Alexei Navalny as Harry Potter?

By Robin Bates | Published: February 18, 2024
Potter (Radcliffe) squares off with Volemort (Fiennes)

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Monday

Whether he was murdered or died as the result of harsh imprisonment, Russia’s Alexei Navalny has paid the ultimate price for opposing Vladimir Putin. In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Friday night, dissident Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar talked about how many Russians had come to see Navalny as Harry Potter, “the boy who lived,” and can’t believe he is dead. Just as Harry three times survives Voldemort’s attacks, once as a baby and twice in the final book, so it appeared to many that Navalny would survive Putin’s machinations. After all, Putin had once poisoned him and he had bounced back from that.

In the end, however, the man Zygar described as the last uncynical Russian—a man who believed in democracy with all his soul—could not hold out against a bloodthirsty dictator. Russians had hoped that Navalny was Russia’s George Washington, Zygar told Hayes, but said that instead he proved to be Russia’s Martin Luther King.

Let’s examine the Harry Potter comparison, however.  In the last of the Harry Potter novels, Harry becomes a Christ-like figure, sacrificing himself for his followers and for all that is good and right. Once he discovers he is one of the horcruxes keeping Voldemort alive, he knows he himself must die if Voldemort is to become mortal. Therefore, he allows Voldemort to kill him—only instead of ending Harry’s life, Voledort’s killing curse kills his own soul fragment that is lodged in Harry. As a result, Harry can return to confront—and this time defeat—the tyrant.

Deathly Hallows, however, is a fantasy whereas there is no coming back for Navalny. It’s as though the final Harry Potter novel ends with Voldemort delivering the curse:

Voldemort had raised his wand. His head was still tilted to one side, like a curious child, wondering what would happen if he proceeded. Harry looked back into the red eyes, and wanted it to happen now, quickly; while he could still stand, before he lost control, before he betrayed fear—

He saw the mouth move and a flash of green light, and everything was gone.

The comparison with Martin Luther King reminds me of a Lucille Clifton poem on the assassination:

the meeting after the savior gone
4/4/68

what we decided is
you save your own self.
everybody so quiet
not so much sorry as
resigned
we was going to try and save you but
now i guess you got to save yourselves
(even if you don’t know
who you are
where you been
where you headed)

So if Navalny can’t save Russia now, “i guess you got to save yourselves.”

But maybe, just maybe, there can be a Harry Potter ending after all. Once Harry, with the help of Neville, manages to kill the remaining horcruxes (himself and the snake Ngani), Voldemort is suddenly vulnerable in a way he hadn’t been before. At the same time, Harry’s inspiring sacrifice manages to galvanize “Dumbledore’s Army” into action so that, when he returns from the dead, it is to witness a full-blown rebellion against Voldemort.

Maybe it’s not too much of a far-flung fantasy to think that Navalny’s sacrifice has not been in vain. Maybe, just maybe, he has opened up cracks in Putin’s reign of terror. Maybe, just maybe, Putin will suffer Voldemort’s end. Here’s the moment:

And Harry, with the unerring skill of the Seeker, caught the wand in his free hand as Voldemort fell backward, arms splayed, the slit pupils of the scarlet eyes rolling upward. Tom Riddle [Voldemort] hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing. Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hand, staring down at his enemy’s shell.

And if, or when, that moment occurs, can we fantasize that we will see something comparable to the reaction to Harry’s victory:

One shivering second of silence, the shock of the moment suspended: and then the tumult broke around Harry as the screams and the cheers and the roars of the watchers rent the air. The fierce new sun dazzled the windows as they thundered toward him, and the first to reach him were Ron and Hermione, and it was their arms that were wrapped around him, their incomprehensible shouts that deafened him….[A]nd Harry could not hear a word that anyone was shouting, nor tell whose hands were seizing him, pulling him, trying to hug some part of him, hundreds of them pressing in, all of them determined to touch the Boy Who lived, the reason it was over at last—

It’s important, when opposing authoritarianism, to be clear-eyed. Fantasy will get one only so far, and wishing can lead to spectacular shipwrecks on the rocks of reality. But that being acknowledged, it’s also true that literary narratives, including those found in fantasy novels, have sometimes propelled activists to change the world in ways that no one could foresee. Don’t underestimate the power of dreaming. Harry Potter may yet stage a comeback.

