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Friday
Sunday is Guy Fawkes Day, which commemorates the moment, in 1606, when radical Catholics were thwarted in their attempt to blow up King James and the British Parliament. The following poem, written in 1870, bouncily reports what happened.
I’ve only read about, never experienced, the November 5 celebrations. Apparently bonfires are lit, upon which are burned effigies of Guy Fawkes, the conspirator assigned to light the match.
The occasion is also known as “Bonfire Night.” Sometimes fireworks are involved. All in all, it’s a good occasion to gather around a fire when the weather is turning cold. Oh, and a good time to sing the following poem, which ends with a cheer.
Remember, remember! The fifth of November, The Gunpowder treason and plot; I know of no reason Why the Gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot! Guy Fawkes and his companions Did the scheme contrive, To blow the King and Parliament All up alive. Threescore barrels, laid below, To prove old England’s overthrow. But, by God’s providence, him they catch, With a dark lantern, lighting a match! A stick and a stake For King James’s sake! If you won’t give me one, I’ll take two, The better for me, And the worse for you. A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope, A penn’orth of cheese to choke him, A pint of beer to wash it down, And a jolly good fire to burn him. Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring! Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King! Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!
Public poems that can be chanted are good for bringing people together.
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Thursday
As today is All Souls’ Day and a time when various cultures are celebrating the Dead of the Dead, I share the first part of a talk I gave this past Sunday on literary depictions of life after death. (I will post the final part of the talk, on Philip Pullman’s Amber Spyglass, on Sunday.)
We cannot know, of course, if the authors are right about the afterlife, and in any event depictions of post-life realms are more about negotiating the challenges of this world than predicting the next. But by putting those challenges in a death setting, the authors add an extra level of intensity and urgency to our biggest issues. Or put another way, to seriously imagine what, in passing over, we pass over to, leads to profound insights into the great existential questions—the great existence questions—about the meaning of life.
After all, as Samuel Johnson once said, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
When I started putting this talk together, I didn’t fully realize how the four works I have in mind are all variations of the same work. It all started with the underworld scene in Homer’s Odyssey, which inspired the underworld scene in Virgil’s Aeneid, which in turn inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy. Meanwhile, one can find traces of Homer, Virgil and Dante in Philip Pullman’s underworld scene in The Amber Spyglass, which is the third book in his Golden Compass fantasy trilogy.
The Odyssey
In the Odyssey, Odysseus visits the land of the dead after having spent a year on the island of the sorceress Circe. He does so to figure out what to do next. At this point in his travels, he has encountered considerable hardships. The storms and encounters with hostile islanders have, I believe, made him question whether he really wants to set out to sea again. After all, he has found safe refuge with Circe.
To be sure, he has difficulties with her at first—she tries to turn him and his men into livestock—but since then she has provided him with a comfortable life. In fact, by getting him to temporarily give up his duty to return home, along with its duties of kingship, perhaps she has succeeded after all in transforming him and his men into contented animals. To borrow a line from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” they have become people who do no more than “hoard, and sleep, and feed.”
I frame the drama in this particular way because the prospect of death often gets us to reflect upon our lives, as my wife Julia mentioned in her talk on Louise Penny’s murder mysteries last week. When The Odyssey opens in medias res, we see the gods discussing the hero, who has been stranded on Calypso’s island, this time for seven years, not just one. It is the gods who reaffirm that he has a purpose in life: he must return home to restore order in Ithaka. By this point, of course, he has lost everything—all his boats, all his men, and all his spoils from the Trojan War. On the plus side, he has the option of spending the rest of his life with a beautiful island nymph.
So back to Circe’s island, where he still has a boat. To determine what to do next, he takes her advice to consult with the prophet Teiresias in the land of the dead and travels there. In Hades he encounters a vast array of characters that those who know their Greek mythology will recognize. They cover the full range of human behavior, some having achieved glory, others having committed horrible crimes. After having learned his future from Teiresias—he will encounter more death and heartbreak but will ultimately die quietly in bed surrounded by his community—he converses with various individuals. In the talks with his former war companions Agamemnon and Achilles, I believe, we see the real meaning of the episode.
Before turning to them, however, allow me to mention his encounter with his mother, who has died while he was away. It is a heartbreaking scene and speaks especially powerfully to any of us who have lost someone we have loved. Odysseus’s mother tells him that she has died for “loneliness for you”:
“[O]nly my loneliness for you, Odysseus, for your kind heart and counsel, gentle Odysseus, took my own life away.’
