On Lear and Turning 73

By Robin Bates | Published: June 11, 2024
William Dyce, King Lear and the Fool in the Storm

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Wednesday

Today I turn 73, a number that has special significance for me since in 1973 I both married Julia and graduated from Carleton. To celebrate, I’m sharing this fun poem on retirement lessons taken from King Lear. Although I retired six years ago, David Wright’s poem applies to aging as well. To love the play (as I do) is to appreciate the poem, especially its humor.

Lear’s problem is that he wants to abandon the cares of being king while surrendering none of a king’s privileges. To engineer this, he has come up with a “still untested pension plan.” An insecure control freak, he also tries to engineer the love of his daughters, which backfires spectacularly.

For the first 13 lines of his poem, Wright suggests things that Lear could do, and not do, to make his post-retirement life better:

“Lines on Retirement, after Reading Lear”
By David Wright
for Richard Pacholski

Avoid storms. And retirement parties.
You can’t trust the sweetnesses your friends will
offer, when they really want your office,
which they’ll redecorate. Beware the still
untested pension plan. Keep your keys. Ask
for more troops than you think you’ll need. Listen
more to fools and less to colleagues. Love your
youngest child the most, regardless. Back to
storms: dress warm, take a friend, don’t eat the grass,
don’t stand near tall trees, and keep the yelling
down—the winds won’t listen, and no one will
see you in the dark. It’s too hard to hear
you over all the thunder.

At this point in the poem, however, Wright changes direction. “But you’re not Lear,” he tells us—or himself—and then suggests a different approach to the storm.

But you’re not
Lear, except that we can’t stop you from what
you’ve planned to do. In the end, no one leaves
the stage in character—we never see
the feather, the mirror held to our lips.
So don’t wait for skies to crack with sun. Feel
the storm’s sweet sting invade you to the skin,
the strange, sore comforts of the wind. Embrace
your children’s ragged praise and that of friends.
Go ahead, take it off, take it all off.
Run naked into tempests. Weave flowers
into your hair. Bellow at cataracts.
If you dare, scream at the gods. Babble as
if you thought words could save. Drink rain like cold
beer. So much better than making theories.
We’d all come with you, laughing, if we could.

Wright is reminding us that we’re all going to die. “No one leaves the stage in character,” he notes, with “the feather, the mirror held to our lips” referring to Lear having to acknowledge Cordelia’s death. The storm that is coming is the final storm so “don’t wait for the skies to crack with sun.”

Rather, learn to love whatever time you have left, even if you are experiencing some version of cataracts and huricanoes blowing, cracking, drenching and drowning with “sulphurous and thought-executing fires” (to quote from Lear’s storm-defying rant). Since Lear’s useless orders to the storm can be seen as an attempt to persuade himself he’s still in control, Wright suggests taking another tack. “Feel the storm’s sweet sting invade you to the skin,” he advises, “the strange, sore comforts of the wind.”

In fact, open yourself fully to old age. Instead of trying to get those around you to tell you exactly what you want to hear, “embrace your children’s ragged praise and that of friends.” In fact, forget about dignity:

Go ahead, take it off, take it all off.
Run naked into tempests. Weave flowers
into your hair. Bellow at cataracts.
If you dare, scream at the gods. Babble as
if you thought words could save. Drink rain like cold
beer.

The ”weaving flowers” is what Cordelia reports of her now-insane dad:

Alack, ’tis he! Why, he was met even now
 As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud,
 Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,
 With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckooflowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
 In our sustaining corn. 

Lear’s tragedy is that, by thinking he could have everything, he lost everything. Maybe that’s what Wright means by “making theories.” So since such planning doesn’t work—and wouldn’t even if Lear were far more careful than he was—then why not let it all hang out? Carl Jung, who feared that the figure of the wise old sage could become stultifying, talked about how an old fool could release new life energies. So did W.B. Yeats in his Crazy Jane poems. Wright may have this in mind when he says, “We’d  all come with you, laughing, if we could.”

I can assure my loved ones that, having reached 73, I’m not going to start running around naked in the rain and weaving flowers into my hair. But I also have no illusion that I am some fount of wisdom that everyone should revere. I’m just someone stumbling through old age trying to make sense of things. And working to appreciate “the storm’s sweet sting.”

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An Ent Sighting in New Zealand

By Robin Bates | Published: June 10, 2024
The Northern Rātā or walking tree

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Tuesday

Here’s a fascinating article that I somehow stumbled upon, maybe through Spoutible (which I now use instead of Twitter). The headline says it all:

100-foot ‘walking tree’ in New Zealand looks like an Ent from Lord of the Rings — and is the lone survivor of a lost forest

The article goes on to elaborate:

An unusual northern rātā tree that looks like it is striding across an empty field has been crowned New Zealand’s Tree of the Year. The giant plant, which looks strikingly similar to an Ent from The Lord of the Rings, is centuries old.

