Brave New World and Cellphones

By Robin Bates | Published: May 28, 2024
Aldous Huxley

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Wednesday

My dear friend Rebecca Adams sent me a fascinating article on Gen Z members who are pushing back against “phone-based childhood.” In “The Youth Rebellion is Growing,” Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt profile seven leaders who are actively working to reduce the serious harms associated with cellphones.

One of these leaders, Ben Spagloss, could be a poster child for better living through literature. Thanks to a mentor he met in high school, Spagloss went from non-reader to voracious reader. Now, as an adult, he uses TikTok to persuade people to get off their phones. He also wants us all to pressure Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, which tech companies are fighting with a $60 million a year lobbying effort.

 As Spagloss describes his outreach to his 190,000 followers,

I will try to get people interested in books, or post at night to help people to power off and sleep. I will also try to teach different behavioral change skills to help people navigate some of the internal barriers that can make change so hard.”

It’s ironic that Spagloss uses his phone to persuade others to abandon theirs, but how else would he do it? As he puts it, “My generation’s world is online, so I thought I’d try to reach people there.” 

Spagloss reports that books received no respect in his high school, where

“reading a book” was a joke. The laugh-out-loud kind of funny. The reality was SparkNotes, CliffNotes, your friend’s notes, or whatever you found online to get the assignment done. The real school we went to every day was the Internet. The social media platforms had a perfect attendance rate, but what they were giving to the kids, nobody knew at the time.

What changed him was an after-school tutor who became a father figure. The man saw through Spagloss’s tough and uncaring act, teaching him “that loving others and aspiring to change the world was a much better philosophy.”

Imitating his mentor, Spagloss turned to books, reading 50 his first year and “a couple hundred” the year after. Reading changed the way he saw his phone.

It was in part this new perspective that drew him to dystopian or speculative fiction. While bookish adolescents are generally attracted to this genre—after all, they’re beginning to think beyond their family and peer units to explore the broader world—Spagloss was most fascinated by a work that is sometimes overshadowed by 1984, The Road, The Stand, Handmaid’s Tale, The Giver, Fahrenheit 451, Parable of the Sower, Station Eleven, The Hunger Games, and the Oryx and Crake trilogy. Looking at his concerns, however, one can see why Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World would strike a chord.

As Spagloss points out, in Huxley’s work “the typical antagonist of the tyrannical government isn’t present. Instead, the protagonist is the antagonist. The people oppress themselves.” Because the authorities encourage consumerism and endless entertainment and freely allow both sex and drug use, the citizenry doesn’t aspire to anything more. As Bernard Marx, a discontented character, observes, people used to read and think, whereas now

the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labor and distraction, scampering from feely [movie] to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to…” 

Spagloss sees Brave New World as even more relevant now than it was in the early 1930s, when it first appeared. He observes,

It pointed to a world where the books don’t burn, but the libraries are left unchecked. Where information is not deprived from people, but given in incomprehensible abundance. Where the culture is not controlled but instead trivial, comedic, sexual, or roasted. In this world, people are not controlled by inflicting pain, but pleasure. It was a world without pain, poetry, truth, or meaning. I saw pleasure, when Huxley and later [Neil] Postman, pointed from their graves to my phone with their stories.

American culture critic Postman, whose 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, saw Brave New World rather than 1984 as our future in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. I wonder what he’d say now, what with the rise of Donald Trump in this country and of authoritarian regimes around the world. Orwell seems only too relevant, especially the dictum, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

As I think about this further, however, one can combine both dystopias: what we are currently experiencing is a reality television host performing Big Brother wannabe for the entertainment of his fans. Trump has become the drug of choice for a swath of the American public, some of whom saw invading the U.S. Capitol as freedom fighter cosplay. (Meanwhile some of Trump’s enablers in Congress have described them as “tourists” and “hostages.”)

In Brave New World, meanwhile, John the Savage, seeking to escape a world in which constant drugs and entertainment numb the senses, engages in self-flagellation with a ceremonial whip—but that just becomes a new form of entertainment for the jaded multitudes. What are the feelies and soma to spectator sadism?

“The whip,” answered a hundred voices confusedly. “Do the whipping stunt. Let’s see the whipping stunt.”

Then, in unison and on a slow, heavy rhythm, “We-want-the whip,” shouted a group at the end of the line. “We-want-the whip.”

