Trusting the Gift Within

By Robin Bates | Published: November 29, 2025
Ivan Aivazovsky, Neopolitan Lighthouse, 1842

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First Sunday in Advent

For today’s Gospel reading, we have a passage from Matthew that is the basis for so-called Rapture Fiction, where readers get to fantasize about being raptured off to Heaven while their benighted neighbors are “left behind” to suffer apocalyptic destruction along the lines of Noah’s flood. That the Left Behind series has sold over 65 million copies worldwide shows how pervasive the fantasy is, but it’s probably not what Jesus had in mind, especially since the fantasies are often laced with resentment and thoughts of vengeance. More on that after we examine the passage:

Jesus said to the disciples, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

In an essay posted on the Journey with Jesus website, Amy Frykholm writes that Jesus is pointing to an experience that exists outside of our known parameters. It is a time outside of time, Kairos rather than Chronos. Whereas Rapture Fiction operates comfortably in the realm of the familiar—we are invited to smugly identify with those who are taken and to feel superior to the wretched souls who are not—Frykholm says that Jesus has something far more challenging in mind, something that he himself can only glimpse. Because poetry can take us further into realms where language itself is inadequate, Frykholm turns to W.S. Merwin’s “Gift” and Mary Oliver’s “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field” to help her out. Kairos time, she says,  

introduces us to our wild and unpredictable God. This is not the God of The Bible Code, where everything can be deciphered if we just apply the right numerological formulas. This also isn’t the sentimental God of commercial Advent, where we go through the cycles of Christmas preparation. This is a God that the poet W.S. Merwin calls “Nameless One, Invisible, Untouchable Free.” This is the God of the owl in a Mary Oliver poem, “Coming down out of the freezing sky/with its depths of light.” The God of kairos time is terrifying. If we’re afraid, it’s because God exceeds our understanding and often does not seem to have our best interests at heart. Like the people of Noah’s time, we might like to avoid the presence of this God. But this God is the God of now. The God of here. The God coming to be in our midst. 

Think of the Matthew passage, then, as more about spiritual awakening than physical relocation, which is only a hackneyed metaphor anyway.  “If the Gospel is a message of love and not a message of fear,” she writes, “then love is always, already, the moment of now.”

In “Gift” Merwin is striving to give voice to this God in our midst, this gift, and imagining how to respond. “I have to trust what was given to me/ if I am to trust anything,” the poet writes, but that is difficult as the gift refuses to be held down. “I have to let it open its wings and fly among the gifts of the unknown,” Merwyn says. The various names he bestows on the gift are ultimately inadequate because it is nameless, and when he calls to it, it responds like God to Moses from the burning bush:

I am nameless I am divided
I am invisible I am untouchable
and empty 

Yet as elusive as it is, there is still a role for the poet and a role for all of us. We are to be led by this gift

as streams are led by it
and braiding flights of birds
the gropings of veins the learning of plants
the thankful days
breath by breath

Calling us “nomad,” the nameless gift tells us that we are to be 

my eyes
my tongue and my hands
my sleep and my rising
out of chaos

In the end, we are wanderers who are to come and be given to the world as a gift is given. 

Gift
By W.S. Merwin

I have to trust what was given to me
if I am to trust anything
it led the stars over the shadowless mountain
what does it not remember in its night and silence
what does it not hope knowing itself no child of time

what did it not begin what will it not end
I have to hold it up in my hands as my ribs hold up my heart
I have to let it open its wings and fly among the gifts of the unknown
again in the mountain I have to turn
to the morning

I must be led by what was given to me
as streams are led by it
and braiding flights of birds
the gropings of veins the learning of plants
the thankful days
breath by breath

I call to it Nameless One O Invisible
Untouchable Free
I am nameless I am divided
I am invisible I am untouchable
and empty
nomad live with me
be my eyes
my tongue and my hands
my sleep and my rising
out of chaos
come and be given

In the liturgical calendar, Advent signals the movement from the “ordinary time” of Pentecost to apocalyptic time. Poetry can play a powerful role in this transition that defies understanding.

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My Life as Bildungsroman

By Robin Bates | Published: November 28, 2025
Albert Finney as Tom Jones

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Friday

This is the latest post in my on-going series on “My Life in Literature,” which appears every Friday. Because an informal autobiography written by my great grandmother Eliza Scott means so much to me—she discusses the novels that were important to her as she grew up in Victorian England—I figured I should do something similar for family members who come after me. Of course, the subject is also consistent with the mission of this blog, which is to explore the many ways that literature enhances and sometimes changes our lives.

In the classic bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, the protagonist goes through an intense period of inner turmoil and discomfort before discovering his or her strengths and stepping out confidently into the world. Literary examples include Tom Jones, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Little Women, and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Leaving Carleton and entering what we college kids called “the real world” was my own discomfort. 

Carleton did its part in the task of my formation. Editing the Carletonian taught me leadership, my classes shaped my intellect, I developed lifelong friendships, and I met the love of my life. Little surprise that the prospect of leaving terrified me.

If I had gone directly into graduate school and the world of books, the transition would have been easier, but some deep part of me resisted that. If I was to grow up, I thought, I would need to explore alternatives to life as a professor. For a brief moment I considered publishing since I have been accepted into the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course. Journalism also seemed a possibility, and a recruiter from Northwestern Journalism School assured me that I would be accepted.

