Lit Heals By Keeping Us Off Balance

By Robin Bates | Published: January 8, 2024

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Monday

In my weekly series on Angus Fletcher’s book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, I look today at his argument that Thomas More’s Utopia, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness help us to “decide wiser.” By this he means that these works help us see the world through expanded awareness by getting us to suspend judgment, thereby freeing ourselves from bias.

In what I am calling Fletcher’s anthropological-psychological approach to literature, the Ohio State “professor of story science” says that while staying comfortably inside one’s own judgments can feel “instantly good to our neurons”—it delivers “pleasant microdoses of emotional superiority”—in the long run doing so “make[s] us anxious, incurious, and less happy.” But we can improve our long-term mental well-being by suspending judgment:

The longer we suspend our judgments, the more accurate our subsequent verdicts become. This valuable fact has been uncovered by researchers who’ve spent decades probing the mechanics of better decision-making, only to discover the key is simply more time and more information. Which is to say: reserving our judgment until the last possible moment.

One of the best ways for suspending our judgments and expanding our view of the world is through traveling to other cultures—and if one can’t travel in actuality, one can travel through books. Thus Fletcher mentions such works as “Herodotus’s fourth century-BCE musings on Egyptian circumcision; Fan Chengda’s twelfth-century geographies of the painted towers of the southern Song dynasty; and Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth-century guides to the fruited rivers of Persia, the pickled pepper pods of Zanzibar, and the seed-eating wizards of the old Mughal Empire.”

The problem with travel books, however, is that, while we are invited to sample other cultures, the narrator is often, comfortably, one of us:

The travelogues of Herodotus, Fan Chengda, and Ibn Battuta are all told in the voice of a single author who presents himself as a trustworthy set of eyes; the sort of experienced guide whom we might hire on a real trip to show us around. This style of writing sets our brain on autopilot. Even when the travelogue introduces us to people who act unexpectedly, it supplies us with a constant source of social cues: the narrator.

Because this perspective is less jolting than actual physical travel, such travelogues are less effective at boosting our sense of wonder. Fletcher therefore turns to three works that find ways to jolt us further, with each one (he contends) being an advance over the previous.

The first is Thomas More’s Utopia, which has two narrators arguing over an imaginary land. In other words, there are two perspectives about how we are to judge it, that of the character Hythloday and that of “Thomas More.” Between these two perspectives, Fletcher says, we inhabit a “netural in-between suspended forever.”

Only, he adds, we don’t. While More has given us two narrators, his original readers “decided the Utopia had only one true author: Hythloday. The ‘Thomas More’ fellow, they reasoned, was a satirical gag, so they compressed Utopia’s unique two author structure into a traditional one-author travelogue.”

Swift in Gulliver’s Travels found a different way to jolt us, turning its narrator into an untrustworthy witness. By the end of the work, Gulliver has gone mad, so if we have been relying on him to give us a solid view of the world, we find ourselves suddenly having to readjust where we thought we stood. Otherwise, we would find ourselves putting trust in a man who agrees that human beings (the Yahoos) should be exterminated. Indeed, when the Platonic horses order him to leave their kingdom, he uses the skin of human babies for his ship’s sails and human fat to caulk the boat. When he returns home to his family, meanwhile, he faints at the smell of his wife and spends four hours a day talking to the horses in his stables.

But Fletcher, for reasons that I’ll disagree with in a moment, says that we find a way to become comfortable in Swift’s vision: we just see it as satiric, and with that familiar category settled, we are no longer jolted. Therefore, Fletcher says, we need one more Henry Jamesian turn of the screw (my comparison, not his). This, he says, we get from Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness.

In that sci-fi novel we have a character, Genly Ai, who is so revolted “at the ‘animals’ of his own species that he flees to escape them in a separate room.” But when he visits the family of a Gethen friend—another  people—he finds himself “overwhelmed with ‘strangeness,’ feeling as shockingly repelled by the Gethens as he does by humans.” Fletcher writes,

With this narrative twist, Ursula Le Guin doubles the innovation of Gulliver’s Travels. It’s as though Gulliver ended by swooning in horror at his wife—then swooning in horror at the horses of his stables….So rather than allowing us to follow the readers of Gulliver’s Travels in rocketing out of the narrator’s orbit, Left Hand interrupts our thrust away, suspending us in a state of half repulsion and half agreement…Gently Ai is crazy—and he’s sane. He’s so strange—and he’s just like me…our judgment hung in space indefinitely.

