Glück on the “Lethal, Unstable” Future

By Robin Bates | Published: October 18, 2023
Fresco of the sacrifice of Iphigenia

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Thursday

When I was a child, I remember spending a lot of time thinking about why bad things happen and how I could get the world to work in my favor. Sometimes I would make little deals with God, sometimes I figured I would be rewarded if I became a better person. I had forgotten about these efforts, however, until coming across a poem by Nobel-prize winning Louise Glück, whom I have been revisiting since her death last week.

In “The Empty Glass,” Glück examines how humans respond to uncertainty. To get a better understanding, she goes back to her childhood, revisiting the different ways she tried to achieve a modicum of control. She begins by telling us that she “asked for much”—from God? from her parents?—only to get contradictory results. In the course of the poem, she recounts various superstitions that are supposed to ward off bad luck—don’t open an umbrella indoors; don’t put your shoes on the table; don’t walk under ladders; throw salt over your left shoulder—that presumably she followed.

Sometimes she concluded that bad luck—or perhaps bullying—was her own fault, a result of “my nature.” But after beating herself up for her faults, she then notes that her fortunes changed while she herself remained the same, which means that there must have been other causes.

When she asks if those causes involved the sea or some “celestial force,” she is imagining higher powers at work. Just in case, she tries praying and then, just like me trying to placate the who or what that controls destiny, she too tries to be a better person. However, she is assured by friends, who clasp her hand intently, that she already is that better person, not pathetic at all. Perhaps she is even a queen or a saint! And so we grasp for compliments and reassurance.

Perhaps this whole tangled process—which Glück says began as terror and “matured into moral narcissism”—is “in fact human growth.” If moral narcissism is the belief that how we behave determines what happens to us—solipsistic Robinson Crusoe thinks that God punishes him with an earthquake because he has disobeyed his father—then it does indeed have something to do with how we grow up. Maybe, Glück conjectures, “some good will come of simply trying.” If we put in the effort, perhaps the “initiating impulse” is irrelevant.

In any event, these efforts to control our future, futile though they may be, are all we have “to appease the great forces.” After all,

What are we without this?
Whirling in the dark universe,
alone, afraid, unable to influence fate

Yet even as she casts a relatively benign eye on our struggles, Glück (as is characteristic with her) introduces a dark note into her poem, one that becomes fully realized in the final stanza. So as not to spoil the suspense, I’ll discuss it after you’ve read the poem:

The Empty Glass
By Louise Glück

I asked for much; I received much.
I asked for much; I received little, I received
next to nothing.

And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors.
A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table.

O wrong, wrong—it was my nature. I was
hard-hearted, remote. I was
selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny.

But I was always that person, even in early childhood.
Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children.
I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract
tide of fortune turned
from high to low overnight.

Was it the sea? Responding, maybe,
to celestial force? To be safe,
I prayed. I tried to be a better person.
Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror
and matured into moral narcissism
might have become in fact
actual human growth. Maybe
this is what my friends meant, taking my hand,
telling me they understood
the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted,
implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick
to give so much for so little.
Whereas they meant I was good (clasping my hand intensely)—
a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos.

I was not pathetic! I was writ large,
like a queen or a saint.

Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture.
And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe
in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying,
a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse
to persuade or seduce—

What are we without this?
Whirling in the dark universe,
alone, afraid, unable to influence fate—

What do we have really?
Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,
tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring
attempts to build character.
What do we have to appease the great forces?

And I think in the end this was the question
that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,
the Greek ships at the ready, the sea
invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future
lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking
it could be controlled. He should have said
I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

The dark note is whether the speaker is using these coping mechanisms to endure an abusive relationship. If so, she is right that she may be “a little sick” for putting up with the man (giving him “so much for so little”) whereas her enabling friends are doing her no favors by assuring her that she’s being good, even saint-like. By trying so hard, is she playing into the pathology?

The dangers of trying too hard are spelled out in the last stanza, where we see a father’s efforts at control lead to the death of his daughter. The poet is referring to the moment at Aulis when it appears that the Greek forces, about to set sail for Troy, will be stymied by lack of wind. To appease Artemis, whom he has offended, Agamemnon is informed that he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia and he does so. Although the sacrifice does the trick, his wife (understandably) never forgives him, murdering him upon his return from Troy.

What if, Glück imagines, we were to relinquish our need to control the “lethal, unstable” future. If a lifetime spent trying to appease the great forces leads us to kill what we love, then we really do “have nothing.” Better, at that point, to drop our arms, acknowledge that control is an illusion, and ask for mercy.

Then again, Iphigenia in Euripides’s play gives up and surrenders to her sacrifice, as do some wives in abusive relationships. Glück may not be providing up with a prescription for living here, but she gets us to better understand why we think and behave as we do.

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GOP Intellectuals Want a “Red Caesar”

By Robin Bates | Published: October 17, 2023
Julius Caesar

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Wednesday

There is a frightening new development in rightwing intellectual circles called “Red Caesarism.” As explained by Lindsay Beyerstein of the The Editorial Board, “Caesarism means one-man rule, halfway between monarchy and tyranny. It’s supposed to end democracy while preserving small-r republican rule.”

The term has been coined by Michael Anton, a former Trump national security official and a onetime fellow of the Claremont Institute. Beyerstein lays out Aton’s reasoning:

If current trends continue, conservatives will become electorally irrelevant. Simply put, their policies aren’t appealing to voters. Rather than developing a more attractive policy agenda, Anton would prefer to end voting. And he’s not alone. On Fox, Greg Guttfeld recently proclaimed that “elections don’t work” and suggested civil war as an alternative.

So what insights does Shakespeare’s famous play provide us into Red Caesarism? I think first of what Allan Bloom, in Shakespeare’s Politics (1964), says about the leader. As he reads the play, Brutus and Cassius, defenders of the Roman republic, fail to grasp Caesar’s genius:

Caesar seems to have been the most complete political man who ever lived. He combined the high-mindedness of the Stoic with the Epicurean’s awareness of the low material substrate of political things. Brutus and Cassius could not comprehend such a combination…

I don’t know if the American right, who at one point lionized Bloom, is thinking along these lines in their rejection of democracy. Of course, other than his charisma and willingness to flout norms, Trump has little resemblance to Caesar, who was both a brilliant military leader and a gifted writer. I imagine Mark Antony getting up and saying to the former president, “I knew Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was a friend of mine. You, sir, are no Julius Caesar.”

