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Sunday
This week’s Old Testament reading features Jeremiah employing a somewhat strange analogy that goes in a different direction than I anticipate. The passage sent me scanning my mind for literary works featuring pottery.
Jeremiah (18:1-11) begins with a situation that every potter can relate to:
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.
I thought of a scene from A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which features a gifted potter and his apprentice. At one point this apprentice invites into the workshop one of the daughters of the family that has taken him in. First we encounter Dorothy watching Philip at work:
Philip was at the wheel, his wet hands inside the moving, growing clay wall of a pot. Dorothy stood in the doorway and watched him. She touched the tips of her own fingers with other fingers, trying to imagine, in her skin, how this work would feel. It was precise, and extraordinary. Philip came to the end of turning, finished his rim, smoothed the sides with a wooden baton, and lifted the bat from the wheel. He said to Dorothy “Hello, then,” without turning round. She hadn’t been sure he knew she was there.
“Would you like to make a pot?”
Dorothy said she would. Philip found a smock for her, and ceded his seat at the wheel. He took a ball of clay, and slapped it on the wheel, and centered it for her. “Now,” he said, “pressi down, so, with both hands—use your thumbs—and feel it come up.
Then we get a reenactment of Jeremiah’s scenario:
Dorothy pressed. The clay was wet and clammy and dead, and yet it had a motion of its own, a response, a kind of life. The wheel turned, the clay turned, Dorothy held her fingers steady inside the red-brown cylinder which rose, with narrowing walls, to the rhythm of the turning. Dorothy was delighted. And then, suddenly, something went wrong—the rhythm faltered, the clay walls frilled, slipped and collapsed inwards, and where there had been a tube there was a flailing blob. Dorothy turned to Philip to ask what she had done wrong. She was half-laughing, half-crying. Philip was laughing. He said “That always happens.”
Jeremiah’s analogy shocks because the Lord threatens to do to Israel what Dorothy does to the pot, only deliberately in God’s case:
Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it. Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.
So I guess God is telling Israel that either it will get its act together or it will end up as a flailing blob. On the positive side, those who turn from evil will end up as a beautiful pot.
Imagine this pot as the one described by the 15th century Indian mystic Kabir, an important poet to both Hindus and Muslims. In this lyric a simple clay jug contains the mysteries of creation:
Inside This Clay Jug By Kabir Trans. by Robert Bly
Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!
All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.
The acid that tests gold is here, and the one who judges jewels.
And the music that comes from the strings that no one touches, and the source of all water.
If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.
For Jeremiah, a clay pot works as a symbol of Israel, which God can shape or destroy. For Kabir, each of us is that pot. Inside us is mysterious music, the source of all water, and “the God whom I love.”
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Friday
My great grandparents (father’s side) wrote informal autobiographies late in life, perhaps at prodding from their children, and my father did as well. It’s also a tradition amongst the Moravians, as I have learned from Julia Ruth Miksch, my Moravian wife, who has been uncovering personal Miksch narratives going back to the 18th century. Given how much these narratives mean to us, I’ve decided to write my own.
I haven’t done it earlier because doing so in addition to writing daily blog essays hasn’t seemed possible. If I were to devote my Friday entries to the project, however, I would kill two birds with one stone, so that’s what I’ve decided to do. And since my blog is devoted to literature, I’ll be telling my life story through the poems, stories, and plays I’ve encountered over my 74 years.
Literature has been important in the Scott-Fulcher-Bates side of the family. Eliza Scott Fulcher, as I’ve recounted in my book, used novels to process the big events in her life: her tomboyish youth (George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss),her mother’s final months (Susan Warren’s Wide, Wide World), her unhappiness with the housekeeper who was supposed to take her place (Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain and The Heir of Redcliffe), and her leaving home to become a governess (Jane Eyre). Meanwhile Eliza’s daughter Eleanor (my grandmother) was a reader like her mother and also married into a family of readers.
In fact, my father told me that, if the man she married had had his way, he might have become an English teacher rather than a lawyer. Thomas “Judge” Bates, however, was determined that his son would become a lawyer, and Alfred didn’t even go to college, getting his law education through the family firm. He made up for this, however, by extensive reading. I have many of my grandparents’ books—all of them in deteriorating leather—including the complete works of Robert Louis Stevenson, all of the Walter Scott Waverley novels, all of Shakespeare’s plays (in tiny little editions), the poetry of Robert Browning, and novels by James Barrie, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and many others. My father grew up in this household so it’s not surprising that he would end up as a literature professor.
I don’t remember the same focus on reading in my mother’s family but she herself was a voracious reader. As a child I read her tattered copies of the Oz books—she had a dozen or so—and she herself was a huge Anthony Trollope fan. I once showed her a list of Trollope’s 51 novels and we figured out that she had read 17 of them.
