Trump CEOs and Plantation Mentality

Vivian Leigh in Gone with the Wind

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Friday

Yesterday I recommended the Sustack blog The Editorial Board for political scientist John Stoehr’s counterintuitive insights into the psychology of the Trump faithful. Monetary self-interest will not push voters towards the Democrats, Stoehr argues, and the figure of Barbara Kingsolver’s Nick Tavoularis in Unsettled helps us understand why. Stoehr has a similar take on wealthy Trump supporters who are being hurt by his financial shenanigans. They too, he says, will continue to hang with Trump and the GOP because they get something more important than money from the alliance. They get power.

Stoehr calls this “Plantation mentality,” which sends me to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Stoehr learned about the concept when he worked as a Georgia arts reporter:

My source recalled for me his experience arbitrating contract negotiations between a local orchestra’s musicians and management. He gave up, he told me, because there was no reasoning with the orchestra’s aristocratic donors. They expected the musicians to work for pennies. When they used their lawful rights to demand more, donors saw the move as tantamount to armed robbery. Years later, they [the donors] shut the whole organization down as punishment for the injustice.

Stoehr tells us that the wealthy particularly resent

the constraints that are placed on that power by democratic politics and the rule of law. When you are born believing the ability to control the minds and bodies of others is a God-given right, the law becomes a crime. Reducing lesser mortals to the level of serfdom is an act of liberation.

In Gone with the Wind, we see the sense of entitlement that comes with owning a literal plantation. As Mitchell frames her story, the villains in the novel are the federal troops that destroy the Tara plantation, the federal government that taxes it, and the African Americans who refuse to keep working for it.

From the very first pages we see this sense of entitlement in Scarlett’s three brothers:

Although born to the ease of plantation life, waited on hand and foot since infancy, the faces of the three on the porch were neither slack nor soft.  They had the vigor and alertness of country people who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull things in books….[R]aising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring  the ladies with elegance and carrying one’s liquor like a gentleman were the things that mattered.

From the funeral oration honoring founder Gerald O’Hara, we are given the sense that he built Tara all by himself. There’s no mention of the slave labor required–which is to say, Mitchell is no Faulkner and Gone with the Wind is no Absalom, Absolom!:

He warn’t scared of the English government when they wanted to hang him.  He just lit out and left home.  And when he come to this country and was pore, that didn’t scare him a mite neither.  He went to work and he made his money.  And he warn’t scared to tackle this section when it was part wild and the Injuns had just been run out of it.  He made a big plantation out of a wilderness.  And when the war come on and his money begun to go, he warn’t scared to be pore again.  And when the Yankees come through Tara and might of burnt him out or killed him, he warn’t fazed a bit and he warn’t licked neither.  He just planted his front feet and stood his ground.  That’s why I say he had our good points.  There ain’t nothin’ FROM THE OUTSIDE can lick any of us.

For her part, Scarlett cannot imagine herself living in anything less than her former plantation splendor. She’d rather die than go back to scratching a living from the land like the pioneers of old, she says. “Tara isn’t going to be like that,” she says defiantly. “Not even if I have to plow myself.” But of course, she isn’t going to plow it herself. As she acknowledges at a more rational moment,   

Without the darkies, it will be all we can do to keep body and soul together.  Nobody can run a big plantation without the darkies, and lots of the fields won’t be cultivated at all and the woods will take over the fields again. Nobody can plant much cotton, and what will we do then?

Her problem is that the “darkies” she needs won’t work for slave wages. Mitchell weighs in here, accusing African Americans of being shiftless for not coming to Scarlett’s aid. Note how the author characterizes the former slaveowners as “kind-hearted” in this imagined scenario:

The old darkies went back to the plantations gladly, making a heavier burden than ever on the poverty-stricken planters who had not the heart to turn them out, but the young ones remained in Atlanta. They did not want to be workers of any kind, anywhere. Why work when the belly is full?

Today they would be called welfare cheats reliant on government handouts. Trump-supporting CEOs, affronted by workers who want a living wage and pro-union legislation, would rather have Trump burn down the world economy than pay their fair share of taxes and abide by workplace regulations. I’m not sure who feels more aggrieved, the MAGA rich or the MAGA poor.

Plantation mentality is real. They must have their Taras and damn the consequences.

Additional note: When I was a grad student at Emory University in Atlanta, our Professor of Southern Literature–Floyd Watson–created a minor controversy when he penned an editorial for The Atlanta Constitution where he dismissed Gone with the Wind as popular literature and not very deep. If great literature depicts people in their full humanity, one can set Mitchell’s handling of African American characters against works like Light in August and Intruder in the Dust, by her contemporary Faulkner, to see that Watkins was absolutely correct.

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Kingsolver on Trump’s Rabid Support

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Thursday

I recently listened to Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered (2018), which as suggested by the title deals with economic uncertainty (including houses that are falling down). The novel toggles back and forth between 2016, with Trump’s presidential campaign as backdrop, and 1874, when debates about Charles Darwin are raging. While Unsheltered is not one of Kingsolver’s best novels, it’s nevertheless worth reading, with its mixture of social commentary, love of nature, and concern about struggling families. I write about it today because of its insightful depiction of a Trump supporter.

Kingsolver notices aspects of Trump fandom that political scientist John Stoehr focuses on in his Substack blog Editorial Board. I appreciate Stoehr for the way he disputes conventional political wisdom about what drives MAGA. Trump, he contends, is giving his supporters exactly what they want from him, even when he makes their lives harder. Forget about them ever seeing the light and voting Democratic, he says. What they like is how Trump does even more damage to the people they hate:

It’s not that Trump voters were mad at Biden, because he didn’t do enough about inflation. I think they were mad at him, because he did more than any president to expand the economic pie to include all those who are usually left behind, especially Black people. 

In other words, it didn’t matter that Biden delivered on his promise to expand the economy from the bottom up and from the inside out. As far as MAGA was concerned, the problem was that he succeeded. “Sad as it is,” Stoehr writes,

the fact remains that when Black Americans are doing well for themselves, too many white people in this country start feeling like something is wrong, something is being taken from them, someone somewhere is cheating them, even when they are in fact thriving. It’s white-power’s zero-sum. If America includes “them,” it excludes “us.”

This, by the way, is the central point of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which to my mind is the best explanation of how race works in America.

Kingsolver’s Nick Tavoularis is a prime example of our caste system at work. A refugee from the Greek civil war of 1946-49, Nick comes to the United States self-identifying as White. This means that, although a lowly immigrant, he can see himself as superior to all people of color. Or as he calls them, wetbacks, spics, monkeys and chinks.

It doesn’t matter that he lost his factory job in the 1980s thanks to Ronald Reagan’s anti-union laws. The real culprits, as he sees it, are the Mexican immigrants. To which his daughter-in-law Willa sarcastically responds, “I see. Illegal Mexican immigrants invaded your plant, wrestled the white guys to the ground, escorted them out, and then told the company, ‘Sure boss, we don’t need any union wages.’”

Given Nick’s working-class background, Willa can’t understand why he is drawn to Trump. Her daughter Tig has it figured out, however. Here’s their conversation:

“I sure don’t get it. He loves this billionaire running for president who’s never lifted a finger doing anything Nick would call work. Why that guy?”

“Because rich white guys are supposed to be running the world. Papu thinks this dude must have put in the time and gamed the system to get his billions, because that’s how it works in America. So it’s his turn to be president. What Papu can’t stand is getting pushed out of the way by people he doesn’t even think should be voting, never mind getting jobs or benefits or whatever.”

“Never mind the White House.”

“Definitely that. He thinks they’re cutting into the line ahead of him. How can black and brown people get to have nice stuff and be in charge of things? Or women, God forbid. When Papu didn’t get his turn yet?”

