Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Monday
Last month I reported on a Smithsonian article by Angus Fletcher, a “professor of story science” at Ohio State, about the different ways that literature comes to our aid. Fletcher’s book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature is an anthropological-psychological study of narrative that breaks new ground as it explores why different literary techniques affect us as they do. Now that I’ve obtained a copy, I can talk about it more directly.
Fletcher startles us with his depiction of narrative form as an invented technology. Normally, Fletcher observes, we tend to think of technology as “gadgetries of steel and silicon.” Furthermore, we think that technology is supposed to address such physical needs as hunger, shelter, travel, communication, defense, etc. But if we see technology as first and foremost about helping solve problems, then there are uniquely human problems that, say, an airplane or a furnace cannot address. This is “the problem of being human in a nonhuman world”:
To be human is to wonder Why? As in, Why are we here? What’s the purpose of our hours? Does this life mean anything? And to be human is to have irrational desires and uncontrollable passions, and griefs that split us into pieces. Or to put it in the frank language of our scientific present: to be human is to be saddled with the problem of having a human brain. A brain capable of asking vast questions that it cannot answer.
Looking back at the very earliest instance of written literature—Queen Enheduanna of Ur—Fletcher says we can see how literature harnessed “literature’s great power of emotion” to “imbue[ ] faltering spirits with togetherness and courage.” While creations like Neolithic axes and Bronze Age plows “turned outward to grapple with the problem of surviving in our world,” he writes, “literature turned inward to grapple with the problem of surviving as ourselves.”
To get even more specific, literary technology was invented to “fix hearts and lift souls.” It was a “narrative-emotional technology that helped our ancestors cope with the psychological challenges posed by human biology. It was an invention for overcoming the doubt and the pain of just being us.”
And these tools “didn’t suddenly stop working when our ancestors departed this globe,” Fletcher adds. Literature “can still reckon with death and unshatter the psyche. It can still give us the stuff past the stars and the meaning immortal.”
Literature, furthermore, should not be seen as only one great invention but as many great inventions, each with “a unique purpose, engineered with its own intricate circuitry to click into our psyche in a different way”:
So there was one special invention for lightening sorrow, another for banishing loneliness, another for diminishing anxiety, another for treating the symptoms of trauma, another for bringing hope, another for heightening joy, another for stirring love, another for ushering in tranquility, and so on and so.
Why don’t literature departments see literature in this way? In the book I’ve just finished writing, I put some of the blame on New Criticism, which chose to cordon off literature from life. Fletcher, however, thinks the problem predates the New Critics by 25 centuries. The Greek sophists, he believes, looked at literature as a healing technology, only to run up against the philosophers (Socrates, Plato) and the rhetoricians. Because the sophists didn’t specialize in arguments, they died out. Rhetoric and philosophy, by contrast, flourished:
In our modern literature classes, from elementary school all the way through college, we concentrate primarily on two skills-building rubrics: (1) essay writing and (2) reading comprehension and analysis. In essay writing, we learn to frame arguments as thesis statements that we defend with paragraphs of supporting evidence. In reading comprehension and analysis, we learn to pinpoint what literature is saying….We’re taught, that is, to see literature as a species of argument.
The one exception to philosophy’s triumph, Fletcher acknowledges, is Aristotle, who in his writing about tragedy was interested in how literature impacts us. That’s a colossally large exception although, in Fletcher’s defense, I’ll note that much of literary criticism has focused more on what Aristotle said about form (say, the tragic hero) and less about its cathartic effect. It has been psychologists such as Freud who were more interested in catharsis, which Aristotle described as the purging of the emotions of pity and fear.
To give you a clearer sense of Fletcher’s project, I turn to what he says about tragedy’s ability to treat trauma.
Aristototle, he says, noted that Greek tragedy
didn’t just make people feel good. It also made them feel less bad. The feeling good came from enriching the brain with positive experiences such as wonder and hope, while the feeling less bad came from the inverse: emptying the brain of negative experiences like grief and anxiety. Or to use modern psychiatric parlance: the feeling good came from boosted mental well-being, that neural condition of happy thriving where our life reaches its fullest potential, while the feeling less bad came from improved mental health, that psychological foundation for mental well-being—and for normal daily functioning.
Fletcher discusses how catharsis—empathetic pity and distancing fear—works therapeutically in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, which is about Clytemnestra killing her husband when he returns from the Trojan War. In the following account, EMDR stands for eye-movement desensitizing and reprocessing, a particular trauma therapy. Fletcher says that the 2500-year-old play
gave its audience a chance to experience ancient literary versions of two modern psychiatric treatments for posttraumatic fear. Like autobiographical review, Agamemnon prompted spectators to review their posttraumatic memories in a physically safe and emotionally supportive environment. And like EMDR, the play’s chorus delivered that prompt in a dynamic performance that shifted the eyes left and right. And although we cannot travel back in time to gauge the therapeutic effectiveness of these long-ago treatments, we have been able to observe their healing action on twenty-first-century trauma survivors. Over the past decade, performances of the chorus of Agamemnon and other Greek tragedies have been staged for combat veterans by initiatives such as Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War Production and Peter Meineck’s Aquila Theatre Company (which places particular emphasis on the side-to-side movement incorporated into EMDR). And in response to these performances, veterans have self-reported a decrease in feelings of isolation, hypervigilance, and other symptoms of posttraumatic fear. Just as Aristotle describes in the Poetics, they’ve undergone an experience of catharsis.
Fletcher cautions that this doesn’t make Greek tragedy a “miracle cure” but it can help some who suffer. And then Fletcher makes a further claim: that there’s a further literary technique that can boost tragedy’s effects, what he calls the “Hurt Delay.” This is the character suffering trauma but not acknowledging it until later, a plot twist that one finds in Sophocles’s Oedipus.
It is what school kids learn as “tragic irony”—at least I did in high school—and it consists of the audience being able to see what the protagonist cannot. Fletcher contends that Hurt Delay helps trauma victims by giving them a “godlike experience of looking down.” In doing so, the play “reduces activity in our brain’s deep emotion zones, acting as a neural shock absorber against the traumatic events before us.” And this in turn increases “our belief in our ability to cope with trauma ourselves.”
This is called “self-efficacy,” and Fletcher says it has been correlated with significantly higher rates of trauma recover, explaining,
Even though we’re no more able than Oedipus to stop the inevitable, the Hurt Delay strengthens our capacity to manage when the inevitable arrives. Shifting our tragic feeling of helplessness into a psychological sensation of helpfulness, it supplies our brain with a visceral belief in our power to heal.
There’s a lot more in the book, which I’ll be exploring in future posts. For the moment I’ll just note that what Fletcher is trying to set forth systematically, readers have intuitively known forever. Often we sense the kind of book we need at different moments of our lives.
Think of it as self-medication although my own preferred analogy has been a tool kit. The advantage of being well-read, as I’ve frequently told my students, is that you’re always adding to the number of tools you have at your disposal. When a problem arises, someone who’s read a wide variety of works is more likely to have the necessary literary hammer or screwdriver.
