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Thursday
Over the past year I’ve been reporting on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, focusing on one literary invention at a time. Fletcher, who is “Professor of Story Science” at Ohio State, takes what could be described as a psychological-anthropological-historical approach to literary techniques, arguing that they have had an impact similar to, say, the introduction of the wheel or the steam engine on human development. Given that my own project is charting how literature changes lives, you can see why I’ve devoted so much attention to the book.
In a chapter that touches on Don Quixote, Greek and Roman comedies (Aristophanes’s Frogs and Lysistrata, Platus’s Pseudolus), and the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, Fletcher looks at works that move between different fictional realities, thereby “prompting our brain to wonder: Is one reality more real? Is one reality more fictional.“
Fletcher’s major example is part 2 of Don Quixote, where the knight encounters people who have read part 1. As Fletcher puts it,
This is a mind bender, not just for the don but for us. A fictional character is riding around the world where his fictions have been published—which is to say, a fictional character is riding around the factual world. So, is the don real? Or is the real world a fiction? Our brain flutters back and forth, inspecting both possibilities, trying to sort out the meta-textual puzzle.
There are yet more twists and turns to come, especially since Cervantes in part 2 is also responding to a counterfeit sequel written by the pseudonymous author Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. Cervantes’s Quixote calls out this other Quixote as a fraud. Or as Fletcher puts it, “an unreal character sets out to disprove a false fiction by revealing himself in the real world through a genuine fiction.”
Fletcher says the mental gymnastics involved in contrasting fantasy from reality is key to engaging with the world. As we mature, our understanding of what life can contain is enlarged, enabling us to transition from the rules of one environment to the next. While it’s an understanding that Quixote himself has trouble achieving, most of us come to it as we grow older.
But then Fletcher takes another step. Through certain kinds of fiction, we can engage in counterfactual thinking, conducting thought experiments into what an alternate world might look like. Rather than “impossibly reimagining life to suit our fancy,” he writes, we can “learn how to construct plausible dreams that we can export more readily to the life beyond.” We do this with what Fletcher calls “the Comic Wink.”
For a work that employs this wink, he turns to Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata, which posits the question, “What would life be like if women ran the government?” The counterfactual thinking encouraged by comedy, he says, “was important to Athenian democracy, which depended for its survival on an openness to new ideas.” But because new ideas can be unsettling, they must be cushioned by a wink, which is “a potent reality-suspending device.” For just a moment, an actor breaks the theater’s fourth wall to assure us, “None of this is really real.” Here’s Plautus’s Pseudolus giving us this wink:
I know, I know. You’re thinking that I’m a two-bit charlatan. But I assure you, all my impossible promises will come true. What kind of a comedy would this be if they didn’t.
You may be familiar with Pseudolus from Mel Brooks’s Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Forum.
While the Comic Wink has proved effective in “getting human brains to open themselves to outside ways of thinking,” Fletcher writes, “it’s only the first half of the dream-come-true technology that modern authors have derived from the Story in the Story.” The second half is the “Reality Shifter.”
Unlike the Comic Wink, which starts in the fantasy but gestures towards the real world, the Reality Shifter “starts in the real world—and then drifts in to fantasy, gently pulling the boundary of reality with it.” This happens in Don Quixote when the hero of part 1 reaches out to readers that the author imagines reading the book, including them as characters in part 2.
And how does this change our lives? Fletcher writes that scientists have shown “that exercises in counterfactual thinking can boost our ability to imagine creative ways to translate fantasy into reality.” It “increases our belief in our ability to change the world; and it improves the problem-solving skills we need to make change a reality. It gives us the will and then gives us a way.”
Put more prosaically, it gets us to think outside the box when we encounter life’s challenges.
In other words, Fletcher gives us yet another reason to make sure our children read imaginative literature throughout their education.
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Wednesday
A Washington Post review of Somehow, Anne Lamott’s latest book, notes that she concludes with a William Blake passage. This gives me an excuse to write about “The Little Black Boy,” which is brilliant in its handling of race. I also take this occasion to express my appreciation for Lamott.
Like many writing teachers, I have used her Bird by Bird in the classroom, especially Lamott’s advocacy of the “shitty first draft.” One of the major hurdles faced by writers is breaking the silence of the blank page or blank screen. If beginning writers come to think differently about their halting first efforts, the process becomes a lot easier.
I’m also a fan of Lamott’s observation that “you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do.” While this may put us in mind of various resentment-crazed fundamentalists, Lamott does not exempt herself. “My lifelong cross to bear,” she writes in Somehow, “has been secret derisive judgment, a pinball machine of sizing up everything and everyone.” To which she adds, “I am working on it, but the healing is going slightly more slowly than one would hope.”
According to the review, Lamott’s latest book ends with the Blake passage, “And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love.” The reviewer observes, “No matter one’s external descriptors, Lamott speaks to the human in all of us, challenging us to bear her beam of love, and our own.”
The poem in which the line appears is more complex than it first seems:
The Little Black Boy By William Blake
My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child: But I am black as if bereav’d of light
My mother taught me underneath a tree And sitting down before the heat of day, She took me on her lap and kissed me, And pointing to the east began to say.
Look on the rising sun: there God does live And gives his light, and gives his heat away. And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive Comfort in morning joy in the noonday.