Tig observes that Nick is not alone:

There’s a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people. They feel it slipping away and they’re scared. This guy says he’s bringing back yesterday, even if he has to use brass knuckles to do it, and drag women back to the cave by their hair. He’s a bully, everybody knows that. But he’s their bully.

What Kingsolver wrote in 2018 is even more evident today. Here’s Tig again:

Really it’s just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club.

Willa imagines that it must be exhausting to Nick “to keep track of individual grudges against so many disparate objects, people, and doctrines.” Wouldn’t it be easier, she thinks, “to have some unifying theory of hatred that covered everything at once.” But her daughter is more tolerant, observing, “I can be nice to Papu. He’s basically over.”

The irony, as Democrats pointed out during the 2024 election and as is becoming painfully evident to many Trump supporters now, is that they are reliant on many of the welfare programs that Nick has contempt for. By the end of the novel, Nick’s family has enrolled him in Medicare and Obamacare behind his back because it’s the only way his emphysema and diabetes will be treated. They also sneak his ashes into the historical cemetery that he requested but which they can’t afford.

They are forced to these measures because they are going through their own hard times. Iano is a political science professor who is working for peanuts as an adjunct professor after losing his tenured job when his college folded. To his horror, he discovers that their family medical insurance plan won’t cover his father. Willa, meanwhile, has lost her job with a magazine; their adult daughter Tig has returned to live at home; and their son, who has graduated from Harvard with a mountain of college debt, leaves his son to be raised by them after his partner commits suicide. Nick’s obliviousness to their sacrifices on his behalf is not unlike the way that Red States ignore how many of their programs are financed by Blue States. While others pay the bills, they listen to rightwing radio complaining about freeloading people of color.

Will hard times change their mindset? Stoehr contends it won’t make any difference. The more the Trump faithful suffer, he says, “the closer they are likely going to bind themselves to the president.” Their suffering, he says, “will be taken as proof of their patriotism and devotion to the cause of justice, and because their savior will be the only one who can relieve them of it.”

As regards liberals and progressives, Stoehr faults those who “can’t or won’t see the role of racism in politics.” One only has to read Unsheltered to see how deep the problem goes. Our best hope, Stoehr goes on to say, is not that Democrats will win over people like Nick. Racist resentment cuts too deep for that, and for many years into the future there will be immigrants—including Hispanics, South Asians, and others–who keep America’s caste system going as they self-identify as White. The hope, he says, is that not every demagogue will have Trump’s drawing power so that the Nicks of the world will refrain from voting.

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Libraries, Bulwarks against Fascism

Library page boys awaiting the opening of the Cincinnati Public Library (1925)

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Wednesday

As this is National Library Week, I take the occasion to celebrate libraries and librarians as being critical in the fight to preserve democracy. Unfortunately, every day we see new attacks on libraries including, most recently, the Naval Academy Library. In advance of a visit from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, that library removed 381 titles, including Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. (Thanks to Katherine Zammit for the alert.)

According to the New York Times,

The list also includes Memorializing the Holocaust, Janet Jacobs’s examination of depictions of women in the Holocaust, and How to Be Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi. Also listed are The Making of Black Lives Matter, by Christopher J. Lebron; How Racism Takes Place, by George Lipsitz; The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward; The Myth of Equality, by Ken Wytsma; studies of the Ku Klux Klan, and the history of lynching in America.

The list also includes books about gender and sexuality, like Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex by Elizabeth Reis, and Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes by Gerald N. Callahan. 

When librarians are kept from sharing books freely with the public, minds narrow and growth is stunted, although these outcomes appear of no concern to the Trump administration. In fact, it may regard them as desirable.

In my book Better Living through Literature, I note some of the gifts we receive from libraries. For instance, during War I librarians played an important healing role, distributing books to wounded veterans. In the process, they noted the various therapeutic effects that books had on patients, with Theodor Wesley Koch of the Library of Congress noting that “stories are sometimes better than doctors.” (Thanks to Oberlin librarian Valerie Hotchkiss for informing me of this.)

Koch also noticed that “a novel with a happy ending is not necessarily a stimulant to the depressed patient, who may be tempted to contrast his own wretched state with that of the happy hero. Nor is every tragedy a depressant.” Elaborating on the latter, he observed that “a serious book may prove to be better reading for a nervous patient than something in a lighter vein – he may get new courage and a firm resolve to be master of his fate and by reading of another’s struggle against adverse circumstances.”

Through his observations, Koch helped found the practice of bibliotherapy.

Unfortunately, librarians and teachers recommending books is coming under fire, including threats of imprisonment. According to Musk Watch, for instance, lawmakers in Texas

 are seeking to impose harsh criminal penalties on school librarians and teachers who provide award-winning works of literature to students. Identical bills in the Texas Senate and House would make it a crime for librarians and teachers to provide books or learning materials that contain sexually explicit content, punishable by up to 10 years behind bars — whether or not a book has educational or literary merit.

If we are to go by books singled out by Texas legislators in recent years, teachers and librarians could be jailed for teaching or recommending Catcher in the Rye, Bluest Eye, Handmaid’s Tale, The Color Purple, not to mention dozens of young adult novels.

The article mentions other states threatening penalties:

Multiple states, including Indiana and Arkansas, have already passed laws that make educators or librarians vulnerable to harsh penalties, or even jail time, for providing “obscene” materials to minors, the Washington Post reported. In December, a federal judge struck down parts of an Arkansas law that would have “established a criminal misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison, for librarians and booksellers who distribute ‘harmful’ material to a minor,” ruling that “elements of the law [were] unconstitutional.”

In my book, I talk about the conflicting agendas between such conservatives and young people when it comes to reading:

From the many essays I have received from students on instances of censorship, I have learned that some version of the following dynamic is usually at play: students turn to works like Perks of Being a Wallflower and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret because they hunger for information. As they leave their family cocoons and enter a world that contains drugs, sexuality, race tension, suicide, gender and sexual identity confusion, and other major life issues, they want to know what is going on. Teachers and librarians, whose job it is to help them learn and mature, are generally sympathetic and will often assign such works, either during the school year or for summer reading. On the other hand, parents, who are programmed to keep their kids safe, sometimes fear losing their children to an uncertain world that is beyond their control. In too many cases they blame the books and sometimes the teachers themselves for prematurely plunging their sons and daughters into that world.

According to their accounts, students generally side with the teachers and librarians. After all, the world is an uncertain place—even more so with easy access to the internet—and young people are looking for resources that will help them negotiate uncomfortable realities.

Censorship perhaps works as an indirect compliment, testifying to the explosive power of literature. Perhaps Trumpists have reasons to be worried as literature has helped and is helping former colonized populations, women, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, LBGTQ+ folk, those with disabilities, and others find their voice while, at the same time, challenging reigning power assumptions. As I observe in my book,

Perhaps literature teachers have been more successful than they realized in developing open-minded human beings resolved to think for themselves. Maybe that’s a big reason why anti-Enlightenment forces are increasing their attacks on school libraries and classroom curricula, not to mention public schools themselves. Several times in these pages I’ve compared reading literature to playing with dynamite or waving a loaded gun, and many rightwing extremists would agree. They fear that once young readers—or readers of any age—immerse themselves in books, powerful feelings, ideas, and even movements will be unleashed.

I conclude today’s blog with this excerpt from my book’s conclusion:

 If literature can indeed sometimes change our lives and sometimes change our world, then a special responsibility is laid upon those of you who connect others with books, whether you be a parent, a librarian, a teacher, a critic, a therapist, a social worker, a member of the clergy, a book discussion group leader, or just a friend recommending a good read. Think of yourselves as literature coaches. You are handling a rare, precious and, yes, sometimes dangerous substance, but any risks involved are worth it because the potential payoff is so great.