Others at once took up the cry, and the phrase was repeated, parrot- fashion, again and again, with an ever-growing volume of sound, until, by the seventh or eighth reiteration, no other word was being spoken. “We-want- the whip.”

They were all crying together; and, intoxicated by the noise, the unanimity, the sense of rhythmical atonement, they might, it seemed, have gone on for hours almost indefinitely.

When Lenina, a sexually charged woman who has been trying to seduce John, rushes out to him, he turns the whip first on her and then back on himself. The crowd has gotten what they came for:

With a whoop of delighted excitement the line broke; there was a convergent stampede towards that magnetic center of attraction. Pain was a fascinating horror.

Their subsequent behavior is akin to all those MAGA bullies who, inspired by Trump, confront people in supermarkets, shopping malls, parks, and other venues. It’s as though they have been given permission to lash out, and they turn on each other and on Lenina, who is on the ground: 

Drawn by the fascination of the horror of pain and, from within, impelled by that habit of cooperation, that desire for unanimity and atonement, which their conditioning had so ineradicably implanted in them, they began to mime the frenzy of his gestures, striking at one another as the Savage struck at his own rebellious flesh, or at that plump incarnation of turpitude writhing in the heather at his feet. 

I can’t help but see the storming of the Capitol in the scene. 

Tom Nichols, a former Republican who writes for the Atlantic, has been calling America “an unserious country” for close to a decade now, seeing us “in the grip both of trivial silliness and dead-serious psychosis.” When people are more interested in being entertained than in governing, we have a Huxley society. Unfortunately, Huxley is only a step away from Orwell since there are authoritarians-in-waiting who are more than eager, with a Trump victory, to install a Christo-fascist state. And if that happens, the reality television show that is American politics will turn deadly serious. Actual pain will ensue.

Can literature stop this? Well, if it alerts Gen Z leaders like Ben Spagloss to these dangers—and if he can persuade his fellows to put down their phones and pay attention to what’s happening—then at least there will be pushback.

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Pinocchio and Appalachian Hunger

By Robin Bates | Published: May 27, 2024
Illus. from Pinocchio

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Tuesday

I never cease to marvel at how small scenes from a novel read in childhood—scenes that others might overlook—are woven into our understanding of the world. When the scene intersects with something we encounter in real life, we have a powerful framework for processing this new information.

Today I’m thinking of my first encounter with real hunger. Having been raised in a middle-class household, I have never experienced deprivation. But Sewanee is located in the Southern Appalachians, where Hunger exists—or at least it did so in my childhood. Two incidents come to mind.

Before recounting them, however, I share a passage from Carlo Collodi’s Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), which primed me for what I was to witness. The novel, I hasten to mention, is nothing like the Disney movie. For one thing, early in the book Pinocchio throws a hammer at the talking cricket that functions as his conscience, killing it (“With a last weak “cri-cri-cri” the poor Cricket fell from the wall, dead!”). After that, the mischievous marionette can receive guidance only from the cricket’s ghost. Pinocchio is unexpectedly grim for a children’s book—at one point Pinocchio barely survives after the Fox and the Cat hang him by the neck from a tree—and part of the grimness involves starvation.

In the scene I remember, Pinocchio has been frantic with hunger until Geppetto returns home with three pears, at which point he gets picky. What transpires is a lesson in not wasting food:

“If you want me to eat them, please peel them for me.”

“Peel them?” asked Geppetto, very much surprised. “I should never have thought, dear boy of mine, that you were so dainty and fussy about your food. Bad, very bad! In this world, even as children, we must accustom ourselves to eat of everything, for we never know what life may hold in store for us!”

“You may be right,” answered Pinocchio, “but I will not eat the pears if they are not peeled. I don’t like them.”

And good old Geppetto took out a knife, peeled the three pears, and put the skins in a row on the table.

Pinocchio ate one pear in a twinkling and started to throw the core away, but Geppetto held his arm.

“Oh, no, don’t throw it away! Everything in this world may be of some use!”

“But the core I will not eat!” cried Pinocchio in an angry tone.

“Who knows?” repeated Geppetto calmly.

And later the three cores were placed on the table next to the skins.

Pinocchio had eaten the three pears, or rather devoured them. Then he yawned deeply, and wailed:

“I’m still hungry.”

“But I have no more to give you.”

“Really, nothing—nothing?”