I bit my lip, rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her, and tried three times, putting my arms around her, but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable as shadows are, and wavering like a dream. Now this embittered all the pain I bore, and I cried in the darkness:
“O my mother, will you not stay, be still, here in my arms, may we not, in this place of Death, as well, hold one another, touch with love, and taste salt tears’ relief, the twinge of welling tears? Or is this all hallucination, sent against me by the iron queen, Perséphonê, to make me groan again?”
Attempting unsuccessfully to hug a loved one will show up again in The Aeneid and Pullman’s Amber Spyglass.
Back to his battle companions. If I am right that Odysseus is really struggling about whether to leave the island or to stay, Agamemnon and Achilles both give him reasons to reject his duty and choose Circe.
Agamemnon, although he himself has returned safely to Greece, has then been killed by his wife Clytemnestra, which raises doubts that Odysseus himself may have: has his own wife, after 12 years of her husband’s absence, remained faithful? If not, why go home at all? Agamemnon, after describing his own murder in graphic detail, unloads on all women:
There is no being more fell, more bestial than a wife in such an action, and what an action that one planned! The murder of her husband and her lord. Great god, I thought my children and my slaves at least would give me welcome. But that woman, plotting a thing so low, defiled herself and all her sex, all women yet to come, even those few who may be virtuous.
Then he concludes with a piece of misogynistic advice:
Let it be a warning even to you. Indulge a woman never, and never tell her all you know. Some things a man may tell, some he should cover up.
If we see this as an interior dialogue within Odysseus’s own mind, then he would be coming up with reasons not to go home. And although Agamemnon then goes on to say that Penelope is probably an exception to the rule—maybe this is Odysseus reassuring himself—the doubts are there.
Doubts comes from another quarter in Odysseus’s conversation with Achilles. When Odysseus essentially tells him that it’s not so bad being dead because Achilles won so much fame when alive, Achilles shuts him down real fast. First, here’s Odysseus:
But was there ever a man more blest by fortune than you, Akhilleus? Can there ever be? We ranked you with immortals in your lifetime, we Argives did, and here your power is royal among the dead men’s shades. Think, then, Akhilleus: you need not be so pained by death.
In his reply, Achilles essentially accuses Odysseus of being facile. It’s one of my favorite passage in the epic:
Let me hear no smooth talk of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils. Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man, on iron rations, than lord it over all the exhausted dead.
In other words, don’t tell someone who has died that death is not so bad.
Plato, incidentally, found this passage in Homer particularly objectionable. He feared the whole Hades episode would so terrify young men with the grim prospect of death that they would turn cowards on the battlefield.
But there’s a twist. After his bitter words, Achilles asks about his son, and Odysseus’s account of Neoptólemos’s bravery and his success in battle changes the father’s mood:
But I said no more, for he had gone off striding the field of asphodel, the ghost of our great runner, Akhilleus Aiákidês, glorying in what I told him of his son.
In other words, although personal glory may not be enough—the great anti-war poet Wilfred Owen makes a similar point in his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”—one’s children can help give one’s life meaning. Given that Odysseus has a son awaiting him at home, this is important for him to hear. It may help convince him to leave, regardless of the dangers that await.
The Aeneid
Virgil’s underworld episode plays much the same role as Homer’s. Aeneas too has been wrestling with whether to continue on to fulfill his destiny—which is to kickstart the Roman Empire—or to settle for a comfortable but forgettable life elsewhere. He first encounters this dilemma with the Carthaginian queen Dido, whose heart he breaks when he leaves her. As in the Odyssey, Zeus—or in this case Jupiter—stands in for duty and purpose, and when he orders Aeneas to fulfill his destiny, the Trojan cannot refuse.
Aeneas encounters the same choice again on the island of Sicily. His father, whom he depends on for guidance, has just died and, to honor him, the troops hold various contests. While they are doing so, however, the women—sick of traveling and desiring to settle down–set fire to the ships. Aeneas and the men barely manage to put out the flames.
It is as this point that Aeneas, who has been asking a lot of his people, decides to visit an Apollonian oracle in Naples, presided over by the Cumaean sibyl. She will serve as his guide through the underworld, just as Virgil serves as Dante’s guide.
