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Friday
When I was growing up, the superstition of Friday the 13th being unlucky was kept alive by the turtle character Churchy La Femme (after “cherchez la femme”) in the cartoon strip Pogo. If the 13th did not land on a Friday, Churchy would remark, “Friday the 13th is on a Tuesday [or whatever] this month.”
An internet search informs me that, while 13 is itself regarded as an unlucky number in many cultures, its pairing with Friday may originate in a now-forgotten French play. In Les Finesses des Gribouilles, we encounter a character declaring, “I was born on a Friday, December 13th, 1813 from which come all of my misfortunes.”
Incidentally, my internet search also informed me that there is a word for fear of Friday the 13th. “Paraskevidekatriaphobia” is derived from the Greek words Paraskeví (meaning Friday) and dekatreís (meaning thirteen).
Today’s lyric, while a nod to superstition (black cats in this instance), is a great poem in its own right. Some people believe it is bad luck for a black cat to cross one’s path, and Rilke’s poem contends that black cats are even more unsettling than ghosts. A ghost, after all, will arrest the sight, whereas the “thick black pelt” of a black cat will absorb “your strongest gaze” so that you disappear into it.
This is not altogether bad, the poet adds. For while disappearing into a cat’s blackness is like a raving man charging howling into a dark night, the absorption also pacifies him.
Perhaps that’s because, when we disappear into the abyss, we lose all sense of self. Thus Rilke talks of curling up to sleep with this “menacing and sullen” apparition. We stop fighting our fear of losing our reason and surrender to the darkness.
Only the peace is temporary because, when the cat turns its face on us, we awaken again to ourselves, seeing ourselves “suspended” or trapped–“like a prehistoric fly”–in “the golden amber of her eyeballs.” Self, as Jane Austen puts it, will intrude.
I am reminded of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Black Cat” story when the madman thinks he has found peace after having walled up his murdered wife. After all, he has successfully eluded the police, the superegos to his id–only it so happens that he has accidentally walled up the cat as well, and its mewing alerts the authorities to the crime. The cat, like the tell-tale heart, will not remain silent.
In other words, we cannot escape the self, which glows in the darkness, and feel powerless.
Black Cat By Rainer Maria Rilke Trans. Stephen Mitchell
A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place your sight can knock on, echoing; but here within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze will be absorbed and utterly disappear:
just as a raving madman, when nothing else can ease him, charges into his dark night howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels the rage being taken in and pacified.
She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen into her, so that, like an audience, she can look them over, menacing and sullen, and curl to sleep with them. But all at once
as if awakened, she turns her face to yours; and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny, inside the golden amber of her eyeballs suspended, like a prehistoric fly.
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Thursday
Reader and friend Mike Hazard alerted me to a politician using the Scarlet Letter in a recent press conference. Although MSNBC host Katie Phang called it a stunt and “performative nonsense,” I think there might be something to it. Here’s historian Heather Cox Richardson’s report:
Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) entered the Republican candidate forum today wearing a white T-shirt with a red letter “A” on it, saying she was doing so because of the backlash she faced as “a woman up here, and being demonized for my vote and for my voice.” Mace, one of the eight House Republicans who voted to get rid of former speaker Kevin McCarthy, said the A was her “scarlet letter,” an apparent reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel involving a woman forced to wear a scarlet A after giving birth to a child without identifying the father.
While I know barely anything about Mace (Wikipedia is my main source of information on her), I know that some consider her to be what passes for a moderate in the GOP these days—and that people were therefore surprised when she joined with Matt Gaetz and the “crazy caucus” against House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the first time in American history a Speaker has been voted out by his own party. She’s considered a moderate because she believes that victims of rape and incest should indeed have access to abortion. (Apparently she herself was raped by a classmate at age 16.) Also, at a time when some on the right are attacking birth control itself, she’s an advocate, which I guess is something.
At any rate, it’s interesting that she identifies with a book about an unwanted pregnancy although her “stunt” is not about reproduction. Rather, she is addressing those fellow Republicans who are furious about her vote against McCarthy. Her self-defense bolsters her claims of moderation. McCarthy lost her vote, she claims, because he “did not follow through on pushing her legislation to address the country’s rape-kit backlog, expand access to birth control, adopt a balanced budget amendment and create an alert system that would notify people when there is a mass shooting.”
Turning to the novel, if Hester Prynne had access to abortion, she never would have been exhibited on the scaffold or shunned by society. She finds her punishment excruciating:
The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom [where the scarlet letter is placed]. It was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety of insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the object. Had a roar of laughter burst from the multitude,—each man, each woman, each little shrill-voiced child, contributing their individual parts,—Hester Prynne might have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.
Hawthorne describes the Puritan audience as “stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity.” We also learn that her cuckolded husband finds the punishment appropriate: “She will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious letter be engraved upon her tombstone,” he tells a fellow onlooker. In such people one sees our own forced birth fundamentalists. those that would have a 12-year-old give birth to her father’s child and a rape victim to her rapist’s. And that would force a woman to risk her health and life by carrying a non-viable fetus to term.
Mace, who is well acquainted with the neo-Puritan sensibilities of her fellow Republicans, is uncomfortable that their ire has suddenly been turned on her. She is discovering that any party member who shows even a hint of moderation will suffer their slings and arrow, and she channels Hester to give her the strength to bear up against such attacks. Her showy display of a scarlet letter is akin to Hester’s own boldness:
On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold-thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.
The scarlet letter for both Mace and Hester is designed to create a sensation. Here’s the effect of Hester’s letter:
But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,—so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,—was that Scarlet Letter, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
Perhaps Mace, feeling martyred herself, likes the beauty that martyrdom conveys upon Hester. I can imagine the legislator thrilling to the following passage when she read Scarlet Letter in high school or college:
The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped.
In light of her familiarity with Hester’s imprisonment, I find it interesting that, as a South Carolina House member, Mace was instrumental in passing a law exempting imprisoned pregnant women from shackles. Maybe the book made her more sensitive to the issue.
For all the positive things one can say about Mace, however, she still advocates a 12-15-week limit for abortions—before some women even know they are pregnant–after which she is in favor of unleashing state power and public opprobrium against offenders. She’s all too willing to become one of those censorious Puritans herself. Nor, as far as I can tell, has she shown any inclination to support programs for new mothers or for impoverished families with kids. Her support for a “balanced budget”—unless it included cuts to the military and significantly higher taxes on the wealthy—would ravage social safety net programs. The Puritans, at least, allow Hester to have a house and a garden plot.
Indeed, for all the seemingly laudable reasons Mace gave for voting against McCarthy, I wonder whether that was the actual stunt. After all, if one only voted for candidates who endorsed all one’s pet projects, no one would ever be elected to Speaker. Perhaps, Mace thinks, she can get away with her quasi-moderation if she joins—on this vote—with those who want to “burn the whole place down” (McCarthy’s words).
Still, I always enjoy seeing someone making use of a classic.
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Wednesday
In yesterday’s post I contended that Grendel’s Mother (GM) was at work in the Middle East—which is to say, I saw her grief-fueled revenge working itself out in the seemingly never-ending blood feud between Israelis and Palestinians. While GM is an archetypal account of such violence, the poem also provides down-to-earth examples of deep grudges leading to bloodshed, despite truces meant to keep the peace.
