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Thursday
Poet Joseph Fasano tweeted out a moving poem yesterday on how to comfort a child when you are being bombed or assaulted, as is occurring currently in Gaza, Ukraine, and other parts of the world. One respondent wrote back that the poem reminded her of the 1997 Italian film Life Is Beautiful, in which an inmate of a concentration camp tries to shield his son from its horrors by spinning a fantasy about it.
Childhood innocence is so important to us that we will go to great lengths to preserve it. When the situation is truly dire, our creativity knows no bounds.
Words Whispered to a Child under Siege By Joseph Fasano
No, we are not going to die. The sounds you hear knocking the windows and chipping the paint from the ceiling, that is a game the world is playing. Our task is to crouch in the dark as long as we can and count the beats of our own hearts. Good. Like that. Lay your hand on my heart and I’ll lay mine on yours. Which one of us wins is the one who loves the game the most while it lasts. Yes, it is going to last. You can use your ear instead of your hand. Here, on my heart. Why is it beating faster? For you. That’s all. I always wanted you to be born and so did the world. No, those aren’t a stranger’s bootsteps in the house. Yes, I’m here. We’re safe. Remember chess? Remember hide-and-seek? The song your mother sang? Let’s sing that one. She’s still with us, yes. But you have to sing without making a sound. She’d like that. No, those aren’t bootsteps. Sing. Sing louder. Those aren’t bootsteps. Let me show you how I cried when you were born. Those aren’t bootsteps. Those aren’t sirens. Those aren’t flames. Close your eyes. Like chess. Like hide-and-seek. When the game is done you get another life.
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Wednesday
I’ve been thinking about all those people out there who make our lives a little better, including the federal workforce that Donald Trump decries as “the deep state.” He has so brainwashed his followers that some can’t even recognize when people are trying to help them, a situation that reminds me of a character in Voltaire’s Candide.
Before discussing the barons of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, here’s a story I heard from a childhood friend a few weeks ago. Recently retired from a career spent in legal aid, she told of working with a man who had significant medical expenses. Even though she had come up with a way for him to hold on to his house, he turned to her at one point, with contempt in his eyes, and said, “You’re a Democrat, aren’t you?”
She noted that her political sympathies had nothing to do with seeking to protect him, but he left and didn’t return. Later he lost his house.
He’s not the first, of course, to behave this way. Ever since Ronald Reagan did incomparable harm by declaring, with his folksy charm, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,'” Americans have been savaging civil servants. Reagan used his attacks on social services to hollow out the middle class while engineering large tax cuts for the wealthy, and Trump has been doing the same in his attacks on the federal work force. Many of these workers have provided a check against his and his cronies’ corruption tendencies.
As a young man, Candide is chased away by the local baron for not being good enough to exchange amorous looks with his daughter. The baron’s family can boast of a lineage of 72 quarterings whereas Candide has only 71.
Disaster will befall all of the characters multiple times, with Candide several times providing invaluable service to the baron who exiled him. Yet each time he proposes marriage–Candide is now dealing with the baron’s son, Cunegonde’s brother—he runs into the same prejudice. Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, Jr., in other words, is behaving like my friend’s client. Here is situation at the end of the book, by which time Cunegonde, because of her various trials, has lost her looks:
Cunegonde did not know she had grown ugly, for nobody had told her of it; and she reminded Candide of his promise [of marriage] in so positive a tone that the good man durst not refuse her. He therefore intimated to the Baron that he intended marrying his sister.
“I will not suffer,” said the Baron, “such meanness on her part, and such insolence on yours; I will never be reproached with this scandalous thing; my sister’s children would never be able to enter the church in Germany. No; my sister shall only marry a baron of the empire.”
Cunegonde flung herself at his feet, and bathed them with her tears; still he was inflexible.
Candide, having become far wealthier than the baron, is finally able to stand up to him:
“Thou foolish fellow,” said Candide; “I have delivered thee out of the galleys, I have paid thy ransom, and thy sister’s also; she was a scullion, and is very ugly, yet I am so condescending as to marry her; and dost thou pretend to oppose the match? I should kill thee again, were I only to consult my anger.”
“Thou mayest kill me again,” said the Baron, “but thou shalt not marry my sister, at least whilst I am living.”
Throughout the United States, there are ideologues who are rejecting the good faith efforts of legal aid lawyers, medical professionals, teachers, social workers, federal workers, and others whose mission is to help them. Many of my classmates and many of my students have gone into these professions out of the idealistic belief that they help make the world a better place. My friend, who attended Duke Law School, could have gone into a far more lucrative field of law than legal aid. Then they run up against ideological rigidity.
At such times, MAGA resembles a self-destructive cult, willing to sacrifice their goods and even their lives to prove their loyalty to their grifting master. They have contempt for those who care about them.
In Voltaire’s works, one of Candide’s friends wants to drown the Baron and another to return him to the slave galleys. In the end, they return him to Rome, where he been serving as a Jesuit missionary. In doing so, “they had the double pleasure of entrapping a Jesuit and punishing the pride of a German baron.”
