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Sunday– Looking Ahead to Passover
In anticipation of the Passover holidays, which begin tomorrow, I’ve been reading Chaya Lester’s “Lit”—Poetry for the Jewish Holidays. According to her website, Lester is a clinical psychologist and co-director of Jerusalem’s Shalev Center for Jewish Personal Growth, as well as one who has explored “Experiential Torah Learning.”
According to Lester in “Lit” (which you can find here),
The Hebrew name for Passover is Pe-Sach, which is symbolically read as Peh Sach – the mouth that speaks. Indeed, on Seder night the retelling of the story of our people’s enslavement is nothing short of a national therapeutic ritual. Psychology has shown us the necessity of using speech and expression to best process through the pains and traumas of our lives. Our yearly processing through re-telling has been an essential path of healing and empowerment for our people over millennia. At the same time, Seder night also offers us a ritual space for processing through our personal enslavements. Speech is the ideal vehicle for generating our personal freedom in tandem with the national freedom tale.
With that in mind, here’s a poem about the incident that started the ball rolling—which is to say God addressing Moses as a burning bush. If you need reminding, here’s the account in Exodus:
There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”
And then the instructions:
The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”
In “Hear the Call,” the poet says that the bush will speak to all of us who “simply NOTICE.” If we step aside from our “daily grind,” we will “notice the quiet light that burns inside.” But the daily grind in this case may be trauma that we have surrendered to. As Lester observes, “We can endure most anything we set our souls to.”
If, as Lester goes on to say, we are the “sacred bush of paradox and calling,” the paradox may be that our trauma–that which sears our leaves–also calls us to freedom. Perhaps thinking of people trapped (like the Israelites) in abusive relationships, Lester assures us that we “need not be consumed by life’s smoky plumes.” Rather, when we hear the call, we can “be prepared to leave.”
Hear the Call
They say that the bush burned not only for Moses but for anyone who would simply NOTICE.
Simply step aside from their daily grind and notice the quiet light that burns inside.
And know this: We need not be consumed by life’s smoky plumes. We can endure most anything we set our souls to.
For we are the sacred brush of paradox and calling.
Sit with the things that sear your leaves and when you hear the call – be prepared to leave.
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Friday
Whether or not Trump’s Manhattan trial sends him to prison, there is a way in which he is already experiencing some of prison’s agonies. In that way, he resembles the inhabitants of Dante’s Inferno, whose tormented afterlives are metaphorical versions of the hells they created for themselves while still alive. Hang on while I explain.
Dante’s psychological brilliance lies in the many ways he shows that sin itself causes suffering. People may think they are getting away with their behavior but they live in darkness. Those who are consumed with lust, for instance, are buffeted endlessly by violent winds (Paolo and Francesca) while those in the grip of anger either tear at each other incessantly in a dark marsh (active anger) or gurgle below the surface (sullen or repressed anger).
I owe my understanding of how the trial itself is hellish for Trump to his niece, clinical psychologist Mary Trump, and to fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Mary Trump observes that
even after only two days, it is nearly intolerable for Donald to sit there quietly. As he continues to hear disparaging comments, as he continues to submit to somebody else’s authority, the pressure will build. In some ways, I think this experience might be worse for him than jail.
The disparaging comments are coming in the form of tweets and other social media posts and mock and criticize Trump.
Meanwhile Ben-Ghiat writes that the longer the “confinement” of the trial goes on,
the harder it will be for Trump to restrain himself. The narcissism and the ego needs of the strongman simply cannot bear the feeling of being constrained by others. They need to turn every space and every interaction into an opportunity to dominate and humiliate others and speak for as long as they like (the rambling rallies).
Referencing her own book on fascism, Ben-Ghiat, points out that, in the courtroom,
Trump is surrounded and contained by armed officers and the judge. He is not the master of this space —quite the contrary. If you have read Strongmen or other studies of authoritarian leaders, you will understand the novelty of this situation for Trump, with the judge monitoring his every outburst and warning him that he will be arrested if he violates the rules.
