The weather seems to have finally changed, and as I look at the fading flowers on our deck, I think of George Herbert’s description of himself as a nipped blossom hanging discontented.
“Denial” is one of many poems in which the poet laments his inability to experience God’s presence. Although he wears out his knees praying, the poet says, God does not appear to hear him. Instead, like the stricken flower or like an untuned and unstrung instrument that lies forgotten in a corner, Herbert feels abandoned, his breast “full of fear and disorder.”
Among the multiple metaphors he uses for his disconsolate state is a brittle bow that flies asunder when the archer draws it back, with the arrow going who knows where. We’ve all experienced those moments when we cannot focus our mind—“the monkey mind,” some call it– and Herbert reports that some of his “bent thoughts” “would to pleasures go,/ Some to the wars and thunder/ Of alarms.” In other words, sometimes he is distracted by illicit desires, sometimes by various worries.” I can certainly relate.
On Herbert’s use of the bow metaphor, it’s useful to remember that the word “sin,” as used by both the Hebrews and the Greeks, was originally an archery term meaning to miss the mark. The poet’s words are not hitting their mark, although the poet partly accuses God for the problem. Herbert’s devotions cannot pierce God’s silent ears.
Why should God “give dust a tongue” and then refuse to hear the tongue crying out, Herbert wonders despairingly and perhaps even angrily.
Having so vented, however, the poet concludes by assuring us that his untuned, unstrung instrument has been mended and that he can finally be at one with the divine. Perhaps we need to vent a bit before we can get right with God, which is certainly the theme of Herbert’s well-known poem “The Collar.”
In any event, each stanza of “Denial” until the last one has ended on a discordant note, with the final word landing like a wrong note, rhyming with nothing that has come before. The last stanza, however, ends with a rhyming couplet, like a chord resolving itself. God has answered the poet’s request.
Denial By George Herbert
When my devotions could not pierce Thy silent ears, Then was my heart broken, as was my verse; My breast was full of fears And disorder.
My bent thoughts, like a brittle bow, Did fly asunder: Each took his way; some would to pleasures go, Some to the wars and thunder Of alarms.
“As good go anywhere,” they say, “As to benumb Both knees and heart, in crying night and day, Come, come, my God, O come! But no hearing.”
O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue To cry to thee, And then not hear it crying! All day long My heart was in my knee, But no hearing.
Therefore my soul lay out of sight, Untuned, unstrung: My feeble spirit, unable to look right, Like a nipped blossom, hung Discontented.
O cheer and tune my heartless breast, Defer no time; That so thy favors granting my request, They and my mind may chime, And mend my rhyme.
For all the upbeat news about Kamala Harris’s surge, I’ve been hearing one note of caution: Trump this time is poised to pick up votes of many young men who, in 2020, elected for Joe Biden. There’s something about Trump’s performance of dominance masculinity that ropes in a distressing large number of these people.
A columnist for The Bulwark, a publication run by former Republicans who have fled their party, describes the thinking as follows:
Facts and evidence don’t matter. A decent respect for our fellow citizens doesn’t matter. The nativism is the point. The prejudice is the point. The bigotry is the point. The cruelty is the point. The slander is the point.
Thom Hartmann, who runs the Substack column The Hartmann Report, says that America at the moment has been overtaken by an epidemic of bullying, set off and exploited by Donald Trump. For the first time in American history, Hartmann writes,
we’re learning what other countries that suffered under authoritarian bullies know: the damage runs deep, tears communities and families apart, and spawns its own mini-industry of strutting militia-type bullies intent on emulating dear leader.
Harmann mentions “Brownshirts, Blackshirts, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, you name it.” The groups, he says are “mostly made up of men deeply insecure about their own masculinity or role in the world who find safety and meaning by joining the über-bully’s gang.”
The effect of such bullying, he goes on to lament, is that it has “drained many of us of our hope and optimism, much as it did in the 1950s when Joe McCarthy last led a national bullying campaign.” Ten years of Trumpian bullying, he contends, causes people “to check out of the political process, to essentially give up like an abused spouse, or to retreat into sports, music, and hours of binge-watched TV dramas.”
