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Spiritual Sunday
Today being the third Sunday of Advent, the focus is on Mary. In place of the weekly psalm, Episcopal churches have the option of reading “The Song of Mary.” That’s the one that begins,
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed: the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.
To mark the occasion, I share this W.B. Yeats poem that I’ve just discovered. The first stanza is about the Annunciation, the second about Mary’s daily activities—how she feels she doesn’t fit in with the other women–and the third is about the love she has for her baby. The love goes so deep that she has a premonition of something going wrong:
This love that makes my heart’s blood stop Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones And bids my hair stand up?
What loving parent has not felt the “Sudden chill” that can accompany the vulnerability brought on by having a child:
The Mother of God By W.B. Yeats
The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare Through the hollow of an ear; Wings beating about the room; The terror of all terrors that I bore The Heavens in my womb.
Had I not found content among the shows Every common woman knows, Chimney corner, garden walk, Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes And gather all the talk?
What is this flesh I purchased with my pains, This fallen star my milk sustains, This love that makes my heart’s blood stop Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones And bids my hair stand up?
In the final stanza, there seems momentary deflation—is the baby worth the pains I went through to birth it, Mary wonders. (In the poem “Among School Children,” Yeats doubts that mother, upon seeing her 60+-year-old son, would see in that shape “a compensation for the pang of his birth.”) At first, doubts about having a child prmpt of her to think of the infant Jesus as a “fallen star.” But then this doubt is countered by a love that goes so deep that it “makes my blood stop/ Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones / And bids my hair stand up.”
The third stanza gives us insight into the “threefold terror of love” mentioned in the first. The first is the impregnating visit of the Holy Spirit that results in the fallen star (“the fallen flare/ Through the hollow of an ear”). The second is the awe-inspiring presence of the divine through angelic visitation (“wings beating about the room”). The third is the terror of God’s incarnation, which is to say divinity taking human form and coming to dwell amongst us.
Perhaps at this moment of greatest vulnerability—where Mary’s heart is utterly open—she senses the cross.
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Friday
The Christmas bird count began yesterday (Dec. 15-Jan. 5), leading to a slew of bird stories, including one about how the American Ornithological Society will be renaming a number of birds that currently carry people’s names. These include the Cooper’s hawk, the Bachman’s sparrow, and the Townsend warbler.
Some of the renaming is because the original people were awful. John Kirk Townsend, for instance, stole skulls from Navaho graves in the 1800s to promote his theory that they were racially inferior while John Bachman once wrote that “the Negro will remain as he is, unless his form is changed by an amalgamation, which … is revolting to us. That his intellect … is greatly inferior to that of the Caucasian, and that he is, therefore … incapable of self-government. That he is thrown to our protection. That our defense of slavery is contained within the Holy scriptures.”
The broader rationale about changing names is that birds don’t belong to people. And except for the minor inconvenience of learning new names, the name changes could be good, especially if they’re imaginative.
Anyway, I use the seasonal bird count as an excuse to share one of my father’s poems about a very unusual sighting. Scott Bates was an ardent birdwatcher, and occasionally he would merge this passion with his annual Christmas poem, as he did when he imagines a couple having a roc sighting.
Sinbad the Sailor describes the Roc in the Arabian Nights—it is so large that it preys on elephants—and even hitches a ride with the bird. And now George and May have a new bird for their life list.
And if this seems unlikely, as it does to their fellow birdwatchers, just remember that Christmas is a time for miracles.
A Roc for Christmas By Scott Bates
It came as something of a shock When George and May put down “One roc” On the list of the annual Christmas count Of our Audubon Club in Marymount– But they weren’t kidding. They were serious And didn’t hear jokes from the rest of us Like “you got rocs in your head?” or “where’s the djinn?” Or “where in the heck have you two been?” –Or whether they’d seen too much Jim Crow Or an ornithological UFO– They were in a daze. Oblivious. In the garbage dump at five o’clock George and May had seen a roc. George saw it first. He was coming around The fence at the village dumping ground In gathering dusk when he cried aloud As something rose up like a great gold cloud Or like the sun—but it wasn’t the sun (Which just at that moment was going down), It was a hawk—a humongous hawk, A hawk as big as a city block, With golden wings and a silver tail And a body as big as a humpbacked whale And a glow on its wings of a million lights Like the stars in all the Arabian Nights And a sound in its wings like the rising sea And a crest like a blazing Christmas tree With a flashing eye that became a star Like the star that was followed by Balthazar As it flew away with tremendous speed “To the court of the Caliph Haroun el Raschid,” Said May with a shiver. And she was sure That it left behind it a scent of myrrh. . . .
