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Tuesday
I suspect I’m not the only American thoroughly confused by the present political climate. On the one hand, this country is doing remarkably well, not only economically but in many other realms, especially with regard to technological advances and medical breakthroughs. We also have a remarkable university system which educates those who go on to make possible many of societal and life style benefits we have come to take for granted. Millions around the world would love to emigrate here.
Yet at the same time, we regularly hear open calls for civil war from various quarters, and while an authoritarian ignoramus like Donald Trump may have lost the last election, he still commands a following in the tens of millions. At his instigation, some of these stormed the Capitol while others carry out lone wolf programs of mass shootings.
We have such a strong military that we fear no invasion—think how few countries have been able to say that in world history—and yet we never know when lethal violence will break out in this school or that church/synagogue/ mosque. Meanwhile, the same technology that allows us unprecedented mobility and comfort at contributing to extreme weather events that overwhelm us.
If ever there were a time to cite the opening lines to Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, this is it:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
Maybe I’ll just leave it there, adding only that—in the course of the novel—the human heart ultimately shines brighter than human evil and human ignorance. For all the damage caused by the “worst of times,” Dickens assures us that the destroyers don’t get the last word.
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Labor Day
Here’s a good worker poem for Labor Day. Seamus Heaney’s “The Forge” is a nostalgic look at an ancient profession. Passing by “old axles and iron hoops rusting,” the poet enters a dark room where the blacksmith, somewhat mythically, hammers upon an anvil that is “horned as a unicorn.” This is sacred space as the smith hammers upon an “altar,” “expend[ing] himself in shape and music.
And if perchance he ventures outside to view the modern world, he sees nothing worth noting: monotonous traffic flashes by where once there was a “clatter of hoofs.” Unimpressed, he returns to “beat real iron out, to work the bellows.” “Leathered aproned” with “hairs in his nose,” he stands in contrast to the anonymous, mechanized work force of our own time. He brings to mind Longfellow’s smith:
Under a spreading chestnut-tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands; And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long, His face is like the tan; His brow is wet with honest sweat, He earns whate’er he can, And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man.
I suspect Heaney was well acquainted with this figure from pre-industrial times.
The Forge By Seamus Heaney
All I know is a door into the dark. Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting; Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring, The unpredictable fantail of sparks Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water. The anvil must be somewhere in the center, Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square, Set there immoveable: an altar Where he expends himself in shape and music. Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose, He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows; Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.
Simon Vouet, Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry (detail)
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Sunday
I share here a talk I am giving today to our church’s Adult Forum on “Creating in God’s Image.” The topic is the relationship of God and creativity.
In her best-selling writer’s guide The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron maps out the connection she sees between God and creativity. Her ten basic principles, she says, are the bedrock on which “creative recovery and discovery can be built.” As the former alcoholic, drug addict, and agnostic sees it, connecting with God not only helped her get her life back in order but also proved to be a boon to her writing.
I begin today’s talk with Cameron’s articulation because it provides a perspective on how artists throughout history have drawn on spiritual energies in their work. My focus will be on the act of requesting divine aid, whether through prayer, ritual ceremony, meditation, or “invoking the muse,” as Homer does in the opening lines of both The Iliad and The Odyssey.
First, however, here are Cameron’s Ten Principles on how creativity has a spiritual dimension:
1. Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure creative energy. 2. There is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life — including ourselves. 3. When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the creator’s creativity within us and our lives. 4. We are, ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves. 5. Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God. 6. The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to our true nature. 7. When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: good orderly direction. 8. As we open our creative channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected. 9. It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity. 10. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.
In choosing “Creating in God’s Image” as our Sunday Forum theme this year, our Christian Formation Committee riffed off the passage in Genesis as to how humankind was created in God’s image. As Cameron describes it, in creating we reenact the creation, fulfilling our essential purpose and, in so doing, moving toward divinity.
On the other hand, Cameron says that we experience blockage when we let our egos get in the way. We don’t allow ourselves to be conduits for God’s creativity but instead—to borrow a line from Pride and Prejudice—allow self to intrude. We don’t, as the saying is, “let go, let God.