I get insights into the thrill bullies feel when I read Thomas Love Peacock’s “The War-song of Dinas Vawr.” The poem once seemed so over-the-top to me that I found it funny, what with its outrageous female rhymes (where the rhyme falls on the next to last syllable) and casual, unapologetic sadism. I get that it’s meant to be a comic parody of warrior culture.
I don’t find it so funny now that I see people actually imagining their own updated versions of this conquest fantasy. While “owning the libs” and taking down the elites may seem like entertainment tv, there will be horrific real-life consequences if Trump is reelected.
But who cares as long as you’re feasting and singing?
The War-song of Dinas Vawr By Thomas Love Peacock
The mountain sheep are sweeter, But the valley sheep are fatter; We therefore deemed it meter To carry off the latter. We made an expedition; We met a host, and quelled it; We forced a strong position, And killed the men who held it.
On Dyfed’s richest valley, Where herds of kine were browsing, We made a mighty sally, To furnish our carousing. Fierce warriors rushed to meet us; We met them, and o’erthrew them: They struggled hard to beat us; But we conquered them, and slew them.
As we drove our prize at leisure, The king marched forth to catch us: His rage surpassed all measure, But his people could not match us. He fled to his hall-pillars; And, ere our force we led off, Some sacked his house and cellars, While others cut his head off.
We there, in strife bewild’ring, Spilt blood enough to swim in: We orphaned many children, And widowed many women. The eagles and the ravens We glutted with our foemen; The heroes and the cravens, The spearmen and the bowmen.
We brought away from battle, And much their land bemoaned them, Two thousand head of cattle, And the head of him who owned them: Ednyfed, king of Dyfed, His head was borne before us; His wine and beasts supplied our feasts, And his overthrow, our chorus.
Peacock meant the poem as a joke, and it is. That is, until it isn’t.
So after years of Donald Trump periodically citing various experts in support of his actions (whom he never names), he has finally gotten around to my profession. Apparently English professors are telling him that his rambling talks are “the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.” I guess this means we professors are putting his stream-of-consciousness gibberish—what he calls “the weave”—up there with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
I’ll share his quote in a moment, along with how my own mind has woven together our current political situation and Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony. But before I go on, let me reassure readers that this post will be less about Trump’s inanities and more about mending the torn fabric of our nation. I believe, on the basis of what Silko says about the healing process, that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have the potential to make some significant progress in that endeavor.
To start us off, here’s Trump’s quote:
I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things and they all come back brilliantly together. And friends of mine who are, like, English professors, they say: “That’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen!” But the fake news, you know what they say? “He rambled.” It’s not rambling. What you do is you get off a subject, mention another little tidbit, then you get back onto the subject. And you go through this, and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.
First, I doubt seriously that Trump has any English professor friends. (It’s an open question whether he has any friends at all but put that aside.) Second, while it’s true that the musings of Leopold Bloom and Clarissa Dalloway are all over the map, they are engaging in private thoughts, not public performances. Neither one, when talking to someone else, would deliver anything comparable to the following, voiced during a recent Trump rally:
You take a look at bacon and some of these products. Some people don’t eat bacon anymore. And we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down — you know, this was caused by their horrible energy — wind, they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.
John Stoehr of the blog Editorial Board, drawing on first-hand experience with a close family member, believes that Trump’s “weaving” is a sign of dementia, with his denials an attempt to hide it. “He knows he’s rambling so he covers it up saying he’s not rambling,” Stoehr contends before adding,
He must prove it’s not happening. He does this by repeating himself. It’s as if the sheer volume of verbosity will make it real. It’s as if getting us to believe he’s still big and strong and tough will stop the inevitable.