Fletcher calls this “the invention of the Double Alien,” and it’s worth noting that this is not the only work where Le Guin uses it. In The Dispossessed, for instance, against the backdrop of an Earth that has been environmentally destroyed, the protagonist bounces back and forth between a capitalist planet where some lessons have been learned and its desolate moon, which has been settled by idealistic anarchists. Each society has its flaws, as the anarchist protagonist discovers as he finds himself out of step with both societies. As in Left Hand of Darkness, there’s resistance to any final judgment.

But I think the same occurs with Gulliver’s Travels, which I consider the world’s greatest work of satire. The extra twist, which Fletcher doesn’t mention, is how Swift satirizes satire itself. Swift never ever allows one to rest comfortably. Gulliver by the end of the book has essentially become a satirist—only horses are worth talking to he thinks—and Swift shows that to be a dead-end as well.

At the same time, he provides us with a character, the Portuguese sea captain who rescues Gulliver, who all but restores our faith in humanity. Even though Brits of the time associated the Portuguese with the Portuguese Inquisition, Pedro de Mendez goes out of his way to make sure that Gulliver gets safely home. It’s an example of something Swift once remarked in a letter, of loving people but hating humanity. Or to use his exact words,

I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one, and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians—I will not speak of my own trade—soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.

So one problem I find with Fletcher’s mind-expanding book is that he talks as though literary techniques are superseded just as human inventions are. But literature is more than a technique. Authors can create timeless works even while working within limitations. Swift doesn’t need Le Guin’s “double alien technique” to pull the rug out from under us every time we become complacent. He’s brilliant at always keeping us off balance.

Which is to say, in great works of art our judgment never finds a comfortable position upon which to rest.

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Epiphany: Seeking Our Heart’s Desire

By Robin Bates | Published: January 6, 2024
Durer, Adoration of the Magi

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Epiphany Sunday

Yesterday having been the Feast of the Epiphany, I share this wonderful Epiphany poem by writer and poet Dudley Delffs, my next door neighbor. I love the passage,

Like wise men from afar,
exotic visitors to our own lives,
we scan the horizon each morning
with ferocious hope, wondering
if this is the day when our star
appears…

The star, the poem explains, is our heart’s desire. When we find it, we “make camp and worship, adore the living/ daylight out of every new morning.” The Epiphany is that moment when the numinous enters our lives and we feel we are seeing the world as though for the first time. As T.S. Eliot observes in his own Epiphany poem, even when the journey is long and difficult, no other search compares with it.

Epiphany
By Dudley Delffs

Black coffee morning in winter,
and the Three Kings have finally found
the Christ Child, many days, fittingly,
after all the hoopla has been exchanged
for gifts of another kind.
Outside my window, the sun
lets down her hair, spills light
across the shoulders of the frozen earth,
loosens the white shawl tatted
by snow and ice on muddy ground.
Like wise men from afar,
exotic visitors to our own lives,
we scan the horizon each morning
with ferocious hope, wondering
if this is the day when our star
appears, the shine in the eyes
of someone who knows
where we’re going, a gold beacon
winking from the dark sea of desire.
We can’t help but wander with them,
the Magi, traipsing like gypsies,
across moor and mountain,
field and fountain, seeking, knocking,
following, finding. What do you do
when you find your heart’s desire?
You make camp and worship, adore the living
daylight out of every new morning.
You offer all you came to give.

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Gilead Is Becoming a Reality

By Robin Bates | Published: January 4, 2024

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Friday

When Margaret Atwood imagines dark futures for us, she calls it speculative rather than dystopian science fiction, and her speculations often prove disturbingly prescient. I’ve written multiple times about how Christo-fascists are attempting to establish a version of Atwood’s Gilead in America, but even I didn’t foresee how far they would go and in such a short time.

I didn’t foresee that a 10-year-old child rape victim in Ohio, six weeks pregnant, would be forced to travel to another state to get an abortion. I didn’t foresee that a woman, also in Ohio, would be arrested for a miscarriage of a 22-week-old non-viable fetus. When a Texas woman discovered that her fetus had a lethal fetal anomaly and a judge ruled that neither she nor her husband would be criminally or civilly penalized for terminating her pregnancy, I didn’t foresee that the state’s attorney general would sue to have the ruling overturned and that Trump-appointed judges would in fact overturn it, forcing the woman to leave the state to protect both her health and her future fertility. And when the Biden administration sued Texas for not allowing women to get emergency abortions when their lives or health depended on it (this under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA)), I didn’t foresee that these same judges would rule that the fetus would be entitled to “an equal level of life-saving care as is provided to the woman carrying it.”