But publishing proved too commercial for my tastes, and two years working on small town newspapers—the Pine City Pioneer in Pine City, Minnesota and the Winchester Herald-Chronicle in Winchester, Tennessee—let me know that devoting myself to everyday facts did not excite me. I learned that I was too gullible and too shy to be a good investigative reporter, and while I excelled at feature writing, I couldn’t see doing it for the rest of my life. Julia and I decided, therefore, that after two years of establishing herself as a middle school or high school teacher so that she could get a job anywhere, I would enter a graduate English program with the goal of becoming a professor.

Public school positions being scarce in 1973, Julia had to settle for a wretched post in east central Minnesota, with a principal who bullied first-year women teachers to maintain his self-esteem. I, meanwhile, first landed a job as proofreader for an advertising shopper (the Cambridge Scotsman) and then, a couple of months later, as the sole reporter and photographer for the Pioneer. While working for the shopper, where I cut and pasted grocery ads, I became convinced that my mind was deteriorating, and I read frantically. Unfortunately, one of the first works I read was Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street since Sauk Center, Minnesota, where it is based, was only 100 miles away. Lewis’s vision of the rural Midwest as a cultural wasteland reenforced our own experience there and added to my panic.

Other works included John Knowles’s Separate Peace (through which I processed high school memories), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Studying for the literature Graduate Record Exam, I also went through the Norton anthologies, all but memorizing the extensive introductions while dipping into various works. As a result, I tested in the top 10%, even though I hadn’t majored in English. It helped that there were four questions on Vanity Fair.

The work that made the most positive impression was Tom Jones, a comic masterpiece. I loved the sophisticated humor, the sexual innuendo, the rambunctious protagonist, the beautiful and principled heroine, and the author’s good nature and big heart. Any century that can produce such a work, I decided, was worth studying further. As I was already well versed in the French 18th century, it wasn’t much of a stretch to move across the channel. 

The Minnesota newspaper hadn’t had a full-time reporter for years—the owners were improving it in order to sell it, I later learned—so I had an entire untouched county about which to write feature stories, which I did. This provided me with the broad introduction to life that one finds in coming-of-age novels: I entered the lives of farmers, church ministers, small store owners, artists, car mechanics, garbage men, police officers, fast food franchise owners, piano tuners, and county politicians. Everyone is interesting enough to warrant a feature, I declared, and set out to prove it. I even wrote an article about the town dump. It was a fun experience, but I was let go after a few months after the newspaper changed hands and ran into financial difficulties. The new editor took over my writing and photography duties.

Here’s something I learned from this first year of work: although I liked to think of myself as staff, I automatically identified with management (which is why my firing came as a shock). A life of privilege will do this to you, and it would not be the last time I would be served this lesson.

Julia was desperately unhappy in her job and so was fortunate to find a more rewarding position the following year, teaching English and French at Grundy County High School in Appalachian Tennessee. (We had decided we wanted to spend the remaining year before graduate school close to either her parents or mine.) I, meanwhile, found a job at the biweekly Herald Chronicle. The year was 1974-75, and I can report that I heard the n-word on a daily basis—usually from the publisher—which is why I had fled to a northern college in the first place. I was able to continue writing feature stories, however, although two were suppressed (a profile on the remarkable chair of the local NAACP, who had spearheaded our integration efforts, and a where-are-they-now article on the Highlander Center, which had been run out of Grundy County by racists 15 years earlier).  At least I was adding experiences to my life basket.

My history major made it difficult to get into a graduate English program, especially since literary formalists pooh-poohed historical context. Luckily, Emory’s J. Paul Hunter, its 18th century specialist, saw the history background as a plus, along with my interest in Tom Jones, so I attended Emory. Later, when I landed a job at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, I would teach Tom Jones every other year in my “Couples Comedy in the British Restoration and 18th Century.” The love affair lasted up until about 10 years ago, when Fielding’s gentry perspective came to seem a bit too entitled. By way of contrast, Jane Austen—whose Sense and Sensibility I always taught to conclude the course—has never let me down.

I realize that, in this post, I haven’t talked much about how I used literature to process my life, but that’s because at the time I saw literature mostly as a means of escaping life. It was a refuge, not a way to negotiate life’s challenges. It may be significant that, during lunch hours at the Winchester newspaper, I worked my way through Don Quixote, which is about a man who finds the world of books more fulfilling than reality.

I also, rather dangerously, attempted to memorize poetry during the dull commute to work, the equivalent of today’s texting while driving. I’ll end today’s essay with a story about how this practice ended when a tragedy occurred.

I was in the process of memorizing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and had the book propped in my lap. I would look down, grab a couple of lines, and refocus on the road. At one point I glanced up to see a puppy in front of me.

I simultaneously slammed on the brakes and honked the horn. Unfortunately, the dog froze when it heard the horn rather than continuing on, and to this day I can still feel the jolt as I went over it. A driver coming from the other direction shook his finger at me. 

