Tenniel, illus. from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Friday
The MAGA members of the House appear to be suffering from indictment envy and impeachment envy, so much so that they may shut down the government if Speaker McCarthy doesn’t start proceedings against President Biden. Think of them as the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, who at one point declares, “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
Of course, they’ve been like this for a while. We all remember the 2016 election, when “Lock her up!” was their rallying cry. As political scientist John Stoehr points out,
Most people understand the difference between evidence of wrongdoing and claims of wrongdoing – most people, anyway, if they have ever watched a television courtroom drama in which evidence is independent of the interests of those who enter it into the record. The accused is not guilty because the accuser says he is. He is guilty because the evidence points overwhelmingly toward guilt.
“Most people,” however, doesn’t include either the Queen of Hearts or MAGA Republicans. Stoehr points out that the latter
begin with a verdict and then work backwards, no matter how objectively cynical it may appear. They took control of the House “knowing” that Biden was guilty of impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors. They have since then worked very hard to uncover reasonsreasonsreasons for why they’re right.
The crime in Alice in Wonderland is the theft of tarts, as described in the nursery rhyme that Lewis Carroll draws on:
The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, All on a summer day: The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts, And took them quite away!”
Of course the knave, unlike Biden, is actually guilty. Still, evidence is needed to determine guilt. In Alice in Wonderland the King of Hearts, as judge, keeps trying to move past the evidence stage:
Consider your verdict,” the King said to the jury. “Not yet, not yet!” the Rabbit hastily interrupted. “There’s a great deal to come before that!”
And:
Consider your verdict,” he said to the jury, in a low, trembling voice. “There’s more evidence to come yet, please your Majesty,” said the White Rabbit, jumping up in a great hurry; “this paper has just been picked up.”
The paper proves to be a set of verses, but the subsequent conversation about them shows a looseness of legal reasoning that would do MAGA House members proud:
“Are they in the prisoner’s handwriting?” asked another of the jurymen. “No, they’re not,” said the White Rabbit, “and that’s the queerest thing about it.” (The jury all looked puzzled.) “He must have imitated somebody else’s hand,” said the King. (The jury all brightened up again.) “Please your Majesty,” said the Knave, “I didn’t write it, and they can’t prove I did: there’s no name signed at the end.” “If you didn’t sign it,” said the King, “that only makes the matter worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like an honest man.” There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever thing the King had said that day. “That proves his guilt,” said the Queen.
In this crazy world of upside-down logic, there’s only one who calls BS, and that’s Alice. And while the nonsense world doesn’t collapse like a house of cards, she exposes it for what it is:
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!” “Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple. “I won’t!” said Alice. “Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved. “Who cares for you?” said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her…
It is at this point in the book that Alice awakens from what has become a nightmare:
…she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face. “Wake up, Alice dear!” said her sister; “Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!”
It would be nice to think that unhinged MAGA Republicans are no more substantial than pieces of cardboard. I recently read an article by NeverTrumper Steve Schmidt who, interviewing Trump supporters around the country, has been discovering that many regard him, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and the others as performance artists—which, it so happens, is how the Lewis Carroll’s Gryphon sees the Queen of Hearts:
The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen till she was out of sight: then it chuckled. “What fun!” said the Gryphon, half to itself, half to Alice. “What is the fun?” said Alice. “Why, she,” said the Gryphon. “It’s all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody, you know. Come on!”
When I was a child, the sight of the cards flying at Alice used to terrify me but now they seem harmless enough. Unfortunately, performance artists who get hold of power can do actual damage. The question is whether these Americans will grow out of their wonderland before someone gets hurt.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Thursday
Friend and former colleague Lois Stover alerted me to this Smithsonian article about the psychological impact of different literary elements. According to Angus Fletcher, who is a “professor of story science” at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, fictional techniques like plot twists, secret disclosures, and empathy generators can
alleviate grief, improve your problem-solving skills, dispense the anti-depressant effects of LSD, boost your creativity, provide therapy for trauma (including both kinds of PTSD), spark joy, dole out a better energy kick than caffeine, lower your odds of dying alone, and (as impossible as it sounds) increase the chance that your dreams will come true. They can even make you a more loving spouse and generous friend.