Of course, there’s also work involved in the artistic process—it’s not just about letting go—and in a moment I’ll move into Plato’s exploration over whether art is more an artisanal craft or a divine madness. Some, reminding us of the effort required, talk about art being “10% inspiration, 90% perspiration.” But focus on that 10% for a moment. The word “inspiration” comes from the Latin “inspiratus,” meaning “breathe into.” It is as though some other worldly force is breathing into the artist, with the work of art the result.
The Romantic poets, especially Percy Bysshe Shelley, believed that a creative force blows through the universe. Shelley may have proclaimed himself an atheist while a student at Oxford but, if so, he was a particularly spiritual atheist. In “Ode to the West Wind,” he finds a metaphor for divine Imagination.
The west wind, which seems wild, untameable, and at times destructive, is also a source for new life. In the final two sections of the poem, Shelley talks of himself being carried by the west wind as though he were a dead leaf. He also imagines himself as a “swift cloud,” as a wave “pant[ing] beneath thy power,” and as an Aeolian or wind harp, with the wind blowing through him just as it blows through a forest:
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Why a dead leaf? Shelley here may be talking of how poets can find themselves cut off from the creative spirit. I recall Sparky Edgin, who taught us the poem in my junior English class at Sewanee Military Academy, pointing out that the leaf could also be the leaf or page of a book. Shelley at this point in the poem is lamenting how his adult sensibility and the cares of the world are keeping him from being as open to creativity as he was when he was a boy, “when to outstrip thy skiey speed/ Scarce seem’d a vision.” Instead, he now falls upon the “thorns of life” and bleeds.
This is a common Romantic theme, found most notably in such Wordsworth poems as Tintern Abbey and Intimations of Immortality. “Shades of the prison-house begin to close/ Upon the growing boy,” Wordsworth writes in the latter.. But Shelley then holds out a vision of hope. Perhaps the spirit is not altogether dead. Imagine those withered leaves, he says, as sparks from a fire that has not altogether gone out. And if they are still alive, maybe they will awaken the cold earth with new fire. Propelled by this divine spirit, Shelley’s words will function as a prophecy: spring will come.
To be sure, the west wind is destructive as well as creative, bringing wintry blasts as well as carrying seeds. Earlier in the poem Shelley calls it “destroyer and preserver.” For Shelley as for Lord Byron, nature isn’t only Wordsworth’s daffodils but also storms and volcanoes, what the Romantics called “the dark sublime.”
I mention this dark side of the creating spirit—the idea that this divine force can be destructive as well as life affirming—because that’s how Plato saw it. You’ve perhaps heard about how, in his ideal “republic,” he bans poets for being a disorderly influence. He wants philosopher kings, not poets, running things.
Nevertheless, Plato has some interesting thoughts about the divine source of poetic inspiration. Some of his most interesting thoughts appear in The Ion, where Socrates cross-examines a rhapsode famous for his dramatic recitations of Homer.
Ion has the ability to sway audiences with emotional renderings of (to mention instances cited by Socrates) the wrenching scene where Andromache, Hecuba and Priam mourn the death of I Hector and the heart-stopping moment when Odysseus reveals himself to the suitors. Imagine being in the audience as the greatest actor of your day recites the following passage:
You yellow dogs, you thought I’d never make it home from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder, twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared bid for my wife while I was still alive. Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven, contempt for what men say of you hereafter. Your last hour has come. You die in blood.
I imagine one could have heard a pin drop.
Stretching the audience to the emotional max is no problem for Ion—he revels in it as much as the spectators do—but for Plato it’s a problem. After all, if you’re wound up, that means you are not, to use his words, in your “right mind.” If Ion were applying crafted artifice in his cause, it would be okay because reason would be involved. But Plato fears that he has been inspired.
Inspired people, as Plato sees it, get swept up in their emotions. It’s a very different perspective than we find in Shelley and the other Romantics. While not opposed to Reason, they are promoting feeling to counteract what they saw as the 18th century’s overemphasis on rationality. In defense of Plato’s anxieties about emotional appeals, we must remember that he saw strong emotions propel the Athenian assembly into ruinous wars, not to mention the execution of his beloved teacher. But the main reason why I bring up The Ion is because of Plato’s exploration of divine inspiration.