Come to think of it, talking about literary technique as a technology doesn’t startle me as much as I thought.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Sunday
I continue to share literature-related lectures from our church’s Sunday Forum series, “Creating in God’s Image.” Since the Feast of St. Francis was this past Wednesday, we asked the Rev. Jim Pappas to talk about the saint and his thoughts about beauty. Jim says he began a deep relationship with the Franciscan tradition over thirty years ago while a college student at Quincy University. For the last several years he has been offering introductory classes in Franciscan spirituality through area parishes.
By the Rev. Jim Pappas
Altissimu, onnipotente bon Signore, tue so’ le laude, la gloria e l’honore et onne benedictione. Ad te solo, Altissimu, se konfano et nullu homo ene dignu te mentovare.
So begins the oldest work of literature in the Italian language with a known author (there is at least one anonymous love song that is older). We commonly know the poem as The Canticle of the Creatures or The Canticle of Brother Sun. The first seven stanzas were composed 799 years ago by a wandering preacher by the name of Francis as he suffered through an illness in a little shack outside of a convent below the Italian hill-town of Assisi. He would add the final stanzas over the next two years. Here is the entire Canticle in my own translation:
Most High, all-powerful good Lord, yours are the praises, the glory, and the honor, and every blessing. To You alone, Most High, do they belong, and no person is worthy to speak Your name.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, with all your creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun, who is the day, and we are enlightened by him. And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor: of You, Most High, he bears the symbol.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for Sister Moon and the stars: in the sky you formed them bright and precious and beautiful.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for Brother Wind and for the air and the cloudy sky and the clear sky and every type of weather, by which all Your creatures are sustained.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for Sister Water, which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for Brother Fire, by which the night is illumined: and he is beautiful and jovial and very robust and strong.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for our sister Mother Earth, which sustains and governs us, and produces diverse fruits along with colorful flowers and herbs.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for those who give pardon because of Your love and endure infirmity and tribulation. Blessed are those who endure in peace, because of You, Most High, they will be crowned.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, by our Sister Bodily Death, of which no living person can escape: woe to those who will die in mortal sin; blessed are those who will be found in Your most holy will, because the second death will not harm them.
Praise and bless my Lord and give thanks, and serve Him with great humility.
The Canticle was more than a poem. It was a song. We know from various sources that Francis and the first brothers sang it, including at the time of his death. Sadly, the original tune for the Canticle has been lost, so we cannot sing it exactly as Francis did. But the Canticle is still sung to many musical settings. We probably know it best in the paraphrase “All Creatures of Our God and King” set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
I start with the Canticle because any discussion about ideas like beauty or creativity in the Franciscan tradition has to start in the life and work of Francis himself. Francis was not a philosopher or a theologian. But he was a poet. And more importantly, he was a performer. He often referred to himself as the Jester of the Great King, and he called his brothers the Jongleurs, or Street Performers, of God. Francis and his first companions preached the Gospel through poetry, song, and dance. What is more, almost every aspect of Francis’s life can be taken as a kind of performance art. Because of this, any genuine Franciscan spirituality must include creativity, and its related concept of beauty, as core components.
To understand the Franciscan concepts of beauty and creativity, we need to situate ourselves at least a little in a medieval worldview. For us, the word beauty is an aesthetic term. And in the modern usage, it is a very subjective idea, summed up in the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We do not find it strange at all that what I find beautiful might be very different from what you find beautiful. And I think that even our philosophers have given up on trying to define the aesthetics of beauty in objective terms on which everyone can agree.
But eight hundred years ago, beauty was much more an ethical term than an aesthetic one. Guided by Platonic thought, beauty was easily defined in terms of ordered relationship, balance, and harmony. Following Augustine (and others) in placing these Platonic ideas into a Christian framework, theological discussions of beauty speak about such things as divine intent and design.
It was thought within this world view that beauty was a coolly logical concept about which there could be no differing opinion. Beauty could be established by means of logical argument, without any appeal to emotion or taste. Failure to appreciate beauty was a sign not of differing opinion, but of a disordered life brought about by sin. And within the Platonic ideals, human affections and desire of any kind are viewed at least with suspicion, if not outright hostility. The “desires” are part of fallen flesh, rather than Godlike spirit.
Enter Francis. As I have already mentioned, Francis and his first companions are notable because their preaching was not the cool logical arguments of the scholars but was full of music and drama and performance. Franciscan preaching was an appeal to the affections. The Franciscan approach to God depends deeply upon desire – both ours and God’s. Human persons are called into a personal, emotional experience of God, which by necessity extends into a personal, emotional experience of creation.
In the cool Platonic world view, beauty is certainly one of God’s qualities. But in the emotive Franciscan approach, Beauty becomes a possible name for God! Rather than beauty being a sort of tangential effect within creation, it becomes an absolute essential. If God is Beauty Itself, then it follows that that which God has made must be beautiful. Just as musical compositions show us the composer, just as paintings show us the painter, just as poems show us the poet, so creation shows us the Creator. God’s fingerprints–or in the Franciscan parlance of that time, God’s footprints–are to be found everywhere.
In the one hundred twenty-fourth chapter of Thomas of Celano’s second account of the life of Francis, the provocatively titled Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul, we see this idea laid out:
This happy traveler hurrying to leave the world as the exile of pilgrimage, was helped, and not just a little, by what is in the world Toward the princes of darkness, he certainly used it as a field of battle. Toward God, however, he used it as the clearest mirror of goodness. In art he praises the Artist; whatever he discovers in creatures he guides to the Creator. He rejoices in all the works of the Lord’s hands, and through their delightful display he gazes on their life-giving reason and cause. In beautiful things he discerns Beauty Itself; All good things cry out to him: “The One who made us is the Best.” Following the footprints imprinted on the creatures, he follows his Beloved everywhere; out of them all he makes for himself a ladder by which he might reach the Throne.
He embraces all things with an intensity of unheard devotion, speaking to them about the Lord and exhorting them to praise Him.
Note that in speaking about the life of Francis, Celano does not shy away from the word desire. Rather than treating desire as categorically defective, Franciscans see desire as part of what it is to be created beings. Francis longs for, desires God, a God who is apprehended under the name of Beauty. It is this beautiful God that appeals to, even inflames, Francis’ desires.
As I have said, Francis was not a theologian. Francis was God’s lover, a poet-preacher who desperately wanted to draw others into this love affair with the Creator. His friend Clare was denied the opportunity to be a preacher and street performer for God. But she was no less an adherent and proponent of this new approach to relationship with God. Stuck within the walls of the cloister at San Damiano, she spent her time in silence contemplating the Beautiful One to whom her life was drawn. She stares into the Beauty of God and sees her own beauty reflected back. In her Fourth Letter to Agnes of Prague, she writes:
Happy, indeed is she to whom it is given to share in this sacred banquet so that she might cling with all her heart to Him Whose beauty all the blessed hosts of heaven unceasingly admire Whose affection excites Whose contemplation refreshes, Whose kindness fulfills, Whose delight refreshes, Whose remembrance delightfully shines, By Whose fragrance the dead are revived, Whose glorious vision will bless all the citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem: which, since it is the splendor of eternal glory, is the brilliance of eternal light and the mirror without blemish.
Gaze upon that mirror each day and continually study your face within it, that you may adorn yourself within and without with beautiful robes.
