Kipling’s Warning to Empires

By Robin Bates | Published: November 26, 2024
Rudyard Kipling

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Wednesday

How can a country featuring the world’s most powerful military and boasting an economy that is “the envy of the world” be so bent on self-destruction? Is this how empires die? Certainly, there are many Americans willing to turn their backs on the reasons for America’s success, including its vibrant immigrant culture, its constitutional democracy that allows marginalized groups (including women) to flourish, and its robust judicial system, which has an impressive history of ferreting out corruption. Like spoiled rich kids who take their advantages for granted while ignoring the reasons behind their wealth, MAGA Americans are prepared to throw it all away in what perhaps can best be described as a White supremacist temper tantrum.

I think of the poem that Rudyard Kipling wrote for the jubilee 50th year celebration of Queen Victoria’s reign. While certainly prone to writing poetry that celebrated empire—e.g. “The White Man’s Burden”—in “Recessional” Kipling takes an unexpectedly somber tone. Rather than sing praises to an empire upon which the sun (as the saying had it) never set, he talked about the dangers of what could happen if Great Britain lost its way.

As I read “Recessional,” I think of the many ways that America has lost its way in the past. And while it has shown an amazing ability to self-correct after violating basic principles, the question is whether it can continue to do so. That Americans chose to reelect a man who represents, in every conceivable way, the negation of the American promise poses special challenges.

When Kipling speaks of the “God of our fathers, known of old,” he is thinking of Christian values, but for our purposes of today’s essay I turn to our own holy documents—which is to say, those that establish and refresh our Constitutional democracy: the Declaration of Independence, the amended Constitution, the “Gettysburg Address,” the Emma Lazarus lines on the Statue of Liberty, the Seneca Falls Declaration, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and others. If we ever forget those, we may indeed become—as Kipling warns—like Nineveh, Tyre, and other empires that once were great but now are no more.

The poem begins by acknowledging the “far-flung battle-line” of the British empire, whose awe-inspiring hand holds dominion over the palm trees of the south and the pine trees of the north. “Be with us yet, lest we forget,” he begs:

God of our fathers, known of old,
   Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand
   Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

In contrast to the tumult of war and the shouting of the victors, Kipling sets up a humble and a contrite heart. If America is given special wealth and power, its purpose should be to serve humankind—to serve democracy world-wide—rather than to prop up vainglorious ego:

The tumult and the shouting dies;
   The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
   An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
   On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Kipling goes on to mention the dangers of being “drunk with sight of power.” There’s a touch of imperialistic racism in the phrase “lesser breeds without the law,” but the point is otherwise good. If we put our trust in armed might, in “reeking tube and iron shard,” then we are but building dust on dust.

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
   Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
   Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
   In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
   And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

What tears my heart with Trump’s reelection is the sense that there is so much good that we could have done with our power that will now be wasted and even turned to active destruction. Both we and the rest of the world will pay a severe price.

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The Power of Parental Reading

By Robin Bates | Published: November 25, 2024
Frederick Warren Freer, Mother and Child Reading

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Tuesday

I must be deliberately vague in this first paragraph as people I care about want me to keep the personal parts private. All I can say is that reading a beloved children’s story to an invalid can sometimes have restorative powers. I have first-hand knowledge that this is true.

There are two aspects to this. One is the book itself and one is the act of love involved in the reading. I’ve heard that music can touch patients who seem otherwise beyond our reach—we played Mozart’s Magic Flute to my mother in her final hours when she seemed oblivious to all around her—and I’m wondering if hearing the stories we cherished as children has a similar effect.

I suspect it would work on me because I have such deep recollections of my father reading to me and my three brothers throughout our childhood. We didn’t have a television, my parents figuring that stories and poems were much richer than anything appearing on “the boob tube.” After a sit-down family supper each evening, therefore, we settled down on the couch, getting a chapter each.

If it was a book we agreed on, that meant multiple chapters. Our books included The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Doctor Doolittle, The Jungle Books, Huckleberry Finn, E. Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers, The Chronicles of Narnia, and on and on. Then, after we had brushed our teeth and gotten into bed, each of us also got a poem of his choosing. Our lives were saturated with literature.

I raised my children the same way (again, no television), sometimes with the same books, sometimes with new arrivals. For instance, while I of course read Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, we also ventured into Lloyd Alexander’s Taran series, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, and any number of Roald Dahl novels.

