Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Epiphany Sunday
Yesterday having been the Feast of the Epiphany, I share this wonderful Epiphany poem by writer and poet Dudley Delffs, my next door neighbor. I love the passage,
Like wise men from afar, exotic visitors to our own lives, we scan the horizon each morning with ferocious hope, wondering if this is the day when our star appears…
The star, the poem explains, is our heart’s desire. When we find it, we “make camp and worship, adore the living/ daylight out of every new morning.” The Epiphany is that moment when the numinous enters our lives and we feel we are seeing the world as though for the first time. As T.S. Eliot observes in his own Epiphany poem, even when the journey is long and difficult, no other search compares with it.
Epiphany By Dudley Delffs
Black coffee morning in winter, and the Three Kings have finally found the Christ Child, many days, fittingly, after all the hoopla has been exchanged for gifts of another kind. Outside my window, the sun lets down her hair, spills light across the shoulders of the frozen earth, loosens the white shawl tatted by snow and ice on muddy ground. Like wise men from afar, exotic visitors to our own lives, we scan the horizon each morning with ferocious hope, wondering if this is the day when our star appears, the shine in the eyes of someone who knows where we’re going, a gold beacon winking from the dark sea of desire. We can’t help but wander with them, the Magi, traipsing like gypsies, across moor and mountain, field and fountain, seeking, knocking, following, finding. What do you do when you find your heart’s desire? You make camp and worship, adore the living daylight out of every new morning. You offer all you came to give.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Friday
When Margaret Atwood imagines dark futures for us, she calls it speculative rather than dystopian science fiction, and her speculations often prove disturbingly prescient. I’ve written multiple times about how Christo-fascists are attempting to establish a version of Atwood’s Gilead in America, but even I didn’t foresee how far they would go and in such a short time.
I didn’t foresee that a 10-year-old child rape victim in Ohio, six weeks pregnant, would be forced to travel to another state to get an abortion. I didn’t foresee that a woman, also in Ohio, would be arrested for a miscarriage of a 22-week-old non-viable fetus. When a Texas woman discovered that her fetus had a lethal fetal anomaly and a judge ruled that neither she nor her husband would be criminally or civilly penalized for terminating her pregnancy, I didn’t foresee that the state’s attorney general would sue to have the ruling overturned and that Trump-appointed judges would in fact overturn it, forcing the woman to leave the state to protect both her health and her future fertility. And when the Biden administration sued Texas for not allowing women to get emergency abortions when their lives or health depended on it (this under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA)), I didn’t foresee that these same judges would rule that the fetus would be entitled to “an equal level of life-saving care as is provided to the woman carrying it.”
In describing the situation, blogger Tom Hartmann of The Hartmann Reportinvokes not only Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale but William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. Only where Sophie has a legitimate dilemma as she is forced to choose one child over the other, the judges agonize over what should be a self-evident choice:
So, therefore, what’s really at stake here, in the minds of these judges, is a sort of Sophie’s Choice between the full rights to healthcare and the survival it can provide to both mom and the fetus…er…“child.”
Then he quotes their ruling:
We agree with the district court that EMTALA does not provide an unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child especially when EMTALA imposes equal stabilization obligations.
Blogger Lucian K. Trescott IV has called the judges “The Handmaid’s Court,” explaining,
Yes, you read that right: Three justices on the Fifth Circuit, one a Bush appointee and two appointed by Donald Trump, have essentially ruled that the Texas law banning abortions has supremacy over a federal law protecting the life of a pregnant mother if an abortion is deemed medically necessary to save her life.
In blogger Jessica Valenti’s framing, meanwhile, it sounds like the judges are channeling Atwood’s Gilead patriarchs:
How many more ways can they make it clear that they want us dead? And I mean that literally. As I wrote in 2022, it’s not just that Republican lawmakers and the anti-abortion movement see women dying as an unfortunate but acceptable consequence of making abortion illegal. To them, the most noble thing a pregnant woman can do is die so that a fetus can live….To them, women dying in pregnancy isn’t collateral damage—it’s just our job.
