A GOP Version of Chekhov’s Gun

By Robin Bates | Published: September 21, 2023

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Friday

I recently came across a reference to “Chekhov’s gun” in an article reporting on the threatened government shutdown—which appears increasingly likely as MAGA House Republicans renege on a previous budget agreement, squabble with other Republicans, and refuse to let anything go forward. The allusion gives me a chance to revisit the Russian’s author’s first play, The Seagull, which features the gun he may have been thinking of.

To be sure, there are ways to work around Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the other 14 or so MAGA extremists, but any compromise could set off Chekhov’s gun. MSNBC’s Hayes Brown uses the image to explain why House Speaker Kevin McCarthy can’t simply put together a coalition of Democrats and less extreme Republicans and pass the budget both parties agreed to last spring:

But even that strategy would require more political courage than McCarthy has displayed to date. Keeping the government open with Democratic votes would likely trigger the Chekhov’s gun that’s been sitting on the House dais since he first won the speaker’s gavel: a motion to vacate the chair, aka a vote on whether to remove McCarthy from the speakership.

Here’s some background: In January McCarthy agreed, in exchange for the MAGA votes he needed to become Speaker, that they could vote at any time to have him removed. His agreement was unprecedented, leaving him vulnerable as no previous speaker has been. Chekhov, meanwhile, once wrote to a colleague that one “must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off.” He elaborated further in another letter:

Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.

If the current GOP imbroglio were a Chekhov play, the “motion to vacate” would be introduced in the first act of McCarthy’s speakership and eventually get fired in the last. And even if it never got fired, spectators would always be aware that it could be fired, which would add to the drama.

Maybe “sword of Damocles” would be a more apt allusion in McCarthy’s case. To communicate to his courtier Damocles what it was really like to be king, Dionysius I of Syracuse (so the legend goes) suspended a sword a single horse’s hair, point down, above the throne and invited Damocles to sit there. Forget the glory and the luxuries that go with being king, in other words. This is what it’s really like.

But such a sword works just as well as a gun in Chekhov’s scenario. A playwright should not put it in the play unless it is going to play some kind of role.

In his MSNBC article, Brown notes that McCarthy has “all but dared” Gaetz to “file the freaking motion” if he’s serious about it—in other words, to fire the gun—but doesn’t think the Speaker’s “newfound bravado will hold up for long.” In any event, having been introduced, the motion to vacate is now an integral part of the ongoing action.

Chekhov’s most famous use of his principle occurs in The Seagull. There we see aspiring writer Constantine Treplieff, in Act II, enter with a rifle, which he has just used to shoot a gull. Treplieff is in love with Nina, who is in love with a writer Treplieff regards as a rival. By shooting the gull, Treplieff shows how he himself feels shot down.

As it turns out, he is not the only rejected “gull” as there are three others, but Chekov’s rule decrees that we will see Treplieff’s gun again. In fact, by the beginning of Act III we learn that he has used it in a suicide attempt, and by the end of the final act we hear the shot as he succeeds.

The difference between those frustrated lovers and Speaker McCarthy is that they are governed by tragic longings. As George Saunders writes of Chekhov and other Russian masters (I wrote about this yesterday), they show that “every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.”

Chekov’s greatness is such that he probably could find complexity even in McCarthy. Without such artistic treatment, however, the Speaker seems little more than a power-obsessed but straw-filled puppet who dances reflexively to whatever MAGA tune is playing.

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Life Lessons from Russian Masters

By Robin Bates | Published: September 20, 2023

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Thursday

I just stumbled across George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life (2021). Since (as you well know) I’m a sucker for those who write about literature’s life lessons, I just had to hear what the Booker-winning novelist’s had to say on what Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Gogol can teach us.

Swim in a Pond is itself a master class, based on a course that Saunders teaches to aspiring writers. As such, it functions as a “workbook” (Saunders’ description), and the author regularly interrupts the stories he’s anthologized with questions about how we are responding.

He observes that those stories, while quiet, domestic, and apolitical, can at the same time be regarded as “resistance literature, written by progressive reformers in a repressive culture, under constant threat of censorship, in a time when a writer’s politics could lead to exile, imprisonment, and execution.” The resistance in the stories, he explains, is

quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.

To offer a personal example of how such works can impact a life, he recounts his experience with (not so apolitical) Grapes of Wrath, which he read while holding down a brutal summer job in a Texas oil field as a “jug hustler”:

As I read Steinbeck after such a day, the novel came alive. I was working in a continuation of the fictive world, I saw. It was the same America, decades later. I was tired, Tom Joad was tired. I felt misused by some large and wealthy force, and so did Reverend Casy. The capitalist behemoth was crushing me and my new pals beneath it, just as it had crushed the Okies who’d driven through this same Panhandle in the 1930s on their way to California. We too were the malformed detritus of capitalism, the necessary cost of doing business. In short, Steinbeck was writing about life as I was finding it. He’d arrived at the same questions I was arriving at, and he felt they were urgent, as they were coming to feel urgent to me.