Like Francis, Clare was not primarily a theologian. But she was a contemplative. First enclosure, and then years of illness that kept her bedridden, left her with time to reflect upon the beautiful God who calls us into relationship. She quite literally lived with the cross from which Francis heard Christ’s call to discipleship. And gazing into it day after day, she learned the methodology that would make Franciscan theology possible. Her affective approach to contemplation – gaze, consider, contemplate, imitate – would make it possible for others to follow in the way that she and Francis set out to live. Franciscan friar and poet Murray Bodo captures the essence of Clare beautifully in his poem, “St. Clare Dies at Her Mirror, August 11, 1253”:
I’ve lived in the labyrinth, love its scrubbed walls, doors whose thresholds lead to the brass basin, worn where a Sister’s foot soaks warm in my laving hand. Portals here billow into linen albs, their shadows arching into gates through which the Saracen horses pound toward their own retreat; the blinding ciborium whirls warriors, spins our lacing bobbins. Winter roofbeams groan their vows beneath God’s weight, His rough beard scratches the eaves like a storm of olive branches.
I’ve embraced the labyrinth, the basin’s womb become a mirror for seeing around corners; looked into, it’s the crucifix that spoke to Francis, Christ’s wounded, bent face now a lucid window onto my own riddle recumbent on the stone pillow. On the roof God hops, sparks in a gossip of sparrows. Small, brown, winged, my soul flits through death’s dark mirror, into light.
It ultimately falls to those who come after Francis and Clare to sort out what this spiritual approach means for the world of theology. At least at first, it did not mean completely upending the apple cart of Platonic thought. The first university theologians among the Franciscans, men like Alexander of Hales and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, were thoroughly Platonic in their world view.
Beauty remains an ethical concept, as illustrated by this statement from Bonaventure’s Lectures on the Six Days of Creation: “Justice makes beautiful that which had been deformed.” It remains a given that nothing can be beautiful unless it is as God designs it. Human sin deforms beauty. Repentance and justice restore it. But what does change for Franciscan thinkers is the approach. Theology under the Franciscans becomes an affective enterprise, and not merely a logical one. And Beauty as a core aspect of God’s personal identity helps to drive this.
Bonaventure places our experience of beauty at the beginning of all spiritual work. Each human person in relationship with God is drawn into that relationship by first emotionally experiencing beauty in art and creation. While the intellect is certainly not excluded from the process of entering into deeper relationship with God, it cannot be the beginning. God is apprehended first in the wordless emotive space of experiencing creative beauty. And in the deepening relationship, the created beauty is transcended not by words, but by the eventual apprehension of uncreated Beauty.
We find this idea expressed not only in the works theology, but in art as well. Dante’s Divine Comedy follows this model of affective journey. And it is no wonder, for Dante was himself a Franciscan tertiary, a member of the so-called Third Order movement that Francis designed for those who couldn’t live the absolutely radical life of the friars or of Clare’s Poor Ladies, but who still wanted to live out the Franciscan way as best as they could. We can see this Franciscan ideal of journey into transcendent beauty illustrated well in the final verses of Canto XXXIII of The Paradiso (trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow):
O how all speech is feeble and falls short Of my conceit, and this to what I saw Is such, ’tis not enough to call it little!
O Light Eterne, sole in thyself that dwellest, Sole knowest thyself, and, known unto thyself And knowing, lovest and smilest on thyself!
That circulation, which being thus conceived Appeared in thee as a reflected light, When somewhat contemplated by mine eyes,
Within itself, of its own very colour Seemed to me painted with our effigy, Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein.
As the geometrician, who endeavours To square the circle, and discovers not, By taking thought, the principle he wants,
Even such was I at that new apparition; I wished to see how the image to the circle Conformed itself, and how it there finds place;
But my own wings were not enough for this, Had it not been that then my mind there smote A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.
Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy: But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.
If Bonaventure and others like him open the door to a new theological approach, it will fall to the greatest Franciscan thinker, John Duns Scotus, to completely change the direction. Like the Dominican thinker Thomas Aquinas before him, Scotus was an Aristotelian rather than a Platonist. And doing theology under a completely different world view required new approaches and new terminology.
Without delving too deeply into all of this, I want to point out three of Scotus’ innovations. Two of the ideas are so radical that Scotus actually had to invent words for them. And all three strike me as completely natural progressions from the approach begun by Francis and Clare, and also as the radical shifts necessary to enable our contemporary theological and creative reception of the Franciscan tradition.
The first idea is what Scotus termed haecceitas. We would translate that as this-ness. It means the particularity of any individual, whether it be a person, or a leaf, or a stone. Under traditional Platonic thought, what was important about individual persons was that they participated in a larger category of Personhood. But under Scotus’ idea of this-ness, what is important about individual persons is their individuality. Each created thing is so beloved of God that God pays special attention to the differentiating details.
That means that beauty shifts away from some definition that can be objectively designed by category and into something that must be more subjectively apprehended, because beauty is now entirely tied up with individual integrity. Beauty can still be marred by sin, but even this can no longer be easily described by simple category. And restoration to beauty is more about drawing an individual back to their true self. We see this idea illustrated wonderfully in Galway Kinnell’s poem, “Saint Francis and the Sow”:
The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
The second idea that Scotus gives us is that the Incarnation is not a result of humanity’s fall from grace due to sin, but rather that it is a foregone conclusion of the creation. God’s interest in the individual integrity of each bit of creation, God’s deep appreciation of the beauty of that creation, God’s desire for close relationship with it, means that from the moment God decided to create us, God also planned to become one of us and share in our entire experience. Episcopal priest and theologian Marilyn McCord Adams once described this as “incarnation anyway.” Just as our beauty is a reflection or footprint of God’s Beauty, so too our desire for God is a reflection or footprint of God’s desire for us.
The final idea that I want to mention is what Scotus calls univocity. By this, he means that when we use a word to talk about both God and people, or God and the creation, we mean the same thing by that word. God’s beauty and our beauty are the same kind of thing, not different categories. The only difference is that our experience of what it means to be beautiful can be marred by sin. But restoration to our divinely created beauty is not to some fuzzy shadow of true beauty. Rather, the true beauty of creation, whether human or animal or plant or mineral, is the beauty of God.
No poet better embodies all of these ideas from Scotus than the Irish Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. And that makes sense, since Scotus was the focus of Hopkins’ scholarly work. I think that all of these ideas are perfectly captured in Hopkins’ poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
Despite having a deep intellectual tradition embodied by the likes of Bonaventure and Scotus, for most of us in the Franciscan tradition, the point is still about trying to walk in the way marked out by Francis and Clare and their first companions. And that means approaching life with a creative apprehension of beauty, both of the created and of the Creator.
I therefore would like to bring us around to looking at a couple of specific instances from life of Francis and see how artists can use these Franciscan ideas of beauty to illuminate life, both Francis’ and ours. And while we could certainly make forays into music or the visual arts as a part of this, I hope that you will forgive me for sticking with poetry for our artistic models.