My parents met at Carleton College in the spring semester of January, 1946 in an English class (my mother was an English major). My father was just back from the war and my mother, not having seen many men in her college years, went and sat next to him. He was instantly smitten and they dated throughout the semester. Julia recently came across their love letters and discovered that they shared a love for Don Marquis’s Archie and Mehitabel, a newspaper poetry series featuring a cockroach and an alley cat. Mehitabel, who claims to be a reincarnation of Cleopatra, lives according to the philosophy, “Toujours gai” and “There’s life in the old girl yet.” “Toujours gai” became a recurring phrase for them, and it’s the line we put on my mother’s cemetery plaque.
My mother decided she wanted to date other men over the summer, breaking my father’s heart (and also leading to a number of poems about unrequited love), but by the end of the following semester they were back together. They wanted to get married after commencement (which Julia and I, also students at Carleton, did) but were persuaded to wait a year. My father was off to the University of Wisconsin to become a French professor.
My mother married him the following April and three years later they had me.
My father had just received a Fulbright to study either Arthur Rimbaud or Guillaume Apollinaire in France —in the end he chose Apollinaire—so my first language was French. My parents read to me regularly but I don’t remember any of the books, other than the adventures of the elephant Babar (at the time a French comic strip) and a book about a pair of cats. Pouf is white and well-behaved while Noiraud is black and mischievous. I recall one scene where they are skating their names into the ice and Noiraud goes around and around on the “O” in his name until he cuts a hole and falls through.
I’ve since gone back and reread these to see if they had an influence. I learned that I should be like Pouf and not like Noiraud, and the determination to be a good little boy was a major personal goal throughout my childhood. What I recall from Babar is the death of his mother—shot by a hunter—and his transition from wild elephant to civilized elephant as he flees to the city and is clothed. For a two-year-old realizing that he has an independent identity apart from his mother, the narrative teaches that the socialization process is positive. Chilean author Ariel Dorfman, who sees a colonialist agenda in the Babar story, disagrees, but for child looking to make sense of a difficult transition, the story is a comfort, capturing both the trauma and the reassurance. (The Old Lady functions as the replacement mother.)
That’s enough for this installment. More next Friday.
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Thursday
In the past I’ve compared Donald Trump to King Lear—both are supreme narcissists who plunge their nations into civil strife to indulge their own egos—and now I’ve found another point of commonality: both are obsessed with wind power.
To be sure, they come at the issue from opposite sides. But let’s look at how they see it.
Although in the past Trump has complained that wind turbines kill birds and disturb whales, he didn’t provide any explanation as to why, on August 22 (as reported by historian Heather Cox Richardson),
the Interior Department suddenly and without explanation stopped construction of a wind farm off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island that was 80% complete and was set to be finished early next year. As Matthew Daly of the Associated Press noted yesterday, Revolution Wind was the region’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm. It was designed to power more than 350,000 homes, provide jobs in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and enable Rhode Island to meet its goal of 100% renewable energy by 2033.
Since only the most credulous MAGA member would believe that Trump is actually concerned about wildlife, we can all figure out the real reason. Trump wants to prop up fossil fuel industries, including Russia’s biggest energy company Rosneft, while also taking an axe to one of Joe Biden’s signature achievements.
Lear, on the other hand, allies himself with wind power. Enraged that his two eldest daughters are not letting him have his way, he sees in a blustery storm his own turbulent emotions. Whereas Trump has been known to fling ketchup bottles against the walls, Lear imagines the storms unleashing its fury on the world:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world! Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once, That make ingrateful man!
It’s ironic that, by targeting renewables, Trump is making extreme weather events like Lear’s storm more likely. As we’ve seen to our sorrow, “cataracts and hurricanoes”—from North Carolina to Texas to Japan to Europe and elsewhere—are drenching us with historically unprecedented, oak-cleaving ferocity. Like Kent, we are seeing “the storm of the century” hit us on a regular basis:
Things that love night Love not such nights as these. The wrathful skies Gallow the very wanderers of the dark And make them keep their caves. Since I was man, Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder, Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never Remember to have heard.
Like Lear, however, Trump is indifferent. All-shaking thunder can smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world for all he cares since he’s doesn’t see it as his job to pick up the pieces.
Like Trump, Lear surrounds himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear (Regan, Goneril) while driving away those who tells him what he needs to hear (Cordelia, Kent). He is driven mad when he discovers he can’t shape reality to conform to his desires.
Unlike Trump, however, Lear is ultimately able to connect with his soul. It all starts when he recognizes the humanity of another human being. Seeing that his fool is shivering, he reaches out in sympathy:
Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold? I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow? The art of our necessities is strange, That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel. Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart That’s sorry yet for thee.