To be sure, Dante would go even further and see Trump, even prior to the the trial, living in a self-created hell. In two past posts (here and here) I have noted all the punishments in Inferno, along with the accompanying torment, that apply to Trump. They are lust (Circle 2), Gluttony (circle 3), waste and hoarding (circle 4), wrath and sloth (circle 5), heresy (circle 6), blasphemy (circle 7), simony or betraying the public trust and putting the government up for sale (circle 8), graft (circle 8), sowing discord (circle 8) and treason (circle 9).
But just because Trump has created a constant inner hell for himself—anyone who watches him even briefly knows that he has turned his back on inner peace, not to mention God’s love—doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t still be held accountable by our justice system. As Yale law school professor Bandy Lee notes (quoted by Ben-Ghiat), the only way to avoid violence in someone such as Trump is to place limits on their behavior. To which Ben-Ghiat adds,
[T]he history of authoritarianism shows that appeasing bullies and not acting due to fear of possible violence merely sets up the conditions for more violence. It allows the bully to feel empowered and righteous in his lawlessness, which triggers more feelings of omnipotence and grandiosity and more reckless actions.
This is why Ben-Ghiat finds it “an amazing and beautiful and never-to-be-taken-for-granted fact that this trial is happening at all.” For Trump’s “bubble of invincibility [to be] punctured with a conviction,” she writes, “would be an unwelcome and yet powerful lesson for his followers.”
In short, it’s not enough that Trump has brought suffering on himself. We must see justice done and, if he is found guilty, punishment meted out.
Bullfrog at the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center
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Thursday
Today’s essay on two Mary Oliver April poems expands on a previous post. In one, Oliver does all she can to capture the ecstatic feelings that an April evening arouses in her. In the other, she gives up on words and just points at the peeping frogs.
When I’ve taught “Blossom” in my Intro to Lit class, my biology students have often informed me that all the peeping and croaking is designed to attract a mate. Well aware of this, Oliver appears to have written her poem as a series of pelvic thrusts.
I particularly like Oliver’s contrast between sex and death. In a chilling line, she observes that “time/chops at us like an iron/hoe” and that “death/is a state of paralysis.” We cannot deny this reality. Nevertheless, when we are in the grip of desire, “everything else can wait.” Our bodies take over and we “hurry down into the body of another.” Just because we are more than our bodies–“more than blood”–we can ignore the fact that we are also our bodies and, as such, belong to the moon.
As an aside, I note that this is not Oliver’s only explicitly erotic poem. For instance, we get a vivid depiction of lesbian sex at night in a garden in her poem “The Gardens”:
You gleam as you lie back breathing like something taken from water, a sea creature, except for your two human legs which tremble and open into the dark country I keep dreaming of. How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere?
In the final image in “Blossom,” Oliver joins John Donne and Andrew Marvell when she shows sex warring with time. In “Good Morrow,” neo-Platonic Donne imagines time standing still when he is making love. At the end of “To His Coy Mistress,” carpe diem Marvell does not see this as possible but declares, “Although we cannot make time stand still, yet we can make him run.” Oliver adds a third possibility: time is shattered at the moment of union.
Blossom By Mary Oliver
In April the ponds open like black blossoms the moon swims in every one; there’s fire everywhere: frogs shouting their desire, their satisfaction. What we know: that time chops at us all like an iron hoe, that death is a state of paralysis. What we long for: joy before death, nights In the swale—everything else can wait but not this thrust from the root of the body. What we know: we are more than blood–we are more than our hunger and yet we belong to the moon and when the ponds open, when the burning begins the most thoughtful among us dreams of hurrying down into the black petals, into the fire, into the night where time lies shattered, into the body of another.
Given how determined Oliver is to capture the experience in language, it’s noteworthy that she gives up on language altogether at the end of another April frog poem. Here it is:
April
I wanted to speak at length about The happiness of my body and the Delight of my mind for it was April, a night, a full moon and—
But something in myself for maybe From somewhere other said: not too Many words, please, in the muddy shallows the
Frogs are singing.
Sometimes just mentioning the frogs’ night chorus is enough. Still, it’s nice to have other Oliver poems that go into more detail.