The strange tree, which has been nicknamed the “walking tree” because it looks like it’s striding across a field, is a northern rātā (Metrosideros robusta) — one of New Zealand’s tallest flowering tree species that can live for up to 1,000 years.

After reading the story and looking at the photo, I had to go back and check out exactly how Tolkien’s Ents walk. Here’s what I found:

Holding the hobbits gently but firmly, one in the crook of each arm, Treebeard lifted up first one large foot and then the other, and moved them to the edge of the shelf. The rootlike toes grasped the rocks. Then carefully and solemnly, he stalked down from step to step, and reached the floor of the Forest. At once he set off with long deliberate strides through the trees, deeper and deeper into the wood, never far from the stream, climbing steadily up towards the slopes of the mountains. Many of the trees seemed asleep, or as unaware of him as of any other creature that merely passed by; but some quivered, and some raised up their branches above his head as he approached.

And then there’s this detail that caught my attention:

All the while, as he walked, he talked to himself in a long running stream of musical sounds.

This put me in mind of a book written by a biology professor here at Sewanee, David Haskell’s The Songs of the Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors. Looking at the different sounds connected with a variety of trees, Haskell describes such communication systems as the following, which involves a balsam fir:

This network of communication also includes leaves. There plant cells not only sniff the air to detect the health of neighbors but also use airborne odors to attract helpful caterpillar-eating insects. Sound plays a role in this communication. When a leaf senses the vibrations of a caterpillar’s moving jaws, those chewing sounds cause the leaf to mount a chemical defense against the insect. Leaf cells therefore integrate chemical and acoustic cues as they sense and respond to their surroundings.

The article mentioning that the rātā is “the lone survivor of a lost forest” leaves us to wonder whether it is searching for the lost Entwives. Treebeard recalls his last encounter with his own love:

Very fair she was still in my eyes, when I had last seen her, though little like the Entmaiden of old. For the Entwives were bent and browned by their labor; their hair parched by the sun to the hue of ripe corn and their cheeks like red apples. Yet their eyes were still the eyes of our own people.

Once, he says, the land of the Entwives

blossomed richly, and their fields were full of corn. Many men learned the crafts of the Entwives and honored them greatly; but we were only a legend to them, a secret in the heart of the forest. Yet here we still are, while all the gardens of the Entwives are wasted: Men call them the Brown Lands now.

That’s what the Ents discovered when they went in search. The passage may owe something to the fields of Flanders, scorched by World War I, which Tolkien witnessed first hand:

We crossed over Anduin and came to their land; but we found a desert: it was all burned and uprooted, for war had passed over it. But the Entwives were not there. Long we called, and long we searched; and we asked all folk that we met which way the Entwives had gone. Some said they had never seen them; and some said that they had seen them walking away west, and some said east, and others south. But nowhere that we went could we find them. Our sorrow was very great. Yet the wild wood called, and we returned to it. For many years we used to go out every now and again and look for the Entwives, walking far and wide and calling them by their beautiful names. But as time passed we went more seldom and wandered less far. And now the Entwives are only a memory for us, and our beards are long and grey.

So we now know what the Ents look like when they go out searching. The longing for a bygone era brings to mind a line by the World War I poet Wilfred Owen: “Now men will go content with what we spoiled.” But the wilderness that has been lost is, at least, recalled by elves in a song they have written about the Ents and Entwives. Here’s an excerpt:

Ent: When Winter comes, the winter wild that hill and wood shall slay;
When trees shall fall and starless night devour the sunless day;
When wind is in the deadly East, then in the bitter rain
I’ll look for thee, and call to thee; I’ll come to thee again!

Entwife: When Winter comes, and singing ends; when darkness falls at last;
When broken is the barren bough, and light and labor past;
I’ll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again:
Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain!

Both: Together we will take the road that leads into the West,
And far away will find a land where both our hearts may rest.’

See this both as a lament for the environment we have destroyed but perhaps, also, as a spur to reforestation efforts.

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Dostoevsky’s Near Death Experience (NDE)

By Robin Bates | Published: June 9, 2024


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Monday

A dear friend who, as an early Covid sufferer, had a near death experience, recently sent me a Scientific American article about NDEs. My friend spent a month on a ventilator and, at a moment when doctors had all but given up on her, she had vision that she can recall vividly to this day. I cite the article here because it draws on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot for a description.

