.
Recall that Kurtz commits unspeakable atrocities while in the Congo. (We never learn what they are but an outward manifestation is human heads on stakes.) Bray uses the character to understand why American soldiers have gone astray, wondering how much to attribute to his own internal make-up, how much to the cynicism of Europe’s amoral plundering of African resources:
Did [Kurtz] yield to a temptation to go where most civilized Europeans dare not go — face-to-face with their own natural amoral savagery, a place where one can make oneself into a god to others and indulge in any desire? Going there and realizing one’s true nature is the ultimate horror — hence Kurtz’s final words, “the horror, the horror,” before dying in the hold of Marlow’s steamer. In Ken Burns’ 2017 documentary on the Vietnam War, novelist and war veteran Karl Marlantes (Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War) seemed to hold this view of human nature: “People talk a lot about how well the military turns kids into killing machines, and I’ll always argue that it’s just finishing school. What we do with civilization is that we learn to inhibit and rope in these aggressive tendencies, and we have to recognize them.” Conrad’s story is a journey into the savage wilderness of our own nature, where Marlow, while searching for Kurtz, discovers the lie “civilized” man indulges to justify the entire colonial project — a lie Mark Twain described as “the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”
Bray is mixed about whether America’s current engagements are turning its service members into Kurtzes. On the one hand, he believes that we are, in fact, finding ways to “inhibit and rope in these aggressive tendencies”:
There’s a case to be made that the U.S. military in recent decades has by many estimates prosecuted war (jus in bello) more justly than at any time in history. Smart weapons may minimize collateral damage, and military personnel observe fairly restrictive rules of engagement. Young military professionals today should not despair but be confident that — if put to the test in the most demanding combat environments — they will serve with dignity, honor, and moral courage.
In this way, Heart of Darkness is a good reminder why we have these rules. And why, to look at Donald Trump for a moment, it is so dangerous when he flouts the military command structure and celebrates and pardons alleged war criminals. I’m thinking especially of special operations chief Eddie Gallagher, who was regarded as “freaking evil” by fellow soldiers after having stabbed a captive just so he could get a photograph. According to USA Today,
Gallagher’s fellow SEALs became so disturbed with his killings of civilians that they tampered with his sniper rifle to make it less accurate, and would also fire warning shots at civilians to prevent Gallagher from shooting at them, according to prosecutors.
If Trump were Marlow, he would have contempt, not admiration, for Kurtz’s deathbed self-assessment where he condemns himself. Marlow is impressed by “the expression of some sort of belief; it had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth—the strange commingling of desire and hate.” Trump, by contrast, finds Gallagher tickling his sadistic fantasies.
Bray mentions his own experience with a Kurtz:
When I served in East Africa in 2006, we had to initiate a command investigation of a servicemember in charge of a remote camp accused of selling medical supplies to villagers on the local black market and of illegally hunting rare, protected game. He abused the power he had been given to exploit the local population. While he wasn’t cutting off heads, left alone and relatively unsupervised for months, did he yield in a lesser way to a temptation to make himself into a god like Kurtz had? I think so.
Achebe has legitimate quarrels with Conrad’s novel, but there is more to the work than cultural identity issues. Africans no less than westerners can learn from it how cynical power grabs hollow us out. As Bray concludes,
Marlow’s journey up the Congo and Kurtz’s journey into madness retain a metaphorical reach into modern warfare. In reading Heart of Darkness, military and national security professionals should always be mindful that Kurtz is not just a fictional character — he is a warning sign.
Further thought: I so happens that one of my tennis partners is a Kurtz with combat experience. Walter Kurtz, who was a second lieutenant and bronze star recipient in Vietnam before going on to become a judge, says that, in his experience, officers make a significant difference in how their men (and now women) behave. In other words, good leadership can hold at bay the inner heart of darkness.
Two years ago Julia and I retired to Sewanee to live with my mother, and last week she celebrated her 95th birthday, sometimes in small (socially-distanced) groups, sometimes via zoom. Shakespeare would approve of the love we feel for her as he hopes for such love from the “faire youth” to whom he addresses the first 126 sonnets. (Disclaimer: At 69, I do not lay claim to “faire youth” status.)