In Handmaid’s Tale, the women are supposed to be pleased that, in place of bodily autonomy, they are elevated upon pedestals. They get to be saintly martyrs, superior to brutish men. Offred reports how their trainer Aunt Lydia socializes them into this perspective:
A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get. We want you to be valued, girls. She is rich in pauses, which she savors in her mouth. Think of yourselves as pearls.
If women choose not to be saintly martyrs, they risk being arrested, and a few legislators in various states have started calling for the death penalty. It’s as though some are regarding Handmaid’s Tale, not as a warning, but as a wish fulfillment.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Thursday
I wore myself out hauling wood yesterday and don’t have the energy to write a post so I’m re-running one that appeared last year. All that has changed since I wrote it is that I was too optimistic about how long the wood would last. We are burning it at such a rapid clip that there is no danger of our woodpiles rotting away in oblivion, as described by Robert Frost. The good news is that we barely used our heat pump at all last winter and are avoiding it this year as well.
From February 20, 2022
Christmas has come early to the Bates household: we have just purchased a wood splitter, which feels like getting a giant new toy. As I watch the blade cut effortlessly through giant logs, literary references to woodcutting come to mind.
First of all, some background. My mother owns 18 heavily wooded acres surrounding her house by Lake Eva in the Southern Cumberlands. We are surrounded by tall oaks but, because of the shallow soil, sooner or later out red and black oaks hit rock, at which point they begin rotting from within. (The root systems of white oaks are able to work around the rock so they don’t have the same problem.) Then, come winter, the water that has entered the rot freezes, expanding and cracking the foundation. After that, it just takes a strong wind to topple the tree. As a result, just within 50 feet of our house, three red oaks, one hickory and one maple that have all gone down. In addition, a tree service had to take down two trees that threatened to fall on the house.
With all this free wood around, the question has been how to take advantage of it. I finally found someone who would cut the trees into chunks, and he in turn persuaded us to buy a log splitter (rather than rent one at $250 a shot). I rev up the machine whenever I want a break from writing.
A Robert Frost poem confirmed me in my decision not to add a chainsaw to the log splitter. You may know “Out, Out,” maybe his most horrifying poem. In it, a boy is sawing logs when the unimaginable happens:
His sister stood beside him in her apron To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw, As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap— He must have given the hand. However it was Neither refused the meeting. But the hand! The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh, As he swung toward them holding up the hand Half in appeal, but half as if to keep The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all— Since he was old enough to know, big boy Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart— He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off— The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’ So. But the hand was gone already.
Better to pay a skilled professional, I figured, than take that risk.
Another Frost poem has me wondering, however, if the wood I split and stack—being so plentiful—will end up like the abandoned woodpile, in the poet’s poem by that name. Frost comes across it quite by accident and figures it is at least three years old.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split And piled—and measured, four by four by eight. And not another like it could I see No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it. And it was older sure than this year’s cutting, Or even last year’s or the year’s before. The wood was gray and the bark warping off it And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. What held it though on one side was a tree Still growing, and on one a stake and prop, These latter about to fall. I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labor of his ax And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
So if I turn four fallen oaks into firewood with this wondrous log splitter, that could be enough wood to fuel our wood stove for ten years. But would it stay good for that long? [Update: The question has become moot because we sometimes go through an entire tree in a few weeks.]
One other literary image comes to mind as I add logs to our fire. I gave Julia a bellows for her birthday and suddenly we feel as though, without it, we’ve been making fires with one hand tied behind our backs. It also makes me think of Flute, who reluctantly plays the female lead in Pyramus and Thisbe in Midsummer Night’s Dream and who is a bellows mender. I’ve never thought of bellows needing mending—much less that there was a special profession dedicated to doing so—but now that we own one, I realize that they can wear out.
