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Tuesday
I recently stumbled across this Laura Gilpin poem and felt compelled to share it today. In many cultures, honoring one’s departed forebears is a bigger deal than it is in the United States. This poem helps us understand the deep wisdom underlying ancestor worship.
Life After Death By Laura Gilpin
These things I know: How the living go on living and how the dead go on living with them so that in a forest even a dead tree casts a shadow and the leaves fall one by one and the branches break in the wind and the bark peels off slowly and the trunk cracks and the rain seeps in through the cracks and the trunk falls to the ground and the moss covers it and in the spring the rabbits find it and build their nest inside the dead tree so that nothing is wasted in nature or in love.
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Monday
An Alabama judge ruling that frozen IVF embryos are children is causing acute distress amongst certain Republicans. Those politicians who contend that a fertilized egg should have the same rights as people must now explain to angry constituents why it’s okay to destroy extra embryos. Or for that matter, to engage in a process that will invariably result in the “deaths” of many of these children.
I thought of the Alabama case recently when I was sitting on a dissertation proposal committee. A Bosnian student at the University of Ljubljana wishes to write a dissertation about biopunk fiction and (since we approved her proposal) will be writing on works that grapple with some of the issues raised by the Alabama case. In her proposal Majda noted that, since biotechnology has had such a profound impact upon our lives, biopunk has arisen to mirror and explore the new developments.
Majda says that Biopunk, which emerged during the 1990s,
deals with biotechnology, depicting a futuristic society that misuses biotechnology to gain power and exert control. Biopunk’s futuristic setting discusses genetic engineering and enhancement and shows the consequences of unchecked powers of biotechnology.The definition of what constitutes biopunk is taken further by [German literature professor Lars] Schmeink, who terms it as, “a creative exploration not only of the technoscientific possibilities of further progress in genetics, but also of the environmental and social consequences.”
The biopunk novels that Majda will focus on are Greg Bear’s Blood Music, Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.
To be sure, biopunk has been around (although not with that label) since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and even earlier. Indeed the golem figure of Jewish folklore, a creature created from inanimate clay or mud that would rise up and protect the Jewish people, goes back to the Middle Ages. But the acceleration of biotechnology in our own time has increased anxieties about what is human and what is not. Horror fiction often has this anxiety at its core.
To be sure, people often pick and choose which instances of biotechnology they wish to attack and which to let slide. Since many wealthy Republicans have given birth thanks to IVF, Republican politicians are rushing to defend that. Whereas when medical technology determines that a fetus threatens the life of a woman, multiple states are determining that she should just let nature take its course.
Certain people think nature should also take its course with regard to Covid—or they think it should until they actually contract the disease. Anti-vaxxers rail against vaccines although one wonders whether they would be quite so vociferous if their children started contracting measles, polio, smallpox, etc. As it is, they function as free riders on the herd immunity that arises when everyone around them is vaccinated.
But set all that aside for a moment. The best biopunk doesn’t offer facile plots but explores how definitions of “the human” keep changing. Our biological selves are now so bound up with scientific and technological advances that at times it is impossible to separate the two. Majda’s project will extend our understanding of what perceptive authors make of this situation.
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Sunday
I report again today on John Gatta’s Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology, which is the subject of our Lenten study this year. As I’ve been noting, Gatta believes that Christian faith applies to all creation, not only humans. If this is true, then nature experiences some version of sin and salvation. At one point in his second chapter, Gatta writes,
St. Paul affirms that the rest of creation, too, shares in humanity’s wounded condition. Suffering from a certain incompleteness and “bondage to decay,” the whole creation in his view has been “groaning in labor pains,” waiting “in eager longing” for a redemptive liberation to be achieved in and through Christ (Romans 8:19, 21–22).
John acknowledges that it’s difficult to envision such fallenness, as well as what redemption might look like. “We realize, of course, that nonhumans suffer many ills—including, on the part of sensate animals, physical pain, loss, dislocation, terror, and death—even if they are not capable of sin,” he writes, adding,
We may even dream of a transformed biological order, free of predatory violence, that resembles the “Peaceable Kingdom” prophesied by Isaiah (11:1–9) and often represented pictorially by Quaker artist Edward Hicks.