I can report that, while mother has multiple aches and pains and requires a cane, she continues to write her weekly poetry column for the local newspaper and is as sharp as ever. Sonnet 73 seems particularly applicable.
The poet describes himself as getting old, comparing himself to the time of year when “yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold.” The shaking may be palsy and the leaves the teeth that he is losing. The “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” meanwhile, are the monasteries that fell into decay after Henry VIII broke with Catholicism and seized their assets. Age is causing us all to fall apart.
Death, the poet acknowledges, is not far away, and he himself has been reduced to smoldering embers. This fact, however, just “makes thy love more strong,/ To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
I think my mother has many good years left and don’t anticipate her leaving us ere long. The knowledge that we are witnessing “the twilight of such day/As after sunset fadeth in the west,” however, does indeed make my love for her more strong. I have learned to treasure every moment.
Happy birthday, mama.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Having read most of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books before losing interest with Unseen Academicals, I’ve moved on to Anne Perry’s Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, which offer a different kind of pleasure. Thomas is a cop who joins and eventually heads England’s “Special Branch,” which handles highly sensitive cases of national security. Charlotte is his upper-class wife who often helps him solve his mysteries. Set in Victorian England, the series offers us anarchistic plots, international diplomacy, aristocratic malfeasance, and police corruption. In Treachery at Lancaster Gate (2016), which I’m currently reading, the plot reminds me only too much of our current politics.
The year is 1898 and five police have been killed in what at first appears to be an anarchist bombing. Anarchy does in fact loom large, but it’s more like the anarchy that we are currently witnessing from the Trump administration, the anarchy that emerges when faith in guardrail institutions is undermined.
In Lancaster Gate, Special Branch keeps such a close eye on anarchist organizations that it is fairly sure that they are not behind the bombing. This means it may be a revenge killing against bad cops. When Thomas and Charlotte begin to detect official corruption, they are horrified:
“Charlotte…” he protested, but the argument died before he could find words for it. What she was suggesting was extreme, but the breaking of trust in government was the beginning of anarchy. And it would not be the first time.
“Frighten people, make them angry,” she went on, “and they can be persuaded to do all kinds of things. If I were in danger and the police would not protect me, wouldn’t you do so yourself?”…
“I shall consider that very dangerous possibility,” he promised. “It is one of the many things we need to watch for. As you say, if you want to ruin a nation, begin by ruining their trust in the law. Then each man will take it into his own hands, and you have anarchy.”
At present we ourselves have a Department of Justice that is acting increasingly lawlessly. Assistant U.S. attorney for Massachusetts James Herbert recently (and courageously) summed it up in a letter written to the Boston Globe:
“From his misleading summary of the Mueller Report, to his selective intervention in cases against political allies of the president, to his accusation that victims such as George Floyd are being used as mere ‘props’ by those calling for racial justice, to his baseless claims about mail-in ballots, William Barr has done the president’s bidding at every turn,” he wrote.
“For 30 years I have been proud to say I work for the Department of Justice, but the current attorney general has brought shame on the department he purports to lead,” Herbert added.
In addition to Barr shenanigans, of course, we are watching court packing, political pressure on the health agencies, systematic undermining of the intelligence services, an assault on public education, corrupt officials selling off the nation’s public lands, and on and on. In the novel, everyone wants to blame swarthy men with East European accents, just as Trump and Barr want to blame Black Lives Matter protesters. As in many Perry novels, however, the real culprits are the people in positions of public trust who find scapegoats to deflect from their own corrupt agendas.
Perry only seems to be writing about the 19th century.