The reflective conversations that occur after one has immersed oneself in a work are particularly important. You can talk with your child about how a particular character negotiates a challenging situation and with your students about a work’s insights into their own life situations. You can also talk about a work’s blindnesses: is it hampered by race, gender, class, and other biases that keep it from acknowledging the full humanity of its subject or does it manage to transcend the prejudices of the author or of the age? One can regard these very discussions as citizenship training exercises since often they will arise when the work touches on hot button social issues. The best literature, being as complex as life, will provide plenty of material for rich conversations….

In other words, we cannot know how readers will employ the social dynamite we put into their hands. Our job, then, is to develop thoughtful and independent-minded men and women who will take stories and poems that catch their fancy and run with them. Once we’ve linked people up to the power source and directed their attention to the on-off button, the next step is to get out of their way.

If the literature is good, they will be okay. As we have noted, thinkers from Aristotle to Sir Philip Sidney to Samuel Johnson to Percy Shelley to Friedrich Engels to W.E.B. Du Bois to Martha Nussbaum have noted that the best authors are those who are most true to experience and do most honor to humanity’s richness. In a 2018 essay, British-Indian author Salman Rushdie responded to the torrent of lies emanating from the Donald Trump White House by pointing out that the classics will always remain relevant because of their commitment to truth. Seeing literature as essentially a “no bullshit” zone, Rushdie wrote that the job of contemporary writers was “rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality.”

At some deep level, this is why people turn to literature. They intuitively recognize that masterworks, whether old classics or new arrivals, have the power to point us towards the individual and social transformation we crave. These works can turn us upside down and inside out as no other form of writing can.  The culture wars forget this when they attempt to reduce literature to politics. When conservatives think that only older works are of value and that works by women or people of color have nothing to teach them, then they are circumscribing their vision of the world. The same is true for those radicals who think that writers and readers should stay within the bounds of their own communities. The thinkers we have surveyed in this book know literature is more powerful and challenging than any of these simplistic ways of thinking, as do good literature teachers, librarians and other of literature’s advocates. They know—and you do as well—that a rich life opens before us the moment we pick up a book and immerse ourselves in its words.

So, hurrah for libraries!

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Hats Off, the Flag Is Passing By!

Norman Rockwell, The Spirit of America

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Tuesday

Born in 1951, I was raised in a small Tennessee college town and remember growing up at a time when we said the “Pledge of Allegiance,” committing ourselves every morning to “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Looking back, I realize that this was our sacred credo for what was in essence a civil religion.

 We also sang patriotic songs, such as “America the Beautiful, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” “God Bless America,” and the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty.” And we read patriotic poems, one of which I’ll share with you in a moment.

At the time, Norman Rockwell’s paintings dominated the covers of The Saturday Evening Post, assuring us that (1) Americans were basically decent people and (2) we should all learn to get along and respect each other. Meanwhile, Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man exhibit, featuring photographs of people from all over the globe, extended that vision to the world at large. Our glory and strength as a nation, we believed, lay in the way that we could appreciate and welcome a wide variety of people.

Not everything was rosy, of course. The cold war was going on and segregation reigned in the south. If America’s civil religion came under severe attack during the 1960s, it was in large part because young people saw the country failing to live up to the ideals they had been taught in school. I fled the south when it was time to attend college because of the racism, and I remember feeling personally betrayed by being expected to fight in a war whose rationale no one could adequately explain. But despite our disillusion, the ideals themselves formed our core. If I am in any way typical, many of the seniors who participated in the “Hands Off” demonstrations this past weekend felt propelled by this foundational identity.

Senior citizens were certainly in abundance at the demonstration I attended near the federal building in Winchester TN. Given that Franklin County went 75-25 to Trump, I figured we’d be lucky to draw 50 people and was therefore amazed when around 250 showed up. For two hours we brandished our signs, listened to speakers, and shouted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Elon Musk has got to go.”

While issues like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were certainly on our minds, so were the threats to democracy. And because of the rise of Trumpian authoritarianism, those old poems—which as college kids we dismissed as cheesy—seem to carry special significance. That goes for Henry Holcomb Bennett’s “The Flag Goes By”:

Hats off!
Along the street there comes
A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums,
A dash of color beneath the sky:
Hats off!
The flag is passing by!

Blue and crimson and white it shines,
Over the steel-tipped, ordered lines.
Hats off!
The colors before us fly;
But more than the flag is passing by.

Sea-fights and land-fights, grim and great,
Fought to make and to save the State:
Weary marches and sinking ships;
Cheers of victory on dying lips;

Days of plenty and years of peace;
March of a strong land’s swift increase;
Equal justice, right and law,
Stately honor and reverend awe;

Sign of a nation, great and strong
To ward her people from foreign wrong:
Pride and glory and honor,–all
Live in the colors to stand or fall.

Hats off!
Along the street there comes
A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums;
And loyal hearts are beating high:
Hats off!
The flag is passing by!

Amen to “equal justice, right and law.” What the flag symbolizes and what we once took for granted seems most precious when we are in danger of losing it.

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What We Should Value in a Leader

Admiral Horatio Nelson

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Monday

Today being William Wordsworth’s birthday, I share a poem he wrote about leadership. His description, which probably has Trafalgar hero Admiral Horatio Nelson in mind, is everything our current president is not. On the other hand, it does a pretty good job of capturing our past two Democratic presidents, what with its emphasis on public service, self-sacrifice, and high moral character.

For instance, one thinks of how Joe Biden, suffering unimaginable loss (a wife, a daughter, a grown-up son), found inner strength from his tragedy. As Wordsworth puts it,

Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!
Turns his necessity to glorious gain…

And then there’s Barack Obama, whose commitment to making healthcare available to millions of previously uninsured (and sometimes uninsurable) Americans makes the following description applicable:

Who, not content that former worth stand fast,
Looks forward, persevering to the last,
From well to better, daily self-surpassed…

Uncharacteristically for Wordsworth, he chose to write his poem mostly in heroic couplets (although there are occasional triplets, as in the examples above). This style is associated more with 18th century classicism than 19th century Romanticism. In fact, the poem shares certain characteristics with Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man.

The poem makes one long for the days when such qualities were valued in our presidents. Sadly, the cult of Donald Trump has prompted millions of Americans to abandon such standards—and, in the case of some worshippers, to accept his self-valuation that he is greater than both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Character of a Happy Warrior
By William Wordsworth

  Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?
—It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought:
Whose high endeavors are an inward light
That makes the path before him always bright;
Who, with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;
Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,
But makes his moral being his prime care;
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!
Turns his necessity to glorious gain;
In face of these doth exercise a power
Which is our human nature’s highest dower:
Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves
Of their bad influence, and their good receives:
By objects, which might force the soul to abate
Her feeling, rendered more compassionate;
Is placable—because occasions rise
So often that demand such sacrifice;
More skillful in self-knowledge, even more pure,
As tempted more; more able to endure,
As more exposed to suffering and distress;
Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.
—’Tis he whose law is reason; who depends
Upon that law as on the best of friends;
Whence, in a state where men are tempted still
To evil for a guard against worse ill,
And what in quality or act is best
Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,
He labors good on good to fix, and owes
To virtue every triumph that he knows:
—Who, if he rise to station of command,
Rises by open means; and there will stand
On honorable terms, or else retire,
And in himself possess his own desire;
Who comprehends his trust, and to the same
Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim;
And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait
For wealth, or honors, or for worldly state;
Whom they must follow; on whose head must fall,
Like showers of manna, if they come at all:
Whose powers shed round him in the common strife,
Or mild concerns of ordinary life,
A constant influence, a peculiar grace;
But who, if he be called upon to face
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
Great issues, good or bad for human kind,
Is happy as a Lover; and attired
With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired;
And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw;
Or if an unexpected call succeed,
Come when it will, is equal to the need:
—He who, though thus endued as with a sense
And faculty for storm and turbulence,
Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans
To home felt pleasures and to gentle scenes;
Sweet images! which, wheresoe’er he be,
Are at his heart; and such fidelity
It is his darling passion to approve;
More brave for this, that he hath much to love:—
‘Tis, finally, the Man, who, lifted high,
Conspicuous object in a Nation’s eye,
Or left unthought-of in obscurity,—
Who, with a toward or untoward lot,
Prosperous or adverse, to his wish or not—
Plays, in the many games of life, that one
Where what he most doth value must be won:
Whom neither shape or danger can dismay,
Nor thought of tender happiness betray;
Who, not content that former worth stand fast,
Looks forward, persevering to the last,
From well to better, daily self-surpassed:
Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth
Forever, and to noble deeds give birth,
Or he must fall, to sleep without his fame,
And leave a dead unprofitable name—
Finds comfort in himself and in his cause;
And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws
His breath in confidence of Heaven’s applause:
This is the happy Warrior; this is he
That every man in arms should wish to be.