The incident described is a Dane-Frisian/Jute battle, followed by a truce that is then broken, that bears more than a little resemblance to the situation in the Middle East. While versions of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians goes back thousands of years, it began to take its present form when the state of Israel was formed. As Ishaan Tharoor of the Washington Post reminds us, thousands were
forced to flee their homes and native villages amid the bloody Israeli expulsion campaigns that followed the country’s creation in 1948. Hundreds of Palestinian towns were wiped off the map, while thousands of Palestinians were killed in numerous documented massacres carried out by Israeli troops and paramilitary organizations.
Whatever the sins of the past, however, one can’t fight forever the battles of the past if one is to move forward—one must come up with new arrangements to deal with the new reality—and there have been multiple attempts since Israel’s founding to arrive at various peace agreements. Some of these have been very intricate, such as dealing with the various holy sites in Jerusalem. But just like Grendel’s Mother, who “brooded on her wrongs,” there are always parties willing to blow up any truce arrived at.
The story of Finn and Hengest, which the bard recounts to the Danish court, parallels the Israeli-Palestinian situation only too well. The Danes and the Frisians/Jutes, who are perpetually at war, have attempted to use a diplomatic marriage to end hostilities: the Danish king Hnaef’s sister, Hildebuhr, is married off to the Frisian king Finn, with whom she has a son. Beowulf will later remark that diplomatic marriages seldom work, and he proves to be right here as Hnaef attacks Finn. The subsequent battle is a draw although both Hnaef and Hildebuhr’s son, fighting on opposite sides, are killed. The story as we have it starts at this point, with an accounting of the violence and killing:
Hildeburh had little cause to credit the Jutes: she lost them both on the battlefield. She, bereft and blameless, they foredoomed, cut down and spear-gored. She, the woman in shock, waylaid by grief Hoe’s daughter— how could she not lament her fate when morning came and the light broke on her murdered dears? And so farewell delight on earth…
Because neither side prevails and because the Danes (apparently because of the winter weather) can’t return home, Finn sets up a delicate balancing act to keep everyone from each other’s throats:
So a truce was offered as follows: first separate quarters to be cleared for the Danes, hall and throne to be shared with the Frisians. Then, second: every day at the dole-out of gifts Finn, son of Focwald, should honor the Danes, bestow with an even hand to Hengest and Hengest’s men the wrought-gold rings bounty to match the measure he gave his own Frisians— to keep morale in the beer-hall high.
The Jutes and the Danes then swear oaths to maintain the arrangement:
Both Sides then the Danish sealed their agreement with Oaths to Henges t Finn swore openly, solemnly, that the battle survivors would be guaranteed honor and status.
No infringement by word or deed, no provocation would be permitted.
So, separate but equal living quarters and an even distribution of gifts. What could go wrong? The Danes, we are told, are unhappy with the situation but must accept it, given that “their own ring-giver”
was dead and gone, they were leaderless, in forced allegiance to his murderer.
Finn is only too aware of how the situation can blow up. All it takes is for one of his men to taunt a Dane for the fighting to recommence. One thinks of the sometimes seemingly tiny things that have set off triggered violence in Israel and Palestine over the years:
So if any Frisian stirred up bad blood with insinuations or taunts about this, the blade of the sword would arbitrate it.
The Danish warriors now spread through Friesland in a situation not unlike Jewish settlements on the West bank. Note that the Danes carry their grieving with them:
Warriors scattered to homes and forts all over Friesland
fewer now, feeling loss of friends.
Meanwhile Hnaef’s second-in-command, Hengest, must live in Finn’s hall. He too broods:
Hengest stayed, lived out that resentful, blood-sullen winter with Finn, homesick and helpless.
We are told that he longs for vengeance and “to bring things to a head.” All it takes is for one of his men to drop a sword in his lap and for a couple of others to remind him of old grievances:
So he did not balk once Hunlafing placed on his lap Dazzle-the-Duel, the best sword of all, whose edges Jutes knew only too well
And:
after Guthlaf and Oslaf back from their voyage made old accusation: the brutal ambush, the fate they had suffered, all blamed on Finn.
And then you have the blood lust that we are seeing in far too many, for those who want to “exterminate” (Sen. Marc Rubio’s word) all of Gaza to those cheering on the terrorists:
The wildness in them had to brim over. The hall ran red with blood of enemies. Finn was cut down, the queen brought away and everything the Shieldings could find inside Finn’s walls — the Frisian king’s gold collars and gemstones — swept off to the ship.
So are the bard’s Danish auditors—remember, this is a poem inside Beowulf—horrified by Danes breaking a truce and slaughtering Frisians? Hardly:
The poem was over, the poet had performed, a pleasant murmur started on the benches, stewards did the rounds with wine in splendid jugs…
I wonder if there will be, if not pleasant murmurs, at least tacit approval of the declaration by Israel’s Defense Minister, as reported by the Washington Post column:
In an address Monday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said he had ordered “a complete siege” on the territory where Hamas first emerged and now operates. Gallant went on to invoke rhetoric that rights groups claimed what amounts to announcing war crimes. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant said of Gaza. “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
In a fine blog post, Yale historian Timothy Snyder points out the danger of such thinking. It’s not just that it dehumanizes a whole population but it’s what the terrorists want:
Classically, a terrorist provokes a state in order to generate so much suffering among his own people that they will take the terrorist’s side indefinitely.
Snyder points out that, for this reason, the 9-11 terrorists ultimately achieved their aim:
9/11 was a successful terrorist attack because we made it so. Regardless of whether or not its planners and perpetrators lived to see this, it achieved its main goal: to weaken the United States. Without 9/11, the United States presumably would not have invaded Iraq, a decision which led to the death of tens of thousands of people, helped fund the rise of China, weakened international law, and undid American credibility. 9/11 was a contributing cause to American decisions that caused far more death than 9/11 itself did. But the point here is that 9/11 facilitated American decisions that hurt America far more than 9/11 itself did.
Beowulf understands the toll that blood feuds take on society, which is why (as I explained in yesterday’s post) he has to reach down into a deep magic to stop GM-style retribution from engulfing the Danes. He doesn’t flail with an impotent sword but invokes a warrior ethos from the golden age before the flood. I don’t see such leadership coming from Netanyahu and Gallant, and those who want more bloodletting only make Grendel’s Mother more powerful.
After Grendel’s Mother kills Hrothgar’s best friend, the king essentially wants to curl up into a ball. “Rest, what is rest, sorrow has returned,” he moans. Throughout the epic, that are instances of kings who become so discouraged by violent death that they retreat from the world, becoming human dragons. But if we are to honor (and save) life, we need to resists our urge for revenge—or inner Grendel’s Mother—and face our challenges with a Beowulfian clarity of mind.
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Tuesday
Of thethree monsters in Beowulf, the most intractable and the hardest to kill is Grendel’s Mother. In my reading, she is the monstrous form—the archetype—of out-of-control grief. Such grief could ravage 8th century warrior society, leading to tit-for-tat violence that led to generations-long blood feuds. When I look for contemporary instances of grief turning violent, Israelis and Palestinians often come first to mind.
Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel—its goal is “the destruction of Israel”—and Israel’s horrific counter-response (cutting off food, water, and electricity to the citizens of Gaza, many of whom are anti-Hamas) may serve the purposes of demagogic politicos but, as is usually the case in such hostilities, the suffering is borne mainly by the innocent. Such is also the case in Beowulf: after the hero kills Grendel, it is not he who suffers GM’s retribution but Aeschere, King Hrothgar’s best friend.