Further thoughts: Since writing this post, I’ve finished the novel and have seen more connections with present days events. The police, after having accidentally killed an innocent man in a drug raid gone bad, shift the blame to a drug addict, who is subsequently hanged. An unscrupulous lawyer with political ambitions, Josiah Abercorn, takes the police’s side, demonizing anarchists and immigrants the way that Trump demonizes immigrants and African Americans:
If Charlotte was correct and [Abercorn] was busy courting public support, he would find a great deal of it. The bombing had stirred up a powerful undercurrent of fear. Most people were frightened by the specter of uncertainty, disorder, and panic in the streets. There were more and more immigrants in London, and they were easy to identify….They were an easy focus for the fear that displayed itself as anger.
Was Abercorn feeding that fear, and hoping it would in turn feed him? It was despicable, but he certainly would not be the first, or the last, to use it for his own ends.
If justice does not prevail, then state anarchy is unleashed. One wishes that Trump’s GOP enablers would heed the words of Gracie Tellman, who tells us what happens when people responsible for upholding the law allow the Trumps of the world to get away with lawbreaking:
But someone what ’urts other people if ye’re the law, yer gotta draw a line an’ say, “If yer do this, then it’ll cost yer.” If yer don’t, then they know they can do anything they like, and yer won’t ever do anything.
I can’t say that Anne Perry is a great author–her novels are formulaic and suffer from too many plot holes–but I’m with her on her moral messages. Oh, and she hooks the reader with her characters.
Today is Yom Kippur, the day when Jews seek to atone for their sins against God and their fellow human beings, both publicly and privately. Grace Schulman’s Yom Kippur poem “Prayer” focuses on repairing relations with Arab Palestinians, as daunting a Yom Kippur task as one could imagine.
Because Jerusalem is not only Judaism’s most important city but also of special significance to Islam (the Dome of the Rock is one of its holiest shrines), Schulman moves beyond Judaic tribalism to see the promise of cross-cultural intermingling in the city. Yom Kippur becomes a chance to reflect upon what it would mean for “Jerusalem” to live up to its potential as a city of peace.
Schulman herself is wearing an Arab dress that points to commonalities between the contending parties:
My Arab dress has blue-green-yellow threads the shades of mosaics hand-wrought in Jerusalem
that both peoples prize, like the blue-yellow Dome of the Rock, like strung beads-and-cloves, said to ward off the drought in Jerusalem.
Schulman doesn’t ignore Israeli-Palestinian violence, mentioning car bombings. At the same time, however, she speaks of an Arab poet translating Hebrew verses, and her poem is dedicated to Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shadid Ali. According to Poetry Foundation,
Ali was noted as a poet uniquely able to blend multiple ethnic influences and ideas in both traditional forms and elegant free-verse.
Both she and Ali, she observes, tap into poetic legends, she to the 12th century Jewish-Spanish poet Judah Halevi, he to the 19th century Persian poet Ghalib. Their respective traditions yield rich images:
Stone lions pace the sultan’s gate while almonds bloom into images, Hebrew and Arabic, wrought in Jerusalem.
Such richness, she asserts, cannot be found in the violence (“No words, no metaphors, for knives that gore flesh”). Instead, she returns to images of woven threads, including spider webs and the colors of the rainbow. Pointing out that her first name means “chana” or “God’s love” in both Hebrew and Arabic, she prays, “May its meaning…at last be taught in Jerusalem.”
Prayer For Agha Shahid Ali By Grace Schulman
Yom Kippur: wearing a bride’s dress bought in Jerusalem, I peer through swamp reeds, my thought in Jerusalem
Velvet on grass. Odd, but I learned young to keep this day just as I can, if not as I ought, in Jerusalem.
Like sleep or love, prayer may surprise the woman who laughs by a stream, or the child distraught in Jerusalem.
My Arab dress has blue-green-yellow threads the shades of mosaics hand-wrought in Jerusalem
that both peoples prize, like the blue-yellow Dome of the Rock, like strung beads-and-cloves, said to ward off the drought in Jerusalem.
Both savor things that grow wild—coreopsis in April, the rose that buds late, like an afterthought, in Jerusalem.
While car bombs flared, an Arab poet translated Hebrew verses whose flame caught in Jerusalem.
And you, Shadhid, sail Judah Halevi’s sea as I, on Ghalib’s, course like an Argonaut in Jerusalem.
