Sir Gawain and the Winter Solstice

By Robin Bates | Published: December 20, 2023
Videogame version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

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Thursday

Today being the Winter Solstice, I turn to my favorite story about paganism’s winter festival and Christianity’s Christmas coming to blows. Of course, I’m thinking of the 14th century Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. “Coming to blows,” I admit, gives a misleading impression since the blows are framed as a game, not a battle. Still, death is a possible outcome.

Here’s the message I carry away from the poem.

SGGK opens with a Christmas feast, which is to say, a celebration of the birth of a god who, at the darkest time of year, promises to bring an end to death. The display of extravagance we see in a time of austerity shows Arthur’s faith in that promise:

This king lay at Camelot at Christmastide;
Many good knights and gay his guests were there,
Arrayed of the Round Table rightful brothers,
With feasting and fellowship and carefree mirth.
There true men contended in tournaments many,
Joined there in jousting these gentle knights,
Then came to the court for carol-dancing,
For the feast was in force full fifteen days,
With all the meat and the mirth that men could devise,
Such gaiety and glee, glorious to hear,
Brave din by day, dancing by night.
High were their hearts in halls and chambers,
These lords and these ladies, for life was sweet.
In peerless pleasures passed they their days,
The most noble knights known under Christ,
And the loveliest ladies that lived on earth ever,
And he the comeliest king, that that court holds,
For all this fair folk in their first age
                                             were still.

It’s doubtful that Christ was actually born in late December. If his birth did in fact coincide with an in-person Roman taxation decree, then surely it would have come at a warmer time of the year. I suspect that, by putting Christ’s mass on December 25, the Church unconsciously was tapping into the energies of paganism’s Winter Solstice, which acknowledges the death of the sun while at the same time celebrating its rebirth (the days begin to get longer). Perhaps enterprising Christianity missionaries re-dated Christmas in order to co-opt pagan opposition, just as Spanish missionaries in Peru turned the celebration of the 12 Incan emperors into a celebration of 12 Christian saints.

But in celebrating Christmas in late December, King Arthur’s court all but conjures up a pagan Green Man figure. While not altogether hostile to Christian feasting, the Green Knight is affronted by—or at least intrigued by—these parvenues’ claims of life after death. As one plugged into nature’s cycle, the Green Knight knows there is life after death. After all, he sees it every year in the spring growth that follows the winter die-off. But here are people claiming that their god will end death forever, not just seasonally, and the Green Kngith is skeptical.

So he proposes a beheading game. If you really are not afraid of death, he tells Arthur’s court, then you will engage in a contest where first you cut off my head and then I cut off yours. He himself has no fear: after all, he knows that vegetation grows back.

So challenged, Gawain too claims not to fear death and agrees to the game. The rest of the poem unfolds, then, with the Green Knight—sometimes disguised as Lord Bertilak—testing Gawain to find out if he is as unconcerned as he claims to be. And what Bertilak/Green Knight discovers—and forces Gawain to acknowledge—is that Christians aren’t as indifferent as many believe. Though Gawain believes in eternal life, he’s also deeply invested in life here on earth. He wants to continue living for a whole.

There are multiple ways in the poem that Christianity believes it has triumphed over paganism, and not only by turning Winter Solstice celebrations into a Christian feast. For instance, it has taken the pagan pentangle and reinterpreted it in a Christian-friendly way. (Although that being said, the pagan star is often associated with Satanism.) Modern day Christians, meanwhile, have replaced the Green Knight’s holly bob with the Christmas tree and paganism’s Green Man with Santa Claus—or in Dickens’s case, with the Ghost of Christmas Present:

It was clothed in one simple deep green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark-brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. [my italics]  

In addition to the beheading game, Green Knight tests Gawain in other ways. As I read the temptation scenes in the castle, Bertilak is the Lord of Death while his consort is the Lady of Life. In the three days before Gawain thinks he’s going to die, he witnesses both the lure of life (a beautiful lady offering him sex) and the grim, matter-of-fact reality of death (the animal carcasses). Here’s an instance of the latter:

And duly dressed the deer, as the deed requires.
Some were assigned the assay of the fat:
Two fingers’-width fully they found on the leanest.
Then they slit the slot open and searched out the paunch,
Trimmed it with trencher-knives and tied it up tight.
They flayed the fair hide from the legs and trunk,
Then broke open the belly and laid bare the bowels,
Deftly detaching and drawing them forth.
And next at the neck they neatly parted
The weasand from the windpipe, and cast away the guts.

Still think you don’t care about your life, Gawain? Still think you’re not afraid of dying?

In one final test, the Green Knight feints an axe blow when Gawain’s head is on the block and watches the knight shrink. Some deep part of the Camelot knight still wants to live, which is what GK has wanted him to acknowledge all along.