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African-American Lit for Lent

By Robin Bates | Published: February 17, 2024

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Sunday

Each year, as a Lenten discipline, I take up a challenging reading project that I believe will deepen me spiritually. As poet priest Malcolm Guite observes, Lent is a good time for poetry since, through poems, we can arrive at “clarification of who we are, how we pray, how we journey through our lives with God and how he comes to journey with us.” Lent, Guite says,

 is a time set aside to re-orient ourselves, to clarify our minds, to slow down, recover from distraction, to focus on the values of God’s Kingdom and on the value he has set on us and on our neighbours. There are a number of distinctive ways in which poetry can help us do that…

Guite then quotes Seamus Heaney as to how poetry offers a “a glimpse and a clarification,” and he quotes Coleridge about what he and Wordsworth were hoping to offer through their poetry, which was

awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

 An article I blogged on 13 years ago, by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, compares reading literature carefully to the ancient practice of lectio divina, which involves “reading Scripture slowly, listening for the word or phrase that speaks to you, pausing to consider prayerfully the gift being offered in those words for this moment.” Reading this way, she says,

can change the way we listen to the most ordinary conversation. It can become a habit of mind. It can help us locate what is nourishing and helpful in any words that come our way—especially in what poet Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said”—and it can equip us with a personal repertoire of sentences, phrases, and single words that serve us as touchstones or talismans when we need them.

And:

In each reading of a book or poem or play, we may be addressed in new ways, depending on what we need from it, even if we are not fully aware of those needs. The skill of good reading is not only to notice what we notice, but also to allow ourselves to be addressed. To take it personally. To ask, even as we read secular texts, that the Holy Spirit enable us to receive whatever gift is there for our growth and our use. What we hope for most is that as we make our way through a wilderness of printed, spoken, and electronically transmitted words, we will continue to glean what will help us navigate wisely and kindly—and also wittily—a world in which competing discourses can so easily confuse us in seeking truth and entice us falsely.

Over the years, for my Lenten reading I’ve read Proust’s Swann’s Way, Book I of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the poetry of George Herbert, John Milton’s Paradise Regained, the religious poems of T. S. Eliot, and Dante’s Paradiso. 

This year I’ve decided to read works by African American authors that I should have read years ago, along with Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which has been made into a movie. (Julia and I watched it in a theater a week ago.) By seeing caste rather than racism as America’s underlying problem, Wilkerson is able to connect America-style discrimination with what has happened to marginalized groups in other societies and other times, such as the Dalits or “untouchables” in India and the Jews in Nazi Germany.

I’m eager to see how thinking of racism as a caste will influence my reading of Richard Wright’s Native Son, Laraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, all works which I should have read but for one reason or another haven’t. And of course I’ll read Caste as well.

In a recent column on why Trump is so popular amongst the white working class, New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait recently made a compelling case that other factors than the economy are the determining factor. After all, these voters were ravaged by the Trump presidency and are benefiting from the Biden economy. Chait writes that

delivering broadly shared prosperity for the working class has done nothing so far to reduce the appeal of Trumpism. His appeal is not born of desperation or despair. Whatever alchemy produced the Trump cult, money alone will not dispel it.

Perhaps America’s caste system is the explanatory alchemy. Creative writers who have been victimized by that system often have the deepest insight into it, understanding best how it has worked into the fibers of our being. Understanding the dynamics of caste may allow me to be a more articulate critic.

