My brother David just reminded me of the following Douglas Adams passage (from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish), which is always relevant but never more so than now as U.S. Covid deaths pass the 150,000 mark, the result of wretched governance. For those who think of politicians as lizards, then it’s important to also acknowledge that not all lizards are the same:
[Ford said], “On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur. “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going in for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”
If, in 2016, more people had worried about the wrong lizard getting in, then Hillary Clinton would currently be orchestrating America’s response to the pandemic, tens of thousands Covid victims would still be alive, and schools would probably be opening on time. The wrong lizard could get in again if people don’t turn out and vote for Joe Biden.
This is no time for purity tests. The lizard we vote in will make all the difference.
Joy Reid, MSNBC’s newest primetime host, recently made a literary reference that has changed the way I see a certain Republican senator. South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, she observed, has been playing Renfield to Donald Trump’s Dracula.
Graham is noteworthy for his dramatic change from tough Trump critic to leading Trump sycophant, leading some to wonder whether Trump or Putin is blackmailing him. Or perhaps (this would be a more plausible interpretation), he has sold his soul to ward off a rightwing primary challenge. Whatever the case, the senator who once charted an independent course now delivers up daily versions of Renfield’s call-out to the Count:
I am here to do Your bidding, Master. I am Your slave, and You will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped You long and afar off. Now that You are near, I await Your commands, and You will not pass me by, will You, dear Master, in Your distribution of good things?
When he says this, Renfield has momentarily escaped from his insane asylum. In order to become closer to his master, he has become a bloodsucker, starting with flies before moving up to spiders, birds and rats.
Come to think of it, Vice President Mike Pence might be a better candidate for Trump’s Renfield given that he even mimics Trump’s tiny movements. Graham is not far behind, however. While the president is America’s premier bloodsucker, making free use of “other people’s money” and accomplishments, Pence and Graham now leach off of Trump. They are learning their craft from a master.
In Stoker’s novel, Renfield has a moment where he comes to his senses and tries to escape the vampire. Unfortunately, he suffers a version of the fate that is metaphorically visited upon former Trump associates who try to break free:
When I came to Renfield’s room I found him lying on the floor on his left side in a glittering pool of blood. When I went to move him, it became at once apparent that he had received some terrible injuries; there seemed none of that unity of purpose between the parts of the body which marks even lethargic sanity. As the face was exposed I could see that it was horribly bruised, as though it had been beaten against the floor—indeed it was from the face wounds that the pool of blood originated. The attendant who was kneeling beside the body said to me as we turned him over:—
“I think, sir, his back is broken. See, both his right arm and leg and the whole side of his face are paralyzed.”
In other words, everything Dracula touches dies.
Trump has maintained control over the GOP as Dracula does over his victims. While he may not be able to glide between the bars of a maniac’s cell, his tweets have had their own brutal efficacy.
Many of us are praying that Joe Biden proves to be our Van Helsing, putting a stake in the monster who has been draining America of its lifeblood. Dracula’s enablers must be dealt with as well.
Edward Henry Potthast, Children at Play on the Beach
Wednesday
Our family had to cancel a planned visit to Myrtle Beach this year, which means that Julia and I didn’t get to spend a week with our eight-year-old grandson. To vicariously experience the sea, I turn to a luminescent poem by Sewanee English chair Jennifer Davis Michael. It appears in her recently published chapbook Let Me Let Go.
Opening the Hand
I don’t recall my first view of the beach: my terror at the blank expanse of sand and that tremendous, always-moving water. No silent-movie footage of me bolting for the motel’s sliding door or burying my face in my father’s scratchy neck. But there’s a photo of my hooded self, snug, smiling in the nest he dug for me: a tiny sea enclosed by shoveled walls --infinity made comprehensible.
I do remember two or three years later, he took me in the surf up to his waist and taught me how to float there, on my back. The water chilled my ears and muted sounds, so that I felt the waves but didn’t hear them. His hand stayed on my shoulder until a gust of wind blew off his cap and he lunged, letting go of me. Just then an upstart wave, whipped up by that same wind, broke over me. I choked and came up crying, cursing him in the wordless way of children, but he was there. He’d never been away. And yet, in that split-second of emptiness, by opening his hand, he’d let me feel the sea.
