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Friday
When I was a young child, one of my favorite books was Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo (1899). I forced my parents to read it to me over and over, and to this day I have parts of it memorized. Unfortunately, the fact that “Sambo” became a racial slur means that I haven’t been able to read it to my grandchildren, which is a pity because its plot is great for enhancing a child’s self-esteem. In the course of the story we see Sambo outwit five tigers, each of which threatens to devour him.
Sambo must bargain away his fine suit of clothes, piece by piece, to escape. By the end, however, not only has he retrieved his clothes, but he has entirely turned the tables. He himself has become the devourer.
I’ll explain how in a moment, but I need to explain why I’m bringing it up. At present, the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man are having a spectacular falling out after having had—briefly to be sure—what MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace describes as “the most corrupt and superficial relationship in American history.” While the relationship held, they managed to do untold damage to America, but now their competing narcissism has led to a conflagration. No one is sure where this one ends.
Now to the story. Sambo is walking proudly through the jungle since his parents have bestowed upon him a fine set of clothes, including a “pair of shoes with crimson soles and crimson linings” and a large green umbrella. When each tiger threatens our hero—“Little Black Sambo, I’m going to eat you up”—Sambo gives away first his “beautiful little red coat,” then his “beautiful little blue trousers,” then his shoes, and finally his umbrella. When the last two tigers initially reject his offer (two shoes for four feet, no way for a tiger to hold an umbrella), Sambo quickly comes up with ingenious solutions.
As each of the tigers strives off with one of Sambo’s possessions, he proudly announces, “Now I’m the grandest Tiger in the Jungle.”
Which, of course, is how both Trump and Musk see themselves. And as in the story, there’s room for only one grandest tiger.
The consoling message here, for those dispirited at how the country we love is being trashed, is that we have but to wait. The destroyers will destroy themselves. Here’s what Sambo witnesses from his hiding place behind a tree:
[H]e saw all the Tigers fighting, and disputing which of them was the grandest. And at last they all got so angry that they jumped up and took off all the fine clothes, and began to tear each other with their claws, and bite each other with their great big white teeth.
At this point, each tiger grabs another tiger’s tail, leading to a climactic conclusion:
And the Tigers were very, very angry, but still they would not let go of each other’s tails. And they were so angry, that they ran round the tree, trying to eat each other up, and they ran faster and faster, till they were whirling round so fast that you couldn’t see their legs at all.
And they still ran faster and faster and faster, till they all just melted away, and there was nothing left but a great big pool of melted butter (or “ghi,” as it is called in India) round the foot of the tree.
Sambo gets his clothes back and his father, returning from work, collects the ghi in a big brass pot he happens to be carrying. In her turn, Sambo’s mother uses it for pancakes. In this eating drama, Sambo gets the last bite:
And then they all sat down to supper. And Black Mumbo ate Twenty-seven pancakes, and Black Jumbo ate Fifty-five but Little Black Sambo ate a Hundred and Sixty-nine, because he was so hungry.
Sadly, winning back America will take more that watching its oligarchs fight amongst themselves. Still, the two are exposing vulnerabilities that patriots can exploit.
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Thursday
I’ve become a fan of Joseph Fasano, who posts many of his poems on Bluesky. As the GOP tries to ram its billionaire bill through Congress while cutting everything that is of worth, it’s nice to have two poems calling out these vultures.
Both poems approach the subject from a child’s point of view. Many of us can remember being Fasano’s “child with a light” who reads beneath the covers. I think of the line early in John’s Gospel (1:5): “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” We’re seeing a lot of uncomprehending darkness in MAGA these days.
For Those Who Try to Cut Funding for the Arts By Joseph Fasano
I know you won’t be reading this anyway. But maybe, alone under the covers, a child with a light in the darkness is opening the first words of a story, a story that your hands would try to close now. Whatever you do for the darkness that child with the light will survive you.
The theme of darkness continues in the second poem, and I like how Fasano associates the GOP looters (thanks Ayn Rand for that label) with the dark arts. The poem feels vaguely familiar as I’ve been reading A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which opens with an impoverished child so enamored of art that he hides out in the British Museum, undergoing hunger and cold in order to sketch the treasures he finds there.
For Those Who Defund the Arts as a Political Weapon By Joseph Fasano
You can waste your life on the dark arts. But the soul in you knows what matters. Like the boy who broke into the Louvre and was found alone in the morning, asleep beside the Mona Lisa. He said she looked like his mother.
They led him back to the orphanage– to his century, to his little cot, his life.
Listen. A heart is what you do with it. The world will give us sieges and great plagues and prophets of doom and ruin, but who will be there for that child who hacks for days at the window-lock and only wants comfort and immensity and the smile that cannot die
What shall we do with the hearts we have been given? Those who lock them down imprison the child within, who longs for comfort and immensity and “the smile that cannot die?”
Note: Fasano’s most recent collection of poetry is The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions, 2024).
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. I’ll subscribe you via Mailchimp for the weekly or email you directly for the daily (your choice). Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone.
Wednesday
Yesterday I wrote of how A.S. Byatt’s novel about artist communities in late Victorian and Edwardian England has taken me back to my own childhood. From the moment we could understand “chapter books,” my father read my brothers and me novels from that period, and they have shaped the way that I see the world.