–Well, no one believed them. But we could see They had had some sort of epiphany, And we felt a kind of sadness then Like the feeling you had at the age of ten When you knew that you’d never believe again; So we left the roc on the record to stay– For, whatever the sighting of George and May, They gave us a sighting that you can bet The Audubon Club won’t soon forget. . . .
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Thursday
An article comparing ex-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy to various tragic heroes recently caught my attention since the idea seemed so absurd. And in fact, Professor Rachel Hadas ultimately comes to the same conclusion. Asking whether the fall of the first Speaker ever deposed by his own party fulfills the criteria for a dramatic tragedy, Hadas concludes with a resounding, “Uh, no.”
Along the way, however, she offers us a tutorial on tragic heroes. And she also comes up with what I think is the perfect literary parallel for McCarthy: Lepidus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
What, you don’t recall Lepidus from the play? There’s a reason for that. I’ll explain in a moment.
First, however, let’s talk about all the heroes that McCarthy is not like. Hadas essentially tells the former speaker, “You, sir, are no Oedipus, Creon, Ajax, Cassius, or Brutus.” She does, however, note that Claudius from Hamlet might be a match. And Lepidus.
The fun of Hadas’s piece is what she says about real heroes. First, there’s Creon in Sophocles’s Antigone, who takes a principled stand in refusing his foes (Antigone’s brothers) a proper burial, only to see it backfire on him as first Antigone, then his son Haemon, and then his wife commit suicide. Hadas draws a dramatic contrast:
McCarthy says he will “serve America in new ways.” When heroes are defeated, they don’t usually retire into private life, claiming that a new chapter lies before them.
Rather, classical heroes admit and enact drastic reversals. For instance, Creon… withdraws from the scene, admitting to his disastrous errors of judgment…Oedipus himself, at the close of his eponymous tragedy, blinds and exiles himself.
McCarthy, on the other hand, is retiring in mid-session so that he can get an early start as a highly paid lobbyist.
I can’t figure out why Hadas mentions Sophocles’s Ajax since the two men don’t belong in the same ballpark. This becomes instantly clear from her account of Ajax’s downfall:
[The] hero is so enraged and shamed by the fact that the dead Achilles’ armor has gone to Odysseus rather than to him, that he butchers innocent livestock, deluded in his madness that he is killing his fellow Greeks.
McCarthy is susceptible to jealousy, so there’s that. But a more two-faced, calculating politician it’s hard to imagine. No raging warrior he, unless one counts how, in a fit of peak, he elbowed a colleague in the kidneys before running off. Hadas appears to have included him only for the sake of contrast:
[Ajax’s] madness, sent by the gods, ebbs, and Ajax falls on his sword rather than live with the guilt and disgrace of his actions. But although he accurately attributes his spell of madness to the gods, Ajax also takes responsibility for what he has done.
There’s no such accountability in Kevin’s case. As Hadas wrly remarks in a subhead, “to fall, you need height.”
How about Brutus and Cassius? Well, he’s no kin to “the noblest Roman of them all.” On the other hand, I do find some Cassius similarities. For both, their actions seem more promoted by ego than the good of the republic. But I suspect Hadas brings in Julius Caesar only so she can float her best parallel:
Kevin McCarthy, with his pleasant face and unconfrontational style, reminds me of another passage in Julius Caesar. Late in the play, the victorious Antony and Octavian send the third man of their triumvirate, Lepidus, on an errand to retrieve Caesar’s will. No sooner has Lepidus scurried off than Antony vents his contempt for their associate:
This is a slight unmeritable man, Meet to be sent on errands…
Historically, Hadas observes, Lepidus “never got to share in the spoils of victory over Caesar’s assassination.” Instead he was banished by Antony and Augustus and went into exile.
Now to Claudius:
But although McCarthy surely felt wronged and wounded by his ouster, he didn’t say so. On the contrary, McCarthy’s special quality, his insistent good cheer, calls to mind another applicable passage from Shakespeare. Noting his uncle Claudius’s urbane and courtly manners, Hamlet observes, “One may smile and smile and be a villain.”
As with the Greek figures she mentions, however, Hadas proffers the Claudius parallel only to withdraw it:
Is villain even the word for McCarthy? Only in the swamp of Washington, D.C., politics does he look, if not like a virtuous character, then like a relatively innocent victim. His chief hubris was in gambling that his maneuvers would work.
