Students as Beowulf vs. Covid

By Robin Bates | Published: May 10, 2020

Monday

I received insight into Covid’s impact on students through through several Beowulf essays I received recently. The connection is not a stretch since our students—like the rest of us—feel that a monster has invaded their safe spaces. Their responses demonstrate how literature helps us process trauma.

Teressa Colhoun, a political science major, sees similarities between Grendel and those Covid protesters carrying guns while refusing to wear masks or to practice social distancing. Teressa’s question: As a president or governor, how do you manage the chaos of resentment-crazed citizens taking the law into their own hands?

In the social contract that is foundational to all societies, both citizens and leaders have responsibilities, and beaching the contract imperils society as a whole. In Beowulf, Grendel is the archetype of the resentment-crazed warrior who puts his personal anger over the good of the whole. Danish King Hrothgar can only despair as his kingdom is ravaged by this anger:

Their mighty prince,
the storied leader, sat stricken and helpless,
humiliated by the loss of his guard,
bewildered and stunned, staring aghast
at the demon’s trail, in deep distress.

Teressa goes on to say that today’s leaders aren’t faring much better:

[I]t seems as though America’s “mead hall’ is under attack. Our leaders must grapple with dilemmas like those Hrothgar faced in his sixth-century Danish kingdom. Social contracts impose obligations on citizens; citizens are expected to act in accordance with these expectations. When they choose not to, we expect leaders to handle violations accordingly. Like Hrothgar, though, it seems our leaders still struggle to answer these questions.

To interject an observation here: Beowulf defeats Grendel with his mighty grip, which can be interpreted as applying a firm hand. Several foreign governments and certain of our own governors have had success applying firm measures. Unfortunately, our president is undermining these very measures, describing our weapons-toting Grendels as “very good people.” Trump’s inconsistent messaging is playing havoc as local leaders try to figure out what to do.

Teressa points out that Hrothgar sends out his own mixed messages in that he allows Unferth, someone who has killed kinsmen, a place of honor at his table. Unferth is the warrior who, “sick with envy,” challenges Beowulf upon his entrance. Here we have Grendelian resentment emanating from the upper reaches of the administration.

Eliza Hogan sees things slightly differently. In her own examination of Hrothgar’s handling of warrior resentment, she compliments him on how he puts ego aside in service of the higher good, key to leadership in Eliza’s eyes. Hrothgar, she notes, wisely allows a young warrior to help him with his Grendel problem. Rather than the Danes regarding Hrothgar as weak for doing so, the poet observes, “Yet there was no laying of blame on their lord, the noble Hrothgar; he was a good king.”

Eliza sees the dragon as the archetype of destructive egotism, with the bad king Heremod held up as the ultimate human exemplar. Hrothgar warns the young Beowulf against becoming a Heremod, but both Eliza and history major Thomas Simerville see dragon traits creeping in. Beowulf essentially sounds like Trump at one point, Thomas points out, essentially saying, “I alone can fix it.” Or to quote him directly prior to his battle with the dragon,

Men at arms, remain here on the barrow,
safe in your armor, to see which one of us
is better in the end at bearing wounds
in a deadly fray. This fight is not yours,
nor is it up to any man except me
to measure his strength against the monster
or to prove his worth.

Beowulf, as it turns out, is not up to the challenge. If the dragon battle is an internal one, he will lose because going it alone is a dragon trait. Only with the help of Wiglaf does he kill the monster.

Thomas gives Beowulf some credit for allowing Wiglaf to help him, comparing the young warrior to Dr. Fauci. Working together, they emerge victorious. Eliza, who is harder on Beowulf, says that, when our leaders let us down, it is up to us as individuals to become Wiglafs:

Wiglaf ultimately saves the kingdom, not Beowulf, because of his own selflessness. He shows the readers that great heroes and leaders rise from places of unselfishness, and despite differing backgrounds or homes, anyone can be a leader. This has been proven over and over amid the COVID outbreak. Not only great doctors and nurses, but postmen, cashiers at grocery stores, garbage men, perhaps some of the most unlikely and belittled members of society, have proven themselves leaders and heroes through their selfless commitments to their own work.

And in conclusion:

Not only our leaders hold great responsibility during coronavirus, but each one of us has a responsibility to sacrifice our own wants (to go to restaurants, to play with friends, to travel) for the health of others. As a young healthy person, I probably wouldn’t die if I contracted the coronavirus, so if I were to go out and ignore social distancing rules, I personally would probably be fine. However, I know that I would put others at risk by doing so, and therefore I will not. In order to beat the coronavirus, each one of us must sacrifice our wants for the good of others.

