The Tradition of the Yule-Log

By Robin Bates | Published: December 22, 2019

Monday

Yesterday I mentioned the syncretism involved in the nativity story, with images from a wide variety of traditions contributing to the manger scene. While the yule-log, which I write about today, is not connected with the manger, it was an integral part of many Christmas celebrations before central heating. The long-burning log affirms light in the season of darkness.

Incidentally, Jesus in all likelihood was not born on December 25. The date, fixed upon in the 3rd century, is probably based upon two seasonal moments of ancient significance. The Annunciation or conception of Jesus coincides roughly with the spring equinox, Christmas with the winter solstice. The promise of new life in the case of the first and light at the darkest time of year in the case of the second is so entrenched in Christian imagery that I doubt Christians would change course even if they suddenly discovered that Jesus was born in, say, May or October. The symbolism, I suspect, would prevail over historical fact.

Back to the symbolism of the yule-log. In “Yule-Tide” William Kean Seymour points out that the yule-log has roots in Mithras, an Indo-Iranian deity associated with light that was worshipped by Roman mystery cults; in the Greek fertility goddess Demeter, who celebrates the return of her kidnapped daughter Persephone each spring; in druidic fertility religions, which celebrate the same seasonal cycle; and in Roman Saturnalia, a time of merry making and gift giving dedicated to Saturn, a Roman god associated with “generation, dissolution, plenty, wealth, agriculture, periodic renewal and liberation” (Wikipedia).  Saturn supposedly ruled during the lost Golden Age.

While the yule-log is mostly associated with northern Europe, I remember as a child reading a Harriet Tubman biography that described her as having the strength of a man and helping her fellow slaves drag in the annual yule-log. Apparently Maryland slaves didn’t have to work for as long as the yule-log burned, which meant that they selected the biggest log they could carry and then soaked it for days. Its connection with celebrating the birth of one who came “to proclaim freedom for the prisoners” and “to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18) is doubly appropriate. Light at a time of darkness indeed.

While religious fundamentalists complain about syncretistic elements and attempt to strip various symbols out of Christmas, for me the effect is to impoverish the occasion. The Christmas images carry weight precisely because they have been appropriated from older traditions. People attempting to touch the face of God borrow freely from what seems to work. They don’t care where it comes from.

Yule-Tide

Roman Saturnalia,
    Christian Adoration,
 Ivy wreath of Thalia,
    Druid exaltation.
 
 Spruce and fir and myrtle;
    Mithras, God of Light;
 How the yule-logs spurtle,
    Blaze for Christmas Night!
 
 Yule, or Jul (from Caesar:
    Others claim Demeter--
 Hymn they sang to please her,
    Every graceful eater);
 
 Giul or hiul (for wheeling
    Winter orb of light):
Shadows wreathe the ceiling,
    Dance on Christmas Night.
 
 Ritual Germanic,
    Gothic and Moravian,
 Persian and Romanic,
    Greek and Scandinavian.
 
 Oel (or ale in plenty),
    Yule-log blazing bright:
 Dolce far niente, 
    Joy this Christmas Night.
 
 Pagan Saturnalia,
    Christian Adoration.
 Christ—and Sun—the Savior,
    Hear our Salutation!

An additional poem:

I don’t know whether Seymour’s poem influenced my father, but here’s his own syncretistic Christmas poem, written in response to various legal battles about Christian creches in public spaces. My analysis of the poem can be found here:

Christmas at the Courthouse

By Scott Bates

The wise-men are Egyptian,
The virgin birth, Antique;
The evergreen is Roman
The manger scene is Greek;

T’is the Saturnalian Season
When solar gifts are cool,
So Happy Birthday, Horus!
From our Multiculture School.
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A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Nativity

By Robin Bates | Published: December 21, 2019
The Master of Vyssi Brod, c. 1350

Spiritual Sunday – 4th Sunday of Advent

I am of two minds about running the following Christmas poem by my father. On the one hand, it captures the hope that Jesus represents, along with some of the syncretism involved in the manger drama. Every religion combines elements of previous religions in its symbolism, and the birth story draws on multiple traditions.

On the other hand, while the poem captures Advent darkness, it doesn’t capture Advent hope. In that way, it reminds me of a stanza from the song “Rock Island Line,” as sung by the Weavers:


Jesus died to save our sins,
Glory to God, we’re gonna need him again.