To describe it, he uses two analogies, one involving a magnet, the other ecstatic dance. Here’s the first:
The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration.
In other words, the artist serves as a channel from the heavenly muse to the audience.
Perhaps finding magnets not dynamic enough, however, Socrates turns to another analogy, this one involving possession and Bacchanalian frenzy:
For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revelers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and meter they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind.
While Plato prefers that Apollo rather than Dionysus influence his art—in The Republic he praises Apollo’s lyre while banning Pan’s pipes—he sees divinity at work in both kinds of art. Humans are creating in the god’s image in both instances. It’s just that, in a polytheistic society, there are different gods one can draw inspiration from. In Christianity people sometimes need to resort to the religion’s unofficial second god, Satan, to explain the supernatural source for art they don’t like. Recall that, in the 1950s and 1960s, Christians like Billy Graham regarded rock and roll as “the devil’s music.”
It makes sense, given the stupendous challenge of a 24-book oral epic , that Homer would feel the need for divine assistance. “Anger be now your song, immortal one,” he says as he invokes the muse Calliope in The Iliad while in The Odyssey (to quote from Emily Wilson’s wonderful translation) he calls out,
Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost…
Milton, seeking to write a Christian epic that would rival the epics of his pagan predecessors, found his own muse in the Holy Spirit. This was the spirit that spoke to Moses on the mountain, to Jesus during his baptism, and to the disciples at Pentecost:
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing, Heavenly Muse…
Milton has a heavy ask of this Heavenly Muse:
Illumine, what is low raise and support; That, to the height of this great argument, I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.
In other words, this blind, imprisoned poet is asking the Holy Spirit to enlighten him as to why God allows bad things to happen to good people.
Milton’s muse provides seemingly supernatural assistance. In Book IX, conflating Urania, the muse of astronomy, with the Holy Spirit, Milton reports that his “celestial patroness” shows up nightly. And in fact, each morning he would come to breakfast with dozens of lines in his head to pass on to his scribes. In his words, his patroness
dictates to me slumb’ring, or inspires Easy my unpremeditated Verse…
To conclude, I turn to two other request for divine aid I’ve come across my reading. Alice Walker addresses a spirit as she opens The Color Purple, although her faith tradition is unclear:
To the Spirit:
Without whose assistance Neither this book Nor I Would have been Written.
As Walker sees it, the spirit is not only working through her but has created her. She is a result of the creative process that, in turn, is using her to continue creating.
Native American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko says something similar in the opening of Ceremony, where she invokes figures from Laguna Pueblo traditions:
Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought Woman, is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears.
She thought of her sisters, Nau’ts’ity’I and I’tcts’ity’I, and together they created the Universe this world and the four worlds below.
Thought-Woman, the spider, named things and as she named them they appeared.
She is sitting in her room thinking of a story now
I’m telling you the story she is thinking.
For the Laguna Pueblo, storytelling is a ceremony that links them with their mythical deities. This goes not only for their traditional stories but also for new stories arising out of the tradition. Silko makes a point throughout her novel that, in a changing environment, the stories too must evolve. That being said, however, she still grounds herself in the core traditions of her people. Thought-Woman is her muse.
It’s noteworthy that this muse is also depicted as a spider—a creature that spins its creation out of the core of its being—since the West African storytelling god Anansi is also a spider. Originating in Ghana but then brought to the Caribbean by slaves, Anansi is a trickster figure with a complicated relationship with the creator. In some stories, Anansi sounds like Prometheus, only instead of bringing down fire from the sky gods, he brings down stories. In any event, like all muse figures, he works as an intermediary between the sacred and the profane. To invoke Anansi or to tell an Anansi story is to immerse oneself in a culture sustaining process.
