Erotic Dreams of a Wild Sea

By Robin Bates | Published: February 14, 2024

Ludolf Backhuysen, Ships in a Stormy Sea off a Coast

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Wednesday – Valentine’s Day

Given that Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights” emerged out of a repressed New England culture, it is as astonishing as any love poem that I know. Apparently Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who edited Dickinson’s poetry after her death, contemplated not publishing it, fearing it would damage his view of her as a pure woman. Fortunately he included it in the collection, perhaps rationalizing it as a poem written to God in the manner of Teresa of Avila, the medieval mystic famous for her ecstatic relationship with the divine.

On this Valentine’s Day, however, we don’t have to settle for sublimation borne of repression and can just see the poem for what it is, which is a woman singing her sexual passion for another. She is casting off all the restrictions that normally guide her actions—“Done with the compass – / Done with the chart!”—and setting out for open waters. “Luxury” has special meaning for this utilitarian society which looks with suspicion on activity it considers unproductive.

When Dickinson mentions “rowing in Eden,” I think of the passionate love between Adam and Eve that Puritan John Milton describes in Book IV of Paradise Lost, a work that Dickinson would have known well. The couple has a flowery bower, complete with a nuptial bed that Eve has decked with “flowers, garlands, and sweet-smelling herbs.” Milton is a little circuitous about what they do in that bed: by saying that the couple did not refuse “the rites mysterious of connubial love,” he’s basically saying that Adam and Eve did not not have sex. But he gets the point across:

Into their inmost bower
Handed they went; and eased the putting off
These troublesome disguises which we wear, 
Strait side by side were laid, nor turned I ween
Adam from his fair Spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial Love refused…

He concludes their night of lovemaking with a shower of roses:

And on their naked limbs the flowery roof
Showered Roses, which the morn repaired. Sleep on
Blest pair; and O yet happiest if ye seek
No happier state, and know to know no more.

Sex in Eden before the fall apparently has no withered roses and no post-coital letdown.

In her own poem, I wonder if Dickinson is imagining the three stages of lovemaking: first there is making love (the rowing), then the ecstatic climax (“Ah – the Sea!”), and finally the quiet mooring in the arms of the beloved. Here’s the poem:

Wild nights – Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –
To a Heart in port –
Done with the Compass –
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah – the Sea!
Might I but moor – tonight –
In thee!

Happy Valentine’s Day.

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Poet Hart Crane on Forgetting

By Robin Bates | Published: February 13, 2024
Hart Crane

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Thursday

Given how the Washington press corps is piling on President Biden following special prosecutor Robert Hur’s gratuitous swipes at his memory, I’m sharing a forgetfulness poem. I owe the idea Greg Olear’s Prevail blog, which has some choice words for both Hur and the mainstream media for taking his comments seriously:

Is Joe’s occasional inability to immediately summon some piece of data a sign of mental incompetence? Of creeping dementia? Or is it just a function of being alive for 80 years—and in the thick of everything for 50 of those years? I’d argue that it’d be weirder if he didn’t have occasional memory lapses. Who cares if it takes him a few more seconds to remember something? Does it really matter?

Now, Biden has some deep tragedies in his life that one imagines he would like to forget, such as the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident and the cancer death of Beau Biden, caused by his encounter with toxic waste dumps when serving in Iraq. When Hur claimed the president could not recall “even within several years” when his oldest son had died, Biden fired back,

How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business. I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away, or that he passed away.

In other words, what we witnessed with Hur is what we previously witnessed with Kenneth Starr, James Comey, and John Durham—which is to say, Republican investigators looking for gotcha moments with Democratic politicians when they can’t find anything to prosecute.

But setting aside politics, Crane’s “Forgetfulness” is a wonderfully ambiguous poem about this state of mind. It begins by seeing forgetfulness almost as a blessing, only to later reverse itself to point out its darker side. Here’s the poem:

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, —
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, — or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, — white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

 Often, the urge to remember is an urge to control, to have a stable footing. Both the song and the bird, however, are no longer constrained—by beat and measure in the one case, by a fixed destination in the other—and so are free to simply wander and soar.