Bates’s poem ends with a variant of the classic Mafia threat, “Nice little place you got here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.” We can regard his message, however, as a reminder of what hope looks like, whatever the planet’s environmental prospects. My father’s sense of playfulness turns bleak prospects into a humorous wake-up call.

The Nativity Plot

By Scott Bates

“Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger, but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits…” – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

As in earlier times
 we were alerted . . .

As for example when (with
 tremendous foresight
 and incredible organizational ability)
 those two remarkable animals
 the Ox and the Ass (crudely referred to
 in other contexts as “Mithra” and “Dionysus”)
 carefully arranged and supervised
 a quiet little coming-out party
 in the middle of the night in a central location in the
 Middle East
 in an attempt to raise the ratio of basic intelligence 
in the universe
 (The operation had been carried out under the direction 
of the Dove “Isis”
 who had personally delivered the main invitation
 while assorted sheep goats camels sheepdogs etc.
 rounded up kings and shepherds for publicity)

It had been quite a success
 and brought about a number of needed reforms
 but that was a long time ago
 and since then a lot of people have blown it
 and a lot of other people haven’t even gotten the message
 in spite of everything the dolphins and others
 (like rats chimpanzees great auks and Galapagos finches)
 could do to straighten us out

Too bad
 It was a nice little planet
 and in the meantime we’ve been wondering
 what those cockroaches have been
 holding mass meetings about
 in our kitchen . . .

Other Christmas Poems by Scott Bates

A Solution to Nativity Scene Battles
Holly & Ivy Dance to the Music of the Moon
Night before Christmas on the Moon
Move with the Wind, Sleep under the Snow
Midwinter Transformation: A Poem
An ABC of Children’s Books
The Divine Comedy, Doggerel Version
Books Unleashed in Christmas Carrels
Epiphany Sunday and the Arabian Nights
Epiphany from a Camel’s Point of View
A Roc for Christmas (Annual Bird Count)
Christmas Eve (Updated)
Christmas Bird Count from Santa’s Sleigh
Letters from Mrs. Santa Claus
A Season for Miraculous Breakthroughs
The Divine Enters through Imagination’s Holes
The Quest of the Marvelous Tree
Where Are the Fathers of Yesteryear?
Moving through Death’s Doorway

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GOP Epitaph: “He Loved Big Brother”

By Robin Bates | Published: December 19, 2019

Friday

The House may have impeached Donald Trump Wednesday night, but Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has a point when he says that Trumpism prevailed. That’s because Trump has managed to turn most of the GOP into a version of himself.

Republicans have, as I noted the other day, learned to love Big Brother.

Once upon a time, the GOP had some vestige of integrity. Once Republicans called out frauds and lies. Once South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham was saying, “I’m not going to try to get into the mind of Donald Trump because I don’t think there’s a whole lot of space there. I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office.”

How much has changed! On Wednesday, Republicans were all but arguing that war is peace, slavery is freedom, and ignorance is strength. Milbank describes the scene:

Wednesday’s 10-hour impeachment debate on the House floor and the party-line vote that followed proved that Trump’s multiyear campaign against the truth — 15,000 lies and counting — has succeeded. Republicans, united, didn’t spend much time defending Trump on the (unfavorable) merits. Instead, in an appalling spectacle of mass projection, they took turns accusing Democrats of the very offenses Trump committed — with Trumpian language and disregard for reality.

Democrats are the ones, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) said, who committed a “stunning abuse of power.” Democrats are the ones, Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.) said, who “colluded with Russia and Ukraine.” Democrats are the ones, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said, who engaged in “the largest and most massive coverup of such a list of crimes against our country.” Democrats are the ones, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said, who committed an “assault on the Constitution.” Democrats are the ones, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) said, who are “interfering in America’s election.” Democrats are the ones, Rep. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said, who “have dangerously shattered precedents.”

It was as though Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson had taken over the House floor. Even during the most solemn constitutional ritual, Republicans were auditioning for an audience of one — and outbidding each other with conspiracy theories in hopes of scoring a favorable tweet from the boss.

What does it take to turn former foes into cult worshippers? In 1984, Big Brother threatens Winston Smith with his deepest fear, which he correctly predicts will prove more powerful than love. Because Winston has a phobia about rats, the dictator fills a cage with starving rodents and straps them to his head. He has but to flip a lever and the rats will burrow into Winston’s face.