Byatt observes that children’s lit flourished because people were coming to see children in a new way:
The Fabians and social scientists, writers and teachers saw, in a way earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences. They saw that they were neither dolls, nor toys, nor miniature adults. They saw, many of them, that children needed freedom, needed not only to learn, and be good, but to play and be wild
Byatt notes that many of them saw this “out of a desire of their own for a perpetual childhood.” She then turns to some of these works:
In 1901 James Barrie wrote The Boy Castaways for the Llewelyn-Davies boys, Peter Rabbit was published, and Kipling published Kim, the tale of a boy scout. In 1902 E. Nesbit wrote Five Children and It, a tale where resourceful, unwise children meet a sand-fairy. In that year Barrie published the Little White Bird, in which an embryonic Peter Pan, the little boy who wouldn’t grow up, made his first appearance. [It] was staged (in a primitive form) in 1904. Rupert Brooke went to see it twelve times. In 1906 [Kipling’s] Puck of Pook’s Hill appeared, and so did The Railway Children and Benjamin Bunny. It was seriously suggested that the great writing of the time was writing for children, which was also ready by grown-ups.
Byatt also mentions Kenneth Grahame, who balanced working as a high-level bank secretary with writing The Golden Age, Dream Days, and The Wind in the Willows (1908).
We don’t only see children’s literature in Byatt’s novel. In an Edenic scene, we watch as the children, now adolescents, gather to camp out, swim, and converse. Among their topics of conversation is literature:
They read plays—[John Milton’s] Comus, with Griselda as the Lady, Julian as Comus and Gerry as the Attendant Spirit, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Wolfgang as Oberon, Florence as Titania, Imogen as Hippolyta and Charles, Griselda, Dorothy and Geraint as the confused lovers. Tom was Puck. Toby Youlgreave read Sir Philip Sidney and Malory, Joachim Susskind and the Sterns read poems by Schiller and Goethe, Julia read Marvell’s “Garden” and Tom read Tennyson. Julian had learned conversations with Toby Youlgreave about Philip Sidney.
The discussion about the Elizabethan poet Sidney leads to an insight into how what we read can transform what we see. The passage is from Sidney’s Defence of Poesy:
Sidney had written what Julian believed was his favorite sentence—certainly his favorite this year. “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry, as divers Poets have done, neither with pleasant rivers fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers: nor whatever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the Poets only deliver a golden…”
From this experience Julian, a student at Oxford, determines to study the pastoral form:
He said he had been looking for a thesis subject, in case he decided to apply for a Fellowship at King’s, and he rather thought there might be something there. “English pastoral, in poetry and painting—” Pastoral was always at another time, in another place. Even the green pool and the long walk, over the Downs, would not become pastoral until they were past. And yet, the sun shone on them, and the leaves and the water and the grass shone with its reflections.
If we sometimes look back at the Edwardians with pastoral nostalgia, it’s because World War I blasted it utterly, flinging us violently into “the Age of Lead.” Rupert Brooke, of “If I should die, think only this of me,” would die in that war, as would many fellow poets and artists.
To be sure, the ending of childhood is often traumatic. It’s just that the break is not normally so violent.
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Tuesday
I’m currently immersed in A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which I first read in 2012. This time the novel has sent me spiraling into my past for reasons I share with you today.
Set mostly in the latter years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th (up through World War I), Children’s Book takes as its focus the family of Olive Wellwood, who is loosely based on children’s author Edith Nesbit. My father read to us Treasure Seekers, Wouldbegoods, New Treasure Seekers, and Five Children and It, and I would later add The Railway Children, The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Story of the Amulet to the E. Nesbit books I read to my own children. They made a deep impression on me, and one reason I sign off my weekly newsletter with “Good reading” is because I remember how the Bastable children in Treasure Seekers are always quoting the sign-off in Kipling’s Jungle Books: “Good hunting.”
There’s one scene that has haunted me ever since I first read the novel in 2012. Tom, who is Olive’s golden child and the model for her story about a boy who has his shadow stolen, is sexually molested and brutally bullied by senior students when he is sent off to boarding school. Seeking to hold on to his innocence, Tom runs away from the school, and for weeks his family doesn’t know if he is alive or dead. When he finally returns home, he retreats into the idyllic natural landscape that surrounds the family house. From then on, he makes a determined effort to hold on to his innocence, resisting family pressure to study for his exams and go off to college.
My father Scott was a kind of Tom. Unlike his two older brothers, who were outgoing and successful in sports, my father was sickly and shy. My grandmother, born in 1886 in England and a veritable angel of the house, dressed him as Little Lord Fauntleroy when he was small. (I have a picture of him in velvet with a lace collar.) He was more drawn to her and his grandmother Sarah Ricker than to his father, who worried that he wasn’t masculine enough. Scott wrote poetry, drew pictures, and was an ardent bird watcher. He would eventually go on to become a French literature major in college.