Silko sees herself as a weaver of stories, transcribing what “Thought-Woman, the spider” puts in her head. What initially put me on to Ceremony was Silko’s own description of out-of-control stream of consciousness. In her case, she’s describing the PTSD thoughts of Tayo, a World War II veteran who has seen Rocky, his cousin and best friend, killed when the Japanese held them captive. Early in the novel, Silko uses the metaphor of tangled threads to capture his state of mind:
He could get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present, tangled up like colored threads from old Grandma’s wicker sewing basket when he was a child, and he had carried them outside to play and they had spilled out of his arms into the summer weeds and rolled away in all directions, and then he had hurried to pick them up before Aunti found him. He could feel it inside his skull—the tension of little threads beingp ulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more. So Tayo had to sweat through those nights when thoughts became entangled; he had to sweat to think of something that wasn’t unraveled or tied in knots to the past…
Later, when Tayo goes to the local medicine man searching for healing, we learn about the fragility of a weave, in this case a spider’s early morning web:
“But you know, grandson, this world is fragile.”
The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the story for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way.
We also learn about how easily those threads can be destroyed:
The old man only made him certain of something he had feared all along, something in the old stories. It took only one person to tear away the delicate strands of the web, spilling the rays of sun into the sand, and the fragile world would be injured.
From the start of his first presidential campaign, Trump has been tearing apart norms and institutions, most notably the peaceful transition of power, respect for military veterans, respect for the rule of law, and, recently, the rituals of Arlington National Cemetery. Nothing to him is sacred. Indeed, the line describing Big Jim in Bob Dylan’s “Jack of Hearts” often comes to me when I think of Trump:
With his bodyguards and silver cane and every hair in place He took whatever he wanted to and he laid it all to waste
I promised you a more positive turn to this post so here it is. Tayo is on a healing quest—for himself and for the world—and he searches for a pattern that will address the sickness that has set humans against the environment, Whites against Indians, and Indians against Indians. In the end, he finds it in an inner peace that refuses to get drawn into the world’s hatred, anger, and fear, what Silko calls witchery. It’s like the way that Harris insists on joy and hope in the face of Trump’s racism and misogyny.
This peace is captured in beautiful patterns that one finds in Pueblo blankets and Navajo sand paintings. Ultimately Tayo finds that pattern in the stars:
Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars. But there were others who would be working this night, casting loose countermotions to suck in a great spiral, swallowing the universe endlessly into the black mouth, their diagrams in black ash on cave walls outlining the end in motionless dead stars. But he saw the constellation in the north sky, and the fourth star was directly above him; the pattern of the ceremony was in the stars, and the constellation formed a map of the mountains in the directions he had gone for the ceremony. For each star there was a night and a place; this was the last night and the last place, when the darkness of night and the light of day were balanced. His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun, in the pattern of the stars. He had only to complete this night, to keep the story out of the reach of the destroyers for a few more hours, and their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them.
It so happens that the witchery does in fact collapse in upon itself as the forces seeking to destroy Tayo, baffled by his refusal to engage with them, instead turn on each other. I wonder if something similar will eventually happen to Trump and Trumpism. The racists and fascists that Trump has emboldened have already destroyed the traditional GOP. Will they eventually cannibalize each other? Silko concludes the novel with the following poem:
Whirling darkness started its journey with its witchery and its witchery has returned upon it.
Its witchery has returned into its belly.
Its own witchery has returned all around it.
Whirling darkness has come back on itself. It keeps all its witchery to itself.
It doesn’t open its eyes with its witchery.
It has stiffened with the effects of its own witchery.
It is dead for now. It is dead for now. It is dead for now. It is dead for now.
And then, on the last page:
Sunrise, accept this offering, Sunrise.
Or as the Rev. Al Sharpton put it in his speech at the Democratic National Convention:
[W]eeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. We’ve endured January 6th. We’ve endured conspiracy theories. We’ve endured lies and areas of darkness. But if we stay together, Black, White, Latina, Asian, Indian American, if we stay together, joy, joy, joy, joy coming in the morning.
For a humorous interlude, I share today a post I encountered on Spoutible that was triggered by someone offering driving advice. (I don’t know who started the thread.) Apparently some official somewhere asserted that “obeying the rules when you drive dramatically reduces your chances of crashing,” leading this wag to wonder what it in fact meant to “drive dramatically.” Could it, he or she wondered, involve quoting Shakespeare as one negotiates traffic? And if so, which passages would one turn to?
Responders weighed in with several creative answers, to which I’ve added several more. Feel free to send in your own.