“I have only these three cores and these skins.”

“Very well, then,” said Pinocchio, “if there is nothing else I’ll eat them.”

At first he made a wry face, but, one after another, the skins and the cores disappeared.

“Ah! Now I feel fine!” he said after eating the last one.

And then this very didactic book delivers its message:

“You see,” observed Geppetto, “that I was right when I told you that one must not be too fussy and too dainty about food. My dear, we never know what life may have in store for us!”

 Now for my childhood stories. Appalachian poverty runs deep, and in some of the communities around Sewanee were people living in tarpaper shacks. There were no free-lunch or free-breakfast programs in those days, and I remember a couple of boys in seventh grade leaving morning classes early in order to sweep out the dining hall in exchange for lunch money.

At one point in fifth grade we had an Easter egg hunt, with the prize being a large popcorn rabbit held together by some sweet, sticky substance, maybe caramel.

I took the hunt very seriously and am pretty sure I found the most eggs. But classmate Curtis (not his real name) claimed that he had found the most and, without counting what was in our bags, the teacher presented him with the rabbit.  I remember feeling cheated and aggrieved.

Or I felt that way until I saw what happened next. Curtis grabbed the rabbit and bit into it with ferocity such as I had never seen before, devouring it to the last kernel. There was no dainty nibbling around the edges. I knew—in part from having reading Pinocchio and in part by the intensity of the moment—that I was in the presence of Hunger. At that moment, I was glad that, whether fairly or not, Curtis had won that rabbit. My own desires and needs were secondary.

This experience was reenforced a couple of years later in seventh grade. We had some kind of bread or rice pudding for lunch one day, into which the chef had much so much sugar or something that it was too rich too eat. Kids will eat almost anything sweet, but in this case no one could get it down. We all left it on our plates.

Well, almost all of us. I remember seeing Curtis, back behind the lunch counter, shoveling down the food from the large bowl out of which it had been served. He was using one of the large serving spoons and appeared to be (as the expression went) “in hog heaven.” Once again, I recognized I was in the presence of Hunger.

I’m not sure I would have connected the dots had I not read Pinocchio. The story had lodged in my head because of my strong initial response—I had been torn between feeling sorry for the marionette and ashamed at his antics—and now a life incident was prompting me to recall it.

All of which is to say that, whether at home or at school, children must be introduced to a constant stream of books. Adults cannot always predict what they will take away with them.

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The Heartbreak in the Heart of Things

By Robin Bates | Published: May 26, 2024
A World War I cemetery


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Monday – Memorial Day

British poet Wilfrid Wilson Gipson, who saw two years of action in World War I before an injury sent him home, wrote “Lament” immediately after the war ended. In some ways, he appears to be suffering from survivor’s guilt, or at least shock at how it no longer seems possible to enjoy the small things of life.

The poem is powerful in its quiet simplicity, which is not easy to achieve for someone who has experienced war firsthand. One reviewer of the time wrote of Gipson, “Under the impact of the greatest crisis in history, he has been not stunned to silence or babbling song, but awakened to understanding and sober speech, and thereby has proved his genius.” Another said that, although his poems are “nothing more than etchings, vignettes, of moods and impressions,” they nevertheless “register with a burning solution on the spirit what the personal side of the war means to those in the trenches and at home.”

In other words, Gipson struck a chord amongst those who were still reeling from “the Great War.” By attaching words to feelings that seem to defy language, poetry gives us a place to rest. And to remember.

Lament

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly and spent
Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings –
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heartbreak in the heart of things?

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Christ Be with Me, Christ within Me

By Robin Bates | Published: May 25, 2024
Celtic cross

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Trinity Sunday

Church friends of mine inform me that clergy often dread giving the sermon for Trinity Sunday.  With the Holy Spirit’s Pentecostal entry into the world, an explanation was needed for who exactly it was that Christians were worshipping: God, Jesus, or this inner spirit? Out of this arose bitter debates, not to mention more than a little confusion. As John Gatta explains in Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology, there is a supposition “that the Trinity is a forbidding abstract and abstruse doctrine—hence one that might best be left unmentioned in public discourse.”

Gatta’s book contends that Christianity provides us with powerful guidance in how to honor the natural world, and this includes the concept of the Trinity. Yet Gatta observes that people often see the Trinity as

inherently problematic rather than illuminating. If regarded mainly as an esoteric puzzle beyond our capacity to solve, then this doctrine looks indeed to be a barrier rather than a breakthrough to fuller understanding.