Throughout my childhood, I remember my father saying that the worst thing in the world was “the desecration of innocence,” and Byatt’s novel is bringing clarity to what he meant by that. The book sees the late Victorian and Edwardian ages as a time of innocence where people didn’t reveal their innermost secrets but put their energy into being polite and well-mannered. Better to close one’s eyes to dark realities, such as child abuse and infidelity, than cause a social scene. As Byatt writes of Olive at one point,
Things had always been behind thick, felted, invisible curtains, or closed into heavy, locked, invisible boxes. She herself had hung the curtains, held the keys to the boxes, made sure that the knowable was kept from the unknown, in the minds of her children, most of all. And now she knew that grey, invisible cats had crept from their bags and were dancing and spitting on stair-corners, that curtains had been shaken, lifted, peeped behind by curious eyes, and her rooms were full of visible and invisible dust and strange smells.
And because she is an author, Oliver finds a way to transform this into fantasy narrative:
She was rather pleased with all these metaphors and began to plan a story in which the gentle and innocent inhabitants of a house became aware that a dark, invisible, dangerous house stood on exactly the same plot of land, and was interwoven, interleaved with their own. Like thoughts which had to stay in the head taking on an independent life, becoming solid objects, to be negotiated.
One sees this longing for innocence, for not knowing, in the popularity of the children’s fiction of the time. In addition to the E. Nesbit books, there were The Jungle Books (1894), Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (1902), James Barrie’s Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904), Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows (1908), and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden (1910).
My father, who was born in 1923, was raised on these books, and he then read them to me and my brothers as we were growing up—up through middle school. Reading took the place of television for us, and I can see how the novels allowed my father to revisit his own childhood innocence.
As the first born, I particularly got caught up in this innocence drama. I was born in 1951, six years after my father returned from World War II, and my mother tells me that he was enthralled with having a child after not being sure what to expect. Although he hadn’t been in combat, he had witnessed horrors, most notably the Dachau concentration camp three days after it was liberated. Indeed, it became his job, in 1945, to take German civilians on required tours of the camp to show them what their government had done. He was 22 at the time.
In the books he read us, I noted that he hated endings where children leave the fantasy worlds they inhabit, as occurs to Wendy at the end of Peter Pan and Christopher Robin at the end of House at Pooh Corner. Meanwhile, he filled our childhood with games, in which he fully participated. In fact, he extended this to the entire faculty at the University of the South. Each year following graduation, he and my mother held a large party of over a hundred. The house he built for the occasion (which I have inherited) has a shuffleboard court down one side, a deck on the roof for playing badminton, a sunroom for playing ping pong and foosball, and a horseshoe court out in the yard. Faculty got the opportunity to be children again when they attended.
From all this I intuited, early on, that I was supposed to remain innocent for as long as possible. I consciously worked on it, closing my ears to the profanities and dirty jokes of my classmates and shying away from rock music. I chose instead to immerse myself in the fantasy worlds of George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis.
In my book I’ve written how I loathed J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, assigned to me in sophomore English, because of the way he enters the adult world. It was only years later that I realized that Holden has the same longing I did, which is for his sister Phoebe and him to remain innocent. He fantasizes catching little children as they run through tall rye grass, saving them from growing up.
The end of Edwardian innocence was World War I, just as the end of my father’s innocence was World War II. It took me a while before I realized that I myself had to grow up. (The prospect of being drafted into the Vietnam War played a role.) And even though I did make my piece with adulthood, I relived my childhood by reading to my own children deep into their childhoods and teaching courses in literary fantasy.
The E. Nesbit character in the book imagines her child without a shadow—in other words, a perpetually golden child—but as Jung teaches us, we all have a shadow side. If we wish to grow into mature and well-balanced people, we must open ourselves to it, not wish it away. Because I wished to please my father, I struggled with this issue for a long while.
As frustrating as he could be, however, I find myself deeply grateful to my father for the world he created around for me and my brothers. If there were blindnesses, they were benign. He died 13 years ago, at age 90, and thanks to Byatt’s novel the memories have come flooding back. I miss him terribly.
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Monday
George Orwell’s 1984 continue to apply only too well to the Trump administration. Linda McMahon, former professional wrestling promoter and now Secretary of the Education Department, offered up this little nugget: “Universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they’re abiding by the laws and in sync, I think, with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish…”
And then there’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. substituting his own crazed medical theories for peer reviewed scientific inquiry.
The systematic attacks on education, science, and fact-finding in general indicate the wholesale adoption of one of Big Brother’s basic dictums:
Ignorance is strength.
Even more than “Freedom is slavery” and “War is peace,” this declaration goes to the heart of Trumpism.
At one point in his journal Winston Smith notes, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
Big Brother’s response is to torture Winston until he sees the world as Big Brother wants him to see it. Holding up four fingers, he refuses to stop the electric shocks until Winston can no longer see reality as it is. Think of those shocks as a metaphor for what we are currently undergoing:
Perhaps the needle was eighty–ninety. Winston could not intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing. Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing. He shut his eyes again.
‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six–in all honesty I don’t know.’
‘Better,’ said O’Brien.
Trump’s repeated blows against truth at all levels are intended to achieve such capitulation. Those who are succumbing, however, have less of an excuse than Winston.
