Irish state television concluded a recent program with a poem by Irish poet Derek Mahon. You’ll understand why when you read it.
The speaker is looking out of a window from what appears to be a sickbed. It could even be a deathbed since the speaker mentions (twice) that “there will be dying.” Yet death appears to be an afterthought compared to what he sees and what he knows to be out there. “The sun rises in spite of everything”—in spite of the things that drag us down, that is—”and the far cities are beautiful and bright.” How can one be disheartened given that “poems flow from the hand unbidden/ and the hidden source is the watchful heart”?
With such forces as work in the world, the poet can confidently assert that “everything is going to be all right.” This is not facile consolation but deep truth, uttered with conviction.
Everything Is Going to Be All Right
How should I not be glad to contemplate the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window and a high tide reflected on the ceiling? There will be dying, there will be dying, but there is no need to go into that. The poems flow from the hand unbidden and the hidden source is the watchful heart. The sun rises in spite of everything and the far cities are beautiful and bright. I lie here in a riot of sunlight watching the day break and the clouds flying. Everything is going to be all right.
We are about to see death at a scale most of us have never experienced before. Let’s make sure we watch the day break and the clouds flying.
As we are in the Lenten season, the liturgy has of reading one of the strangest passages in the Bible, that being Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones. I repost today an essay from April 6, 2016 on T. S. Eliot’s allusion to the imagery. Given how desolate many of us are feeling these days, it’s worth revisiting both the Biblical passage and Eliot’s poem.
Reposted from April 6,
2016
I find one of the
strangest passages in the Bible to be Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, which we
will hear in church today. Although Ezekiel envisions a happy ending for his
bones, the image of death and sterility is so grim and unsettling that T. S.
Eliot uses it as one of his foundational images in The Waste Land (1922). Yet for all his pessimism,
Eliot’s hints at a possibility of spiritual renewal.
Here’s the passage
from Ezekiel (37:1-14):
The hand of the Lord came upon
me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the
middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were
very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, “Mortal,
can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.” Then he said to me,
“Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the
Lord. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you,
and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon
you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and
you shall know that I am the Lord.”
So I prophesied as I had been
commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the
bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them,
and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no
breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal,
and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O
breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as he
commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their
feet, a vast multitude.
Then he said to me, “Mortal,
these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, `Our bones are dried up,
and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ Therefore prophesy, and say
to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: I am going to open your graves, and bring you
up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of
Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and
bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you,
and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know
that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord.
My
friend John Morrow, a retired Episcopal priest, says that the story reflects
God’s deep and abiding love for his people. If He can create Adam out of dust,
He can breathe new life into those who have lost touch with Him.
Eliot
is describing a world where people feel cut off from spiritual meaning. His
first reference to the bones occurs as part of a sterile domestic conversation
in Part II (“The Game of Chess”), a scene that may be based on Eliot’s own
troubled relationship with his first wife. Hearing her incessant complaining,
he silently thinks of Ezekiel’s valley:
“My nerves are bad tonight.
Yes, bad. Stay with me. “Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? “I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones.
The poem continues on
with an ironic allusion to the divine breath that God promises the people of
Israel. In this case, the wind is empty:
“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door. “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.
Bones show up twice in Part III (“The Fire Sermon”), the first time in a terrifying echo of a line from Andrew Marvell’s famous carpe diem poem “To His Coy Mistress.” Pleading for his mistress to yield to his overtures, Marvell’s speaker comes up with a startling version of “gather ye rosebuds while ye may”:
But always at my back I hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.
Eliot
drops Marvell’s cavalier tone and describes only our grim condition:
But at my back in a cold blast
I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
The poet then returns
to the image of the impotent fisher king that is at the core of the poem. At
the same time, rats make a repeat appearance, prompting us to wonder about the
state of Eliot’s London apartment. The passage also has images of death
(Ferdinand in The Tempest mourning his
father’s apparent death) and of sterile sexuality (“white bodies naked”):
A rat crept softly through the
vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal On a winter evening round behind the gashouse Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck And on the king my father’s death before him. White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones cast in a little low dry garret, Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.
In
Part IV (“Death by Water”), there is another image of bones being picked clean,
although this time they are not dry bones. Nevertheless, the image has the same
effect:
Phlebas the Phoenician, a
fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss.