If we’re bringing in Hamlet, rather than Claudius I’d suggest Polonius, the scheming courtier who coaches his daughter into serving as a spy and then gets accidentally stabbed when one of his plots goes awry. Polonius grovels before Claudius and Gertrude as McCarthy did before Donald Trump, bringing him back from the political dead after January 6 when he realized that he needed Trump’s fund-raising lists. What Hadas says about McCarthy can certainly be said of Polonius: “To be humiliated, to fall, you have to have attained some height to begin with.”
So Hadas’s article is an exercise in defining by contrast. Except for the Lepidus comparison, which is gold. “Slight unmeritable man, meet to be sent on errands” says it all.
Further thought – In T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the speaker at one point admits he is a Polonius rather than a Hamlet. McCarthy could say the same:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.
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Wednesday
A couple of weeks ago I posted about how people like Donald Trump, Jr., Elon Musk, and other neo-fascists are attempting to appropriate George Orwell’s 1984 for their purposes. In furtherance of this goal they are now, according to a piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, attacking the left for attempting to cancel Orwell. More on that in a moment.
In my post I quoted FrameLab’s Gil Duran on the absurd way they are using Orwell:
The skewed conservative interpretation of Orwell holds that freedom means the freedom to spread lies about topics like the 2020 election, COVID, vaccines or anything else. It depicts any effort to challenge falsehoods as an attack on this supposed freedom, and as a form of “thought control” in line with 1984’s totalitarian Big Brother. It vilifies fact-checkers, journalists and social media content moderation policies as enemies of freedom. According to its twisted upside-down logic, liars are defenders of liberty and truth is a form of oppression.
Since Duran’s article appeared, we have seen Trump acknowledging that he would be dictator “on day one” if he is elected and his aides promising to go after the press. In the words of Kash Patel, a chief of staff in the Defense Department and member of the National Security Council under Trump, “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media” (this over the “stolen” 2020 election).
Meanwhile Ohio senator J.D. Vance wants the Department of Justice to investigate Washington Post contributing editor Robert Kagan for his opinion column warning readers that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.” Vance said that Kagan’s article falls under the DOJ’s jurisdiction to intervene in cases of invitation to insurrection, manifestation of criminal conspiracy, and an attempt to bring about civil war.
Basically, the MAGA right is saying that free speech has no limits for me and my friends but you are criminally liable when you use it. Or more succinctly, “liberty for me but not for thee.”
Author Sandra Newman’s article in the Post notes that the MAGA right is using a new biography of Orwell’s first wife as proof that liberals are trying to cancel Orwell, making them the authoritarians, not MAGA. They point to how biographer Anna Funder has described Orwell as “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent.” Nor is Funder the only one who has noticed Orwell’s dark side, which includes “his shabby treatment of his wife, his alleged attempt to rape a childhood friend, his homophobic remarks and his colonial service.”
MAGA critics have accused Newman herself of canceling Orwell through her feminist novel Julia: A Retelling of George Orwell’s 1984.And it’s true that she acknowledges the book to have blind spots that can be linked to Orwell’s life:
The evil Party in the book imposes a cartoonish version of feminism on its members, forbidding perfume and makeup, and forcing women to wear gender-neutral overalls and short hair. When Julia and Winston find a hideaway where they can safely express themselves, for him it means voicing his political opinions; for her it means putting on pretty dresses and making cups of tea for him.
More startling, Winston imagines murdering women on several occasions. Before he ever speaks to Julia, he has fantasized about raping and killing her. Julia says of the women’s hostel where she lives, “Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!” and chides Winston for not following through on his idea of killing his wife.
But—and this is a very big “but”—one doesn’t cancel a book because it’s got some bad in it. She herself wants us to continue reading 1984 because its virtues outweigh its flaws:
However bad Orwell’s attitudes toward women were, the warning he gave us in 1984 was not that society might someday become so twisted that women would criticize him. His novel was a warning against the kind of leaders who call their opponents “vermin,” leaders who want to punish people for having the “wrong” opinions or being of the “wrong” ethnicity. It was written about leaders who become cult figures, whose idealized image is plastered everywhere as a symbol of belonging, who hold rallies at which their followers join to scream in ecstatic hatred. It was written about a world in which such leaders could avail themselves of advanced technology, in which propaganda and surveillance were unavoidable and ubiquitous.
In other words, those on the right are engaging in doublethink when they accuse the non-authoritarian left of an Orwellian cancellation of Orwell. “What’s Orwellian,” Newman says, “is using his work to defend the people who are moving us toward the political horror he most feared.”