I’m thinking that rain at night, the “old house in a forest,” and the child are like partial remembrances when we’ve forgotten the rest. We no longer have a context for them, which means that they shimmer in our minds. All of this sounds picturesque, even romantic, until we get to the image of a blasted white tree. Suddenly, we are looking at the horror of erasure.

Crane’s image makes me think of a mind ravaged by dementia and especially of Jonathan Swift, who in his final years ended up as “a driv’ler and a show” (to use Samuel Johnson’s unnerving characterization in Vanity of Human Wishes). Realizing that he was losing his mind, Swift at one point said, after seeing a tree whose crown had been blasted by lightning, “I shall be like that tree. I shall die at the top.”

Anyone who has lost a loved one to dementia knows the horror of Crane’s blasted white tree. Herman Melville explains why whiteness can horrify us in his Moby Dick chapter “On the Whiteness of the Whale”:

Is it that by its indefiniteness [whiteness] shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?

Whereas color indicates life, Melville goes on to say, whiteness is what that color is, in the end, reduced to, “the charnel-house within.”

Such annihilation can bury gods, Crane observes, although he also notes that from it can also emerge Delphic utterances that go deeper than logic. I think of my father’s own brief episode with dementia in his final year.

Perhaps it is because of our fears of forgetfulness, of not being in control of our past, that is prompting the media’s overreaction to Biden’s memory lapses. This seems of more concern to the New York Times than, say, Trump’s invitation to Russia to invade NATO countries. For all the print it is generating, however, Olear believes the story will blow over fairly quickly. Because he remembers much forgetfulness in our history, he points out,

The United States is a nation of amnesiacs. Nothing is as American as forgetting.  

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Lit’s Invention of “The Second Look”

By Robin Bates | Published: February 12, 2024
Scene from Kurosawa’s Rashomon

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Tuesday

Over the past few months I’ve been reporting on Angus Fletcher’s book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, with each post dedicated to a different “invention.” Today I look at what the Ohio State Professor of Story Science says about “the invention of the second look.” He finds evidence of this invention in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar but notes that it comes into its own with the Ryūnosuke Akutagawa short story Rashomon, with Akiri Kurosawa adding a further turn of the screw in his film version.

In a literary approach that I have described as anthropological-neurobiological, Fletcher talks about how we are conditioned to believe what our brains tell us. While this works very well for animals, however, eventually

more complex brains emerged. And these brains discovered that there could be advantages to questioning. One of the advantages, rather ironically, was to offer protection from other complex brains. Complex brains could lie and deceive, duping their targets with elaborate fictions. So, over time the complex brain evolved the capacity to skeptically evaluate the things it saw—and judge whether or not those things could be believed.

In other words, to more effectively engage with the world we need a second look. Literature proves powerful ways to develop this look.

Fletcher’s first example is Antony’s famous speech in Julius Caesar. While Antony’s audience begins by thinking of Brutus as an “honorable man,” Antony delivers his speech in such a way that his auditors start questioning this assumption. Here’s an excerpt:

The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man.

By the end of the speech, audience members are asking themselves whether Brutus is, in fact, honorable Fletcher writes,

Antony’s repetition incites this question for a simple reason: it creates a light sensation of déjà vu that makes our brain self-conscious. In that self-conscious state, our brain is pulled out of its passive viewing experience and prompted to take an active second, third, and fourth look at our internalized belief that Brutus is an honorable man. And as our brain goes back and reviews, and re-reviews, and re-re-reviews, we have to decide, and re-decide, and re-re-decide: Do I tag this belief as true or untrue? So a belief that initially slipped inside our head without resistance becomes a repeated object of our conscious judgment.

If you’ve seen Kurosawa’s Rashomon, you know about this re-re-deciding. The film gives us four different accounts of an encounter between a man and his wife’s encounter with a bandit while traveling through the woods. Each appears to be true as we can see it with our own eyes, only to be thrown into question by the next account.