Ella Cobbs goes at our current crisis from a different angle, asking, “How do we keep our emotions from overwhelming us in a time of crisis.” The monstrosity of Grendel’s Mother is that her emotions lead her to destructive behavior. Beowulf’s heroism, by contrast, lies in his ability to keep a level head. If one sees his descent into the Grendels’ lake as a metaphor for being engulfed by emotions, then the giant sword he finds is the counterforce, a higher principle that Ella identifies as “devotion to the greater good.” She concludes her essay as follows:   

In times of stress and turmoil it is all too easy to let our emotions take the reins and control our thinking. Today we are living in a world dealing with overwhelming grief and uncertainty, and I know for me personally, I have wallowed in my own anger and sadness over the situation and often forgotten about the bigger picture. It takes our inner Beowulf to snap us back into reality, remind us that what we are feeling is momentary, and remember that we are a part of something larger than ourselves.

We are running the risk of becoming a world of Grendel’s mothers, and we need instead to follow in the footsteps of Beowulf. All of us are wracked with emotions, despair, depression, anger, loneliness, but we cannot let ourselves succumb to these emotions as Grendel’s mother does. If we selfishly let our loneliness influence our actions and we meet up with friends for a seemingly harmless gathering, we can be directly endangering the lives of others. Instead, we must be the Beowulfs of the world, keeping a level head and doing what we need to in order to protect everyone. Beowulf is a hero not only because of his immense physical strength, but because of the control he has over his emotions and his devotion to the greater good.

I’ll note one other essay which, while not explicitly about the pandemic, nevertheless touches on the depression many are experiencing. As Patrick Rodriguez sees it, Grendel and Grendel’s Mother represent forms of depression as experienced by young warriors, the dragon depression as experience by old men..

In battling depression, sometimes a young warrior, when tempted to become murderously resentful, can be redirected with a firm hand. The out-of-control rage of Grendel’s Mother—sometimes followed by sinking into deep depths of despair—can be countered by a higher ideal. But when one becomes an old man who, upon looking back over his life, sees nothing but a long string of meaningless deaths, all that can help is young people entering your life. If you open yourself to their vision and their energy, they may keep you from succumbing to dragonhood.

In other words, the five essays all seek to imagine ways forward when the world appears dark and overwhelming. God bless these students for refusing to be either cynical or fatalistic. And God bless Beowulf  for providing images and narratives that they can turn to.

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Mothering Jesus

By Robin Bates | Published: May 9, 2020
Michelangelo, Pieta (1499)

Spiritual Sunday – Mother’s Day

For Mother’s Day, here are three Madeleine L’Engle poems about Mary and Jesus following the crucifixion. I love how they focus on Mary as mother.

Three days
When you agree to be the mother of God
You make no conditions, no stipulations.
You flinch before neither cruel thorn nor rod.
You accept the tears; you endure the tribulations.
But, my God, I didn’t know it would be like this.
I didn’t ask for a child so different from others.
I wanted only the ordinary bliss,
To be the most mundane of mothers.

Mary Speaks
O you who bear the pain of the whole earth, I bore you.
O you whose tears give human tears their worth, I laughed with you.
You, who, when your hem is touched, give power, I nourished you.
Who turn the day to night in this dark hour, light comes from you.
O you who hold the world in your embrace, I carried you.
Whose arms encircle the world with your grace, I once held you.
O you who laughed and ate and walked the shore, I played with you.
And I, who with all others, you died for, now I hold you.

Jesus is the speaker in the third poem, a silence presence as Mary returns to an empty house. Her non-argument (as Jesus sees it) is that her son can’t really be dead as no angel has announced his death.

I’m somewhat baffled by “second given son.” Is L’Engle saying that she has a premonition of Jesus’s second birth? Maybe the poem is telling us that angel voices will guide us in our hours of darkness, assuring us that love is stronger than death.

In a mother’s love for her child, we witness that love in action.

The Tenth Hour
My lips move. “Mother.” Though no sound comes.
She leaves the hill, the three crosses.
I follow. To her empty house.
She does not weep or wail as I had feared.
She does the little, homely things, prepares a meal, then
O God, Washes my feet.
“An angel came,” she said,
“to tell me of his birth. And I obeyed.
No angel’s come to tell me of his death.”

This, I thought, was not an argument.
I held back tears, since she held hers, though foolishly.
We ate—somehow—she always listening.
I said at last, “You do not mourn.”
She looked down at me gravely.
“No, my son. My second given son.
I obeyed then. Shall I do less today?“

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Choose Life over Needless Sacrifice

By Robin Bates | Published: May 7, 2020
Claude Monet, Water Lilies (1919)

Friday

I declare today that, even though I am about to turn 69, I wish to continue living and do not wish to be sacrificed so that Donald Trump can convince us that life is returning to normalcy. Apparently, our so-called pro-life party is shrugging off the danger of mass coronavirus deaths amongst our elderly as the price for reopening the economy. (I wrote about this yesterday.) Perhaps they are following the pathway already forged by gun violence: while solutions exist, they opt instead for lots of people dying.