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Tuesday
I’ve been listening to Terry Pratchett fantasy novels as I drive around and have just come across one that helps explain rightwing America’s obsession with guns. Pratchett is to fantasy what Douglas Adams is to science fiction—a devastatingly witty satirist who takes on issues of modernism in the guise of familiar genre—and in Men at Arms he grapples with authoritarian impulses.
The 1993 novel seems particularly relevant to today as it pits a complex multicultural society against longing for an all-powerful ruler. On the one hand, there are Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mandates for the Night Watch, which decree that the police force should be open to non-humans as well as humans. This includes trolls, dwarfs, vampires, zombies, and werewolves. While the mix causes internal problems, especially because trolls and dwarfs are traditional enemies, ultimately it works to society’s advantage in that a diverse police force is more effective at handling social unrest (including brawls between trolls and dwarfs). The novel stands in noted contrast to Lord of the Rings, where goblins and trolls are bad and dwarfs and elves are good.
Indeed, Pratchett appears to be writing a deliberate response to Tolkien, who in his fiction longs for a pre-World War I world where yeoman farmers live in rural peace. Much of the drama in Pratchett’s novels involves members of various species learning to move past their quarrels and appreciate the richness that diversity offers.
Traditionalists, however, are appalled at these modern developments and long for “the return of the king” (to quote Tolkien), a return to the past where “species bias” is acceptable. They long for a man (and in there minds it has to be a man, not to mention a human) who can pull a sword out of a stone. Sadly, one of these traditionalists has access to a new weapon known as “the gonne.”
The gonne has been invented by Leonard da Qvirm, who is based on Da Vinci, and unfortunately it proves to have a life of its own. In this way, it is very much like “the one ring to rule them all.” When one man succeeds in wresting it from another (as Isildur wrests the ring from Sauron), he himself becomes possessed by it. In adapting Tolkien’s drama, Pratchett helps us understand our own gun fanatics.
The power of the gonne becomes especially clear to Samuel Vimes, head of the Night Watch, when he wrestles it from the grasp of a man who is trying to kill him with it, not to mention overthrow the government. Although Vimes believes passionately in the law, that belief starts to drop away when he has the gonne in his hand. In fact, the metal tube actually speaks to him and tries to act of its own volition as it turns on the head of the Assassins Guild, its previous possessor:
You’re mine. We don’t need him anymore.
The shock of the voice was so great that [Vimes] cried out.
He swore afterwards that he didn’t pull the trigger. It moved of its own accord pulling his finger with it. The gonne slammed into his shoulder and a six-inch hole appeared in the wall by the Assassin’s head, spraying him with plaster.
The gonne doesn’t stop there but keeps attempting to seduce its new possessor:
All that you hate, all that is wrong—I can put it right.
And:
Shoot them all. Clean up the world….
But…why not? Why not fire? Who was this man? He’d always wanted to make the city a cleaner place, and he might as well start here. And then people would find out what the law was…
After Vimes manages, barely, to escape the deadly attraction of the weapon, he reflects on its power:
No wonder no one had destroyed it. You couldn’t destroy something as perfect as this. It called out to something deep in the soul. Hold it in your hand, and you had power. More power than any bow or spear—they just stored up your own muscles’ power, when you thought about it. But the gonne gave you power from outside. You didn’t use it, it used you.
Gun supporters in this country are fond of saying, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” as though this excuses them from regulating firearms. Pratchett makes it clear that guns do in fact kill people, preying on us the way that, say, drugs do. They feed upon fantasies of power and invulnerability and, in the process, lead to an epidemic of gun deaths. America has experienced between 40-50,000 gun deaths in each of the past three years.
In Pratchett’s novels, the gonne is considered so dangerous that it is buried away where no one will ever find it. Now that’s the kind of fantasy I can get behind.
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Monday
Today I will be teaching the card game “ombre” as one of Sewanee’s “Friends of the Library” events. I’ve written in the past about teaching the game to college classes, but this will be slightly different as the participants will not have previously spent a week studying Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1714), in which the card game is played. Many of them will have attended last year’s event featuring the card game Speculation, played in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and so may come expecting a similarly simple game. Ombre is more complicated, unfortunately, but I’ve modified the rules somewhat to make it easier to play.
Here is the lecture I will be giving, along with the rules for ombre and the game as it is played in Rape of the Lock:
Alexander Pope was born in 1688 into a wealthy British Catholic family. Although you may not be familiar with his poetry, you will recognize some of the lines that he wrote, such as:
–A little learning is a dangerous thing. –Hope springs eternal in the human breast. –To err is human. To forgive, divine. –Charms strike the sight but merit wins the soul. –Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. –Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is man.
Pope first made his mark in his early twenties with the dazzling Essay on Criticism, which he then followed up with the even more dazzling Rape of the Lock.
