For some comic relief in these dark times, here’s a poem by my father about an introverted candle who chooses (contra Jesus’s instructions) to hide his light under a bushel. What is more enticing, after all, than curling up with a good book.
If COVID-19 is prompting you to avoid society and if you’re frustrated that sports have vanished from the air waves, look to reading. Amazing worlds await your discovery.
The Retiring Candle By Scott Bates
A Candle Burned under A bushel
He did not let his light shine forth Among Men He did not even let his light shine forth Among Potatoes The bushel was empty (Being upside down) And somewhat stuffy besides
They all called down to him To come up on deck And get some air They wanted him to be the life of the party To shine Illuminate eternal verities Set the world on fire
But no He politely declined He didn’t want to set the world on fire All he wanted to do was stay down in the hold And smoke And curl up with a good book
Which he did
He smoked and curled up with The poems of Yevtushenko The Theory of the Leisure Class Perrault the Duc de la Rochefoucauld Erewhon and Through the Looking Glass Also assorted Elizabethan sonnets
When he had finished He put himself out And went to sleep
Probably it was because I had just taught the Aeneid earlier in the day, but as I watched the Democratic primary results roll in Tuesday evening, I couldn’t help but think of Joe Biden as Aeneas and Bernie Sanders as Turnus. In the battle-to-the-death that ends Virgil’s epic, Aeneas wins the day but Turnus, although he is killed, receives a substantial consolation prize.
Here’s the plot background you need to know. The
omens tell King Latinus he should give his daughter to a stranger about to show
up on his shores (Aeneas) rather than to hometown boy Turnus, a charismatic but
volatile warrior. Turnus, needless to say, objects, as does the queen, and the
result is six books of bloody warfare. By the epic’s final book, however,
Latinus wants to return to his original plan. There’s been enough fighting, he points
out to Turnus, and there’s enough land and wealth for everyone to live contentedly.
Turnus insists on the solitary combat,
however, which for us may sound like Sunday’s upcoming debate between Biden and
Sanders. A solemn pact is sworn by both sides to abide by the outcome. The
Latins, however, lose confidence in Turnus, which leads them to breach the
pact. Fighting breaks out again, Aeneas is hit with an arrow, and Turnus,
sensing that the moment could be his, goes charging into the fray rather than
attempting to hold his troops back. As a result, many more men die, the last
one being Turnus himself.
If I were living in the Age of Dryden or the
Age of Pope, it would not be a stretch to apply The Aeneid to modern
politics. Allusions to Virgil’s epic are scattered throughout Mac Flecknoe,
Rape of the Lock, and other poems, adding to the dense texture of the works.
Readers raised on the classics would
recognize and appreciate the references.
Pretend, then, that you are in the British 17th or 18th century as you draw the parallels. King Latinus is the Democratic electorate (Bernie Sanders calls it the Democratic Establishment) that wants a peaceful resolution to the conflict. He could be South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn, who said after Biden’s convincing Michigan win, “I think it is time for us to shut this primary down, it is time for us to cancel the rest of these debates…”
Latinus makes a similar case to Turnus, telling him he’d rather see him comprising and alive than principled and dead:
Since then, Turnus, you see what assaults, what crises dog my steps, what labors you have shouldered, you, first of all. Beaten twice in major battles, our city walls can scarcely harbor Italy’s future hopes. The rushing Tiber still steams with our blood, the endless fields still glisten with our bones. Why do I shrink from my decision? What insanity shifts my fixed resolve? If, with Turnus dead, I am ready to take the Trojans on as allies, why not stop the war while he is still alive?
Turnus, however, insists on his one-on-one battle. The situation would still be similar to the one the Democratic Party is hoping for, however: whoever wins will get the hand of Lavinia whereas whoever loses will withdraw his claim, with Aeneas returning to a Trojan encampment in Sicily. If he wins, however, he will be magnanimous, opening his arms to the Latins as Biden on Wednesday opened his arms to Bernie supporters:
I call on the springs and streams, the gods enthroned in the arching sky and gods of the deep blue sea! If by chance the victory goes to the Latin, Turnus, we agree the defeated will depart to Evander’s city, Iulus will leave this land. Nor will Aeneas’ Trojans ever revert in times to come, take up arms again and threaten to put this kingdom to the sword. But if Victory grants our force-in-arms the day, as I think she may—may the gods decree it so— I shall not command Italians to bow to Trojans, nor do I seek the scepter for myself. May both nations, undefeated, under equal laws, march together toward an eternal pact of peace. I shall bestow the gods and their sacred rites. My father-in-law Latinus will retain his armies, my father-in-law, his power, his rightful rule. The men of Troy will erect a city for me— Lavinia will give its walls her name.