I note in passing that John Milton, in Paradise Lost, sees creation suffering a fall along with Adam and Eve. Whereas the weather in Eden has been temperate and all the animals vegetarians, Milton says the humans tasting the forbidden fruit changes all that. Suddenly we have seasons:
The sun Had first [God’s] precept so to move, so shine, As might affect the earth with cold and heatScarce tolerable; and from the north to call Decrepit winter; from the south to bring Solstitial summer’s heat.
Beast now with beast ‘gan war, and fowl with fowl, And fish with fish; to graze the herb all leaving, Devoured each other; nor stood much in awe Of Man, but fled him; or, with countenance grim, Glared on him passing.
Of course, Milton believes that nature’s fall from perfection is all due to humanity. And while it is true that humans have had a disproportionate impact on the world, Gatta’s vision of creation goes beyond humans. Because it does, he must acknowledge the limits of his vision:
What God’s redemption of all creation might ultimately look like, …I cannot pretend to know. I know only that a Christian faith worthy of the name must presume that God somehow wills to bring to fulfillment not human beings alone but everything God had ever created, sustained, and esteemed as “very good.”
Gatta then points to the “larger life mystery of symbiotic processes reflected in nature”:
We know that through the course of earth’s biological cycles death, dissolution, and decay are perforce conjoined with the emergence of new life. Poet Walt Whitman helps us remember that dead bodies make for “good manure.” Vedic teaching likewise recognizes the interwoven texture of death and life, affirming that Lord Brahma, as creator, must be seen as more nearly partner than adversary of Lord Shiva, the destroyer.
Along these lines, Gatta cites one of Wendell Berry’s sabbath poems, noting that it is informed by St. Paul’s reflections on creation and that it “beautifully captures this cyclic dynamic rooted in a transformational falling and rising”:
What stood will stand, though all be fallen, The good return that time has stolen. Though creatures groan in misery, Their flesh prefigures liberty To end travail and bring to birth Their new perfection in new earth. . . . What stood, whole in every piecemeal Thing that stood, will stand though all Fall—field and woods and all in them Rejoin the primal Sabbath’s hymn.
God is what stands “whole in every piecemeal thing that stood,” the underlying creative force. “Fall” invokes the original fall, which is countered by all of nature rejoining “the primal Sabbath’s hymn.”
While Gatta doesn’t want to privilege humankind over the rest of creation, he also doesn’t want to downplay the significance of humankind in nature’s journey. There are environmentalists who essentially see humans as creation’s original sin, messing up an otherwise perfect nature. I pick up some of this sentiment in Sarah Teasdale’s post-World War I poem “Then Will Come Soft Rain,” which dreams of a world in which humans have eradicated themselves:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Teasdale seems to regard humans as an unfortunate desecration of nature’s innocence. But humans have also produced beautiful poems like Teasdale’s. Through the human mind, nature comes to know itself, and while that can have bad effects, it can also have good ones. In other words, by evolving to include humans, nature is changing in remarkable ways, and who knows what the future holds? Why long for a blissful pre-human past when the future could be (emphasis on “could” as there are no guarantees) even more exciting? As Gatta puts it,
For Christians, the doctrine of a “fortunate fall,” or felix culpa, derives from recognition that through the saving deed of Christ’s death and resurrection, humankind’s moral standing or nature has been marvelously elevated to a level even above that presumed in its pre-lapsarian state.
In the final stanzas of Paradise Lost, the archangel Michael promises Adam,
for then the Earth Shall all be Paradise, far happier place Than this of Eden, and far happier days.
To which Adam responds,
O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good; more wonderful Than that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness!
A new creation surpassing the original creation, in other words.
Marcantonio Raimondi, Alexander the Great commanding that the work of Homer be placed in the tomb of Achilles (ca 1500-34)
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Friday
The recent New Yorker has a wide-ranging (sometimes too wide-ranging) article on “the fate—and the power—of books in wartime.” Claudia Roth Pierpont shares fascinating anecdotes about literature attempting to come to our aid when things are at their grimmest. It also has given me insight into my father, who was a soldier in World War II.