The poem takes me back to an unforgettable moment at Edisto Beach when I was six or so. The tide was out and I was trailing my father by some distance through the shallow surf when I hit a dip. Suddenly I found myself totally submerged and thrashing around. Somehow I made it to the surface and regained my footing, but I carry that moment of panic with me to this day.
As Jennifer would observe, in that “split-second of emptiness” I experienced the sea. To be sure, we have drawn different lessons. In her case, she thinks of her father as always being there for her, even when he seems to have let her go. My father, by contrast, seemed impossibly far away. He never saw my sudden immersion, and I lacked the language to convey the trauma. I was like the “country husband” in the John Cheever story of that name, unable to convey to those close to me my near-death experience.
But in another way, the experiences were the same. Both of us were raised in protective environments—lovingly constructed nests “enclosed by shoveled walls”—only to experience a reality shock. I love the movement in the poem from not hearing the waves (when her father is holding her) to suddenly experiencing them in a new and visceral way. One of life’s gusts hits her father unexpectedly and he lets his daughter go, thereby allowing her a momentary glimpse of life on her own. The world never feels quite the same again.
That’s why, though we may forget all the surrounding circumstances, that moment endures.
Henri Matisse, The Reader, Marguerite Matisse (1906)
Tuesday
Guardian book editor Sian Cain has a fascinating article in which she turns to literature to bolster her climate change decision not to have children. Given the predicted horrors of global warming, she regards bringing more people into the world as irresponsible, but this viewpoint is so fraught that she needs literature to help her sort it out.
Cain gives a stark view of the world the next generation can expect:
If my baby were to be born today, they would be 10 years old when a quarter of the world’s insects could be gone, when 100 million children are expected to be suffering extreme food scarcity. My child would be 23 when 99% of coral reefs are set to experience severe bleaching. They would be 30 – my age now – when 200 million climate refugees will be roaming the world, when half of all species on Earth are predicted to be extinct in the wild. They would be 80 in 2100, when parts of Australia, Africa and the United States could be uninhabitable.
We are in the middle of a mass extinction, the first caused by a single species. There are 7.8 billion of us, on a planet that scientists estimate can support 15 billion humans living as the average US citizen does today. And we know that the biggest contribution any individual living in affluent nations can make is to not have children. According to one study, having one fewer child prevents 58.6 tons of carbon emissions every year; compare that with living car-free (2.4 tons), avoiding a transatlantic return flight (1.6), or eating a plant-based diet (0.82). Another study said it was almost 20 times more important than any other choice an environmentally minded individual could make.
Cain admits this is not the whole story, which is why she turns to literature. At first glance, however, literature seems to come up short:
Few novels have attempted to tell us what to do in the face of climate catastrophe. Amitav Ghosh has called this “a crisis of imagination.” As Richard Powers writes in his 2018 novel The Overstory, “The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
Nevertheless, Cain mentions some novels that are attempting to grapple with the question. In Lydia Millet’s Children’s Bible (2020), for instance,
kids are contemptuous of adults for their lack of action before the collapse of society. “It was so sudden, they said. They’d all been told there was more time. Way more. It was someone else’s fault for sure.” One of the children, Jack, finds a decaying Bible, and in it, a way of making sense of his disintegrating world. When an apocalyptic storm hits the US, the book tells him what to do: build an ark.
Children play an important emotional role in apocalyptic climate fiction by raising the stakes of survival. Cain says that sometimes they lend significance to the narrative by their presence, sometimes by their absence. A number of her books approach the issue from an adult perspective:
But even when the future seems like no place for a child, there is always room for them in fiction set at the end of the world: they are emotional ammunition, a reminder of bigger stakes to come. In Lauren Beukes’s upcoming Afterland, a global pandemic that kills only men has led to a “global reprohibition”; Cole, a mother on the run with her mysteriously still-living teenage son, thinks: “When there aren’t going to be any more kids, you want to hold on to their childhood for as long as you can. There must be a German word for that. Nostalgenfreude. Kindersucht.”