Fletcher sets forth his ideas in Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, which I have yet to read. I’m intrigued by his characterization of story elements as “inventions” and report here on the effect he believes they have.
I first like what he says about Aristo how he discusses Aristotle. In Poetics, the Greek philosopher proposed that literature was
many inventions, each constructed from an innovative use of story. Story includes the countless varieties of plot and character—and it also includes the equally various narrators that give each literary work its distinct style or voice. Those story elements, Aristotle hypothesized, could plug into our imagination, our emotions, and other parts of our psyche, troubleshooting and even improving our mental function.
In my own work with Aristotle, I look into how he saw tragedy as a way to train Greek youth in citizenship responsibilities. For his part, Fletcher singles out Aristotle’s focus on the Plot Twist, which he says can have potent psychological effects:
Who hasn’t felt a burst of wonder—or as Aristotle called it, thaumazein—when a story pivots unexpectedly? And as modern research has revealed, that wonder can be more than a heart-exciting sensation. It can stimulate what psychologists term a self-transcendent experience (or what “father of American psychology” William James more vividly termed a “spiritual” experience), increasing our overall sense of life purpose.
The other literary inventions that Fletcher mentions in his Smithsonian article are:
–The Hurt Delay
A work foreshadowing hurt to come (as in Oedipus) can “stimulate catharsis, alleviating the symptoms of post-traumatic fear.” Fletcher says he has witnessed the effect upon war veterans:
[B]y stimulating an ironic experience of foreknowledge in our brain’s perspective-taking network, the Hurt Delay can increase our self-efficacy, a kind of mental strength that makes us better able to recover from experiences of trauma.
–the Tale Told from Our Future
We are well familiar with this technique, which as Fletcher notes is the foundation of the modern thriller (think of those stories that open with a flash forward). Fletcher says that this “can have a potent neural effect: by activating the brain’s primal information-gathering network, it boosts curiosity, immediately elevating your levels of enthusiasm and energy.”
–the Secret Discloser
The “narrative revelation of an intimate character detail,” Fletcher says,
activates dopamine neurons in the brain to convey the hedonic benefits of loving and being loved, boosting your positive affect and making you more cheerful and generally glad to be alive.
He mentions Charlotte Bronte so perhaps he has in mind Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe both coming to acknowledge their love for the male protagonists (Rochester and Paul Emanuel).
–the Serenity Elevator
The storytelling element, Fletcher says, involves “a turning around of satire’s tools (including insinuation, parody and irony) so that instead of laughing at someone else, you smile at yourself.” (He cites Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as an example.) The Serenity Elevator “can have analgesic effects—and more importantly, …it can convey your brain into the serene state of feeling like it’s floating above mortal cares.”
–the Empathy Generator
This insight that we are given into “a character’s private feeling of self-critique,” Fletcher says, “stimulates empathy in our brain’s perspective-taking network,” helping nurture kindness towards others. (He gives the example of Jo March’s having regrets over accidentally burning Meg’s hair.) Fletcher traces this fictional element back to the Book of Job, which he “may have reflected the poet’s effort to promote peace in the wake of the Judah-Babylonian-Persian wars.”
–the Almighty Heart
Omniscient narration is “a story told by someone with a human heart and a god’s all-seeing eye.” Fletcher credits Homer with its invention and mentions as a more recent example the opening lines of Tale of Two Cities, which I wrote about on Tuesday (including “it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair”). He observes,
The invention works by tricking your brain into feeling like you’re chanting along with a greater human voice. And that feeling—which is also triggered by war songs and battle marches—activates the brain’s pituitary gland, stimulating an endocrine response that’s linked to psychological bravery. So, even in the winter of despair, you feel a fortifying spring of hope.
–the Anarchy Rhymer
This is “a rule-breaking element inside a larger formal structure.” To my mind, Fletcher doesn’t describe it very well, but it seems to be what all great authors do. (To do otherwise is to be formulaic and predictable.) According to Fletcher, the Anarchic Rymer activates a brain region known as the Default Mode Network, which is the region of the brain that is most active during REM sleep, daydreaming, and reading stories. The result of encountering the Rhymer is increased creativity.
