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Tuesday
An article in Literary Hub by literary scholar John MacNeill Miller has introduced me to a fascinating British novelist from the 19th century that I didn’t know about. Harriet Martineau, he contends, “foresaw ecology, environmentalism, and realist fiction.”
Miller notes that we’ve long known that Victorian novelists “pioneered the use of storytelling to reveal interwoven social networks,” a strategy that we see in everything from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth to David Simon’s The Wire. What sets Martineau apart, however, is how she shows people’s lives impacted by changes, not just in other people, but in the environment. He points out that her stories involve “lives upended by unexpected patterns of rainfall, by the felling of trees, by the importing of new crops, and by the movements of fish.”
In short, Martineau’s work is ecological along with being sociological. More than another other novelist he can name, Miller says, she looks into “the entanglements that draw the fates of humans together with those of trees, water, grain, cattle, and fish.”
What is significant about this? Miller says that “it wasn’t until the late twentieth century and the rise of environmentalism that novelists began, slowly, to reconnect their stories of human lives to the material changes in the nonhuman world around them.” He finds Martineau remarkably astute when it comes to recording “the surprising ways interspecies connections affect us all.”
Miller attributes this sensitivity to Martineau’s relationships with political economist Thomas Robert Malthus and biologist Charles Darwin, two men who studied environmental shifts. This focus leads to “intricate interspecies plotting” that “far exceeds the simplistic moral and economic lessons she tags onto the end of each novella.”
Think of it this way: Rather than focus on individuals’ emotional and mental lives, which is what we normally expect from novels, Martineau’s stories instead look at “the extent to which all our lives are shaped by circumstances beyond our control, circumstances that arise from both human and nonhuman events unfolding around us.” They focus more on human exteriority than interiority.
As a result, we begin to notice “all the ways humans are bound into much larger networks of beings.” And when we do so, we elevate the nonhuman world, which is normally consigned to the margins. We stop “treating plants and animals as mere surroundings with little impact on the stories of our lives.”
Miller concludes,
By downplaying all the widely glorified aspects of being human, Martineau refocuses readers’ attentions on all the ways humans are bound into much larger networks of beings. She reminds us that our individual and communal lives are not really so different from the lives of the animals and plants who share our planet. And in this age of extinction, that is a lesson we still desperately need to learn.
Although Martineau’s work has largely been forgotten, it was much admired in its time by writers such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Miller recommends novels Illustrations and Deerbrook as must reading in this era of climate change.
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Monday
Tomorrow, for the first time in my life, I will be teaching Shakespeare’s Richard II, which among other things points to what we can expect if Donald Trump is re-elected president. It has also provided me with a great phrase to describe the ex-president and all the grifters who follow in his wake: think of them as “caterpillars of the commonwealth.”
Richard II is a particularly bad king in ways that are reminiscent of Trump. In the course of the play we see him as
—incompetent: he botches a quarrel between two noblemen in ways similar to how Trump botched the Covid pandemic, sometimes lurching one way, sometimes another; —corrupt: he confiscates Henry Bolingbroke’s land to pay for his Irish war, just as Trump unlawfully has been accepting and soliciting bribes from a variety of sources, foreign and domestic; —susceptible to impulsive actions and wild mood swings; —arrogant and deaf to good advice; —enabling of corruption in others: Bushy, Bagot, and Green, the named caterpillars, resemble Jared Kushner, the Trump children, Steve Bannon, various former members of Trump’s cabinet, and a host of others.
This enabling, incidentally, gets some of the best lines in the play. The court gardener turns a pruning lesson into a political allegory on the state of the nation. His servant starts him off by wondering why they should continue upkeep when the nation is falling apart around them:
The gardener is referring to how Henry has, in fact, executed these individuals. He observes that Richard would have preserved his kingship if he himself had “trimm’d and dress’d his land”:
If Trump is re-elected and, following the advice of Project 2025 as well as his own inclination, replaces civil servants with loyalists, we too will find our land swarming with caterpillars.
So what does this drama about overthrowing a divinely anointed monarch have to do with those of us who live in a secular democracy? Well, before Trump, I might have thought, “not much.” But then, I wouldn’t have thought we needed President Biden reminding us that “presidents are not kings.” And I never thought I’d see Supreme Court justices chastising the court’s majority for having created a “law free zone around the President.” In granting Trump immunity for his crimes, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, the rightwing justices have ignored the Constitution by creating “an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law.”
Recall that Trump informed us at one point that God may well have saved him from assassination in order to achieve higher things. “I’d like to think that God thinks that I’m going to straighten out our country,” he told radio host Mark Levin. For his part, Richard periodically reminds himself that he too is God’s instrument—so much so that it doesn’t matter that his troops have fled, his enemy is at the gates, and his advisors have been executed:
But for all Richard’s blinkered arrogance, he says one thing that we do well to heed. If there is no orderly plan of succession, the country will be ripped apart. In 14th century England, the monarch was monarch for life and the throne was passed on to a predetermined line of succession. In our case, the president is succeeded by whoever gets the most electoral votes in the next election. Thus Henry’s attack on Richard has its modern version in Trump and the GOP’s attacks on elections themselves. With bogus charges of massive voter fraud—which have yet to be verified by any objective authority—they undermine constitutional governance itself. Lisa Needham of Public Notice notes what many political observers are pointing out: the goal of the GOP is a swing state like Pennsylvania is “to sew distrust in the election, likely setting up a challenge for Trump to contest the results if Pennsylvania doesn’t go his way.”
