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Tuesday
Over the past few months I’ve been reporting on Angus Fletcher’s book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, with each post dedicated to a different “invention.” Today I look at what the Ohio State Professor of Story Science says about “the invention of the second look.” He finds evidence of this invention in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar but notes that it comes into its own with the Ryūnosuke Akutagawa short story Rashomon, with Akiri Kurosawa adding a further turn of the screw in his film version.
In a literary approach that I have described as anthropological-neurobiological, Fletcher talks about how we are conditioned to believe what our brains tell us. While this works very well for animals, however, eventually
more complex brains emerged. And these brains discovered that there could be advantages to questioning. One of the advantages, rather ironically, was to offer protection from other complex brains. Complex brains could lie and deceive, duping their targets with elaborate fictions. So, over time the complex brain evolved the capacity to skeptically evaluate the things it saw—and judge whether or not those things could be believed.
In other words, to more effectively engage with the world we need a second look. Literature proves powerful ways to develop this look.
Fletcher’s first example is Antony’s famous speech in Julius Caesar. While Antony’s audience begins by thinking of Brutus as an “honorable man,” Antony delivers his speech in such a way that his auditors start questioning this assumption. Here’s an excerpt:
By the end of the speech, audience members are asking themselves whether Brutus is, in fact, honorable Fletcher writes,
Antony’s repetition incites this question for a simple reason: it creates a light sensation of déjà vu that makes our brain self-conscious. In that self-conscious state, our brain is pulled out of its passive viewing experience and prompted to take an active second, third, and fourth look at our internalized belief that Brutus is an honorable man. And as our brain goes back and reviews, and re-reviews, and re-re-reviews, we have to decide, and re-decide, and re-re-decide: Do I tag this belief as true or untrue? So a belief that initially slipped inside our head without resistance becomes a repeated object of our conscious judgment.
If you’ve seen Kurosawa’s Rashomon, you know about this re-re-deciding. The film gives us four different accounts of an encounter between a man and his wife’s encounter with a bandit while traveling through the woods. Each appears to be true as we can see it with our own eyes, only to be thrown into question by the next account.
Fletcher says that, by deliberately alienating their audience, Akutagawa and Kurosawa clear our heads so we don’t allow our brains to be taken over by ideas that aren’t our own. “You may be doomed to believe everything you see,” he concludes, “but with fiction…you can take another look.”
Other works that get us to take this second look, he notes, are James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy, Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. In Passing, for instance, we never learn definitively how Clare falls from a window—there are two characters who could have pushed her and she also may have committed suicide—while in Mother Courage we are torn between whether to cheer for or boo the protagonist, who sells provisions to soldiers during the Thirty Years War.
As with all Fletcher’s inventions, the second look enables us to engage much more effectively with the world. Better living through literature, in other words.
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Monday
Wide receiver Mecole Hardman, Jr., who caught the winning touchdown in last night’s Super Bowl, was an unlikely hero, given that he hadn’t caught a touchdown pass all year. In fact, up until this game, his season had been a disappointment.
This makes Mark Halliday’s poem “Wide Receiver” a fitting selection for today’s post, especially since it also features a quarterback who, like Patrick Mahomes, loves to pump fake. Also, like the quarterback in the poem, Mahomes spent much of the game dissatisfied “with what [he] saw downfield.” If we didn’t see the dazzling passing game from him that we might have expected, it’s because San Francisco did a good job of keeping him off balance while shutting down his receivers.
Not that his receivers would have admitted they were shut down. Like the player in the poem, wide receivers are famous for thinking that they’re always open. And in the end, Hardman was.
Wide Receiver By Mark Halliday
In the huddle you said “Go long—get open” and at the snap I took off along the right sideline and then cut across left in a long arc and I’m sure I was open at several points— glancing back I saw you pump-fake more than once but you must not have been satisfied with what you saw downfield and then I got bumped off course and my hands touched the turf but I regained my balance and dashed back to the right I think or maybe first left and then right and I definitely got open but the throw never came—
maybe you thought I couldn’t hang on to a ball flung so far or maybe you actually can’t throw so far but in any case I feel quite open now, the defenders don’t seem too interested in me I sense only open air all around me though the air is getting darker and it would appear by now we’re well into the fourth quarter and I strongly doubt we can afford to settle for dinky little first downs if the score is what I think it is
so come on, star boy, fling a Hail Mary with a dream-coached combination of muscle and faith and I will gauge the arc and I will not be stupidly frantic and I will time my jump and—I’m just going to say in the cool gloaming of this weirdly long game it is not impossible that I will make the catch.