The first instance from the life of Francis that I would like us to examine is Francis’ encounter with lepers. That might seem an odd place to go to talk about beauty. But Francis did not learn to see the beauty of creation by looking at birds and flowers and then extend that to people. Rather, Francis first learned to see beauty by approaching that which he feared. In his Testament he tells us:
The Lord gave me, Brother Francis, thus to begin doing penance in this way: for when I was in sin, it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers. And the Lord Himself led me among them and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, what had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body. And afterwards I delayed a little and left the world.
This incident of Francis’ first encounter as he just described is set forth in the fourth chapter of The Legend of the Three Companions:
One day he was riding his horse near Assisi, when he met a leper. And, even though he usually shuddered at lepers, he made himself dismount, and gave him a coin, kissing his hand as he did so. After he accepted a kiss of peace from him, Francis remounted and continued on his way.
After a few days, he moved to a hospice of lepers, taking with him a large sum of money. Calling them all together, as he kissed the hand of each, he gave them alms. When he left there, what before had been bitter, that is, to see and touch lepers, was turned into sweetness.
Now let us now see how a poet tells the story and see if we can notice the Franciscan ideal of beauty at work. Here is David Citino’s “Francis Meets a Leper”:
He heard the bell toll, erratic in a palsied hand, and smelled the goatish scent before he saw the figure moving in mist on the road to Assisi, a traveler gloved and shod, as was the law, to hide the sores, a man’s inhumanity, missing fingers and toes, and tried to unmask the face, slack muscles showing nothing but astonishment, lower lids keeping eyes open always to our providential decay, flesh soft and thick as rotten wood. Francis saw in bleary eyes, near to him as his mother’s as she loved him, a brother, then someone dearer, wrapped as he’d seen others in his father’s cloth that first had profited English shepherds and the weavers of Ghent, a skin bleached white as bone, a flower blazing in snow, so close to perfection it could only decay. Francis did the only thing he could, sun rising high enough now to burn away the mist. He unwrapped the face, studying lineaments fashioned by a master’s hand, image and likeness of the death that beautifies all living. He closed his eyes and kissed.
It was in seeing the beauty of God in the leper that Francis began to be able to apprehend the beauty of God—first in himself, then in all of the people around him, and finally in all of creation. But as it is Francis’ love of the non-human parts of the created order that so often leads folks to him today, I want to pay attention to at least one of those stories as well. Here is the beloved account of Francis preaching to the birds from the twenty-first chapter of Thomas of Celano’s Life of Saint Francis:
Francis reached a place near Bevagna, in which a great multitude of birds of different types gathered, including doves, crows, and jackdaws. When Francis saw them, he ran swiftly toward them, leaving his companions on the road. He was a man of great fervor, feeling much sweetness and tenderness even toward lesser, irrational creatures. When he was already very close, seeing that they awaited him, he greeted them in his usual way. He was quite surprised, however, because the birds did not take flight, as they usually do. Filled with great joy, he humbly requested that they listen to the word of God.
Among many other things, he said to them: “My brother birds, you should greatly praise your Creator, and love him always. He gave you feathers to wear, wings to fly, and whatever you need. God made you noble among His creatures and gave you a home in the purity of the air, so that, though you never sow nor reap, He nevertheless protects and governs you without your least care.” At these words, the birds rejoiced in a wonderful way according to their nature. They stretched their necks, spread their wings, opened their beaks, and looked at him. He passed through their midst, coming and going, touching their heads and bodies with his tunic. Then he blessed them, and having made the sign of the cross, gave them permission to fly off to another place.
After the birds had listened so reverently to the word of God, Francis began to accuse himself of negligence because he had not preached to them before. From that day on, he carefully exhorted all birds, all animals, all reptiles, and also insensible creatures, to praise and love the Creator.
Again, let us see what poets can do with this story. This time I have selected two approaches. The first is Seamus Heaney’s “Saint Francis and the Birds”:
When Francis preached love to the birds They listened, fluttered, throttled up Into the blue like a flock of words
Released for fun from his holy lips. Then wheeled back, whirred about his head, Pirouetted on brothers’ capes.
Danced on the wing, for sheer joy played And sang, like images took flight. Which was the best poem Francis made,
His argument true, his tone light.
And the second is a selection from Marilyn Nelson’s The Life of a Saint: after Giotto:
IV. The Saint Preaches
The saint has come back to town. Everyone comes out. His father’s old retainers whisper how he’s changed. He says he has a mistress now, that his pride kisses the ground. He seems so strange. He carries his hunger in a wooden bowl.
Some say they see his mistress, that she’s old and wears rags. He says he’s been praying for years. When he limps through the streets he leaves red footprints for the rain to eat. He looks as wild as the Baptist, everyone says, but they hang around anyway when he starts to preach.
He’s talking to something beyond them, it seems, no, something so close they’d forgotten to notice, like their own good stink or the beauty of kitchens. When he opens his arms they think birds fly out like coins.
He speaks a language they understand but can’t speak. It sounds to them like singing, like the melody of the wind in the gray olive trees.
They hang around all day and when they go home it seems better, as if they’d discovered salt. They forget the dark they’re afraid of and remember all night long how the saint opened his wings among the gathering birds, how he opened his beak, how he sang.
And so we end where we began, with Francis the poet singing the song of divine beauty. Francis would want us to always continue to diligently search out Beauty. He even now urges us to desire it, to give ourselves over to an all-consuming relationship with the God who is Beauty Itself, the God who desires us so much that being with us and sharing our entire experience has always been a part of the divine plan. And Francis would have us not just to seek this Beauty for ourselves, but to creatively share it so that others may know Beauty as well.
Finally, as the final stanza of the Canticle reminds us, Francis reminds us that nothing, not even death itself, can ultimately separate us from the Beauty by whom and for whom we are made.
Acknowledgements: I am indebted to Mary Beth Ingham, Rejoicing in the Works of the Lord: Beauty in the Franciscan Tradition (Franciscan Heritage Series, vol. 6) for the material on the pre-Franciscan medieval outlook on beauty, as well as the material which appears later on Bonaventure and Scotus. I never directly quote her work, but this lecture would be impossible without it. I have also drawn on Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, Volume II: The Founder (eds. Regis J. Armstrong et. al.) and Francis and Clare in Poetry: An anthology (eds. Janet McCann and David Craig).
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Friday
The Washington Post headline could not fail to catch the eye: “Antisemitism is rising. Time to summon a 10-foot-tall crisis monster.” The subject, as author Adam Mansbach explained, was The Golem of Prague, a giant figure from Jewish folklore who is created out of mud and clay and “animated through secret incantations to defend the Jewish people in times of crisis.” Mansbach says stories of the golem date back to the 1500s.
Reading Mansbach’s article brought to mind the handling of the Golem legend in Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. More on that in a moment.
Mansbach’s interest in the Golem has been spurred by the increasing number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States:
I started writing about golems in the spring of 2022 —before Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and Kyrie Irving dominated the news cycle with antisemitic screeds and Holocaust denial — and finished my project the week former president Donald Trump had dinner with Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. I’m writing this two months after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed the coronavirus had been engineered to exempt Ashkenazi Jews; a month after audio transcripts filed in a Manhattan court revealed Rudy Giuliani mocking Jews for celebrating Passover and Robert G. Bowers was sentenced for killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the day Elon Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League for costing X, formerly known as Twitter, ad revenue by calling attention to rising hate speech on the platform.