And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love, And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice. Saying: come out from the grove my love & care, And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.
Thus did my mother say and kissed me, And thus I say to little English boy. When I from black and he from white cloud free, And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:
Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear, To lean in joy upon our fathers knee. And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair And be like him and he will then love me.
What first stands out is the color imagery, with whiteness being associated with goodness and purity and black the opposite. But rather than endorse this view, Blake is instead pointing out that the little Black boy has internalized the racial hierarchy. He thinks the little English boy will see him as white—and come to love him—only if he is loving and shields him from the heat.
We know from our racial history—and so did Blake—that such submissive behavior will only feed the White boy’s sense of entitlement and privilege. In fact, this is how slaveholders wanted their slaves to behave, remaining docile as the sun burned their faces in the cotton, rice, and cane fields. Blake is a master of irony who doesn’t hesitate to contrast the innocence of children with the hypocrisy of their Christianity-professing elders.
In “Holy Thursday,” for instance, he contrasts the orphans who are being marched to church—who raise a “mighty wind” as they pour out their hearts in hymn singing—with the “grey-headed beadles” who use their staffs to corral them. (Blake ironically compares these staffs to “wands as white as snow.”) Once you are attuned to Blake’s irony, you can almost hear him spit out, as sanctimonious pabulum, the final lines: “Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor/ Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.”
Can you detect the sarcasm? These “wise guardians of the poor” have long ago driven angels from their doors.
They’ve also benefited from the racial hierarchy in “Little Black Boy,” using Christianity to buttress their positions of power. Central to Blake’s vision is Jesus’s admonition to his ambitious disciples in Matthew 18:3-5:
I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me.
And lest you miss the point in his first “Holy Thursday” poem (found in Songs of Innocence), Blake has a companion “Holy Thursday” poem in Songs of Experience. Here he doesn’t couch his point in irony:
Is this a holy thing to see, In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reducd to misery, Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song? Can it be a song of joy? And so many children poor? It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine. And their fields are bleak & bare. And their ways are fill’d with thorns. It is eternal winter there.
In our own rich and fruitful land, meanwhile, we have self-professed Christian legislators rolling back child labor laws and cutting support systems for poor families while voting in large tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. Often in the name of Christ.
What is miraculous is that love manages to make itself heard at all. Lamott turns to Blake, and to his little Black boy, to make sure the message gets through.
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Tuesday
“What can an ordinary voter do to maintain engagement with the election while not turning their cerebral cortex into a wet, steaming mess of fused wiring?” asks Tom Nichols in an Atlantic article that speaks directly to many of us. Nichols points out that this is actually Trump’s strategy. To cause disillusion with democracy, “flood the zone with shit,” as Trump whisperer Steve Bannon colorfully puts it.
Among literary characters who show strength and resolve to stand strong in the face of relentless attacks, Lizzie in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market comes to mind.
First, however, here’s Nichols expanding on the problem:
By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil. His campaign’s goal is to turn voters into moral zombies who can no longer tell the difference between Stormy and Hunter or classified documents and personal laptops, who cannot parse what a “bloodbath” means, who no longer have the ability to be shocked when a political leader calls other human beings “animals” and “vermin.”
And further:
Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.
In Goblin Market, goblins seek to seduce Lizzie and Laura by appealing to their base desires, offering them forbidden fruit. Think of these tempters as “the best and most serious people” who currently surround Trump: Stephen Miller, Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, Jim Jordan, Jeffrey Clark, and others. Link them up with the following as you see fit:
One had a cat’s face, One whisk’d a tail, One tramp’d at a rat’s pace, One crawl’d like a snail, One like a wombat prowl’d obtuse and furry, One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry.
So what base desires does Trump appeal to? Well, resentment, sadism, fear, and the urge to dominate, among others. And what must they offer up in return? In Laura’s case, it’s a lock of her golden hair—which is to say, her innocence, her purity, her integrity. And at first, she is as exhilarated as Trump supporters upon first encountering him:
She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl, Then suck’d their fruit globes fair or red: Sweeter than honey from the rock, Stronger than man-rejoicing wine, Clearer than water flow’d that juice; She never tasted such before, How should it cloy with length of use? She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more Fruits which that unknown orchard bore; She suck’d until her lips were sore; Then flung the emptied rinds away But gather’d up one kernel stone, And knew not was it night or day As she turn’d home alone.
Yes, there is a heady feeling when one has sucked upon Trumpian fruit. The problem , however, is that it leaves one a shell of one’s former self, a robot who can respond only to Trump’s trigger words. There are, in the United State, cultists who are so in thrall to the man that they have cut themselves off from their spouses, partners, children, grandchildren, relatives and friends, not to mention from humanity generally. We see in Laura the effects of such surrender:
But when the noon wax’d bright Her hair grew thin and grey; She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn To swift decay and burn Her fire away.
Now to Lizzie, who refuses to succumb to the goblin men as she goes to the aid of her sister. What truly sustains us, we learn, is not forbidden fruit but love. But this love requires courage and Lizzie encounters the kind of hate that, as we have learned to our sorrow, Trump cultists are only too willing to dish out to anyone who disagrees with them:
Their tones wax’d loud, Their looks were evil. Lashing their tails They trod and hustled her, Elbow’d and jostled her, Claw’d with their nails, Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking, Tore her gown and soil’d her stocking, Twitch’d her hair out by the roots, Stamp’d upon her tender feet, Held her hands and squeez’d their fruits Against her mouth to make her eat.
