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Monday
When I heard the news about ICE murdering Nicole Renee Good in Minneapolis, followed by Border Patrol killing two more in Portland, Oregon, the lyrics of an old Phil Ochs protest song came to mind. While the blood of martyrs, most notably Emmitt Till eight years earlier, may have been the seed of the Civil Rights Movement, in the “The Ballad of Medgar Evers” the dispirited singer just sees another meaningless death:
Too many martyrs and too many dead Too many lies, too many empty words were said Too many times for too many angry men Oh, let it never be again
Evers died in June of 1963 and, as it turned out, there would be many more martyrs before Congress would pass significant legislation. Victims would include the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing and various voting rights activists. Although I was only twelve at the time, I remember sharing Ochs’s pessimism. It seemed like segregation would be with us always.
The good news is that both he and I were wrong. All those martyrs awakened even indifferent members of the public to the horrors of Jim Crow while spurring others to action. The ultimate result was the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, titanic achievements that changed the American landscape. While they didn’t eradicate white supremacism (as we know to our sorrow), they made possible many of the advances we have seen over the past 50 years.
Rather than stay with Ochs, then, here’s a lyric by Lord Byron, written after leaving comfortable surroundings in Italy to agitate for Greek independence from the Turks:
The dead have been awakened – shall I sleep? The World’s at war with tyrants – shall I crouch? The harvest’s ripe – and shall I pause to reap? I slumber not; the thorn is in my Couch; Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear, Its echo in my heart…
The thorn of Nicole Renee Good’s murder will not allow sleep. As a recent Atlantic article put it, “What is now overt, in a way that it hadn’t been Wednesday morning, is that these agents are at war with the public, and have been for some time.” A trumpet is sounding and its echoes are reaching American hearts.
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Sunday
In the Episcopal Church we have entered the season of Epiphany, which apparently in the Roman Catholic Church is called “Ordinary Time.” According to W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, “the most trying time of all” is the interim between Christmas and Lent. “For the time being” (a phrase so commonplace as to be almost invisible) is a time of tepid emotions, humdrum compromises, and low expectations.
“The happy morning is over. The night of agony still to come,” the poet observes, adding “the time is noon.” Missing the intensity of Christmas, when “everything became a You and nothing was an It,” we find ourselves thrown back into unpleasant self-reflection.
As we return to household chores and workday commutes—back to the Aristotelian city, where everything is matter-of-fact measurable—the marvelous sense of having stepped out of time is fading. Rather, we now operate according to Euclid’s geometry and Newton’s mechanics. Auden asks whether great suffering would be preferable to this time when the Spirit doesn’t seem to be showing forth in force but is merely practicing his scales? What could be less inspiring than these days when there are “bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, irregular verbs to learn”? The streets appear to have shrunk and the office to have become more depressing, while the Christmas feast is but a distant memory and a clean-up job. Echoing Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Berkeleyan idealism, the poet tells us that “the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.”
For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio III
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree, Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes — Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic. The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt, And the children got ready for school. There are enough Leftovers to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week — Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot, Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully — To love all of our relatives, and in general Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed To do more than entertain it as an agreeable Possibility, once again we have sent Him away, Begging though to remain His disobedient servant, The promising child who cannot keep His word for long. The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory, And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are, Back in the moderate Aristotelian city Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience, And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it. It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen The Child, however dimly, however incredulously, The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all. For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious; Remembering the stable where for once in our lives Everything became a You and nothing was an It. And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause, We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son, We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father; “Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.” They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form That we do not expect, and certainly with a force More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem From insignificance. The happy morning is over, The night of agony still to come; the time is noon: When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure A silence that is neither for nor against her faith That God’s Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers, God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.
The greatest enemy to faith in this season, Auden seems to be saying, is indifference. God is not going to step in and prevent the world as it is from triumphing if we let it.
It is up to us, then, to redeem time from insignificance—which is to say, we must seek the divine no less now than at other times of year. God’s presence shouldn’t be dependent on the season.