Winston’s love for Julia doesn’t stand a chance:

The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down, the other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air. Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless….

The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then–no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just ONE person to whom he could transfer his punishment–ONE body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.

‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!’

I’m not sure that Orwell proves anything useful here. Few people, I suspect, can stand up to torture or the prospect of hideous death. The GOP, however, does not have this excuse, which leads us to ask what has led to their Trump capitulation.

Do they fear the systematic ostracism that happens to those Republicans that stand up to the president? Do they fear Trump’s tweets and the tweets of his followers? Do they fear losing their seats in Congress? Do they fear a multicultural America, with white men no longer calling all the shots?

Or is something more nefarious at work? To explain what I have in mind, I turn to a rediscovered Harper’s article that appeared in August, 1941—which is to say, after Germany had invaded its neighbors but before Pearl Harbor. Many Americans (including Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford) supported Hitler in those days, and Dorothy Thompson, imagining a cocktail party, tries to figure out which of the guests will “go Nazi” and which will resist. In other words, what personality types are susceptible to fascism.

Her conclusion is that those who don’t have a deep foundation or a strong sense of self are vulnerable to an autocrat’s blandishments:

Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi…. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.

Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t–whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.

If the current GOP had a deep core, it could resist Trumpism. Because it has been hollowed out and behaves as the wind behaves (to quote Eliot’s Hollow Men), it can be turned by an unscrupulous con man. Worse yet, it feels an exhilarating sense of power to be so turned. Suddenly it doesn’t have to worry about truth or responsibility or any of those factors that complicate our lives. It has only to talk and act like its dear leader.

At the end of 1984, Winston feels nothing so much as a deep sense of relief:

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

The House GOP has won the victory over itself and proved its love. Will Senate Republicans do the same?

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Will UK One Day “Rue” Brexit?

By Robin Bates | Published: December 18, 2019
A bank of rue

Thursday

I’ve been so taken up with the Trump impeachment hearings that I haven’t acknowledged the sad news coming out of Britain. With Boris Johnson’s mandate election dashing the Remainers’ dream of a second referendum, Brexit now appears a certainty. And a hard Brexit at that.

I fear that, by failing to heed John Donne’s warning that “no man is an island,” the U.K. will face a tough reckoning. In Donne’s famous meditation, the major image involves a plague victim assuming the death bells he’s hearing are ringing for someone else. Given the rate at which people are dying, however, there’s a chance he’s hearing bells tolling his own death. Thus the famous conclusion: “[N]ever send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Donne’s point is that, whether it is we or someone else, we are all so interconnected that it doesn’t matter who is dying. “[E]very man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” Donne writes, and then adds, “if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were.” England is more than a clod but still considerably smaller than the entirety of the continent. Because we are all “involved in mankind,” we all share the same fate.

Brexiteers fantasize that they can once again, if not rule the waves, at least control their own imports and exports and who gets in. No more Brussels bureaucrats to worry about. The sad truth, however, is that we live in an interconnected world and England will not regain the power it imagines.

For one thing, it will no longer speak with the force of Europe. Currently it sings with the backing of a great organ and a full choir. After Brexit, despite its glorious history, it will discover its voice sounds reedy and thin.

In April I shared a poem appearing in the Irish Times lamenting Brexit. I republish a slightly adapted version of that post again today.  

Reprinted from April 1, 2019

When The Irish Times interviewed several Irish authors about Brexit, one of them responded with a lyric. In dark and confusing times, poetry steps up.

It makes sense that Irish authors would weigh in since the Emerald Isle, especially Northern Ireland, has more at stake than almost anyone else. The border between the two Irelands was essentially erased when the UK (which includes Northern Ireland) became part of the European Union, which in turn helped bring an end to the Irish troubles.

If Britain pulls out, some are predicting renewed violence in the northern counties. Brexiteers offer no viable solutions.

Ian Duhig writes about a French street named after Helen Joanne Cox (a.k.a. Jo Cox), the Labor Member of Parliament who was assassinated by a Brexit supporter. Duhig plays with the French word for street (“rue”), concluding with an allusion to Irish author Jonathan Swift, famous for his savage indignation:

Rue
Rue Jo Cox, Députée Britannique,
the street sign in Burgundy reads:
Assassinée pour ses convictions.