And here’s one last example. Lucille Clifton sometimes sees it as a mixed blessing that she is in thrall to spiritual energies. In her poem “the light that came to lucille clifton,” she talks about the moment in her life when she came to see herself not just as a mother and a wife but as a poet. In her recounting, she had been resisting that knowing but the light proved to be too insistent:
the light that came to lucille clifton came in a shift of knowing when even her fondest sureties faded away. it was the summer she understood that she had not understood and was not mistress even of her own off eye. then the man escaped throwing away his tie and the children grew legs and started walking and she could see the peril of an unexamined life. she closed her eyes, afraid to look for her authenticity but the light insists on itself in the world; a voice from the nondead past started talking, she closed her ears and it spelled out in her hand “you might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.”
Art, has countless people have noted over the centuries, is a strange mixture of the material and the otherworldly. It’s building blocks are things of this world—words, sounds, human movement, wood, stone, clay, etc.—but something spiritual enters in. Perhaps, this being a Christian forum, we can think of it as a little piece of God’s kingdom come to earth.
In my talk today I’ve given instances of artists acknowledging art’s spiritual dimension and sometimes overtly courting it. I’d be very interested in our question-and-answer period of hearing about your own experiences with artistic transcendence. If you are an artist, how do you channel spirit into your work? If you are a consumer of art, what works have lifted you out of yourself and into a different space? Where have you experienced creating in God’s image?
Robert Frost reading at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration
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Friday
With all the recent rightwing assaults on books, it’s good to revisit John F. Kennedy’s Amherst speech in favor of the arts, delivered shortly before he was shot. Since discomfort with independent thinking appears to be a major factor propelling the censors, it’s refreshing to hear from someone who likes it when artists critique our society and call out America for failing to live up to its full potential.
Delivered on Oct. 26, 1963, the talk was in part to honor Robert Frost, who had died earlier in the year. Frost, Kennedy said, “brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society”:
His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. “I have been” he wrote, “one acquainted with the night.” And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair.
Kennedy goes on to talk about how a poet like Frost challenges power hierarchies, which is why great literature makes rightwing governors like Texas’s Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis so uncomfortable. Kennedy notes that, “at bottom,” Frost
held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it is hardly an accident that [he] coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.
As we watch authoritarians pervert school curricula, censor libraries, and interfere with reproductive and gender choices, watching someone applaud artists who remain faithful to their “personal vision of reality” is a welcome change. Such an artist, Kenney says, becomes
the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover’s quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist’s fidelity has strengthened the fiber of our national life.
For a dramatic instance of Frost’s darker truths, it’s worth revisiting “The Road Not Taken” since it’s so frequently misinterpreted. In the past I’ve done a deep dive into the poem so I’ll just mention here that it’s not a self-flattering poem about making daring and unconventional choices. Rather, it exposes how we fool ourselves about past decisions. Wanting to think of ourselves as heroic individualists, we tell ourselves we took the less-worn path but have to admit, in retrospect, that the two paths were “really about the same.” Frost, in other words, is dismantling a key American myth.
Back to Kennedy’s speech, which goes on to have a message for those Florida and Texas censors who are banning works by Toni Morrison, Khaled Hosseini, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Isabel Allende, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sandra Cisneros, Maya Angelou, and John Irving (among many others) while expurgating Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth:
If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.
Really, Kennedy’s speech should be required reading for everyone engaged in education and civic life since it doesn’t hold back. Continuing on in the same vein, Kennedy says,
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
And:
In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society–in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having “nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.”
I’d like to see “art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth” above every library—and plastered in every literature classroom—in America. The problem with the MAGA right is that they aren’t about to let the chips “fall where they may.” They want to control kids rather than allow them to search for truth. Choosing sterility because its feels safe to them, they shortchange the nation in the process.
Towards the end of his talk, Kennedy says,
I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens.
There are currently forces at work in our country seeking just the opposite—and all too often getting their way.
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Thursday
There are different ways to interpret Franz Kafka’s nightmarish visions. Some read his stories as vivid allegories of being trapped in one’s mind, where guilt, paranoia, and a pervading sense of dread combine to plunge us into depression. Others, such as imprisoned Russian dissident Valdimir Kara-Murz, see them as an objective description of life under authoritarian rule.