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Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Vision

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Sunday

This past year our church has sponsored a series of lecture devoted to the theme, “This Fragile Earth, Our Island Home.” The talks have been tremendously successful, ranging from biologists talking about human cells to botanists sharing research about Appalachian plant species to forest managers describing trees responding to fire. The series concluded on a high note as English professor Dr. Andrea Sanders explored poet Wendell Berry’s vision of the Sabbath.

Andrea accompanied her talk with stunning photographs and, at one point, the song of a wood thrush. She agreed to allow me to share the talk here although, without the photos and bird song, it is not quite as spectacular. On the plus side, reading the talk allows you to sit for a while in the poems she shares.

By Andrea Sanders, delivered in the Adult Forum series “This Fragile Earth, Our Island Home” at the Parish of St. Mark and St. Paul on the Mountain, Sewanee TN, March 30, 2025

I want to start by thanking Robin Bates and his committee for putting together this Sunday Forum series. Like many of you, I have been delighted and inspired by what I have heard. Often, our themes and even our examples overlap. Hopefully, our synergy will fuel continued talk and action on these topics. 

My husband Tom is a nut about bicycles. He rides them, collects them from dumpsters, fixes them up, and gives them away. When you ask Tom how many bicycles a person should have, his answer is “N + 1,” with “N” standing for the number of bicycles you currently have and the “plus 1” being the next bicycle you get–and on to infinity. 

Why am I telling you about Tom and his bicycles? It’s because, while I was working on this talk and we were talking about the meaning of the Sabbath, Tom told me what happens to him when he rides a bike. He zips along, pedaling, not thinking, just getting into the rhythm–world passing by, wind on his face, sights and sounds around him. He says it becomes a moment, not of motion, but of great stillness as he sheds all the anxieties he woke up with that morning. Out of this motionless forward momentum emerge insights and revelations, ideas that probably would not have come to him had he simply stayed put inside his office, his eyes glued to a screen.

The restorative powers of stillness and reflection are what the Sabbath is all about, with a special resonance during the season of Lent. The word “sabbath” is derived from a Hebrew word meaning “rest.”  The word “Lent” comes from the Old English word lencten, which refers to the lengthening of days in the spring season.

To signal the beginning of this season, we observe Ash Wednesday, the day we are reminded of our earthly mortality. As Lent begins, some of us give up some form of earthly pleasure to honor the 40 days Jesus fasted in the desert. This quiet time of meditation, prayer, and abstinence from worldly desires prepares us for the celebration of Christ’s resurrection. Just as the wildflowers gather their strength underground to burst into bloom in the spring, we gather our strength during Lent to replenish and rejuvenate our spirits–to get our hearts and minds in the right place, ready to bloom in the spirit.

In his book The Sabbath, Rabbi Abraham Heschel defines the Sabbath as a retreat from the cares and materialism of daily existence. But he frames the experience as less of a retreat from and more of a retreat to a rejuvenating peace and glimpse of the eternal.

Rabbi Heschel talks about how, as humans, we are limited by our belief that time has a past, present, and future. Yet he observes that, from the perspective of eternity, humans are actually limited by space, not time. Honoring the Sabbath gives us an opportunity to step into Sabbath time, eternal time. He says, “Time is everlasting; it is the world of space which is perishing,” and by this he means the “world of space” where our mortal bodies reside. He continues:

It is the dimension of time wherein man meets God, wherein man becomes aware that every instant is an act of creation, a Beginning, opening up new roads for ultimate realizations. Time is the presence of God in the world of space, and it is within time that we are able to sense the unity of all beings.

In Herschel’s definition, “space” might be Tom’s pedals on the bike, whereas time is his still center and the opening of his mind. I’m sure we’ve all had moments where we are suddenly awash in eternity. It can happen anywhere, anytime: you might be sitting by a mountain stream or staring out at the Grand Canyon or looking into your brand-new grandbaby’s eyes–or just stepping out of your car at the Piggly Wiggly.

It’s a moment that feels like you’re hitting the pause button on regular, prosaic time. You recognize, fleetingly, your small place in the fabric of the universe but also your belongingness in it. You are one with it; you are one with God and creation. In Sabbath time, during which we glimpse the eternal, we also sense our unity with creation. 

Wendell Berry attempts to capture this “dimension of time” in Sabbaths, 2005, XIII:

Eternity is not an infinity.
It is not a long time.
It does not begin at the end of time.
It does not run parallel to time.
In its entirety it always was.
In its entirety it will always be.
It is entirely present always.

This talk will try to capture that spirit of quiet, reflective, yet active questing for a state of mind that is both present here on earth and also present in the eternity of creation–Sabbath time or Sabbath rest. As John Gatta tells us in his book Green Gospel, “Observance of the Sabbath, modelled on God’s seventh-day ‘rest,’ presented a formidable, sacred limit to humanity’s otherwise unlimited ambition to work and amass wealth, to achieve, to strive for more and more rather than resting in what had been given.” Sabbath rest is a time when we turn away from the noise and materialism of the workaday world–the world that often holds us prisoner to deadlines, appointments, reports, buying and selling. As Wordsworth said, 

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

As we talk today, I hope you will take a mental vacation–a “Sabbath rest”– from thinking analytically and put yourself in your mind’s eye walking along your favorite path in the woods or gazing across your neighbor’s pasture or watching the sunset from the Sewanee cross. Sabbath rest is not just for Sunday or for Lent, but a practice that we can revisit again and again for restoration, strength, and insight. 

We will focus on Wendell Berry, a writer many of you know and love, and who infuses the sense of the eternal and our unity with Creation into his Sabbath poetry. Robin and I share another favorite author, the literature scholar Wayne Booth, who wrote a book called The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. In this book, Booth explains how reading is engaging in a reciprocal dialogue with another person–and sometimes we need to consider carefully the people we hang out with. Wendell Berry is the type of company we keep to make us better people. 

Berry, who has visited Sewanee multiple times, lives in Henry County, Kentucky, where he was born and has farmed for over 40 years. He has written over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays, all of which champion the agrarian life, living locally in harmony with nature, and basing one’s life on the bonds of neighborliness and affection for other people and all the earth’s inhabitants.

But what I just said makes him sound a little too mild; he is an activist: staunch in his advocacy against technology and against the misplaced value system in our current economy. His actions and writings on these topics are uncompromising and fierce, and they would definitely be appropriate for our forum topic “Our Fragile Earth.” However, for today’s talk, I have decided to focus on his more philosophical and meditative side.

Since 1979, Berry has periodically written and published what he calls his “Sabbath poems.” In his introduction to This Day, a collection of Sabbath poems he wrote from 1979 to 2013 and from which I choose many of the following lyrics, he writes,

On Sunday mornings I often attend a church in which I sometimes sat with my grandfather, in which I sometimes sit with my grandchildren, and in which my wife plays the piano. But I am a bad-weather churchgoer. When the weather is good, sometimes when it is only tolerable, I am drawn to the woods on the local hillsides or along the streams. . . . In such places, on the best of these Sabbath days, I experience a lovely freedom from expectations–other people’s and also my own. I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration.