And further on:
One may lead a horse to water, Twenty cannot make him drink. Though the goblins cuff’d and caught her, Coax’d and fought her, Bullied and besought her, Scratch’d her, pinch’d her black as ink, Kick’d and knock’d her, Maul’d and mock’d her, Lizzie utter’d not a word; Would not open lip from lip Lest they should cram a mouthful in…
And now to the passage I have in mind about standing up to Trumpist attempts to short-circuit our brains. It takes Lizzie’s resolve to stay firm and keep our eyes on the prize:
White and golden Lizzie stood, Like a lily in a flood,— Like a rock of blue-vein’d stone Lash’d by tides obstreperously,— Like a beacon left alone In a hoary roaring sea, Sending up a golden fire,— Like a fruit-crown’d orange-tree White with blossoms honey-sweet Sore beset by wasp and bee,— Like a royal virgin town Topp’d with gilded dome and spire Close beleaguer’d by a fleet Mad to tug her standard down.
Compare this with Nichol’s advice on how we should respond to Trump:
The way to withstand Trump’s daily assaults on our senses is to regard them with fortitude, and even some stoicism. He’s trying to shake our confidence in democracy and basic decency; remaining engaged in civic life, calmly and without stooping to such tactics and rhetoric, is the superpower of every citizen in a democracy.
Plotwise, Lizzie allows Laura to lick the fruit juice she has accumulated off her face, where it works as an antidote to Laura’s addiction. In other words, love conquers base desire. Or in our case, love of “democracy and basic decency” can overcome (or so we can hope) fascistic temptation.
We dream that those Americans who have been led astray by this temptation will abandon the cult and return to the family and friends they have rejected. For her part, Laura, after having gone through an intense inner struggle, finds her way back:
Laura awoke as from a dream, Laugh’d in the innocent old way, Hugg’d Lizzie but not twice or thrice; Her gleaming locks show’d not one thread of grey, Her breath was sweet as May And light danced in her eyes.
I have experienced a loved one who was once taken over by a cult. During his junior year in college my son Justin joined a rabid fundamentalist church, which made prickly his ties with his family (especially when he told one of his brothers that he was going to hell). Once he asked me if I “had been saved,” even though he knew I attend church weekly. Apparently Julia and I weren’t Christian enough for him.
He was still a lovely man, however, and he would still give out hugs. Whenever I saw him around campus (he was attending the college where I taught), I refused to argue with him but instead saw myself ducking beneath the branches to embrace the trunk. What was most important was the love I had for him.
That’s how Lizzie saves Laura, who years later tells her children,
For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands.
I will never know if my love would have helped Justin to a more balanced perspective because he drowned on April 30 in a freak accident. (I take some consolation from his friends reporting that he was starting to soften not long before then, as if he had had to experiment with total religious immersion before arriving at his own faith.) Likewise, I don’t know whether our caring for family and friends who have sold out to Trump will ever bring them back. We can only control what what we ourselves do, not how they will respond. Like Queequeg in Moby Dick, we throw our caskets into the sea and hope that our Ishmaels will find them in time.
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Monday
I’ve come across two solar eclipse poems to prepare you for today’s great celestial event. In Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s sensuous sonnet, the moon is the earth’s ever-faithful lover who “shines ever on her lover as they run/ And lights his orbit with her silvery smile.”
And every so often, as on April 8, 2024, she “softly slips,/ And with her mantle veils the Sun’s bold eyes.” While we below “see only that the Sun is in eclipse,” the moon is stealing a kiss:
A Solar Eclipse By Ella Wheeler Wilcox
In that great journey of the stars through space About the mighty, all-directing Sun, The pallid, faithful Moon, has been the one Companion of the Earth. Her tender face, Pale with the swift, keen purpose of that race, Which at Time’s natal hour was first begun, Shines ever on her lover as they run And lights his orbit with her silvery smile.
Sometimes such passionate love doth in her rise, Down from her beaten path she softly slips, And with her mantle veils the Sun’s bold eyes, Then in the gloaming finds her lover’s lips. While far and near the men our world call wise See only that the Sun is in eclipse.
Deborah Trestman’s “The Eclipse” also finds something mystical as “planets/ perfectly align for three long/ minutes, as long as a song.” In this magical moment of “night without sunset,” the birds go quiet and the poet imagines beasts, charmed by the moment, dancing to bells and flute and “forgetting fear and fierceness.” She appears to be referencing celestial harmonies, the music of the spheres, when she says that “gentled bears and lions” are “tamed for the length/ of a chiming whistling tune.”
But the moment passes as “the sun heals white.” In the cold light of day, reality reasserts itself and people become strangers once again. I’m not sure what the poet means by “the crown of the queen of false night”—and how one loses said crown—but it sounds like the magic has gone and, with it, the possibility of a better world. Here’s the poem:
The Eclipse By Deborah Trestman
Birds nest at midday, chirp night songs in midday twilight –night without sunset, the sun noon high, bruised black by the moon.
