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Tuesday
I continue today with my journey through Angus Fletcher’s Masterworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. As I’ve noted, Fletcher provides a new spin on certain literary conventions that are taught in virtually every Introduction to Literature course, whether in high school or college. Instead of just pointing them out and getting us to recognize them, however, the Ohio State “professor of story science” examines the role they play in human development. If storytellers of the past “invented” literary conventions, he says, it’s because they play an important role in how humans handle life.
Today’s post summarizes Fletcher’s insights into satire, including parody and ironic detachment. When I was taught these elements in high school, my teachers provided no rationale as to why we should be learning them. Or at any rate, they provided no rationale that would capture the imagination of a teenager, even a teenager who loved literature as much as I did.
Student: Why do I have to know what irony is? Teacher: Well, because it’s there. That’s what literary study is all about, to understand such concepts. Trust me, it is good for you to know these things.
If, by contrast, we had been shown how satiric irony is a tool we could use to push back against a world that often felt overwhelming, then studying it would have made more sense. A teacher familiar with Fletcher’s book might have been appreciative how, as teenagers, we constantly resorted to sarcasm, a form of irony, as a defense mechanism. Using words that seemed to say one thing but meant something else was the armor we employed to protect our vulnerable selves.
As Fletcher sees it, satire is a “serenity elevator,” and he discusses how it helped Socrates “float above his hurt” in the moments before drinking the hemlock.
The chapter begins with Socrates referring to Aesop as he is surrounded by his students, leading one of them (Phaedo, after whom Plato names the dialogue) to conclude that he was “imitating” the famous author of fables. Aesop couched his observations about humans in animal fables “because he knew that people would get angry if he pointed out their fault directly,” and Plato (according to Fletcher) realized that, in talking about Aesop, Socrates was also talking about himself:
Like Aesop, Socrates had spent his life wryly pointing out people’s follies. And like Aesop, Socrates had tried to avoid people’s wrath by pretending to be a harmless gadfly. So, like Aesop, Socrates had been a covert satirist.
Not all satire is good, Fletcher acknowledges. It was invented “to make us laugh at others,” and he notes that scientific studies have revealed that
laughing at others isn’t always good for our health. It feels good, certainly. It gives us the pleasure of feeling superior. But this pleasure is only momentary. And it can have negative long-term effects: condescension and negative judgments of others…have been correlated with increased anxiety and elevated blood pressure, boosting our risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Self-satire, by contrast, is a different matter. Fletcher sees it as key to Socrates’s calmness in the face of death and again goes into the science:
In the short term, laughing at ourselves releases feel-good neuro-opioids and drops our blood level of cortisol, diminishing stress. And in the long-term, laughing at ourselves reduces anxiety, nurtures emotional resilience, and helps us bond with other people.
All of these were in play in Socrates’s final moments:
Socrates was calm, resilient, and surrounded in his final moments by friends. And Socrates was also resistant to pain, which, as it turns out, is another benefit of laughing at ourselves. Psychologists have found that when we laugh with others (as opposed to laughing at them), our brain releases endorphins that can significantly increase our tolerance for pain. And this analgesic effect, as psychologists have also discovered, can be boosted further by self-irony. Self-irony flips around the perspective-taking network of our frontal brain, making us feel like we’re looking at our self from outside. That detached vantage reduces the felt intensity of our emotional hurts, which is why wry humor is common among soldiers, paramedics and other professionals who deal daily with death. Their irony is quite literally numbing; it’s a mental novocaine for coping with the horrors of war zones and emergency rooms.
Fletcher concludes,
So, by satirizing ourselves, we dose our brain with Socratic up-aboveness and pain-quenching neuro-pharmacologies, while by satirizing others, we drag ourselves down with anxiety and cardiac arrest.
Fletcher ends the chapter with a passage from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) that puts us in our place. When earthling Arthur Dent hears from alien researcher Ford Prefect what the galactic encyclopedia has to say about Earth, he is shocked:
“What? Harmless! Is that all it’s got to say? Harmless! One word!” Ford shrugged. “Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book’s microprocessors,” he said, “and no one knew much about the Earth, of course.” “Well, for God’s sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit.” “Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it’s still an improvement.” “And what does it say now?” asked Arthur. “Mostly harmless.”
To be sure, self-satire is not a magic bullet that will banish fear of death. Literature by itself can’t perform miracles. Still, it’s healthy to be able to step back and realize that (in Fletcher’s words) “the greatest cosmic joke is on us.”
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In the weekly Sunday Forum series at our church, we have been focusing on the arts and spirituality (“Creating in God’s Image”). Yesterday my wife Julia spoke about the murder mysteries of Canadian author Louise Penny. Here’s the talk.
Monday
By Julia Bates
I begin today’s talk on mystery writer Louise Penny with a basic definition of creativity since creativity is the focus of this year’s Sunday Forum. I follow it up with insights from Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, in which he discusses the sometimes tortuous path that creative persons must follow to fulfill their creative impulses and share what they create as a gift. Sharing, Hyde maintains, is vital both for the creative process and to the health of the creative person and the receiving culture.
I then explore how Penny’s writing history is an example of someone heroically moving into the creative process and how a pair of mystery novels, A Trick of the Light and The Beautiful Mystery, foreground the tensions in creative gift giving and commercialization that Hyde describes.
The Encyclopedia Britannica says that creativity is “the ability to make or otherwise bring into existence something new, whether a new solution to a problem, a new method or device, or a new artistic object or form.” A creative person, then, is someone who can look at things as they are from a new angle. That creative observation opens up possibilities for change and healthy growth in the receiving culture.
The risk is that the creative gift may not be accepted by the receiving culture, with consequences for both the creative person and the surrounding culture.
Hyde notes,
An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received, and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves this ‘begging bowl” to which the gift is drawn.
Polish Poet Czeslaw Milosz seconds this observation, speaking of the inner certainty he experienced that a shining point exists where all lines intersect. He writes about feeling very strongly that “nothing depended on my will, that everything I might accomplish in life would not be won by my own efforts but given as a gift.” Hyde says many artists have this sense that some element of their work comes to them from a source they do not control.
The artistic creation is also a spark for the audience’s own imagination. Novelist Joseph Conrad suggests that the artist appeals to that part of our being that is curious about change. That spark of curiosity, he says, “is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring.”
With such observations in mind, I look at the Canadian mystery writer as an example of an artist who struggles with both light and darkness to create the gift of her books. But since mysteries are often dismissed as “beach reading,” hardly worthy of the terms “art” or “literature,” what spark of creativity could she share?
I’m suggesting that, in the struggles Penny portrays between lead investigator Armand Gamache and the darkness that produces a murder, she provides many gifts to us as readers, sparking us to become potential creators and givers of gifts as well.
To explain both artistic gifts and the daunting barriers to sharing those gifts, Hyde provides an anecdote about a Native American giving a Puritan a ceremonial pipe. Delighted, the Puritan takes it home to add to his collection of new world art. He is taken aback, however, when a chief visits him two weeks later and wants a smoke and to receive the pipe in turn. These kinds of misunderstandings about the reason behind gifts gave rise to the derogatory term “Indian giver.”
Native Americans, according to Hyde, believed that gifts received should then move rather than be turned into private capital. If a gift is not treated as such–if one form of property is merely converted into a private hoard—something horrible will happen. In folk tales the hoarder usually dies. In tribal groups, the social fabric of the group is destroyed.
Hyde explores this principle further as regards the modern publishing world and the world of art galleries. While these organizations function as ways of “sharing” a creative gift, they also turn the gift into a commodity, which damages both the artists and the culture that tries to decipher what this “gift” of art means. How can a purchased item placed in a private space (say, a private art collection) create a call for change in the larger culture? When the gift is hidden away, the challenge of its call can’t be heard.
Remember: The artistic gift is not just the “thing” itself but the urge it ignites within us to also create and share.
In the two novels I’ve chosen, Penny explores the dynamics of (1) artistic preparation for the inspiration; (2) the possible corruption of the gifting process between the artist and the receiving community; and (3) the healing and atonement that can happen if the gifting process is honored.