Or as the headline of her piece puts it, “If you can’t beat ’em, destroy the system.”
Richard, speaking to Northumberland but seeing his boss in the background, points to what happens if we violate society’s rules for orderly succession:
And so it transpires in Henry IV, Part I, with civil strife breaking out almost immediately after Henry grabs the throne. In the opening scene of the sequel, Henry thinks he has found some breathing space and plans a crusade to wash away the blood from his coup and the assassination of Richard. He quickly discovers, however, that he can’t command the blind obedience due to a divinely ordained king. After all, his fellows have seen him as one of them.
For instance, when Henry orders Northumberland’s son Hotspur to do something he doesn’t want to do, Hotspur doesn’t refer to Henry as king but as “this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke.” He also calls out his father for having assisted in “murderous subornation.” Together they have “put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose.”
Before dying, Richard has predicted to Northumberland that he will one day fall out with Henry. And in fact, Northumberland and Hotspur do rebel. Here’s Richard’s prediction:
That’s the key: once one “know’st the way to plant unrightful kings,” one will know “another way to pluck him headlong from the usurped throne.” And indeed, early into Henry IV Northumberland is contending that Richard had chosen a different successor, not Henry, were he to die. Multiple claimants to the throne, none being able to claim absolute legitimacy, is how you plunge a nation into “civil butchery.”
So for all those Republicans buying into Trump’s Big Lie that he did not lose to Joe Biden, remember this: as soon as candidates start getting seats they did not legitimately win, bloody succession battles become likely. No one’s seat is safe.
Richard may have been a bad king, but Shakespeare indicates that, in overthrowing him, Henry sowed the seeds for the Wars of the Roses.
Biden is fond of saying, “You can’t love your country only when you win.” Are we really going blow up our democracy, along with all the benefits of a stable society, for the sake of Donald Trump?
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Sunday
When I read God’s answer to the long-suffering Job, today’s Old Testament reading and a magnificent poem in its own right, I recognize the God I encountered when I lost my oldest son 24 years ago.
In response to the question “why suffering?”—the toughest of all questions–Job receives what at first appears a non-answer. Rather than speaking to Job as Job’s so-called friends have been doing, God essentially accuses Job of thinking too small. He even throws in a little sarcasm: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?…surely you know!”
What I hear God saying to Job is this: “You are part of a drama that is bigger than you can ever know. You are part of the great dance of creation and destruction, one that involves the foundation of the earth and the creation of the stars and nature’s cycle of life. So gird up your loins and expand your imagination.”
Although I didn’t read the Bible when I lost Justin, turning instead to poems like Shelley’s Adonais and Tennyson’s In Memoriam, I came to an insight similar to what God is telling Job. In losing Justin and in experiencing unbearable mental anguish, I felt connected with the universe in a new way. It’s like what Sartre’s Orestes says to his sister Electra in The Flies when she wants to retreat into a comforting rationalizations. “We were too light,” he tells her. “Now our feet sink into the soil, like chariot-wheels in turf.”
If I had thought that God was singling me out—if I had thought that God was some old man watching me through a telescope– if I had rationalized that God was somehow doing this for reasons that would be revealed later—I would have found such a God to be disappointingly small. And if God was this small, then the pain I was feeling was also a lot smaller than I thought it was, something that could be encapsulated in a maxim or some other kind of explanation. And that, I felt, would have failed to do justice to the loss.
Where I departed from Sartre’s Orestes is that, rather than feel weighed down—even in a good way—I felt expanded. I felt like I was entering unknown territory. I looked up at the summer sky and out over the St. Mary’s River where Justin had drowned and into the woods that border our house and understood now that I was a member, however unwilling, of God’s larger mysteries.
It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean but that’s why we have poems like Book of Job. Here’s God’s full response (Job 38), not just the excerpted passage that will be read in church today:
The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
“Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?
“Have you commanded the morning since your days began and caused the dawn to know its place, so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it? It is changed like clay under the seal, and it is dyedlike a garment. Light is withheld from the wicked, and their uplifted arm is broken.
“Have you entered into the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this.
“Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness, that you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home? Surely you know, for you were born then, and the number of your days is great!
“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war? What is the way to the place where the light is distributed or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth?
“Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no one lives, on the desert, which is empty of human life, to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground put forth grass?
“Has the rain a father, or who has fathered the drops of dew? From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven? The waters become hard like stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.
“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or can you guide the Bear with its children? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?
“Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are’? Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind? Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens, when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?
“Can you hunt the prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert? Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food?”
What I thought about God in those awful days and weeks and months, I also thought of literature. Poets since the dawn of time—including the Job poet—have been grappling with heart-rending tragedy. And although they have always come up short when it comes to putting their grief into words, they also found a measure of meaning and a measure of consolation.
I turned to poetry in a new and intense way to explore this new connection with creation. Just as Justin, in his birth, had opened up new pathways for me, so was he doing so with his death.