Aeneas expands Homer’s vision of Hades. Although Homer implies that it is sectioned off—with places of torment for some and fields of asphodel for others–Virgil goes into much more detail. He is also more interested in using the afterlife as a place where the evil are punished and the good rewarded—so much so that Dante and others saw the pagan Virgil prefiguring a Christian vision. Because he is not Christian, Virgil can’t take Dante through Paradiso, but he does guide him through Inferno and Purgatorio. More on that in a moment.
In Virgil’s hell, we see what (by the poet’s standards) it takes to be a good Roman citizen. What follows is a list of what one should not do:
Here are those who hated their brothers, in life, or struck a parent, or contrived to defraud a client, or who crouched alone over the riches they’d made, without setting any aside for their kin (their crowd is largest), those who were killed for adultery, or pursued civil war, not fearing to break their pledges to their masters: shut in they see their punishment. Don’t ask to know that punishment, or what kind of suffering drowns them. Some roll huge stones, or hang spread-eagled on wheel-spokes: wretched Theseus sits still, and will sit for eternity: Phlegyas, the most unfortunate, warns them all and bears witness in a loud voice among the shades: “Learn justice: be warned, and don’t despise the gods.” Here is one who sold his country for gold, and set up a despotic lord: this one made law and remade it for a price: he entered his daughter’s bed and a forbidden marriage: all of them dared monstrous sin, and did what they dared. Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, a voice of iron, could I tell all the forms of wickedness or spell out the names of every torment.”
The good, by contrast, end up in something resembling a college campus or and idyllic senior center:
[T]hey came to the pleasant places, the delightful grassy turf of the Fortunate Groves, and the homes of the blessed. Here freer air and radiant light clothe the plain, and these have their own sun, and their own stars. Some exercise their bodies in a grassy gymnasium, compete in sports and wrestle on the yellow sand: others tread out the steps of a dance, and sing songs. There Orpheus too, the long-robed priest of Thrace, accompanies their voices with the seven-note scale, playing now with fingers, now with the ivory quill…. Aeneas marvels from a distance at their idle chariots and their weapons: their spears fixed in the ground, and their horses scattered freely browsing over the plain: the pleasure they took in chariots and armor while alive, the care in tending shining horses, follows them below the earth.
Virgil, much more than Homer, focuses on ethical behavior. In his underworld we get a sense of lives well-lived and badly-lived, and Dante will expand on this vision of the afterlife. Meanwhile, Aeneas gets from his dead father the clear and inspirational understanding he needs to continue his mission. Anchises knows the future and is able to spell out the history of Rome’s founding and rise to greatness. When he gets back to Sicily, Aeneas has reconnected with his sense of purpose and his resolve.
The Divine Comedy
The most extensive and famous depiction of life after death is, of course, Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s impossible to do justice to this work in the short time I have so I’ll just talk about it in the framework of my remarks so far, which is that artistic explorations of the afterlife are as much about this life as the next—and that extended explorations of death are ways of grappling with the meaning of our current life.
Dante, at the beginning of the Inferno, describes himself as undergoing what today we might call a mid-life crisis.
MIDWAY upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say What was this forest savage, rough, and stern, Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more…
Initially Dante believes that he just has to be a good Christian, and he turns toward the distant light of Paradise, only to be beset by hostile animals—or, as we might interpret them psychologically, inner doubts and fears. In other words, there’s no cheap grace. Instead, he must confront human darkness, including his own. There’s no way around, only through.
For help, he turns to the author who means the most to him and asks for guidance—which is to say, to Virgil. Dante draws on Aeneas’s journey into the underworld, as Virgil drew on Odysseus’s, to explore his inner turmoil. These doubts begin with what people think they want—sex, money, power, revenge, self-annihilation—and goes on to conclude that, if people have turned their desires into false idols, then they create hells for themselves—not only hell in the afterlife but hell in the here and now.
Put another way, the Inferno is not about how we are going to be punished after we die but how we apply our own punishments to ourselves while still alive. To cite an example, those who are driven by greed Dante describes as incessantly pushing enormous weights.
Here too, I saw a nation of lost souls,
far more than were above: they strained their chests against enormous weights, and with mad howls
rolled them at one another.
Dante observes,
Not all the gold that is or ever was under the sky could buy for one of these exhausted souls the fraction of a pause.
Paradiso, by contrast, is accessible to those who open themselves to God’s love. Again, one doesn’t have to die to experience Paradise. After all, God’s love is always there for us. Dante expresses this idea after catching a glimpse of God:
O grace abounding and allowing me to dare to fix my gaze on the Eternal Light, so deep my vision was consumed in it!