Stone lions pace the sultan’s gate while almonds bloom into images, Hebrew and Arabic, wrought in Jerusalem.
No words, no metaphors, for knives that gore flesh on streets where the people have fought in Jerusalem.
As this spider weaves a web in silence, may Hebrew and Arabic be woven taut in Jerusalem.
Here at the bay, I see my face in the shallows and plumb for the true self our Abraham sought in Jerusalem.
Open the gates to rainbow-colored words of outlanders, their sounds untaught in Jerusalem.
My name is Grace, Chana in Hebrew—and in Arabic. May its meaning, “God’s love,” at last be taught in Jerusalem.
Catherine Morland searching for Northanger Abbey’s dark secret
Friday
Knock on wood but Sewanee’s Covid program appears to be working. There is regular testing for students, faculty and staff, and the few students who have tested positive have been quarantined, along with everyone they have come in contact with. Various other measures are in place, and because the college and the town are one and the same (the entire town sits on college land), virtually everyone is following the Covid protocols. The very few people without masks I have seen are not connected with the college.
One of Sewanee’s compliance mechanisms reminds me of a strange passage in Northanger Abbey that has long startled Austen fans. The mechanism is a special app that allows students to report on their fellow students if they see them violating Covid rules. The passage is Henry Tilney rebuking Catherine after discovering that she, on the basis of her gothic novel obsession, suspects his father of having imprisoned or even killed his mother:
If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?
In one respect, the rebuke seems unobjectionable. Use your common sense, he tells her, reminding her that nothing in English culture, education, or legal history makes such behavior likely. Catherine, although thoroughly mortified, nevertheless draws the proper lesson from Tilney’s words and resolves on a more balanced view of human behavior in the future. While people in other countries may be prone to extremes,
among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad. Upon this conviction, she would not be surprised if even in Henry and Eleanor Tilney, some slight imperfection might hereafter appear; and upon this conviction she need not fear to acknowledge some actual specks in the character of their father, who, though cleared from the grossly injurious suspicions which she must ever blush to have entertained, she did believe, upon serious consideration, to be not perfectly amiable.
The discordant phrase is “voluntary spies,” which has more bite than one would anticipate in a discourse on English reasonableness. Being aware of what your neighbors are doing takes on a sinister air, a threat designed to ensure civilized behavior. The hint of menace is associated with the very gothic sensibility that Tilney is attacking.
Such “spying” is occurring in Sewanee as well. I’ve heard of at least one roommate turning in another for dropping her boyfriend off at an airport (she didn’t get out of the car but wasn’t even supposed to leave the campus) and of two students being sent home because they were seen on an elevator surveillance camera carrying MacDonald’s carryout. Such spying—or even just the threat of it—may be necessary as millions of dollars in college fees are at stake, not to mention the health and even the lives of those with whom the students come into contact. Still, as in Tilney’s speech, the idea of ratting out one’s fellows makes one uneasy.
Perhaps Tilney (and Austen herself?) feels suffocated by his closed society and momentarily kicks out against it. After all, versions of the spying he mentions occur in all of Austen’s novels. (How else do the Bennets know that Bingley is worth 5000 a year?) It doesn’t help that sometimes the spies get their information wrong: Tilney’s father at first hears from sources that Catherine’s family is wealthier than they actually are and then poorer, leading him to first welcome her to his home and then boot her out. In his rebuke, Tilney essentially tells Catherine that his father didn’t kill his mother because the spy network would have reported it if he had.
Framing social gossip as spying, then, links General Tilney to the gothic novel after all, even if he isn’t a murderer. Spying plays to the paranoia that (according to scholar Tania Modleski) is at the heart of the genre. She argues that dictatorial patriarchs like the general drove women to the genre, who saw themselves in the persecuted and imprisoned heroines. While gothics may mislead Catherine in one respect, symbolically they give her a fairly good picture of how the “not perfectly amiable” general made his wife’s life a living hell.