Anyway, here’s a fun poem about bellows, by one John Steele, which appeared in The Amethyst Review:
The Bellows
The bellows breath ignites a fire. Flames purge your nostrils, gut, and brain, rouse the serpent from its slumber, coiled up in your sacral cave.
Cross-legged, your head bowed to face your heart, breathe in to lift your chest up toward your chin. Exhale, inhale through your nose,
pump your gut to blast air out— in-out, in-out, in-out… Then with a sharp in-breath, suck your belly in and hold…
Work the bellows till the embers glow. Breath by breath, surrender to the flow.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Wednesday
Yesterday a junco killed itself by flying into one of our windows. An old Lucille Clifton poem came immediately to mind.
Apparently birds flying into windows is a serious problem. The Nature Bird Conservancy estimates that such collisions kill between 365 million and one billion birds annually in the United States alone. In reflected images of nature, birds see promises of food, shelter or escape routes—in other words, opportunity—which are then cruelly thwarted.
That’s the lesson that Clifton draws in her poem “for the bird who flew against our window one morning and broke his natural neck”:
my window is his wall. in a crash of birdpride he breaks the arrogance of my definitions and leaves me grounded in his suicide.
Clifton wrote her poem in 1972, six years before feminist Marilyn Loden first used the metaphor of “glass ceiling,” but it captures the same idea. One think one has limitless possibilities, only to get brought up short by prejudice. Clifton’s poem could describe any number of privileges (white privilege, male privilege, monied privilege). A window of opportunity for some can be a wall into which others crash.
The privilege that Clifton begins with is human privilege. After all, windows are our inventions and we use them for our benefit. As the Bird Conservancy article notes, most of the time “humans can use door frames and other visual clues to anticipate the presence of glass and avoid collisions.” Clifton is not an aggrieved party here.
But as one looks closer at the poem, one realizes Clifton is seeing her own situation as a Black woman in the bird’s tragedy. After all, what she describing is a human phenomenon, not an avian one. Birds are not proud or arrogant when they crash into windows, nor can their deaths be regarded as suicide. It’s as though Clifton uses the death to remind herself that when she confidently assumes that her talent will allow her to rise above her racist society, the bird reminds her that there are barriers, often invisible, that she will crash into. While she may initially have thought that she defines the parameters of her life, she now realizes that was her “birdpride” speaking. The bird’s death grounds her in the reality of her life.
The word “arrogance” puzzled me for a while, but I don’t wonder if she is concerned about looking down on others of her race and gender who haven’t succeeded as she has. I talked about this issue with Nikki Haley in yesterday’s post and it’s the case with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as well. When they attack affirmative action (Thomas) or claim that there’s no systemic racism is America (Haley), they use their own lives as proof. If they have made it, everyone should be able to.
I think that Clifton is using this poem to caution herself against such arrogance. She is not exempt from the dramas that beset her fellows, who too often stun themselves against the glass windows, or ceilings, of prejudice. Don’t think you’re better than they are, she reminds herself.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Tuesday
The recent dodge by Nikki Haley on what caused the Civil War—she didn’t want to say “slavery” for fear of offending Trump supporters—had a familiar ring to it. In 1963-64 in my seventh grade Tennessee History class, our teacher told us that the causes were states’ rights issues and economic differences, not slavery. While Fred Langford didn’t go so far as refer to the Civil War as “the War of Northern Aggression,” it was clear that he didn’t want to mention that southern plantation owners enslaved human beings. I don’t recall any mention of slaves the entire year or, for that matter, of Jim Crow laws.
So that’s where we are now with the GOP: even the supposedly moderate Haley, the establishment Republicans’ choice, feels the need to kowtow to white supremacists. What particularly bothers me is that this descendant of Sikh immigrants (her full name is Nimarata Nikki Randhawa) has thrown in her lot with a party that is demonizing people of color. I think of the white supremacist who, a year after 9-11, shot ten members of a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six of them. Does Haley really think she will placate such people by signaling that she doesn’t think that slavery was a big deal? Does she think that they will regard her as white like them? I think of the Association of German National Jews, which endorsed Hitler in his early days before they were rebuffed by the Nazis.