In preparation for this talk, I looked at a series of interviews with Louise Penny to find examples of gifts she received during her creative journey. Penny notes,
I was a fearful child. Afraid of everything. I withdrew from the world and wanted to be in my room reading. As a punishment, my mother would send me outside to play. At the age of eight I came to a turning point when I read Charlotte’s Web. When I finished the book, I realized I was no longer afraid of spiders. The thing I was most afraid of disappeared because of the power of the story. It was magic. I wanted to be part of creating that magic; I wanted to be a writer.
The gift of a story about a spider gave Penny a goal.
Inevitably, however, barriers arose. Penny recalls, “I became afraid of becoming a writer. In Waiting for Godot, one of the characters notes, ‘Maybe it’s best if a dream isn’t attempted. What happens if you try and it doesn’t work?’” Penny reports,
I did delay. I delayed for 20 years. I took on elements of writing in journalism and editing, but not fiction. I covered Quebec politics and ended up feeling bruised. I took to drink. By the age of 35, I hit bottom. I realized I was only halfway through life. How do I get to age 80? If I had had a gun, I would have done myself in. In January of 1994, I went to an AA meeting and listened to two women talk about the holidays and their past ways of coping through drinking. They talked about things I was ashamed of.
The meeting proved to be a turning point. Penny found golden gifts through the sharing of stories and in the solid relationships she formed in sobriety:
I felt hope. In talking to others I realized I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t know how to live. I’m now a big believer in asking for help. If you reach out, there will be a hand reaching out. Now I respond in kind. Within three years I was married to Michael and within five I began writing fiction. Michael said he would support me, and he become my biggest fan.
To be sure, there were still struggles. At first, Penny tried to write the “best historical fiction ever.” Nothing, however, happened creatively. Her muse wasn’t coming to spark the filling of her empty bowl, and a series of other things had to happen to get her writing.
Among these were moving out of Montreal to a small village. There Penny found a group of creative women who called themselves “Les Girls.” In their monthly meetings, which continue to this day, she saw some creative projects that succeeded and others that did not. She noticed that having a flop didn’t kill anyone, a realization that was itself a gift. “Not trying to write is what would kill me,” she realized.
Penny had started reading crime novels at the age of 11 when her mother gave her an Agatha Christie novel she had just finished reading. She felt honored then to be gifted a “grown-up” book to read, and returning to that experience, decided to try her hand at mystery novels. She began by drawing a map of Three Pines, the village featured in many of the novels.
In Canadian history, three pines were often planted to indicate Loyalist leanings prior to the American Revolutionary War. After twenty years, these pine plantings served as signals to fugitives leaving an America that would no longer harbor them. The village is a gift Penny gave herself as a safe refuge. It is a gift of refuge for readers as well.
Penny then wrote biographies of the characters who inhabited Three Pines. She based Gamache , her lead detective, on her husband Michael. “I knew I wouldn’t get published,” she says,” so I wanted people and places that I would love to be with.” Again, she felt the comfort of retreating to her own room. “The writing began as a gift to myself,” she says. Furthermore, “the village and people continued to comfort me while Michael went into decline with dementia and eventually died and while Covid isolated all of us.”
The next step, getting published, was an ordeal, much as Hyde describes the damage that can be done to both the creative person and the receiving community when a gift is abused. Penny sent Still Life, her first novel, out to 50 publishers and received no answers. She had submitted it to the “Dagger Award” competition for first time mystery writers. She got an email saying that, out of 800 submissions, she had made the top five and was invited to the awards ceremony.
She notes,
As a journalist, I got prepared, I researched all the publishers and agents who would be there. At the awards ceremony, I looked for the top agents. The top agent wasn’t there, the second level agent snubbed me, and the third level agent was drunk. Then I didn’t get the prize. I went home and curled into a ball. Michael said, ‘get up, we’re going to a party that is also a silent auction to benefit a charity.” With no good grace, I went. I saw a lovely blue shawl. I reached out to take it at the same time another woman took hold. I introduced myself. “Oh, she said, “I have your name on a post-it note on my laptop.” Then she introduced herself as the top agent who hadn’t attended the ceremony.
They have worked together ever since. What a gift that chance encounter was to Penny! The agent has made the gift transfer process between Penny and her reading audience as transparent as possible.
The books eventually were well received, although they took a while to catch on. Not until book six did Penny feel she could actually make a living by writing. Hyde would observe that Penny has negotiated the challenge of giving a gift, of successfully marketing what she has created.
Penny doesn’t stick slavishly to the typical mystery “who-done-it” structure. She is more interested in themes based on our yearning for community. She feels that, regardless of where the reader lives, there is that universal yearning to belong. In the face of murder, of terrible violations of community, she writes of atonement, of second chances. Her village of characters “opt for decency.”
Many of her themes involve poetry or music or art as expressions of the creative spark. She used to walk with her grandfather, who recited poems as they went along, and from those walks she developed an ear for the cadence of language. She takes the poetic gifts that others have created and moves them forward.
For instance, she notes in the acknowledgements of How the Light Gets In that she wrote to Leonard Cohen about using the lines from one of his songs:
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There’s a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.
When she asked how much she would need to pay for their use, he told her she could have them for free, even though he had just lost a lot of his wealth to a scam artist. “How the Light Gets In” is the title of her ninth novel.
Meanwhile, Penny has credited Ruth Zardo, the crazy poet of Three Pines, with portions of poems actually written by Margaret Atwood and Marylyn Plessner (with their generous permission). Another gift.
In at least three of the novels, works of art created in Three Pines are key clues in solving a murder. While the novels show the generative creative power of art and gift giving, they also show how the stultification of the creative/ giving process corrupts and destroys people and organizations. To control or to own art for mercenary reasons wreaks destruction all around. Fortunately, in solving the mystery of the crime, Gamache makes atonement possible. Art can once again contribute to the health of the community.
Penny says that she lays out her novels in groups of three or four with layers of plot development that move at three different paces. The fastest pace is the solution of the current murder, yet sometimes the crime is not presented until three chapters into the book.
The next level of movement lies within the Three Pines characters or the lead members of Gamache’s investigative team, who grow or change based on their own limitations or gifts. These changes happen over multiple novels and some characters never stop changing.
The final and slowest strata occurs at the national level of Canadian cultural institutions, primarily the Catholic church and the Canadian government. This theme plays out in all the novels, with occasional volcanic eruptions.
The leader on all three levels is Armand Gamache. He and his actions and thoughts are the measuring rod of integrity in all of the novels. Because she had used her husband as a model. she wondered if she could continue to write after he died. But she has continued to find comfort in meeting up with the spirit of Michael as she creates and moves forward with Gamache. We see Gamache in his first appearance in Still Life:
He knelt down; his knees cracking like the report of a hunter’s rifle, his large expressive hands hovering over the tiny circle of blood marring her fluffy cardigan, as though like a magician he could remove the wound and restore the woman. But he could not. That wasn’t his gift. Fortunately for Gamache he had others. He was surprised to see her. That was his little secret. Not that he’d ever seen her before. No. His little secret was that in his mid-fifties, at the height of a long and now apparently stalled career, violent death still surprised him. Which was odd, for the head of homicide, and perhaps one of the reasons he hadn’t progressed further in the cynical world of the Surete. Gamache always hoped maybe someone had gotten it wrong, and there was no dead body.”
The element of surprise means Gamache sets aside assumptions about the cause of death. Gamache speaks to a particularly inept cadet about those assumptions: “You look but you don’t see. You hear, but you don’t listen.” He then conveys four sentences that function as a guide to wisdom, which he learned from his mentor and regards as “a huge mountain of a gift”:
–I’m sorry. –I don’t know. –I need help. –I was wrong.
Over the course of 18 mysteries, we see Gamache share these truths with all of his team members. Often the adages are received with skepticism until the new detective acknowledges their wisdom three novels later.
In contrast with Gamache, we read of Beauvoir, his second in command, who first sees the darkness in every situation. The tension between the two leads us through the problem-solving process that is reading a mystery. One sees the two go back and forth in Trick of Light and Beautiful Mystery.