If a fear of neighborhood spies keeps General Tilney from actually killing his wife, however, then there’s something to be said for spying. Similarly, if it keeps students from engaging in dangerous behavior so that the school remains open, then who can argue? Nevertheless, one understands Tilney’s underlying exasperation with the practice. Many of Sewanee’s students undoubtedly feel the same.
When I learned that Kamala Harris’s first name means “lotus” in Sanskrit (associated with Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of divine energy), just for fun I went searching for lotus poems and recalled one my father wrote. In Hindu mythology, the lotus flower is often regarded as a fertility symbol, associated with life-giving waters, and that is how it is depicted in a poem in Scott Bates’s ABC of Radical Ecology.
The poem’s title—”While I on the Other Hand Is for Isis (And for Iesus and Ishtar and Ignatz and All Those Other Infinities)”—requires some explanation. My father, an immensely learned man, was fascinated by erotic symbols as they appear in different mythological traditions. Drawing on the work of Joseph Campbell and many others, he saw cosmic significance attached to male and female principles. When these forces achieve union, they achieve an ecstatic bliss where time stops, a kind of infinity. We all long for this sacred union.
Isis is the Egyptian mother goddess, Ishtar the Mesopotamian mother goddess, and many early Christians regarded Jesus as a fertility god along the lines of Dionysus. (I’m not sure about Ignatz, since the brick-throwing mouse in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat cartoon strip doesn’t make sense here.) In his collection, my father pairs I with H (that explains “on the other hand”), with H standing for “the Hero from Inner Space.” A male seeker along the lines of Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces, H “has to go/across the perilous bridge below” to reach the secret valley of the self. (For balance, I have included that poem following the Isis poem.)
In the I poem, Isis sits upon the sacred lotus (that’s for you, Kamala Harris) floating in the middle of the Nile. The epigraph, taken from the D. H. Lawrence novella The Man Who Died, refers to the resurrected Jesus turning his back on self-denying versions of Christianity and impregnating a priestess of Egypt’s fertility goddess. The Jesus in the novella has been emptied out by too much self-sacrifice and needs the healing that she represents. “I am risen” has a sexual double meaning, and their union represents the coming together of sky and earth, individual and community, self and other.
Put another way, Isis is the valley that the hero seeks. The letters featured in the poem are all, with the exception of the last one, perfectly symmetrical and therefore represent balance and completeness. The U opens up as a flower and the S, representing the goddess’ serpentine smile, is a wild card, a final mystery that eludes us.
How does this apply to “Lotus” Harris? She certainly balances out the Biden ticket, a (relatively) young woman of color balancing out an older white patrician, a life force that will rejuvenate this representative of the old order. While she doesn’t exactly have a serpentine smile—rather a boisterous laugh—she offers the hope of renewal for a land that has been laid waste by the forces of greed, self-absorption, illness, and environmental devastation.
Hopefully, voters will undertake pilgrimages to the voting booth, as to a shrine, to pay her homage in the upcoming weeks.
While I on the Other Hand Is for Isis
(and for Iesus and Ishtar and Ignatz and All Those Other Infinities)
“I am risen!” said Jesus making love
to the Priestess of Isis…--Lawrence
I
is
the Goddess
sitting on a lotus
floating on a lotus
in the middle of the Nile
X
is her legs crossed
O
is her leaf
U
is her flower
the Love of her Life
and
S
is
her serpentine
smile
H Is the Hero from Inner Space
H sits serenely in his chair like Taliesin in mid-air among the Seven Serpents of the Way H dreams of how he has to go across the perilous bridge below in the midst of the mountain of A to the towers of M the mysterious home of the mighty Moon Mother of A and how he must play on his mandolin to lull to sleep the ferocious Djinn who is guarding the tree with the wonderful N in the secret valley of WE I
That Breonna Taylor’s family is receiving a $12 million settlement and the promise of police reform following her wrongful shooting by Louisville police is in part a testimony to Black Lives Matters protests and other instances of public pressure. Without them, we might not even know her name. With that in mind, I return to last week’s post about Terry Pratchett and police brutality.