I’ve written many times about the difference between the two trolls. Whereas Grendel’s rage is fueled by resentment—he feels unappreciated and neglected—his mother’s is fueled by sorrow. Those who have suffered loss, as both Israelis and Palestinians have, can brood for years before their rage explodes into murderous violence. The poem describes this place of brooding as “fearful waters” and “cold depths.” GM, we learn, is related to the Bible’s most famous murderer:
Grendel’s mother, monstrous hell-bride, brooded on her wrongs. She had been forced down into fearful waters, the cold depths, after Cain had killed his father’s son, felled his own brother with a sword. Branded an outlaw, marked by having murdered, he moved into the wilds, shunned company and joy. (trans. Seamus Heaney)
The “dark waters” are further described later on. Encountering the demon of sorrow is so frightening, the poem tells us, that a stag pursued by hounds would sooner be torn apart on the shore that leap into those cold depths:
A few miles from here The haunted mere a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch above a mere; the overhanging bank is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface. At night there, something uncanny happens: the water burns. And the mere bottom has never been sounded by the sons of men. On its bank, the heather-stepper halts: the hart in flight from pursuing hounds will turn to face them with firm-set horns and die in the wood rather than dive beneath its surface. That is no good place. When wind blows up and stormy weather makes clouds scud and the skies weep, out of its depths a dirty surge is pitched towards the heavens
People who live in those depths—let’s start with the genocidal Hamas terrorists who indiscriminately slaughtered any civilians they encountered—have forfeited their humanity. The trolls in the poem are described as cut off from civilization:
They are fatherless creatures, and their whole ancestry is hidden in a past of demons and ghosts. They dwell apart among wolves on the hills, on windswept crags and treacherous keshes, where cold streams pour down the mountain and disappear under mist and moorland.
King Hrothgar is clear that GM’s attack is part of a continuing blood feud:
[S]he has taken up the feud because of last night, when you killed Grendel, wrestled and racked him in ruinous combat since for too long he had terrorized us with his depredations. He died in battle, paid with his life; and now this powerful other one arrives, this force for evil driven to avenge her kinsman’s death.
In other words, there seems no end, which is why Hrothgar—like many observes of Middle East hostilities—is in despair:
Then Hrothgar, the Shieldings’ helmet, spoke: “Rest? What is rest? Sorrow has returned. Alas for the Danes! Aeschere is dead. He was Yrmenlaf’s elder brother her son and a soul-mate to me, a true mentor, my right-hand man when the ranks clashed and our boar-crests had to take a battering in the line of action. Aeschere was everything the world admires in a wise man and a friend. Then this roaming killer came in a fury and slaughtered him in Heorot.
The poem strikes a hopeful note in assuring us that GM can be defeated, and it shows us how. It’s important to note that merely lashing at her with a sword doesn’t work, just as slashing at Afghanistan and Iraq after 9-11 didn’t work (and Iraq was actually innocent). Instead, the killing in Afghanistan went on for 17 years until the United States finally gave up and got out while those who had housed Al Kaieda emerged triumphant.
In Beowulf’s case, the sword he initially wields against GM in her underwater lair proves ineffective, shattering upon contact. Instead, “deeper magic”—as C.S. Lewis calls it in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—is called for. In Beowulf, this takes the form of a giant sword found in the lair.
As I read it, this sword for the Anglo-Saxons is their higher purpose, something that can take their society beyond perpetual blood feuds. Think of it as a principle so lofty and so authoritative that conflict ends.
I admit that this sounds like fantasy, and the poem itself goes on to recount one damn death after another, as though Beowulf never wielded that sword. One can see why Hrothgar is so discouraged. But at least a vision has been articulated, just as Israeli and Palestinian peace activists continue to uphold a vision of coexistence.
They do this even as their revenge-obsessed fellow citizens attempt to silence them. That know only too well that whatever punishment Israel now metes out to Hamas and Gaza will simply perpetuate the feud.
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Monday
Last month I reported on a Smithsonian article by Angus Fletcher, a “professor of story science” at Ohio State, about the different ways that literature comes to our aid. Fletcher’s book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature is an anthropological-psychological study of narrative that breaks new ground as it explores why different literary techniques affect us as they do. Now that I’ve obtained a copy, I can talk about it more directly.
Fletcher startles us with his depiction of narrative form as an invented technology. Normally, Fletcher observes, we tend to think of technology as “gadgetries of steel and silicon.” Furthermore, we think that technology is supposed to address such physical needs as hunger, shelter, travel, communication, defense, etc. But if we see technology as first and foremost about helping solve problems, then there are uniquely human problems that, say, an airplane or a furnace cannot address. This is “the problem of being human in a nonhuman world”:
To be human is to wonder Why? As in, Why are we here? What’s the purpose of our hours? Does this life mean anything? And to be human is to have irrational desires and uncontrollable passions, and griefs that split us into pieces. Or to put it in the frank language of our scientific present: to be human is to be saddled with the problem of having a human brain. A brain capable of asking vast questions that it cannot answer.
Looking back at the very earliest instance of written literature—Queen Enheduanna of Ur—Fletcher says we can see how literature harnessed “literature’s great power of emotion” to “imbue[ ] faltering spirits with togetherness and courage.” While creations like Neolithic axes and Bronze Age plows “turned outward to grapple with the problem of surviving in our world,” he writes, “literature turned inward to grapple with the problem of surviving as ourselves.”
To get even more specific, literary technology was invented to “fix hearts and lift souls.” It was a “narrative-emotional technology that helped our ancestors cope with the psychological challenges posed by human biology. It was an invention for overcoming the doubt and the pain of just being us.”
And these tools “didn’t suddenly stop working when our ancestors departed this globe,” Fletcher adds. Literature “can still reckon with death and unshatter the psyche. It can still give us the stuff past the stars and the meaning immortal.”
Literature, furthermore, should not be seen as only one great invention but as many great inventions, each with “a unique purpose, engineered with its own intricate circuitry to click into our psyche in a different way”:
So there was one special invention for lightening sorrow, another for banishing loneliness, another for diminishing anxiety, another for treating the symptoms of trauma, another for bringing hope, another for heightening joy, another for stirring love, another for ushering in tranquility, and so on and so.
Why don’t literature departments see literature in this way? In the book I’ve just finished writing, I put some of the blame on New Criticism, which chose to cordon off literature from life. Fletcher, however, thinks the problem predates the New Critics by 25 centuries. The Greek sophists, he believes, looked at literature as a healing technology, only to run up against the philosophers (Socrates, Plato) and the rhetoricians. Because the sophists didn’t specialize in arguments, they died out. Rhetoric and philosophy, by contrast, flourished:
In our modern literature classes, from elementary school all the way through college, we concentrate primarily on two skills-building rubrics: (1) essay writing and (2) reading comprehension and analysis. In essay writing, we learn to frame arguments as thesis statements that we defend with paragraphs of supporting evidence. In reading comprehension and analysis, we learn to pinpoint what literature is saying….We’re taught, that is, to see literature as a species of argument.
The one exception to philosophy’s triumph, Fletcher acknowledges, is Aristotle, who in his writing about tragedy was interested in how literature impacts us. That’s a colossally large exception although, in Fletcher’s defense, I’ll note that much of literary criticism has focused more on what Aristotle said about form (say, the tragic hero) and less about its cathartic effect. It has been psychologists such as Freud who were more interested in catharsis, which Aristotle described as the purging of the emotions of pity and fear.