A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers.
Finally, in Part V (“What the Thunder Said”), we have yet more images of death with no resurrection: a decayed hole (Jesus’s tomb?), overgrown graves, an empty chapel, and a door swinging helplessly in the wind. These dry bones will “harm no one”:
In this decayed hole among the
mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home. It has no windows, and the door swings, Dry bones can harm no one.
Despite the grim
images, however, there is subsequently a hint that resurrection may be on its
way, although Eliot detects no more than a hint. A cock crows—think of Henry
Vaughan’s poem about the resurrected Jesus as a rooster—and
then there is a flash of lightning and “a damp gust/bringing rain.” This is not
“the dry sterile thunder without rain” from earlier in the poem. There may be
hope after all.
Eliot
does not offer us easy grace in this poem. He does not have Ezekiel’s
energizing faith as he struggles with deep spiritual depression. But because
his hints of spiritual redemption are so hard won, they have a ring of truth to
them.
Illustration from 14th century manuscript Book of the Hunt
Friday
For a work that provides
guidance for handling a killer epidemic, consider Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written by someone who had either first or second-hand
experience with the Black Plague. It is one of the most profound works I know
for dealing with death.
At first glance, the romance, written towards the end of the 14th century, comes across as a mere fairy story, complete with a magical foe, an enchanted castle, and a series of tests for a Camelot knight. A close examination shows that much more is going on, however, and in ways that are relevant to our current situation.
SGGK opens with a society that is
feeling pretty good about itself. The knights know themselves to be the
foremost court in the land, and they are celebrating that fact with an end-of-the-year
Christmas feast. Perhaps they are so self-confident that they think they can
disband their pandemic team, indulge in anti-vaxxer theories, and ignore
warnings from intelligence and medical experts about approaching danger.
King Arthur, however, is a bit
bored and declares that they won’t eat until an adventure presents itself. Maybe
he senses that his court isn’t as substantive as it thinks. In any event, an
adventure shows up in the form of a gigantic green man, who challenges the court
to a beheading contest. Someone is to cut of his head and then he will return
the blow.
Cracks appear in Camelot’s surface when no one steps forward to play the “game.” (The knights should be clamoring to take on the challenge.) Gawain, Camelot’s premier knight, finally volunteers and wields the axe, at which point Green Knight retrieves the head and informs Gawain that he’ll see him at “the Green Chapel” in a year’s time.
As I read the tale, the figure that strides into Camelot is a reminder that we are natural beings. The knights think that they have conquered their natural selves, both because of their adherence to the knightly code (they claim that honor means more to them than their lives) and their faith (Christianity promises triumph over the grave). Such beliefs make sense in the wake of the Black Plague, when people would have been seeking for some way to cope an illness that killed off a third of Europe’s population. Maybe Jerry Falwell, Jr.’s decision to reopen Liberty University in the teeth of the pandemic carries with it some of this Christian confidence. Who cares if students die if Heaven awaits?
Camelot’s self-assurance, however, may well
hide some real doubts. When their heads are on the chopping block, as Gawain’s
is at the poem’s end, will they continue to believe?
I’ve written about this poem
many times so you can read some of my various thoughts on it in the links at
the end of this entry. Here I just want to examine the ways it shows people handling
death since most Americans are about to see more death than they’ve ever seen
before. The poet sets forth three ways that we respond.
He does this in the poem’s
castle scene. Gawain has set off to find the Green Chapel when he stumbles
across a magnificent castle. While his host goes out hunting each day, Gawain
is himself hunted/tempted by the Lady of the Castle. The poem goes into detail
about the three animal hunts, which represents the three responses.
The deer are caught entirely
unaware. Think of them as the Americans who closed their eyes when the COVID-19
pandemic was on its way. Such figures are ruthlessly cut down:
The does with great din were
driven to the valleys.
Then you were ware, as they went, of the whistling of arrows;
At each bend under boughs the bright shafts flew
That tore the tawny hide with their tapered heads.