Although other countries have taken effective steps to halt the pandemic, Trump apparently prefers a laissez-faire approach. Go shopping and, if you succumb to the virus, well, so it goes. Some on the right regard this as “economic patriotism.”

I’ve long wondered whether Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was an attempt to shake people out of a fatalistic acceptance of death that grew out of the Black Plague. Gawain’s apparent stoic acceptance of his upcoming beheading may have two origins, chivalric death with honor and Christian belief in an afterlife. Yet if these are no more than psychological insurance policies, then they do not allow us to truly live. We steel ourselves to death rather than embrace life.

As I see it, the Green Knight—as Nature—is doing everything he can to restore Gawain to a healthy perspective. For a moment he succeeds: as the falling axe merely nicks Gawain, the Camelot knight realizes he is still alive and experiences a rush of joy he hasn’t felt in years:

Not since he was a babe born of his mother
Was he once in this world one-half so blithe…

I’ve described the experience of teaching SGGK to an Afghanistan War veteran who realized how his time spent defusing roadside bombs had caused him to calcify over. The poem helped him reconnect with a love of life he had been missing.

As the Covid death count climbs—we’re headed for the equivalent of a daily 9-11—people will be tempted to turn the deaths into abstractions. I’ve noticed that MSNBC is highlight individual coronavirus fatalities so that we can’t entirely reduce them to anonymous statistics. Poetry too helps us hold on to our humanity.

Thinking of some way to express how sweet I find life to be, I return to a poem fraught with personal significance. I’ve written about how, when my eldest son died 20 years ago, I turned to Mary Oliver’s “The Lost Children.” I didn’t know at the time the content of the poem, just that it provided two images that my tortured mind clung to as if to a life raft.

Until I started writing today’s post, however, I didn’t grasp all the ways the poem hits home. Some additional context is necessary.

Justin drowned in water that was so cold that, for a while, people at first thought he had died of hypothermia. (The coroner told us he didn’t.) It was so cold that, for a couple of agonizing days, we wondered whether Justin had committed suicide. I learned from two students who had seen Justin earlier, however, that he was actually bubbling over with joy. The day was beautiful—one of the few beautiful days in what had been an historically wet spring—and out of this abundance of happiness, Justin threw himself fully clothed into the river. That’s when a rogue current grabbed him.

It was not the first time he had immersed himself in this fashion. The river had been safer when he had done so previously, however.

In the poem, a little girl goes missing in colonial America. She is never found and her father goes crazy as he searches for her (“pain picked him up and held him in her gray jaw” was one of the lines I held on to). But Indian footprints are found—maybe she didn’t die after all but was raised Indian—and Oliver says, “Now the possibilities are endless.”

The passage that I’ve been thinking about today is this one:

But I think the girl
knelt down somewhere in the woods
and drank the cold water of some
wild stream, and wanted
to live.

Justin launched himself into cold water because he was exuberant about life. For him, it was a kind of baptismal rite. In the face of this pandemic, I want to experience life just as intensively. If I were a doctor or a nurse, I would be doing so by working in a hospital fighting for the lives of others, but as I’m on the sidelines, I write to urge you to throw yourself into life. Do not surrender to Trumpian death cult fatalism.

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Blundering into the Valley of Death

By Robin Bates | Published: May 6, 2020
Richard Caton Woodville, Charge of the Light Brigade (1895)

Thursday

It now appears that the Trump administration has finally come up with a coherent response to the coronavirus attack. Alfred Lord Tennyson captures it in “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

In other words, their approach is to reopen everything and send the American public charging into the teeth of the virus. Meanwhile, cannons to the left of us, cannons to the right of us volley and thunder.

We’re even hearing military analogies. Here’s the president on Tuesday:

I’m viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent and to a large extent as warriors. They’re warriors. We can’t keep our country closed. We have to open our country.

Sounding like General Buck “I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed” Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove, he continued,

I’m not saying anything is perfect. And yes, will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open.

In his turn, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) has invoked World War II, saying Monday that

the U.S. should push ahead with reopening its economy during the coronavirus pandemic because “there are going to be deaths no matter what.” He compared it to the loss of lives during the two World Wars, saying it’s a “sacrifice” Americans must make for their way of life.

“The American people have gone through significant death before,” Christie, a Republican, said on The Daily DC podcast with CNN’s Dana Bash. “We’ve gone through it in World War I, we’ve gone through it in World War II. We have gone through it and we’ve survived it. We sacrificed those lives.”

A Politico article foresaw that the GOP would get to this place, reporting in March,

Forget “15 days to slow the spread.” A growing chorus of conservatives have started arguing that older adults should voluntarily return to work to save the country from financial ruin.

Call it “economic patriotism.”

Into the valley of death are riding America’s elderly (along with doctors and nurses, meat packers, store clerks, prisoners and guards, and eventually all of us). But at least these patriots will save the economy. And (so these conservatives hope) the reelection of Donald J. Trump.