And indeed, other religions have sometimes regarded Christianity as polytheistic rather than monotheistic. After all, how can God be “three in one”? Gatta’s discussion of the Trinity, however, makes it anything but abstruse. Rather, it captures the way that nature lovers actually experience nature.

To explain, Gatta provides us with a Wordsworthian example. He reports that,

as I sit quietly to watch a cascading watercourse somewhere in Yosemite Valley or the Adirondack Mountains, I sense a flow of divine spirit that seems to be at once within and yet beyond the physical scene I am trying to absorb. The way we experience God in these moments cries out for something more than an either/or solution: God beyond us or God within us.

In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity, while appearing to be a logical contradiction, is instead a way of getting at some of the deepest paradoxes of existence. Think of using it, for instance, to describe Tennyson’s experience upon encountering a “Flower in the Crannied Wall”:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

The poet is simultaneously seeing “root and all” and “all in all.” There is something that is both in the flower and beyond it. Wordsworth describes the same experience when, at the conclusion of Intimations of Immortality, he declares, “To me the meanest flower that blows can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” We may not to be able to logically explain how something can be both immanent and transcendent but we feel it.

With the concept of the Trinity, Christianity avoids both the idea that God is detached from nature (what theologian John Macquarrie calls “monarchical monotheism”) and the idea that God is the same as nature (pantheism). Rather, God is both the generative force beyond nature and a participant in it. God did not create the universe and then sit back but instead fully entered creation, becoming active in all the wondrous and unpredictable forms that nature takes. Rather than being at odds with evolution, as some creationists insist, God is evolution, even as God is simultaneously the spirit behind and beyond evolution. God became one with a human being—Jesus—and by means of Jesus’s guidance and the breath of the Holy Spirit, God becomes one with all that will open their hearts to Him/Her.

Poetry makes this point clearer than theology, and Gatta quotes from a hymn that we will be singing in church today. “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” is taken from a medieval Irish prayer with Druidic origins, origins that become particularly clear in parts of the prayer that do not show up in the hymn:

Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul;
Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me an abundance of reward.  

There’s plenty in the hymn itself, however, that points to Ireland’s pagan roots, which were never fully eradicated from Celtic Christianity and which help explain its richness. Nature plays a major role in Christian revelation, as Gatta notes when writing about the hymn’s fourth stanza. He notes that the “strong name” of the Trinity, equivalent to a formidable breastplate or a Gaelic protection prayer, is “a name bound up with the force of ‘lightning free’ and those ‘old eternal rocks.’”

I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun’s life-giving ray;
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea
around the old eternal rocks.

Because the speaker feels kinship with these natural forces—with God’s creation—he or she can confidently assert that Christ is both within and without:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

There is nothing esoteric with how the speaker sees the concept of the Trinity here. Rather, as Gatta writes, there is a joyous dance between Father, Son, and Sprit, a dance of life that we are invited to join, comprised as it is of “a joyous rhythm mirrored in the rush of subatomic particles or in the ongoing symphony of kinesis performed by cosmological bodies.” Gatta notes that it’s a vision captured in the final canto of Dante’s Paradiso, where pilgrim Dante

is privileged to receive at least a mediated glimpse of the Beatific Vision. That vision includes, in addition to the Celestial Rose peopled by the communion of all saints, God’s great book of Eternal Light, binding with love within its leaves all that is or ever was of Creation.

Or in Dante’s concluding words, “The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

Follow-up note: Gatta quotes priest Michael Mayne as imagining that God’s first question at judgment will be, “Did you enjoy my creation?” I think of Mary Oliver, a poet who makes a concerted effort to drink in nature’s wonders and who sees her felt connection as a gift from God. In her poem about a yellow-breasted chat, a bird that sings at night, God the creator and God the immanent spirit are one and the same:

The Chat
By Mary Oliver

I wish
I were
the yellow chat
down in the thickets
who sings all night,
throwing
into the air
praises
and panhandles,
plains,
in curly phrases,
half-rhymes,
free verse too,
with head-dipping
and wing-wringing,
with soft breast
rising into the air-
meek and sleek,
broadcasting,
with no time out
for pillow-rest,
everything-
pathos,
thanks-
Oh, Lord,
what a lesson
you send me
as I stand
listening
to your rattling, swamp-loving chat
singing
of his simple, leafy life-
how I would like to sing to you
all night
in the dark
just like that.