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Sunday
Thanks to Victoria Emily Jones’s Art and Theology website, I now know about the medieval poem “Easter Song,” written in Latin by the 9th century Irish monk Sedulius Scottus. Although Scottus was driven out of his Irish monastery by Norse invaders and ended up in current day France (the city of Liège), his poem features much of the intense nature imagery that we associate with Celtic Christianity:
Easter Song By Sedulius Scottus Translated by Helen Waddel
Last night did Christ the Sun rise from the dark, The mystic harvest of the fields of God, And now the little wandering tribes of bees Are brawling in the scarlet flowers abroad. The winds are soft with birdsong; all night long Darkling the nightingale her descant told, And now inside church doors the happy folk The Alleluia chant a hundredfold. O Father of thy folk, be thine by right The Easter joy, the threshold of the light.
I love the idea of seeing Easter as “a mystic harvest of the fields of God.” The lyric throbs with life, from brawling bees to scarlet flowers to winds “soft with birdsong.” During the night, the nightingale “her descant told,” and now we witness “Christ the Sun rise from the dark.”
In such a vibrant setting, the “alleluia chant” pours spontaneously forth “a hundredfold.”
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Friday
This past April the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore reported on how she turned to a hundred classics to survive the first one hundred days of the Trump administration. Her resounding conclusion—”There is no emergency, nor any day, that does not require poetry”—could well be the motto for my own blog.
By poetry Lepore means fine writing, and the works she turned to for solace and strength were Penguin’s Little Black Classics, a collection of slim paperbacks that she noted can be held in the hand like a phone. Her article traces the history of cheap versions of the classics, going back to 1906 when a London bookseller began publishing the Everyman Library. The company drew its name from Knowledge’s advice to Everyman in the medieval play of that name: “Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, / In thy most need to go by thy side.” In dire times, Lepore asserts, we need wisdom.
A more direct ancestor of the Little Black Classics is the “Little Leather Library,” which was founded in America in 1915 and which produced “handy little classics” by such figures as Shakespeare, Longfellow, Tennyson, and Poe. When America entered the war in 1917, Lepore writes, the company
began to sell them by mail order to the families of soldiers to send to the boys at the front, because men in trenches, and men who’d once been in trenches, battered by shelling and up to their waists in mud and blood, “read, eagerly, cravingly, everything they can lay their hands on,” as a Little Leather Library ad explained in October, 1917. “They have gone through such frightful experiences that they require something to put them in touch again with a sane world.”
Thinking of that war, Lepore quotes from Wilfred Owen’s poem “1914,” which she encountered in Penguin Little Black Classics #50, focusing especially on the passage,
. . . Rent or furled Are all Art’s ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin Famines of thought and feeling. Love’s wine’s thin. The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.
While not a soldier on the battlefield, Lepore says that “now begin famines of thought and feeling” struck home.
In some ways, Lepore’s project could be best summed up by the 14th century Japanese Buddhist poet Yoshido Kenkō (#11): “It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.”
I won’t mention all of the works that Lepore turned to, just cite some of the highlights. As is customary with this blog, I’ll confine myself to poetry, fiction, and drama.
–For the Silicon Valley billionaires licking Trump’s boots, there’s this line from the Greek poet Sappho (#74): “Wealth without real worthiness / Is no good for the neighborhood.”
–For Trump’s assaults on the National Parks and the environment generally, Lepore recorded two lines from a Tang dynasty poet (#9): “Can I bear to leave these blue hills? / And the green stream—what of that?”
–For the stop-work order for the H.I.V./AIDS treatment-and-prevention program, which is expected to lead to the deaths of half a million children in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030 and the orphaning of another 2.8 million, there was Mark Twain’s “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn’t Come to Grief” (#88). Lepore explains that it’s
the tale of a very nasty little boy who, unlike those in all the storybooks, never pays the cost for all the terrible things he does: “And he grew up, and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality, and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature.”
–For the Democrats’ ineffective protest at Trump’s State of the Union speech, Lepore was put in mind of the damned awaiting progress across the River Styx in canto 3 of Dante’s Inferno (#25):
They raged, blaspheming God and their own kin, the human race, the place and time, the seed from which they’d sprung, the day that they’d been born.
–After seeing a Turkish graduate student at Tufts being handcuffed by immigration officers, Lepore reread “The Nightingales Are Drunk” by the great 14th century Persian poet Hafez (#27):
And when did kindness end? What brought The sweetness of our town to naught?
–When Jeff Bezos, Amazon and Washington Post owner, declared that the newspaper would no longer print columns questioning the free market, Lepore turned to Gogol’s short story “The Nose” (#46), a satire involving a nose that escapes from a man’s face. Lepore focused on the following passage, in which he wants to advertise to get it back:
The clerk’s tightly pressed lips showed he was deep in thought. “I can’t print an advertisement like that in our paper,” he said after a long silence.
“What? Why not?”
“I’ll tell you. A paper can get a bad name. If everyone started announcing his nose had run away, I don’t know how it would all end.”
–Aesop’s fable about “The Frogs Who Demanded a King” (#61) was an obvious choice although to compare Joe Biden to the log in the story does an injustice to his presidency. Still, many who voted for Trump are discovering they elected a water serpent:
The frogs, annoyed with the anarchy in which they lived, sent a deputation to Zeus to ask him to give them a king. Zeus, seeing that they were but very simple creatures, threw a piece of wood into their marsh. The frogs were so alarmed by the sudden noise that they plunged into the depths of the bog. But when the piece of wood did not move, they clambered out again. They developed such a contempt for this new king that they jumped on his back and crouched there.