Turnus accedes to the rules—let’s call them the
rules to be followed at the Democratic Convention—and all looks promising. Then
Turnus’s followers begin acting up.
There is some concern that Sanders will not
be able to bring along some of his own followers, just as he failed to bring
along everyone in the 2016 election. To cite one instance, African American
surrogate and Sanders delegate Cornel West voted for the Green Party’s Jill Stein
in the general election. Will Bernie’s troops rebel again this time if their leader
calls it quits, just as Turnus’s troops do when they begin losing confidence in
him. Turnus, like Bernie, may want to end the hostilities with one last
glorious combat, but that’s small consolation to his followers if he loses. Here
they are being urged to violate the peace pact:
Aren’t you ashamed, Rutulians, putting at risk the life of one to save us all? Don’t we match them in numbers, power? Look, these are all they’ve got— Trojans, Arcadians, and all the Etruscan forces, slaves to Fate—to battle Turnus in arms! Why, if only half of us went to war, each soldier could hardly find a foe. But Turnus, think, he’ll rise on the wings of fame to meet the gods, gods on whose altars he has offered up his life: he will live forever, sung on the lips of men! But we, if we lose our land, will bow to the yoke, enslaved by our new high lords and masters— we who idle on amid our fields!”
Stinging taunts inflame the will of the fighters all the more till a low growing murmur steals along the lines.
Much bloodshed follows. I noted that both Turnus
and Bernie, however, get consolation prizes. While Jupiter allows Aeneas to triumph,
he promises the disappointed Juno that the hero’s future empire won’t be named
after the Trojans. Instead, Turnus’s Latins will get that honor:
Smiling down, the creator of man and the wide world returned: “Now there’s my sister. Saturn’s second child— such tides of rage go churning through your heart. Come, relax your anger. It started all for nothing. I grant your wish. I surrender. Freely, gladly too. Latium’s sons will retain their fathers’ words and ways. Their name till now is the name that shall endure. Mingling in stock alone, the Trojans will subside. And I will add the rites and the forms of worship, and make them Latins all, who speak one Latin tongue. Mixed with Ausonian blood, one race will spring from them, and you will see them outstrip all men, outstrip all gods in reverence. No nation on earth will match the honors they shower down on you.”
Sanders’s consolation is to have pulled the
entire Democratic Party in a more progressive direction. Political John Stoehr
of the Editorial Board explains that it only seems like the moderates
have won:
Exit polls show Democratic voters want things like universal health care, higher wages, affordable housing and the rest. They want, in other words, what Bernie Sanders was selling them. They just don’t want to buy it from Sanders.
These progressive policies, he predicts, will
continue in a Biden administration:
[Biden is] less candidate than vessel into which the party will pour its ambitions. I think legendary broadcaster Dan Rather was right when he said: “Joe Biden is being characterized as a ‘moderate,’ but if elected I think it might turn out that he ends up presiding over one of the most progressive administrations in American history. It’s where his party is going, and on many issues where the country is going as well.”
Some scholars believe that Turnus is a sacrifice that ensures the ultimate triumph of the Latins. Could Bernie be such a sacrifice as well, a leftwing version of Barry Goldwater, who paved the way for Ronald Reagan? Could this be a case of losing the battle but winning the war?
Of course, all this is predicated on Biden becoming first the nominee and then the president.
Further thought: In some ways, Virgil is in the same position as Chair of the National Democratic Committee Tom Perez, knowing that the Trojans and the Latins must one day reunite in common cause and hoping that not too much damage occurs before then. The following passage sums up the fears and the hopes of both men:
Now what god can unfold for me so many terrors? Who can make a song of slaughter in all its forms— the deaths of captains down the entire field, dealt now by Turnus, now by Aeneas, kill for kill? Did it please you so, great Jove, to see the world at war, the peoples clash that would later live in everlasting peace?