To bolster our sagging spirits, Auden follows up section III of his Oratorio with a luminous section IV. He suggests a way to transform ordinary time into extraordinary time:
IV CHORUS
He is the Way. Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness; You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
He is the Truth. Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety; You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
He is the Life. Love Him in the World of the Flesh; And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
Apparently, “Land of Unlikeness” is taken from a quotation of Saint Bernard and refers to the human soul’s unlikeness to God and unlikeness to its own pre-awakened state. Poet Robert Lowell, who also uses the phrase, has it symbolize how modern man, cut off from the sight of God, wanders through the land driven by greed and cruelty.
Despite the challenges, however, Auden’s wonderful images reassure us that magic and adventure can still be there for us. We have but to love Christ “in the World of the Flesh.” Even though we may dwell in “the Kingdom of Anxiety” (or “Age of Anxiety,” as Auden wrote three years earlier), by following the Truth we will come “to a great city that has expected your return for years.”
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Friday
It so happens that I have a bad bout of the flu (in spite of having had a flu shot), although at first my doctor thought it was something more serious and sent me to the emergency room. The pain has now been brought under control but, as I’m not yet up to writing a substantive post, you’re getting this instead.
The Sewanee hospital’s emergency room, where I have spent many hours with my mother, is quite small so I was occupying a bed in full view of the ER administrator. As I was lying there groaning, with stabbing pains alternating between head and chest, she was sitting behind her desk doing, well, administrative work. I felt like I was in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
The scene I had in mind was when an invalid finds himself sharing the same room as the ivory company’s chief accountant. Despite the Congo’s challenging conditions, the accountant is immaculately dressed. Marlow describes him as “a miracle”:
I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear.
To this man, the illness of others is an irritant:
When a truckle-bed with a sick man (some invalid agent from upcountry) was put in there, he exhibited a gentle annoyance. ‘The groans of this sick person,’ he said, ‘distract my attention. And without that it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors in this climate.’
I did my best to keep my groans from becoming an annoyance but wasn’t always successful. I apologized several times.
I fully acknowledge that my flu was nothing compared to the malaria suffered in the novel. Nevertheless. I still related to what Marlow experiences towards the end of the book:
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.
A little later he describes this condition as “a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things—even of this pain itself.”
While I didn’t share his careless contempt when it came to my pain—instead I fervently prayed it would go away—I recognized the greyness.
It all made me see why Marlow is in awe of the station manager that he meets upon first arriving in Africa. The man is a mediocrity and maybe even a hollow man à la T.S. Eliot—”Perhaps there was nothing within him,” Marlow reflects—but he has one thing going for him:
His position had come to him—why? Perhaps because he was never ill… He had served three terms of three years out there… Because triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself.
Given how I have been feeling the last few days, I can see why Marlow is impressed. And with that, I’m off to crawl beneath my blankets once again.
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Thursday
I’m flat on my back with a bad head cold (I think that’s what it is) so you’ll have to make do with minimal commentary on today’s poem. Christopher Robin, to whom I partially owe my name, has a case of the wheezles and sneezles and unfortunately I feel his pain. Also unfortunately, I lack his miraculous powers of recovery as I’m in the second day of this and see no sign of it letting up.
Wish me well. Achoo!
Sneezles By A.A. Milne
Christopher Robin Had wheezles And sneezles, They bundled him Into His bed. They gave him what goes With a cold in the nose, And some more for a cold In the head. They wondered If wheezles Could turn Into measles, If sneezles Would turn Into mumps; They examined his chest For a rash, And the rest Of his body for swellings and lumps. They sent for some doctors In sneezles And wheezles To tell them what ought To be done. All sorts and conditions Of famous physicians Came hurrying round At a run. They all made a note Of the state of his throat, They asked if he suffered from thirst; They asked if the sneezles Came after the wheezles, Or if the first sneezle Came first. They said, “If you teazle A sneezle Or wheezle, A measle May easily grow. But humour or pleazle The wheezle Or sneezle, The measle Will certainly go.” They expounded the reazles For sneezles And wheezles, The manner of measles When new. They said “If he freezles In draughts and in breezles, Then PHTHEEZLES May even ensue.”