The poem is based on an actual incident involving two Catholic families. The young Lord Petre, with a pair of scissors, had cut a ringlet from the head of Arabella Fermor. This serious breach of etiquette—we would call it sexual assault today—caused great commotion and led to a seemingly irreparable feud between the families. Pope’s friend John Caryll, who was also a friend of both families, came to the young poet and suggested that a comic poem might help the warring parties move past their quarrel by laughing the incident off. Pope, who would later make his fortune by translating the Iliad, decided to write up the incident as though it were an epic battle, with Arabella and Lord Petre as warriors. Their field of battle was the card game ombre.
In the late 17th century and early 18th century, ombre was the most popular card game in Europe. Its name comes from the Spanish word for man, and its popularity lay in the fact that it was the first card game where players bid for trump. It was brought over to England from France when Charles II was restored to the monarchy, and Matthew Mitchell of Sewanee’s history department informs me that Charles’s queen, Catherine de Braganza, was a great fan. By 1674, it had become so popular in high society—and people were losing so much money over it—that there were discussions in Parliament to either pass an act against playing it or at least to limit the stakes to 5 pounds. Ultimately the issue became moot as ombre was surpassed first by quadrille, then by whist, and finally by bridge, all of which also involve bidding.
I can assure you that no one will lose any money in today’s demonstration. Nor will any locks of hair be cut.
In the poem we first see Belinda, the star of our show, dreaming of a possible encounter with the Baron. Then we see the Baron resolving that he will do anything he can to possess her. Then we see Belinda at her dressing table. and the beautification process is compared to a knight preparing for battle: “Now awful Beauty puts on all its arms;/ The fair each moment rises in her charms,” Pope announces.
Throughout his poem, Pope satirizes the glam culture and the materialist consumerism of his day. While he’s sympathetic with and even a bit dazzled by Belinda, he also thinks she takes herself far too seriously.
Belinda next takes a boat to the royal palace of Hampton Court, where the ball is being held. Once she gets there, she plays cards with the Baron and an anonymous third player who has come to be called Sir Anonyme. She wins a tightly played hand and taunts the Baron with her victory, upon which he, in revenge, sneaks up behind her when she’s bending over a cup of coffee and snips off one of her two curls. At that point everyone starts shouting while Belinda first bursts into tears and then throws a pinch of snuff into the Baron’s face. A woman named Clarissa steps forward and advises her to laugh the whole thing off but no one listens to her. In all the commotion, the lock disappears but Pope assures Belinda that it has flown off into the heavens and become a constellation.
In other words, Belinda—and by extension Arabella Fermor—has just been immortalized.
When those fair suns shall set, as set they must, And all those tresses shall be laid in dust, This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame, And ‘midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name.
Although he originally wrote the poem for private purposes, Pope realized that it was so good that he had to publish it, which he did. Reports are that, in the short run, Arabella Fermor was not amused, figuring that her dirty laundry was being aired in public. As she grew older, however, she came to appreciate that she had in fact been immortalized. After all, literary aficionados still know who Arabella Fermor is.
When the poem came out, the first thing that ombre players all over England did was lay out the hand as it is played in the poem. At the end of our session, I will walk you through it. But to fully appreciate Pope’s brilliance, it helps to know how to play.
I’ve promised participants that, after seeing how Pope describes the cards, they’ll never look at kings, queen and jacks the same way again. Look at a deck to check out the accuracy of the following:
Behold, four Kings in majesty rever’d, With hoary whiskers and a forky beard; And four fair Queens whose hands sustain a flow’r, Th’ expressive emblem of their softer pow’r; Four Knaves in garbs succinct, a trusty band, Caps on their heads, and halberts in their hand; And particolour’d troops, a shining train, Draw forth to combat on the velvet plain.
We get even more detailed descriptions of the kings. First up is the king of spades. Everything that Pope says about the cards of his time still applies to today’s pack except for the fact that our kings do not have legs:
With his broad sabre next, a chief in years, The hoary Majesty of Spades appears, Puts forth one manly leg, to sight reveal’d, The rest, his many-colour’d robe conceal’d. The rebel Knave, who dares his prince engage, Proves the just victim of his royal rage.
Next, the king of clubs:
Thus far both armies to Belinda yield; Now to the Baron fate inclines the field. His warlike Amazon her host invades, Th’ imperial consort of the crown of Spades. The Club’s black Tyrant first her victim dy’d, Spite of his haughty mien, and barb’rous pride: What boots the regal circle on his head, His giant limbs, in state unwieldy spread; That long behind he trails his pompous robe, And, of all monarchs, only grasps the globe?
And finally, the king of diamonds:
The Baron now his Diamonds pours apace; Th’ embroider’d King who shows but half his face And his refulgent Queen, with pow’rs combin’d Of broken troops an easy conquest find. Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, in wild disorder seen, With throngs promiscuous strow the level green.