This quotation captures the idea that the Sabbath–like Tom’s bike ride–sets something free in us to make space for inspiration to enter in. And if it sounds like he is playing hooky from church as a “bad-weather churchgoer,” he is not the only one. You will recall Emily Dickinson’s poem “Some keep the Sabbath” from Robin’s talk just a couple of weeks ago:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –
I, just wear my Wings –
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton – sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –
I’m going, all along.

Why do so many of us (including so many of my students) fall in love with this poem? Maybe because it captures

  • how the tiniest of nature’s inhabitants is sacred and evokes the sense of the sacred in us,
  • how the persona identifies with the bobolink–wearing her “wings” as though she herself is one of Matthew’s “least of these” or “lily of the field,” 
  • how the poem connects being immersed in nature and sensing infinity,
  • how the poet resolves that Heaven is right here, right now, all around us.

Wendell Berry too makes much of the deep connection between the infinite and the natural world.  Nature is the ongoing act of God’s creation, and–since we are a part of nature–we, too, are an ongoing act of God’s creation. Referencing the creation story in Genesis and the fourth commandment in Exodus, Berry tells us that

The Sabbath is the day, and the successive days honoring the day, when God rested after finishing the work of creation. . . . The idea of the Sabbath gains in meaning as it is brought out-of-doors and into a place where nature’s principles of self-sustaining wholeness and health are still evident. In such a place–as never, for me, under a roof–the natural and the supernatural, the heavenly and the earthly, the soul and the body, the wondrous and the ordinary, all appear to occur together in the one fabric of creation.

Like Emily Dickinson, Berry sees the presence of God in the trees, which are, for him, a “timbered choir.” In this poem, he is talking about a small woodland he “let alone” at his farm, land he allowed to recover naturally from having been strip-mined:

Sabbaths, 1986, I

Slowly, slowly, they return
To the small woodland let alone:
Great trees, outspreading and upright,
Apostles of the living light.

Patient as stars, they build in air
Tier after tier a timbered choir,
Stout beams upholding weightless grace 
Of song, a blessing on this place.

They stand in waiting all around,
Uprisings of their native ground, 
Downcomings of the distant light;
They are the advent they await.

Receiving sun and giving shade,
Their life’s a benefaction made,
And is a benediction said
Over the living and the dead.

In fall their brightened leaves, released,
Fly down the wind, and we are pleased
To walk on radiance, amazed.
O light come down to earth, be praised!

In The Gift of Good Land, Berry tells us,

In token of His landlordship, God required a Sabbath for the land, which was to be left fallow every seventh year; and a Sabbath of Sabbaths every fiftieth year, a “year of jubilee,” during which not only would the fields lie fallow, but the land would be returned to its original owners, as if to free it of the taint of trade and the conceit of human ownership. But beyond their agricultural and social intent, these Sabbaths ritualize an observance of the limits of “my power and the might of mine hand”–the limits of human control. Looking at their fallowed fields, the people are to be reminded that the land is there only by gift; it exists in its own right, and does not begin or end with any human purpose.

Berry sees the Sabbath of Sabbaths–the jubilee–as a celebration that emphasizes the gift of good land and the limitations of human control. In other words, it is an occasion for us to be humble, which reminds me of the season of Lent and also of another Sabbath poem:

Sabbaths, 2012, VIII

Since, despite the stern demands 
of scientist and realist, we will always
be supposing, let us suppose 
that Nature gave the world flowers
and birdsong as a language, by which
it might speak to discerning humans.
And what must we say back? Not
just thanks or praise, but acts
of kindness bespeaking kinship
with the creatures and with Nature, acts
faithful as the woods that dwells in place
time out of mind, self-denying
as the parenthood of the birds, and like
the flowers humble and beautiful. 

You’ll notice that this jubilee is also an occasion to give not only thanks and praise but also “acts / of kindness bespeaking kinship / with the creatures and with Nature.” Berry feels deeply the kinship with his land, his neighbors, and all of creation. Like Aldo Leopold in Sand County Almanac, he has learned to “think like a mountain.” Like Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, he has made respect for and reciprocity with all of creation the basis of his value system. Berry continues: 

[W]e depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Berry talks about the absurdity of farmers having to leave their country life behind because they can’t make a living. He says, “It’s a result of having the wrong idea about what we mean by ‘making a living’ in the first place. To make a living is not to make a killing, it’s to have enough.”

This idea of having “enough” and finding joy and fulfillment in sharing with and respecting the rest of creation is intimately tied to the idea of the Sabbath. Maria Popova, whose blog The Marginalian many of us enjoy, writes about how Berry’s insistence on taking a Sabbath rest constitutes an act of resistance against our culture’s “cult of more.” To take a Sabbath in nature is even more radical, for nature is “that eternal pasture of enoughness.” She continues:

To be in nature, without doing, is to be reminded that we are nature, too; that we cannot force the creative force that made us; that we need not keep breaking our own hearts on expectation’s cold hard edge of not-enough.

In the Moyers interview, Berry makes the connections between Nature, Sabbath, and values even more explicit:

I consider myself a person who takes the Gospel very seriously. . . . A lot of my writing, when it hasn’t been in defense of precious things, has been a giving of thanks for precious things. . . . It’s mighty hard  right now to think of anything that is precious that isn’t in danger.

People of religious faith know that the world is maintained every day by the same force that created it. It’s an article of my faith and belief that all creatures live by breathing God’s breath and participating in His spirit. And this means that the whole thing’s holy–the whole shootin’ match. There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. So finally I see those gouges in the surface mine country as desecrations, not just as land abuse, not just as human oppression, but as desecration, as blasphemy.

His Sabbath poems defend and give thanks for precious things, and they celebrate the sacredness of nature and community. They share the joy of the Sabbath jubilee, the inevitability of the season of death, and the promise of rebirth. Furthermore, for Berry there is no separation between what an anthropologist might call the sacred and the profane. All are of a piece. All are woven into the same fabric. If we do not take care of the land and each other, we are blasphemers. 

In the poem “How to Be a Poet,” Berry gives some good advice:

Make a place to sit down.   
Sit down. Be quiet.
               . . .
There are no unsacred places;   
there are only sacred places   
and desecrated places.
Make a place to sit down.   
Sit down. Be quiet. 
               . . .
Accept what comes from silence.   
Make the best you can of it.   
Of the little words that come   
out of the silence, like prayers   
prayed back to the one who prays,   
make a poem that does not disturb   
the silence from which it came.

Berry often emphasizes the need for quiet, for silence. One reason is to make room to listen. Another is that words are simply inadequate. He says, “To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.” In celebrating the Sabbath outside in quiet solitude, he is honoring a sacred gift, one that we can enjoy on any day of the week:

That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods, grow quiet, and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace. Though associated with a particular day, this is a possibility that may present itself at any time.

Berry associates being silent and fully present in Nature with being open and receptive to grace, to life, and to eternity. Sometimes Berry’s language echoes that of T. S. Eliot, who also recognizes the inadequacy of language, the perception of the eternal, and the shadow of being human and being trapped in and tempted by the material world, where we lose vision, where we lose insight, as Jesus in human flesh was tempted in the desert:

                                       Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.  

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

. . . say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. 