Charmed beasts dance to bells and flute, forgetting fear and fierceness, gentled bears and lions tamed for the length of a chiming whistling tune.
Strangers fall in love; a prince and a princess, parrots. Planets perfectly align for three long minutes, as long as a song,
until the sun heals white. Costumed parrots mock the wounds of magic. Strangers once more have lost the crown of the queen of false night.
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Sunday
During my recent trip, I screened the 2006 film Stranger Than Fiction at the Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Greenbelt MD, focusing on the movie’s Lenten theme. I hadn’t fully appreciated until our discussion, however, just how Lenten the film is.
In the film IRS agent Harold Crick (Will Farrell), living a lonely and overregulated existence, awakes one morning to discover that a voice in his head is narrating his life. It so happens that he is a character in a book and that the voice is that of author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who has created him. Disturbed, he goes to literature professor Jules Hibbert (Dustin Hoffman), who starts him wondering whether his life is a comedy or a tragedy. As Hibbert puts it,
To quote Italo Calvino, “The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.” Tragedy, you die. Comedy, you get hitched.
Crick begins a systematic examination of his life and concludes that he is in a tragedy, even as he increasingly realizes that he wants to live. After informing him that we all die, Hibbert then advises him to make his life “the one you’ve always wanted.” Taking up the challenge, Harold begins a relationship with baker Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhall) and learns how to play the guitar. But since he also knows he’s in a tragedy, he goes in search of the author to plead for his life.
While this is going on, we watch Eiffel grappling with how to finish her novel. She herself is a chain-smoking mess, and while all of her previous novels have ended with dead protagonists, she’s not sure she wants to end her current novel this way—even though, artistically speaking (or at least in Professor Hibbert’s opinion), a tragic ending is the better ending. As I watched her struggle, I thought of Samuel Richardson and Charlotte Bronte, who killed off characters that their readers desperately wanted them to keep alive (Clarissa Harlowe in Clarissa and Paul Emanuel in Villette).
It so happens that Harold, to whom she gives a draft copy of the novel that has him dying, ends up agreeing with Professor Hibbert. He withdraws his request that Eiffel change the ending, concluding that he must die for the sake of art and beauty.
Since I was thinking of the film in terms of Lent, I couldn’t help but recall Jesus’s Garden of Gethsemane moment. First resisting but then accepting the narrative that has been written for him, Jesus says, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
But as one of our discussants noted, the Christian story is a comedy, not a tragedy, and Stranger Than Fiction proves to be one as well. Ignoring the professor, who thinks she is ruining what would otherwise be her masterpiece, Eiffel comes up with a miraculous ending: although Crick steps in front of a bus to save a boy, a metal fragment from his watch lodges in his arm, preventing an artery from bleeding out. At the end he is recovering in a hospital room and receiving a visit from Ana.
Picking up on the Easter theme, my college roommate Paul Thompson, who had invited me to give the talk, wrote me in a follow-up e-mail,
It seems that when Harold surrenders to dying as “a good ending” of the story, the surprise of a transformed ending happens. It seems to me in my reading of mystics and maybe also St. Paul, that the goal of life is to surrender our ego-self, not with the expectation of living forever—not as a means to an end—but as an actual trust in the dying itself. Resurrection is just a welcome “surprise,” from a God of love who promises surprises that are beyond our imagination and may be beyond our narrow sense of self.
The author offers a similar idea as she argues with Professor Hibbert on how to end her book. As she explains her authorial decision, I thought of Jesus:
Because it’s a book about a man who doesn’t know he’s about to die and then dies. But if the man does know he’s going to die and dies anyway, dies willingly, knowing he could stop it, then… I mean, isn’t that the type of man you want to keep alive?
Her way of keeping him alive is significant. The watch that saves Harold has been the symbol of his boring and meaningless existence. With its shattering, Harold steps out of profane time into sacred time. By accepting his death, Harold shows that death doesn’t get the last word.
And it’s not only Harold who has been living a life of quiet desperation. In his acceptance of his destiny, he shows the author and the professor that they too have been stuck in an old story. Through Harold—or through the power of literature (since he’s a literary character)—they realize that a much bigger narrative is available to them. They have been offered a new dispensation.
The author ends this new story with a deeper appreciation of life than (from what we can tell) she has previously had. If we recall that her story is the frame story—that this is a film about an author whose writing takes her to hopeful places she hadn’t expected—then the film’s final montage represents awakening. Let’s call it the Easter promise.
Stranger than Fiction delivers this promise through a film-ending montage, recounted by Eiffel’s narrative voice, that begins with Ana offering Harold a cookie:
As Harold took a bite of Bavarian sugar cookie, he finally felt as if everything was going to be ok. Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies. And, fortunately, when there aren’t any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind and loving gesture, or subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort, not to mention hospital gurneys and nose plugs, an uneaten Danish, soft-spoken secrets, and Fender Stratocasters [the guitar Harold buys], and maybe the occasional piece of fiction [my italics]. And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days, are effective for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives. I know the idea seems strange, but I also know that it just so happens to be true.