When we visit our grandchildren, reading aloud leads to instant bonding since my two sons have continued the practice. I’m so accustomed to reading to boys, however, that I’ve had to make an adjustment for my granddaughters, who have different tastes (although they too love Narnia).

I think when we are read to as adults, we return to a world where we felt safe, cared for, and loved. Those memories bolster and restore. As novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson observes, “The broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health.”

I bring in Robinson because it’s her birthday today. In her essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books, she talks about the power of joining the broader community of fictional characters:

I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of—who knows it better than I?—people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season.

Robinson concludes, “I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.”

Here’s one last Robinson quotation about this community:

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across the millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility.

Or as Emily Dickinson puts it, “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.”

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Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Gilead Guardian

By Robin Bates | Published: November 25, 2024
Moss in Handmaid’s Tale

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Monday

I suppose it’s not uncommon for writers to regret leaving things out of recently published work, and I have two regrets about Better Living through Literature. In the chapter on postcolonial literary theory, I wish I had included Edward Said along with Franz Fanon since the author of Orientalism has a lot to say about how literature can influence (often negatively) our view of other cultures.  I also wish I had included Handmaid’s Tale as a work that has impacted history.

Like George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s novel provides a compelling lens through which to process the workings of authoritarianism, to which it adds insights into toxic masculinity. The novel’s power was enhanced by the riveting television adaptation, which gave rise to the iconic red cloaks and white bonnets employed in protests around the world. Even without this extra boost, however, the novel would have made its mark.

To be sure, just as “no lyric has ever stopped a tank” (to quote poet Seamus Heaney), so no novel can prevent a coup. Nevertheless, Handmaid’s Tale has proved a boost to women’s resistance movements everywhere, which is why various MAGA-run school boards and libraries have been banning it. Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, one of our go-to experts on the nature of tyranny, makes excellent use of the novel by applying it to Trump’s current nominee for secretary of defense.

Pete Hegseth, Snyder says, “has two ideas about what the armed forces are for: a site to express Christian Reconstructionism and gender ideology; and a means to defeat other Americans inside America.” Gender ideology is more important to Hegseth, Snyder says,

 than the world itself, let alone the security interests of the United States.  He wants us to believe that the two are the same thing: that women in uniform prove the existence of a Leftist plot to destroy America.

With the looming threat of Hegseth heading the military, Snyder reminds us that Atwood’s plot also involves a few men who wish to oppress women. Their Christian Reconstructionist coup, which they present as God’s law, succeeds in supplanting the United States with Gilead.

If Hegseth were to be confirmed, one of his first targets would be Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as Chief of Naval Operations and the first woman ever on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hegseth has contended that “to create a society of warrior women you must separate them first from men, and then from the natural purposes of their core instincts.” To which Snyder responds,

This is pure gender ideology.  He is just making this up.  Women who have seen combat have not been separated from men or their instincts.  They are sometimes traumatized.  As are men.  Armies fight with women when and because it works.  Women can kill men and then raise children and, historically speaking, have done so. 

Thinking of Ukraine Snyder adds, “They are doing so right now.” 

Hegseth’s Christian views, meanwhile, are as authoritarian as his gender views. The Constitution, he believes, is (in Snyder’s summation)

subordinate to a broader unwritten Covenant with God, the meaning of which is of course known to him personally.  He thus opposes the constitutional structure of the United States as it figures in the actual text.

Asserting that America’s founders separating church and state opened “the gates of Mordor,” Hegseth believes that constitutional patriotism is bad since it can (in his words) “untether us from the timeless truth.” “Without God, America is not America,” he contends, blaming what he sees as America’s malaise on “the diminished role of Christ’s Kingdom in America’s founding.”

“As is always the case,” Snyder responds sarcastically, “God’s law turns out to mean what Hegseth and his friends say that it means.”

The Yale historian points out that there is one other similarity between Hegseth and Gilead’s guardians:

In the novel…people very much like Hegseth come to power, oppress women, and turn the armed forces into domestic shock troops who fight a civil war…[T]he notion that women are just objects goes hand in hand with the idea that the real fight for American soldiers is against other Americans. 

Trump too has talked of purging the armed forces while Hegseth once fantasized about civil war should Joe Biden be reelected:

America will decline and die. A national divorce will ensue. Outnumbered freedom lovers will fight back. The military and the police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice. It will not be good. Yes, there will be some sort of civil war.

Would this man resist a Trump order to invoke the insurrection act against peaceful protesters?