I saw how it contains within its depths all things bound in a single book by love of which creation is the scattered leaves…
Dante sums it up in his famous concluding lines:
Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars, My will and my desire were turned by love, The love that moves the sun and the other stars.
As I say, we’ll see Pullman borrow from both Virgil and Dante in Lyra’s journey to the land of the dead. But that’s the subject of Sunday’s post.
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Wednesday
My friend Rebecca Adams sent me a gorgeous poem to welcome in November. Spring in California, she provocatively contends, begins in November, and “Chaparral Spring” goes on to show how. “Everywhere, rolling brown hills bloom with green,/ A thick new blanket pushing up through dry selvage.”
The reversal continues on throughout the year. In March and April, the chaparral experiences its own version of snow covering “familiar landmarks”—only, instead of snow, it’s orange poppies that
sweep the contours of hills, verges of roads, pool into bright swaths, While blue lupine well into gratitude.
In an explanatory note sent along with the poem, Rebecca says (quoting Wikipedia) that the chaparral is “a shrubland plant community found primarily in California, in southern Oregon and in the northern portion of the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico. It is shaped by a Mediterranean climate (mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers) and infrequent, high-intensity crown fires.”
Chaparral Spring By Rebecca Adams
In coastal California, in chaparral country, Spring comes first in November With strong winter rains.
Out here, fire’s the first fear. Golden summer fields have tensed to crackling parchment, waiting to explode by any little spark.
Winter’s relief from danger. Winter is spring. Everywhere, rolling brown hills bloom with green, A thick new blanket pushing up through dry selvage.
This green winter coat stays bare late Fall through February Except for some wild sourgrass, A stem with solitary yellow flowers.
But in March and April, the coastland ranges And all the valleys and wooded foothills of the Sierras Finally catch up. Now spring comes on like winter.
We watch for wildflowers like you’d anticipate The first snowfall, thinking how it will cover Familiar landmarks. Suddenly, it breaks:
Orange poppies sweep the contours of hills, verges of roads, pool into bright swaths, While blue lupine well into gratitude.
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Tuesday – Halloween
For Halloween, I share this passage from Virgil’s Aeneid (trans. Robert Fagles). At the entrance of the underworld, Aeneas must muster up all his courage to make his way through a swarm of horrors. If you are one who dresses up for Halloween, you might find some ideas here.
The Trojan leader is on his way to query his recently deceased father about what he should do next. (Answer: Conquer the Latins and kickstart the Roman Empire.) The Cunaean sybil, who presides over Apollo’s oracle in Naples, is his guide. Before reaching the door of the underworld, they must walk through gloomy darkness, just as we did as kids:
On they went, those dim travelers under the lonely night, through gloom and the empty halls of Death’s ghostly realm, like those who walk through woods by a grudging moon’s deceptive light when Jove has plunged the sky in dark and the black night drains all color from the world.
Unlike trick-or-treaters, it is the monsters who are at the door. They are plenty frightening:
There in the entryway, the gorge of hell itself, Grief and the pangs of Conscience make their beds, and fatal pale Disease lives there, and bleak Old Age, Dread and Hunger, seductress to crime, and grinding Poverty, all, terrible shapes to see—and Death and deadly Struggle and Sleep, twin brother of Death, and twisted, wicked Joys and facing them at the threshold, War, rife with death, and the Furies’ iron chambers, and mad, raging Strife whose blood-stained headbands knot her snaky locks.
There in the midst, a giant shadowy elm tree spreads her ancient branching arms, home, they say, to swarms of false dreams, one clinging tight under each leaf. And a throng of monsters too—what brutal forms are stabled at the gates—Centaurs, mongrel Scyllas, part women, part beasts, and hundred-handed Briareus and the savage Hydra of Lerna, that hissing horror, the Chimaera armed with torches—Gorgons, Harpies and triple-bodied Geryon, his great ghost. And here, instantly struck with terror, Aeneas grips his sword and offers its naked edge against them as they come, and if his experienced comrade had not warned him they are mere disembodied creatures, flimsy will-o’-the-wisps that flit like living forms, he would have rushed them all, slashed through empty phantoms with his blade.
You could also choose to go to your Halloween party as Charon, the boatman who takes the dead across the River Styx:
And here the dreaded ferryman guards the flood, grisly in his squalor—Charon . . . his scraggly beard a tangled mat of white, his eyes fixed in a fiery stare, and his grimy rags hang down from his shoulders by a knot. But all on his own he punts his craft with a pole and hoists sail as he ferries the dead souls in his rust-red skiff.