Granted, equating “the world at war” with the Democratic primaries is hyperbolic, but you get the point.
As
I was watching the lovely film Farewell this past week [warning: major
spoiler alert], a passage from The Importance of Being Earnest came to
mind. The startling premise of the film matches up with a very funny Oscar
Wilde interchange.
The film is about the apparently common Chinese custom of hiding from cancer patients their actual condition. While the granddaughter and her parents claim to be returning to the homeland to attend a family wedding, they have really shown up because doctors have predicted the grandmother will die in a few months. The wedding itself has been moved forward to give them a plausible reason for their presence.
The drama lies in whether they can hide the real reason from the grandmother, who is quite sharp.
As an uncle explains to the skeptical Chinese-American protagonist, her belief in transparency and individualism gets trumped in China by a family’s belief that they should carry the expected death of a relative on their own shoulders. The grandmother shouldn’t have to worry about such a thing.
The doctors’ falsehood, however, turns out to be true. We think we’re seeing the grandmother’s final days as the family leaves to go back to America, only to be informed during the credits that she’s still alive four years later. (The film claims to be based on a true story—or as it puts it, a real lie.) In other words, she lives up to what her doctors publicly proclaim.
In Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon suddenly finds himself forced to
account for the absence of his imaginary invalid friend Bunbury when his aunt
unexpectedly shows up. He bumbles his way to an excuse:
Lady Bracknell. May I ask if it is in this house that your
invalid friend Mr. Bunbury resides? Algernon. [Stammering.] Oh! No! Bunbury doesn’t
live here. Bunbury is somewhere else at present. In fact, Bunbury
is dead. Lady Bracknell. Dead! When did Mr. Bunbury die? His
death must have been extremely sudden. Algernon. [Airily.] Oh! I killed Bunbury this
afternoon. I mean poor Bunbury died this afternoon. Lady Bracknell. What did he die of? Algernon. Bunbury? Oh, he was quite exploded. Lady Bracknell. Exploded! Was he the victim of a
revolutionary outrage? I was not aware that Mr. Bunbury was interested in
social legislation. If so, he is well punished for his morbidity. Algernon. My dear Aunt Augusta, I mean he was found out! The
doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean—so Bunbury
died. Lady Bracknell. He seems to have had great confidence in the
opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind
at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical
advice.
The grandmother in The Farewell also has great confidence in the opinion of her physicians. Under proper medical advice–at least by Chinese standards–she shoulders on.
Washington
Post humorist
Alexandra Petri yesterday tweeted out the following message about coronavirus
in the news, leading to today’s post:
I’ve had enough of this news! time to read some escapist literature, maybe a classic I’ve been putting off for a long time now to take a big sip of coffee and open this copy of the Decameron
Decameron (1353) is about a group of young men and women who retreat to a rural villa to escape from the Black Plague, which in 1347-51 wiped out a third of Europe’s population. To while away the time, they tell ten stories a day for ten days before returning to Florence. Decameron was the major inspiration for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which appeared at the end of the century.
The Black Plague, of course, was far, far worse than COVID-19, but there are similarities in how people respond. On the one hand, Boccaccio describes those who isolate themselves entirely from the rest of society:
Some there were who conceived that to live moderately and keep oneself from all excess was the best defense against such a danger; wherefore, making up their company, they lived removed from every other and shut themselves up in those houses where none had been sick and where living was best; and there, using very temperately of the most delicate viands and the finest wines and eschewing all incontinence, they abode with music and such other diversions as they might have, never suffering themselves to speak with any nor choosing to hear any news from without of death or sick folk.
Of course, not everyone can afford this option, but the mentality describes those who withdraw in panic.