Pierpont recounts how “Armed Services Editions” were printed and sent to soldiers during the war. In 1942 President Roosevelt declared, “In this war, we know books are weapons.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Office of War Information “issued a poster that framed a photograph of a book burning with the words “THE NAZIS BURNED THESE BOOKS…but free Americans CAN STILL READ THEM.” THEN IT SENT MILLIONS OF BOOKS.” Then, in 1943, millions of books were sent overseas:
These editions were small in format and printed on lightweight paper, designed so that they could fit in a serviceman’s pocket and withstand some half a dozen readings, as soldiers passed them on. (There is an entire book about this series, Molly Guptill Manning’s When Books Went to War.) Thirty titles were sent out to start, fifty thousand copies of each. Hundreds of works were eventually added, and the number of copies tripled: fiction, classics, biographies, humor, history, mystery, science, plays, poetry. Bundles of books were flown to the Anzio beachhead, in Italy, dropped by parachute on remote Pacific islands, and stockpiled in warehouses in the spring of 1944, so that they could be shipped to the staging grounds for D Day.
It may have been one of these books—For Whom the Bell Tolls –that made it to my father. It was June of 1944 and he was on night duty in, I believe, Coventry. To pass the time, he was reading Ernest Hemingway’s novel, which Pierpont says became a British bestseller as the war progressed. At first, all was quiet—a night like any other—only suddenly my father heard a loud noise and, looking up, saw that the entire sky will filled with planes. It was the day before D-Day and they were off to bomb German positions in France in preparation for the Normandy landing.
My father would be in France less than a month later, posted as translator for an American unit in charge of the city of Avranches in Normandy. He would then spend time on to the outskirts of Paris before finally ending up in Munich. During that trek across Europe, he carried with him Untermeyer’s famous anthology, Modern American and British Poetry.
I can imagine him reading the World War I poets (whom he would one day introduce to me) like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg. He was also drawn to the poetry of Robert Graves, who like these others spent time in the World War I trenches but who wrote a very different kind of poetry. As I wrote in a past post,
I went back and looked at the Grave poems my father read and can see what he would have found in them. Unlike, say, Owen, who unleashes his fury at the absurdity of war, Graves looks for ways to protect his inner imagination. For instance, in “A Pinch of Salt” he advises his reader to “mask your hunger,” which sounds as though he’s recommending the outward fatalism that my father adopted throughout the war to protect his inner sensitivity. If one doesn’t mask, one risks emotional devastation.
Back to Pierpont’s article. Apparently the Nazis, in their plans to invade England, had a “Special Wanted List” of British subject and foreign residents they planned to arrest. On this list were a number of authors, including writers E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, Noël Coward, and Virginia Woolf. For their part, the Americans sent over (among other works) a novel by Woolf (The Years), Oliver Twist, Grapes of Wrath, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (one of the most popular), Zane Grey westerns, and Ogden Nash poetry.
Pierpont doesn’t limit herself to World War II. Looking back at the Civil War, she mentions Uncle Tom’s Cabin, although she underestimates the role that it played. While she’s probably correct that it didn’t turn everyone into abolitionists—more people fought to preserve the union than to end slavery—historiaan David S. Reynolds makes a compelling case that the novel made civil war more likely and that it influenced the war’s subsequent progress.
In Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, Reynolds says that the novel rejuvenated and united the abolitionist movement, which until its publication had been scattered and on the defense. He also believes it enhanced the chances of an anti-slavery candidate winning the presidency, even while at the same time it hardened southern attitudes. Both developments were key factors in the outbreak of hostilities. Furthermore, he believes Uncle Tom’s Cabin undermined British sympathy for the southern cause so that, despite Britain’s reliance on southern cotton, it did not intervene on the South’s behalf. The power of the work was such, Reynolds adds, that it probably strengthened Lincoln’s resolve when it came to signing the Emancipation Proclamation, which earlier he had avoided so as not to offend slave states that remained within the union (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri).
Tracking back to earlier wars, Pierpont talks about the importance of The Iliad in ancient times. Apparently people would choose to be buried with passages from Homer’s poem, “as though it were a sacred text.” Warriors would have responded to Homer’s lesson that even those favored by the gods will not be saved and that “man is born to die, long destined for it”:
The story runs thick with the blood of heroes, with the pain and defilement of their wounded bodies, which is presumably why the Iliad, unlike the Odyssey, was not among the books sent to American servicemen. Still, the Iliad has inspired soldiers from antiquity onward. Alexander the Great is said to have always kept it near him, and to have seen himself as a new Achilles, as he conquered lands from Egypt to India.