One sees where Dante got his ideas for TheInferno. And why Virgil functions as his guide.
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Monday
It seems as if, overnight, the autumn leaves have started to come down in torrents and for no other reason that it’s time. (In other words, neither wind nor rain have been playing a role.) This gives me an excuse to share a simple but powerful Lucille Clifton poem.
In “the lesson of the falling leaves,” Clifton marvels at how, with little fanfare, leaves let go of the branches. There’s no clinging tightly to safety, and in that easy faith in the future, Clifton finds grace:
the leaves believe such letting go is love such love is faith such faith is grace such grace is god i agree with the leaves
Letting go and venturing out into the unknown is a theme of Clifton’s. It shows up as well in “the blessings of the boats (at st. mary’s)” where she thinks of what it must have been like for English colonists to have set out for America in 1634. (The “blessing of the fleet” is celebrated every year to commemorate their landing in St Mary’s County, Maryland, where both Clifton and I taught for a number of years.) In her blessing, she asks that the sailors be carried out “beyond the face of fear”—and that they venture forth into the unknown with the same confidence as the leaves:
may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that
I note that, for years, this poem was read at our commencement as we looked over the St. Mary’s River, up which the colonists sailed to establish Maryland’s first colonial capital (St. Mary’s City). This sailing into the unknown also reminds me of the jazz pianist in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” venturing out into the terrifying waters of artistic exploration.
In doing so, Sonny shows his cautious brother that there’s more to life than playing it safe. In the following key passage, Sonny’s jazz ensemble is welcomes him back following a stint in prison for heroin. Creole is group’s leader:
But as I began to watch Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing–he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water,
Deep water and drowning are not the same thing. And letting go is love.
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Sunday
Sewanee English professor Jennifer Michael has alerted me to the spiritual poetry of Mary Karr, including this lyric on meditation. In it, the poet imagines that “a weightless hand” is guiding her, softly pressing her “in the back’s low hollow,” and that, like a sailboat tacking against the wind, she goes there.
This “there” is the world revealed when the meditator’s third eye, with the aid of eucalyptus, is opened. (Eucalyptus is used in meditation to clear the mind, promote clear thinking and dispel anxiety.) In “the wide vermilion sky” that cradled us before birth, I am reminded of Wordsworth’s own account of birth: “But trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God, who is our home.” As Karr sees it, the sun that pours “its golden sap” is like the resin of primeval forests that captures and preserves ancient insects in timeless amber. We glow, preserved, in God’s love.
Julian of Norwich could say about this “precious insect” what she says about the hazelnut that was the focus of her own meditation: God made it, God loves it, God keeps it.
Meditatio By Mary Karr
In the back’s low hollow sometimes a weightless hand guides me, gentle pressure so I tack soft as a sailboat. (Go there)
Soften the space between your eyes (smudge of eucalyptus), the third eye opens. There’s the wide vermilion sky
that cradled us before birth, and the sun pours its golden sap to preserve me like His precious insect.
Fiennes as Fred Waterford, Commander of the Faithful
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Friday
The United States has not yet become Gilead, the Christian fascist state in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, but by electing Mike Johnson to Speaker of the House, GOP legislators have brought us a step closer. As Jamie Raskin, the principled Maryland representative and constitutional scholar, remarked the other night to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Johnson appears to be rooting against handmaid Offred and for the patriarchs who preside over the dystopian society.
Perhaps our own Christian fascists are attempting to ban Atwood’s novels from schools because it reveals their plans.
The new speaker is authoritarian through and through. After Joe Biden won the election, he was the principle architect of a Texas lawsuit aiming to throw out the votes of four states that voted against Trump. Johnson pressured fellow GOP lawmakers to sign on to the amicus brief by threatening, “Trump said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.” He also endorsed the theory that the ghost of Hugo Chavez planted vote-stealing software in the vote-counting machines.
In other words, a man who doesn’t believe that Biden is a legitimate president is second in the line of succession for the presidency. As Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri observed after Johnson’s fellow Republicans unanimously elected him,
In a stunning abandonment of principle that was sure to reverberate through the country over the coming year, House Republicans, led by Mike Johnson (La.), accepted the results of an election.
Participation in Trump’s coup attempt is only one of Johnson’s extreme positions. He has co-sponsored bills calling for a nationwide ban on all abortions after 15 weeks. He has also introduced legislation that would prohibit discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as related subjects, at any institution that receives federal funds.