Christopher Robin Got up in the morning, The sneezles had vanished away. And the look in his eye Seemed to say to the sky, “Now, how to amuse them to-day?”
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Wednesday
Yesterday David Corn of Mother Jones made perfect use of Nineteen Eighty-Four to explain what has happened to memories of Donald Trump’s January 6 coup attempt five years ago. His column sent me back to George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, where I discovered that the novel also provides insight into Trump’s motivations for invading Venezuela and threatening other countries in the western hemisphere.
First, January 6 amnesia. Here’s Corn:
In 1984, George Orwell observed that a fascist state relies upon its ability to control—or obliterate—memory. As Winston Smith, the ill-fated protagonist, ponders the Party’s ability to manipulate reality and history, Orwell writes, “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” Another passage in the novel describes the Party’s relentless effort to construct the dominant narrative: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Sound familiar?
In a small news item that shows how thorough the erasure has been, the GOP is refusing to mount a plaque honoring the Capitol police who protected legislators and staff from the mob of Trump supporters.
Corn continues,
Like the Party in Orwell’s dystopia, Trump and the Republicans have sought to rewrite history and erase the stain of Trump’s profound betrayal of America. He pardoned the violent marauders, and his henchmen in charge of the FBI and Justice Department have fired agents and prosecutors who participated in the investigation and prosecution of these thugs. And Trump’s MAGA legions mounted a disinformation campaign that advanced various conspiracy theories—the FBI did it! Antifa did it!—to absolve Trump and his thugs.
Most important is that
an entire political party and tens of millions of American voters memory-holed Trump’s war on American democracy and his embrace of political violence. What is perhaps the gravest transgression ever committed by a US president has been airbrushed out of the picture and the perp allowed (by a majority of voters) to return to the scene of the crime. This is one of the most worrisome turns in American history. If our democracy cannot protect itself from such peril and repel such a dangerous threat, can it survive?
In a clear instance of Newspeak, some Republicans are even attempting to defend Trump’s incitement to riot as freedom of speech, a kind of “freedom is slavery” jiujitsu. Special counsel Jack Smith, who would have brought insurrection charges against Trump has our rightwing Supreme Court not intervened, refused to back down when questioned by Republicans. Corn reports,
A key exchange occurred when a Republican staffer (whose name is redacted in the transcript) asked, “The President’s statements that he believed the election was rife with fraud, those certainly are statements that are protected by the First Amendment, correct?” This has been a central contention of the Trump cult: You cannot prosecute Trump for stating his opinion that the election was rigged against him. But Smith fired back: “Absolutely not. If [these false statements] are made to target a lawful government function and they are made with knowing falsity, no, they are not.” Statements made to promote a fraud are not protected by the First Amendment.
Somewhat ironically sharing a name with Winston Smith, Jack Smith insisted that 2+2=4 as he reported to the Congressional committee:
“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power,” Smith said at the start. He added, “Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”
And:
Smith patiently explained how Trump’s (alleged) crime related to January 6: “January 6th was an attack on the structure of our democracy in which over 140 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted. Over 160 individuals later pled guilty to assaulting police that day. Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election.”
In its own attempts at erasure, the GOP-run committee refused to allow Smith to testify publicly (as he requested) and then released the report of the hearing at a time when it would be most overlooked—which is to say, on New Year’s Eve.
Now to the Venezuela invasion and to the threats Trump is making against Colombia, Cuba, Canada, and Greenland. In Nineteen Eighty-Four there are three countries that have absorbed the rest of the world. Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are involved in forever wars whose purpose, in part, is to keep their populations impoverished and docile. While Orwell doesn’t get everything right, we can see our own situation in how the three countries use showy wars to distract the public from extreme wealth inequality:
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
In short, after passing a Big Beautiful Bill that elevates billionaires while hammering everyone else, Trump attempts to take the public mind off the economy by invading Venezuela and promising a Donroe Doctrine reminiscent of the 19thcentury—a world where the United States in fact becomes Oceania.
