What Do Odysseus’s Monsters Mean?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 27, 2020
Fuseli, Odysseus in Front of Scylla

Tuesday

My Representative Masterpiece students are entering the Odyssey’s monster section today so I will be giving them my special matrix for how to analyze a literary monster. As I see it, monsters have a personal/psychological explanation, a historical/political explanation, and a spiritual/existential explanation. Toggling between the three, here are some of my readings of Homer’s monsters:

–The Lotos Eaters, Circe, and Calypso – I group these three together because the danger they represent is men abandoning their quest and remaining on the island. Since Ithaca’s king is duty-bound to return to his kingdom and restore order, Zeus orders Calypso to release him. Without such a higher calling, men are no more than swine, which is the fate they suffer at Circe’s hands. Thanks to messenger-of-the-gods Hermes, who keeps Odysseus in touch with his higher self, the epic’s hero can stay connected with his ideals, even as he tastes the sorceress’ delights. (But he still remains on the island for a full year—and on Calypso’s island for seven.)

Psychologically, Circe and Calypso threaten the hero’s masculinity, as does Scylla—a toothed vagina—and maybe the Sirens. More on these latter monsters in a moment. Politically and historically, the island enchantresses function like the earth religions through with the Biblical Hebrews pass, with their worship of fecundity figures like the golden calf. To yield to them and merge with the population is essentially to surrender the historical self.

–Polyphemus, the Cyclops—The cyclops, like the goddesses, once again represents fecund nature. Unlike the Greeks he does not cultivate the land—therefore he’s a barbarian—but food grows in wild abundance nevertheless. He’s a cannibal who eats men raw, once again representing annihilation of self. To reassert his manhood, Odysseus has his men drive a fire-tipped, pointed log into Polyphemus’s eye, which psychologically can be read as either rape or castration.

–The Laestrygonians—The most distinctive figure in this cannibalistic tribe is another castrating woman, “a giantess as huge as a mountain.” The Laestrygonians destroy the Ithacan ships with boulders and then spear the men like fish.

–The Sirens—Interestingly, the Sirens offer Odysseus knowledge, not sensual delights. I’m still trying to figure these monsters out.

Scylla and Charybdis – Odysseus must thread his way between these two monsters, one a six-headed beast who grabs six sailors, the other a whirlpool that swallows up the entire ship. (Forced to choose, Odysseus goes for Scylla.) Odysseus’s sword is helpless against the castrating Scylla, but his sense of self is strong enough that he manages to survive the annihilating whirlpool.

I’ll report on any further explanations I get from my students.

Addendum – I distributed the following “Monster Analysis Kit” to my students today:

Overarching theory
Monsters are a symbolic version of what most shames or frightens us.

Psychological explanation for the theory
When what shames or frightens us is particularly painful, we may repress it, pushing it into our unconscious. The energy we spend not dealing with our anxieties renders them toxic. When our anxieties reemerge in our dreams or take the form of psychosis, as they invariably will, we have what Freud termed “the return of the repressed.”

Theory’s Usefulness
(1) By analyzing the monster that frightens you the most, you can identify your deepest anxieties.
(2) You can also identify the fears of an author, culture, or historical period by looking at the monsters they create. A great author will channel his culture’s anxieties and give them back in the form of monster stories.

What to look for in analyzing a monster
(1) Personal/psychological anxieties – These are anxieties experienced at a personal level. Analyzing an individual’s personal history may help us understand why he or she fears a particular literary monster.
(2) Political/historical anxieties – Because we are not only individuals but members of larger communities, one can examine the dynamics of those communities to understand why certain literary monsters rose to prominence.
(3) Spiritual/existential anxieties – At the broadest level, monsters speak to the anxieties that all humans share about the basic facts of life. Those monsters that are “not of an age but of all time” reflect these anxieties.

Note: The three types of anxieties are not always separable since, after all, we are all of us historical individuals grappling with existential and spiritual questions. Focusing on just one level, however, helps determine the intellectual tools one uses, whether they be psychological, sociological, anthropological, historical, political, philosophic, religious, or other.  

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Kobe’s Farewell Poem

By Robin Bates | Published: January 26, 2020
In his final game, Kobe scored an astonishing 60 points

Monday

In his farewell to basketball, Kobe Bryant wrote a poem expressing his appreciation of the game he had played with unmatched intensity and excellence. The poem takes on a new complexion when we read it in light of his death yesterday in a helicopter crash, becoming a reminder that we must live life with Kobe’s intensity if we are to do it full justice. We don’t know when our end will be, but we know what we can do now.