In playing the game, the two major things to know are the order of the cards and the possible bids The top three cards, known as Matadors and with each having a special name, are treated as trump:
Ace of Spades (Spadillia) 2 of trump (Manillia) Ace of Clubs (Basto) King Queen Knave Ace 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 (if not Manillia)
Because Spadillia and Basto are treated as trump, the other players must follow them with a card in the trump suit, not with a spade or a club (unless spades or clubs is trump).
Nine cards are dealt to each player, which means that a winning hand usually involves winning five tricks. The six possible bids are:
1. Non-spade with a partner – 5 tricks (or a dominant 4) in conjunction with a partner* with diamonds, hearts, or clubs as trump–2 pts each for bidder and partner (only the bidder loses 2 if bid fails) 2. Spade with a partner – 5 tricks (or a dominant 4) in conjunction with a partner* with spades as trump (called “color”) (4 pts each for bidder and partner (only the bidder loses 4 if bid fails) 3. Solo non-spade – 5 tricks on your own, with diamonds, hearts or clubs as trump – 4 pts (or -4) 4. Solo spade – 5 tricks on your own, with spades as trump – 8 pts (or -8)5. Tout non-spade – All nine tricks, with diamonds, hearts, or clubs as trump – 16 pts (or -16) 6. Tout spade – All nine tricks, with spades as trump – 32 pts(or -32)
*The first opponent to play a king is your partner.
Order of play
–Nine cards of the 40 (10s, 9s and 8s having been removed) are dealt to the three players, with the remaining 13 cards set aside into a pool.
–The player to the left of the dealer (Belinda in Pope’s poem) begins the bidding. She either passes or bids “non-color with a partner.” The player to her left (the Baron) says either “will you raise to ‘spade with a partner’?” If yes, that is Belinda’s new bid. If no, the bid passes to the Baron, at which point Sir Anonyme has a chance to push the bid up even further. After the bid is determined, the winner of the bid may raise (but obviously not lower) the bid—say, from “spade with a partner” to “solo non-color” or “solo spade” etc.
–The player who wins the bid is the “hombre” or “ombre” and has a chance to trade in as many cards as desired from the pool, followed by the other two players.
–The ombre begins play first.
–If the bid is “with partner,” the partner will be the first opponent to play a king. The ombre may choose to start play with a low card to bring out a king.
–Play continues until either the bid is achieved or fails. Failure is known as codille.
Sequence of cards played in Rape of the Lock
Belinda’s bid: “Solo spade.” (“Let spades be trumps, she said, and trumps they were.”) As the winner of the bid, Belinda (as ombre) leads.
Belinda Baron Sir Anonyme
ace of spades (Spadillia) four of spades six of spades two of spades (Manillia) five of spades three of spades ace of clubs (Basto) seven of spades* two of hearts** king of spades knave of spades three of hearts king of clubs queen of spades knave of clubs six of diamonds king of diamonds seven of diamonds queen of clubs queen of diamonds four of hearts queen of hearts knave of diamonds six of hearts king of hearts ace of hearts*** knave of hearts
*a spade must be played here because Basto counts as a trump **devoid of trump, Sir Anonyme can throw off anything ***lower than the king, queen and knave
I’ve already read some of the action in Pope’s description of the kings. Here’s his account of the final two tricks. Remember that red aces rank lower than the picture cards:
The Knave of Diamonds tries his wily arts, And wins (oh shameful chance!) the Queen of Hearts. At this, the blood the virgin’s cheek forsook, A livid paleness spreads o’er all her look; She sees, and trembles at th’ approaching ill, Just in the jaws of ruin, and Codille. And now (as oft in some distemper’d State) On one nice Trick depends the gen’ral fate. An Ace of Hearts steps forth: The King unseen Lurk’d in her hand, and mourn’d his captive Queen: He springs to Vengeance with an eager pace, And falls like thunder on the prostrate Ace. The nymph exulting fills with shouts the sky; The walls, the woods, and long canals reply.
In football, Belinda might be penalized for taunting. That’s certainly how the thin-skinned Baron sees it, and he probably regards her response as a personal rejection as well. But that’s not to excuse what he does, and his society certainly did not.
I can’t think of any other work that sticks so closely to an actual game, with the exception of Alice through the Looking Glass, which is based on an actual chess problem. In any event, Pope blew 18th century audiences away with his poetic wit and flawless couplets.
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Sunday
I recently came across a long and fascinating poem by Howard Nemerov in Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba’s anthology of American Religious Poems. “The Loon’s Cry,” published in The Sewanee Review in 1956 (which, for what it’s worth, was two years after my family moved to Sewanee), seems to be in dialogue with William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us.”
In that sonnet, Wordsworth is in despair at how capitalist society is so bent on “getting and spending” that “we lay waste our powers.” Nature has become alien to us because “we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” Even when we are presented with nature’s unfathomable mysteries, we don’t respond. As Wordsworth puts it,
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.