Perhaps it is kindersucht we feel when we read novels like The Children of Men by PD James, Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, or JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, in which children are conspicuous by their presence or absence. In Ballard’s 1962 novel, set in a submerged London, “the birth of a child had become a comparative rarity, and only one marriage in 10 yielded any offspring … the genealogical tree of mankind was systematically pruning itself.” In Margaret Atwood’s 1977 short story “When It Happens”, a middle-aged woman makes preparations to flee her family home due to an unnamed threat, and her gaze falls on a family photo: “The children when they were babies. She thinks of her girls now and hopes they will not have babies; it is no longer the right time for it.” In Jenny Offill’s Weather, the narrator watches her son play and recalls a past conversation with an environmentalist friend: “I asked her once what I could do, how I could get him ready. It would be good if he had some skills, she said. And of course, no children.”
Other authors take up the next generation’s point of view:
Children become resigned to not having the future they should have had; in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, when the father says: “You are not the one who has to worry about everything,” his son counters, “I am the one.” And in Season Butler’s Cygnet, a teenager mopes around an island populated only by pensioners waiting out the end as their homes slowly crumble into the sea: “I think about the kids that people my age are having, or will start having soon. Life is going to be so boring for them. Not just because the world will have gone completely to shit by then and there won’t be much of anything left, but because their parents are going to talk constantly about how the world used to be.”
Cain looks at non-fiction as well as fiction, observing as she does so that many of these works are written by parents. She acknowledges that having children gives their climate activism a particular urgency:
[I]t is remarkable how many of these authors suggest that having a child is a hopeful gesture, a sign of one’s investment in the future. [Uninhabitable Earth author David] Wallace-Wells has said having children “is a reason to fight now”. [Notes from an Apocalypse author Mark] O’Connell writes that his son’s birth is a dilemma because “the last thing the world needed, after all, was more people in it, and the last thing my hitherto nonexistent person needed was to be in the world”; by the end, he has a second child, and a “radically increased stake in the future.”
Cain doesn’t so much disagree with these authors as note that it’s a vexed question whether or not go childless. As she herself faces intense pressure for her views, she looks to literature for support:
Ever since my partner and I concluded that we wanted to be child-free, I have looked to books for positive examples of fulfilling and rewarding lives lived without children. The closest I have found have been eccentric spinsters and ambivalent parents, in a long line from Doris Lessing and DH Lawrence, Barbara Pym and Rachel Cusk. There are countless mothers who find their intellectual pursuits strangled by their children and absent husbands (most recently, Fleishmann Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet).
She is reassured, however, that recent works are more likely to feature characters who shrug off the traditional childbearing expectations:
But recently, as millennials are coming of age as both prospective parents and as authors, characters are questioning the status quo. “Fuck all those childbearers and their ‘fulfilling’ lives, never getting to have adventures like mine,” thinks the 38-year-old narrator of Melissa Broder’s The Pisces, for whom the prospect of children is “like something mildly distasteful: a piece of onion I would prefer not to put on my plate.” “Why bother having a kid when the world’s going to hell anyway?” wonders one character in Ottessa Moshfegh’s A Year of Rest and Relaxation. “Why do you want children?” the narrator of Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar asks her boyfriend. “He shrugs. ‘So we can be like everybody else.’” In Amina Cain’s Indelicacy, a woman objects to her husband’s expectation that they will someday have children. “Why is it necessary for everyone to think of it, as if there were no other choice?” she rages at a friend.
Cain ultimately finds a silver lining—a very thin one, to be sure—in climate change: it can get us to rethink how to live a meaningful life. Maybe childbearing, important as it is for many, isn’t our only option. In the end, Cain wants us to tolerate those who live another way:
The climate crisis has presented an opportunity to rebrand being child-free, once the greatest taboo, into the ultimate altruistic act. At the same time, parenthood is framed as the ultimate investment in a better future. But choosing to have children is neither inherently good nor selfish, and the same goes for being child-free. We must challenge the orthodoxy that says choosing to live one way is a criticism of another. Just this week comes a new novel by Emma Gannon, Olive, which centers on a woman in her 30s who has chosen to be child-free; Gannon herself has spoken about being made to feel guilty for her choice. What we need instead is a quiet revolution, a complete reappraisal of what we deem to be a meaningful life.
As a Guardian book editor, it makes sense that Cain would replace children with books:
I, for one, will continue to turn to books, where I find reassurance in the strangest of places. In one tiny strand of The Overstory, Ray and Dorothy, a couple who have spent thousands on fertility treatments, finally decided to move on. “In place of children, then, books,” Powers writes. “Ray likes to glimpse the grand project of civilization ascending to its still-obscure destiny. He wants only to read on, late into the night, about the rising quality of life, the steady freeing of humanity by invention, the breakout of know-how that will finally save the race.”