The early conservative chorus included Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who said in March, “Getting coronavirus is not a death sentence except for maybe no more than 3.4 percent of our population.” (For the record, 3.4 percent of 330 million is 11.2 million).

And then there was Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s “Let’s get back to living. Let’s be smart about it. And those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves, but don’t sacrifice the country.” (“Taking care of ourselves” is a euphemism for dying, which residents of nursing homes have been doing in the thousands.)

In Tennyson’s poem, the soldiers are aware that a mistake has been made:

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
   Someone had blundered.
   Theirs not to make reply,
   Theirs not to reason why,
   Theirs but to do and die.
   Into the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.

In our case, the blundering has been going on for months. It began by dismantling the institutions and procedures set up to fight against just such a pandemic; then ignoring the intelligence services as they warned us to take this seriously; then firing or sidelining those officials who reported the truth; then failing to use the WHO’s tests and botching our own; then failing to mobilize all our resources to provide sufficient PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) and testing; then undercutting the governors trying to institute the Coronavirus Task Force’s own guidelines; and now reopening the country—or pressuring governors to do so–even as infection numbers continue rising.

Meanwhile, hospitals and nursing homes are still not getting all the PPE they need while the country continues to lag in testing and contact tracing.

Trump’s response? Close down the Coronavirus Task Force and take a suicidal gamble.

When your bungling leads to abject failure, a bold Light Brigade charge is all you have left. Maybe the Administration hopes we’ll become as inured to Covid deaths as we’ve become inured to gun deaths.

Maybe that’s what acquiescent Republicans are counting on, figuring

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.

If they take an electoral beating in November, however, at least they won’t literally die. No, that privilege will be accorded to the workers ordered back to work, with loss of jobs and health benefits if they refuse. They are the ones who are being ordered to do a version of

Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
   All the world wondered.
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre stroke
   Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not
   Not the six hundred.

But set aside stirring accounts of heroes thrown into doomed battles, whether they be calvary soldiers or nurses, doctors, and other front-line workers. For the last word on leaders who tell us that it is “sweet and fitting to die for one’s country,” turn to Wilfred Owen.

In “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen describes a different lung death, this one brought about by poison gas. He still has in mind, however, those Trumps and Christies who call on people to senselessly sacrifice themselves:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Never forget that what is happening did not need to happen. A timely and competent response would have saved tens of thousands of lives.

Nor is it too late. There are still things we can do, including donning masks, washing our hands, practicing social distancing, and calling upon our elected leaders to be responsible. If you passively accept the order to charge, you’re part of the problem.

Further thought: I’ve written about my mixed feelings about Tennyson’s poem. On the one hand, I want our heroes to be honored, as he does in the final stanza:

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
   All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made!
Honor the Light Brigade,
   Noble six hundred!

Our own version is New York applauding its front-line workers every night.

But I also think of Galileo saying, in Brecht’s play, “Unhappy the land that needs heroes.” If we had addressed the pandemic early, we wouldn’t need these heroic sacrifices.

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Gide’s Immoralist & Trump’s Double Game

By Robin Bates | Published: May 5, 2020
André Gide

Wednesday

I’ve finally figured out a literary parallel that has been tugging at my mind for the past few weeks as Donald Trump plays a double game regarding the pandemic. The president is behaving like Michel, the narrator in André Gide’s scandalous 1902 novel The Immoralist.

On the one hand, the president has been pointing to the Coronavirus Task Force guidelines and telling governors it’s up to them to handle the pandemic. On the other, he has been undercutting the governors and encouraging weapons-toting protestors (“very good people”) to “Liberate Michigan” (and Virginia and Minnesota) from these very guidelines. Because of Trump’s wretched leadership, wearing a mask has itself become a provocation in some areas so that there’s been at least one murder, numerous tirades (in which potentially infectious droplets travel wild and free), and various governors deciding that requiring masks is “a bridge too far.” As a result, the serious governors are being attacked while the others have all but surrendered, opting instead for Trumpian magical thinking. The consequences we face are beyond imagining.

Immoralist is the first-person account of a narcissist who, after a bout with near-fatal tuberculosis on his honeymoon, discovers a passion for young boys. While Michel never acts on this passion, his fascination with the forbidden clashes with his responsibilities as married man and farm owner. Increasingly he becomes more interested in the secret lives of the peasants on his farm than he does in his marriage.

The Trumpian moment occurs when, intrigued by a poacher he catches—the younger son of his estate manager–he joins him in setting secret traps on his own land! Basically, he is a respectable landowner and married man by day and a secret thief by night.

From that moment I no longer cared for going out in the day, when there was so little to attract me in the emptied woods. I even tried to work — melancholy, purposeless work, for I had resigned my temporary lectureship — thankless, dreary work, from which I would be suddenly distracted by the slightest song, the slightest sound coming from the country outside; in every passing cry I heard an invitation. How often I have leapt from my reading and run to the window to see — nothing pass by! How often I have hurried out of doors. . . . The only attention I found possible was that of my five senses.