So what can we carry away from the joining of Christmas with paganism’s Winter Solstice? That, in the end, reconciliation is possible, even though the Christian Church officially doesn’t think so. God puts us on earth to love life, and God shows us that love is more powerful than death. If we can’t hold both of those ideas in our head at once—and admittedly it’s difficult—then we need poems and stories like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to remind us.

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Cloud Cuckoo Land: The Power of Story

By Robin Bates | Published: December 19, 2023

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Wednesday

A few weeks ago I finished listening to one of the most satisfying novels I’ve encountered in a while, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land (major spoiler alert). Doerr, who won a Pulitzer for the All the Light We Cannot See, has created a fictional narrative that he attributes to the first century author Antonius Diogenes. Then he links this made-up story to three different eras: the mid-15th century when Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks; the 20th century, when 3-D and X-ray technology manage to read the damaged manuscript and share it with the world, including an octogenarian living in small town Idaho; and the not-too-distant future, when the world has been decimated by extreme climate events, including an unending drought in Australia.

While Diogenes did write a work—The Wonders Beyond Thule—we know of it only through a few papyrus scraps and a confusing summation by another writer. Doerr, who initially considered recreating one of Aristophanes’ lost plays, stepped into this vacuum instead. He got the idea in part from the city in the sky that appears in Aristophanes’ The Birds.

Throughout Cloud Cuckoo Land Doerr provides us with excerpts from his invented manuscript, which is about a man who wants to be transformed into a bird so that he can live in this utopian city. It’s a silly story, full of magical mishaps so that, instead of a bird, Aethon finds himself transformed first into a much-abused ass and then into a hunted fish. Eventually, however, he makes it to Cloud Cuckoo Land, only to discover a version of “there’s no place like home.”

I fell in love with Doerr’s vision of how even a silly story can mean the world to different people: to an abused Christian girl, who discovers the manuscript in an abandoned monastery and then saves it from the city before it is sacked; to an Ottoman ox-driver, who saves her from slavery, marries her, and comes to regard the book as magical so that he travels with it to Urbino after her death so that the book will be saved; to a 20th-century Korean War veteran, who learns Greek from a fellow inmate in their North Korean prison and sets out to translate the work upon returning home to Idaho; to the children of his town, whom he is directing in a library performance of the story when they encounter a boy—an eco-terrorist in the eyes of the law–bent on blowing up the real estate office next door; and to a little girl in the future, who is the last survivor of a ship bound for a distant planet and who remembers it from her father having recited it to her as a child. (It so happens that his grandmother was one of the children performing the story when they encountered the bomber.)

The story of how a story survives, redeeming and sometimes saving lives along the way, fits my view of the power of narrative. In this case, the story makes its way from Constantinople to Italy to a reader in Idaho to outer space. That frequently all hope seems lost, as countless times it does, just serves to highlight the resilience of narrative.

With this in mind, I focus today on two of the novel’s turning points. In one, Anna in Constantinople encounters an episode from The Odyssey, which a Greek teacher is having a classroom of boys memorize. Odysseus has made it to the island of the Phaeacians after leaving Circe’s island and is about to enter Alcinous’s court. She listens mesmerized from outside the window, and passages from the work become some of the tools she uses to navigate her world:

 Anna forgets the handcart, the wine, the hour—everything. The accent is strange but the voice is deep and liquid, and the meter catches hold of her like a rider galloping past….What palace is this, where the doors gleam with gold and the pillars are silver and the trees never stop fruiting? As though hypnotized, she advances to the rooming house wall and scales the gate and peers through the shutter…

The tutor resumes the verse, in which a goddess disguises the traveler in mist so that he can sneak inside the shining palace…

In return for pilfered food, the teacher teaches her how to read the manuscript and then gives it to her when he is dying. And although the man in charge of the textile shop where she works destroys the manuscript upon discovery, she is able to read Cloud Cuckoo Land when she unearths it.

Another key incident takes a bit more explaining. Konstance, the girl in the spaceship, discovers that many of the images of the world in the ship’s computer have been doctored, with all the bad parts left out. It’s as though Moms for Liberty and other rightwing groups bent on erasing the past have seized control and created a more “acceptable” reality. One of those responsible for doctoring the images is the bomber, who did it for years in prison (his labor contracted out) and then continued after he was released.

While he does what the company orders him to do, however, he also puts in little images which, if clicked upon, will reveal the reality behind the images. Konstance discovers this while tracking down Aethon’s story, which her father recited to her throughout her childhood, so that, once again, the journey of shepherd-ass-fish-bird saves someone. For Konstance discovers that not only are the images faked but so is her space journey itself. In actual fact, the rocket has never left the ground—it has all been a multi-generational experiment with everyone aboard (all of whom are now dead except for Konstance) having served as human guinea pigs for potential space travel. Konstance manages to hack her way out of the ship and join a tiny Scandinavian island community, survivors of catastrophic climate change.