To give you a clearer sense of Fletcher’s project, I turn to what he says about tragedy’s ability to treat trauma.
Aristototle, he says, noted that Greek tragedy
didn’t just make people feel good. It also made them feel less bad. The feeling good came from enriching the brain with positive experiences such as wonder and hope, while the feeling less bad came from the inverse: emptying the brain of negative experiences like grief and anxiety. Or to use modern psychiatric parlance: the feeling good came from boosted mental well-being, that neural condition of happy thriving where our life reaches its fullest potential, while the feeling less bad came from improved mental health, that psychological foundation for mental well-being—and for normal daily functioning.
Fletcher discusses how catharsis—empathetic pity and distancing fear—works therapeutically in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, which is about Clytemnestra killing her husband when he returns from the Trojan War. In the following account, EMDR stands for eye-movement desensitizing and reprocessing, a particular trauma therapy. Fletcher says that the 2500-year-old play
gave its audience a chance to experience ancient literary versions of two modern psychiatric treatments for posttraumatic fear. Like autobiographical review, Agamemnon prompted spectators to review their posttraumatic memories in a physically safe and emotionally supportive environment. And like EMDR, the play’s chorus delivered that prompt in a dynamic performance that shifted the eyes left and right. And although we cannot travel back in time to gauge the therapeutic effectiveness of these long-ago treatments, we have been able to observe their healing action on twenty-first-century trauma survivors. Over the past decade, performances of the chorus of Agamemnon and other Greek tragedies have been staged for combat veterans by initiatives such as Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War Production and Peter Meineck’s Aquila Theatre Company (which places particular emphasis on the side-to-side movement incorporated into EMDR). And in response to these performances, veterans have self-reported a decrease in feelings of isolation, hypervigilance, and other symptoms of posttraumatic fear. Just as Aristotle describes in the Poetics, they’ve undergone an experience of catharsis.
Fletcher cautions that this doesn’t make Greek tragedy a “miracle cure” but it can help some who suffer. And then Fletcher makes a further claim: that there’s a further literary technique that can boost tragedy’s effects, what he calls the “Hurt Delay.” This is the character suffering trauma but not acknowledging it until later, a plot twist that one finds in Sophocles’s Oedipus.
It is what school kids learn as “tragic irony”—at least I did in high school—and it consists of the audience being able to see what the protagonist cannot. Fletcher contends that Hurt Delay helps trauma victims by giving them a “godlike experience of looking down.” In doing so, the play “reduces activity in our brain’s deep emotion zones, acting as a neural shock absorber against the traumatic events before us.” And this in turn increases “our belief in our ability to cope with trauma ourselves.”
This is called “self-efficacy,” and Fletcher says it has been correlated with significantly higher rates of trauma recover, explaining,
Even though we’re no more able than Oedipus to stop the inevitable, the Hurt Delay strengthens our capacity to manage when the inevitable arrives. Shifting our tragic feeling of helplessness into a psychological sensation of helpfulness, it supplies our brain with a visceral belief in our power to heal.
There’s a lot more in the book, which I’ll be exploring in future posts. For the moment I’ll just note that what Fletcher is trying to set forth systematically, readers have intuitively known forever. Often we sense the kind of book we need at different moments of our lives.
Think of it as self-medication although my own preferred analogy has been a tool kit. The advantage of being well-read, as I’ve frequently told my students, is that you’re always adding to the number of tools you have at your disposal. When a problem arises, someone who’s read a wide variety of works is more likely to have the necessary literary hammer or screwdriver.
Come to think of it, talking about literary technique as a technology doesn’t startle me as much as I thought.
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Sunday
I continue to share literature-related lectures from our church’s Sunday Forum series, “Creating in God’s Image.” Since the Feast of St. Francis was this past Wednesday, we asked the Rev. Jim Pappas to talk about the saint and his thoughts about beauty. Jim says he began a deep relationship with the Franciscan tradition over thirty years ago while a college student at Quincy University. For the last several years he has been offering introductory classes in Franciscan spirituality through area parishes.
By the Rev. Jim Pappas
Altissimu, onnipotente bon Signore, tue so’ le laude, la gloria e l’honore et onne benedictione. Ad te solo, Altissimu, se konfano et nullu homo ene dignu te mentovare.
So begins the oldest work of literature in the Italian language with a known author (there is at least one anonymous love song that is older). We commonly know the poem as The Canticle of the Creatures or The Canticle of Brother Sun. The first seven stanzas were composed 799 years ago by a wandering preacher by the name of Francis as he suffered through an illness in a little shack outside of a convent below the Italian hill-town of Assisi. He would add the final stanzas over the next two years. Here is the entire Canticle in my own translation:
Most High, all-powerful good Lord, yours are the praises, the glory, and the honor, and every blessing. To You alone, Most High, do they belong, and no person is worthy to speak Your name.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, with all your creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun, who is the day, and we are enlightened by him. And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor: of You, Most High, he bears the symbol.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for Sister Moon and the stars: in the sky you formed them bright and precious and beautiful.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for Brother Wind and for the air and the cloudy sky and the clear sky and every type of weather, by which all Your creatures are sustained.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for Sister Water, which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for Brother Fire, by which the night is illumined: and he is beautiful and jovial and very robust and strong.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for our sister Mother Earth, which sustains and governs us, and produces diverse fruits along with colorful flowers and herbs.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, for those who give pardon because of Your love and endure infirmity and tribulation. Blessed are those who endure in peace, because of You, Most High, they will be crowned.
Praised (yes!), my Lord, by our Sister Bodily Death, of which no living person can escape: woe to those who will die in mortal sin; blessed are those who will be found in Your most holy will, because the second death will not harm them.
Praise and bless my Lord and give thanks, and serve Him with great humility.
The Canticle was more than a poem. It was a song. We know from various sources that Francis and the first brothers sang it, including at the time of his death. Sadly, the original tune for the Canticle has been lost, so we cannot sing it exactly as Francis did. But the Canticle is still sung to many musical settings. We probably know it best in the paraphrase “All Creatures of Our God and King” set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
I start with the Canticle because any discussion about ideas like beauty or creativity in the Franciscan tradition has to start in the life and work of Francis himself. Francis was not a philosopher or a theologian. But he was a poet. And more importantly, he was a performer. He often referred to himself as the Jester of the Great King, and he called his brothers the Jongleurs, or Street Performers, of God. Francis and his first companions preached the Gospel through poetry, song, and dance. What is more, almost every aspect of Francis’s life can be taken as a kind of performance art. Because of this, any genuine Franciscan spirituality must include creativity, and its related concept of beauty, as core components.
To understand the Franciscan concepts of beauty and creativity, we need to situate ourselves at least a little in a medieval worldview. For us, the word beauty is an aesthetic term. And in the modern usage, it is a very subjective idea, summed up in the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We do not find it strange at all that what I find beautiful might be very different from what you find beautiful. And I think that even our philosophers have given up on trying to define the aesthetics of beauty in objective terms on which everyone can agree.
But eight hundred years ago, beauty was much more an ethical term than an aesthetic one. Guided by Platonic thought, beauty was easily defined in terms of ordered relationship, balance, and harmony. Following Augustine (and others) in placing these Platonic ideas into a Christian framework, theological discussions of beauty speak about such things as divine intent and design.