The frogs were deeply ashamed at having such a king, so they sent a second deputation to Zeus asking him to change their monarch. For the first was too passive and did nothing.
Zeus now became impatient with them and sent down a water-serpent which seized them and ate them all up.
–When Columbia University “decided to allow Trump to dictate what college students will learn about the Middle East,” which was followed up by the White House announcing an end to legal aid for migrant children, Lepore turned to the world’s most famous essay about victimizing children. In Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” (#8) we read, “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food.”
–When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and various other Cabinet members were discovered using insecure communications channels, Lepore thought of the Brothers Grimm story “The Six Servants” (#68):
After a while they found another man lying on the ground with one ear pressed against the grass. ‘What are you doing there?’ asked the prince. ‘I’m listening,’ answered the man. ‘What are you listening for so attentively?’ ‘I’m listening to what’s going on in the world at this moment, for nothing escapes my ears, I can even hear the grass growing.’
Lepore observes, “It sounds like Pete Hegseth, tapping at his phone, “Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.”
–A line from Virgil’s “Eclogue II”(#76), in which the speaker laments how good men have sowed the fields for godless soldiers and barbarians to harvest, came to mind when Lepore saw the banner “SAVE OUR DEMOCRACY, UPHOLD OUR CONSTITUTION” draped over an overpass. As she reports, she had to pull over on the soft shoulder (“not soft enough”) and weep as she thought of the passage,
Look where strife has led Rome’s wretched citizens.
–Trump’s non-stop threats brought to mind a passage in Coleridge’s poem “Fears in Solitude” (#35), in which the poet is worrying about the threat represented by Napoleon:
. . . may the vaunts And menace of the vengeful enemy Pass like the gust.
–When Trump promised new tariffs on “Liberation Day,” causing both the stock market and the bond market to plummet, Lepore turned to the great 17th century haiku poet Matsuo Bashō (#62):
Spring’s exodus— birds shriek, fish eyes blink tears.
–Lepore turned to literature to process some of her frustrations at the Democrats’ response to Trump. For Cory Booker’s impressively long but ultimately ineffective filibuster, Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet” (#49) came to mind:
I had thought him placid, and he was placid enough; such a surface was the hard polished glass that encased the bauble of his vanity.
–More hopeful was an April 1 Democratic victory in Wisconsin assuring the state of a more balanced Supreme Court. A line from Edith Wharton’s “The Reckoning” jumped out: “Did not a magnolia open its hard white flowers against the watery blue of April.”
–The continued failure of Democratic messaging, however, sent Lepore to Sophocles’s Antigone (#55). The “blows of fate” are a reference to Creon losing his son Haemon, who has committed suicide in response to Antigone’s suicide:
Chorus: The mighty words of the proud are paid in full with mighty blows of fate, and at long last those blows will teach us wisdom.
–For Trump’s attacks on Harvard, Lepore imagines the university as Odysseus threatened by the cyclops, “a giant lawless brute,” who has him trapped in his cave: “When young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more / the monster relit his fire.”
Lepore says she saved Walt Whitman for the hundredth day because, like her, he relied on the classics to carry him through:
Whitman wanted to be the Homer of America, the Herodotus of democracy. He, too, toted around little copies of the classics. “Every now and then,” he once wrote, “I carried a book in my pocket—or perhaps tore out from some broken or cheap edition a bunch of loose leaves.” He loved the Iliad. He pored over Virgil and Sophocles, Shakespeare and Dante. And yet he insisted, “I stand in my place with my own day here.”
Lepore chose a passage from Whitman’s “With Antecedents.” Written in 1860 when America was on the verge of civil war, it provides an important perspective for living in troubled times:
I assert that all past days were what they must have been, And what they could no-how have been better than they were, And that to-day is what it must be, and that America is, And that to-day and America could no-how be better than they are.
Whitman doesn’t necessarily want us to stop trying to make America better, but he wants us to stop fretting when it falls short of what we would like. His magisterial view suggests that we should factor in shortcomings—we are who we are—rather than fall into despair. In pointing out that we are the culmination of soaring human history, he appears to be counseling a kind of acceptance.
That being said, I’m a little surprised that Lepore stopped at his observations about the past and the present. After all, the poem concludes with Whitman looking towards the future:
I know that the past was great, and the future will be great, And I know that both curiously conjoint in the present time, (For the sake of him I typify—for the common average man’s sake— your sake, if you are he And that where I am, or you are, this present day, there is the center of all days, all races,
And there is the meaning, to us, of all that has ever come of races and days, or ever will come.
As we are assaulted daily by Trump’s attempts at a fascist coup—just as Whitman would have been assaulted by secessionist talk—it’s good sometimes to step back and see ourselves in the larger sweep of history. Lepore takes some comfort from seeing the present moment from this vantage point.
Protestant reformer and antinomian Johannes Agricola
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Thursday
One of the most baffling aspects of Trump cultism for me is his enduring support amongst white fundamentalists. Don’t these people, who want to plaster the Ten Commandments on every classroom and government office wall, realize that they have pledged their fealty to someone who all his life has routinely broken every one of those commandments (well, except for murder)? Doesn’t hypocrisy mean anything to these people? Or does their fervent approval of Trump’s racism and sexism blind them to what is obvious to everyone else.