I note in passing that, whereas Alexander could have made a compelling case for himself as a new Achilles, Mussolini was less convincing when he declared himself to be a new Aeneas, destined to conquer Ethiopia and Slovenia.
Pierpont offers another couple of interesting anecdotes, even at the risk of making her article disjointed. Apparently the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in one of Stalin’s corrective labor camps, used to tell his wife Nadezhda not to complain about their tribulations under the dictator: “Poetry is respected only in this country—people are killed for it.”
Pierpont notes that Nadezhda too had a great faith (perhaps too great faith) in the power of literature:
Immediately after Osip’s death, she tells us, she spent several weeks with a friend who had just been released from a camp, and the friend’s mother, whose husband had been shot. Reading Shakespeare together, the three women paused over young Arthur in King John, whose death is ordered by his scheming uncle but whose innocence softens the heart of his executioner, who can’t bear to carry out the crime. What Nadezhda cannot understand, she tells her friend, is how the English, who must have read about young Arthur, had not stopped killing their fellow-men forever. The friend replies, with clear intent to comfort, that for a long time Shakespeare had not been read or staged, and that people kept slaughtering one another because they had not seen the play. The notion of literature’s power is left intact. The explanation allows for the possibility, at least, that the play will have an effect someday. But Nadezhda is not comforted. “At nights I wept at the thought that executioners never read what might soften their hearts,” she writes. “It still makes me weep.”
Nadezhda’s belief that literature can soften the hearts of evildoers is similar to an idea put forth in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesie. Because tragedy “openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue,” Sidney reasoned it would deter kings from becoming tyrants. This is one of the more dubious of Sidney’s contentions, unfortunately. Piermont notes that Stalin, “in his youth, published romantic poems in a Georgian journal and never stopped caring about poetry.” He also was quite the reader and owned some 25,000 books. Hitler, Pierpont adds, owned about 16,000 books, including a hand-tooled leather set of Shakespeare, translated into German.
Although literature can do much good, we can’t expect it to accomplish miracles. Sidney himself said that poetry, in the hands of a bad man, can be corrupted, just as physic can be used both to cure and to poison and swords to aid to heroes and traitors. But acknowledging literature’s limitations, however, should not blind us to its positive effects.
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Thursday
Like many who grew up during the civil rights movement, I am appalled at the way the GOP’s one Black senator smiles in the face of Donald Trump’s periodic humiliation of him. It feels like a flashback to that earlier time and brings to mind various poems about the Uncle Tom stereotype. More on those in a moment.
To be sure, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of our foremost experts on authoritarianism, has one thing to say on Trump’s behalf. He is an equal opportunity bully, just as likely to humiliate his White allies as his Black ones:
Trump has used ritual humiliation to make the GOP his personal tool, and the list of Republicans he has mocked publicly is long. In classic autocratic tradition, the more submissive Republican elites are with Trump — supporting him through impeachments, indictments and a coup attempt that sent them running for their lives — the more he openly scorns them, losing few opportunities to cut them down.
Ritual humiliation, Ben-Ghiat notes, is characteristic of authoritarian leaders:
Authoritarian politicians are fragile and insecure creatures, always looking over their shoulders to see who is after them. To build themselves up and deter potential challengers, they take others down in public, letting them know exactly where they stand. They apply this same vicious treatment even to their most loyal collaborators, so that no one ever feels safe and thus everyone continues to act in a slavish manner.
Ben-Ghiat observes that, throughout history, there has been an unending supply “of opportunists and profiteers who are all too willing to play this game, even to the detriment of their dignity.” In her article, she notes that Trump has been particularly keen to enact humiliation on South Carolina’s two Republican senators, the Black Scott and the White Lindsey Graham.
One note on Graham before returning to Scott. For all Graham’s groveling, it appears that, deep down, he is troubled by how he has sold his soul. Trump, sensitive to the slightest sign of disloyalty, knows this. Because there are occasional signs that Graham’s conscience is bothering him, Ben-Ghiat writes,
he will likely continue to be a target of Trump’s scorn. Trump knows that ritual humiliation breaks down the morale of his enablers, who try so hard to please him but never receive absolute validation and at any moment can be taken down again.