I am struck that Kobe turned to poetry rather than prose to help him let go of basketball. Poetry, as I tell my students, is language going as far as language can to capture our feelings. Given how difficult it was for Kobe to walk away from the game, prose wouldn’t have served his purpose. Twice I too turned to literature to capture his struggle, once comparing him to the aging head wolf in the Jungle Books and once admiring Sherman Alexi’s reflections about him.

There are other basketball poems that are far superior. (Check out Quincy Troupe’s wonderful homage to Magic Johnson.) But given our sorrow, this is the poem we need right now.

From the moment
 I started rolling my dad’s tube socks
 And shooting imaginary
 Game-winning shots
 In the Great Western Forum
 I knew one thing was real:
 
 I fell in love with you.
 
 A love so deep I gave you my all —
 From my mind & body
 To my spirit & soul.
 
 As a six-year-old boy
 Deeply in love with you
 I never saw the end of the tunnel.
 I only saw myself
 Running out of one.
 
 And so I ran.
 I ran up and down every court
 After every loose ball for you.
 You asked for my hustle
 I gave you my heart
 Because it came with so much more.
 
 I played through the sweat and hurt
 Not because challenge called me
 But because YOU called me.
 I did everything for YOU
 Because that’s what you do
 When someone makes you feel as
 Alive as you’ve made me feel.
 
 You gave a six-year-old boy his Laker dream
 And I’ll always love you for it.
 But I can’t love you obsessively for much longer.
 This season is all I have left to give.
 My heart can take the pounding
 My mind can handle the grind
 But my body knows it’s time to say goodbye.
 
 And that’s OK.
 I’m ready to let you go.
 I want you to know now
 So we both can savor every moment we have left together.
 The good and the bad.
 We have given each other
 All that we have. 
 
 And we both know, no matter what I do next
 I’ll always be that kid
 With the rolled up socks
 Garbage can in the corner
 :05 seconds on the clock
 Ball in my hands.
 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1
 
 Love you always,
 Kobe
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Nourished by the Mystery

By Robin Bates | Published: January 25, 2020
Ancient mosaic found in a Galilee church

Spiritual Sunday

I went looking for fish poems to accompany today’s Gospel reading and as a result found myself rethinking a Mary Oliver poem I thought I knew well. I have long argued that Oliver’s nature poems are often simultaneously religious poems, and “The Fish” bears me out.

The Gospel reading involves Jesus’s initial encounter with Peter and Andrew (Matthew 4:18-22):

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

Oliver’s poem involves suffering, death, communion, resurrection, and grace—which is to say, Christianity’s central drama:

The first fish

I ever caught

would not lie down

quiet in the pail

but flailed and sucked

at the burning

amazement of the air

and died

in the slow pouring off

of rainbows. Later

I opened his body and separated

the flesh from the bones

and ate him. Now the sea

is in me: I am the fish, the fish

glitters in me; we are

risen, tangled together, certain to fall

back to the sea. Out of pain,

and pain, and more pain

we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished

by the mystery.

I’ve mentioned in the past that Oliver, like George Herbert and Flannery O’Connor, doesn’t believe in cheap grace. The poem wrestles with the agony of mortality as the fish dies a painful death. I think that the fish dying “at the burning amazement of the air” is like God, become human, being amazed at what humans suffer. In what is an allusion to Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem “The Fish,” the rainbow imagery points to how the dying is simultaneously beautiful (“the slow pouring off of rainbows”) and ghastly (“flailed and sucked”).

As with the Eucharist, Oliver consumes the fish in a ceremonial way. In doing so, she feels filled, not only by the physical fish, but by the mysterious cycle of death and resurrection. “[W]e are/ risen, tangled together, certain to fall/ back to the sea.” The fish, like the Holy Spirit, “glitters in me.”

Oliver is reminding us of Christ’s promise in this veil of tears. No matter the “pain, and pain, and more pain” that we suffer, we feed and are nourished by “this feverish plot,” this “mystery.”  In the end, when we fall back to the sea, it is as though we are folded once again in God’s loving embrace.