Most of these examples are accompanied by shots of people we have seen in the film, including Professor Hibbert, who shows up in conjunction with “nose plugs.” While earlier we have seen him as a lifeguard at the faculty pool, this time he is diving into the pool, as though he no longer is satisfied with being just a watcher of life. Perhaps, as he advised Harold, he’s decided to go live the life he’s always wanted.
And as for the author coming up with an ending she never expected, I think of what John Gatta says about God’s relationship to creation in Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology . (I’ve written about Gatta’s illuminating book here, here, and here.) Rather than creating a blueprint that is mechanistically carried out (Gatta is criticizing the theory of “intelligent design” here), God participates in the unfolding of creation. It’s as though, He (or She) has created a process that surprises and teaches even Him/Her. Gatta writes,
In contrast to such a predesigned, blueprint model of creation, we might consider how, in the Wisdom tradition of the Old Testament, an enigmatic female personification of Wisdom once sported with God in playful “delight, rejoicing before him always” in the elemental acts of creation, “rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race” (Proverbs 9:30-31).
Gatta also mentions the final voice from the whirlwind heard by Job, which “recalls how the divine artisan’s genesis of all things had melded with a glorious music, ‘when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy’ (Job 38:7).” Gatta points out that this “note of musicality, of divine creation as a ceaseless and soul-stirring flow rather than a static design, has been echoed since by countless writers and lovers of nature.”
Karen Eiffel may not be God, but we can imagine her as one creating in God’s image as she rejoices and delights in her fictional creation. Through this creation, like God’s creation of Jesus, she has opened up new possibilities for herself and for her readers. The new story that emerges—like the Resurrection story—saves lives.
So yes, sometimes this vision is conveyed to us through an “occasional piece of fiction.”
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Friday
As today is Algernon Charles Swinburne’s birthday, I share his best-known poem, which also might be considered an anti-spring poem. And that’s okay. Just because buds are bustin’ out all over doesn’t mean that we have to feel energized. In fact, T.S. Eliot considered April to be the cruelest month. After all, it breeds
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
So okay, I grant that Eliot’s preferred state here is one of emotional numbness—”Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow.” Still there are those times when “the world is too much with us” (to quote Wordsworth) and we just want to rest. I think of the final lines of Tennyson’s “Lotus Eaters”:
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.
Swinburne appears to be coming from a similar place in “The Garden of Proserpine.” Proserpine was the daughter of Ceres, goddess of the harvest, and was carried off to the kingdom of the dead by Pluto. When her mourning mother stopped growing crops, the gods pressured Pluto to release her. But because Proserpine had eaten six pomegranate seeds in the underworld, she had to stay there every six months of the year.
Swinburne’s speaker, on the other hand, appears to want to be there year-round. He is “tired of tears and laughter” and pretty much everything else associated with living. “Even the weariest river,” he writes, “winds somewhere safe to sea.” Here’s the poem:
The Garden of Proserpine By Algernon Swinburne
Here, where the world is quiet; Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot In doubtful dreams of dreams; I watch the green field growing For reaping folk and sowing, For harvest-time and mowing, A sleepy world of streams.
I am tired of tears and laughter, And men that laugh and weep; Of what may come hereafter For men that sow to reap: I am weary of days and hours, Blown buds of barren flowers, Desires and dreams and powers And everything but sleep.
Here life has death for neighbour, And far from eye or ear Wan waves and wet winds labour, Weak ships and spirits steer; They drive adrift, and whither They wot not who make thither; But no such winds blow hither, And no such things grow here.
No growth of moor or coppice, No heather-flower or vine, But bloomless buds of poppies, Green grapes of Proserpine, Pale beds of blowing rushes Where no leaf blooms or blushes Save this whereout she crushes For dead men deadly wine.
Pale, without name or number, In fruitless fields of corn, They bow themselves and slumber All night till light is born; And like a soul belated, In hell and heaven unmated, By cloud and mist abated Comes out of darkness morn.
Though one were strong as seven, He too with death shall dwell, Nor wake with wings in heaven, Nor weep for pains in hell; Though one were fair as roses, His beauty clouds and closes; And well though love reposes, In the end it is not well.
Pale, beyond porch and portal, Crowned with calm leaves, she stands Who gathers all things mortal With cold immortal hands; Her languid lips are sweeter Than love’s who fears to greet her To men that mix and meet her From many times and lands.
She waits for each and other, She waits for all men born; Forgets the earth her mother, The life of fruits and corn; And spring and seed and swallow Take wing for her and follow Where summer song rings hollow And flowers are put to scorn.
There go the loves that wither, The old loves with wearier wings; And all dead years draw thither, And all disastrous things; Dead dreams of days forsaken, Blind buds that snows have shaken, Wild leaves that winds have taken, Red strays of ruined springs.
We are not sure of sorrow, And joy was never sure; To-day will die to-morrow; Time stoops to no man’s lure; And love, grown faint and fretful, With lips but half regretful Sighs, and with eyes forgetful Weeps that no loves endure.
From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Then star nor sun shall waken, Nor any change of light: Nor sound of waters shaken, Nor any sound or sight: Nor wintry leaves nor vernal, Nor days nor things diurnal; Only the sleep eternal In an eternal night.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud theorizes that there is a desire within cells to return to their previous inanimate state, a drive he called the death wish or Thanatos. This exists in tension with Eros, the life drive, with sometimes one predominant, sometimes the other. Swinburne’s poem can be seen as an homage to Thanatos.