Then there are those who go about convincing themselves that all is well:
Others…carouse and make merry and go about singing and frolicking and satisfy the appetite in everything possible and laugh and scoff at whatsoever befell was a very certain remedy for such an ill. That which they said they put in practice as best they might, going about day and night, now to this tavern, now to that, drinking without stint or measure…
Boccaccio recommends “a middle course,” which involves using common sense but being careful:
Many others held a middle course between the two aforesaid, not straitening themselves so exactly in the matter of diet as the first neither allowing themselves such license in drinking and other debauchery as the second, but using things in sufficiency, according to their appetites; nor did they seclude themselves, but went about, carrying in their hands, some flowers, some odoriferous herbs and other some4 divers kinds of spiceries, which they set often to their noses, accounting it an excellent thing to fortify the brain with such odours, more by token that the air seemed all heavy and attainted with the stench of the dead bodies and that of the sick and of the remedies used.
To
be sure, we no longer think that carrying flowers will work. (People used to
think that the plague was conveyed through unpleasant smells.) But we can think
of such a measure as the equivalent of washing our hands, not touching our faces,
and avoiding large crowds.
One other detail from the introduction caught my eye as it suggests a reverse swine flu (a previous pandemic). If that one was passed from birds to humans through swine, Boccaccio describes an instance of swine infected by humans:
[N]ot only did it pass from man to man, but this, which is much more, it many times visibly did;—to wit, a thing which had pertained to a man sick or dead of the aforesaid sickness, being touched by an animal foreign to the human species, not only3 infected this latter with the plague, but in a very brief space of time killed it. Of this mine own eyes (as hath a little before been said) had one day, among others, experience on this wise; to wit, that the rags of a poor man, who had died of the plague, being cast out into the public way, two hogs came up to them and having first, after their wont, rooted amain among them with their snouts, took them in their mouths and tossed them about their jaws; then, in a little while, after turning round and round, they both, as if they had taken poison, fell down dead upon the rags with which they had in an ill hour intermeddled.
The young lords and ladies who retire to the villa model for us a healthy response: if the virus drives us into quarantine, we can use the found time to cultivate our minds and feed our souls. Picking up Decameron is not a bad option after all.
People hear in a story what they want to hear. That’s what my student Rin Carroll discovered when she compared the different versions of the Agamemnon-Clytemnestra-Orestes story that appear in The Odyssey. Of the five different characters who recount the tale, each has a different take.
The Agamemnon story is important, Rin noted, because it works as a foil to Odysseus’s story. He too could suffer Agamemnon’s fate if Penelope were to be unfaithful and a lover murderous. Warriors absent for long periods may well have suffered such anxieties. Odysseus allays their fears with its happy ending.
In the first book, law-and-order Zeus alludes to Agamemnon’s murder. In his eyes, Aegisthus has ignored heavenly instruction, conveyed through messenger-of-the-god Hermes, “not to murder Agamemnon or court his wife.” As a result, divine justice is administered:
Aegesthus would not hear that
good advice.
But now his death has paid all debts.
(trans. Emily Wilson)
Agamemnon’s marital relations don’t show up in Zeus’s account. That would be Hera’s domain.
Zeus’s observations prompt Athena to point out that Odysseus cannot fulfill his own divinely-mandated duties because he is stuck on Calypso’s island. Zeus consequently instructs Hermes to tell the island enchantress to let Odysseus go. Seen psychologically, Odysseus—unlike Aegesthus—hears the inner call of duty. He launches out upon the uncertain sea to fulfill it.
We next hear of Agamemnon when
Athena, taking the form of the wise counselor Mentes, talks with Telemachus.
Here, however, the emphasis is all on Orestes—which makes sense, since Mentes
is urging Telemachus to step into manhood:
You must not stick to childhood; you are no longer just a little boy. You surely heard how everybody praised Orestes when he killed the man who killed his famous father--devious Aegisthus.
As Rin points out, Mentes/Athena doesn’t mention Orestes killing his mother since that part of the story doesn’t match up. Unlike Clytemnestra, Penelope remains faithful.
When he travels to see Nestor and
Menelaus, Telemachus hears the Agamemnon story two more times. Nestor, like
Mentes, is interested in seeing Telemachus grow up and so also focuses on
Orestes:
How fortunate the dead man [Agamemnon]
had left a son to take revenge upon
the wicked, scheming killer, that Aegisthus,
who killed Orestes’ father. My dear boy,
I see that you are tall and strong. Be brave,
so you will be remembered
Telemachus acknowledges the parallel:
Your majesty, King Nestor, yes. Orestes took revenge. The Greeks will make him famous through the world and into future times. I wish the gods would grant me that much power against those men who threaten and insult me—those cruel suitors!