You can use this as a quiz as well. Can you identify the original passage in each instance? (Answers at the end)
1. Is this a red light I see before me?!
2. Forsooth, yonder light is rendered green. And yet thou dost tarry! Shall I produce such a sound as to wake you from your slumber?
3. What light through yonder windscreen breaks? Is it the amber, and my brake pedal the sun!
7. The first thing we do, let’s kill all the traffic cops.
8. The devil can cite traffic law to his purpose.
9. I wish my car had the speed of your tongue!
10. Beware the Ides of March—especially if it falls on a weekday between 4-7 and you’re trying to exit Atlanta.
Answer key: 1. Macbeth 2. I’m thinking a combination of Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night’s Dream 3. Romeo and Juliet 4. Romeo and Juliet 5. The Tempest 6. Midsummer Night’s Dream 7. Henry VI, Part II 8. Merchant of Venice 9. Much Ado about Nothing 10. Julius Caesar
According to the Washington Post’s Philip Bump, Donald Trump surviving an assassin’s bullet has elevated him to messiah status amongst certain of his evangelical supporters. One of the problems of such reasoning was voiced by Voltaire 265 years ago.
In his article, Bump reports that some supporters in Congress and on social media
have shared Bible scriptures and illustrations showing the Holy Ghost deflecting the bullet. Internet celebrities such as boxer Jake Paul have called the moment proof of “who God wants to win,” and posters on TheDonald, a far-right message board unaffiliated with Trump, have mentioned God seven times as often as they did in the week before the shooting, a Washington Post analysis found.
Trump, as they see him, has been anointed by God to save a troubled nation, and apparently Trump is in agreement. Here’s what he had to say in a recent television interview with Dr. Phil (McGraw):
“Is there a reason you think you were spared?” McGraw asked.
“I mean, the only thing I can think is that God loves our country,” Trump replied. “And he thinks we’re going to bring our country back. He wants to bring it back.”
“You believe God’s hand was in this that day?” McGraw asked a bit later in the discussion.
“I believe so, yeah, I do,” Trump replied.
“And you talk about the country; you believe you have more to do,” McGraw followed up. “You weren’t done. You were spared for a reason.”
“Well,” Trump said, “God believes that.”
Bump then raises the objection that Voltaire voiced in his satire Candide. Why, he asks, did firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was struck by one of the bullets, have to die? He adds wryly that the question went unaddressed by McGraw or Trump.
It does not go unaddressed in Candide. In Voltaire’s scorching satire, a Dutch sea captain has just robbed Candide of many of the jewels he acquired in El Dorado:
Candide followed in a little boat to join the vessel in the roads. The skipper seized his opportunity, set sail, and put out to sea, the wind favoring him. Candide, dismayed and stupefied, soon lost sight of the vessel.
“Alas!” said he, “this is a trick worthy of the old world!”
It so happens, however, that Candide, upon booking a second ship, comes upon a sea battle where a Spanish vessel is attacking the ship of the thief. He watches as the ship goes down, along with “the immense plunder which this villain had amassed.” Candide sees the same hand of providence at work that Trump’s evangelical supporters saw in his case:
“You see,” said Candide to Martin, “that crime is sometimes punished. This rogue of a Dutch skipper has met with the fate he deserved.”
To which Martin asks, “But why should the passengers be doomed also to destruction?
Seeking his own explanatory framework, Martin comes up with one which appears to let God somewhat off the hook: “God has punished the knave, and the devil has drowned the rest.”
This actually sounds like Trumpian reasoning: Trump takes credit for whatever goes right while finding ways to blame others for whatever goes wrong.
In any event, as a supreme egotist, Trump unsurprisingly takes it for granted that God would single him out to save. As for Comperatore, I doubt he has given him a second thought.