Knowing, as God tells Job, that I knew nothing of what provides “wisdom in the inward parts” or that gives “understanding to the mind,” I gave myself over to all that grieving had in store for me.
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Saturday
I’m writing this special Saturday post because I promised the students in my University of Ljubljana class a summation of the major ideas in my first two Shakespeare lectures. Those of you interested in Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet may also enjoy it as it manages to tie them all together.
I began the course with some observations on why Shakespeare is so admired, mentioning his
–virtuosity
Shakespeare wrote 38 or so different plays in three different genres (comedy, tragedy, and history), with unquestioned masterpieces in each. Most playwrights limit themselves to a single genre (Sophocles tragedy, Molière comedy, etc.). He also wrote astounding sonnets, reinventing the form in the process. And then there were three long narrative poems.
–linguistic inventiveness
Shakespeare added above 1000 new words to the language—there’s dispute as to the exact number—along with countless memorable expressions. Among the words are alligator, bedroom, eyeball, gossip, inaudible, lonely, puppy, assassination, gloomy, and pious. Among the expressions: “We have seen better days”; “I have not slept one wink”; “the clothes make the man”; “it’s Greek to me”; “what’s done is done”; “wild goose chase”; “tower of strength”; “the world is my oyster.”
–depth of character
He created characters that feel so real that it’s as though they actually existed. And with this in mind, here’s what I write in my book about how, in Harold Bloom’s opinion, Shakespeare “invented the human”:
Harold Bloom contends that Shakespeare “pragmatically reinvented” us, changing the way we see others and ourselves and even how we experience feelings. Whereas fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Johnson “ideograms,” Shakespeare created characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, thereby inventing “human inwardness.” Personality as we understand it, Bloom explains, is “a Shakespearean invention…Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater…”
“Even if we never attend a performance or read a play,” Bloom writes, Shakespeare has “made us theatrical,” changing our ideas “as to what makes the self authentically human.” 17th century British theatergoers loved how Hamlet upended conventional expectations of what to expect from a revenge tragedy. They were so enthralled by the wild ramblings of Hamlet’s mind that the play’s revenge plot seemed almost incidental. They were similarly fascinated by Falstaff, Othello, Rosamond, Macbeth, Lear, Cleopatra, and others. For them, it was if the world had gone from black and white to color.
I concluded this early part of the first lecture with Ben Jonson’s immortal line, “He was not of an age but for all time!” And so it has proved as Shakespeare is read and performed endlessly around the world.
In the first two lectures I looked at Shakespeare’s handling of dangerous desires: gender-bending desire in Twelfth Night, sexual desire in Midsummer and Romeo and Juliet. Of the six plays that feature cross-dressing, Twelfth Night is my favorite. I advised my students to take special note of the play’s subtitle—What You Will—as Shakespeare plays with the notion of “what you will” or “what you desire” throughout.
The play is set in Italian Ilyria—I mentioned that the students wouldn’t necessarily be wrong if they imagined it being set in Slovenia—and Shakespeare plays with the Italian word for “want” (“volere”) in naming his characters. There’s Malvolio (“bad willing”), along with Viola and Oliva (near anagrams of each other). The end result in a plot in which we see
–a man fantasizing about having the qualities he associates with women (Orsino); –a woman passing herself off as a man (Viola as Cesario); –two women fantasizing about being able to behave like men (Viola and Olivia); –a man in love with another man (Antonio); –a woman in love with another woman (Olivia); –an effeminate man who doesn’t want to fight but succumbs to male peer pressure (Sir Andrew and also, in a sense, Cesario); –a sensitive man who, while a good fighter, is not afraid to admit that he can cry like a woman (Sebastian); –a man desiring to rise above his station (Malvolio); –and a wise fool who concludes, from observing all this gender confusion, that once we grow up and are slotted into fixed categories, life starts to suck.
Early in the play, I pointed out, a lightning bolt splits the ship upon which Viola and her twin brother are journeying. I speculated that this is inspired by the allegory that Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium recounts to explain sexual desire: once we were perfect creatures, with two heads and four arms and four legs, but the gods, fearing that we were so self-sufficient that we would ignore them, split us in half. Ever since, rather than contending with Mount Olympus, we have been searching for our missing half: split men are looking for other men, split women are looking for other women, and split androgynes are looking for members of the opposite sex.
In other words, Shakespeare is telling us that, at an early age, society splits us off from an integral part of ourselves, decreeing from henceforth we can only behave as a single gender. Understanding humans as well as anyone ever has, the Bard wrote a play that acknowledged that we are more complex than the gender labels and the associated behaviors that society foists on us.
I touched on the issue of homosexuality in Shakespeare’s time, noting the Buggery Act of 1533, which made it a capital offense. To be sure, the laws were not as comprehensive as they would become in Victorian times as there was a lot of gray area. It was okay, for instance, to have “masculine friendship,” which could include embraces, protestations of love, physical closeness in a common bed, and physical intimacy.
Still, there were boundaries for men and even more for women, who could not dress as men (as Viola does) or go running after men (as Olivia does). Nor could a steward marry a lady (as Malvolio desires). In short, Shakespeare is challenging rigid boundaries in his play, and if it is called Twelfth Night, it’s because the end-of-the-year twelfth night festivities were one of the few times of the year when people could pretend to be someone they weren’t.