Saunders said that the Russian authors, when he encountered them a few years later, worked on him in the same way:

They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.

At a time when various universities, regarding literature as “something decorative,” are reducing or even eliminating their humanities departments, Saunders shows us the colossal error of their ways. The aim of art, he says, is

to ask the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?

To which he adds, with a parenthetical wry smile,

(You know, those cheerful Russian kinds of big questions.)

To engage his students, Saunders teaches very much as I do in that he wants them to report on their interactions with the work. He makes clear there is no wrong answer (except, I suppose, claiming a reading experience you didn’t in fact have):

The basic drill I’m proposing here is: read the story, then turn your mind to the experience you’ve just had. Was there a place you found particularly moving? Something you resisted or that confused you? A moment when you found yourself tearing up, getting annoyed, thinking anew? Any lingering questions about the story? Any answer is acceptable. If you (my good-hearted trouper of a reader) felt it, it’s valid. If it confounded you, that’s worth mentioning. If you were bored or pissed off: valuable information. No need to dress up your response in literary language or express it in terms of “theme” or “plot” or “character development” or any of that.

If we study the way we read, he explains, we will become alert to how we process reality. Or as he puts it:

To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it behaves in relation to another mind (i.e., the writer’s) across space and time. What we’re going to be doing here, essentially, is watching ourselves read (trying to reconstruct how we felt as we were, just now, reading). Why would we want to do this? Well, the part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.

Saunders also provides a reassuring observation for those concerned about all the assaults on books, libraries, and the humanities in general:

Over the past ten years I’ve had a chance to give readings and talks all over the world and meet thousands of dedicated readers. Their passion for literature (evident in their questions from the floor, our talks at the signing table, the conversations I’ve had with book clubs) has convinced me that there’s a vast underground network for goodness at work in the world—a web of people who’ve put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people and makes their lives more interesting.

(Enthusiastic applause)

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The Social Novel Tackles Our Dilemmas

By Robin Bates | Published: September 19, 2023
Albert André, Woman at a Window

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Wednesday

A few months ago my friend John Giusti, an enthusiastic Chautauqua participant, alerted me to a Maureen Corrigan talk given there about the importance of imaginative storytelling. According to the Cautauquan Daily’s write-up, the Georgetown English professor and Fresh Air book critic said that the socially aware novel is thriving in America at the moment.

The reason, according to Corrigan, is because we “live in a world that’s very anxious about a lot of issues, and literature is one of the ways in which we grasp – and even imagine solutions to – those larger dilemmas of our time.”

In her talk she mentioned Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperfield, about an Appalachian orphan boy’s journey through the foster care system, and Herman Diaz’s Trust, about wealth and power in capitalistic society. She could also have mentioned another Pulitzer-prize winning book that I’ve just completed, Richard Power’s Overstory, about the wisdom of trees and their wholesale destruction.

Corrigan traces the social novel back to 19th century England, which means she probably has such authors as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell in mind. (I’m tempted to add in the 18th century’s Daniel Defoe, but he didn’t have the same belief as the Victorians that his novels could bring about social change.)

Corrigan apparently used the word “resurgence” because America too has seen this kind of novel before. The 1930s experienced some of the things we’re going through now, what with extreme weather events (the Dust Bowl) and the rise of fascism. Back then it was writers like John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, and Dashiell Hammet showing how an exploitative system crushes ordinary citizens.

I remember my father, who grew up in a well-off Illinois Republican household, feeling awakened when he encountered these authors in a high school anthology. His reading and his experiences in World War II would radicalize him, and upon his return home in 1945, his teetotalling family was scandalized by his drinking, smoking, and having voted for Roosevelt.

With Corrigan’s observation that “we’re living in a moment where imaginative literature is foregrounding the social problems of our time,” I got a clearer understanding into the current mania for banning books. Many of those works under attack—I’m thinking especially of such young adult fiction (YAF) as Perks of Being a Wall Flower and Fault in Our Stars —are more interested in the day-to-day workings of our lives than were the authors of my childhood (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis). Corrigan noted that such books help readers counter ignorance and isolation and can even disrupt and change minds.

But it is precisely because of this power that we’re seeing rightwing attacks. “As more people are feeling empowered to write about social issues in America,” she said, “there’s an accompanying pushback – a very strong pushback – to silence those voices.”

And she added,

I sometimes think Americans show more passion about banning books than they do for reading them.

She reported that, according to the American Library Association, 2022 saw the highest number of book challenges since the organization started tracking the statistics more than 20 years ago.

Attacks can come from the left as well as from the right, and Corrigan mentioned bans on J.K. Rowling for her transphobic remarks, along with publisher plans to revise objectionable passages in Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming. But while I agree with her that liberals should refrain from such endeavors, I’ll note the danger of bothsiderism here. I have never encountered a single liberal—not one—who says that Harry Potter should be banned. Nor are liberals seeking to close down school libraries and public libraries because they contain books we find objectionable.