Literary scholar Wayne Booth, in his book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction,” is smart in his handling of flawed masterpieces. Contending that we should regard books as friends, he says that just as our friends aren’t perfect, so are many beloved works. And as with friends, we factor the imperfections into the way we deal with them.
To be sure, if it turns out that the friendship is truly noxious, we should end it—there are books that are out-and-out bad for us—but in the case of 1984, the warning against dictatorship is so powerfully presented that we can separate it out from the novel’s limitations.
People do the same with other works all the time, with Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Taming of the Shrew coming immediately to mind. We don’t wholesale reject Shakespeare, or even the plays themselves, because of their problematic images of Jews and women. Instead, we enter into nuanced discussions, seeking to separate out the good from the not-so-good.
I sometimes wonder, while watching how Trumpist authoritarians use 1984 to accuse their enemies of authoritarianism, whether there’s a silver lining here. The French 17th century moralist François de La Rochefoucauld once wrote that “hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue,” the point being that when vice clothes itself in the vestments of virtue, virtue still has the upperhand. If Trumpists claim that freedom is a good thing, even though they then interpret that to mean freedom to oppress other people, freedom itself is celebrated. And once it is, then it’s harder to argue against freedom to love who you want, freedom to make your own decisions about your body, freedom to speak out against injustice—or even freedom just to assert that 2+2=4.
The MAGA right hasn’t yet gotten to the 1984 stage of arguing that “freedom is slavery” and that only mindless obedience to a dictator is true freedom. And while they may get there, so far most Americans still embrace the “self-evident truth” that they have a right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Most Americans still push back against abortion bans and contraception bans and book bans and LGBTQ+ bans.
In other words, most of us are not yet contending that 2+2=5.
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Tuesday
Because I switched from The New York Times to the Washington Post after their hatchet job on Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, I no longer have access to the columns of Maureen Dowd. Which is a pity because, even when I disagreed with her, I always appreciated her literary references. Recently I came across someone quoting a passage from a Dowd column where she piled one allusion on top of another:
No doubt the president is having a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea that the 77-year-old Mar-a-Lago Dracula has risen from his gilded coffin even though he’s albatrossed with legal woes and seems more deranged than ever.
The image of Trump as a blood-sucking vampire lurking in his castle works for me. And the idea of his coming back from the dead seems fitting as well given that Trump was seen as down-and-out after his January 6 coup attempt. Would Mitch McConnell have persuaded colleagues to find him guilty in the impeachment hearings if he could have foreseen that Trump would be the 2024 GOP nominee for president?
It’s worth noting that Dracula is as much of a narcissist as Trump. Here he is telling Jonathan Harker about his dictatorial ancestor:
They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! What good are peasants without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and heart to conduct it? Again, when, after the battle of Mohacs, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelys, and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains, and their swords, can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach.
A dictator from day one, in other words.
Dracula has the same effect upon Harper that Trump has upon many of his critics:
As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.
Dracula, like Trump, has his fanatical supporters: the Romani, who attempt to protect him when Van Helsing and company track him down. The good news is that, in the end, he is decapitated and stabbed in the heart, at which point he crumbles to dust. Will Trump crumble away with these court hearings. We should be so lucky.
The albatross, of course, comes from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. For having shot the albatross, a benign and friendly bird that is doing harm to no one, the mariner has the bird hung around his neck (no small burden given that albatrosses are huge birds). Think of the albatross as America’s multicultural democracy. Killing the bird leads to a crisis aboard the ship, which happens to be our case as well. Pray that Trump doesn’t get a second shot at the albatross.
The mariner is able to find redemption through repentance. No one thinks there is any chance that Trump will do the same.
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Monday
In my weekly report on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of the World, I look today at the importance he attaches to Hamlet’s great soliloquy over whether or not to end his life. Such soliloquies help us see (in the words of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson) “the infinitude of the private man.” Through their identification with Hamlet and his heirs, Fletcher writes, audiences and readers were able to feel connected to “every person on earth.” And from there (so goes the transcendentalist credo) the soul stretched “to include every tree, every star, everything in the galaxy.”
As Emerson puts it in his poem “Each and All,”
Beauty through my senses stole; I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
How is the “to be or not to be” soliloquy a breakthrough? Fletcher says that engaging in a back-and-forth interior dialogue has “an extraordinary neural effect.” It makes our brain feel “I am the character asking the questions. I am Hamlet.” Here’s the opening of the speech if you need reminding:
To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them.