Neuropsychologist Christof Koch notes that there’s uniformity amongst NDE reports:

NDEs are not fancy flights of the imagination. They share broad commonalities—becoming pain-free, seeing a bright light at the end of a tunnel and other visual phenomena, detaching from one’s body and floating above it, or even flying off into space (out-of-body experiences). They might include meeting loved ones, living or dead, or spiritual beings such as angels; a Proustian recollection or even review of lifetime memories, both good and bad (“my life flashed in front of my eyes”); or a distorted sense of time and space.

Koch says that NDEs can be both positive and negative:

The former receive all the press and relate to the feeling of an overwhelming presence, something numinous, divine. A jarring disconnect separates the massive trauma to the body and the peacefulness and feeling of oneness with the universe. Yet not all NDEs are blissful—some can be frightening, marked by intense terror, anguish, loneliness and despair.

One can see how narratives of heaven and hell have grown out of NDEs. Indeed, religious people often use them as confirmation. But as a scientist, Koch doesn’t search for metaphysical explanations and notes that there are other experiences—he calls them NDE-lite—that resemble NDEs. One of these involves epileptic fits, also known as complex partial seizures:

These fits partially impair consciousness and often are localized to specific brain regions in one hemisphere. They can be preceded by an aura, which is a specific experience unique to an individual patient that is predictive of an incipient attack. The seizure may be accompanied by changes in the perceived sizes of objects; unusual tastes, smells or bodily feelings; déjà vu; depersonalization; or ecstatic feelings.

Koch says that the last items on the list feature in what are clinically known as Dostoyevsky seizures because the author—who suffered from severe temporal lobe epilepsy—describes them memorably in The Idiot.The novel’s protagonist is the Christ-like Prince Myschkin:

During his epileptic fits, or rather immediately preceding them, he had always experienced a moment or two when his whole heart, and mind, and body seemed to wake up to vigor and light; when he became filled with joy and hope, and all his anxieties seemed to be swept away forever; these moments were but presentiments. As it were, of the one final second (it was never more than a second) in which the fit came upon him. That second, of course, was inexpressible. When his attack was over, and the prince reflected on his symptoms, he used to say to himself: …”What matter thought it be only disease, an abnormal tension of the brain, if when I recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life?…I would give my whole life for this one instant.

Koch says that neuroscience is now able to induce these ecstatic feelings, which Dostoevsky described 150 years ago, by

electrically stimulating part of the cortex called the insula in epileptic patients who have electrodes implanted in their brain. This procedure can help locate the origin of the seizures for possible surgical removal. Patients report bliss, enhanced well-being, and heightened self-awareness or perception of the external world. Exciting the gray matter elsewhere can trigger out-of-body experiences or visual hallucinations. This brute link between abnormal activity patterns—whether induced by the spontaneous disease process or controlled by a surgeon’s electrode—and subjective experience provides support for a biological, not spiritual, origin. The same is likely to be true for NDEs.

Just because science can duplicate the experience does not mean that they don’t have a mystical aspect, however, just as our possession of Richard Dawkins’s “God gene” doesn’t disprove the existence of God. All we know is that the more we delve into the natural world—including the brain—the more amazing it appears, a constant unfolding. Genius authors like Dostoevsky, whose creativity also defies scientific understanding, open up windows into this infinitely complex universe.

Sigmund Freud, who founded psychoanalysis, credited literature–especially the plays of William Shakespeare and the ancient Greek tragedians–as having provided him with his most profound discoveries. First literature paves the way, then the scientific mind scrambles to catch up.

Yet another argument for a liberal arts education.

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Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer and Jesus

By Robin Bates | Published: June 8, 2024
Wendell Berry

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Sunday

One of my favorite websites is Journey to Jesus, which each week features a sermon on one of the Sunday readings by Dan Clendenin, usually with a poem attached. This week he turns to a Wendell Berry poem in response to the moment in Mark where Jesus’s family thinks he is crazy.

The passage is the following:

The crowd came together again, so that Jesus and his disciples could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.” 

Jesus smartly replies with a passage that was treasured by Abraham Lincoln–“How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand”—but Clendenin is more interested in the insanity diagnosis.  He argues,

It is the world that has gone mad, not Jesus, and he is rightly angered and aggrieved at this — the religious sanctimony, economic exploitation, political oppression, social exclusion, and the like. And when Jesus disrupts this cultural status quo, he is scapegoated as insane.