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A Swift Birthday Poem for Julia

By Robin Bates | Published: February 15, 2024
Julia Bates

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Saturday

In the film Dead Poets Society, the Robin Williams character informs his all-male English class that the purpose of poetry is to “woo women.” Needless to say, this is more a tactic to sell poetry to adolescents than a truth statement. Nor can I claim to have used poetry to woo my wife Julia, who today celebrates her 73rd birthday today. Nevertheless, it did play a role.

We were in our junior year at Carleton College and Julia, through my roommate, had invited me to join a poetry reading group she had started. I dutifully came, read the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo”—the first stanza of which I recited by heart—but then informed her that my work on the school newspaper was so time-consuming that I could participate in anything else. And that appeared to be that.

The Hopkins poem, which is very bouncy and alliterative, is not exactly woman-wooing material, given that it is about the evanescence of beauty. Here’s how it begins:

How to keep–is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere
known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch
or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing
away?

Although nothing further happened between Julia and me at that point, she was impressed with what she saw as my poetic soul. In other words, the seeds had been sown for our future relationship, which started up the following March. By the summer we had decided to get married.

Poetry has played a major role in our marriage, beginning with the erotic D. H. Lawrence poem that we had someone read at our wedding (“Tortoise Shout”). Sometimes poetry has entered in unexpected ways. I recall one time when I had been an insensitive jerk, going out with graduate friends on a sudden impulse and not asking Julia along. Julia was asleep in bed by the time I returned home, but she had left 20 angry poems plastered all over our apartment (numbered, so I knew what order to read them in) letting me know how she felt. For Julia, poetry has always been a major way of expressing her deepest feelings.

I too have always used poetry to celebrate special occasions with her (although not my own, not being the poet she is). Which brings me to today’s birthday poem.

I’m sharing one of the birthday poems that Jonathan Swift wrote for Esther Johnson (“Stella”), whom he first met when she was a girl (he was 14 years her senior) and to whom he may or may not have been married. (It’s crazy that we don’t know for sure.) Swift wrote a birthday poem for Stella each of the last ten years of her life, and although they always have the bantering tone that is characteristic of Swif’s poetry, the last one he wrote—not long before she died at 46—has an unexpectedly serious side. As he puts it, “Accept for once some serious lines.”

One of the wonderful things about being married to Julia for fifty years has been a growing tenderness. The highs and lows have evened out, mellowing (to borrow a line from Langston Hughes) to a golden note. Every day I find myself feeling grateful that she is in my life. I think that’s what Swift is feeling as well in this last poem.

To set up a contrast with what he wrote previously, here are the opening lines of his first birthday poem, written ten years earlier when Stella would have been 36. Note that he points out she’s aging and gaining weight:

Stella this day is thirty-four,
(We shan’t dispute a year or more:)
However, Stella, be not troubled,
Although thy size and years are doubled
Since first I saw thee at sixteen,
The brightest virgin on the green;
So little is thy form declined;
Made up so largely in thy mind.

And now for the last poem, written when he knew she didn’t have much time left. It begins by deciding not to talk about either her illness and his own aging:

This day, whate’er the Fates decree,
Shall still be kept with joy by me:
This day then let us not be told,
That you are sick, and I grown old;
Nor think on our approaching ills,
And talk of spectacles and pills;
Tomorrow will be time enough
To hear such mortifying stuff.Y
et, since from reason may be brought
A better and more pleasing thought,
Which can, in spite of all decays,
Support a few remaining days;
From not the gravest of divines
Accept for once some serious lines. 

If we can’t look forward, he then notes, at least we can look back:  

Although we now can form no more
Long schemes of life, as heretofore;
Yet you, while time is running fast,
Can look with joy on what is past. 

In a somewhat convoluted argument (so I’m skipping the first half of the next stanza), Swift examines different ways of looking at virtue. One of its advantages, he contends, is that it gives us something comforting to look back on. It leaves behind 

Some lasting pleasure in the mind,
Which, by remembrance, will assuage
Grief, sickness, poverty, and age;
And strongly shoot a radiant dart
To shine through life’s declining part. 