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Wednesday
Recently I encountered a fascinating article about how Indians are using poetry to protest the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attacks on India’s Muslim minority. Krupa Shandilya, professor of Sexuality, Gender, and Women’s Studies at Amherst College notes that protesters have turned to two poems in particular: “Tum Dekhogey” (“You Will See”), by contemporary poet and Bollywood lyricist and scriptwriter Hussain Haidry, and “Hum Dekhenge” (“We Will See” or “On That Day”) by Pakistani poet (although he was born in pre-partition India) Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
Shandilya says that, in 2019, university campuses and Muslim neighborhoods were “packed with people who, day after day, chanted slogans, belted out songs and recited poetry.” The poetry, she observes, “seemed to unsettle the government the most” so that dissenters reciting the protest poems “were accused of spreading hate against India, beaten and arrested by the police.”
As a scholar and translator of Urdu poetry, Shandilya writes that she was moved by the way that Haidry’s “You Will See”” described the state’s violence against peaceful protesters. “For me,” she says, “the poem crystallizes the disturbing turn of events in a country that once prized secularism, democracy and free expression.
“Because poems like Haidry’s directly challenge state power,” she adds, “the government and its supporters seek to portray them as seditious and anti-Indian.”
“You Will See” was inspired by a 101-day sit-in by Muslim women in Shaheen Bagh, a Muslim neighborhood in Delhi. Written from the perspective of those women, the poem “lambastes the silent bystanders who do nothing as hardcore Hindu nationalists – who believe in Hindu supremacy – terrorize religious minorities”:
You Will See By Hussain Haidry Trans. by Krupa Shandilya
Yes, you too will see This night spent on the streets, this ice in our breath, This brutal, unjust night, this too will be your fate When the tyrant attacks you, you stifle your screams When you beg for justice, you are battered instead When trapped in saffron cages, eating roti dipped in water – Our slaughtered faces will appear before you We will curse you, we will spit on you And Hindustan will be but a hollow word – scared, cowardly hell, slaughterhouse – and you will lament: I was there and so were you Then the tyrant will laugh and say: I was there and so were you
Shandilya says that the line “This night on the street, this ice in our breath” refers to the frigid winter nights that the women of Shaheen Bagh endured during their sit-in, when they had no access to heat or electricity. The peaceful protesters endured the attacks and the battering of Hindu nationalists. The “saffron cages” can refer either to religious intolerance in general or to the actual jail cells in which the protesters were imprisoned. Saffron is the color used by Modi’s ruling party, the BJP.
The other poem showing up in protests, Faiz’s “On that Day,” was actually written to protest the Pakistani dictator Muhammad Zia ul Haq in 1979 but it has been adapted by Indian Muslim to protest Modi’s Rule:
On That Day by Faiz Ahmed Trans. Jennifer Dubrow
That day will come Yes, that day will come That day we have been promised When mountains of tyranny and oppression will float away like cotton And the earth will tremble and shake under the feet of the oppressed The sky will thunder and roar on the heads of the arbitrators False idols will be uprooted from the Ka’ba of God’s earth And the pure-hearted will be seated in places of honor Thrones will be smashed And crowns overthrown On that day Only the name of God shall remain Who is both present and unseen Who is both the observer and the perceived On that day The cry of “I am God!” will resound The God that is in you and me And the earth shall be ruled by those whom God created The people, who are you and me
Shandilya says that this poem was the most recited poem at Shaheen Bagh and other sites during the 2019 protests. In adapting it to their purposes, she notes, the protesters tapped into a long tradition of reciting poetry as a form of protest so that “poems from the past often evolve to become freshly relevant.” And because the tradition is primarily an oral one—even though the poems appear in print—they are “recited as poems and sung as songs at marches, protests and on university campuses. As a result, they can reside in the popular imagination decades after their publication.”
Reading Shamilya’s account, I am struck by how these poems function as (to draw on Franz Fanon’s classic anti-colonialist work Wretched of the Earth) a literature of combat. Those who draw on them may be disempowered minorities lacking the firepower of the state, but they have language at its most powerful to bolster them.
To be sure, Fanon points out that poetry can’t change politics on its own. Indeed, in dark times (here I draw on Percy Shelley) poetry may be able to do little more than keep the spark of hope alive. But at other times, poetry can become an indispensable ally in the battle for political freedom.