Recently I wrote about a 2018 Salman Rushdie New Yorker article written in response to Donald Trump’s non-stop lying. Rushdie said that, at such times, we need literary classics more than ever because of their “commitment to truth.” Seeing literature as essentially a “no bullshit” zone, Rushdie wrote that the job of contemporary writers is “rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality.”

In the final paragraph of Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, we see Konstance as a mother reading Aethon’s story to her son. Who knows how he himself will use it to connect to reality in the uncertain world that lies before him?

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Paul Celan on Fascism’s Horrors

By Robin Bates | Published: December 18, 2023
Poet Paul Celan

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Tuesday

Reader Patty R alerted me to a World War II poem that, at the moment, has an ironic second meaning given what is currently happening in Israel and Gaza (more on that in a moment). The Free Press’s Douglas Murry, after voicing the common wisdom that the second world war did not produce great poets in the way the first world war did (Wilfred Owen above all but also Siegfried Sassoon, Alan Seeger, and Rupert Brooke), refutes it by pointing to a poem by Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan.

Written in 1944 by one who barely escaped death in the camps that claimed the lives of his parents, “Death Fugue” sets up two perspectives that (as in a fugue) work contrapuntally. One the one hand, there is the “man in the house,” the camp commander, who “gifts us a grave in the air” (the cremated bodies) and who idealizes the “golden hair Margarete,” symbol of German womanhood. On the other, there are his prisoners, who are forced to dig their graves in a dance of death. Shulamit, the beloved in the Song of Songs, mourns her people, covering her hair with ashes. Meanwhile milk, which should sustain us when we awake in the morning, has turned black and treacherous, and the prisoners are forced to drink it at all times of the day and night.

I find the poem ironic since Israel is currently meting out death itself in Gaza. I say this knowing full well that Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas’s terror attacks, that Hamas fully desires to wipe Israel off the map, and that Israel’s current actions are a far cry from Hitler’s methodical extermination of the Jews. There are checks against genocide within Israel, a democracy, that are not to be found within its enemies. But those important qualifiers aside, I also know that, just as the United States lost more than it achieved in the way it struck back at Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, so Benjamin Netanyahu’s overreach is blackening Israel in the eyes of the world. And that’s not even to mention how he’s turning a blind eye to increasingly militant Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

But we don’t have to take sides in the current conflict to acknowledge the universal message in “Death Fugue.” When horror is meted out to innocent civilians, whether Israeli or Palestinian, they all drink black milk.

Death Fugue
By Paul Celan
Trans. Pierre Joris

Black milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it darkens to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
he writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he whistles his dogs to come
he whistles his jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth
he commands us play up for the dance

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you mornings and noontime we drink you evenings
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it turns dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamit we dig a grave in the air there one lies at ease

He calls jab deeper into the earth you there and you other men sing and play
he grabs the gun in his belt he draws it his eyes are blue
jab deeper your spades you there and you other men continue to play for the dance

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon we drink you evenings
we drink you and drink
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakes

He calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland
he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air
then you’ll have a grave in the clouds there you’ll lie at ease

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland
we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink
death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue
he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air
he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit

A passage from W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” which Murray wrote about a few weeks ago, comes to mind here as I think of the attack and counterattack we have been witnessing in the Middle East:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Murray objects to the sentiment since he believes it removes accountability from the perpetrator. Was Germany justified in invading Poland because of the Treaty of Versailles, he asks. People who desire bloodshed, however, can always look into the past to find reasons. Bosnian Serbs justified slaughtering Srebrenica Muslims because Turks had slaughtered Serbs in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo.

But as a fact rather than a justification, it’s hard to argue with what we all know: as often as not, evil acts trigger reciprocal evil acts. After 9-11, the U.S. engaged in torture and extra-judicial imprisonment while members of its military committed war crimes. Following its own 9-11, Israel is in danger of going down a similar path.

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Horror Fiction, Anecdote to Fear

By Robin Bates | Published: December 17, 2023
Censored scene from 1931 Frankenstein

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Monday

In my weekly report on Angus Fletcher’s book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, I look at the benefits of meta-horror, invented (so he claims) by Mary Shelley. Meta-horror is a horror story that is self-conscious of itself as a horror story.

I believe that my first encounter with meta-horror was Scream, a slasher film in which the characters reflect on who, given the conventions of the horror genre, is the most likely to be slashed first. As I recall, someone observes the promiscuous girl will get it before the others. And so she does.