The brain goes on alert when we have such internal conflict, Fletcher says, shouting out to us, “Hey! You’re fighting with yourself! You need to sort out which part of you is right!” This warning in turn
rouses our self-awareness, reminding us that we’re not part of the undivided flow of life. We’re a distinct entity with our own individual drives and needs and those drives and needs could be compromised if we don’t resolve our inner conflict…Biologically speaking, self-awareness is thus a tool of self-preservation It makes us aware that we have a self so that we can protect that self by stepping back from life’s flow to act more coherently.
“The sheer experience of being mentally torn between ‘To be or not to be,’” Fletcher continues, “will make our brain feel that part of us is Shakespeare’s prince.”
While Fletcher acknowledges that people felt for characters prior to Hamlet—say, for Achilles and Antigone—he says that Shakespeare’s prince took us “beyond caring about characters.” From henceforth that possibility existed that “we would become them.”
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Harold Bloom’s idea that Shakespeare invented the human. As he writes in his book on the subject,
Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare’s greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness. Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater…
Fletcher gives us another way of understanding how this invention happened, at least with Hamlet.
Then he provides instances of subsequent literary inventors building on Shakespeare’s soliloquy. For instance, 21 years after Shakespeare’s death, there was Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid, in which we see the title character struggling “between the honor demanded by his father and the love demanded by his betrothed”:
My father or my betrothed? Love or honor? Duty’s harsh bonds or the heart’s sweet tyranny? Either my happiness dies, or my name is ruined; One is bitter, the other unthinkable.
The moment is so powerful that theater patrons attended the play night after night. Some, Fletcher reports, stood upon their gallery seats and chanted these lines in unison with the actor. As he explains, “The audience had literally become the character. Their lives had fused with his.”
This evening was so unprecedented, Fletcher says, that the civic authorities became perturbed, unsettled by this new force that had been released into the world. “Fearing that Le Cid might herald a social revolution,” he writes, “the king’s chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, censored the play for being a dangerous novelty.”
The next step in the innovation was the novel, and Fletcher mentions Robinson Crusoe, Sorrows of Young Werther, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In each work, we see characters wrestling with themselves—Crusoe between duty to his father and his hunger for adventure; Werther between his love for Charlotte and his admiration for Charlotte’s betrothed; and Huck on his duty to report Jim to the authorities and his urge to free him (even if it means going to hell).
In fact, first-person novels specialize in the drama of the soliloquy. One of my favorite examples occurs at that key moment when Jane Eyre wrestles with whether or not to become Rochester’s mistress:
While [Rochester] spoke my very conscience and reason turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamored wildly. “Oh, comply!” it said. “Think of his misery; think of his danger—look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair—soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?”
Still indomitable was the reply—“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
Novels, Fletcher says, “upgraded the soliloquy by accident. Their authors didn’t craft a new literary mechanism to insert into Hamlet; they simply deleted the stage and the persons upon it…By eliminating the physical element that disrupted the soliloquy’s identification effect, the novel added via subtraction.”
Fletcher adds one more novel to his discussion. What stands out about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is that the soliloquies multiply. Not only does Scout soliloquize but she observes “other characters as they soliloquize.” At which point, Scout identifies with those characters, prompting our brain, through Scout, to identify with them too. Scout finds herself identifying with two people who are also torn, Atticus (who talks about his inner conflicts) and Boo Radley (who’s conflicted state we see in his advance/retreat behavior). At the end of the novel, Scout comes to understand Boo:
Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.
In this remarkable moment, Fletcher writes,
Scout realizes that she’s come to identify with two other people. She sees through her father’s eyes—Atticus was right—as she stands in Boo’s shoes. And while she is perceiving two minds in one, we the reader are experiencing three minds in one. “This is multiple times the identification provided by Hamlet,” Fletcher writes. “It’s Emerson’s greater soul, expanded, giving us an intuition of the humanity beyond…and beyond…and beyond.”
What we see, in this process, is “not our fleshly desires, but the more rarefied elements of our consciousness: higher meaning, eternal truth, universal justice.” And the intuition of these cosmic values “can give our brain purpose in times of peace and strength in times of disaster.” It becomes possible to follow Martin Luther King’s injunction to “respond to hate with love.”
Fletcher adds that, when we extend that love, “one last wonder occurs”:
As modern psychologists have learned, nothing boosts our neural happiness more reliably, more deeply, or more enduringly than acts of generosity. So by giving our love to others, we really do receive ourselves. Like…the transcendentalists, we find connection to a greater human soul.