As it was in the 2019 demonstrations, when it helped the protesters accomplish something tangible. According to Shamilya, due to the protests and the widespread outcry, an anti-Muslim law was put on hold.
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Tuesday
Since I’m currently in the process of setting up a C.S. Lewis symposium for our church, I’ve been rereading the Narnia series. Most of the books, especially The Silver Chair, hold up very well, but I’ve just been reminded how unpleasant The Last Battle is. It’s everyone’s least favorite book and with good reason.
Because Narnia’s inhabitants have been duped by a false Aslan, most have become either cynical nonbelievers or lost souls, which means that King Tirian and his unicorn companion Jewel can’t rally them to fight for their freedom. As a result, everyone dies, with C.S. Lewis reenacting the Biblical Book of Revelations to bring his series to an apocalyptic conclusion.
To be sure, it’s not totally depressing as everyone we like gets to go to Narnia Heaven. Still, we have to wade through a lot of yuk to get there. One of the yukkiest scenes reminds me of the bothsiderism that is characterizing much of the 2024 election coverage.
Bothsiderism in our case is the press giving the fascist who is running for president the same treatment as his opponent. Whatever Joe Biden’s flaws, he is not promising to weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies nor promising to be “dictator on day one” nor giving state secrets to the Russians. Humorist David Sedaris memorably captured the situation when he wrote (this in the final weeks of the 2008 election)
I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
I’ll grant that it’s debatable that Sedaris’s illustration applies to Barack Obama running against John McCain. (Then again, Sarah Palin helped tilt it into shit-with-glass territory.) But it’s definitely the situation now, just as it was when Social Democratic and Centre candidates were running against Adolph Hitler in the 1933 German federal election.
Those media outlets treating 2024 as just another election are like the dwarfs in Last Battle. The Calormenes have used a fabricated god to gain control over Narnia, including to persuade the dwarfs to slave for them in the mines. When Tirian frees the dwarfs and then tries to rally them to his cause, however, they aren’t having any of it. To be sure, at first things appear hopeful as they join with him, helping beat back a Calormene assault. But the aid they provide is illusory:
“Had enough, Darkies?” they yelled [at the Calormenes]. “Don’t you like it? Why doesn’t your great Tarkaan go and fight himself instead of sending you to be killed? Poor Darkies!”
“Dwarfs,” cried Tirian. “Come here and use your swords, not your tongues. There is still time. Dwarfs of Narnia! You can fight well, I know. Come back to your allegiance.”
“Yah!” sneered the Dwarfs. “Not likely. You’re just as big humbugs as the other lot. We don’t want any Kings. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs. Boo!”
This is bothsiderism at its clearest. Rather than seeing Trump as a clear and present danger to a free press, too many journalists see it as their job to treat both sides as equal humbugs. Hillary Clinton gets the same treatment for a minor e-mail violation that Trump does for a clear record of rape and fraud while Biden is hammered for his age.
In Last Battle, the dwarfs treating each side equally leads to the saddest scene in the entire book. Tirian has managed to rally some of the talking animals to his side and has sent off the mice, moles and squirrels to gnaw the ropes of talking horses that have been imprisoned by the Calormenes. Then this happens:
With a thunder of hoofs, with tossing heads, widened nostrils, and waving manes, over a score of Talking Horses of Narnia came charging up the hills. The gnawers and nibblers had done their work.
Poggin the Dwarf and the children opened their mouths to cheer but that cheer never came. Suddenly the air was full of the sound of twanging bowstrings and hissing arrows. It was the Dwarfs who were shooting and—for a moment Jill could hardly believe her eyes—they were shooting the Horses. Dwarfs are deadly archers. Horse after horse rolled over. Not one of those noble Beasts ever reached the King.
When Eustace expresses his horror, the dwarfs respond like newspapers shrugging off liberal critics:
[T]he Dwarfs jeered back at Eustace. “That was a surprise for you, little boy, eh? Thought we were on your side, did you? No fear. We don’t want any Talking Horses. We don’t want you to win any more than the other gang. You can’t take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”
Now, I’m not saying that mainstream media should turn into a leftist version of Fox News. The problem is that, by reporting “Democrats say-Republicans say” in an even-handed manner, the press actually helps the side that traffics most in lying and disinformation. The falsehoods become part of the discourse and are thereby normalized. As NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen points out, while “some lies and acts of disinformation are too important to be ignored, … repeating them in news accounts only helps them spread.”