Further thought: I should have mentioned how one of the Chief receivers–though in this case not a wide one–was as frustrated as Halliday’s speaker in the first half of the Super Bowl. In the first half tight end Travis Kelce screamed at Chiefs coach Mike Holmgren that he wasn’t being used enough (he also bumped him to emphasize his point). Coach and quarterback adjusted took him seriously and Kelce dominated the second half with a game-high 93 receiving yards. “It is not impossible that I will make the catch” he could have said to Holmgren had he chosen to make his point more indirectly.
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Spiritual Sunday
The last Sunday in Epiphany always features the Transfiguration, which is when three of the disciples witness Jesus conversing with Moses and Elijah. I’m therefore sharing some preliminary thoughts about Joh Gatta’s book The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation.
John, a friend and one-time former colleague at Sewanee, extends the idea of the Transfiguration. While it is traditionally seen as that moment when the disciples fully realized that Christ was the messiah, John sees it as something more than a signal that God has entered humanity. Rather, it can be read as God entering creation generally, non-human as well as human. Here’s the story as it appears in Mark:
Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.
As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. (Mark 9:2-9)
Believing that such a story can connect Christian vision with environmentalism, John’s book addresses the question of “how the entire cosmos stands transfigured in the light of Christ?” “How,” he asks, “might this vision of New Creation shape the earth-centered spirituality that has begun to surface lately in response to our planet’s ecological crisis?”
John complains that, too often, the only parts of the Bible that are seen as having relevance to the environmental movement are a couple of early episodes in Genesis. Those who insist that humans should have dominion over creation square off against those who believe God put us on earth as stewards of creation. The Transfiguration story, John contends, can be used to chart a more productive path forward:
The paradigm of Transfiguration encourages us to view creation as a continuously evolving transformation of matter and energy, a dynamic immediacy, rather than a one-time leap from nothingness situated in the distant path. As Teilhard de Chardin so clearly perceived, such a dynamic cosmology requires a theology for our post-Darwinian era that is responsible to the spirit of evolutionary science. Transfiguration also highlights Christ’s role in the New Creation, thereby leading us to identify the process of creation not simply with a time of origins, but with God’s ideal and future fulfillment of redemption. So Transfiguration carries the promise of extending our horizon of faith–beyond belief in the world’s original goodness, toward a vision of eschatological hope [where we are headed].
Because I am currently with our grandchildren in Georgia and forgot to bring John’s book with me (I’m relying on what shows up in Google Books here), I can’t yet report on the late chapters, where John shows how the arts (including literature) articulate visions of a transformed and transfigured nature. Nor do I recall what literature he has chosen. While I look forward to sharing more from his book in future posts, I’d be surprised if he doesn’t cite the following Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet. The poem, which seems to evoke the spirit that the disciples witnessed on the mount, also strives to imagine a nature that resists the attempts of industrial capitalism to subdue it:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Central to John’s book is this notion that nature, despite how we abuse it, is “never spent” and that there continues to live “the dearest freshness deep down things.” Stay tuned for more on this.
Reader comment from Pastor Sue Schmidt: In this coming reading, the SALT commentary, a wonderful blog resource, mentions that Jesus was in the wilderness with the wild animals, and that Mark ends his gospel by having Jesus tell his disciples to preach the good news to all creation. Mark 16:15. This is a nice parallel to your thoughts today.
I also am pondering my earth day sermon – a first. How we as Christians often forget the first commandment, which was to take care of creation. And now, because of “the fall,” all creation is groaning as it waits for the “sons of God to be revealed.” (Romans 8: 19-21.) Reclaiming our love of and care for the earth is a sign that God is truly coming to life and light within us.
And my response: I’m just becoming aware of Paul’s notion of “the cosmic Christ,” Sue, which makes so much sense. I love the way that Barbara Kingsolver handles the religious dimension in Flight Behavior in an internal debate that the family is having over logging. Discussing it over with their pastor, the mother says, “That land was bestowed on on for a purpose. And I don’t think it was to end up looking like a pile of trash.” And a little later, after the father calls the pastor “a tree hugger,” the pastor, who “looked amused,” responds, “Well now, what are you, Burley, a tree puncher? What have you got against the Lord’s trees?” And that carries the day.
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Friday
I experienced a shock of recognition when I watched the stage action following Donald Trump’s recent victory over Nikki Haley in the New Hampshire primary. My faculty reading group had just begun discussing King Lear, and when I saw South Carolina Senator Tim Scott tell Donald Trump, “I love you, man,” I felt I was watching Lear’s love test for his three daughters all over again, with Scott playing the role of the two. older sisters.