The problem with Julius Caesars, no matter how exemplary, is that they invariably bring ruin upon their countries. Mussolini modeled himself on Julius Caesar, as did Napoleon, and France and Italy suffered the consequences. And look at what Vladimir Putin, who models himself on the tsars of old (“tsar” is derived from “Caesar”) has done to Russia.

Few truisms are truer than “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The genius of democracy is that, inefficient though it may be, it provides checks and balances on wannabe strongmen who invariably weaken their countries. As Jay Kuo, writing for The Big Picture, said yesterday of wannabe authoritarian Benjamin Netanyahu,

Netanyahu’s self-absorption and corruption led directly to disastrous policy choices, including the elevation of extremists willing to destabilize Israel in order to pave the way for Netanyahu’s autocratic policies.

Kuo warns that the same awaits America if Trump is reelected or if insurrectionist Jim Jordan, currently seeking to become Speaker of the House and second in line to the presidency, succeeds in his effort.

Looking closely at Shakespeare’s play, one sees a number of unsettling parallels with Trump. First of all, there is the man-in-the-street support. Julius Caesar opens with a carpenter and a cobbler on their way to celebrate Caesar’s overthrow of Pompey. “But indeed sir,” the cobbler says to an official, “we make holiday to see Caesar and to rejoice in his triumph.”

These men are unaffected when the officials point out that, not long ago, they were celebrating Pompey. “And when you saw his chariot but appear,” Murellus notes,

Have you not made an universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks
To hear the repoication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way
That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood?

The fickle mob, as the official sees it, will follow anyone who sways their passions in the moment. And in fact, anti-Caesarite Casca at one point makes an observation that sounds a lot like Trump boasting, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Casca is reporting on Antony’s attempt to crown Caesar and on Caesar’s moment of weakness (he suffers from a brief fit):

Three or four wenches where I stood cried “Alas, good soul!” and forgave him with all their hearts. But there’s no heed to be taken of them; if Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less.

Swaying the mob (or as the Romans called them, “hoi polloi,” the common people) continues on after Caesar has been assassinated. In their competing speeches, Brutus speaks to his countrymen’s higher values, Mark Antony to their narrow self-interest. In Brutus’s words I am reminded of those NeverTrumpers who, like Liz Cheney, plead with their fellow Republicans to honor the ideals upon which America was founded:

If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer:–Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honor him: but, as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his fortune; honor for his valor; and death for his ambition. Who is here so base that would be a bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so rude that would not be a Roman? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so vile that will not love his country? 

Mark Antony, by contrast, talks about all the goodies that Caesar handed out. He reminds me of Trump’s populist appeals, especially his defense of Social Security. When his Republican competitors in the 2016 primaries were railing against government handouts, Trump ran to their left:

But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff…

Later, after teasing them about whether or not he should read Caesar’s will, he reveals tangible benefits:

Antony: Here is the will, and under Caesar’s seal.
To every Roman citizen he gives,
To every several man, seventy-five drachmas.

Second Citizen: Most noble Caesar! We’ll revenge his death.

Third Citizen: O royal Caesar!

Antony: Hear me with patience.

All: Peace, ho!

Antony: Moreover, he hath left you all his walks,
His private arbors and new-planted orchards,
On this side Tiber; he hath left them you,
And to your heirs forever, common pleasures,
To walk abroad, and recreate yourselves.
Here was a Caesar! when comes such another?

There are Trump supporters who are convinced that he cares for them, even though it’s clear to any objective observer that he cares only for himself. Caesar and Antony manipulate crowds even better than Trump, and we see Antony inciting the mob to storm the Capitol hunt down “the traitors” and, essentially, overthrow the Roman Republic.

The “traitors” in our own situation are any who resist Trump—Democrats, of course, but even more those Republicans who can’t stomach what their party has become. In Brutus, we see some of the internal struggle NeverTrumpers went through before choosing to align with the opposition. Brutus, who at one point says that he is “with himself at war,” articulates his resolve should “the people” crown Caesar king. The “general good,” he declares, must come first:

What is it that you would impart to me?
If it be aught toward the general good,
Set honor in one eye and death i’ the other,
And I will look on both indifferently,
For let the gods so speed me as I love
The name of honor more than I fear death.

Instead of “death” for today’s Republicans, substitute “electoral defeat.” A number were in fact defeated after choosing honor, including Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, those who voted to impeach Trump, and various state officials who stood up to his attempts to steal the election. In the end Antony, looking down at the dead Brutus, describes him as “the noblest Roman of them all,” and these have proved worthy successors.

Of course, even after winning, Mark Antony himself will die in the subsequent civil war as former confederates turn on each other, just as Caesar and Ptolemy turn on each other. Violence is an invariable feature of authoritarian societies.

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Euripides on the Loss of a Child

By Robin Bates | Published: October 16, 2023
Astyanax torn from mother Andromache’s arms

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Tuesday

In a recent New York Review of Books interview with the noted philosopher Martha Nussbaum, I came across this nugget about how Euripides came to her aid at an unbearably tragic moment:

I basically had a privileged and happy life up to the time I lost my daughter. My parents died, my marriage and several relationships ended, I didn’t get tenure at Harvard, but I always had a core confidence, stemming from my happy childhood, that I could prevail despite life’s tragedies. But I have also always had a very vivid sense of tragedy. I remember lying on the couch in our prosperous upper-middle-class house in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, reading Dickens—and later Tolstoy and Henry James, and of course the Greek tragedies themselves. In my imagination I was Hecuba and Clytemnestra. I was also an actress, both in school and, for a short time, professionally, and I tried to explore those roles in my own body. Even now, at the University of Chicago, we put on faculty productions, and I have played Clytemnestra opposite Richard Posner’s Agamemnon, and Hecuba surrounded by a wonderful cast of faculty friends in a production of The Trojan Women.

So my inner world had been prepared, almost rehearsed, for the biggest shock of my life, when my daughter died at the age of forty-seven, after a long illness, of a fungal infection after surgery. As she was dying I found myself in tears, hearing in my head Hecuba’s speech over the body of her grandson, when she says that she had always expected to die first, and all of a sudden she has to mourn this young child. I think that mental preparation was a kind of road map that made me less alone, and less clueless, in my grief.

In addition to being deeply moved, I heartily agree with the observation that a lifetime of reading literature prepares one’s inner life, almost as a rehearsal, for tragedy when it strikes. It makes sense that Nussbaum, who dropped out of college for a short while to perform in New York productions of Greek tragedies, would think automatically of Hecuba mourning her grandson, whom the Greeks have thrown over the ramparts despite being only a baby.