When it comes to my Labor Day post, I always face the question of whether my literary selection should celebrate labor or relief from labor. Frequently I think of the passage in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where narrator Marlow shares his mixed feelings about work. In this instance, the work involves refitting the boat that will take him into the Congo to retrieve Kurtz:
She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
One finds a very different view of work in Jenny Diver’s violent revenge fantasy in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s Three Penny Opera. The fantasy, which helps Jenny endure her hard life, starts with her venting her frustrations:
You people can watch while I’m scrubbing these floors And I’m scrubbin’ the floors while you’re gawking Maybe once ya tip me and it makes ya feel swell In this crummy southern town In this crummy old hotel But you’ll never guess to who you’re talkin’. No. you couldn’t ever guess to who you’re talkin’.
And then “one night there’s a scream in the night” as a ghostly black freighter sails into the harbor. The ship’s cannons level all the building except for the hotel, and the only one who knows why is Jenny, whom the others see “grinnin’ while I’m scrubbin’.” The mystery is solved the next morning when they see her stepping out, “looking nice with a ribbon in my hair”:
And the ship The black freighter Runs a flag up its masthead And a cheer rings the air
By noontime the dock Is a-swarmin’ with men Comin’ out from the ghostly freighter They move in the shadows Where no one can see And they’re chainin’ up people And they’re bringin’ em to me Askin’ me, “Kill them now, or later?” Askin’ me! “Kill them now, or later?”
Noon by the clock And so still by the dock You can hear a foghorn miles away And in that quiet of death I’ll say, “right now. Right now!”
Then they’ll pile up the bodies And I’ll say, “That’ll learn ya!”
And the ship The black freighter Disappears out to sea And On It Is Me
Brecht does not see women as sweet, soft, and sentimental angels ready to forgive. (Neither does Margaret Atwood, come to think of it—I’ve just reread Blind Assassin and see her rebelling against the same stereotype.)
Marge Piercy’s “Secretary’s Chant,” today’s featured poem, is closer to Jenny’s vision than Marlow’s (although it lacks the revenge fantasy). There’s nothing noble or self-revelatory about how the job takes over the speaker’s identity, prompting her to see herself as an anonymous cog in the corporate structure. “File me under W,” she says—she might as well say, “Bury me”– “because I wonce was a woman.”
The Secretary Chant By Marge Piercy
My hips are a desk, From my ears hang chains of paper clips. Rubber bands form my hair. My breasts are quills of mimeograph ink. My feet bear casters, Buzz. Click. My head is a badly organized file. My head is a switchboard where crossed lines crackle. Press my fingers and in my eyes appear credit and debit. Zing. Tinkle. My navel is a reject button. From my mouth issue canceled reams. Swollen, heavy, rectangular I am about to be delivered of a baby Xerox machine. File me under W because I wonce was a woman.
In “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband,” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu imagines a victim of marital injustice writing, “But this last privilege I still retain;/ Th’ oppressed and injured always may complain.” “Pirate Jenny’s Song” and “Secretary’s Chant” invoke this last privilege. I imagine them sharing these poems around a barbecue on the one day of the year that has been specially set up for them.
Gerard van Honhorst, St. Peter Being Freed from Prison
Sunday
I was thumbing through my Collected Poetry of Denise Levertov yesterday and came across a wonderful poem that I had forgotten about. My late friend Dana Greene, in her biography of Levertov, spoke of the poet’s focus on “primary wonder,” and what I love about Levertov is that, for her, such wonder is not the end but the beginning. It’s after we experience divine revelation that the real work begins.
That’s how it was for the disciples after they encountered the risen Jesus and how it is for Peter in the poem that I share today. “St. Peter and the Angel” is a reflection on this episode, recounted in Acts 12: 5-11, about Peter’s miraculous escape from Herod’s prison. Here’s the passage:
Peter was therefore kept in prison, but constant prayer was offered to God for him by the church. And when Herod was about to bring him out, that night Peter was sleeping, bound with two chains between two soldiers; and the guards before the door were keeping the prison. Now behold, an angel of the Lord stood by him, and a light shone in the prison; and he struck Peter on the side and raised him up, saying, “Arise quickly!” And his chains fell off his hands. Then the angel said to him, “Gird yourself and tie on your sandals”; and so he did. And he said to him, “Put on your garment and follow me.” So he went out and followed him, and did not know that what was done by the angel was real, but thought he was seeing a vision. When they were past the first and the second guard posts, they came to the iron gate that leads to the city, which opened to them of its own accord; and they went out and went down one street, and immediately the angel departed from him.