I’ll go further. Although I find horrific such rightwing novels as Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman and (to cite Steve Bannon’s favorite book) Jean Raspail’s Camp of Saints—both noteworthy for their egregious racism—I think students should still have access to them. I also think teachers should teach their students how to critically read and assess them, just as I was intellectually challenged by Hitler’s Mein Kamf in a high school Modern European History class. The real groomers—those who want to mold their kids in their own image, who see kids as puppets or passive vessels—are more likely to be rightwing authoritarian than liberal.

But back to social awareness novels, which I suppose politicians like Ron DeSantis would describe as socially woke. It’s true that, just as Dickens sought to awaken readers to child poverty and Gaskill to inhuman working conditions, so today’s authors are alerting us to our own problems. Of course, some novels suffer from being narrowly didactic. But the best ones, by getting us to enter fully into the lives of their fictional worlds, enrich our perspectives and provide us the necessary understanding and sensitivity to address our greatest challenges.

Latest update on an attempted Texas book ban: Incidentally, as I was writing this, a relevant item entered my newsfeed. According to Chris Geidner at the Law Dork blog , Texas’s recent law banning books has proved too much even for a Trump-appointed judge:

On Monday, a federal judge ruled in favor of booksellers who argued that Texas’s new law banning some books from public school libraries and restricting others through an onerous and complicated regime is likely unconstitutional in an opinion that blasted the law and the arguments the state made in its defense.

As Geidner explains it, the proposed law

purported to set up a system for categorizing books as “sexually explicit” or “sexually relevant,” with the former barred and the latter subject to restrictions, or unrated and available on unrestricted terms. The system, however, requires booksellers to do the initial rating by reviewing and rating every book that they sell to a school. A state agency is then free to change the rating of any book — with no apparent standards or way for the booksellers to appeal that decision — and then post the booksellers’ list (as potentially altered by the state) publicly. Failure to adhere to this system means you can’t sell books to schools in Texas.

Basically, the judge shredded the law for being incompetently formulated, not to mention vague, costly, unenforceable, and, as noted above, unconstitutional.

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Washington’s Last Gift to Us

By Robin Bates | Published: September 18, 2023
Horatio Greenough, George Washington (1840)

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Tuesday

Today is the 227th anniversary of a momentous event that, over the past three years, has come to seem even more important than we previously realized. On September 19, 1796, President George Washington, announced that he would be stepping down from the presidency at the end of his term of office. His “Farewell Address” also warned the nation against political partisanship (!) and (particularly relevant given Russia’s continuing interference on Trump’s behalf) foreign influence in politics.

When George III heard of Washington’s plan to voluntarily relinquish power, he reportedly observed, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

We can appreciate that Washington, laudatory in so many other ways, also gave us a model for the peaceful transition of administrations. With the exception of 1860, when the election of Abraham Lincoln led to the secession of the Confederate states, Washington’s decision has served us well. That is, until January 6, 2021.

To honor Washington, I’m posting a Phillis Wheatley poem, written shortly before the American Revolution.

Wheatley, sold as a slave by a tribal chieftain in Senegal or the Gambia, ended up with the Wheatley family in Boston, who recognized her talents and encouraged her poetry. Not long after her book of poetry was published in London in 1773, the Wheatley family freed her. Her poem in praise of Washington was in turn praised by Washington, who wrote, “the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical Talents.” He also invited her to visit him at his military camp, which she did.

The poem is written in heroic couplets, often used in the 18th century for epic poetry. (Alexander Pope, for instance, used the form for his translations of Homer.) When Wheatley invokes “Celestrial choir! Enthron’d in realms of light,” recent scholarship notes that she is probably invoking the African sun god of her childhood as well as the Greek muse that she encountered in her Latin and Greek education with the Wheatleys. The effect is to elevate America—Columbia—to mythic heights.

With the suffering colonies “involved in sorrows and the veil of night,” she calls upon Washington to unleash his armies as Aeolus, Greek god of the winds, releases his tempests. Calling the general “first in peace and honors,” she writes,

                                           we demand
The grace and glory of thy martial band.
Fam’d for thy valour, for thy virtues more,
Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore!

After all, since Washington has demonstrated his prowess in the French and Indian War (“When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found”), America should be able to turn to him for defense against “whoever dares disgrace/ The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!” The poem concludes with a call:

   Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev’ry action let the Goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! Be thine.

While Washington probably would have proceeded even without Wheatley’s injunction, such a poem probably enters somewhere into that decision-making equation. Perhaps it puts a little more steel in the spine at a time when one needs all the courage one can muster.

His Excellency General Washington
By Phillis Wheatley

Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light,
Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.
While freedom’s cause her anxious breast alarms,
She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms.
See mother earth her offspring’s fate bemoan,
And nations gaze at scenes before unknown!
See the bright beams of heaven’s revolving light
Involved in sorrows and the veil of night!

   The Goddess comes, she moves divinely fair,
Olive and laurel binds Her golden hair:
Wherever shines this native of the skies,
Unnumber’d charms and recent graces rise.