In Euripides’s play, Hecuba has just been presented with Astyanax’s body, laid out on a shield. Her first words are bitterly sarcastic as she mocks the so-called bravery of warriors who feel the need to kill an innocent baby:  

O ye Argives, was your spear
Keen, and your hearts so low and cold, to fear
This babe? ‘Twas a strange murder for brave men!
For fear this babe someday might raise again
His fallen land! Had ye so little pride?
While Hector fought, and thousands at his side,
Ye smote us, and we perished; and now, now,
When all are dead and Ilion lieth low,
Ye dread this innocent! 

There is no wisdom behind the decision, she goes on to say, but only “that rage of fear that hath no thought.” 

Having vented her fury at those responsible, she turns to the child, pointing to the irony that the high walls that were supposed to protect the Trojans have been the instrument of his death:  

Poor little child!
Was it our ancient wall, the circuit piled
By loving Gods, so savagely hath rent
Thy curls, these little flowers innocent
That were thy mother’s garden, where she laid
Her kisses… 

Hecuba goes on to remember a tender moment of togetherness. As Nussbaum notes (and as I, who have also lost a child, can confirm), there’s a special agony when the natural order is reversed and the child dies before the adult:

What false words ye said
At daybreak, when ye crept into my bed,
Called me kind names, and promised: ‘Grandmother,
When thou art dead, I will cut close my hair,
And lead out all the captains to ride by
Thy tomb.’ Why didst thou cheat me so? ‘Tis I,
Old, homeless, childless, that for thee must shed
Cold tears, so young, so miserably dead. 

All that Hecuba can feel in this moment is absence:    

Dear God, the pattering welcomes of thy feet,
The nursing in my lap; and O, the sweet
Falling asleep together! All is gone. 

Then her anger and bitter sarcasm takes over again. This is how mourning works, with the mind swinging wildly between heartbreak and rage:

How should a poet carve the funeral stone
To tell thy story true? ‘There lieth here
A babe whom the Greeks feared, and in their fear
Slew him.’ Aye, Greece will bless the tale it tells!” 

The speech ends with the irony of a prince’s son being buried in “poor garments,” along with a reflection—characteristic of the Greeks—on reversals of fortune and the vanity of human wishes. “Count no man happy until he is dead,” the historian Herodotus wrote, and Sophocles concludes Oedipus with the Chorus remarking, “[W]e cannot call a mortal being happy before he’s passed beyond life free from pain.” Euripides has a particularly bleak image, comparing fate (“the chances of the years”) to an idiot dancing in the wind: 

Go, bring them—such poor garments hazardous
As these days leave. God hath not granted us
Wherewith to make much pride. But all I can,
I give thee, Child of Troy.—O vain is man,
Who glorieth in his joy and hath no fears:
While to and fro the chances of the years
Dance like an idiot in the wind! And none
By any strength hath his own fortune won. 

When Nussbaum says that Hecuba’s speech provided her with “a kind of road map that made me less alone, and less clueless, in my grief,” she refers to stepping into the great community of suffering humanity that goes back to the beginning of time. I remember thinking along the same lines the night after we lost Justin—that this is what the poets, playwrights, and fiction writers had been referring to in all the books I had read.

It was a small comfort to realize that I now was one of them. When tragedy strikes, we may feel like a drowning victim thrashing around in the water, but literature provides us with images, characters, and words that we can grab onto, as though to a life raft.

Put another way, when we join with Hecuba in our grieving, we do indeed feel “less alone.” We see that people have trod this path before us, noble and heroic as they protest life’s sorrows, which means that we can trod it as well.

Literature as an essential survival kit to cope with the worst that life can throw at us.

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Glück on Teen Sex, Rape, and Persephone

By Robin Bates | Published: October 15, 2023
Daniel Gabriel Rossetti, Prosperpine

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Monday

Louise Gluck, the American poet who won the Nobel Prize in 2020, died last week. I found myself fascinated at one point by her poems about Persephone (Roman name Proserpine) and repost here the essay I wrote about one of them.

Reprinted from Oct. 15, 2020

I’m falling in love with the Persephone poems of Louise Glück, the recent Nobel literature laureate. “Persephone the Wanderer” is a nuanced exploration of explosive issues regarding teenage sexuality and rape.

In the myth, earth goddess Demeter threatens to kill all vegetation unless Hades returns her daughter, whom he has abducted. (In high school Latin, in conjunction with the story, I learned the word “rapere,” which means “to snatch” and which is the origin of our word “rape.”) Demeter gets only half of what she wants as Persephone, because she has eaten food in the underworld (six pomegranate seeds), can return for only half the year. Demeter’s mourning during those months explains fall and winter.

The poem begins with the mother’s perspective. Her scorched earth response to Persephone’s abduction hurts everyone. This, the poet explains, is “consistent with what we know of human behavior.” While I’m not sure why Glück calls this “negative creation,” I’ll buy her subsequent observation:

Human beings take profound satisfaction
in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm

This is our first glimpse into Glück’s readiness to point out unpleasant parts of ourselves, which can be hidden under seemingly virtuous desires. Demeter is right to be upset, but does she relish her anger a bit too much? Does she enjoy lashing out?

The poem moves into an even more controversial female emotion when it raises the possibility of complicity. Did Persephone “cooperate in her rape,” the poet asks before turning to a more acceptable possibility:

[O]r was she drugged, violated against her will,
as happens so often now to modern girls.

While Glück says that scholars debate the issue, her use of the word “pawed” suggests that their motives may be more lascivious and less academic than they would admit:

Persephone’s initial
sojourn in hell continues to be
pawed over by scholars who dispute
the sensations of the virgin…

[Side note: In discussing her new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Sewanee classics professor Stephanie McCarter could have used the word “pawed” as she discussed how previous translators of Ovid–unlike Ovid himself–have sexualized Apollo’s attempted rape of Daphne.]

The story doesn’t end when Persephone returns home since, no longer a virgin, she bears a mark of shame. The red juice of the pomegranate seeds reminds the poet of Hawthorne’s scarlet letter:

As is well known, the return of the beloved
does not correct
the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home
stained with red juice like
a character in Hawthorne—

That’s not the end of the story, however. Glück is noteworthy for her extended meditations so that one is never sure where her poems are heading. Mentioning the word “home” gets her thinking along Thomas Wolfe’s observation that one can’t go home again. Persephone’s encounter with Hades means that, henceforth, she will become a wanderer, “at home nowhere”:

I am not certain I will
keep this word [“home”]: is earth
“home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere?

Her encounter with Hades has changed everything. Home can no longer be the innocence of childhood, a meadow filled with daisies where she sang “her maidenly songs”:

When death confronts her, she has never seen
the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs
about her mother’s
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.