In describing the situation, blogger Tom Hartmann of The Hartmann Report invokes not only Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale but William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. Only where Sophie has a legitimate dilemma as she is forced to choose one child over the other, the judges agonize over what should be a self-evident choice:

So, therefore, what’s really at stake here, in the minds of these judges, is a sort of Sophie’s Choice between the full rights to healthcare and the survival it can provide to both mom and the fetus…er…“child.”

Then he quotes their ruling:

We agree with the district court that EMTALA does not provide an unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child especially when EMTALA imposes equal stabilization obligations.

Blogger Lucian K. Trescott IV has called the judges “The Handmaid’s Court,” explaining,

Yes, you read that right:  Three justices on the Fifth Circuit, one a Bush appointee and two appointed by Donald Trump, have essentially ruled that the Texas law banning abortions has supremacy over a federal law protecting the life of a pregnant mother if an abortion is deemed medically necessary to save her life.

In blogger Jessica Valenti’s framing, meanwhile, it sounds like the judges are channeling Atwood’s Gilead patriarchs:

How many more ways can they make it clear that they want us dead? And I mean that literally. As I wrote in 2022, it’s not just that Republican lawmakers and the anti-abortion movement see women dying as an unfortunate but acceptable consequence of making abortion illegal. To them, the most noble thing a pregnant woman can do is die so that a fetus can live….To them, women dying in pregnancy isn’t collateral damage—it’s just our job.

  In Handmaid’s Tale, the women are supposed to be pleased that, in place of bodily autonomy, they are elevated upon pedestals. They get to be saintly martyrs, superior to brutish men.  Offred reports how their trainer Aunt Lydia socializes them into this perspective:

A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get. We want you to be valued, girls. She is rich in pauses, which she savors in her mouth. Think of yourselves as pearls.

If women choose not to be saintly martyrs, they risk being arrested, and a few legislators in various states have started calling for the death penalty. It’s as though some are regarding Handmaid’s Tale, not as a warning, but as a wish fulfillment.

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Tales of Wood Splitting

By Robin Bates | Published: January 3, 2024

Pissarro, The Wood Cutter

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Thursday

I wore myself out hauling wood yesterday and don’t have the energy to write a post so I’m re-running one that appeared last year. All that has changed since I wrote it is that I was too optimistic about how long the wood would last. We are burning it at such a rapid clip that there is no danger of our woodpiles rotting away in oblivion, as described by Robert Frost. The good news is that we barely used our heat pump at all last winter and are avoiding it this year as well.

From February 20, 2022

Christmas has come early to the Bates household: we have just purchased a wood splitter, which feels like getting a giant new toy. As I watch the blade cut effortlessly through giant logs, literary references to woodcutting come to mind.

First of all, some background. My mother owns 18 heavily wooded acres surrounding her house by Lake Eva in the Southern Cumberlands. We are surrounded by tall oaks but, because of the shallow soil, sooner or later out red and black oaks hit rock, at which point they begin rotting from within. (The root systems of white oaks are able to work around the rock so they don’t have the same problem.) Then, come winter, the water that has entered the rot freezes, expanding and cracking the foundation. After that, it just takes a strong wind to topple the tree. As a result, just within 50 feet of our house, three red oaks, one hickory and one maple that have all gone down. In addition, a tree service had to take down two trees that threatened to fall on the house.

With all this free wood around, the question has been how to take advantage of it. I finally found someone who would cut the trees into chunks, and he in turn persuaded us to buy a log splitter (rather than rent one at $250 a shot). I rev up the machine whenever I want a break from writing.

A Robert Frost poem confirmed me in my decision not to add a chainsaw to the log splitter. You may know “Out, Out,” maybe his most horrifying poem. In it, a boy is sawing logs when the unimaginable happens:

His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.

Better to pay a skilled professional, I figured, than take that risk.

Another Frost poem has me wondering, however, if the wood I split and stack—being so plentiful—will end up like the abandoned woodpile, in the poet’s poem by that name. Frost comes across it quite by accident and figures it is at least three years old.