It was thought within this world view that beauty was a coolly logical concept about which there could be no differing opinion. Beauty could be established by means of logical argument, without any appeal to emotion or taste. Failure to appreciate beauty was a sign not of differing opinion, but of a disordered life brought about by sin. And within the Platonic ideals, human affections and desire of any kind are viewed at least with suspicion, if not outright hostility. The “desires” are part of fallen flesh, rather than Godlike spirit.
Enter Francis. As I have already mentioned, Francis and his first companions are notable because their preaching was not the cool logical arguments of the scholars but was full of music and drama and performance. Franciscan preaching was an appeal to the affections. The Franciscan approach to God depends deeply upon desire – both ours and God’s. Human persons are called into a personal, emotional experience of God, which by necessity extends into a personal, emotional experience of creation.
In the cool Platonic world view, beauty is certainly one of God’s qualities. But in the emotive Franciscan approach, Beauty becomes a possible name for God! Rather than beauty being a sort of tangential effect within creation, it becomes an absolute essential. If God is Beauty Itself, then it follows that that which God has made must be beautiful. Just as musical compositions show us the composer, just as paintings show us the painter, just as poems show us the poet, so creation shows us the Creator. God’s fingerprints–or in the Franciscan parlance of that time, God’s footprints–are to be found everywhere.
In the one hundred twenty-fourth chapter of Thomas of Celano’s second account of the life of Francis, the provocatively titled Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul, we see this idea laid out:
This happy traveler hurrying to leave the world as the exile of pilgrimage, was helped, and not just a little, by what is in the world Toward the princes of darkness, he certainly used it as a field of battle. Toward God, however, he used it as the clearest mirror of goodness. In art he praises the Artist; whatever he discovers in creatures he guides to the Creator. He rejoices in all the works of the Lord’s hands, and through their delightful display he gazes on their life-giving reason and cause. In beautiful things he discerns Beauty Itself; All good things cry out to him: “The One who made us is the Best.” Following the footprints imprinted on the creatures, he follows his Beloved everywhere; out of them all he makes for himself a ladder by which he might reach the Throne.
He embraces all things with an intensity of unheard devotion, speaking to them about the Lord and exhorting them to praise Him.
Note that in speaking about the life of Francis, Celano does not shy away from the word desire. Rather than treating desire as categorically defective, Franciscans see desire as part of what it is to be created beings. Francis longs for, desires God, a God who is apprehended under the name of Beauty. It is this beautiful God that appeals to, even inflames, Francis’ desires.
As I have said, Francis was not a theologian. Francis was God’s lover, a poet-preacher who desperately wanted to draw others into this love affair with the Creator. His friend Clare was denied the opportunity to be a preacher and street performer for God. But she was no less an adherent and proponent of this new approach to relationship with God. Stuck within the walls of the cloister at San Damiano, she spent her time in silence contemplating the Beautiful One to whom her life was drawn. She stares into the Beauty of God and sees her own beauty reflected back. In her Fourth Letter to Agnes of Prague, she writes:
Happy, indeed is she to whom it is given to share in this sacred banquet so that she might cling with all her heart to Him Whose beauty all the blessed hosts of heaven unceasingly admire Whose affection excites Whose contemplation refreshes, Whose kindness fulfills, Whose delight refreshes, Whose remembrance delightfully shines, By Whose fragrance the dead are revived, Whose glorious vision will bless all the citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem: which, since it is the splendor of eternal glory, is the brilliance of eternal light and the mirror without blemish.
Gaze upon that mirror each day and continually study your face within it, that you may adorn yourself within and without with beautiful robes.
Like Francis, Clare was not primarily a theologian. But she was a contemplative. First enclosure, and then years of illness that kept her bedridden, left her with time to reflect upon the beautiful God who calls us into relationship. She quite literally lived with the cross from which Francis heard Christ’s call to discipleship. And gazing into it day after day, she learned the methodology that would make Franciscan theology possible. Her affective approach to contemplation – gaze, consider, contemplate, imitate – would make it possible for others to follow in the way that she and Francis set out to live. Franciscan friar and poet Murray Bodo captures the essence of Clare beautifully in his poem, “St. Clare Dies at Her Mirror, August 11, 1253”:
I’ve lived in the labyrinth, love its scrubbed walls, doors whose thresholds lead to the brass basin, worn where a Sister’s foot soaks warm in my laving hand. Portals here billow into linen albs, their shadows arching into gates through which the Saracen horses pound toward their own retreat; the blinding ciborium whirls warriors, spins our lacing bobbins. Winter roofbeams groan their vows beneath God’s weight, His rough beard scratches the eaves like a storm of olive branches.
I’ve embraced the labyrinth, the basin’s womb become a mirror for seeing around corners; looked into, it’s the crucifix that spoke to Francis, Christ’s wounded, bent face now a lucid window onto my own riddle recumbent on the stone pillow. On the roof God hops, sparks in a gossip of sparrows. Small, brown, winged, my soul flits through death’s dark mirror, into light.
It ultimately falls to those who come after Francis and Clare to sort out what this spiritual approach means for the world of theology. At least at first, it did not mean completely upending the apple cart of Platonic thought. The first university theologians among the Franciscans, men like Alexander of Hales and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, were thoroughly Platonic in their world view.
Beauty remains an ethical concept, as illustrated by this statement from Bonaventure’s Lectures on the Six Days of Creation: “Justice makes beautiful that which had been deformed.” It remains a given that nothing can be beautiful unless it is as God designs it. Human sin deforms beauty. Repentance and justice restore it. But what does change for Franciscan thinkers is the approach. Theology under the Franciscans becomes an affective enterprise, and not merely a logical one. And Beauty as a core aspect of God’s personal identity helps to drive this.
Bonaventure places our experience of beauty at the beginning of all spiritual work. Each human person in relationship with God is drawn into that relationship by first emotionally experiencing beauty in art and creation. While the intellect is certainly not excluded from the process of entering into deeper relationship with God, it cannot be the beginning. God is apprehended first in the wordless emotive space of experiencing creative beauty. And in the deepening relationship, the created beauty is transcended not by words, but by the eventual apprehension of uncreated Beauty.
We find this idea expressed not only in the works theology, but in art as well. Dante’s Divine Comedy follows this model of affective journey. And it is no wonder, for Dante was himself a Franciscan tertiary, a member of the so-called Third Order movement that Francis designed for those who couldn’t live the absolutely radical life of the friars or of Clare’s Poor Ladies, but who still wanted to live out the Franciscan way as best as they could. We can see this Franciscan ideal of journey into transcendent beauty illustrated well in the final verses of Canto XXXIII of The Paradiso (trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow):
O how all speech is feeble and falls short Of my conceit, and this to what I saw Is such, ’tis not enough to call it little!
O Light Eterne, sole in thyself that dwellest, Sole knowest thyself, and, known unto thyself And knowing, lovest and smilest on thyself!
That circulation, which being thus conceived Appeared in thee as a reflected light, When somewhat contemplated by mine eyes,
Within itself, of its own very colour Seemed to me painted with our effigy, Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein.
As the geometrician, who endeavours To square the circle, and discovers not, By taking thought, the principle he wants,
Even such was I at that new apparition; I wished to see how the image to the circle Conformed itself, and how it there finds place;
But my own wings were not enough for this, Had it not been that then my mind there smote A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.
Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy: But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.
If Bonaventure and others like him open the door to a new theological approach, it will fall to the greatest Franciscan thinker, John Duns Scotus, to completely change the direction. Like the Dominican thinker Thomas Aquinas before him, Scotus was an Aristotelian rather than a Platonist. And doing theology under a completely different world view required new approaches and new terminology.