In other words, if the world is insane, then maybe the insane are sane, a reversal that is at the heart of the 1966 Alan Bates film King of Hearts. It is also the basis of Wendell Berry’s sixteen Mad Farmer poems, in one of which he writes,

To be sane in a mad time
is bad for the brain, worse
for the heart. The world
is a holy vision, had we clarity
to see it—a clarity that men
depend on men to make.

My favorite of the Mad Farmer poems is also the one that Clendenin features. Like Jesus, the Mad Farmer first shows us how we have lost our way and then presents us with a different way to live. “So friends,” he says in “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” “every day do something that won’t compute.” His list of suggestions includes everything from loving someone “who does not deserve it” to planting sequoias to, in the final line, practicing resurrection.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
By Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

If you find echoes of Jesus in the Mad Farmer’s manifesto, you’re not seeing things.

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Happy Marriages Are NOT All Alike

By Robin Bates | Published: June 6, 2024
Gleeson, Vikander as Levin, Kitty in Anna Karenina


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Friday

I write this post for Julia in honor of our 51st wedding anniversary, which is tomorrow. Last year, for our fiftieth, I looked at poems that describe long marriages. Today I feature my favorite literary couple, Levin and Kitty in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

Although Tolstoy famously opens his novel with the assertion that “happy families are all alike,” there is something special about this happy family.

The scene that moves me the most involves Levin’s dying brother. Levin at first does not want Kitty to accompany him to see the dissolute Nikolay because he doesn’t want her mixing with “the common wench” who is his brother’s mistress. At this point in their recent marriage, Levin paternalistically sees his new wife as a sweet little thing who won’t have much to contribute to a deathbed situation. He is startled when Kitty pushes back, saying she doesn’t care about Nikolay’s mistress. Levin starts off the following interchange:

“Well, for one thing then, because this woman’s there whom you can’t meet.”

“I don’t know and don’t care to know who’s there and what. I know that my husband’s brother is dying and my husband is going to him, and I go with my husband too….”

“Kitty! Don’t get angry. But just think a little: this is a matter of such importance that I can’t bear to think that you should bring in a feeling of weakness, of dislike to being left alone. Come, you’ll be dull alone, so go and stay at Moscow [with your family] a little.”

“There, you always ascribe base, vile motives to me,” she said with tears of wounded pride and fury. “I didn’t mean, it wasn’t weakness, it wasn’t … I feel that it’s my duty to be with my husband when he’s in trouble, but you try on purpose to hurt me, you try on purpose not to understand….”

Kitty refuses to be soothed with soft words and is so insistent that Levin finally gives in, even while kicking himself for not showing “more strength of will.”

When they arrive at Nikolay’s apartment, however, Levin discovers that Kitty has strengths he has not dreamed of. While he feels out of his depth in the sick room, Kitty marches right in:

“Kostya! take me to him; it will be easier for us to bear it together. You only take me, take me to him, please, and go away,” she said. “You must understand that for me to see you, and not to see him, is far more painful. There I might be a help to you and to him. Please, let me!” she besought her husband, as though the happiness of her life depended on it.

Levin was obliged to agree, and regaining his composure, and completely forgetting about Marya Nikolaevna [Nilolay’s mistress] by now, he went again in to his brother with Kitty.

Kitty, it turns out, makes an instant connection:

Stepping lightly, and continually glancing at her husband, showing him a valorous and sympathetic face, Kitty went into the sick-room, and, turning without haste, noiselessly closed the door. With inaudible steps she went quickly to the sick man’s bedside, and going up so that he had not to turn his head, she immediately clasped in her fresh young hand the skeleton of his huge hand, pressed it, and began speaking with that soft eagerness, sympathetic and not jarring, which is peculiar to women.

“We have met, though we were not acquainted, at Soden,” she said. “You never thought I was to be your sister?”

“You would not have recognized me?” he said, with a radiant smile at her entrance.

“Yes, I should. What a good thing you let us know! Not a day has passed that Kostya has not mentioned you, and been anxious.”

Kitty is able to scope out the situation because she looks at it through Nicolay’s eyes. “I am afraid you are not quite comfortable here,” she at one point says to him and then, turning to her husband, “We must ask about another room so that we might be nearer.”

Tolstoy contrasts the two and finds Levin wanting. The husband, who lives in his head, feels he should be able to control the situation and consequently feels defeated:

Levin could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself be natural and calm in his presence. When he went in to the sick man, his eyes and his attention were unconsciously dimmed, and he did not see and did not distinguish the details of his brother’s position. He smelt the awful odor, saw the dirt, disorder, and miserable condition, and heard the groans, and felt that nothing could be done to help. It never entered his head to analyze the details of the sick man’s situation, to consider how that body was lying under the quilt, how those emaciated legs and thighs and spine were lying huddled up, and whether they could not be made more comfortable, whether anything could not be done to make things, if not better, at least less bad. It made his blood run cold when he began to think of all these details. He was absolutely convinced that nothing could be done to prolong his brother’s life or to relieve his suffering. But a sense of his regarding all aid as out of the question was felt by the sick man, and exasperated him. And this made it still more painful for Levin. To be in the sick room was agony to him, not to be there still worse. And he was continually, on various pretexts, going out of the room, and coming in again, because he was unable to remain alone.