But back to Scott, who was publicly humiliated by Trump on the night he won the New Hampshire primary. “I just love you,” Scott said after Trump baited him (“You must really hate her”). But Scott doesn’t need direct prodding from Trump to grovel. Ben-Ghiat reports that
Scott has been performing self-abasement spontaneously, likely to Trump’s delight. “I’m far better encouraging and being excited and motivated for President Trump than I was for myself,” Scott said after voting in the South Carolina primary. And at the post-primary rally, he assured the audience that he would keep his speech short because “the longer I speak, the less you hear of him.”
Trump is infamous for believing that African Americans should “know their place.” There were his racist housing policies and his persecution of “the Central Park Five” (even after DNA proved them innocent of the rape with which they were charged) and his birther charges against Barack Obama. What is discouraging is that 60 years after the Civil Rights Act, a Black man would still behave this way. Which brings us to Langston Hughes and Lucille Clifton.
Hughes is repulsed by Blacks who play Uncle Tom, although he at least blames Whites for some of it:
Uncle Tom By Langston Hughes
Within— The beaten pride. Without— The grinning face, The low, obsequious, Double bow, The sly and servile grace Of one the white folks Long ago Taught well To know his Place.
Clifton, writing in the militant sixties, is less kind:
robert By Lucille Clifton
was born obedient without questions
did a dance called picking grapes sticking his butt out for pennies
married a master who whipped his mind until he died
until he died the color of his life was nigger
It’s worth noting that, in a poem written four years later (“All of Us Are All of Us”), she has evolved to a kinder stance, choosing not to make a hard separation between, on the one hand, Malcolm, Martin, and various Black activists and slave revolutionaries and, on the other,
Stepen Fetchit Amos and Andy Sapphire and Uncle Tom
In the poem, it’s as though she’s saying (to quote an old Joan Baez song), “Be not too hard for life is short, and nothing is given to man.” Or put another way, we’re all in this together. Here’s the poem:
All of Us Are All of Us By Lucille Clifton
Malcolm and Martin George little Emmett Billie of the flower the flower Bessie all of us are all of us Nat Gabriel Denmark Patrice and Kwame Marcus black Hampton all of us are all of us Stepen Fetchit Amos and Andy Sapphire and Uncle Tom all of us are all of us Orangeburg Jackson Birmingham here my Mama your Daddy my Daddy your Mama oh all of us are all of us and this is a poem about Love
So can we love Tim Scott, with his “grinning face” and his version (when in the presence of Trump) of “the low, obsequious, double bow”? I suspect Clifton would say that even love may have its limits. Maybe the answer lies in the degree to which Scott is willing to enable fascism.
Additional note: The Uncle Tom stereotype, while originating with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is based on the character as he appeared in the “Tom shows,” theatrical versions of the novel in which white actors in blackface offered up degrading caricatures of African Americans. The original Tom is a man of dignity and a Christ figure who is willing to die to protect his fellow slaves. While some, including James Baldwin, still critiqued the novel, Frederick Douglass saw Stowe as an important ally while Hughes saw the book as “a moral battle cry” as well as “a good story, exciting in incident, sharp in characterization, and threaded with humor.”
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Wednesday
David Corn of Mother Jones has announced a new series of short videos on the very real danger of a fascist takeover of the United States. In a reference to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, Corn has entitled the series It Can Happen Here.
Of course, Lewis too believed that it could happen here, with his title designed to jolt American moderates, liberals and leftists out of any complacency. As Corn explains in the blog post announcing the series, Lewis’s novel
was a reaction to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe and the spread of demagogic populism in the United States by Huey Long, the strongman governor of Louisiana, and Father Charles Coughlin, the wildly popular antisemitic radio preacher. In Lewis’ alternative universe, a politician named Buzz Windrip, who champions “traditional” values and who promises to restore America to greatness, defeats FDR in the presidential election of 1936 and then through a self-coup seizes dictatorial powers. He establishes a paramilitary force to do his bidding, curtails the rights of women and minorities, and locks up dissidents and political foes in concentration camps. Eventually, his reign leads to civil war. It’s a grim tale.
If 1930s America did not succumb to the fascist wave, Corn says, it was in part due to the assassination of Long, to Coughlin being forced off the air, and to Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II. So no Buzz Windrip emerged.