Ah! They bray and they bleed, on banks they die,
And ever the pack pell-mell comes panting behind;
Hunters with shrill horns hot on their heels—
The boar thinks he can tough it out and turns to fight his death. Let’s say that this is Donald Trump when he announces himself to be a war president and declares defiantly that he will defeat the virus. Or maybe boar is the megachurch pastor who continued his large services while declaring those afraid of COVID-19 to be “pansies.” Or maybe he is those young people who think they are tough and invulnerable and stride right into the teeth of the virus.
Standing tall, however, doesn’t keep the hunter from closing in:
With the bank at his back he scrapes the bare earth, The froth foams at his jaw, frightful to see. He whets his white tusks…
That boar makes for the man with a mighty bound So that he and his hunter came headlong together Where the water ran wildest—the worse for the best, For the man, when they first met, marked him with care, Sights well the slot, slips in the blade, Shoves it home to the hilt, and the heart shattered...
And then there is the fox, which thinks it can duck and weave around the approaching death. This is Trump as well, who sometimes utters defiance, sometimes imagines magical cures, sometimes downplays the illness (he’s more like the deer as such moments), sometimes thinks he can blame other people for the onrushing huntsmen. Presidential candidate Joe Biden compared him to a yo-yo the other day, which gets at how he’s all over the map. In any event, COVID-19 is relentless.
Thanks to scientific advances, we have options that those in the 14th century lacked so our case is not quite as hopeless. It is possible to mitigate impact of COVID-19, even though it will still claim many lives. We must be smarter and more disciplined than our deer, boars, and foxes, however.
But forget about policy for a
moment and think of the three animals as ways to process the emotional turmoil
that awaits us. We can’t ignore that we may soon be grieving (like the deer), nor
can we be stoic in the face of raging emotions (like the boar). And if our mind
starts ducking and weaving rather facing up to heartbreak, well, that response
won’t serve us either. Sooner or later, many of us will be looking death in the
face. People in New York are already doing so.
If the host is (as I see him)
the Lord of Death, however, his wife is the Lady of Life. Her job is to teach
Gawain how sweet life is. Gawain is so caught up in his coping mechanisms (he’s
a chivalric Christian knight) that he refuses to accept what life offers. As a
result, he becomes entangled in his own mind.
As I look at how many Americans are responding to COVID-19, however, I see them embracing life as never before. This is what the Lord and Lady of Life’s castle want for us. The catastrophe is prompting people to examine relationships, values, priorities. They may have been super serious Camelot knights before, but now they are opening themselves up to the pleasures of the castles in which many are sheltering. They are learning the lessons that the Lord and the Lady are trying to get through Gawain’s thick skull.
And learn them he does,
accepting from the Lady a magic girdle which she tells him will save his life. Life
means something to him after all. Unfortunately, he sees his acceptance as
something to be ashamed of rather than celebrated.
Whatever happens in the upcoming weeks and months, we must open ourselves to life’s gifts. Enough with elaborate coping mechanisms.
Further thought: I wrote recently about Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, in which Prince Prospero and his guests are like deer, pretending that the plague cannot reach them. Unlike Prospero, however, Gawain is willing to look death in the face and to go on a journey to see what it will teach him about himself. That’s why the Green Knight is far more benign than the Red Death. Prospero’s denial makes the Red Death monstrous whereas Gawain’s engagement turns the Green Knight into something more like a coach.
Mike Hanlon (Mustafa) researches America’s forgotten past in “IT”
Thursday
While Stephen King’s The Stand is noteworthy for
its depiction of a pandemic, I’m going to focus today on another King novel because
of the way it shows us our penchant for forgetting past cataclysms, thereby
ensuring that we will repeat our mistakes. IT is only too relevant in
showing how this forgetting works.
To be accurate, I shouldn’t say “we” since many people acknowledged the COVID-19 threat from the first. They remembered all too well our encounters with the bird flu, the swine flu and the Ebola virus and were calling for immediate action in January. The nation’s pandemic team would have done the same had not Trump disbanded it. I’m therefore just talking about those who allowed Donald Trump to erase whatever disagreeable memories they had of past epidemics. Forgetting was easy because it was what they wanted.
It has been a costly forgetting. Because of administrative
inaction, America will soon be the world epicenter of the virus and could lose
upwards of two million people.