Of course, the poem is about the mariner gratuitously killing an albatross, perhaps to show his power over nature or perhaps simply because he can. As punishment, his fellow sailors hang the bird around his neck, and I imagined the puppy being hung around my own. Because he has committed this sin, however, the mariner—after great suffering—comes to understand our connection with nature. “He prayeth well, who loveth well/ Both man and bird and beast,” he tells a young man who needs to learn the same lesson.

I can’t say that my puppy taught me this message. But what I was doing was dangerous so perhaps it lost its life to save me from a much more serious accident. I continue to be haunted, as the mariner is haunted, but I became a much more careful driver after that incident.

There’s no predicting how literature will enter our lives.

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Thanksgiving, a Time to Remember

By Robin Bates | Published: November 26, 2025
Norman Rockwell

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Thursday – Thanksgiving

Today the Bateses and the Degens will celebrate Thanksgiving with a family gathering that has been held every year, with only occasional exceptions, since 1954. That was the year the Bateses moved to Sewanee. Our fathers were newly hired professors and our mothers met on Phoebe Bates’s full day here, when she formed a friendship with Eileen Degen that lasted the rest of their lives. The Bates boys and the Degen girls grew up together, and although we went our separate ways after high school, we have been reuniting since Julia and I retired here. Cathy comes up from Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Barbara down from Alexandria, Virginia to stay in the house they inherited from their parents. In other words, our joint family Thanksgivings have survived our parents.

But of course we are keenly aware of all who can no longer join us. Every year, it seems, our numbers diminish. My brother David died earlier this year, and Barbara lost a brother-in-law just this past week, so our joy at being together will be tinged with melancholy. Linda Pastan’s “Home for Thanksgiving” captures such mixed feelings.

In the family Thanksgiving she describes, she is intensely aware of the passage of time: it is late afternoon and “the light is wasting away.” As it grows darker, individuals become silhouettes, just as, when they die, they become memories. The poem provides two images of death, one dark, one less so. “Wasting away” suggests illness, and the silhouettes are harsh as death is harsh, stripping away our rich complexity. Yet the tone modulates toward the poem’s ending as daughters removing their aprons are compared to trees shedding their leaves. A lifetime of work will ultimately lead to a final rest that is part of nature’s cycle of life.

Knowing that all this will pass, Pastan tells us that we should “fill ourselves up.” It’s Horace’s injunction to seize the moment. When she advises us to “eat quickly,” maybe she has in mind the Passover feast (the author is Jewish), which was eaten hurriedly prior to a long journey into the unknown. The reference to albums closing may be to the photo albums that record past Thanksgivings and in which may be how we ourselves are remembered. Yet the evanescence of life makes the present moment all the more precious.

We are deeply grateful that we have had such gatherings with loved ones in the past and that we continue to do so. Happy Thanksgiving! 

Home for Thanksgiving
By Linda Pastan

The gathering family 
throws shadows around us,
it is the late afternoon
of the family.

There is still enough light
to see all the way back,
but at the windows
that light is wasting away.

Soon we will be nothing
but silhouettes: the sons’
as harsh
as the fathers’.

Soon the daughters
will take off their aprons
as trees take off their leaves
for winter.

Let us eat quickly—
let us fill ourselves up.
The covers of the album are closing
behind us.

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ICE and W.C. Williams’s Ice Box Theft

By Robin Bates | Published: November 25, 2025

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Wednesday

Here’s a random use of literature that caught my eye: in an article about the jury acquitting “Sandwich Guy” for “hurling a hoagie” at ICE agents, Atlantic reporter Ashley Parker invoked William Carlos Williams’s famous poem “This Is Just to Say.” While she applied it to Sean Charles Dunn, however, I think it comes closer to characterizing the mentality of ICE agents who went after him, not to mention those Trumpists in general who are drunk with power. Hang on while I explain.

First, here’s Parker citing Williams as she sums up what happened:

The facts of the incident are ostensibly simple: In the early days of Trump’s militarization of the nation’s capital, Dunn—a 37-year-old Air Force veteran and, at the time, Justice Department employee—screamed at federal officers stationed in a popular nightlife corridor, repeatedly calling them fascists, and then hurled a Subway footlong at a Customs and Border Protection agent, hitting him squarely in the chest. “I did it. I threw a sandwich,” Dunn confessed to law enforcement upon being apprehended—a sort of modern Williams Carlos Williams (“I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox …”) for the more carnivorous, angrier set. Although it was widely reported at the time that the sandwich was salami, Dunn later said it was turkey.

Referring to the Trumpist response as “hoagie histrionics,” Parker reports,

Four days later, despite Dunn offering to surrender to the police, at least half a dozen law-enforcement officials in tactical gear staged a nighttime raid on his apartment, bringing him out in handcuffs—footage of which the White House blasted out in a highly stylized video, reminiscent of a Netflix FBI thriller. Finally, after a federal grand jury failed to indict him on a felony charge, prosecutors attempted to get him on misdemeanor assault.

Apparently the motivation behind throwing the sandwich was to pull ICE agents away from a gay club holding a special Latino night. After insulting the officers, Dunn threw the sandwich, prompting the officers to leave the post in front of the club to swarm after him. (“I succeeded,” he told the court.) 