Fletcher says that, by deliberately alienating their audience, Akutagawa and Kurosawa clear our heads so we don’t allow our brains to be taken over by ideas that aren’t our own. “You may be doomed to believe everything you see,” he concludes, “but with fiction…you can take another look.”

Other works that get us to take this second look, he notes, are James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy, Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. In Passing, for instance, we never learn definitively how Clare falls from a window—there are two characters who could have pushed her and she also may have committed suicide—while in Mother Courage we are torn between whether to cheer for or boo the protagonist, who sells provisions to soldiers during the Thirty Years War.

As with all Fletcher’s inventions, the second look enables us to engage much more effectively with the world. Better living through literature, in other words.

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A Poem Honoring Wide Receivers

By Robin Bates | Published: February 11, 2024
Mecole Hardman’s Super Bowl-winning catch

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Monday

Wide receiver Mecole Hardman, Jr.,  who caught the winning touchdown in last night’s Super Bowl, was an unlikely hero, given that he hadn’t caught a touchdown pass all year. In fact, up until this game, his season had been a disappointment.

This makes Mark Halliday’s poem “Wide Receiver” a fitting selection for today’s post, especially since it also features a quarterback who, like Patrick Mahomes, loves to pump fake. Also, like the quarterback in the poem, Mahomes spent much of the game dissatisfied “with what [he] saw downfield.” If we didn’t see the dazzling passing game from him that we might have expected, it’s because San Francisco did a good job of keeping him off balance while shutting down his receivers.

Not that his receivers would have admitted they were shut down. Like the player in the poem, wide receivers are famous for thinking that they’re always open. And in the end, Hardman was.

Wide Receiver
By Mark Halliday

In the huddle you said “Go long—get open”
and at the snap I took off along the right sideline
and then cut across left in a long arc
and I’m sure I was open at several points—
glancing back I saw you pump-fake more than once
but you must not have been satisfied with what you saw downfield
and then I got bumped off course and my hands touched the turf
but I regained my balance and dashed back to the right
I think or maybe first left and then right
and I definitely got open but the throw never came—

maybe you thought I couldn’t hang on to a ball flung so far
or maybe you actually can’t throw so far
but in any case I feel quite open now,
the defenders don’t seem too interested in me
I sense only open air all around me
though the air is getting darker and it would appear
by now we’re well into the fourth quarter
and I strongly doubt we can afford to settle for
dinky little first downs if the score is what I think it is

so come on, star boy, fling a Hail Mary
with a dream-coached combination of muscle and faith
and I will gauge the arc and I will not be stupidly frantic
and I will time my jump and—I’m just going to say
in the cool gloaming of this weirdly long game
it is not impossible that I will make the catch.

Further thought: I should have mentioned how one of the Chief receivers–though in this case not a wide one–was as frustrated as Halliday’s speaker in the first half of the Super Bowl. In the first half tight end Travis Kelce screamed at Chiefs coach Mike Holmgren that he wasn’t being used enough (he also bumped him to emphasize his point). Coach and quarterback adjusted took him seriously and Kelce dominated the second half with a game-high 93 receiving yards. “It is not impossible that I will make the catch” he could have said to Holmgren had he chosen to make his point more indirectly.

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The Transfiguration’s Green Promise

By Robin Bates | Published: February 10, 2024


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Spiritual Sunday

The last Sunday in Epiphany always features the Transfiguration, which is when three of the disciples witness Jesus conversing with Moses and Elijah. I’m therefore sharing some preliminary thoughts about Joh Gatta’s book The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation.