All of which leads the poet to wish he lived in an earlier age when, looking out at sea, one saw not a scientifically explainable natural phenomenon but gods and goddesses:
Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Nemerov, who also has written poems decrying commercialization (for instance, “Boom!”), is having thoughts similar to Wordsworth’s as he walks alone “on a cold evening, summer almost gone.” While struck by the beauty of the scene as the sun goes down and a full moon rises, he worries that he is missing some deeper meaning. As he describes himself at “the fulcrum of two poised immensities” (the sun and the moon), I almost hear him saying (as Yeats says in “The Second Coming”), “Surely some revelation is at hand”:
On a cold evening, summer almost gone, I walked alone down where the railroad bridge Divides the river from the estuary. There was a silence over both the waters, The river’s concentrated reach, the wide Diffusion of the delta, marsh and sea, Which in the distance misted out of sight.
As on the seaward side the sun went down, The river answered with the rising moon, Full moon, its craters, mountains and still seas Shining like snow and shadows on the snow. The balanced silence centered where I stood, The fulcrum of two poised immensities, Which offered to be weighed at either hand.
Like Wordsworth, however, he laments that, instead of detecting some otherworldly significance, he is limited to mere nature viewing. “No longer a pagan suckled in a creed outworn” (to quote Wordsworth), he sees only natural science, not theology. He, like Wordsworth, has fallen from “the symboled world” where one found mysteries of meaning, form, and fate/ Signed on the sky”:
But I could think only, red sun, white moon, This is a natural beauty, it is not Theology. For I had fallen from The symboled world, where I in earlier days Found mysteries of meaning, form, and fate Signed on the sky, and now stood but between A swamp of fire and a reflecting rock.
In the past, Nemerov imagines, the “energy in things shone through their shapes” (he uses the image of Japanese lanterns to capture the idea). For instance, one once saw the drama of God’s war with Satan in all things. Now, however, we’ve “traded all those mysteries in for things.” One hears, at this point, Wordsworth chiming in with “a sordid boon”:
I envied those past ages of the world When, as I thought, the energy in things Shone through their shapes, when sun and moon no less Than tree or stone or star or human face Were seen but as fantastic japanese Lanterns are seen, sullen or gay colors And lines revealing the light that they conceal.
The world a stage, its people maskers all In actions largely framed to imitate God and His Lucifer’s long debate, a trunk From which, complex and clear, the episodes Spread out their branches. Each life played a part, And every part consumed a life, nor dreams After remained to mock accomplishment.
Under the austere power of the scene, The moon standing balanced against the sun, I simplified still more, and thought that now We’d traded all those mysteries in for things, For essences in things, not understood— Reality in things! and now we saw Reality exhausted all their truth.
However, at the very moment the speaker feels we have stripped nature of its mystery by reducing it to thingness—we reduce the world by thinking that the literal is reality and truth—he hears the cry of a loon, which is so primal that it seems invested with transcendent meaning. He feels like he is Adam, “hearing the first loon cry in paradise”:
As answering that thought a loon cried out Laughter of desolation on the river, A savage cry, now that the moon went up And the sun down—yet when I heard him cry Again, his voice seemed emptied of that sense Or any other, and Adam I became, Hearing the first loon cry in paradise.
That haunting cry supersedes our despair at living in a world “that seems too much with us.” With the cry, we are “blessed beyond all that we thought to know”:
For sometimes, when the world is not our home Nor have we any home elsewhere, but all Things look to leave us naked, hungry, cold, We suddenly may seem in paradise Again, in ignorance and emptiness Blessed beyond all that we thought to know: Then on sweet waters echoes the loon’s cry.
The cry puts the world in a new context, seeming to express its contempt at our having reduced reality to “the forms of things.” The loon batters and undermines our seemingly fixed world:
I thought I understood what that cry meant, That its contempt was for the forms of things, Their doctrines, which decayed—the nouns of stone And adjectives of glass—not for the verb Which surged in power properly eternal Against the sea wall of the solid world, Battering and undermining what it built…
What the loon’s cry accomplishes, the poet can accomplish as well. By “respeaking” the world, the poet aims to reawaken us to the world’s mystery, just as the loon does. After hearing the loon’s cry, the speaker is struck by how the moon rises and the stars begin to shine:
And whose respeaking was the poet’s act, Only and always, in whatever time Stripped by uncertainty, despair and ruin, Time readying to die, unable to die But damned to life again, and the loon’s cry. And now the sun was sunken in the sea, The full moon high, and stars began to shine.
This mention of the cold moon leads the poet to think of it as a metaphor for the coldness of our own world, at least to the extent that we have reduced it to thingness. Or in Wordsworth words, to “buying and spending”:
The moon, I thought, might have been such a world As this one is, till it went cold inside, Nor any strength of sun could keep its people Warm in their palaces of glass and stone. Now all its craters, mountains and still seas, Shining like snow and shadows on the snow, Orbit this world in envy and late love.