To describe Persephone’s encounter with sexuality as “in the bed of the god” raises the issue of sexuality’s power, how it can seem to take over one’s entire being.  That the god’s “rape” might not be entirely objectionable is a possibility raised again by the final stanza, which suggests choice:

What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?

To move from girlhood into sexuality can feel like something that is beyond mind:

She is lying in the bed of Hades.
What is in her mind?
Is she afraid? Has something
blotted out the idea
of mind?

Although her mother may be devastated, winter is not where Persephone herself is:

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

Put another way, it is snowing in her mother’s world but not in Persephone’s, which is why the poet asks, “Where is it snowing?” While the loss of Persephone may be winter for Demeter, for Persephone winter is more about forgetfulness than desecration. I suppose this could be PTSD trauma, Persephone blotting out what has happened, but other things in the poem suggest that Persephone is moving into an exciting new world.  In any event, the poem moves powerfully between a mother’s and a daughter’s perspective, between desecration and simply forgetting one’s past:

You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness,
of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

As it turns out, Persephone’s imprisonment in hell—if imprisonment is what it is—is not that different from her imprisonment in her girlhood:

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

Sex in hell may represent liberation from one perspective, but from another it’s just exchanging one prison for another. According to the latter, Persephone is just a pawn in a battle between possessive mother and possessive lover. The story “should be read,” Glück writes,

as an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat.

Or as the old folk song puts it, “Controlled by her parents until she’s a wife,/ A slave to her husband the rest of her life.”

However one reads the abduction that separates Persephone from her mother, it will change their future interactions. Reunions will become emotionally charged affairs as she wanders between earth and death. Will there be guilt at having left that she feels she must expiate? If she is not allowed to entirely leave (so that her old self can “die”) and yet feels that she regresses to her girlhood self while in her mother’s home (“you do not live”), then she will in fact drift. Glück startles us with the observation that her two worlds “seem, finally, strangely alike”:

The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live. You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike.

At one point in the poem, Glück invokes Freud’s tripartite scheme of the mind—id, ego, and superego—which suggests a battle between forbidden desires (id) and social taboos (super ego). With regard to the sexual taboos, id, illicit desire, and Hades are all bound up together. But Hades is also the mythic realm that the poet can go to for inspiration. According to myth scholars, Persephone is associated with the world of spirit and the occult, the archetype that guides mystics and visionaries. In other words, she is fitting subject matter for a poet who looks for the spiritual dimensions of everyday life:

Song of the earth, song
of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth…

Although the poem seems to have strayed from the theme of adolescent sexuality at this point—maybe she feels shattered because she keeps searching for the mythic ramifications—earth and myth are indeed bound up together. The fascination with sex and death, between the life force and the death force, could be what draws Persephone to Hades and, for that matter, teenagers to risky behavior. In the question that concludes the poem, Glück essentially asks how one could listen to one’s mother when this mysterious, dangerous, and unknown world beckons:

What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?

I sense that, for anyone with spirit and imagination, the invitation will be hard to turn him down—which may go a long way towards explaining why teens so often “get into trouble.”

Here’s the poem:

Persephone the Wanderer
By Louise Gluck

In the first version, Persephone
is taken from her mother
and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth—this is
consistent with what we know of human behavior,
 
that human beings take profound satisfaction
in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm:

we may call this
negative creation.

Persephone’s initial
sojourn in hell continues to be
pawed over by scholars who dispute
the sensations of the virgin:

did she cooperate in her rape,
or was she drugged, violated against her will,
as happens so often now to modern girls.

As is well known, the return of the beloved
does not correct
the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home
stained with red juice like
a character in Hawthorne—

I am not certain I will
keep this word: is earth
“home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like
no one, you know. The characters
are not people.
They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided,
ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world,
a kind of diagram that separates
heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness,
of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades.
What is in her mind?
Is she afraid? Has something
blotted out the idea
of mind?

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live. You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.

White of forgetfulness,
white of safety—

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as suggestion—
as we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read
 
as an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen
the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs
about her mother’s
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth, song
of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?

Note on the painting: Rossetti’s “Proserpine,” one of my favorite paintings (it hangs in our living room), captures the fascination with sexuality and death that Glück explores. Proserpine is cast as an Eve figure, deliberately and provocatively eating the pomegranate as though she is fully aware of the consequences. The slice taken from the fruit resembles a vaginal opening, further suggesting she has embraced her abduction.

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Poetry Rescues Women in Dark Places

By Robin Bates | Published: October 14, 2023
Adriann Meulemans, Old Woman Reading

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Sunday

Our church’s Director of Christian Formation, Jeannie Babb, addressed our weekly Sunday Forum last week about how she uses poetry as a tool for healing ministry in jail and at a long-term residence for women recovering from commercial sexual exploitation and addiction. In the course of her talk, Jeannie read us poems that women had written as they sought to come to terms with their past and negotiate their futures.

For privacy reasons, we can’t share the poems here, but I can report that they moved us deeply as they captured both what it’s like to feel trapped and to experience hope. Many were expressions of deep gratitude.

Jeannie, who has an STM degree (Master of Sacred Theology) from Sewanee’s School of Theology (class of ’13), wrote her thesis on violence against women in scripture and martyrology.

To set the tone for her talk, Jeannie shared one of her own poems, which we came to realize describes many of the ways that the women she works with use poetry.

Jelly God
By Jeannie Babb

I am thankful for the invisible
jellylike grace
that surrounds and supports me
when God has no face,
and for the sky that quietly
swallows my shouts
and forgets them more eloquently
than I bellow them out.
And when I fall I’m thankful
that it hurts when I land,
to know the ground was solid
where I made my stand.

By Jeannie Babb, Director of Christian Formation at St. Mark and St. Paul, Sewanee Tn

Sometimes poetry is just a prayer.

Sometimes it’s a sermon.

What else can poetry be?

–an instruction
–a declaration
–a petition
–a judgment

Sometimes the purpose of poetry is to give voice to collective pain and hope.

What else might it be?

–an invitation|
–a realignment

Poet Bobby LeFebre recently described his designation as Colorado’s Poet Laureate as

more than a title; it was a calling, a duty, and a privilege. The poet, when effective, is not merely a writer of words, but a cultural worker—a healer who uses the alchemy of language to mend the broken and bind the wounds of our collective spirit. The poet is a conductor and conduit of a world that begs us to see and celebrate our profound relationship to it. We are more than literature; we are cultural translators, humble prophets, communal visionaries. We are stewards and servants of humanity and emotion, dreamers and realists inseparably entwined. 