Stella, he says, has much virtue to look back upon, acting providentially to help people in need:  

Say, Stella, feel you no content,
Reflecting on a life well spent?
Your skillful hand employed to save
Despairing wretches from the grave;
And then supporting with your store
Those whom you dragg’d from death before?
So Providence on mortals waits,
Preserving what it first creates.
Your generous boldness to defend
An innocent and absent friend;
That courage which can make you just
To merit humbled in the dust;
The detestation you express
For vice in all its glittering dress… 

When I read these lines, I think of how Julia too works unstintingly on behalf of other people. I sensed that she had this commitment when I first met her (at the time she was training to be a middle school and high school teacher), and so it has turned out. Where she sees people needing help, she always steps forward. 

After a few comments on how Stella is stoically enduring her illness,  in part because she can look back at “a life well-spent,” Swift concludes by talking about how much she has meant to him. I “glad would your suffering share,” he tells her—and because she has taken such good care of him, he is in a position to express his appreciation:   

O then, whatever Heaven intends,
Take pity on your pitying friends!
Nor let your ills affect your mind,
To fancy they can be unkind.
Me, surely me, you ought to spare,
Who gladly would your suffering share;
Or give my scrap of life to you,
And think it far beneath your due;
You, to whose care so oft I owe
That I’m alive to tell you so.

I use this poem of appreciation to tell Julia how much she means to me. Happy birthday, beautiful!

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Erotic Dreams of a Wild Sea

By Robin Bates | Published: February 14, 2024

Ludolf Backhuysen, Ships in a Stormy Sea off a Coast

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Wednesday – Valentine’s Day

Given that Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights” emerged out of a repressed New England culture, it is as astonishing as any love poem that I know. Apparently Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who edited Dickinson’s poetry after her death, contemplated not publishing it, fearing it would damage his view of her as a pure woman. Fortunately he included it in the collection, perhaps rationalizing it as a poem written to God in the manner of Teresa of Avila, the medieval mystic famous for her ecstatic relationship with the divine.

On this Valentine’s Day, however, we don’t have to settle for sublimation borne of repression and can just see the poem for what it is, which is a woman singing her sexual passion for another. She is casting off all the restrictions that normally guide her actions—“Done with the compass – / Done with the chart!”—and setting out for open waters. “Luxury” has special meaning for this utilitarian society which looks with suspicion on activity it considers unproductive.

When Dickinson mentions “rowing in Eden,” I think of the passionate love between Adam and Eve that Puritan John Milton describes in Book IV of Paradise Lost, a work that Dickinson would have known well. The couple has a flowery bower, complete with a nuptial bed that Eve has decked with “flowers, garlands, and sweet-smelling herbs.” Milton is a little circuitous about what they do in that bed: by saying that the couple did not refuse “the rites mysterious of connubial love,” he’s basically saying that Adam and Eve did not not have sex. But he gets the point across:

Into their inmost bower
Handed they went; and eased the putting off
These troublesome disguises which we wear, 
Strait side by side were laid, nor turned I ween
Adam from his fair Spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial Love refused…

He concludes their night of lovemaking with a shower of roses:

And on their naked limbs the flowery roof
Showered Roses, which the morn repaired. Sleep on
Blest pair; and O yet happiest if ye seek
No happier state, and know to know no more.

Sex in Eden before the fall apparently has no withered roses and no post-coital letdown.

In her own poem, I wonder if Dickinson is imagining the three stages of lovemaking: first there is making love (the rowing), then the ecstatic climax (“Ah – the Sea!”), and finally the quiet mooring in the arms of the beloved. Here’s the poem:

Wild nights – Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –
To a Heart in port –
Done with the Compass –
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah – the Sea!
Might I but moor – tonight –
In thee!

Happy Valentine’s Day.

