Shohei Like a Superhero in a Novel

By Robin Bates | Published: August 24, 2023
Shohei Ohtani before his injury

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Friday

Since I no longer follow baseball closely, an injury to this or that player doesn’t normally catch my attention, especially if the team is not in contention for a title. In the case of 29-year-old Shohei Ohtani, however, I sit up and pay attention. I also think of Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

That’s because it too shows something bad happening to a miraculous player. More on the novel in a moment.

If you don’t know about Shohei, I’m here to tell you that “miraculous” is almost an understatement. Before yesterday’s injury, he may have been both the best hitter AND the best pitcher in the league. As Joe Posnanski wrote in the Washington Post a week ago, Shohei “is doing things on a baseball diamond that scramble the mind.”

Many have noted in recent years that the game has become almost impossible to watch, which is why we’ve seen pitchers and batters put on a time clock and a new element introduced into extra-inning games. Nothing revitalize a game so much, however, as a one-in-a-lifetime talent.

Posnanski pointed out last week that, as a hitter, Shohei was leading or was tied for the lead in the American league in triples, home runs, walks, on-base percentage and slugging percentage. At the same time, he had allowed fewer hits per game than any other pitcher. Batter have been hitting only .185 against him, the best figure in all of baseball. Posnanski notes,

There is no precedent in Major League Baseball. The closest thing was Babe Ruth, who devoted baseball fans will know was a great pitcher before he became a legendary slugger. But even the Babe did not do what Ohtani is doing. He more or less stopped pitching once he became an everyday player. There were great pitcher-hitter combinations in the Negro Leagues, such as Bullet Rogan and Martin Dihigo. But, alas, they spent their careers in the shadows before Jackie Robinson.

In his forthcoming book Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments, Posnanski has a chapter devoted to Shohei. The player presents a special problem for the author of such a book, however, as he keeps topping himself. In an early draft, Posnanski wrote about back-to-back games against Kansas City in 2022 where Shohei hit two home runs and drove in eight runs on Tuesday and then threw eight scoreless innings with 13 strikeouts on Wednesday. He later rewrote the chapter when Shohei “struck out his friend and teammate Mike Trout, the best player of the past decade, to close out Japan’s victory over the United States in the World Baseball Classic.”

Then, in June, Shohei had what Posnanski describes as “perhaps the greatest month any player has ever had.” The Japanese player hit .394 with 15 home runs in 27 games while also winning two games as a pitcher and striking out 37 batters. Then, in July, he had “the most singular day,” throwing a one-hit shutout in the first game of a doubleheader in Detroit and following that up with “two titanic home runs” in the second game. Posnanski writes, “I might be writing and rewriting that Ohtani chapter for the next decade.”

Shohei has certainly caught my interest, which is no small feat since I fell out of love with baseball years ago after having been a passionate fan, first of the Cubs and then (when we moved to Maryland) of the Baltimore Orioles. I followed the latter avidly for several years, listening to them nightly on the radio as I washed the dishes. I became disillusioned and left the sport when the Orioles’ narcissistic owner (but I repeat myself, as Twain would say*) fired the smart and witty sportscaster John Miller. The magic had gone out of the game for me.

Which is what happens in Universal Baseball Association, where the game had fallen into the doldrums. Coover’s novel anticipates sports fantasy leagues by having an aging accountant invent a game played with three dice. Plays depend on the roll, and Waugh keeps the stats while creating names and personal histories for all the players. The league has played 56 seasons when the book opens so that Waugh can think back to fathers and grandfathers who also played the game.

But the game has gotten stale so that Waugh feels himself just going through the motions. That is, until Damon Rutherford, a rookie pitcher and son of hall-of-famer Brock Rutherford, explodes on the scene. In the first chapter we watch Damon pitch a perfect game (!):

Henry’s heart was racing, he was sweating with relief and tension all at once, unable to sit, unable to think, in there, with them! Oh yes, boys, it was on! He was sure of it. More than just another ball game now: history! And Damon Rutherford was making it. Ho ho! too good to be true! And yes, the stands were charged with it, turned on, it was the old days all over again, and with one voice they rent the air as the Haymaker Star Hamilton Craft spun himself right off his feet in a futile cut at Damon’s third strike—zing! whoosh! zap! OUT! Henry laughed, watched the hometown Pioneer fans cheer the boy, cry out his name, then stretch—not just stretch—leap up for luck. He saw beers bought and drunk, hot dogs eaten, timeless gestures passed.