The jury, meanwhile, was appalled that the case had even been brought before them. (Having once served on a laughable case myself, I can sympathize.) One juror told Parker that they used words like absurd, laughable, and waste of government money. “We’re supposed to be looking at the evidence, but a clear majority felt it was nonsensical,” she said.

When the officer complained, “I had mustard and condiments on my uniform, and an onion hanging from my radio antenna that night,” this juror’s response was, “Oh, you poor baby.” Then it turned out that the sandwich had never left its wrapper anyway.

Now to the poem:

This Is Just to Say
By William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

While multiple interpretations of the poem are possible, to me it smacks of entitlement:  the plum thief is offering up a faux apology while reveling in the fact that the victim can’t do anything about it. The plums are particularly delicious because they have been stolen, and by mentioning this, the thief is rubbing the theft in the owner’s face.

Which pretty much sums up the mentality of many ICE agents: they are reveling in their ability to commit illicit acts with impunity. Complaining won’t do any good, they are essentially telling their victims. That their actions are causing pain and distress just makes them more delicious.

Or put another way, pain and distress are the icing on ICE’s ice box theft.

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Cliff’s Reggae Defined Jamaica

By Robin Bates | Published: November 24, 2025

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Tuesday

When I learned yesterday that legendary reggae singer Jimmy Cliff had died, I was surprised to learn that he was still alive. That’s in part because his performance as a reggae singer whom the authorities gun down in The Harder They Come is so compelling that I had unconsciously conflated character and actor. Perhaps I also conflated him a little with Bob Marley, who did in fact die young. In real life, Cliff would go on continuing to perform—he won a Grammy for best reggae album in 2013—and died a peaceful death at 81.

The film was important to me in that he made me realize how vital the arts are in a culture’s sense of itself. The two arts highlighted in Harder They Come are music (of course) but also cinema. The title song and a Cliff Eastwood western where a lone gunman overcomes impossible odds provide the urban poor a consoling narrative. Those dwelling in shanty towns may be powerless and doomed but these art forms leave them with some measure of dignity.

In Cliff’s honor, I share a poem by Kwame Dawes, who while from Ghana grew up in Jamaica and says he writes out of a reggae aesthetic. As he puts it in his poem “Recall,” “reggae’s insinuating bass cleaves to my bloodline.”  In the poem I share today, Dawes says that it is Jamaica’s artists, including its reggae musicians, who transformed Kingston from a “makeshift dwelling” of “dust and stone” into a holy city. Dawes calls these artists “prophets and seers” and says that they provided him a language for truly seeing Jamaica. Until he heard reggae “psalming its apocalypse across this city,” he 

could not call it holy, until the names of this constantly
new land, broken and wrecked by storms and neglect, and then
restored in riotous green within days, without aid,
without urging, until then, I had no language for the holiness
of this Kingston…

Poets like himself play their own role in devising a language to express all that makes up Jamaica, and he looks back at himself as a young boy “walking ‘bout” neighborhoods and soaking up the sights and sounds. When he began recording these memories, he suddenly achieved a broad perspective, which he likens to climbing a mountain road and looking down to see Kingston laid out below him. “A city requires psalms, songs, and the distilled language,” he writes. And although he “can’t say I knew this then,” he knows it now.  “In such clear holy prophecy,” he writes, “the impregnation of need did happen.”

Reggae played a key role in the process, and in acknowledging this, we pay honor to Jimmy Cliff:

Walking ’Bout
By Kwame Dawes

Bless my eyes this morning.
—Bob Marley, “So Much Trouble”

Marcus Garvey prophecize say 
“One mus’ live 10 miles away,” yeah.
I-man satta at the mountain top,
Watching Babylon burning red hot, red hot.
—Max Romeo, “War Ina Babylon”

It was the prophets and the seers, they were the ones
who anointed my city holy—Kingston of dust and stone,
Kingston haunted by the ghosts loitering in the pens,
the enslaved and the enslavers, the homeless and lost,
the flesh and stench of people who have not learned
the language of futures of  hope. Before the prophets and seers
the city is a makeshift dwelling, a shelter for the exploiters
and the exploited, a village of gutters and middens,
where coins are exchanged, where blood is shed,
where the dead are an inconvenience. It is words
that construct the cathedrals of memory, how a boy,
restless and seduced by the culturing of secrets growing
in his mind, forgets the difference between words
spoken and words rattling about in the soul’s case, a boy
walking through lanes and alleys, only to arrive at familiar
places, the empty cricket field, the deserted yards
and classrooms of  his primary school, arriving
there to stand still and listen to the birds, the hum
of engines, the hollow echoing of memory, every
desire, every revelation, the stories in books in the ticking
library, the clandestine looks at the girls leaping
over ropes, the vocabulary of love and lust and rejection.
The wheezing boy, his nose stuffed with mucus, his skin
tender with seething mosquito bites, his shoes
worn down by the deformity of an old ankle wound,
stands there considering the sky, considering the taste
of green mangoes, considering the chaos of memory
as if there may be a holy writ to be retained. Perhaps
this terror of forgetting is the making of the prophet,
the scribe who longs to name each street, each scent
arriving and departing, this is where fear is fostered,
and perhaps art is made. Until I heard the sound
of reggae, psalming its apocalypse across this city,
I could not call it holy, until the names of this constantly
new land, broken and wrecked by storms and neglect, and then
restored in riotous green within days, without aid,
without urging, until then, I had no language for the holiness
of this Kingston—“It sipple out there,” says the griot.
“It slide out there,” says the roots man, calling me up
to the hills, and me walking, child astray, up Jack’s Hill,
aimlessly moving toward a certain absence, and then
arriving at a turn in the road, from where I see
the city laid out before me, contained by sea and mountain;
far enough to become art, glorious enough to calm
my terror of predators and temptations, from there,
a city requires psalms, songs, and the distilled language.
I can’t say I knew this then, not in such clear holy
prophecy, but the impregnation of need did happen,
the disquiet of the anticipation of an unseen forming, a kind
of  lamentation long before the amassed dead drew
closer to my door. Bless my eyes, oh God, bless my eyes.