Interestingly, Snyder draws on the novel to end his essay on a partially positive note:

Misogyny is not the elevation of masculinity but its collapse, both as morality and as politics. Although the richness of Atwood’s story is in the exposition of a modern patriarchy, I find it important to note that Gilead, the Christian Reconstructionist state, does not endure for long. 

Earlier in the essay Snyder observes that Gilead is never able to fully control all its former territories, and we’re currently seeing efforts by blue states to protect their populations from MAGA fundamentalists. So perhaps Trumpism will indeed just be a temporary phenomenon. Unfortunately, it can do a lot of damage in a short period of time.

Let your members of Congress know that Hegseth is unacceptable. A warning, however: If you compare him to Gilead’s guardians, some in the GOP might regard that as an endorsement.

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Jesus as the Flame within the Flame

By Robin Bates | Published: November 23, 2024
Unknown Greek artist, c. 1600

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Sunday

Today is “Christ the King Sunday,” which is “a feast in the liturgical year which emphasizes the true kingship of Christ” (Wikipedia). I have problems with the metaphor of Christ as king– I suspect Jesus himself would have balked at the description–but if I understand it to mean that Jesus functions as our supreme guide and inspiration, then it somewhat works. Poet Malcolm Guite makes it clear that he sees Jesus as such in “Everything Holds Together,” a sonnet he wrote for the festival.

Sadly I missed Guite when he visited Sewanee this past month as I was in Slovenia. He is one of my favorite religious poets and I would have loved to have met him. In his sonnet he invokes a God that runs the gamut from galaxies to quarks. (I love how stellar sparks of light become “secret seeds that open every spring.”) Eucharistic Prayer C in the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer has a line that I love and that may have contributed to the poem:

At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home. By your will they were created and have their being.

God can become too small when invoked in ideological battles. As Anne Lamott has wisely said, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” If, on the other hand, we see ourselves created in God’s image, then the ego falls away and the immensity of the universe opens within us and before us. Our defensive boundaries crumble in the presence of a God that is not only bigger than we think but bigger than we can think. Here’s the poem:

Everything holds together, everything,
From stars that pierce the dark like living sparks,
To secret seeds that open every spring,
From spanning galaxies to spinning quarks,
Everything holds together and coheres,

Unfolding from the center whence it came.
And now that hidden heart of things appears,
The first-born of creation takes a name.
And shall I see the one through whom I am?
Shall I behold the one for whom I’m made,
The light in light, the flame within the flame,
Eikon tou theou, image of my God?
He comes, a little child, to bless my sight,
That I might come to him for life and light.

In his letter to the Colossians (1:15), Paul uses the phrase, “eikon tou theou tou aoratou,” meaning “the express image of the invisible God.” In other words, if Christ is described as king, it is because he came as close as anyone ever has (or so Christians believe) to grasping, articulating, and living out our divine potential. Jesus connected, in ways unfathomable to us, to that which holds everything together, to the “hidden heart of things.” Or, to borrow from Dante, to “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

In Guite’s words, Jesus is “the one through whom I am” and “the one for whom I’m made.” Light in light and flame within flame, Jesus comes as “a little child to bless my sight.” He does so that we might, in turn, come to him “for life and light.”

Becoming subjects of a king is one way of expressing this journey. I prefer Guite’s images, however, which see us as a light in the light that is in the light and as a flame within the flame that is within the flame.

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Dreams of a Sex Strike

By Robin Bates | Published: November 21, 2024
Ilus. from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata

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Friday

The election of an adjudicated rapist, along with such gloating from Trumpists as “your body, my choice,” has certain American women turning to the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata. Or at least they’re citing a South Korean movement that is following the strategy set forth in the play.

According to a Rachel Triesman NPR article, a South Korean movement known as 4B or the 4 No’s (bi means “not” in Korean) calls for the refusal of (1) dating men (biyeonae), (2) sexual relationships with men (bisekseu), (3) heterosexual marriage (bihon) and (4) childbirth (bichulsan). Triesman reports,

Interest in the 4B movement has surged in the days since the election, with Google searches spiking and the hashtag taking off on social media. Scores of young women are exploring and promoting the idea in posts on platforms like TikTok and X.