I’ve compared Trump to Lear many times on this blog, and applying the play to Scott’s recent declaration solidifies the connection even more. Both Trump and Lear are narcissists, and the loneliness and insecurity that arise from thinking you are the center of the universe explains why they administer love tests in the first place. Somewhere deep inside they feel they are unworthy of being loved and so use their power to force declarations of love from others.
Throughout Trump’s presidency, we witnessed numerous instances of him demanding that subordinates sing his praises. The same dynamic played out in Scott’s “I love you, man.” Here’s Goneril’s own declaration:
By professing such love, however insincerely, Goneril and Regan get that piece of the kingdom originally intended for Cordelia. By his profession of love, Scott ensures that no other Republican will run against him when he is up for reelection. Perhaps Trump will even choose him for running mate.
Rather than bask in his triumph, however, Trump unloaded on Haley with the same fury that Lear directs toward Cordelia. After all, she had had the temerity to stand up to him. Therefore, after Scott endorsed him for president, he had to make sure the Scott hated Haley as much as he did. His comment—”And you’re the senator of her state. And [you] endorsed me. You must really hate her”—is what drew Scott’s declaration of love.
While Nikki has mostly soft-pedaled her criticisms of Trump, that’s not enough for the ex-president. It’s the same with Cordelia. Her “I love your majesty according to my bond; nor more nor less” is essentially a refusal to play Lear’s narcissistic game. In doing so, however, she appears to confirm—at least as he sees it—what he secretly fears to be the truth, which is that he is unlovable. As a result, he erupts:
Who the hell was the imposter who went up on the stage before, and like, claimed a victory? You can’t let people get away with bullshit. And when I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy, I said, “What’s she doing? We won.”
And later:
I don’t get too angry. I get even.
To Scott’s declaration, meanwhile, Trump responded, “That’s why he’s a great politician!” In other words, he didn’t believe him, just as Lear, deep down, probably doesn’t believe Goneril or Regan. Nevertheless, to prop up this fragile self, he needs to hear the words.
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Thursday
Poet Joseph Fasano tweeted out a moving poem yesterday on how to comfort a child when you are being bombed or assaulted, as is occurring currently in Gaza, Ukraine, and other parts of the world. One respondent wrote back that the poem reminded her of the 1997 Italian film Life Is Beautiful, in which an inmate of a concentration camp tries to shield his son from its horrors by spinning a fantasy about it.
Childhood innocence is so important to us that we will go to great lengths to preserve it. When the situation is truly dire, our creativity knows no bounds.
Words Whispered to a Child under Siege By Joseph Fasano
No, we are not going to die. The sounds you hear knocking the windows and chipping the paint from the ceiling, that is a game the world is playing. Our task is to crouch in the dark as long as we can and count the beats of our own hearts. Good. Like that. Lay your hand on my heart and I’ll lay mine on yours. Which one of us wins is the one who loves the game the most while it lasts. Yes, it is going to last. You can use your ear instead of your hand. Here, on my heart. Why is it beating faster? For you. That’s all. I always wanted you to be born and so did the world. No, those aren’t a stranger’s bootsteps in the house. Yes, I’m here. We’re safe. Remember chess? Remember hide-and-seek? The song your mother sang? Let’s sing that one. She’s still with us, yes. But you have to sing without making a sound. She’d like that. No, those aren’t bootsteps. Sing. Sing louder. Those aren’t bootsteps. Let me show you how I cried when you were born. Those aren’t bootsteps. Those aren’t sirens. Those aren’t flames. Close your eyes. Like chess. Like hide-and-seek. When the game is done you get another life.
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Wednesday
I’ve been thinking about all those people out there who make our lives a little better, including the federal workforce that Donald Trump decries as “the deep state.” He has so brainwashed his followers that some can’t even recognize when people are trying to help them, a situation that reminds me of a character in Voltaire’s Candide.
Before discussing the barons of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, here’s a story I heard from a childhood friend a few weeks ago. Recently retired from a career spent in legal aid, she told of working with a man who had significant medical expenses. Even though she had come up with a way for him to hold on to his house, he turned to her at one point, with contempt in his eyes, and said, “You’re a Democrat, aren’t you?”
She noted that her political sympathies had nothing to do with seeking to protect him, but he left and didn’t return. Later he lost his house.
He’s not the first, of course, to behave this way. Ever since Ronald Reagan did incomparable harm by declaring, with his folksy charm, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,'” Americans have been savaging civil servants. Reagan used his attacks on social services to hollow out the middle class while engineering large tax cuts for the wealthy, and Trump has been doing the same in his attacks on the federal work force. Many of these workers have provided a check against his and his cronies’ corruption tendencies.
As a young man, Candide is chased away by the local baron for not being good enough to exchange amorous looks with his daughter. The baron’s family can boast of a lineage of 72 quarterings whereas Candide has only 71.