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Normalizing Nooses and Swastikas

By Robin Bates | Published: November 23, 2025
Benjamin Kopman, The Lynchings (1955)

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Monday

While the Democrats currently are the big tent party, fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat  notes that MAGA has a big tent of its own. One of MAGA’s superpowers, she notes, is how it 

made room for Southern racists full of nostalgia for the Jim Crow South; people who distrust or feel hostile to anyone who is not White and Christian; neo-Nazis; and far-right extremists linked to Russia, Hungary, and other present-day autocracies. MAGA brought global and home-grown hatreds together and gave them a political home.

A recent indicator of this nostalgia is how the Coast Guard recently tried to roll back its absolute prohibition of noose drawings—and also swastikas–before public outrage forced it to retreat. By calling them only “potentially divisive” and classifying their display as only  “a potential hate incident,” authorities were attempting to normalize them. As Ben-Ghiat points out,

The word “potential” does the normalization work here. It suggests that some people don’t have a problem with swastikas or nooses and don’t find them hateful. Maybe they have positive feelings about Nazis and their quest to create a Jew-free world, or see Blacks as undeserving of rights: if Blacks were lynched, they must have had it coming to them. 

Normalization, Ben-Ghiat points out, serves MAGA’s agenda:

We should not be surprised that a U.S. government entity was attempting to make nooses and swastikas more acceptable. Each expression of racism has its own history in America, but in 2025 they come together to advance the goal of creating an American ethno-state supported by ideologies of White supremacy and Christian nationalism—a state in which racialized voter suppression, mass detention and deportation, and Fascist-style population engineering schemes reshape American governance and society.

Great literature resists normalization, showing us the truth in ways that sink in. In response to the Coast Guard, I could choose either Holocaust or lynching poems for today’s post, but I’ve chosen the latter as I live in a Tennessee county that, in 1918—which is to say, 36 years before my family moved here—had one of the most violent lynching incidents in U.S. history. You can read the Wikipedia article here if you want the full story, but suffice it to say that it all started with a Black man standing up for himself. It ended with acts of unimaginable horror.

Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday, draws its power from its disturbing comparison, which catches us off guard. Then it hits us with the contrast between “scent of magnolia sweet and fresh” and “the sudden smell of burning flesh”: 

Strange Fruit
By Abel Meeropol

Southern trees bearing a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is a fruit for the crow to pluck
For the rain to wither, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Toni Morrison may have this poem in mind when she writes about a lynching in Beloved. The novel is about attempts to bury the past. No matter how much Sethe attempts to do so, however, the past keeps returning. Here she find her mind return to life on the Sweet Home plantation, where life for slaves was relatively good until a new master came upon the scene. Once again we are bludgeoned with the contrast between natural beauty and human bestiality:

[S]uddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shamless beauty It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her—remembering the wonderful sloughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.

Here’s one more poem, in which Claude McKay begins with the victim but then shifts to the white witnesses who condone the hanging. This is the kind of normalizing that Ben-Ghiat fears:

The Lynching
By Claude McKay

His spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven.
His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
Had bidden him to his bosom once again;
The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
All night a bright and solitary star
(Perchance the one that ever guided him,
Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)
Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.

Perhaps you think that this could not happen again in America. But then, did you ever imagine that a day would come when we would see masked police grabbing people off the street and sending them, unrecorded, to foreign concentration camps?

The good news is that pushback yields results. The American military is once again classifying nooses and swastikas as hate symbols.

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Rescuing the Christ the King Metaphor

By Robin Bates | Published: November 22, 2025
Michelangelo, Christ and the Two Thieves

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Sunday

In these days of No Kings marches, it seems somewhat ironic to be celebrating “Christ the King Sunday” today. Indeed, applying the king metaphor to Christ has always struck me as wrong and, even worse, ineffective. Figurative language is supposed to carry us beyond ourselves whereas applying “king” to Jesus seems to lessen him.

Malcolm Guite solves the problem by seeing “Christ the King” as an oxymoron, with Christ refusing the trappings of royalty. Rather, his Christ calls to us “from the hungry furrows,” stands in long lines, is strip searched by those in authority,  turned away from hospitals, and locked up “in the prisons of our fear/ Lest he unlock the prison of our wealth.”

Guite’s sonnet reminds me of George Herbert’s Redemption, where the speaker goes looking for God “in cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts,” only to find him elsewhere:

At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of theeves and murderers: there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died.