This fantasy league gives meaning to a life that is otherwise spent working for a dull accounting firm during the day and ordering home delivery deli sandwiches in the evening, along with an occasional trip to the local bar and a fling with an aging prostitute. While Waugh is unable to explain this private passion to others, they can see how his excitement over Rutherford’s achievement lights him up.

Sports can do that, structuring our time and our passions in ways that seem disproportionate to their actual importance. After all, it’s only a game.

But because sports has this outsized influence, Coover uses the fantasy baseball league to further explore the meaning of life when tragedy hits. In the midst of Rutherford’s rookie glory, Waugh twice rolls three sixes in a row, which takes him to “the Extraordinary Occurrences Chart.” Anything can happen here, from a fist fight to a fixed game. The chart, Coover explains, is what gives the game its special quality, making it “much more than just a series of hits and walks and outs.”

Unfortunately for Waugh, the chart indicates that Damon, the future of the league, has been struck by a beanball and killed. With this sudden reversal of fortune Waugh’s life, which had seemed redeemed by sports success, suddenly appears existentially and tragically absurd.

So how does Waugh cope? At first he doesn’t but instead spirals into madness, experiencing fully the bleakness of his existence.

I’m not saying that the lives of baseball enthusiasts will suddenly feel bleak with Shohei’s injury. Furthermore, there’s a possibility that he will come back from this tear in one of his elbow ligaments. I can’t see him ever having another season like the one we’ve just seen, however. I fully expect him to give up pitching.

In the novel, Waugh makes a devil’s bargain in an attempt to pull himself out of his madness. Since he happens to be the divine creator of this world (J. Waugh can be read as Jahweh), he can do what he wants. Einstein famously said that “God does not play dice with the universe,” and here is the game’s proprietor choosing, for once, not to play dice. Or rather, he deliberately fixes a throw, which is the same thing. To restore balance, he believes the pitcher who killed Damon must be killed in return, so he arranges a trip to the Chart of Extraordinary Circumstances and has him knocked off by a hard-hit line drive.

The baseball universe has now become unrecognizable, however, as the players sense strange patterns occurring within their lives. Take free will and chance out of the equation and reality begins to look much different.

Which means that Coover’s novel can provide us insight into more than sports. (Warning: I’m about to veer from sports into politics so feel free to stop reading.) Since many Americans these days like to think that they can create “alternative facts” (to quote Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway) that will correspond with their desires—for instance, they believe they can wish away climate change and Covid—we get a glimpse of what life would look like if that were true.

A quick history lesson here. Contempt for the so-called “reality-based community” was expressed by a member of the George W. Bush administration, who dismissed those who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” This official went on to say,

That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Donald Trump, of course, took “creating other new realities” to a whole new level.

So what happens in the novel? Well, the players start formulating elaborate conspiracy theories about how the world is constructed. (Waugh by this time has disappeared from the book so that we only see his mad creations.) They start noticing prophetic number combinations and repetitions of old dramas. Fatalism and paranoia begin to rule their lives.

It’s a reminder that life is much more enchanting if it is not predetermined, if we have free will. Think of how facing up to reality—including climate change and Covid—can bring out the best in human beings as we discover new sources of energy and new vaccines. Think of how interacting with other races, ethnicities, and nationalities—uncomfortable though some find it—causes us to adapt and expand in ways that confining ourselves to the familiar never does.

And think of how truly wonderful it is when a player like Shohei Ohtani bursts on the scene, even if only for a brief moment. We couldn’t have imagined him before he showed up but, once he did, he stand in awe. We thought we understood how reality is configured, only to discover our vision was limited.

*Twain quote: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

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The Trumpists That Didn’t Bark

By Robin Bates | Published: August 23, 2023
Cumberbatch as Holmes in Sherlock

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Thursday

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow made creative use of a Sherlock Holmes story this past Monday: she quoted a line that everybody knows from a story that almost nobody knows. Then she applied it to Donald Trump supporters.

The story is “Silver Blaze,” about (spoiler alert) a heavily guarded horse, the favorite to win an important race, that disappears only days before the event while its trainer ends up dead. The guard watching over the horse has been drugged, but the important clue—which of course only Holmes grasps—occurs in the following passage:

The two lads who slept in the chaff-cutting loft above the harness-room were quickly aroused. They had heard nothing during the night, for they are both sound sleepers.

I should mention that, four paragraphs earlier, there is casual mention of a watchdog.

And now for Holmes’s insight:

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

The curious incident is that the dog didn’t bark, which would have awakened the stable boys. And if the dog didn’t bark, it is because the thief was someone with whom the dog was familiar—which is to say, the trainer himself. Eventually we learn that, deeply in debt, he has laid bets against his own horse and then taken it out to subtly cripple it. Fortunately, the horse’s kick kills him before he can accomplish his goal.