In Aristophanes’ 411 BCE comedy, the women of Greece launch a sex strike to bring an end to the years-long Peloponnesian War (431-404). We hear about female frustrations from Lysistrata, an Athenian woman who becomes the movement’s leader:

Lysistrata: All the long years when the hopeless war dragged along we, unassuming, forgotten in quiet,
Endured without question, endured in our loneliness all your incessant child’s antics and riot.
Our lips we kept tied, though aching with silence, though well all the while in our silence we knew
How wretchedly everything still was progressing by listening dumbly the day long to you.
For always at home you continued discussing the war and its politics loudly, and we
Sometimes would ask you, our hearts deep with sorrowing though we spoke lightly, though happy to see,
“What’s to be inscribed on the side of the Treaty-stone
What, dear, was said in the Assembly today?”
“Mind your own business,” he’d answer me growlingly, “hold your tongue, woman, or else go away.”
And so I would hold it.

Determined not to remain passive anymore, Lysistrata teams up with the Spartan Lampito to take action. It’s not easy, however, as women love sex just as much as men do. Lysistrata learns early on the challenges ahead:

Lysistrata: We must refrain from every depth of love….
Why do you turn your backs? Where are you going?
Why do you bite your lips and shake your heads?
Why are your faces blanched? Why do you weep?
Will you or won’t you, or what do you mean?
Myrrhine: No, I won’t do it. Let the war proceed…
Calonice: Anything else? O bid me walk in fire
But do not rob us of that darling joy.
What else is like it, dearest Lysistrata?

Lysistrata stands firm, however, and outlines strategies to make the strike more effective:

Lysistrata: By the two Goddesses, now can’t you see
All we have to do is idly sit indoors
With smooth roses powdered on our cheeks,
Our bodies burning naked through the folds
Of shining Amorgos’ silk, and meet the men
With our dear Venus-plats plucked trim and neat.
Their stirring love will rise up furiously,
They’ll beg our arms to open. That’s our time!
We’ll disregard their knocking, beat them off–
And they will soon be rabid for a Peace.
I’m sure of it.

The danger of forced sex—what we call marital rape—is mentioned, but Lysistrata has a plan for that as well:

Calonice: But if they should force us?
Lysistrata: Yield then, but with a sluggish, cold indifference.
There is no joy to them in sullen mating.
Besides we have other ways to madden them;
They cannot stand up long, and they’ve no delight
Unless we fit their aim with merry succour.

The women then all repeat the following oath after Lysistrata, which they follow up by sacrificing a bowl of wine:

Lysistrata:  SO, grasp the brim, you, Lampito, and all.
You, Calonice, repeat for the rest
Each word I say. Then you must all take oath
And pledge your arms to the same stern conditions–
To husband or lover I’ll not open arms
Though love and denial may enlarge his charms.
But still at home, ignoring him, I’ll stay,
Beautiful, clad in saffron silks all day.
If then he seizes me by dint of force,
I’ll give him reason for a long remorse.
I’ll never lie and stare up at the ceiling,
Nor like a lion on all fours go kneeling.
If I keep faith, then bounteous cups be mine.
If not, to nauseous water change this wine.
Do you all swear to this?
Myrrhine: We do, we do.
Lysistrata: Then I shall immolate the victim thus. (drinks from the bowl)

For all their resolve, however, the women have difficulty denying their sexual cravings. Lysistrata must remain vigilant to keep them in line:

Lysistrata: What use is Zeus to our anatomy?
Here is the gaping calamity I meant:
I cannot shut their ravenous appetites
A moment more now. They are all deserting.
The first I caught was sidling through the postern
Close by the Cave of Pan: the next hoisting herself
With rope and pulley down: a third on the point
Of slipping past: while a fourth malcontent, seated
For instant flight to visit Orsilochus
On bird-back, I dragged off by the hair in time….
They are all snatching excuses to sneak home.

In the following interchange with a couple of these women, sexual innuendo involving female anatomy ranges wild and free:

1st woman: I must get home. I’ve some Milesian wool
Packed wasting away, and moths are pushing through it.
Lysistrata: Fine moths indeed, I know. Get back within.
1st woman: By the Goddesses, I’ll return instantly.
I only want to stretch it on my bed.
Lysistrata: You shall stretch nothing and go nowhere either.
1st woman: Must I never use my wool then?
Lysistrata: If needs be.
2nd woman:  How unfortunate I am! O my poor flax!
It’s left at home unstript.
Lysistrata: So here’s another
That wishes to go home and strip her flax.
Inside again!