Can you imagine Trump reaching out to someone like this? Or for that matter, giving his heart over to Cordelia.
To be sure, Lear still has a ways to go, and he will descend into complete madness before recovering enough to ask for forgiveness. His reward will be to find love for the first time in his life.
Significantly, Lear is saved by people standing up to him. Trump should be so fortunate.
I know it’s only been six months since I applied Percy Shelley’s “England in 1819” to the Trump administration, but it’s even more relevant now than it was then. That’s because we now can add Trump’s bloated body and rapidly deteriorating mind to the wholesale damage he’s visiting on the nation. Here’s Ben Mesilas of the Meidas Touch making the connection:
I’ve been saying it for weeks now: Donald Trump looks like a man decomposing in real time….Meanwhile, businesses are reporting stagflation, empty trucking fleets, sugar prices surging thanks to his reckless tariffs, and orders drying up across industries. This isn’t the “golden age” Trump claims. It’s the economic apocalypse he designed.
And now here’s Shelley speaking specifically about George III and generally about the monarchy:
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,— Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring,— Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling, Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,—
When I wrote about the poem in March, it was not evident to me just how much money that Trump, his family, and his wealthy supporters would make off the presidency. Fascism historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, however, predicted the billions they are raking in, noting that it is customary for the leaders of kleptocracies, mafia states, gangster governments, and dictatorships to persecute and steal from their people, impoverishing them as they themselves become fabulously wealthy. Clinging “leech-like” to a fainting country pretty much sums up Trump’s relationship to the nation that he’s supposed to be leading.
I also appreciate the “muddy spring” analogy. The description of the Hanoverian kings as the dregs of a muddy spring—the muck has drifted to the bottom—fits as well today’s GOP. Even if our own old, mad, and despised president were to die, there’s no sign that those Republicans waiting in the wings would be any cleaner. The Supreme Court allowing Republicans to gut the Clean Water Act seems symbolic, and J.D. Vance offers no more hope of a new day than George III’s dissolute Prince Regent, the future George IV.
There are other ways in which Shelley’s poem resonates more now than it did in March. His tariffs and his “Big Beautiful Bill” are starting to send food and medical prices skyrocketing; his rightwing Supreme Court is still enabling his “golden and sanguine [greedy and bloody] laws”; he has been imposing the National Guard and sometimes even the military on Democratic cities; and a GOP-controlled Congress (“Senate” in Shelley’s poem) has just given a blank check to ICE, which increasingly resembles a lawless paramilitary force. Shelley describes the army as a two-edged sword—after all, it had just saved England from Napoleon, even though it was now being used to massacre workers in Manchester (Waterloo/Peterloo)—and we see Trump similarly attempting to twist America’s well-regarded armed forces to his own ends.
Oh, and much of this is being done in the name of a Christianity that has abandoned Christ and doesn’t appear to have opened the Bible. Or as Shelley puts it, “Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed”:
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,— An army which liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,— Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed,—A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepealed…
Shelley, writing in an age of revolutions, ends his poem by imagining that out of the wreckage will arise a glorious Phantom. The monarchy’s victims, he imagines,
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.
It is an image that Shelley-admiring Karl Marx would use in The Communist Manifesto, sending a warning shot to monarchs of Europe with the declaration, “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism.”
In yesterday’s post I wrote about how fascism expert Timothy Snyder, drawing on another Shelley poem, predicts that Shelley’s hoped-for renewal could happen here in tempestuous America as well:
It can seem difficult to resist merchants of calamity such as Trump and Vance. No one action seems to stop them. But every act of resistance creates the possibility that the country itself can survive, and every moment of hope creates the foundation for a better republic. The actions we take have to be actions against, against what is being done to us now. But by their nature every strike, every protest, every act of organization, every act of kindness and solidarity are also actions for, for a future in which the United States continues to exist, and in which the learning from resistance becomes the politics of freedom.
If insightful poets, writing in desperate times, can imagine better days, so can we.
yTrump’s Ozymandias banner at the Department of Agriculture
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Tuesday
In July, political commentator Robert Hubbell wrote about the Democrats’ “Failure of Imagination.” The post was triggered by the Supreme Court allowing the Trump administration to dismantle the Department of Education—even though, according to the Constitution, only Congress can undo what Congress has established—with Hubbell observed that this is only the latest in a long string of imagination breakdowns:
The collective failure of imagination of Democrats to foresee the overruling of Roe v. Wade at the first opportunity, the grant of criminal immunity to the nation’s first convicted felon president, the tacit approval of kidnapping of immigrants and sending them to war-torn countries not their home, the injection of prayer into public schools, the erosion of voting rights, and the denial of the right of parents of transgender youth to make medical decisions about their children—and more.