So if you find yourself losing faith in that soul, Fletcher has a ready solution: go read a novel. “Anytime that you notice yourself identifying with a character who seems nothing like you,” he says, you will probably be responding to some version of a soliloquy.
Gerritt van Honthorst, Adoration of the Shepherds (1622)
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Spiritual Sunday
Here’s an Advent poem that we need pretty much every year at this time (not to mention the rest of the year as well). Author Allan Boesak is a South African pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church who worked to end apartheid. I like how, by folding passages from scripture into the poem, Boesak highlights the poetry of the gospel writers.
Advent Credo By Allan Boesak
It is not true that creation and the human family are doomed to destruction and loss— This is true: For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life;
It is not true that we must accept inhumanity and discrimination, hunger and poverty, death and destruction— This is true: I have come that they may have life, and that abundantly.
It is not true that violence and hatred should have the last word, and that war and destruction rule forever— This is true: Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, his name shall be called wonderful councilor, mighty God, the Everlasting, the Prince of peace.
It is not true that we are simply victims of the powers of evil who seek to rule the world— This is true: To me is given authority in heaven and on earth, and lo I am with you, even until the end of the world.
It is not true that we have to wait for those who are specially gifted, who are the prophets of the Church before we can be peacemakers— This is true: I will pour out my spirit on all flesh and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions and your old men shall have dreams.
It is not true that our hopes for liberation of humankind, of justice, of human dignity of peace are not meant for this earth and for this history— This is true: The hour comes, and it is now, that the true worshipers shall worship God in spirit and in truth.
So let us enter Advent in hope, even hope against hope. Let us see visions of love and peace and justice. Let us affirm with humility, with joy, with faith, with courage: Jesus Christ—the life of the world.
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Friday
Last week, I wrote about Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature opening my eyes on how Hamlet provides us with a powerful means to grieve. It also has helped me understand how I myself used Beowulf to grieve following the death of my oldest son.
Beowulf is as much a poem about grieving as it is about fighting, which makes sense when you think about violence in the culture. Grendel’s Mother grieves over the death of her son (she’s the archetype of vengeful grief), and after she gets her revenge, we see Hrothgar grieving for the man she kills. (“Rest, what is rest, sorrow has returned,” he tells Beowulf.) In the tale of Finn, Hengest grieves the death of his fallen lord Hnaef. Hrethel, who loses his son in a hunting accident, climbs into bed and never gets out again. The “last veteran” retreats into his treasure hoard after everyone around him has died, becoming (as I read the scene) a human dragon. And my reading of the poem’s ending is that Beowulf, upon looking back over his life and seeing a long string of deaths, is himself in danger of scaly and hard.
In this reading of the poem, two of the three monsters are connected with grieving, with Grendel’s Mother being a hot anger response and the Dragon being a sullen withdrawal response. But as I have noted, Grendel’s Mother and the Dragon are coin sides of the same emotion: after killing Hrothgar’s companion, she becomes a dragon, retreating to her underwater lair, and the dragon, when triggered, comes charging out his cave to burn down everything around him.
When Hrothgar sinks into grief, Beowulf’s first recommendation is revenge therapy. “”Wise sir, do not grieve. It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning,” he says before concluding his speech by describing such mourning as unmanly: “Endure your troubles today. Bear up and be the man I expect you to be” (trans. Seamus Heaney).
But as Fletcher points out in Wonderworks, Hamlet reveals the emptiness of revenge therapy. The problem with typical revenge stories, he points out, is that they suggest that the solution to grief is doing something. In Beowulf, he might point out, Beowulf is telling Hrothgar that the revenge plot just needs more plot.
Shakespeare, however, understands this is not enough and gives us a play where, for large stretches, there doesn’t seem to be any plot. Discussing the “strange plotlessness” of the play, Fletcher points out that Hamlet doesn’t behave like a character in a traditional revenge tragedy. Instead, he wanders around the castle with a book while delivering long soliloquies, raving about his inner doubts, and venting his disgust at life. In fact, he wanders so far from the typical revenge plot that the ghost of his father returns to get him back on track. “This visitation is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose,” he tells his son.
Grieving, in other words, requires more than revenge—or, from another perspective, it requires less.