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Poet Hart Crane on Forgetting

By Robin Bates | Published: February 13, 2024
Hart Crane

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Thursday

Given how the Washington press corps is piling on President Biden following special prosecutor Robert Hur’s gratuitous swipes at his memory, I’m sharing a forgetfulness poem. I owe the idea Greg Olear’s Prevail blog, which has some choice words for both Hur and the mainstream media for taking his comments seriously:

Is Joe’s occasional inability to immediately summon some piece of data a sign of mental incompetence? Of creeping dementia? Or is it just a function of being alive for 80 years—and in the thick of everything for 50 of those years? I’d argue that it’d be weirder if he didn’t have occasional memory lapses. Who cares if it takes him a few more seconds to remember something? Does it really matter?

Now, Biden has some deep tragedies in his life that one imagines he would like to forget, such as the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident and the cancer death of Beau Biden, caused by his encounter with toxic waste dumps when serving in Iraq. When Hur claimed the president could not recall “even within several years” when his oldest son had died, Biden fired back,

How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business. I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away, or that he passed away.

In other words, what we witnessed with Hur is what we previously witnessed with Kenneth Starr, James Comey, and John Durham—which is to say, Republican investigators looking for gotcha moments with Democratic politicians when they can’t find anything to prosecute.

But setting aside politics, Crane’s “Forgetfulness” is a wonderfully ambiguous poem about this state of mind. It begins by seeing forgetfulness almost as a blessing, only to later reverse itself to point out its darker side. Here’s the poem:

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, —
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, — or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, — white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

 Often, the urge to remember is an urge to control, to have a stable footing. Both the song and the bird, however, are no longer constrained—by beat and measure in the one case, by a fixed destination in the other—and so are free to simply wander and soar.

I’m thinking that rain at night, the “old house in a forest,” and the child are like partial remembrances when we’ve forgotten the rest. We no longer have a context for them, which means that they shimmer in our minds. All of this sounds picturesque, even romantic, until we get to the image of a blasted white tree. Suddenly, we are looking at the horror of erasure.

Crane’s image makes me think of a mind ravaged by dementia and especially of Jonathan Swift, who in his final years ended up as “a driv’ler and a show” (to use Samuel Johnson’s unnerving characterization in Vanity of Human Wishes). Realizing that he was losing his mind, Swift at one point said, after seeing a tree whose crown had been blasted by lightning, “I shall be like that tree. I shall die at the top.”

Anyone who has lost a loved one to dementia knows the horror of Crane’s blasted white tree. Herman Melville explains why whiteness can horrify us in his Moby Dick chapter “On the Whiteness of the Whale”:

Is it that by its indefiniteness [whiteness] shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?

Whereas color indicates life, Melville goes on to say, whiteness is what that color is, in the end, reduced to, “the charnel-house within.”

Such annihilation can bury gods, Crane observes, although he also notes that from it can also emerge Delphic utterances that go deeper than logic. I think of my father’s own brief episode with dementia in his final year.

Perhaps it is because of our fears of forgetfulness, of not being in control of our past, that is prompting the media’s overreaction to Biden’s memory lapses. This seems of more concern to the New York Times than, say, Trump’s invitation to Russia to invade NATO countries. For all the print it is generating, however, Olear believes the story will blow over fairly quickly. Because he remembers much forgetfulness in our history, he points out,

The United States is a nation of amnesiacs. Nothing is as American as forgetting.  

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Lit’s Invention of “The Second Look”

By Robin Bates | Published: February 12, 2024
Scene from Kurosawa’s Rashomon

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Tuesday

Over the past few months I’ve been reporting on Angus Fletcher’s book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, with each post dedicated to a different “invention.” Today I look at what the Ohio State Professor of Story Science says about “the invention of the second look.” He finds evidence of this invention in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar but notes that it comes into its own with the Ryūnosuke Akutagawa short story Rashomon, with Akiri Kurosawa adding a further turn of the screw in his film version.

In a literary approach that I have described as anthropological-neurobiological, Fletcher talks about how we are conditioned to believe what our brains tell us. While this works very well for animals, however, eventually

more complex brains emerged. And these brains discovered that there could be advantages to questioning. One of the advantages, rather ironically, was to offer protection from other complex brains. Complex brains could lie and deceive, duping their targets with elaborate fictions. So, over time the complex brain evolved the capacity to skeptically evaluate the things it saw—and judge whether or not those things could be believed.