Even calling the play Twelfth Night didn’t give Shakespeare full license, however, and he had to cast his gender exploration as a comedy, not as a melodrama. Furthermore, he framed it as what film theorist Chris Straayer calls a “temporary transvestite comedy”—which means characters cross-dress only because they are forced to, not because they want to. Famous film examples of the genre are Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Victor/Victoria, and She’s the Man (which is a modern teen version of Twelfth Night).
In a temporary transvestite comedy, characters must return to their “correct” genders by the end, and so it happens in Twelfth Night. But because Shakespeare feels that some precious part of us is denied when this happens—remember the violence of the lightning strike—he adds a sad note at the end, with the fool singing about “the wind and the rain.” Twelfth Night has been called “an autumnal comedy” as a result. After all, Antonio is thwarted in his love for Sebastian, Olivia finds herself married to a stranger, and Orsino—while seemingly happy to be marrying Viola—would like to see her dressed in male clothing for a little longer. Perhaps he is sad at losing this “masculine friendship.”
For that matter, how do we think Viola will take to wearing dresses and conforming to proper female behavior again? As the twelfth night party ends, life is about to feel a lot narrower.
And remember, I told the students—all these issues arise in a play nearly half a millenium ago.
I hadn’t fully realized, when I paired Midsummer and R&J for the second lecture, how much they reflect each other. Of course, I knew that Pyramus and Thisby, the source story for R&J, gets performed in Midsummer. But there’s more, with the same interplay between sexual drive and imagination occurring in both plays. With that in mind, it’s interesting to see what different insights emerge when one approaches the same subject through two different genres.
Comedy, I told the students (calling on theorist Northrup Frye) focuses on society, tragedy on the individual. And where comedy aims to renew and thereby restore a society that has become static and stale, tragedy acknowledges the depth of the individual. To cite a word that could have been coined by Shakespeare but instead is the invention of the immortal Lisa Simpson, one emerges from a tragedy “embiggened.”
For this genre discussion, I also quoted Charlie Chaplin, who once observed, “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up but a comedy in long-shot.”
There’s plenty of potential for tragedy in Midsummer—Lysander and Demetrius could kill each other, leading to a double suicide on the part of their lady loves–and a slight mix-up in timing is all that keeps R&J from becoming a comedy. (Well, that and the deaths of Mercutio, Tybalt, and Paris.) And there are other similarities as well.
For instance, while we watch magic fairy juice cause Lysander to rapidly switch his allegiance from Hermia to Helena, we see Romeo too turning on a dime, from Rosaline to Juliet, and there’s no Puck around to explain that. While King Theseus notes that there’s not much difference between lovers and madmen (he also throws in poets), Mercutio says something similar when he describes Queen Mab. In both speeches, our fertile imaginations, spurred by sexual desire, are seen as taking control. Here’s Theseus:
Mercutio says something similar as he watches Romeo lose his head over Rosaline. The difference is that he is just imagining a fairy whereas actual fairies show up in the other play. Romeo reports that he has been dreaming of his love, to which Mercutio responds by describing a malevolent fairy who visits our dreams.
If Shakespeare explored socially-disruptive gender desire in Twelfth Night, he focuses on the chaos that can be caused by sexual desire in Midsummer and R&J. We see this from the very first scene when testosterone-fueled Capulets swagger through the streets looking for violence and sex:
SAMPSON: A dog of that house shall move me to stand: I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s. GREGORY: That shows thee a weak slave; for the weakest goes to the wall. SAMPSON: True; and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his maids to the wall.
Under the influence of sexuality’s force, women too become assertive, even when threatened with explusion (Juliet) or death (Hermia in Midsummer). Juliet knows what to expect from her father when she resists him:
An you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend; And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets, For, by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee, Nor what is mine shall never do thee good: Trust to’t, bethink you; I’ll not be forsworn…
Desire is so strong, however, that these formerly docile and obedient daughters go into full rebellion. “I know not by what power I am made bold,” Hermia tells Theseus while Juliet absolutely revels in her newly discovered sexuality. In her longing for Romeo, she speaks with a new boldness, showing herself to be as much in love with her own power as in her lover.
Whereas Midsummer is shot in long shot, however, R&J is shot in close-up. Puck can look down on the lovers as they go careening through the woods and say, “What fools these mortals be.” Likewise he and Oberon can look from afar as Queen of the Fairies Titania, under the influence of the same love potion, falls in love with an ass. Yes, desire makes us do things that, at a distance, appear funny.
But it’s not funny if you’re one of the lovers. We see, in close-up intensity, the joys and agonies of Romeo and Juliet’s relationship. We get to laugh at ourselves with the first play, but with the second–one of the world’s great love stories–we are embiggened. Sexual passion and our seething imaginations can be seen in two different ways.
We don’t know which of these two plays, both written around 1595-96, came first. Did Shakespeare step back from tragic immersion to make fun of himself? Or did he parody love in his first play and then get serious? Whatever the case, his ability to produce two masterpieces in two different genres is what I mean by genius versatility.