   Muse! Bow propitious while my pen relates
How pour her armies through a thousand gates,
As when Eolus heaven’s fair face deforms,
Enwrapp’d in tempest and a night of storms;
Astonish’d ocean feels the wild uproar,
The refluent surges beat the sounding shore;
Or think as leaves in Autumn’s golden reign,
Such, and so many, moves the warrior’s train.
In bright array they seek the work of war,
Where high unfurl’d the ensign waves in air.
Shall I to Washington their praise recite?
Enough thou know’st them in the fields of fight.
Thee, first in peace and honors—we demand
The grace and glory of thy martial band.
Fam’d for thy valour, for thy virtues more,
Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore!

   One century scarce perform’d its destined round,
When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found;
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!
Fix’d are the eyes of nations on the scales,
For in their hopes Columbia’s arm prevails.
Anon Britannia droops the pensive head,
While round increase the rising hills of dead.
Ah! Cruel blindness to Columbia’s state!
Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late.

   Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev’ry action let the Goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! Be thine.

Further thought: Did Wheatley also have slavery in mind when she called for those who “disgrace the land of freedom’s heaven defended race”? There’s irony here in that Washington himself was a slaveowner. But contradictions aside, Wheatley did make subtle allusions to slavery in her poetry, such in an earlier poem that she directed to George III:

And may each clime with equal gladness see
A monarch’s smile can set his subjects free!

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A GOP Senator as Doctor Faustus

By Robin Bates | Published: September 17, 2023
J.D. Vance and actors Close, Adams in Hillbilly Elegy

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Monday

Last week I wrote on a literary work—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—that has been applied so many times to politics that it has become a cliché. In fact, people don’t even mention the work when they talk about creating a monster that you cannot control. Nor do they cite Alice in Wonderland when they say “going down a rabbit hole” or Doctor Faustus when they accuse someone of selling his or her soul. Clichés, a readily applicable formula, too often take the place of thought.

But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. As a wise English colleague once pointed out to me, students using clichés are often on the verge of insight. Rather than dismiss the cliché, the best approach is to prod the writer to reexamine and explore it further.

Similarly, one can revitalize a literary cliché by returning to the original work. I do so in today’s post after having encountered Mitt Romney’s observation about a colleague selling himself.

It appears in what people are calling Mitt Romney’s “burn book,” in that the former GOP presidential nominee has been remarkably frank in sharing his low opinion of his colleagues with his biographer. One particular target of his contempt is Ohio senator and author of Hillbilly Elegy J.D. Vance. Romney had been impressed by Vance after reading the book, but that all changed when Vance became a Trump sycophant in order to win the election:

“How can you go over a line so stark as that — and for what?” Romney wondered. “It’s not like you’re going to be famous and powerful because you became a United States senator. It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?”

According to biographer McKay Coppins, Romney had similar things to say about others senators with potential:

“They know better!’ (Romney) told me. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” They were too smart, Romney believed, to actually think that Trump had won the 2020 election. Hawley and Cruz “were making a calculation,” Romney told me, “that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”

None of the three men is using their power to make American lives better, having become Trump sycophants and internet trolls. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus also sells himself cheap, and it’s worth looking at how and why that happens.

The foremost scientist, doctor, theologian, and philosopher of his day, Faustus is admired by everyone. We learn that he has cured whole cities of the plague (his medical prescriptions are “hung up as monuments”) and he excels “all those whose sweet delight dispute/ In heavenly matters of theology.” The chorus in the play says that he is as worthy of having his story told as a great general or legendary lover. 

So where does he go wrong? Well, he decides he wants power and will make a deal with the devil to get it. 

Now, power isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it is used wisely. And indeed, Faustus originally claims that he wants to do good things with it. We get a list of projects, delivered to us in Marlowe’s soaring poetry: 

Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
I’ll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I’ll have them read me strange philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;
I’ll have them wall all Germany with brass,
And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg;
I’ll have them fill the public schools with silk,
Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad;
I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring,
And chase the Prince of Parma from our land,
And reign sole king of all the provinces;
Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war,
Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp’s bridge,
I’ll make my servile spirits to invent.

You may find some of these ambitions problematic—say, “stranger engines for the brunt of war”—but at least he’s got a program. Marlowe is tapping into new world exploration, interchanges with newly discovered cultures, and the dawning of the scientific age. What formerly seemed impossible now seems within reach.

Only Faustus accomplishes none of these things. Instead, he uses his powers to become a trickster, conman, and court entertainer. At different times we see him play tricks on the pope, plant cuckold horns on the head of a rival, swindle some poor guy out of $40 by selling him a horse that was originally straw (and that reverts to straw again when the horse touches water), and entertain a couple of rulers with (1) fresh grapes in winter time and (2) a holographic image of Helen of Troy. This is what he gets in return for selling his immortal soul?!

Such a downfall could be predicted. Once you value your private gratification more than your soul, you can no longer distinguish between what’s important and what’s trivial. You squander your considerable gifts chasing cheap applause, and when the end comes, it’s agonizing because you’ve put all your faith in something that is transitory—which is to say, in your ego.