It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

So if I turn four fallen oaks into firewood with this wondrous log splitter, that could be enough wood to fuel our wood stove for ten years. But would it stay good for that long? [Update: The question has become moot because we sometimes go through an entire tree in a few weeks.]

One other literary image comes to mind as I add logs to our fire. I gave Julia a bellows for her birthday and suddenly we feel as though, without it, we’ve been making fires with one hand tied behind our backs. It also makes me think of Flute, who reluctantly plays the female lead in Pyramus and Thisbe in Midsummer Night’s Dream and who is a bellows mender. I’ve never thought of bellows needing mending—much less that there was a special profession dedicated to doing so—but now that we own one, I realize that they can wear out.

Anyway, here’s a fun poem about bellows, by one John Steele, which appeared in The Amethyst Review:

The Bellows

The bellows breath ignites a fire.
Flames purge your nostrils, gut, and brain,
rouse the serpent from its slumber,
coiled up in your sacral cave.

Cross-legged, your head bowed
to face your heart, breathe in
to lift your chest up toward your chin.
Exhale, inhale through your nose,

pump your gut to blast air out—
in-out, in-out, in-out…
Then with a sharp in-breath,
suck your belly in and hold…

Work the bellows till the embers glow.
Breath by breath, surrender to the flow.

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Crashing into Invisible Barriers

By Robin Bates | Published: January 2, 2024

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Wednesday

Yesterday a junco killed itself by flying into one of our windows. An old Lucille Clifton poem came immediately to mind.

Apparently birds flying into windows is a serious problem. The Nature Bird Conservancy estimates that such collisions kill between 365 million and one billion birds annually in the United States alone. In reflected images of nature, birds see promises of food, shelter or escape routes—in other words, opportunity—which are then cruelly thwarted.

That’s the lesson that Clifton draws in her poem “for the bird who flew against our window one morning and broke his natural neck”:

my window
is his wall.
in a crash of
birdpride
he breaks the arrogance
of my definitions
and leaves me grounded
in his suicide.

Clifton wrote her poem in 1972, six years before feminist Marilyn Loden first used the metaphor of “glass ceiling,” but it captures the same idea. One think one has limitless possibilities, only to get brought up short by prejudice. Clifton’s poem could describe any number of privileges (white privilege, male privilege, monied privilege). A window of opportunity for some can be a wall into which others crash.

The privilege that Clifton begins with is human privilege. After all, windows are our inventions and we use them for our benefit. As the Bird Conservancy article notes, most of the time “humans can use door frames and other visual clues to anticipate the presence of glass and avoid collisions.” Clifton is not an aggrieved party here.

But as one looks closer at the poem, one realizes Clifton is seeing her own situation as a Black woman in the bird’s tragedy. After all, what she describing is a human phenomenon, not an avian one. Birds are not proud or arrogant when they crash into windows, nor can their deaths be regarded as suicide. It’s as though Clifton uses the death to remind herself that when she confidently assumes that her talent will allow her to rise above her racist society, the bird reminds her that there are barriers, often invisible, that she will crash into. While she may initially have thought that she defines the parameters of her life, she now realizes that was her “birdpride” speaking. The bird’s death grounds her in the reality of her life.

The word “arrogance” puzzled me for a while, but I don’t wonder if she is concerned about looking down on others of her race and gender who haven’t succeeded as she has. I talked about this issue with Nikki Haley in yesterday’s post and it’s the case with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as well. When they attack affirmative action (Thomas) or claim that there’s no systemic racism is America (Haley), they use their own lives as proof. If they have made it, everyone should be able to.

I think that Clifton is using this poem to caution herself against such arrogance. She is not exempt from the dramas that beset her fellows, who too often stun themselves against the glass windows, or ceilings, of prejudice. Don’t think you’re better than they are, she reminds herself.

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Nikki Haley, a Minor Character in 1984

By Robin Bates | Published: January 1, 2024
Nikki Haley explains what caused the Civil War

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Tuesday

The recent dodge by Nikki Haley on what caused the Civil War—she didn’t want to say “slavery” for fear of offending Trump supporters—had a familiar ring to it. In 1963-64 in my seventh grade Tennessee History class, our teacher told us that the causes were states’ rights issues and economic differences, not slavery. While Fred Langford didn’t go so far as refer to the Civil War as “the War of Northern Aggression,” it was clear that he didn’t want to mention that southern plantation owners enslaved human beings. I don’t recall any mention of slaves the entire year or, for that matter, of Jim Crow laws.