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Friday
The other evening I was discussing Donald Trump’s increasing incoherence with my Slovenian friend Mladen Dolar, along with how Trump has been covering for himself by calling it “the weave.” In response, Mladen mentioned a Heinrich Heine poem that, when I checked it out, works as a perfect rejoinder to someone who hates labor unions and has, throughout his life, stiffed workers. It also captures the candidate who has begun threatening to unleash the U.S. military on all of his enemies, at home as well as abroad.
First about the Trump weave. John Stoehr of the Substack blog Editorial Board believes that Trump is discussing it because he senses he’s slipping into dementia. By talking about his growing mental deficit as though it were a mental asset, he “wants us to believe that cognitive decline is extraordinary.”
“In reality,” Stoehr observes, “the weave is what happens when an aging brain flits from topic to topic without any apparent reason for doing so.”
Trump’s habit of projecting his own vulnerabilities onto his foes, we could add, provides another indication of his condition: he has been calling Kamala Harris “retarded.”
Heine envisions Silesian weavers responding to the bosses who ruthlessly put down their 1844 revolt over exploitation and wage decreases. After killing 11and imprisoning many others, the Prussian military banned the subsequent poem and sent to prison a man who publicly recited it.
Although the weavers’ revolt was unsuccessful, however, it proved a harbinger of the revolutions that would break out all over Europe four years later. Meanwhile Karl Marx published the poem in his newspaper Forward! while Friedrich Engels translated it into English.
Imagine the weavers as the voters who, if there is justice in the world, will send Trump packing three weeks from now. It would be our own version of the weavers’ shroud.
The Weavers By Heinrich Heine
Not a tear in the dark eye
From darkened eyes no tears are falling; Gnashing our teeth, we sit here calling: “Germany, listen, ere we disperse, We weave your shroud with a triple curse — We weave, we are weaving!
“A curse to the false god that we prayed to, And worshiped in spite of all, and obeyed, too. We waited and hoped and suffered in vain; He laughed at us, sneering, for all of our pain — We weave, we are weaving!
“A curse to the king, and a curse to his coffin, The rich man’s king whom our plight could not soften; Who took our last penny by taxes and cheats, And let us be shot like the dogs in the streets — We weave, we are weaving!
“A curse to the Fatherland, whose face is Covered with lies and foul disgraces; Where the bud is crushed as it leaves the seed, And the worm grows fat on corruption and greed — We weave, we are weaving!
“The shuttle flies in the creaking loom; And night and day we weave your doom — Old Germany, listen, ere we disperse We weave your shroud with a triple curse. We weave — we are weaving!”
Trump’s weaving deserves a counter weave. Although in our case, we are weaving a shroud to save our Fatherland.
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Thursday
Although Donald Trump’s rhetoric grows increasingly Hitlerian by the day, the corporate media continues to sane-wash him. I’m thinking that Jonathan Swift, in my opinion literature’s greatest satirist, would have had something to say about this.
First of all, Swift would point out how Trump dehumanizes migrants, using fascistic rhetoric as he accuses them of poisoning American blood and, thanks to their genes, of committing thousands of murders. As Trump remarked to conservative television host Hugh Hewitt,
How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know now a murder, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.
In “Modest Proposal,” we counter similar cold-blooded talk about human beings as the fictitious author treats children as marketable assets:
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.
I call Trump’s rhetoric Hitlerian because Nazi propaganda about how the German master race was threatened by inferior blood lines may well be behind his thinking. Such pseudo-science, of course, helped provide a rationale for the Final Solution. So how did the New York Times report this? Its headline talked of Trump’s “long-held fascination with genes and genetics.”
Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri was having none of this. As she noted, “That is simply not correct. That’s not genetics! It’s not even science.” And then she thought of parallel situations:
This would be like hearing someone say, “Let’s bleed him to release the humors!” and calling him fascinated with medicine. Sure, if by “fascinated with,” you mean “not paying attention to” — but that is not what those words mean! Unless we are just indifferent to the meaning of words now, something that is always possible.
And again:
Similarly, if someone said, “I sure love that the sun revolves around us every day!” you would not say, “That man is fascinated with astronomy.” You would say, “That man has been in a coma for centuries! Remarkable!”
And finally:
I could go on. I will go on! If someone says, “I’m about to add people to this party by murdering seven!” you don’t call him passionate about arithmetic. You say, “That man is threatening people, and also — way, way down the list of priorities — he doesn’t seem to understand how addition works!”
But the Times was not deterred by the scathing criticism it received. Two weeks later, it was back at it again. At a Trump town hall in which two people fainted, he decided that he would shut down questions and just play his favorite songs. For an extraordinary 39 minutes, he swayed along with the music before leaving. Was this a sign of early dementia, as many psychologists are starting to tell us? Was it, as fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat believes, an authoritarian “basking in a cocoon of adoration, standing in a protected environment of his own design”? Neither, according to the Times:
And so Mr. Trump, a political candidate known for improvisational departures, made a detour. Rather than try to restart the political program, he seemed to decide in the moment that it would be more enjoyable for all concerned—and, it appeared, for himself—to just listen to music instead.