Romney, a man of principle as well as ambition, had the vision to see that Vance had something to him. Whether or not one likes Hillbilly Elegy—Vance’s contempt for many of his fellow hillbillies has drawn criticism—it is still impressive that he rose out of poverty to eventually attend Yale Law School. It is a life trajectory that he shares with Faustus, who also triumphed over an impoverished childhood (his parents are described as “base of stock”) to attend Wittenberg, German’s premier university.

With his direct experiences of rural poverty, it would be laudable if he ran for Senate so that he could address these issues associated with it. If, say, he worked with Democrats to bring industry back to America or transform coal country into a green energy producer, he might be able to justify whatever nefarious means he used to be elected senator.

Instead, he has chosen to be a performance artist and a clown for Trump. To repeat Romney’s reaction, “Really? You sell yourself so cheap?”

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God as a Homeless Man

By Robin Bates | Published: September 16, 2023
Photo by Mike Hazard, Tragedy

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Sunday

Two weeks ago I shared a talk on how artists and writers access or harness the spirit in their creations. I looked at how Homer invokes the muse, Milton the Holy Spirit, Percy Shelley the divine force he sees blowing through the universe, Leslie Marmon Silko Thought Woman (a Laguna Pueblo deity). When former Carleton classmate and artist Mike Hazard responded approvingly, I asked him about his own muse.

Mike, a photographer poet located in Minnesota’s twin cities, sent me two photographs (see above and below) that he took 50 years ago in St. Paul. As “Tragedy” and “Comedy,” he says, they sometimes serve as depictions of his muse.

He also sent me the following observations, along with a poem. The latter reminds me of the story of Baucis and Philemon, who open their house (when no one else will) to two strangers, only to discover that they are wandering gods. Jon Hassler, whom Mike mentions, is a Minnesota novelist noted for writing about rural communities.

Here’s Mike:

It occurs that I have never consciously considered who my muse is or if there is such a being.
I think I have simply always felt I have been photographing God (without always using that word).
My companion?
The people I meet in the street?
The tree that invites a picture? The rock that draws my eye?
The work is a conversation with spirit.
Like Jon Hassler, I aim to look up to everyone, to hear everyone.
As a pantheist and animist, everywhere I am I’m in awe, praising unceasingly.
I pray to a universe, but do not really ask for things.
When I am drawn to photograph or write about an animal, vegetable or mineral, I nod in gratitude.
It is an exchange, a conversation, an encounter.
Sometimes I feel like a colonizing collector. Other times, enthralled with, by all, I am ecstatic.

This poem might illumine.

Open the Door
By Mike Hazard

An old man who might be God*, if I believe all the poets I love—
who’ve taught me that everything, everyone is holy—is pushing
a crummy chrome shopping cart across the rainbow bridge.
He’s in mind as I drive to the post office to check my mailbox
and remind myself that we are all holy, and God might really be,
when he wheeled into the post office like Santa Claus with a full sleigh.
I try not to stare, but I see the janitor instantly appears, looking busy.
A pair of blue jeans falls off his mountain of stuff onto the marble floor.
He picks it up. He moves in slow motion, deliberate as a good judge.
I am reading the junk mail which I got in my box at a counter.
I look up to see he is doing the same thing. He smells pretty strong.
Then he squints into his scoping hands to read a sign right in front of him.
He is steady, focused. He has large features, a weathered and leathery face.
He’s Italian maybe, and a bit ruddy. Has he been drinking too much?
Is that his trouble? Is God a wino? He doesn’t see me at all, for all I know.
We start leaving at the same time. I cross in front of his cart, to get ahead
and open the door for him. He thanks me in a deep, resonant, rich voice.
As he pushes away, his voice echoes in my mind. I look up and see
the first pair of nighthawks of spring, on the wing in the sky above us.
I think hard about a poor man whose life is loaded on a silver sleigh,
a mailbox, a beautiful baritone’s voice, and the manners of a saint.
I wonder if we will ever meet again. I wonder if he was we know who.

*Note to self: The word God might also be Friend, Gitchie Manido, Mohammed, Krishna, Allah, Buddha, Jesus, Brahma, Wakantanka, Deos, Jehovah, Thor, Great Mother, Holy Father, Zeus, Saub, Spirit, and/or any one of ten thousand other names.

Photo by Mike Hazard, Comedy
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The Poet as Pascal Wanderlust

By Robin Bates | Published: September 14, 2023

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Friday

I’ve been reading the two most recent poetry collections of Norman Finkelstein, my best friend in grad school and a remarkable poet and scholar. This past Sunday I shared my theories about the connection between literature and spirituality, and Norman has been exploring a version of that topic for quite some time. I am particularly entranced those poems in which he imagines himself as “Pascal Wanderlust,” a poet wanderer seeking to understand his quest.