The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance. . . . 
(from Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton”)

In the following Sabbath poem, Berry explores what happens when we cannot find Sabbath rest and are, in effect, lost in the desert:

Sabbaths, 1980, V

Six days of work are spent
To make a Sunday quiet
That Sabbath may return.
It comes in unconcern;
We cannot earn or buy it.
Suppose rest is not sent
Or comes and goes unknown,
The light, unseen, unshown.
Suppose the day begins
In wrath at circumstance,
Or anger at one’s friends
In vain self-innocence
False to the very light, 
Breaking the sun in half, 
Or anger at oneself
Whose controverting will 
Would have the sun stand still.
The world is lost in loss
Of patience; the old curse
Returns, and is made worse 
As newly justified.
In hopeless fret and fuss,
In rage at worldly plight
Creation is defied, all order is unpropped,
All light and singing stopped.

The Sabbath might go “unseen, unshown” because we are angry at events, at friends, at ourselves–but in all cases, “the world is lost in loss / Of patience” and “the old curse”–by which I think he means Adam’s curse–returns and “All light and singing” are “stopped.” 

In another poem, Berry’s language echoes Eliot’s as he strains to convey the now of creation and of the narrow passage we must navigate to get there. The ending, the passage through the narrow gap, requires a stripping away of the body’s life to the “shadow of the mercy of light.” To get to the Sabbath, we must leave anger and pettiness behind and pass through “the narrow gate”:

Sabbaths 1985, V

How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
Of all its past, and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
Of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity, for its end and beginning 
Belong to the end and beginning of all things, 
The beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s 
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow 
of the grace of the strait way’s ending, 
the shadow of the mercy of light.

Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come in among these trees you must leave behind
The six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone, 
Expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
Into the ease of sign, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.

Sometimes Berry avoids explanation and tries to get us through that narrow passage by helping us simply be present in Nature, demanding nothing of it and quietly joining in the experience. Here is one of my favorite poems of this type:

Sabbath VIII, 1994

And now this leaf lies brightly on the ground. 

Why aren’t there more words in this poem? Berry is working in the tradition of haiku and imagism, in which words were used to evoke an explicit experience of the real. For example, the ancient poet Kobayashi Issa wrote:

On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.

The Modernist poet Ezra Pound, meanwhile, saw the sudden “apparition of face in the crowd” as “petals on a wet, black bough.”

For his part, T. S. Eliot sought the “objective correlative,” the precise words that would convey lived experience, and in “Ars Poetica,” Archibald Macleish famously said, “A poem should not mean / But be.” Virginia Woolf described her “moments of being,” and Gaston Bachelard talked about the “poetic instant.” Words are inadequate to convey reality, but poets, perhaps, take us as close as we can get. 

Here are two more beautiful examples. What I love about these poems is how they invite us to the experience, call us to the table, to be nourished by what we find there, much of which comes from our own memories and imagination–the realm of God and Creation. Close your eyes and listen to the wood thrush while I read these poems to you:

Sabbath 1996, VI

A bird the size 
of a leaf fills 
the whole lucid
evening with
his note, and flies. 

And:

Sabbath 1997, I

Best of any song 
is bird song 
in the quiet, but first 
you must have the quiet.

In these poems we become Emerson’s famous “transparent eyeball”:

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity . . . which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent Eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. 

Having played the song of the wood thrush, I remind you, as Tom reminded me, that Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau said in his Journal of July 5, 1852: “The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. . . . Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him.” In the Sabbath moment, in Sabbath rest, the gates of heaven are opened to us.

We can pair Sabbath V of 1980, where Berry says, “The old curse / Returns, and is made worse,” with the idea of finding Sabbath rest by stepping a toe into eternity. When I read “The old curse,” I think, of course, of Adam’s curse–of the knowledge of good and evil, of being exiled from the garden to a wasteland, of alienation from God and intimate union with creation, of being lost to language and daily toil. To be human is to be mortal; life itself comes paired up with a death sentence. Creation is not all roses; the roses have thorns. The Sabbath reminds us that the story of creation is the story of life and death, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, triumph and tragedy. Experiencing the Sabbath gives us the perspective we need to see that all are of a piece, a tightly-woven fabric in eternity.

No one conveys the complexity of the sacred tapestry of creation better than Annie Dillard, whose Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is one long Sabbath excursion into the natural world. As she says, “Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. . . . We value the individual supremely, and nature values him not a whit.” In fact, she says, “that something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation.”

Dillar concludes, “The terms are clear: if you want to live you have to die. . . . A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says–and, of course, that poet is Dylan Thomas, “‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age.’” In other words, the same generative life that creates us and propels us also dooms us. How do we reconcile this truth with the fullness of creation as revealed in the Sabbath? 

Dillard recounts a dream where she saw “all the individual people . . . in their individual times and places . . . dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped, in a never-ending cloth.” This is the fabric of creation–so huge and infinite that we cannot comprehend it. It is this ignorance that may prevent us from having faith. “Faithlessness,” she says,

is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination. . . . If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the world existed. . . . The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that. No claims of any and all revelation could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.

In the presence of the immensity of creation–and stifled by our perceptions of our own fallibility–ordinary humans tend to lack vision. Maybe this is one reason that poets and artists might end up saving the world. Dillard describes a goldfinch sitting atop a thistle, on a perch of fluffy, downy seeds surrounded by thorns. She uses the image to make a point about creation:

The thistle is part of Adam’s curse. “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.” A terrible curse: But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle, or do I? If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed. If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom. This crown of thorns sits light on my skull, like wings. The Venetian Baroque painter Tiepolo painted Christ as a red-lipped infant clutching a goldfinch; the goldfinch seems to be looking around in search of thorns. Creation itself was the fall, a burst into the thorny beauty of the real.

Creation is both rose and thorns. To embrace our place in creation, we must embrace life and death, embrace the fall, embrace the mystery of both the beauty and the misery of existence, embrace our imperfections and the grace that allows us to rise above them. 

I am reminded of the Japanese concepts of wabi-sabi, finding beauty in the natural imperfections of people and things, and kintsugi, “golden joinery,” a technique in which precious pottery is repaired with gold–the lines of the brokenness making the pot even more beautiful. And these ideas remind me of Leonard Cohen’s famous phrases: 

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in…

We cannot allow our obsessions with our imperfections, our things, our lack of things–our everyday trivialities–blind us to the unfathomable richness we have been blessed with in the unity of creation. Echoing Thomas Merton’s exhortation for us to quit “diddl[ing] around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues,” Dillard invites us–as does Berry–to stop tippy-toeing around in the quotidian and embrace the immensity of the gift we have been given. Dillard meets Berry in the gaps, in his “narrow gate,” his silent woods:

It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing.The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock–more than a maple–a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

In the gaps is where we find rebirth and redemption and are at home in creation, as Berry reveals in these poems:

Sabbaths 1992, III

Again we come
to the resurrection
of bloodroot from the dark,

a hand that reaches up 
out of the ground,
holding a lamp.

And:

Sabbaths 1992, II

Lift up the dead leaves
and see, waiting 
in the dark, in cold March, 

the purplish stems, leaves, 
and buds of twinleaf,
infinitely tender, infinitely

expectant. They straighten
slowly into the light after
the nights of frost. At last

the venture is made: the brief
blossoms open, the petals fall, 
the hinged capsules of seed

grow big. The possibility
of this return returns
again to the seed, the dark, 

the long wait, and the light again.

And this poem, which emphasizes that being “invisible” in nature–the “transparent eyeball,” the meditative silence and receptivity of the Sabbath mind. We must pass through the “narrow gap” to be truly at home in creation: 

Sabbaths 1980, IV

The frog with lichened back and golden thigh
Sits still almost invisible
On leafed and lichened stem,
Invisibility
Its sign of being at home
There in its given place, and well.

The warbler with its quivering striped throat
Would live almost beyond my sight, 
Almost beyond belief,
But for its double note–
Among high leaves a leaf, 
At ease, at home in air and light.