John, a friend and one-time former colleague at Sewanee, extends the idea of the Transfiguration. While it is traditionally seen as that moment when the disciples fully realized that Christ was the messiah, John sees it as something more than a signal that God has entered humanity. Rather, it can be read as God entering creation generally, non-human as well as human. Here’s the story as it appears in Mark:

Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. (Mark 9:2-9)

Believing that such a story can connect Christian vision with environmentalism, John’s book addresses the question of “how the entire cosmos stands transfigured in the light of Christ?” “How,” he asks, “might this vision of New Creation shape the earth-centered spirituality that has begun to surface lately in response to our planet’s ecological crisis?”

John complains that, too often, the only parts of the Bible that are seen as having relevance to the environmental movement are a couple of early episodes in Genesis. Those who insist that humans should have dominion over creation square off against those who believe God put us on earth as stewards of creation. The Transfiguration story, John contends, can be used to chart a more productive path forward:

The paradigm of Transfiguration encourages us to view creation as a continuously evolving transformation of matter and energy, a dynamic immediacy, rather than a one-time leap from nothingness situated in the distant path. As Teilhard de Chardin so clearly perceived, such a dynamic cosmology requires a theology for our post-Darwinian era that is responsible to the spirit of evolutionary science. Transfiguration also highlights Christ’s role in the New Creation, thereby leading us to identify the process of creation not simply with a time of origins, but with God’s ideal and future fulfillment of redemption. So Transfiguration carries the promise of extending our horizon of faith–beyond belief in the world’s original goodness, toward a vision of eschatological hope [where we are headed].

Because I am currently with our grandchildren in Georgia and forgot to bring John’s book with me (I’m relying on what shows up in Google Books here), I can’t yet report on the late chapters, where John shows how the arts (including literature) articulate visions of a transformed and transfigured nature. Nor do I recall what literature he has chosen. While I look forward to sharing more from his book in future posts, I’d be surprised if he doesn’t cite the following Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet. The poem, which seems to evoke the spirit that the disciples witnessed on the mount, also strives to imagine a nature that resists the attempts of industrial capitalism to subdue it:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Central to John’s book is this notion that nature, despite how we abuse it, is “never spent” and that there continues to live “the dearest freshness deep down things.” Stay tuned for more on this.

Reader comment from Pastor Sue Schmidt: In this coming reading, the SALT commentary, a wonderful blog resource, mentions that Jesus was in the wilderness with the wild animals, and that Mark ends his gospel by having Jesus tell his disciples to preach the good news to all creation. Mark 16:15. This is a nice parallel to your thoughts today.

I also am pondering my earth day sermon – a first. How we as Christians often forget the first commandment, which was to take care of creation. And now, because of “the fall,” all creation is groaning as it waits for the “sons of God to be revealed.” (Romans 8: 19-21.) Reclaiming our love of and care for the earth is a sign that God is truly coming to life and light within us.

And my response: I’m just becoming aware of Paul’s notion of “the cosmic Christ,” Sue, which makes so much sense. I love the way that Barbara Kingsolver handles the religious dimension in Flight Behavior in an internal debate that the family is having over logging. Discussing it over with their pastor, the mother says, “That land was bestowed on on for a purpose. And I don’t think it was to end up looking like a pile of trash.” And a little later, after the father calls the pastor “a tree hugger,” the pastor, who “looked amused,” responds, “Well now, what are you, Burley, a tree puncher? What have you got against the Lord’s trees?” And that carries the day.

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Trump’s Love Test Resembles Lear’s

By Robin Bates | Published: February 8, 2024
Sir John Gilbert, Cordelia in the Court of Lear

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Friday

I experienced a shock of recognition when I watched the stage action following Donald Trump’s recent victory over Nikki Haley in the New Hampshire primary. My faculty reading group had just begun discussing King Lear, and when I saw South Carolina Senator Tim Scott tell Donald Trump, “I love you, man,” I felt I was watching Lear’s love test for his three daughters all over again, with Scott playing the role of the two. older sisters.

I’ve compared Trump to Lear many times on this blog, and applying the play to Scott’s recent declaration solidifies the connection even more. Both Trump and Lear are narcissists, and the loneliness and insecurity that arise from thinking you are the center of the universe explains why they administer love tests in the first place. Somewhere deep inside they feel they are unworthy of being loved and so use their power to force declarations of love from others.