As I look back at the weeks following Justin’s death, I realize I picked up this lesson from Beowulf. For all of Beowulf’s can-do spirit, when he leaps into the mere (lake) to confront Grendel’s mother, for the first time we see him passive. Because the monster has him in her grip, he can do nothing. Sea monsters strike against his chest armor and he is helpless against them. The lesson I took from this when I reread the poem two weeks after the drowning—I had returned to a book I was writing on various classics as my therapy—was that I just needed to let the monster take me wherever she would and not fight back. As I write in that book (which will come out in the fall),
“I don’t know where this grieving is going to take me,” I remember saying to myself, “but I will follow her wherever she leads me…” Following grief’s lead, I was to discover, meant accepting whatever she dished out to me each day. Sometimes I was furious, sometimes I was sad, and often I was unimaginably tired, experiencing a bone fatigue that nothing could assuage. In each case I didn’t fight it. I just figured that anger or depression or fatigue were on the menu for that day.
I picked up the same lesson from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I was also writing about in the summer following Justin’s death. Early in the poem, in what I tell my students is comparable to a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Gawain knows he only has a year left to live. After all, he can’t survive the return axe blow from the Green Knight, with whom he is having a beheading contest. At first Gawain tries to fill up the intervening time with action—which is to say, with plot. And while it first appears that (unlike in Hamlet), we get lots of plot, that plot is presented in such a way as to be virtually meaningless. Basically Gawain is presented with one damn adventure after another as he rides to keep his rendezvous with death:
Many a cliff must he climb in country wild; Far off from all his friends, forlorn must he ride; At each strand or stream where the stalwart passed T’were a marvel if he met not some monstrous foe, And that so fierce and forbidding that fight he must. So many were the wonders he wandered among That to tell but the tenth part would tax my wits. Now with serpents he wars, now with savage wolves, Now with wild men of the woods, that watched from the rocks, Both with bulls and with bears, and with boars besides, And giants that came gibbering from the jagged steeps. Had he not borne himself bravely, and been on God’s side, He had met with many mishaps and mortal harms. (trans. Marie Borroff)
The actions that make a knight a knight no longer have significance in the face of death. It’s like someone continuing to do his or her job—let’s say, writing up reports—after the cancer diagnosis. The poet says that his wits are being taxed but it’s more like he has lost all interest. After all, other things are more important.
Beowulf’s descent into the depths of the mere has its equivalent in Gawain being lost in a dark wood (to use Dante’s phrasing):
…By a mountain next morning he makes his way Into a forest fastness, fearsome and wild; High hills on either hand, with hoar woods below, Oaks old and huge by the hundred together. The hazel and the hawthorn were all intertwined With rough raveled moss, that raggedly hung, With many birds unblithe upon bare twigs That peeped most piteously for pain of the cold. The good knight on Gringolet glides thereunder Through many a marsh and mire, a man all alone…
Think of Gawain–or anyone grieving for either a loved one or for him/herself–as those unblithe (sorrowful) birds peeping most piteously.
My next project, The Green Knight’s Guide to Grieving, will take up this work so I’ll put it aside for now. Returning to Beowulf, I get a better sense from Fletcher’s Hamlet discussion how Beowulf helped me grieve. In addition to guiding me into a plotless space, it also let me know that there’s no magic bullet to ending grieving.
I thought at one point that the manner in which Beowulf kills Grendel’s Mother might provide an answer. The sword, which was forged by giants in the golden age before the flood, was (as I interpreted it) a cause greater than oneself. For Beowulf, the sword represents the warrior ethos while for me it meant my family, my students, my college, and my community. If I gave myself over to them, I hoped I would find peace.
It took a student undergoing her own grieving to point out what I was getting wrong. I quote from Erica, whose mother was dying and who took up my suggestion that Beowulf might speak to her emotional turbulence. She wrote that the author of Beowulf, having “no real solution for the problem of grief, simply created the sword as a way to escape a real answer, a real struggle.” Because “neither the poet nor the society understood or felt comfortable enough to really feel grief,” she said, “Beowulf hid behind his armor and his weapons, under the pretext that he was on the good side and grief was on the bad side.”
Only at the end of the poem, Erica continued, do we see an end to grieving. From this she took away the lesson that “grief will get you. If not now, it will come later, and denying yourself the emotional freedom to be honest with your own heart will only work against you in the end.” And she added, “Grief is not always a bad thing to feel; it allows you to come to terms with, and reconcile with, things in your life that cause you pain. In this way you grow and mature with greater wisdom, and even [develop] coping skills.”
Thanks to Erica and to Fletcher’s book, I now see that Beowulf is more of a unified whole when it comes to grieving. Fletcher says that Hamlet is finally able to move past grieving when, seeing Laertes mourning Polonius and Ophelia, he “acknowledges that someone can feel like him.” When we see, in this other mourner, that “we’re not alone in our sorrow” and that a wider public “understands what it is to lose someone who can never be replaced,” we experience relief. “With their understanding,” Fletcher writes, the public “helps not only to support us through our bereavement, but also to relieve our anxiety that we haven’t done enough to commemorate our dead.”