And I, through woods and fields, through fallen days, 
Am passing to where I belong:
At home, at ease, and well, 
In Sabbaths of this place
Almost invisible, 
Toward which I go from song to song.

In a final Sabbath poem, I see a blessing and a benediction and a fine way to end this talk. Berry helps us realize that as we release our Earthly desires in the Sabbath moment and become one with creation, we recognize that we are “the maker’s joy in what is made,” which is “the joy in which we come to rest.” 

Sabbaths 2007, XII

Learn by little the desire for all things
Which perhaps is not desire at all 
But undying love which perhaps 
Is not love at all but gratitude
For the being of all things which
Perhaps is not gratitude at all 
But the maker’s joy in what is made,
The joy in which we come to rest.

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How Swift Would Respond to Trump

Gulliver talking with the king of the Brobdingnagians

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Friday

Yesterday, while discussing Adrienne Rich’s poem “What Kinds of Times Are These,” I imagined her grappling with the question of how to speak to people about political danger. After a while, one begins tunning out the doomsayers, even when (or especially when) they’re right. Her answer is to speak to people indirectly through poetry. I imagine her saying, with Emily Dickinson, “Tell the truth but tell it slant.”

The reason why literature instruction is so vital is that many of the great authors have anticipated the issues we’re dealing with now. Take Gulliver’s Travels, for instance. When I heard that ICE had sent an innocent man to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center based on an “administrative error”—and then complained that people were making a fuss over it—I thought of Gulliver complaining about the King of Brobdingnag’s “nice, unnecessary scruple” over gunpowder. Given that ICE officers are wielding such impressive power as they deport brown-skinned immigrants, I imagine Trump saying, why get hung up over the minor technicality that some of them have done nothing wrong?

I also thought of the line from Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove when General Buck Turgidson’s “infallible” human reliability test fails to screen out a mad general who sets off World War III. When criticized by the president, Turgidson replies, “Well, I, uh, don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.”

But back to Gulliver, who when he is in the land of the giants provides insight into Trump. Because he is a small man (literally), he seeks to impress by talking big. Gulliver thinks he will win the giant king’s admiration with the secret of gunpowder. In this, he reminds me of the way that Trump, in his first administration, talked about using nuclear weapons and bunker busting bombs—or for that matter, the way that is currently flaunting American might and casually talking about going to war with Canada, Greenland, and Panama. Here’s Gulliver attempting to impress the Brobdingnagian king:

I told him of “an invention, discovered between three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder, into a heap of which, the smallest spark of fire falling, would kindle the whole in a moment, although it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up in the air together, with a noise and agitation greater than thunder. That a proper quantity of this powder rammed into a hollow tube of brass or iron, according to its bigness, would drive a ball of iron or lead, with such violence and speed, as nothing was able to sustain its force. That the largest balls thus discharged, would not only destroy whole ranks of an army at once, but batter the strongest walls to the ground, sink down ships, with a thousand men in each, to the bottom of the sea, and when linked together by a chain, would cut through masts and rigging, divide hundreds of bodies in the middle, and lay all waste before them. That we often put this powder into large hollow balls of iron, and discharged them by an engine into some city we were besieging, which would rip up the pavements, tear the houses to pieces, burst and throw splinters on every side, dashing out the brains of all who came near. That I knew the ingredients very well, which were cheap and common; I understood the manner of compounding them, and could direct his workmen how to make those tubes, of a size proportionable to all other things in his majesty’s kingdom, and the largest need not be above a hundred feet long; twenty or thirty of which tubes, charged with the proper quantity of powder and balls, would batter down the walls of the strongest town in his dominions in a few hours, or destroy the whole metropolis, if ever it should pretend to dispute his absolute commands.” This I humbly offered to his majesty, as a small tribute of acknowledgment, in turn for so many marks that I had received, of his royal favour and protection.

The king is as horrified as we should all be at Trump, and his reaction is one for the ages:

The king was struck with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. “He was amazed, how so impotent and groveling an insect as I” (these were his expressions) “could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation which I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines; whereof,” he said, “some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver. As for himself, he protested, that although few things delighted him so much as new discoveries in art or in nature, yet he would rather lose half his kingdom, than be privy to such a secret; which he commanded me, as I valued any life, never to mention any more.”

Impotent groveling insect unmoved at the prospect of blood and desolation? Yes, that’s our president. Unlike this enlightened king, Trump thinks that having absolute power over others should be every leader’s desire.

The Gulliver of Book II is an ardent patriot who thinks his country is the greatest. Under cross examination, however, the king carries away a picture that looks less like an idealized Great Britain and more like the Trump administration and his GOP enablers. Here’s his summation, which he figures out by reading between the lines of Gulliver’s praise:

My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom.

Based on this, the king concludes, “I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

While I like to think that the rest of the world is distinguishing between Trumpists and other Americans, I shudder to think how we will be viewed if we’re not able to stop all the damage that he is inflicting. I predict we will see increasing numbers of Americans pretending they’re Canadian when traveling abroad.

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Poetry an Ally in Times Like These

Adrienne Rich

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Thursday

The horrors of being baselessly deported and imprisoned are becoming a daily occurrence in America, with one of the latest instances being an “administrative error.” Apparently Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a El Salvadoran man here under protected legal status and the father of a U.S. citizen, has been sent to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, even though he is innocent of all wrongdoing.

According to the Associated Press, Abrego Garcia “was arrested in Baltimore on March 12 after working a shift as a sheet metal apprentice in Baltimore and picking up his 5-year-old son, who has autism and other disabilities, from his grandmother’s house.” Although ICE has acknowledged that they made a mistake, they are now, predictably, claiming that Abrego Garcia is a gang member. His lawyers point out that the U.S. Government “has never produced an iota of evidence.” Trumpism’s history of lying to cover up its crimes undoubtedly means that the charge is fabricated..

I wonder if, in her 1991 poem “What Kinds of Times Are These,” Adrienne Rich anticipated such seizures. After all, she talks about our country having “its own way of making people disappear.” So maybe, even 25 years ago, she sensed we had the potential. “Our country,” she writes, “is moving closer to its own truth and dread.”

The poem is responding to a fine Bertolt Brecht lyric where he writes that, when times are dark, “a conversation about trees is almost a crime.” The dark times he is referencing is Hitler coming to power. His point is that talking about anything else seems an indulgence:

Truly, I live in the dark ages.
What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!

Brecht doesn’t like this state of affairs but appears to find it inevitable. While it’s necessary to focus on the evil in the world, he laments that doing so to the exclusion of all else distorts us:

For we knew only too well: 
Even the hatred of squalor 
Makes the brow grow stern. 
Even anger against injustice 
Makes the voice grow harsh. 
Alas, we 
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness 
Could not ourselves be kind.  

Rich’s counter-response is that perhaps, at such moments, talking about trees is exactly what we need.

What Kind of Times Are These
By Adrienne Rich

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

As I read the poem, Rich seems to be saying that talking about trees is a necessary counter to authoritarianism and oppression. In the growth and hope of trees, there is an implied reproof to the forces of death. Talking about trees, in other words, isn’t an avoidance of fascism but a way of connecting with the life force necessary to fight it. In this way, Rich hopes to avoid the trap that Brecht identifies.

Years ago, I attended a symposium on Iran, held at my old college (St. Mary’s College of Maryland). In one session we discussed Reading Lolita in Tehran, and one political activist was critical, wondering why we were talking about literature—and why Azar Nafisi was receiving so much publicity—when there were much more pressing issues.

My response was that if the prospect of a society in which art could flourish was not one of the goals of political change, then what was the point? It was a version of a quote attributed to Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Rich is suggesting that, by listening carefully to poetry, we discover an essential ally in times like these.

I’m certainly finding it an ally in writing this blog. Whereas most of my posts these days are about our own dark times, I find my spirits lifted by the application of literature. It functions as a stable base and a guiding compass.