But when night fell — and it was the season now when night falls early — that was our hour. I had never before guessed its beauty; and I stole out of doors as a thief steals in. I had trained my eyes to be like a night-bird’s. I wondered to see the grass taller and more easily stirred, the trees denser. The dark gave everything fresh dimensions, made the ground look distant, lent every surface the quality of depth. The smoothest path looked dangerous. Everywhere one felt the awakening of creatures that lead a life of darkness.

Eventually, the older son of his manager catches him at it and calls him out: 

“Take care, Charles, you’re going too far. …”

“Oh, all right! You’re the master — you can do as you please.”

“Charles, you know perfectly well I’ve made a fool of no one, and if I do as I please, it’s because it does no one any harm but myself.”

He shrugged his shoulders slightly.

“How can one defend your interests when you attack them yourself? You can’t protect both the keeper and the poacher at the same time.”

“Why not?”

“Because . . . Oh, you’re a bit too clever for me, Sir. I just don’t like to see my master joining up with rogues and undoing the work that other people do for him.”

Unfortunately, in our case people get sick when Trump joins up with rogues.

Scholar Louis A. MacKenzie has noted that the “scandal” of Gide’s novel is how it lures the reader into sympathizing with a narcissist’s vision of the world:

One could in fact assert that the “scandal” of L’Immoraliste resides specifically in the friction between a tale of arrogance, ego-centrism, dissipation, and decadence and a style that tends to thwart the rush to judgment by cloaking such unsavory traits and actions in language that is as refined as it is clever.

I can’t say that I was won over by the narrator when I read Immoralist as a French minor at Carleton College fifty years ago. In fact, he left me cold. But then, even at 20 I was someone who believes in responsible leadership, whether of a farm or a country. I will choose a colorless but competent technocrat like Hillary Clinton over a perpetual adolescent like Trump any day.

Why some people are thrilled by an outlaw president who flirts with the dark side baffles me. I just pray that they’ll come around to Charles’s view, as expressed in his final words to Michel:

You taught me last year, Sir, that one has duties to one’s possessions. One ought to take one’s duties seriously and not play with them … or else one doesn’t deserve to have possessions.

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Feeding on Beauty in the Midst of Horror

By Robin Bates | Published: May 4, 2020
Jewish band members at the Janowska Concentration Camp

Tuesday

Art arrives to rescue us–or at least comfort us–in dark times. What would we do without literature, music, art, cinema, and the performing arts (although no live performances, alas) as the coronavirus casualty figures mount up? Former National Poet Laureate Rita Dove speaks to our need in her poem “Transit.” (Thanks to my friend Carl Rosin for reminding me of the poem.)

To be sure, “Transit” is written about a far darker period than this. It was inspired by how Holocaust survivor and accomplished musician Alice Herz-Sommer turned to music to survive her Nazi concentration camp. Dove writes about Herz-Sommer’s experience to explain her poem:

Many Jewish musicians and composers were interned at Theresienstadt, the “model” concentration camp showcased by the Nazis when the Red Cross arrived for inspection: New clothes were issued, fresh produce displayed in the “marketplace,” while the musicians played concerts and marched in mock parades. As soon as the inspectors left, grim reality returned—including death marches to mass extermination sites like Auschwitz. Even so, those whom Fate spared one more time continued to compose and perform for their fellow inmates; they even staged operas from memory. How does one retain a human yearning in the midst of such horror?

Of her performances, Herz-Sommer herself wrote,

Whenever I knew that I had a concert, I was happy. Music is magic. We performed in the council hall before an audience of 150 old, hopeless, sick and hungry people. They lived for the music. It was like food to them. If they hadn’t come [to hear us], they would have died long before. As we would have.

Dove’s poem begins with the opening line from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Music is more than the food of love, however—it also is fundamental to survival, allowing us to pull ourselves, rung by painful rung, with barely “a fingertip’s purchase,” “across the unspeakable world.” We may be limited to black water passing for coffee and white water for soup, but we can still sup on Chopin.

The black and white soup appears to refer also to the music played for the rigged parades in which the prisoners marched and performed to deceive Red Cross observers. (As Dove puts it, “to soothe regiments/ of eyes, guilt-reddened/ lining the parade route.”) Art can be twisted to perverted ends. But while Dove “won’t speak judgment on” the “horn flash, woodwind wail” of such music, nothing matches how

in the midst of horror
we fed on beauty—and that,
my love, is what sustained us.

“Transit” may refer both to how Theresienstadt inmates would be shipped to Auschwitz and to how, for a moment, they moved into “the house that music built.”

To maintain your mental equilibrium as you settle in place, read novels and poems, listen to music, gaze at art works, feast upon films, and watch televised plays and dance performances. The arts will sustain you.