Fletcher adds that
the relief deepens when the public then carries our intended meaning beyond us into future days and places. As that shared remembrance spreads forth, the deep centers of our guilt network gently relax. We come to see that we don’t need to devote our every waking hour to mourning remembrance. We can return to the rhythms of our daily lives, secure in the emotional discovery that a memorial exists in a human community far vaster than ourselves.
So sorrowful warriors could have used Beowulf to work through their own grief issues. First they would have seen Beowulf open himself to Wiglaf, accepting his help in fighting the dragon—which is to say bitterness and withdrawal. Then they would have seen a woman keening for the fallen king:
A Geat woman too sang out in grief; A Geat woman’s with hair bound up, she unburdened herself of her worst fears, a wild litany of nightmare and lament…
Finally, they would have seen the Geats constructing a marker, one that will guide sailors through dark seas:
Then the Geat people began to construct Beowulf’s barrow a mound on a headland, high and imposing, a marker that sailors could see from far away…
Before dying, Hamlet asks Horatio for a different kind a monument, a sharing of his story. Fletcher points out that “once again, a public memorial is required”:
Then twelve warriors rode around the tomb, chieftain’s sons, champions in battle, all of them distraught, chanting in dirges, mourning his loss as a man and a king. They extolled his heroic nature and exploits and gave thanks for his greatness; which was the proper thing, for a man should praise a prince whom he holds dear and cherish his memory when that moment comes when he has to be convoyed from his bodily home. So the Geat people, his hearth companions, sorrowed for the lord who had been laid low. They said that of all the kings upon the earth he was the man most gracious and fair-minded, kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.
There are different kinds of memorials. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, I determined that I would reach out to suffering students since I now knew what it was to have suffered. Indeed, I might not have guided Erica to Beowulf to explore her own grieving had I not gone through my own experience.
But there was another kind of public memorial as well. Julia and I set up an international exchange scholarship in Justin’s name. 23 students from Slovenia, where I had a pair of Fulbright fellowships, have attended St. Mary’s College of Maryland for a semester, living with us as they did so, and a like number of American students have studied in Ljubljana. When we visited Slovenia last year, we joined up with many of these former students and learned about their lives, which have included careers, partners, sometimes children. Many told us that their semester at St. Mary’s was a high point in their lives.
In seeing them, we were able to see the future that we were denied with Justin. And were comforted.
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Thursday
December 7, the day that will live in infamy, was always an important date to my parents. My father was 18 at the time, my mother 16, and they often commemorated Pearl Harbor Day at this time of year through the poem they chose for their weekly poetry column.
My father would be drafted a few months after the Japanese attack and was sent to Europe as an interpreter, serving first in Normandy and later in Munich. My mother, of course, observed the war from stateside but it shaped her view of the world no less than my father’s. It is from a perspective closer to hers that today’s poem comes.
The speaker in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the sonnet-ballad” is a mother whose son is off fighting. Or as the speaker puts it, “they took my lover’s tallness off to war, / Left me lamenting.” In her view, her son has been lured away by “coquettish death,” and war—with its “possessive arms” (a pun) and beauty—can make a man change. The rhetorical question that the poem asks in the first and last lines presumably invites the answer “nowhere.” After all her son “won’t be coming back here any more” and her heart-cup is empty.
Although some people refer to World War II as “the great war,” I always think of documentarist Ken Burn’s description of it as “the worst war.” My father, when he talked about it, saw nothing glorious about it. For him, it was always an utter waste, even though he was glad to see fascism defeated.
the sonnet-ballad By Gwendolyn Brooks
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness? They took my lover’s tallness off to war, Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess What I can use an empty heart-cup for. He won’t be coming back here any more. Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew When he went walking grandly out that door That my sweet love would have to be untrue. Would have to be untrue. Would have to court Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort) Can make a hard man hesitate—and change. And he will be the one to stammer, “Yes.” Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
One other story given that the soldier here is African American. Sometime during the war–I’m not sure whether in France or in Germany–my father did Military Police patrol with two others, a White southerner and an Black serviceman from Chicago. The White wouldn’t talk to the Black so my father served as a kind of intermediary. The experience was formative: shocked by the man’s racism, my father would become a passionate supporter of the Civil Rights movement.