Disaster will befall all of the characters multiple times, with Candide several times providing invaluable service to the baron who exiled him. Yet each time he proposes marriage–Candide is now dealing with the baron’s son, Cunegonde’s brother—he runs into the same prejudice. Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, Jr., in other words, is behaving like my friend’s client. Here is situation at the end of the book, by which time Cunegonde, because of her various trials, has lost her looks:
Cunegonde did not know she had grown ugly, for nobody had told her of it; and she reminded Candide of his promise [of marriage] in so positive a tone that the good man durst not refuse her. He therefore intimated to the Baron that he intended marrying his sister.
“I will not suffer,” said the Baron, “such meanness on her part, and such insolence on yours; I will never be reproached with this scandalous thing; my sister’s children would never be able to enter the church in Germany. No; my sister shall only marry a baron of the empire.”
Cunegonde flung herself at his feet, and bathed them with her tears; still he was inflexible.
Candide, having become far wealthier than the baron, is finally able to stand up to him:
“Thou foolish fellow,” said Candide; “I have delivered thee out of the galleys, I have paid thy ransom, and thy sister’s also; she was a scullion, and is very ugly, yet I am so condescending as to marry her; and dost thou pretend to oppose the match? I should kill thee again, were I only to consult my anger.”
“Thou mayest kill me again,” said the Baron, “but thou shalt not marry my sister, at least whilst I am living.”
Throughout the United States, there are ideologues who are rejecting the good faith efforts of legal aid lawyers, medical professionals, teachers, social workers, federal workers, and others whose mission is to help them. Many of my classmates and many of my students have gone into these professions out of the idealistic belief that they help make the world a better place. My friend, who attended Duke Law School, could have gone into a far more lucrative field of law than legal aid. Then they run up against ideological rigidity.
At such times, MAGA resembles a self-destructive cult, willing to sacrifice their goods and even their lives to prove their loyalty to their grifting master. They have contempt for those who care about them.
In Voltaire’s works, one of Candide’s friends wants to drown the Baron and another to return him to the slave galleys. In the end, they return him to Rome, where he been serving as a Jesuit missionary. In doing so, “they had the double pleasure of entrapping a Jesuit and punishing the pride of a German baron.”
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Tuesday
I’ve been listening to Terry Pratchett fantasy novels as I drive around and have just come across one that helps explain rightwing America’s obsession with guns. Pratchett is to fantasy what Douglas Adams is to science fiction—a devastatingly witty satirist who takes on issues of modernism in the guise of familiar genre—and in Men at Arms he grapples with authoritarian impulses.
The 1993 novel seems particularly relevant to today as it pits a complex multicultural society against longing for an all-powerful ruler. On the one hand, there are Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mandates for the Night Watch, which decree that the police force should be open to non-humans as well as humans. This includes trolls, dwarfs, vampires, zombies, and werewolves. While the mix causes internal problems, especially because trolls and dwarfs are traditional enemies, ultimately it works to society’s advantage in that a diverse police force is more effective at handling social unrest (including brawls between trolls and dwarfs). The novel stands in noted contrast to Lord of the Rings, where goblins and trolls are bad and dwarfs and elves are good.
Indeed, Pratchett appears to be writing a deliberate response to Tolkien, who in his fiction longs for a pre-World War I world where yeoman farmers live in rural peace. Much of the drama in Pratchett’s novels involves members of various species learning to move past their quarrels and appreciate the richness that diversity offers.
Traditionalists, however, are appalled at these modern developments and long for “the return of the king” (to quote Tolkien), a return to the past where “species bias” is acceptable. They long for a man (and in there minds it has to be a man, not to mention a human) who can pull a sword out of a stone. Sadly, one of these traditionalists has access to a new weapon known as “the gonne.”
The gonne has been invented by Leonard da Qvirm, who is based on Da Vinci, and unfortunately it proves to have a life of its own. In this way, it is very much like “the one ring to rule them all.” When one man succeeds in wresting it from another (as Isildur wrests the ring from Sauron), he himself becomes possessed by it. In adapting Tolkien’s drama, Pratchett helps us understand our own gun fanatics.
The power of the gonne becomes especially clear to Samuel Vimes, head of the Night Watch, when he wrestles it from the grasp of a man who is trying to kill him with it, not to mention overthrow the government. Although Vimes believes passionately in the law, that belief starts to drop away when he has the gonne in his hand. In fact, the metal tube actually speaks to him and tries to act of its own volition as it turns on the head of the Assassins Guild, its previous possessor:
You’re mine. We don’t need him anymore.
The shock of the voice was so great that [Vimes] cried out.