We knew this was coming. We didn’t know the details, but we lacked the imagination to anticipate the worst.
So what resources are available to spur us to imagine better? Hmm, I wonder.
At the very least, literature is able to help us recognize what is happening, even if before catastrophe strikes we treat it like Cassandra. Sometimes it’s only when all hell breaks loose that we realize we should have been listening to our poets all along. Last week I encountered three cases of commentators turning to literature to make sense of the news.
First of all, there was political consultant and blogger Jay Kuo turning to Margaret Atwood to frame frightening new developments in Texas’s on-going assault on reproductive rights:
Texas Goes Full Handmaid’s Tale A new bill would empower private parties to sue out-of-state abortion medication providers.
Then there was former federal attorney and co-host of the #SistersInLaw podcast Joyce Vance, whose summer book group discussed George Orwell’s 1984. Vance drew on the book to see the sinister implications of the following news item:
The Federal Communications Commission’s approval of CBS owner Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance came with a condition to install an ombudsman, which FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has described as a “bias monitor.”
There are two ways that literature gets used in these discussions. In some instances, as with Kuo’s use of Atwood, it works as shorthand to make a point. If one has read Handmaid’s Tale or seen the television series, one has a gut sense of the lengths to which religious fanatics will go to control and suppress women. Other works often employed as shorthand are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (creating a monster one can’t control), Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (disappearing down a rabbit hole), Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (selling one’s soul), Kafka’s The Trial (getting destroyed by the machinations of bureaucratic state power), and of course 1984 (the same only with flesh-eating rats).
E.D. Hirsch, former literature professor and founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation, talks about how societies need these common cultural referent points—this shorthand—to operate communally. Cultural literacy, he writes, is
the network of information that all competent readers possess. It is the background information, stored in their minds, that enables them to take up a newspaper and read it with an adequate level of comprehension, getting the point, grasping the implications, relating what they read to the unstated context which alone gives meaning to what they read.
Without cultural literacy we risk becoming a siloed Tower of Babel.
One can also use literature to glean further insight into issues, which of course is how I use it on this blog and what Joyce Vance has been doing with 1984. Orwell’s novel, she notes, is not only about the dangers of fascism but also “the vital role of open, truthful dialogues, like the ones we have here and take out into our communities. It’s about the protection of democratic institutions against the corrosive effects of misinformation and attempts to rewrite history.”
The comment from the FCC chair about installing a “bias monitor” to police CBS, Vance points out,
follows Trump’s ridiculous lawsuit about how a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was edited. That’s the lawsuit CBS’s parent company, Paramount, agreed to pay Trump $16 million to resolve, despite the fact that most legal experts who had assessed it thought it was a loser.
Of course, Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth,” “Newspeak,” “double think” and other ways of distorting language come to mind. “When the fourth branch of government, the free press, bends the knee like that,” Vance declares, “it’s time to reread 1984.“
For his part, Snyder quotes the final six lines of Shelley’s famous sonnet “Ozymandias” to begin his meditation on the current plight of the United States. A traveler reports to the speaker about having seen the gigantic head of a statue lying on the ground, “half buried by the sand,” alongside the pedestal upon which the statue once stood:
And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Snyder was led to think of the poem after seeing the gigantic banner of Trump that currently adorns the Department of Agriculture, and this in turn led to a rumination about “the labors of creation and of destruction.” For all the similarities between Trump and Ozymandias (Ramses II), however, the pharaoh at least had accomplishments to boast of. After all, he “won battles, built temples, and ruled for decades. He led a state that lasted for millennia, of such fame that Percy Shelley and his friends could write poems about it millennia after its end.”
All Trump has done, by contrast, is tear things apart. Snyder points out,
We are living through a regime in which there is no creativity between the boasting and the vanity. It is not that Trump is building great things and boasting about them, and that only time will reveal the inherent tragedy of human achievement. He is bragging about destroying what others have created.
Even the kingdoms of great rulers come to an end, however. Shelley reminds us that this final, unavoidable reality “is what makes vanity of every boast.” Snyder applies this insight to our own predicament. Trump and J.D. Vance, he notes, “seem to believe that the United States will go on forever, regardless of what they do,” not realizing that
no political order is eternal. It is one thing to build things and imagine that all must bow before them indefinitely – the mistake of the poetical Oyzmandias. But it is a less forgivable mistake to believe the destruction can go on forever.