But what about poetry as a medium for healing? We do that every Sunday morning, at least. In our prayers, in the Psalms and the Prophets, in many of the Old and New Testament readings,

Poetry is self-help. It’s hard to write poetry and not grow, emotionally and spiritually. Recovery groups like AA use poetry as well. We all know the serenity prayer. Well, it’s actually part of a poem attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change.
Courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace.
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
trusting that He will make all things
right if I surrender to His will;
that I may be reasonably happy
in this life,
and supremely happy with Him
forever in the next.

I have been using poetry with women in recovery for many years, most recently in a class that I teach at Rahab’s Rest in Chattanooga, which is a long-term residential program for women who are survivors of commercial sexual exploitation. Rahab’s Rest is a ministry of Love’s Arm Outreach, a non-profit agency that also provides street outreach and jail outreach, a crisis hotline, jail ministry and other programs to exploited women.

Poetry is artifice, from which we get the word art. In other words, it is not reality but a representation of it. If an artist paints your portrait, that portrait is not you but an interpretation of you. This means that poets, without revealing anything, can still be dangerously open and raw. The words are both a mirror to reveal ourselves and a medium to hide behind.

When someone writes a story or book, the first question the world wants to know is often, “Is it true?” But having delivered many different poems in a wide variety of places, I can report that nobody asks you if it’s true. Somehow, poetry does not carry the same burden of reality as prose. All poetry is true, in the sense that a dream is true. For this reason, poetry is an especially poignant vehicle for reflecting on, sharing, and healing from trauma.

Here is a poem I’ve read with my students at Rahab’s Rest:

i have been a thousand different women
By Emory Hall

make peace
with all the women
you once were.

lay flowers
at their feet.

offer them incense
and honey
and forgiveness.

honor them
and give them your silence.

listen.

bless them
and let them be.

for they are the bones
of the temple
you sit in now.

for they are
the rivers
of wisdom
leading you toward
the sea.

In the recovery context, some poems work better than others. As regards my students, they generally haven’t attended college and many were on the street before they completed high school. Some were already pregnant or in jail or both.

I wonder what words or pictures come in your mind when I say that my students are victims of sex trafficking or commercial sexual exploitation, what we used to call prostitutes. I wonder what you think they look like. How old are these women in your mind? What color are they? Are they hometown girls or from far away? Whatever you imagine is probably not wrong, just incomplete.

The ages of my students span several decades. Some are mothers, usually from a young age. Many of them have given up children, lost children, or had them taken from them. Many of them are now grandmothers.

When we talk about recovery, that includes recovery from substance abuse. It’s a chicken-and-egg sort of question: is one exploited because of addiction or does one become addicted because of exploitation? Answer: it goes both ways. The real “egg” here is the sexual abuse of children.

Right now, there’s a lot of focus on sex trafficking (and especially child sex trafficking) in popular culture, but people have a lot of misconceptions. Some suburban moms think their child is going to be abducted out of the shopping cart at Target. That’s not what’s happening—if it were, it would be all over the news.

The truth is much more insidious. Victims of child sexual abuse are typically harmed in their own homes, by a family member or someone close to the family.  Women who are being commercially exploited were usually groomed from the time they were very young and then trafficked by family members, neighbors, or boyfriends. By the time they reach adulthood, they are deeply traumatized, suffering from substance abuse disorders and other mental health conditions. They have been conditioned to accept sexual abuse and exploitation.

Another misconception is that these women “just need Jesus.” The truth is that many already embrace him. The women I meet at Rahab’s Rest and the women I meet in jail have a very deep faith in God. I’ve yet to meet a survivor who says that God has let her down. Now, she may tell you that people have let her down, although in most cases she’ll blame herself. But as far as God goes, residents at Rahab’s Rest and women I meet in jail are often grateful to God and to those who have reached out to them. This comes through in their poetry.

One day during class I asked the women at Rahab’s Rest if they would like to write some poems for me to take to the jail. Because we wanted the poems to be from all the students and be fully anonymous, I had them each write a line of a poem and then pass the page on to someone else, who wrote a second line, and so on.

The next Saturday I laid the poems in the tray that goes through the metal detector, and the chaplain led me across the yard through all the locked gates and heavy doors to a classroom. Always, it seems, it’s a different classroom because parts of the jail are undergoing renovation.

When the women came to the room, they were dragging chains. The chaplain explained that, because of the classroom location, they could only attend Bible class if they wore shackles. She gently reminded them to take small steps so they wouldn’t trip, and one older woman was stifling a cry with every step because the cuffs were digging into her tendons.

I was humbled, realizing how badly they wanted to be there. If they had to drag chains to hear a message of God’s love, they would do so. I told them about the poems that had been written specifically for them and passed them around, having the women read them out loud.

“Dope was the love of my life,” one inmate read, and then clutched the paper to her chest. “It’s me,” she said, “this poem is about me.” She continued reading, with tears streaming down her face, as the poem pivoted from despair to a message of hope.

The women I work with in jail are, again, all ages. Most of them grew up in the area. In some cases, their grandmothers prayed for them and took them to church. Given their deep faith, I find myself wondering whether agnosticism and atheism is a sign of privilege. These women don’t have that luxury. Given that they often lack education, generational wealth, mental health and in many cases physical health, prayer is all they have.

Their conditions are often very treatable, but instead of treatment they encounter punishment and a cycle of poverty, exploitation, and substances.

One day I asked Chaplain Jones about the most common factor leading to incarceration in Hamilton County. I expected her to point to substance abuse but instead she said, “lack of affordable housing.” People are becoming newly-homeless at an alarming rate in Chattanooga.

Often they live in their car, at least at first. One of my students wrote about the grace of still having that one single possession when one has lost everything else. She wrote how her car “held” her and helped quiet “the voices of addiction.” In that space, she could hear a still, small voice that gave her just enough hope to make the phone call that led her to Love’s Arm, where she has experienced safety, clarity, and sobriety.

While I had permission to read the students’ poetry aloud, I asked Robin not to include them in his blog since they are “unpublished.” Recently my students had the idea to write a poetry chapbook compiling their works. They hope their poems will find their way to people who need that kind of hope.

Recently, Love’s Arm opened a second house, this one to provide acute rather than long-term assistance. Josephine’s House provides a safe place for bringing women directly off the street and assisting them with active addiction. The goal is to provide safety as well as some immediate medical and mental health care so residents can find that clarity of mind our poet mentioned. After that, they can decide what step they are ready to take. The women at Rahab’s Rest have enthusiastically pitched in to prepare Josephine’s House.