As I think about it, today’s Gospel reading plays with the same paradox since it’s the story of our king undergoing what, in Roman times, was regarded as the most humiliating and certainly the most unkingly of executions. The word “king” is first used sarcastically and then transformed into something holy:

When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his clothing. The people stood by, watching Jesus on the cross; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:33-43)

Here’s Guite’s poem:

Christ the King
Matthew 25-31-46

Our King is calling from the hungry furrows
Whilst we are cruising through the aisles of plenty,
Our hoardings screen us from the man of sorrows,
Our soundtracks drown his murmur: ‘I am thirsty’.
He stands in line to sign in as a stranger
And seek a welcome from the world he made,
We see him only as a threat, a danger,
He asks for clothes, we strip-search him instead.
And if he should fall sick then we take care
That he does not infect our private health,
We lock him in the prisons of our fear
Lest he unlock the prison of our wealth.
But still on Sunday we shall stand and sing
The praises of our hidden Lord and King.

This “hidden Lord and King,” this “man of sorrows,” is not demanding pomp and ceremony, and he has nothing to do with prosperity theology, despite the contentions of certain megachurch pastors. The soldiers’ sarcasm is turned on its head, just as so much was turned on its head with Jesus’s death and resurrection.

In short, when you hear Christ described as king, don’t think of him as an elevated king. He’s down here in the trenches with us.

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On Lawrence and a Sexual Awakening

By Robin Bates | Published: November 21, 2025
Our wedding at Carleton College, June 8, 1973

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Friday

This is the latest post in my on-going series on “My Life in Literature,” which appears every Friday. Because an informal autobiography written by my great grandmother Eliza Scott means so much to me—she discusses the novels that were important to her as she grew up in Victorian England—I figured I should do something similar for family members who come after me. Of course, the subject is also consistent with the mission of this blog, which is to explore the many ways that literature enhances and sometimes changes our lives.

In my last “Life in Literature” post I mentioned how, although many of my college literature essays felt like meaningless cerebral essays, occasionally I would write one where something seemed to be at stake. That was the case for an essay I wrote my senior year on D. H. Lawrence’s poetry. It was meaningful because it coincided with my blossoming love affair with Julia.

I had met Julia Ruth Miksch the year before. One of a handful of Carleton students with a farming background, Julia was touted by the Admissions Office as adding diversity to the student body. (“One of your classmates is a pig farmer’s daughter,” the admissions director informed us during first-year orientation.”) Julia had started a poetry reading group our junior year and, because she was a friend of my roommate, I wandered in. Apparently I impressed her by citing the first few lines of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem—the very rhythmical “Leaden Echo”—but I didn’t join the group as the college newspaper was taking up all of my extra time.

We reconnected the following term, where over lunch we began a conversation that unexpectedly lasted for several hours. Conversing excitedly about ideas functioned as an aphrodisiac that led to the first real sex of my life, after which I was hooked. Over the summer Julia visited us in Sewanee after recovering from a severe case of mono contracted during her spring semester, and we decided we would get married after graduation. Senior year at Carleton proved a very rich time. Julia had to drop basketball because of the aftereffects of her sickness but found her time filled up with student teaching and preparing for comps. I, meanwhile, was editing the Carletonian while recovering from a broken leg and writing my senior thesis. Nevertheless, I would spend many nights in her room and (when the weather turned warm) out in the arboretum. Into these exhilarating days stepped Lawrence’s poetry.

Creative writing professor Keith Harrison was teaching a course on 20th century poetry, which introduced me to Lawrence. I sometimes think of D.H. as a young person’s author since his fascination with sex matches our own at that age. His collection Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, which contains pulsating poems about the natural world, was just the ticket. Take, for instance, these opening stanzas from “Tortoise Shout,” a poem about copulating turtles that, somewhat unbelievably, we had someone read at our wedding:

I thought he was dumb,
I said he was dumb,
Yet I’ve heard him cry.

First faint scream,
Out of life’s unfathomable dawn,
Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon’s dawning rim,
Far, far off, far scream.

Tortoise in extremis.

Why were we crucified into sex?
Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves,
As we began,
As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?

A far, was-it-audible scream,
Or did it sound on the plasm direct?

An urge driven by nature’s seething plasm? Never underestimate the power of a young person’s sexual awakening.

Some background is useful here. Both sides of my family were sexually repressed, which I duly imbibed in a deep way. Few novels have understood me as well as John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant Woman, which I read as a sophomore and which features a young man who, while an intellectually adventurous Darwinist, is otherwise tightly wound. Everything changes for him when he meets a mysterious woman—just as, a year later, everything would change for me when I met Julia.

I say my family was repressed even though my father became somewhat famous (or infamous) for his fascination with erotica. It showed up in his groundbreaking Apollinaire scholarship, in his teaching, in his poetry, and in the “Erotic Film Series” he ran for years at the University of the South. In fact, the two of us once collaborated on an essay contending that “rosebud” in Citizen Kane was originally a vulva. (It’s my most cited article.) But one can reinscribe repression in rebelling against it, which I think my father did in attempting to break free from my grandparents’ Victorian views of sex. All of which is to say that I felt boxed in by my own feelings of guilt and timidity when it came to my sexuality.