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Swift Foresaw ChatGPT’s Problems

By Robin Bates | Published: May 23, 2024
The device in Gulliver’s Travels used to produce knowledge.

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Friday

I retired from full time college teaching in 2018 at the age of 68, and what I miss most is watching students using literature to grapple with foundational questions. In my final years, after 40 years in the classroom, I was still being surprised and delighted at the variety of ways that students would use poems and stories to find meaning in their lives.

What I don’t miss is having to grapple with the challenges posed by new technologies, whether they be cellphones, zoom classes, or fake essays written by ChatGPT. The best teachers, as they always have, find ways to rise to the occasion, but there comes a point when one becomes tired of always having to rise. It’s enough of a task just to get students to engage with and reflect upon old-fashioned books.

In my defense, I’ll note that my wariness about the potential of new technology to enhance learning is not new. Three hundred years ago a writer was voicing his skepticism on this very issue.

The writer I have in mind is Jonathan Swift. In Book III of Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726, Swift directs his satire against the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, a.k.a. the Royal Society. While a remarkable organization, like all such organizations it was prone to excesses and misguided enthusiasms. After all, when you openly invite new projects and proposals, you will see genuinely whacky theories arise. In his book Swift imagines scientists attempting to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, soften marble into pillows and pincushions, replace silkworms with spiders (and having them eat brightly colored flies so the threads will be pre-dyed), mix paint by smell, reassemble original food stuffs from excrement, and build houses from the top down (in imitation of the bee and the spider).

And then there’s a project that anticipates ChatGPT, the Artificial Intelligence program that produces seemingly acceptable writing from material it pulls from the internet. Swift’s engineer wants to build a contrivance by which “the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labor, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” In other words, anyone can be an expert with this gizmo, which is twenty feet square and fills up an entire room:

 The superficies was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order.

The engine works as follows:

The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

The inventor explains that he “had emptied the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made the strictest computation of the general proportion there is in books between the numbers of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech.” For their part, the students spend six hours a day gathering these sentence fragments, which are then transcribed into a large folio. The inventor hopes that those rich materials will “give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences.”

Of course, like any start-up tech company, he can’t do this without more money. Also, like ChatGPT and other such systems, he plans to make uncompensated use of other people’s written work. Gulliver reports that this 18th century tech bro hopes “that the public would raise a fund for making and employing five hundred such frames in Lagado, and oblige the managers to contribute in common their several collections.”

The issues that Swift raises are also being encountered by ChatGPT. As a New Yorker article points out, one only gets an approximation of knowledge from the program, which the author compares to a blurry JPEG image:

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way, that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable.

ChatGPT-generated work is acceptable only in appearance. To be sure, an essay produced through such a means can look professional and polished, but often one only needs to look at the footnotes to realize how fake it all is. I don’t know if the story is apocryphal about a lawyer being disbarred after his AI generated brief was discovered to have phony footnoted precedents, but I do know that teacher acquaintances have told me that essays quickly fall apart once one compares footnotes created in this fasion with the actual source material.

Gulliver’s account of a frame filling up an entire room is reminiscent of the early days of large mainframe computers, and certainly we’ve found ways to shrink everything down while automating the scribe work that the narrator describes. But the reason that Swift can anticipate the future problems technology will encounter, along with the abuses that will arise from it, is because he understands that human beings are deeply flawed. For all the promises of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and the Scientific and Technological Revolutions, he knows that science and technology and social engineering (including “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country”) will founder the moment we start ignoring human nature.

Man is an animal capable of reason, Swift often said, with emphasis on the “capable.” As often as not, people’s soaring ambitions are sabotaged by their own pride and by their capacity for sin. Swift talks about the philosopher who, because he gazes only at the stars while walking, ends up in the gutter.

All of which is to say that teachers should never forget the human element in their profession. To overlook it results in shoddy teaching.

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Do You Have Time to Linger?

By Robin Bates | Published: May 22, 2024

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Thursday

Goldfinches have more or less taken over our bird feeders for the past few weeks. They don’t exactly chase away the titmice, nuthatches, and chickadees, but they make it clear that the feeders belong to them. So here’s a poem about them.