I see that Sewanee’s library has a copy of the book so I’ll be checking it out and reporting on more of what Fletcher has to say.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Wednesday
One of the best things to come out of our trip to Ireland last spring was being introduced to the poetry of Patrick Kavanaugh. Here’s a joyous September poem he wrote as he nostalgically recalls working with neighboring farms during harvest season.
I showed the poem to my wife, who was raised on a small farm in southeast Iowa, and she said it captures the experience perfectly. In her case, her own family would combine efforts with her two uncles, along with a couple of other farm families. They would move from farm to farm, and Julia recalls taking on different tasks at different ages, from driving the tractor that lifted the hay bales to collecting the hay bales in the field to receiving and stacking the bales in the barn.
When Kavanagh talks about how “we owed them a day at the threshing since last year” and how “it was a delight to be paying bills of laughter and chaffy gossip in kind,” Julia says he is spot on. She remembers the men making slightly off-color jokes, which the children barely understood. “Chaffy gossip” is a wonderful way to describe the dialogue—almost light as air and filling the atmosphere.
And then there was the “work thrown in to ballast the fantasy-soaring mind.” The work made it real, giving substance to the communal good feelings.
Julia tells me that Kavanagh’s sense that he was entering heaven’s (haggard) gate to a kind of paradise –“no earthly estate”–is no exaggeration. Being an integral part of a family and communal enterprise gave her a strong sense of being important. “Lost in unthinking joy” was what it felt like.
On an Apple-Ripe September Morning By Patrick Kavanagh
On an apple-ripe September morning Through the mist-chill fields I went With a pitch-fork on my shoulder Less for use than for devilment.
The threshing mill was set-up, I knew, In Cassidy’s haggard last night, And we owed them a day at the threshing Since last year. O it was delight
To be paying bills of laughter And chaffy gossip in kind With work thrown in to ballast The fantasy-soaring mind.
As I crossed the wooden bridge I wondered As I looked into the drain If ever a summer morning should find me Shoveling up eels again.
And I thought of the wasps’ nest in the bank And how I got chased one day Leaving the drag and the scraw-knife behind, How I covered my face with hay.
The wet leaves of the cocksfoot Polished my boots as I Went round by the glistening bog-holes Lost in unthinking joy.
I’ll be carrying bags to-day, I mused, The best job at the mill With plenty of time to talk of our loves As we wait for the bags to fill.
Maybe Mary might call round… And then I came to the haggard gate, And I knew as I entered that I had come Through fields that were part of no earthly estate.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Tuesday
I suspect I’m not the only American thoroughly confused by the present political climate. On the one hand, this country is doing remarkably well, not only economically but in many other realms, especially with regard to technological advances and medical breakthroughs. We also have a remarkable university system which educates those who go on to make possible many of societal and life style benefits we have come to take for granted. Millions around the world would love to emigrate here.
Yet at the same time, we regularly hear open calls for civil war from various quarters, and while an authoritarian ignoramus like Donald Trump may have lost the last election, he still commands a following in the tens of millions. At his instigation, some of these stormed the Capitol while others carry out lone wolf programs of mass shootings.
We have such a strong military that we fear no invasion—think how few countries have been able to say that in world history—and yet we never know when lethal violence will break out in this school or that church/synagogue/ mosque. Meanwhile, the same technology that allows us unprecedented mobility and comfort at contributing to extreme weather events that overwhelm us.
If ever there were a time to cite the opening lines to Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, this is it:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
Maybe I’ll just leave it there, adding only that—in the course of the novel—the human heart ultimately shines brighter than human evil and human ignorance. For all the damage caused by the “worst of times,” Dickens assures us that the destroyers don’t get the last word.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Labor Day
Here’s a good worker poem for Labor Day. Seamus Heaney’s “The Forge” is a nostalgic look at an ancient profession. Passing by “old axles and iron hoops rusting,” the poet enters a dark room where the blacksmith, somewhat mythically, hammers upon an anvil that is “horned as a unicorn.” This is sacred space as the smith hammers upon an “altar,” “expend[ing] himself in shape and music.