To be clear, I’d rather have Haley than Trump for president. She seems less likely to corrupt the Department of Justice, the military, and other institutions. Nor will she throw in with Putin, destroy NATO, or abandon Ukraine. But while she may not aspire to be Big Brother, as I noted in a blog post this past February she reminds me of another character in 1984. I reprint that post today:
Reprinted from February 16, 2023
Tuesday
“Kim” on Spoutify has just reminded me of a passage from 1984 that describes all too well many of today’s GOP apparatchiks, one of whom has just announced she will be running for president. In the words of Atlantic columnist and former Republican Tom Nichols, the video announcing the candidacy of South Carolina governor Nikki Haley
was as vapid and weightless a product as any in recent political memory. Of course, it checked all the right boxes: Family, devotion to public service, all the usual generic gloss, and all of it presented as if the past seven years had never happened.
Quoting fellow NeverTrumper and former GOP consultant Stuart Stevens, Nichols notes that, just days after the January 6 insurrection, “Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA.” And then a few months after that Haley said of Trump that “we need him in the Republican Party” and “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.” “She’ll never snatch the green jacket from the Master’s Open in Sucking Up from Lindsey Graham,” Nichols concludes, “but she’s certainly putting in the effort.”
The reason Nichols singles out Haley for special scorn is because, as a youthful and formerly moderate woman of color, she once seemed to offer the GOP a different path forward. But like so many of these figures—New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik also comes to mind—she has totally thrown in with Big Brother.
That’s what political cult worship does to one: it hollows out your principles (if you ever had any) and renders you stupid. That’s why comparing Haley to Winston Smith’s next door neighbor Tom Parsons is altogether apt. Both have drunk the Kool-Aid:
Parsons was Winston’s fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years.
The stability—or at least continuance—of Trumpism depends on the Haleys of the world. Like Nichols and Stevens, I don’t believe anything less than continued electoral defeats will bring the GOP back to its senses. Or as Nichols puts it, “no person or party should ever get a second chance to betray the Constitution.”
Further thought: Contrasting Haley’s Tom Parsons to Trump’s Big Brother brings to mind T. S. Eliot’s contempt for authoritarian wannabes in “The Hollow Men.” Better to be a lost violent soul, he says, than a hollow men:
Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us-if at all-not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.
By opening his poem with an epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness–“Mistah Kurtz–he dead”–Eliot is telling us that he’d choose a villainous brute like Kurtz over a wishy-washy scarecrow. While I myself will take a scarecrow any day and find Eliot’s preference for an authoritarian leader problematic (and similarly problematic the celebration of Kurtz by Marlow, Conrad’s narrator in Heart of Darkness), the poem does a good job of depicting figures like Haley. She blows as the wind blows:
We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar
And yet a further thought: T.S. Eliot’s contempt for such people also shows up “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.
As she refuses to criticize Donald Trump in her campaign, Haley appears to be opting for the “attendant lord” role. Which is to say Polonius to Hamlet. Or Tom Parson to Trump’s Big Brother.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Monday – New Year’s Day
Here’s a fun poem by Philip Appleman, reminding us to remember all those who, often invisibly, improve the quality of our lives. A good New Year’s resolution is to respect and honor our fellow human beings, including those that work in the shadows.
After all, at this time of renewal as many celebrate Christianity’s apocalyptic promise, Appleman tells us in his concluding punchline that these unseen workers represent “the second coming.”
To the Garbage Collectors in Bloomington, Indiana, the First Pickup of the New Year By Philip Appleman
(the way bed is in winter, like an aproned lap, like furry mittens, like childhood crouching under tables) The Ninth Day of Xmas, in the morning black outside our window: clattering cans, the whir of a hopper, shouts, a whistle, move on … I see them in my warm imagination the way I’ll see them later in the cold, heaving the huge cans and running (running!) to the next house on the street.