He swore afterwards that he didn’t pull the trigger. It moved of its own accord pulling his finger with it. The gonne slammed into his shoulder and a six-inch hole appeared in the wall by the Assassin’s head, spraying him with plaster.
The gonne doesn’t stop there but keeps attempting to seduce its new possessor:
All that you hate, all that is wrong—I can put it right.
And:
Shoot them all. Clean up the world….
But…why not? Why not fire? Who was this man? He’d always wanted to make the city a cleaner place, and he might as well start here. And then people would find out what the law was…
After Vimes manages, barely, to escape the deadly attraction of the weapon, he reflects on its power:
No wonder no one had destroyed it. You couldn’t destroy something as perfect as this. It called out to something deep in the soul. Hold it in your hand, and you had power. More power than any bow or spear—they just stored up your own muscles’ power, when you thought about it. But the gonne gave you power from outside. You didn’t use it, it used you.
Gun supporters in this country are fond of saying, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” as though this excuses them from regulating firearms. Pratchett makes it clear that guns do in fact kill people, preying on us the way that, say, drugs do. They feed upon fantasies of power and invulnerability and, in the process, lead to an epidemic of gun deaths. America has experienced between 40-50,000 gun deaths in each of the past three years.
In Pratchett’s novels, the gonne is considered so dangerous that it is buried away where no one will ever find it. Now that’s the kind of fantasy I can get behind.
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Monday
Today I will be teaching the card game “ombre” as one of Sewanee’s “Friends of the Library” events. I’ve written in the past about teaching the game to college classes, but this will be slightly different as the participants will not have previously spent a week studying Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1714), in which the card game is played. Many of them will have attended last year’s event featuring the card game Speculation, played in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and so may come expecting a similarly simple game. Ombre is more complicated, unfortunately, but I’ve modified the rules somewhat to make it easier to play.
Here is the lecture I will be giving, along with the rules for ombre and the game as it is played in Rape of the Lock:
Alexander Pope was born in 1688 into a wealthy British Catholic family. Although you may not be familiar with his poetry, you will recognize some of the lines that he wrote, such as:
–A little learning is a dangerous thing. –Hope springs eternal in the human breast. –To err is human. To forgive, divine. –Charms strike the sight but merit wins the soul. –Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. –Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is man.
Pope first made his mark in his early twenties with the dazzling Essay on Criticism, which he then followed up with the even more dazzling Rape of the Lock.
The poem is based on an actual incident involving two Catholic families. The young Lord Petre, with a pair of scissors, had cut a ringlet from the head of Arabella Fermor. This serious breach of etiquette—we would call it sexual assault today—caused great commotion and led to a seemingly irreparable feud between the families. Pope’s friend John Caryll, who was also a friend of both families, came to the young poet and suggested that a comic poem might help the warring parties move past their quarrel by laughing the incident off. Pope, who would later make his fortune by translating the Iliad, decided to write up the incident as though it were an epic battle, with Arabella and Lord Petre as warriors. Their field of battle was the card game ombre.
In the late 17th century and early 18th century, ombre was the most popular card game in Europe. Its name comes from the Spanish word for man, and its popularity lay in the fact that it was the first card game where players bid for trump. It was brought over to England from France when Charles II was restored to the monarchy, and Matthew Mitchell of Sewanee’s history department informs me that Charles’s queen, Catherine de Braganza, was a great fan. By 1674, it had become so popular in high society—and people were losing so much money over it—that there were discussions in Parliament to either pass an act against playing it or at least to limit the stakes to 5 pounds. Ultimately the issue became moot as ombre was surpassed first by quadrille, then by whist, and finally by bridge, all of which also involve bidding.
I can assure you that no one will lose any money in today’s demonstration. Nor will any locks of hair be cut.
In the poem we first see Belinda, the star of our show, dreaming of a possible encounter with the Baron. Then we see the Baron resolving that he will do anything he can to possess her. Then we see Belinda at her dressing table. and the beautification process is compared to a knight preparing for battle: “Now awful Beauty puts on all its arms;/ The fair each moment rises in her charms,” Pope announces.
Throughout his poem, Pope satirizes the glam culture and the materialist consumerism of his day. While he’s sympathetic with and even a bit dazzled by Belinda, he also thinks she takes herself far too seriously.
Belinda next takes a boat to the royal palace of Hampton Court, where the ball is being held. Once she gets there, she plays cards with the Baron and an anonymous third player who has come to be called Sir Anonyme. She wins a tightly played hand and taunts the Baron with her victory, upon which he, in revenge, sneaks up behind her when she’s bending over a cup of coffee and snips off one of her two curls. At that point everyone starts shouting while Belinda first bursts into tears and then throws a pinch of snuff into the Baron’s face. A woman named Clarissa steps forward and advises her to laugh the whole thing off but no one listens to her. In all the commotion, the lock disappears but Pope assures Belinda that it has flown off into the heavens and become a constellation.