Eventually all the women sign on, however, and some even engage in effective guerilla tactics, such as teasing their husbands and then running away at the critical moment. The playwright conveys the resultant desperation of the men by having them carry long poles, which bulge conspicuously under their tunics. Soon they are having conversations such as the following, which once again feature non-stop innuendo:

Chorus: Here come the Spartan envoys with long, worried beards.
Hail, Spartans how do you fare?
Did anything new arise?
Spartans: No need for a clutter o’ words. Do ye see our condition?
Chorus: The situation swells to greater tension.
Something will explode soon.
Spartans: It’s awful truly.
But come, let us with the best speed we may
Scribble a Peace.
Chorus: I notice that our men
Like wrestlers poised for contest, hold their clothes
Out from their bellies. An athlete’s malady!
Since exercise alone can bring relief.
Athenians: Can anyone tell us where Lysistrata is?
There is no need to describe our men’s condition,
It shows up plainly enough.
Chorus: It’s the same disease.
Do you feel a jerking throbbing in the morning?
Athenians: By Zeus, yes! In these straits, I’m racked all through.
Unless Peace is soon declared, we shall be driven
In the void of women to try Cleisthenes.

In the end, it is clear to all that everyone should be making love, not war. Those of our own citizens who fantasize about dominant men and submissive women would benefit from this vision where everyone gets what he or she wants. At the end of the play, joy reigns supreme:

Lysistrata: In the end, Earth is delighted now, peace is the voice of earth.
Spartans, sort out your wives: Athenians, yours.
Let each catch hands with his wife and dance his joy,
Dance out his thanks, be grateful in music,
And promise reformation with his heels.
Athenians: O Dancers, forward. Lead out the Graces,
Call Artemis out;
Then her brother, the Dancer of Skies,
That gracious Apollo.
Invoke with a shout
Dionysus out of whose eyes
Breaks fire on the maenads that follow;
And Zeus with his flares of quick lightning, and call,
Happy Hera, Queen of all,
And all the Daimons summon hither to be
Witnesses of our revelry
And of the noble Peace we have made,
Aphrodite our aid.

Although tragedy lays claim to more literary glory than comedy, the latter, with its emphasis on sex and the body, articulates a powerful life force that will not be denied. To be sure, Lysistrata did not bring an end to Athens-Sparta hostilities, and I’m skeptical of the long-term effectiveness of the 4B movement. But such comic drama, by providing the powerless with a voice, can bolster their spirits and keep them going in the face of oppression. Throughout human history, comedy has always played this vital social role.

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On Dante and Betrayal in Election 2024

By Robin Bates | Published: November 20, 2024

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Thursday

I post today on a Dante passage that a political commentator uses and then withdraws to capture his feelings about Donald Trump’s election victory. It’s a nice instance of how, even when not altogether applicable, literature opens up rich opportunities for exploration.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, former basketball great (some think the greatest) and a remarkably thoughtful observer, talks of feeling betrayed by those Americans who elected “a conman who represents the opposite of what the U.S. Constitution stands for.” He says watching those “who made his ascension possible” is like “finding your drug-addict son robbing your safe to buy drugs.”

“You still love him,” Abdul-Jabbar comments, “but you grieve over who he has become. The first is the grief of immediate fear, the second is the grief of damaged love.”

Then comes the allusion to Dante’s Inferno Circle #9, which is the circle of betrayal. It involves four levels: betrayal of family, of country, of guests and of benefactors. The souls there are encased in ice because betrayal involves a cold closing down of the heart, entirely shutting out God’s love.

Abdul-Jabbar misremembers the episode slightly, putting Cain as well as Judas in the lowest level. (The first level, Caina, is named after Cain but he doesn’t himself appear.) The other two figures who join Judas in the jaws of Satan—perpetually devoured by the three heads of the ultimate betrayer–are Brutus and Cassius. Their cold-blooded betrayal of their friend and benefactor Julius Caesar, whom Dante regarded as an essential part of God’s plan for human happiness, makes them worse than every other sinner in human history. Well, except for Judas.

So are we to see Trump supporters as irredeemable sinners who have sabotaged democracy and all hope for human happiness? You can see why a man of color would feel that way towards people who supported a racist that openly courted White supremacists. But Abdul-Jabbar then makes it clear that this is only how it feels to him—how he feels betrayed—rather than what these people are actually like. And he ends his short essay on the hopeful note that Trump voters will come to see the error of their ways. “I’m hopeful,” he writes,

that as the next four years progress, they will eventually slap their foreheads and cry out, “What was I thinking!?!” And reason and compassion will once again prevail. Or, as Joni Mitchell sings in “Woodstock”: “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

The souls in Dante’s Inferno are incapable of such rethinking, which is why they are there in the first place. Those who, however bad their behavior, ultimately open themselves to God’s love—to divine reason and compassion—end up in Purgatory, not in Hell.