The dog that didn’t bark in Trump’s case is the supporters who didn’t show up at his indictments. On January 6, of course, Trump achieved spectacular results when he called upon them to turn out in force. The invitation only worked that first time, however. The following Truth Social tweet, despite its use of all caps, brought out only a handful of Trumpists:

NOW ILLEGAL LEAKS FROM A CORRUPT & HIGHLY POLITICAL MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEYS OFFICE, WHICH HAS ALLOWED NEW RECORDS TO BE SET IN VIOLENT CRIME & WHOSE LEADER IS FUNDED BY GEORGE SOROS, INDICATE THAT, WITH NO CRIME BEING ABLE TO BE PROVEN, & BASED ON AN OLD & FULLY DEBUNKED (BY NUMEROUS OTHER PROSECUTORS!) FAIRYTALE, THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!

For indictment #2, the one at the Miami courthouse, Trump tried repeating his January 6 call—“Be there, will be wild!”–once again resorting to all caps:

SEE YOU IN MIAMI ON TUESDAY!!!

Again, nothing, leading Trump to refrain altogether from commanding his troops to rally for indictments three and four. In other words, first his supporters stopped barking and then he did.

And how is this a curious incident? It may be that Trump is losing his ability to create massive disruption. To be sure, his angry tweets (or whatever they’re called) can rile up individual followers, so there have been many threats from Trumpists directed at prosecutors, judges, witnesses, grand jury members, etc. Someone could still get killed.

But if this indeed proves to be the beginning of the end for the ex-president, then we may point to Trump supporters not barking as the first indication.

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Clifton’s Poem about a Lynching Victim

By Robin Bates | Published: August 22, 2023
James Byrd of Jasper TX, lynched by three White men 25 years ago

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Wednesday

Yesterday’s Washington Post reminded us of a horrific lynching that occurred in Jasper, Texas 25 years ago, along with a follow-up report on what has occurred there since. The hate crime led to a Lucille Clifton poem, which I heard her read not long after she composed it.

Post reporter Emmanuel Felton tells what happened:

On a June evening in 1998, three White men chained a Black man by his ankles to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him for several miles down a twisting country road in this small East Texas town, decapitating him in the process. The next day, pieces of James Byrd’s body were found all along the route.

Clifton is often an inspirational poet, finding ways to triumph in the most desperate of circumstances. (I think of how she uses poetry to process her father abusing her as a child.)  In “jasper texas 1998,” however, she is just discouraged, writing, “Hope bleeds slowly from my mouth/ into the dirt that covers us all.”

In the poem, Clifton imagines herself as Byrd’s head, speaking for his dismembered body. While his body is no longer recognizably human, the truly disfigured are the ones whom racism has twisted. “Who is the human in this place,” the speaker asks, “the thing that is dragged or the dragger?”

At such moments, bridging the racial divide seems an impossible task. “why and why and why/ should i call a white man brother?” Clifton asks through Byrd. In her current state, there seems no reason to do so, even though Jasper’s Black and White citizens—at least some of them—have come together to sing “We Shall Overcome.” Here’s the poem:

jasper texas 1998
By Lucille Clifton
for j. byrd

i am a man’s head hunched in the road.
i was chosen to speak by the members
of my body. the arm as it pulled away
pointed toward me, the hand opened once
and was gone.

why and why and why
should i call a white man brother?
who is the human in this place,
the thing that is dragged or the dragger?
what does my daughter say?

the sun is a blister overhead.
if i were alive i could not bear it.
the townsfolk sing we shall overcome
while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth
into the dirt that covers us all.
i am done with this dust. i am done.

Sadly, the Washington Post story shows the poem to be predictive, with current day Jasper focused on forgetting the incident:

But now, 25 years later, the horrific attack that once galvanized this community is barely discussed. Byrd is not mentioned in the local school district’s Texas history textbooks and he’s absent from the Jasper County Historical Museum, which opened in 2008. His family says their efforts to keep Byrd’s memory alive, including a push to open a museum in his honor, have largely been met with lackluster support from local officials. Few people showed up at a Juneteenth event they held this year to acknowledge the anniversary of Byrd’s murder.

It’s as though Jasper wants the dust to be swept under the rug. As reporter Felton observes,

The town’s collective amnesia reflects the worst fears of racial justice advocates about what may follow George Floyd’s 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer. Byrd’s death, like Floyd’s, was supposed to represent a turning point in American history, but it has been relegated to a footnote even in his hometown, they say.