His sweet little wife, by contrast, is thoroughly up to the moment:

But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On seeing the sick man, she pitied him. And pity in her womanly heart did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out all the details of his state, and to remedy them. And since she had not the slightest doubt that it was her duty to help him, she had no doubt either that it was possible, and immediately set to work. The very details, the mere thought of which reduced her husband to terror, immediately engaged her attention.

We see her swing into action:

She sent for the doctor, sent to the chemist’s, set the maid who had come with her and Marya Nikolaevna to sweep and dust and scrub; she herself washed up something, washed out something else, laid something under the quilt. Something was by her directions brought into the sick room, something else was carried out. She herself went several times to her room, regardless of the men she met in the corridor, got out and brought in sheets, pillowcases, towels, and shirts.

Levin, who has been sent away for medicine, is struck by the results:

Levin found the sick man settled comfortably and everything about him completely changed. The heavy smell was replaced by the smell of aromatic vinegar, which Kitty with pouting lips and puffed-out, rosy cheeks was squirting through a little pipe. There was no dust visible anywhere, a rug was laid by the bedside. On the table stood medicine bottles and decanters tidily arranged, and the linen needed was folded up there, and Kitty’s broderie anglaise. On the other table by the patient’s bed there were candles and drink and powders. The sick man himself, washed and combed, lay in clean sheets on high raised pillows, in a clean night-shirt with a white collar about his astoundingly thin neck, and with a new expression of hope looked fixedly at Kitty.

Sometimes only Kitty can understand what Nikolay needs and takes charge to make sure he gets it:

No one could make out what he said but Kitty; she alone understood. She understood because she was all the while mentally keeping watch on what he needed.

“On the other side,” she said to her husband, “he always sleeps on that side. Turn him over, it’s so disagreeable calling the servants. I’m not strong enough…”

Terrible as it was to Levin to put his arms round that terrible body, to take hold of that under the quilt, of which he preferred to know nothing, under his wife’s influence he made his resolute face that she knew so well, and putting his arms into the bed took hold of the body…While he was turning him over, conscious of the huge emaciated arm about his neck, Kitty swiftly and noiselessly turned the pillow, beat it up and settled in it the sick man’s head, smoothing back his hair, which was sticking again to his moist brow.

To be sure, Kitty cannot save Nikolay’s life as he is past saving. But having proved herself in the face of death, she then discovers she is pregnant, and we have no doubt that she will rise to that occasion no less ably. Levin must radically revise his previous assumptions about his wife.

Fortunately, he has the humility, the intelligence, and the sensitivity to do so. It will be a good marriage.

Reading over this episode, I wonder if Julia and me dealing with my dying mother pushed our own marriage to a higher level. I’ve noticed in myself new levels of tenderness for her since those final weeks and days. Time and time again I saw Julia, like Kitty, intuiting what my mother most needed and building a deep rapport with her in the process. I emerged from the experience with a sense of awe and gratitude, just as, 23 years before, I was amazed as I watched Julia gather and exert her strength over and over in the hours-long delivery of our first son. Repeatedly, this woman who I thought I knew has expanded my horizons beyond what I thought was possible.

People may think they know what a marriage involves, but I’ve been in one for five decades and I’m still discovering wonders.

Happy anniversary, my dear.

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For Pride Month, An Awakening

By Robin Bates | Published: June 5, 2024
 Simeon Solomon, Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene

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Thursday

June being Pride Month, I share this wonderful Julie Marie Wade poem about an awakening. In this instance, a literal awakening foreshadows a later metaphorical awakening as the speaker gets an inkling of her true lesbian self.

Waking up in an unfamiliar house during a slumber party, Wade tells us that, back then, she “did not love women as I do now.” Or rather, she loved them “with my eyes closed, my back turned”—which is to say, without fully acknowledging that love. Her reference to “sleeping bags like straitjackets” hints at how she is herself trapped in an anatomically assigned identity. Her face “pressed into a slender pillow,” like the closed eyes, points to how close she is to a desire she dare not name. Only a slender membrane separates her from this other reality.