Fletcher sets up the psychological risks and rewards of horror by looking at two different versions of the adrenaline rush we get when we are scared. A good cortisol boost “charges our mind, powering us to get more out of life,” while a bad boost can damage our health. As he elaborates,

The same elevated cortisol that benefits us in the short term can damage our health in the long. It can cause insomnia and exhaustion, contribute to anxiety and depression, and increase our odds of diabetes, heart attack, and stroke.

Hungarian doctor Hans Selye in the mid-twentieth century discovered that we can get sick and even die from stress. But he also discovered that there is good stress, which “gives us all the benefits of extra cortisol—increased energy and focus—without the drawbacks.”

The one exception, apparently, is exhaustion, which even good stress can cause. He says that we don’t get additional brain activity for free.

Selye called bad stress “distress” and good stress “eustress.” The difference between the two is whether the stress is perceived as voluntary or not. While involuntary stress (fight or flight responses to being stalked by a predator, bullied by a boss, or getting sick) is bad, voluntary stress (“embarking on a new career, venturing on a first date, or banking everything on a dream”) is good. So if we want to turn distress into eustress, we just have to choose to embrace our stress, perhaps by finding the opportunity or silver lining in a crisis.

Now to literature. What sets Frankenstein apart from earlier gothics, Fletcher says, is that it creates distance from the horror through its story within a story (and sometimes story within a story within a story). He provides the following example, where the monster is recounting one of his most horrific acts, the murder of a child:

My rage returned; I remembered that I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow… I only wonder that at that moment, instead of venting my sensations in exclamations and agony, I did not rush among mankind and perish in the attempt to destroy them.

Fletcher writes,

Here the monster is absorbed in a profound feeling of horror until suddenly he gains a reflective distance: “I only wonder.” And moments later, the narrative provides us with the reflective distance too. The monster’s Story in the Story ends, and we’re extracted to the outside story of Dr. Frankenstein: “The [monster] finished speaking and fixed his looks upon me.”

By pulling us out of the story in which we have been immersed, Fletcher says, the novel activates our brain’s “self zone”:

Undoing the neural effect of the Story in the Story stretch, and replacing our lost-in-a-book flow with an abrupt consciousness of our own separate existence.

This happens again at the end of the novel where we exit from Dr. Frankenstein’s tale to the perspective of the sea captain who has picked him up. “You have read this strange and terrific story, Margaret,” Walton writes to his sister, “and do you not feel your blood congeal with horror, like that which even now curdles mine?” Fletcher points out,

Once again, our immersion is doubly broken. First, we’re made aware that Frankenstein’s narrative is a “story.” And second, we’re called upon to self-consciously analyze our feeling of “horror,” prompting renewed activation in the fiction distance of our neural self zone.

In other words, our brain becomes conscious “that the horror is a fiction that we’ve chosen to consume—and can keep choosing to consume if we wish.” Mary Shelley’s meta-narrative, Fletcher writes, “keeps our adrenaline pulse elevated and our cortisol eye full open—transforming our stress from bad monster to good.”

He adds that, in the novel, Dr. Frankenstein gives the mutinous sailors who want to return home this same choice. Before dying he tells them that they can

decide to abandon the expedition, calming their minds back to normal. Or they can decide to feel more alive by embracing danger again.

When we sit down with a horror novel, we can best move from distress to eustress by choosing those works that follow Mary Shelley’s meta-horror blueprint, giving our brain a self-aware distance. The films Fletcher mentions (which other than Scream I haven’t seen) are the epilogue of the 1983 film Twilight Zone, The Cabin and the Woods, and Funny Games.

 I realize that one reason I’m not a horror fan is that I have difficulty separating myself from the story. I become so immersed that I experience acute distress. But I remember a story a student told the class when I was team-teaching “Adolescence and Film” with Dr. Barbara Bershon, a psychologist with expertise in adolescence. Because horror is so popular with teens, we had watched the slasher film Nightmare on Elm Street, which is driven by teen anxieties about rape and sexual assault. (Underlying the popularity of the film with teams is partly the reasoning, “If my parents are scared of whatever they won’t talk to me about, then I’m really scared! But maybe I’ll be less scared if I actually see whatever it is.”) One member of the class said that, for Saturday night entertainment, she and her friends used to check out the clunkiest slasher film they could find and have fun laughing at it.

We realized, as we analyzed her account, that this was a healthy way of processing their fears. Even if the films weren’t instances of meta-horror, their very badness meant that viewers could maintain a distance. Or put another way, they transformed the viewing into a meta-experience. Potential distress was transformed into eustress.