At this point Snyder, spurred by the poem, engages in the kind of imaginative speculation to Robert Hubbell calls for:
In the present circumstances, the future of the United States cannot be taken for granted. The negative scenario in On Tyranny, and I think the negative scenario most often imagined, is that the entirety of the United States will undergo a regime change towards an authoritarian order, without the rule of law, without checks and balances, with permanent repression of dissidents, with informational control via technology, with programmed ignorance through decimated and humbled schools and universities, with an economy controlled such that social advancement is impossible and wealth remains with the regime-friendly oligarchs. That is the goal of those in power, and we are right to fear it, and right to work against it – more right, I think, than we realize.
But if we need to imagine the worst that can happen, we also need to imagine what we can do in response. Snyder does so at the end of his essay. Progressive, liberals, and principled conservatives can take heart that, in Trump and Vance thinking that they can continue to plunder the country to their heart’s content, they are setting themselves up for a fall. As Snyder puts it, “Believing in forever, acting as if forever belongs to you, is a certain way to summon doom. Trump and Vance will not learn from Ozymandias or from history.”
This means that patriotic resistance will not be in vain. Cracks will open in Trumpism, leading to its eventual collapse, and although we don’t know which particular acts will bring that about, we do know that a better America “can rest only on the labor that we perform now, on the good that we do now.”
To be sure, the resistance at the moment seems more against than for. With the GOP currently controlling the presidency, the Congress, the Supreme Court, and many governorships and state legislatures, the politics of freedom will often take the form of digging in one’s heels. But Snyder adds that, by their very nature, “every strike, every protest, every act of organization, every act of kindness and solidarity are also actions for, for a future in which the United States continues to exist.”
I sometimes wonder if the rightwing craze for literature banning arises from its fear of people thinking and imagining. Handmaid’s Tale, both the novel and the graphic novel version, is among the most banned books at the moment, and 1984 shows up on a number of lists.
So think of librarians and language arts teachers as key members of the resistance. Democrats of the world, imagine!
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Monday – Labor Day
Given that Labor Day was instituted to give Americans a break from the weariness of work, Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” seems an appropriate poem for today. The poem has always been one of my favorite of his poems. One can imagine various circumstances that have occasioned the piano player’s blues–maybe harsh working conditions, maybe no work at all.
Note how Hughes works changes of rhythm into his account of the pianist’s playing. Some of the lines are drawn out (“He did a lazy sway” and “O Blues!”), some are bouncier (“He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool”). And after the blues provide one kind of relief, sleep provides another.
Happy No Labor Today Day.
The Weary Blues By Langston Hughes
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway . . . He did a lazy sway . . . To the tune o’ those Weary Blues. With his ebony hands on each ivory key He made that poor piano moan with melody. O Blues! Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet Blues! Coming from a black man’s soul. O Blues! In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan— “Ain’t got nobody in all this world, Ain’t got nobody but ma self. I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’ And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more— “I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied. Got the Weary Blues And can’t be satisfied— I ain’t happy no mo’ And I wish that I had died.” And far into the night he crooned that tune. The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
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Sunday
“Trump’s biggest reveal,” the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser recently wrote in an article entitled “The Sycophancy Must be Televised,” “is what he shows about those around him; he is a mirror, and not a flattering one, for other people’s souls.” Glasser was reporting on what she describes as “the longest, cringiest Trump Cabinet meeting yet,” in which Trump underlings competed with each other in a flattery contest.
At the same time that I was reading the article, I was looking over this Sunday’s Biblical readings, all three of which warn against exactly such behavior. More on those in a moment, along with a Joseph Fasano poem about what it takes to hold on to one’s soul
Glasser’s article provides examples of soulless sycophancy that are so spectacular they bring to mind the toadies that groveled before Stalin and Hitler:
[F]ew on Tuesday could top the Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who invited Trump to come see his own “big, beautiful face” mounted on a huge, Putin-style banner flying on the outside of her department’s headquarters. “You are really the transformational President of the American worker,” she told him. Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, offered some stiff competition, though, as she waxed poetic about Trump’s contribution to the history of the Republic. “I do believe we’re in a revolution,” she said. “1776 was the first one, 1863 or so with Abraham Lincoln was the second. This is the third, with Donald Trump leading the way. And we are saving America.”
The winner in the soul-betraying contest, Glasser writes, was Trump’s global envoy Steve Witkoff, who told Trump
that he already should go down in history as the greatest of all peacemakers. “There’s only one thing I wish for,” he said, “that the Nobel Committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate” ever for a Nobel Peace Prize. “Your success is game-changing out in the world today, and I hope everybody one day wakes up and realizes that,” he concluded, a finale that caused the entire Cabinet to break out in applause.
Of course Ukrainians and Gazans, not to mention many Israelis, see the situation differently.
In today’s Old Testament reading, one sees the Jewish scribe Sirach calling out narcissists like Trump:
The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker. For the beginning of pride is sin, and the one who clings to it pours out abominations.