The irony is that, before Trump, the United States commanded more influence that any of the three superpowers in Nineteen Eighty-Four, what with NATO in Europe and alliances with those countries worried about China in the Pacific Rim. But I guess Orwell’s point is that an increase in global prosperity brought about by this political stability was bad for the elites. Kleptocrats prefer chaos.
Further thought: After writing this piece, I noted an Anne Applebaum article in the Atlantic where she too references the three countries in Nineteen Eighty-Four and makes the same point about Trump weakening America:
If America is just a regional bully, after all, then our former allies in Europe and Asia will close their doors and their markets to us. Sooner or later, “our” Western Hemisphere will organize against us and fight back. Far from making us more powerful, the pursuit of American dominance will make us weaker, eventually leaving us with no sphere, and no influence, at all.
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Tuesday
“Reading is a vice,” Adam Kirsch provocatively proclaims in a recent Atlantic article. Intending to push our buttons, he argues that reading means “cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive.” Since my blog and my book assert just the opposite, today’s post is my response.
Observing that reading is on the decline—Kirsch notes that, in 2023, “just 14 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day”—he observes that educators are taking the wrong tack to reverse the trend:
If people won’t read books because they enjoy it, perhaps they can be persuaded to do it to save democracy. The International Publishers Association, which represents publishers in 84 countries, has spent the past year promoting the slogan “Democracy depends on reading,” arguing that “ambitious, critical, reflective reading remains one of the few spaces where citizens can rehearse complexity, recover attention and cultivate the inner freedoms that public freedoms require.”
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes the most eloquent case for this position, contending that reading great literature can produce good citizens and good voters. Kirsch, however, says that it doesn’t matter whether or not this is true (as I believe it is). The problem is that such arguments
don’t actually persuade anyone to read more, because they misunderstand why people become readers in the first place. Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society. It’s a utilitarian argument for what should be a personal passion.
Then he makes his “vice” argument:
It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.
And further on:
Reading is not profitable; it doesn’t teach you any transferable skills or offer any networking opportunities. On the contrary, it is an antisocial activity in the most concrete sense: To do it you have to be alone, or else pretend you’re alone by tuning out other people. Reading teaches you to be more interested in what’s going on inside your head than in the real world.
Kirsch’s point here reminds me of an article by my dissertation director, J. Paul Hunter, who in “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reader” notes that many husbands in the 18th century were threatened by the million-word novel Clarissa because their wives would disappear into it for days, neglecting household responsibilities.
Kirsch goes on to argue that young people are more likely to read novels if their elders attack them, citing Madame Bovary, Ulysses, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover as instances.
I won’t say this is entirely wrong. My eldest son read Huckleberry Finn on his own in high school—he even wrote an essay on it–after reading a Washington Post column contending that it shouldn’t be taught in high school as teenagers couldn’t understand the irony. Justin wanted to prove that he could get the irony. But Kirsch has it mostly backwards: teenagers don’t read books because adults condemn them. Rather, adults condemn books because teenagers like them. Samuel Johnson fulminated against the wildly popular Tom Jones because he feared it made vice look attractive, and German parents attacked the similarly popular Sorrows of Young Werther because they feared it would lead their teens to commit suicide. Similarly, kids aren’t reading Judy Blume novels or The Perks of Being a Wall Flower because Moms for Liberty are out to ban them—although that being said, knowing that the books are under attack can add to their allure.