I ask the same question of those who, every two years, send my Tennessee Congressman back to Washington. Scott DesJarlais, who once was unofficially named the worst member of Congress before the competition for that honor became so stiff, is an ardent pro-life family values guy who was revealed to have urged abortions for both his ex-wife and his mistress. Yet none of this seems to matter in my heavily Christian district.
I have gained some enlightenment into this recently from a Robert Browning poem about an antinomian figure from the 16th century, leading me to wonder if there’s an antinomian strain in Trumpist Christianity. “Johannes Agricola in Meditation” is a dramatic monologue in which the speaker ponders his position in the universe.
If you don’t know what an antinomian is, you’re not alone. I only learned recently, thanks to a session with my faculty reading group where we discussed the poem, that it’s an extreme form Calvinism–with Calvinism itself providing much of the foundation of Protestant fundamentalism. As defined by Wikipedia, an antinomian
is one who takes the principle of salvation by faith and divine grace to the point of asserting that the saved are not bound to follow the moral law contained in the Ten Commandments. Christian antinomians believe that faith alone guarantees humans’ eternal security in Heaven regardless of one’s actions.
The antimonians’ faith is not only in God but in their own election by God. In the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, only God’s grace, not our good works, determines whether we go to heaven or hell. One logical extension of this is that it doesn’t matter if one sins. Or as Agricola once stated, “If you sin, be happy, it should have no consequence.” One can see how this could stem from the Calvinist view, “Once saved, always saved.”
So I’m thinking that those Christian Trumpists who believe that he has been ordained by God—and there are many of them—have no problem with giving him an automatic sin pass. Forget about Jesus’s “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” That particular standard does not apply.
Browning is best known for his dramatic monologues in which the speakers inadvertently reveal their inner character as they talk about this or that. “My Last Duchess” is often taught in classrooms because students have a chance to play detective and, reading between the lines, figure out what has happened to the duke’s former wife. (Spoiler alert: He murdered her.) “Agricola in Meditation” begins with the speaker declaring that, when he looks up at the heavens, he doesn’t pay attention to the “dazzling glory” of the sun, moon and starts. That’s because, as one of the elect, he intends to bypass them and go straight to God. He is, in other words, “splendor-proof”:
There’s heaven above, and night by night I look right through its gorgeous roof; No suns and moons though e’er so bright Avail to stop me; splendor-proof I keep the broods of stars aloof: For I intend to get to God, For ‘t is to God I speed so fast, For in God’s breast, my own abode, Those shoals of dazzling glory, passed, I lay my spirit down at last.
Because God has predestined us from before we were born—indeed, before He “piled the heavens” and “fashioned star or sun”—Agricola is sure he has nothing to worry about:
I lie where I have always lain, God smiles as he has always smiled; Ere suns and moons could wax and wane, Ere stars were thundergirt, or piled The heavens, God thought on me his child; Ordained a life for me, arrayed Its circumstances every one To the minutest; ay, God said This head this hand should rest upon Thus, ere he fashioned star or sun.
Indeed, God has made Agricola as a tree that is destined to flourish. And like a tree, he will be “guiltless forever”:
And having thus created me, Thus rooted me, he bade me grow, Guiltless forever, like a tree That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know The law by which it prospers so: But sure that thought and word and deed All go to swell his love for me, Me, made because that love had need Of something irreversibly Pledged solely its content to be.
Even if this tree were to be watered with poison—in other words, if it were to sin—there’s no problem. Agricola assures himself that the poison would be converted into “blossoming gladness”:
Yes, yes, a tree which must ascend, No poison-gourd foredoomed to stoop! I have God’s warrant, could I blend All hideous sins, as in a cup, To drink the mingled venoms up; Secure my nature will convert The draught to blossoming gladness fast:
Such is not the case, unfortunately, for those foredoomed to be gourds rather than trees. Even good water won’t help them:
While sweet dews turn to the gourd’s hurt, And bloat, and while they bloat it, blast, As from the first its lot was cast.
Browning’s poem doesn’t only help us understand how antinomians and their American descendants get a pass when it comes to sinning. It also gives us insight into the delight they appear to take when innocents are grabbed off the streets and carted off to Salvadoran or Sudanese concentration camps. Agricola takes positive delight in the prospect of looking down from his privileged position (“for as I lie, smiled on, full-fed”) on the non-elect burning in hell. He gets extra satisfaction from gazing at the misery of those who thought that, by doing good, they would at least keep “God’s anger in,” if not altogether win God’s approval. These poor suckers think good deeds will get them to heaven, not realizing that all their “striving” will be “turned to sin”:
For as I lie, smiled on, full-fed By unexhausted power to bless, I gaze below on hell’s fierce bed, And those its waves of flame oppress, Swarming in ghastly wretchedness; Whose life on earth aspired to be One altar-smoke, so pure! to win If not love like God’s love for me, At least to keep his anger in; And all their striving turned to sin. Priest, doctor, hermit, monk grown white With prayer, the broken-hearted nun, The martyr, the wan acolyte, The incense-swinging child undone Before God fashioned star or sun!