Until they rethink, however, Abdul Jabbar says that “our goal for now is to fasten our seatbelts, fling our arms across the chests of our children to protect them, and hang in there. Americans have corrected course before…”

So, Inferno—which many times I’ve applied to Trump himself–may not describe his supporters.

Previous Posts about Trump and Dante’s Inferno
—Trump and Dante’s Corrupt Popes (Feb/ 1. 2021)
—Dante’s Weighs in on Trumpian Sins (April 28, 2020)
—Trump Infernos: 9 Circles, Pick One (April 27, 2020)
—Flattering Trump Is Like Wallowing in S*** (July 24, 2017)
—In a Dante-esque Prison of His Own Making(April 18, 2024)

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Clifton Poems for Cancer Sufferers

By Robin Bates | Published: November 19, 2024
Van Gogh, Ward of Arles Hospital

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Wednesday

I’m reposting an essay written seven years ago when someone else close to me was dying of cancer. Lucille Clifton knew whereof she spoke when she wrote these poems.

Reposted from July 5, 2017

Lucille Clifton’s cancer poems mean a lot more to me since I spent several days in a Bronx oncology ward with my friend Rachel Kranz, who is battling ovarian cancer. I promised Joyce A. Asante, her wonderfully supportive nurse, that I would write a post on those poems so here it is.

Clifton became acquainted with the illness when her husband Fred, who didn’t smoke, came down with lung cancer and died at 49. In Next (1987), Clifton writes both about Fred’s cancer and that of other patients she met in the cancer ward. The book gets its title from a two-line poem that reminds us that the bell tolls for all of us:

the one in the next bed is dying.
mother we are all next. or next.

Clifton is struck by how cancer cells appear to “bloom,” normally a positive, life-affirming process. Not in this instance, however:

something is growing in the strong man.
it is blooming, they say, but not a flower.
he has planted so much in me, so much.
I am not willing, gardener, to give you up to this.

The cancer treatment process seems to violate the natural order in numerous ways, most notably by injecting poisonous medicines into the body. Instead of mothers with nurturing remedies, Clifton sees cold God-like doctors administering chemicals to cure the disease. In “chemotherapy,” she cries out that none of it makes sense:

my hair is pain.
my mouth is a cave of cries.
my room is filled with white coats
shaped like God.
they are moving their fingers along
their stethoscopes.
they are testing their chemical faith.
chemicals    chemicals    oh mother mary
where is your living child? 

In a poem dedicated to 21-year-old “joanne c.,” probably a patient that Clifton met in the ward, Clifton gets at another confusing aspect of cancer: the body is at war with itself. (The Gettysburg reference signals that it’s a civil war.) Also contradictory is cancer’s “murderous cure”:

the death of joanne c.
11/30/82
aged 21

i am the battleground that
shrieks like a girl.
to myself i call myself
gettysburg. Laughing,
twisting the i.v.,
laughing or crying, i can’t tell
which anymore,
i host the furious battling of
a suicidal body and
a murderous cure.

Clifton is struck by how the very word “cancer” can reduce us to a helpless state. In “incantation,” she imagines that an evil magician has transformed the patient into a puppet. Unlike my friend Rachel, who is an exemplary and therefore difficult patient because she demands that every procedure be explained and justified, the patient in Clifton’s poem has surrendered her autonomy:

incantation
overheard in hospital

pluck the hairs
from the head
of a virgin.
sweep them into the hall.
take a needle
thin as a lash,
puncture the doorway
to her blood.
here is the magic word:
cancer.
cancer.
repeat it, she will
become her own ghost.
repeat it, she will
follow you she will
do whatever you say.

Rachel and I were both struck by how many of the hospital’s doctors engage in power struggles and prefer docile patients to questioning patients. Clifton is never one who will do “whatever you say,” however, and she insists that we own our own emotions. In “leukemia as white rabbit,” she draws on Alice in Wonderland to show a patient acknowledging just how “furious” she is.