No British road is named after her,
I found on returning home, for fear
it might have proved controversial.

I remembered in Shakespeare rue
even for ruth, called ‘herb of grace’
because it was used in exorcisms,

by the angel to clean Adam’s eyes
and Gulliver back home for his nose
against the smell of his countrymen.

To identify the literary allusions, in Richard II the royal gardener has the thankless task of telling the queen her husband has been overthrown. Duhig identifies with the gardener’s sadness and understands why he resolves to plant a bank of rue.

“Rue” reminds this gardener of “ruth,” defined by Webster’s as a feeling of pity, distress or grief. “Herb of grace” refers to the belief that rue could keep evil spirits at bay. Duhig wishes his poem would function as a bank of rue. Here’s Shakespeare:


Here did she fall a tear; here in this place
I’ll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace:
Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen,
In the remembrance of a weeping queen.

In Paradise Lost, meanwhile, rue is one of the herbs that the Archangel Michael uses to clear Adam’s eyesight so that he will see the future. Adam has been blinded by the seductive promises of the forbidden fruit and requires rue as an antidote:

Michael from Adam’s eyes the film removed
Which that false fruit that promised clearer sight
Had bred; then purged with euphrasie and rue
The visual Nerve, for he had much to see…

Duhig here wishes that his poem would clear the eyesight of deluded Britons.

The allusion to Swift’s Gulliver sharpens his attack on those who engineered the Brexit vote. Having encountered the perfect Houyhnhnms, Gulliver stuffs his nose with rue because he can’t stand the contrasting smell of his fellow human beings:

I found my terror gradually lessened, but my hatred and contempt seemed to increase.  I was at last bold enough to walk the street in his company, but kept my nose well stopped with rue, or sometimes with tobacco.

And later:

 During the first year, I could not endure my wife or children in my presence; the very smell of them was intolerable; much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room.

Duhig uses the allusion to vent his own disgust.

In sum, Duhig uses Shakespeare to express his sadness that something precious has died, Swift to signal that the Brexiteers stink to high heaven, and Milton to predict a dark future. Regarding the allusion to Paradise Lost, the first future event Adam sees is Cain’s murder of Abel. The Brexiteers may dream of the power promised by the snake, but it doesn’t take an archangel to expose this as no more than a groundless fantasy.

In a further note, Duhig notes one other definition of rue:

 Of course, rue has another common meaning, regret: whatever the risk to post-Brexit shortages in food and medicine, generations of regret are being stockpiled now.

One of the few silver linings is that the UK’s travails are causing other EU members to appreciate what they have. That will be of scant comfort to suffering Brits, however.

Previous posts on Brexit

Ishiguro Predicted Brexit, Trump

Brexit or Never Let Me Go

Brexit Caused by Stiff-Necked Pride

Kipling has the Brexiteers’ Number

With Brexit, UK Betrayed the Spirit of Chaucer https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/with-brexit-uk-betrayed-spirit-of-chaucer/


Donne vs. Brexit: No Nation Is an Island https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/donne-vs-brexit-no-nation-is-an-island/

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In the Face of Trump, Be Aeneas Strong

By Robin Bates | Published: December 17, 2019
Federico Barocci, Aeneas Flees Burning Troy (1598)

Wednesday

Yesterday, after getting our stove pipe cleaned (note to self: write blog post about Blake’s chimney sweep), I lit a fire, watched snow flurries through the window, made myself a hot buttered rum, and opened The Aeneid. Next semester I’ll be teaching Virgil’s epic in Sewanee’s “Representative Masterpieces” class (fondly known as RepMas), and I have to get ready.

As I read, I came across a passage that speaks to the difference between following the mob and being a statesperson. It’s an epic simile describing how Poseidon commands the winds that have been battering Aeneas’s ships to cease. These winds, incidentally, are the work of the vengeful Juno, who has bribed the guardian of the winds to unleash them. Juno’s desire to sabotage Aeneas’s great mission is not unlike Trump desire to disrupt a fair and free election.