But in warning what can happen to us, Nemerov is acknowledging that all is not lost. Even though we are faced with a “burning cold,” it is as though the loon’s cry—to which Nemerov adds a distant train whistle—can restore mystery to our world. By means of “arts contemplative” (including poetry) we can read more into things than we thought. They present us with signatures that “leave us not alone/ Even in the thought of death.”
And the stars too? Worlds, as the scholars taught So long ago? Chaos of beauty, void, O burning cold, against which we define Both wretchedness and love. For signatures In all things are, which leave us not alone Even in the thought of death, and may by arts Contemplative be found and named again.
The loon again? Or else a whistling train, Whose far thunders began to shake the bridge. And it came on, a loud bulk under smoke, Changing the signals on the bridge, the bright Rubies and emeralds, rubies and emeralds Signing the cold night as I turned for home, Hearing the train cry once more, like a loon.
What began as a cold evening excursion is suddenly filled with “bright/ Rubies and emeralds, rubies and emeralds.” Whereas Wordsworth thought that he had lost forever the vision of “Proteus rising from the sea,” Nemerov assures us that poetry can find and name those things again.
Which is what both Nemerov and Wordsworth do with their poems. In other words, when the world is too much with us—or when we find ourselves standing between sunset and moon rise (“swamp of fire and reflecting rock”)—we can listen to the loon’s cry and to the poet writing about it.
At that point, the world moves from “natural beauty to theology.” Triton blows his wreathèd horn.
Bill Murray and Punxsutawney Phil in Groundhog Day
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Friday
Today being Groundhog Dog, with the length of winter determined by whether or not it sees its shadow, I imagine Punxsutawney Phil having a T.S. Eliot-style existential crisis. After all, when the speaker in The Waste Land sees his shadow, it reminds him of the passage of time and his eventual death:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
In this barren landscape, the speaker hopes for something to believe in but sees only a “heap of broken images.” He longs for regenerating water such as Jesus promised the Samaritan woman at the well but sees only drought-stricken trees, stony rubbish, and the sun beating relentlessly down. And then there is the shadow, which may stride confidently behind you in the morning but ominously rises up to meet you at the close of day.
“The shadow” also shows up in Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” where it symbolizes a paralysis that falls between the idea and the reality, the motion and the act, the conception and the creation, the emotion and the response, the desire and the spasm, the potency and the existence, the essence and the descent. In other words, as hollow men we cannot redeem our empty lives with meaningful action.
Interestingly, in the wonderful Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Connors is leading a Waste Land existence. His question to a man in a bar sums up both the plot and the theme of the film: “What would you do, if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing you could say, and nothing you could do, mattered?”—to which the man replies, “That about sums it up for me.” Further on Connors says bitterly (this to the television audience watching him report on Punxsutawney Phil), “You want a prediction about the weather, you’re asking the wrong Phil. I’ll give you a winter prediction: It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.”
So if the groundhog sees its shadow tomorrow, will it think about the day that its dust will mingle with the dust of the earth and be plunged into existential despair? Or will it, like the Bill Murray character, eventually use this reminder of mortality to embrace that life it has been given and turn to poetry, music, art, community service, and love?
We have a choice in how we view six more weeks of winter. And life generally, when it comes down to it.
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Thursday
Sometimes, when we feel burdened by “the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world” (to quote from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”), a visionary poem of human possibility will lift the spirit. That’s what Maya Angelou’s “A Brave and Startling Truth” does for me.
I encountered it in essayist Maria Popova’s blog Marginalian. Apparently it was inspired by a photograph of the earth taken from the outer reaches of the Solar System. In the words of Carl Sagan, the earth appears in the photo as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Sagan points out that “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives” on this mote.
Of all the marvels on planet earth, Angelou tells us, none matches human beings when they are at their best. Her poem, according to Popova, is dedicated to “the hope for peace, which lies, sometimes hidden, in every heart.”
A Brave and Startling Truth By Maya Angelou
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet Traveling through casual space Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns To a destination where all signs tell us It is possible and imperative that we learn A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it To the day of peacemaking When we release our fingers From fists of hostility And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean When battlefields and coliseum No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters Up with the bruised and bloody grass To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches The screaming racket in the temples have ceased When the pennants are waving gaily When the banners of the world tremble Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders And children dress their dolls in flags of truce When land mines of death have been removed And the aged can walk into evenings of peace When religious ritual is not perfumed By the incense of burning flesh And childhood dreams are not kicked awake By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it Then we will confess that not the Pyramids With their stones set in mysterious perfection Nor the Gardens of Babylon Hanging as eternal beauty In our collective memory Not the Grand Canyon Kindled into delicious color By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji Stretching to the Rising Sun Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor, Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace We, this people on this mote of matter In whose mouths abide cankerous words Which challenge our very existence Yet out of those same mouths Come songs of such exquisite sweetness That the heart falters in its labor And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet Whose hands can strike with such abandon That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness That the haughty neck is happy to bow And the proud back is glad to bend Out of such chaos, of such contradiction We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it We, this people, on this wayward, floating body Created on this earth, of this earth Have the power to fashion for this earth A climate where every man and every woman Can live freely without sanctimonious piety Without crippling fear
When we come to it We must confess that we are the possible We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world That is when, and only when We come to it.