In it, Mary Oliver cites a line from one of my favorite Rilke poems. Upon viewing “An Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Rilke is dazzled by its power:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power.

How should one respond to such an experience? Rilke has a simple and direct answer: “You must change your life.”

Oliver is so moved by this that she borrows it—or as T.S. Eliot would say, steals it—for her own ending (although at least she gives Rilke credit). Like the goldfinches, she sings her own poems “for sheer delight and gratitude”:

Invitation
by Mary Oliver

Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy

and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles

for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,

or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?
Their strong, blunt beaks
drink the air

as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine

and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude –
believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing

just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
I beg of you,

do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.

It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.

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The Bard Understood Race in a Deep Way

By Robin Bates | Published: May 21, 2024

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Wednesday

My friend Sue Schmidt recently alerted me to an enlightening article about “What Shakespeare Can Teach Us about Racism.” I’ve argued “a lot” in past essays on Othello, Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest, but Professor David Stirling Brown has opened my eyes to further dimensions.

Brown says that scholars view these three plays plus Titus Andronicus and Antony and Cleopatra as Shakespeare’s five “race plays,” and his naming Titus Andronicus as his favorite play was the spur I needed to go read it. (It’s one of the few I hadn’t read, the others being Two Gentlemen of Verona, Pericles, Henry VIII, King John, and Timon of Athens.)

My response to Titus was, “Oh my God!” One of Shakespeare’s earliest dramas (1591/92), it has as much casual sadism, as much blood and gore, as a Quentin Tarantino film. A Goth prisoner is executed as a sacrifice, Roman general Titus kills one of his sons for disobeying him, and then there’s the mayhem unleashed by Tamora, a captive Goth queen who becomes Roman empress when the emperor marries her. Because it is one of her sons that has been sacrificed, she goads her other two sons to attack Titus’s daughter Lavinia, along with Lavinia’s husband. (Following the rape, they rip out Lavinia’s tongue and cut off both hands so she can’t testify against them.) Then, with the help of her moor lover Aaron, Empress Tamora frames two of Titus’s sons for the husband’s death, leading to their execution.

Not, however, before Aaron has told Titus that, if he sacrifices his hand, the emperor will spare his sons. Titus, who has already lost 21 sons (!) in battling the Goths–not to mention the one he killed for disobedience–does so, and there’s even a sick Dad Joke when he asks for Aaron’s assistance: “Lend me thy hand, and I will give thee mine.”

Of course Aaron—an early forerunner of Iago as a character who unabashedly revels in being evil—has just been messing with him. Titus’s suit is rejected and his hand is returned to him, along with the heads of his two sons.

Shakespeare is just getting warmed up. Tamora, worried about Titus’s one remaining son—the exiled Lucius is off persuading the Goths to join him in a revenge conquest of Rome—seeks to use Titus to lure him into a trap. Titus, feigning madness, seems to play along and, in the process, gets her to leave her two sons with him (the ones who raped Lavinia and killed Lavinia’s husband). These he kills and uses their body parts as ingredients in a pie, which he then serves to Tamora and her emperor husband. Following this, there’s a final bloodletting in which she, the emperor and Titus all get stabbed. But not before Titus has killed his daughter Lavinia for having been dishonored. If you’re keeping count, 27 of his 28 children have been killed, two by himself.

And then there’s Aaron. His earlier relationship with the empress has resulted in a “coal-black” baby boy. Rather than kill the baby, he kills the midwives present at the birth (to hide the secret), substitutes a white child so that Tamora’s infidelity will remain a secret, and runs off with the child. He is captured by Lucius’s forces, to whom he reveals his perfidy, and is condemned to be starved to death while buried up to his neck in the ground. I guess one could say that the play ends happily since Lucius is named the new Roman emperor, but that’s just because Shakespeare always feels the need to restore political order at the end of his tragedies (think of Fortinbras, Edgar, and Malcolm).

Shakespeare being Shakespeare, there’s some good poetry in Titus Andronicus, including the chilling declaration by the two Goth boys about their intentions to “hunt” Lavinia during a hunting party: “Chiron, we hunt not, we, with horse nor hound,/ But hope to pluck a dainty doe to ground.” Still, the play lacks the deep psychology of a Hamlet or a King Lear. It’s Grand Guignol spectacle, not moving tragedy.