I remember, in college, being drawn to “Garden of Proserpine” when I was at the end of an arduous semester and was feeling wrung out. Given all the pressure that I placed on myself, an inanimate state seemed pretty good to me. One of my favorite paintings has always been Daniel Gabriel Rossetti’s painting Proserpine, which was inspired by the poem and which hangs in our living room. In it one sees Proserpine almost defiantly biting into a pomegranate—like Eve biting into the apple—as though, like Swinburne’s speaker, she wants to remain.
I’m not recommending world-weary poems for all occasions. Sometimes, however, there’s consolation in finding a lyric that makes your exhaustion feel poetic.
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Thursday
Whenever a political columnist uses a literary allusion to illustrate a point, I grab onto it as a sign that literature still provides our culture with vibrant images with which to negotiate our troubled times. Recently blogger Greg Olear turned to J.R.R. Tolkien and Washington Irving to depict the workings of Vladimir Putin’s secret police. Meanwhile Armanda Marcotte of Salon compared an anxious Donald Trump to the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Olear sees Putin’s use of secret police as nothing new in Russian history:
From the days of Ivan IV in the late sixteenth century, Russia’s leaders have been extraordinarily ruthless about the application of terror to maintain power. The first secret state police, called the oprichnina, was devised by this first tsar, whom history knows as Ivan the Terrible. Black-clad patrolmen on black mounts descended on towns and villages, like a scene from J.R.R. Tolkien or Washington Irving, leaving death and destruction in their wake.
Passages from The Fellowship of the Ring show us how Putin’s victims must feel when his henchmen come knocking. In the scene, Frodo and Sam are seeking to evade Sauron’s Nazgul or Black Riders:
Round the corner came a black horse, no hobbit-pony but a full-sized horse; and on it sat a large man, who seemed to crouch in the saddle, wrapped in a great black cloak and hood, so that only his boots in the high stirrups showed below; his face was shadowed and invisible.
When it reached the tree and was level with Frodo the horse stopped. The riding figure sat quite still with its head bowed, as if listening. From inside the hood came a noise as of someone sniffing to catch an elusive scent; the head turned from side to side of the road.
And further on:
The sound of hoofs stopped. As Frodo watched he saw something dark pass across the lighter space between two trees, and then halt. It looked like the black shade of a horse led by a smaller black shadow. The black shadow stood close to the point where they had left the path, and it swayed from side to side. Frodo thought he heard the sound of snuffling. The shadow bent to the ground, and then began to crawl towards him.
These scenes terrified me when I was a child.
Irving’s Ichabod Crane is riding a horse when he encounters his own black rider:
In the dark shadow of the grove, on the margin of the brook, he beheld something huge, misshapen and towering. It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon the traveler….On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveler in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless!—but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of his saddle! His terror rose to desperation; he rained a shower of kicks and blows upon Gunpowder, hoping by a sudden movement to give his companion the slip; but the specter started full jump with him. Away, then, they dashed through thick and thin; stones flying and sparks flashing at every bound. Ichabod’s flimsy garments fluttered in the air, as he stretched his long lank body away over his horse’s head, in the eagerness of his flight.
The German S.S. were probably Tolkien’s inspiration for the Nazgul. Frodo and Sam fortunately manage to escape their black riders but Crane, like far too many of Putin’s opponents, meets his demise.
Examining Donald Trump’s psychological response to his upcoming election interference/hush money trial, Marcotte concludes that he is running scared. She points out,
As the trial date nears, his already bizarre behavior is getting worse, like he’s the murderer in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” He posted 77 times on Truth Social on Easter, and that’s not even counting his threatening post depicting Joe Biden being kidnapped.
In Poe’s story, the murderer thinks he has gotten away with killing his neighbor, at least at first, and converses “in a friendly way” with the visiting police officers. Soon, however, he begins to panic. If he were Trump, he would start manically texting:
I soon wished that they would go. My head hurt and there was a strange sound in my ears. I talked more, and faster. The sound became clearer. And still they sat and talked.
Suddenly I knew that the sound was not in my ears, it was not just inside my head. At that moment I must have become quite white. I talked still faster and louder. And the sound, too, became louder. It was a quick, low, soft sound, like the sound of a clock heard through a wall, a sound I knew well. Louder it became, and louder. Why did the men not go? Louder, louder. I stood up and walked quickly around the room. I pushed my chair across the floor to make more noise, to cover that terrible sound. I talked even louder. And still the men sat and talked, and smiled. Was it possible that they could not hear??
Trump is not ravaged by guilt for his alleged election fraud (far from it!), but he certainly keeps speaking louder. With his long Truth Social messages, written in all-caps, and his increasingly unhinged accusations against the calmly talking and smiling Joe Biden, he does indeed sound like Poe’s narrator.
Now all we need is for him to break down and deliver some version of the narrator breaking down: “Yes! Yes, I killed him. Pull up the boards and you shall see! I killed him.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Trump suddenly came clean and admitted that he’s been lying all along about the election being stolen?
To feel the need to confess, however, one must first have a conscience.