Without delving too deeply into all of this, I want to point out three of Scotus’ innovations. Two of the ideas are so radical that Scotus actually had to invent words for them. And all three strike me as completely natural progressions from the approach begun by Francis and Clare, and also as the radical shifts necessary to enable our contemporary theological and creative reception of the Franciscan tradition.
The first idea is what Scotus termed haecceitas. We would translate that as this-ness. It means the particularity of any individual, whether it be a person, or a leaf, or a stone. Under traditional Platonic thought, what was important about individual persons was that they participated in a larger category of Personhood. But under Scotus’ idea of this-ness, what is important about individual persons is their individuality. Each created thing is so beloved of God that God pays special attention to the differentiating details.
That means that beauty shifts away from some definition that can be objectively designed by category and into something that must be more subjectively apprehended, because beauty is now entirely tied up with individual integrity. Beauty can still be marred by sin, but even this can no longer be easily described by simple category. And restoration to beauty is more about drawing an individual back to their true self. We see this idea illustrated wonderfully in Galway Kinnell’s poem, “Saint Francis and the Sow”:
The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
The second idea that Scotus gives us is that the Incarnation is not a result of humanity’s fall from grace due to sin, but rather that it is a foregone conclusion of the creation. God’s interest in the individual integrity of each bit of creation, God’s deep appreciation of the beauty of that creation, God’s desire for close relationship with it, means that from the moment God decided to create us, God also planned to become one of us and share in our entire experience. Episcopal priest and theologian Marilyn McCord Adams once described this as “incarnation anyway.” Just as our beauty is a reflection or footprint of God’s Beauty, so too our desire for God is a reflection or footprint of God’s desire for us.
The final idea that I want to mention is what Scotus calls univocity. By this, he means that when we use a word to talk about both God and people, or God and the creation, we mean the same thing by that word. God’s beauty and our beauty are the same kind of thing, not different categories. The only difference is that our experience of what it means to be beautiful can be marred by sin. But restoration to our divinely created beauty is not to some fuzzy shadow of true beauty. Rather, the true beauty of creation, whether human or animal or plant or mineral, is the beauty of God.
No poet better embodies all of these ideas from Scotus than the Irish Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. And that makes sense, since Scotus was the focus of Hopkins’ scholarly work. I think that all of these ideas are perfectly captured in Hopkins’ poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
Despite having a deep intellectual tradition embodied by the likes of Bonaventure and Scotus, for most of us in the Franciscan tradition, the point is still about trying to walk in the way marked out by Francis and Clare and their first companions. And that means approaching life with a creative apprehension of beauty, both of the created and of the Creator.
I therefore would like to bring us around to looking at a couple of specific instances from life of Francis and see how artists can use these Franciscan ideas of beauty to illuminate life, both Francis’ and ours. And while we could certainly make forays into music or the visual arts as a part of this, I hope that you will forgive me for sticking with poetry for our artistic models.
The first instance from the life of Francis that I would like us to examine is Francis’ encounter with lepers. That might seem an odd place to go to talk about beauty. But Francis did not learn to see the beauty of creation by looking at birds and flowers and then extend that to people. Rather, Francis first learned to see beauty by approaching that which he feared. In his Testament he tells us:
The Lord gave me, Brother Francis, thus to begin doing penance in this way: for when I was in sin, it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers. And the Lord Himself led me among them and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, what had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body. And afterwards I delayed a little and left the world.
This incident of Francis’ first encounter as he just described is set forth in the fourth chapter of The Legend of the Three Companions:
One day he was riding his horse near Assisi, when he met a leper. And, even though he usually shuddered at lepers, he made himself dismount, and gave him a coin, kissing his hand as he did so. After he accepted a kiss of peace from him, Francis remounted and continued on his way.
After a few days, he moved to a hospice of lepers, taking with him a large sum of money. Calling them all together, as he kissed the hand of each, he gave them alms. When he left there, what before had been bitter, that is, to see and touch lepers, was turned into sweetness.
Now let us now see how a poet tells the story and see if we can notice the Franciscan ideal of beauty at work. Here is David Citino’s “Francis Meets a Leper”:
He heard the bell toll, erratic in a palsied hand, and smelled the goatish scent before he saw the figure moving in mist on the road to Assisi, a traveler gloved and shod, as was the law, to hide the sores, a man’s inhumanity, missing fingers and toes, and tried to unmask the face, slack muscles showing nothing but astonishment, lower lids keeping eyes open always to our providential decay, flesh soft and thick as rotten wood. Francis saw in bleary eyes, near to him as his mother’s as she loved him, a brother, then someone dearer, wrapped as he’d seen others in his father’s cloth that first had profited English shepherds and the weavers of Ghent, a skin bleached white as bone, a flower blazing in snow, so close to perfection it could only decay. Francis did the only thing he could, sun rising high enough now to burn away the mist. He unwrapped the face, studying lineaments fashioned by a master’s hand, image and likeness of the death that beautifies all living. He closed his eyes and kissed.
It was in seeing the beauty of God in the leper that Francis began to be able to apprehend the beauty of God—first in himself, then in all of the people around him, and finally in all of creation. But as it is Francis’ love of the non-human parts of the created order that so often leads folks to him today, I want to pay attention to at least one of those stories as well. Here is the beloved account of Francis preaching to the birds from the twenty-first chapter of Thomas of Celano’s Life of Saint Francis:
Francis reached a place near Bevagna, in which a great multitude of birds of different types gathered, including doves, crows, and jackdaws. When Francis saw them, he ran swiftly toward them, leaving his companions on the road. He was a man of great fervor, feeling much sweetness and tenderness even toward lesser, irrational creatures. When he was already very close, seeing that they awaited him, he greeted them in his usual way. He was quite surprised, however, because the birds did not take flight, as they usually do. Filled with great joy, he humbly requested that they listen to the word of God.
Among many other things, he said to them: “My brother birds, you should greatly praise your Creator, and love him always. He gave you feathers to wear, wings to fly, and whatever you need. God made you noble among His creatures and gave you a home in the purity of the air, so that, though you never sow nor reap, He nevertheless protects and governs you without your least care.” At these words, the birds rejoiced in a wonderful way according to their nature. They stretched their necks, spread their wings, opened their beaks, and looked at him. He passed through their midst, coming and going, touching their heads and bodies with his tunic. Then he blessed them, and having made the sign of the cross, gave them permission to fly off to another place.
After the birds had listened so reverently to the word of God, Francis began to accuse himself of negligence because he had not preached to them before. From that day on, he carefully exhorted all birds, all animals, all reptiles, and also insensible creatures, to praise and love the Creator.
Again, let us see what poets can do with this story. This time I have selected two approaches. The first is Seamus Heaney’s “Saint Francis and the Birds”:
When Francis preached love to the birds They listened, fluttered, throttled up Into the blue like a flock of words
Released for fun from his holy lips. Then wheeled back, whirred about his head, Pirouetted on brothers’ capes.
Danced on the wing, for sheer joy played And sang, like images took flight. Which was the best poem Francis made,
His argument true, his tone light.
And the second is a selection from Marilyn Nelson’s The Life of a Saint: after Giotto:
IV. The Saint Preaches
The saint has come back to town. Everyone comes out. His father’s old retainers whisper how he’s changed. He says he has a mistress now, that his pride kisses the ground. He seems so strange. He carries his hunger in a wooden bowl.