Alice encounters the White Rabbit and his pocket watch at the start of her adventures and is struck by his obsession with time. Time, of course, being of paramount importance to one who is dying. To set up the poem, here are a couple of the relevant passages from Alice:

[The White Rabbit] came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to himself as he came, ‘Oh! the Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! won’t she be savage if I’ve kept her waiting!’

and

[I]n a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting ‘Off with his head!’ or ‘Off with her head!’ about once in a minute.

leukemia as white rabbit

running always running murmuring
she will be furious    she will be
furious, following a great
cabbage of a watch that ells only
terminal time, down deep into a
rabbit hole of diagnosticians shouting
off with her hair    off with her skin and
i am    i am    i am    furious.

I can testify, from watching Rachel go through the medical system, that “rabbit hole of diagnosticians” is a perfect description. Each department had its own theory of what was wrong with Rachel and what needed to be treated first—after the Emergency Room, she went first to the cardiac ward and then to the oncology ward, which is probably where she should have been from the first.

In the face of institutional anonymity, Clifton has a fantasy of a powerful and positive incantation, unlike the disempowering “cancer” incantation of the doctors. She imagines her mother, clad as a powerful witch, incanting the words she most needs to hear:

enter my mother
wearing a peaked hat.
her cape billows,
her broom sweeps the nurses away,
she is flying, the witch of the ward, my mother
pulls me up by the scruff of the spine
incanting   Live   Live   Live!

Living, to be sure, may not be an option, as it wasn’t with joanne c. In that instance, a dignified surrender will do. The blood as a white flag may be a reference to declining white blood count:

the message of jo

my body is a war
nobody is winning
my birthdays are tired.
my blood is a white flag,
waving.
surrender,
my mother darling,
death is life.

Clifton may, in this acceptance of death, have in mind a poem by Mary Oliver, who was a friend. The influence goes back and forth as Oliver herself borrows Clifton’s image of bones, which appear throughout her poetry as a metaphor for that which is foundational. In “In Blackwater Woods,” Oliver tells us how we should live and how we should die:

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

To sum up the trajectory of this post, Clifton moves from confusion to anger to acceptance. The acceptance extends not only to the patient but to those left behind. As she imagines Fred sending her messages, she picks up one that is particularly important:

the message of fred clifton

I rise up from the dead before you
a nimbus of dark light
to say that the only mercy
is memory,
to say that the only hell
is regret

Regret grows out of anger, memory out of love. Only one is healthy.

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Trump’s Orwellian Cabinet Picks

By Robin Bates | Published: November 18, 2024
From George Orwell, 1984

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Tuesday

I’m struck by how much my attitude to George Orwell’s 1984 has changed over the years. When I first encountered the novel as a bookish teenager, I reveled in it as a stimulating thought experiment. When I served on a college discussion panel in 1984 during the virulently anti-communist Ronald Reagan administration, it struck me as somewhat over-the-top paranoia about the dangers of totalitarianism. Now I see it as an essential resource for combating Trumpism.

The first time I fully realized the novel’s applicability was when newly elected Trump began telling easily disprovable lies, such as that his inauguration was larger than Barack Obama’s. The point of such lying, Orwell points out, is not to persuade people. After all, there’s compelling photographic evidence on crowd sizes. The point is to get you “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” This, the author tells us, is the Party’s “final, most essential command.”

Trump got virtually the entire Republican party to reject the clear and compelling evidence that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and he has ridden their slavish loyalty to a second term in office in 2024. Now it appears that he has come up with another test: will Republican senators support, for cabinet positions, a nominee for the law that is anti-law, a nominee for national intelligence that is anti-intelligence, a nominee for national defense that is anti-defense and a nominee for science that is anti-science. 

I am using paraphrasing here from an excellent John Stoehr essay in his Substack blog The Editorial Page. Stoehr then goes on to quote Orwell, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” 

The plain awfulness of Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, Stoehr argues, is the point. The Senate really will become no more that clay in his hands if if surrenders to (1) an alleged statutory rapist and sex trafficker to be attorney general; (2) a Russian asset to be director of national intelligence; (3) a religious fanatic and Kremlin stooge to be secretary of defense; and (4) an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist as secretary of health and human resources.

There’s another explanation, one not mentioned in 1984, for why Trump has made such awful picks. In addition to them being a test of Senate loyalty, Stoehr writes that totalitarians

fear individual excellence, first because they can’t understand it, and second because excellence threatens their goal of totalizing conformity. They are not humble enough to admit that they are mediocre people but they are arrogant enough to believe they can force the rest of us down to their level. 