So that’s where we are now with the GOP: even the supposedly moderate Haley, the establishment Republicans’ choice, feels the need to kowtow to white supremacists. What particularly bothers me is that this descendant of Sikh immigrants (her full name is Nimarata Nikki Randhawa) has thrown in her lot with a party that is demonizing people of color. I think of the white supremacist who, a year after 9-11, shot ten members of a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six of them. Does Haley really think she will placate such people by signaling that she doesn’t think that slavery was a big deal? Does she think that they will regard her as white like them? I think of the Association of German National Jews, which endorsed Hitler in his early days before they were rebuffed by the Nazis.

To be clear, I’d rather have Haley than Trump for president. She seems less likely to corrupt the Department of Justice, the military, and other institutions. Nor will she throw in with Putin, destroy NATO, or abandon Ukraine. But while she may not aspire to be Big Brother, as I noted in a blog post this past February she reminds me of another character in 1984. I reprint that post today:

Reprinted from February 16, 2023

Tuesday

“Kim” on Spoutify has just reminded me of a passage from 1984 that describes all too well many of today’s GOP apparatchiks, one of whom has just announced she will be running for president. In the words of Atlantic columnist and former Republican Tom Nichols, the video announcing the candidacy of South Carolina governor Nikki Haley

was as vapid and weightless a product as any in recent political memory. Of course, it checked all the right boxes: Family, devotion to public service, all the usual generic gloss, and all of it presented as if the past seven years had never happened.

Quoting fellow NeverTrumper and former GOP consultant Stuart Stevens, Nichols notes that, just days after the January 6 insurrection, “Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA.” And then a few months after that Haley said of Trump that “we need him in the Republican Party” and “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.” “She’ll never snatch the green jacket from the Master’s Open in Sucking Up from Lindsey Graham,” Nichols concludes, “but she’s certainly putting in the effort.”

The reason Nichols singles out Haley for special scorn is because, as a youthful and formerly moderate woman of color, she once seemed to offer the GOP a different path forward. But like so many of these figures—New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik also comes to mind—she has totally thrown in with Big Brother.

That’s what political cult worship does to one: it hollows out your principles (if you ever had any) and renders you stupid. That’s why comparing Haley to Winston Smith’s next door neighbor Tom Parsons is altogether apt. Both have drunk the Kool-Aid:

Parsons was Winston’s fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years.

The stability—or at least continuance—of Trumpism depends on the Haleys of the world. Like Nichols and Stevens, I don’t believe anything less than continued electoral defeats will bring the GOP back to its senses. Or as Nichols puts it, “no person or party should ever get a second chance to betray the Constitution.”

Further thought: Contrasting Haley’s Tom Parsons to Trump’s Big Brother brings to mind T. S. Eliot’s contempt for authoritarian wannabes in “The Hollow Men.” Better to be a lost violent soul, he says, than a hollow men:

Those who have crossed
    With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
    Remember us-if at all-not as lost
    Violent souls, but only
    As the hollow men
    The stuffed men.

By opening his poem with an epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness–“Mistah Kurtz–he dead”–Eliot is telling us that he’d choose a villainous brute like Kurtz over a wishy-washy scarecrow. While I myself will take a scarecrow any day and find Eliot’s preference for an authoritarian leader problematic (and similarly problematic the celebration of Kurtz by Marlow, Conrad’s narrator in Heart of Darkness), the poem does a good job of depicting figures like Haley. She blows as the wind blows:

We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats’ feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar

And yet a further thought: T.S. Eliot’s contempt for such people also shows up “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

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

As she refuses to criticize Donald Trump in her campaign, Haley appears to be opting for the “attendant lord” role. Which is to say Polonius to Hamlet. Or Tom Parson to Trump’s Big Brother.

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For the New Year, Honor the Overlooked

By Robin Bates | Published: December 31, 2023
Garbage collection in New York City

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Monday – New Year’s Day

Here’s a fun poem by Philip Appleman, reminding us to remember all those who, often invisibly, improve the quality of our lives. A good New Year’s resolution is to respect and honor our fellow human beings, including those that work in the shadows.

After all, at this time of renewal as many celebrate Christianity’s apocalyptic promise, Appleman tells us in his concluding punchline that these unseen workers represent “the second coming.”