St. Paul, meanwhile, enjoins his Jewish audience, “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” And finally there’s Jesus addressing his Pharisee host at a dinner party: “[A]ll who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted…. [W]hen you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
Jesus at various times in the Bible informs people of the hells that they create for themselves when they sell their souls—this is also the theme of Dante’s Inferno—but in his advice here he is also, like Sirach and Paul, showing us the way back. The kingdom of God awaits us in the here and now if we follow his guidance.
For his part, Fasano, a Mary Oliver-type poet whose lyrics I have discovered on his Bluesky timeline, provides his own guidance in “Instructions for Having a Soul.”
Fasano acknowledges that our soul can get dirty and that, if neglected, will turn on us. “Starve it,” he writes,
and the mind, the flesh is empty; the world breaks down; symphonies go unwritten; the rockets fall; the children die in flames.
In our anguish over having lost touch with our souls, we become hard and cruel. We distract ourselves from our own suffering by feasting on the suffering of others. I think of Faustus’s interaction with the Old Man in Christopher Marlowe’s play,who shows Faustus the way back to his soul, only for Faustus to attack him for doing so. First, here’s the Old Man:
Ah, stay, good Faustus, stay thy desperate steps! I see an angel hovers o’er thy head, And, with a vial full of precious grace, Offers to pour the same into thy soul: Then call for mercy, and avoid despair.
After a moment of hesitation, Faustus then silences him, instructing Mephistophilis,
Torment, sweet friend, that base and crooked age, That durst dissuade me from thy Lucifer, With greatest torments that our hell affords.
To which the Devil’s henchman replies,
His faith is great; I cannot touch his soul; But what I may afflict his body with I will attempt…
I imagine Fasano as the Old Man:
Instructions for Having a Soul By Joseph Fasano
Take it out in the rain sometimes. It has vast, invisible wings that gather dirt and need rinsing. When it tries to kill you that is because you’ve forgotten to let it look into someone’s eyes for longer than a minute. It needs that the way a bee needs nectar in the early morning dew. Every so often, take it on a journey. Let it read long, hard books and let it stare into the depths of the sea. Yes, you can give it chips and whiskey but from time to time let it kneel in a place that is holy like the simple cathedral of the willows. All it wants is to live, to keep becoming. Nourish it, and it puts down roots, it opens. But starve it, and the mind, the flesh is empty; the world breaks down; symphonies go unwritten; the rockets fall; the children die in flames. Listen. It is not too late to wake it. Say the names of the wild, the forgotten things: bluebird, red wolf, robin; violet, child, clover. You cannot save the world but you can open the window for the trapped wren in the cellar. Read a book to a blind man, to your father. Tell a child you do believe her anger. Make your life the first life that you save.
Looking into another’s eyes. Reading a long, hard book. Wandering amongst willows. Showing a child you are listening to her and taking her seriously.
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Friday
For a light note following a grim week, I share today Adrian Mitchell’s wonderful takeoff of Philip Larkin’s much quoted “This Be the Verse,” which begins, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to but they do.” In an off-color way, Larkin’s lyric has practically achieved the status of a folk epigram. I love the little twist that ends that stanza:
They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
Larkin goes on to describe a hellish and inescapable cycle, but because he does so in a lilting, almost nursery rhyme sort of way, he shields the reader from the grimness of his message:
But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
As much fun as I’ve had with the poem, which allows one to vent in moments of frustration, it actually doesn’t describe my own reality whereas the following parody, sent to me by my son Tobias Wilson-Bates, does so. “This Be the Worst” lacks Larkin’s bite but, for many of us, it’s truer to life:
This Be the Worst By Adrian Mitchell
(after hearing that some sweet innocent thought that Philip Larkin must have written: ‘They tuck you up, your mum and dad’)
They tuck you up, your mum and dad, They read you Peter Rabbit, too. They give you all the treats they had And add some extra, just for you.
They were tucked up when they were small, (Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke), By those whose kiss healed any fall, Whose laughter doubled any joke.
Man hands on happiness to man, It deepens like a coastal shelf. So love your parents all you can And have some cheerful kids yourself.
My parents read me Peter Rabbit when I was young—I remember being terrified of Mr. McGregor—and whatever Freudian tussles I had with them were far outweighed by all the gifts they imparted. It means a lot that my son shared the poem with me.
So take that, Philip Larkin!
Note: Larkin takes his title, I assume, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s powerful poem “Requiem,” which serves as the epitaph on his grave. Does this mean that “get out as early as you can” is meant to serve as his own epitaph? Here’s Stevenson:
Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.