But we have a Buzz Windrip now as MAGA fascists pray that Trump will make their fever dreams come true. We saw their desires in full living color at last week’s gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference, during which time (according to Corn)
top strategist of the MAGA right, Jack Posobiec, a prominent conspiracy theorist of the alt-right, declared, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” He apparently was referring to the Trumpian vanguard present in the room, and [Trump supporter Steve] Bannon interjected, “Amen.” Posobiec, an early promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that led to a dangerous shooting at a Washington, DC, restaurant, added, “All glory is not to government. All glory to God.”
Other declarations at CPAC included Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota proclaiming, “There are two kinds of people in this country right now. There are people who love America, and there are those who hate America,” and Trump adviser Stephene Moore asserting that “one of the most evil left-wing organizations in America is the AARP” (!). Shifting novels, Corn notes that “Trump and his minions were engaged in an orgy of despisal akin to the ‘Two Minutes of Hate’ Orwell imagined in 1984.” If you need a reminder, here’s Orwell’s account:
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic…. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.
So how worried should we be when Trump labels his political foes as “vermin” or accuses migrants of “poisoning the blood” of the United States? Would a reelected Trump go as far as Windrip? Corn points out that he
vows to deport millions of people, which would require massive detention camps. He has consistently pledged he would prosecute and imprison his critics and rivals. He has said (jokingly or not) he would act as a dictator only on his first day in office. He has threatened to use the power of government to crush media outlets he doesn’t favor. This is all Windripish. Moreover, throughout MAGA-land, it’s easy to find Trumpists who denigrate democracy and scheme workarounds to direct elections. And the Alabama Supreme Court justice who last week handed down an opinion stating that fertilized embryos are people—a ruling that imperils in vitro fertilization treatments—has stated that the Bible dictates that conservative Christians ought to rule over government, as well as business, media, and education.
Someone, perhaps Lewis, once remarked that when Fascism comes to America, “it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” In what can serve as a response, someone else said (perhaps Thomas Jefferson but again we don’t know for certain), “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Dystopian novels like It Can’t Happen Here, 1984, and, more recently, Philip Roth’s The Plot against America (2004) are designed to keep us vigilant. Liberty is too precious a gift to squander.
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Tuesday
From time to time I have been posting on Angus Fletcher’s “25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature” (to cite the subtitle of the Ohio State Professor of Story Science’s Wonderworks). Today I look at his account of the revolutionary impact of nursery rhymes, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and A.A. Milne. All of these, he says, have unleashed our inner “anarchic rhymer.”
Fletcher starts his chapter by, essentially, castigating John Locke and the Enlightenment for shutting now our imaginative capabilities. Because of Locke’s emphasis on reason, schooling became obsessed with “morality, sober restraint, and industrious prosperity.” Prior to Locke’s new method for educating young minds, set forth in his Essay on Human Understanding, Fletcher writes that young children
had been told creative fictions about “goblins and sprites.” But no more. In the future, they would be drilled only in the “association of ideas” that possessed “a natural correspondence.” Children would, in other words, be taught the laws of physics. From the cradle to the schoolhouse, they would be told that ice was cold and fire hot; that money bought things and dreams did not.”
Before Locke, Fletcher adds, “a child’s education was haphazard and spontaneous, filled with gaps and free time for random imagining.” After Locke, by contrast, a child’s education
became increasingly regimented, formal and serious. Children were placed in rows of desks, where they memorized rules about counting and grammar. They were taught that playtime was for organized games and sports with rules; they were assigned homework to discipline their hours out of school. And so it came to be that in school districts across the globe, idle daydreaming was replaced by practical life skills, logical decisions, and prudent forward planning.
Only in the late 20th century, Fletcher goes on to say, did scientists make “a startling discovery: daydreaming wasn’t a menace, a defect, or a time-wasting indulgence. Daydreaming was good for the mind.”
When not otherwise engaged, Fletcher says, the brain reverts to play, what neuroscientists call “the default mode network.” This mind wandering
has been linked with myriad psychological benefits. It can nurture creativity. It can inspire fresh solutions to nagging old problems. And it can also just be fun, increasing our well-being and making us more cheerful at life.