In these novels Penny wrestles with the demands of creativity and how being open to its gifts affects individuals and communities, especially as the gifts encounter the warping demands posed by art critics, gallery owners and publishing houses.
A Trick of the Light centers around the creative life of Clara, an artist in Three Pines, as other artists (including her jealous husband) recognize that she has an authentic vision and artistic style. She has spent 25 years in obscurity living in Three Pines and experimenting with sculpture and painting. She has patiently opened herself, creating the ‘begging bowl” for the muse of inspiration. In the midst of her first major exhibition and celebration, another artist is murdered.
Clara’s mind seems to be a venue for Penny to explore her own fears concerning creativity and recognition—issues that were still fresh since the novel came out only four years after her first one. We see a Clara who is terrified to enter her first solo art gallery presentation, a dream she has had since childhood.
In her panic attack, Clara thinks, “Someone had lied. Or hadn’t told the whole truth. In her dream, her only dream, played over and over since childhood, she had a solo show at the Musee d’Art Contemporain. She walked down this corridor. Composed and collected. Beautiful and slim. Witty and popular.
Into the arms of an adoring world.
Now within feet of the end of her journey all she wanted to do was run away home to Three Pines. The person who had lied was herself.
Clara’s frightened ego has gotten in the way of being that composed person. She may be her own worst enemy.
But there are other enemies. As the novel progresses, we learn about the source of her terrible fear. Artists have to deal with gallery owners so that the public—those that the artists want to reach—can receive it. Then artists face reviews written by critics of those displays that mediate how the public will see their creative gifts. A bad review can metaphorically kill a career. In this novel, a bad review is also connected with a literal death.
We see the spark of Clara’s inner motivation through the eyes of her jealous husband Peter:
Without a single crucifix, or host, or bible. Without benefit of clergy, or church. Clara’s paintings radiated a subtle, private faith. In a single bright dot in an eye. In old hands holding old hands. For dear life. Clara painted for dear life. While the rest of the cynical art world was painting the worst, Clara painted the best. …Peter had never met God so how could he paint him.
Clara had not only met Him, she knew Him. And she painted what she knew.
As readers we can suspect that this description could also describe Louis Penny and the motivation behind her mysteries.
Later, at a gallery showing, we get another glimpse into Clara’s depth as Gamache and an art dealer discuss a portrait of a friend:
Clara had painted her (Mary) as the forgotten and belligerent Virgin Mary. Worn down by age and rage, by resentments real and manufactured. By friendships soured. By entitlements denied and love withheld. But there was something else. A vague suggestion in those weary eyes. Not even seen really. More a promise. A rumor in the distance.
Amid all the brush strokes, all the elements, all the color and nuance in the portrait, it came down to one tiny detail. A single white dot.
In her eyes.
Clara Morrow had painted the moment despair became hope.
The official art world is so cynical, however, that it’s suspicious of authenticity:
Francois Marois stepped back half a pace and nodded gravely.
It’s remarkable. Beautiful.” He turned to Gamache then. “Unless, of course, it’s a ruse.”
“What do you mean?” asked Gamache.
“Maybe it isn’t hope at all,” said Marois, “but merely a trick of the light.”
Gamache, in his integrity, can honor the spark of inspiration ignited by the painting. The gallery owner, facing the challenge of hope, is open to denial and rejection of the gift of the painting.
In both Trick of the Light and Beautiful Mystery, Penny wrestles with this question about the inspiration we might gain from a creative gift. Is the artist sincere, are the insights we gain legitimate and illuminating for our lives? Or are these moments of uplift merely our visceral response to good marketing?
In exploring these moments of inspiration and testing them for authenticity, we are like detectives solving a crime. We look for clues in the scene of the inspiring moment and in our own responses.
Penny poses two modalities of exploration: intuition and logic. Gamache is intuitive and creative in his problem solving. Beauvoir, his right-hand man, is a logical, linear thinker.
Of Gamache’s approach, Penny writes,
Facts were necessary. They pointed the way and helped form the net. But the killer himself was tracked by following not only facts but feelings. The fetid emotions that had made a man into a murderer.
In contrast, Beauvoir’s approach is darker. He contrasts himself with his chief:
The chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you’ll find good. He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn’t. He believed that if you sift through good, you’ll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit.”
And every day it frightened him (Beauvoir) that Gamache couldn’t see that. That he was blind to it. Because out of blind spots terrible things appeared.
This back and forth debate about the nature of good and evil continues between the two mindsets through all of the novels. Penny also uses both men and their early childhood immersion in the Catholic church to explore why they have moved away from formal religion to frame this good vs evil conflict more broadly.
These reflections could have been expressed as author asides, but instead Penny acts as a mind reader author so that the debate is between characters, not imposed from the outside.
The second novel, Beautiful Mystery, is set in the heart of established religion—which is to say, in a monastery. The structure, while it allows Penny to explore the limits and perhaps hypocrisy of structured religion, also has the creative potential to show the transformation possible during an authentic ritual. As Penny notes in the acknowledgements,
The book started as a fascination with music, and a very personal and baffling relationship with it. I love music. Various pieces have inspired each of the books, and I’m convinced music has had a near magical effect on my creative process. When I sit on planes, or go for walks, or drive and listen to music, I can see scenes from the book I’m about write, or am writing. I feel the characters. Hear them. Sense them. It’s thrilling. Gamache and Clara and Beauvoir come even more alive when I’m listening to certain music. It’s transformative. Spiritual, even. I can feel the divine in the music. Just a few notes can take us to a different time and place, can conjure a person, an event, a feeling. Can inspire great courage, and reduce us to tears.
In this novel, as in Trick of the Light, Penny shows how a genuine gift can be corrupted. A secluded monastery in the Canadian woods excels at performing inspirational Gregorian chants, but these are originally intended only for the members of the abbey, and we get a deep history of their purpose and how they were created.
The monastery’s isolation is shattered, however, when someone sends out a CD of the chants, which proceed to become a musical bestseller. The monastery’s choir director is then murdered just as he is urging the monastery to create a second CD, which will save the monastery’s walls from collapse.
The project divides the monks into two groups and challenges the consensual leadership of the abbot. The scene is the familiar mystery structure of a crime committed within a locked room— or in this case, a private garden.
We see the scene through Gamache’s eyes:
For the first time, Gamache began to wonder if the garden existed on different planes. It was both a place of grass and earth and flowers. But also an allegory. For that most private place inside each one of them. For some it was a dark, locked room. For others, a garden.
Each of the characters in the book is led to explore his (all men in this text) own inner room. We are at that second level of change that I mentioned earlier: personal growth of Penny’s detective team. We as readers experience both the fantastical play of light through the monastery windows and the haunting sounds of the chants through the effects they have on Beauvoir, who is avoiding being honest with Gamache and himself about a growing drug addiction.
The book ends with an indigenous people’s parable that speaks to the tensions between Beauvoir and Gamache:
An elder told him that when he was a boy his grandfather came to him one day and said he had two wolves fighting inside him. One was gray, the other black. The gray one wanted his grandfather to be courageous, and patient, and kind. The other, the black one, wanted his grandfather to be fearful and cruel. This upset the boy. He asked, “grandfather, which of the wolves will win?”
“The one I feed”, the grandfather said.
Gamache feeds the gray wolf, Beauvoir the black.
And what gifts has Penny given us? First, she presents us with a set of characters whom we would like to have as friends. They grow and evolve in ways that Lord Peter Whimsey or Hercule Poirot don’t. Gamache is a template for our own best selves.
At the same time, Penny gives us a village where friendship is enacted over and over again in the face of tragedy and dire mistakes. We would like to live in such a place, and Penny challenges us to create similar villages rather than just allowing us to find a comfortable fictional retreat.
The particular way that crimes are handled, meanwhile, point to the higher ethical imperatives that are invoked. This depth is unusual in detective fiction.
Second, Penny calls us to explore our own dark gardens. What have we locked inside that needs to see the light of day? Penny’s own life is anchored on the twelve-step program that supported her after reaching rock bottom. How can we make amends to those we have offended? How can we step beyond fear to share our gifts?