No wonder Clifton sounds so discouraged. If things like this keep on happening, then the only true equality we can hope for is one day becoming indistinguishable dust. “We therefore commit this body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” reads the Anglican burial service.

And if that’s the case, then one can understand why even a fighter like Clifton would say, “i am done with this dust. i am done.” Along with the dust through which Byrd has been dragged, Clifton could also be talking about humanity. As in, “I’m fed up with people!”

Even as the poem captures the poet at her most discouraged, however, her composing it is itself a refusal to fully surrender. To be sure, poetry, as truth, has to give full weight to those moments when we are down and despairing; we can’t just skip over them. But having acknowledged this, we must also acknowledge that African Americans, despite all that they have suffered, have refused to stay buried by dust for long.

For instance, writing about her revelation (this at her father’s funeral) that there is hope even after one has been sexually abused, Clifton proclaims,

only then did i know that to live
in the world all that i needed was
some small light and know that indeed
i would rise again and rise again to dance.

While Byrd can’t rise again from the dust—his tragedy should remain with us always—the rest of us can keep fighting, keep dancing, to create a world where Jasper, Texas doesn’t keep happening. Hope and realism must combine forces.

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MAGA & Regeneration thru Violence

By Robin Bates | Published: August 21, 2023

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Tuesday

One problem with MAGA’s rhetoric of violence is that different figures compete for who can sound the most bloodthirsty. While it’s difficult to decide who wins the prize, Ron DeSantis’s “We’re going to start slitting throats on Day 1” is up there. The reference is to downsizing the federal bureaucracy.

Incidentally, this is a man who has investigated violent death. As a 27-year-old Navy lawyer in 2006, he was on the team looking into three Guantanamo prisoners found hanging from their necks, their hands and feet bound and rags in their throats. (The lawyers found no evidence of foul play.)

Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman recently wrote an article for MSNBC’s on-line magazine that puts the escalating rhetoric in perspective.  Although the January 6 insurrection failed, what remains is MAGA’s thirst “to solve their problems with spasms of redemptive violence.” This thirst, Waldman adds, is “being fed every day, by elite figures on the right who believe they can harness the bloodlust they reinforce for their own ends.”

Waldman glumly concludes, “And we don’t yet know whether next time will be even harder to contain.”

I first came across the notion of redemptive violence in Richard Slotkin’s series of studies on the frontier myth of the frontier, which included Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860; Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890; and Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Slotkin’s central thesis is that, throughout our history, many have regarded “the redemption of American spirit” as being achieved “through a scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or ‘natural’ state, and regeneration through violence” (Slotkin’s italics).

“The core of that scenario,” Slotkin explains, is

the symbol of “savage war,” which was both a mythic trope and an operative category of military doctrine. The premise of “savage war” is that ineluctable political and social difference—rooted in some combination of “blood” and culture—make coexistence between primitive natives and civilized Europeans impossible on any basis other than that of subjugation. Native resistance to European settlement therefore takes the form of a fight for survival, and because of the “savage” and bloodthirsty propensity of the natives, such struggles inevitably become “wars of extermination” in which one side or the other attempts to destroy its enemy root and branch.

A literature professor, Slotkin turns to narrative to track the myth, starting with early Indian captivity narratives and Daniel Boone stories and the writings of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville. He concludes, in Gunfighter Nation, with the western and crime genres, both in literature and film. Over the years, Indians have been replaced in this frontier drama with immigrants, labor activists (“socialists”), Muslims, LBGTQ+ folk, and, above all, urban Blacks. Sometimes the rhetoric is broadened to include all Democrats, with Waldman providing examples:

The audience for conservative media imbibes the rhetoric of violence every day. Michael Savage, one of the most widely heard radio hosts in the country, says that because of LGBTQ acceptance and other perceived left-wing excesses, “I’m willing to pick up arms. I can’t take it anymore.” Right-wing media stars laugh and cheer about violence directed at climate activists. A popular far-right podcaster tells his listeners that if the Founding Fathers were alive today, they would “violently overthrow” the American government.

Waldman observes,

Wherever vigilantism looks like a tool the right can use against the left, it will be venerated and even turned into law. Republican legislatures have passed laws shielding people who mow down protesters with their cars from civil liability. Country star Jason Aldean’s single “Try That in a Small Town” imagines urbanites bringing their criminality to rural areas and being met with a violent response.

“[A]re we supposed to be surprised,” Waldman asks, “when the fantasy of violence turns into actual violence?”