Kara-Murz, who has been in jail since April for speaking out against the Ukraine invasion, alludes to Kafka in a recent Washington Post column. In it he describes his experience of serving as a defense witness for Alexei Navalny, the opposition candidate that Putin first imprisoned, then poisoned, and then imprisoned again. Kara-Murz participated in the hearing through a video link while locked inside an iron cage. He describes the scene:
What I saw made me think of a scene in Franz Kafka’s The Trial in which the protagonist, facing a prosecutor and assembled guests in the attic of a random residential building, has to respond to charges of which he has no knowledge. The room on the video screen looked like a school gym. At the head of the court, under a double-headed eagle clumsily fastened to the wall, sat Moscow City Court Judge Andrei Suvorov, with his chair behind a small (also school-type) desk. His judicial gown looked strikingly out of place given the circumstances. The room was filled with men in black masks and khaki uniforms. At another table by the wall on the left side of the screen sat the defendant surrounded by his lawyers — and it was only when he stood up to approach the camera and speak that I realized it was Alexei Navalny.
Here’s the episode from The Trial that Kara-Murz references:
K. thought he had stepped into a meeting. A medium sized, two windowed room was filled with the most diverse crowd of people—nobody paid any attention to the person who had just entered. Close under its ceiling it was surrounded by a gallery which was also fully occupied and where the people could only stand bent down with their heads and their backs touching the ceiling….
At the other end of the hall where K. had been led there was a little table set at an angle on a very low podium which was as overcrowded as everywhere else, and behind the table, near the edge of the podium, sat a small, fat, wheezing man who was talking with someone behind him.
It was not only the setting that reminded Kara-Murz of The Trial. Because Navalny could only ask for Kara-Murz’s supportive testimony in terms of his official indictment, his questions proved to be “no less Kafkaesque than the surroundings.” Presumably, Kara-Murz answered “no” to the following queries, but there’s a sense of unreality in Navalny having to ask them at all:
Does public opposition to the government constitute extremist activity? Is the freedom of public demonstrations conditional on permission by the authorities? Was [Navalny’s] 2013 campaign for mayor of Moscow (where he came in second with 27 percent of the vote) just a cover for his underground illegal activities? Were Alexei’s anticorruption investigations detailing the riches of Vladimir Putin and his close entourage slanderous fabrications? And so on. A few times I had to ask whether the question was serious. “Unfortunately, yes — that is my indictment,” Alexei would respond each time.
The questions are Kafkaesque because, as becomes quickly clear while reading The Trial, dialogue seldom has a natural feel to it. It’s as though everything has been run through a bureaucratic filter. Even a conversation that K has with his uncle is skewed and elliptical.
Kara-Murz would undoubtedly characterize Navalny’s and his own trials as Kafkaesque, given that the outcomes are predetermined. That’s also the case with K, as he is informed by a court painter with insights into how the system works:
We’re talking about two different things here, there’s what it says in the law and there’s what I know from my own experience, you shouldn’t get the two confused. I’ve never seen it in writing, but the law does, of course, say on the one hand that the innocent will be set free, but on the other hand it doesn’t say that the judges can be influenced. But in my experience it’s the other way round. I don’t know of any absolute acquittals but I do know of many times when a judge has been influenced. It’s possible, of course, that there was no innocence in any of the cases I know about. But is that likely? Not a single innocent defendant in so many cases? … I hardly ever got the chance to go to court myself but always made use of it when I could, I’ve listened to countless trials at important stages in their development, I’ve followed them closely as far as they could be followed, and I have to say that I’ve never seen a single acquittal.
Russia is notorious for its high conviction rates, especially when it comes to those who oppose Putin. So yes, “Kafkaesque” is an apt description.
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Wednesday
Is there anyone in American political history who has elicited more loyalty from his followers than Donald Trump? It may be the case, as Never Trumper Rick Wilson puts it, that “everything Trump touches dies,” but even in “death” Trump supporters don’t abandon him. In fact, they seem to cling to him even more.