And if perchance he ventures outside to view the modern world, he sees nothing worth noting: monotonous traffic flashes by where once there was a “clatter of hoofs.” Unimpressed, he returns to “beat real iron out, to work the bellows.” “Leathered aproned” with “hairs in his nose,” he stands in contrast to the anonymous, mechanized work force of our own time. He brings to mind Longfellow’s smith:
Under a spreading chestnut-tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands; And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long, His face is like the tan; His brow is wet with honest sweat, He earns whate’er he can, And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man.
I suspect Heaney was well acquainted with this figure from pre-industrial times.
The Forge By Seamus Heaney
All I know is a door into the dark. Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting; Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring, The unpredictable fantail of sparks Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water. The anvil must be somewhere in the center, Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square, Set there immoveable: an altar Where he expends himself in shape and music. Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose, He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows; Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.
Simon Vouet, Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry (detail)
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Sunday
I share here a talk I am giving today to our church’s Adult Forum on “Creating in God’s Image.” The topic is the relationship of God and creativity.
In her best-selling writer’s guide The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron maps out the connection she sees between God and creativity. Her ten basic principles, she says, are the bedrock on which “creative recovery and discovery can be built.” As the former alcoholic, drug addict, and agnostic sees it, connecting with God not only helped her get her life back in order but also proved to be a boon to her writing.
I begin today’s talk with Cameron’s articulation because it provides a perspective on how artists throughout history have drawn on spiritual energies in their work. My focus will be on the act of requesting divine aid, whether through prayer, ritual ceremony, meditation, or “invoking the muse,” as Homer does in the opening lines of both The Iliad and The Odyssey.
First, however, here are Cameron’s Ten Principles on how creativity has a spiritual dimension:
1. Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure creative energy. 2. There is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life — including ourselves. 3. When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the creator’s creativity within us and our lives. 4. We are, ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves. 5. Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God. 6. The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to our true nature. 7. When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: good orderly direction. 8. As we open our creative channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected. 9. It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity. 10. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.
In choosing “Creating in God’s Image” as our Sunday Forum theme this year, our Christian Formation Committee riffed off the passage in Genesis as to how humankind was created in God’s image. As Cameron describes it, in creating we reenact the creation, fulfilling our essential purpose and, in so doing, moving toward divinity.
On the other hand, Cameron says that we experience blockage when we let our egos get in the way. We don’t allow ourselves to be conduits for God’s creativity but instead—to borrow a line from Pride and Prejudice—allow self to intrude. We don’t, as the saying is, “let go, let God.
Of course, there’s also work involved in the artistic process—it’s not just about letting go—and in a moment I’ll move into Plato’s exploration over whether art is more an artisanal craft or a divine madness. Some, reminding us of the effort required, talk about art being “10% inspiration, 90% perspiration.” But focus on that 10% for a moment. The word “inspiration” comes from the Latin “inspiratus,” meaning “breathe into.” It is as though some other worldly force is breathing into the artist, with the work of art the result.
The Romantic poets, especially Percy Bysshe Shelley, believed that a creative force blows through the universe. Shelley may have proclaimed himself an atheist while a student at Oxford but, if so, he was a particularly spiritual atheist. In “Ode to the West Wind,” he finds a metaphor for divine Imagination.
The west wind, which seems wild, untameable, and at times destructive, is also a source for new life. In the final two sections of the poem, Shelley talks of himself being carried by the west wind as though he were a dead leaf. He also imagines himself as a “swift cloud,” as a wave “pant[ing] beneath thy power,” and as an Aeolian or wind harp, with the wind blowing through him just as it blows through a forest:
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Why a dead leaf? Shelley here may be talking of how poets can find themselves cut off from the creative spirit. I recall Sparky Edgin, who taught us the poem in my junior English class at Sewanee Military Academy, pointing out that the leaf could also be the leaf or page of a book. Shelley at this point in the poem is lamenting how his adult sensibility and the cares of the world are keeping him from being as open to creativity as he was when he was a boy, “when to outstrip thy skiey speed/ Scarce seem’d a vision.” Instead, he now falls upon the “thorns of life” and bleeds.
This is a common Romantic theme, found most notably in such Wordsworth poems as Tintern Abbey and Intimations of Immortality. “Shades of the prison-house begin to close/ Upon the growing boy,” Wordsworth writes in the latter.. But Shelley then holds out a vision of hope. Perhaps the spirit is not altogether dead. Imagine those withered leaves, he says, as sparks from a fire that has not altogether gone out. And if they are still alive, maybe they will awaken the cold earth with new fire. Propelled by this divine spirit, Shelley’s words will function as a prophecy: spring will come.