I fully support Cain’s decision not to have children, even though I can’t imagine my own life without my two sons and their five children. But I worry about their future in just the ways the Cain worries. A leap of faith is required but, as we are seeing from far too many of our leaders these days, such leaps can far too easily become magical thinking.
Literature is a great forum for grappling with these issues, however.
As I watch Donald Trump trying to scare “suburban housewives” (his twitter phrase) with racist visions of invading black hoards and plummeting property values, I see him returning to his realtor and slumlord roots, using the tried-and-true tactics that made his father a rich man. Fred Trump was held accountable by the Justice Department for his his racist housing practices and discriminatory rental policies, however, whereas Attorney General William Barr fully endorses Trump’s program. The presence of paramilitary troops is meant to convince Whites that there is a corresponding Black threat.
Meanwhile, Covid deaths continue to rise and the economy to crater under Trump’s management. Unless the Republican Senate stops dawdling, as many as 23 million renters may face eviction by the end of September (this according to the COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project).
Not all landlords are like the Trumps, of course—many themselves face economic ruin—but this seems a good time to share Langston Hughes’s “Ballad to a Landlord.” When a black homeowner pushes against his negligent landlord, he quickly learns who has access to institutions of power, including the police, the press, and the judicial system.
The poem is dated in that those who feel threatened by men of color no longer shout out, “Police! Police! Come and get this man.” Instead, they use their cellphones.
Ballad of a Landlord
Landlord, landlord, My roof has sprung a leak. Don't you 'member I told you about it Way last week?
Landlord, landlord, These steps is broken down. When you come up yourself It's a wonder you don't fall down.
Ten Bucks you say I owe you? Ten Bucks you say is due? Well, that's Ten Bucks more'n I'll pay you Till you fix this house up new.
What? You gonna get eviction orders? You gonna cut off my heat? You gonna take my furniture and Throw it in the street?
Um-huh! You talking high and mighty. Talk on-till you get through. You ain't gonna be able to say a word If I land my fist on you.
Police! Police! Come and get this man! He's trying to ruin the government And overturn the land!
Copper's whistle! Patrol bell! Arrest. Precinct Station. Iron cell. Headlines in press:
MAN THREATENS LANDLORD TENANT HELD NO BAIL JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL
Other timely Hughes poems:
Here’s one that gets straight to the emotional core of current anxieties. It’s short and sweet and makes playful use of parentheses. Hughes is a master at understatement when it comes to life and death issues, avoiding melodrama with a dash of stoic irony:
Little Lyric (of Great Importance)
I wish the rent Was Heaven sent
His use of the cosmopolitan “ennui,” meanwhile, contrasts with–and thereby accentuates–the numbing actuality of grinding poverty:
I’ve written a couple of times about Jesus’s “pearl of great price,” found in today’s Gospel reading (Matthew 13:44-46). It provides the climactic image for a Hilda Doolittle poem and a pivotal allusion for a fine William Cowper meditation upon truth. (See the links at the end of today’s post for the essays.) Today I turn to an R. S. Thomas poem, which compares it to the sun breaking through clouds.
Jesus’s metaphors for the process of spiritual exploration include a field containing buried treasure as well as the pearl:
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.
Thomas, a Welsh Anglican priest with a passion for nature, continues Jesus’s search for metaphors:
The Bright Field
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Comparing the sunlight to the pearl and the field is a nice touch, and Williams brings in another light image with Moses’s burning bush. The epiphanic moment when God spoke directly to Moses adds a directive to Jesus’s image: God, after all, directed his servant to lead his people out of bondage to the promised land, while Williams hears the call to focus on eternity.
It doesn’t matter how transitory the moment seems. Before the moment, we are hurrying toward some receding future ir longing for some imagined past. What appears as a turning aside comes to clarify our purpose in life.
Yesterday Lafayette Square, today Portland, tomorrow maybe Chicago. Donald Trump is making sure that his secret and unmarked federal troops are stirring things up in what is the 2020 version of sending troops to the southern border (2018) to intercept non-existent migrant caravans. (All talk of the caravans disappeared immediately after the election.) These troops remind me of the outlaws in B. Traven’s 1927 novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
While few people know the novel, many know the line delivered by Gold Hat, the head of a gang posing as mounted police. Desiring the weapons of three gold prospectors, he accuses them of hunting without a license and possessing unregistered firearms. This result in the following interchange, which concludes with X-rated profanity that doesn’t appear in the film:
“All right,” Curtin shouted back. “If you are the police, where are your badges? Let’s see them.”