In this list, Mansbach doesn’t mention Trump’s “good people on both sides” characterization of the Charlottesville marchers chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” Or his recent Rosh Hashanah message, with its implied threat:
Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!
If the Golem looms so large in the Jewish collective imagination, it is because, Mansbach says, it
represents vigilance against the inevitable, cyclical return of injustice. His myth is born of an understanding that antisemitism is ineradicable — that as long as there are people who feel embittered about their lives, constrained by forces they cannot control, they will come to blame the Jews and then to enact violence upon us.
Our contemporary challenge, Mansbach concludes, is for we ourselves to internalize golem vigilance:
In the absence of a giant clay superhero, our only choice is to become the golems we need. This doesn’t just mean physical confrontation, though there are times when that might be necessary. Nor does it consist simply of vigilance against Jew haters. Instead, it requires Jewish people to enlarge and modernize our watchfulness, to understand that every vehicle of hatred is built on a chassis of antisemitism, and that violence — in word or deed — against any marginalized group will always be a harbinger of tragedy for us.
Kavalier and Clay informs us that, whether we know it or not, we are familiar with the Golem. Superman, created in 1938 by a couple of Jewish artists (one of whose parents had fled Russian pogroms in 1900), inspired by this myth of a strongman saving the downtrodden. Chabon makes the link Jewish resistance and comic book characters even more explicit. It begins with the story of a Houdini-like figure spiriting a golem statue out of Prague before the Nazis find it. Chabon lets us in on some of the deliberations behind the decision. Some want to keep the Golem in Prague since that’s where it has always been. In fact, there
were even a few in the circle who, when pressed, admitted that they did not want to send the Golem away because in their hearts they had not surrendered the childish hope that the great enemy of Jew-haters and blood libelers might one day, in a moment of dire need, be revived to fight again. In the end, however, the vote went in favor of removing the Golem to a safe place, preferably in a neutral nation that was out of the way and not entirely devoid of Jews.
The escape artist in charge of the transfer also uses the occasion to help one of his students, Josef Kavalier, to escape Czechslovakia. The Golem is transferred in a coffin, as though it is a corpse, with Kavalier hidden at one end. Through that means he crosses the border, takes the Siberian railway to Japan, and then finds his way to New York, where he connects with his cousin Samuel Klayman. As Kavalier is a gifted artist, the two invent a comic book series that proves to be wildly successful.
The protagonist of their comic book is “the Escape Artist,” who, Houdini-like, escapes all manner of confinements to make war on the Nazis while helping the innocent escape. On the cover of the first issue, Kavalier vents his frustration by showing the Escape Artist unloading a punch on Adolph Hitler. After that, Chabon writes,
it had been total war. The Escapist and his gang fought on land, at sea, in the skies of Fortress Europa, and the punishment taken by the minions of the Iron Chain grew operatically intense.
And:
It was Joe’s battle scenes—the type of panel or sequence known in the trade as a slugfest—that first got his work noticed, both in the business and by the boggled young manhood of America. These scenes have been described as wild, frenetic, violent, extreme, even Breughelian. There is smoke, fire, and lightning. There are thick flocks of bombers, spiky flotillas of battleships, gardens of blooming shell bursts. Up in one corner, a bombed-out castle looms stark on a hill. Down in another corner, a grenade is exploding in a henhouse as chicken and eggs go flying, Messerschmitts dive, finned torpedoes plow up the surf. And somewhere in the middle of it all struggles the Escapist, lashed with naval chain to the business end of a prescient Axis rocket bomb.
At first, Sam’s boss worried that the direct references to Hitler and the Nazis is too political (America has not yet entered the war), but Kavalier and Clay insist on it, although they compromise a little. At first the Escapist and his company fight “the Razi elites of Zothenia, Gothsylvania, Draconia, and other pseudonymous dark bastions of the Iron Chain,
arranging jailbreaks for resistance leaders and captured British airmen, helping great scientists and thinkers out of the clutches of the evil dictator, Attila Hakoff, and freeing captives, missionaries, and prisoners of war.
Chabon refers to the two comic book creators as “golem makers,” and their Golem does a version of what he’s supposed to do, which is to come to the rescue of European Jews. In its small way, the comic book character helps prepare Americans to embrace the war effort, which will culminate in ending the Final Solution. Chabon writes,
[Kavalier] wanted [their boss] to understand the importance of the fight, to succumb to the propaganda that he and Sammy were unabashedly churning out. If they could not move Americans to anger against Hitler, then Joe’s existence, the mysterious freedom that had been granted to him and denied to so many others, had no meaning.
Many of today’s comic book heroes, whether Batman or Iron Man or the Incredible Hulk—pretty much anyone with bulging muscles and a mission to defeat evil—can be traced back to the Golem of Prague. And yes, we need him now as much as ever.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Thursday
If you enjoy autumn strolls, check out the poetry of the 17th century Anglican cleric Thomas Traherne. My Faculty Reading Group, which has been discussing the work of such metaphysical poets as John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan, has introduced me to Traherne, who is perpetually enthusiastic about the gifts he sees in the world around him. Walking, as he sees it, is one of the best ways of experiencing them.
Traherne makes a distinction between seeing with the eyes and seeing with the mind. The first is merely mechanical and does not involve noticing things. When we walk in this manner, Traherne says, we are like “dead puppets” who “may move in the bright and glorious day, yet not behold the sky.”
In his extended essay on walking, Henry David Thoreau makes a similar distinction. For him, it is the difference between the body and the spirit:
I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is — I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?
Actually, Thoreau prefers the word “sauntering,” which accentuates the randomness of the experience.
Traherne agrees. When we walk, he says, we should think of ourselves as bees gathering pollen. Or as he sensuously puts it,
To fly abroad like active bees, Among the hedges and the trees, To cull the dew that lies On ev’ry blade, From ev’ry blossom; till we lade Our minds, as they their thighs.
For a moment, Traherne sounds Wordsworthian, suggesting that we lose something as we grow older:
A little child these well perceives, Who, tumbling in green grass and leaves, May rich as kings be thought…
Wordsworth similarly observes (in Intimations of Immortality), “But yet I know, where’er I go,/That there hath past away a glory from the earth.”
Unlike Wordsworth, however, Traherne, then assures us that these pleasures are equally available to adults:
But there’s a sight Which perfect manhood may delight, To which we shall be brought.
Apparently this is a theme for Traherne. In fact, as we were informed by Sewanee’s Renaissance specialist James MacDonald, Traherne has one note, which he plays over and over. One sees his non-stop enthusiasm in “Wonder” as well as in “Walking.” Here are two stanzas:
The skies in their magnificence, The lively, lovely air; Oh how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair! The stars did entertain my sense, And all the works of God, so bright and pure, So rich and great did seem, As if they ever must endure In my esteem.
A native health and innocence Within my bones did grow, And while my God did all his glories show, I felt a vigour in my sense That was all spirit. I within did flow With seas of life, like wine; I nothing in the world did know But ’twas divine.
As one of our members put it, it’s like Blake’s Songs of Innocence without the accompanying Songs of Experience.
In this regard, Traherne differs from George Herbert, whom we had just discussed and who constantly grapples with mood swings and agonizing doubt. Although he, like Traherne often ends up with a deep appreciation of God’s bounty, he has to work harder to get there.