My main question is what to make of the major figures in the genre, starting with Stephen King, who do not engage in meta-horror. By instead attempting to immerse us in the full horror of the story, would these authors (by Fletcher’s reasoning) be bad for us?

But perhaps the very act of picking up a book—“I want to spend a few hours boosting my cortisol”—gives one the sense of choice that provides an out. For that matter, telling yourself, in the midst of terrified immersion, “it’s only a movie” (or book) might also work. While not a literary invention in the Angus Fletcher sense, it might achieve the same end.

Speaking for myself, I’ve always felt this to be cheating. When I engage with a work, I feel committed to having the full immersive experience. If it calls for ironic distance, then I’ll maintain that distance, but if it doesn’t, I am captured hook, line, and sinker. My Adolescence and Film students had fun laughing at how much I was frightened by Nightmare on Elm Street, with which they were well familiar but which I was watching for the first time. They had to scrape me from the ceiling.

Full immersion, I’ve always felt, allows me to get the most out of a work of art, a point made by Wayne Booth in The Company We Keep. But since to fully immerse myself in a work of horrors causes me acute distress, I tend to avoid it altogether rather than opt for coping strategies.

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Mary and the Threefold Terror of Love

By Robin Bates | Published: December 16, 2023

Leonard da Vinci, Madonna Litta

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Spiritual Sunday

Today being the third Sunday of Advent, the focus is on Mary. In place of the weekly psalm, Episcopal churches have the option of reading “The Song of Mary.” That’s the one that begins,

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.

To mark the occasion, I share this W.B. Yeats poem that I’ve just discovered. The first stanza is about the Annunciation, the second about Mary’s daily activities—how she feels she doesn’t fit in with the other women–and the third is about the love she has for her baby. The love goes so deep that she has a premonition of something going wrong:

This love that makes my heart’s blood stop
Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?

What loving parent has not felt the “Sudden chill” that can accompany the vulnerability brought on by having a child:

The Mother of God
By W.B. Yeats

The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room;
The terror of all terrors that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.

Had I not found content among the shows
Every common woman knows,
Chimney corner, garden walk,
Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes
And gather all the talk?

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart’s blood stop
Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?

In the final stanza, there seems momentary deflation—is the baby worth the pains I went through to birth it, Mary wonders. (In the poem “Among School Children,” Yeats doubts that mother, upon seeing her 60+-year-old son, would see in that shape “a compensation for the pang of his birth.”) At first, doubts about having a child prmpt of her to think of the infant Jesus as a “fallen star.” But then this doubt is countered by a love that goes so deep that it “makes my blood stop/ Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones / And bids my hair stand up.”

The third stanza gives us insight into the “threefold terror of love” mentioned in the first. The first is the impregnating visit of the Holy Spirit that results in the fallen star (“the fallen flare/ Through the hollow of an ear”). The second is the awe-inspiring presence of the divine through angelic visitation (“wings beating about the room”). The third is the terror of God’s incarnation, which is to say divinity taking human form and coming to dwell amongst us.

Perhaps at this moment of greatest vulnerability—where Mary’s heart is utterly open—she senses the cross.

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A Roc Sighting in Xmas Bird Count

By Robin Bates | Published: December 14, 2023
Edward Julius Detmold, Roc

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Friday

The Christmas bird count began yesterday (Dec. 15-Jan. 5), leading to a slew of bird stories, including one about how the American Ornithological Society will be renaming a number of birds that currently carry people’s names. These include the Cooper’s hawk, the Bachman’s sparrow, and the Townsend warbler.

Some of the renaming is because the original people were awful. John Kirk Townsend, for instance, stole skulls from Navaho graves in the 1800s to promote his theory that they were racially inferior while John Bachman once wrote that “the Negro will remain as he is, unless his form is changed by an amalgamation, which … is revolting to us. That his intellect … is greatly inferior to that of the Caucasian, and that he is, therefore … incapable of self-government. That he is thrown to our protection. That our defense of slavery is contained within the Holy scriptures.”

The broader rationale about changing names is that birds don’t belong to people. And except for the minor inconvenience of learning new names, the name changes could be good, especially if they’re imaginative.

Anyway, I use the seasonal bird count as an excuse to share one of my father’s poems about a very unusual sighting. Scott Bates was an ardent birdwatcher, and occasionally he would merge this passion with his annual Christmas poem, as he did when he imagines a couple having a roc sighting.

Sinbad the Sailor describes the Roc in the Arabian Nights—it is so large that it preys on elephants—and even hitches a ride with the bird. And now George and May have a new bird for their life list.

And if this seems unlikely, as it does to their fellow birdwatchers, just remember that Christmas is a time for miracles.