Norman’s Wanderlust poems appear both in In a Broken Star (2021) and Further Adventures (2023). The poems are each 12 lines long and appear in groups of 12. Norman has named his hero (or anti-hero) after the line of flowered boots made by Dr. Martens (see picture), but the name also conjures up the brilliant 17th century French mathematician, scientist, and thinker Blaise Pascal, famous for (among other things) his reflections on the nature of God. In an essay appended to Further Adventures, Norman cites Pascal’s observation, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” which Norman jokes makes “Pascal Wanderlust” an oxymoron. Except it’s not, of course, because one can wander in the mind as well as in space, which is what Norman does in his poetic sequence.

Norman’s previous book, From the Files of the Immanent Foundation, chooses an institute or think tank or something (he’s deliberately vague) to explore the nature of poetry. Here, by contrast, he has found an avatar for himself, one who wanders through classic poetry, the Kabbala, various mystics, graphic novels, Freudian psychology, science fiction and fantasy, philosophy, film, and other fields to understand what drives him and the nature of his project.

I share two poems, the first of the Pascal Wanderlust poems (from In a Broken Star) and the self-introduction in Further Adventures (where Norman imagines himself as “the Arch-Mage of Nonsense”).

In our first view of Wanderlust, he is wearing his flowered Doc Martens, along with a mist-grey cloak reminiscent of Gandalf. It is spring and he is following the earth’s invisible energy line, propelled by visions of “palaces lately dreamed” and “that Shining Land lying just ahead, mirage at mountainous horizon.” The breezes that “promise music, scented sensuous turnings of air and vapor, rustling sounds,” remind me of Caliban’s vision in The Tempest:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

Add to that Prospero’s vision in the same play of “cloud-capp’d towers,” “gorgeous palaces” and “solemn temples”—”we are such stuff as dreams are made on,” the magician says—and you see why Wanderlust is so eager to set out on his journey:

Pascal Wanderlust, flowered Docs
and mist-grey cloak, follows the ley line
leading down the lane. The last patches
of snow are melting, and Pascal side-
steps puddles on the way to palaces
lately dreamed. Breezes promise music,
scented sensuous turnings of air
and vapor, rustling sounds. Pascal
pulls back a hood grown moist
in greening weather. That Shining Land
lying just ahead, mirage at mountainous
horizon: what does Pascal know of destinations?

In the other poem, we glimpse many of the elements that the alchemist poet mixes together in his poetry workshop. Some are elevated, some look like they’ve been lifted from old science fiction movies and comic books.

“Adam Kadmon,” which I had to look up, is a figure from Jewish mysticism. Neither male nor female, Kadmon is the original human, made up of pure spirit and pure potential, from which Adam and Eve were fashioned (“the ego in pieces”). And indeed Wanderlust, when he plugs into his Adam Kadmon soul, is sometimes a man, sometimes a woman.

Notice how Norman is not afraid to make fun of himself: not only does he admit that he might be turning out nonsense, but he has a sense of humor about his enterprise. Although he seeks to touch base with his higher self, he does so with imperfect instruments, including narration, which refuses to cohere as it breaks into pieces (like the ego). In other words, don’t expect a straightforward story.

All of which is great fun. The Arch-Mage’s laughter, Norman tells us, echoes through space.

The Arch-Mage of Nonsense
is at work in his study
shaping an ego
out of old books of poems
bits of gossip
found on the internet
and vague memories
that were once his own.

The ego is dispersed
across page after page
decanted stuff
from alembics and test tubes
and vacuum chambers
retrieved from space stations
long abandoned
orbiting the moon.

Like a comic book born
of ennui and sorrow
pain and irony
and impossible magic
the ego and its dreamwork
are laid out in poems
panel next to panel
demanding interpretation.

Panel next to panel
in their inane contiguity
defying continuity
yet insisting upon narration
the ego in pieces
like Adam Kadmon
and the laughter of the Arch-Mage
echoing through space.

Added note: Copies of In a Broken Star and Further Adventures can be found at the publisher Dos Madres (www.dosmadres.com). After I sent my post to Norman, he pointed out that I may have made the common reader’s error of too readily equating the character with the author. Or as he put it, “Funny, I don’t think of myself as PW (or vice versa), or at least no more so than novelists think of themselves in their characters. Though I admit to being the Arch-Mage of Nonsense!”

Norman also observed,

Pascal is androgynous, and I never use any pronouns in reference to that character (note that I’m not using “him” in this sentence). This is as much a stylistic move as it is a matter of gender, and plot. I hate using the third-person plural to refer to a single individual, so I chose to use no pronouns at all. This puts a certain stress or torque to the syntax, a deliberate formal constraint.

Previous Posts on Norman Finkelstein

—Poetry, a Road to the Spirit World
—Gnosticism’s Flight from Earth
—A Long Day’s Journey into Mystery
—Music Only Poets Can Here
—The Bloody Flesh Our Only Food
—Childhood, Space of Terror and Enchantment
—A Poem in Praise of Libraries
—Death and Miracles and Stars without Number
—Passover: Blood on the Doorposts

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Navarro, Wells, and Acting with Impunity

By Robin Bates | Published: September 13, 2023

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Thursday

Of all the Trump associates who are in legal trouble, I’ve been particularly fascinated by Peter Navarro, the former Trump advisor who was just convicted of defying a Congressional subpoena. Maybe it’s because he’s a former professor and I recognize in him some of the arrogance characteristic of certain academics, especially at research universities. Be that as it may, applying H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man to Navarro provides some insight into why Trump has been able to attract into his circle some supposedly intelligent people.