To the Garbage Collectors in Bloomington, Indiana, the First Pickup of the New Year
By Philip Appleman

(the way bed is in winter, like an aproned lap,
    like furry mittens,
    like childhood crouching under tables)
The Ninth Day of Xmas, in the morning black
outside our window: clattering cans, the whir
of a hopper, shouts, a whistle, move on …
I see them in my warm imagination
the way I’ll see them later in the cold,
heaving the huge cans and running
(running!) to the next house on the street.

My vestiges of muscle stir
uneasily in their percale cocoon:
what moves those men out there, what
drives them running to the next house and the next?
Halfway back to dream, I speculate:
The Social Weal? “Let’s make good old
    Bloomington a cleaner place
    to live in—right, men? Hup, tha!”
Healthy Competition? “Come on, boys,
    let’s burn up that route today and beat those dudes
    on truck thirteen!”
Enlightened Self-Interest? “Another can,
    another dollar—don’t slow down, Mac, I’m puttin’
    three kids through Princeton?”
Or something else?
Terror?

A half hour later, dawn comes edging over
Clark Street: layers of color, laid out like
a flattened rainbow—red, then yellow, green,
and over that the black-and-blue of night
still hanging on. Clark Street maples wave
their silhouettes against the red, and through
the twiggy trees, I see a solid chunk
of garbage truck, and stick-figures of men,
like windup toys, tossing little cans—
and running.

All day they’ll go like that, till dark again,
and all day, people fussing at their desks,
at hot stoves, at machines, will jettison
tin cans, bare evergreens, damp Kleenex, all
things that are Caesar’s.

O garbage men,
the New Year greets you like the Old;
after this first run you too may rest
in beds like great warm aproned laps
and know that people everywhere have faith:
putting from them all things of this world,
they confidently bide your second coming.

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This Clean Moment before the New Year

By Robin Bates | Published: December 30, 2023
Monet, Snow at Argenteuil

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Sunday

On this New Year’s Eve I post a Kenneth Patchen poem that appears to be a prayer addressed to God the Father. But before you conjure up images of an old man with a gray beard, know that Patchen once wrote that “only an unbeliever could have created our image of God: and only a fake God could be satisfied with it.” We can never wrap our minds around God, even though we attempt to do so through anthropomorphizing.

“At the New Year,” which I’ll share in a moment, is not the only poem where Patchen associates God with the purity of snow. In “The Snow Is Deep on the Ground,” the poet assures us that “God shall not forget us./ Who made the snow waits where love is.” Seeming to echo The Song of Solomon only with snow instead of vineyards and apple trees, Patchen associates the whiteness of the snow with his beloved. Sewanee experienced a lovely dusting of snow last night, so I have a fresh sense of why a poet would link this whiteness to the woman he loves. Here’s the poem:

The Snow Is Deep on the Ground
By Kenneth Patchen

The snow is deep on the ground.   
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.

This is a good world.
The war has failed.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the snow waits where love is.

Only a few go mad.
The sky moves in its whiteness
Like the withered hand of an old king.   
God shall not forget us.
Who made the sky knows of our love.

The snow is beautiful on the ground.   
And always the lights of heaven glow   
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.

Now to Patchen’s New Year’s poem, which also takes place on a snowy night. Looking out at the world, Patchen sees the bad along with the good. At the same time that he is gazing into the “deep throw of stars,” he is also seeing the horrors of war, with the dead lying in the World War I trenches.

When the poem starts out, we don’t expect this dark turn. Indeed, it seems more of an “Oh, holy night” type of poem. Then, however, it moves into a balancing act where “all that has been said bravely” is countered by “all that is mean anywhere in the world,” and where “all that is good and lovely” is followed by “every house where sham and hatred are.” The poet will not pretend that the world is other than what it is.

And yet he imagines a “clean moment” on New Year’s Eve when we await the ringing of bells that we pray will usher us into new possibilities and new hope. “Before this clean moment has gone,” he writes to the Father, “before this night turns to face tomorrow…there is this high singing in the air.”

The singing reminds me of the voices that the desperate speaker strives to hear and longs for in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

For Patchen, this “little point in time” before the New Year bells brings out our best. Although he knows only too well that the bells will just take us into the same world we have left—“the sorrowful human face in eternity’s window”—he knows that he is sensing the numinous as he imagines “other bells that we would ring.” These inner bells, like the high singing, are our connection with “our Father, who art in heaven.”  