Ellis-Taylor as Wilkerson visiting India in Origins
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Wednesday
I’ve been so enthralled with the thesis of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents that Julia and I made sure we saw Origins, the film based on the book, when it appeared in theaters. By viewing America’s treatment of Blacks through the lens of the Dalits (a.k.a. the Untouchables) in India and the Jews in Nazi Germany, Wilkerson clarifies how racism works in the United States. Sadly, if race operates as a caste, then it is much more deeply entrenched in the American psyche than many liberals, including me, have assumed.
To illustrate Wilkerson’s point, in today’s post I feature a poem by Langston Hughes and passages from Huckleberry Finn and Arundhati Roy’s Booker-winning God of Small Things.
Among other things, caste helps explain why impoverished immigrants coming to the United States didn’t feel an automatic kinship with oppressed groups already here. It’s understandable why people would have adopted America’s caste system upon entry: suddenly a big part of your identity is someone else being at the bottom rung of the status ladder.
To focus on one group, the Irish for centuries were treated like dirt by the British, and at first many Irish immigrants found life not a lot better when they immigrated to America. Indeed, many were treated worse than African slaves since, in monetary terms, their lives were worth less. After all, they weren’t prize chattel. But at least they could regain some self-respect by their white skin, a dynamic that is explored in Noel Ignatiev’s study How the Irish Became White.
The poor Whites that I grew up with in segregated Appalachian Tennessee—many of Scotch and Irish descent—were more openly and vocally racist than the rich Whites, more likely to use the n-word and engage in direct violence. (Upper class racism was more subtle, as Harper Lee shows in her sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird.) Hughes pours contempt on these poor Whites in his poem “Ku Klux”:
They took me out To some lonesome place. They said, “Do you believe In the great white race?”
I said, “Mister, To tell you the truth, I’d believe in anything If you’d just turn me loose.”
The white man said, “Boy, Can it be You’re a-standin’ there A-sassin’ me?”
They hit me in the head And knocked me down. And then they kicked me On the ground.
A klansman said, “Nigger, Look me in the face — And tell me you believe in The great white race.”
I think also of the racist rant from Irish descendant “Pap” Finn in Huckleberry Finn:
Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio—a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ’lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me—I’ll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger—why, he wouldn’t a give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?—that’s what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State six months, and he hadn’t been there that long yet. There, now—that’s a specimen. They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months. Here’s a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet’s got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger, and—
Regarded as trash by the Judge Thatchers of the world, Pap salvages some self-dignity thanks to America’s caste system. If you want to understand the irrational hatred that many Whites had for Barack Obama—a hatred that propelled birther-spouting Donald Trump to the White House—look no further. Many of the Pap Finns who voted for him in 2016 were voting for the first time in their lives.
Now, I want to be clear there are plenty of Irish descendants who are not racist, starting with my wife, who broke free of the prejudices of her mother. The problems of caste, furthermore, extend far beyond the Irish. When Julia and I spent a year in rural Minnesota after graduating from Carleton College, I encountered anti-Black racism in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and German descendants—which was a shock since I had gone north hoping to escape such prejudice. Even though there were few if any Blacks in the area, my first boss told me a racist joke on my first day and my second boss informed me that Blacks were little better than animals.
This is the point of Wilkerson’s book: the American caste system has always been available to anyone that wanted to make use of it because that’s how caste works. Democrats are currently worried about certain Latinos, especially white Latinos, gravitating to Donald Trump’s white supremacist views. If they are in fact doing so, they are traveling a well-worn path.
I don’t know a lot about India’s caste system, but God of Small Things shows me just how deep caste systems reach. In this tragic novel about an upper-class woman who falls in love with an Untouchable and sees the lives of herself, the man, and her children destroyed in the process, the author at one point reflects on where the tragedy begins. One answer is thousands of years earlier:
It could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.
That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
America finally got rid of its own miscegenation laws in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, but that hasn’t made the beliefs go away.
In an excruciating scene, Roy shows us the violence that is used to prop up caste. “Touchable Policemen” have tracked down the kindly Velutha, Ammu’s lover, and while Ammu’s horrified twins watch from the shadows, they beat him to death. The author shows the violence comes less from the men than from the caste system:
The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness.
Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
Man’s Needs.
By adding sexism and classism into the mix, Roy shows that caste is not the only dynamic at work. Her novel shows how far the power structure will go to maintain power. As she explains,
What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn’t know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience.
There was nothing accidental about what happened that morning. Nothing incidental. It was no stray mugging or personal settling of scores. This was an era imprinting itself on those who lived in it.
History in live performance.
Further emphasizing how the killing is systemic rather than individual, Roy writes of the policemen,
If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he was a fellow creature—had been severed long ago. They were not arresting a man, they were exorcising fear. They had no instrument to calibrate how much punishment he could take. No means of gauging how much or how permanently they had damaged him.
Roy’s book is brilliant in part because it shows how inexorable the process is. If the central characters worship “the god of small things,” it’s in part because the big gods are not there for them. To borrow the title of Jean Cocteau’s Oedipus play, when there’s an “infernal machine” grinding them down, they find solace in small acts of love, which become everything to them. If it’s useless to worry about tomorrow, one lives day to day.