Rin notes that Menelaus, by contrast, is far more focused on the pathos of the act. He describes Agamemnon’s joy of stepping foot in his country–he “touched and kissed the earth of his dear home” and “wept hot floods of tears, from happiness”–and the tells how Aegisthus, tipped off by his spy, springs his trap. Military-minded as he is, Menelaus mentions the battle and how many were killed. Clytemnestra is never mentioned.
She takes center stage in Agamemnon’s account, told to Odysseus in the underworld. (Aegisthus, meanwhile, barely shows up.) It makes sense that this would be a husband’s major focus. Agamemnon also mentions Cassandra, whom he has brought home to be his mistress and who is absent from the other accounts:
I heard the desperate voice
of Priam’s daughter, poor Cassandra, whom
deceitful Clytemnestra killed beside me.
As I lay dying, struck through by the sword,
I tried to lift my arms up from the ground.
That she-dog turned away. I went to Hades.
She did not even shut my eyes or close
my mouth. There is no more disgusting act
than when a wife betrays a man like that.
That woman formed a plot to murder me!
Her husband! When I got back home, I thought
I would be welcomed, at least by my slaves
and children. She has such an evil mind
that she has poured down shame on her own head
and on all other women, even good ones.
As I interpret the underworld scene, it is Odysseus’s internal struggle about whether to stay with Circe or to head home. Agamemnon’s fate argues for the first option, but the king then reassures Odysseus:
But your wife
will not kill you, Odysseus. The wise
Penelope is much too sensible
to do such things.
Despite such faith, Odysseus will take one piece of Agamemnon’s advice when he returns home, hiding his identity from Penelope until after he has killed the suitors. Agamemnon has advised,
So you must never treat your wife
too well.
Do not let her know everything you know.
Tell her some things, hide others.
We see Agamemnon one last time in
the last book when the suitors stream into Hades, his reappearance accentuating
the contrast between the two stories. Once again, Agamemnon is focused on wives,
never once mentioning Aegisthus or Orestes:
Lucky you, cunning Odysseus: you got yourself a wife of virtue—great Penelope. How principled she was…
Just as different characters in The Odyssey take away what they need from the story, so Homer’s readers have been doing so with The Odyssey itself. I’ve written how Sophocles and Euripides have a mostly negative view of Odysseus, as has Dante, while Tennyson is ambivalent (but leaning positive). Nikos Kazantzakis and C.P. Cavafy are positive, Margaret Atwood is ambivalent (but leaning negative), and my students are all over the map. One writes that Odysseus is “a jerk,” one is put off by his lying, one regards him as an oppressive patriarch, one likes how he works in concert with his wife, one is impressed that he resists going over to the dark side.
And so a rich story is interpreted and reinterpreted countless times, with each reader and each generation of readers focusing on the themes that serve them. The works are constantly renewed in the process.
I’ve been thumbing through Wendell Berry’s This Day: Sabbath Poems Collected & New, 1979-2013 and have found a poem that fits the season. One can see how it might have emerged from Berry’s Emily Dickinson-like way of observing the Sabbath.
Noting that he is a “bad weather churchgoer,” Berry often heads for a Dickinsonian orchard or some other outdoor spot when the weather is good. In Berry’s eyes, the Sabbath is “as rich and demanding an idea as any I know.” By resting on the sabbath while the world goes on of its own accord, we are reminded that the world’s work is
far more complex and wonderful than any work we have ever done or will ever do. It is more complex and wonderful than we will ever understand.
On the Sabbath, Berry experiences
a lovely freedom from expectations—other people’s and also my own. I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thought: to what I am very willing to call inspiration. The poems come incidentally or they do not come at all. If the Muse leaves me alone, I leave her alone. To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.
Berry chooses spots “where nature’s
principles of self-sustaining wholeness and health are still evident.” In such
places,
the natural and the supernatural, the heavenly and the earthly, the soul and the body, the wondrous and the ordinary, all appear to occur together in the one fabric of creation. All stand both upon the earth and upon the fundamental miracle that where once was nothing now we have these creatures in this place on this day. In such a place one might expectably come to rest, with trust renewed in the creation’s power to exist and to continue.