But okay, let’s say that official approval doesn’t help matters. This is a point that Horace made back in 19 BC, noting in Ars Poetica that “the tribes of the seniors” (by which he means grumpy old men) “rail against everything that is void of edification” whereas “the exalted knights” (young men) disregard poems which they find to be “austere” (preachy and moralistic). But Horace doesn’t agree with Kirsch that reading should only be seen as a “private pleasure” or that we should promote books by labeling them transgressive and dangerous. Whereas Kirsch’s standard is whether a book will draw us in so much that we’ll read it under the covers with a flashlight, Horace, after agreeing, adds that it should also be instructive. The best poets, he wrote, “deliver at once both the pleasures and the necessaries of life.”
By focusing exclusively on delight—and by attacking utilitarians who think that literature can make us better people—Kirsch ignores the instructive side. It seems to matter little to him that the examples he gives are books that render a person mad (Don Quixote’s chivalric romances) or so discontented with life as to lead to suicide (Emma Bovary’s 18th century Harlequin romances). He appears to be saying that reading’s only purpose is to immerse us.
It seems of no concern to him, for instance, that the book that turns Emma’s head–Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s 1788 novel Paul and Virginia–is schlock. Emma is besotted with “the little bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fidele, but above all of the sweet friendship of some dear little brother, who seeks red fruit for you on trees taller than steeples, or who runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird’s nest.” Such a work, however, fails to move Emma beyond her shallow, materialist desires.
And what about two 20th century works that have pulled readers in. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged so engaged Speaker of the House Paul Ryan that he used it as his inspiration to slash America’s social safety net. Jean Raspail’s Camp of Saints, meanwhile, continues to fuel rightwing xenophobia with its racist depictions of dark-skinned immigrants. Now that is reading as a vice, instances of books ruining lives. If Kirsch used these examples rather than Cervantes and Flaubert, he’d have to complicate the nature of delight and write a less edgy article.
As I learned from writing my book, there has always been a tension between literature as entertainment and literature as instruction. Whenever one side has had the upper hand, the other has struck back. When 19th century utilitarians like John Stuart Mill argued for literature as a social good, movements like art for art’s sake countered that literature should be an end itself. Kirsch is replicating that debate in his article.
My own view is that teachers and librarians have a role to play in introducing to young readers to works that will both entrance and educate them and that, by listening to their pupils’ needs, they can generate the enthusiasm that both Kirsch and the International Publishers Association desire. I think reading aloud in class, putting less emphasis on testing, and ignoring rightwing attacks on beloved young adult novels will help in the endeavor.
Allowing kids free rein in uncensored libraries is also essential. Reading specialist John Holt has written that the more kids read, the more discriminating they become and that quantity is more important than quality at the beginning. Early in my childhood I devoured the abysmally written Hardy Boy and Bobbsey Twin series but eventually started looking for more variety. I watch my own grandchildren veering between formulaic dreck and substantive books without consciously noticing the difference. They’ll gravitate naturally towards the better stuff the more they read and will be readers for life.
Oh, and thanks to their encounters with books, they’ll also grow up to be complex and reflective citizens. I saw it in myself and in my three sons, and I’m beginning to see it in Alban, Esmé, Etta, Eden, and Ocean.
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Monday
Whenever the United States intervenes to topple the corrupt ruler of another country, I always think of William Blake’s “The Grey Monk.” Not that the parallels are exact since the Grey Monk is complaining about actual injustice whereas there’s no sign that Trump cares that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is corrupt and stole an election. Trump has made no mention of protecting democracy, focusing instead on Venezuela’s vast oil reserves—which is not surprising since Trump too is corrupt and attempted to steal an election.
Even in those cases where the United States has claimed to support democracy, however, its interventions have been disastrous. Is the world better off because we invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, even though all three were run by genuinely evil men (as is the United States at the moment)? In all three, citizens were suffering as they suffer in Blake’s poem.
“I die, I die!” the Mother said, “My children die for lack of bread. What more has the merciless Tyrant said?” The Monk sat down on the stony bed.
The monk is a Christ figure who bears witness to tyranny’s oppression and feels in his bones the misery of the people:
The blood red ran from the Grey Monk’s side, His hands and feet were wounded wide, His body bent, his arms and knees Like to the roots of ancient trees.