Throughout Trump’s presidency, we witnessed numerous instances of him demanding that subordinates sing his praises. The same dynamic played out in Scott’s “I love you, man.” Here’s Goneril’s own declaration:

Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter;
Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty;
Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare;
No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour;
As much as child e’er loved, or father found;
A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable;
Beyond all manner of so much I love you.

And now Regan’s:

Sir, I am made
Of the self-same metal that my sister is,
And prize me at her worth. In my true heart
I find she names my very deed of love;
Only she comes too short: that I profess
Myself an enemy to all other joys,
Which the most precious square of sense possesses;
And find I am alone felicitate
In your dear highness’ love.

By professing such love, however insincerely, Goneril and Regan get that piece of the kingdom originally intended for Cordelia. By his profession of love, Scott ensures that no other Republican will run against him when he is up for reelection. Perhaps Trump will even choose him for running mate.

Rather than bask in his triumph, however, Trump unloaded on Haley with the same fury that Lear directs toward Cordelia. After all, she had had the temerity to stand up to him. Therefore, after Scott endorsed him for president, he had to make sure the Scott hated Haley as much as he did. His comment—”And you’re the senator of her state. And [you] endorsed me. You must really hate her”—is what drew Scott’s declaration of love.

While Nikki has mostly soft-pedaled her criticisms of Trump, that’s not enough for the ex-president. It’s the same with Cordelia. Her “I love your majesty according to my bond; nor more nor less” is essentially a refusal to play Lear’s narcissistic game. In doing so, however, she appears to confirm—at least as he sees it—what he secretly fears to be the truth, which is that he is unlovable. As a result, he erupts:

[B]y the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate, and the night;
By all the operation of the orbs
From whom we do exist, and cease to be;
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee, from this, for ever. The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbour’d, pitied, and relieved,
As thou my sometime daughter.

Trump was less poetic but just as angry:

Who the hell was the imposter who went up on the stage before, and like, claimed a victory? You can’t let people get away with bullshit. And when I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy, I said, “What’s she doing? We won.”

And later:

I don’t get too angry. I get even.

To Scott’s declaration, meanwhile, Trump responded, “That’s why he’s a great politician!” In other words, he didn’t believe him, just as Lear, deep down, probably doesn’t believe Goneril or Regan. Nevertheless, to prop up this fragile self, he needs to hear the words.

If Trump ever loses his power, he is likely to find himself rejected by Republicans no less than Lear is by Goneril and Regan. I can imagine him railing at their ingratitude–How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”–and the turning him out into the storm. 

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Comforting Children under Attack

By Robin Bates | Published: February 7, 2024
A Palestinian boy in Gaza

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Thursday

Poet Joseph Fasano tweeted out a moving poem yesterday on how to comfort a child when you are being bombed or assaulted, as is occurring currently in Gaza, Ukraine, and other parts of the world. One respondent wrote back that the poem reminded her of the 1997 Italian film Life Is Beautiful, in which an inmate of a concentration camp tries to shield his son from its horrors by spinning a fantasy about it.

Childhood innocence is so important to us that we will go to great lengths to preserve it. When the situation is truly dire, our creativity knows no bounds.

Words Whispered to a Child under Siege
By Joseph Fasano

No, we are not going to die.
The sounds you hear knocking the windows and chipping the paint
from the ceiling, that is a game
the world is playing.
Our task is to crouch in the dark as long as we can
and count the beats of our own hearts.
Good. Like that. Lay your hand
on my heart and I’ll lay mine on yours.
Which one of us wins
is the one who loves the game the most
while it lasts.
Yes, it is going to last.
You can use your ear instead of your hand.
Here, on my heart.
Why is it beating faster? For you. That’s all.
I always wanted you to be born
and so did the world.
No, those aren’t a stranger’s bootsteps in the house.
Yes, I’m here. We’re safe.
Remember chess? Remember
hide-and-seek?
The song your mother sang? Let’s sing that one.
She’s still with us, yes. But you have to sing
without making a sound. She’d like that.
No, those aren’t bootsteps.
Sing. Sing louder.
Those aren’t bootsteps.
Let me show you how I cried when you were born.
Those aren’t bootsteps.
Those aren’t sirens.
Those aren’t flames.
Close your eyes. Like chess. Like hide-and-seek.
When the game is done you get another life.