My vestiges of muscle stir uneasily in their percale cocoon: what moves those men out there, what drives them running to the next house and the next? Halfway back to dream, I speculate: The Social Weal? “Let’s make good old Bloomington a cleaner place to live in—right, men? Hup, tha!” Healthy Competition? “Come on, boys, let’s burn up that route today and beat those dudes on truck thirteen!” Enlightened Self-Interest? “Another can, another dollar—don’t slow down, Mac, I’m puttin’ three kids through Princeton?” Or something else? Terror?
A half hour later, dawn comes edging over Clark Street: layers of color, laid out like a flattened rainbow—red, then yellow, green, and over that the black-and-blue of night still hanging on. Clark Street maples wave their silhouettes against the red, and through the twiggy trees, I see a solid chunk of garbage truck, and stick-figures of men, like windup toys, tossing little cans— and running.
All day they’ll go like that, till dark again, and all day, people fussing at their desks, at hot stoves, at machines, will jettison tin cans, bare evergreens, damp Kleenex, all things that are Caesar’s.
O garbage men, the New Year greets you like the Old; after this first run you too may rest in beds like great warm aproned laps and know that people everywhere have faith: putting from them all things of this world, they confidently bide your second coming.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Sunday
On this New Year’s Eve I post a Kenneth Patchen poem that appears to be a prayer addressed to God the Father. But before you conjure up images of an old man with a gray beard, know that Patchen once wrote that“only an unbeliever could have created our image of God: and only a fake God could be satisfied with it.” We can never wrap our minds around God, even though we attempt to do so through anthropomorphizing.
“At the New Year,” which I’ll share in a moment, is not the only poem where Patchen associates God with the purity of snow. In “The Snow Is Deep on the Ground,” the poet assures us that “God shall not forget us./ Who made the snow waits where love is.” Seeming to echo The Song of Solomon only with snow instead of vineyards and apple trees, Patchen associates the whiteness of the snow with his beloved. Sewanee experienced a lovely dusting of snow last night, so I have a fresh sense of why a poet would link this whiteness to the woman he loves. Here’s the poem:
The Snow Is Deep on the Ground By Kenneth Patchen
The snow is deep on the ground. Always the light falls Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
This is a good world. The war has failed. God shall not forget us. Who made the snow waits where love is.
Only a few go mad. The sky moves in its whiteness Like the withered hand of an old king. God shall not forget us. Who made the sky knows of our love.
The snow is beautiful on the ground. And always the lights of heaven glow Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
Now to Patchen’s New Year’s poem, which also takes place on a snowy night. Looking out at the world, Patchen sees the bad along with the good. At the same time that he is gazing into the “deep throw of stars,” he is also seeing the horrors of war, with the dead lying in the World War I trenches.
When the poem starts out, we don’t expect this dark turn. Indeed, it seems more of an “Oh, holy night” type of poem. Then, however, it moves into a balancing act where “all that has been said bravely” is countered by “all that is mean anywhere in the world,” and where “all that is good and lovely” is followed by “every house where sham and hatred are.” The poet will not pretend that the world is other than what it is.
And yet he imagines a “clean moment” on New Year’s Eve when we await the ringing of bells that we pray will usher us into new possibilities and new hope. “Before this clean moment has gone,” he writes to the Father, “before this night turns to face tomorrow…there is this high singing in the air.”
The singing reminds me of the voices that the desperate speaker strives to hear and longs for in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the wind’s singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star.
For Patchen, this “little point in time” before the New Year bells brings out our best. Although he knows only too well that the bells will just take us into the same world we have left—“the sorrowful human face in eternity’s window”—he knows that he is sensing the numinous as he imagines “other bells that we would ring.” These inner bells, like the high singing, are our connection with “our Father, who art in heaven.”
In “the deep throw of stars,” in “the wide land waiting,” in “all that has been said bravely,” in “all that is good and lovely,” these are the “other bells that we would ring, Father.”