To be sure, the west wind is destructive as well as creative, bringing wintry blasts as well as carrying seeds. Earlier in the poem Shelley calls it “destroyer and preserver.” For Shelley as for Lord Byron, nature isn’t only Wordsworth’s daffodils but also storms and volcanoes, what the Romantics called “the dark sublime.”
I mention this dark side of the creating spirit—the idea that this divine force can be destructive as well as life affirming—because that’s how Plato saw it. You’ve perhaps heard about how, in his ideal “republic,” he bans poets for being a disorderly influence. He wants philosopher kings, not poets, running things.
Nevertheless, Plato has some interesting thoughts about the divine source of poetic inspiration. Some of his most interesting thoughts appear in The Ion, where Socrates cross-examines a rhapsode famous for his dramatic recitations of Homer.
Ion has the ability to sway audiences with emotional renderings of (to mention instances cited by Socrates) the wrenching scene where Andromache, Hecuba and Priam mourn the death of I Hector and the heart-stopping moment when Odysseus reveals himself to the suitors. Imagine being in the audience as the greatest actor of your day recites the following passage:
You yellow dogs, you thought I’d never make it home from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder, twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared bid for my wife while I was still alive. Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven, contempt for what men say of you hereafter. Your last hour has come. You die in blood.
I imagine one could have heard a pin drop.
Stretching the audience to the emotional max is no problem for Ion—he revels in it as much as the spectators do—but for Plato it’s a problem. After all, if you’re wound up, that means you are not, to use his words, in your “right mind.” If Ion were applying crafted artifice in his cause, it would be okay because reason would be involved. But Plato fears that he has been inspired.
Inspired people, as Plato sees it, get swept up in their emotions. It’s a very different perspective than we find in Shelley and the other Romantics. While not opposed to Reason, they are promoting feeling to counteract what they saw as the 18th century’s overemphasis on rationality. In defense of Plato’s anxieties about emotional appeals, we must remember that he saw strong emotions propel the Athenian assembly into ruinous wars, not to mention the execution of his beloved teacher. But the main reason why I bring up The Ion is because of Plato’s exploration of divine inspiration.
To describe it, he uses two analogies, one involving a magnet, the other ecstatic dance. Here’s the first:
The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration.
In other words, the artist serves as a channel from the heavenly muse to the audience.
Perhaps finding magnets not dynamic enough, however, Socrates turns to another analogy, this one involving possession and Bacchanalian frenzy:
For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revelers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and meter they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind.
While Plato prefers that Apollo rather than Dionysus influence his art—in The Republic he praises Apollo’s lyre while banning Pan’s pipes—he sees divinity at work in both kinds of art. Humans are creating in the god’s image in both instances. It’s just that, in a polytheistic society, there are different gods one can draw inspiration from. In Christianity people sometimes need to resort to the religion’s unofficial second god, Satan, to explain the supernatural source for art they don’t like. Recall that, in the 1950s and 1960s, Christians like Billy Graham regarded rock and roll as “the devil’s music.”
It makes sense, given the stupendous challenge of a 24-book oral epic , that Homer would feel the need for divine assistance. “Anger be now your song, immortal one,” he says as he invokes the muse Calliope in The Iliad while in The Odyssey (to quote from Emily Wilson’s wonderful translation) he calls out,
Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost…
Milton, seeking to write a Christian epic that would rival the epics of his pagan predecessors, found his own muse in the Holy Spirit. This was the spirit that spoke to Moses on the mountain, to Jesus during his baptism, and to the disciples at Pentecost:
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing, Heavenly Muse…
Milton has a heavy ask of this Heavenly Muse:
Illumine, what is low raise and support; That, to the height of this great argument, I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.
In other words, this blind, imprisoned poet is asking the Holy Spirit to enlighten him as to why God allows bad things to happen to good people.