In IT, the memories erased are America’s periodic
explosions of unbridled violence. The story takes place in Derry, Maine—think of
it as one of the idealized small towns found in 1960s sitcoms—which is haunted
by a homicidal clown living under the streets. At one point he tears apart a
child, at another he murders a gay man.
In my recent course on supernatural horror, I discussed how the gothic is a powerful literary vehicle for capturing how we repress sides of ourselves we are unwilling to face up to. Unwilling to acknowledge that much of its history has featured horrific violence, from Indian massacres to land grabs to lynchings, America has invented a benign history. What we repress turns toxic, however, and the gothic specializes in such toxicity, thereby making it a favored genre for our truth-telling poets and novelists.
In IT, a group of marginalized kids forms “The Losers Club” and manages to defeat the clown. (Their parents, dulled by worldly cares, can’t see what’s going on.) Then they forget what they have seen and done, just as America forgets the bloodshed.
Here’s a personal example of such forgetting. I was raised in, and now have retired to, Franklin County, Tennessee, which includes the township of Estill Springs. For most people in the county, Estill Springs is little more than a blip in the road between Winchester (our county seat) and Tullahoma (the county seat in adjoining Coffee County). Growing up, I never heard about the 1918 Estill Springs lynching in which an innocent man was chained to a tree by a mob, which used hot irons to force a confession, tortured him, and then burned him alive. This occurred a mere 35 years before my family moved to the area.
In It, the only kid who stays in Derry and the only kid who does not forget is the African American member. Later, as the town’s librarian, Mike Hanlon makes it his mission to watch for the clown’s return. Mike also becomes Derry’s unofficial historian and discovers outbreaks of violence every 27 years. Sure enough, 27 years after the defeat of the clown, he sees a recurring pattern of renewed violence and concludes that the clown is back. He reassembles the group and refreshes their memories. They must battle the clown again, this time without the protection of childhood innocence.
It makes sense that Hanlon is African American because, as such, he is far more likely to acknowledge America’s violent past. The privilege of whiteness is that it can close its eyes to violence whereas people of color do not have this luxury. The club, however, made a blood pact as children to fight the violence should it ever recur, and they honor their commitment as adults.
COVID-19 is not racial violence, but it’s an extremely disagreeable truth. Because it takes courage to face up to such truths, Trump is showing himself to be the most cowardly president in American history. Given that he’s determined to do nothing more than screw things up, forget about him. Americans must face up to COVID-19 on their own, doing whatever we can. to help. At the very least, we can wash our hands, maintain social distance, and (if we have the option) shelter in place.
When we are in the grip of fear, we can become monsters. This is the central message of IT (and of King’s fiction generally). Each member of the Losers Club, first as a child and then as an adult, must grapple with his or her particular fears if the clown is not to gain supremacy. All but one rise to the occasion. This is what heroism looks like.
Amy Davidson Sorkin has a lovely New Yorker article on how Dickens and Charlotte Bronte characters handle epidemics. The classics she mentions reinforce the imperative to “settle in place” at such moments.
Sorkin sees Esther Summerson in Bleak House as “one of the great heroines of literature, in part because she understands the vital importance of social distancing and isolation, even when it is hard.” Sorkin is thinking of the episode where, while tending a smallpox sufferer, Esther hears housemate and best friend Ada Clair approaching:
Esther doesn’t hesitate: “I hurried to the door of communication between my room and our pretty sitting-room, and locked it. Just in time, for she tapped at it while my hand was yet upon the key.”
When
Esther herself contracts the illness, she insists on the same distancing:
Before Esther slips into delirium, she makes Charley, whom she has nursed and who by then has recovered enough to nurse her, promise not to let anyone in—especially not Ada. “When she knows I am ill, she will try to make her way into the room,” Esther says. “Keep her out, Charley, if you love me truly, to the last!” Charley, despite her youth, does the job, which is a terrible one:
I had heard my Ada crying at the door, day and night; I had heard her calling to me that I was cruel and did not love her; I had heard her praying and imploring me to be let in to nurse and comfort me, and to leave my bedside no more. . . . Charley had been true to me in that time of need, and with her little hand and her great heart had kept the door fast.
Jane Eyre fans will remember the typhus that rampages through Lowood school, where “semi-starvation and neglected colds had predisposed most of the pupils to receive infection; forty-five of the eighty girls lay ill at one time.”