Pop culture, especially vigilante narratives, continue to feed the fantasy, while the “actual” shows up in mass shootings, white militia activity, police misbehavior, and attacks on government agencies and officials. For far too many Republicans, dreams of regeneration seem to require, to repeat Slotkin’s words, “temporary regression to a more primitive state.” Elections are regarded as “savage war” where the Democrats must be destroyed “root and branch.” Every tactic becomes permissible.

But just as popular culture bolsters the myth, so do many thoughtful authors–from Hawthorne and Melville through Faulkner and O’Connor to Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison–help dismantle it, exposing its perniciousness. By teaching students about the nature of narrative, we help free them from its harmful aspects.

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In Soccer, MAGA Rooted against Casey

By Robin Bates | Published: August 20, 2023

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Monday

Despite rightwing accusations that the U.S. National Women’s Soccer Team (USNWT) lost in the World Cup’s round of 16 because they were too “woke,” yesterday’s final between the stalwart English and the incandescent Spanish made clear what really happened: the rest of the world has caught up. I don’t think anyone could have beaten La Roja this year, given its sublime passing and its ability to turn from defense to offense in a microsecond. But why let the improbability of an aging U.S. squad pulling off a three-peat get in the way of your political rage?

As basketball-great-turned Blogger Kareem Abdul-Jabbar puts it, it’s as though the American right was rooting for Casey to strike out:

The classic American poem “Casey at the Bat,” chronicling the hometown disappointment when their team hero strikes out, failing to win the big game, has been subverted by right-wing commentators and politicians giddy at the U.S. women’s soccer team losing in the World Cup round of 16. Shockingly, there finally is joy in Mudville—not because the mighty Casey got a hit, but because he struck out. The hometown fans wanted their team to lose. Crazy, I know.

Foremost among those rooting against the U.S. was, of course, Donald Trump, who took the occasion to taunt Megan Rapinoe—winner of both the Golden Boot and the Golden Goal in 2019—for missing a penalty shot in the shootout:

The ‘shocking and totally unexpected’ loss by the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team to Sweden is fully emblematic of what is happening to the our once great Nation under Crooked Joe Biden. Many of our players were openly hostile to America – No other country behaved in such a manner, or even close. WOKE EQUALS FAILURE. Nice shot Megan, the USA is going to Hell!!! MAGA.

Others followed:

“I’m thrilled they lost,” said former Fox News host Megyn Kelly. “You don’t support America, I don’t support you.”

So being critical of Trump is apparently not supporting America.

But let’s look at Jabbar’s “Casey” allusion. Although the U.S. team had a certain swagger, that’s just the way it is with great teams. If anyone really behaves like Casey, however, it’s Trump himself. Following the law is as beneath him as strikes are to Casey:

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped—
“That ain’t my style,” said Casey. “Strike one!” the umpire said.

Actually, come to think of it, Casey’s crowds are not unlike Trump’s, with one critical difference:

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore;
“Kill him! Kill the umpire!” shouted someone on the stand;
And it’s likely they’d have killed him had not Casey raised his hand.

The difference, of course, is that Trump would have riled up this crowd, not calmed it down. “If you see somebody with a tomato, knock the crap out of them,” he once told a crowd. What better way to avoid accountability than have the umpire removed?

“Casey at the Bat” is a classic case of hubris, of pride going before the fall. But in sports, losing eventually happens to everyone. And unlike Casey and the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, Trump doesn’t have a record of accomplishment to justify his swagger.

To defend Casey further, even the greatest batters fail more often than they succeed. If, in the major leagues, you register an out no more than seven out of every 10 times, you can wind up as the batting champion. As for the USNWT, it’s those who mock a team that has won four of the nine world championships that come across looking small.

For “American carnage” Trump, it fits his narrative that America is turning into Mudville. You can bet that, on his watch, he’ll make sure that there are no bands playing somewhere, or men laughing or children shouting. And definitely no light hearts.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.

Trump is where joy goes to die.

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A Moses Poem for a Lost Child

By Robin Bates | Published: August 19, 2023
Philip Richards Morris, Infant Moses and Mother

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Sunday

This past May journalist Josie Glausius wrote about how she turned to poetry when her 12-year-old son was dying of a rare form of brain cancer. The poem that meant the most to her was one that alludes to one of next Sunday’s Old Testament readings, the one about infant Moses in the river.

Before turning to it, here are some other ways poetry served her. She reports that she read him poems her mother had read to her as a child, including Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29” (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”) and John Masefield’s “Cargoes.” She says her son listened “rapt and smiling,” after which they would talk about the meaning of the poems.