And when Peter had come to himself, he said, “Now I know for certain that the Lord has sent His angel, and has delivered me from the hand of Herod and from all the expectation of the Jewish people.”
Somewhat like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Peter realizes that our most challenging task is handling the freedom we are granted. While the Inquisitor speaks of the fear, however, he omits the joy that comes with embracing that freedom. When we can no longer feel the angel, that’s when we hear our own footsteps and experience the “long street’s majestic emptiness”:
St. Peter and the Angel By Denise Levertov
Delivered out of raw continual pain, smell of darkness, groans of those others to whom he was chained–
unchained, and led past the sleepers, door after door silently opening– out! And along a long street’s majestic emptiness under the moon:
one hand on the angel’s shoulder, one feeling the air before him, eyes open but fixed . . .
And not till he saw the angel had left him, alone and free to resume the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of what he had still to do, not till then did he recognize this was no dream. More frightening than arrest, than being chained to his warders: he could hear his own footsteps suddenly. Had the angel’s feet made any sound? He could not recall. No one had missed him, no one was in pursuit. He himself must be the key, now, to the next door, the next terrors of freedom and joy.
When Bill Clinton, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, said, “We need Kamala Harris, the president of joy, to lead us,” I thought of some of the great poems about joy. They include two by William Blake and another by Kahlil Gibran.
Before looking them over, let’s first talk about this joy explosion that has broken out amongst Democrats. Fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat says that joy is critical in opposing dictators and wannabe dictators and that the Harris-Walz campaign are right to adopt the slogan “Joy and Hope.” The scholar notes that
positive emotions such as love, solidarity, and yes, joy, have been part of successful anti-authoritarian political strategies. Positive emotions motivate people to engage in politics when they might have grown apathetic or cynical about the possibility of change.
She therefore takes issue with a New York Times opinion column by columnist Patrick Healy when he “cringed a little” at Clinton’s words, opining, “”Joy is not a political strategy.” Rather than simply disagree with him, however, Ben-Ghiat goes further and analyzes his response. We’ve been so inundated by negative images and rhetoric “designed to evoke fear, contempt, hatred, and disgust with others,” she says, that the prospect of joy feels unfamiliar and even shocking. The purpose of Trump’s language has been, in part, to make us “feel hopeless and down, so that we lose our faith in ourselves and each other.”
One thinks of the “immigrants as rapists and murderers” speech with which Trump began his first presidential campaign; his “American carnage” speech at his inauguration; the ceaseless lying and demonization that we endured during his years in office; and the non-stop attacks in the years since on the judicial system that has been trying to hold him accountable. No wonder, then, that a newspaper columnist would be distrustful.
Fear, contempt, hatred, and disgust with others don’t necessarily get the last word, however. In his poem “Joy and Sorrow,” which appears in The Prophet, Gibran makes Ben-Ghiat’s point in another way. The joy that many of us are feeling at the moment, Gibran would explain, is a logical outgrowth of the sorrow we have been experiencing. The two are coin sides of each other:
Joy and Sorrow By Kahlil Gibran
Then a woman said, ‘Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.’ And he answered: Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that hold your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.” But I say unto you, they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed. Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy. Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced. When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.
Perhaps Trump has carved into our being, attempting to hollow us out with his knives. What he has wrought instead, however, is a lute that soothes the spirit.
Blake makes the same point–that joy and woe are closely linked–in a passage from his mystical “Auguries of Innocence”:
Man was made for Joy & Woe And when this we rightly know Thro the World we safely go Joy & Woe are woven fine A Clothing for the soul divine Under every grief & pine Runs a joy with silken twine
Blake doesn’t end the matter there, however. In his short poem “Eternity,” he feels the need to distinguish between different kinds of joy:
Eternity By William Blake
He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
The lyric serves as a good rejoinder to those who contend that Democrats are experiencing a sugar high, that Harris is having a honeymoon that can’t last, that “joy is not a political strategy.” And to give this observation some credit, this is the case when we “bind” ourselves to a certain feel-good moment. If we do so, then we do indeed destroy this winged thing, becoming disheartened when the feeling dissipates.