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Wednesday
Margaret Hartmann of New York Magazine’s Intelligencer made good use of the Grimm Brothers in a recent column about Republican rage at singer Taylor Swift. “All the talk about the pop star’s staggering popularity,” she notes, “reportedly has Trump privately fretting over the possibility that he is not the fairest one of all.” We all know the story, of course. but applying it to the former president accentuates his jealousy.
The Grimms don’t waste any time in bringing up the emotion:
A year later the king took himself another wife. She was a beautiful woman, but she was proud and arrogant, and she could not stand it if anyone might surpass her in beauty. She had a magic mirror. Every morning she stood before it, looked at herself, and said:
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Who in this land is fairest of all?
To this the mirror answered:
You, my queen, are fairest of all.
Then she was satisfied, for she knew that the mirror spoke the truth.
Snow-White grew up and became ever more beautiful. When she was seven years old she was as beautiful as the light of day, even more beautiful than the queen herself.
One day when the queen asked her mirror:
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Who in this land is fairest of all?
It answered:
You, my queen, are fair; it is true. But Snow-White is a thousand times fairer than you.
The queen took fright and turned yellow and green with envy. From that hour on whenever she looked at Snow White her heart turned over inside her body, so great was her hatred for the girl. The envy and pride grew ever greater, like a weed in her heart, until she had no peace day and night.
Snow White is described as being white as snow, red as blood, and black as ebony. Swift has blond rather than black hair but otherwise checks the boxes.
According to Hartmann’s source, Trump is pretty much yellow and green with envy. He has “privately claimed that he is ‘more popular” than Swift is and that he has more committed fans than she does.” According to this source, Trump was particularly furious that Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year went not to him but to Swift.
Anne Sexton, in her version of the fairy tale, says of the queen, “Pride pumped in her like poison.” As a result, her rage knows no bounds:
…so she condemned Snow White to be hacked to death. Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter, and I will salt it and eat it. The hunter, however, let his prisoner go and brought a boar’s heart back to the castle. The queen chewed it up like a cube steak.
Channeling Dante’s Inferno, Sexton notes that the obsessively jealous create their own internal hells. As she puts it, “Oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.” This is a reference to the Grimms’ grim ending, where this literally happens:
At first [the queen] did not want to go to the wedding, but she found no peace. She had to go and see the young queen. When she arrived she recognized Snow-White, and terrorized, she could only stand there without moving.
Then they put a pair of iron shoes into burning coals. They were brought forth with tongs and placed before her. She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead.
MAGA Republicans at the moment have to go and see the young queen—which is to say, they cannot stop obsessing over Swift. Dancing the fire dance in iron shoes, they are spooling out unhinged conspiracy theories, including that the Kansas City football team is in the Super Bowl only because Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce is Swift’s boyfriend.
One beef that Republicans have with Swift is that she has been urging young people to register to vote, with 35,000 registering following an Instagram suggestion (!). Also, although she normally steers clear of politics, she endorsed Biden in 2020. But as Gil Duran of FrameLab points out, she challenges old straight white guys simply by being an independent and powerful woman who opposes racism and champions LGBTQ+ folk.
And which would you rather watch, The Eras Tour or a Trump rally?
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Tuesday
Yesterday I wrote about a Maureen Dowd column in which she uses two literary works to characterize Donald Trump’s performance in the recently concluded New Hampshire primary. Yesterday I focused on her comparing Trump with Grendel and complaining about his opponent Nikki Haley failing to step up as a Beowulf. Today I look at a comparison with Captain Queeg in Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Caine Mutiny (1952). It so happens that it’s a comparison I myself made in the last year of Trump’s presidency. I am reposting that essay today.
In her column, Dowd wrote that Trump was so rattled by Haley’s continued opposition that he couldn’t refrain from a “Captain Queeg rant.” At which point Dowd writes, “Ah, but the strawberries.”
It’s an allusion that, I suspect, will elude many if not most of Dowd’s readers. I’m not sure if the strawberry rant shows up in the Humphrey Bogart film—it’s been decades since I watched The Caine Mutiny—but it’s a major incident in the novel. I’ll let Wikipedia describe what happens with the increasingly unhinged captain:
Queeg’s next act of paranoia begins when over half of a prized container of strawberries is discovered to be empty. He concocts elaborate and time-consuming procedures in which to catch the thief. These occupy all of the officers and crew for long hours and further erode confidence in and respect for the captain. When Queeg’s pet theory is finally decisively flouted, he disappears into his cabin, leaving the ship in executive officer Lieutenant Stephen Maryk’s hands for days.