Often we have a penchant to retreat into ego-driven responses. We reflexively reject new works of art or music, ignoring the sparks they can ignite within us to take risks. Can we say what Gamache recommends: I’m sorry. I don’t know. I need help. I was wrong.
Finally, Penny confronts us with our mortality. As we face death within her murder mysteries, we are like Penny learning not to fear spiders through reading Charlotte’s Web. In these novels we see how the dead are honored by their friends and family. At the same time, we see a detective team giving the victim’s lives worth by investing their time and ingenuity in deciphering what has happened. Our own lives are works of art that we can share with others.
A crime, Penny notes, begins when an event creates a miserable hook in someone’s past that festers and eventually explodes. In essence, that wound causes someone to break the ten commandments, which constitute the ethical background of the novels. We feel secure when those rules are reestablished as the norm at the end of each book. But death is something we all will face, whether we are murdered or die at a healthy old age. We all have buried wounds that may cause us to speak darkly behind someone’s back or to turn a deaf ear to a request for help.
The question facing us at the end of each of Penny’s mysteries is how we share the gifts we’ve been given. Are those around us familiar with our stories because it is the sharing of stories that is the ultimate gift. Weaving the stories together creates a village where we can belong as living beings or as honored ancestors. Sharing gifts strengthens relationships and encourages creativity in ourselves and others.
Here in Sewanee we live in a village much the same size as Three Pines. Are we a place of refuge and creativity? In his October 1 sermon, Rev. Lamborn challenged us to become such a place by discovering the fullness of our begging bowls and pouring them out in love.
Vatican tapestry of the resurrected Jesus (detail)
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Sunday
A month ago I shared a talk given by Sewanee English professor Jennifer Michael on poems that help us imagine ourselves in the scriptures. In “Descending Theology: The Resurrection,” Mary Karr puts herself in the mind of the recently crucified Jesus, longing for the physicality of flesh even when that physicality involves pain.
It is a version of the theology that believes that God became incarnate in Jesus because God wanted to experience what it’s like to be human. In a talk I once gave on literary angels I noted that, in Philip Pullman’s vision, angels don’t glory in their immateriality but rather long for immersion in the world of the senses. Kerr refers to such longing in her poem:
From the far star points of his pinned extremities, cold inched in—black ice and squid ink— till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void even for pain, he missed his splintered feet, the human stare buried in his face. He ached for two hands made of meat he could reach to the end of. In the corpse’s core, the stone fist of his heart began to bang on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now
it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water shatters at birth, rivering every way.
I love the birth imagery here. As in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land or George Herbert’s “Altar,” there is something stiff and hard resisting new life, something that breaks wide open at the resurrection. New hope rivers every way.
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Friday
I have been working my way through Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature and, as promised, share some more of what he has to say. I’ll note first, however, that this scholarly book sometimes sounds like a self-help manual. Check out the following:
Some of these inventions target what modern psychiatrists have identified as common forms of mental distress: grief, grudges, pessimism, shame, heartbreak, rumination, reactive thoughts, self-doubt, numbness, loneliness. Some impart what modern psychologists have identified as well-being boosters: courage, love, curiosity, belief, energy, imagination. And some indirectly support our mental health and well-being by nurturing practical life skills: freethinking, problem solving, de-biasing, counterfactual speculating, cognitive flexing, relearning, introspecting.
Like any responsible self-help manual, Wonderworks then issues a caution:
These benefits are by no means replacements for modern psychiatry. They’re supplements, just as a healthy diet and regular exercise are supplements for doctor visits and blood pressure medications.
Fletcher adds that one can be thoroughly pragmatic in how one uses his book. “If you’re seeking a particular benefit from literature,” he suggests, “you can jump to reading that chapter now.” He himself, while drawing on scientific findings, strives to be as colloquial as possible “with a view to assisting you in using the invention more effectively.”
I obviously don’t have problems with using literature as self-help although I’ve sometimes shied away from being quite as programmatic as Fletcher. As I’ve noted numerous times, sometimes literature’s magic lies in how it catches the reader unawares: you don’t think it has any personal application and then it does. In fact, some part of me resists books that are prescribed for my improvement, as though someone else wants to determine my reading experience for me. But that being acknowledged, there’s a lot in what Fletcher has to say, so here goes.
In chapters on Homer and Sappho, Fletcher looks at the literary inventions of omniscient heroic narratives and first-person love lyrics. Fletcher notes that narrative broke important ground thousands of years ago when it realized it could speak in a “God Voice.” (“Let there be light” in Genesis is an example, and one also finds the God Voice, used to instill wonder and fear, in the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.) Homer then took the God Voice to a new level, using it to enter into recognizable human emotions. When Homer opens the Iliad with, “Sing, goddess of the anger of Achilles,” Fletcher observes that the God Voice, while huge, is also human:
It’s not a divinity aloof. It’s a vaster version of ourselves, an “Almighty Heart” that echoes our emotional response to the spectacle of war and death.
What Homer has done, Fletcher says, is “hybridize[ ] the two species of voice, blending mortal sentiment and cosmic scope into an anthropomorphic far-sightedness.” The effect is to engender courage in listeners and readers. Moving into a chemical description, Fletcher explains,
When that feeling of vaster humanity is combined with the neurochemicals stimulated by our primary fear response, the result is a threefold chest heat: the blood-pumping warmth of adrenaline, the pain-dulling warmth of our native opioids, and the social-bonding warmth of oxytocin. This neurochemical elixir makes us feel energized, impervious to harm, and willing to sacrifice ourselves. It’s the heart flame that we hail as courage.
I’ll note in passing that Plato feared that The Odyssey would make young men cowardly, not brave—at least the journey to the underworld episode—but in this he has been in the minority. Homer has often been used to engender courage in schoolboys, both in ancient Athens and in 18th and 19th century Britain.
In the chapter on Sappho, Fletcher contrasts the Homeric omniscient voice with the private first-person voice. Love, he asserts, is a mix of awe and self-disclosure, both of which appear in the following lyric about lesbian love:
He seems to me a god that man listening to you chat sweetly and laugh like music, scattering my heart.
When I look at you, I can’t speak. My tongue breaks and my skin is on fire.
Writing that this is “genuine self-disclosure,” Fletcher adds,
Sappho doesn’t just expose her private secrets. She mixes in wonder. She stretches her inner feelings into simple but awe-summoning metaphors of heart scatter and skin fire.
And then, Fletcher notes, Sappho innovates even further: one can make intimate disclosures about others as well as oneself. Take “Fragment 16,” for instance, in which (as Fletcher puts it) Sappho rewrites the Iliad:
Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet the most beautiful of sights the dark earth offers, but I say it’s what- ever you love best.
And it’s easy to make this understood by everyone, for she who surpassed all human kind in beauty, Helen, abandoning her husband–that best of
men–went sailing off to the shores of Troy and never spent a thought on her child or loving parents: when the goddess seduced her wits and left her to wander,
she forgot them all, she could not remember anything but longing, and lightly straying aside, lost her way. But that reminds me now: Anactória,
she’s not here, and I’d rather see her lovely step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and glittering armor.
If literature could make self-disclosures on behalf of Helen, Fletcher notes, it “could take any story and make it a love story.”
And because he always wants to anchor literature’s effects in the brain, Fletcher writes,
We can keep on exchanging wonder-enriched self-disclosures with our wooer, creating a reciprocal cycle of dopamine prime and release that makes us feel increasingly happy together and encourages us to disclose more personal details to each other until we’ve built an intimate emotional bond.
Although ideally we want to experience love with another person, Fletcher adds that we can get all the love we need from literature. He turns to a Darcy-Elizabeth passage—proposal made and accepted—to make his point.
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Thursday
When I was a child, I remember spending a lot of time thinking about why bad things happen and how I could get the world to work in my favor. Sometimes I would make little deals with God, sometimes I figured I would be rewarded if I became a better person. I had forgotten about these efforts, however, until coming across a poem by Nobel-prize winning Louise Glück, whom I have been revisiting since her death last week.
