Bluest Eye and Ohio’s Abortion Politics

By Robin Bates | Published: August 16, 2023

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Thursday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fani Willis’s Big Baggy Monster

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

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Wednesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Beowulf” on Why Demagogues Arise

By Robin Bates | Published: August 14, 2023

Dragon in Beowulf film (2007)

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Tuesday

A recent study about how social discontent contributes to the rise of populist demagogues confirms what Beowulf long ago had to say about public anger’s destructive consequences. Where modern social science talks about resentment, sadness, stress, worry and dismay, however, the Beowulf poet expresses the same feelings through two trolls and a dragon.

I owe my awareness of the new study to Washington Post columnist Charles Lane. In an article entitled “Populism thrives because people are mad, and also because they’re sad,” Lane writes about three social scientists who took on the question of whether anger drives populism. Their conclusion, he reports, is partially yes but that anger is not the only emotion involved:

Anger alone cannot account for recent U.S. vote shifts in favor of populist candidates (of both the left and right). Rather, the trends reflect a wider mix of negative emotions such as sadness, stress and worry.

The report, which studied Gallup polls from 2008-17, showed that “a county’s average anger level correlated positively with higher vote shares for Trump and for socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the 2016 GOP and Democratic primaries, respectively.”

According to Lane, the authors contend that (in their words) “anger no longer operates as a separate channel in driving the populist vote share.” Instead, “a more complex sense of malaise and gloom, rather than anger per se, drives the rise in populism.”

Lane concludes that “voters who propelled Trump to the White House seven years ago did so more in sorrow than in anger.”

Beowulf shows us, however, that it’s not either/or because anger and sorrow are integrally related. Resentful anger is embodied in the figure of Grendel, grieving anger in the figure of his mother. The dragon, meanwhile, is a figure of “malaise and gloom” and is yet a third form that anger can take. Whereas the sorrowing anger of Grendel’s mother blows hot, the depressed anger of the dragon blows cold. She is boiling rage, the dragon is frozen rage.

Nor do the resemblances end there. Just as Grendel’s mother can retreat into her cave after blowing up, so the hunkered-down dragon can come charging out of its own place of seclusion when it feels its prerogatives have been impinged upon. When it does so, it burns down everything around it. In short, think of the three monsters as the anger gang, with each posing a major threat to society.

I wrote my book How Beowulf Can Save America: An Epic Hero’s Guide to Defeating the Politics of Rage in 2008 when Barack Obama was running for reelection after having been “shellacked” (his word) by Tea Party populism two years before. At the time, Beowulf helped me diagnose the different forms of anger at play: there was certainly economic and racial resentment at work, but we also saw grief for a cherished image of America that some felt was being lost. Sometimes this grief manifested itself in troll violence, sometimes in dragon depression.

What I didn’t anticipate in 2008 was that a demagogue would one day turn enough of the American public into trolls and energized dragons to win an election. I also failed to fully appreciate the racial component of the various angers, and I was overly optimistic about Obama’s Beowulfian response.

For instance, I saw Obama standing strong and calm in the face of Grendelian resentment. I saw him successfully wielding the giant sword with which Beowulf kills the sorrowing rage of Grendel’s mother, that sword being the American principles found in The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution. And I saw him fighting off America’s dragon depression by galvanizing people to work collectively (as Beowulf works with Wiglaf) for the greater good.

I still see all these approaches as necessary. Unfortunately, since the monsters seem to have grown in power and subsumed a significant section of the population, the task of defeating them appears harder than I once thought it was.

So I disagree with Lane when he says that Trump was the beneficiary of sorrow more than anger, which almost makes the monsters seem noble. Anger can transform resentment, sorrow and malaise into lethal behavior, giving us hideous beasts who are capable of slaughtering shoppers, worshippers and school children; storming the Capitol; or giving a demagogue carte blanche to do whatever he wants.

Unless a riled-up public chooses to be Beowulf strong rather than indulging in dark rage, they will do damage to others, to themselves, and to this country we love.

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New Monument Protected against Witchery

By Robin Bates | Published: August 13, 2023
Ancestral Footprints National Monument

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Monday

Last week President Joe Biden officially designated almost a million acres of land north and south of the Grand Canyon as the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni [Our Ancestral Footprints] National Monument. In doing so, he closed the land off to new uranium mining, which put me in mind of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Uranium plays a significant thematic role in the novel by the Laguna Pueblo author, and the move to ban further mining is in line with Silko’s desire to push back against what she calls “the witchery.”

First, a note about uranium mining in the area. According to science reporter Justine Calma of The Verge (blogger Heather Cox Richardson alerted me to her article), past uranium mining left 500 abandoned mines on Navajo Nation land, and pollution from those mines has been linked to life-threatening illnesses among children there. Nevertheless and predictably, Republicans are objecting to prohibiting further uranium mining. (The present uranium mines are grandfathered in.)