These poor souls, many apparently Catholic, don’t realize they were damned “before God fashioned star or sun.” The glee that Agricola takes in imagining a child undone may bring to mind those Trumpists unfazed by immigrant children torn from their mothers or killed in Gaza.
As is customary with Browning, the poem ends with a final twist. How would Agricola feel if God did in fact allow such souls to bargain for his love and, through the price of good deeds, end up at his right hand? Well, that would be a God that didn’t live up to the antinomian’s high standards and who would therefore lose his respect and praise:
God, whom I praise; how could I praise, If such as I might understand, Make out and reckon on his ways, And bargain for his love, and stand, Paying a price, at his right hand?
I suspect that few if any of Trump’s followers label themselves antinomian. But once you start seeing yourselves as elect and others as damned—once you have a mechanism for dismissing your own sins while condemning your enemies to hell—you reveal your kinship with Browning’s Agricola.
Of course, through the dramatic monologue genre Browning reveals his speaker to be guilty of overweening pride, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. Agricola and many of Trump’s followers, however, would just call this faith that God has singled them out for special favor.
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Wednesday
Last week, in an attempt to better understand Trump cultism, I examined what Haruki Murakami has to say about cults in 1Q84. There we see a 1960s commune, formed by disaffected students and intellectuals, turn tyrannical and become associated with toxic masculinity and violence against women. In my post I noted that there were aspects of the book that I still wanted to work out, and today’s essay does that.
This means that I will focus more on literary interpretation than on literary application so that this essay may most appeal to those who have read the novel and want to understand it better. But that being said, I must point out that the novel is very relevant to today as we witness a rise in toxic masculinity. (Trump owes some of his 2024 election to the “bro vote.”) Murakami, as I see it, has given us a mythical fable that envisions a healthier relationship between men and women.
This vision may be what so captivates me about the work, which I first encountered through a New Yorker excerpt. “The City of Cats” chapter so captured my imagination that I knew I had to read the entire novel. I entered the Avid Reader bookstore in Davis, California (where my granddaughter Esmé had just been born) and said I was looking for a novel by a Japanese novelist with numbers and letters in the title. They knew exactly what I wanted and, after I purchased it, I lost myself completely in its 1100 pages. Then I went back to the bookstore and bought every other Murakami novel they had. It is unlike me to become so instantly obsessed but such was the case here.
I loved the heroine and hero, who are given alternating chapters until the very end. Aomame and Tengo meet as 10-year-old children, have a brief but meaningful encounter, and then don’t see each other for the next 20 years. Aomame grows up to be a fitness instructor, Tengo a math tutor and aspiring writer. Then the story turns magical realist as they find themselves part of a world that both is and is not our own (which is a pretty good description of magical realism).
The magic involves tiny people who emerge from dead mouths and weave “air chrysalises” out of invisible threads plucked from the air. The cult’s leader can channel these voices but, after he dies and the voices are cut off, the protagonists become targets of the cult (more on this in a moment). In the end (spoiler alert) Aomame and Tengo find each other and escape this alternate world via the portal through which Aomame initially entered.
The most confusing part of the book is the “Little People,” who find their way into our world through an act of cruelty: teenage Fukuda, the daughter of the cult leader, is punished after her negligence results in the death of one of the commune’s goats. Her sentence is to be locked up in solitary confinement with the animal for ten days. She is fed daily, of course, but is given minimal protection against the cold.
It is during the course of this confinement that the small men emerge from the goat’s mouth. Fukuda watches them work and, at the end of her sentence, peeks into the chrysalis, which proves to contain a version of herself. She later learns that this shadow figure is her “dohta” while she, the original, is a “maza.”
Rather than return to the commune and to her parents, she runs away, ending up with a former friend of her father’s. She tells him and his daughter her story, which they write down and submit to a writing competition for new writers. Tengo is brought in to secretly copy edit the novel (which violates the rules of the competition) and is so taken with it that he turns out a masterful work. His collaboration with Fuka-Eri (her author’s name) functions as a portal into this other world, which he understandably thinks is fantastical rather than real.
The story makes heavy use of Jungian symbolism, and the Little People are to be read through that lens. They and the dohta that they create can be seen as our shadow side. As Jung, following Freud, saw it, the shadow is that part of ourselves that we dislike and fear and that we push into the unconscious, where it becomes toxic. In what Freud called “the return of the repressed,” the shadow refuses to remain hidden but manifests itself in various ways, including through nightmares and pathological behavior. Murakami, in other words, has created a story where he can explore what he and his society are repressing.
What is being repressed is Japanese male violence, which Japan witnessed in full living color during the brutal invasion of Manchuria and China in the 1930s and the subsequent attack on British and American colonies in World War II. While, following its defeat, Japan committed itself to a peaceful course of action, it saw violence erupt in the 1968-69 student demonstrations, which in the novel lead to the formation of the commune/cult.
Violence also breaks out in domestic relationships, where seemingly respectable husbands and fathers batter women and children. I count at least ten instances of violence against women in the novel, two involving strangulation and two suicide. And then there is the cult leader, who rapes little girls whose parents hope that they will give birth of his heir. Instead, he destroys their ovaries.
The Little People are the figures for this violence. They initially seem harmless, given that they resemble the dwarfs in “Snow White,” but their size is deceptive. Sometimes it is small men who are most anxious about their manhood—unlike Tengo, who is large and gentle.