In “The Empty Glass,” Glück examines how humans respond to uncertainty. To get a better understanding, she goes back to her childhood, revisiting the different ways she tried to achieve a modicum of control. She begins by telling us that she “asked for much”—from God? from her parents?—only to get contradictory results. In the course of the poem, she recounts various superstitions that are supposed to ward off bad luck—don’t open an umbrella indoors; don’t put your shoes on the table; don’t walk under ladders; throw salt over your left shoulder—that presumably she followed.
Sometimes she concluded that bad luck—or perhaps bullying—was her own fault, a result of “my nature.” But after beating herself up for her faults, she then notes that her fortunes changed while she herself remained the same, which means that there must have been other causes.
When she asks if those causes involved the sea or some “celestial force,” she is imagining higher powers at work. Just in case, she tries praying and then, just like me trying to placate the who or what that controls destiny, she too tries to be a better person. However, she is assured by friends, who clasp her hand intently, that she already is that better person, not pathetic at all. Perhaps she is even a queen or a saint! And so we grasp for compliments and reassurance.
Perhaps this whole tangled process—which Glück says began as terror and “matured into moral narcissism”—is “in fact human growth.” If moral narcissism is the belief that how we behave determines what happens to us—solipsistic Robinson Crusoe thinks that God punishes him with an earthquake because he has disobeyed his father—then it does indeed have something to do with how we grow up. Maybe, Glück conjectures, “some good will come of simply trying.” If we put in the effort, perhaps the “initiating impulse” is irrelevant.
In any event, these efforts to control our future, futile though they may be, are all we have “to appease the great forces.” After all,
What are we without this? Whirling in the dark universe, alone, afraid, unable to influence fate
Yet even as she casts a relatively benign eye on our struggles, Glück (as is characteristic with her) introduces a dark note into her poem, one that becomes fully realized in the final stanza. So as not to spoil the suspense, I’ll discuss it after you’ve read the poem:
The Empty Glass By Louise Glück
I asked for much; I received much. I asked for much; I received little, I received next to nothing.
And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors. A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table.
O wrong, wrong—it was my nature. I was hard-hearted, remote. I was selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny.
But I was always that person, even in early childhood. Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children. I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract tide of fortune turned from high to low overnight.
Was it the sea? Responding, maybe, to celestial force? To be safe, I prayed. I tried to be a better person. Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror and matured into moral narcissism might have become in fact actual human growth. Maybe this is what my friends meant, taking my hand, telling me they understood the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted, implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick to give so much for so little. Whereas they meant I was good (clasping my hand intensely)— a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos.
I was not pathetic! I was writ large, like a queen or a saint.
Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture. And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying, a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse to persuade or seduce—
What are we without this? Whirling in the dark universe, alone, afraid, unable to influence fate—
What do we have really? Sad tricks with ladders and shoes, tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring attempts to build character. What do we have to appease the great forces?
And I think in the end this was the question that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach, the Greek ships at the ready, the sea invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking it could be controlled. He should have said I have nothing, I am at your mercy.
The dark note is whether the speaker is using these coping mechanisms to endure an abusive relationship. If so, she is right that she may be “a little sick” for putting up with the man (giving him “so much for so little”) whereas her enabling friends are doing her no favors by assuring her that she’s being good, even saint-like. By trying so hard, is she playing into the pathology?
The dangers of trying too hard are spelled out in the last stanza, where we see a father’s efforts at control lead to the death of his daughter. The poet is referring to the moment at Aulis when it appears that the Greek forces, about to set sail for Troy, will be stymied by lack of wind. To appease Artemis, whom he has offended, Agamemnon is informed that he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia and he does so. Although the sacrifice does the trick, his wife (understandably) never forgives him, murdering him upon his return from Troy.
What if, Glück imagines, we were to relinquish our need to control the “lethal, unstable” future. If a lifetime spent trying to appease the great forces leads us to kill what we love, then we really do “have nothing.” Better, at that point, to drop our arms, acknowledge that control is an illusion, and ask for mercy.
Then again, Iphigenia in Euripides’s play gives up and surrenders to her sacrifice, as do some wives in abusive relationships. Glück may not be providing up with a prescription for living here, but she gets us to better understand why we think and behave as we do.
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Wednesday
There is a frightening new development in rightwing intellectual circles called “Red Caesarism.” As explained by Lindsay Beyerstein of the The Editorial Board, “Caesarism means one-man rule, halfway between monarchy and tyranny. It’s supposed to end democracy while preserving small-r republican rule.”
The term has been coined by Michael Anton, a former Trump national security official and a onetime fellow of the Claremont Institute. Beyerstein lays out Aton’s reasoning:
If current trends continue, conservatives will become electorally irrelevant. Simply put, their policies aren’t appealing to voters. Rather than developing a more attractive policy agenda, Anton would prefer to end voting. And he’s not alone. On Fox, Greg Guttfeld recently proclaimed that “elections don’t work” and suggested civil war as an alternative.
So what insights does Shakespeare’s famous play provide us into Red Caesarism? I think first of what Allan Bloom, in Shakespeare’s Politics (1964), says about the leader. As he reads the play, Brutus and Cassius, defenders of the Roman republic, fail to grasp Caesar’s genius:
Caesar seems to have been the most complete political man who ever lived. He combined the high-mindedness of the Stoic with the Epicurean’s awareness of the low material substrate of political things. Brutus and Cassius could not comprehend such a combination…
I don’t know if the American right, who at one point lionized Bloom, is thinking along these lines in their rejection of democracy. Of course, other than his charisma and willingness to flout norms, Trump has little resemblance to Caesar, who was both a brilliant military leader and a gifted writer. I imagine Mark Antony getting up and saying to the former president, “I knew Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was a friend of mine. You, sir, are no Julius Caesar.”
The problem with Julius Caesars, no matter how exemplary, is that they invariably bring ruin upon their countries. Mussolini modeled himself on Julius Caesar, as did Napoleon, and France and Italy suffered the consequences. And look at what Vladimir Putin, who models himself on the tsars of old (“tsar” is derived from “Caesar”) has done to Russia.
Few truisms are truer than “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The genius of democracy is that, inefficient though it may be, it provides checks and balances on wannabe strongmen who invariably weaken their countries. As Jay Kuo, writing for The Big Picture, said yesterday of wannabe authoritarian Benjamin Netanyahu,
Netanyahu’s self-absorption and corruption led directly to disastrous policy choices, including the elevation of extremists willing to destabilize Israel in order to pave the way for Netanyahu’s autocratic policies.
Kuo warns that the same awaits America if Trump is reelected or if insurrectionist Jim Jordan, currently seeking to become Speaker of the House and second in line to the presidency, succeeds in his effort.
Looking closely at Shakespeare’s play, one sees a number of unsettling parallels with Trump. First of all, there is the man-in-the-street support. Julius Caesar opens with a carpenter and a cobbler on their way to celebrate Caesar’s overthrow of Pompey. “But indeed sir,” the cobbler says to an official, “we make holiday to see Caesar and to rejoice in his triumph.”
These men are unaffected when the officials point out that, not long ago, they were celebrating Pompey. “And when you saw his chariot but appear,” Murellus notes,
The fickle mob, as the official sees it, will follow anyone who sways their passions in the moment. And in fact, anti-Caesarite Casca at one point makes an observation that sounds a lot like Trump boasting, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Casca is reporting on Antony’s attempt to crown Caesar and on Caesar’s moment of weakness (he suffers from a brief fit):
Three or four wenches where I stood cried “Alas, good soul!” and forgave him with all their hearts. But there’s no heed to be taken of them; if Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less.
Swaying the mob (or as the Romans called them, “hoi polloi,” the common people) continues on after Caesar has been assassinated. In their competing speeches, Brutus speaks to his countrymen’s higher values, Mark Antony to their narrow self-interest. In Brutus’s words I am reminded of those NeverTrumpers who, like Liz Cheney, plead with their fellow Republicans to honor the ideals upon which America was founded:
If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer:–Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honor him: but, as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his fortune; honor for his valor; and death for his ambition. Who is here so base that would be a bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so rude that would not be a Roman? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so vile that will not love his country?