So what to do? He, along with strategic language expert George Lakoff, argues for a truth sandwich. Rosen describes it as follows:
First state what is true. Then introduce the truthless or misleading statement. Then repeat what is true, so that the falsehood is neither the first impression nor the takeaway.
Too many in the media are seeing it more as their job to balance their coverage than to “state what is true.” By doing so, they could suffer the same fate as the dwarfs, who end up as dead as the Narnians. Or in Lewis’s metaphorical version of death, find themselves thrown into a dark stable.
In other words, Biden is fighting to save a democracy that ensures press freedom no less than free and fair elections.
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Monday
Today being tax day, I’ve got a poem and a literary passage to honor the occasion. The first is a poem in favor of taxes, the second a slam on the rich for doing everything in their power not to pay them. I’m thinking especially of those billionaires who are willing to sacrifice democracy in exchange for wannabe dictator Donald Trump lowering their taxes and gutting regulations.
But first the positive poem, written by “people’s poet” Edgar Guest (1881-1959). Guest was so called because, during his life, he wrote some 11,000 poems that were syndicated in 300 newspapers. And while newspaper poems were often derided by modernist writers in the 1920s and 1930s–they wanted more complex fare–they at least had the virtue of exercising people’s poetry muscles. Once newspapers stopped running poetry, some people stopped reading it altogether.
Anyway, Guest, reminds us why we pay taxes:
Taxes By Edgar A. Guest
When they become due I don’t like them at all. Taxes look large be they ever so small Taxes are debts which I venture to say, No man or no woman is happy to pay. I grumble about them, as most of us do. For it seems that with taxes I never am through.
But when I reflect on the city I love, With its sewers below and its pavements above, And its schools and its parks where children may play I can see what I get for the money I pay. And I say to myself: “Little joy would we know If we kept all our money and spent it alone.”
I couldn’t build streets and I couldn’t fight fire Policemen to guard us I never could hire. A water department I couldn’t maintain. Instead of a city we’d still have a plain Then I look at the bill for the taxes they charge, And I say to myself: “Well, that isn’t so large.”
I walk through a hospital thronged with the ill And I find that it shrivels the size of my bill. As in beauty and splendor my home city grows, It is easy to see where my tax money goes And I say to myself: “if we lived hit and miss And gave up our taxes, we couldn’t do this.”
And now to what Dickens has to say about those wealthy members of society who are doing all in their power to avoid taxes—which is to say, who want other people to pay for the infrastructure, the educated workforce, and the political and economic stability upon which they depend. Dickens unleashes his sarcasm on those factory owners who claim that the government is out to bankrupt them:
The wonder was, [Coketown] was there at all. It had been ruined so often, that it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks. Surely there never was such fragile chinaware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send laboring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke.
And now business’s threatened retaliation, which sounds like a direct echo of billionaires for Trump:
[One prevalent fiction] took the form of a threat. Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used—that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts—he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would “sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.” This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.
So should we conclude from this the companies that stash their cash abroad are unpatriotic? Not at all:
However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.
Think how much better we’d all feel about paying taxes if we knew that the wealthiest amongst us were paying their fair share.
Lory Widmer Hess, author of When Fragments Make a Whole
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Sunday
Lory Widmer Hess, a long-time reader of this blog, has just published a book that uses Biblical stories the way that I use literary stories: to understand life’s pressing issues and find ways to address them. In When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey through Healing Stories in the Bible (Floris Books), Lory shows how the Bible’s narrative richness helped her handle a covert depression that lasted for decades. Her work with developmentally disabled adults also contributed to her healing process and to her understanding of the Gospel story.
Lory has identified 18 healing stories involving Jesus, from his work with lepers, with the blind and the deaf, with those possessed by demons, and with Lazarus. With each she looks at the psychological and spiritual dynamics at play before finding an equivalent in her own healing trajectory. Each chapter ends with a meditational prompt, and each is accompanied by a poem Lory has written from the point of view of the sufferer.