Like the leaders of Gilead, Johnson believes that abortion is the cause of many social ills, including school shootings. Atlantic’s Irin Carmon has the quote:
Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are. When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.
Sometimes Johnson links his policy positions in imaginative ways, such as regarding abortion as the cause of the funding problems faced by social security and Medicare, which he wishes to slash. In a statement that eerily resembles a passage in Atwood’s novel, he explains his reasoning:
You think about the implications on the economy. We’re all struggling here to cover the bases of social security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this … I will not yield I will not. Roe was a terrible corruption of America’s constitutional jurisprudence.
So American women—including those impregnated through incest and rape—must be forced to produce future workers and taxpayers. Here’s a comparable passage in Handmaid’s Tale, describing the book that Offred’s Commander reads to his household every evening:
It’s the usual story, the usual stories. God to Adam, God to Noah. Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. Then comes the moldy old Rachel and Leah stuff we had drummed into us at the Center. Give me children, or else I die. Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? Behold my maid Bilhah. She shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her. And so on and so forth.
Like many Republicans, Johnson evokes a mid-20th century golden age to justify his proposals. The Atlantic’s Carmon reports,
Having genially presented himself as law abiding and his cause as bipartisan, Johnson proceeded to tell a story of America not unlike the one Trump would narrate: a little mid-century nostalgia, a little American carnage. “A society that has become gradually more coarsened, more dangerous,” he said, adding, “When I was a kid, the most popular show on television was The Brady Bunch. When my father was a child, it was The Andy Griffith Show. Now it’s murder and mayhem. We’re not in a good place in America, and I think that’s beyond dispute.”
In Gilead indoctrination, meanwhile, Aunt Lydia shows the women images of past “murder and mayhem” to justify the current order of things:
Sometimes the movies she showed would be an old porno film, from the seventies or eighties. Women kneeling, sucking penises or guns, women tied up or chained or with dog collars around their necks, women hanging from trees, or upside-down, naked, with their legs held apart, women being raped, beaten up, killed.
Aunt Lydia then tells the women how lucky they are to be living in a state that respects them:
Consider the alternatives, said Aunt Lydia. You see what things used to be like? That was what they thought of women, then. Her voice trembled with indignation.
Johnson himself has a “covenant marriage,” designed to make divorce difficult, with his wife. Just like the Commander and Serena Joy.
Given that the House is now headed by someone who tried to overthrow a free and fair election, it’s useful to review how the Christian fascists come to power in Atwood’s novel. It’s not unlike the fantasies of some of Trump’s followers, especially General Mike Flynn.
One of the plans was to have Trump supporters clash with Antifa on January 6, at which point Trump could declare a national emergency and call in the military. As it turned out, Antifa members very smartly stayed away, anticipating such a plot, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, similarly wary, did the same. But had either of those decided differently, we might have seen a scenario such as Atwood describes:
It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.
…I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.
So as not to end on an entirely pessimistic note, it’s worth remembering that most Americans are not buying what MAGA is selling. Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin yesterday quoted from Public Religion Research Institute’s recent survey:
[I]n a positive sign of public sanity, “Overwhelming majorities of Americans today support teaching the good and the bad of American history, trust public school teachers to select appropriate curriculum, and strongly oppose the banning of books that discuss slavery or the banning of Advanced Placement (AP) African American History.” Moreover, “A solid majority of Americans also oppose banning social and emotional learning programs in public schools.” Though some Republicans have made “anti-wokeism” a key requirement of their political identity, their message is deeply unpopular. “Fewer than one in ten Americans favor the banning of books that include depictions of slavery from being taught in public schools (7%), compared with 88% who oppose such bans.”
And:
Sixty percent say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, compared with 37 percent who say it should be illegal in most or all cases. In a political reversal, “Democrats are now significantly more likely than Republicans to say their support for a candidate hinges on the candidate’s position on abortion,” 50 percent vs. 38 percent.
In Atwood’s novel, a series of environmental catastrophes, including San Andreas Fault earthquakes that cause nuclear meltdowns, open the door to social disruption. I suppose similar chaos could open the door to neo-fascism. Then again, we had a major epidemic and came out intact, so maybe our institutions are not as fragile as we fear.
To be sure, we must remain vigilant. But we shouldn’t become hysterical.