It appears that once you have declared love for Big Brother, there’s no going back.
I recently thought of this love after reading an “I was wrong” column by Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait. Exploring why he had overestimated Ron DeSantis’s prospect of dethroning Trump, Chait said that he had underestimated Trump’s attraction. “The personality cult is even cultier than I’d thought,” he writes, explaining,
I made the larger error of analyzing the primary as though it were a normal party nomination, when in reality DeSantis is attempting the far more difficult task of displacing the leader of a personality cult.
And:
[I]t wasn’t mere pugilism that Republican voters turned out to crave. Trump had redefined the party’s identity around loyalty to himself….His fans have grown accustomed to altering their beliefs about everything and anything to conform to their leader’s ever-changing line.
At one point in the article Chait points out that a declaration of Trump spokesman Steven Cheung– “Trump is always right”–echoes the horse Boxer in Orwell’s Animal Farm:
Boxer, who had now had time to think things over, voiced the general feeling by saying: “If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right.” And from then on he adopted the maxim, “Napoleon is always right,” in addition to his private motto of “I will work harder.”
Digging deeper into cult psychology, Chait quotes a rightwing pundit, who received the following from one of her listeners. It helps us understand why none of Trump’s GOP opponents can dent his popularity:
Keep in mind that supporting Trump came with costs never associated with supporting Bush, McCain, or Romney. Trump supporters lost friendships. Brothers and sisters stopped talking to each other. There are parents whose children disowned them, and grandparents who will never see their grandchildren again because they stood by Donald Trump.
Every Republican has these stories. Every Republican knows Republicans who have these stories.
Attacking Trump was effectively telling every Republican who made real sacrifices that they were stupid for doing so because Trump was just a poser.
In other words, Trump-worshipping parents and grandparents have chosen him over their children and grandchildren. It is a move reminiscent of 1984’s Winston Smith transferring his love from Julia to Big Brother. In doing so, his previous beliefs about himself are shattered:
‘They can’t get inside you,’ she had said. But they could get inside you. ‘What happens to you here is FOR EVER,’ O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
To be sure, Trump supporters haven’t turned their backs on loved ones because they were threatened with face-eating rats. But they have their own fears—whether about race, gender, immigration, or LBGTQ+ folk—and these have overridden tender feelings. Ideology has trumped love, leading them to versions of Orwell’s final terrifying vision:
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Why settle for blood kin when you can have a figure who makes perfect calls, one who is (for some) the reincarnation of Jesus himself? Why struggle with difficult familial relationships when you can fall, all doubts resolved, upon Big Brother’s loving breast? It’s so much easier than wrestling with one’s own confused heart.
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Tuesday
Former GOP consultant and now leading Never Trumper Rick Wilson famously coined the maxim “Everything Trump Touches Dies” (ETTD for short). As various of Trump’s former lawyers face disbarment for their work on his behalf, I’ve been thinking of a literary character whose glib tongue gets him hired by a powerful man, only to ultimately be brought low by the association: Gri’ma, a.k.a. the Wormtongue.
Some of the Wormtongues who have worked for Trump—and who are now being indicted along with him by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis—are Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jeffrey Clark. Among their crimes are devising the fake electors scheme and pressuring Georgia officials to “find” more votes for Trump. For their efforts, they now face a fate similar to that suffered by Wormtongue after his boss Saruman is toppled.
Wormtongue is noteworthy for having poured poison into the ears of King Theoden and others in his court as he sought to replace truth with falsehood. In the end, he finds himself tied to his disgraced boss, wandering the landscape as a beggar while Saruman berates him:
‘Get up, you idiot!’ he shouted to the other beggar, who had sat down on the ground; and he struck him with his staff. ‘Turn about! If these fine folk are going our way, then we will take another. Get on, or I’ll give you no crust for your supper!’
The beggar turned and slouched past whimpering: ‘Poor old Grı´ma! Poor old Grı´ma! Always beaten and cursed. How I hate him! I wish I could leave him!’
‘Then leave him!’ said Gandalf.