In other words, to more effectively engage with the world we need a second look. Literature proves powerful ways to develop this look.

Fletcher’s first example is Antony’s famous speech in Julius Caesar. While Antony’s audience begins by thinking of Brutus as an “honorable man,” Antony delivers his speech in such a way that his auditors start questioning this assumption. Here’s an excerpt:

The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man.

By the end of the speech, audience members are asking themselves whether Brutus is, in fact, honorable Fletcher writes,

Antony’s repetition incites this question for a simple reason: it creates a light sensation of déjà vu that makes our brain self-conscious. In that self-conscious state, our brain is pulled out of its passive viewing experience and prompted to take an active second, third, and fourth look at our internalized belief that Brutus is an honorable man. And as our brain goes back and reviews, and re-reviews, and re-re-reviews, we have to decide, and re-decide, and re-re-decide: Do I tag this belief as true or untrue? So a belief that initially slipped inside our head without resistance becomes a repeated object of our conscious judgment.

If you’ve seen Kurosawa’s Rashomon, you know about this re-re-deciding. The film gives us four different accounts of an encounter between a man and his wife’s encounter with a bandit while traveling through the woods. Each appears to be true as we can see it with our own eyes, only to be thrown into question by the next account.

Fletcher says that, by deliberately alienating their audience, Akutagawa and Kurosawa clear our heads so we don’t allow our brains to be taken over by ideas that aren’t our own. “You may be doomed to believe everything you see,” he concludes, “but with fiction…you can take another look.”

Other works that get us to take this second look, he notes, are James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy, Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. In Passing, for instance, we never learn definitively how Clare falls from a window—there are two characters who could have pushed her and she also may have committed suicide—while in Mother Courage we are torn between whether to cheer for or boo the protagonist, who sells provisions to soldiers during the Thirty Years War.

As with all Fletcher’s inventions, the second look enables us to engage much more effectively with the world. Better living through literature, in other words.

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A Poem Honoring Wide Receivers

By Robin Bates | Published: February 11, 2024
Mecole Hardman’s Super Bowl-winning catch

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Monday

Wide receiver Mecole Hardman, Jr.,  who caught the winning touchdown in last night’s Super Bowl, was an unlikely hero, given that he hadn’t caught a touchdown pass all year. In fact, up until this game, his season had been a disappointment.

This makes Mark Halliday’s poem “Wide Receiver” a fitting selection for today’s post, especially since it also features a quarterback who, like Patrick Mahomes, loves to pump fake. Also, like the quarterback in the poem, Mahomes spent much of the game dissatisfied “with what [he] saw downfield.” If we didn’t see the dazzling passing game from him that we might have expected, it’s because San Francisco did a good job of keeping him off balance while shutting down his receivers.

Not that his receivers would have admitted they were shut down. Like the player in the poem, wide receivers are famous for thinking that they’re always open. And in the end, Hardman was.

Wide Receiver
By Mark Halliday

In the huddle you said “Go long—get open”
and at the snap I took off along the right sideline
and then cut across left in a long arc
and I’m sure I was open at several points—
glancing back I saw you pump-fake more than once
but you must not have been satisfied with what you saw downfield
and then I got bumped off course and my hands touched the turf
but I regained my balance and dashed back to the right
I think or maybe first left and then right
and I definitely got open but the throw never came—

maybe you thought I couldn’t hang on to a ball flung so far
or maybe you actually can’t throw so far
but in any case I feel quite open now,
the defenders don’t seem too interested in me
I sense only open air all around me
though the air is getting darker and it would appear
by now we’re well into the fourth quarter
and I strongly doubt we can afford to settle for
dinky little first downs if the score is what I think it is

so come on, star boy, fling a Hail Mary
with a dream-coached combination of muscle and faith
and I will gauge the arc and I will not be stupidly frantic
and I will time my jump and—I’m just going to say
in the cool gloaming of this weirdly long game
it is not impossible that I will make the catch.