Further thought: I should add that Johnson believes he was “ordained by God” to be Speaker and explained the absence of his wife at the swearing in ceremony by telling those in attendance that she was worn out as “[s]he’s spent the last couple of weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord.”
Star Trek’s George Takei, who comments regularly on social media, quipped, “What is the name of Mike Johnson’s wife again. Is it Ofmike?”
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Thursday
Pastor Sue Schmidt has alerted me to two timely poems posted on the website of Salt, a “not-for-profit production company dedicated to the craft of visual storytelling.” One is by the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, the other by Arab American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, daughter of a Palestinian refugee. As people become unhinged in their response to the horrific events unfolding in the Middle East, these poems do what poems do best, which is remind us what really matters.
Amichai’s poem starts with a bomb—it could have been delivered by any of the warring parties—and then proceeds to move outward to all it has touched. Describing the effect as circles rippling outward, as though from a stone thrown into a pond, Amichai begins with the diameter of the bomb; looks at those whom it directly impacted in its seven-meter radius; mentions the slightly further-out hospitals and graveyard to which the victims have been carried (“a larger circle of pain and time”); and then reaches out to the city in which one of the victims is now buried (“at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers”) and the “solitary man” who mourns her death “at the distant shores of a country far across the sea.” By now, the poet observes, the circle has enlarged considerably, encompassing the entire world.
But the circle doesn’t end with the world since the cries of those who have been orphaned ascend to God on his throne. “A father of the fatherless, and a defender of the widows, is God in his holy habitation,” promises Psalm 68, while the god of Exodus declares, “You shall not take advantage of any widow or fatherless child. If you take advantage of them at all, and they cry at all to me, I will surely hear their cry…” In other words, the circle now encompasses all of creation.
By ending his poem with a vision that goes beyond the throne of God to an endless circle with no God, I hear the poet rejecting specific cultural gods (including those who are envisioned as sitting on thrones) to something wider and more expansive. Destruction may begin with a circular bomb, but in Amichai’s expansive vision, we go beyond circles, boundaries, and religions to a vision of creation all bound together.
The Diameter of the Bomb by Yehuda Amichai
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded. And around these, in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered and one graveyard. But the young woman who was buried in the city she came from, at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers, enlarges the circle considerably, and the solitary man mourning her death at the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle. And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans that reaches up to the throne of God and beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.
The second poem is similar. Whether through a bomb blast or something other disaster, the speaker talks of losing everything. This includes that which we have carefully saved, the future we counted on, and comforting landmarks. Only after such losses, she writes, can we know “what kindness really is.”
In this drama, life becomes an endless bus ride through desolate landscapes, which could involve interior depression as well as outward travel. On the journey, the poet speaks of seeing and identifying someone dead by the side of the road and realizing
how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Learning about kindness, then, involves “the other deepest thing,” which is sorrow. We must get to know this sorrow because, in doing so, we catch “the thread of all sorrows” until we see “the size of the cloth”—which I assume to be all of suffering humanity. In the face of such universal sorrow, we come to conclude that it is “only kindness that makes sense anymore.”
Being newly aligned with deep kindness helps us get up in the morning, leave the house, and go out into the world. Kindness at this point becomes a shadow and a friend that accompanies us everywhere. We appreciate its “tender gravity” when someone is kind to us in a moment of crisis and also when we gaze at the crowd and see someone who needs kindness from us. It is at such moments that we fully realize how precious this friendship is.
The mention of kindness puts me in mind of the prophet Micah declaring that all that is asked of us is “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] God.” Nye deepens our understanding of what this kindness involves.
Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
If these poets, with direct connections to the warring parties in the Middle East, can step beyond the hostilities and embrace all of suffering humankind, the rest of us should be able to do so as well.
Voldemort (Fiennes) delivers the Avada Kedavra curse
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Wednesday
Pundit Cliff Schechter recently posted a video exploring why the Republican Party has become “so dysfunctional, so self-destructive, so downright crazy.” At present, the craziness is most on display in the House of Representatives and concerns the position of Speaker. Not only is the GOP, although in the majority, currently unable to choose someone to fill the position, but the position has been unstable for quite some time. Contrast that with the Democrats, who for years had a steady hand at the tiller in Nancy Pelosi.
While some might seek to blame the GOP’s current struggles on the intense polarization between rightwing and extreme rightwing members, along with a tiny majority that gives any small group of Representatives effective veto power, Schechter has another explanation: The position of Speaker, when occupied by a Republican, has been cursed by dark magic.