In “the deep throw of stars,” in “the wide land waiting,” in “all that has been said bravely,” in “all that is good and lovely,” these are the “other bells that we would ring, Father.”

At the New Year
By Kenneth Patchen

In the shape of this night, in the still fall
       of snow, Father
In all that is cold and tiny, these little birds
        and children
In everything that moves tonight, the trolleys
        and the lovers, Father
In the great hush of country, in the ugly noise
        of our cities
In this deep throw of stars, in those trenches
        where the dead are, Father
In all the wide land waiting, and in the liners
        out on the black water
In all that has been said bravely, in all that is
        mean anywhere in the world, Father
In all that is good and lovely, in every house
        where sham and hatred are
In the name of those who wait, in the sound
        of angry voices, Father
Before the bells ring, before this little point in time
        has rushed us on
Before this clean moment has gone, before this night
         turns to face tomorrow, Father
There is this high singing in the air
Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity’s window
And there are other bells that we would ring, Father
Other bells that we would ring.

In Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” which has been my New Year’s poem for the past two years, the poet imperiously instructs the bells to “ring out the darkness of the land,/ Ring in the Christ that is to be.” In Raymond MacDonald Alden’s “Why the Chimes Rang,” my favorite Christmas story, the chimes are quieter. “So far away, and yet so clear the music seemed,” he writes, “—so much sweeter were the notes than anything that had been heard before, rising and falling.” Patchen’s bells are even more distant–imagined rather than actual–but no less powerful for all that.

We all of us have those chimes within us. I pray to the God that (in the words of Julian of Norwich) made, loves and keeps us to help me hear them.

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The Novel that Moved Me the Most in 2023

By Robin Bates | Published: December 28, 2023
Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Hamlet

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Friday

As this is my last weekday post of the year, I went rummaging through past 2023 essays and came across one was particularly heartfelt. While I had many sublime reading experiences this past year—Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water, Min Yin Lee’s Pachinko, Richard Powers’s Overstory, Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, George MacDonald’s Sir Gibbie, the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh and multiple novels by William Faulkner (Light in August, Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!) and Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton, North and South, Wives and Daughters)—none had the  emotional impact of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. As I read her novel about Shakespeare using his famous play to process the grief over losing his son Hamnet, I remembered how I had turned to literature after my eldest son died 23 years ago.

This was before I learned, as I did later in the year from Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, that Hamlet may be above all a play about grieving—and that, through it, Shakespeare taught us a new and more powerful way to grieve than had existed previously. When I reached the end of Hamnet, I cried for Justin for the first time in over two decades. As you will see, I was profoundly moved by a book that reaffirmed how I had used art to work through my own sorrow.  

Reprinted from March 6, 2023

I have just been emotionally blindsided by a powerful Maggie O’Farrell novel about Shakespeare’s wife and children. Hamnet (2020) is a fictional account of the bard’s marriage to Anne (Agnes) Hathaway and how the two processed the death of Hamnet, their one son. (According to Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt, “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” are in fact the same name.)

While some speculate that the marriage was troubled, that is not how O’Farrell sees it. Or at least, it is not troubled until Hamnet dies, at which point Shakespeare starts avoiding the family and burying himself in the theater. Feeling abandoned, Anne journeys to London when she hears (not from her husband) that he has written a play bearing their son’s name.

It is when she is responding to the play that Hamnet hit me with its hammer blow. Of course, the novel had to set me up for the final scene. As I read about Hamnet’s death and the family’s mourning, I thought of my own Justin, who drowned 23 years ago and who would have turned 44 this coming Sunday. Justin wasn’t uppermost in my mind as I was reading, but when I reached the end of the novel—where we see Anne/Agnes at the lip of the stage reaching out to the figures of Hamlet and the ghost of his father (played by Shakespeare)—something in me broke. I, who haven’t cried for Justin in over 20 years, was wracked by loud sobs that I couldn’t stop. Here’s the passage—the novel’s final paragraphs—that unleashed pent-up emotions I didn’t know were there:

For now, she is right at the front of the crowd, at the edge of the stage; she is gripping its wooden lip in both hands. An arm’s length away, perhaps two, is Hamlet, her Hamlet, as he might have been, had he lived, and the ghost, who has her husband’s hands, her husband’s beard, who speaks in her husband’s voice.She stretches out a hand, as if to acknowledge them, as if to feel the air between the three of them, as if wishing to pierce the boundary between audience and players, between real life and play.The ghost turns his head towards her, as he prepares to exit the scene. He is looking straight at her, meeting her gaze, as he speaks his final words:

“Remember me.”