The title of the book is echoed in the epigraph, taken from Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott’s Nobel-Prize acceptance speech: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.” The reference to fragments brings to mind the line from T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land—“These fragments I have shored against my ruin”—although Walcott’s and Lory’s vision of the process is more positive. They write less from a defensive crouch, more in a proactive effort to construct a healthy life.
Language has been the great love of my life, even at the times when it seemed to be the greatest stumbling block. Insofar as the gospels are stories, crafted in artistic language, I therefore have some experience in how to navigate them. Long before I started to study the Bible or to cultivate a conscious relationship with Christ, I was steeped in the magic of story, finding in it my own personal savior. How this personal salvation eventually became connected with the Savior of the world, and how my love of story eventually guided me to recognize and claim my own healing story, forms much of the background of this book. If you, too, love language and find relief for your suffering through narrative, I hope it will resonate with you.
For today’s blog Lory agreed to share how she came to write her book. I conclude today’s post with a poem that Lory wrote about doubting Thomas.
By Lory Widmer Hess
Words have always been magic to me — through them, I could enter into other worlds, enchanted lands, the minds and hearts of people who lived in distant places and times, or never existed except on the page. As a child I read voraciously, particularly fantasy books that would carry me along on a hero’s quest to uphold good and conquer evil. And I aspired to be a writer, to make my own words a part of that quest.
The words of scripture were familiar to me, since I sang in an Episcopal church choir from the age of eight. I loved the ritual and the sense of mystery, but when I turned to the Bible, I found it puzzlingly opaque. This was a gateway of meaning for many people, but for me it just brought up unanswered questions. What did it mean to “lose yourself to find yourself”? Why did a God of love so often sound threatening? If the events of Holy Week had been foretold by prophets, did that mean everything was predetermined? Where was human freedom in the Bible story? I remained intrigued, but an outsider in terms of religious faith. I didn’t want to just have faith, I wanted to understand.
As I grew up, while I carried my love of words and my questions into adult life, I lost the creative writing spark. It seemed to have been snuffed out, under the pressure of inner and outer obstacles. I couldn’t find the right words for so many things, for my doubts and fears and grief, for a buried anger that scared me too much to talk about it. Silence was safer than the scary unknown that would open up if I tried to express myself, to describe and name the monsters lurking inside me.
That changed when I spent time living and working with people who didn’t often express themselves in words, or not in the ways I’d been used to. Caring developmentally disabled adults challenged me to care for myself as well in an unaccustomed way. I had to learn to listen far harder than ever before, to communicate with my whole being and not with my intellect alone, and to strain to comprehend a reality that was powerful and real but not accessible to ordinary ways of thinking. As the effort slowly changed me, it challenged me to also change the circumstances of my life, to stop tolerating unhealthy relationships, to speak up and to have faith in my own feelings and my own voice.
The idea of writing poems from the point of view of the people who are healed in the gospels came to me as a gift during this exciting, but often scary and confusing time. Feeling as though some creative energy had finally been unlocked, I received it with gratitude, and then wondered how I could carry it further. The healing stories became more and more alive for me, showing me a new way forward. As my life settled into a new form, I continued to write — essays and memoir sections that complemented the healing stories and brought them into a narrative structure.
What had formerly seemed opaque and incomprehensible started to open up and reveal hidden depths. Thoughts that I’d gathered over the years began to come together, making fragments into a whole picture. I started to grasp ever more powerfully the Gospel story that is all about human freedom and divine love, guiding us toward a part of ourselves that seemed lost but has never truly been forgotten.
My “disabled” friends had been Christ-bearers for me, showing me what is also spoken and demonstrated in the way of the Beloved of God: we do not become human in the truest sense by becoming hard and impervious and self-defensive, but by making ourselves utterly vulnerable, admitting our need for help, daring to trust even though that lays us open to the greatest possible hurt. When this is done in innocence, humbly offering up the seed of our child-self that we all still carry within, the most amazing rebirths can happen.
Finally, though witnessing that process in myself and in others, I found that I’d begun both to understand, and to have faith.