When she goes to visit her friend Helen Burns,
who has tuberculosis, not typhus, Jane instinctively knows that she must steer
clear of the fever room, with its “odour of camphor and burnt vinegar.”
Sorkin notes that, as horrendous as the tragedy is, something positive emerges from it and wonders if that will be our case as well:
The typhus runs its course and disappears, “but not till its virulence and the number of its victims had drawn public attention on the school. Inquiry was made into the origin of the scourge, and by degree various facts came out which excited public indignation in a high degree.” There was a new building, new regulations, better food, a better system. “The school, thus improved, became in time a truly useful and noble institution.” Let the same be said of many of our institutions, once we are through this.
Sorkin pulls together these literary images in her
conclusion, which includes a reminder that social distancing is essential:
In some ways, with covid-19, we are as vulnerable as the Victorians were—given the novelty of the virus, our lack of immunity, the inequalities that make its depredations worse. We are all like a child in a dark hallway. But in many other respects, of course, we are lucky: covid-19 has not proved as deadly as smallpox (which has been eradicated) or typhus. We know how diseases spread. Doctors around the world are working on vaccines and treatments, and there is every faith that they’ll find them. Until then, we can do what we have long known how to do. Keep on different sides of the door—the Adas and Esthers among us can FaceTime or Zoom—and do everything humanly possible to lighten the load on hospitals and medical professionals. Remember that most of us can walk past the fever room. They have to go inside.
Looking over deathbed scenes in 19th century literature reminds us what a gift medical science has been. Illnesses that once swept regularly through our homes have been contained (although anti-Vaxxers, bolstered by unscrupulous politicians like Trump, have sought to undo some of the progress). Sickness is far less prominent in contemporary novels.
For a contrast, think of Beth in Little Women, who dies of scarlet fever; Mary’s parents in The Secret Garden, who die of of cholera; Tiny Tim, who will die of rickets without Scrooge’s intervention; Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, who dies of typhoid fever; and Bessy Higgins in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, who dies of tuberculosis. Tertius Lydgate, the doctor in Middlemarch, is ahead of his time in wanting to bring sanitation to hospitals.
We currently have a president who doesn’t read and doesn’t want to hear the bad news he’s getting from medical experts. We’re now learning that the United States is well on its way to becoming the epicenter of COVID-19, and it will remain so if states listen to Trump’s calls to open up the economy prematurely.
A liberal education gives one a sense of history, without which we improvise from day to day. We are getting pounded by ignorance.
If you have been following Congressional fighting about emergency funding, it has broken down in predictable ways: the Democrats want to give the money directly to suffering people, healthcare services, and small businesses while the Republicans want to give it (or most of it) to big businesses, who will be expected to pass it along to their workers.
As Washington Post’s Paul Waldman sums up the current Republican plan, Treasury Director Steve Mnuchin “would have almost unlimited power to decide which companies do and don’t get this assistance,” he “would be able to keep the identity of the companies receiving assistance secret for six months, and companies would be required only to keep workers on the payroll ‘to the extent possible.’”
In other words, trickledown economics is the
GOP’s universal panacea, even for a world-wide pandemic that is cratering
national economies.
For that matter, Trump won’t employ the war
powers act to force companies to make masks or respirators because that would
be messing with free markets. (Apparently giving such companies large tax cuts
and bailouts—what Bernie Sanders calls socialism for the rich—is not messing
with markets.)
Such inflexibility, which we also saw from Herbert Hoover prior to the Great Depression, reminds me of the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh in Voltaire’s Candide. No matter what the circumstance, the Baron refuses to let his daughter Cunégonde marry Candide because the Thunder-ten-Tronckhs have 72 quarterings to their name whereas Candide only has 71. Candide is expelled from the castle, whereupon he undergoes an endless series of misfortunes.
These include being pressed into the army, flogged, nearly executed, nearly killed, shipwrecked, captured by the Inquisition, nearly tortured and hanged, and nearly cooked in a stew. Cunégonde, meanwhile, is raped and disemboweled by the troops that overrun her father’s castle, enslaved multiple times, and finally deprived of one of her buttocks by hungry soldiers during a siege. In short, they experience hardships that are at least as bad as the COVID-19 epidemic.