Up until the moment when the young Hamlet appears on stage, Agnes has been furious with her husband. The rest of the audience may be gripped with the early presence of the ghost on the ramparts, but Agnes cannot understand why Shakespeare would have their son’s name emerge from “the mouths of people she has never known and will never know.” Why pretend, she asks, that their son’s name

means nothing to him, just a collection of letters? How could he thieve this name, then strip and flense it of all it embodies, discarding the very life it once contained? How could he take up his pen and write it on a page, breaking its connection with their son? It makes no sense. It pierces her heart, it eviscerates her, it threatens to sever her from herself, from him, from everything they had, everything they were.

And:

She had thought that coming here, watching this, might give her a glimpse into her husband’s heart. It might have offered her a way back to him. She thought the name on the playbill might have been a means for him to communicate something to her. A sign, of sorts, a signal, an outstretched hand, a summons. As she rode to London, she had thought that perhaps now she might understand his distance, his silence, since their son’s death. She has the sense now that there is nothing in her husband’s heart to understand. It is filled only with this: a wooden stage, declaiming players, memorized speeches, adoring crowds, costumed fools. She has been chasing a phantasm, a will-o’-the-wisp, all this time.

Then, however, the magic of the theatre takes over, which is all the more intense in her case because she recognizes, in the boy playing Hamlet, her own son. Shakespeare has coached the actor to be Hamnet had he grown into a man:

He has found this boy, instructed him, shown him how to speak, how to stand, how to lift his chin, like this, like that. He has rehearsed and primed and prepared him.

As fiction becomes more real than reality itself, Agnes realizes what her husband has done:

Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own.; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. “O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!” murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.

The novel affected me not only because, through it, I relived the death of our son. After all, I have encountered other such dramas in the intervening years that, while moving, have not struck this deep. No, I think what O’Farrell has done is show how, in a great work of art, we are able, momentarily, to penetrate the boundary that separates us from the dead. Agnes sees—imagines she sees— her child on the stage and experiences “an old, familiar urge, like water gushing into a dry streambed. She wants to lay hands on that boy; she wants to fold him in her arms, comfort and console him—and she has to, if it is the last thing she does.”

Of course, art, no matter how great, can’t bring the dead back to life. But think about it this way: those we have lost were never entirely material to begin with. They were the emotions they aroused in us, the anxieties they put us through, the love we felt for them. They are also integrally intertwined with the people we have become. What Hamlet does for Agnes is bring back all of that. She sees, in one of the most three-dimensional characters ever penned, everything but the actual flesh and blood of her beloved son. And that flesh and blood were never the most important part of him anyway.

I realized, in reading Hamnet, that the way I turn to literature to process my life—including the death of my son—is more than a shallow consolation or a wish fulfillment or a cerebral exercise. I already knew, of course—but here was an author confirming it—that literature puts us closer to life’s essence than any other use of language. Watching Agnes watching Hamlet, I saw myself reading the literature I turned to after Justin died: Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Mary Oliver’s “The Lost Children” and Percy Shelley’s Adonais and Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. These works, I realized, connected me to parts of myself that Justin had touched—which is to say, ways in which Justin was still alive. The sorrow I felt while reading Hamnet, which took me back to my own mourning period, was intermixed with a deep joy and maybe even relief: these fictional re-creations to which I have devoted my life, I was assured, are not in vain.

Julia the other day asked me why I thought she is so drawn to certain fantasy works (especially Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown) that she returns to time and again. I said that the works we love have articulated deep soul longings and that we reread to get back in touch. Sometimes an old work still functions as a conduit and sometimes we discover we have grown past it and need to turn elsewhere. In any event, when she saw me crying and saw the book that was lying by my side (she’s the one who alerted me to it), she knew what had happened and she held me, just as she held me almost 23 years ago when we mourned our son together.

And in that action, I see another passage in Hamnet. Right before the end the author tells us that, after the play, Agnes will find her husband, “his face still streaked with traces of paste,” and they will stand together in “the open circle of the playhouse” until it is “as empty as the sky above it.” Perhaps they will think together, “Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” Because art has opened hearts that were in danger of shriveling, their relationship too will grow, in spite of—or even because of—the stresses that have been put on it. The Globe Theater opens them up to a vision that is as wide as the sky.

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