We see such trust renewed when Berry
ventures out a cold day in March and finds “the purplish stems, leaves, and
buds” of twinleaf. “Infinitely expectant,” they “straighten/slowly into the
light after/ the nights of frost.”
No matter how long the darkness of winter, there is always the “possibility of this return.”
Lift up the dead leaves
and see, waiting
in the dark, in cold March,
the purplish stems, leaves,
and buds of twinleaf,
infinitely tender, infinitely
expectant. They straighten
slowly into the light after
the nights of frost. At last
the venture is made: the brief
blossoms open, the petals fall,
the hinged capsules of seed
grow big. The possibility
of this return returns
again to the seed, the dark,
While sexism isn’t the only reason why the immensely talented Elizabeth Warren was forced to suspend her campaign, it was certainly a factor. Interviewed yesterday about the Massachusetts senator, author Connie Shultz quoted a Lucille Clifton aphorism after hearing Warren’s snappy observation on the obstacles women face.
Asked
whether her gender ultimately doomed her candidacy, Warren replied,
Gender is the trap question for everyone. If you say, yeah, there was sexism in this race, everyone says, “whiner.” And if you say, no, there was no sexism, about a bazillion women think, “What planet do you live on?”
Schultz said that the reply, and Warren in general, reminded her of Clifton’s powerfully balanced observation,
What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.
In other words, regardless of what other people call you, you can control your own response.
Warren insists on controlling how she responds, which makes her the kind of woman who shows up in many of Clifton’s poems. There we encounter a big-hipped woman who swings those hips freely; a large woman with a “geography of [her] own” who looks in her mirror and imagines her lover as one lucky man; and an abuse survivor who refuses to be a victim. We also meet up with a woman who celebrates menstruation, bulldozes through cancer and kidney failure, and (as Clifton frequently said of herself) afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted.
In her interview last night with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Warren channeled the Clifton spirit in refusing to be downcast. Here’s a Clifton poem (read my analysis here) to bolster those who feel that, with the withdrawal of the last viable woman in the race, they’ve just witnessed a kind of death. Like Clifton, Warren sees every defeat as just another spur to keep on fighting.
won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in Babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.
Warren had no model in this presidential contest but made it up as she went along. In the process, she created a bridge between earthy reality and starry dreams that future women politicians will cross.
Ernesto Cardenal, Niacaragua’s Marxist poet priest, died Sunday at 95, sending me back to poems I taught years ago. Although he wrote some fine revolutionary poems in the years before he split with the Ortega regime (for which he was persecuted), one that stands out for me is a reflection on Marilyn Monroe following her death.
Framed as a prayer, the poem blasts the movie industry,
which Cardenal regards as a “den of thieves.” Hungry for love and looking to
fame to supply it, the orphan who was raped at nine and who attempted suicide
at 16 found herself settling for cheap substitutes: “a cruise on a yacht, a
kiss in Singapore, a dance in Rio,/ a reception in the mansion of the Duke and Duchess
of Windsor.” (That last one especially sounds like hell on earth.)
Then, when sadness and desperation overwhelmed her, she was
directed to psychoanalysis and tranquilizers.
Meanwhile we, who share her hunger, “gave her the script”
and pressured her to keep lifting us up. “Forgive us all,” the poet asks,
for this our 20th Century and the Mammoth Super-Production in whose making we all shared.
In the end, Cardenal imagines God at the other end of Marilyn’s never completed phone call. And now he too “goes into Your presence” without any aids. He too finds himself “[l]onely as an astronaut facing the darkness of outer space.”
Prayer for Marilyn Monroe
Lord accept this girl called Marilyn Monroe throughout the world though that was not her name (but You know her real name, that of the orphan raped at nine, the shopgirl who tried to kill herself aged just sixteen) who now goes into Your presence without make-up without her Press Agent without her photographs or signing autographs lonely as an astronaut facing the darkness of outer space.
When she was a child, she dreamed she was naked in a church (according to Time) standing in front of a prostrate multitude, heads to the ground, and had to walk on tiptoe to avoid the heads. you know our dreams better than the psychiatrists. Church, house, or cave all represent the safety of the womb but also something more. . . . The heads are admirers, so much is clear (that mass of heads in the darkness below the beam to the screen). But the temple isn’t the studio of 20th-Century Fox who made Your house of prayer a den of thieves.