Except, perhaps, for the scene that draws Professor Brown to the play, which is in fact extraordinary. Tamora’s two sons want to kill the baby since its skin color will expose their mother, but Aaron, the baby’s father, holds them off. Brown notes that Shakespeare “momentarily offers a beautiful defense of Blackness”:

What, what, you sanguine, shallow-hearted boys,
 You white-limed walls, you alehouse painted signs!
 Coal-black is better than another hue
 In that it scorns to bear another hue;
For all the water in the ocean
 Can never turn the swan’s black legs to white,
 Although she lave them hourly in the flood.
 Tell the Empress from me, I am of age
 To keep mine own, excuse it how she can.

Aaron, Brown points out, is challenging the cultural norm here, arguing that Black is beautiful and strong. The scholar adds that one finds such an endorsement of Black identity nowhere else in Shakespeare, even in Othello. (I would add that Othello not only fails to celebrate Blackness but that Othello’s defensiveness about his skin color makes him vulnerable to Iago’s manipulation.)

Brown contends that Shakespeare helps us understand race even in those plays  where there are no characters of color. In these instances, the Bard examines whiteness, which wasn’t an automatic identity marker before the 17th century. In other words, Shakespeare was writing at a time when people were just beginning to define themselves by racial characteristics, with the elite (but not the working class) seeing themselves as white. As Brown notes, Shakespeare “details the nuances of race through his characters’ racial similarities, thus making racial whiteness very visible.”

Shakespeare, with his powerful poetry, does bear some responsibility for establishing race as a marker. Brown cites the collection of essays White People in Shakespeare, reviewed in The Atlantic (paywalled), which contends that “Shakespeare’s work … was central to the construction of whiteness as a racial category during the Renaissance.” In addition to that, white people “have used Shakespeare to regulate social hierarchies ever since.” The collection contends that “what’s beautiful in Shakespeare,—or what Shakespeare’s speakers take as beautiful—is often cast in racial terms.”

For instance, Brown says, in several of his plays Shakespeare uses white hands as “noble symbols of purity and white superiority.” He also will call attention to a character’s race by describing him/her as “white” or “fair.”

And then there’s the opposite, when black gets used as an insult: the fair Hero in Much Ado about Nothing, who has been falsely accused of an affair, is described by her father as having “fallen into a pit of ink.” Brown says that hero momentarily represents “an ‘inked’ white woman – or a symbolic reflection of the stereotyped, hypersexual Black woman.”

Shakespeare’s role in establishing whiteness as a virtue has proved problematic for some otherwise fervent admirers. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare’s #1 fan, believes that Shakespeare’s creation of Shylock did more damage to Jews than did the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic text that played a key role in Nazi propaganda.

Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defense of Poetry, acknowledges that good things can be perverted to bad and that poetry is no exception. It is like a sword, he says, that can both heroically defend freedom and basely promote tyranny. That being noted, there are those who defend Shakespeare’s creation of Shylock, including leading Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt. Even while Shakespeare was giving us an unforgettable image of the moneylending Jew, Greenblatt writes, he was simultaneously exploding the stereotype. While we shy away in horror from Shylock’s demand for a pound of flesh, at the same time we see his full humanity, along with the ugliness of those who mock him. Brown appears to me making such a defense of the evil-but-fatherly moor in Titus Andronicus.

In his essay Brown argues for the openness of James Baldwin, who once condemned Shakespeare as “one of the authors and architects of my oppression” but later changed his mind. The Bard, Baldwin writes, “found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people.” Shakespeare, he adds, “could have done this only through love—by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.”

Baldwin concludes that Shakespeare’s “responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that almighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man.”

Or as Brown, less poetically, puts it,

Just as Shakespeare didn’t create misogyny and sexism, he didn’t create race and racism. Rather, he observed the complex realities of the world around him, and through his plays he articulated an underlying hope for a more just world.

Or to put it even more succinctly, Shakespeare understood people at a deeper level than anyone ever has.

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Margaret Atwood on the Cicada Love Song

By Robin Bates | Published: May 20, 2024
Cicadas mating

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Tuesday

With the cicadas in full-throated mating call, I went hunting for cicada poems. I found one in the Iliad where Trojan elders too old to fight sit “like cicadas that chirrup delicately from the boughs of some high tree in a wood” as Helen walks by. But because delicate chirruping doesn’t do justice to the incessant roar of our current surround-sound experience, I feature instead a Margaret Atwood lyric.

