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Monday
It seems as if, overnight, the autumn leaves have started to come down in torrents and for no other reason that it’s time. (In other words, neither wind nor rain have been playing a role.) This gives me an excuse to share a simple but powerful Lucille Clifton poem.
In “the lesson of the falling leaves,” Clifton marvels at how, with little fanfare, leaves let go of the branches. There’s no clinging tightly to safety, and in that easy faith in the future, Clifton finds grace:
the leaves believe such letting go is love such love is faith such faith is grace such grace is god i agree with the leaves
Letting go and venturing out into the unknown is a theme of Clifton’s. It shows up as well in “the blessings of the boats (at st. mary’s)” where she thinks of what it must have been like for English colonists to have set out for America in 1634. (The “blessing of the fleet” is celebrated every year to commemorate their landing in St Mary’s County, Maryland, where both Clifton and I taught for a number of years.) In her blessing, she asks that the sailors be carried out “beyond the face of fear”—and that they venture forth into the unknown with the same confidence as the leaves:
may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that
I note that, for years, this poem was read at our commencement as we looked over the St. Mary’s River, up which the colonists sailed to establish Maryland’s first colonial capital (St. Mary’s City). This sailing into the unknown also reminds me of the jazz pianist in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” venturing out into the terrifying waters of artistic exploration.
In doing so, Sonny shows his cautious brother that there’s more to life than playing it safe. In the following key passage, Sonny’s jazz ensemble is welcomes him back following a stint in prison for heroin. Creole is group’s leader:
But as I began to watch Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing–he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water,
Deep water and drowning are not the same thing. And letting go is love.
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Sunday
Sewanee English professor Jennifer Michael has alerted me to the spiritual poetry of Mary Karr, including this lyric on meditation. In it, the poet imagines that “a weightless hand” is guiding her, softly pressing her “in the back’s low hollow,” and that, like a sailboat tacking against the wind, she goes there.
This “there” is the world revealed when the meditator’s third eye, with the aid of eucalyptus, is opened. (Eucalyptus is used in meditation to clear the mind, promote clear thinking and dispel anxiety.) In “the wide vermilion sky” that cradled us before birth, I am reminded of Wordsworth’s own account of birth: “But trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God, who is our home.” As Karr sees it, the sun that pours “its golden sap” is like the resin of primeval forests that captures and preserves ancient insects in timeless amber. We glow, preserved, in God’s love.
Julian of Norwich could say about this “precious insect” what she says about the hazelnut that was the focus of her own meditation: God made it, God loves it, God keeps it.
Meditatio By Mary Karr
In the back’s low hollow sometimes a weightless hand guides me, gentle pressure so I tack soft as a sailboat. (Go there)
Soften the space between your eyes (smudge of eucalyptus), the third eye opens. There’s the wide vermilion sky
that cradled us before birth, and the sun pours its golden sap to preserve me like His precious insect.
Fiennes as Fred Waterford, Commander of the Faithful
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Friday
The United States has not yet become Gilead, the Christian fascist state in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, but by electing Mike Johnson to Speaker of the House, GOP legislators have brought us a step closer. As Jamie Raskin, the principled Maryland representative and constitutional scholar, remarked the other night to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Johnson appears to be rooting against handmaid Offred and for the patriarchs who preside over the dystopian society.
Perhaps our own Christian fascists are attempting to ban Atwood’s novels from schools because it reveals their plans.
The new speaker is authoritarian through and through. After Joe Biden won the election, he was the principle architect of a Texas lawsuit aiming to throw out the votes of four states that voted against Trump. Johnson pressured fellow GOP lawmakers to sign on to the amicus brief by threatening, “Trump said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.” He also endorsed the theory that the ghost of Hugo Chavez planted vote-stealing software in the vote-counting machines.
In other words, a man who doesn’t believe that Biden is a legitimate president is second in the line of succession for the presidency. As Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri observed after Johnson’s fellow Republicans unanimously elected him,
In a stunning abandonment of principle that was sure to reverberate through the country over the coming year, House Republicans, led by Mike Johnson (La.), accepted the results of an election.
Participation in Trump’s coup attempt is only one of Johnson’s extreme positions. He has co-sponsored bills calling for a nationwide ban on all abortions after 15 weeks. He has also introduced legislation that would prohibit discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as related subjects, at any institution that receives federal funds.
Like the leaders of Gilead, Johnson believes that abortion is the cause of many social ills, including school shootings. Atlantic’s Irin Carmon has the quote:
Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are. When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.
Sometimes Johnson links his policy positions in imaginative ways, such as regarding abortion as the cause of the funding problems faced by social security and Medicare, which he wishes to slash. In a statement that eerily resembles a passage in Atwood’s novel, he explains his reasoning:
You think about the implications on the economy. We’re all struggling here to cover the bases of social security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this … I will not yield I will not. Roe was a terrible corruption of America’s constitutional jurisprudence.
So American women—including those impregnated through incest and rape—must be forced to produce future workers and taxpayers. Here’s a comparable passage in Handmaid’s Tale, describing the book that Offred’s Commander reads to his household every evening:
It’s the usual story, the usual stories. God to Adam, God to Noah. Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. Then comes the moldy old Rachel and Leah stuff we had drummed into us at the Center. Give me children, or else I die. Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? Behold my maid Bilhah. She shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her. And so on and so forth.
Like many Republicans, Johnson evokes a mid-20th century golden age to justify his proposals. The Atlantic’s Carmon reports,
Having genially presented himself as law abiding and his cause as bipartisan, Johnson proceeded to tell a story of America not unlike the one Trump would narrate: a little mid-century nostalgia, a little American carnage. “A society that has become gradually more coarsened, more dangerous,” he said, adding, “When I was a kid, the most popular show on television was The Brady Bunch. When my father was a child, it was The Andy Griffith Show. Now it’s murder and mayhem. We’re not in a good place in America, and I think that’s beyond dispute.”
In Gilead indoctrination, meanwhile, Aunt Lydia shows the women images of past “murder and mayhem” to justify the current order of things:
Sometimes the movies she showed would be an old porno film, from the seventies or eighties. Women kneeling, sucking penises or guns, women tied up or chained or with dog collars around their necks, women hanging from trees, or upside-down, naked, with their legs held apart, women being raped, beaten up, killed.