And if, in the process, one violates love laws—not only caste and miscegenation laws but also (in the case of the twins) incest laws—well, where else is comfort to be found? Unfortunately, the system makes sure the lawbreakers pay a horrendous price, which it does in a cold and efficient manner:
Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot, that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn’t tear out his hair or burn him alive. They didn’t hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didn’t rape him. Or behead him.
After all they were not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak.
America’s increasingly multicultural society is seeing far too many of these inoculation attempts. The liberal hope has been that Americans would come to embrace the pluralistic dream once they got to know each other, with Inclusion, Diversity, and Equality programs helping the process along. And in truth, there has been significant progress.
Unfortunately, we may have underestimated the staying power of caste and the extent to which certain fellow citizens are impelled by primal feelings “born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear.”
Further thought: Given the pessimism in today’s post, I should add that millions of immigrant descendants—which includes everyone other than Native Americans and those who were brought here by force—are appalled by caste racism. While caste helps explain why Trump has been as successful as he has been, millions of White Americans will still vote against him in the upcoming election.
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Tuesday
Baltimore’s Key Bridge catastrophe, brought about when a container ship destroyed a section by colliding with one of the pilings, has me thinking about Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1933). The poet’s ambitious and challenging epic uses the Brooklyn Bridge to symbolize the spirit of the American Dream.
Opened in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge was an astounding achievement, seeming proof of America’s aspirational greatness. This raises the question of whether we can still dream soaring dreams. Even as Joe Biden promises federal aid to restore the Baltimore bridge as soon as possible, the GOP’s “harpies of the shore” (to borrow a phrase from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Old Ironsides”) are threatening to deny funding. Meanwhile, some MAGAts are blaming both Biden and diversity policies for the disaster.
Because “To Brooklyn Bridge,” which functions as a prologue to Crane’s poem, is often obscure, I’ll walk you through it. It begins with the image of a soaring seagull looking down at the bridge, which seems to chain the waters below. The bird appears as a brief apparition to office workers in skyscrapers, perhaps reminding them that we are a nation of dreamers. In fact, this dreaming takes them to movie theaters time and again:
To Brooklyn Bridge (prologue to The Bridge)
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty—
Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; —Till elevators drop us from our day …
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene Never disclosed, but hastened to again, Foretold to other eyes on the same screen…
As I read these lines, I think of the opening passage from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God:
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Crane, however, has not turned his eyes away in resignation. Rather, he sees the Bridge as a symbol of tangible hope, at least for some. The sun that moves across it, turning it silver, leaves some of its energy with it. The bridge may be stationary and yet it seems to soar freely:
And Thee, across the harbor, silver paced As though the sun took step of thee yet left Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,— Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
I say “for some” because Crane then mentions a mad man who commits suicide by leaping from its heights. Not all American stories are happy ones and Crane himself in the near future will commit suicide in similar fashion, leaping off the back of a boat. Yet even this instance speaks to the bridge’s mesmerizing power:
Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets, Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning, A jest falls from the speechless caravan.
This is only a temporary interlude, however. Shining through the bridge’s girders is the sun (“the sky’s acetylene”), casting rip-tooth shadows onto Wall Street. And while the cargo-loading derricks turn under a cloudy sky, the bridge’s cables “breathe the North Atlantic still,” which I’m reading as partaking of and embodying the awesome power of nature. The bridge may be made by humans for commercial purposes, but it channels something greater:
Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks, A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene; All afternoon the cloud flown derricks turn … Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.
The bridge radiates not only natural force but spiritual mystery (“the heaven of the Jews”). The anonymous masses of New York feel their power as they are lifted up and redeemed by the structure, which the poet comes to see as a great musical instrument. When Crane describes the Brooklyn Bridge as “harp and altar,” I think of the importance that Romantic poets like Percy Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge attached to aeolian harps, which use the wind’s power to create art. Crane sees the bridge’s music attracting prophets, outcasts, and lovers (he himself regarded himself as all three):
And obscure as that heaven of the Jews, Thy guerdon … Accolade thou dost bestow Of anonymity time cannot raise: Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.
O harp and altar, of the fury fused, (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!) Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge, Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry…
At night, as car headlamps outline the bridge with a string of luminescent beads, Crane senses that it is lifting up the night itself in its arms. And then later, after all the city lights have gone out (“the City’s fiery parcels all undone”), he experiences the full shadow of the bridge. His observation that snow is submerging “an iron year” hints, once again, that something about the bridge is redemptive. As prophet, outcast, and lover himself, he is being lifted above his hard and unforgiving iron existence:
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, Beading thy path—condense eternity: And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited Only in darkness is thy shadow clear. The City’s fiery parcels all undone, Already snow submerges an iron year …
And indeed the bridge—this “immaculate sigh of stars”—is a constant presence. It’s as though, by vaulting sea and looking out towards the western prairies, it connects the high and the low, the sky and the sod. Caught up in the sweep and curve of the cables, the poet feels that God has been given a new myth. We call that myth the American Dream:
O Sleepless as the river under thee, Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod, Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
I grant that Baltimore’s Key Bridge is nothing like the Brooklyn Bridge, which is an architectural as well as an engineering marvel. Nevertheless, our current challenge begs the question of whether America is still capable of lending a myth to God.