At the New Year By Kenneth Patchen
In the shape of this night, in the still fall of snow, Father In all that is cold and tiny, these little birds and children In everything that moves tonight, the trolleys and the lovers, Father In the great hush of country, in the ugly noise of our cities In this deep throw of stars, in those trenches where the dead are, Father In all the wide land waiting, and in the liners out on the black water In all that has been said bravely, in all that is mean anywhere in the world, Father In all that is good and lovely, in every house where sham and hatred are In the name of those who wait, in the sound of angry voices, Father Before the bells ring, before this little point in time has rushed us on Before this clean moment has gone, before this night turns to face tomorrow, Father There is this high singing in the air Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity’s window And there are other bells that we would ring, Father Other bells that we would ring.
In Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” which has been my New Year’s poem for the past two years, the poet imperiously instructs the bells to “ring out the darkness of the land,/ Ring in the Christ that is to be.” In Raymond MacDonald Alden’s “Why the Chimes Rang,” my favorite Christmas story, the chimes are quieter. “So far away, and yet so clear the music seemed,” he writes, “—so much sweeter were the notes than anything that had been heard before, rising and falling.” Patchen’s bells are even more distant–imagined rather than actual–but no less powerful for all that.
We all of us have those chimes within us. I pray to the God that (in the words of Julian of Norwich) made, loves and keeps us to help me hear them.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Friday
As this is my last weekday post of the year, I went rummaging through past 2023 essays and came across one was particularly heartfelt. While I had many sublime reading experiences this past year—Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water, Min Yin Lee’s Pachinko, Richard Powers’s Overstory, Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, George MacDonald’s Sir Gibbie, the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh and multiple novels by William Faulkner (Light in August, Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!) and Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton, North and South, Wives and Daughters)—none had the emotional impact of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. As I read her novel about Shakespeare using his famous play to process the grief over losing his son Hamnet, I remembered how I had turned to literature after my eldest son died 23 years ago.
This was before I learned, as I did later in the year from Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, that Hamlet may be above all a play about grieving—and that, through it, Shakespeare taught us a new and more powerful way to grieve than had existed previously. When I reached the end of Hamnet, I cried for Justin for the first time in over two decades. As you will see, I was profoundly moved by a book that reaffirmed how I had used art to work through my own sorrow.
Reprinted from March 6, 2023
I have just been emotionally blindsided by a powerful Maggie O’Farrell novel about Shakespeare’s wife and children. Hamnet (2020) is a fictional account of the bard’s marriage to Anne (Agnes) Hathaway and how the two processed the death of Hamnet, their one son. (According to Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt, “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” are in fact the same name.)
While some speculate that the marriage was troubled, that is not how O’Farrell sees it. Or at least, it is not troubled until Hamnet dies, at which point Shakespeare starts avoiding the family and burying himself in the theater. Feeling abandoned, Anne journeys to London when she hears (not from her husband) that he has written a play bearing their son’s name.
It is when she is responding to the play that Hamnet hit me with its hammer blow. Of course, the novel had to set me up for the final scene. As I read about Hamnet’s death and the family’s mourning, I thought of my own Justin, who drowned 23 years ago and who would have turned 44 this coming Sunday. Justin wasn’t uppermost in my mind as I was reading, but when I reached the end of the novel—where we see Anne/Agnes at the lip of the stage reaching out to the figures of Hamlet and the ghost of his father (played by Shakespeare)—something in me broke. I, who haven’t cried for Justin in over 20 years, was wracked by loud sobs that I couldn’t stop. Here’s the passage—the novel’s final paragraphs—that unleashed pent-up emotions I didn’t know were there:
For now, she is right at the front of the crowd, at the edge of the stage; she is gripping its wooden lip in both hands. An arm’s length away, perhaps two, is Hamlet, her Hamlet, as he might have been, had he lived, and the ghost, who has her husband’s hands, her husband’s beard, who speaks in her husband’s voice.She stretches out a hand, as if to acknowledge them, as if to feel the air between the three of them, as if wishing to pierce the boundary between audience and players, between real life and play.The ghost turns his head towards her, as he prepares to exit the scene. He is looking straight at her, meeting her gaze, as he speaks his final words:
“Remember me.”