A Roc for Christmas
By Scott Bates

It came as something of a shock
When George and May put down “One roc”
On the list of the annual Christmas count
Of our Audubon Club in Marymount–
But they weren’t kidding. They were serious
And didn’t hear jokes from the rest of us
Like “you got rocs in your head?” or “where’s the djinn?”
Or “where in the heck have you two been?”
–Or whether they’d seen too much Jim Crow
Or an ornithological UFO–
They were in a daze. Oblivious.
In the garbage dump at five o’clock
George and May had seen a roc.
George saw it first. He was coming around
The fence at the village dumping ground
In gathering dusk when he cried aloud
As something rose up like a great gold cloud
Or like the sun—but it wasn’t the sun
(Which just at that moment was going down),
It was a hawk—a humongous hawk,
A hawk as big as a city block,
With golden wings and a silver tail
And a body as big as a humpbacked whale
And a glow on its wings of a million lights
Like the stars in all the Arabian Nights
And a sound in its wings like the rising sea
And a crest like a blazing Christmas tree
With a flashing eye that became a star
Like the star that was followed by Balthazar
As it flew away with tremendous speed
“To the court of the Caliph Haroun el Raschid,”
Said May with a shiver. And she was sure
That it left behind it a scent of myrrh. . . .

–Well, no one believed them. But we could see
They had had some sort of epiphany,
And we felt a kind of sadness then
Like the feeling you had at the age of ten
When you knew that you’d never believe again;
So we left the roc on the record to stay–
For, whatever the sighting of George and May,
They gave us a sighting that you can bet
The Audubon Club won’t soon forget. . . .

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McCarthy a Greek Hero? NOT!

By Robin Bates | Published: December 13, 2023
Ex-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy

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Thursday

An article comparing ex-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy to various tragic heroes recently caught my attention since the idea seemed so absurd. And in fact, Professor Rachel Hadas ultimately comes to the same conclusion. Asking whether the fall of the first Speaker ever deposed by his own party fulfills the criteria for a dramatic tragedy, Hadas concludes with a resounding, “Uh, no.”

Along the way, however, she offers us a tutorial on tragic heroes. And she also comes up with what I think is the perfect literary parallel for McCarthy: Lepidus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

What, you don’t recall Lepidus from the play? There’s a reason for that. I’ll explain in a moment.

First, however, let’s talk about all the heroes that McCarthy is not like. Hadas essentially tells the former speaker, “You, sir, are no Oedipus, Creon, Ajax, Cassius, or Brutus.” She does, however, note that Claudius from Hamlet might be a match. And Lepidus.

The fun of Hadas’s piece is what she says about real heroes. First, there’s Creon in Sophocles’s Antigone, who takes a principled stand in refusing his foes (Antigone’s brothers) a proper burial, only to see it backfire on him as first Antigone, then his son Haemon, and then his wife commit suicide. Hadas draws a dramatic contrast:

McCarthy says he will “serve America in new ways.” When heroes are defeated, they don’t usually retire into private life, claiming that a new chapter lies before them.

Rather, classical heroes admit and enact drastic reversals. For instance, Creon… withdraws from the scene, admitting to his disastrous errors of judgment…Oedipus himself, at the close of his eponymous tragedy, blinds and exiles himself.

McCarthy, on the other hand, is retiring in mid-session so that he can get an early start as a highly paid lobbyist.

I can’t figure out why Hadas mentions Sophocles’s Ajax since the two men don’t belong in the same ballpark. This becomes instantly clear from her account of Ajax’s downfall:

[The] hero is so enraged and shamed by the fact that the dead Achilles’ armor has gone to Odysseus rather than to him, that he butchers innocent livestock, deluded in his madness that he is killing his fellow Greeks.

McCarthy is susceptible to jealousy, so there’s that. But a more two-faced, calculating politician it’s hard to imagine. No raging warrior he, unless one counts how, in a fit of peak, he elbowed a colleague in the kidneys before running off. Hadas appears to have included him only for the sake of contrast:

[Ajax’s] madness, sent by the gods, ebbs, and Ajax falls on his sword rather than live with the guilt and disgrace of his actions. But although he accurately attributes his spell of madness to the gods, Ajax also takes responsibility for what he has done.

There’s no such accountability in Kevin’s case. As Hadas wrly remarks in a subhead, “to fall, you need height.”

How about Brutus and Cassius? Well, he’s no kin to “the noblest Roman of them all.” On the other hand, I do find some Cassius similarities. For both, their actions seem more promoted by ego than the good of the republic. But I suspect Hadas brings in Julius Caesar only so she can float her best parallel:

Kevin McCarthy, with his pleasant face and unconfrontational style, reminds me of another passage in Julius Caesar. Late in the play, the victorious Antony and Octavian send the third man of their triumvirate, Lepidus, on an errand to retrieve Caesar’s will. No sooner has Lepidus scurried off than Antony vents his contempt for their associate:

This is a slight unmeritable man,
Meet to be sent on errands…

Historically, Hadas observes, Lepidus “never got to share in the spoils of victory over Caesar’s assassination.” Instead he was banished by Antony and Augustus and went into exile.