But if you want your walk to be unalloyed joy, Traherne is the poet for you.
Walking By Thomas Traherne
To walk abroad is, not with eyes, But thoughts, the fields to see and prize; Else may the silent feet, Like logs of wood, Move up and down, and see no good Nor joy nor glory meet.
Ev’n carts and wheels their place do change, But cannot see, though very strange The glory that is by; Dead puppets may Move in the bright and glorious day, Yet not behold the sky.
And are not men than they more blind, Who having eyes yet never find The bliss in which they move; Like statues dead They up and down are carried Yet never see nor love.
To walk is by a thought to go; To move in spirit to and fro; To mind the good we see; To taste the sweet; Observing all the things we meet How choice and rich they be.
To note the beauty of the day, And golden fields of corn survey; Admire each pretty flow’r With its sweet smell; To praise their Maker, and to tell The marks of his great pow’r.
To fly abroad like active bees, Among the hedges and the trees, To cull the dew that lies On ev’ry blade, From ev’ry blossom; till we lade Our minds, as they their thighs.
Observe those rich and glorious things, The rivers, meadows, woods, and springs, The fructifying sun; To note from far The rising of each twinkling star For us his race to run.
A little child these well perceives, Who, tumbling in green grass and leaves, May rich as kings be thought, But there’s a sight Which perfect manhood may delight, To which we shall be brought.
While in those pleasant paths we talk, ’Tis that tow’rds which at last we walk; For we may by degrees Wisely proceed Pleasures of love and praise to heed, From viewing herbs and trees.
I recently discovered a news item that, while horrific, brought back fond memories of reading Brian Jacques’s Redwall books to my children. The memory involves the shrew characters.
The Redwall series could be described as a blend of Wind in the Willows and Lord of the Rings. In it, various animals—most notably mice (Martin the Warrior) but also (as in Kenneth Grahame’s novel) badgers, moles and otters. The villains are invariably (again as in Wind in the Willows), weasels and stoats, as well as foxes and rats. The good guys seek to defend Redwall Abbey from invasion and venture out to rescue captured comrades, all the while employing pre-gunpowder military technology.
But I want to talk about shrews, who are also in alliance with the good guys. They are headed by one Log-a-Log and they show up en masse, dozens upon dozens. Invariably, like actual shrews, they are fearless and go plunging into battle. They also suffer mass casualties. It’s not uncommon, say when they are aboard a boat, to see a score of them swept into the water.
When I was reading the books to Justin, Darien and especially Toby, we sometimes would talk about the “expendable shrews.” To show it means business and to add to the suspense, an adventure book like this needs to have some of the good characters die. But it can’t have major figures suffer death since, after all, it’s not Game of Thrones. To the shrews, therefore, goes the honor of perishing for the greater good.
In Russia’s invasion, it’s former convicts who are playing the role of the shrews. A recent Reuters article reports that convicts, insubordinate soldiers, and drunk recruits get pressed into Russian penal units known as “Storm-Z” squads and are routinely sent to the most exposed parts of the front line. “They’re just meat,” said one soldier, who disobeyed a commander by treating wounded Storm-Z fighters rather than just leaving them. Another fighter described similar conditions:
On the frontline, where we’ve been, we did not get deliveries of ammunition. We did not get water or food. The injured were not taken away: still now the dead are rotting…
At least, in the later Redwall books, there are instances of individual shrews getting rescued. In fact, there are fewer of them and they are more individuated.
In other words, after getting to know his animal characters, Jacques could not bring himself to see any of them as expendable. We should wish the same for Putin.
Further note: Having found similarities between Jacques and Tolkien, here’s the latter’s description of expendable Orcs. As it so happens, the Ukrainians draw upon Lord of the Rings, characterizing the Russian invaders as orcs. The scene is from the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers:
Then at last an answer came: a storm of arrows met them, and a hail of stones. They wavered, broke, and fled back; and then charged again, broke and charged again; and each time, like the incoming sea, they halted at a higher point. Again trumpets rang, and a press of roaring men leaped forth. They held their great shields above them like a roof, while in their midst they bore two trunks of mighty trees. Behind them orc-archers crowded, sending a hail of darts against the bowmen on the walls. They gained the gates. The trees, swung by strong arms, smote the timbers with a rending boom. If any man fell, crushed by a stone hurtling from above, two others sprang to take his place. Again and again the great rams swung and crashed.
Unfortunately, like the defenders of Helm’s Gate, Ukraine will lose a battle of attrition. Russia has more lives to waste. The Ents save the Riders of Rohan and members of the fellowship but who will come to the support of the Ukrainians?
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Tuesday
Six years ago, when Donald Trump was in the first year of his presidency, I turned to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls to better understand why America had fallen for his con. After all, Gogol’s 1842 novel features two con men, the villainous protagonist Chichikov and the comically crazy and fascinating liar Nozdrev. As I watched a New York judge call out Trump’s real estate company for outrageously inflating the value of its holdings, I thought again of Gogol’s work.
The New York case, as The Washington Post reports, involves “statements of financial condition,” dating back to 2011, that have manipulated “the value of Trump’s property and other real estate assets by up to $2.2 billion annually.” Because of the fraud, “the real estate, hospitality and golf resort company received better interest and policy rates than it otherwise would have.”
The judge in that case has already ruled that certain aspects of Trump’s real estate fraud have been so egregious that, for the first count against him, a trial is unnecessary. When Trump’s lawyers argued that square footage estimates were subjective—30,000 square feet as opposed to actual 10,000 square feet—the judge declared, “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud.”
Elsewhere he summed up Trump’s business practices as follows:
In defendants’ world: rent regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air; a disclaimer by one party casting responsibility on another party exonerates the other party’s lies. That is a fantasy world, not the real world.”
In Gogol’s novel, meanwhile, Chichikov is seeking to buy “dead souls”—which is to say, serfs who have died but who are still on the landowner’s tax rolls. Once he has acquired enough dead souls, he will take out a loan against them and pocket the money. In the course of buying, he comes up against another conman, Nozdrev, who is so transparent (unlike Chichikov) that one can only gape in wonder. When I wrote my two posts on the novel, I was trying to figure out which kind of con man Trump was, the vicious Chichikov or the relatively harmless Nozdrev. At the time, I associated Trump with the latter.
That’s because Nosdrev is mercurial and “a lover of fast living.” At one moment he seems to be your friend, at the next he is quarreling with you. Overall, he is “loquacious, dissipated, high-spirited, over-showy.”
Like Trump, Nosdrev must be constantly in the public eye and, like Trump, he thrives on conflict. Chaos appears to energize him:
Never at any time could he remain at home for more than a single day, for his keen scent could range over scores and scores of verses, and detect any fair which promised balls and crowds. Consequently in a trice he would be there—quarreling, and creating disturbances over the gaming-table…
Nozdrez, it turns out, has the same regard for the truth that Trump has:
Moreover, the man lied without reason. For instance, he would begin telling a story to the effect that he possessed a blue-coated or a red-coated horse; until, in the end, his listeners would be forced to leave him with the remark, “You are giving us some fine stuff, old fellow!”