 Channeling the spirit of D. H. Lawrence, who in his poetry collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers captures the primal sexual urges that surge through nature,  Atwood imagines these insects “cut[ting] loose the yammer of desire” after “nine years of snouting through darkness” (or 17 years, which is the cycle of the other species that has surfaced).

Or maybe she’s channeling Walt Whitman sounding his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Or Molly Bloom’s urgent “yes” as she recalls having sex with Leopold. Using repetition to drive home the carpe diem urgency of gathering rosebuds at right this moment, Atwood writes, “Now it says Now it says Now.” Time’s winged chariot may be drawing near but “first, first, first, first” there is this.

And if this “piercing one note of a jackhammer,” this “maddening racket,” starts to get to you—well, just remember that it’s a love song.

Cicadas
By Margaret Atwood

Finally, after nine years
of snouting through darkness
he inches up scarred bark
and cuts loose the yammer of desire:

the piercing one note of a jackhammer,
vibrating like a slow bolt of lightning,
splitting the air
and leaving a smell like burnt tar paper.

Now it says Now it says Now
clinging with six clawed legs
and close by, a she like a withered ear,
a shed leaf brown and veined,
shivers in sync and moves closer.

This is it, time is short, death is near, but first,
first, first, first
in the hot sun, searing, all day long,
in a month that has no name:

This annoying noise of love. This maddening racket.
This—admit it—song.

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Trump, Quixote, and Windmills

By Robin Bates | Published: May 19, 2024
Gustave Doré, illus. from Don Quixote

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Monday

I perked up recently when New York Times columnist Paul Krugman compared Donald Trump to Don Quixote. Both, he points out, have an animus towards windmills. (Krugman’s article has been gifted here.)

Krugman notes that Trump’s animus toward wind power us

one of the strangest obsessions of a man with many unusual preoccupations (toilets! hair spray!). Over the years, he has asserted, falsely, that wind turbines can cause cancer, that they can cause power outages and that wind energy “kills all the birds” (cats and windows do far more harm). Now he says that if he wins in November, on “Day 1” he’ll issue an executive order putting the brakes on offshore wind farm construction.

And now for Quixote’s opposition:

At this point they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that there are on that plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, “Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God’s good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.”

While Trump vows to use presidential executive authority in his battle, Quixote uses an old-fashioned lance:

A slight breeze at this moment sprang up, and the great sails began to move, seeing which Don Quixote exclaimed, “Though ye flourish more arms than the giant Briareus, ye have to reckon with me.”

So saying, and commending himself with all his heart to his lady Dulcinea, imploring her to support him in such a peril, with lance in rest and covered by his buckler, he charged at Rocinante’s fullest gallop and fell upon the first mill that stood in front of him…

Interestingly, windmills in the 17th century represented cutting-edge technology, just as they do today. In Spain’s Golden Age, people harnessed the wind to pump water and grind grain whereas today we used it to generate clean electricity. Krugman points out that wind technology is one of the most exciting developments in the battle against climate change:

[T]he idea of an economy reliant on solar and wind power has gone from hippie fantasy to realistic policy goal. It’s not just that the costs of renewable electricity generation have plunged; related technologies, especially battery storage, have gone a long way toward resolving the problem that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind always blow.

In other words, both Trump and Quixote are battling technology that is changing our relationship with nature. And while neither likes the way that windmills are suddenly dominating the landscape—or in Trump’s case, ruining the view from his Scottish golf course –the resemblances end there. Trump, after all, is in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, having recently promised to gut environmental regulations if the oil companies will donate a billion dollars to his reelection campaign. Quixote, by contrast, sees it as his knightly duty to “defend maidens, to protect widows and to succor the orphans and the needy.”

As opposed to raping maidens, evicting widows, imprisoning orphans in cages, and gutting welfare programs for the needy.

All those who care about the health of the planet can only hope that Trump’s attacks suffer the same fate as Quixote’s:

[B]ut as he drove his lance-point into the sail the wind whirled it round with such force that it shivered the lance to pieces, sweeping with it horse and rider, who went rolling over on the plain, in a sorry condition. Sancho hastened to his assistance as fast as his ass could go, and when he came up found him unable to move, with such a shock had Rocinante fallen with him.

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