I love these choices. With the Shakespeare sonnet I can imagine her son feeling sorry for himself (“I all alone beweep my outcast state”) but then moving on to a more positive vision:

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
   For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
   That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

The Masefield poem, meanwhile, would have helped him imagine his unknown journey as sailing to exotic lands with strange-sounding names. It would have appealed to his vision of adventure, which was also the reason why he liked Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” which his mother recited to him in his final hours when he was lying unconscious. She explains what the poem had meant to him:

My son had learned the words to Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem by listening to me recite it to him and his twin sister at bedtime. A brave, bright, imaginative, optimistic boy, he loved the drama of the poem and the courage of the “beamish boy” as, with his “vorpal sword” in hand, he defeats his “manxome foe.”

During the illness, Glausius started a poetry group on WhatsApp, which she called “Poetry Is Medicine.” As she had discovered during earlier crises, “the rhythm of poetry can soothe my anxieties. With just a word or a phrase, a poem can reach the hidden places that prayers or well-meaning advice cannot.”

Her friends in the group responded by sending her poems that reached deep:

One sent “Chinese Foot Chart,” by Kay Ryan: (“Look, / boats of mercy / embark from / our heart at the / oddest knock.”). Another carefully translated the Hebrew poem “Apple of Imperfection,” by Varda Genossar: “First speech is the speech of love … last speech, silence.”

After her son died, there were yet other poems. One friend sent her Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment,” his last published poem:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

The poem “offered me some small comfort,” Glausius wrote, “because I knew that even in my son’s darkest hours, he was always loved — and still is — and was never for a moment alone.”

Another friend sent her Calista Buchen’s “Taking Care”:

I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don’t say, shhh. I don’t say, its okay.  I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes. We crack  open bedroom  doors,  step over  the creaks, and kiss  the children.  We  are sore from  this grief,  like we’ve returned from a run, like we are training for a marathon. I’m with you all the way, says my grief, whispering,  and then we splash our face with water and stretch,  one big shadow and one small. 

And then there was Carl Sandburg’s “Theme in Yellow,” which she appreciated because the title “contains my son’s favorite, ‘cheerful’ color.” She particularly liked the passage,

When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs

But the poem that reached the deepest was about infant Moses. Here’s the relevant section from the Biblical story:

When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.

The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him…

Glausius says she read Spanish poet Luis Alberto de Cuenca’s “Moses” (trans. Gustavo Pérez Firmat) by her son’s grave eight days after his death. Like some of the other poems that consoled her and her son in his final months, it imagines death as a journey. Along with the basket story, in also alludes to the parting of the Red Sea and other divine interventions:

Give me your hand. We have to cross
the river and my strength fails me.
Hold me as if I were an abandoned package
in a wicker basket, a lump that moves
and cries in the twilight. Cross the river
with me. Even if this time the waters
don’t part before us. Even if this time God
doesn’t come to our aid and a flurry of arrows
riddles our backs. Even if there is no river.

I love how we’re uncertain whom the poem addresses. When Glausius read the poem at the graveside service, was she asking for God’s help while imagining herself, like her son when he was a baby, as a “lump that moves and cries in the twilight.” The river in this case would be her son’s death, which she doesn’t want to turn away from–and which God has not forestalled by divine intervention.

Or did she see herself asking her son to give her strength, the parent-child relationship momentarily reversed? It could be that she’s asking him to help her stay upright at the moment when her strength fails her.

The power that lies in making such a request is that one feels less alone. One imagines that someone is listening and reaching out a hand.

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Belarus Bans 19th Century Poet

By Robin Bates | Published: August 17, 2023
Authoritarian leaders Putin and Lukashenko

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Friday

According to the BBC, Belarus’s authoritarian leader and Putin puppet Alexander Lukashenko has banned two 19th poems by one of the founders of the modern Belarusian literary tradition. According to Wikipedia, Vincent Dunin-Martsinkevich was a Polish-Belarusian writer, poet, poet, dramatist and social activist who helped establish the national school theatre. It appears that his extremism consists of drawing a contrast between Belarus and Russia. Lukashenko has also targeted works by 20th century Belarusian authors Larisa Geniyush, Vladimir Neklyayev, Lidiya Arobey and Natalya Arseneva.

Despite an intense google search, I have not been able to find copies of the two banned Dunin-Martsinkevich poems, “The Winds Are Floating” and “Conversation of an Elderly Man.” The poet sounds like other regional authors in the 19th century Russian empire, such as Ukraine’s Taras Shevchenko. (I write about Shevchenko here  and here.) By tapping into local folklore and writing great poetry in his own tongue, Dunin-Martsinkevich gave Belarusians confidence in their own national identity.