When I Was Straight
Julie Marie Wade

I did not love women as I do now.
I loved them with my eyes closed, my back turned.
I loved them silent, & startled, & shy.

The world was a dreamless slumber party,
sleeping bags like straitjackets spread out on
the living room floor, my face pressed into a

slender pillow.

All night I woke to rain on the strangers’ windows.
No one remembered to leave a light on in the hall.
Someone’s father seemed always to be shaving.

When I stood up, I tried to tiptoe
around the sleeping bodies, their long hair
speckled with confetti, their faces blanched by the

porch-light moon.

I never knew exactly where the bathroom was.
I tried to wake the host girl to ask her, but she was
only one adrift in that sea of bodies. I was ashamed

to say they all looked the same to me, beautiful &
untouchable as stars. It would be years before
I learned to find anyone in the sumptuous,

terrifying dark.

One day she will step into that dark, touching the stars, and it will be sumptuous.

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Gulliver Reminds Us of Civic Virtue

By Robin Bates | Published: June 4, 2024
Gulliver discoursing with the Brobdingnagian king

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Wednesday

While I don’t think requiring civics in grade school is the magic cure-all for our fractured society, it’s useful from time to time to remind ourselves of our foundational values. Jonathan Swift provides us with a useful summation in Book II of Gulliver’s Travels.

Given that Swift’s work is a satire—one of the world’s greatest—it’s surprising to extract anything from Gulliver’s Travels other than instances of humans acting up. There’s a point in Book II, however, where Gulliver sets forth a vision of how society’s leaders should behave.

Swift uses various satiric personae in his book to take down his targets. In Book I Gulliver is a gullible giant who takes the words of the small-minded Lilliputians at face value, in Book IV he is a crazed misanthrope who sees the worst in everybody. In Book II, however, he is a fervent patriot who sees his own country as superior to everyone else. It takes a large-minded giant to see through his boasts.

Nevertheless, his boasts give us a good sense of what we should demand of our leaders, even while making allowances that no one can achieve perfection, that we all fall short. Here’s Gulliver:  

I then spoke at large upon the constitution of an English parliament; partly made up of an illustrious body called the House of Peers; persons of the noblest blood, and of the most ancient and ample patrimonies. I described that extraordinary care always taken of their education in arts and arms, to qualify them for being counsellors both to the king and kingdom; to have a share in the legislature; to be members of the highest court of judicature, whence there can be no appeal; and to be champions always ready for the defense of their prince and country, by their valor, conduct, and fidelity. That these were the ornament and bulwark of the kingdom, worthy followers of their most renowned ancestors, whose honor had been the reward of their virtue, from which their posterity were never once known to degenerate. To these were joined several holy persons, as part of that assembly, under the title of bishops, whose peculiar business is to take care of religion, and of those who instruct the people therein. These were searched and sought out through the whole nation, by the prince and his wisest counsellors, among such of the priesthood as were most deservedly distinguished by the sanctity of their lives, and the depth of their erudition; who were indeed the spiritual fathers of the clergy and the people.

That the other part of the parliament consisted of an assembly called the House of Commons, who were all principal gentlemen, freely picked and culled out by the people themselves, for their great abilities and love of their country, to represent the wisdom of the whole nation. And that these two bodies made up the most august assembly in Europe; to whom, in conjunction with the prince, the whole legislature is committed.

I then descended to the courts of justice; over which the judges, those venerable sages and interpreters of the law, presided, for determining the disputed rights and properties of men, as well as for the punishment of vice and protection of innocence. I mentioned the prudent management of our treasury; the valor and achievements of our forces, by sea and land. I computed the number of our people, by reckoning how many millions there might be of each religious sect, or political party among us. I did not omit even our sports and pastimes, or any other particular which I thought might redound to the honor of my country. And I finished all with a brief historical account of affairs and events in England for about a hundred years past.

The giant king, after taking notes as he listens carefully, punctures all of Gulliver’s claims in ways that you can imagine. In fact, by the end of his interview, he concludes,

I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valor; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counselors for their wisdom….[B]y what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

Gulliver will come to this same conclusion in Book IV.

But as Swift sees it, utter cynicism about human beings is no more accurate than blinkered optimism. (He counters Gulliver’s misanthropy at the end of book by giving us Pedro de Mendez, the benevolent Portuguese sea captain who goes out of his way to support Gulliver.) Why I focus on Gulliver’s paean to his country’s institutions in today’s essay is because sometimes we need reminding of what they are capable. Politicians can be broadminded and put their country first, judges can be fair, those in charge of our country’s finances can be trustworthy.