Perhaps the always ironic Larkin regards Stevenson’s poem as “soppy stern.” I certainly can’t imagine him reading Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses to any children he might have had, as I did to mine.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Thursday
If you’ve been following the news, you’ve probably noticed that political parody has been having a field day with Donald Trump. While the president has been masterful at dominating the airwaves with his incendiary tweets—many delivered in all caps and awash in exclamation marks—California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been responding in kind, bolstering the Trump opposition while unnerving Trump’s supporters. It has all been very Swiftian.
As arguably history’s greatest parodist, the 18th century Anglo-Irish satirist knew how to cut fraudsters, venial politicians, power-hungry tyrants and others down to size with pitch perfect imitations of their style. “A Modest Proposal” is Jonathan Swift’s most famous example, but the Newsom-Trump battle reminds me more of Swift’s run-in with the most famous almanac writer of the day, who claimed that he could foretell the future.
More on the Issac Bickerstaff papers in a moment. First, however, here’s a taste of what has been transpiring between Newsom and Trump. For several years now, Trump has been tweeting out messages like the following:
THE DEMOCRATS ARE EXTORTIONISTS WHO ALMOST DESTROYED OUR COUNTRY. NOW WE ARE BACK, AND THE USA IS THE “HOTTEST” COUNTRY ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
Now here’s Newsom:
DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER “HOT.” FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME — GAVIN C. NEWSOM — HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS “STEP.” MANY ARE SAYING HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE “BIG STAIRS” ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE — USES THE LITTLE BABY STAIRS NOW. SAD! TOMORROW HE’S GOT HIS “MEETING” WITH PUTIN IN “RUSSIA.” NOBODY CARES. ALL THE TELEVISION CAMERAS ARE ON ME, AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR. EVEN LOW-RATINGS LAURA INGRAM (EDITS THE TAPES!) CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT MY BEAUTIFUL MAPS. YOU’RE WELCOME FOR LIBERATION DAY, AMERICA! DONNIE J MISSED “THE DEADLINE” (WHOOPS!) AND NOW I RUN THE SHOW. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! — GCN
There have also been visual parodies. Newsom’s target is images of Trump, created by his fans, as a superhero, as the pope, as a carving on Mount Rushmore, as a figure in a painting where Washington and Lincoln listen to him respectfully. It’s political kitsch that feels like self-parody only that those who produce it are serious. Newsom has therefore been responding in kind with images of himself in similar poses.
Few things are more delicious in a satiric battle than when the target and his allies fail to realize that they are being satirized, which has been the case with a number of Trump supporters. Certain rightwing political and media figures have been lecturing the governor on how he is acting undignified and needs to grow up—which, of course, is Newsom’s satiric point about Trump.
For his part, 18th century almanac writer John Partridge also missed Jonathan Swift’s point, which pushed the satirist to ever greater satiric heights. I borrow some from a previous post to tell the story.
Astrologers were as popular in the early 18th century as they are now, but Swift considered them frauds and the people who believed them fools. Partridge was the Jean Dixon of his day, publishing a yearly almanac of predictions. In January of 1708 Swift, under the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff, challenged Partridge with his own “Predictions for the Year 1708.” Partridge was a fraud, Bickerstaff wrote, because he failed to predict that he himself would die “upon the 29th of March next”:
My first prediction is but a trifle, yet I will mention it, to show how ignorant those sottish pretenders to astrology are in their own concerns: It relates to Partridge the almanack-maker; I have consulted the stars of his nativity by my own rules, and find he will infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever; therefore I advise him to consider of it, and settle his affairs in time.
Literary scholars believe that Swift chose the March 29 date so that he could then publish “The Accomplishment of the First of Mr. Bickerstaff’s Predictions” as close to April Fool’s Day as possible. (April 1 itself was out because it was a Sunday.)
The day after March 29th, there was a follow-up letter, with Swift this time impersonating a supposedly impartial observer. This gentleman reported that Partridge had in fact died, as Bickerstaff had predicted:
In obedience to your lordship’s commands, as well as to satisfy my own curiosity, I have for some days past inquired constantly after Partridge the almanack-maker, of whom it was foretold in Mr. Bickerstaff’s predictions, published about a month ago, that he should die the 29th instant, about eleven at night, of a raging fever. I had some sort of knowledge of him when I was employed in the Revenue, because he used every year to present me with his almanack, as he did other gentlemen, upon the score of some little gratuity we gave him. I saw him accidentally once or twice about ten days before he died, and observed he began very much to droop and languish, though I hear his friends did not seem to apprehend him in any danger. About two or three days ago he grew ill, was confined first to his chamber, and in a few hours after to his bed, where Dr. Case and Mrs. Kirleus were sent for, to visit and to prescribe to him.