In this, Dunin-Martsinkevich served not only the interests of Belarusians but of Poles as well. He translated Poland’s great epic poem Pan Tadeusz, by its greatest poet Adam Mickiewicz, into Belarusian, the first translation of the poem into another Slavic language. One subplot of Pan Tedusz involves a spontaneous revolt of local inhabitants against an occupying Russian garrison. There’s also this famous invocation, which nationalist Lithuanians, Poles, and Belarusians thrilled to:

Lithuania, my country! You are as good health:
How much one should prize you, he only can tell
Who has lost you. Your beauty and splendor I view
And describe here today, for I long after you.

Holy Virgin who shelters our bright Częstochowa
And shines in Ostra Brama! You, who yet watch over
The castled Nowogródek’s folk faithful and mild;
As You once had returned me to health, a sick child,
(When by my weeping mother into Your care given,
I by miracle opened a dead eye to heaven,
And to Your temple’s threshold could straightaway falter
For a life thus returned to thank God at the altar)
Thus to motherland’s breast You will bring us again.

Meanwhile, bear my soul heavy with yearning’s dull pain,
To those soft woodland hillocks, those meadows, green, gleaming,
Spread wide along each side of the blue-flowing Niemen,
To those fields, which by various grain painted, there lie
Shimmering, with wheat gilded, and silvered with rye…

To understand the poem’s power, imagine how “America the Beautiful” would sound to our ears if the United States were dominated by a foreign power.

Both Dunin-Martsinkevich and Adam Mickiewicz came under fire from Russian authorities. Mickiewicz fled to France while Dunin-Martsinkevich was arrested for his role in Poland’s 1863 January uprising. Although he was eventually set free, his daughter Kamila Marcinkievič was sentenced to a psychiatric hospital for her participation.

Once can see why Dunin-Martsinkevich would take on a new urgency in present day Belarus. Lukashenko relies on Vladimir Putin to stay in power but is facing new nationalist pressures as Belarusians see what Russia is doing to Ukraine, with whom they can relate.

It doesn’t matter that Dunin-Martsinkevich’s works were composed over 150 years ago. Poetry, no matter how old, can speak with power to the present moment. Keep this in mind as Florida school systems ban classic works by Toni Morrison, Khaled Hosseini, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, Arundhati Roy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sandra Cisneros, Isabel Allende, and hundreds of others. And as they censor Shakespeare as well.

 This is what authoritarians do.

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Bluest Eye and Ohio’s Abortion Politics

By Robin Bates | Published: August 16, 2023

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Thursday

When Ohio’s fetal heartbeat law went into effect upon the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v Wade, a ten-year-old rape victim was forced to go to neighboring Indiana for an abortion (!). While I took note of the story at the time, I missed making a connection with Ohio’s greatest author. Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, is about an 11-year-old is also impregnated, in her case by her father.

Like the Ohio child, Pecola Breedlove does not have abortion as an option, the story having been set in the 1930s. Instead, the baby comes prematurely and dies while Pecola herself goes mad. Her fostering sister Claudia reports,

The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach—could not even see—but which filled the valleys of the mind.

Initially ostracized because she is unattractive, Pecola thinks that having blue eyes like Shirley Temple would make people love her. After the rape has driven her mad, she even thinks that her eyes have in fact turned blue, with the fantasy becoming a kind of refuge. But for Claudia, her plight is a condemnation of society, which has long scapegoated her so that it could feel better about itself:

All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorates us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, there thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.

So how do forced-birth advocates feel when presented with a Pecola situation?  Well, we know that many of them initially claimed that the Ohio story was a hoax, although they went silent when the rapist was caught and, last month, found guilty and sentenced.

Once it was clear that the story was not a hoax, they then moved to a second rationalization John Stoehr of The Editorial Board, who has studied the mindset of Calvinist fundamentalists, explains that they write off such hard cases as God’s will:

The teachings of Jesus – “turn the other cheek” – subvert the self-interests of conservatives, who must divide the world between those who are “saved” and those who are damned. They must cling to punishment because punishment explains and rationalizes the surrounding reality. 

Why are there poor people in America? Why do Black people suffer most? Why do so many hard-working people struggle to make ends meet? They must have done something to deserve their lot in life. And because they deserve it, there’s nothing to be done. It’s God’s will.

Stoehr also notes that seeing the world this way serves to preserve privilege, which is why many forced-birth advocates also oppose contraception.  Preventing women from making their own reproductive choices is a way of controlling them. If the Pecola Breedloves of the world pay the price for their power grab—well, that’s for God to sort out.