When the couple finally reunite at the end of the work, however, does the Baron (or rather his son since the father’s been killed) change his views about the marriage? Does it matter to him that now Candide has more money and has just bailed him out of slavery? No, he has his principles and will stick to them, even if they drive him off a cliff:
Cunegonde did not know she had grown ugly, for nobody had told her of it; and she reminded Candide of his promise in so positive a tone that the good man durst not refuse her. He therefore intimated to the Baron that he intended marrying his sister.
“I will not suffer,” said the Baron, “such meanness on her part, and such insolence on yours; I will never be reproached with this scandalous thing; my sister’s children would never be able to enter the church in Germany. No; my sister shall only marry a baron of the empire.”
Cunegonde flung herself at his feet, and bathed them with her tears; still he was inflexible.
“Thou foolish fellow,” said Candide; “I have delivered thee out of the galleys, I have paid thy ransom, and thy sister’s also; she was a scullion, and is very ugly, yet I am so condescending as to marry her; and dost thou pretend to oppose the match? I should kill thee again, were I only to consult my anger.”
“Thou mayest kill me again,” said the Baron, “but thou shalt not marry my sister, at least whilst I am living.”
In disgust, Candide returns him back to the slave galleys.
Following the 2008 election, when the country was trying to figure out how to come back from the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, Mitch McConnell’s primary goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. Now that we are facing the greatest health crisis since the 1918 flu epidemic, McConnell’s primary goal appears to see how much more money he can push into the hands of wealthy Americans. He cares for nothing but power and wealth.
Say what you will, at least, like the Thunder-ten-Tronckhs, the man’s consistent.
For those of us living in rural America, hearing news of overcrowded Italian hospitals and mounting COVID-19 deaths makes us feel like we are in the calm before the storm. All hell is about to break loose but at the moment, with the exception of the various closings, life in Appalachian Tennessee goes on as before.
No poet captures this temporary lull so well as Jonathan Swift in his “Description of a City Shower.” “Careful observers may foretell the hour,” he writes, “(By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower.”
Many, both in the government and out of it, were prognosticating this particular shower, only to have their warnings overridden by Donald Trump and the rightwing media. While few are now denying the approaching storm, I still see people downplaying it, including Tennessee’s governor and its Republican legislators. Oh, and Trump himself in his refusal to take drastic action.
In the poem, Swift lists multiple signs that a storm is on its
way:
While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o’er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more. Returning home at night, you’ll find the sink Strike your offended sense with double stink. If you be wise, then go not far to dine; You’ll spend in coach hire more than save in wine. A coming shower your shooting corns presage, Old achès throb, your hollow tooth will rage. Sauntering in coffeehouse is Dulman seen; He damns the climate and complains of spleen.
On March 16, in one of his many attempts to underplay the virus, Trump used the image of washing, as though America would experience a cleansing. Making soothing wave motions with his hands, he said, “So it could be right in that period of time [the middle of the summer] where it, I say, wash — it washes through. Other people don’t like that term. But where it washes through.”
There is nothing clean about Swift’s shower. The poet compares the approaching dark cloud to a drunkard, saying that it “swilled more liquor than it could contain” before it “gives it up again.” The first few droplets, meanwhile, are like the dirty water in a mop that is being twirled by a “careless quean” (a cantankerous woman) in her battle with dust. Violent gusts of wind stir up the sweepings she is trying to contain.
Incidentally, Shakespeare too has a dark image of the rain cycle, which he actually associates with contagion. The cause is Oberon’s and Titania’s quarrel:
The heavens open up as well in Swift’s poem (“now in contiguous drops the flood comes down, /Threatening with deluge this devoted town”), causing chaos amongst the city folk. Then, in the last stanza, it’s Armageddon.
Armageddon in this instance involves all the city’s garbage, from every street and ally, converging in an unstoppable flood of filth. The heroic couplets that have been valiantly trying to contain it break down in the final line:
Now
from all parts the swelling kennels flow,
And bear their trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell
What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell.
They, as each torrent drives with rapid force,
From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course,
And in huge confluence joined at Snow Hill ridge,
Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge.
Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.