The above Joseph Farris cartoon also helps. In case you are reading this without the illustration, it features a well-dressed and supremely confident man informing a skeptical judge, “It really wasn’t my fault, your honor. I was led to believe I was above the law.”

Navarro is noteworthy for having proudly revealed “the Green Bay Sweep” on Ari Melber’s MSNBC show The Beat. The plan called for members of Congress to disrupt the counting of electoral votes so as to cause a historic delay. This, the plotters hoped, would get media attention and allow public pressure to build for then-Vice President Mike Pence to send electoral votes back to the six contested states. To which Melber responded, “Do you realize you are describing a coup?”

While Navarro may yet be held responsible for working to overturn the election, his recent conviction was for defying a subpoena from the Congressional committee investigating the coup. Arguing that Trump had granted him “executive privilege” (even though Trump has never confirmed this), Navarro declined to offer any defense or to call any witnesses. A jury quickly found him guilty, and he could face a year in jail and a $100,000 fine for each of the two counts against him.

Navarro has complained bitterly that the court costs and the fines are impoverishing him, but he could have avoided it all by simply showing up to the Congressional hearing. If he had decline to answer their questions, he would have faced no penalty (on the grounds of self-incrimination).

But to have done so would have meant acknowledging that he was answerable to another authority. I suspect the fantasy of thumbing one’s nose at the law with impunity may explain much of Trump’s popularity. Of course, the way that Trump articulates deep racial, ethnic, and sexual grievances is also part of his allure. But that’s a feeling that churns in the gut whereas defying rules and regulations gives one the sense that one can soar above earthly accountability.

Which brings me to Invisible Man, a work I’ve applied multiple times to Trump and other authoritarian figures. To revisit some of those ideas here, I’ve noted that Griffin describes a “feeling of extraordinary elation” when he realizes that people can’t see him. Confiding his history to his college friend Kemp, he says he immediately burned down the house where he made his discoveries so that others wouldn’t discover his secrets:

“You fired the house!” exclaimed Kemp.
“Fired the house. It was the only way to cover my trail—and no doubt it was insured. I slipped the bolts of the front door quietly and went out into the street. I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realize the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.

He uses the word “impunity” again further on:

Practically I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose, everything—save to give away my secret. So I thought. Whatever I did, whatever the consequences might be, was nothing to me. I had merely to fling aside my garments and vanish. No person could hold me.

In the past, I’ve compared Griffin’s behavior to that of bad cops who bang suspects’ heads against car door frames (as Trump recommended), severely beat suspects, and sometimes shoot unarmed men. Griffin undergoes a similar trajectory, beginning with minor social infractions:

My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.

With each action, Griffin becomes hungry for more, confirming the old adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When Kent asks about “the common conventions of humanity,” Griffin replies that they are “all very well for common people.”

Griffin’s dark ambitions grow with his madness. Thinking he has successfully enlisted Kemp, he plots ways to wield total power:

“And it is killing we must do, Kemp.”
“It is killing we must do,” repeated Kemp. “I’m listening to your plan, Griffin, but I’m not agreeing, mind. Why killing?”
“Not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying. The point is, they know there is an Invisible Man—as well as we know there is an Invisible Man. And that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror. Yes; no doubt it’s startling. But I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must take some town like your Burdock and terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways—scraps of paper thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend them.”

Note that he uses one of Trump’s favorite words here: “dominate.” He’s prepared to use violence if necessary.

While I don’t know if I can attribute Griffin’s sadism to Navarro, some Trump followers feel as though he’s given them permission to act out their dark impulses. The thrill that comes with asserting your dominance over others is a sensation familiar to rapists.

But putting that aside, Navarro may have felt so exhilarated at thumbing his nose at Congress—something his idol has done regularly—that the rush overwhelmed common sense. What a sensation for someone who, all his life, has had to follow the rules.

To be sure, there’s another explanation for his behavior, something slightly more rational than an emotional Trumpian high. As John Stoehr of Editorial Board points out, Navarro may have just been making a calculated gamble, one that came perilously close to succeeding:

[Navarro] is where he is, because the plan failed. If it had succeeded, there’d be a Trump White House and a Trump Department of Justice. There’d be no accountability, “because I’m a Trump guy!” 

Indeed, Navarro’s throw of the dice may still be rewarded if Trump is reelected, pardons him, and awards him a high position. Many Trumpists are convinced that their man will wipe the floor with “senile” Joe Biden.

Such gambles have succeeded in the past, as Steve Bannon well knows. Bannon, the Trump whisperer who will also be going to jail for defying a Congressional subpoena, points to figures like Lenin, Mao and Castro, who risked everything and came out on top. And they got satisfying payback as well.