Richardson notes that the move is part of a larger promise Biden made about protecting 30% of all the nation’s lands and waters by 2030. To date, Richardson reports, the Biden administration has protected

9 million acres in Alaska, 225,000 acres in Minnesota, 50,000 acres in Colorado, 500,000 acres in Nevada, and 6,600 acres in Texas. It has restored protections for three national monuments the previous administration had gutted: Grand Staircase–Escalante and Bears Ears in Utah and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts off the New England coast. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is working on creating a maritime sanctuary by protecting 770,000 square miles in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Hawaii. 

And then there’s this:

The administration is also, [Biden] said, honoring his commitment “to prioritize respect for the Tribal sovereignty and self-determination, to honor the solemn promises the United States made to Tribal nations to fulfill federal trust and treaty obligations.” The protected land is home to 3,000 cliff houses, cave paintings, and other Indigenous cultural sites. Biden explained that the land being protected and the land already protected as the Grand Canyon National Monument had been Indigenous homelands. 

Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, meanwhile, has included funding to clean up such industrial pollution in the region, including the abandoned oil wells that leak toxic gases into the air and hazardous chemicals into the water.

Ceremony is a novel about an Indian war veteran who returns from World War II, having survived the Bataan Death march in which thousands of Filipino and American prisoners died. Tayo is suffering from PTSD but that’s not his only problem. In addition to survivor guilt and various family and tribal issues, he returns to a land in which White America is destroying the land and undermining the Indians’ connection with it. At one point, the destruction is articulated as a story poem. About the Whites, Silko writes,

 Then they grow away from the earth
 then they grow away from the sun
 then they grow away from the plants and animals.
 They see no life
 When they look
 they see only objects.
 The world is a dead thing for them
 the trees and rivers are not alive
 the mountains and stones are not alive
 The deer and bear are objects
 They see no life

They fear
 They fear the world.
 They destroy what they fear.
 They fear themselves.

This is not the worst of it, however. The culmination of this destruction is nuclear annihilation of everyone:

They will take this world from ocean to ocean
they will turn on each other
they will destroy each other
Up here
in these hills
they will find the rocks,
rocks with veins of green and yellow and black.
They will lay the final pattern with these rocks
they will lay it across the world
and explode everything

Seeking to find shelter at an abandoned uranium mine as former Indian companions seek to kill him (it’s not only Whites who are murderous), Tayo comes across some of these rocks:

He knelt and found an ore rock. The gray stone was streaked with powdery yellow uranium, bright and alive as pollen; veins of sooty black formed lines with the yellow, making mountain ranges and river across the stone. But they had taken these beautiful rocks from deep within earth and they had laid them in a monstrous design, realizing destruction on a scale only they [the witches] could have dreamed.

Tayo’s grandmother has witnessed the explosion of Trinity, which occurred three hundred miles to the southwest. Uranium mining on Indian land, which eventually leads to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, gives Tayo a way of connecting the local with the global. Suddenly he sees all humankind united against a common enemy:

[T]he lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery’s final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.

The final showdown occurs at the uranium mine. Deprived of their victim, Tayo’s former companions turn on each other in a bloody ritual. Tayo resists yielding to his own anger and, in so doing, emerges with a sense of the healing the world needs. Silko writes,

Big clouds covered the moon, but he could still see the stars. He had arrived at a convergence of patterns; he could see them clearly now. The stars had always been with them, existing beyond memory, and they were all held together there. The stars had always been with them, existing beyond memory, and they were all held together there. Under these same stars the people had come down from White House in the north. They had seen mountains shifts and rivers change course and even disappear, back into the earth; but always there were these stars.

So the world will keep going although Silko then adds a cautionary note:

The only thing is: it has never been easy.

Honoring tribal lands and addressing the pollution left over from uranium mines and oil wells is one way of pushing back against the witchery. So is taking strides against global warming and climate change. As the world teeters between darkness and light, we must start by tapping into our inner light and then doing the best we can.

Silko shows us the way. To his credit, President Biden is doing what he can to make sure we take the necessary steps.

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On Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne

By Robin Bates | Published: August 12, 2023
Suzanne Verdal, Leonard Cohen’s muse for “Suzanne”

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Sunday

As today’s Gospel reading is the account of Jesus walking on the water and as I recently watched the Netflix documentary on Leonard Cohen, I devote today’s post to “Suzanne,” which mentions the Biblical episode. The documentary, because it was focused on “Hallelujah,” didn’t have much to say about “Suzanne,” but it taught me a lot about Cohen’s intense spiritual searching.

Although Jewish, Cohen at one point spent five years in a Buddhist monastery. When he left, he discovered the experience had strengthened his Jewish identity, although stories from the Hebrew Bible had always appeared in his songs. He has also identified at times with the Jewish prophet Jesus.