His eye was dry; no tear could flow: A hollow groan first spoke his woe. He trembled and shudder’d upon the bed; At length with a feeble cry he said:
“When God commanded this hand to write In the studious hours of deep midnight, He told me the writing I wrote should prove The bane of all that on Earth I lov’d.
My Brother starv’d between two walls, His Children’s cry my soul appalls; I mock’d at the rack and griding chain, My bent body mocks their torturing pain.
The poem then articulates the fantasy that violence can avenge “the wrongs thy Children feel.” Blake may once have had this fantasy himself, being a supporter of the French Revolution, but he became disenchanted when it descended into the reign of terror:
Thy father drew his sword in the North, With his thousands strong he marched forth; Thy Brother has arm’d himself in steel To avenge the wrongs thy Children feel.
Violence, however, is not the solution. Only prayer, empathy, and sacrifice—the tear of understanding, the sigh of compassion, the groan of the martyr–“can free the world from fear”:
But vain the Sword and vain the Bow, They never can work War’s overthrow. The Hermit’s prayer and the Widow’s tear Alone can free the World from fear.
For a Tear is an intellectual thing, And a Sigh is the sword of an Angel King, And the bitter groan of the Martyr’s woe Is an arrow from the Almighty’s bow.
And now for the lines which have been going through my head for the past two days after hearing about the American air strikes and the kidnapping of Maduro:
The hand of Vengeance found the bed To which the Purple Tyrant fled; The iron hand crush’d the Tyrant’s head And became a Tyrant in his stead.
Okay, so Trump started out as a tyrant rather than turning into one. Nevertheless, Blake’s point still applies: military power such as that possessed by the United States can turn a country into a monster, regardless of its claim to be “leader of the free world.”
It’s why the real source of American strength has been USAID, global alliances, AIDS outreach, the Peace Corps, Climate Change leadership, multiculturalism, liberal immigration policy, health research, and other such programs. Tyrants don’t understand this.
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Sunday
In a search for Feast of the Epiphany poems, I stumbled across this Godfrey Rust lyric. It’s the fourth of a four-poem sequence inspired by the story of the three wisemen, who are described as seekers after truth. The poem borrows from T.S. Eliot’s well-known “Journey of the Magi,” which ends,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods.
In Rust’s poem, the Magi discover love to be at the center of creation. Counterintuitively, its very vulnerability means that it cannot be bought, digitized, invested in, or otherwise appropriated:
The Epiphany By Godfrey Rust
A stable’s a good place for revelations. Some of the most profound discoveries are made in back rooms, half by accident, by people half-exhausted, looking for something else. Just as we felt like giving up, when the whole thing had become ridiculous and had gone on much too long, and we were blaming everybody else for our mistakes, we came upon the unexpected answer in the most unlikely place: a speechless, thoughtless, helpless child who just lay there, needing to be loved. In this subversion of all natural things was born the enabling power of sacrifice— a being whose ambition was to seek its own destruction, and then call upon his followers to do no more or less. What kind of way was this to rule a world? He just lay there, needing to be loved. It must be stopped: each Herod would conspire to kill it when it cannot be tempted with possessions or subdued with pain, or lulled to sleep with alcohol or television. Here was something we could not buy or cure, digitize, transplant, upgrade, invest in, analyze or write a business plan for. He had no army, text-book, voters’ mandate or computer markup language with which to implement his great design: he just lay there, needing to be loved. It was the most implausible demand. Anything else we might negotiate but not this life of grace secured through death: grace, born out of deprivation, grace born of the endurance of the oppressed, grace born of the hardships of the poor, grace born of the forgiveness of the intolerable, grace borne in the dignity of silence, grace born from incomprehensible submission to the absolute abuse of power. In the strength of his weakness he just lay there, needing to be loved. Eons after energy exploded into matter here in this stable was let loose the yet more potent power of perfect love Our gifts were tokens. There was nothing more to do but leave the child to his own terrible story, and return by different routes to our own countries, strangers to us now, yet seeing them as if for the first time, how they just lie there, needing to be loved.