The difference between those throwing rocks and the he who stops them is the difference between those standing up for the Constitution and those capitulating to a fear of Trump tweets and Facebook denunciations. Various Democrats in Trump-leaning districts have decided that Trump’s extortion efforts outweigh concerns about their political futures and will be voting to hold him accountable. Now we need Republicans to do the same:

                        Just as, all too often,
 some huge crowd is seized by a vast uprising
 the rabble runs amok, all slaves to passion,
 rocks, firebrands flying. Rage finds them arms
 but then, if they chance to see a man among them,
 one whose devotion and public service 
           lend him weight [pietate gravem],
 they stand there, stock-still with their ears alert as
 he rules their furor with his words and calms 
           their passion. (Trans. Robert Fagles)

In the House impeachment hearings, we saw pietate gravem demonstrated by ambassadors and State Department officials. Virgil may be overly optimistic, however, in his belief that a devout public servant can get the Jim Jordans of the world to stand stock-still with their ears alert and their passions calmed.

We are at a critical juncture in our nation’s history. Regardless of how the firebrands behave, we must stand strong.

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Trump Love: I Lie with Him and He with Me

By Robin Bates | Published: December 16, 2019
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Ask Me No More

Tuesday

Yesterday I analyzed the “strange love” that the GOP has for Donald Trump. Continuing that line of thought, today I share a couple of legendary love poems, one that describes a state of denial, the other a crazed and irrational affection. Trump Love has elements of both.

Denial is definitely at work as the GOP goes to unprecedented lengths to defend a man caught red-handed in acts of extortion, bribery, abuse of power, and obstruction of justice and of Congress. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138, written to a mysterious dark lady, the lover is so smitten that he pretends not to know she has a “false-speaking tongue.” “When my love swears that she is made of truth,” he says, “I do believe her, though I know she lies.”

I’ve adapted Sonnet 138 to apply to Trump worship. As you can see if you compare it to the original, I’ve kept four of the lines, including the final two. The devastating pun that runs through the sonnet captures how Trump and the GOP have become inseparable bedfellows. One partner calls the shots while the other allows him/herself to be abused:

Sonnet 138 (adapted)

When my love swears the call was perfect,
I do believe him, though I know he lies,
That he might think that I am loyal,
Gullible as to how he bends the truth.
Thus vainly thinking that he’s on my side,
Though knowing that betrayal is never far:
Simply I credit his false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
Why doesn’t he say he cares but for himself?
Why not admit that I am just the same?
Oh, politics’ best habit is in seeming trust
And hacks love not to have the truth revealed.
     Therefore I lie with him and he with me,
      And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

Once one’s mind starts running in this direction, one no longer needs to adapt. Sonnet 147 can be applied with no changes since Trump love “is a fever” and his followers’ thoughts “as madmen’s are.” If forced to tell the truth, like Shakespeare’s lover they might acknowledge, “My reason…hath left me.” They might even say secretly (and perhaps one day will publicly),

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
 Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

At the moment, however, Trump supporters seem “past cure” and “frantic-mad with evermore unrest.” They indulge their Trump obsession to please their “uncertain sickly appetite,” only to discover that, in so doing, they but “preserve the ill.”

The physician Reason has long since thrown up his hands and left the building.

Sonnet 147

My love is as
a fever, longing still

For that which longer nurseth the disease,

Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please.

My reason, the physician to my love,

Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,

Hath left me, and I desperate now approve

Desire is death, which physic did except.

Past cure I am, now reason is past care,

And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,

At random from the truth vainly expressed:

     For I have sworn thee fair, and thought
thee bright,

     Who art as black as hell, as dark as
night.

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Strange Love: How the GOP Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Donald Trump

By Robin Bates | Published: December 15, 2019
Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove

Wednesday

I turn to film rather than literature today because I think that Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant black comedy has something to teach us about the GOP’s wholesale capitulation to the most corrupt and mendacious president in the country’s history. One can either spend all one’s energies worrying about how to defend Trump’s actions or one can simply embrace the whole package.

With regard to the president’s attempts at bribery and extortion, it doesn’t matter that the Ukraine phone call indicts the president, that his chief of staff admits he did it, that his E.U. ambassador says he did it, that various witnesses heard him do it, and that the president all but confirmed he did it by publicly calling, on the White House lawn, for Ukraine and for China as well to investigate Biden. (And let’s not forgot that he asked Russia to release hacked e-mails during the 2016 campaign, which they did.) Worried? Just embrace the Trumpian playbook and contend that none of this happened. It’s so much easier that way.