Mr. Trump had his staff fire up his playlist, standing on the stage for about half an hour and swaying to songs as the crowd slowly dwindled.
Other news organizations had their own version of “improvisational departures.” Associated Press reported, “Trump turned his town hall into an impromptu concert,” while the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Pennsylvania Town Hall Ends in Concert.”
Not that it was ever exceptionally strong to begin with, but I feel I have lost my hold on reality.
I could have sworn that Donald Trump prematurely ended his town hall (I use the term loosely, because that implies a forum where questions are asked and answered, which this really was not) and instead forced the crowd to stand there while he swayed along to his rally playlist. But it is equally possible that I am hallucinating and my brain is just trying to make me realize that my body is being dissected by aliens in a laboratory.
Then she thought of an analogous situation:
Imagine, by comparison, the audience’s response if Taylor Swift stopped an Eras Tour concert early and decided to play her favorite political speeches instead while she remained onstage, occasionally mouthing along with the words (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) and the audience tried to decide whether this was a sign that their idol had finally cracked.
I promised you Jonathan Swift so here he is. This master satirist is brilliant in his ability to take sordid reality and sane-wash it. At the end of “Modest Proposal,” he characterizes his baby-killing idea as follows:
But, as to myself, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal, which, as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real, of no expense and little trouble, full in our own power…
He even, in his proposal’s defense, assures us that he has no ulterior motive. He offers it to us purely from the goodness of his heart as he does not stand to benefit in any way from it:
I profess in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the publick good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich. I have no children, by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing.
My favorite instance of Swift inappropriately using neutral language to describe a horror appears in his Tale of a Tub. It’s short and sweet and therefore devastating. I suspect he is describing a prostitute tied to the back of an ox cart and flogged through the town:
Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.
The difference between Swift and the New York Times, of course, is that he means for us to be appalled by his speakers’ underreactions. We are meant to harshly criticize people who, by choosing to suspend their humanity and by failing to fully acknowledge what they are witnessing or proposing, have surrendered all moral authority.
Our corporate media, by contrast, is repeatedly surrendering. Under the guise of what it calls its imperative to even-handedly report on both sides, itfails in its basic obligation to report the truth.
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Wednesday
An Ursula K. Le Guin short story is helping me understand some of the batshit craziness (to use the technical term) that we have been witnessing in some of Trump followers. I’m thinking of how MAGA thugs have been threatening workers from FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) in their rescue and clean-up efforts after the two hurricanes. Meanwhile Marjorie Taylor Green—she of “Jewish space lasers” fame—has informed us that Democrats are sending the hurricanes to devastate Trump areas.
And then, as I mentioned Monday, there are portions of MAGA have all but become a death cult, sometimes deliberately exposing themselves to Covid. And I suppose I should mention those Christian fundamentalists who believe that the end times have arrived.
We’re not only hearing apocalyptic talk from the right, however. There are well-founded warnings (in my opinion) about cataclysmic climate change and, if Trump triumphs in the election, about a fascist takeover that would end America’s democratic experiment. The world, especially with the internet, has shrunk considerably while the things we do—from hydrocarbons to plastic production—are having outsized effects. No wonder we seem simultaneously to have more and less control than we have ever had. For the Marjorie Taylor Greens, maybe targeted hurricanes is the logical next step in this evolution.
“Things” is a short story about an island population that is facing extinction, although we never know from what. The islanders have two responses: there are those who weep and those who rage. The Ragers, who resemble some of our MAGA nihilists, destroy everything upon which people depend. They also target anyone who doesn’t think like them. As one of them tells the brickmaker protagonist,
Things, things! Free yourself of things, Lif, from the weight that drags you down! Come with us, above the ending of the world!
This freedom sometimes takes the form of active destruction, with the Ragers burning crops, killing livestock, and tearing down local businesses.
Neither a Rager nor a Weeper, Lif takes a third path. Although he knows the task is impossible, he begins using his bricks to build an underwater road to the other islands. In this he has the help of a widow and her child. The Ragers would attack him if they realized he was doing something constructive, but thinking that he is merely drowning his bricks, they applaud him.
After he has used up all his bricks, Lif assures the widow that they will trod this road together:
By God! said Lif, thinking of his underwater road across the sea that went for a hundred and twenty feet, and the sea that went on ten thousand miles from the end of it–I’ll swim there! Now then, don’t cry, dear heart. Would I leave you and the little rat here by yourselves?
“Things” ends ambiguously in a way that is characteristic of Le Guin’s short stories. Lif and the widow wade to the end of the road and then, up to their chests in water, prepare to take the last step. At that moment Lif thinks that he sees the whiteness of a sail, a “dancing light above the waves, dancing on towards them and towards the greater light that grew behind them”:
Wait, the call came from the form that rode the grey waves and danced on the foam, Wait! The voices rang very sweet, and as the sail leaned white above him he saw the faces and the reaching arms, and heard them say to him, Come, come on the ship, come with us to the Islands.
Hold on, he said softly to the woman, and they took the last step.