Some say they see his mistress, that she’s old and wears rags. He says he’s been praying for years. When he limps through the streets he leaves red footprints for the rain to eat. He looks as wild as the Baptist, everyone says, but they hang around anyway when he starts to preach.
He’s talking to something beyond them, it seems, no, something so close they’d forgotten to notice, like their own good stink or the beauty of kitchens. When he opens his arms they think birds fly out like coins.
He speaks a language they understand but can’t speak. It sounds to them like singing, like the melody of the wind in the gray olive trees.
They hang around all day and when they go home it seems better, as if they’d discovered salt. They forget the dark they’re afraid of and remember all night long how the saint opened his wings among the gathering birds, how he opened his beak, how he sang.
And so we end where we began, with Francis the poet singing the song of divine beauty. Francis would want us to always continue to diligently search out Beauty. He even now urges us to desire it, to give ourselves over to an all-consuming relationship with the God who is Beauty Itself, the God who desires us so much that being with us and sharing our entire experience has always been a part of the divine plan. And Francis would have us not just to seek this Beauty for ourselves, but to creatively share it so that others may know Beauty as well.
Finally, as the final stanza of the Canticle reminds us, Francis reminds us that nothing, not even death itself, can ultimately separate us from the Beauty by whom and for whom we are made.
Acknowledgements: I am indebted to Mary Beth Ingham, Rejoicing in the Works of the Lord: Beauty in the Franciscan Tradition (Franciscan Heritage Series, vol. 6) for the material on the pre-Franciscan medieval outlook on beauty, as well as the material which appears later on Bonaventure and Scotus. I never directly quote her work, but this lecture would be impossible without it. I have also drawn on Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, Volume II: The Founder (eds. Regis J. Armstrong et. al.) and Francis and Clare in Poetry: An anthology (eds. Janet McCann and David Craig).
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Friday
The Washington Post headline could not fail to catch the eye: “Antisemitism is rising. Time to summon a 10-foot-tall crisis monster.” The subject, as author Adam Mansbach explained, was The Golem of Prague, a giant figure from Jewish folklore who is created out of mud and clay and “animated through secret incantations to defend the Jewish people in times of crisis.” Mansbach says stories of the golem date back to the 1500s.
Reading Mansbach’s article brought to mind the handling of the Golem legend in Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. More on that in a moment.
Mansbach’s interest in the Golem has been spurred by the increasing number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States:
I started writing about golems in the spring of 2022 —before Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and Kyrie Irving dominated the news cycle with antisemitic screeds and Holocaust denial — and finished my project the week former president Donald Trump had dinner with Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. I’m writing this two months after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed the coronavirus had been engineered to exempt Ashkenazi Jews; a month after audio transcripts filed in a Manhattan court revealed Rudy Giuliani mocking Jews for celebrating Passover and Robert G. Bowers was sentenced for killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the day Elon Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League for costing X, formerly known as Twitter, ad revenue by calling attention to rising hate speech on the platform.
In this list, Mansbach doesn’t mention Trump’s “good people on both sides” characterization of the Charlottesville marchers chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” Or his recent Rosh Hashanah message, with its implied threat:
Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!
If the Golem looms so large in the Jewish collective imagination, it is because, Mansbach says, it
represents vigilance against the inevitable, cyclical return of injustice. His myth is born of an understanding that antisemitism is ineradicable — that as long as there are people who feel embittered about their lives, constrained by forces they cannot control, they will come to blame the Jews and then to enact violence upon us.
Our contemporary challenge, Mansbach concludes, is for we ourselves to internalize golem vigilance:
In the absence of a giant clay superhero, our only choice is to become the golems we need. This doesn’t just mean physical confrontation, though there are times when that might be necessary. Nor does it consist simply of vigilance against Jew haters. Instead, it requires Jewish people to enlarge and modernize our watchfulness, to understand that every vehicle of hatred is built on a chassis of antisemitism, and that violence — in word or deed — against any marginalized group will always be a harbinger of tragedy for us.
Kavalier and Clay informs us that, whether we know it or not, we are familiar with the Golem. Superman, created in 1938 by a couple of Jewish artists (one of whose parents had fled Russian pogroms in 1900), inspired by this myth of a strongman saving the downtrodden. Chabon makes the link Jewish resistance and comic book characters even more explicit. It begins with the story of a Houdini-like figure spiriting a golem statue out of Prague before the Nazis find it. Chabon lets us in on some of the deliberations behind the decision. Some want to keep the Golem in Prague since that’s where it has always been. In fact, there
were even a few in the circle who, when pressed, admitted that they did not want to send the Golem away because in their hearts they had not surrendered the childish hope that the great enemy of Jew-haters and blood libelers might one day, in a moment of dire need, be revived to fight again. In the end, however, the vote went in favor of removing the Golem to a safe place, preferably in a neutral nation that was out of the way and not entirely devoid of Jews.
The escape artist in charge of the transfer also uses the occasion to help one of his students, Josef Kavalier, to escape Czechslovakia. The Golem is transferred in a coffin, as though it is a corpse, with Kavalier hidden at one end. Through that means he crosses the border, takes the Siberian railway to Japan, and then finds his way to New York, where he connects with his cousin Samuel Klayman. As Kavalier is a gifted artist, the two invent a comic book series that proves to be wildly successful.
The protagonist of their comic book is “the Escape Artist,” who, Houdini-like, escapes all manner of confinements to make war on the Nazis while helping the innocent escape. On the cover of the first issue, Kavalier vents his frustration by showing the Escape Artist unloading a punch on Adolph Hitler. After that, Chabon writes,
it had been total war. The Escapist and his gang fought on land, at sea, in the skies of Fortress Europa, and the punishment taken by the minions of the Iron Chain grew operatically intense.
And:
It was Joe’s battle scenes—the type of panel or sequence known in the trade as a slugfest—that first got his work noticed, both in the business and by the boggled young manhood of America. These scenes have been described as wild, frenetic, violent, extreme, even Breughelian. There is smoke, fire, and lightning. There are thick flocks of bombers, spiky flotillas of battleships, gardens of blooming shell bursts. Up in one corner, a bombed-out castle looms stark on a hill. Down in another corner, a grenade is exploding in a henhouse as chicken and eggs go flying, Messerschmitts dive, finned torpedoes plow up the surf. And somewhere in the middle of it all struggles the Escapist, lashed with naval chain to the business end of a prescient Axis rocket bomb.
At first, Sam’s boss worried that the direct references to Hitler and the Nazis is too political (America has not yet entered the war), but Kavalier and Clay insist on it, although they compromise a little. At first the Escapist and his company fight “the Razi elites of Zothenia, Gothsylvania, Draconia, and other pseudonymous dark bastions of the Iron Chain,
arranging jailbreaks for resistance leaders and captured British airmen, helping great scientists and thinkers out of the clutches of the evil dictator, Attila Hakoff, and freeing captives, missionaries, and prisoners of war.
Chabon refers to the two comic book creators as “golem makers,” and their Golem does a version of what he’s supposed to do, which is to come to the rescue of European Jews. In its small way, the comic book character helps prepare Americans to embrace the war effort, which will culminate in ending the Final Solution. Chabon writes,
[Kavalier] wanted [their boss] to understand the importance of the fight, to succumb to the propaganda that he and Sammy were unabashedly churning out. If they could not move Americans to anger against Hitler, then Joe’s existence, the mysterious freedom that had been granted to him and denied to so many others, had no meaning.