The fantasy author shows that even a good cop like Commander Vimes occasionally feels the urge to abuse his authority. While applauding Patchett’s popular character for resisting “the Summoning Dark,” I omitted mentioning the role that concerned citizens and his own colleagues play in keeping him on the straight and narrow (to borrow an image from Pilgrim’s Progress).
Vimes is trying to maintain peace between his city’s trolls and dwarfs, who have an enmity stretching back centuries. At one point, as he starts to solve a set of dwarf murders, he gets so close to the truth that the dwarfs responsible set out to kill his wife and child. No longer capable of balanced judgment, he starts hearing from his darkest impulses.
Pratchett conveys this through switching to italics in the midst of Vimes’s interior monologues. Earlier we encounter the Summoning Darkness’ point of view in italics, so whenever we encounter these italics, we have a sense of the commander’s interior battle. You’ll see what I mean in a moment.
First, here’s the world seen from the vantage point of Vimes’s dark side. At the moment, his inner urge towards violence is encountering resistance from his ethical center:
It was still nighttime in the city of endless rain. It was never not nighttime. No sun rose here.
The creature lay coiled in its alley.
Something was seriously wrong. It had expected resistance. There was always resistance, and it always overcame it. But even now, when the invisible bustle of the city had slowed, there was no way iin. Time and again it’d be sure that it had found a point of control, some tide of rage it could use, and time and again it’d be slammed back here, into this dark alley where the gutters overflowed.
That was not the usual kind of mind. The creature struggled. But no mind had ever beaten it yet. There was always a way.
And here is Vimes right after having saved his wife and son (with the help of his wife’s pet dragons) from the homicidal dwarfs—who, because they ingest slow-working poison before taking on their mission, resemble suicide bombers. Note how he prays for any excuse to use homicidal force in return:
Could they have been that stupid? he wondered. A dead wife? A dead child? Could they think that would mean for one moment that I’d stop? As it is, when I catch up with whoever ordered this, and I will, I hope there’s someone there to hold me back.
They will burn for what they did.
And a little later:
They shall bur—no! They shall be hunted down to any hole they hide in and brought back to face justice. Unless (oh please!) they resist arrest…
Fortunately for Vimes, his society has enlightened citizens like the dwarf Brag Bashfullsson, who insists on being present when Vimes questions a suspect. He wants to make sure that Vimes doesn’t descend into barbarism, as America did when it waterboarded terrorism suspects following 9-11. Bashfullsson provides a healthy check on Vimes’s interrogations and, because he is there the entire time, he can clear Vimes of suspicion when the suspect dies of a (non-police caused) heart attack:
Commander Vimes, I will swear that Helmclever was treated with nothing but concern and courtesy while he was here. And perhaps with more kindness from you than a dwarf might have a right to expect. His death is not on your hands.
Bashfullsson also draws a distinction between the religion of the dwarfs and the fanatics who espouse it;
“You know, your religion really messes people up,” said Vimes.
“Not in comparison to what they do to one another,” said Bashfullsson, calmly folding the dead dwarf’s hands across his chest. “And it is not a religion, Commander. Tak wrote the World and the Laws, and then He left us. He does not require that we think of Him, only that we think.
Vimes is not out of the woods yet, however. When he finally confronts the dwarfs who ordered the raid on his home, he is filled with righteous fury and is on the verge of killing every one of them. While it’s one thing to kill the guards who are trying to kill him, however, the four old men he encounters are a different matter.
If he refrains from butchering them, it is partly because his internal checks kick in and partly because a fellow cop (a werewolf, who must struggle to overcome her own savage tendencies) jumps on him. The two of them process it afterwards:
All that anger, all that red-hot rage, had flowed out of him in a torrent, without thought. “I killed those damn soldiers…”
“Most of them, sir,” said Angua cheerfully. “And there’s a couple of miners who got in the way who’ll be aching for months.”…
It was all coming back to Vimes now. He wished it wasn’t…
“I remember those old dwarfs,” he said. They were cowering like little maggots. I wanted to smash them…”
“You resisted for almost four seconds, sir, and then I brought you down,” said Angua.