In other words, Belinda—and by extension Arabella Fermor—has just been immortalized.
When those fair suns shall set, as set they must, And all those tresses shall be laid in dust, This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame, And ‘midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name.
Although he originally wrote the poem for private purposes, Pope realized that it was so good that he had to publish it, which he did. Reports are that, in the short run, Arabella Fermor was not amused, figuring that her dirty laundry was being aired in public. As she grew older, however, she came to appreciate that she had in fact been immortalized. After all, literary aficionados still know who Arabella Fermor is.
When the poem came out, the first thing that ombre players all over England did was lay out the hand as it is played in the poem. At the end of our session, I will walk you through it. But to fully appreciate Pope’s brilliance, it helps to know how to play.
I’ve promised participants that, after seeing how Pope describes the cards, they’ll never look at kings, queen and jacks the same way again. Look at a deck to check out the accuracy of the following:
Behold, four Kings in majesty rever’d, With hoary whiskers and a forky beard; And four fair Queens whose hands sustain a flow’r, Th’ expressive emblem of their softer pow’r; Four Knaves in garbs succinct, a trusty band, Caps on their heads, and halberts in their hand; And particolour’d troops, a shining train, Draw forth to combat on the velvet plain.
We get even more detailed descriptions of the kings. First up is the king of spades. Everything that Pope says about the cards of his time still applies to today’s pack except for the fact that our kings do not have legs:
With his broad sabre next, a chief in years, The hoary Majesty of Spades appears, Puts forth one manly leg, to sight reveal’d, The rest, his many-colour’d robe conceal’d. The rebel Knave, who dares his prince engage, Proves the just victim of his royal rage.
Next, the king of clubs:
Thus far both armies to Belinda yield; Now to the Baron fate inclines the field. His warlike Amazon her host invades, Th’ imperial consort of the crown of Spades. The Club’s black Tyrant first her victim dy’d, Spite of his haughty mien, and barb’rous pride: What boots the regal circle on his head, His giant limbs, in state unwieldy spread; That long behind he trails his pompous robe, And, of all monarchs, only grasps the globe?
And finally, the king of diamonds:
The Baron now his Diamonds pours apace; Th’ embroider’d King who shows but half his face And his refulgent Queen, with pow’rs combin’d Of broken troops an easy conquest find. Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, in wild disorder seen, With throngs promiscuous strow the level green.
In playing the game, the two major things to know are the order of the cards and the possible bids The top three cards, known as Matadors and with each having a special name, are treated as trump:
Ace of Spades (Spadillia) 2 of trump (Manillia) Ace of Clubs (Basto) King Queen Knave Ace 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 (if not Manillia)
Because Spadillia and Basto are treated as trump, the other players must follow them with a card in the trump suit, not with a spade or a club (unless spades or clubs is trump).
Nine cards are dealt to each player, which means that a winning hand usually involves winning five tricks. The six possible bids are:
1. Non-spade with a partner – 5 tricks (or a dominant 4) in conjunction with a partner* with diamonds, hearts, or clubs as trump–2 pts each for bidder and partner (only the bidder loses 2 if bid fails) 2. Spade with a partner – 5 tricks (or a dominant 4) in conjunction with a partner* with spades as trump (called “color”) (4 pts each for bidder and partner (only the bidder loses 4 if bid fails) 3. Solo non-spade – 5 tricks on your own, with diamonds, hearts or clubs as trump – 4 pts (or -4) 4. Solo spade – 5 tricks on your own, with spades as trump – 8 pts (or -8)5. Tout non-spade – All nine tricks, with diamonds, hearts, or clubs as trump – 16 pts (or -16) 6. Tout spade – All nine tricks, with spades as trump – 32 pts(or -32)
*The first opponent to play a king is your partner.
Order of play
–Nine cards of the 40 (10s, 9s and 8s having been removed) are dealt to the three players, with the remaining 13 cards set aside into a pool.
–The player to the left of the dealer (Belinda in Pope’s poem) begins the bidding. She either passes or bids “non-color with a partner.” The player to her left (the Baron) says either “will you raise to ‘spade with a partner’?” If yes, that is Belinda’s new bid. If no, the bid passes to the Baron, at which point Sir Anonyme has a chance to push the bid up even further. After the bid is determined, the winner of the bid may raise (but obviously not lower) the bid—say, from “spade with a partner” to “solo non-color” or “solo spade” etc.