Many of today’s comic book heroes, whether Batman or Iron Man or the Incredible Hulk—pretty much anyone with bulging muscles and a mission to defeat evil—can be traced back to the Golem of Prague. And yes, we need him now as much as ever.
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Thursday
If you enjoy autumn strolls, check out the poetry of the 17th century Anglican cleric Thomas Traherne. My Faculty Reading Group, which has been discussing the work of such metaphysical poets as John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan, has introduced me to Traherne, who is perpetually enthusiastic about the gifts he sees in the world around him. Walking, as he sees it, is one of the best ways of experiencing them.
Traherne makes a distinction between seeing with the eyes and seeing with the mind. The first is merely mechanical and does not involve noticing things. When we walk in this manner, Traherne says, we are like “dead puppets” who “may move in the bright and glorious day, yet not behold the sky.”
In his extended essay on walking, Henry David Thoreau makes a similar distinction. For him, it is the difference between the body and the spirit:
I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is — I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?
Actually, Thoreau prefers the word “sauntering,” which accentuates the randomness of the experience.
Traherne agrees. When we walk, he says, we should think of ourselves as bees gathering pollen. Or as he sensuously puts it,
To fly abroad like active bees, Among the hedges and the trees, To cull the dew that lies On ev’ry blade, From ev’ry blossom; till we lade Our minds, as they their thighs.
For a moment, Traherne sounds Wordsworthian, suggesting that we lose something as we grow older:
A little child these well perceives, Who, tumbling in green grass and leaves, May rich as kings be thought…
Wordsworth similarly observes (in Intimations of Immortality), “But yet I know, where’er I go,/That there hath past away a glory from the earth.”
Unlike Wordsworth, however, Traherne, then assures us that these pleasures are equally available to adults:
But there’s a sight Which perfect manhood may delight, To which we shall be brought.
Apparently this is a theme for Traherne. In fact, as we were informed by Sewanee’s Renaissance specialist James MacDonald, Traherne has one note, which he plays over and over. One sees his non-stop enthusiasm in “Wonder” as well as in “Walking.” Here are two stanzas:
The skies in their magnificence, The lively, lovely air; Oh how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair! The stars did entertain my sense, And all the works of God, so bright and pure, So rich and great did seem, As if they ever must endure In my esteem.
A native health and innocence Within my bones did grow, And while my God did all his glories show, I felt a vigour in my sense That was all spirit. I within did flow With seas of life, like wine; I nothing in the world did know But ’twas divine.
As one of our members put it, it’s like Blake’s Songs of Innocence without the accompanying Songs of Experience.
In this regard, Traherne differs from George Herbert, whom we had just discussed and who constantly grapples with mood swings and agonizing doubt. Although he, like Traherne often ends up with a deep appreciation of God’s bounty, he has to work harder to get there.
But if you want your walk to be unalloyed joy, Traherne is the poet for you.
Walking By Thomas Traherne
To walk abroad is, not with eyes, But thoughts, the fields to see and prize; Else may the silent feet, Like logs of wood, Move up and down, and see no good Nor joy nor glory meet.
Ev’n carts and wheels their place do change, But cannot see, though very strange The glory that is by; Dead puppets may Move in the bright and glorious day, Yet not behold the sky.
And are not men than they more blind, Who having eyes yet never find The bliss in which they move; Like statues dead They up and down are carried Yet never see nor love.
To walk is by a thought to go; To move in spirit to and fro; To mind the good we see; To taste the sweet; Observing all the things we meet How choice and rich they be.
To note the beauty of the day, And golden fields of corn survey; Admire each pretty flow’r With its sweet smell; To praise their Maker, and to tell The marks of his great pow’r.
To fly abroad like active bees, Among the hedges and the trees, To cull the dew that lies On ev’ry blade, From ev’ry blossom; till we lade Our minds, as they their thighs.
Observe those rich and glorious things, The rivers, meadows, woods, and springs, The fructifying sun; To note from far The rising of each twinkling star For us his race to run.
A little child these well perceives, Who, tumbling in green grass and leaves, May rich as kings be thought, But there’s a sight Which perfect manhood may delight, To which we shall be brought.
While in those pleasant paths we talk, ’Tis that tow’rds which at last we walk; For we may by degrees Wisely proceed Pleasures of love and praise to heed, From viewing herbs and trees.
I recently discovered a news item that, while horrific, brought back fond memories of reading Brian Jacques’s Redwall books to my children. The memory involves the shrew characters.
The Redwall series could be described as a blend of Wind in the Willows and Lord of the Rings. In it, various animals—most notably mice (Martin the Warrior) but also (as in Kenneth Grahame’s novel) badgers, moles and otters. The villains are invariably (again as in Wind in the Willows), weasels and stoats, as well as foxes and rats. The good guys seek to defend Redwall Abbey from invasion and venture out to rescue captured comrades, all the while employing pre-gunpowder military technology.
But I want to talk about shrews, who are also in alliance with the good guys. They are headed by one Log-a-Log and they show up en masse, dozens upon dozens. Invariably, like actual shrews, they are fearless and go plunging into battle. They also suffer mass casualties. It’s not uncommon, say when they are aboard a boat, to see a score of them swept into the water.
When I was reading the books to Justin, Darien and especially Toby, we sometimes would talk about the “expendable shrews.” To show it means business and to add to the suspense, an adventure book like this needs to have some of the good characters die. But it can’t have major figures suffer death since, after all, it’s not Game of Thrones. To the shrews, therefore, goes the honor of perishing for the greater good.
In Russia’s invasion, it’s former convicts who are playing the role of the shrews. A recent Reuters article reports that convicts, insubordinate soldiers, and drunk recruits get pressed into Russian penal units known as “Storm-Z” squads and are routinely sent to the most exposed parts of the front line. “They’re just meat,” said one soldier, who disobeyed a commander by treating wounded Storm-Z fighters rather than just leaving them. Another fighter described similar conditions:
On the frontline, where we’ve been, we did not get deliveries of ammunition. We did not get water or food. The injured were not taken away: still now the dead are rotting…
At least, in the later Redwall books, there are instances of individual shrews getting rescued. In fact, there are fewer of them and they are more individuated.
In other words, after getting to know his animal characters, Jacques could not bring himself to see any of them as expendable. We should wish the same for Putin.
Further note: Having found similarities between Jacques and Tolkien, here’s the latter’s description of expendable Orcs. As it so happens, the Ukrainians draw upon Lord of the Rings, characterizing the Russian invaders as orcs. The scene is from the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers:
Then at last an answer came: a storm of arrows met them, and a hail of stones. They wavered, broke, and fled back; and then charged again, broke and charged again; and each time, like the incoming sea, they halted at a higher point. Again trumpets rang, and a press of roaring men leaped forth. They held their great shields above them like a roof, while in their midst they bore two trunks of mighty trees. Behind them orc-archers crowded, sending a hail of darts against the bowmen on the walls. They gained the gates. The trees, swung by strong arms, smote the timbers with a rending boom. If any man fell, crushed by a stone hurtling from above, two others sprang to take his place. Again and again the great rams swung and crashed.
Unfortunately, like the defenders of Helm’s Gate, Ukraine will lose a battle of attrition. Russia has more lives to waste. The Ents save the Riders of Rohan and members of the fellowship but who will come to the support of the Ukrainians?