When a publisher accepted the book I’d created, I was thankful that they thought my scribblings might be of help and interest to others. The book is now making its way in the world, and I wonder what will come of it. Will the seeds lying dormant in other hearts break open? Will the creative spark be ignited for someone else? I hope so, and I trust that good will come of the gift that was given to me. The magic of words continues to work in us and between us, showing the way toward the Word that made us.
* * *
As we are in the Easter season, here’s a poem Lory wrote about Doubting Thomas, which appeared in the Dec. 9, 2022 issue of the Agape Review. One can see in the poem the psychological drama that Lory explores in her book—how one can be “crowded with grief and disbelief” and imprisoned by doubt and “self-willed pain.” In Thomas’s case, Lory writes, he “had to feel before he’d heal.”
Doubting By Lory Widmer Hess
But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. John 20:24-25
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Friday
For a few years now I’ve been in charge of our parish’s Adult Forum, a weekly series occurring between our two church services devoted to exploring some topic or theme. This year’s theme has been art and spirituality, to which we have given the name “Creating in God’s Image.”
I like this title, which echoes the line in Genesis that we are “created in God’s image,” because I often feel we are closest to God when we are engaging with art, whether creating it or consuming it.
Thus this past week’s presentation, when the noted poet Wyatt Prunty talked about “Faith and Imagination,” was particularly apropos. Prunty wasn’t specifically talking about religious faith—which is to say, he didn’t mention prayer or God or church—but that didn’t matter in the slightest. When he said that the poet has a faith in order and a conviction that the topic chosen is worth pursuing, he was gesturing towards a mystery that does not seem to be of this world.
Trying to explain how a poem comes about, he said that it sometimes feels like he is tapping into a melody which he must then follow. “It seems like there’s an inevitability to it,” he noted.
Prunty said this conviction doesn’t come from the classroom. Rather, it’s as though he is in a dark hall, and while he can’t see where he is going, he has faith that he has been there before and will find his way out.
Faith enables the imagination, he explained, while imagination justifies that faith, finding pre-existing connections that have been hitherto hidden from us.
Not that the process is easy or that poets are necessarily secure in their faith. Often, Prunty says, poets are a bit lost and wandering. Prunty’s image of being lost in a dark hall put him in mind of the Richard Wilbur poem “The Writer,” where the poet is hearing the intermittent typing and silences of his daughter working on a story. Wilbur is reminded of a bird trapped in a room:
I remember the dazed starling Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago; How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it; And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door, We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody, For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back, Beating a smooth course for the right window And clearing the sill of the world.
Another image of lost or wandering birds made its appearance later in the talk, with Prunty citing the final lines of Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” The poem is about a woman meditating on nature, death, and beauty:
And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
So sometimes writers are thrashing around in an unfamiliar room, sometimes sinking downward to darkness.
As he looked at poets attempting to complete inner melody or find exit from hall or room, Prunty continued his focus on young people entering the unknown. In the Wilbur poem, the poet wishes the following for his story-writing daughter:
Young as she is, the stuff Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy: I wish her a lucky passage.
Then, in a much darker poem, Prunty shared Ben Jonson’s elegy on the death of his seven-year-old son, whom he calls his “best piece of poetry” and whom he imagines escaping “the world’s and flesh’s rage.” He concluded with one of his own best-known poems, about helping his daughter learn how to ride a bicycle.
Learning the Bicycle for Heather
The older children pedal past Stable as little gyros, spinning hard To supper, bath, and bed, until at last We also quit, silent and tired Beside the darkening yard where trees Now shadow up instead of down. Their predictable lengths can only tease Her as, head lowered, she walks her bike alone Somewhere between her wanting to ride And her certainty she will always fall.
Tomorrow, though I will run behind, Arms out to catch her, she’ll tilt then balance wide Of my reach, till distance makes her small, Smaller, beyond the place I stop and know That to teach her I had to follow And when she learned I had to let her go.
Just as a poet must have faith that his poems will discover where they are going, so a father must have that faith in his children.