Various works of literature have proven particularly effective at “restoring our natural mind-wandering abilities,” with one of the oldest being the nursery rhyme. Fletcher examines “Hey diddle diddle,” noting that the play between structure (the poem has a syncopated metrical beat and catchy rhymes) and anarchy loosens the stricture of reason and allows us to enter a space where anything is possible. Our brains “frolic audaciously into the unknown.”
Charles Dickens critiques the heirs of Lockean regimentation in Mr. M’choakumchild, the teacher in Hard Times, whom Dickens shows is at odds with the world of the circus. But the works that Fletcher uses to illustrate creative anarchy are the poetry of Lear (he mentions “The Owl and the Pussycat”), Carroll’s Alice books, and Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books.
Anarchy always requires some sort of structure to set it off. In Alice in Wonderland, the stability of common-sensical Alice is offset by the crazy events going on around her, while in Winnie-the Pooh, it is Pooh who is whimsical in Christopher Robin’s “sensible story-world.” As an example of the latter, Fletcher mentions the episode where Pooh attempts to disguise himself as a cloud as he invades a beehive.
One final author mentioned by Fletcher is Dr. Seuss, who revolutionized children’s books with the Cat in the Hat:
Something went bump! How that bump made us jump! We looked! …And we saw him! The Cat in the Hat!
Like Pooh, Fletcher writes, the Cat in the Hat “is an anarchist in a storyworld of rules and order.” The admonishing Fish, I would add, functions as a voice of the absent mother. After having indulged in an anarchic scenario, the child reader returns to the world of order as the Cat returns everything to its proper place.
There were moral censors who objected to the Alice books in the 19th century and self-styled guardians who fulminated against Dr. Seuss in the 1950s. That’s one signs that the authors were striking a nerve that needed to be struck.
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Monday
Thanks to Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s blog, I am now acquainted with a lovely Philip Larkin poem entitled “Days.” In a very subtle way, the lyric grapples with the meaning of life, including with whether life in fact means anything at all. “What are days for?” the speaker asks.
And at first, days don’t seem to be for anything other than living in. Put that way, there’s no real difference between humans and animals since, for both, days “come, they wake us/ Time and time over.” One hears an echo of Macbeth here:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.
Unlike Macbeth, however, Larkin then adds that days “are to be happy in.” There’s a suggestion here that he favors a Taoist acceptance of the life we have been given. But while that sounds fine, it doesn’t strike everyone as an answer. Those who are dissatisfied, Larkin observes, call in doctors and priests, the first presumably to prolong their days and the second to find cosmic meaning in them. Here’s the poem:
Days By Philip Larkin
What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields.
Doctors and priests, who wear long coats to signal their authority, seem out of place.There’s a Blakean drama of innocence and experience underway here. In Songs of Innocence, children play in fields, sometimes filled “with many sweet flowers.” But in “The Garden of Love,” where this is mentioned, a chapel has invaded the green while “Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,/ And binding with briars, my joys & desires.”
Difficult though it may be, we must strive to live each day to the fullest, treasuring what we are given without being sidetracked. After all, where can we live but days?
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Spiritual Sunday
For our Lenten study, our church is reading Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology, by my dear friend and colleague John Gatta. Among other things, the book is giving me a new respect for the 17th century poet Thomas Traherne, who plays a key role in the book. More on Traherne in a moment.
First, however, to John’s thesis, which is that Christianity and environmentalism can complement and feed each other. That’s in part because Christianity does not apply only to human beings. John writes,
Faith must encompass everything—all things seen and unseen, human and nonhuman beings of every stripe, throughout the whole of creation. For us living today, a Jesus capable of rescuing just ourselves, or our kind alone, from sin and death can no longer be recognized as God’s savior of the world. Only a cosmic Christ, as Saint Paul first envisioned, could possibly fulfill that role.
Extending the idea of salvation to nonhumans as well as humans is central to Green Gospel. As John notes, God didn’t just create the universe and then sit back. Rather, God is incarnate within the evolving universe, simultaneously within it and beyond it. This, John says, is the meaning of the trinity, which captures this paradoxical situation:
The vision of a Triune God contributes most critically toward shaping a robust ecotheology, I believe, by holding together, in creative and paradoxical tension, two seemingly contrary notions of the Godhead. Or as [Jürgen] Moltmann puts it, the “trinitarian concept of creation binds together God’s transcendence and immanence,” thereby conjoining the partial, opposite truths represented both in radical monotheism and in a pantheism that would virtually equate Nature with divinity.