Which is why Lawrence hit with such force. Even before I encountered his poetry, I had read The Man Who Died, a novella about Christ deciding to live a very different kind of life when he returns from the dead. The original title of the work was The Escaped Cock, with the sexual pun fully intentional, and we see Jesus rejecting self-denial for a life that includes sexual pleasure. By the end, he is sleeping with and impregnating an Egyptian priestess of Isis. 

Characteristic of the novel is the following passage, which now strikes me as verging on parody but which was heady stuff for a 20-year-old with my background:

He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins, magnificent.

“I am risen!”

Magnificent, blazing indomitable in the depths of his loins, his own sun dawned, and sent its fire running along his limbs, so that his face shone unconsciously.

Jesus as imagined by Lawrence has cared so much for others that he has neglected his own needs, which is what he must learn. As he tells Mary Magdalene, “The teacher and the savior are dead in me; now I can go about my business, into my own single life.” And she, whom Lawrence imagines to be a former prostitute who has given up the sensual life for the spiritual, is depicted as having gone too far the other way. Your lovers, he tells her, “were much to you, but you took more than you gave. Then you came to me for salvation from your own excess.” Elsewhere the author informs us, “Now the other doom was on her. She wanted to give without taking. And that, too, is hard, and cruel to the warm body.”

Lawrence is rebelling here, not only against sexual repression but against sacrificing oneself to a life of service to others. Given that “service” could have been my middle name, and Julia’s as well, reading Lawrence at the height of the sexual revolution gave us permission to explore our bodies.

But there’s another way that Lawrence was important to me, which I explored in my essay. Even as the author imagines losing himself in a grand passion, he is also fearful of losing his individuality. His poems reflect this tension, as does his essay on Walt Whitman, who in Song of Myself sometimes focuses on the Self apart, sometimes on merging with the cosmos. Here’s Lawrence doing a version of the same in “Hummingbird”:

Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

As I look back at the wedding ceremony I composed, I see that I used poetry to figure out how two people can hold on to their separate identities while still forming a more perfect union. Furthermore, I felt that I, as a non-believer, had to justify the very fact that I was getting married. Nor was that the only impediment since, to many of us at the time, marriage seemed an outdated institution (which is how Sartre saw it). Why have a ceremony at all? Since literature was my religion—it seemed to me a much richer symbol system—I turned to poetry to reconcile myself with exchanging vows before a minister.

The ceremony wasn’t a problem for Julia since she had been raised in a Moravian community and had been attending the local Moravian church in Northfield. That must have been why she gave me a free hand in writing the ceremony. In the following segment—which came after Keith Harrison reading Lawrence’s “Tortoise Shout”— I draw on an image from Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” to capture separate-but-together and W.B. Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter” to justify the ceremony. For good measure, I also throw in the Hegelian/Marxist dialectic, anticipating tension between my thesis and Julia’s antithesis but predicting a higher synthesis.

Before sharing it, let me set the scene. My sons, looking at photos, tell me that we had a hippy wedding. While I distanced myself from hippy drug culture, it’s true that I had long hair and wore blue jeans and sandals while Julia had a muslin wedding dress on which her mother and sister had embroidered mushrooms. The wedding, meanwhile was held outside and featured a classmate playing a lute, so you can tell me if my sons are right. Here’s the passage from the ceremony I’m referencing:

Minister: The marriage bond is a bond between two individuals. It does not entail a merging of one into the other, for in merging the individuality is lost.
Congregation: There must be a tension of difference. Without the tension, there can be no growth.
Minister: From the tension, this man and this woman will grow to new awarenesses and reach new syntheses. Marriage can be beautiful because it provides a unified form in which to search.
Congregation: Marriage is like a sonnet. As a fixed form, it endows a heightened beauty on the infinite number of variations within.
Minister: The bond is the attraction between two stars revolving around each other, caught in each other’s orbit but resisting an incorporation which would burn brightly but die quickly.
Congregation: “Love is the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea.”
Minister: If we are gathered together today, it is because through ritual we ascertain the symbolic nature of the bond. And only through symbolism can we touch upon the beauty and the innocence.
Congregation: “How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.”

Following the exchange of vows and a reception, Julia and I climbed into her Ford pickup and drove off into the great unknown. And here we are, still together, 53 years later.

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DJT’s Cabinet: Jumping Frogs, Lilliputians

By Robin Bates | Published: November 19, 2025

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Thursday

I’ve written numerous posts about the slavish devotion Donald Trump demands of his cabinet officials, but Digby’s Hullabaloo website has just given me another literary way of imagining it: “The Celebrated Jumping Magas of Washington, D.C.”  

For extra measure, the post references King Lear, and it also gives me the opportunity to share a favorite image of mine from Gulliver’s Travels.

The title, as no doubt you know, references Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Channeling Twain’s satiric tone, Digby notes that it took Pam Bondi a whole three hours and 37 minutes (!) to respond to Trump’s command to investigate Democrats associated with Jeffrey Epstein. Trump, of course, wants to deflect attention from his own association with Epstein, but no president since Richard Nixon has had the gall to sic the Justice Department on his enemies—and not even Nixon did it openly!