Further thought: The line “beside the darkening yard” reminds me of William Blake’s account of children leaving their play as the sun descends in “The Echoing Green.” The poem concludes,
Till the little ones weary No more can be merry The sun does descend, And our sports have an end: Round the laps of their mothers, Many sisters and brothers, Like birds in their nest, Are ready for rest; And sport no more seen, On the darkening Green.
While the poem, appearing in Songs of Innocence, appears to be happy, the “darkening” foreshadows Songs of Experience. Heather Prunty too will be leaving her innocent childhood behind.
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Thursday
Over the past year I’ve been reporting on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, focusing on one literary invention at a time. Fletcher, who is “Professor of Story Science” at Ohio State, takes what could be described as a psychological-anthropological-historical approach to literary techniques, arguing that they have had an impact similar to, say, the introduction of the wheel or the steam engine on human development. Given that my own project is charting how literature changes lives, you can see why I’ve devoted so much attention to the book.
In a chapter that touches on Don Quixote, Greek and Roman comedies (Aristophanes’s Frogs and Lysistrata, Platus’s Pseudolus), and the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, Fletcher looks at works that move between different fictional realities, thereby “prompting our brain to wonder: Is one reality more real? Is one reality more fictional.“
Fletcher’s major example is part 2 of Don Quixote, where the knight encounters people who have read part 1. As Fletcher puts it,
This is a mind bender, not just for the don but for us. A fictional character is riding around the world where his fictions have been published—which is to say, a fictional character is riding around the factual world. So, is the don real? Or is the real world a fiction? Our brain flutters back and forth, inspecting both possibilities, trying to sort out the meta-textual puzzle.
There are yet more twists and turns to come, especially since Cervantes in part 2 is also responding to a counterfeit sequel written by the pseudonymous author Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. Cervantes’s Quixote calls out this other Quixote as a fraud. Or as Fletcher puts it, “an unreal character sets out to disprove a false fiction by revealing himself in the real world through a genuine fiction.”
Fletcher says the mental gymnastics involved in contrasting fantasy from reality is key to engaging with the world. As we mature, our understanding of what life can contain is enlarged, enabling us to transition from the rules of one environment to the next. While it’s an understanding that Quixote himself has trouble achieving, most of us come to it as we grow older.
But then Fletcher takes another step. Through certain kinds of fiction, we can engage in counterfactual thinking, conducting thought experiments into what an alternate world might look like. Rather than “impossibly reimagining life to suit our fancy,” he writes, we can “learn how to construct plausible dreams that we can export more readily to the life beyond.” We do this with what Fletcher calls “the Comic Wink.”
For a work that employs this wink, he turns to Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata, which posits the question, “What would life be like if women ran the government?” The counterfactual thinking encouraged by comedy, he says, “was important to Athenian democracy, which depended for its survival on an openness to new ideas.” But because new ideas can be unsettling, they must be cushioned by a wink, which is “a potent reality-suspending device.” For just a moment, an actor breaks the theater’s fourth wall to assure us, “None of this is really real.” Here’s Plautus’s Pseudolus giving us this wink:
I know, I know. You’re thinking that I’m a two-bit charlatan. But I assure you, all my impossible promises will come true. What kind of a comedy would this be if they didn’t.
You may be familiar with Pseudolus from Mel Brooks’s Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Forum.
While the Comic Wink has proved effective in “getting human brains to open themselves to outside ways of thinking,” Fletcher writes, “it’s only the first half of the dream-come-true technology that modern authors have derived from the Story in the Story.” The second half is the “Reality Shifter.”
Unlike the Comic Wink, which starts in the fantasy but gestures towards the real world, the Reality Shifter “starts in the real world—and then drifts in to fantasy, gently pulling the boundary of reality with it.” This happens in Don Quixote when the hero of part 1 reaches out to readers that the author imagines reading the book, including them as characters in part 2.
And how does this change our lives? Fletcher writes that scientists have shown “that exercises in counterfactual thinking can boost our ability to imagine creative ways to translate fantasy into reality.” It “increases our belief in our ability to change the world; and it improves the problem-solving skills we need to make change a reality. It gives us the will and then gives us a way.”
Put more prosaically, it gets us to think outside the box when we encounter life’s challenges.
In other words, Fletcher gives us yet another reason to make sure our children read imaginative literature throughout their education.