The idea of God having created a blueprint in which everything is foreseen, John says, is ironically similar to 18th century deist notions of God as a clockmaker winding up the giant clock of creation. John says that those Christian fundamentalists who embrace the theory of intelligent design, and with it attack attack scientific theories of evolution, turn God into a “lifeless, loveless, and cheerless” being or force:
Far from bolstering esteem for the Creator-God, the ideology of intelligent design fails to recognize the richly creative, cooperative, and dynamic force inherent in the Creator’s inspiration of evolutionary processes. Even if we affirm, in faith, that God is the first cause and ground of all creation, we must acknowledge—as intelligent design does not—the substantial role and freedom that God has allowed within the cosmic drama for all manner of secondary causes and chance developments. Such causes, though sometimes agents of sorrow and malignancy, also infuse into existence a welcome color, variety, beauty, and unanticipated marvels.
In sum, the Creator-God of intelligent design is not genuinely creative—not, at least, by analogy with the sublime expressions of creativity we have come to recognize in great literary authors, composers, public leaders, and painters. Nor is the Designer-God artistic, vital, original, or playful. What this God designs, in figurative essence, is just a series of static blueprints, destined for sequential realization in the material realm. These preconceived blueprints for the design of all creaturely existence might be correct in every detail but comparatively lifeless, loveless, and cheerless in their conception.
A number of poets have seen God is simultaneously prime mover and incarnate in nature, including William Blake (“to see heaven in a wild flower”) and Alfred Lord Tennyson (“Little flower—but if I could understand/ What you are, root and all, and all in all,/ I should know what God and man is”). But one doesn’t need theology or poetry to realize this. Think of times in your own life when you have looked at nature and experienced a sense of the divine, even while knowing at the same time that natural scientific processes were at work.
But while we can know this without poetry, poetry clarifies and intensifies the vision. Take, for instance, Traherne’s poem “The Sand Is Endless,” where he writes,
In all Things, all Things service do to all: And thus a Sand is Endless, though most small. And every Thing is truly Infinite, In its Relation deep and exquisite.
In “Dumbness,” meanwhile, he writes,
And every stone, and every star a tongue, And every gale of wind a curious song. The Heavens were an oracle, and spake Divinity: the Earth did undertake The office of a priest…
Finally, there’s Traherne’s beautiful poem “Walking,” clearly written by someone who treasures the activity. At one point the poet writes,
To note the beauty of the day, And golden fields of corn survey; Admire each pretty flow’r With its sweet smell; To praise their Maker, and to tell The marks of his great pow’r.
Traherne wants us to pay attention when we venture out into nature. Otherwise, we are no more than “dead puppets” whose
silent feet, Like logs of wood, Move up and down, and see no good Nor joy nor glory meet.
Here’s the poem:
Walking By Thomas Traherne
To walk abroad is, not with eyes, But thoughts, the fields to see and prize; Else may the silent feet, Like logs of wood, Move up and down, and see no good Nor joy nor glory meet.
Ev’n carts and wheels their place do change, But cannot see, though very strange The glory that is by; Dead puppets may Move in the bright and glorious day, Yet not behold the sky.
And are not men than they more blind, Who having eyes yet never find The bliss in which they move; Like statues dead They up and down are carried Yet never see nor love.
To walk is by a thought to go; To move in spirit to and fro; To mind the good we see; To taste the sweet; Observing all the things we meet How choice and rich they be.
To note the beauty of the day, And golden fields of corn survey; Admire each pretty flow’r With its sweet smell; To praise their Maker, and to tell The marks of his great pow’r.
To fly abroad like active bees, Among the hedges and the trees, To cull the dew that lies On ev’ry blade, From ev’ry blossom; till we lade Our minds, as they their thighs.
Observe those rich and glorious things, The rivers, meadows, woods, and springs, The fructifying sun; To note from far The rising of each twinkling star For us his race to run.
A little child these well perceives, Who, tumbling in green grass and leaves, May rich as kings be thought, But there’s a sight Which perfect manhood may delight, To which we shall be brought.
While in those pleasant paths we talk, ’Tis that tow’rds which at last we walk; For we may by degrees Wisely proceed Pleasures of love and praise to heed, From viewing herbs and trees.