The need to maintain distance between the president and the attorney general has been so important that even casual encounters can create as stir, as Obama AG Loretta Lynch learned when she had a brief discussion with Hillary Clinton’s husband on an airport tarmac during the 2016 election. AG Merritt Garland, meanwhile, was scrupulous to a fault in maintaining distance from Joe Biden: when he saw that it was necessary to investigate Trump himself for instigating a coup attempt and stealing government documents, he appointed a special prosecutor.

Forget all that when it comes to Trump, who on Friday tweeted out,

Now that the Democrats are using the Epstein Hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans, to try and deflect from their disastrous SHUTDOWN, and all of their other failures, I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him.

To which Bondi responded, 

Thank you, Mr. President. SCNY U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton is one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country, and I’ve asked him to lead. As with all matters, the Department will pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people.

Noting the time lapse between when Trump tweeted out his “ask” and Bondi responded with her reassurance, Digby comments, “Surely you can do better, Pam. Usually, Trump’s people are pretty snappy about shouting, ‘Yes, sir! How high?’ whenever he says jump.”

Digby then suggests a contest between cabinet officials:

Why not a competition on the White House South Lawn? Let’s see who can jump faster and higher for their king. Consider it a trial run for the UFC the former reality TV star has planned there for the country’s 250-year anniversary. His entire boot-licking cabinet, plus Stephen Miller and OMB Director Russ Vought. Open the games with a solemn quote from King Lear: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?“

For the record, here’s the response of Lear’s oldest daughter to that question:

Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter,
 Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty,
 Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare,
 No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor;
 As much as child e’er loved, or father found;
 A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable.
 Beyond all manner of so much I love you.

As apt as the Lear reference is, Swift goes it one better. In his visit to Lilliput, Gulliver witnesses two gymnastic exercises required of those seeking the emperor’s favor. The first involves a tightrope, a metaphor that every politician who has ever had to balance competing interests will appreciate. Flimnap in Swift’s allegory is Prime Minister Robert Walpole:

When a great office is vacant, either by death or disgrace (which often happens) five or six of those candidates petition the emperor to entertain his majesty and the court with a dance on the rope; and whoever jumps the highest, without falling, succeeds in the office. Very often the chief ministers themselves are commanded to show their skill, and to convince the emperor that they have not lost their faculty. Flimnap, the treasurer, is allowed to cut a caper on the straight rope, at least an inch higher than any other lord in the whole empire. I have seen him do the summerset several times together, upon a trencher fixed on a rope which is no thicker than a common packthread in England. 

The other test involves either jumping over a stick or crawling under it (i.e., groveling). The threads awarded as prizes stand in for different orders of knighthood (the Order of the Garter, the Order of the Bath, and the Order of the Thistle):

There is likewise another diversion, which is only shown before the emperor and empress, and first minister, upon particular occasions. The emperor lays on the table three fine silken threads of six inches long; one is blue, the other red, and the third green. These threads are proposed as prizes for those persons whom the emperor has a mind to distinguish by a peculiar mark of his favor. The ceremony is performed in his majesty’s great chamber of state, where the candidates are to undergo a trial of dexterity very different from the former, and such as I have not observed the least resemblance of in any other country of the new or old world. The emperor holds a stick in his hands, both ends parallel to the horizon, while the candidates advancing, one by one, sometimes leap over the stick, sometimes creep under it, backward and forward, several times, according as the stick is advanced or depressed. Sometimes the emperor holds one end of the stick, and his first minister the other; sometimes the minister has it entirely to himself. Whoever performs his part with most agility, and holds out the longest in leaping and creeping, is rewarded with the blue-coloured silk; the red is given to the next, and the green to the third, which they all wear girt twice round about the middle; and you see few great persons about this court who are not adorned with one of these girdles.

In the case of walking the tightrope, everyone takes a fall sooner or later, but Flimnap/Walpole has special insurance:

These diversions are often attended with fatal accidents, whereof great numbers are on record. I myself have seen two or three candidates break a limb. But the danger is much greater, when the ministers themselves are commanded to show their dexterity; for, by contending to excel themselves and their fellows, they strain so far that there is hardly one of them who has not received a fall, and some of them two or three. I was assured that, a year or two before my arrival, Flimnap would infallibly have broke his neck, if one of the king’s cushions, that accidentally lay on the ground, had not weakened the force of his fall.

In Swift’s mind, the cushion is the Duchess of Kendal, mistress of the king and a Walpole supporter. When Walpole messed up, Kendal was there to smooth things over. In Trump’s case, the cushion is merely undying loyalty to Trump so that various screw-ups are allowed—mistakenly leaking battle plans (Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth), using a government jet to visit a mistress (FBI director Kash Patel)—if one is satisfactorily dancing, jumping, or crawling. 

Gulliver and Lear actually fit Trump better than Twain’s jumping frog since a stranger rigs the contest. As the storyteller recounts it, “he got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled him full of quail shot—filled him pretty near up to his chin.” It’s this stranger who bears the most resemblance to the current White House since Trump has been sabotaging his opponents his entire life. And as with this stranger, they have yet to “ketch” him.

But whether as jumping frogs, avaricious daughters, or gyrating Lilliputians, the heads of our most important governmental bodies are putting on quite a show.

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