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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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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.
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
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 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.
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
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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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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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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Tuesday
Of thethree 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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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.
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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).