To switch poems, at the moment we in rural America are like those oblivious children in Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” From his hilltop position, he can see the approaching storm as they cannot and melodramatically observes, “Alas, regardless of their doom/ The little victims play.” Thanks to news reports we’re not quite so ignorant, but we’re still playing.
That’s about to end. As America’s most recent Nobel laureate in literature informs us, “It’s a hard rain that’s a-gonna fall.” No gentle washing.
Here’s Swift’s poem in its entirety.
A Description of a City Shower By Jonathan Swift
Careful observers may foretell the hour (By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower: While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o’er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more. Returning home at night, you’ll find the sink Strike your offended sense with double stink. If you be wise, then go not far to dine; You’ll spend in coach hire more than save in wine. A coming shower your shooting corns presage, Old achès throb, your hollow tooth will rage. Sauntering in coffeehouse is Dulman seen; He damns the climate and complains of spleen. Meanwhile the South, rising with dabbled wings, A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings, That swilled more liquor than it could contain, And, like a drunkard, gives it up again. Brisk Susan whips her linen from the rope, While the first drizzling shower is born aslope: Such is that sprinkling which some careless quean Flirts on you from her mop, but not so clean: You fly, invoke the gods; then turning, stop To rail; she singing, still whirls on her mop. Not yet the dust had shunned the unequal strife, But, aided by the wind, fought still for life, And wafted with its foe by violent gust, ’Twas doubtful which was rain and which was dust. Ah! where must needy poet seek for aid, When dust and rain at once his coat invade? Sole coat, where dust cemented by the rain Erects the nap, and leaves a mingled stain. Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down, Threatening with deluge this devoted town. To shops in crowds the daggled females fly, Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy. The Templar spruce, while every spout’s abroach, Stays till ’tis fair, yet seems to call a coach. The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While seams run down her oiled umbrella’s sides. Here various kinds, by various fortunes led, Commence acquaintance underneath a shed. Triumphant Tories and desponding Whigs Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs. Boxed in a chair the beau impatient sits, While spouts run clattering o’er the roof by fits, And ever and anon with frightful din The leather sounds; he trembles from within. So when Troy chairmen bore the wooden steed, Pregnant with Greeks impatient to be freed (Those bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do, Instead of paying chairmen, run them through), Laocoön struck the outside with his spear, And each imprisoned hero quaked for fear. Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow, And bear their trophies with them as they go: Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell. They, as each torrent drives with rapid force, From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course, And in huge confluence joined at Snow Hill ridge, Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge. Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood, Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.
Is the disciple raising his hands to stop Jesus from healing “a sinful man”?
Spiritual Sunday
Today my good friend and occasional contributor to this blog Sue Schmidt shares a sermon, undelivered because of the Coronavirus shutdown. Many have been troubled by Jesus’s response to the blind man in John 9:1-14 because he appears to see God as using human suffering to make a point. Sue, however, convincingly argues for a more humane reading of the passage and then points out what we can learn from it as we face the Coronavirus challenge. She accentuates her point with an Edwina Gately poem.
Sue recently graduated from Fuller Theological Seminary with an MDiv and is currently seeking ordination with the United Church of Christ.
By Sue Schmidt, M.Div
The Lectionary reading for today is taken from John chapter 9. The full text (v.1-14) can be found here. Since it’s rather long, I’ll just post the first seven verses and follow them with some thoughts.
And as [Jesus] passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind? Jesus answered, Neither did this man sin, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.We must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. When I am in the world, I am the light of the world. When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and anointed his eyes with the clay, and said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (which is by interpretation, Sent). He went away therefore, and washed, and came seeing.
John’s telling of the healing of a blind man begins with what Jesus sees. Interestingly, this man is not calling out to get Jesus’s attention, as do other blind men and women we encounter in the Gospels. But as Jesus is walking along, he notices this person and points him out to the disciples.
I wonder what response Jesus is hoping for. Will they suggest that Jesus (or they) offer to bring healing, like they have seen before?
If Jesus is hoping for compassion, the disciples fail miserably. They see instead a lesson in morality involving a question of blame. Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind, they ask. (One wonders how an unborn child could be responsible for sin.)