The 17th century French moralist François de la Rochefoucauld famously wrote that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. If hypocrites believe they must pretend to be virtuous, at least they acknowledge virtue to be important. I worry that Trump has taught the GOP that it’s no longer necessary to be defensively hypocritical. You say whatever you must say and do whatever you must do to gain power, with any adherence to higher values seen as a sucker’s game. In Book II, Gulliver still thinks that human beings have potential.

By Book IV, he is so disgusted with human beings that he is using human skin to fashion shoes and sails. Then he feels bad when the Houyhnhnms see him as little different from other human beings (“But I’m not like them!” he essentially protests) and drive him from their shore. Now there’s a lesson for Trump supporters who think that Trumpism will only hurt their enemies.

For those who haven’t given up, Gulliver’s description of a principled society is a lodestar that can guide our way.

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On Portia, Milosz, and Pardoning Trump

By Robin Bates | Published: June 3, 2024
Portia arguing with Shylock about mercy

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Tuesday

With Donald Trump now a convicted felon, certain parties are calling upon President Biden to pardon him. Greg Olear, a novelist and political writer who blogs at the substack Prevail, thinks this is a terrible idea and cites Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and a Czeslaw Milosz poem to explain why.

In Shakespeare’s play Portia, attempting to persuade Shylock to withdraw his “pound of flesh” agreement, delivers one of literature’s most powerful speeches on behalf of mercy. Mercy, she asserts, is a divine or holy power:

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

The problem with pardoning Trump, Olear points out, is that the power of pardoning is

not be used willy-nilly. Indiscriminate mercy is not mercy at all, because true mercy requires reciprocity. [Portia’s] speech begins and ends with this “both sides” idea. Mercy is a two-way street. It blesses “him that gives and him that takes.” And in praying that mercy be granted to ourselves, we learn to grant mercy to those who trespass against us.

It’s stating the obvious to say that this is not how Trump sees pardoning. Indeed, Olear say that Trump’s practice of pardoning political allies was one of the most outrageous things that he did as president. He himself

 is incapable of mercy, and that makes him unworthy of mercy. There was no divinity within him when he signed off on the pardons for Roger Stone and Mike Flynn. He is a transactional creature—temporal, devoid of wisdom and refinement. He is…the man who commits a crime and should know better.

Trump has, Olear says, desecrated presidential pardoning power, draining it of its higher meaning.

Instead of being guided by lopsided demands that he pardon Trump, therefore, Olear says that Biden should be guided by Truth and Justice, two concepts celebrated in Milosz’s poem “Incantation.” The Polish poet, who helped Jews escape the Nazis during World War II and then defected from communist Poland to the West, declares that poetry and Philo-Sophia (love of wisdom) will go undefeated. Olear believes that Milosz is deliberately echoing Portia’s speech:

Incantation
By Czeslaw Milosz

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

So will “lie and oppression” indeed deliver themselves to destruction. If so, it won’t happen soon. Despite the fact that Trump is now a convicted felon, his supporters are more ardent than ever. In fact, they have now taken up Trump’s drumbeat that the judicial system is rigged, just as most are claiming that the 2020 election was rigged. Rationalizing away their cult leader’s behavior, they engage in “the filthy discord of tortured words,” a powerful way to describe how they contort reason and corrupt language.

If the idea of poetry and Philo-Sophia joining forces to usher in a new order seems fanciful, recall that the poet witnessed first-hand both the Holocaust and Stalinism. He saw graphic instances of bars, barbed wire, and the pulping of books. In other words, he’s no starry-eyed idealist. Perhaps, by calling his poem “incantation,” he is imagining that words of truth can bring about positive change. As Martin Luther King, echoing Jesus, put it, “I still believe that freedom is the bonus you receive for telling the truth. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”

The power of literature to speak truth to power is a point that Indian novelist Salman Rushdie has made in an article about why we should continue to read the classics.  Meanwhile Milosz sounds, in the last line, as though he’s channeling the Biblical psalms or the prophecies of Isaiah.

By observing that news of this new dispensation has been brought by “a unicorn and an echo,” Milosz acknowledges that the victory he longs for will require stepping beyond normal reality and heeding distant words. Yet he’s right that human reason Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope, that it doesn’t distinguish “Jew from Greek or slave from master.” Human reason is beautiful and invincible in the same sense that (against quoting King) the long arc of history bends toward justice. “No sentence of banishment can prevail against it,” says the man who was forced to flee Stalinist Poland.

If Portia’s mercy or Milosz’s human reason could soften Trump’s heart or open his mind, then maybe discussion of a pardon would not be out of bounds (although Biden, not being the New York governor, couldn’t usher one in the Manhattan case). But, like one of Dante’s damned souls, Trump is impervious to anything that “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.” Truth and Justice are all we have to combat him with.