Milton’s muse provides seemingly supernatural assistance. In Book IX, conflating Urania, the muse of astronomy, with the Holy Spirit, Milton reports that his “celestial patroness” shows up nightly. And in fact, each morning he would come to breakfast with dozens of lines in his head to pass on to his scribes. In his words, his patroness
dictates to me slumb’ring, or inspires Easy my unpremeditated Verse…
To conclude, I turn to two other request for divine aid I’ve come across my reading. Alice Walker addresses a spirit as she opens The Color Purple, although her faith tradition is unclear:
To the Spirit:
Without whose assistance Neither this book Nor I Would have been Written.
As Walker sees it, the spirit is not only working through her but has created her. She is a result of the creative process that, in turn, is using her to continue creating.
Native American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko says something similar in the opening of Ceremony, where she invokes figures from Laguna Pueblo traditions:
Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought Woman, is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears.
She thought of her sisters, Nau’ts’ity’I and I’tcts’ity’I, and together they created the Universe this world and the four worlds below.
Thought-Woman, the spider, named things and as she named them they appeared.
She is sitting in her room thinking of a story now
I’m telling you the story she is thinking.
For the Laguna Pueblo, storytelling is a ceremony that links them with their mythical deities. This goes not only for their traditional stories but also for new stories arising out of the tradition. Silko makes a point throughout her novel that, in a changing environment, the stories too must evolve. That being said, however, she still grounds herself in the core traditions of her people. Thought-Woman is her muse.
It’s noteworthy that this muse is also depicted as a spider—a creature that spins its creation out of the core of its being—since the West African storytelling god Anansi is also a spider. Originating in Ghana but then brought to the Caribbean by slaves, Anansi is a trickster figure with a complicated relationship with the creator. In some stories, Anansi sounds like Prometheus, only instead of bringing down fire from the sky gods, he brings down stories. In any event, like all muse figures, he works as an intermediary between the sacred and the profane. To invoke Anansi or to tell an Anansi story is to immerse oneself in a culture sustaining process.
And here’s one last example. Lucille Clifton sometimes sees it as a mixed blessing that she is in thrall to spiritual energies. In her poem “the light that came to lucille clifton,” she talks about the moment in her life when she came to see herself not just as a mother and a wife but as a poet. In her recounting, she had been resisting that knowing but the light proved to be too insistent:
the light that came to lucille clifton came in a shift of knowing when even her fondest sureties faded away. it was the summer she understood that she had not understood and was not mistress even of her own off eye. then the man escaped throwing away his tie and the children grew legs and started walking and she could see the peril of an unexamined life. she closed her eyes, afraid to look for her authenticity but the light insists on itself in the world; a voice from the nondead past started talking, she closed her ears and it spelled out in her hand “you might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.”
Art, has countless people have noted over the centuries, is a strange mixture of the material and the otherworldly. It’s building blocks are things of this world—words, sounds, human movement, wood, stone, clay, etc.—but something spiritual enters in. Perhaps, this being a Christian forum, we can think of it as a little piece of God’s kingdom come to earth.
In my talk today I’ve given instances of artists acknowledging art’s spiritual dimension and sometimes overtly courting it. I’d be very interested in our question-and-answer period of hearing about your own experiences with artistic transcendence. If you are an artist, how do you channel spirit into your work? If you are a consumer of art, what works have lifted you out of yourself and into a different space? Where have you experienced creating in God’s image?
Robert Frost reading at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Friday
With all the recent rightwing assaults on books, it’s good to revisit John F. Kennedy’s Amherst speech in favor of the arts, delivered shortly before he was shot. Since discomfort with independent thinking appears to be a major factor propelling the censors, it’s refreshing to hear from someone who likes it when artists critique our society and call out America for failing to live up to its full potential.
Delivered on Oct. 26, 1963, the talk was in part to honor Robert Frost, who had died earlier in the year. Frost, Kennedy said, “brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society”:
His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. “I have been” he wrote, “one acquainted with the night.” And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair.
Kennedy goes on to talk about how a poet like Frost challenges power hierarchies, which is why great literature makes rightwing governors like Texas’s Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis so uncomfortable. Kennedy notes that, “at bottom,” Frost
held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it is hardly an accident that [he] coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.
As we watch authoritarians pervert school curricula, censor libraries, and interfere with reproductive and gender choices, watching someone applaud artists who remain faithful to their “personal vision of reality” is a welcome change. Such an artist, Kenney says, becomes
the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover’s quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist’s fidelity has strengthened the fiber of our national life.