Up until the moment when the young Hamlet appears on stage, Agnes has been furious with her husband. The rest of the audience may be gripped with the early presence of the ghost on the ramparts, but Agnes cannot understand why Shakespeare would have their son’s name emerge from “the mouths of people she has never known and will never know.” Why pretend, she asks, that their son’s name
means nothing to him, just a collection of letters? How could he thieve this name, then strip and flense it of all it embodies, discarding the very life it once contained? How could he take up his pen and write it on a page, breaking its connection with their son? It makes no sense. It pierces her heart, it eviscerates her, it threatens to sever her from herself, from him, from everything they had, everything they were.
And:
She had thought that coming here, watching this, might give her a glimpse into her husband’s heart. It might have offered her a way back to him. She thought the name on the playbill might have been a means for him to communicate something to her. A sign, of sorts, a signal, an outstretched hand, a summons. As she rode to London, she had thought that perhaps now she might understand his distance, his silence, since their son’s death. She has the sense now that there is nothing in her husband’s heart to understand. It is filled only with this: a wooden stage, declaiming players, memorized speeches, adoring crowds, costumed fools. She has been chasing a phantasm, a will-o’-the-wisp, all this time.
Then, however, the magic of the theatre takes over, which is all the more intense in her case because she recognizes, in the boy playing Hamlet, her own son. Shakespeare has coached the actor to be Hamnet had he grown into a man:
He has found this boy, instructed him, shown him how to speak, how to stand, how to lift his chin, like this, like that. He has rehearsed and primed and prepared him.
As fiction becomes more real than reality itself, Agnes realizes what her husband has done:
Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own.; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. “O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!” murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.
The novel affected me not only because, through it, I relived the death of our son. After all, I have encountered other such dramas in the intervening years that, while moving, have not struck this deep. No, I think what O’Farrell has done is show how, in a great work of art, we are able, momentarily, to penetrate the boundary that separates us from the dead. Agnes sees—imagines she sees— her child on the stage and experiences “an old, familiar urge, like water gushing into a dry streambed. She wants to lay hands on that boy; she wants to fold him in her arms, comfort and console him—and she has to, if it is the last thing she does.”
Of course, art, no matter how great, can’t bring the dead back to life. But think about it this way: those we have lost were never entirely material to begin with. They were the emotions they aroused in us, the anxieties they put us through, the love we felt for them. They are also integrally intertwined with the people we have become. What Hamlet does for Agnes is bring back all of that. She sees, in one of the most three-dimensional characters ever penned, everything but the actual flesh and blood of her beloved son. And that flesh and blood were never the most important part of him anyway.
I realized, in reading Hamnet, that the way I turn to literature to process my life—including the death of my son—is more than a shallow consolation or a wish fulfillment or a cerebral exercise. I already knew, of course—but here was an author confirming it—that literature puts us closer to life’s essence than any other use of language. Watching Agnes watching Hamlet, I saw myself reading the literature I turned to after Justin died: Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Mary Oliver’s “The Lost Children” and Percy Shelley’s Adonais and Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. These works, I realized, connected me to parts of myself that Justin had touched—which is to say, ways in which Justin was still alive. The sorrow I felt while reading Hamnet, which took me back to my own mourning period, was intermixed with a deep joy and maybe even relief: these fictional re-creations to which I have devoted my life, I was assured, are not in vain.
Julia the other day asked me why I thought she is so drawn to certain fantasy works (especially Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown) that she returns to time and again. I said that the works we love have articulated deep soul longings and that we reread to get back in touch. Sometimes an old work still functions as a conduit and sometimes we discover we have grown past it and need to turn elsewhere. In any event, when she saw me crying and saw the book that was lying by my side (she’s the one who alerted me to it), she knew what had happened and she held me, just as she held me almost 23 years ago when we mourned our son together.