One could read this ending as death—who knows what really lies beyond that great divide?– or one could read it as an assertion of radical hope. In certain ways, it resembles the existentialists’ Sisyphus, about whom Albert Camus writes,
Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
For Le Guin, however, I think it means more than this. After all, Lif’s road goes forward rather than in a circle. I think the author is saying that if we refuse to surrender to either raging or weeping, using instead our tools and our talents in the world that we have been given, unforeseen possibilities may open up. True, it may be, as Ulysses puts it in Tennyson’s poem, “that the gulfs will wash us down.” But it also may be the case that “we shall touch the Happy Isles,/ And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.”
In any event, we will dwell in possibility rather than in despair, in hope rather than in hatred. That’s not a bad way to spend the remaining time we have on earth.
Gustave Doré, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (in Paradise Lost)
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Tuesday
As hurricanes bore down on the east coast of the United States, there’s one poem that I found myself periodically reciting. We memorized Lord Byron’s “Destruction of Sennacherib” my sophomore year in high school as an example of anapestic meter (short, short, long):
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
We did not experience the poem’s happy ending, where the invading force is destroyed, not the Israelites. It is the people of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina who “lay withered and strown” (along with their leaves):
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green, That host with their banners at sunset were seen: Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown, That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
A retired librarian, wrote wondering whether Hurricane Milton was revenging itself on Florida for allowing a school district to ban Paradise Lost (you can read about it here). Since I’m hearing about this particular ban for the first time, allow me a momentary digression.
Back in 1994, in a fight with my Maryland school superintendent over her banning of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, I imagined a Paradise Lost ban. Thinking no one would take me seriously, I noted that Milton has far worse in his epic than Morrison’s two pages of trash talk. After all, in one scene Satan rapes his daughter Sin, who is then subsequently raped by Death, their son. The birth of Death, meanwhile, tears Sin’s entrails apart in horrific style. And indeed, I was right: Paradise Lost remains untouched in St. Mary’s County, Maryland whereas English teachers to this day are not allowed to teach Song of Solomon.
I don’t know if this was the scene that triggered the Florida ban or if the censors were more concerned about Adam and Eve having sex, which was controversial even when Milton wrote the poem. In any event, one school board member asserted that Milton’s masterpiece was removed “not out of prudery but by fear of inviting trouble from the state.”
This is how bullies and fascists work—they establish an atmosphere in which people begin censoring themselves.
For the record, Milton doesn’t say that Adam and Eve have sex. He just says that did not not have sex. Here’s the passage:
[I]nto their inmost bower Handed they went; and, eased the putting off These troublesome disguises which we wear, Straight side by side were laid; nor turned, I ween, Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites Mysterious of connubial love refused…
Then the author launches into an attack on 17th century versions of Florida’s censors, calling them hypocrites who are “defaming as impure what God declares pure.” After all, “Our Maker bids increase; who bids abstain/ But our Destroyer, foe to God and Man?” Rightwing ideologues may talk of “purity, and place, and innocence” but they are working for Satan.
But back to hurricanes. The destruction wrought by Helene and then Milton has resembled the devastation in Heaven caused by the battle between the bad angels and the good angels in Book VI. The devils, under Satan’s leadership, have gained a temporary advantage by introducing gun powder into the fray. Never at a loss, however, the good angels respond by tearing up tree-covered hills, with which they temporarily bury the bad angels. Then these respond in their turn by start throwing their own hills. As Milton describes it in a passage that North Carolinian Appalachians will relate to,
So hills amid the air encountered hills, Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire…
But they [the good angels] stood not long; Rage prompted them at length, and found them arms Against such hellish mischief fit to oppose. Forthwith (behold the excellence, the power, Which God hath in his mighty Angels placed!) Their arms away they threw, and to the hills (For Earth hath this variety from Heaven Of pleasure situate in hill and dale,) Light as the lightning glimpse they ran, they flew; From their foundations loosening to and fro, They plucked the seated hills, with all their load, Rocks, waters, woods, and by the shaggy tops Up-lifting bore them in their hands: Amaze, Be sure, and terror, seized the rebel host, When coming towards them so dread they saw The bottom of the mountains upward turned; Till on those cursed engines’ triple-row They saw them whelmed, and all their confidence Under the weight of mountains buried deep; Themselves invaded next, and on their heads Main promontories flung, which in the air Came shadowing, and oppressed whole legions armed; Their armor helped their harm, crushed in and bruised Into their substance pent, which wrought them pain Implacable, and many a dolorous groan; Long struggling underneath, ere they could wind Out of such prison, though Spirits of purest light, Purest at first, now gross by sinning grown. The rest, in imitation, to like arms Betook them, and the neighbouring hills uptore: So hills amid the air encountered hills, Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire; That under ground they fought in dismal shade; Infernal noise! war seemed a civil game To this uproar; horrid confusion heaped Upon confusion rose…
Finally God, who has foreseen all this, decides enough is enough and sends in Jesus in all his glory. The bad angels take one look at him and jump over the side of heaven, falling through Chaos for nine days before ending up in hell. Jesus’s intervention is not only a lesson to the bad angels but to the good angels as well: they cannot save themselves but need God in the end.
So yes, the hurricanes have been like the battle in heaven. Or as Ferdinand in Shakespeare’s Tempest puts it before it before jumping into the sea,
Hell is empty And all the devils are here!