For a dramatic instance of Frost’s darker truths, it’s worth revisiting “The Road Not Taken” since it’s so frequently misinterpreted. In the past I’ve done a deep dive into the poem so I’ll just mention here that it’s not a self-flattering poem about making daring and unconventional choices. Rather, it exposes how we fool ourselves about past decisions. Wanting to think of ourselves as heroic individualists, we tell ourselves we took the less-worn path but have to admit, in retrospect, that the two paths were “really about the same.” Frost, in other words, is dismantling a key American myth.
Back to Kennedy’s speech, which goes on to have a message for those Florida and Texas censors who are banning works by Toni Morrison, Khaled Hosseini, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Isabel Allende, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sandra Cisneros, Maya Angelou, and John Irving (among many others) while expurgating Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth:
If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.
Really, Kennedy’s speech should be required reading for everyone engaged in education and civic life since it doesn’t hold back. Continuing on in the same vein, Kennedy says,
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
And:
In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society–in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having “nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.”
I’d like to see “art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth” above every library—and plastered in every literature classroom—in America. The problem with the MAGA right is that they aren’t about to let the chips “fall where they may.” They want to control kids rather than allow them to search for truth. Choosing sterility because its feels safe to them, they shortchange the nation in the process.
Towards the end of his talk, Kennedy says,
I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens.
There are currently forces at work in our country seeking just the opposite—and all too often getting their way.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Thursday
There are different ways to interpret Franz Kafka’s nightmarish visions. Some read his stories as vivid allegories of being trapped in one’s mind, where guilt, paranoia, and a pervading sense of dread combine to plunge us into depression. Others, such as imprisoned Russian dissident Valdimir Kara-Murz, see them as an objective description of life under authoritarian rule.
Kara-Murz, who has been in jail since April for speaking out against the Ukraine invasion, alludes to Kafka in a recent Washington Post column. In it he describes his experience of serving as a defense witness for Alexei Navalny, the opposition candidate that Putin first imprisoned, then poisoned, and then imprisoned again. Kara-Murz participated in the hearing through a video link while locked inside an iron cage. He describes the scene:
What I saw made me think of a scene in Franz Kafka’s The Trial in which the protagonist, facing a prosecutor and assembled guests in the attic of a random residential building, has to respond to charges of which he has no knowledge. The room on the video screen looked like a school gym. At the head of the court, under a double-headed eagle clumsily fastened to the wall, sat Moscow City Court Judge Andrei Suvorov, with his chair behind a small (also school-type) desk. His judicial gown looked strikingly out of place given the circumstances. The room was filled with men in black masks and khaki uniforms. At another table by the wall on the left side of the screen sat the defendant surrounded by his lawyers — and it was only when he stood up to approach the camera and speak that I realized it was Alexei Navalny.
Here’s the episode from The Trial that Kara-Murz references:
K. thought he had stepped into a meeting. A medium sized, two windowed room was filled with the most diverse crowd of people—nobody paid any attention to the person who had just entered. Close under its ceiling it was surrounded by a gallery which was also fully occupied and where the people could only stand bent down with their heads and their backs touching the ceiling….
At the other end of the hall where K. had been led there was a little table set at an angle on a very low podium which was as overcrowded as everywhere else, and behind the table, near the edge of the podium, sat a small, fat, wheezing man who was talking with someone behind him.
It was not only the setting that reminded Kara-Murz of The Trial. Because Navalny could only ask for Kara-Murz’s supportive testimony in terms of his official indictment, his questions proved to be “no less Kafkaesque than the surroundings.” Presumably, Kara-Murz answered “no” to the following queries, but there’s a sense of unreality in Navalny having to ask them at all:
Does public opposition to the government constitute extremist activity? Is the freedom of public demonstrations conditional on permission by the authorities? Was [Navalny’s] 2013 campaign for mayor of Moscow (where he came in second with 27 percent of the vote) just a cover for his underground illegal activities? Were Alexei’s anticorruption investigations detailing the riches of Vladimir Putin and his close entourage slanderous fabrications? And so on. A few times I had to ask whether the question was serious. “Unfortunately, yes — that is my indictment,” Alexei would respond each time.