But Wormtongue only shot a glance of his bleared eyes full of terror at Gandalf, and then shuffled quickly past behind Saruman. As the wretched pair passed by the company they came to the hobbits, and Saruman stopped and stared at them; but they looked at him with pity.
While Trump may not insult his lawyers in this fashion, he exhibits his own form of contempt by refusing to pay them. Word is that Giuliani is bankrupt and the others are looking for other sources to cover their legal expenses. As someone (I believe Never Trumper lawyer George Conway) once quipped, MAGA stands for “Make Attorneys Get Attorneys.”
The question is now whether Trump’s lawyers will rise up against him as Wormtongue does with Saruman. Jay Kuo, who authors the legal blog The Status Kuo, is predicting that they will:
These defendants may seek to tie Trump directly to the case in order to throw him under the bus before he can do it to them. For example, they could claim they provided Trump with an array of options, but he took it to the next level by choosing the most crimey path.
In the final episode involving Saruman and Wormtongue, the hobbits have just overthrown them in the battle to free the Shire and sent them packing once again. Saruman (a.k.a. Sharkey) reveals how Wormtongue, at his command, killed quisling hobbit chieftain Lotho Baggins and possibly ate him:
‘Worm killed your Chief, poor little fellow, your nice little Boss. Didn’t you, Worm? Stabbed him in his sleep, I believe. Buried him, I hope; though Worm has been very hungry lately. No, Worm is not really nice. You had better leave him to me.’
A look of wild hatred came into Wormtongue’s red eyes. ‘You told me to; you made me do it,’ he hissed.
Saruman laughed. ‘You do what Sharkey says, always, don’t you, Worm? Well, now he says: follow!’ He kicked Wormtongue in the face as he groveled, and turned and made off.
It is at this point that this follower has had enough:
But at that something snapped: suddenly Wormtongue rose up, drawing a hidden knife, and then with a snarl like a dog he sprang on Saruman’s back, jerked his head back, cut his throat, and with a yell ran off down the lane.
Will Trump’s coup co-conspirators ultimately cut Trump’s throat (metaphorically) to save themselves? Will their defense strategy consist of hissing out, “You told me to; you made me do it”? Stay tuned.
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Monday
I’m a bit dumbstruck to learn that one of the major inspirations for the Barbie movie is Milton’s Paradise Lost, although in retrospect it makes a lot of sense. Here’s what director Greta Gerwig has to say about her use of the 17th century epic:
I remember the first time when I read Milton and I realized this idea of, Paradise has no poetry. Because what do you need metaphor for if everything is literally what it is? You need this sort of separation from your environment in order to have a need for the beauty of poetry.
I don’t entirely agree about there being no poetry in Eden—I’ll give an example in a moment—but I get Greta Gerwig’s point. The aspects of the poem we are most likely to recall are (1) Satan’s fall and (2) Adam and Eve’s temptation. There’s not much drama to be found in the first humans pruning bushes and having beautiful sex.
And yes, Milton believes that Adam and Eve had sex. After all, they needed to turn out more bush pruners. The poet does, however, draw a discrete curtain over the act, essentially saying that the two did not not have sex. Or as Milton puts it, after lying down naked side by side, they didn’t refuse “the rites mysterious of connubial love”:
…and eased the putting off These troublesome disguises which we wear, Straight side by side were laid, nor turned I ween Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites Mysterious of connubial Love refused…
But as for poetry, right before this scene there’s some pretty good verse, offered up as a hymn of gratitude:
Thus at their shady lodge arrived, both stood Both turned, and under open sky adored The God that made both sky, air, earth and heaven Which they beheld, the moon’s resplendent globe And starry pole: “Thou also mad’st the night Maker omnipotent, and though the day Which we in our appointed work employed Have finished happy in our mutual help And mutual love, the crown of all our bliss Ordained by thee, and this delicious place For us too large, where thy abundance wants Partakers, and uncropped falls to the ground. But thou hast promised from us two a race To fill the earth, who shall with us extoll Thy goodness infinite, both when we wake, And when we seek, as now, thy gift of sleep.”