Now to Claudius:

But although McCarthy surely felt wronged and wounded by his ouster, he didn’t say so. On the contrary, McCarthy’s special quality, his insistent good cheer, calls to mind another applicable passage from Shakespeare. Noting his uncle Claudius’s urbane and courtly manners, Hamlet observes, “One may smile and smile and be a villain.”

As with the Greek figures she mentions, however, Hadas proffers the Claudius parallel only to withdraw it:

Is villain even the word for McCarthy? Only in the swamp of Washington, D.C., politics does he look, if not like a virtuous character, then like a relatively innocent victim. His chief hubris was in gambling that his maneuvers would work.

If we’re bringing in Hamlet, rather than Claudius I’d suggest Polonius, the scheming courtier who coaches his daughter into serving as a spy and then gets accidentally stabbed when one of his plots goes awry. Polonius grovels before Claudius and Gertrude as McCarthy did before Donald Trump, bringing him back from the political dead after January 6 when he realized that he needed Trump’s fund-raising lists. What Hadas says about McCarthy can certainly be said of Polonius: “To be humiliated, to fall, you have to have attained some height to begin with.”

So Hadas’s article is an exercise in defining by contrast. Except for the Lepidus comparison, which is gold. “Slight unmeritable man, meet to be sent on errands” says it all.

Further thought – In T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the speaker at one point admits he is a Polonius rather than a Hamlet. McCarthy could say the same:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

He was also second in line to the presidency.

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The Left Wants to Cancel Orwell? Nope

By Robin Bates | Published: December 12, 2023

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Wednesday

A couple of weeks ago I posted about how people like Donald Trump, Jr., Elon Musk, and other neo-fascists are attempting to appropriate George Orwell’s 1984 for their purposes. In furtherance of this goal they are now, according to a piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, attacking the left for attempting to cancel Orwell. More on that in a moment.

In my post I quoted FrameLab’s Gil Duran on the absurd way they are using Orwell:

The skewed conservative interpretation of Orwell holds that freedom means the freedom to spread lies about topics like the 2020 election, COVID, vaccines or anything else. It depicts any effort to challenge falsehoods as an attack on this supposed freedom, and as a form of “thought control” in line with 1984’s totalitarian Big Brother. It vilifies fact-checkers, journalists and social media content moderation policies as enemies of freedom. According to its twisted upside-down logic, liars are defenders of liberty and truth is a form of oppression.

Since Duran’s article appeared, we have seen Trump acknowledging that he would be dictator “on day one” if he is elected and his aides promising to go after the press. In the words of Kash Patel, a chief of staff in the Defense Department and member of the National Security Council under Trump, “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media” (this over the “stolen” 2020 election).

Meanwhile Ohio senator J.D. Vance wants the Department of Justice to investigate Washington Post contributing editor Robert Kagan for his opinion column warning readers that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.” Vance said that Kagan’s article falls under the DOJ’s jurisdiction to intervene in cases of invitation to insurrection, manifestation of criminal conspiracy, and an attempt to bring about civil war.

Basically, the MAGA right is saying that free speech has no limits for me and my friends but you are criminally liable when you use it. Or more succinctly, “liberty for me but not for thee.”

Author Sandra Newman’s article in the Post notes that the MAGA right is using a new biography of Orwell’s first wife as proof that liberals are trying to cancel Orwell, making them the authoritarians, not MAGA. They point to how biographer Anna Funder has described Orwell as “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent.” Nor is Funder the only one who has noticed Orwell’s dark side, which includes “his shabby treatment of his wife, his alleged attempt to rape a childhood friend, his homophobic remarks and his colonial service.”

MAGA critics have accused Newman herself of canceling Orwell through her feminist novel Julia: A Retelling of George Orwell’s 1984. And it’s true that she acknowledges the book to have blind spots that can be linked to Orwell’s life:

The evil Party in the book imposes a cartoonish version of feminism on its members, forbidding perfume and makeup, and forcing women to wear gender-neutral overalls and short hair. When Julia and Winston find a hideaway where they can safely express themselves, for him it means voicing his political opinions; for her it means putting on pretty dresses and making cups of tea for him.

More startling, Winston imagines murdering women on several occasions. Before he ever speaks to Julia, he has fantasized about raping and killing her. Julia says of the women’s hostel where she lives, “Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!” and chides Winston for not following through on his idea of killing his wife.