Before this fictional Partridge passes away, however, he makes a deathbed retraction where he admits to being a fraud:
“By what I can gather from you,” said I, “the observations and predictions you printed with your almanacks were mere impositions on the people.” He replied, “If it were otherwise I should have the less to answer for. We have a common form for all those things; as to foretelling the weather, we never meddle with that, but leave it to the printer, who takes it out of any old almanack as he thinks fit; the rest was my own invention, to make my almanack sell, having a wife to maintain, and no other way to get my bread; for mending old shoes is a poor livelihood; and,” added he, sighing, “I wish I may not have done more mischief by my physic than my astrology; though I had some good receipts from my grandmother, and my own compositions were such as I thought could at least do no hurt.”
An elegy about Partridge also appeared. Here’s the first stanza:
Well, ’tis as Bickerstaff has guess’d, Tho’ we all took it for a jest; Partridge is dead, nay more, he dy’d E’re he could prove the good ‘Squire ly’d. Strange, an Astrologer shou’d die, Without one Wonder in the Sky!
At this point, the fun really began. Proclaiming himself very much alive and treating Bickerstaff as though he were an actual person, Partridge accused him of lying. In other words, he responded like those Newsom critics who accuse him of shameless narcissism when he announces, “ALL THE TELEVISION CAMERAS ARE ON ME, AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR.” In a pamphlet entitled, Squire Bickerstaff detected; or, the astrological impostor convicted, the astrologer also complained of ill treatment:
I could not stir out of doors for the space of three months after this, but presently one comes up to me in the street; Mr Partridge, that coffin you was last buried in I have not been yet paid for: Doctor, cries another dog, How d’ye think people can live by making of graves for nothing? Next time you die, you may e’en toll out the bell yourself for Ned. A third rogue tips me by the elbow, and wonders how I have the conscience to sneak abroad without paying my funeral expences. Lord, says one, I durst have swore that was honest Dr. Partridge, my old friend; but poor man, he is gone. I beg your pardon, says another, you look so like my old acquaintance that I used to consult on some private occasions; but, alack, he’s gone the way of all flesh —- Look, look, look, cries a third, after a competent space of staring at me, would not one think our neighbour the almanack-maker, was crept out of his grave to take t’other peep at the stars in this world, and shew how much he is improv’d in fortune-telling by having taken a journey to the other?
Swift couldn’t believe his good luck, just as Newsom has been enjoying those Trump fans who fail to grasp that he’s being satiric. He therefore had Bickerstaff write an indignant rebuttal–A vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq; against what is objected to him by Mr. Partridge in his almanack for the present year 1709—in which he complains that Partridge has treated him “after a very rough manner.” Should gentlemen be able to have a civilized discussion over what is merely a difference of opinion, he asks.
Then he goes on to prove that, despite Partridge’s assertions to the contrary, he is in fact dead. Bickerstaff proves this in two ways.
First of all, he reports that he has overheard the following response from people who have bought Partridge’s almanac:
Without entering into criticisms of chronology about the hour of his death, I shall only prove that Mr. Partridge is not alive. And my first argument is thus: Above a thousand gentlemen having bought his almanacks for this year, merely to find what he said against me; at every line they read, they would lift up their eyes, and cry out, betwixt rage and laughter, “They were sure no man alive ever writ such damn’d stuff as this.” Neither did I ever hear that opinion disputed: So that Mr. Partridge lies under a dilemma, either of disowning his almanack, or allowing himself to be “no man alive.”
He follows this up with a second argument:
Mr. Partridge pretends to tell fortunes, and recover stolen goods; which all the parish says he must do by conversing with the devil and other evil spirits: And no wise man will ever allow he could converse personally with either, till after he was dead.
To be on the safe side, however, Bickerstaff does throw in a disclaimer:
But now if an uninformed carcass walks still about, and is pleased to call itself Partridge, Mr. Bickerstaff does not think himself any way answerable for that. Neither had the said carcass any right to beat the poor boy who happen’d to pass by it in the street, crying, “A full and true account of Dr. Partridge’s death, etc.”
Swift didn’t write any more under the pseudonym but essayists Joseph Addison and Steele kept the name alive in their legendary tabloid The Tatler. Its purported editor was Isaac Bickerstaff.
So how much good can Newsom’s parodies do? I wrote recently about the elevated claim, made by Mark Twain’s Satan in The Mysterious Stranger, that “against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.” Needless to say, this is not entirely true since comedians have been making fun of Trump for years and yet he’s still standing.
But it’s also true that Newsom’s parodies are revealing his emptiness. Trump relies, like other dictatorial leaders, on intimidation. When one starts making fun of his threats, one chips away at his seeming invincibility.
In short, don’t stop with the mockery. Just make sure it’s smart and witty.