Emma Goldman quotation: While Goldman never wrote the quote attributed to her, it’s a nice distillation of her thinking. In 1973 anarchist printer Jack Frager printed tee shirts with the supposed Goldman quote, which is actually a summation of the Goldman passage:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it.

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Shakespeare on Trans Rights

Stubbs, Carter, Stephens in Twelfth Night (1996)


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Wednesday

In these dark times, we look desperately for points of light where we can find them, and one positive development has been all the judges ruling against Trump’s egregious executive orders. Recently, one court overturned his ban on transgendered people serving in the military and an appeals court upheld that ruling.

When it comes to transgender rights, we can count on William Shakespeare, who understood in a deep way the fragility of gender distinctions. Plays like Twelfth Night and As You Like It are critical for exploring why some feel compelled to change genders that don’t correspond with their birth anatomy.

That being said, Shakespeare also has a warning that progressives should heed given the outsized role that trans women competing in women’s sports has played in electoral politics. It’s an issue that alienates some liberals who otherwise have no problem with bathrooms or pronouns, partly because sports and domination are so connected. In the figure of Twelfth Night’s Orsino, the Bard shows what male entitlement looks like when it crosses gender lines.

But let’s look first at how Shakespeare challenges gender distinctions. To borrow from my book, in Twelfth Night

we encounter a man who discovers he has an inner woman, a woman who discovers she has an inner man, two men who are attracted to other men, and a woman who is attracted to another woman. Count Orsino gets to marry someone he once thought was a man; Lady Olivia makes overtures to another woman (although technically she thinks he’s a man); Viola, under the flimsiest of pretexts, passes herself off as a man; and Orsino for a time mimics behavior that he regards as feminine.

“Understanding humans as well as anyone ever has,” I go on to write, “Shakespeare knew that we are more complex than the gender labels foisted upon us by tradition, and he found an artistic vehicle to explore our complexity.”

We can regard the twins in the play, Viola and Sebastian, as stand-ins for all of us—we all have a male and a female side, and the lightning strike that splits their ship and separates them is symbolic of how, from the beginning, society assigns one gender and all the characteristics traditionally associated with it to each of us. For some, it feels as though the universe has played a terrible joke: a bolt of lightning out of the blue has separated them from an essential part of themselves.

Sometimes this ambiguity even shows up in the biological realm. There are people born with ambiguous sexual organs (“easier to dig a hole than erect a pole” has often been society’s surgical response), and there are people whose chromosomes don’t fall into either the xx or xy categories. As University of Hawaii biologist Milton Diamond succinctly puts it, “Nature loves diversity; society hates it.”

Thank goodness we have a society that is somewhat willing—at least so far—to allow people to openly cross the gender divide. Society is the beneficiary because people can serve in ways that otherwise would have been closed to them. From what I understand, trans members of the armed forces have made tremendous contributions. One reason America as a nation has flourished is because it has granted people the freedom to follow their genius, even when doing so breaks with past practice.

To voice my one concern, however, I offer up a personal story. To begin with some background, I was a small and shy boy when I was growing up, one who didn’t engage in roughhouse or play football (a religion in rural Tennessee). Although I am cis-gender, I vividly remember thinking that a mistake had been made somewhere, that I was actually a girl. I was riveted by stories of boys who looked like girls (Little Lord Fauntleroy) or actually were girls (Tip/Ozma in The Land of Oz), and when I encountered a recording of Twelfth Night in seventh grade, I listened to it over and over. I identified especially with Viola, with her male exterior hiding a female interior.

Here’s my story: once, at fifth grade recess, I left the boys and inserted myself in a girls’ dodgeball game. While I wasn’t athletic, my boy’s physiology meant that, for once in my life, I was the best player on the field. I still remember the satisfaction I felt. And I also remember the fury of Tootsie Green, the most athletic girl in the class, at how I had invaded her turf. She did everything she could to get me out of the game, ignoring all the other girls in the ring.

Of course, I had a testosterone advantage. If males are stronger and faster than women, it is because we have more muscle mass, larger frames, and larger lung and heart capacity. Weak though I was compared to other boys, I could dominate over girls, something males have a history of doing (to say the least). My reservation about trans women playing female sports is that there is not a level physiological playing field, giving them a built-in advantage.

Martine Navratilova, a pioneering lesbian athlete, got into trouble in 2019 when she made this point. Male athletes who transition to become female athletes but decline to undergo gender reassignment surgery, she said, are “cheating” and should not be allowed to compete against women. As a result of her comments, she was called transphobic, dismissed as a TERF (trans-exclusionary feminist), and dropped by Athlete Ally, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.

Decades later, I remembered the brief sense of superiority I felt on that dodgeball pitch after seeing the movie Tootsie, where an unemployed actor (played by Dustin Hoffmann) passes himself off as a woman in order to get a job. An English colleague of mine expressed her fury about the film, which she said contends that it takes a man to be a superior woman.

Orsino certainly believes this. At the beginning of the play, he has discovered love and sweetness, which he regards as women’s domain. “If music be the food of love, play on,” he commands, lolling around rather than (as his attendant desires) going out deer hunting. Learning that Lady Olivia won’t consider his suit until she has spent seven years mourning her brother, he is overcome with admiration. Women, with their deep sensitivity, are far superior to men, he concludes. If she can love a brother that much, he muses, just think how much she will love a husband.

Note how his gender stereotyping locks both him and Olivia into a life-denying behavior. He admires her decision to mourn for seven years and she herself feels obligated to do so. It takes a figure like Viola, who refuses to conform to gender expectations, to free the two from these mental prisons.

But before that happens, we see what happens when someone with Orsino’s male privilege starts mimicking what he regards as female behavior. When Viola, in the guise of Cesario, tries to argue him out of his Olivia fixation—Olivia, she implies, is shrugging Orsino off the way Orsino would shrug off a woman who loved him—Orsino won’t accept the equation. Now that he has ventured into women’s territory, he wishes to control it. Love for women, he asserts, is merely an appetite whereas, for men like him, it involves the liver. (Note: The liver in the 17th century was considered the site of the soul, the vital organ and the central place of all forms of mental and emotional activity. Since then we have shifted the symbolism from liver to heart.) He doesn’t acknowledge that he earlier he attributed to Olivia a great liver:

There is no woman’s sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart
So big, to hold so much; they lack retention.
Alas, their love may be called appetite,
No motion of the liver but the palate,
That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;
But mine is all as hungry as the sea,
And can digest as much. Make no compare
Between that love a woman can bear me
And that I owe Olivia.

So take that, women. Now that I’ve entered your domain, I can inform you that you are merely emotional when you think you are in love whereas men in love are having an oceanic experience.

What’s my point? In addition to having qualms about trans women playing women’s sports, I guess I’m also advising humility in the transitioning. Patriarchal arrogance, the very thing that some transitioning men are seeking to escape, strikes deep. At the very least, Orsino’s behavior can help us understand why some TERFs are hostile to trans women. Perhaps talking about the character may pave the way for more productive interactions.

Goodness knows we need such conversations at the present moment. Radical feminists find themselves targeted by Trumpists no less than trans folk. And then there are all those other letters in LGBTQ+–not only the “T”–that find themselves in jeopardy. The time has come for being politically smart and reaching out to others.

Further thought: As I talk about how acceptance of difference has been one of the foundations of American greatness, I should mention Louise Erdrich’s novel The Last Report about the Miracles at Little No Horse. In it, a woman passes herself off as a man so that she can serve an Ojibwe community as their Catholic priest. In the process, we see how the world would be enriched if Catholicism allowed women to serve as priests. Of course, “Father Damian” must hide her anatomical identity, but Erdrich’s big-hearted novel challenges gender distinctions in a compelling way–and in a way consistent with American dreams of ever expanding freedom.

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