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Candide and the Deep State

By Robin Bates | Published: February 6, 2024
The Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh banished Candide

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Wednesday

I’ve been thinking about all those people out there who make our lives a little better, including the federal workforce that Donald Trump decries as “the deep state.” He has so brainwashed his followers that some can’t even recognize when people are trying to help them, a situation that reminds me of a character in Voltaire’s Candide.

Before discussing the barons of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, here’s a story I heard from a childhood friend a few weeks ago. Recently retired from a career spent in legal aid, she told of working with a man who had significant medical expenses. Even though she had come up with a way for him to hold on to his house, he turned to her at one point, with contempt in his eyes, and said, “You’re a Democrat, aren’t you?”

She noted that her political sympathies had nothing to do with seeking to protect him, but he left and didn’t return. Later he lost his house.

He’s not the first, of course, to behave this way. Ever since Ronald Reagan did incomparable harm by declaring, with his folksy charm, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,'” Americans have been savaging civil servants.  Reagan used his attacks on social services to hollow out the middle class while engineering large tax cuts for the wealthy, and Trump has been doing the same in his attacks on the federal work force. Many of these workers have provided a check against his and his cronies’ corruption tendencies.

As a young man, Candide is chased away by the local baron for not being good enough to exchange amorous looks with his daughter. The baron’s family can boast of a lineage of 72 quarterings whereas Candide has only 71.

Disaster will befall all of the characters multiple times, with Candide several times providing invaluable service to the baron who exiled him. Yet each time he proposes marriage–Candide is now dealing with the baron’s son, Cunegonde’s brother—he runs into the same prejudice. Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, Jr., in other words, is behaving like my friend’s client. Here is situation at the end of the book, by which time Cunegonde, because of her various trials, has lost her looks:

Cunegonde did not know she had grown ugly, for nobody had told her of it; and she reminded Candide of his promise [of marriage] in so positive a tone that the good man durst not refuse her. He therefore intimated to the Baron that he intended marrying his sister.

“I will not suffer,” said the Baron, “such meanness on her part, and such insolence on yours; I will never be reproached with this scandalous thing; my sister’s children would never be able to enter the church in Germany. No; my sister shall only marry a baron of the empire.”

Cunegonde flung herself at his feet, and bathed them with her tears; still he was inflexible.

Candide, having become far wealthier than the baron, is finally able to stand up to him:

“Thou foolish fellow,” said Candide; “I have delivered thee out of the galleys, I have paid thy ransom, and thy sister’s also; she was a scullion, and is very ugly, yet I am so condescending as to marry her; and dost thou pretend to oppose the match? I should kill thee again, were I only to consult my anger.”

“Thou mayest kill me again,” said the Baron, “but thou shalt not marry my sister, at least whilst I am living.”

Throughout the United States, there are ideologues who are rejecting the good faith efforts of legal aid lawyers, medical professionals, teachers, social workers, federal workers, and others whose mission is to help them. Many of my classmates and many of my students have gone into these professions out of the idealistic belief that they help make the world a better place. My friend, who attended Duke Law School, could have gone into a far more lucrative field of law than legal aid. Then they run up against ideological rigidity.

At such times, MAGA resembles a self-destructive cult, willing to sacrifice their goods and even their lives to prove their loyalty to their grifting master. They have contempt for those who care about them.

In Voltaire’s works, one of Candide’s friends wants to drown the Baron and another to return him to the slave galleys. In the end, they return him to Rome, where he been serving as a Jesuit missionary. In doing so, “they had the double pleasure of entrapping a Jesuit and punishing the pride of a German baron.”