Lord, in the world defiled by radioactivity and sin, surely You will not blame a shopgirl who (like any other shopgirl) dreamed of being a star. And her dream became “reality” (Technicolor reality). All she did was follow the script we gave her, Forgive her Lord and forgive all of us for this our 20th Century and the Mammoth Super-Production in whose making we all shared.
She was hungry for love and we offered her tranquilizers. For the sadness of our not being saints they recommended Psychoanalysis. Remember Lord her increasing terror of the camera and hatred of make-up (yet her insistence on fresh make-up for each scene) and how the terror grew and how her unpunctuality at the studios grew.
Like any other shopgirl she dreamed of being a star. And her life was as unreal as a dream an analyst reads and files.
Her romances were kissed with closed eyes which when the eyes are opened are seen to have been played out beneath the spotlights and the spotlights are switched of and the two walls of the room (it was a set) are taken down while the Director moves away notebook in hand, the scene being safely canned. Or like a cruise on a yacht, a kiss in Singapore, a dance in Rio, a reception in the mansion of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor viewed in the sad tawdriness of a cheap apartment.
The film ended without the final kiss. They found her dead in bed, hand on the phone. And the detectives never learned who she was going to call. It was as though someone had dialed the only friendly voice and heard a prerecorded tape just saying, “WRONG NUMBER”; or like someone wounded by gangsters, who reaches out toward a disconnected phone.
Lord, whoever it may have been that she was going to call but did not (and perhaps it was no one at all or Someone not in the Los Angeles telephone book), Lord, You pick up that phone. (trans. Donald D. Walsh)
My friend Glenda Funk has invokedMacbeth for how to deal with the coronavirus—or rather, how not to deal with it.
It involves hand washing. “Wash your hands frequently, and don’t touch your face,” we’re all being told. But as Glenda points out, “some things cannot come clean with a little soap and water”:
Perhaps the most famous hand-washing episode in literature is in Act V of The Tragedy of Macbeth. In this scene Lady Macbeth attempts to cleanse her hands of King Duncan’s blood, symbolic of her culpability in the king’s murder. At this point in the play the Macbeths are trapped in their deception. We hear the Doctor, a Gentlewoman, and Lady Macbeth:
Doctor: What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands. Gentlewoman:It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus washing her hands: I have known her continue in this quarter of an hour. Lady Macbeth: Yet here’s a spot. Doctor:Hark! she speaks: I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly. Lady Macbeth: Out, damned spot! out, I say!–One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t.–Hell is murky!–Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?–Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.What, will these hands ne’re be clean?
Glenda observes that, earlier in the play following Duncan’s murder, Lady Macbeth sends her husband to cleanse himself. Evidence cleansing is one thing, however, whereas “neither Lady Macbeth nor Macbeth can cleanse their hearts and souls of the stain that blots them.”
Glenda then connects the dots:
Similarly, we’re witnessing the effect of a dirty administration mired in the muck of greed, science denial, deregulation, and dismantling of government institutions designed to protect our citizens. We see the muzzling of the CDC coupled with budget cuts that make disaster preparedness a shadow of its former self.
A makeshift cleanup crew has been summoned by the Grand Poobah: “We’ve ordered lots of medical elements” he promised during a press conference before heading out for a round of golf. It is an accustomed action with him. We hear him calling the coronavirus “a hoax. This is their new hoax.”
We have the great science denier VP responsible for an HIV outbreak in his home state Indiana on hand to dust off and reopen the office created to handle the ebola epidemic during former President Obama’s administration.
We hear the government cries: “Out damned spot. Hell is murky” amid 25 million dollars in cuts to the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response and eighteen million dollars cut from the Hospital Preparedness Program. Oh, and there’s the proposal to cut eighty-five million dollars from the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. COVID-19 is a zoonotic disease.
I’ll just add that Trump, with his autocratic tendencies, shares Macbeth’s paranoia, with the Democratic Party as his Banquo. Unlike the Macbeths, however, Trump has no second thoughts about his past actions. It will take something comparable to the movement of Birnam Wood to oust him.