Evidence that Oliver regards returning to the sea as spiritual communion is clear from another fish poem, this one entitled “The Sea.” In it, she merges her religious beliefs and her understanding of evolution to celebrate the final coming together. It’s another version of Wordsworth’s assertion that “trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God who is our home”:

Stroke by
      stroke by stroke
           my body remembers that life and cries for
                the lost parts of itself—-

fins, gills
      opening like flowers into
           the flesh—-my legs
                want to lock and become
 
 one muscle, I swear I know
      just what the blue-gray scales
           shingling
                the rest of me would

feel like!
      paradise! Sprawled
           in that motherlap,
                in that dreamhouse
 
 of salt and exercise,
      what a spillage
           of nostalgia pleads
                from the very bones! How

they long to give up the long trek
      inland, the brittle
           beauty of understanding,
                and dive,
                
and simply
      become again a flaming body
           of blind feeling
                sleeking along
                
in the luminous roughage of the sea’s body,
      vanished
           like victory inside that
                insucking genesis, that
                
roaring flamboyance, that
      perfect
           beginning and
                conclusion of our own.

Further thought: Speaking of Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality, Oliver borrows an image directly from that poem, although in her case she’s drawing on our knowledge of evolution as well as Wordsworth’s spiritual beliefs. She talks about “the long trek/ inland” whereas Wordsworth writes,

          Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
               Which brought us hither…

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Starbucks Chose Wrong Moby Dick Name

By Robin Bates | Published: January 23, 2020
From the Moby Dick card game

Friday

I learned yesterday from my office neighbor John Gatta that Starbucks Coffee is named after the first mate aboard the Pequod in Moby Dick. Predictably, that got my mind spinning and I have concluded that the company is misnamed. We should be hankering after Flask coffee.

That’s because Flask is the mate who doesn’t sit down and linger over. Rather, like many Starbucks consumers, he is a man on the go. He only gets to eat after Captain Ahab, Starbucks, and second mate Stubbs have been served, and he must have finished his meal before Stubbs decides he’s done:

Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask is the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask’s dinner was badly jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him; and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb even, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small appetite, and soon shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir himself, he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day; for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck. Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that moment he had never known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less. 

If not a Starbucks customer, Flask sounds like he would make a great Starbucks barista. The stable and cautious Starbuck, by contrast, doesn’t have the energy that the coffee company strives for.

“Call me Flask,” I imagine the company initially announcing. And then realizing this would send the wrong message.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

The Real Face of Patriotism

By Robin Bates | Published: January 22, 2020

Wednesday

As the story behind Retired Navy Admiral William H. McRaven’s 2018 Washington Post opinion piece has recently come to light, I am reprinting a blog post I wrote at the time. The Navy Seal who headed the Osama Bin Laden raid was apparently vacationing in a remote location when he heard that Donald Trump had revoked former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance. The voice mail he left for Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty was printed as an opinion column. You will see why his response reminded me of a Bertolt Brecht poem.

Reprinted from August 20, 218

A Bertolt Brecht poem came to mind when Retired Navy Admiral William H. McRaven came to the defense of former CIA Director John Brennan, who was recently stripped of his security clearance by a Donald Trump angry at his criticisms.

Vox has the story of what happened:

The man who led the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 has a message for President Donald Trump: Revoke my security clearance, too.

Retired Navy Admiral William H. McRaven, who led US Joint Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2014, wrote a short, but blistering op-ed for the Washington Post on Thursday afternoon, challenging the president on his decision to revoke the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan.

In the statement, he praised Brennan’s service to America, and his “unparalleled integrity.”

McRaven continued, writing, “I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency.”

The poem I have in mind is Brecht’s “Burning of the Books”:

When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge

Should be
publicly burned and on all sides

Oxen were
forced to drag cartloads of books

To the
bonfires, a banished

Writer, one
of the best, scanning the list of the

Burned, was
shocked to find that his

Books had
been passed over. He rushed to his desk

On wings of
wrath and wrote a letter to those in power

Burn me! he
wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t my books

Always
reported the truth? And here you are

Treating me
like a liar! I command you:

Burn me

The security clearance incident occurred during the same weekend that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani declared, “Truth isn’t truth,” a statement consistent with Trump’s instruction to to his followers last month, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” As George Orwell memorably informs us, autocrats’ first target is always the truth:

[Winston Smith] picked up the children’s history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you — something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable, what then? 

All patriots, like Brennan and Admiral McRaven, need to hold to the old arithmetic. And step up to the bonfire.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Are Dems Hampered by “Moral Claptrap”?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 21, 2020
John McLenan, illus. of Hartright confronting Fosco

Tuesday

I recently finished reading Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White, which led me to take special notice of a former GOP strategist’s advice to Democrats. “Democrats play to win an argument; Republicans play to win an election,” contends Rick Wilson, author of the just released Running to Beat the Devil: How to Save America from Trump—and Democrats from Themselves. Seeing the election through Collins characters, the Democrats are Walter Hartright, the Republicans Count Fosco.