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Friday
This is the latest post in my on-going series on “My Life in Literature,” which appears every Friday. My inspiration is an informal autobiography written by my great grandmother, Eliza Scott, who was raised on the Lord Bunbury estate in Barton, England (her father Thomas was the estate manager) and ended up in Evanston, Illinois. In her memoir she talks about the novels that were important to her as she grew up, and 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.
I’ve reached the point in my memoir where I must grapple with the issue of racism. While not as painful to contemplate as it is to experience, it still makes me uncomfortable. That’s in part because I have within two warring impulses, the desire to please people and the need to take principled stands. This has meant accommodating myself to people who, in my childhood, supported segregation and who, in my Tennessee retirement, still harbor racist beliefs. I feel torn between my mother’s urge to play nice and my father’s desire to confront, so that I never feel on solid ground. This internal discomfort has occasionally caused me to shy away from addressing racial issues, which I then regard as cowardice and take them on anyway.
As I’ve mentioned, I attended Carleton College in part because I was fleeing southern racism. It turns out that I wasn’t prepared for what I got. Suddenly no one was talking about Martin Luther King’s non-violent resistance, which I had heard him espouse two years before. (“Therefore I say, not ‘Burn, baby, burn, but build baby build!” he said defensively in a Charleston speech at which I was present.) My rightwing high school history teacher, in response to King’s assassination a year later, had declared, “He lived by the sword and died by the sword,” but at Carleton in 1969 people were talking about him as though he had been an Uncle Tom. Instead, I encountered only Black militant writers. We were assigned to read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice for freshman orientation and The Autobiography of Malcolm X and George Jackson’s Soledad Brother for Government 101, taught by future senator Paul Wellstone.
Just think, we could have been assigned more moderate voices, like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Looking back, I realize that liberals lost our bearings as we attempted to negotiate post-Jim Crow America. In the confusion, the loudest and angriest voices seized center stage. In Soul on Ice, which I now realize is the kind of book one might expect from a rapist who is full of himself, I saw Carleton telling me to take seriously a man who recounted, with relish, stories of rich white men hiring Black men to make love to their wives. (The stories were a way of elevating his claims to potency while emasculating whites.) Some Black militants at the time excoriated liberals like me as being no better than Klan members, even as conservatives like Tom Wolfe mocked us for “radical chic.” Battered from both sides, it seemed better just to keep one’s head down.
Only I couldn’t do that either. I’ve mentioned how, when working as a journalist after graduation, my features on prominent local Black figures were suppressed by my newspaper. More positive was the year I spent teaching at HBCU Morehouse College after receiving my PhD.
1981-82 was an exciting year to be in Atlanta. The city had its first Black mayor in Maynard Jackson, and Atlanta was billing itself as “the city too busy to hate” (which wasn’t true—there was still a lot of hate). Each week we had a noteworthy speaker at the school—Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, even Baldwin himself (!!)—and I learned that any generalizations I had about African Americans had to be jettisoned.
The year itself is a blur now, given that I was also a new father and a new homeowner. (Julia and I bought a house in a multiracial neighborhood.) In the humanities sequence I taught at Morehouse, however, I remember one work clearly. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, challenging though it is, got my students’ full attention.
Invisible Man opens with a student having to endure public humiliation in order to get a scholarship to attend an HBCU (one based on Tuskegee Institute in Alabama). Then the Institute itself comes up short, as does every other institution that the narrator encounters. Time after time he is rendered invisible by the agendas of those who interact with him, and to this can be added his own confusion about his identity. Who is he anyway? The novel hit a responsive chord in my students, who recognized in the narrator their own identity struggles.
As an aside I note that, decades later when St. Mary’s College of Maryland had its first Black president, she referenced Invisible Man in her inaugural address. She too knew what invisibility was and applied the analogy to the college and well as to herself. Although St. Mary’s is ranked among the nation’s top public liberal arts colleges, it was not seen as she wanted it to be seen.