Mark Antony, by contrast, talks about all the goodies that Caesar handed out. He reminds me of Trump’s populist appeals, especially his defense of Social Security. When his Republican competitors in the 2016 primaries were railing against government handouts, Trump ran to their left:
There are Trump supporters who are convinced that he cares for them, even though it’s clear to any objective observer that he cares only for himself. Caesar and Antony manipulate crowds even better than Trump, and we see Antony inciting the mob to storm the Capitol hunt down “the traitors” and, essentially, overthrow the Roman Republic.
The “traitors” in our own situation are any who resist Trump—Democrats, of course, but even more those Republicans who can’t stomach what their party has become. In Brutus, we see some of the internal struggle NeverTrumpers went through before choosing to align with the opposition. Brutus, who at one point says that he is “with himself at war,” articulates his resolve should “the people” crown Caesar king. The “general good,” he declares, must come first:
Instead of “death” for today’s Republicans, substitute “electoral defeat.” A number were in fact defeated after choosing honor, including Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, those who voted to impeach Trump, and various state officials who stood up to his attempts to steal the election. In the end Antony, looking down at the dead Brutus, describes him as “the noblest Roman of them all,” and these have proved worthy successors.
Of course, even after winning, Mark Antony himself will die in the subsequent civil war as former confederates turn on each other, just as Caesar and Ptolemy turn on each other. Violence is an invariable feature of authoritarian societies.
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Tuesday
In a recent New York Review of Books interview with the noted philosopher Martha Nussbaum, I came across this nugget about how Euripides came to her aid at an unbearably tragic moment:
I basically had a privileged and happy life up to the time I lost my daughter. My parents died, my marriage and several relationships ended, I didn’t get tenure at Harvard, but I always had a core confidence, stemming from my happy childhood, that I could prevail despite life’s tragedies. But I have also always had a very vivid sense of tragedy. I remember lying on the couch in our prosperous upper-middle-class house in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, reading Dickens—and later Tolstoy and Henry James, and of course the Greek tragedies themselves. In my imagination I was Hecuba and Clytemnestra. I was also an actress, both in school and, for a short time, professionally, and I tried to explore those roles in my own body. Even now, at the University of Chicago, we put on faculty productions, and I have played Clytemnestra opposite Richard Posner’s Agamemnon, and Hecuba surrounded by a wonderful cast of faculty friends in a production of The Trojan Women.
So my inner world had been prepared, almost rehearsed, for the biggest shock of my life, when my daughter died at the age of forty-seven, after a long illness, of a fungal infection after surgery. As she was dying I found myself in tears, hearing in my head Hecuba’s speech over the body of her grandson, when she says that she had always expected to die first, and all of a sudden she has to mourn this young child. I think that mental preparation was a kind of road map that made me less alone, and less clueless, in my grief.
In addition to being deeply moved, I heartily agree with the observation that a lifetime of reading literature prepares one’s inner life, almost as a rehearsal, for tragedy when it strikes. It makes sense that Nussbaum, who dropped out of college for a short while to perform in New York productions of Greek tragedies, would think automatically of Hecuba mourning her grandson, whom the Greeks have thrown over the ramparts despite being only a baby.
In Euripides’s play, Hecuba has just been presented with Astyanax’s body, laid out on a shield. Her first words are bitterly sarcastic as she mocks the so-called bravery of warriors who feel the need to kill an innocent baby:
O ye Argives, was your spear Keen, and your hearts so low and cold, to fear This babe? ‘Twas a strange murder for brave men! For fear this babe someday might raise again His fallen land! Had ye so little pride? While Hector fought, and thousands at his side, Ye smote us, and we perished; and now, now, When all are dead and Ilion lieth low, Ye dread this innocent!
There is no wisdom behind the decision, she goes on to say, but only “that rage of fear that hath no thought.”
Having vented her fury at those responsible, she turns to the child, pointing to the irony that the high walls that were supposed to protect the Trojans have been the instrument of his death:
Poor little child! Was it our ancient wall, the circuit piled By loving Gods, so savagely hath rent Thy curls, these little flowers innocent That were thy mother’s garden, where she laid Her kisses…
Hecuba goes on to remember a tender moment of togetherness. As Nussbaum notes (and as I, who have also lost a child, can confirm), there’s a special agony when the natural order is reversed and the child dies before the adult:
What false words ye said At daybreak, when ye crept into my bed, Called me kind names, and promised: ‘Grandmother, When thou art dead, I will cut close my hair, And lead out all the captains to ride by Thy tomb.’ Why didst thou cheat me so? ‘Tis I, Old, homeless, childless, that for thee must shed Cold tears, so young, so miserably dead.
All that Hecuba can feel in this moment is absence:
Dear God, the pattering welcomes of thy feet, The nursing in my lap; and O, the sweet Falling asleep together! All is gone.
Then her anger and bitter sarcasm takes over again. This is how mourning works, with the mind swinging wildly between heartbreak and rage:
How should a poet carve the funeral stone To tell thy story true? ‘There lieth here A babe whom the Greeks feared, and in their fear Slew him.’ Aye, Greece will bless the tale it tells!”
The speech ends with the irony of a prince’s son being buried in “poor garments,” along with a reflection—characteristic of the Greeks—on reversals of fortune and the vanity of human wishes. “Count no man happy until he is dead,” the historian Herodotus wrote, and Sophocles concludes Oedipus with the Chorus remarking, “[W]e cannot call a mortal being happy before he’s passed beyond life free from pain.” Euripides has a particularly bleak image, comparing fate (“the chances of the years”) to an idiot dancing in the wind:
Go, bring them—such poor garments hazardous As these days leave. God hath not granted us Wherewith to make much pride. But all I can, I give thee, Child of Troy.—O vain is man, Who glorieth in his joy and hath no fears: While to and fro the chances of the years Dance like an idiot in the wind! And none By any strength hath his own fortune won.
When Nussbaum says that Hecuba’s speech provided her with “a kind of road map that made me less alone, and less clueless, in my grief,” she refers to stepping into the great community of suffering humanity that goes back to the beginning of time. I remember thinking along the same lines the night after we lost Justin—that this is what the poets, playwrights, and fiction writers had been referring to in all the books I had read.
It was a small comfort to realize that I now was one of them. When tragedy strikes, we may feel like a drowning victim thrashing around in the water, but literature provides us with images, characters, and words that we can grab onto, as though to a life raft.
Put another way, when we join with Hecuba in our grieving, we do indeed feel “less alone.” We see that people have trod this path before us, noble and heroic as they protest life’s sorrows, which means that we can trod it as well.
Literature as an essential survival kit to cope with the worst that life can throw at us.
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Monday
Louise Gluck, the American poet who won the Nobel Prize in 2020, died last week. I found myself fascinated at one point by her poems about Persephone (Roman name Proserpine) and repost here the essay I wrote about one of them.
Reprinted from Oct. 15, 2020
I’m falling in love with the Persephone poems of Louise Glück, the recent Nobel literature laureate. “Persephone the Wanderer” is a nuanced exploration of explosive issues regarding teenage sexuality and rape.
In the myth, earth goddess Demeter threatens to kill all vegetation unless Hades returns her daughter, whom he has abducted. (In high school Latin, in conjunction with the story, I learned the word “rapere,” which means “to snatch” and which is the origin of our word “rape.”) Demeter gets only half of what she wants as Persephone, because she has eaten food in the underworld (six pomegranate seeds), can return for only half the year. Demeter’s mourning during those months explains fall and winter.
The poem begins with the mother’s perspective. Her scorched earth response to Persephone’s abduction hurts everyone. This, the poet explains, is “consistent with what we know of human behavior.” While I’m not sure why Glück calls this “negative creation,” I’ll buy her subsequent observation:
Human beings take profound satisfaction in doing harm, particularly unconscious harm
This is our first glimpse into Glück’s readiness to point out unpleasant parts of ourselves, which can be hidden under seemingly virtuous desires. Demeter is right to be upset, but does she relish her anger a bit too much? Does she enjoy lashing out?
The poem moves into an even more controversial female emotion when it raises the possibility of complicity. Did Persephone “cooperate in her rape,” the poet asks before turning to a more acceptable possibility:
[O]r was she drugged, violated against her will, as happens so often now to modern girls.