Here’s the novel’s version of Queeg’s action:
The captain deliberately lit a cigarette. “Gentlemen, ten minutes before I called this meeting, I sent down for some ice cream and strawberries. Whittaker brought me the ice cream and said “They ain’t no mo’ strawberries.” Has any of you gentlemen an explanation of the missing quart of strawberries?” The officers glanced covertly at each other; none spoke. “Kay.” The captain rose. “I have a pretty good idea of what happened to them. However, you gentlemen are supposed to keep order on this ship and prevent such crimes as robbing of wardroom stores. You are all appointed a board of investigation as of now, with Maryk as chairman, to find out what happened to the strawberries.”
“You mean in the morning, sir?” said Maryk.
“I said now, Mr. Maryk. Now, according to my watch, is not the morning, but forty-seven minutes past three. If you get no results by eight o’clock this morning I shall solve the mystery myself — noting duly for future fitness reports the failure of the board to carry out its assignment.”
Here are a couple of snippets from Trump’s speech as reported by Dowd, who periodically points out the Queeg parallels by inserting, “Ah, but the strawberries”:
“I said I can go up and I can say to everybody, ‘Oh, thank you for the victory. It’s wonderful.’ Or I can go up and say, ‘Who the hell was the impostor that went up on the stage before and, like, claimed a victory?’ She did very poorly, actually.” He added: “I don’t get too angry. I get even.”
Ah, but the strawberries.
“But I felt I should do this because I find in life you can’t let people get away with bullshit. You can’t. You just can’t do that. And when I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy, come up, I said, ‘What’s she doing? We won.’”
As I noted in April of 2020, Trump prefers a comparison with a different captain, that being Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty. After all, Bligh is a tyrant with life and death power over his crew. But Trump is more Queeg or, better yet, the captain in David Eggers’s novel The Captain and the Glory. The post was written in the early days of Covid and captures (lest we forget) the constant chaos that characterized the Trump presidency. It also shows how Trump was already beginning to throw in his lot with insurrectionists.
Reprinted from April 15, 2020
Those of us interested in cultural allusions were struck by a recent Donald Trump Tuesday tweet referencing Mutiny on the Bounty. Washington Post’s Dana Milbank’s reflections on the reference alerted me to an even better one: Trump as the captain in David Eggers’s comic novel The Captain and the Glory. It so happens that Eggers’s captain is based on Trump, and the parallels are spot on.
Trump’s tweet requires some deciphering:
“Tell the Democrat Governors that ‘Mutiny On The Bounty’ was one of my all-time favorite movies. A good old-fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!”
The governors have started setting up multi-state consortiums to address the pandemic. (When it’s working properly, the federal government should be that consortium.) So is Trump thinking of himself as Captain Bligh and perhaps New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as first mate Fletcher Christian? Is he in effect saying, in a patronizing manner, “Ah, isn’t it cute– the governors are declaring their independence when it would be so much easier just to ask me for help?”
That he sees the governors as engaging in mutiny is revealing.
Of course, they’ve more or less given up asking for help given how little good it’s done them. As Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Tuesday,
We have gotten very little help from the federal government…I’ve given up on any promises that have been made. I hope something will get delivered from the federal government, but I don’t expect it anymore.
Unlike Trump, however, Bligh is an accomplished captain, even if he shares his brutishness. When cast adrift, he somehow manages to navigate a lifeboat with 19 passengers 3500 miles to safety. Would that we had someone with these abilities guiding our ship of state.
We also need a captain like Brett Crozier, who warned that authorities that Covid-19 was rampaging through his aircraft carrier and was subsequently fired for his truth telling. (One sailor has since died and 580 have tested positive.) (Update: The number is now 655, with six sailors hospitalized.)
A more accurate parallel is Trump as Queeg in Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine Mutiny. There we encounter a captain who freezes whenever action gets too hot to handle. At one point, Queeg flees rather than escort low-lying landing craft to their line of departure. At another, he freaks out in the face of a typhoon. Our own captain is doing all he can to avoid responsibility and escape reality.
Queeg also falls apart on the witness stand, just as Trump breaks into a rage when asked tough questions by reporters.
Milbank, however, has steered me to a much better parallel in Eggers’s novel. Here goes:
He nudged the wheel a bit left, and the entire ship listed leftward, which was both frightening and thrilling. He turned the wheel to the right, and the totality of the ship, and its uncountable passengers and their possessions, all were sent rightward. In the cafeteria, where the passengers were eating lunch, a thousand plates and glasses shattered. An elderly man was thrown from his chair, struck his head on the dessert cart and died later that night. High above, the Captain was elated by the riveting drama caused by the surprises of his steering.
This is what it has felt like to have Trump as our president for the past three and a half years. Pray to God that the American public rises up in November and replaces him. Thankfully, electoral mutinies have the full support of the Constitution.
Further thought: I just have a new take on Trump’s tweet after seeing new tweets where he supports people defying governors’ settle-in-place orders: he imagines he is one of the mutineers (“exciting and invigorating”) rather than captain of the ship.