Stoerh concludes by quoting Hannah Arendt:

“Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable,” she said. Totalitarianism “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty” (my italics). 

We’re all waiting to see how low the Senate will go.

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Returning to a Desecrated Shire

By Robin Bates | Published: November 17, 2024
Lee, Wood as Saruman, Frodo

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Monday

In the past, when I’ve returned home after an extended visit elsewhere, I’ve sometimes recited “The Road goes ever on and on,” just as Bilbo does at the end of The Hobbit. Upon coming back to the United States this time after spending seven weeks in Slovenia, I’m thinking of a different hobbit homecoming.

I feel as though I’m returning to a country that has been seized by Saruman in my absence. Although the genial Joe Biden is still in charge, we’re about to see Lotho Baggins installed as “Chief,” a new position giving him authoritarian powers. And if Lotho is Trump, then Saruman would be one of his puppet masters, say Vladimir Putin or Elon Musk or Peter Thiel.

The hobbits’ first shock upon their return is to find a hostile reception awaiting them as they pound upon the city gates:

‘Who’s that? Be off! You can’t come in. Can’t you read the notice: No admittance between sundown and sunrise?’

 ‘Of course we can’t read the notice in the dark,’ Sam shouted back. ‘And if hobbits of the Shire are to be kept out in the wet on a night like this, I’ll tear down your notice when I find it.’

Then there are reports of hard-won earnings going to tax cuts for the wealthy “gatherers” and “sharers”:

‘What’s the matter with the place?’ said Merry. ‘Has it been a bad year, or what? I thought it had been a fine summer and harvest.’ ‘Well no, the year’s been good enough,’ said Hob. ‘We grows a lot of food, but we don’t rightly know what becomes of it. It’s all these ‘‘gatherers’’ and ‘‘sharers’’, I reckon, going round counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again.’

Among the new shortages is the Shire’s famous pipeweed:

‘There isn’t no pipe-weed now,’ said Hob; ‘at least only for the Chief’s men. All the stocks seem to have gone. We do hear that waggon-loads of it went away down the old road out of the Southfarthing, over Sarn Ford way. That would be the end o’ last year, after you left. But it had been going away quietly before that, in a small way. That Lotho——’

‘Now you shut up, Hob Hayward!’ cried several of the others. ‘You know talk o’ that sort isn’t allowed. The Chief will hear of it, and we’ll all be in trouble.’

The Hobbits learn more as they go along, including how Lotho done his own version of weaponizing the justice department, which is establishing “the Chief’s men” to go after perceived enemies. One hobbit informs the returning travelers about how the new system works:

 ‘If we all got angry together something might be done. But it’s these Men, Sam, the Chief’s Men. He sends them round everywhere, and if any of us small folk stand up our rights, they drag him off to the Lockholes. They took old Flourdumpling, old Will Whitfoot the Mayor, first, and they’ve taken a lot more. Lately it’s been getting worse. Often they beat ’em now.’

‘Then why do you do their work for them?’ said Sam angrily. ‘Who sent you to Frogmorton?’

‘No one did. We stay here in the big Shirriff-house. We’re the First Eastfarthing Troop now. There’s hundreds of Shirriffs all told, and they want more, with all these new rules. Most of them are in it against their will, but not all. Even in the Shire there are some as like minding other folk’s business and talking big. And there’s worse than that: there’s a few as do spy-work for the Chief and his Men.’

One of the new toughs in town sounds a lot like Steve Bannon, who recently threatened Trump’s enemies with the declaration, “[You] don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity…You deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.” For comparison, check out one of the toughs enforcing the new dispensation:

‘This country wants waking up and setting to rights,’ said the ruffian, “and Sharkey’s going to do it; and make it hard, if you drive him to it. You need a bigger Boss. And you’ll get one before the year is out, if there’s any more trouble. Then you’ll learn a thing or two, you little rat-folk.’

In response Frodo and company, drawing on tradition, arouse the Shire in revolt—“Awake! Awake! Fear, Fire, Foes! Awake! Fire, Foes! Awake!”–and take back their country, disposing of Saruman in the process. Although the country’s wealth has been looted and the environment devastated, in the end the citizens take collective action and restore civil society.

Sadly, our own attempt to raise the Shire was the election and that failed, leaving the “Gatherers and Sharers,” the thugs and the autocrats, in charge. Whether they can maintain power remains to be seen, but we’ll be taking a beating for a while.

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