Greta’s version of this prayer might be Barbie reveling in her dream house. But where both poem and movie pick up, one focuses on what happens after the fall. What seems at first a tragedy—that’s how Barbie initially regards the introduction of discordant elements into her ideal world—eventually becomes a blessing. In Adam’s case, he learns that the first humans can appreciate God’s love even more after the fall because they will see how much God, in his love for humankind, is willing to sacrifice. Being told of this self-sacrificing love, Adam rhapsodizes,
O goodness infinite, goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good; more wonderful Then that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness!
Adam’s excitement is not unlike Barbie’s excitement about the world that awaits her after she leaves her pink plastic paradise. Milton scholar Orlando Reade notes that the montage of the life that awaits Barbie as a real-life human is not unlike the angel Michael’s account of humankind’s future history, which he recounts to Adam prior to the couple being driven from the garden. To be sure, Michael’s account is grimmer that the film’s montage, which is not exactly filled with images of violence, sickness and death.
Gerwig points out another parallel between the film and the poem. Barbie actually reverses Milton’s genesis story. Whereas Eve is taken from Adam’s rib, Barbie precedes Ken, who owes his existence to her. Running with the idea, Reade teases out other parallels:
Ken exists in a state of perpetual anxiety, hoping only to please Barbie. In this, he resembles Milton’s Adam. When Eve is born, she falls in love with her own reflection in a pool of water. On first seeing Adam, she is unimpressed. Adam worries about her self-sufficiency and complains about his desire for her. Milton is said to have invented the word “self-esteem,” and that is exactly what Adam lacks. Fear of living without Eve compels him to eat the fruit.
In the poem, Adam and Eve have a major falling out after the fall, as do Barbie and Ken. Sin and Death enter Milton’s world whereas toxic patriarchy enters Barbie’s. But in the end, Adam and Eve reconcile and bravely go forth, as do Ken and Barbie. Ken realizes that life is much more fulfilling if he learns to define himself as himself—“Ken is me!”—rather than in relation to Barbie. He learns he doesn’t require a docile woman to be strong.
In the final scene, Ken and Barbie may not be holding hands, as Adam and Eve are, but the final lines in Paradise Lost fit their situation. There’s even a version of the tear that rolls down Barbie’s cheek as she contemplates leaving Barbie Land:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The World was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.
Having previously had everything handed to her, Barbie is now going to experience what it’s like to earn a living, have children, and grow old and die. Same with Adam and Eve. Ultimately, this is what we all should want.
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Sunday
Today’s Gospel reading—where Jesus symbolically delivers the kingdom of heaven’s keys to Peter—gives me an excuse to share a wonderful sonnet about the most impetuous of the disciples. I have a special place in my heart for Peter, perhaps because he seems my polar opposite.
Whereas I tend to be deliberate and cautious, attempting to reason everything out, Peter acts on impulse. He thinks more with his heart than with his head. Perhaps it is my reticence, probably the result of my British heritage, that draws me to the disciple who often leaps before he looks. Perhaps a similar dynamic draws British poet and Anglican priest Malcolm Guite to Peter since his poem speaks directly to me.
First, here’s today’s Gospel reading:
When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. (Matthew 16:13-20)
And here’s Guite’s poem:
St. Peter
Impulsive master of misunderstanding You comfort me with all your big mistakes; Jumping the ship before you make the landing, Placing the bet before you know the stakes. I love the way you step out without knowing, The way you sometimes speak before you think, The way your broken faith is always growing, The way he holds you even when you sink. Born to a world that always tried to shame you, Your shaky ego vulnerable to shame, I love the way that Jesus chose to name you, Before you knew how to deserve that name. And in the end your Savior let you prove That each denial is undone by love.
I too love the idea of a divine presence knowing us better than we know ourselves. Not everyone would see firm foundation upon looking at Peter. But Jesus saw the rock within Peter and knew that he would grow into that role.
Even when we are driven, by our fear, to deny that which is most precious to us, Jesus assures us love undoes our betrayals. As Horace puts it and as his words appear on the brooch of Chaucer’s prioress, “Amor vincit omnia.”