The questions are Kafkaesque because, as becomes quickly clear while reading The Trial, dialogue seldom has a natural feel to it. It’s as though everything has been run through a bureaucratic filter. Even a conversation that K has with his uncle is skewed and elliptical.
Kara-Murz would undoubtedly characterize Navalny’s and his own trials as Kafkaesque, given that the outcomes are predetermined. That’s also the case with K, as he is informed by a court painter with insights into how the system works:
We’re talking about two different things here, there’s what it says in the law and there’s what I know from my own experience, you shouldn’t get the two confused. I’ve never seen it in writing, but the law does, of course, say on the one hand that the innocent will be set free, but on the other hand it doesn’t say that the judges can be influenced. But in my experience it’s the other way round. I don’t know of any absolute acquittals but I do know of many times when a judge has been influenced. It’s possible, of course, that there was no innocence in any of the cases I know about. But is that likely? Not a single innocent defendant in so many cases? … I hardly ever got the chance to go to court myself but always made use of it when I could, I’ve listened to countless trials at important stages in their development, I’ve followed them closely as far as they could be followed, and I have to say that I’ve never seen a single acquittal.
Russia is notorious for its high conviction rates, especially when it comes to those who oppose Putin. So yes, “Kafkaesque” is an apt description.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Wednesday
Is there anyone in American political history who has elicited more loyalty from his followers than Donald Trump? It may be the case, as Never Trumper Rick Wilson puts it, that “everything Trump touches dies,” but even in “death” Trump supporters don’t abandon him. In fact, they seem to cling to him even more.
It appears that once you have declared love for Big Brother, there’s no going back.
I recently thought of this love after reading an “I was wrong” column by Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait. Exploring why he had overestimated Ron DeSantis’s prospect of dethroning Trump, Chait said that he had underestimated Trump’s attraction. “The personality cult is even cultier than I’d thought,” he writes, explaining,
I made the larger error of analyzing the primary as though it were a normal party nomination, when in reality DeSantis is attempting the far more difficult task of displacing the leader of a personality cult.
And:
[I]t wasn’t mere pugilism that Republican voters turned out to crave. Trump had redefined the party’s identity around loyalty to himself….His fans have grown accustomed to altering their beliefs about everything and anything to conform to their leader’s ever-changing line.
At one point in the article Chait points out that a declaration of Trump spokesman Steven Cheung– “Trump is always right”–echoes the horse Boxer in Orwell’s Animal Farm:
Boxer, who had now had time to think things over, voiced the general feeling by saying: “If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right.” And from then on he adopted the maxim, “Napoleon is always right,” in addition to his private motto of “I will work harder.”
Digging deeper into cult psychology, Chait quotes a rightwing pundit, who received the following from one of her listeners. It helps us understand why none of Trump’s GOP opponents can dent his popularity:
Keep in mind that supporting Trump came with costs never associated with supporting Bush, McCain, or Romney. Trump supporters lost friendships. Brothers and sisters stopped talking to each other. There are parents whose children disowned them, and grandparents who will never see their grandchildren again because they stood by Donald Trump.
Every Republican has these stories. Every Republican knows Republicans who have these stories.
Attacking Trump was effectively telling every Republican who made real sacrifices that they were stupid for doing so because Trump was just a poser.
In other words, Trump-worshipping parents and grandparents have chosen him over their children and grandchildren. It is a move reminiscent of 1984’s Winston Smith transferring his love from Julia to Big Brother. In doing so, his previous beliefs about himself are shattered:
‘They can’t get inside you,’ she had said. But they could get inside you. ‘What happens to you here is FOR EVER,’ O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
To be sure, Trump supporters haven’t turned their backs on loved ones because they were threatened with face-eating rats. But they have their own fears—whether about race, gender, immigration, or LBGTQ+ folk—and these have overridden tender feelings. Ideology has trumped love, leading them to versions of Orwell’s final terrifying vision:
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Why settle for blood kin when you can have a figure who makes perfect calls, one who is (for some) the reincarnation of Jesus himself? Why struggle with difficult familial relationships when you can fall, all doubts resolved, upon Big Brother’s loving breast? It’s so much easier than wrestling with one’s own confused heart.