“Badges, to god-damned hell with badges! We have no badges. In fact, we don’t need badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges, you god-damned carbron and chinga tu madre!“
In the film, the Bogart character Dobbs is involved in the interchange:
Dobbs: “If you’re the police, where are your badges?” Gold Hat: “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”
Gold Hat ultimately kills Dobbs and then himself is tracked down by actual police and executed.
Our own unmarked police are no more willing to reveal their true identities as they teargas and club non-violent protesters and sweep up random people from the streets. We now know that at least some of them are U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents, bringing with them their questionable and often violent behavior from the Mexican border into the heart of America’s cities. According to former solicitor general Neal Katyal (on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC program), they have no more authority than the novel’s outlaws to exert police power, which is reserved for the states. Conservative Chief Justice William Renquist reasserted this principle in a 2000 ruling.
The disregard for local authority demonstrated by the Acting Head of Homeland Security–himself a man not confirmed by the Senate—is an egregious abuse of power. So is the rationale for federal intervention, which is as flimsy as that offered up by the outlaws. Furthermore, the rationale keeps changing: at first the federal troops were there to guard federal buildings (against graffiti?!), then to fight urban crime. Unless various state attorney generals are successful in stopping the incursion of these troops altogether, the rationale will probably change a few more times.
If memory serves me, in the final scene of the film we see Gold Hat’s hat blowing through the empty and dusty street following the sound of the firing squad’s gunshots, a sign that the legitimate authorities have finally caught up with him. Will we see Trump’s troops stripped of their warrior uniforms and held accountable for the shootings, seizures, and beatings they have administered? Will the rule of law reassert itself in America?
I’m currently on an Amitav Ghosh kick, having completed the Ibis Trilogy (about the British opium trade in 19th century China) and The Calcutta Chromosome (about the discovery of malaria transmission). The Circle of Reason, his first novel, features a villain who reminds me a lot of Donald Trump, especially in the way our president is using a private police force to impose his will on Portland, Oregon.
To be sure, one doesn’t have to leave India to encounter Trump figures since the country currently has its own wannabe autocrat as prime minister. But Trump is who I know and is therefore my focus here.
Bhudeb-Roy is a cagy businessman who sets up a school and hires Balaram, one of the novel’s protagonists, as a teacher. Bhudeb-Roy cares less about education than about the money and fame that running a school provides him. For instance, he has portraits of himself scattered throughout the classrooms, gives all the school’s academic prize money to his five sons, and skims off profits for himself while underpaying Balaram. That, however, is just a start.
When a plane from the India-Pakistan war crashes into the school, he immediately hires 20 young men to ensure there will be no scavenging and then proceeds to sell all the plane’s scrap metal to the villagers. He does very well for himself, leading to a scene resembling those that Mary Trump tells about the Trump family:
In the evening after every little scrap had been sold he plodded back to his house, happily rubbing the folds of flesh on the back of his neck. He called his sons into a room and passed around wads of notes. He smiled as he watched them sensuously running their fingers over the rustling paper. That right, he said, his tiny eyes bulging. You can’t ever know what money means unless you feel it.
That’s not the end of the matter, however. First, he uses the insurance money to arm his twenty young men. Then, when the army shows up, he informs them who has each piece of metal. All is reclaimed and, when a spokesman for the villagers asks for their money back, he is threatened with the full force of the law. In this harangue we first encounter what will become Bhudeb-Roy’s obsession with straight lines:
Be grateful, he roared, that you’re not in gaol for being found in possession of government property. Do you know who you owe it to? Me. Me. Me. Should I charge you lawyer’s fees? And you’ll end up even poorer. If you know what’s good for you, you and all your bad-element friends will start working on straight lines instead of hanging around the banyan tree, doing nothing but rearing your heads and thinking anti-social thoughts.
Bolai-da was led out in a hurry by one of the young men. The other young men began to rattle their sticks and shine their knuckledusters, and the whole delegation was soon hurrying down the lane jaldi-toot-sweet.