This is why the court cases against Trump and his confederates are so important. Sometimes applying justice to a rich and powerful man can itself feel like a gamble, but the arrogance of Trump and his lawbreaking associates can only be stemmed if they are brought to justice. As it is, Trump is desperately attempting to taint the jury pool and to regain the pardon power that comes with the presidency. Wrestling with him can feel like wrestling with someone who is everywhere at once–that’s what it’s like to fight the Invisible Man at the end of Wells’s novel–but in the end the forces of good prevail.

Pray that our own story ends similarly.

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Ted Lasso, Not Larkin, for Child Advice

By Robin Bates | Published: September 12, 2023
Sudeikis as Ted Lasso

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Wednesday

Literary Hub had a fascinating article this past week looking at trauma through the eyes of (1) Ted Larkin’s most quoted (and infamous) poem and (2) the television series Ted Lasso. As Catherine Buni points out, the poem actually gets quoted in one of the series’ last episodes.

First of all, here’s the poem, which you may know already (at least the first line). Reader discretion advised:

This Be the Verse
By Phil Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
    They may not mean to, but they do.   
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.

After observing that Larkin’s parents were problematic (his father was a Hitler admirer and emotionally abusive husband, his mother a depressive) and that he himself could be “an asshole” (a racist, sexist, alcoholic recluse), Buni goes on to assess whether what the poem says is true. If it’s not is it good, she asks, applying Elizabeth Bishop’s observation that accuracy is one of poetry’s best qualities (along with spontaneity and mystery).

Larkin, Buni says, gets certain things wrong about both inherited trauma and coastal shelf geology. Apparently coastal shelves, which consist of “bedded layers, discrete and discernible when extracted for view,” don’t build up the way Larkin thinks they do, with one layer of silt after another drifting down and hardening. Rather, they are the product of underwater sediment routing systems which sometimes add and sometimes take away.

Likewise, childhood trauma is more dynamic than Larkin lets on. Although it’s true that adverse childhood experiences can lead to chronic physical and mental health conditions, it’s also the case that a number of these conditions can be reversed. Checking with several child trauma experts, Buni quotes former California surgeon general on how the cycle can be broken:

 She has identified seven granular, research-based strategies that prevent the human-to-human hand-off of misery: sleep, exercise, time in nature, nutrition, mindfulness, mental health care, and healthy relationships. The tool she uses most? “Walk and talk. Exercise combined with talking with someone.”

Now to Ted Lasso, a show that provide a regular workshop in healthy intervention:

The show’s communities are cooperative and inclusive, with characters who step up against bullies and bigots, who do not tolerate abuse and harm, of anybody, regardless of identity or position. There’s a men’s group that aims to nurture healthy relationships, she observed, the juxtaposition of one dad who is verbally abusive to his son with another dad who lifts his son up, and all sorts of people who decide to try therapy, including Ted. “It feels so different than what we would have seen even ten years ago,” Burke Harris said. “It’s beautiful.”

And then the poem makes its entrance, quoted by Ted’s mother as she visits her son:

Hugging serving tray to chest, Mae approaches Ted, her nimbus of white hair glowing.

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad./…,” Mae begins, no introduction, no title. “They may not mean to, but they do…/.” Her voice dusk-low, the poem unfolds. “But they were fucked up in their turn/ By fools in old-style hats and coats,/…” Mae lands Larkin’s final lines as clear as a crack to the head. “Get out as early as you can,/And don’t have any kids yourself.”

Buni observes,

But, as anyone who’s watched the show knows, it’s too late for Ted. Ted was fucked up in his turn, he knows. He drank up all the faults they had, those fucked up fucks, his mum and dad. And he might fuck up his son, too. He lives an ocean away, and Ted anguishes over the question of whether to return. It won’t be until the last episode that Ted tells his Mom to fuck off, for burying the facts of his father’s death, and then suggests that she, too, might find therapy helpful.

Quoting Ted Lasso’s Peabody Award citation, Buni says that it provides

the perfect counter to the enduring prevalence of toxic masculinity, both on-screen and off, in a moment when the nation truly needs inspiring models of kindness.

She adds that, while the show may not represent a tectonic shift, nevertheless

it has in its own small way pushed towards a new conversation, one aimed at slowly dissolving America’s bedrock violence and banding us together instead. In light of ascendent white nationalist ideologies and communities, increasingly mainstreamed threats of political violence, an unprecedented mental health crisis for kids, and growing partisan hostility, why not create more templates for change? Together, we bear misery, shifting and roiling, riverine.

All of which is to say that we have tools for saving our kids from our misery so that they will not be inevitably doomed by our hang-ups. Indeed they are (I speak from experience here) the greatest gift imaginable and an enduring sign of hope.

So don’t take Larkin’s poem as the last word. Sure, it’s a fun poem to quote when one is feeling frustrated. But if it convinces people not to have kids, then it does more harm than good.

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