 In order to gets his hands on a large inheritance, the devious Italian works with Lady Laura Glyde’s husband to have her stripped of her identity and imprisoned in an asylum. Hartright, who loves Laura, goes after the pair, which inadvertently leads to the death of the husband. Fosco, however, sends a warning through Laura’s half-sister Marian that his disregard for “the laws and conventions of society” will make him much tougher to defeat. Marian reports to Hartright,

“He spoke last of you. His eyes brightened and hardened, and his manner changed to what I remember it in past times—to that mixture of pitiless resolution and mountebank mockery which makes it so impossible to fathom him. ‘Warn Mr. Hartright!’ he said in his loftiest manner. ‘He has a man of brains to deal with, a man who snaps his big fingers at the laws and conventions of society, when he measures himself with ME. If my lamented friend had taken my advice, the business of the inquest would have been with the body of Mr. Hartright. But my lamented friend was obstinate. See! I mourn his loss—inwardly in my soul, outwardly on my hat. This trivial crape expresses sensibilities which I summon Mr. Hartright to respect….Let him be content with what he has got—with what I leave unmolested, for your sake, to him and to you. Say to him (with my compliments), if he stirs me, he has Fosco to deal with. In the English of the Popular Tongue, I inform him—Fosco sticks at nothing.’”

Later, when Hartright and Fosco come face to face, the Italian declares,

If the lives of twenty Mr. Hartrights were the stepping-stones to my safety, over all those stones I would go, sustained by my sublime indifference, self-balanced by my impenetrable calm. Respect me, if you love your own life! 

What impedes Hartright, Fosco tells his foe, are his moral principles. “Your moral clap-traps have an excellent effect in England,” he says, channeling Machiavelli. “Keep them for yourself and your own countrymen, if you please.”

Hartright prevails in the end but his victory is not of his own doing. If Fosco weren’t assassinated by a secret society that somehow shows up at novel’s end, he would undoubtedly kill Hartright.

So the Democrats, according to Wilson, are essentially kept back by their moral clap-traps. They naively think they should play by the rules and operate according to principle. Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell consequently outmaneuver them time and again, from the Merritt Garland nomination to the Mueller investigation to the impeachment trial.

In my own moral universe, the soul is more important than political victory. But maybe Wilson would say that’s the problem.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

When the Court Itself Is on Trial

By Robin Bates | Published: January 20, 2020
Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch

Tuesday

What kind of impeachment trial can we expect with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell informing us that he’s “coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this, to the extent that we can”? And with one of the jurors, South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham, asserting, “I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here”?

It’s safe to say we’ll probably see a trial similar to the one in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, complete with predetermined outcome.

We see oaths sworn in both. As The Hill reports about the one in the Senate,

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath to senators, who were standing at their desks on the Senate floor with their right hands raised. 

“Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, president of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help you god?” Roberts asked senators. 

Senators then walked down to the front of the chamber as their names were called to sign the oath book.

While we don’t see the jurors in the novel sworn in, we do see Bob Ewell swearing—falsely swearing as it turns out—to tell the truth and nothing but the truth:

In answer to the clerk’s booming voice, a little bantam cock of a man rose and strutted to the stand, the back of his neck reddening at the sound of his name. When he turned around to take the oath, we saw that his face was as red as his neck. We also saw no resemblance to his namesake. A shock of wispy new-washed hair stood up from his forehead; his nose was thin, pointed, and shiny; he had no chin to speak of—it seemed to be part of his crepey neck.

“—so help me God,” he crowed.

As the trial unfolds, it’s clear that the Ewells have fabricated a rape that never happened. In our own trial, it appears that Donald Trump’s defense team may not even contest the fact that he extorted Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden. As more damning evidence emerges every day, we may be like the hopeful Jem, who along with Scout and Dill is witnessing the trial from the balcony:

Jem seemed to be having a quiet fit. He was pounding the balcony rail softly, and once he whispered, “We’ve got him.”

As a child, however, Jem is under the mistaken impression that the truth matters. Dill, meanwhile, is so unnerved by the ugliness of the prosecution that he becomes sick. The town’s supposed drunkard, who has a black mistress and mixed-race children, points to the learning curve that awaits him:

He jerked his head at Dill: “Things haven’t caught up with that one’s instinct yet. Let him get a little older and he won’t get sick and cry. Maybe things’ll strike him as being—not quite right, say, but he won’t cry, not when he gets a few years on him.”

“Cry about what, Mr. Raymond?” Dill’s maleness was beginning to asset itself.

“Cry about the simple hell people give other people—without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people, too.”