Further thought: I should have mentioned how one of the Chief receivers–though in this case not a wide one–was as frustrated as Halliday’s speaker in the first half of the Super Bowl. In the first half tight end Travis Kelce screamed at Chiefs coach Mike Holmgren that he wasn’t being used enough (he also bumped him to emphasize his point). Coach and quarterback adjusted took him seriously and Kelce dominated the second half with a game-high 93 receiving yards. “It is not impossible that I will make the catch” he could have said to Holmgren had he chosen to make his point more indirectly.

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The Transfiguration’s Green Promise

By Robin Bates | Published: February 10, 2024


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Spiritual Sunday

The last Sunday in Epiphany always features the Transfiguration, which is when three of the disciples witness Jesus conversing with Moses and Elijah. I’m therefore sharing some preliminary thoughts about Joh Gatta’s book The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation.

John, a friend and one-time former colleague at Sewanee, extends the idea of the Transfiguration. While it is traditionally seen as that moment when the disciples fully realized that Christ was the messiah, John sees it as something more than a signal that God has entered humanity. Rather, it can be read as God entering creation generally, non-human as well as human. Here’s the story as it appears in Mark:

Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. (Mark 9:2-9)

Believing that such a story can connect Christian vision with environmentalism, John’s book addresses the question of “how the entire cosmos stands transfigured in the light of Christ?” “How,” he asks, “might this vision of New Creation shape the earth-centered spirituality that has begun to surface lately in response to our planet’s ecological crisis?”

John complains that, too often, the only parts of the Bible that are seen as having relevance to the environmental movement are a couple of early episodes in Genesis. Those who insist that humans should have dominion over creation square off against those who believe God put us on earth as stewards of creation. The Transfiguration story, John contends, can be used to chart a more productive path forward:

The paradigm of Transfiguration encourages us to view creation as a continuously evolving transformation of matter and energy, a dynamic immediacy, rather than a one-time leap from nothingness situated in the distant path. As Teilhard de Chardin so clearly perceived, such a dynamic cosmology requires a theology for our post-Darwinian era that is responsible to the spirit of evolutionary science. Transfiguration also highlights Christ’s role in the New Creation, thereby leading us to identify the process of creation not simply with a time of origins, but with God’s ideal and future fulfillment of redemption. So Transfiguration carries the promise of extending our horizon of faith–beyond belief in the world’s original goodness, toward a vision of eschatological hope [where we are headed].

Because I am currently with our grandchildren in Georgia and forgot to bring John’s book with me (I’m relying on what shows up in Google Books here), I can’t yet report on the late chapters, where John shows how the arts (including literature) articulate visions of a transformed and transfigured nature. Nor do I recall what literature he has chosen. While I look forward to sharing more from his book in future posts, I’d be surprised if he doesn’t cite the following Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet. The poem, which seems to evoke the spirit that the disciples witnessed on the mount, also strives to imagine a nature that resists the attempts of industrial capitalism to subdue it:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Central to John’s book is this notion that nature, despite how we abuse it, is “never spent” and that there continues to live “the dearest freshness deep down things.” Stay tuned for more on this.

Reader comment from Pastor Sue Schmidt: In this coming reading, the SALT commentary, a wonderful blog resource, mentions that Jesus was in the wilderness with the wild animals, and that Mark ends his gospel by having Jesus tell his disciples to preach the good news to all creation. Mark 16:15. This is a nice parallel to your thoughts today.

I also am pondering my earth day sermon – a first. How we as Christians often forget the first commandment, which was to take care of creation. And now, because of “the fall,” all creation is groaning as it waits for the “sons of God to be revealed.” (Romans 8: 19-21.) Reclaiming our love of and care for the earth is a sign that God is truly coming to life and light within us.