Had social media existed in Nozdrev’s time, one could imagine him wielding it as effectively as the former president:
Also, men like Nozdrev have a passion for insulting their neighbors without the least excuse afforded…The more he became friendly with a man, the sooner would he insult him, and be ready to spread calumnies as to his reputation. Yet all the while he would consider himself the insulted one’s friend, and, should he meet him again, would greet him in the most amicable style possible, and say, “You rascal, why have you given up coming to see me.” Thus, taken all round, Nozdrev was a person of many aspects and numerous potentialities.
Also like Trump, Nozdrev promotes everything he’s connected with, refusing to let facts stand in his way. Here’s only one instance from the many where he makes extravagant claims while refusing to yield to rational assessment:
The tour began with a view of the stables, where the party saw two mares (the one a grey, and the other a roan) and a colt; which latter animal, though far from showy, Nozdrev declared to have cost him ten thousand rubles. “You NEVER paid ten thousand rubles for the brute!” exclaimed the brother-in-law. “He isn’t worth even a thousand.” “By God, I DID pay ten thousand!” asserted Nozdrev. “You can swear that as much as you like,” retorted the other. “Will you bet that I did not?” asked Nozdrev, but the brother-in-law declined the offer.
Nozdrev trying to make deals is like Trump selling “Trump steaks” that have someone else’s sticker on them. Both men are so transparently fraudulent that sometimes you just want to sit back and enjoy the show, as the media did with Trump in 2016. Here is Nosdrev trying to sell some worthless dogs and then a worthless barrel organ to Chichikov:
“Then buy a few dogs,” said Nozdrev. “I can sell you a couple of hides a-quiver, ears well pricked, coats like quills, ribs barrel-shaped, and paws so tucked up as scarcely to graze the ground when they run.” “Of what use would those dogs be to me? I am not a sportsman.” “But I WANT you to have the dogs. Listen. If you won’t have the dogs, then buy my barrel-organ. ‘Tis a splendid instrument. As a man of honour I can tell you that, when new, it cost me fifteen hundred rubles. Well, you shall have it for nine hundred.” “Come, come! What should I want with a barrel-organ? I am not a German, to go hauling it about the roads and begging for coppers.” “But this is quite a different kind of organ from the one which Germans take about with them. You see, it is a REAL organ. Look at it for yourself. It is made of the best wood. I will take you to have another view of it.” And seizing Chichikov by the hand, Nozdrev drew him towards the other room, where, in spite of the fact that Chichikov, with his feet planted firmly on the floor, assured his host, again and again, that he knew exactly what the organ was like, he was forced once more to hear how Marlborough went to the war. “Then, since you don’t care to give me any money for it,” persisted Nozdrev, “listen to the following proposal. I will give you the barrel-organ and all the dead souls which I possess, and in return you shall give me your britchka, and another three hundred rubles into the bargain.”
For Nozdrev, deal making is a form of play. He is a bad dealmaker, as apparently Trump is as well, but one can’t help but admire his enthusiasm.
Chichikov, by contrast, is cold-blooded and calculating. When he figures that one can make millions by working in customs, he first figures out the lay of the land before cashing in. His initial step is to establish himself as an exemplary employee. His instincts are keen, and he knows the perfect moment when to elicit bribes from smugglers.
The result is that Chichikov grows rich whereas Nozdrev bankrupts himself and his estate—just as Trump would be bankrupt were it not for, first, a wealthy father and, second, Russian oligarchs and Arab shieks willing to launder money through his holdings. Oh, and millions of fans who send in money. Nozdrev’s problem is that he lacks a GoFundMe platform.
When I wrote about Gogol’s two conmen in 2017, I reflected that it made sense why rightwing voters would go for the flamboyant liar over the Chichikov-like politicians that he ran against. If many of Trump supporters despised the Paul Ryans and the Mitch McConnells almost as much as they did the Hillary Clintons, it’s because, like Chichikov, they carefully take the measure of every person in the system, add up their strengths and weaknesses, and act accordingly. If such types are assuring you that you will keep your healthcare in the very act of taking it away, I noted, why not just vote in Trump to blow everything up?
And because I didn’t know what to expect over the rest Trump’s presidency, I asked myself, who would I rather have running things: a blowhard that everyone knows to be a blowhard or a secretive conman who says all the right things but, as a result, is able to fleece us all the more effectively? At least when you get taken in by a Nozdrev or a Trump, I rationalized, we can’t say we weren’t warned.
What I failed to factor in is how a Nozdrev with presidential power would behave. Perhaps he would evolve from Gogol’s light-hearted bungler to something far more insidious. Not that Trump was ever as harmless as Nozdrev, as his assault victims will testify. Still, becoming president elevated his threat level to red.
People once laughed at Trump as they laugh at Nozdrev. They’re not laughing now.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Monday
As this is Banned Book Week, I first look at literature banning before discussing how to respond to the banners. According to messaging consultant Antonia Scatton, there’s are ways to effectively counter those parents and others who are bullying and censoring teachers while banning books and closing down school libraries. First of all, however, here are a few observations about banning novels.
Having taught literature for over 40 years, I can testify to the vast range of things that a student can carry away from a work. As reader response theorist Norman Holland once observed, we replicate our identities as we read, which means that a passage which is of immense significance to one reader will often go unnoticed by another. Samuel Delany, the legendary African American science fiction writer, talks about zeroing in on a casual reference in an Isaac Azimov novel to a dusky-faced character. As Delany was trying to find a foothold in the overwhelmingly white 1950’s sci-fi world, that tiny detail meant all the world to him—and nothing at all to most other readers.
Songwriter Tom Lehrer humorously captures the phenomenon in his song “Smut,” written (I believe) in the 1960s. Here’s a stanza:
All books can be indecent books Though recent books are bolder For filth (I’m glad to say) is in the mind of the beholder When correctly viewed Everything is lewd (I could tell you things about Peter Pan And the Wizard of Oz, there’s a dirty old man!)
To demonstrate how far censors are willing to go, Oklahoma’s governor recently attacked National Public Television’s Clifford the Big Red Dog, a series based the Norman Bridwell books. (Apparently there are some lesbian characters in some episodes.)
When it’s not LGBTQ+ issues, censors are going after race and sex. For a Virginia woman recently profiled by the Washington Post, it’s sex. As Hannah Natanson’s article reports, Jennifer Petersen has made it her life’s mission to get books banned from school libraries and curricula:
Jennifer Petersen keeps 73 school books she detests in her basement.
She ordered most from Amazon. In the last year, she read each one. She highlighted and typed up excerpts from more than 1,300 pages — of the 24,000-plus pages she read — that she says depict sexual acts. Then she filed challenges against 71 of the books with Spotsylvania County Public Schools, the Virginia district where one of her children is a student and the other is a recent graduate. (Two books were removed before she could challenge them.)
Thanks to Petersen’s efforts, one of the books banned has been Toni Morrison’s Beloved, one of America’s greatest novels, about which Petersen wrote, “The book illustrates the horrors of our history. However, the passages outlined do not add to the story and they are sexually explicit.”