The Washington Post editorial page, which bends over backward to be balanced in such instances, is unsparing in its criticism:

Democrats arguing for the president’s impeachment repeatedly cited evidence that Mr. Trump conditioned military aid to Ukraine and a White House meeting with its president on an announcement by Ukraine that it would investigate former vice president Joe Biden and a conspiracy theory about the 2016 U.S. election. Most Republicans responded with the diversions they have offered since the impeachment process began: spurious complaints about the process, coupled with claims that Democrats were interested only in reversing the results of the 2016 election.

Remarkably, not one GOP member of the Judiciary Committee was ready to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with Mr. Trump’s demand that a foreign government pursue false charges against one of his most likely Democratic opponents in the 2020 election. They could have followed the example of the several Republican legislators who have said Mr. Trump’s actions were improper but not impeachable. Instead, they offered a display of blind fealty, portraying Mr. Trump as a victim of Democratic persecution while ignoring or misrepresenting the evidence against him.

In Dr. Stangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the United States and the Soviet Union are engaged in complicated diplomacy to keep from blowing each other up.  Such diplomacy, in the minds of certain rabid military officers, is for wimps, which is how they regard President Merkin Muffley.   Better to embrace wholesale destruction, especially if you can wipe out the Soviet Union while losing “no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.” General Jack Ripper takes matters into his own hands and launches an attack, not knowing that the USSR has invented a doomsday machine that will destroy the entire world.

But choosing to attack rather than negotiate is not the only way to stop worrying. Why not just embrace the apocalypse as one final joy ride, blowing everything up with no worry for the future? This, of course, is how bombardier pilot Major Kong goes out, riding a nuclear warhead as though it’s a bronco. Kubrick gives us a masturbation image, with King slapping his cowboy hat at the projectile between in legs in anticipation of the ultimate explosion. All of his worries are about to end.

I’m talking about politics here, but why not extend this to climate change as well? Devour fossil fuels as though there’s no tomorrow. National Parks? Grab all you can while the getting is good. Tax breaks for the rich? Let future generations worry about the deficit. Government regulations: Gut them and see how much you can get away with. Our reality television president is giving his fans the ultimate high.

Atlantic recently profiled Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson and found a Strangelovian shift underway. Years ago, Carlson ran a somewhat balanced program on National Public Television, but no longer. “I’ve made a complete break mentally with the world I used to live in,” Carlson says, and one can see the effect. It’s much easier to say that America is being overrun by dirty immigrants (as Carlson does in the interview) than to work out a nuanced immigration policy. As the article’s author points out, there is no moral self-reflection in Carlson’s world:

But when it comes to the Tucker Carlson of the Trump era, don’t expect any sort of personal reckoning in the near future. “It’s very hard when you’re succeeding to see your own flaws. It’s very hard,” he said. “Because everything about the experience reinforces what you’re doing.”

 Yes, that’s what life looks like when you abandon all moral principles and give yourself over to Trumpism. You stop worrying.

Or as George Orwell would put it, you learn to love Big Brother.

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Let the Evening Come

By Robin Bates | Published: December 14, 2019
Renoir, Lisa Sewing

Spiritual Sunday – Third Sunday of Advent

Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come” beautifully captures the spirit of Advent. Dark though the world may be, Jesus has promised  that “God does not leave us.” Dwelling in that assurance transforms the evening from terror into tranquility.

Instead of dreading the oncoming darkness, focus on those small moments that enrich a life. Think of evening as the time when the dew collects on the hoe after a day’s work and when “a woman takes up her needles and her yarn.”

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
 shine through chinks in the barn, moving
 up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
 as a woman takes up her needles
 and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
 in long grass. Let the stars appear
 and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
 Let the wind die down. Let the shed
 go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
 in the oats, to air in the lung
 let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
 be afraid. God does not leave us
 comfortless, so let evening come.