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“Spare Your Country’s Flag,” She Said

By Robin Bates | Published: June 2, 2024

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Monday

Last week we saw what happens when America’s justice system works, with an impartial judge and a jury taking their responsibilities seriously. Unfortunately, not all judges are like Juan Mercham, as we’ve learned from the story of Justice Samuel Alito flying a “Stop the Steal” flag at his home during Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration. We then learned that he had also been flying a Christian nationalist flag at his summer home.

I feature today a beloved poem about the opposite situation, a woman waving an American flag in the face of enemy fire to remind rebellious traitors of their patriotic duty. More on that in a moment.

Alito blamed both flag incidents on his wife—“She likes to fly flags”—but he has blown all appearance of impartiality by allowing the flags to fly at all. (Further, his story about the flags keeps changing.) That appearance is vital in the presidential immunity case currently before the Supreme Court, which has bearing on the insurrection and stolen documents cases. Alito is refusing to recuse himself from the case, as is Clarence Thomas, whose wife actively lobbied lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin (29 in Arizona, two in Wisconsin) to appoint fake electors.

In fact, there’s a chance that Alito was part of the plot by Trump supporters to stop the certification of Biden’s victory. According to Trump lawyer Sidney Powell  was part of Trump’s post-election strategy

to delay certification of the Electoral College vote until Alito, who sits as Circuit Justice for Pennsylvania’s Third Circuit, could issue an injunction further delaying certification so the election could be thrown into the House of Representatives — where Trump had an advantage, as each state would get one vote to decide a contested presidential election. According to Powell, Speaker Nancy Pelosi thwarted the plot by proceeding immediately to the certification once the Capitol was secured.

Whether or not Alito was actively involved or was just regarded as a useful tool is unclear. But given how he and other rightwing members on the Court appear to be slow walking the immunity case—potentially pushing Trump’s January 6 trial to after the election (when, if elected, he would appoint an attorney general who would quash the charges)—it’s a plausible scenario.

John Greenleaf Whittier wrote “Barbara Frietchie” in 1863 at the height of the Civil War, the last time that America experienced an internal threat this serious to democracy. While Whittier doesn’t get all of his history right—he may have merged two women and two different incidents while the Confederate general involved was probably A.P. Hill rather than Stonewall Jackson—nevertheless he captures the immense significance of raising a flag. While Alito (or at least his wife) inverted their American flag to express solidarity with the January 6 insurrectionists, Frietchie waves hers right-side up in support of those fighting to preserve the union.

Alito and Thomas espouse the judicial philosophy of “originalism,” claiming to interpret the Constitution as it was originally written. Barbara Frietchie, however, proves to be the true originalist.

Barbara Frietchie
By John Greenleaf Whittier

Up from the meadows rich with corn,
Clear in the cool September morn,

The clustered spires of Frederick stand
Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.

Round about them the orchards sweep,
Apple and peach tree fruited deep,

Fair as the garden of the Lord
To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,

On that pleasant morn of the early fall
When Lee marched over the mountain-wall;

Over the mountains winding down,
Horse and foot, into Frederick town.

Forty flags with their silver stars,
Forty flags with their crimson bars,

Flapped in the morning wind: the sun
Of noon looked down, and saw not one.

Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,
Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;

Bravest of all in Frederick town,
She took up the flag the men hauled down;

In her attic window the staff she set,
To show that one heart was loyal yet.

Up the street came the rebel tread,
Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.

Under his slouched hat left and right
He glanced; the old flag met his sight.

“Halt!” — the dust-brown ranks stood fast.
“Fire!” — out blazed the rifle-blast.

It shivered the window, pane, and sash;
It rent the banner with seam and gash.

Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf.

She leaned far out on the window-sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will.

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came;

The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman’s deed and word;

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.

All day long through Frederick street
Sounded the tread of marching feet:

All day long that free flag tost
Over the heads of the rebel host.

Ever its torn folds rose and fell
On the loyal winds that loved it well;

And through the hill-gaps sunset light
Shone over it with a warm good-night.

Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er,
And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.

Honor to her! and let a tear
Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier.

Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave,
Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!

Peace and order and beauty draw
Round thy symbol of light and law;

And ever the stars above look down
On thy stars below in Frederick town!

We not seeing much of a “shade of sadness, a blush of shame” from those Republicans who are voicing support for Trump’s assaults on elections and the court system–which makes insisting on “peace and order” and “light and law” more important than ever. May the true flag of Freedom and Union, not flags of division and Christo-nationalism, forever wave!

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