Pushback comes from two quarters. Tengo and Fuki-Era, by telling her story to the world, temporarily neutralize the Little People. It’s as though the joint authors are Jungian therapists, providing the world with literary understanding of how toxic masculinity works. And then there is Aomame, who becomes the nightmare of abusive men by insinuating herself into their lives and killing them.
We first meet Aomame on her way to one of the assassinations, dressed in a Junko Shimada suit and Charles Jourdan heels. In other words, she resembles a femme fatale from a 1940s film noir only, unlike such women, Murakami doesn’t let Aomame become an archetypal anima figure. Instead, he makes her a three-dimensional character.
What drives her is rage that her two best friends have died due to male violence. Though she doesn’t realize it, it’s as though she’s been called into the magical realist world of 1Q84 to redress an imbalance. We’re not told how many men she kills—she’s an expert at knowing just where to plant an icepick so that the deaths look like heart attacks—but her final job is to kill the cult leader. After all, doesn’t a rapist of little girls deserve to die?
Only the story then starts to get more complicated. As it turns out, the leader has not been raping his shrine maidens but rather their dohtas—which is to say, they are not actual girls by chrysalis replicas. Furthermore, he knows Aomame is coming to kill him but, because he is suffering from a debilitating illness, welcomes her icepick. We’re not entirely clear what has gone wrong with him but, as I read the character, he stands in for suffering Japanese men, whose toxic masculinity is ravaging them. We learn that this leader has actually assisted in his daughter Fuka-Eri’s escape, seeing her as an antibody to the Little People.
It’s as though Donald Trump, who revels in his power to grab women “by their pussies,” were to realize what an empty life he’s been leading and were to surreptitiously take measures to end his MAGA cult. We know, from his whining about “trophy wives” at Saturday’s West Point commencement speech, just how lonely and miserable he is.
Okay, we can dream about Trump seeing the light. But regardless of what the leader in the novel wants, his violent cult is not ready to disband. Desperate to hear the voices again, it attempts to track down Aomame for the killing of their leader and Tengo and Fuka-Eri for writing the book. At this point IQ84 becomes a noir detective novel, and we encounter the chain-smoking and slovenly P.I. that has been hired by the cult to track them down.
A deeper look into Aomame is in order here. Because of a harsh upbringing that involved her religious mother dragging her from house to house to proselytize, she has had to grow up tough, which is why she makes an effective assassin. She has watched her two best friends die and doesn’t want to be vulnerable. Yet she longs for a loving relationship with the boy who once came to her rescue in elementary school.
Tengo, meanwhile, also has had to escape a father who dragged him from door to door—in his case, to collect television and radio fees—and has, like Aomame, retreated into a lonely existence. He longs for the little girl who once unexpectedly squeezed his hand in a classroom.
There’s one scene involving a Tengo encounter with an air chrysalis that needs explaining. While attending the death bed of this father whom he has never loved, he encounters the gauzy wrapping and, looking into it, finds the dohta of 10-year-old Aomame. In other words, Aomame’s shadow side is a sweet little girl, which she has repressed in order to survive in the world.
The dohta enters into Tengo’s drama as well. For weeks after the encounter, Tengo stays close to his comatose father, less for his sake that hoping for a reappearance of the chyrsalis. In the end, however, he has to leave and return home—and only in doing so can he meet the actual Aomame. As I read the scene, only when he leaves his father and grows up to be his own man can he have a relationship, not with a fantasy of his childhood love, but with an actual grown woman.
So the novel evolves into a beautiful love story with wonderful gender balance: Tengo is a sensitive but manly man who learns to commit himself to his writing and to the relationship while Aomame is a forceful woman who learns to reconnect with her tender side and, in the end, her maternal side. That’s because, through the magical mediation of Fuka-Eri, she finds herself pregnant with Tengo’s baby. This conception occurs four months before they actually meet. Somehow, the death of the old leader has led to the possibility of a new kind of relationship between men and women. Their baby represents the future.
The cult is trying to get its hands on this baby—which would continue the old patterns of violence—while Aomame is determined to break free. Together she and Tengo find the portal through which she entered the world of 1Q84 and return to the Japan of 1984. Their new life will involve challenges, of course, but it will be built on a healthier foundation.
Many of us thought that the 1970s feminist movement was critical to building our own healthy foundation, liberating women and men alike from limiting gender expectations. Now the Trump administration is targeting professional women as it seeks to reverse these gains. Trump is channeling America’s Little People for his cult followers, and the result is mounting violence and threats of violence.
But don’t forget about Murakami’s vision of hope. The cult leader explains to Aomame before she helps him die that, while the violence of the Little People can be seen as a virus, as a virus it generates antibodies. The antibody in this instance is the literary collaboration between his daughter and Tengo. Fiction, in other words, will push back against forces that threaten to tear society apart. In the end, the final counter to Japan’s latent violence is Tengo’s and Aomame’s love for each other.
Put another way, in the face of the of the hatred and violence that we witness daily from Trump and his followers, we must never stop loving. Or as Matthew Arnold put it while gazing out at his society’s desolate and dreary prospects, “Ah, love, let us be true to one another.”