 Previous Advent Posts

Leslie Marmon Silko: A Pueblo Novel with an Advent Message
Allan Boesak: Let Us Enter Advent in Hope
Donald Hall: Advent and Horror at the Voice
Jennifer Michael: He Comes to Shatter Expectations
Thomas Hardy: At Once a Voice Arose
Robert Frost: Walking Down the Saddest City Lane
Herman Melville: Like the Crocus Budding in the Snow
Lucille Clifton: John the Baptist: His Mouth Be True as Time
Catherine Alder: The Twisted Fingers Letting Go
Madeleine l’Engle: The Stable Is Our Heart
David Whyte: The New Moon, A Prayer Opening to Faith
Madeleine L’Engle: Climate Hope Shines in Dark Times
Cecil Frances Alexander: Once in Royal David’s City
W. H. Auden: And the Light Shineth in the Darkness
Scott Bates: The Animals Are Trying to Warn Us
Christina Rossetti: Weeping We Hold Him Fast Tonight
Rowan Williams: He Will Come Like Crying in the Night
Rainer Maria Rilke: The Rest between Two Notes
Mark Jarman: The Intrusion of an Overwhelming Joy
Madeleine L’Engle: The Irrational Decision to Have Jesus

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Lit and Life: My Intellectual Trajectory

By Robin Bates | Published: December 12, 2019
Matthias Stom, Young Man Reading by Candlelight

Friday

In yesterday’s post, I was startled to find myself repeating ideas from my 1973 senior thesis. I take the occasion of today’s post to reflect upon what has changed since then and what has remained constant.

Yesterday I wrote that, although certain popular books (like Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique) may have had a more immediate impact on American history, literary classics have had a more profound effect. Figures like Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson and the other great masters were changing, not local topics, but the way reality itself is seen.

As a Carleton College history major 46 years ago, I set out to determine the impact of the French Enlightenment upon the French Revolution. (Unlike graduate students, college students aren’t discouraged from tackling the big questions.) I was pushing back against a French historian who argued that the penny pamphlets appearing on the Paris streets were more responsible for the storming of the Bastille and the overthrow of the monarchy than were the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot.

I argued then, as I argued yesterday, that there’s a difference between changing local circumstance and changing reality itself. After Diderot’s Letter on the Blind and Rousseau’s Discourse upon Inequality, people no longer regarded institutions like the monarchy as fixed and immutable. Once such a view took hold, pamphlets calling for people to march on the royal palace took on a new resonance.

I was drawn to explore such subjects because I believed my lifelong passion for great literature was related to my passion for social justice. (My family was involved in my grade school’s desegregation efforts.)  Both seemed high-minded affairs, and my scholarship and my teaching have explored whether literature and history can be joined. Although a history major at Carleton, in my senior thesis I speculated that a work’s aesthetic aspects might play a critical historical role. I switched to English in graduate school to determine whether that was the case.

At Emory University I discovered reception theory, where focus shifted from text to reader and the reader’s historical context. As I noted yesterday, Hans Robert Jauss argued that great works change an era’s horizons of expectations. In one of my first grad school essays, I claimed that Dickens deliberately challenged his age’s horizon in Martin Chuzzlewit by placing his villain within the domestic hearth, a shock given that Dickens depicts the hearth as sacred in the novels that came before (Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Nicholas Nickleby). By upsetting readers, Dickens prompted them to confront how laissez faire capitalism was desecrating all that they held dear. Although initially a disappointment, by the end of Dickens’s life Martin Chuzzlewit was one of his most popular works.

Over the years I have looked at different ways that literature has impacted audiences. In the 1970s, feminism, Marxism, post-colonialism, and queer theory helped me see how literature has political dimensions. In the 1980s, I turned from political movements to individuals and focused on literature’s psychological aspects. I also focused more on individual lives, especially the lives of my students, and used psychology and sociology to understand how literature was impacting them—and how they in turn could use literature to better their lives.

In the 1990s, when I became an Episcopalian, I looked at how literature helps connect us with our spiritual longings. In the 21st century, with the election of Barack Obama, I rediscovered political hope and once again examined how literature can support our better angels. More recently, with the election of Donald Trump, I am looking to see how literature can help us resist the other angels.

Even as I have explored, over and over, the interaction of literature and history, I have simultaneously regarded literature as its own self-contained world, a refuge into which one can crawl to escape the world. Literature that is transparently didactic is, for me, not real literature. (“The Poet, he nothing affirms,” Sir Philip Sidney tells us.) There’s a tension between literature helping us engage with the world and literature offering us a retreat from the world. I’ve always felt pulled in two directions.

So there you have the mindset that created Better Living through Beowulf. Thanks to the blog form, I don’t have to arrive at a grand summation. I’ll stop from time to time, as I’m stopping today, to reflect on where I am. Otherwise, it’s just a daily plunge into the maelstrom of literature and life.

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