One of them even wrote a poem to welcome new residents.

Note: For more information of Love’s Arm, see lovesarmoutreach.org. You may watch Jeannie’s presentation, along with readings of poems written by the women she works with, at https://www.facebook.com/100064290295310/videos/1365868824305224.

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On Friday 13 and Black Cats

By Robin Bates | Published: October 12, 2023

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Friday

When I was growing up, the superstition of Friday the 13th  being unlucky was kept alive by the turtle character Churchy La Femme (after “cherchez la femme”) in the cartoon strip Pogo. If the 13th did not land on a Friday, Churchy would remark, “Friday the 13th is on a Tuesday [or whatever] this month.”

An internet search informs me that, while 13 is itself regarded as an unlucky number in many cultures, its pairing with Friday may originate in a now-forgotten French play. In Les Finesses des Gribouilles, we encounter a character declaring, “I was born on a Friday, December 13th, 1813 from which come all of my misfortunes.”

Incidentally, my internet search also informed me that there is a word for fear of Friday the 13th.  “Paraskevidekatriaphobia” is derived from the Greek words Paraskeví (meaning Friday) and dekatreís (meaning thirteen).

Today’s lyric, while a nod to superstition (black cats in this instance), is a great poem in its own right. Some people believe it is bad luck for a black cat to cross one’s path, and Rilke’s poem contends that black cats are even more unsettling than ghosts. A ghost, after all, will arrest the sight, whereas the “thick black pelt” of a black cat will absorb “your strongest gaze” so that you disappear into it.

This is not altogether bad, the poet adds. For while disappearing into a cat’s blackness is like a raving man charging howling into a dark night, the absorption also pacifies him.

Perhaps that’s because, when we disappear into the abyss, we lose all sense of self. Thus Rilke talks of curling up to sleep with this “menacing and sullen” apparition. We stop fighting our fear of losing our reason and surrender to the darkness.

Only the peace is temporary because, when the cat turns its face on us, we awaken again to ourselves, seeing ourselves “suspended” or trapped–“like a prehistoric fly”–in “the golden amber of her eyeballs.” Self, as Jane Austen puts it, will intrude.

I am reminded of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Black Cat” story when the madman thinks he has found peace after having walled up his murdered wife. After all, he has successfully eluded the police, the superegos to his id–only it so happens that he has accidentally walled up the cat as well, and its mewing alerts the authorities to the crime. The cat, like the tell-tale heart, will not remain silent.

In other words, we cannot escape the self, which glows in the darkness, and feel powerless.

Black Cat
By Rainer Maria Rilke
Trans. Stephen Mitchell

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

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A House Member’s Scarlet Letter

By Robin Bates | Published: October 11, 2023
Rep. Nancy Mace

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Thursday

Reader and friend Mike Hazard alerted me to a politician using the Scarlet Letter in a recent press conference. Although MSNBC host Katie Phang called it a stunt and “performative nonsense,” I think there might be something to it. Here’s historian Heather Cox Richardson’s report:

Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) entered the Republican candidate forum today wearing a white T-shirt with a red letter “A” on it, saying she was doing so because of the backlash she faced as “a woman up here, and being demonized for my vote and for my voice.” Mace, one of the eight House Republicans who voted to get rid of former speaker Kevin McCarthy, said the A was her “scarlet letter,” an apparent reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel involving a woman forced to wear a scarlet A after giving birth to a child without identifying the father.

While I know barely anything about Mace (Wikipedia is my main source of information on her), I know that some consider her to be what passes for a moderate in the GOP these days—and that people were therefore surprised when she joined with Matt Gaetz and the “crazy caucus” against House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the first time in American history a Speaker has been voted out by his own party. She’s considered a moderate because she believes that victims of rape and incest should indeed have access to abortion. (Apparently she herself was raped by a classmate at age 16.) Also, at a time when some on the right are attacking birth control itself, she’s an advocate, which I guess is something.

At any rate, it’s interesting that she identifies with a book about an unwanted pregnancy although her “stunt” is not about reproduction. Rather, she is addressing those fellow Republicans who are furious about her vote against McCarthy. Her self-defense bolsters her claims of moderation. McCarthy lost her vote, she claims, because he “did not follow through on pushing her legislation to address the country’s rape-kit backlog, expand access to birth control, adopt a balanced budget amendment and create an alert system that would notify people when there is a mass shooting.”

Turning to the novel, if Hester Prynne had access to abortion, she never would have been exhibited on the scaffold or shunned by society. She finds her punishment excruciating:

The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom [where the scarlet letter is placed]. It was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety of insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the object. Had a roar of laughter burst from the multitude,—each man, each woman, each little shrill-voiced child, contributing their individual parts,—Hester Prynne might have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.

Hawthorne describes the Puritan audience as “stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity.” We also learn that her cuckolded husband finds the punishment appropriate: “She will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious letter be engraved upon her tombstone,” he tells a fellow onlooker. In such people one sees our own forced birth fundamentalists. those that would have a 12-year-old give birth to her father’s child and a rape victim to her rapist’s. And that would force a woman to risk her health and life by carrying a non-viable fetus to term.

Mace, who is well acquainted with the neo-Puritan sensibilities of her fellow Republicans, is uncomfortable that their ire has suddenly been turned on her. She is discovering that any party member who shows even a hint of moderation will suffer their slings and arrow, and she channels Hester to give her the strength to bear up against such attacks. Her showy display of a scarlet letter is akin to Hester’s own boldness:

On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold-thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.

The scarlet letter for both Mace and Hester is designed to create a sensation. Here’s the effect of Hester’s letter:

But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,—so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,—was that Scarlet Letter, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

Perhaps Mace, feeling martyred herself, likes the beauty that martyrdom conveys upon Hester. I can imagine the legislator thrilling to the following passage when she read Scarlet Letter in high school or college:

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped.

In light of her familiarity with Hester’s imprisonment, I find it interesting that, as a South Carolina House member, Mace was instrumental in passing a law exempting imprisoned pregnant women from shackles. Maybe the book made her more sensitive to the issue. 

For all the positive things one can say about Mace, however, she still advocates a 12-15-week limit for abortions—before some women even know they are pregnant–after which she is in favor of unleashing state power and public opprobrium against offenders. She’s all too willing to become one of those censorious Puritans herself. Nor, as far as I can tell, has she shown any inclination to support programs for new mothers or for impoverished families with kids. Her support for a “balanced budget”—unless it included cuts to the military and significantly higher taxes on the wealthy—would ravage social safety net programs. The Puritans, at least, allow Hester to have a house and a garden plot.  