And in that action, I see another passage in Hamnet. Right before the end the author tells us that, after the play, Agnes will find her husband, “his face still streaked with traces of paste,” and they will stand together in “the open circle of the playhouse” until it is “as empty as the sky above it.” Perhaps they will think together, “Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” Because art has opened hearts that were in danger of shriveling, their relationship too will grow, in spite of—or even because of—the stresses that have been put on it. The Globe Theater opens them up to a vision that is as wide as the sky.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Thursday
In this Christmas season, why are Republicans behaving like they are villains in a Charles Dickens novel? First, there was Iowa governor Kim Reynolds rejecting a federal summer program to feed underprivileged kids because she was worried that children would become too fat. Then Republican legislators in North Dakota rejected universal free school lunches on the grounds of cost, even while boosting their own meal allotment.
Their defensive rationales are what most remind me of Dickens since his comic satire shines most brilliantly when he’s having his villains defend their behavior. Check out how the trustees in Oliver Twist’s workhouse explain their food policies:
The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered—the poor people liked it! It was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all the year round; a brick and mortar elysium, where it was all play and no work. “Oho!” said the board, looking very knowing; “we are the fellows to set this to rights; we’ll stop it all, in no time.” So, they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the waterworks to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll of Sundays.
Compare this reasoning to that of Iowa governor Reynolds:
“Federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families,” Reynolds said in a release. “An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”
In other words—if Iowa accepted federal funds, we’d have to keep feeding kids when the funds run out and furthermore kids don’t need the aid since they’re already eating badly.
And now check out a North Dakota legislator, courtesy of the Grand Forks Herald:
“Yes I can understand kids going hungry, but is that really the problem of the school district, is that the problem of the state of North Dakota? It’s really the problem of parents being negligent with their kids,” Senator Mike Wobbema said during the March 27 vote. Wobbema was one of the senators who voted in favor of boosting reimbursements for state workers like himself.
So it’s not the state’s problem. It’s the kids’ fault that their parents are negligent. One imagines Wobbema swelling up with indignation, just like Dickens’s workhouse beagle when Oliver asks for more gruel:
“Please, sir, I want some more.”The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralyzed with wonder; the boys with fear.
“What!” said the master at length, in a faint voice.
“Please, sir,” replied Oliver, “I want some more.”
The master aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arm; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.
The board were sitting in solemn conclave, when Mr. Bumble rushed into the room in great excitement, and addressing the gentleman in the high chair, said,
“Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for more!”
There was a general start. Horror was depicted on every countenance.
“For more!” said Mr. Limbkins. “Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?”“He did, sir,” replied Bumble.
“That boy will be hung,” said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. “I know that boy will be hung.”
So our Republicans, who are obsessed with cutting taxes on the wealthy, think they can find offsets by stiffing the poor. Dickens describes the potential savings:
For the first six months after Oliver Twist was removed, the system was in full operation. It was rather expensive at first, in consequence of the increase in the undertaker’s bill, and the necessity of taking in the clothes of all the paupers, which fluttered loosely on their wasted, shrunken forms, after a week or two’s gruel. But the number of workhouse inmates got thin as well as the paupers; and the board were in ecstasies.
Incidentally, I wondered what effect Dickens’s satire had on the poor laws of the time. I found the following from a google search:
While there is no direct link between Dickens’ work and the abolishment of the Poor Laws, his works sparked debate and changed the way people viewed what was going on in England at the time. Dickens’ vivid stories that captured the attention of the country gave faces and names to the tragedy that was the Poor Laws and showed a view into the lives of the poor. As people grew attached to Oliver and felt for his situation, many began to change their views on how the poor should be treated and the current modus operandi of ‘helping’ them.
One wonders whether even Dickens could shame our own legislators.