–The player who wins the bid is the “hombre” or “ombre” and has a chance to trade in as many cards as desired from the pool, followed by the other two players.
–The ombre begins play first.
–If the bid is “with partner,” the partner will be the first opponent to play a king. The ombre may choose to start play with a low card to bring out a king.
–Play continues until either the bid is achieved or fails. Failure is known as codille.
Sequence of cards played in Rape of the Lock
Belinda’s bid: “Solo spade.” (“Let spades be trumps, she said, and trumps they were.”) As the winner of the bid, Belinda (as ombre) leads.
Belinda Baron Sir Anonyme
ace of spades (Spadillia) four of spades six of spades two of spades (Manillia) five of spades three of spades ace of clubs (Basto) seven of spades* two of hearts** king of spades knave of spades three of hearts king of clubs queen of spades knave of clubs six of diamonds king of diamonds seven of diamonds queen of clubs queen of diamonds four of hearts queen of hearts knave of diamonds six of hearts king of hearts ace of hearts*** knave of hearts
*a spade must be played here because Basto counts as a trump **devoid of trump, Sir Anonyme can throw off anything ***lower than the king, queen and knave
I’ve already read some of the action in Pope’s description of the kings. Here’s his account of the final two tricks. Remember that red aces rank lower than the picture cards:
The Knave of Diamonds tries his wily arts, And wins (oh shameful chance!) the Queen of Hearts. At this, the blood the virgin’s cheek forsook, A livid paleness spreads o’er all her look; She sees, and trembles at th’ approaching ill, Just in the jaws of ruin, and Codille. And now (as oft in some distemper’d State) On one nice Trick depends the gen’ral fate. An Ace of Hearts steps forth: The King unseen Lurk’d in her hand, and mourn’d his captive Queen: He springs to Vengeance with an eager pace, And falls like thunder on the prostrate Ace. The nymph exulting fills with shouts the sky; The walls, the woods, and long canals reply.
In football, Belinda might be penalized for taunting. That’s certainly how the thin-skinned Baron sees it, and he probably regards her response as a personal rejection as well. But that’s not to excuse what he does, and his society certainly did not.
I can’t think of any other work that sticks so closely to an actual game, with the exception of Alice through the Looking Glass, which is based on an actual chess problem. In any event, Pope blew 18th century audiences away with his poetic wit and flawless couplets.
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Sunday
I recently came across a long and fascinating poem by Howard Nemerov in Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba’s anthology of American Religious Poems. “The Loon’s Cry,” published in The Sewanee Review in 1956 (which, for what it’s worth, was two years after my family moved to Sewanee), seems to be in dialogue with William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us.”
In that sonnet, Wordsworth is in despair at how capitalist society is so bent on “getting and spending” that “we lay waste our powers.” Nature has become alien to us because “we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” Even when we are presented with nature’s unfathomable mysteries, we don’t respond. As Wordsworth puts it,
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.
All of which leads the poet to wish he lived in an earlier age when, looking out at sea, one saw not a scientifically explainable natural phenomenon but gods and goddesses:
Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Nemerov, who also has written poems decrying commercialization (for instance, “Boom!”), is having thoughts similar to Wordsworth’s as he walks alone “on a cold evening, summer almost gone.” While struck by the beauty of the scene as the sun goes down and a full moon rises, he worries that he is missing some deeper meaning. As he describes himself at “the fulcrum of two poised immensities” (the sun and the moon), I almost hear him saying (as Yeats says in “The Second Coming”), “Surely some revelation is at hand”:
On a cold evening, summer almost gone, I walked alone down where the railroad bridge Divides the river from the estuary. There was a silence over both the waters, The river’s concentrated reach, the wide Diffusion of the delta, marsh and sea, Which in the distance misted out of sight.
As on the seaward side the sun went down, The river answered with the rising moon, Full moon, its craters, mountains and still seas Shining like snow and shadows on the snow. The balanced silence centered where I stood, The fulcrum of two poised immensities, Which offered to be weighed at either hand.
Like Wordsworth, however, he laments that, instead of detecting some otherworldly significance, he is limited to mere nature viewing. “No longer a pagan suckled in a creed outworn” (to quote Wordsworth), he sees only natural science, not theology. He, like Wordsworth, has fallen from “the symboled world” where one found mysteries of meaning, form, and fate/ Signed on the sky”:
But I could think only, red sun, white moon, This is a natural beauty, it is not Theology. For I had fallen from The symboled world, where I in earlier days Found mysteries of meaning, form, and fate Signed on the sky, and now stood but between A swamp of fire and a reflecting rock.