Indeed, for all the seemingly laudable reasons Mace gave for voting against McCarthy, I wonder whether that was the actual stunt. After all, if one only voted for candidates who endorsed all one’s pet projects, no one would ever be elected to Speaker. Perhaps, Mace thinks, she can get away with her quasi-moderation if she joins—on this vote—with those who want to “burn the whole place down” (McCarthy’s words).

Still, I always enjoy seeing someone making use of a classic.

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Finn, Hengest, and Terror in Israel

By Robin Bates | Published: October 10, 2023
John Howe, Hengest and King Finn

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Wednesday

In yesterday’s post I contended that Grendel’s Mother (GM) was at work in the Middle East—which is to say, I saw her grief-fueled revenge working itself out in the seemingly never-ending blood feud between Israelis and Palestinians. While GM is an archetypal account of such violence, the poem also provides down-to-earth examples of deep grudges leading to bloodshed, despite truces meant to keep the peace.

The incident described is a Dane-Frisian/Jute battle, followed by a truce that is then broken, that bears more than a little resemblance to the situation in the Middle East. While versions of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians goes back thousands of years, it began to take its present form when the state of Israel was formed. As Ishaan Tharoor of the Washington Post reminds us, thousands were

forced to flee their homes and native villages amid the bloody Israeli expulsion campaigns that followed the country’s creation in 1948. Hundreds of Palestinian towns were wiped off the map, while thousands of Palestinians were killed in numerous documented massacres carried out by Israeli troops and paramilitary organizations.

Whatever the sins of the past, however, one can’t fight forever the battles of the past if one is to move forward—one must come up with new arrangements to deal with the new reality—and there have been multiple attempts since Israel’s founding to arrive at various peace agreements. Some of these have been very intricate, such as dealing with the various holy sites in Jerusalem.  But just like Grendel’s Mother, who “brooded on her wrongs,” there are always parties willing to blow up any truce arrived at.

The story of Finn and Hengest, which the bard recounts to the Danish court, parallels the Israeli-Palestinian situation only too well. The Danes and the Frisians/Jutes, who are perpetually at war, have attempted to use a diplomatic marriage to end hostilities: the Danish king Hnaef’s sister, Hildebuhr, is married off to the Frisian king Finn, with whom she has a son. Beowulf will later remark that diplomatic marriages seldom work, and he proves to be right here as Hnaef attacks Finn. The subsequent battle is a draw although both Hnaef and Hildebuhr’s son, fighting on opposite sides, are killed. The story as we have it starts at this point, with an accounting of the violence and killing:

Hildeburh
                    had little cause
to credit the Jutes:
                               she lost them both
on the battlefield.
                              She, bereft
and blameless, they
                                 foredoomed, cut down
and spear-gored. She,
                                    the woman in shock,
waylaid by grief
                           Hoe’s daughter—
how could she not
                                lament her fate
when morning came
                                   and the light broke
on her murdered dears?
                                        And so farewell
delight on earth…

Because neither side prevails and because the Danes (apparently because of the winter weather) can’t return home, Finn sets up a delicate balancing act to keep everyone from each other’s throats:

So a truce was offered
                                     as follows: first
separate quarters
                              to be cleared for the Danes,
hall and throne
                          to be shared with the Frisians.
Then, second:
                       every day
at the dole-out of gifts
                                      Finn, son of Focwald,
should honor the Danes,
                                          bestow with an even
hand to Hengest
                             and Hengest’s men
the wrought-gold rings
                                      bounty to match
the measure he gave
                                   his own Frisians—
to keep morale
                          in the beer-hall high.

The Jutes and the Danes then swear oaths to maintain the arrangement:

Both Sides then
                          the Danish
sealed their agreement
                                       with Oaths to Henges       t
Finn swore
                  openly, solemnly,
that the battle survivors
                                         would be guaranteed
honor and status.

                              No infringement
by word or deed,
                             no provocation
would be permitted.

So, separate but equal living quarters and an even distribution of gifts. What could go wrong? The Danes, we are told, are unhappy with the situation but must accept it, given that “their own ring-giver”

 
was dead and gone,
                                 they were leaderless,
in forced allegiance
                                  to his murderer.

Finn is only too aware of how the situation can blow up. All it takes is for one of his men to taunt a Dane for the fighting to recommence. One thinks of the sometimes seemingly tiny things that have set off triggered violence in Israel and Palestine over the years:

So if any Frisian
                           stirred up bad blood
with insinuations
                             or taunts about this,
the blade of the sword
                                       would arbitrate it.

The Danish warriors now spread through Friesland in a situation not unlike Jewish settlements on the West bank. Note that the Danes carry their grieving with them:

Warriors scattered
                               to homes and forts
all over Friesland

                               fewer now, feeling
loss of friends.

Meanwhile Hnaef’s second-in-command, Hengest, must live in Finn’s hall. He too broods:

                       Hengest stayed,
lived out that
                       resentful, blood-sullen
winter with Finn,
                             homesick and helpless.

We are told that he longs for vengeance and “to bring things to a head.” All it takes is for one of his men to drop a sword in his lap and for a couple of others to remind him of old grievances:

                          So he did not balk
once Hunlafing
                         placed on his lap
Dazzle-the-Duel,
                           the best sword of all,
whose edges Jutes
                               knew only too well

And:

                                       after Guthlaf and Oslaf
back from their voyage
                                        made old accusation:
the brutal ambush,
                                 the fate they had suffered,
all blamed on Finn.

And then you have the blood lust that we are seeing in far too many, for those who want to “exterminate” (Sen. Marc Rubio’s word) all of Gaza to those cheering on the terrorists:

                              The wildness in them
had to brim over.
                             The hall ran red
with blood of enemies.
                                       Finn was cut down,
the queen brought away
                                         and everything
the Shieldings could find
                                          inside Finn’s walls —
the Frisian king’s
                              gold collars and gemstones —
swept off to the ship.

So are the bard’s Danish auditors—remember, this is a poem inside Beowulf—horrified by Danes breaking a truce and slaughtering Frisians? Hardly:

                                         The poem was over,
the poet had performed, a pleasant murmur
started on the benches, stewards did the rounds
with wine in splendid jugs…

I wonder if there will be, if not pleasant murmurs, at least tacit approval of the declaration by Israel’s Defense Minister, as reported by the Washington Post column:

In an address Monday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said he had ordered “a complete siege” on the territory where Hamas first emerged and now operates. Gallant went on to invoke rhetoric that rights groups claimed what amounts to announcing war crimes. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant said of Gaza. “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

In a fine blog post, Yale historian Timothy Snyder points out the danger of such thinking. It’s not just that it dehumanizes a whole population but it’s what the terrorists want:

Classically, a terrorist provokes a state in order to generate so much suffering among his own people that they will take the terrorist’s side indefinitely.