But if, instead, we kiss the joy as it flies—if we dedicate ourselves, in our multicultural democracy, to living fully each moment and honoring the full personhood of each person we meet—then the daily sunrise promises us new experiences and new treasures. When a joyful approach to life brings such rewards, why would we ever tire of it?
Citing a Biblical passage that Blake knew well, the Rev. Al Sharpton summed up my point today in his uplifting speech to the Democratic National Convention. Psalm 30 tells us, he told the delegates, that
weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. We’ve endured January 6th. We’ve endured conspiracy theories. We’ve endured lies and areas of darkness. But if we stay together, Black, White, Latina, Asian, Indian American, if we stay together, joy, joy, joy, joy coming in the morning.
Kamala Harris speaking at the Democratic National Convention
Thursday
Two days ago I was having a fun conversation on Spoutible about why English majors often make good lawyers, with my interlocutor–one Phil Boiarski—mentioning the rhetorical skills lawyers need to be successful. Then he asked me what I thought of Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech.
While rhetorical analysis is not a strength of mine, I know that I experienced a mood shift in the course of the speech. I started off feeling warm and fuzzy as Harris recounted her parents’ immigrant stories, along with how her mother and her neighbors combined to bring her up in a middle class Oakland neighborhood. Then, however, the tone shifted dramatically as Harris got serious.
Tomi T. Ahonen, who writes extensively about political speechifying, helped me understand what had happened. The speech, he noted, had two parts, the first recounting Harris’s life story, the second channeling Winston Churchill. About the latter, I’m assuming he particularly had in mind such passages as,
And know this: I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists. And I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim-Jong-Un, who are rooting for Trump. Because they know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors. They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable—because he wants to be an autocrat.
As President, I will never waver in defense of America’s security and ideals. Because, in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand—and where the United States of America belongs.
As I listened, I felt that a battle bugle had been sounded and that I was being marched into action. Or as I told my Spoutible companion in a reference that may have confused him, I felt like the jazz-playing brother in James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” when he’s back at the piano again.
Sonny has recently been released from imprisonment for heroin possession and for the first time is sitting down with his old band at a jazz club. Creole, the band leader, leads Sonny to the piano and at first allows him to focus on the positive:
[Sonny] seemed to have found, right there beneath his fingers, a damn brand-new piano. It seemed that he couldn’t get over it. Then, for a while, just being happy with Sonny, [the band] seemed to be agreeing with him that brand-new pianos certainly were a gas.
Similarly, as we listened to Harris, we were happy to join her in her immigrant success story, one of the foundational stories of our republic.
But we can’t remain in this space any more than Sonny can remain in his. The band leader is there to remind everyone why Sonny is there:
Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.
It’s for Sonny, as it is for Harris, to take leadership in this situation:
And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation. Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny’s blues. He made the little black man on the drums know it, and the bright, brown man on the horn. Creole wasn’t trying any longer to get Sonny in the water. He was wishing him Godspeed. Then he stepped back, very slowly, filling the air with the immense suggestion that Sonny speak for himself.
And speak for himself Sonny does:
Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.
The narrator, who has had his own sorrows, finds momentary relief in Sonny’s playing, even while he simultaneously realizes “that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.”
Harris pointed to our own challenges, even as she gave Democrats and a fair number of Republicans and Independents the confidence that she was the right person to lead us in that endeavor.
In her shift of tone and substance, I was also reminded of Obama’s 2009 inaugural address. Many came to it wanting to bask in his vision of hope and change and were startled when he talked instead of getting down to business. “We campaign in poetry but govern in prose,” New York Governor Mario Cuomo famously said, and Obama and Harris pointed to some of the prose that awaits us.
At the end of Baldwin’s story, Sonny’s playing results in a reconciliation between the two brothers, who have become estranged. For her part, Harris is managing—at least for the moment—to bring together progressives, liberals, moderates, and a significant number of center-right conservatives. Freedom lurks around us, she told us, and she can help us be free if we send her to the White House.