But—and this is a very big “but”—one doesn’t cancel a book because it’s got some bad in it. She herself wants us to continue reading 1984 because its virtues outweigh its flaws:

However bad Orwell’s attitudes toward women were, the warning he gave us in 1984 was not that society might someday become so twisted that women would criticize him. His novel was a warning against the kind of leaders who call their opponents “vermin,” leaders who want to punish people for having the “wrong” opinions or being of the “wrong” ethnicity. It was written about leaders who become cult figures, whose idealized image is plastered everywhere as a symbol of belonging, who hold rallies at which their followers join to scream in ecstatic hatred. It was written about a world in which such leaders could avail themselves of advanced technology, in which propaganda and surveillance were unavoidable and ubiquitous.

In other words, those on the right are engaging in doublethink when they accuse the non-authoritarian left of an Orwellian cancellation of Orwell. “What’s Orwellian,” Newman says, “is using his work to defend the people who are moving us toward the political horror he most feared.”

Literary scholar Wayne Booth, in his book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction,” is smart in his handling of flawed masterpieces. Contending that we should regard books as friends, he says that just as our friends aren’t perfect, so are many beloved works. And as with friends, we factor the imperfections into the way we deal with them.

To be sure, if it turns out that the friendship is truly noxious, we should end it—there are books that are out-and-out bad for us—but in the case of 1984, the warning against dictatorship is so powerfully presented that we can separate it out from the novel’s limitations.

People do the same with other works all the time, with Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Taming of the Shrew coming immediately to mind. We don’t wholesale reject Shakespeare, or even the plays themselves, because of their problematic images of Jews and women. Instead, we enter into nuanced discussions, seeking to separate out the good from the not-so-good.

I sometimes wonder, while watching how Trumpist authoritarians use 1984 to accuse their enemies of authoritarianism, whether there’s a silver lining here. The French 17th century moralist François de La Rochefoucauld once wrote that “hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue,” the point being that when vice clothes itself in the vestments of virtue, virtue still has the upperhand. If Trumpists claim that freedom is a good thing, even though they then interpret that to mean freedom to oppress other people, freedom itself is celebrated. And once it is, then it’s harder to argue against freedom to love who you want, freedom to make your own decisions about your body, freedom to speak out against injustice—or even freedom just to assert that 2+2=4.

The MAGA right hasn’t yet gotten to the 1984 stage of arguing that “freedom is slavery” and that only mindless obedience to a dictator is true freedom. And while they may get there, so far most Americans still embrace the “self-evident truth” that they have a right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Most Americans still push back against abortion bans and contraception bans and book bans and LGBTQ+ bans.

In other words, most of us are not yet contending that 2+2=5.

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Trump as Dracula and Ancient Mariner

By Robin Bates | Published: December 11, 2023

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Tuesday

Because I switched from The New York Times to the Washington Post after their hatchet job on Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, I no longer have access to the columns of Maureen Dowd. Which is a pity because, even when I disagreed with her, I always appreciated her literary references. Recently I came across someone quoting a passage from a Dowd column where she piled one allusion on top of another:

No doubt the president is having a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea that the 77-year-old Mar-a-Lago Dracula has risen from his gilded coffin even though he’s albatrossed with legal woes and seems more deranged than ever.

The image of Trump as a blood-sucking vampire lurking in his castle works for me. And the idea of his coming back from the dead seems fitting as well given that Trump was seen as down-and-out after his January 6 coup attempt. Would Mitch McConnell have persuaded colleagues to find him guilty in the impeachment hearings if he could have foreseen that Trump would be the 2024 GOP nominee for president?

It’s worth noting that Dracula is as much of a narcissist as Trump. Here he is telling Jonathan Harker about his dictatorial ancestor:

They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! What good are peasants without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and heart to conduct it? Again, when, after the battle of Mohacs, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelys, and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains, and their swords, can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach.

A dictator from day one, in other words. 

Dracula has the same effect upon Harper that Trump has upon many of his critics:

As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.

Dracula, like Trump, has his fanatical supporters: the Romani, who attempt to protect him when Van Helsing and company track him down. The good news is that, in the end, he is decapitated and stabbed in the heart, at which point he crumbles to dust. Will Trump crumble away with these court hearings. We should be so lucky.

The albatross, of course, comes from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. For having shot the albatross, a benign and friendly bird that is doing harm to no one, the mariner has the bird hung around his neck (no small burden given that albatrosses are huge birds). Think of the albatross as America’s multicultural democracy. Killing the bird leads to a crisis aboard the ship, which happens to be our case as well. Pray that Trump doesn’t get a second shot at the albatross.

The mariner is able to find redemption through repentance. No one thinks there is any chance that Trump will do the same.  

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