I left Morehouse for St. Mary’s because it offered me a wider range of classes to teach, as well as more money and more job security. Still, I didn’t feel good going to a school with so few Black students. Fortunately, Maryland colleges and universities were under an order to rectify the evils of past segregation by increasing their minority enrollments. The effort paid off as our minority population grew to match the state’s demographics, and I got to know a number of the Black students through the Minority Literature classes I began teaching.
The courses were the most vibrant but also the most contentious that I’ve taught. I had the students read Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morison, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and others, and students often used the works to process race issues they had encountered. I discovered that, more than anything else, my Black students wanted race not to be an issue in their lives. Their second desire was, since they couldn’t have their first wish, that there be open and honest discussions about race.
I wasn’t the ideal person to teach the course—I was doing so because I perceived a need—and we would later hire Jeff Coleman, a specialist in African American literature as well as a fine poet. Jeff’s Minority Lit class featured one approach I wished I’d taken. He’d begin with an American author of an ethnicity that was foreign to everyone in the class (say, a Korean-American or Native American author). That way, everyone was at the same disadvantage—no one could claim expertise and no one is put in a position of having to be the spokesperson for his or her race. The insights that emerged could then be applied to African American authors.
If I had taught this way, I suspect my class would have had fewer battles, with white students feeling less attacked and Black students feeling less misunderstood.
I close with one final episode which I’ve referred to multiple times here on this blog. One Black student created a stir when she wore a t-shirt with the words, “South Africa—It’s a Black thing, you wouldn’t understand.” White students objected, letters to the student newspaper flew back and forth, and (sensing an educational opportunity) someone organized a panel. I was invited to participate, along with the student, one of her critics, and an African American professor.
I can’t remember what I said—probably I made a plea for respectful dialogue—but I can report what Lucille Clifton heard me saying. The noted African American poet was in the audience (later she would become a colleague), and she wrote the following poem, later published in her collection quilting. Here it is:
note to my self
it’s a black thing you wouldn’t understand (t-shirt)
amira baraka—I refuse to be judged by white men.
or defined. and i see that even the best believe they have that right, believe that what they say i mean is what i mean as if words only matter in the world they know, as if when i choose words i must choose those that they can live with even if something inside me cannot live, as if my story is so trivial we can forget together, as if i am not scarred, as if my family enemy does not look like them, as if i have not reached across our history to touch, to soothe on more than one occasion and will again, although the merely human is denied me still and i am now no longer beast but saint
How do I know that Lucille had me in mind when she wrote “even the best”? Because years later, after I had taught the poem multiple times, I asked her directly and she confirmed it. Essentially she is accusing me of feeling entitled to restate what the student is saying and doing so without questioning my right to do so. In the process, whitesplaining, not listening, which is a not uncommon failing amongst white guys.
And what about wanting her to choose words that I could live with? Well, it’s true that I was rendered uncomfortable by her t-shirt, and Lucille probably sensed my discomfort, even if I didn’t express it directly. Something deep within her rebelled against my restatement, so much so that she felt suffocated.
I think I was innocent of wanting to “forget together” past racial injustice. But it is true that I was not as focused on racial injustice as the student and Lucille were, so in a way I did trivialize their stories and overlook their scars.
It’s a fact that most of us, even the best intentioned, still carry prejudice within us. Rather than flagellating ourselves for not being perfect, however, we can reflect on our failings and seek to grow. Life, I have discovered over the decades, is far more interesting when we do so. When we acknowledge human complexity, it’s as though the world goes from black and white to technicolor. We see new dimensions in the people we encounter and in ourselves, and our time on earth becomes infinitely fascinating.
Oh, and one of the best ways to grow into complexity is to immerse yourself in the extraordinary range of works by African American authors. A list of ten favorites, in no particular order, are Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Beloved, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Lucille Clifton’s Blessing the Boats, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Langston Hughes’s Collected Poems, and Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville. And that’s just for starters.