Transit

By Rita Dove

If music be the food of love, play on. 

This is the house that music built:
each note a fingertip’s purchase,
rung upon rung laddering

across the unspeakable world. 
As for those other shrill facades,
rigged-for-a-day porticos

composed to soothe regiments
of eyes, guilt-reddened,
lining the parade route

(horn flash, woodwind wail) . . .
well, let them cheer. 
I won’t speak judgment on

the black water passing for coffee,
white water for soup.
We supped instead each night

on Chopin—hummed our grief-
soaked lullabies to the rapture
rippling through. Let it be said

while in the midst of horror
we fed on beauty—and that,
my love, is what sustained us.

[Alice Herz-Sommer, survivor of the
Theresienstadt ghetto /
concentration camp]
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Tolstoy on Suicidal Cult Followers

By Robin Bates | Published: May 3, 2020
People protesting Michigan Gov. Whitmer’s shutdown orders

Monday

During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump famously said that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any voters. Subsequent events have proved this to be an understatement. We now see that they will prove loyal even when he suggests they drink bleach, take unproven medications, and expose themselves to a deadly virus. It all reminds me of a scene in War and Peace.

Tolstoy is interested in Napoleon’s cult status. Napoleon was responsible for the deaths of somewhere between three and seven million soldiers and civilians, but early in the Russia campaign we see soldiers perform suicidal feats to demonstrate their love for him. The actors in this case are Polish Uhlans or light cavalry.

Standing on the banks of the Nemen River, Napoleon sends an order that the Uhlans are to find a place to ford and join him. The following extraordinary scene subsequently takes place:

The colonel of the Polish Uhlans, a handsome old man, flushed and, fumbling in his speech from excitement, asked the aide-de-camp whether he would be permitted to swim the river with his Uhlans instead of seeking a ford. In evident fear of refusal, like a boy asking for permission to get on a horse, he begged to be allowed to swim across the river before the Emperor’s eyes. The aide-de-camp replied that probably the Emperor would not be displeased at this excess of zeal.

As soon as the aide-de-camp had said this, the old mustached officer, with happy face and sparkling eyes, raised his saber, shouted “Vivat!” and, commanding the Uhlans to follow him, spurred his horse and galloped into the river. He gave an angry thrust to his horse, which had grown restive under him, and plunged into the water, heading for the deepest part where the current was swift. Hundreds of Uhlans galloped in after him. It was cold and uncanny in the rapid current in the middle of the stream, and the Uhlans caught hold of one another as they fell off their horses. Some of the horses were drowned and some of the men; the others tried to swim on, some in the saddle and some clinging to their horses’ manes. They tried to make their way forward to the opposite bank and, though there was a ford one third of a mile away, were proud that they were swimming and drowning in this river under the eyes of the man who sat on the log and was not even looking at what they were doing. When the aide-de-camp, having returned and choosing an opportune moment, ventured to draw the Emperor’s attention to the devotion of the Poles to his person, the little man in the gray overcoat got up and, having summoned Berthier, began pacing up and down the bank with him, giving him instructions and occasionally glancing disapprovingly at the drowning Uhlans who distracted his attention.

For him it was no new conviction that his presence in any part of the world, from Africa to the steppes of Muscovy alike, was enough to dumfound people and impel them to insane self-oblivion. He called for his horse and rode to his quarters.

One would think that the drownings and the emperor’s lack of empathy would cool the ardor of his fans. One would think that 67,000 (and climbing) coronavirus fatalities, along with Trump’s narcissism, would cause his supporters to think twice. One would be wrong. Trump’s 40% base seems steady as ever with yahoos brandishing AK-47s (“very good people,” according to Trump) storm the Michigan state house to “liberate Michigan” from a governor trying to keep people well. Those who survive the Nemen crossing, meanwhile, continue to cheer the Emperor:

Some forty Uhlans were drowned in the river, though boats were sent to their assistance. The majority struggled back to the bank from which they had started. The colonel and some of his men got across and with difficulty clambered out on the further bank. And as soon as they had got out, in their soaked and streaming clothes, they shouted “Vivat!” and looked ecstatically at the spot where Napoleon had been but where he no longer was and at that moment considered themselves happy.

Napoleon awards the Polish colonel the Legion d’honneur, and Trump awarded radio host Rush Limbaugh, who declared Covid-19 to be no worse than the flu, the Presidential Medal of Honor. At least the colonel exposes himself to the same dangers as his followers, unlike Limbaugh and Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Laura Igraham, who urge from their infection-protected studios that the country be reopened. The rightwing media is inciting their listeners to plunge into the flood.

Tolstoy concludes his chapter with the Latin inscription, “Quos vult perdere dementat,” meaning “Those whom (God) wishes to destroy he drives mad.” We’re about ready to see how many of Trump’s mad supporters will be destroyed—and how many nurses, doctors, store clerks, meat packers, transit workers, and senior care residents they will take down with them.