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Pratchett on How Guns Possess Us

By Robin Bates | Published: February 5, 2024

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Tuesday

I’ve been listening to Terry Pratchett fantasy novels as I drive around and have just come across one that helps explain rightwing America’s obsession with guns. Pratchett is to fantasy what Douglas Adams is to science fiction—a devastatingly witty satirist who takes on issues of modernism in the guise of familiar genre—and in Men at Arms he grapples with authoritarian impulses.

The 1993 novel seems particularly relevant to today as it pits a complex multicultural society against longing for an all-powerful ruler. On the one hand, there are Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mandates for the Night Watch, which decree that the police force should be open to non-humans as well as humans. This includes trolls, dwarfs, vampires, zombies, and werewolves. While the mix causes internal problems, especially because trolls and dwarfs are traditional enemies, ultimately it works to society’s advantage in that a diverse police force is more effective at handling social unrest (including brawls between trolls and dwarfs). The novel stands in noted contrast to Lord of the Rings, where goblins and trolls are bad and dwarfs and elves are good.

Indeed, Pratchett appears to be writing a deliberate response to Tolkien, who in his fiction longs for a pre-World War I world where yeoman farmers live in rural peace. Much of the drama in Pratchett’s novels involves members of various species learning to move past their quarrels and appreciate the richness that diversity offers.

Traditionalists, however, are appalled at these modern developments and long for “the return of the king” (to quote Tolkien), a return to the past where “species bias” is acceptable. They long for a man (and in there minds it has to be a man, not to mention a human) who can pull a sword out of a stone. Sadly, one of these traditionalists has access to a new weapon known as “the gonne.”

The gonne has been invented by Leonard da Qvirm, who is based on Da Vinci, and unfortunately it proves to have a life of its own. In this way, it is very much like “the one ring to rule them all.” When one man succeeds in wresting it from another (as Isildur wrests the ring from Sauron), he himself becomes possessed by it. In adapting Tolkien’s drama, Pratchett helps us understand our own gun fanatics.

The power of the gonne becomes especially clear to Samuel Vimes, head of the Night Watch, when he wrestles it from the grasp of a man who is trying to kill him with it, not to mention overthrow the government. Although Vimes believes passionately in the law, that belief starts to drop away when he has the gonne in his hand. In fact, the metal tube actually speaks to him and tries to act of its own volition as it turns on the head of the Assassins Guild, its previous possessor:

You’re mine.
We don’t need him anymore.

The shock of the voice was so great that [Vimes] cried out.

He swore afterwards that he didn’t pull the trigger. It moved of its own accord pulling his finger with it. The gonne slammed into his shoulder and a six-inch hole appeared in the wall by the Assassin’s head, spraying him with plaster.

The gonne doesn’t stop there but keeps attempting to seduce its new possessor:

All that you hate, all that is wrong—I can put it right.

And:

Shoot them all. Clean up the world….

           But…why not? Why not fire? Who was this man? He’d always wanted to make the city a cleaner place, and he might as well start here. And then people would find out what the law was…

After Vimes manages, barely, to escape the deadly attraction of the weapon, he reflects on its power:

No wonder no one had destroyed it. You couldn’t destroy something as perfect as this. It called out to something deep in the soul. Hold it in your hand, and you had power. More power than any bow or spear—they just stored up your own muscles’ power, when you thought about it. But the gonne gave you power from outside. You didn’t use it, it used you.

Gun supporters in this country are fond of saying, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” as though this excuses them from regulating firearms. Pratchett makes it clear that guns do in fact kill people, preying on us the way that, say, drugs do. They feed upon fantasies of power and invulnerability and, in the process, lead to an epidemic of gun deaths. America has experienced between 40-50,000 gun deaths in each of the past three years.

In Pratchett’s novels, the gonne is considered so dangerous that it is buried away where no one will ever find it. Now that’s the kind of fantasy I can get behind.

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