Aunt Lydia then tells the women how lucky they are to be living in a state that respects them:
Consider the alternatives, said Aunt Lydia. You see what things used to be like? That was what they thought of women, then. Her voice trembled with indignation.
Johnson himself has a “covenant marriage,” designed to make divorce difficult, with his wife. Just like the Commander and Serena Joy.
Given that the House is now headed by someone who tried to overthrow a free and fair election, it’s useful to review how the Christian fascists come to power in Atwood’s novel. It’s not unlike the fantasies of some of Trump’s followers, especially General Mike Flynn.
One of the plans was to have Trump supporters clash with Antifa on January 6, at which point Trump could declare a national emergency and call in the military. As it turned out, Antifa members very smartly stayed away, anticipating such a plot, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, similarly wary, did the same. But had either of those decided differently, we might have seen a scenario such as Atwood describes:
It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.
…I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.
So as not to end on an entirely pessimistic note, it’s worth remembering that most Americans are not buying what MAGA is selling. Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin yesterday quoted from Public Religion Research Institute’s recent survey:
[I]n a positive sign of public sanity, “Overwhelming majorities of Americans today support teaching the good and the bad of American history, trust public school teachers to select appropriate curriculum, and strongly oppose the banning of books that discuss slavery or the banning of Advanced Placement (AP) African American History.” Moreover, “A solid majority of Americans also oppose banning social and emotional learning programs in public schools.” Though some Republicans have made “anti-wokeism” a key requirement of their political identity, their message is deeply unpopular. “Fewer than one in ten Americans favor the banning of books that include depictions of slavery from being taught in public schools (7%), compared with 88% who oppose such bans.”
And:
Sixty percent say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, compared with 37 percent who say it should be illegal in most or all cases. In a political reversal, “Democrats are now significantly more likely than Republicans to say their support for a candidate hinges on the candidate’s position on abortion,” 50 percent vs. 38 percent.
In Atwood’s novel, a series of environmental catastrophes, including San Andreas Fault earthquakes that cause nuclear meltdowns, open the door to social disruption. I suppose similar chaos could open the door to neo-fascism. Then again, we had a major epidemic and came out intact, so maybe our institutions are not as fragile as we fear.
To be sure, we must remain vigilant. But we shouldn’t become hysterical.
Further thought: I should add that Johnson believes he was “ordained by God” to be Speaker and explained the absence of his wife at the swearing in ceremony by telling those in attendance that she was worn out as “[s]he’s spent the last couple of weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord.”
Star Trek’s George Takei, who comments regularly on social media, quipped, “What is the name of Mike Johnson’s wife again. Is it Ofmike?”
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Thursday
Pastor Sue Schmidt has alerted me to two timely poems posted on the website of Salt, a “not-for-profit production company dedicated to the craft of visual storytelling.” One is by the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, the other by Arab American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, daughter of a Palestinian refugee. As people become unhinged in their response to the horrific events unfolding in the Middle East, these poems do what poems do best, which is remind us what really matters.
Amichai’s poem starts with a bomb—it could have been delivered by any of the warring parties—and then proceeds to move outward to all it has touched. Describing the effect as circles rippling outward, as though from a stone thrown into a pond, Amichai begins with the diameter of the bomb; looks at those whom it directly impacted in its seven-meter radius; mentions the slightly further-out hospitals and graveyard to which the victims have been carried (“a larger circle of pain and time”); and then reaches out to the city in which one of the victims is now buried (“at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers”) and the “solitary man” who mourns her death “at the distant shores of a country far across the sea.” By now, the poet observes, the circle has enlarged considerably, encompassing the entire world.
But the circle doesn’t end with the world since the cries of those who have been orphaned ascend to God on his throne. “A father of the fatherless, and a defender of the widows, is God in his holy habitation,” promises Psalm 68, while the god of Exodus declares, “You shall not take advantage of any widow or fatherless child. If you take advantage of them at all, and they cry at all to me, I will surely hear their cry…” In other words, the circle now encompasses all of creation.
By ending his poem with a vision that goes beyond the throne of God to an endless circle with no God, I hear the poet rejecting specific cultural gods (including those who are envisioned as sitting on thrones) to something wider and more expansive. Destruction may begin with a circular bomb, but in Amichai’s expansive vision, we go beyond circles, boundaries, and religions to a vision of creation all bound together.
The Diameter of the Bomb by Yehuda Amichai
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded. And around these, in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered and one graveyard. But the young woman who was buried in the city she came from, at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers, enlarges the circle considerably, and the solitary man mourning her death at the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle. And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans that reaches up to the throne of God and beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.
The second poem is similar. Whether through a bomb blast or something other disaster, the speaker talks of losing everything. This includes that which we have carefully saved, the future we counted on, and comforting landmarks. Only after such losses, she writes, can we know “what kindness really is.”
In this drama, life becomes an endless bus ride through desolate landscapes, which could involve interior depression as well as outward travel. On the journey, the poet speaks of seeing and identifying someone dead by the side of the road and realizing
how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Learning about kindness, then, involves “the other deepest thing,” which is sorrow. We must get to know this sorrow because, in doing so, we catch “the thread of all sorrows” until we see “the size of the cloth”—which I assume to be all of suffering humanity. In the face of such universal sorrow, we come to conclude that it is “only kindness that makes sense anymore.”
Being newly aligned with deep kindness helps us get up in the morning, leave the house, and go out into the world. Kindness at this point becomes a shadow and a friend that accompanies us everywhere. We appreciate its “tender gravity” when someone is kind to us in a moment of crisis and also when we gaze at the crowd and see someone who needs kindness from us. It is at such moments that we fully realize how precious this friendship is.
The mention of kindness puts me in mind of the prophet Micah declaring that all that is asked of us is “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] God.” Nye deepens our understanding of what this kindness involves.
Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
If these poets, with direct connections to the warring parties in the Middle East, can step beyond the hostilities and embrace all of suffering humankind, the rest of us should be able to do so as well.
Voldemort (Fiennes) delivers the Avada Kedavra curse
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Wednesday
Pundit Cliff Schechter recently posted a video exploring why the Republican Party has become “so dysfunctional, so self-destructive, so downright crazy.” At present, the craziness is most on display in the House of Representatives and concerns the position of Speaker. Not only is the GOP, although in the majority, currently unable to choose someone to fill the position, but the position has been unstable for quite some time. Contrast that with the Democrats, who for years had a steady hand at the tiller in Nancy Pelosi.
While some might seek to blame the GOP’s current struggles on the intense polarization between rightwing and extreme rightwing members, along with a tiny majority that gives any small group of Representatives effective veto power, Schechter has another explanation: The position of Speaker, when occupied by a Republican, has been cursed by dark magic.
Schechter has in mind the curse that Voldemort in the Harry Potter books lays on the position of instructor of Defense against the Dark Arts.Dumbledore believes that when Voldemort, as Tom Riddle, was initially denied the position, he cursed it so that no one could hold the post for longer than a year.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is the Dark Wizard in Schechter’s scenario. Like Voldemort, Gingrich was “something of a dark arts genius.” He rose to power in the early 1990s practicing a “new cutthroat, extreme brand of politics.” Gingrich was the first to realize that
being as extreme and bare knuckled as possible could be politically successful. Because of the decline of traditional media and the rise of rightwing media, you didn’t have to play the middle anymore. You just had to keep feeding your base a toxic brew to keep them angry.
Although initially successful, Gingrich brought about his own destruction. Caught up in a massive ego trip, he overreached, shutting down the government and undermining Republican reelection chances by conducting ridiculous impeachment hearings against Clinton for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He finally had to resign when he was caught using campaign contributions for private ends. As Schechter points out, he “Avada Kedavraed himself.”
Avada Kedavra, as Harry Potter fans know well, is the killing curse that works instantaneously. We see Voldemort directly use it twice and each time it rebounds upon himself. In the first instance, it bounces off the love that Lily Potter is using to shield her infant son (although it kills her), disintegrating Voldemort’s body. That Gingrich went on to become a shadow of his former self is clear to anyone who has been following politics since his heyday.
The second time occurs in the final showdown with Harry:
“Avada Kedavra!” “Expelliarmus!” The bang was like a cannon blast, and the golden flames that erupted between them, at the dead center of the circle they had been treading, marked the point where the spells collided. Harry saw Voldemort’s green jet meet his own spell…Voldemort fell backward, arms splayed, the slit pupils of the scarlet eyes rolling upward. Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing. Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse…
Throughout the books, Voldemort’s disembodied state doesn’t prevent him from wielding power over the Dark Arts position. (In this way he’s unlike Gingrich.) Schechter compares the first professor, Quirinus Quirrell, to Dennis Hastert, the former speaker who went to prison for abusing teenage boys. The disembodied Voldemort has possessed Quirrell, feeding off him while concealed in his turban and seeking to get him to steal the immortality-granting Philosopher’s Stone. Both Quirrell and Hastert, Schechter says, are men with two faces, “mild mannered on the surface, total evil behind it.”
With the exception of Snape and the werewolf Lupin, all the subsequent Defense against the Dark Arts professors are either bad, incompetent, or both:
Gilderoy Lockhart Bartemius Crouch Jr (in the guise of Mad-Eye Moody) Dolores Umbridge Amycus Carrow
The same has been true of the GOP House Speakers following Gingrich and Hastert. First there was Tom Delay, who was sentenced to three years in prison for his connection with a corrupt lobbyist. He was followed by John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, each forced out by extremists in the party. The two most recent candidates for the position, Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise, have their own connections with dark forces. Jordan, described by Boehner as a “legislative terrorist” who just wants to burn everything down, overlooked sexual abuse of wrestlers while an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State and then, in 2020, actively aided Trump in his coup attempt. Scalise, meanwhile, has ties to White Nationalists and once described himself as a “David Duke without the baggage,” Duke being the former head of the KKK.
At the end of the final Harry Potter book, we see life returning to normal. Harry, Hermione and Ron have survived seven years of chaos—which is how long it has been since Trump was elected president—and we see them, years later, grown up and taking their own kids to school. Many of us long for a world in which Trumpian Death Eaters aren’t dictating the national agenda.
Added note: While he is not in the House, one can find resemblances between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Amycus Carrow, the final Dark Arts professor who is doing incalculable damage to the school he’s in charge of. In his dictatorial regime, Carrow encourages his preferred students to perform the excruciatingly painful Cruciatus Curse—whose use has previously been outlawed—on those who have earned detentions. For his part, DeSantis has gutted the highly regarded New College and has been taking shots at university inclusion and diversity programs, not to mention high school readings lists and curriculums.
In fact, now that I think about it, DeSantis’s revisionary history, which views slavery as internship training for backward Africans, resembles the “Muggles Studies” course that Carrow’s sister teaches. Neville Longbottom describes the course that all Hogwarts students are now compelled to take:
We’ve all got to listen to her explain how Muggles are like animals, stupid and dirty, and how they drove wizards into hiding by being vicious toward them, and how the natural order is being reestablished.
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Tuesday
I continue today with my journey through Angus Fletcher’s Masterworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. As I’ve noted, Fletcher provides a new spin on certain literary conventions that are taught in virtually every Introduction to Literature course, whether in high school or college. Instead of just pointing them out and getting us to recognize them, however, the Ohio State “professor of story science” examines the role they play in human development. If storytellers of the past “invented” literary conventions, he says, it’s because they play an important role in how humans handle life.
Today’s post summarizes Fletcher’s insights into satire, including parody and ironic detachment. When I was taught these elements in high school, my teachers provided no rationale as to why we should be learning them. Or at any rate, they provided no rationale that would capture the imagination of a teenager, even a teenager who loved literature as much as I did.
Student: Why do I have to know what irony is? Teacher: Well, because it’s there. That’s what literary study is all about, to understand such concepts. Trust me, it is good for you to know these things.
If, by contrast, we had been shown how satiric irony is a tool we could use to push back against a world that often felt overwhelming, then studying it would have made more sense. A teacher familiar with Fletcher’s book might have been appreciative how, as teenagers, we constantly resorted to sarcasm, a form of irony, as a defense mechanism. Using words that seemed to say one thing but meant something else was the armor we employed to protect our vulnerable selves.
As Fletcher sees it, satire is a “serenity elevator,” and he discusses how it helped Socrates “float above his hurt” in the moments before drinking the hemlock.
The chapter begins with Socrates referring to Aesop as he is surrounded by his students, leading one of them (Phaedo, after whom Plato names the dialogue) to conclude that he was “imitating” the famous author of fables. Aesop couched his observations about humans in animal fables “because he knew that people would get angry if he pointed out their fault directly,” and Plato (according to Fletcher) realized that, in talking about Aesop, Socrates was also talking about himself:
Like Aesop, Socrates had spent his life wryly pointing out people’s follies. And like Aesop, Socrates had tried to avoid people’s wrath by pretending to be a harmless gadfly. So, like Aesop, Socrates had been a covert satirist.
Not all satire is good, Fletcher acknowledges. It was invented “to make us laugh at others,” and he notes that scientific studies have revealed that
laughing at others isn’t always good for our health. It feels good, certainly. It gives us the pleasure of feeling superior. But this pleasure is only momentary. And it can have negative long-term effects: condescension and negative judgments of others…have been correlated with increased anxiety and elevated blood pressure, boosting our risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Self-satire, by contrast, is a different matter. Fletcher sees it as key to Socrates’s calmness in the face of death and again goes into the science:
In the short term, laughing at ourselves releases feel-good neuro-opioids and drops our blood level of cortisol, diminishing stress. And in the long-term, laughing at ourselves reduces anxiety, nurtures emotional resilience, and helps us bond with other people.
All of these were in play in Socrates’s final moments:
Socrates was calm, resilient, and surrounded in his final moments by friends. And Socrates was also resistant to pain, which, as it turns out, is another benefit of laughing at ourselves. Psychologists have found that when we laugh with others (as opposed to laughing at them), our brain releases endorphins that can significantly increase our tolerance for pain. And this analgesic effect, as psychologists have also discovered, can be boosted further by self-irony. Self-irony flips around the perspective-taking network of our frontal brain, making us feel like we’re looking at our self from outside. That detached vantage reduces the felt intensity of our emotional hurts, which is why wry humor is common among soldiers, paramedics and other professionals who deal daily with death. Their irony is quite literally numbing; it’s a mental novocaine for coping with the horrors of war zones and emergency rooms.
Fletcher concludes,
So, by satirizing ourselves, we dose our brain with Socratic up-aboveness and pain-quenching neuro-pharmacologies, while by satirizing others, we drag ourselves down with anxiety and cardiac arrest.
Fletcher ends the chapter with a passage from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) that puts us in our place. When earthling Arthur Dent hears from alien researcher Ford Prefect what the galactic encyclopedia has to say about Earth, he is shocked:
“What? Harmless! Is that all it’s got to say? Harmless! One word!” Ford shrugged. “Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book’s microprocessors,” he said, “and no one knew much about the Earth, of course.” “Well, for God’s sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit.” “Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it’s still an improvement.” “And what does it say now?” asked Arthur. “Mostly harmless.”
To be sure, self-satire is not a magic bullet that will banish fear of death. Literature by itself can’t perform miracles. Still, it’s healthy to be able to step back and realize that (in Fletcher’s words) “the greatest cosmic joke is on us.”
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In the weekly Sunday Forum series at our church, we have been focusing on the arts and spirituality (“Creating in God’s Image”). Yesterday my wife Julia spoke about the murder mysteries of Canadian author Louise Penny. Here’s the talk.
Monday
By Julia Bates
I begin today’s talk on mystery writer Louise Penny with a basic definition of creativity since creativity is the focus of this year’s Sunday Forum. I follow it up with insights from Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, in which he discusses the sometimes tortuous path that creative persons must follow to fulfill their creative impulses and share what they create as a gift. Sharing, Hyde maintains, is vital both for the creative process and to the health of the creative person and the receiving culture.
I then explore how Penny’s writing history is an example of someone heroically moving into the creative process and how a pair of mystery novels, A Trick of the Light and The Beautiful Mystery, foreground the tensions in creative gift giving and commercialization that Hyde describes.
The Encyclopedia Britannica says that creativity is “the ability to make or otherwise bring into existence something new, whether a new solution to a problem, a new method or device, or a new artistic object or form.” A creative person, then, is someone who can look at things as they are from a new angle. That creative observation opens up possibilities for change and healthy growth in the receiving culture.
The risk is that the creative gift may not be accepted by the receiving culture, with consequences for both the creative person and the surrounding culture.
Hyde notes,
An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received, and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves this ‘begging bowl” to which the gift is drawn.
Polish Poet Czeslaw Milosz seconds this observation, speaking of the inner certainty he experienced that a shining point exists where all lines intersect. He writes about feeling very strongly that “nothing depended on my will, that everything I might accomplish in life would not be won by my own efforts but given as a gift.” Hyde says many artists have this sense that some element of their work comes to them from a source they do not control.
The artistic creation is also a spark for the audience’s own imagination. Novelist Joseph Conrad suggests that the artist appeals to that part of our being that is curious about change. That spark of curiosity, he says, “is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring.”
With such observations in mind, I look at the Canadian mystery writer as an example of an artist who struggles with both light and darkness to create the gift of her books. But since mysteries are often dismissed as “beach reading,” hardly worthy of the terms “art” or “literature,” what spark of creativity could she share?
I’m suggesting that, in the struggles Penny portrays between lead investigator Armand Gamache and the darkness that produces a murder, she provides many gifts to us as readers, sparking us to become potential creators and givers of gifts as well.
To explain both artistic gifts and the daunting barriers to sharing those gifts, Hyde provides an anecdote about a Native American giving a Puritan a ceremonial pipe. Delighted, the Puritan takes it home to add to his collection of new world art. He is taken aback, however, when a chief visits him two weeks later and wants a smoke and to receive the pipe in turn. These kinds of misunderstandings about the reason behind gifts gave rise to the derogatory term “Indian giver.”
Native Americans, according to Hyde, believed that gifts received should then move rather than be turned into private capital. If a gift is not treated as such–if one form of property is merely converted into a private hoard—something horrible will happen. In folk tales the hoarder usually dies. In tribal groups, the social fabric of the group is destroyed.
Hyde explores this principle further as regards the modern publishing world and the world of art galleries. While these organizations function as ways of “sharing” a creative gift, they also turn the gift into a commodity, which damages both the artists and the culture that tries to decipher what this “gift” of art means. How can a purchased item placed in a private space (say, a private art collection) create a call for change in the larger culture? When the gift is hidden away, the challenge of its call can’t be heard.
Remember: The artistic gift is not just the “thing” itself but the urge it ignites within us to also create and share.
In the two novels I’ve chosen, Penny explores the dynamics of (1) artistic preparation for the inspiration; (2) the possible corruption of the gifting process between the artist and the receiving community; and (3) the healing and atonement that can happen if the gifting process is honored.
In preparation for this talk, I looked at a series of interviews with Louise Penny to find examples of gifts she received during her creative journey. Penny notes,
I was a fearful child. Afraid of everything. I withdrew from the world and wanted to be in my room reading. As a punishment, my mother would send me outside to play. At the age of eight I came to a turning point when I read Charlotte’s Web. When I finished the book, I realized I was no longer afraid of spiders. The thing I was most afraid of disappeared because of the power of the story. It was magic. I wanted to be part of creating that magic; I wanted to be a writer.
The gift of a story about a spider gave Penny a goal.
Inevitably, however, barriers arose. Penny recalls, “I became afraid of becoming a writer. In Waiting for Godot, one of the characters notes, ‘Maybe it’s best if a dream isn’t attempted. What happens if you try and it doesn’t work?’” Penny reports,
I did delay. I delayed for 20 years. I took on elements of writing in journalism and editing, but not fiction. I covered Quebec politics and ended up feeling bruised. I took to drink. By the age of 35, I hit bottom. I realized I was only halfway through life. How do I get to age 80? If I had had a gun, I would have done myself in. In January of 1994, I went to an AA meeting and listened to two women talk about the holidays and their past ways of coping through drinking. They talked about things I was ashamed of.
The meeting proved to be a turning point. Penny found golden gifts through the sharing of stories and in the solid relationships she formed in sobriety:
I felt hope. In talking to others I realized I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t know how to live. I’m now a big believer in asking for help. If you reach out, there will be a hand reaching out. Now I respond in kind. Within three years I was married to Michael and within five I began writing fiction. Michael said he would support me, and he become my biggest fan.
To be sure, there were still struggles. At first, Penny tried to write the “best historical fiction ever.” Nothing, however, happened creatively. Her muse wasn’t coming to spark the filling of her empty bowl, and a series of other things had to happen to get her writing.
Among these were moving out of Montreal to a small village. There Penny found a group of creative women who called themselves “Les Girls.” In their monthly meetings, which continue to this day, she saw some creative projects that succeeded and others that did not. She noticed that having a flop didn’t kill anyone, a realization that was itself a gift. “Not trying to write is what would kill me,” she realized.
Penny had started reading crime novels at the age of 11 when her mother gave her an Agatha Christie novel she had just finished reading. She felt honored then to be gifted a “grown-up” book to read, and returning to that experience, decided to try her hand at mystery novels. She began by drawing a map of Three Pines, the village featured in many of the novels.
In Canadian history, three pines were often planted to indicate Loyalist leanings prior to the American Revolutionary War. After twenty years, these pine plantings served as signals to fugitives leaving an America that would no longer harbor them. The village is a gift Penny gave herself as a safe refuge. It is a gift of refuge for readers as well.
Penny then wrote biographies of the characters who inhabited Three Pines. She based Gamache , her lead detective, on her husband Michael. “I knew I wouldn’t get published,” she says,” so I wanted people and places that I would love to be with.” Again, she felt the comfort of retreating to her own room. “The writing began as a gift to myself,” she says. Furthermore, “the village and people continued to comfort me while Michael went into decline with dementia and eventually died and while Covid isolated all of us.”
The next step, getting published, was an ordeal, much as Hyde describes the damage that can be done to both the creative person and the receiving community when a gift is abused. Penny sent Still Life, her first novel, out to 50 publishers and received no answers. She had submitted it to the “Dagger Award” competition for first time mystery writers. She got an email saying that, out of 800 submissions, she had made the top five and was invited to the awards ceremony.
She notes,
As a journalist, I got prepared, I researched all the publishers and agents who would be there. At the awards ceremony, I looked for the top agents. The top agent wasn’t there, the second level agent snubbed me, and the third level agent was drunk. Then I didn’t get the prize. I went home and curled into a ball. Michael said, ‘get up, we’re going to a party that is also a silent auction to benefit a charity.” With no good grace, I went. I saw a lovely blue shawl. I reached out to take it at the same time another woman took hold. I introduced myself. “Oh, she said, “I have your name on a post-it note on my laptop.” Then she introduced herself as the top agent who hadn’t attended the ceremony.
They have worked together ever since. What a gift that chance encounter was to Penny! The agent has made the gift transfer process between Penny and her reading audience as transparent as possible.
The books eventually were well received, although they took a while to catch on. Not until book six did Penny feel she could actually make a living by writing. Hyde would observe that Penny has negotiated the challenge of giving a gift, of successfully marketing what she has created.
Penny doesn’t stick slavishly to the typical mystery “who-done-it” structure. She is more interested in themes based on our yearning for community. She feels that, regardless of where the reader lives, there is that universal yearning to belong. In the face of murder, of terrible violations of community, she writes of atonement, of second chances. Her village of characters “opt for decency.”
Many of her themes involve poetry or music or art as expressions of the creative spark. She used to walk with her grandfather, who recited poems as they went along, and from those walks she developed an ear for the cadence of language. She takes the poetic gifts that others have created and moves them forward.
For instance, she notes in the acknowledgements of How the Light Gets In that she wrote to Leonard Cohen about using the lines from one of his songs:
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There’s a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.
When she asked how much she would need to pay for their use, he told her she could have them for free, even though he had just lost a lot of his wealth to a scam artist. “How the Light Gets In” is the title of her ninth novel.
Meanwhile, Penny has credited Ruth Zardo, the crazy poet of Three Pines, with portions of poems actually written by Margaret Atwood and Marylyn Plessner (with their generous permission). Another gift.
In at least three of the novels, works of art created in Three Pines are key clues in solving a murder. While the novels show the generative creative power of art and gift giving, they also show how the stultification of the creative/ giving process corrupts and destroys people and organizations. To control or to own art for mercenary reasons wreaks destruction all around. Fortunately, in solving the mystery of the crime, Gamache makes atonement possible. Art can once again contribute to the health of the community.
Penny says that she lays out her novels in groups of three or four with layers of plot development that move at three different paces. The fastest pace is the solution of the current murder, yet sometimes the crime is not presented until three chapters into the book.
The next level of movement lies within the Three Pines characters or the lead members of Gamache’s investigative team, who grow or change based on their own limitations or gifts. These changes happen over multiple novels and some characters never stop changing.
The final and slowest strata occurs at the national level of Canadian cultural institutions, primarily the Catholic church and the Canadian government. This theme plays out in all the novels, with occasional volcanic eruptions.
The leader on all three levels is Armand Gamache. He and his actions and thoughts are the measuring rod of integrity in all of the novels. Because she had used her husband as a model. she wondered if she could continue to write after he died. But she has continued to find comfort in meeting up with the spirit of Michael as she creates and moves forward with Gamache. We see Gamache in his first appearance in Still Life:
He knelt down; his knees cracking like the report of a hunter’s rifle, his large expressive hands hovering over the tiny circle of blood marring her fluffy cardigan, as though like a magician he could remove the wound and restore the woman. But he could not. That wasn’t his gift. Fortunately for Gamache he had others. He was surprised to see her. That was his little secret. Not that he’d ever seen her before. No. His little secret was that in his mid-fifties, at the height of a long and now apparently stalled career, violent death still surprised him. Which was odd, for the head of homicide, and perhaps one of the reasons he hadn’t progressed further in the cynical world of the Surete. Gamache always hoped maybe someone had gotten it wrong, and there was no dead body.”
The element of surprise means Gamache sets aside assumptions about the cause of death. Gamache speaks to a particularly inept cadet about those assumptions: “You look but you don’t see. You hear, but you don’t listen.” He then conveys four sentences that function as a guide to wisdom, which he learned from his mentor and regards as “a huge mountain of a gift”:
–I’m sorry. –I don’t know. –I need help. –I was wrong.
Over the course of 18 mysteries, we see Gamache share these truths with all of his team members. Often the adages are received with skepticism until the new detective acknowledges their wisdom three novels later.
In contrast with Gamache, we read of Beauvoir, his second in command, who first sees the darkness in every situation. The tension between the two leads us through the problem-solving process that is reading a mystery. One sees the two go back and forth in Trick of Light and Beautiful Mystery.
In these novels Penny wrestles with the demands of creativity and how being open to its gifts affects individuals and communities, especially as the gifts encounter the warping demands posed by art critics, gallery owners and publishing houses.
A Trick of the Light centers around the creative life of Clara, an artist in Three Pines, as other artists (including her jealous husband) recognize that she has an authentic vision and artistic style. She has spent 25 years in obscurity living in Three Pines and experimenting with sculpture and painting. She has patiently opened herself, creating the ‘begging bowl” for the muse of inspiration. In the midst of her first major exhibition and celebration, another artist is murdered.
Clara’s mind seems to be a venue for Penny to explore her own fears concerning creativity and recognition—issues that were still fresh since the novel came out only four years after her first one. We see a Clara who is terrified to enter her first solo art gallery presentation, a dream she has had since childhood.
In her panic attack, Clara thinks, “Someone had lied. Or hadn’t told the whole truth. In her dream, her only dream, played over and over since childhood, she had a solo show at the Musee d’Art Contemporain. She walked down this corridor. Composed and collected. Beautiful and slim. Witty and popular.
Into the arms of an adoring world.
Now within feet of the end of her journey all she wanted to do was run away home to Three Pines. The person who had lied was herself.
Clara’s frightened ego has gotten in the way of being that composed person. She may be her own worst enemy.
But there are other enemies. As the novel progresses, we learn about the source of her terrible fear. Artists have to deal with gallery owners so that the public—those that the artists want to reach—can receive it. Then artists face reviews written by critics of those displays that mediate how the public will see their creative gifts. A bad review can metaphorically kill a career. In this novel, a bad review is also connected with a literal death.
We see the spark of Clara’s inner motivation through the eyes of her jealous husband Peter:
Without a single crucifix, or host, or bible. Without benefit of clergy, or church. Clara’s paintings radiated a subtle, private faith. In a single bright dot in an eye. In old hands holding old hands. For dear life. Clara painted for dear life. While the rest of the cynical art world was painting the worst, Clara painted the best. …Peter had never met God so how could he paint him.
Clara had not only met Him, she knew Him. And she painted what she knew.
As readers we can suspect that this description could also describe Louis Penny and the motivation behind her mysteries.
Later, at a gallery showing, we get another glimpse into Clara’s depth as Gamache and an art dealer discuss a portrait of a friend:
Clara had painted her (Mary) as the forgotten and belligerent Virgin Mary. Worn down by age and rage, by resentments real and manufactured. By friendships soured. By entitlements denied and love withheld. But there was something else. A vague suggestion in those weary eyes. Not even seen really. More a promise. A rumor in the distance.
Amid all the brush strokes, all the elements, all the color and nuance in the portrait, it came down to one tiny detail. A single white dot.
In her eyes.
Clara Morrow had painted the moment despair became hope.
The official art world is so cynical, however, that it’s suspicious of authenticity:
Francois Marois stepped back half a pace and nodded gravely.
It’s remarkable. Beautiful.” He turned to Gamache then. “Unless, of course, it’s a ruse.”
“What do you mean?” asked Gamache.
“Maybe it isn’t hope at all,” said Marois, “but merely a trick of the light.”
Gamache, in his integrity, can honor the spark of inspiration ignited by the painting. The gallery owner, facing the challenge of hope, is open to denial and rejection of the gift of the painting.
In both Trick of the Light and Beautiful Mystery, Penny wrestles with this question about the inspiration we might gain from a creative gift. Is the artist sincere, are the insights we gain legitimate and illuminating for our lives? Or are these moments of uplift merely our visceral response to good marketing?
In exploring these moments of inspiration and testing them for authenticity, we are like detectives solving a crime. We look for clues in the scene of the inspiring moment and in our own responses.
Penny poses two modalities of exploration: intuition and logic. Gamache is intuitive and creative in his problem solving. Beauvoir, his right-hand man, is a logical, linear thinker.
Of Gamache’s approach, Penny writes,
Facts were necessary. They pointed the way and helped form the net. But the killer himself was tracked by following not only facts but feelings. The fetid emotions that had made a man into a murderer.
In contrast, Beauvoir’s approach is darker. He contrasts himself with his chief:
The chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you’ll find good. He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn’t. He believed that if you sift through good, you’ll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit.”
And every day it frightened him (Beauvoir) that Gamache couldn’t see that. That he was blind to it. Because out of blind spots terrible things appeared.
This back and forth debate about the nature of good and evil continues between the two mindsets through all of the novels. Penny also uses both men and their early childhood immersion in the Catholic church to explore why they have moved away from formal religion to frame this good vs evil conflict more broadly.
These reflections could have been expressed as author asides, but instead Penny acts as a mind reader author so that the debate is between characters, not imposed from the outside.
The second novel, Beautiful Mystery, is set in the heart of established religion—which is to say, in a monastery. The structure, while it allows Penny to explore the limits and perhaps hypocrisy of structured religion, also has the creative potential to show the transformation possible during an authentic ritual. As Penny notes in the acknowledgements,
The book started as a fascination with music, and a very personal and baffling relationship with it. I love music. Various pieces have inspired each of the books, and I’m convinced music has had a near magical effect on my creative process. When I sit on planes, or go for walks, or drive and listen to music, I can see scenes from the book I’m about write, or am writing. I feel the characters. Hear them. Sense them. It’s thrilling. Gamache and Clara and Beauvoir come even more alive when I’m listening to certain music. It’s transformative. Spiritual, even. I can feel the divine in the music. Just a few notes can take us to a different time and place, can conjure a person, an event, a feeling. Can inspire great courage, and reduce us to tears.
In this novel, as in Trick of the Light, Penny shows how a genuine gift can be corrupted. A secluded monastery in the Canadian woods excels at performing inspirational Gregorian chants, but these are originally intended only for the members of the abbey, and we get a deep history of their purpose and how they were created.
The monastery’s isolation is shattered, however, when someone sends out a CD of the chants, which proceed to become a musical bestseller. The monastery’s choir director is then murdered just as he is urging the monastery to create a second CD, which will save the monastery’s walls from collapse.
The project divides the monks into two groups and challenges the consensual leadership of the abbot. The scene is the familiar mystery structure of a crime committed within a locked room— or in this case, a private garden.
We see the scene through Gamache’s eyes:
For the first time, Gamache began to wonder if the garden existed on different planes. It was both a place of grass and earth and flowers. But also an allegory. For that most private place inside each one of them. For some it was a dark, locked room. For others, a garden.
Each of the characters in the book is led to explore his (all men in this text) own inner room. We are at that second level of change that I mentioned earlier: personal growth of Penny’s detective team. We as readers experience both the fantastical play of light through the monastery windows and the haunting sounds of the chants through the effects they have on Beauvoir, who is avoiding being honest with Gamache and himself about a growing drug addiction.
The book ends with an indigenous people’s parable that speaks to the tensions between Beauvoir and Gamache:
An elder told him that when he was a boy his grandfather came to him one day and said he had two wolves fighting inside him. One was gray, the other black. The gray one wanted his grandfather to be courageous, and patient, and kind. The other, the black one, wanted his grandfather to be fearful and cruel. This upset the boy. He asked, “grandfather, which of the wolves will win?”
“The one I feed”, the grandfather said.
Gamache feeds the gray wolf, Beauvoir the black.
And what gifts has Penny given us? First, she presents us with a set of characters whom we would like to have as friends. They grow and evolve in ways that Lord Peter Whimsey or Hercule Poirot don’t. Gamache is a template for our own best selves.
At the same time, Penny gives us a village where friendship is enacted over and over again in the face of tragedy and dire mistakes. We would like to live in such a place, and Penny challenges us to create similar villages rather than just allowing us to find a comfortable fictional retreat.
The particular way that crimes are handled, meanwhile, point to the higher ethical imperatives that are invoked. This depth is unusual in detective fiction.
Second, Penny calls us to explore our own dark gardens. What have we locked inside that needs to see the light of day? Penny’s own life is anchored on the twelve-step program that supported her after reaching rock bottom. How can we make amends to those we have offended? How can we step beyond fear to share our gifts?
Often we have a penchant to retreat into ego-driven responses. We reflexively reject new works of art or music, ignoring the sparks they can ignite within us to take risks. Can we say what Gamache recommends: I’m sorry. I don’t know. I need help. I was wrong.
Finally, Penny confronts us with our mortality. As we face death within her murder mysteries, we are like Penny learning not to fear spiders through reading Charlotte’s Web. In these novels we see how the dead are honored by their friends and family. At the same time, we see a detective team giving the victim’s lives worth by investing their time and ingenuity in deciphering what has happened. Our own lives are works of art that we can share with others.
A crime, Penny notes, begins when an event creates a miserable hook in someone’s past that festers and eventually explodes. In essence, that wound causes someone to break the ten commandments, which constitute the ethical background of the novels. We feel secure when those rules are reestablished as the norm at the end of each book. But death is something we all will face, whether we are murdered or die at a healthy old age. We all have buried wounds that may cause us to speak darkly behind someone’s back or to turn a deaf ear to a request for help.
The question facing us at the end of each of Penny’s mysteries is how we share the gifts we’ve been given. Are those around us familiar with our stories because it is the sharing of stories that is the ultimate gift. Weaving the stories together creates a village where we can belong as living beings or as honored ancestors. Sharing gifts strengthens relationships and encourages creativity in ourselves and others.
Here in Sewanee we live in a village much the same size as Three Pines. Are we a place of refuge and creativity? In his October 1 sermon, Rev. Lamborn challenged us to become such a place by discovering the fullness of our begging bowls and pouring them out in love.
Vatican tapestry of the resurrected Jesus (detail)
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Sunday
A month ago I shared a talk given by Sewanee English professor Jennifer Michael on poems that help us imagine ourselves in the scriptures. In “Descending Theology: The Resurrection,” Mary Karr puts herself in the mind of the recently crucified Jesus, longing for the physicality of flesh even when that physicality involves pain.
It is a version of the theology that believes that God became incarnate in Jesus because God wanted to experience what it’s like to be human. In a talk I once gave on literary angels I noted that, in Philip Pullman’s vision, angels don’t glory in their immateriality but rather long for immersion in the world of the senses. Kerr refers to such longing in her poem:
From the far star points of his pinned extremities, cold inched in—black ice and squid ink— till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void even for pain, he missed his splintered feet, the human stare buried in his face. He ached for two hands made of meat he could reach to the end of. In the corpse’s core, the stone fist of his heart began to bang on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now
it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water shatters at birth, rivering every way.
I love the birth imagery here. As in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land or George Herbert’s “Altar,” there is something stiff and hard resisting new life, something that breaks wide open at the resurrection. New hope rivers every way.
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Friday
I have been working my way through Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature and, as promised, share some more of what he has to say. I’ll note first, however, that this scholarly book sometimes sounds like a self-help manual. Check out the following:
Some of these inventions target what modern psychiatrists have identified as common forms of mental distress: grief, grudges, pessimism, shame, heartbreak, rumination, reactive thoughts, self-doubt, numbness, loneliness. Some impart what modern psychologists have identified as well-being boosters: courage, love, curiosity, belief, energy, imagination. And some indirectly support our mental health and well-being by nurturing practical life skills: freethinking, problem solving, de-biasing, counterfactual speculating, cognitive flexing, relearning, introspecting.
Like any responsible self-help manual, Wonderworks then issues a caution:
These benefits are by no means replacements for modern psychiatry. They’re supplements, just as a healthy diet and regular exercise are supplements for doctor visits and blood pressure medications.
Fletcher adds that one can be thoroughly pragmatic in how one uses his book. “If you’re seeking a particular benefit from literature,” he suggests, “you can jump to reading that chapter now.” He himself, while drawing on scientific findings, strives to be as colloquial as possible “with a view to assisting you in using the invention more effectively.”
I obviously don’t have problems with using literature as self-help although I’ve sometimes shied away from being quite as programmatic as Fletcher. As I’ve noted numerous times, sometimes literature’s magic lies in how it catches the reader unawares: you don’t think it has any personal application and then it does. In fact, some part of me resists books that are prescribed for my improvement, as though someone else wants to determine my reading experience for me. But that being acknowledged, there’s a lot in what Fletcher has to say, so here goes.
In chapters on Homer and Sappho, Fletcher looks at the literary inventions of omniscient heroic narratives and first-person love lyrics. Fletcher notes that narrative broke important ground thousands of years ago when it realized it could speak in a “God Voice.” (“Let there be light” in Genesis is an example, and one also finds the God Voice, used to instill wonder and fear, in the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.) Homer then took the God Voice to a new level, using it to enter into recognizable human emotions. When Homer opens the Iliad with, “Sing, goddess of the anger of Achilles,” Fletcher observes that the God Voice, while huge, is also human:
It’s not a divinity aloof. It’s a vaster version of ourselves, an “Almighty Heart” that echoes our emotional response to the spectacle of war and death.
What Homer has done, Fletcher says, is “hybridize[ ] the two species of voice, blending mortal sentiment and cosmic scope into an anthropomorphic far-sightedness.” The effect is to engender courage in listeners and readers. Moving into a chemical description, Fletcher explains,
When that feeling of vaster humanity is combined with the neurochemicals stimulated by our primary fear response, the result is a threefold chest heat: the blood-pumping warmth of adrenaline, the pain-dulling warmth of our native opioids, and the social-bonding warmth of oxytocin. This neurochemical elixir makes us feel energized, impervious to harm, and willing to sacrifice ourselves. It’s the heart flame that we hail as courage.
I’ll note in passing that Plato feared that The Odyssey would make young men cowardly, not brave—at least the journey to the underworld episode—but in this he has been in the minority. Homer has often been used to engender courage in schoolboys, both in ancient Athens and in 18th and 19th century Britain.
In the chapter on Sappho, Fletcher contrasts the Homeric omniscient voice with the private first-person voice. Love, he asserts, is a mix of awe and self-disclosure, both of which appear in the following lyric about lesbian love:
He seems to me a god that man listening to you chat sweetly and laugh like music, scattering my heart.
When I look at you, I can’t speak. My tongue breaks and my skin is on fire.
Writing that this is “genuine self-disclosure,” Fletcher adds,
Sappho doesn’t just expose her private secrets. She mixes in wonder. She stretches her inner feelings into simple but awe-summoning metaphors of heart scatter and skin fire.
And then, Fletcher notes, Sappho innovates even further: one can make intimate disclosures about others as well as oneself. Take “Fragment 16,” for instance, in which (as Fletcher puts it) Sappho rewrites the Iliad:
Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet the most beautiful of sights the dark earth offers, but I say it’s what- ever you love best.
And it’s easy to make this understood by everyone, for she who surpassed all human kind in beauty, Helen, abandoning her husband–that best of
men–went sailing off to the shores of Troy and never spent a thought on her child or loving parents: when the goddess seduced her wits and left her to wander,
she forgot them all, she could not remember anything but longing, and lightly straying aside, lost her way. But that reminds me now: Anactória,
she’s not here, and I’d rather see her lovely step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and glittering armor.
If literature could make self-disclosures on behalf of Helen, Fletcher notes, it “could take any story and make it a love story.”
And because he always wants to anchor literature’s effects in the brain, Fletcher writes,
We can keep on exchanging wonder-enriched self-disclosures with our wooer, creating a reciprocal cycle of dopamine prime and release that makes us feel increasingly happy together and encourages us to disclose more personal details to each other until we’ve built an intimate emotional bond.
Although ideally we want to experience love with another person, Fletcher adds that we can get all the love we need from literature. He turns to a Darcy-Elizabeth passage—proposal made and accepted—to make his point.