Nobody ever talked again. After that, people said, not a bird chirruped in Lalpukur but with Bhudeb Roy’s permission, and under the supervision of his twenty young men.
In other words, only the privileged deserve good things. Everyone else is a a moocher and a loafer.
With his growing prominence, Bhudeb-Roy—like Trump—begins to consider a political career, although giving up the school will have one drawback:
After all, he had devoted a large part of his life to the school; it was a testament to a youth he was still loath to part with. There was some vanity in it, too: he liked to walk down those corridors looking at pictures of himself and he liked to hear visitors’ compliments.
However, as he informs the villagers in a tearful farewell upon the school’s closing (he’s the only one crying), they won’t lose out on those pictures altogether. In this speech we also get the first glimpse into his law and order platform:
Don’t worry, he wept, waving a consoling hand at the garlanded pictures of himself which had been arrayed behind him on the podium. These aren’t going away. They’re going to be closer to you than ever. They’ll be right among you, everywhere, in the banyan tree, in your houses, in your shops. You’ll never be far from me.
The tears flowed faster as he read accusations into the crowd’s silent, fixed gaze. I couldn’t help it, he cried. It had to come to an end. It was a good school in its time, but that time is past. A new time beckons. The time to teach is over. The time has come to serve the people.
The time has come, he said, his tears drying on his cheeks, for straight lines. The trouble with this village is that there aren’t enough straight lines. Look at Europe, look at America, look at Tokyo: straight lines, that’s the secret. Everything is in straight lines. The roads are straight, the houses are straight, the cars are straight (except for the wheels). They even walk straight. That’s what we need: straight lines. There’s a time and an age for everything, and this is the age of the straight line.
I haven’t yet finished the novel so I don’t know whether Bhudeb-Roy gets away with all his machinations, which include inventing a conspiracy theory to crush his former colleague. Like Trump’s resentment against Obama, Bhudeb-Roy’s detestation of Balaram has grown so intense that he persuades the police that he’s a terrorist out to destroy the country. So far in the novel, he has escaped all accountability.
The villagers, because they are poor and powerless, can be forgiven for not opposing Bhudeb-Roy’s excesses. Trump’s Congressional enablers, occupying one of the three branches of government, have no such excuse.
We have started to harvest a few tomatoes from our small rooftop garden, which gives me an excuse for sharing Pablo Neruda’s luscious “Ode to Tomatoes.” (Thanks to my mother for alerting me to the poem.) Tomatoes originated in Neruda’s part of the world, the Andean culture that also gave us corn and potatoes. When a street is filled with tomatoes, Neruda writes, it’s as though the summer light is cut in half, with its redness running down the byways. The tomato, he observes, sheds its own light.
The tomato’s “fiery color” brings summer even to December tables, appearing a “recurrent and fertile star” that
displays its convolutions, its canals, its remarkable amplitude and abundance…
Containing “no pit,/no husk,/ no leaves or thorns,” the tomato, Neruda informs us, offers us
its gift of fiery color and cool completeness.
When paired with the onion, another vegetable that has received a Neruda ode, the tomato is like the featured celebrity at a sacred union. To be sure, we must first sink a knife into its “living flesh,” but what we get in return is “the wedding of the day.”
Among other things, poetry adds to our gustatory experience.
Ode to Tomatoes
The street filled with tomatoes, midday, summer, light is halved like a tomato, its juice runs through the streets. In December, unabated, the tomato invades the kitchen, it enters at lunchtime, takes its ease on countertops, among glasses, butter dishes, blue saltcellars. It sheds its own light, benign majesty. Unfortunately, we must murder it: the knife sinks into living flesh, red viscera a cool sun, profound, inexhaustible, populates the salads of Chile, happily, it is wed to the clear onion, and to celebrate the union we pour oil, essential child of the olive, onto its halved hemispheres, pepper adds its fragrance, salt, its magnetism; it is the wedding of the day, parsley hoists its flag, potatoes bubble vigorously, the aroma of the roast knocks at the door, it's time! come on! and, on the table, at the midpoint of summer, the tomato, star of earth, recurrent and fertile star, displays its convolutions, its canals, its remarkable amplitude and abundance, no pit, no husk, no leaves or thorns, the tomato offers its gift of fiery color and cool completeness.