Second guessing a Nobel-prize winning author for what does not add to a story shows a breathtaking level of arrogance. If, as I suspect, one of the scenes Petersen tagged was the slaveowner’s sons assaulting Sethe by sucking on her milk-filled breasts, then the scene is integral to the novel’s central theme of violation. It shows both how even slaveholders long for tenderness and how such longing is perverted by a system in which humans own other humans. The theme is taken up later when Sethe murders the very child she has suckled to save it from being returned to slavery. (Its ghost then proceeds to haunt her.)
Censors of all stripes have always had this blinkered arrogance. I think of those fanatical church reformers after Luther who shattered stained glass windows and destroyed musical instruments for (so they argued) interfering with receiving God’s word in plain and unadulterated fashion. Morrison shows the deep complexity of the world, a complexity that includes sexuality, but that’s of no interest to the Petersens of the world.
Who would you trust your kids with—a teacher who, often with years of experience, is seeking to develop well-rounded and mature individuals who can think for themselves? Or a zealot with a narrow ideological agenda?
So anyway, that’s my rant. Now to Antonia Scatton’s recommendations on how to respond to such people. Scatton, according to her website, is a “political messaging expert and communications consultant who is currently partnering with the DNC’s Association of State Democratic Committees to bring her message strategy training workshops to Party leadership, staff, candidates and elected officials across the country.” It so happens that this material is tailored for Virginia, in which Petersen is joined by Republican governor Glenn Youngkin in a culture war against its schools.
Welcome to Democrats Fight Back! Public Schools Edition By Antonia Scatton
Top Talking Points!
On attacks about GLBTQ+ children and parents, Youngkin transgender student policy:
This is state-mandated discrimination, bigotry, and bullying. No child should ever be told that there is something wrong with them because of who they (or their parents) are.
On parents’ rights:
We take all parents beliefs into account, not just those who make the most noise. We’re not going to let a handful of right-wing vigilante parents with extreme minority views override the wishes of most parents.
On CRT and race:
We believe in teaching the truth about our history and our progress as a country.
On culture wars:
It’s puritanism for profit. It’s dangerous and dictatorial. It’s hurting our kids and impeding their education.
It’s book banning, surveillance and state censorship. This relentless teacher harassment is making it impossible for teachers to teach and driving them out of the profession.
This is a national campaign to discredit public schools for private profit and political power. It’s a coordinated effort by private corporations seeking to raid public school budgets. Keep public dollars in public schools.
On why public schools matter:
As a society, we have an obligation to educate every child.
Public schools are what make our children into free and functional adults. They are the engine of equality and economic mobility.
Public schools unite us and make us all Americans. They give us a set of shared American values and a common understanding of our history.
That’s why we need to:
Focus on learning. Help our kids get caught up, make up for lost time. Work with them and their parents to make sure that every single child is being challenged and inspired to do their very best.
Make our schools places where kids can feel welcomed, supported, and safe from bullying, discrimination and (gun) violence. Bring in new resources to support their safety and mental health.
To do that, we need to fully fund our schools. We need to recruit and retain teachers (and support staff) with the best skills and experience, and give them the pay they deserve and the resources, support and trust they need to do their incredibly important jobs.
Bonus:
Generally, we don’t want to engage in debates about gender issues in schools. That’s what they want us talking about. However, several Virginia candidates told me about events where voters were approached by Republican agitators and prompted to ask the candidates whether they wanted “men using girl’s bathrooms.” The best response to this is:
“Did it ever occur to you that Glenn Youngkin’s policy actually forces girls to use men’s bathrooms?”
In short, Scatton is suggesting that liberals take the offensive in responding to the attacks.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Sunday
Last week I reported on a talk given by Sewanee’s Jennifer Michael about finding God in the silences between words. At one point, she handed out a number of poems and had us discuss them in groups, including this tender poem about the Last Supper by Mark Jarman.
In “No One Understood the Final Meal,” Jarman points out that the disciplies could (of course) only grasp its significance upon looking back. After all, at the time it resembled other meals they had had with Jesus. “What was the order,” he asks at one point, only to respond, “But who can remember dinner yesterday?”
After the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, however, they sounght to repeat the meal—as best they could—in order to bring everything back. If they can recrate the details of that last supper, maybe they can bring back their friend.
It’s a very personal way of capturing the meaning of the eucharist. In eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood, we enter into an intimate relationship with him. This miraculous transformation originates in a simple meal.
No One Understood the Final Meal By Mark Jarman
No one understood the final meal, that it was final, each part with a meaning. No one understood as it was served— each portion of the body doled, poured out.
Strange flesh. Strange drink. Each portion of his body. And as they ate and drank, he talked, even had a private conversation.
All they remembered was eating with their friend, a meal they’d had so many times and known the order of. What was the order? But who can remember dinner yesterday?
Forgiven for a crime not yet committed, enjoined to remember someone not yet lost, they tried to bring them back— the taste and texture, somehow, the meal, him.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Friday
One of the benefits of being retired teacher is that I don’t have to grapple with the problems posed by ChatGPT, which is currently the worry of professors everywhere. An artificial intelligence program that can spit out custom-made essays takes plagiarism to a whole new level.
According to Wikipedia, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer“enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language.” A philosophy colleague at Messiah University informs me that it is scaringly effective at mimicking the kinds of essays professors assign. One can even set the level, from kindergarten to graduate study. Sometimes he has had to check footnoted references—which appear to be actual references but are in fact bogus—to realize the essay is machine produced.
In other words, this Shel Silverstein poem does not do justice to such machines. Nevertheless, I share it to bring a little humor into the conversation. My professor son Tobias Wilson-Bates, to whom I used to read Silverstein’s poems, reminded me of it:
The Homework Machine By Shel Silverstein
The Homework Machine, Oh, the Homework Machine, Most perfect contraption that’s ever been seen. Just put in your homework, then drop in a dime, Snap on the switch, and in ten seconds’ time, Your homework comes out, quick and clean as can be. Here it is— ‘nine plus four?’ and the answer is ‘three.’ Three? Oh me . . . I guess it’s not as perfect As I thought it would be.
Toby once joked that it seems like a tremendous waste of money and effort to create a machine designed to generate first-year-student essays. But of course, it can do a lot more.
From my pedagogical perspective, the problem with ChatGPT is that tremendous learning and brain growth come from grappling with the different stages of writing an essay, from the “shitty rough draft” (Anne Lamott’s phrase) to the polished final product. Putting aside the ethical issue of passing along someone else’s work—or something else’s work—as your own, the whole purpose of education is undermined when all you have to do is push a button. It’s like watching an exercise video in lieu of doing the actual exercises. The discovery process that comes from interpreting a work of lit is circumvented.
In my own teaching, because I insisted that the students had to have something at stake in their essays, I encouraged them to find personal application in the works they chose. Often they responded with remarkable insights, both into the works and into their lives. I am told, however, the Chat GPT can fabricate seemingly authentic encounters with poems. I think of the George Burns quote: “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”
Toby, who teaches many non-traditional students at Georgia Gwinnett College, has his students do a lot of writing in class, which is one way of addressing the issue. My Messiah colleague takes it on more directly, having the students analyze ChatGPT responses. In other words, the new challenges posted by AI are prompting teachers to become more creative.
The days of such machines messing up the answer to “nine plus four,” however, are long gone.