“And that was a good thing, was it?” said Vimes.
“Oh, yes. It’s why you’re still here, Commander,” said Bashfullsson, appearing from behind a stalagmite. “I’m glad to see you up and about again. This is a historical day! And you still have a soul, it appears! Isn’t that nice?”
The soul is at stake when police are tempted by their dark urges. And because even the most responsible can succumb, they need protocols, body cameras, transparency, and accountability. They need civilian oversight (like Bashfullsson’s) and timely intervention by fellow cops (like Angua’s), who themselves must be trained to step forward and then be protected if a colleague crosses the line. If Derek Chauvin’s follow cops had brought him down, George Floyd would be alive today.
Unfortunately, in America right now we have far too many police who regard people of color the way that Discworld police see dwarfs and trolls. It used to be worse, just as, in Pratchett’s earlier novel Night Watch, there are the Irregulars, a secret service that routinely tortures those who come into its hands. Vimes, sent back in time, helps clean that up, but Thud! lets us know there is still work to be done.
Of course, exacerbating our situation is a president who cheers on the Summoning Darkness while undermining the rule of law. In Donald Trump’s mind, if checks are abandoned and chaos is unleashed, those with privilege and power can reassert their domination.
It’s a story as old as humankind.
Further thought: Although, in many ways, Pratchett is an anti-Tolkien (he celebrates urban diversity and finds good in trolls and goblins), Vimes’s struggle with the Summoning Darkness is very much like Frodo’s struggle with the ring. Vimes’s humanity saves him in the final showdown–had he slain the four old dwarfs in his fury, he might never have recovered–and Frodo’s former humanity toward Gollum pays off in the final battle.
The New York Times memorably dedicated its front page to Covid victims when the official death count went to 100,000. When we hit 200,000, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death dominated the headlines.
To be fair, the Times apparently had something planned for the Covid nightmare whereas Ginsburg’s passing was startling “news,” which is the bread and butter of journalism. How newsworthy is something we’ve seen coming for months, no matter how horrible? The Times’ choice put me in mind of an image in John Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”
I’ve applied the poem in the past to climate change denialism and am repurposing that post here. Donne talks about two kinds of people, those who focus on immediate cataclysm and those who take the long view. Most of us, when we are dying or facing a long separation, engage in “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests.” We emotionally react when we encounter a “moving of th’ earth,” whether figurative or literal. Ginsburg’s death was a moving of the earth.
To the Trump administration, which has been trying desperately to use “violence in Democrat cities” to get our minds off of its disastrous handling of Covid, the Ginsburg death must have seemed heaven-sent.
Neither Covid nor climate change have gone away, however. In terms of the poem, they are comparable to Donne’s “trepidation of the spheres” (movement of the stars). The 17th century saw such movement as having a profound effect on worldly events. Scholar Alexander Cummins, in The Starry Rubric: Sevententh Century English Astrology and Magic, shows how seriously experts took it. But because it didn’t have immediate ramifications, it seemed “innocent.” Here are Donne’s opening stanzas:
As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say The breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move; ‘Twere profanation of our joys To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears, Men reckon what it did, and meant; But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent.
In other words, “virtuous men” (Socrates would be a good example) see the deep workings of the universe and therefore are not unduly put out by their own passing. Likewise, to use the poem’s drama, Donne urges his wife to accept their physical separation because they have a spiritual bond that transcends time and place. It’s as though they are joined by a fine golden thread that most eyes cannot see, or like a compass that transcribes a circle, with the planted foot rotating in union with the wandering outer pole.
Having used the poem to make my point, however, I now have to qualify it. For all the administration’s attempts to normalize Covid deaths, or for that matter climate change, both are causing earthquakes in the lives of thousands. It does not take finely trained eyes to see packed hospitals or West Coast wildfires. The evidence is there for all to see.
A better analogy is those who refuse to acknowledge what is directly in front of their eyes. Orwell’s 1984 describes those who see only what their leader tells them to see.