Schechter has in mind the curse that Voldemort in the Harry Potter books lays on the position of instructor of Defense against the Dark Arts.Dumbledore believes that when Voldemort, as Tom Riddle, was initially denied the position, he cursed it so that no one could hold the post for longer than a year.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is the Dark Wizard in Schechter’s scenario. Like Voldemort, Gingrich was “something of a dark arts genius.” He rose to power in the early 1990s practicing a “new cutthroat, extreme brand of politics.” Gingrich was the first to realize that
being as extreme and bare knuckled as possible could be politically successful. Because of the decline of traditional media and the rise of rightwing media, you didn’t have to play the middle anymore. You just had to keep feeding your base a toxic brew to keep them angry.
Although initially successful, Gingrich brought about his own destruction. Caught up in a massive ego trip, he overreached, shutting down the government and undermining Republican reelection chances by conducting ridiculous impeachment hearings against Clinton for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He finally had to resign when he was caught using campaign contributions for private ends. As Schechter points out, he “Avada Kedavraed himself.”
Avada Kedavra, as Harry Potter fans know well, is the killing curse that works instantaneously. We see Voldemort directly use it twice and each time it rebounds upon himself. In the first instance, it bounces off the love that Lily Potter is using to shield her infant son (although it kills her), disintegrating Voldemort’s body. That Gingrich went on to become a shadow of his former self is clear to anyone who has been following politics since his heyday.
The second time occurs in the final showdown with Harry:
“Avada Kedavra!” “Expelliarmus!” The bang was like a cannon blast, and the golden flames that erupted between them, at the dead center of the circle they had been treading, marked the point where the spells collided. Harry saw Voldemort’s green jet meet his own spell…Voldemort fell backward, arms splayed, the slit pupils of the scarlet eyes rolling upward. Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing. Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse…
Throughout the books, Voldemort’s disembodied state doesn’t prevent him from wielding power over the Dark Arts position. (In this way he’s unlike Gingrich.) Schechter compares the first professor, Quirinus Quirrell, to Dennis Hastert, the former speaker who went to prison for abusing teenage boys. The disembodied Voldemort has possessed Quirrell, feeding off him while concealed in his turban and seeking to get him to steal the immortality-granting Philosopher’s Stone. Both Quirrell and Hastert, Schechter says, are men with two faces, “mild mannered on the surface, total evil behind it.”
With the exception of Snape and the werewolf Lupin, all the subsequent Defense against the Dark Arts professors are either bad, incompetent, or both:
Gilderoy Lockhart Bartemius Crouch Jr (in the guise of Mad-Eye Moody) Dolores Umbridge Amycus Carrow
The same has been true of the GOP House Speakers following Gingrich and Hastert. First there was Tom Delay, who was sentenced to three years in prison for his connection with a corrupt lobbyist. He was followed by John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, each forced out by extremists in the party. The two most recent candidates for the position, Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise, have their own connections with dark forces. Jordan, described by Boehner as a “legislative terrorist” who just wants to burn everything down, overlooked sexual abuse of wrestlers while an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State and then, in 2020, actively aided Trump in his coup attempt. Scalise, meanwhile, has ties to White Nationalists and once described himself as a “David Duke without the baggage,” Duke being the former head of the KKK.
At the end of the final Harry Potter book, we see life returning to normal. Harry, Hermione and Ron have survived seven years of chaos—which is how long it has been since Trump was elected president—and we see them, years later, grown up and taking their own kids to school. Many of us long for a world in which Trumpian Death Eaters aren’t dictating the national agenda.
Added note: While he is not in the House, one can find resemblances between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Amycus Carrow, the final Dark Arts professor who is doing incalculable damage to the school he’s in charge of. In his dictatorial regime, Carrow encourages his preferred students to perform the excruciatingly painful Cruciatus Curse—whose use has previously been outlawed—on those who have earned detentions. For his part, DeSantis has gutted the highly regarded New College and has been taking shots at university inclusion and diversity programs, not to mention high school readings lists and curriculums.
In fact, now that I think about it, DeSantis’s revisionary history, which views slavery as internship training for backward Africans, resembles the “Muggles Studies” course that Carrow’s sister teaches. Neville Longbottom describes the course that all Hogwarts students are now compelled to take:
We’ve all got to listen to her explain how Muggles are like animals, stupid and dirty, and how they drove wizards into hiding by being vicious toward them, and how the natural order is being reestablished.