Snyder points out that, for this reason, the 9-11 terrorists ultimately achieved their aim:

9/11 was a successful terrorist attack because we made it so.  Regardless of whether or not its planners and perpetrators lived to see this, it achieved its main goal: to weaken the United States.  Without 9/11, the United States presumably would not have invaded Iraq, a decision which led to the death of tens of thousands of people, helped fund the rise of China, weakened international law, and undid American credibility. 9/11 was a contributing cause to American decisions that caused far more death than 9/11 itself did. But the point here is that 9/11 facilitated American decisions that hurt America far more than 9/11 itself did.

Beowulf understands the toll that blood feuds take on society, which is why (as I explained in yesterday’s post) he has to reach down into a deep magic to stop GM-style retribution from engulfing the Danes. He doesn’t flail with an impotent sword but invokes a warrior ethos from the golden age before the flood. I don’t see such leadership coming from Netanyahu and Gallant, and those who want more bloodletting only make Grendel’s Mother more powerful.

After Grendel’s Mother kills Hrothgar’s best friend, the king essentially wants to curl up into a ball. “Rest, what is rest, sorrow has returned,” he moans. Throughout the epic, that are instances of kings who become so discouraged by violent death that they retreat from the world, becoming human dragons. But if we are to honor (and save) life, we need to resists our urge for revenge—or inner Grendel’s Mother—and face our challenges with a Beowulfian clarity of mind.

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Grendel’s Mother Attacks Israel

By Robin Bates | Published: October 9, 2023

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Tuesday

Of the three monsters in Beowulf, the most intractable and the hardest to kill is Grendel’s Mother. In my reading, she is the monstrous form—the archetype—of out-of-control grief. Such grief could ravage 8th century warrior society, leading to tit-for-tat violence that led to generations-long blood feuds. When I look for contemporary instances of grief turning violent, Israelis and Palestinians often come first to mind.

Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel—its goal is “the destruction of Israel”—and Israel’s horrific counter-response (cutting off food, water, and electricity to the citizens of Gaza, many of whom are anti-Hamas) may serve the purposes of demagogic politicos but, as is usually the case in such hostilities, the suffering is borne mainly by the innocent. Such is also the case in Beowulf: after the hero kills Grendel, it is not he who suffers GM’s retribution but Aeschere, King Hrothgar’s best friend.

I’ve written many times about the difference between the two trolls. Whereas Grendel’s rage is fueled by resentment—he feels unappreciated and neglected—his mother’s is fueled by sorrow. Those who have suffered loss, as both Israelis and Palestinians have, can brood for years before their rage explodes into murderous violence. The poem describes this place of brooding as “fearful waters” and “cold depths.” GM, we learn, is related to the Bible’s most famous murderer:

Grendel’s mother, monstrous hell-bride, brooded on her wrongs.
She had been forced down into fearful waters,
the cold depths, after Cain had killed
his father’s son, felled his own
brother with a sword. Branded an outlaw,
marked by having murdered, he moved into the wilds,
shunned company and joy. (trans. Seamus Heaney)

The “dark waters” are further described later on. Encountering the demon of sorrow is so frightening, the poem tells us, that a stag pursued by hounds would sooner be torn apart on the shore that leap into those cold depths:

                                   A few miles from here
The haunted mere a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch
above a mere; the overhanging bank
is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface.
At night there, something uncanny happens:
the water burns. And the mere bottom
has never been sounded by the sons of men.
On its bank, the heather-stepper halts:
the hart in flight from pursuing hounds
will turn to face them with firm-set horns
and die in the wood rather than dive
beneath its surface. That is no good place.
When wind blows up and stormy weather
makes clouds scud and the skies weep,
out of its depths a dirty surge
is pitched towards the heavens

People who live in those depths—let’s start with the genocidal Hamas terrorists who indiscriminately slaughtered any civilians they encountered—have forfeited their humanity. The trolls in the poem are described as cut off from civilization:

They are fatherless creatures,
and their whole ancestry is hidden in a past
of demons and ghosts. They dwell apart
among wolves on the hills, on windswept crags
and treacherous keshes, where cold streams
pour down the mountain and disappear
under mist and moorland.

King Hrothgar is clear that GM’s attack is part of a continuing blood feud:

[S]he has taken up the feud
because of last night, when you killed Grendel,
wrestled and racked him in ruinous combat
since for too long he had terrorized us
with his depredations. He died in battle,
paid with his life; and now this powerful
other one arrives, this force for evil
driven to avenge her kinsman’s death.

In other words, there seems no end, which is why Hrothgar—like many observes of Middle East hostilities—is in despair:

Then Hrothgar, the Shieldings’ helmet, spoke:
“Rest? What is rest? Sorrow has returned.
Alas for the Danes! Aeschere is dead.
He was Yrmenlaf’s elder brother
her son and a soul-mate to me, a true mentor,
my right-hand man when the ranks clashed
and our boar-crests had to take a battering
in the line of action. Aeschere was everything
the world admires in a wise man and a friend.
Then this roaming killer came in a fury
and slaughtered him in Heorot.

The poem strikes a hopeful note in assuring us that GM can be defeated, and it shows us how. It’s important to note that merely lashing at her with a sword doesn’t work, just as slashing at Afghanistan and Iraq after 9-11 didn’t work (and Iraq was actually innocent). Instead, the killing in Afghanistan went on for 17 years until the United States finally gave up and got out while those who had housed Al Kaieda emerged triumphant.

In Beowulf’s case, the sword he initially wields against GM in her underwater lair proves ineffective, shattering upon contact. Instead, “deeper magic”—as C.S. Lewis calls it in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—is called for. In Beowulf, this takes the form of a giant sword found in the lair.

As I read it, this sword for the Anglo-Saxons is their higher purpose, something that can take their society beyond perpetual blood feuds. Think of it as a principle so lofty and so authoritative that conflict ends.

I admit that this sounds like fantasy, and the poem itself goes on to recount one damn death after another, as though Beowulf never wielded that sword. One can see why Hrothgar is so discouraged. But at least a vision has been articulated, just as Israeli and Palestinian peace activists continue to uphold a vision of coexistence.

They do this even as their revenge-obsessed fellow citizens attempt to silence them. That know only too well that whatever punishment Israel now metes out to Hamas and Gaza will simply perpetuate the feud.

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