In his summary statement, Atticus Finch observes that Tom Robinson’s case puts the court system itself on trial. Likewise, we could say that these impeachment hearings put the U.S. Senate on trial. Imagine the senators are hearing the closing argument of American literature’s most beloved lawyer:

Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. I am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this defendant to his family. In the name of God, do your duty.

Atticus’s eloquence falls on deaf ears. When the jury in the novel unanimously delivers a guilty verdict, Jem can’t believe what he has just witnessed:

“Atticus—” said Jem bleakly.

He turned in the doorway. “What, son?”

“How could they do it, how could they?”

“I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep. Good night.”

Will we weep when that Senate delivers its verdict? Or have we become so numbed that the tears will no longer flow?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Hughes Taught King to Dream a World

By Robin Bates | Published: January 20, 2020
Martin Luther King, Langston Hughes

Monday–Martin Luther King’s Birthday

Of the many influences on Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, perhaps none looms so large as Langston Hughes’s “I Dream a World.” Check out the comparison:

King:

I say to you today, my friends, though, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream … I have a dream that one day in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today… I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made palin, and the crooked places will be made straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope.

Hughes:

I Dream A World

I dream a world where man
 No other man will scorn,
 Where love will bless the earth
 And peace its paths adorn
 I dream a world where all
 Will know sweet freedom’s way,
 Where greed no longer saps the soul
 Nor avarice blights our day.
 A world I dream where black or white,
 Whatever race you be,
 Will share the bounties of the earth
 And every man is free,
 Where wretchedness will hang its head
 And joy, like a pearl,
 Attends the needs of all mankind-
 Of such I dream, my world!

Hughes wrote many dream poems, often focusing on “the dream deferred,” and King grew up reading them. Sometimes, as in “Harlem,” Hughes looks at what can happen to a people when the dream is too long deferred. But in “I Dream a World,” like King, he focuses purely on a visionary future.

We don’t live in that world yet, but we are closer to it than we were when I was growing up in the segregated south. Just because we have a long way to go doesn’t mean that we should ignore the progress we have made.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments closed

The Herbert Poem that Converted Weil

By Robin Bates | Published: January 18, 2020
Simone Weil

Spiritual Sunday

In a conversation with colleague and friend John Gatta, I learned that my favorite George Herbert poem had a profound impact on French mystic Simone Weil. She encountered it at a time when she was grappling with doubts and also migraine headaches.

Although raised an agnostic Jew and frequently engaged in political activism (including the Spanish Civil War), in her late twenties Weil began exploring Christianity. While suffering from crippling migraines, she encountered first choral singing and then Herbert’s “Love (3).” At that point, as she writes in her spiritual autobiography, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me”:

In 1938 I spent ten days at Solesmes, from Palm Sunday to Easter Tuesday, following all the liturgical services. I was suffering from splitting headaches; each sound hurt me like a blow; by an extreme effort of concentration I was able to rise above this wretched flesh, to leave it to suffer by itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words. This experience enabled me by analogy to get a better understanding of the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of affliction. It goes without saying that in the course of these services the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all.

There was a young English Catholic there from whom I gained my first idea of the supernatural power of the sacraments because of the truly angelic radiance with which he seemed to be clothed after going to communion. Chance — for I always prefer saying chance rather than Providence — made of him a messenger to me. For he told me of the existence of those English poets of the seventeenth century who are named metaphysical. In reading them later on, I discovered the poem of which I read you what is unfortunately a very inadequate translation. It is called “Love”. I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me…Moreover, in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.

In the poem, Christ bestows his love despite the speaker’s intense feelings of unworthiness:

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
         Guilty of dust and sin.
 But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
          From my first entrance in,
 Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
           If I lacked any thing.
 
 A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
           Love said, You shall be he.
 I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
            I cannot look on thee.
 
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
             Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
              Go where it doth deserve.
 And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
               My dear, then I will serve.
 You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
                So I did sit and eat.

The idea that Christ will come to us in our affliction spoke deeply to Weil, and she sent the poem to her imprisoned brother and to the paralyzed poet Joe Bosquet. As Diogenese Allen writes in an article on Herbert and Weil,

It was a poem which uses the imagination that enabled Weil to break through to a domain above the intellect. The experience gave her the incentive…to assemble material to develop an epistemology [a theory of belief] which related beauty, truth, pain and supernatural good, and thus to achieve full conviction. She then can write such things as “The true mysteries of the Faith are themselves absurd but their absurdity is such as to illumine the mind and cause it to produce in abundance truths which are clear to the intelligence.”

Literature and religion have a lot in common in that respect.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed