Julia and I returned yesterday from a trip that had us visiting one son in Buford GA and the other in Washington, D.C. Since we spent all yesterday in the car, I am reprinting an old post, this one about the poem that Bilbo chants as he nears the shire after having defeated the dragon.
When I went to Wikipedia to find “The Road Goes Ever On and On,” I discovered that there are three versions. The first one alludes to the adventures encountered in The Hobbit:
Roads go ever ever on Under cloud and under star, Yet feet that wandering have gone Turn at last to home afar. Eyes that fire and sword have seen And horror in the halls of stone Look at last on meadows green And trees and hills they long have known.
“Fire and sword” and “horror in the halls of stone” may well be oblique references to Tolkien’s World War I experiences in the trenches. Imagine what it must have meant to him to come home to England’s meadows, trees, and hills—its “green and pleasant land,” as Blake puts it.
I like the way the other two versions capture the different feelings one has, first when one embarks on a journey and then when one comes to the journey’s end. The first poem, as the Wikipedia article notes, talks of eager feet while the second of weary feet. Right now, like many travelers reaching the end of their journeys, I’m experiencing weary feet. The first poem is spoken by Bilbo as he sets off for Rivendell in the third chapter of Fellowship of the Ring. The second is spoken by Bilbo in Rivendell in The Return of the King after Frodo and the others return from the ring quest, weary and in shock. I’ve labeled them “before” and “after.”
Before
The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say.
After
The Road goes ever on and on Out from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, Let others follow it who can! Let them a journey new begin, But I at last with weary feet Will turn towards the lighted inn, My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
I conclude with the final line in Richard O’Connell’s adventure story, “The Most Dangerous Game”:
He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided.
Still from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935)
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Tuesday
I’ve just finished reading W. G. Sebald’s remarkable novel Austerlitz, and while I know this is the Christmas season, it’s nevertheless useful to have this reminder of fascism’s threat, which is always with us. The novel is about a five-year-old boy who, for no reason he can figure out, is suddenly sent to Great Britain by his loving parents and taken in by a grim Welsh couple. The shock is so great that large swatches of his previous life are erased, including the fact that he used to live in Prague. Only years later, after he has retired from a career as an art historian, does he discover that his family was Jewish and that his parents died in the Holocaust.
When he is reconstructing this history through Vera, a family friend whom he has rediscovered, he learns about his father’s first awareness of the threat. On a trip to Germany Maximilian realizes, from a piece of candy, just how deeply the Germans have internalized the fascist ideology. The candy had embedded within it
a raspberry-colored swastika that literally melted in the mouth. At the sight of these Nazi treats, Maximilian had said he suddenly realized that the Germans had wholly reorganized their production lines, from heavy industry down to the manufacturing of items such as these vulgar sweets, not because they had been ordered to do so but each of his own accord, out of enthusiasm for the national resurgence.
I share the following passage because it describes a disturbing number of Trump’s followers. Austerlitz’s father describes Hitler’s famous Nuremberg rally, which brings to mind Donald Trump descent’s down the golden escalator in 2015, where he would go on to accuse Mexico of sending rapists to the U.S. as he announced his candidacy for the presidency:
Hours before his arrival, the entire population of Nuremberg and indeed people from much further afield, crowds flocking in not just from Franconia and Bavaria but from the most remote parts of the country, Holstein and Pomerania, Silesia and the Black Forest, stood shoulder to shoulder all agog with excitement along the predetermined route, until at last, heralded by roars of acclamation, the motorcade of heavy Mercedes limousines came gliding at walking pace down the narrow alley which parted the sea of radiant uplifted faces and the arms outstretched in yearning. Maximilian had told her, said Vera, that in the middle of this crowd, which had merged into a single living organism racked by strange, convulsive contractions, he had felt like a foreign body about to be crushed and then excreted.
In other words, the Jewish Maximilian realizes that fascists regard him (to borrow from Trump’s terminology) as “vermin” and poison in the blood.
Leni Reifenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will, about Hitler’s Nuremberg rally, confirms for Maximilian “his suspicions that, out of the humiliation, from which the Germs had never recovered, they were now developing an image of themselves as a people chosen to evangelize the world.” He mentions how, like Republicans at the 2015 Iowa State Fair witnessing Trump’s helicopter, they are awed by “the Führer’s airplane descending slowly to earth through towering mountain ranges of cloud.”
The extent to which the crowds have internalized Hitler’s message become even clearer to Maximilian when
a bird’s eye view showed a city of white tents extending to the horizon, from which, as day broke the Germs emerged singly, in couples, or in small groups, forming a silent procession and pressing ever closer together as they all went in the same direction, following, so it seemed, some higher bidding, on their way to the Promised Land at last after long years in the wilderness.
The Promised Land for MAGA is a white Christian patriarchy where women, Jews, and people of color know their place. So in the spirit of the season, let’s express our gratitude for our multicultural democracy and celebrate the richness of a society conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.
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Monday – Christmas
Here’s a Christmas poem, written by my father, that was probably inspired by Jean Luc Godard’s controversial film Hail Mary. It captures the miracle of Christmas by situating the birth of Jesus in a setting we can relate to. Merry Christmas!
Item By Scott Bates
They came in on Interstate 93 Past a dozen signs of NO VACANCY
And finally stopped at the Holiday Inn Where she stayed in the car while he went in
And was politely given the information They unfortunately had made no advance reservation
And although it was regrettable considering her condition They were all booked up and in any case had no resident physician
So it was at Cohen’s Garage that it came about With Cohen and his night man helping out
And some workers from the factory across the street Bringing in beer and something to eat
And finding the babe wrapped in a tarpaulin And lying in a station wagon
Between a pickup truck and a Dodge V-8 And staying all night to celebrate
So all in all it was quite a night And she was relieved that everything went all right
And thought to herself that it could have been worse And welcomed him into the universe
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Sunday
Sue Schmidt, pastor at the Salem United Church of Christ in Harrisburg PA, sent me her Christmas Eve sermon, which she says was shaped in part by Denise Levertov’s sublime poem “Annunciation.” Both Levertov and Sue focus on the human choice in accepting the divine call. It took courage on Mary’s part to do so, Levertov observes, while going on to note that we are all of us faced with comparable choices in our own lives. Sue quotes Levertov as she imagines the moment of choosing:
This was the moment no one speaks of, when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed, Spirit, suspended, waiting.
Sue goes on to elaborate:
The angel waits, respectfully, for Mary has a choice. This is Mary’s call, Mary’s invitation to respond to. She could have said – thank you, but I don’t think so. God will have to choose someone else. But after some time, Mary turns to the angel. “Let it be,” she says. “Let it be.” Let it be – these aren’t passive words like some teenagers use – yeah, whatever…said with indifference. Or words of resignation. Sure, if that’s the way it has to be, let it be. No, these are words of co-creation with the God of creation. “All right, God, Mary says, I will do this with you. Together we will co-create the child who will show the world your love.” “Let it be.”
After this choosing Levertov asks, “Aren’t there annunciations / of one sort or another / in most lives?” Sue makes the same point:
Tonight, as we sit surrounded by the beauty of the Christmas story, I wonder. Has God come to you with an invitation? Perhaps it’s a thought or longing that won’t go away. Or a new opportunity that’s been presented to you. It could even have been in a dream. And yet we wonder… How could that happen? I’m not able to do that! I couldn’t be that person! God leaves space for our questions; God stays in the conversation. “Yes, you can. I know. I’ve seen you. I know you. And I’m not asking you to do this alone. My spirit is working in you. I am with you – isn’t that what Immanuel means?”
Sue then drives the theme home by making Mary relatable:
Mary was a regular person. You could have passed her on the road or in the supermarket and not even noticed. She could have been your daughter’s best friend, or your child’s daycare worker. But Mary loved God. And Mary was willing to do something audacious – to create something new and beautiful and powerful with God. Into the silence, into the question, into the improbability of it all, Mary said “Let it be.”
Here’s Levertov’s poem:
Annunciation By Denise Levertov
We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always the tall lily. Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings, the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering, whom she acknowledges, a guest.
But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions courage. The engendering Spirit did not enter her without consent. God waited.
She was free to accept or to refuse, choice integral to humanness.
____________________________
Aren’t there annunciations of one sort or another in most lives? Some unwillingly undertake great destinies, enact them in sullen pride, uncomprehending. More often those moments when roads of light and storm open from darkness in a man or woman, are turned away from in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair and with relief. Ordinary lives continue. God does not smite them. But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
______________________________
She had been a child who played, ate, slept like any other child – but unlike others, wept only for pity, laughed in joy not triumph. Compassion and intelligence fused in her, indivisible.
Called to a destiny more momentous than any in all of Time, she did not quail, only asked a simple, ‘How can this be?’ and gravely, courteously, took to heart the angel’s reply, perceiving instantly the astounding ministry she was offered:
to bear in her womb Infinite weight and lightness; to carry in hidden, finite inwardness, nine months of Eternity; to contain in slender vase of being, the sum of power – in narrow flesh, the sum of light. Then bring to birth, push out into air, a Man-child needing, like any other, milk and love –
but who was God.
This was the moment no one speaks of, when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed, Spirit, suspended, waiting.
______________________________
She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’ Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’ She did not submit with gritted teeth, raging, coerced. Bravest of all humans, consent illumined her. The room filled with its light, the lily glowed in it, and the iridescent wings. Consent, courage unparalleled, opened her utterly.
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Friday
Here’s a heartwarming story that has an obvious literary parallel. Neither story starts out promising, however.
When a tornado recently swept through Clarksville, Tennessee (where, incidentally, my brother lives, although he was unaffected), one family thought they had lost their baby. Here is the account given by ABC News. First the build-up:
Sydney Moore had just put her two young sons down for an afternoon nap when a deadly tornado tore through her hometown of Clarksville, Tennesseenover the weekend.
Moore, 22, said she and her fiancé Aramis Youngblood were standing in the living room of their mobile home when they heard a huge sound that she described as like an airplane flying directly over them.
Then the tragedy. While Moore protected her eldest son, she said Youngblood ran to the front of the house to grab Lord. As the tornado passed through, both adult and baby were grabbed by the winds:
“In the front bedroom, Aramis was in there with Lord, and the roof came off and swept them up,” [Moore] said. “The bassinet was the first thing to go.”
When the storm passed and Moore and Youngblood, whose collarbone had been dislocated, were able to talk, her first frantic question was, “Where’s my baby?” to which he replied he didn’t know.
And then the miraculous ending:
After a 10-minute search, Youngblood found Lord nestled safely in a tree, around 25 feet away, according to Moore.
“It was just like he was placed in a tree, like a little tree cradle for a baby,” Moore said. “It was like a cubby hole in a tree, at the bottom.”
Moore says of Youngblood, “I saw him walking through the woods, carrying Lord in the pouring down rain, and all of his clothes were ripped. It was like a scene in a movie.”
The baby had a cut that had to be treated but was otherwise fine. The trailer home, on the other hand, was completely demolished, with the bathtub “almost a mile away” and the roof at the other end of the trailer park. A member of the rescue unit said of the devastation, “It looked like a bomb went off. It looked like it had been in a war zone.”
And now for the literary equivalent. First, the tornado touches down:
Dorothy caught Toto at last and started to follow her aunt. When she was halfway across the room there came a great shriek from the wind, and the house shook so hard that she lost her footing and sat down suddenly upon the floor.
Then a strange thing happened.
The house whirled around two or three times and rose slowly through the air. Dorothy felt as if she were going up in a balloon.
What happens next is not unlike what happened with baby Lord. The author even compares it to a baby being rocked:
It was very dark, and the wind howled horribly around her, but Dorothy found she was riding quite easily. After the first few whirls around, and one other time when the house tipped badly, she felt as if she were being rocked gently, like a baby in a cradle…. [After hours of suspense], at last she crawled over the swaying floor to her bed, and lay down upon it; and Toto followed and lay down beside her.
In spite of the swaying of the house and the wailing of the wind, Dorothy soon closed her eyes and fell fast asleep.
It so happens that Dorothy’s landing is harder than Lord’s, but both are spared:
She was awakened by a shock, so sudden and severe that if Dorothy had not been lying on the soft bed she might have been hurt. As it was, the jar made her catch her breath and wonder what had happened…
Videogame version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
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Thursday
Today being the Winter Solstice, I turn to my favorite story about paganism’s winter festival and Christianity’s Christmas coming to blows. Of course, I’m thinking of the 14th century Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. “Coming to blows,” I admit, gives a misleading impression since the blows are framed as a game, not a battle. Still, death is a possible outcome.
Here’s the message I carry away from the poem.
SGGK opens with a Christmas feast, which is to say, a celebration of the birth of a god who, at the darkest time of year, promises to bring an end to death. The display of extravagance we see in a time of austerity shows Arthur’s faith in that promise:
This king lay at Camelot at Christmastide; Many good knights and gay his guests were there, Arrayed of the Round Table rightful brothers, With feasting and fellowship and carefree mirth. There true men contended in tournaments many, Joined there in jousting these gentle knights, Then came to the court for carol-dancing, For the feast was in force full fifteen days, With all the meat and the mirth that men could devise, Such gaiety and glee, glorious to hear, Brave din by day, dancing by night. High were their hearts in halls and chambers, These lords and these ladies, for life was sweet. In peerless pleasures passed they their days, The most noble knights known under Christ, And the loveliest ladies that lived on earth ever, And he the comeliest king, that that court holds, For all this fair folk in their first age were still.
It’s doubtful that Christ was actually born in late December. If his birth did in fact coincide with an in-person Roman taxation decree, then surely it would have come at a warmer time of the year. I suspect that, by putting Christ’s mass on December 25, the Church unconsciously was tapping into the energies of paganism’s Winter Solstice, which acknowledges the death of the sun while at the same time celebrating its rebirth (the days begin to get longer). Perhaps enterprising Christianity missionaries re-dated Christmas in order to co-opt pagan opposition, just as Spanish missionaries in Peru turned the celebration of the 12 Incan emperors into a celebration of 12 Christian saints.
But in celebrating Christmas in late December, King Arthur’s court all but conjures up a pagan Green Man figure. While not altogether hostile to Christian feasting, the Green Knight is affronted by—or at least intrigued by—these parvenues’ claims of life after death. As one plugged into nature’s cycle, the Green Knight knows there is life after death. After all, he sees it every year in the spring growth that follows the winter die-off. But here are people claiming that their god will end death forever, not just seasonally, and the Green Kngith is skeptical.
So he proposes a beheading game. If you really are not afraid of death, he tells Arthur’s court, then you will engage in a contest where first you cut off my head and then I cut off yours. He himself has no fear: after all, he knows that vegetation grows back.
So challenged, Gawain too claims not to fear death and agrees to the game. The rest of the poem unfolds, then, with the Green Knight—sometimes disguised as Lord Bertilak—testing Gawain to find out if he is as unconcerned as he claims to be. And what Bertilak/Green Knight discovers—and forces Gawain to acknowledge—is that Christians aren’t as indifferent as many believe. Though Gawain believes in eternal life, he’s also deeply invested in life here on earth. He wants to continue living for a whole.
There are multiple ways in the poem that Christianity believes it has triumphed over paganism, and not only by turning Winter Solstice celebrations into a Christian feast. For instance, it has taken the pagan pentangle and reinterpreted it in a Christian-friendly way. (Although that being said, the pagan star is often associated with Satanism.) Modern day Christians, meanwhile, have replaced the Green Knight’s holly bob with the Christmas tree and paganism’s Green Man with Santa Claus—or in Dickens’s case, with the Ghost of Christmas Present:
It was clothed in one simple deep green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark-brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. [my italics]
In addition to the beheading game, Green Knight tests Gawain in other ways. As I read the temptation scenes in the castle, Bertilak is the Lord of Death while his consort is the Lady of Life. In the three days before Gawain thinks he’s going to die, he witnesses both the lure of life (a beautiful lady offering him sex) and the grim, matter-of-fact reality of death (the animal carcasses). Here’s an instance of the latter:
And duly dressed the deer, as the deed requires. Some were assigned the assay of the fat: Two fingers’-width fully they found on the leanest. Then they slit the slot open and searched out the paunch, Trimmed it with trencher-knives and tied it up tight. They flayed the fair hide from the legs and trunk, Then broke open the belly and laid bare the bowels, Deftly detaching and drawing them forth. And next at the neck they neatly parted The weasand from the windpipe, and cast away the guts.
Still think you don’t care about your life, Gawain? Still think you’re not afraid of dying?
In one final test, the Green Knight feints an axe blow when Gawain’s head is on the block and watches the knight shrink. Some deep part of the Camelot knight still wants to live, which is what GK has wanted him to acknowledge all along.
So what can we carry away from the joining of Christmas with paganism’s Winter Solstice? That, in the end, reconciliation is possible, even though the Christian Church officially doesn’t think so. God puts us on earth to love life, and God shows us that love is more powerful than death. If we can’t hold both of those ideas in our head at once—and admittedly it’s difficult—then we need poems and stories like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to remind us.
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Wednesday
A few weeks ago I finished listening to one of the most satisfying novels I’ve encountered in a while, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land (major spoiler alert). Doerr, who won a Pulitzer for the All the Light We Cannot See, has created a fictional narrative that he attributes to the first century author Antonius Diogenes. Then he links this made-up story to three different eras: the mid-15th century when Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks; the 20th century, when 3-D and X-ray technology manage to read the damaged manuscript and share it with the world, including an octogenarian living in small town Idaho; and the not-too-distant future, when the world has been decimated by extreme climate events, including an unending drought in Australia.
While Diogenes did write a work—The Wonders Beyond Thule—we know of it only through a few papyrus scraps and a confusing summation by another writer. Doerr, who initially considered recreating one of Aristophanes’ lost plays, stepped into this vacuum instead. He got the idea in part from the city in the sky that appears in Aristophanes’ The Birds.
Throughout Cloud Cuckoo Land Doerr provides us with excerpts from his invented manuscript, which is about a man who wants to be transformed into a bird so that he can live in this utopian city. It’s a silly story, full of magical mishaps so that, instead of a bird, Aethon finds himself transformed first into a much-abused ass and then into a hunted fish. Eventually, however, he makes it to Cloud Cuckoo Land, only to discover a version of “there’s no place like home.”
I fell in love with Doerr’s vision of how even a silly story can mean the world to different people: to an abused Christian girl, who discovers the manuscript in an abandoned monastery and then saves it from the city before it is sacked; to an Ottoman ox-driver, who saves her from slavery, marries her, and comes to regard the book as magical so that he travels with it to Urbino after her death so that the book will be saved; to a 20th-century Korean War veteran, who learns Greek from a fellow inmate in their North Korean prison and sets out to translate the work upon returning home to Idaho; to the children of his town, whom he is directing in a library performance of the story when they encounter a boy—an eco-terrorist in the eyes of the law–bent on blowing up the real estate office next door; and to a little girl in the future, who is the last survivor of a ship bound for a distant planet and who remembers it from her father having recited it to her as a child. (It so happens that his grandmother was one of the children performing the story when they encountered the bomber.)
The story of how a story survives, redeeming and sometimes saving lives along the way, fits my view of the power of narrative. In this case, the story makes its way from Constantinople to Italy to a reader in Idaho to outer space. That frequently all hope seems lost, as countless times it does, just serves to highlight the resilience of narrative.
With this in mind, I focus today on two of the novel’s turning points. In one, Anna in Constantinople encounters an episode from The Odyssey, which a Greek teacher is having a classroom of boys memorize. Odysseus has made it to the island of the Phaeacians after leaving Circe’s island and is about to enter Alcinous’s court. She listens mesmerized from outside the window, and passages from the work become some of the tools she uses to navigate her world:
Anna forgets the handcart, the wine, the hour—everything. The accent is strange but the voice is deep and liquid, and the meter catches hold of her like a rider galloping past….What palace is this, where the doors gleam with gold and the pillars are silver and the trees never stop fruiting? As though hypnotized, she advances to the rooming house wall and scales the gate and peers through the shutter…
The tutor resumes the verse, in which a goddess disguises the traveler in mist so that he can sneak inside the shining palace…
In return for pilfered food, the teacher teaches her how to read the manuscript and then gives it to her when he is dying. And although the man in charge of the textile shop where she works destroys the manuscript upon discovery, she is able to read Cloud Cuckoo Land when she unearths it.
Another key incident takes a bit more explaining. Konstance, the girl in the spaceship, discovers that many of the images of the world in the ship’s computer have been doctored, with all the bad parts left out. It’s as though Moms for Liberty and other rightwing groups bent on erasing the past have seized control and created a more “acceptable” reality. One of those responsible for doctoring the images is the bomber, who did it for years in prison (his labor contracted out) and then continued after he was released.
While he does what the company orders him to do, however, he also puts in little images which, if clicked upon, will reveal the reality behind the images. Konstance discovers this while tracking down Aethon’s story, which her father recited to her throughout her childhood, so that, once again, the journey of shepherd-ass-fish-bird saves someone. For Konstance discovers that not only are the images faked but so is her space journey itself. In actual fact, the rocket has never left the ground—it has all been a multi-generational experiment with everyone aboard (all of whom are now dead except for Konstance) having served as human guinea pigs for potential space travel. Konstance manages to hack her way out of the ship and join a tiny Scandinavian island community, survivors of catastrophic climate change.
Recently I wrote about a 2018 Salman Rushdie New Yorker article written in response to Donald Trump’s non-stop lying. Rushdie said that, at such times, we need literary classics more than ever because of their “commitment to truth.” Seeing literature as essentially a “no bullshit” zone, Rushdie wrote that the job of contemporary writers is “rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality.”
In the final paragraph of Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, we see Konstance as a mother reading Aethon’s story to her son. Who knows how he himself will use it to connect to reality in the uncertain world that lies before him?
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Tuesday
Reader Patty R alerted me to a World War II poem that, at the moment, has an ironic second meaning given what is currently happening in Israel and Gaza (more on that in a moment). The Free Press’s Douglas Murry, after voicing the common wisdom that the second world war did not produce great poets in the way the first world war did (Wilfred Owen above all but also Siegfried Sassoon, Alan Seeger, and Rupert Brooke), refutes it by pointing to a poem by Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan.
Written in 1944 by one who barely escaped death in the camps that claimed the lives of his parents, “Death Fugue” sets up two perspectives that (as in a fugue) work contrapuntally. One the one hand, there is the “man in the house,” the camp commander, who “gifts us a grave in the air” (the cremated bodies) and who idealizes the “golden hair Margarete,” symbol of German womanhood. On the other, there are his prisoners, who are forced to dig their graves in a dance of death. Shulamit, the beloved in the Song of Songs, mourns her people, covering her hair with ashes. Meanwhile milk, which should sustain us when we awake in the morning, has turned black and treacherous, and the prisoners are forced to drink it at all times of the day and night.
I find the poem ironic since Israel is currently meting out death itself in Gaza. I say this knowing full well that Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas’s terror attacks, that Hamas fully desires to wipe Israel off the map, and that Israel’s current actions are a far cry from Hitler’s methodical extermination of the Jews. There are checks against genocide within Israel, a democracy, that are not to be found within its enemies. But those important qualifiers aside, I also know that, just as the United States lost more than it achieved in the way it struck back at Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, so Benjamin Netanyahu’s overreach is blackening Israel in the eyes of the world. And that’s not even to mention how he’s turning a blind eye to increasingly militant Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
But we don’t have to take sides in the current conflict to acknowledge the universal message in “Death Fugue.” When horror is meted out to innocent civilians, whether Israeli or Palestinian, they all drink black milk.
Death Fugue By Paul Celan Trans. Pierre Joris
Black milk of morning we drink you evenings we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night we drink and we drink A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes he writes when it darkens to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete he writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he whistles his dogs to come he whistles his jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth he commands us play up for the dance
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you mornings and noontime we drink you evenings we drink and we drink A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes he writes when it turns dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete Your ashen hair Shulamit we dig a grave in the air there one lies at ease
He calls jab deeper into the earth you there and you other men sing and play he grabs the gun in his belt he draws it his eyes are blue jab deeper your spades you there and you other men continue to play for the dance
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you at noon we drink you evenings we drink you and drink a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakes
He calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air then you’ll have a grave in the clouds there you’ll lie at ease
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland
your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamit
A passage from W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” which Murray wrote about a few weeks ago, comes to mind here as I think of the attack and counterattack we have been witnessing in the Middle East:
I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
Murray objects to the sentiment since he believes it removes accountability from the perpetrator. Was Germany justified in invading Poland because of the Treaty of Versailles, he asks. People who desire bloodshed, however, can always look into the past to find reasons. Bosnian Serbs justified slaughtering Srebrenica Muslims because Turks had slaughtered Serbs in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo.
But as a fact rather than a justification, it’s hard to argue with what we all know: as often as not, evil acts trigger reciprocal evil acts. After 9-11, the U.S. engaged in torture and extra-judicial imprisonment while members of its military committed war crimes. Following its own 9-11, Israel is in danger of going down a similar path.
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Monday
In my weekly report on Angus Fletcher’s book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, I look at the benefits of meta-horror, invented (so he claims) by Mary Shelley. Meta-horror is a horror story that is self-conscious of itself as a horror story.
I believe that my first encounter with meta-horror was Scream, a slasher film in which the characters reflect on who, given the conventions of the horror genre, is the most likely to be slashed first. As I recall, someone observes the promiscuous girl will get it before the others. And so she does.
Fletcher sets up the psychological risks and rewards of horror by looking at two different versions of the adrenaline rush we get when we are scared. A good cortisol boost “charges our mind, powering us to get more out of life,” while a bad boost can damage our health. As he elaborates,
The same elevated cortisol that benefits us in the short term can damage our health in the long. It can cause insomnia and exhaustion, contribute to anxiety and depression, and increase our odds of diabetes, heart attack, and stroke.
Hungarian doctor Hans Selye in the mid-twentieth century discovered that we can get sick and even die from stress. But he also discovered that there is good stress, which “gives us all the benefits of extra cortisol—increased energy and focus—without the drawbacks.”
The one exception, apparently, is exhaustion, which even good stress can cause. He says that we don’t get additional brain activity for free.
Selye called bad stress “distress” and good stress “eustress.” The difference between the two is whether the stress is perceived as voluntary or not. While involuntary stress (fight or flight responses to being stalked by a predator, bullied by a boss, or getting sick) is bad, voluntary stress (“embarking on a new career, venturing on a first date, or banking everything on a dream”) is good. So if we want to turn distress into eustress, we just have to choose to embrace our stress, perhaps by finding the opportunity or silver lining in a crisis.
Now to literature. What sets Frankenstein apart from earlier gothics, Fletcher says, is that it creates distance from the horror through its story within a story (and sometimes story within a story within a story). He provides the following example, where the monster is recounting one of his most horrific acts, the murder of a child:
My rage returned; I remembered that I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow… I only wonder that at that moment, instead of venting my sensations in exclamations and agony, I did not rush among mankind and perish in the attempt to destroy them.
Fletcher writes,
Here the monster is absorbed in a profound feeling of horror until suddenly he gains a reflective distance: “I only wonder.” And moments later, the narrative provides us with the reflective distance too. The monster’s Story in the Story ends, and we’re extracted to the outside story of Dr. Frankenstein: “The [monster] finished speaking and fixed his looks upon me.”
By pulling us out of the story in which we have been immersed, Fletcher says, the novel activates our brain’s “self zone”:
Undoing the neural effect of the Story in the Story stretch, and replacing our lost-in-a-book flow with an abrupt consciousness of our own separate existence.
This happens again at the end of the novel where we exit from Dr. Frankenstein’s tale to the perspective of the sea captain who has picked him up. “You have read this strange and terrific story, Margaret,” Walton writes to his sister, “and do you not feel your blood congeal with horror, like that which even now curdles mine?” Fletcher points out,
Once again, our immersion is doubly broken. First, we’re made aware that Frankenstein’s narrative is a “story.” And second, we’re called upon to self-consciously analyze our feeling of “horror,” prompting renewed activation in the fiction distance of our neural self zone.
In other words, our brain becomes conscious “that the horror is a fiction that we’ve chosen to consume—and can keep choosing to consume if we wish.” Mary Shelley’s meta-narrative, Fletcher writes, “keeps our adrenaline pulse elevated and our cortisol eye full open—transforming our stress from bad monster to good.”
He adds that, in the novel, Dr. Frankenstein gives the mutinous sailors who want to return home this same choice. Before dying he tells them that they can
decide to abandon the expedition, calming their minds back to normal. Or they can decide to feel more alive by embracing danger again.
When we sit down with a horror novel, we can best move from distress to eustress by choosing those works that follow Mary Shelley’s meta-horror blueprint, giving our brain a self-aware distance. The films Fletcher mentions (which other than Scream I haven’t seen) are the epilogue of the 1983 film Twilight Zone, The Cabin and the Woods, and Funny Games.
I realize that one reason I’m not a horror fan is that I have difficulty separating myself from the story. I become so immersed that I experience acute distress. But I remember a story a student told the class when I was team-teaching “Adolescence and Film” with Dr. Barbara Bershon, a psychologist with expertise in adolescence. Because horror is so popular with teens, we had watched the slasher film Nightmare on Elm Street, which is driven by teen anxieties about rape and sexual assault. (Underlying the popularity of the film with teams is partly the reasoning, “If my parents are scared of whatever they won’t talk to me about, then I’m really scared! But maybe I’ll be less scared if I actually see whatever it is.”) One member of the class said that, for Saturday night entertainment, she and her friends used to check out the clunkiest slasher film they could find and have fun laughing at it.
We realized, as we analyzed her account, that this was a healthy way of processing their fears. Even if the films weren’t instances of meta-horror, their very badness meant that viewers could maintain a distance. Or put another way, they transformed the viewing into a meta-experience. Potential distress was transformed into eustress.
My main question is what to make of the major figures in the genre, starting with Stephen King, who do not engage in meta-horror. By instead attempting to immerse us in the full horror of the story, would these authors (by Fletcher’s reasoning) be bad for us?
But perhaps the very act of picking up a book—“I want to spend a few hours boosting my cortisol”—gives one the sense of choice that provides an out. For that matter, telling yourself, in the midst of terrified immersion, “it’s only a movie” (or book) might also work. While not a literary invention in the Angus Fletcher sense, it might achieve the same end.
Speaking for myself, I’ve always felt this to be cheating. When I engage with a work, I feel committed to having the full immersive experience. If it calls for ironic distance, then I’ll maintain that distance, but if it doesn’t, I am captured hook, line, and sinker. My Adolescence and Film students had fun laughing at how much I was frightened by Nightmare on Elm Street, with which they were well familiar but which I was watching for the first time. They had to scrape me from the ceiling.
Full immersion, I’ve always felt, allows me to get the most out of a work of art, a point made by Wayne Booth in The Company We Keep. But since to fully immerse myself in a work of horrors causes me acute distress, I tend to avoid it altogether rather than opt for coping strategies.