By giving us three-dimensional depictions of people whom society otherwise stereotypes or ignores, novels function as an implicit rebuke to such thinking. Maybe that’s one reason why Bluest Eye is being banned in schools across the country. The same people that think it’s okay for a 10-year-old to have a baby don’t want high school students to read about it happening. This too is about control.

The good news is that Ohio voters may well, in November, enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution, wresting control back from the rightwing state legislature. Even in red states, the forces of reaction don’t always win.

Another case – Historian Heather Cox Richardson has just alerted me to another recent case, about a

13-year-old Mississippi girl who just gave birth after being raped by a stranger in her yard. She was unable to obtain an abortion because of Mississippi’s abortion ban. She is scheduled soon to start seventh grade.

Meanwhile, rightwing judges are going after the abortion drug mifepristone, approved in 2000 by the Food and Drug Administration. If they can’t ban it, they want to at least severely restrict its use “by saying it could not be sent through the mail or prescribed without an in-person visit to a doctor, cutting midwives and other healthcare providers out of the process.”

A Trump judge, seeking to ban mifepristone altogether, said that doctors suffer moral and aesthetic injury when they have to participate in any way with an abortion. In his minority opinion he quoted a doctor who wrote that he is harmed when he “lose[s] the opportunity…to care for the woman and child through pregnancy and bring about a successful delivery of new life.” 

As abortion centers are shuttered, we are going to have more and more Pecola Breedloves.

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Fani Willis’s Big Baggy Monster

By Robin Bates | Published: August 15, 2023
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis

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Wednesday

As I’ve been reading about the racketeering charges brought against the Trump “enterprise” by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, I’ve been struck by how important a novelistic sensibility is to the prosecution.

It’s not just that it needs to tell a good story. After all, prosecutors and defenders alike need compelling narratives to convince a jury. It’s that, with 19 indicted defendants, not to mention another 30 un-indicted and unnamed co-conspirators, how does the prosecution keep the story from spiraling out of control?

I think of what Henry James and his acolyte, the literary scholar Percy Lubbock, said of such stories.  James labeled many 19th century novels by authors like Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy as “large, loose, baggy monsters”—a phrase which has evolved over the years into “big baggy monsters”—and wasn’t sure that he liked them. His own preference was for the tightly crafted fiction of Gustave Flaubert, which he emulated.

At a time when scholars weren’t sure that novels were literature, James and Lubbock argued that tightly written novels resembled poetry more than their sprawling counterparts. By this criteria, the most controlled of Dickens’s novels (Hard Times) was regarded as the most artistic.

Few literary scholars still think this way, and I myself prefer the big baggy monsters. Rather than regarding them as chaotic, we find underlying patterns.

I take this brief dip into the history of literary criticism because I think one can use the two categories—tightly constructed novels and big baggy monsters—to characterize the two indictments of Donald Trump. Jack Smith has put together a Jamesian indictment whereas Willis’s indictment is Dickensian or Tolstoyan.

It remains to be seen which is a better approach. Smith’s is built for speed, which is what we need right now since, if Trump is found guilty, people need to know before the conclusion of the Republican primary season. Willis’s complicated case may well stretch out until after the November 2024 presidential election.

But Fani Willis’s big baggy monster, like Bleak House and Anna Karenina, has a coherent throughline, which is that Trump headed an enterprise that was willing to break laws to keep him in power. Even though the 19 co-defendants didn’t sit down in a room and plot election overthrow, they were all on the same wavelength, determined to do whatever was necessary to keep Trump in power.

Thus, at one point in this novelistic story there is Trump and those close to him pressuring the Georgia secretary of state to find the necessary votes. There is Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump, Jr. pressuring Georgia Republican legislators to stay loyal to Trump. Some Georgia Republicans forge documents to become fake electors, others try to steal data from voting machines. And in the most heart-rending story of them all—one which lies at the very heart of this novel—some Trumpists pressure two election workers, a mother and a daughter, to confess to non-existent voter fraud.

After getting threatened by certain of the defendants and then vilified publicly by others—so much so that they require bodyguards and have to move—Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss say that their lives will never be the same and that nowhere do they feel safe.

There is something Dickensian or Tolstoyan about their plight, and the Georgia indictment makes for a more emotional reading experience than the stark drama of election theft laid out by Jack Smith. But just as we need both kinds of novels, so do we need both kinds of indictments. Smith’s may be first across the line—like a Flaubert novel, it’s short and to the point—but Willis’s provides more variety and gives a fuller picture.

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