While Glück says that scholars debate the issue, her use of the word “pawed” suggests that their motives may be more lascivious and less academic than they would admit:
Persephone’s initial sojourn in hell continues to be pawed over by scholars who dispute the sensations of the virgin…
[Side note: In discussing her new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Sewanee classics professor Stephanie McCarter could have used the word “pawed” as she discussed how previous translators of Ovid–unlike Ovid himself–have sexualized Apollo’s attempted rape of Daphne.]
The story doesn’t end when Persephone returns home since, no longer a virgin, she bears a mark of shame. The red juice of the pomegranate seeds reminds the poet of Hawthorne’s scarlet letter:
As is well known, the return of the beloved does not correct the loss of the beloved: Persephone
returns home stained with red juice like a character in Hawthorne—
That’s not the end of the story, however. Glück is noteworthy for her extended meditations so that one is never sure where her poems are heading. Mentioning the word “home” gets her thinking along Thomas Wolfe’s observation that one can’t go home again. Persephone’s encounter with Hades means that, henceforth, she will become a wanderer, “at home nowhere”:
I am not certain I will keep this word [“home”]: is earth “home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably, in the bed of the god? Is she at home nowhere?
Her encounter with Hades has changed everything. Home can no longer be the innocence of childhood, a meadow filled with daisies where she sang “her maidenly songs”:
When death confronts her, she has never seen the meadow without the daisies. Suddenly she is no longer singing her maidenly songs about her mother’s beauty and fecundity. Where the rift is, the break is.
To describe Persephone’s encounter with sexuality as “in the bed of the god” raises the issue of sexuality’s power, how it can seem to take over one’s entire being. That the god’s “rape” might not be entirely objectionable is a possibility raised again by the final stanza, which suggests choice:
What will you do, when it is your turn in the field with the god?
To move from girlhood into sexuality can feel like something that is beyond mind:
She is lying in the bed of Hades. What is in her mind? Is she afraid? Has something blotted out the idea of mind?
Although her mother may be devastated, winter is not where Persephone herself is:
Persephone is having sex in hell. Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know what winter is, only that she is what causes it.
Put another way, it is snowing in her mother’s world but not in Persephone’s, which is why the poet asks, “Where is it snowing?” While the loss of Persephone may be winter for Demeter, for Persephone winter is more about forgetfulness than desecration. I suppose this could be PTSD trauma, Persephone blotting out what has happened, but other things in the poem suggest that Persephone is moving into an exciting new world. In any event, the poem moves powerfully between a mother’s and a daughter’s perspective, between desecration and simply forgetting one’s past:
You must ask yourself: where is it snowing?
White of forgetfulness, of desecration—
It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says
As it turns out, Persephone’s imprisonment in hell—if imprisonment is what it is—is not that different from her imprisonment in her girlhood:
She does know the earth is run by mothers, this much is certain. She also knows she is not what is called a girl any longer. Regarding incarceration, she believes
she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.
Sex in hell may represent liberation from one perspective, but from another it’s just exchanging one prison for another. According to the latter, Persephone is just a pawn in a battle between possessive mother and possessive lover. The story “should be read,” Glück writes,
as an argument between the mother and the lover— the daughter is just meat.
Or as the old folk song puts it, “Controlled by her parents until she’s a wife,/ A slave to her husband the rest of her life.”
However one reads the abduction that separates Persephone from her mother, it will change their future interactions. Reunions will become emotionally charged affairs as she wanders between earth and death. Will there be guilt at having left that she feels she must expiate? If she is not allowed to entirely leave (so that her old self can “die”) and yet feels that she regresses to her girlhood self while in her mother’s home (“you do not live”), then she will in fact drift. Glück startles us with the observation that her two worlds “seem, finally, strangely alike”:
The terrible reunions in store for her will take up the rest of her life. When the passion for expiation is chronic, fierce, you do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die.
You drift between earth and death which seem, finally, strangely alike.
At one point in the poem, Glück invokes Freud’s tripartite scheme of the mind—id, ego, and superego—which suggests a battle between forbidden desires (id) and social taboos (super ego). With regard to the sexual taboos, id, illicit desire, and Hades are all bound up together. But Hades is also the mythic realm that the poet can go to for inspiration. According to myth scholars, Persephone is associated with the world of spirit and the occult, the archetype that guides mystics and visionaries. In other words, she is fitting subject matter for a poet who looks for the spiritual dimensions of everyday life:
Song of the earth, song of the mythic vision of eternal life—
My soul shattered with the strain of trying to belong to earth…
Although the poem seems to have strayed from the theme of adolescent sexuality at this point—maybe she feels shattered because she keeps searching for the mythic ramifications—earth and myth are indeed bound up together. The fascination with sex and death, between the life force and the death force, could be what draws Persephone to Hades and, for that matter, teenagers to risky behavior. In the question that concludes the poem, Glück essentially asks how one could listen to one’s mother when this mysterious, dangerous, and unknown world beckons:
What will you do, when it is your turn in the field with the god?
I sense that, for anyone with spirit and imagination, the invitation will be hard to turn him down—which may go a long way towards explaining why teens so often “get into trouble.”
Here’s the poem:
Persephone the Wanderer By Louise Gluck
In the first version, Persephone is taken from her mother and the goddess of the earth punishes the earth—this is consistent with what we know of human behavior,
that human beings take profound satisfaction in doing harm, particularly unconscious harm:
we may call this negative creation.
Persephone’s initial sojourn in hell continues to be pawed over by scholars who dispute the sensations of the virgin:
did she cooperate in her rape, or was she drugged, violated against her will, as happens so often now to modern girls.
As is well known, the return of the beloved does not correct the loss of the beloved: Persephone
returns home stained with red juice like a character in Hawthorne—
I am not certain I will keep this word: is earth “home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably, in the bed of the god? Is she at home nowhere? Is she a born wanderer, in other words an existential replica of her own mother, less hamstrung by ideas of causality?
You are allowed to like no one, you know. The characters are not people. They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.
Three parts: just as the soul is divided, ego, superego, id. Likewise
the three levels of the known world, a kind of diagram that separates heaven from earth from hell.
You must ask yourself: where is it snowing?
White of forgetfulness, of desecration—
It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says
Persephone is having sex in hell. Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know what winter is, only that she is what causes it.
She is lying in the bed of Hades. What is in her mind? Is she afraid? Has something blotted out the idea of mind?
She does know the earth is run by mothers, this much is certain. She also knows she is not what is called a girl any longer. Regarding incarceration, she believes
she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.
The terrible reunions in store for her will take up the rest of her life. When the passion for expiation is chronic, fierce, you do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die.
You drift between earth and death which seem, finally, strangely alike. Scholars tell us
that there is no point in knowing what you want when the forces contending over you could kill you.
White of forgetfulness, white of safety—
They say there is a rift in the human soul which was not constructed to belong entirely to life. Earth
asks us to deny this rift, a threat disguised as suggestion— as we have seen in the tale of Persephone which should be read
as an argument between the mother and the lover— the daughter is just meat.
When death confronts her, she has never seen the meadow without the daisies. Suddenly she is no longer singing her maidenly songs about her mother’s beauty and fecundity. Where the rift is, the break is.
Song of the earth, song of the mythic vision of eternal life—
My soul shattered with the strain of trying to belong to earth—
What will you do, when it is your turn in the field with the god?
Note on the painting: Rossetti’s “Proserpine,” one of my favorite paintings (it hangs in our living room), captures the fascination with sexuality and death that Glück explores. Proserpine is cast as an Eve figure, deliberately and provocatively eating the pomegranate as though she is fully aware of the consequences. The slice taken from the fruit resembles a vaginal opening, further suggesting she has embraced her abduction.
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Sunday
Our church’s Director of Christian Formation, Jeannie Babb, addressed our weekly Sunday Forum last week about how she uses poetry as a tool for healing ministry in jail and at a long-term residence for women recovering from commercial sexual exploitation and addiction. In the course of her talk, Jeannie read us poems that women had written as they sought to come to terms with their past and negotiate their futures.