Jesus must be disheartened by their response. I wonder at his tone of voice when he answers: “Neither did this man sin, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” In other words, Jesus shifts the focus of the conversation from the man’s presumed sin to God’s present desires for us.
This response, while comforting in that it affirms the blindness is not a result of sin, is discomfiting in that it suggests that God caused the blindness in order that good might result. Many people have been disturbed by this reading of the verse and what it implies about God. But is this the only way to understand Jesus’s words?
Wondering if “but that” (“but that the works of God should be made manifest in him”) might be translated differently, I found some support from New Testament scholar Gary Burge. In his commentary on the passage (NIVAC, 2000). Burge suggests changing the focus of the clause so that the passage reads:
It was not that this man sinned, or his parents. But so that the works of God might be displayed in him, we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day. Night comes when no one can work.
In other words, rather than the concluding clause of the previous sentence, it is the introductory clause of the next one.
Like many people Jesus encountered, this man offers an opportunity for the works of God to become evident. The disciples, who see this man as problematized by sin and guilt, have missed the opportunity to bring God’s light and love into his life. Jesus, on the other hand, is always on the lookout for ways in which he can do the work of his Father.
Being about “his Father’s business” is his aim from the age of 12, when he is found discussing theology in the temple with his elders (Luke 2:41-52). As long as Jesus is in the world, he is committed to being the light of the world – bringing truth, hope, and healing to all who will listen to his voice. So it is with this man who, willing to listen to Jesus’ voice, adds his actions to those of Jesus and receives God’s healing gift.
As
we walk through our days, what do we see? What questions do we ask? Are we like
the disciples, who judge and moralize what they see as problematic? Ignoring
the humanity of the person or community in distress, do we sanctimoniously
apportion blame? Or do we have eyes that see opportunities to do the work of
God, to bring light and love into the world?
As spring has arrived, our days are turning brighter. Still we are overshadowed with many concerns, including the outbreak of the Coronavirus and the uncertainties concerning our health and our economy. What is our response?
In her poem “Just a Little Difference,” Edwina Gately encourages us to listen deeply and learn to hear (and see) what God sees. We can take opportunity of our quietness (enforced isolation) to push back against the fear or loneliness around us and reach out to others. In her own life, Gately made more than just a little difference as she founded both a children’s home in Uganda and a home for abused women in Chicago.
Just a Little Difference Edwina Gately
Ah – A resting place Where we come to understand It is not required us of To wrestle constantly and passionately With our God— Nor pursue relentlessly All God’s decrees as we understand them, But only that we listen and wonder And hope and pray That we might, perhaps, Make just a little difference, One quiet grey day.
“If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” Percy Shelley asks—perhaps rhetorically, perhaps because he’s genuinely unsure—at the end of “Ode to a West Wind.” As we languish in the winter of our discontent, here’s a lovely poem to remind us that, at least according to the seasonal calendar, we have slipped into the season that traditionally symbolizes hope.
I love the mixture of joy and caution in Katherine Mansfield’s “Very Early Spring.” On the one hand, we see breathless anticipation. The ice on the lakes has melted, and the bows and stems of the trees “shiver, and wake from slumber” as the sun walks in forest. “Over the barren branches he shakes his yellow curls.”
Yet—the qualifying word appears twice in the poem—the forest is “full of the sound of tears” and doesn’t know whether to trust the change of weather. Although the wind’s “waking laughter” is “shrill and clear,” it’s not clear whether this is a promise of a new day. Perhaps the blue lakes are trembling and “the flags of tenderest green” are bending and quivering out of anxiety rather than joy. We don’t know for sure.
“April is the cruelest month,” T. S. Eliot famously writes, and Mansfield reminds us how brave it is to hope.
Very Early Spring By Katherine Mansfield
The fields are snowbound no longer; There are little blue lakes and flags of tenderest green. The snow has been caught up into the sky-- So many white clouds--and the blue of the sky is cold. Now the sun walks in the forest, He touches the bows and stems with his golden fingers; They shiver, and wake from slumber. Over the barren branches he shakes his yellow curls. Yet is the forest full of the sound of tears.... A wind dances over the fields. Shrill and clear the sound of her waking laughter, Yet the little blue lakes tremble And the flags of tenderest green bend and quiver.