And my response: I’m just becoming aware of Paul’s notion of “the cosmic Christ,” Sue, which makes so much sense. I love the way that Barbara Kingsolver handles the religious dimension in Flight Behavior in an internal debate that the family is having over logging. Discussing it over with their pastor, the mother says, “That land was bestowed on on for a purpose. And I don’t think it was to end up looking like a pile of trash.” And a little later, after the father calls the pastor “a tree hugger,” the pastor, who “looked amused,” responds, “Well now, what are you, Burley, a tree puncher? What have you got against the Lord’s trees?” And that carries the day.

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Trump’s Love Test Resembles Lear’s

By Robin Bates | Published: February 8, 2024
Sir John Gilbert, Cordelia in the Court of Lear

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Friday

I experienced a shock of recognition when I watched the stage action following Donald Trump’s recent victory over Nikki Haley in the New Hampshire primary. My faculty reading group had just begun discussing King Lear, and when I saw South Carolina Senator Tim Scott tell Donald Trump, “I love you, man,” I felt I was watching Lear’s love test for his three daughters all over again, with Scott playing the role of the two. older sisters.

I’ve compared Trump to Lear many times on this blog, and applying the play to Scott’s recent declaration solidifies the connection even more. Both Trump and Lear are narcissists, and the loneliness and insecurity that arise from thinking you are the center of the universe explains why they administer love tests in the first place. Somewhere deep inside they feel they are unworthy of being loved and so use their power to force declarations of love from others.

Throughout Trump’s presidency, we witnessed numerous instances of him demanding that subordinates sing his praises. The same dynamic played out in Scott’s “I love you, man.” Here’s Goneril’s own declaration:

Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter;
Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty;
Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare;
No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour;
As much as child e’er loved, or father found;
A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable;
Beyond all manner of so much I love you.

And now Regan’s:

Sir, I am made
Of the self-same metal that my sister is,
And prize me at her worth. In my true heart
I find she names my very deed of love;
Only she comes too short: that I profess
Myself an enemy to all other joys,
Which the most precious square of sense possesses;
And find I am alone felicitate
In your dear highness’ love.

By professing such love, however insincerely, Goneril and Regan get that piece of the kingdom originally intended for Cordelia. By his profession of love, Scott ensures that no other Republican will run against him when he is up for reelection. Perhaps Trump will even choose him for running mate.

Rather than bask in his triumph, however, Trump unloaded on Haley with the same fury that Lear directs toward Cordelia. After all, she had had the temerity to stand up to him. Therefore, after Scott endorsed him for president, he had to make sure the Scott hated Haley as much as he did. His comment—”And you’re the senator of her state. And [you] endorsed me. You must really hate her”—is what drew Scott’s declaration of love.

While Nikki has mostly soft-pedaled her criticisms of Trump, that’s not enough for the ex-president. It’s the same with Cordelia. Her “I love your majesty according to my bond; nor more nor less” is essentially a refusal to play Lear’s narcissistic game. In doing so, however, she appears to confirm—at least as he sees it—what he secretly fears to be the truth, which is that he is unlovable. As a result, he erupts:

[B]y the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate, and the night;
By all the operation of the orbs
From whom we do exist, and cease to be;
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee, from this, for ever. The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbour’d, pitied, and relieved,
As thou my sometime daughter.

Trump was less poetic but just as angry:

Who the hell was the imposter who went up on the stage before, and like, claimed a victory? You can’t let people get away with bullshit. And when I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy, I said, “What’s she doing? We won.”

And later:

I don’t get too angry. I get even.

To Scott’s declaration, meanwhile, Trump responded, “That’s why he’s a great politician!” In other words, he didn’t believe him, just as Lear, deep down, probably doesn’t believe Goneril or Regan. Nevertheless, to prop up this fragile self, he needs to hear the words.

If Trump ever loses his power, he is likely to find himself rejected by Republicans no less than Lear is by Goneril and Regan. I can imagine him railing at their ingratitude–How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”–and the turning him out into the storm. 

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