In the past, Nemerov imagines, the “energy in things shone through their shapes” (he uses the image of Japanese lanterns to capture the idea). For instance, one once saw the drama of God’s war with Satan in all things. Now, however, we’ve “traded all those mysteries in for things.” One hears, at this point, Wordsworth chiming in with “a sordid boon”:
I envied those past ages of the world When, as I thought, the energy in things Shone through their shapes, when sun and moon no less Than tree or stone or star or human face Were seen but as fantastic japanese Lanterns are seen, sullen or gay colors And lines revealing the light that they conceal.
The world a stage, its people maskers all In actions largely framed to imitate God and His Lucifer’s long debate, a trunk From which, complex and clear, the episodes Spread out their branches. Each life played a part, And every part consumed a life, nor dreams After remained to mock accomplishment.
Under the austere power of the scene, The moon standing balanced against the sun, I simplified still more, and thought that now We’d traded all those mysteries in for things, For essences in things, not understood— Reality in things! and now we saw Reality exhausted all their truth.
However, at the very moment the speaker feels we have stripped nature of its mystery by reducing it to thingness—we reduce the world by thinking that the literal is reality and truth—he hears the cry of a loon, which is so primal that it seems invested with transcendent meaning. He feels like he is Adam, “hearing the first loon cry in paradise”:
As answering that thought a loon cried out Laughter of desolation on the river, A savage cry, now that the moon went up And the sun down—yet when I heard him cry Again, his voice seemed emptied of that sense Or any other, and Adam I became, Hearing the first loon cry in paradise.
That haunting cry supersedes our despair at living in a world “that seems too much with us.” With the cry, we are “blessed beyond all that we thought to know”:
For sometimes, when the world is not our home Nor have we any home elsewhere, but all Things look to leave us naked, hungry, cold, We suddenly may seem in paradise Again, in ignorance and emptiness Blessed beyond all that we thought to know: Then on sweet waters echoes the loon’s cry.
The cry puts the world in a new context, seeming to express its contempt at our having reduced reality to “the forms of things.” The loon batters and undermines our seemingly fixed world:
I thought I understood what that cry meant, That its contempt was for the forms of things, Their doctrines, which decayed—the nouns of stone And adjectives of glass—not for the verb Which surged in power properly eternal Against the sea wall of the solid world, Battering and undermining what it built…
What the loon’s cry accomplishes, the poet can accomplish as well. By “respeaking” the world, the poet aims to reawaken us to the world’s mystery, just as the loon does. After hearing the loon’s cry, the speaker is struck by how the moon rises and the stars begin to shine:
And whose respeaking was the poet’s act, Only and always, in whatever time Stripped by uncertainty, despair and ruin, Time readying to die, unable to die But damned to life again, and the loon’s cry. And now the sun was sunken in the sea, The full moon high, and stars began to shine.
This mention of the cold moon leads the poet to think of it as a metaphor for the coldness of our own world, at least to the extent that we have reduced it to thingness. Or in Wordsworth words, to “buying and spending”:
The moon, I thought, might have been such a world As this one is, till it went cold inside, Nor any strength of sun could keep its people Warm in their palaces of glass and stone. Now all its craters, mountains and still seas, Shining like snow and shadows on the snow, Orbit this world in envy and late love.
But in warning what can happen to us, Nemerov is acknowledging that all is not lost. Even though we are faced with a “burning cold,” it is as though the loon’s cry—to which Nemerov adds a distant train whistle—can restore mystery to our world. By means of “arts contemplative” (including poetry) we can read more into things than we thought. They present us with signatures that “leave us not alone/ Even in the thought of death.”
And the stars too? Worlds, as the scholars taught So long ago? Chaos of beauty, void, O burning cold, against which we define Both wretchedness and love. For signatures In all things are, which leave us not alone Even in the thought of death, and may by arts Contemplative be found and named again.
The loon again? Or else a whistling train, Whose far thunders began to shake the bridge. And it came on, a loud bulk under smoke, Changing the signals on the bridge, the bright Rubies and emeralds, rubies and emeralds Signing the cold night as I turned for home, Hearing the train cry once more, like a loon.
What began as a cold evening excursion is suddenly filled with “bright/ Rubies and emeralds, rubies and emeralds.” Whereas Wordsworth thought that he had lost forever the vision of “Proteus rising from the sea,” Nemerov assures us that poetry can find and name those things again.
Which is what both Nemerov and Wordsworth do with their poems. In other words, when the world is too much with us—or when we find ourselves standing between sunset and moon rise (“swamp of fire and reflecting rock”)—we can listen to the loon’s cry and to the poet writing about it.
At that point, the world moves from “natural beauty to theology.” Triton blows his wreathèd horn.