Their “insane self-oblivion” is meant to demonstrate their love for big brother.

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Enter by the Garden Gate

By Robin Bates | Published: May 2, 2020
Pauline Baynes, illus. from Magician’s Nephew

Spiritual Sunday

I find today’s Gospel reading (John 10:1-10) particularly vivid because I know it by two of the literary passages it influenced, one in Paradise Lost, the other in C.S. Lewis’s Magician’s Nephew. In the reading Jesus compares false prophets to thieves:

“Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus says, “anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice.

When the disciples don’t get the analogy, Jesus elaborates:

Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

In Paradise Lost, Satan is the thief, climbing over the fence surrounding the Garden of Eden to steal away Adam and Eve. Being an angel, however, he bounds rather than climbs:

One Gate there only was, and that looked East
On th' other side: which when th' arch-felon saw
Due entrance he disdained, and in contempt, 
At one slight bound high over leap'd all bound
Of Hill or highest Wall, and sheer within
Lights on his feet. As when a prowling wolf,
Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,
Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve 
In hurdled Cotes amid the field secure,
Leaps o'er the fence with ease into the fold:
Or as a thief bent to unhoard the cash
Of some rich burgher, whose substantial doors,
Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault, 
In at the window climbs, or o'er the tiles;
So climbed this first grand Thief into God’s Fold:
So since into his Church lewd Hirelings climb.
Thence up he flew, and on the Tree of Life,
The middle Tree and highest there that grew, 
Sat like a Cormorant; yet not true Life
Thereby regaind, but sat devising Death
To them who lived…

Milton uses the same passage to go over the Church’s “lewd Hirelings” in the final book. The angel Michael is telling Adam what the future holds once the Jesus’s apostles are no longer around to spread the message:

Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous Wolves,
Who all the sacred mysteries of Heaven
To their own vile advantages shall turn
Of lucre and ambition, 

Milton’s comparison of Satan to a cormorant in the Eden episode accounts for the otherwise unexplained bird that appears in Lewis’s book. Aslan has sent Digory to retrieve an apple that will be planted so that the tree can protect the newly-created Narnia. The details from Jesus’s analogy are all present, including the gate. This one bears an inscription:

Come in by the gold gates or not at all,
Take of my fruit for others or forbear.
For those who steal or those who climb my wall
Shall find their heart's desire and find despair.

Digory wonders why anyone would climb when there’s a gate, which is Jesus’s message:

“Take of my fruit for others,” said Digory to himself. “Well, that’s what I’m going to do. It means I mustn’t eat any myself, I suppose. I don’t know what all that jaw in the last line is about. Come in by the gold gates. Well who’d want to climb a wall if he could get in by a gate! But how do the gates open?” He laid his hand on them and instantly they swung apart, opening inwards, turning on their hinges without the least noise.

When he finds the tree and plucks the apple, he is immediately confronted with temptation:

He knew which was the right tree at once, partly because it stood in the very center and partly because the great silver apples with which it was loaded shone so and cast a light of their own down on the shadowy places where the sunlight did not reach. He walked straight across to it, picked an apple, and put it in the breast pocket of his Norfolk jacket. But he couldn’t help looking at it and smelling it before he put it away.

It would have been better if he had not. A terrible thirst and hunger came over him and a longing to taste that fruit. He put it hastily into his pocket; but there were plenty of others. Could it be wrong to taste one? After all, he thought, the notice on the gate might not have been exactly an order; it might have been only a piece of advice—and who cares about advice? Or even if it were an order, would he be disobeying it by eating an apple? He had already obeyed the part about taking one “for others.”

At this point he encounters the bird:

While he was thinking of all this he happened to look up through the branches towards the top of the tree. There, on a branch above his head, a wonderful bird was roosting. I say “roosting” because it seemed almost asleep: perhaps not quite. The tiniest slit of one eye was open. It was larger than an eagle, its breast saffron, its head crested with scarlet, and its tail purple.

“And it just shows,” said Digory afterwards when he was telling the story to the others, “that you can’t be too careful in these magical places. You never know what may be watching you.” But I think Digory would not have taken an apple for himself in any case. Things like Do Not Steal were, I think, hammered into boys’ heads a good deal harder in those days than they are now. Still, we can never be certain.

The bird in this instance appears to be operating as a superego rather than a Satanic id. Digory sees himself from the outside and that stiffens his resolve–which is fortunate since, at that point, he encounters the Witch Jadis, who has fled upon their encounter with Aslan. In Magician’s Nephew as in The Silver Chair, Lewis problematically conflates women and serpents, Eve and the snake. The red stain around Jadis’s mouth suggests carnality:

Digory was just turning to go back to the gates when he stopped to have one last look round. He got a terrible shock. He was not alone. There, only a few yards away from him stood the Witch. She was just throwing away the core of an apple which she had eaten. The juice was darker than you would expect and had made a horrid stain round her mouth. Digory guessed at once that she must have climbed in over the wall. And he began to see that there might be some sense in that last line about getting your heart’s desire and getting despair along with it. For the Witch looked stronger and prouder than ever, and even, in a way, triumphant: but her face was deadly white, white as salt.