For privacy reasons, we can’t share the poems here, but I can report that they moved us deeply as they captured both what it’s like to feel trapped and to experience hope. Many were expressions of deep gratitude.
Jeannie, who has an STM degree (Master of Sacred Theology) from Sewanee’s School of Theology (class of ’13), wrote her thesis on violence against women in scripture and martyrology.
To set the tone for her talk, Jeannie shared one of her own poems, which we came to realize describes many of the ways that the women she works with use poetry.
Jelly God By Jeannie Babb
I am thankful for the invisible jellylike grace that surrounds and supports me when God has no face, and for the sky that quietly swallows my shouts and forgets them more eloquently than I bellow them out. And when I fall I’m thankful that it hurts when I land, to know the ground was solid where I made my stand.
By Jeannie Babb, Director of Christian Formation at St. Mark and St. Paul, Sewanee Tn
Sometimes the purpose of poetry is to give voice to collective pain and hope.
What else might it be?
–an invitation| –a realignment
Poet Bobby LeFebre recently described his designation as Colorado’s Poet Laureate as
more than a title; it was a calling, a duty, and a privilege. The poet, when effective, is not merely a writer of words, but a cultural worker—a healer who uses the alchemy of language to mend the broken and bind the wounds of our collective spirit. The poet is a conductor and conduit of a world that begs us to see and celebrate our profound relationship to it. We are more than literature; we are cultural translators, humble prophets, communal visionaries. We are stewards and servants of humanity and emotion, dreamers and realists inseparably entwined.
But what about poetry as a medium for healing? We do that every Sunday morning, at least. In our prayers, in the Psalms and the Prophets, in many of the Old and New Testament readings,
Poetry is self-help. It’s hard to write poetry and not grow, emotionally and spiritually. Recovery groups like AA use poetry as well. We all know the serenity prayer. Well, it’s actually part of a poem attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace. Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will; that I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with Him forever in the next.
I have been using poetry with women in recovery for many years, most recently in a class that I teach at Rahab’s Rest in Chattanooga, which is a long-term residential program for women who are survivors of commercial sexual exploitation. Rahab’s Rest is a ministry of Love’s Arm Outreach, a non-profit agency that also provides street outreach and jail outreach, a crisis hotline, jail ministry and other programs to exploited women.
Poetry is artifice, from which we get the word art. In other words, it is not reality but a representation of it. If an artist paints your portrait, that portrait is not you but an interpretation of you. This means that poets, without revealing anything, can still be dangerously open and raw. The words are both a mirror to reveal ourselves and a medium to hide behind.
When someone writes a story or book, the first question the world wants to know is often, “Is it true?” But having delivered many different poems in a wide variety of places, I can report that nobody asks you if it’s true. Somehow, poetry does not carry the same burden of reality as prose. All poetry is true, in the sense that a dream is true. For this reason, poetry is an especially poignant vehicle for reflecting on, sharing, and healing from trauma.
Here is a poem I’ve read with my students at Rahab’s Rest:
i have been a thousand different women By Emory Hall
make peace with all the women you once were.
lay flowers at their feet.
offer them incense and honey and forgiveness.
honor them and give them your silence.
listen.
bless them and let them be.
for they are the bones of the temple you sit in now.
for they are the rivers of wisdom leading you toward the sea.
In the recovery context, some poems work better than others. As regards my students, they generally haven’t attended college and many were on the street before they completed high school. Some were already pregnant or in jail or both.
I wonder what words or pictures come in your mind when I say that my students are victims of sex trafficking or commercial sexual exploitation, what we used to call prostitutes. I wonder what you think they look like. How old are these women in your mind? What color are they? Are they hometown girls or from far away? Whatever you imagine is probably not wrong, just incomplete.
The ages of my students span several decades. Some are mothers, usually from a young age. Many of them have given up children, lost children, or had them taken from them. Many of them are now grandmothers.
When we talk about recovery, that includes recovery from substance abuse. It’s a chicken-and-egg sort of question: is one exploited because of addiction or does one become addicted because of exploitation? Answer: it goes both ways. The real “egg” here is the sexual abuse of children.
Right now, there’s a lot of focus on sex trafficking (and especially child sex trafficking) in popular culture, but people have a lot of misconceptions. Some suburban moms think their child is going to be abducted out of the shopping cart at Target. That’s not what’s happening—if it were, it would be all over the news.
The truth is much more insidious. Victims of child sexual abuse are typically harmed in their own homes, by a family member or someone close to the family. Women who are being commercially exploited were usually groomed from the time they were very young and then trafficked by family members, neighbors, or boyfriends. By the time they reach adulthood, they are deeply traumatized, suffering from substance abuse disorders and other mental health conditions. They have been conditioned to accept sexual abuse and exploitation.
Another misconception is that these women “just need Jesus.” The truth is that many already embrace him. The women I meet at Rahab’s Rest and the women I meet in jail have a very deep faith in God. I’ve yet to meet a survivor who says that God has let her down. Now, she may tell you that people have let her down, although in most cases she’ll blame herself. But as far as God goes, residents at Rahab’s Rest and women I meet in jail are often grateful to God and to those who have reached out to them. This comes through in their poetry.
One day during class I asked the women at Rahab’s Rest if they would like to write some poems for me to take to the jail. Because we wanted the poems to be from all the students and be fully anonymous, I had them each write a line of a poem and then pass the page on to someone else, who wrote a second line, and so on.
The next Saturday I laid the poems in the tray that goes through the metal detector, and the chaplain led me across the yard through all the locked gates and heavy doors to a classroom. Always, it seems, it’s a different classroom because parts of the jail are undergoing renovation.
When the women came to the room, they were dragging chains. The chaplain explained that, because of the classroom location, they could only attend Bible class if they wore shackles. She gently reminded them to take small steps so they wouldn’t trip, and one older woman was stifling a cry with every step because the cuffs were digging into her tendons.
I was humbled, realizing how badly they wanted to be there. If they had to drag chains to hear a message of God’s love, they would do so. I told them about the poems that had been written specifically for them and passed them around, having the women read them out loud.
“Dope was the love of my life,” one inmate read, and then clutched the paper to her chest. “It’s me,” she said, “this poem is about me.” She continued reading, with tears streaming down her face, as the poem pivoted from despair to a message of hope.
The women I work with in jail are, again, all ages. Most of them grew up in the area. In some cases, their grandmothers prayed for them and took them to church. Given their deep faith, I find myself wondering whether agnosticism and atheism is a sign of privilege. These women don’t have that luxury. Given that they often lack education, generational wealth, mental health and in many cases physical health, prayer is all they have.
Their conditions are often very treatable, but instead of treatment they encounter punishment and a cycle of poverty, exploitation, and substances.
One day I asked Chaplain Jones about the most common factor leading to incarceration in Hamilton County. I expected her to point to substance abuse but instead she said, “lack of affordable housing.” People are becoming newly-homeless at an alarming rate in Chattanooga.
Often they live in their car, at least at first. One of my students wrote about the grace of still having that one single possession when one has lost everything else. She wrote how her car “held” her and helped quiet “the voices of addiction.” In that space, she could hear a still, small voice that gave her just enough hope to make the phone call that led her to Love’s Arm, where she has experienced safety, clarity, and sobriety.
While I had permission to read the students’ poetry aloud, I asked Robin not to include them in his blog since they are “unpublished.” Recently my students had the idea to write a poetry chapbook compiling their works. They hope their poems will find their way to people who need that kind of hope.
Recently, Love’s Arm opened a second house, this one to provide acute rather than long-term assistance. Josephine’s House provides a safe place for bringing women directly off the street and assisting them with active addiction. The goal is to provide safety as well as some immediate medical and mental health care so residents can find that clarity of mind our poet mentioned. After that, they can decide what step they are ready to take. The women at Rahab’s Rest have enthusiastically pitched in to prepare Josephine’s House.
One of them even wrote a poem to welcome new residents.
Note: For more information of Love’s Arm, see lovesarmoutreach.org. You may watch Jeannie’s presentation, along with readings of poems written by the women she works with, at https://www.facebook.com/100064290295310/videos/1365868824305224.