And to think, conservatives once fought to keep this poem by a dead white man in schools. I never thought I’d be nostalgic for Lyn Cheney’s National Endowment for the Humanities. Then again, Florida governor Ron Desantis and his book-hating censors are not conservative but dangerously radical.
Further thought: In her note to me, my librarian reader reported,
I encourage my grandchildren to read books that make them feel uncomfortable, and I tell them if they’re not allowed to do it in school, then they can come to my house and read the ones that I have here. I want them to open their minds to all ideas and make their own decisions without being hypnotized…
To which I responded with my gratitude to her and to all librarians, who suddenly find themselves once again on the front line of the battle for critical thinking and imaginative play.
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Monday
Thom Hartmann, whose Substack blog I read regularly, contends that MAGA has become a death cult and he has an explanation why: it’s in part due to Covid-caused PTSD. The idea brought to mind Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I believe was written in response to an even worse pandemic, one that spawned its own share of death cults. Although the author would have had either first or second-hand experience with the 1348-50 Black Plague, which killed off a third of Europe’s population (!!), yet his poem advocates a much healthier response.
Hartmann points to PTSD symptoms that may be showing up in members of Trump’s cult:
-— Hypervigilance and threat sensitivity, causing people to experience heightened alertness to potential and often imagined (like Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants) threats. — Difficulty with trust, which may lead to skepticism of official sources and greater reliance on alternative information channels; vulnerability, in other words, to Trump’s lies and his claims of “fake news” when he’s fact-checked. — Emotional dysregulation, making individuals like Tina Peters, the hundreds of January 6th rioters now in jail, and other Trump followers more vulnerable to emotionally-charged misinformation and MAGA cult membership. —Cognitive changes impacting critical thinking skills needed to evaluate information that might contradict the lies Trump and his co-conspirators promulgate. — Social isolation which may limit exposure to different perspectives and fact-checking from others who try to tell MAGA members how deluded and exploited they really are. — Seeking explanations causing people to have a heightened need to understand and make sense of their experiences, making them more open to MAGA’s anti-science and politically charged explanatory narratives, even when they’re lies. —Avoidance behaviors leading people to avoid exposure to diverse information sources, keeping them trapped in Trump cult bubbles like rightwing hate radio and Fox “News.”
Hartmann cites an article in the National Library of Medicine where researcher Stephen Schwartz writes about the rise of an American death cult:
“[T]his [million-plus Covid] death rate is directly correlated to the politicization and weaponization of anti-science throughout the MAGA world created by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. … Anti-vaxxers, and anti-maskers, usually the same people, have made fidelity to a fact-free but emotionally satisfying reality more important than life itself, and created the first American death cult. …
Writing in February of 2022, Schwartz mentions that, while there was the equivalent of anti-vaxxers during both the Black Plague and the 1918 Spanish Flu, they did not—as Covid did— evolve into a mainstream political movement. After all, those early pandemics didn’t witness people willingly subjecting themselves to a vastly higher risk of contracting and dying of the disease to prove that it wasn’t real. And yet, Schwartz observes, MAGA Americans have been doing this, even in the face of “a million dead, and 2000 people, or more, dying each day.”
In a related incident, I think of the man who reported how his MAGA-obsessed father-in-law refused all help from FEMA after Hurricane Helene wiped away his house, believing Trump when he said the federal agency was hopelessly corrupt.
I’ve long thought that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a 14th century romance that ranks among my top five favorite works of literature, is a poem that deals with PTSD. In it a Camelot knight must grapple with how to respond to what is essentially an immutable death sentence. Confronted by a nature deity that knows him better than he knows himself, he discovers that his coping mechanisms are inadequate. While he initially thinks he can just shrug death off—after all, he is a Christian knight who believes that his faith and his knightly duty should shield him from caring about his life—he discovers by the end of the poem that he cares deeply after all.
In my book I write about how a former student—an Afghan vet who had defused roadside bombs— discovered that the poem spoke directly to his war experience. Matt said that, while he and his fellow marines had thought they didn’t fear death, he realized from reading the poem that they had been in denial. Just as Gawain dons a magical sash that is supposed to save his life, so Matt had religiously donned his Kevlar vest each day before going out into the field. He had thought he was more stoic than he actually was.
The Green Knight, rather than berate Gawain for what Gawain considers an act of cowardice, instead celebrates the fact that he is finally taking life seriously. It’s as though he is celebrating Gawain’s PTSD cure. While Matt never said that he had PTSD so I can’t claim that he did, he spent the entire night reading this 14th century poem (it wasn’t even for an assignment) and came to class awed by what he had read. “That poem is so true,” he told me.
I love Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because it is such a confident assertion of life. It gives us gorgeous nature imagery, even as it simultaneously gives us excruciating depictions of death. (The hunters in the poem don’t just kill animals: we watch them pull their guts out.) When we use ideology as a means of shielding ourselves from death, which is what Gawain does and which many Trump followers have done as well, the Green Knight—in a quirky way that at times is genuinely comic—pushes us back into right relation. Even at the grimmest of times, he reminds us to embrace the vibrancy that is to be found in creation. No holding back.
That a poet with an intimate acknowledge of one the greatest disasters ever to befall humankind can advocate this, surely it is worth our while to listen to him.