Jadis tempts him, first by offering him immense power and immortal life and then, when that doesn’t work, invoking his seriously-ill mother:

“But what about this Mother of yours whom you pretend to love so?”

“What’s she got to do with it?” said Digory.

“Do you not see, Fool, that one bite of that apple would heal her? You have it in your pocket. We are here by ourselves and the Lion is far away. Use your Magic and go back to your own world. A minute later you can be at your Mother’s bedside, giving her the fruit. Five minutes later you will see the colorr coming back to her face. She will tell you the pain is gone. Soon she will tell you she feels stronger. Then she will fall asleep—think of that; hours of sweet natural sleep, without pain, without drugs. Next day everyone will be saying how wonderfully she has recovered. Soon she will be quite well again. All will be well again. Your home will be happy again. You will be like other boys.”

“Oh!” gasped Digory as if he had been hurt, and put his hand to his head. For he now knew that the most terrible choice lay before him.

Digory resists temptation, however, and in the end saves both his honor and his mother. Aslan, however, makes it clear that, had Digory taken the Witch’s power path, both he and his mother would have paid a price:

“I—I nearly ate one myself, Aslan,” said Digory. “Would I——”

“You would, child,” said Aslan. “For the fruit always works—it must work—but it does not work happily for any who pluck it at their own will…And the Witch tempted you to do another thing, my son, did she not?”

“Yes, Aslan. She wanted me to take an apple home to Mother.”

“Understand, then, that it would have healed her; but not to your joy or hers. The day would have come when both you and she would have looked back and said it would have been better to die in that illness.

The way to Heaven—or to Heaven on earth—is letting God rather than your ego guide your life.

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During Covid, Workers Must Unite

By Robin Bates | Published: April 30, 2020
Antoni Berni, Public Demonstration

Friday – May 1, International Worker’s Day

International Workers’ Day has special significance this year given the GOP’s assault on front-line workers. I’m thinking particularly of those in meat-packing plants who are being pressured to return to work, even as hundreds of workers are falling ill of Covid-19 and some are even dying. Trump is willing to exempt the plants from employee lawsuits but not to force the plant themselves to undertake measures to protect the workers. The Iowa governor, meanwhile, has said that workers who refuse to work due to coronavirus fears won’t receive unemployment benefits.

As conservative stalwart but now NeverTrumper Bill Krystol tweeted,

So the Republican position is employers should get a waiver of liability if their workplace turns out to be unhealthy, but employees should lose unemployment benefits if they won’t return to that unhealthy workplace. Will American capitalism survive the current Republican Party?

Who knew that Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle would return to relevance? Meat packers once again stand in for all those who are expected to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the well-off.

These other workers include hospital employees who are still not getting sufficient personal protective equipment, especially in the V.A. hospitals. And those airline, metro, bus and other transit workers who are getting sick at disproportionate rates. And those Navy seamen who were supposed to gut it out when the coronavirus broke out on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt. And those West Point cadets who are supposed to return to New York to hear a presidential commencement speech. And the prisoners and prison workers in America’s jails.

Add to these the economic casualties, including those teachers, hospital workers, police, firefighters, and other state employees who will lose their jobs if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refuses to help cash-strapped states. (State pensioners will also take a hit if states are forced to declare bankruptcy.) And the postal workers who will be out of work if the USPS to go belly up, as Trump is threatening. And all those small businesses and their employees who are losing out as large corporations vacuum up the trillions of dollars passed by Congress that were supposedly intended for the masses.

It’s time to dust off Percy Shelley’s “Song: To the Working Men of England.”

Written at a time when, because of the French Revolution, England had turned reactionary, Shelley’s poem was turned into a song and sung by working class organizers. It begins by pointing out class injustice:

Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed and clothe and save
From the cradle to the grave
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?

Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil?

Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm?
Or what is it ye buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?

The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.

Sow seed—but let no tyrant reap:
Find wealth—let no imposter heap:
Weave robes—let not the idle wear:
Forge arms—in your defense to bear.

The poem concludes by warning of inaction’s dangers. If you don’t stand up to the “stingless drones,” Shelley tells his readers, then the chains you forged will be used on you, as will the weapons you manufactured. In the end, you will be buried in winding-sheets that you yourself have woven:

Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells—
In halls ye deck another dwells.
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see
The steel ye tempered glance on ye.

With plough and spade and hoe and loom
Trace your grave and build your tomb
And weave your winding-sheet—till fair
England be your Sepulcher.

America, starting with its packing plants, will be the sepulcher for many of its workers if we shrink back now.

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