“Suzanne” opens with his Platonic relationship with Suzanne. The night spent beside her, apparently, involves watching the boats go by:

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her lover

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And then you know that she will trust you
For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind

Suzanne is not only physically beautiful but beautiful as a person, and her presence has pulled the speaker away from the emptiness of consumer/ materialist society. The relationship is also spiritual rather than sexual, which is why I suppose he assures her that she can trust him. Adopting her perspective, he comes to see simple things like tea and oranges in a new light—they are exotic, not commonplace.

At this point in his life, the poet feels himself incapable of love—“you have no love to give her”—but Suzanne communicates, through the sound of the river they are watching together, that he has this capacity for love after all. The “her” in “her lover” could be either Suzanne or the river or, best of all, both. He can connect with this spiritual current that runs through the universe if he abandons the urge to possess and control. The only way to travel is to abandon preconceptions and travel blind.

Unfortunately, the connection fades. The next section of the poem has him retreating once more into himself and his weariness. To  capture the spiritual fatigue, he thinks of Jesus, whom he imagines as similarly weary. Before examining what he is up to, let’s review Biblical passage (Matthew 14:22-33) since Cohen follows it somewhat closely:

Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

For Cohen, a worn-out Jesus has retreated, not to the mountain, but to his “lonely wooden tower,” a symbol of the self. His message of love is not getting through and he becomes discouraged.

People, however, do pay attention to that message when they are dying—when Peter is sinking—so Jesus gifts the world with his death. But before the resurrection sky opens, there is the crucifixion, and Jesus appears broken. The disciples forsake him and one can think of the moments before the crucifixion where he appears “almost human”–for instance, when he asks God to “take this cup from me” at Gethsemane and his cry from the cross, “Why have you forsaken me?”

And Jesus was a sailor
When He walked upon the water
And He spent a long time watching
From His lonely wooden tower

And when He knew for certain
Only drowning men could see Him
He said, “All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them”

But He Himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

And you want to travel with Him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you’ll trust Him
For He’s touched your perfect body with his mind

I’m reading “wisdom” here as matter-of-fact conventional wisdom, which can’t see beyond the material. But because Jesus has touched “your perfect body”—He sees the beauty in us more than we see it in ourselves—we think maybe we’ll trust Him. (I love the tentativeness of “you think maybe.”) If the speaker surrenders to Him–if he travels blind–he will be restored.

Having seen the significance of his encounter with Suzanne spelled out in religious terms, we return to Suzanne, a Madonna of the harbor clothed in Salvation Army rags and feathers. Under her tutelage—like the disciplines under Jesus—the speaker finds those people who have been rejected and forgotten. These “children of the morning” are “leaning out of love/And they will lean that way forever,” and Cohen recognizes himself in them (“While Suzanne holds the mirror”).

Whereas earlier Cohen assured Suzanne that she could trust him, now he knows that he can trust her and her spiritual mind. He has new confidence that he will touch base with the divine. Here’s how the song ends:

Now, Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From the Salvation Army counters

And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers

There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind

We all have it within us to embark on such a journey.

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When Bicycling, Marvels Coast By

By Robin Bates | Published: August 10, 2023
Federico Zandomeneghi, Meeting on a Bicycle (1895)

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Friday

I’ve spent the last two weeks in Madison with my brother Sam. While he goes off to his job at Quince and Apple (specializing in gourmet jams and preserves), I’ve been bicycling around the city, which is a Mecca for cyclists.

Madison has special bike paths (including some with tunnels that go under major thoroughfares), special bicycle traffic lights and crossings electric bikes that one can rent, “sharrow” markings on certain streets to remind motorists they are to share the road, and signs directed specifically to bikers (“one way—except for bikes”). I’ve seen parents with one and sometimes two children either sitting behind them or pulled in a cart, as well as families of cyclists where everyone has his or her own bike. My brother tells me that Madison also has hardcore cyclists who will commute to work even in sub-zero temperatures, withspecial fat tires that can handle ice and snow.

More sobering, occasionally I’ve seen “ghost bicycles,” painted white and decaying at intersections where cyclists have died after colliding with cars. There’s one of these bicycles on Baldwin and Wilson, a few blocks from my brother’s house on East Mifflin.

While here, I’ve taken one thirteen-mile ride around Lake Monona, the southernmost of the Madison lakes, and another extended trip to the zoo, which is next to the apartment where my family lived for the first month of my life. (My father was a Wisconsin graduate student at the time.) The vistas are breathtaking.

So here’s a William Stafford poem celebrating a bike ride. Although it takes place in a colder season, it captures what it feels like to be riding alone in nature and appreciating the “marvels” that “coast by.” At such moments we become aware of “the splendor of our life.”

When Stafford addresses us as “citizens of our great amnesty,” he is talking about how we have been granted temporary amnesty from death. After all, “we live”:

Maybe Alone on My Bike
By William Stafford

I listen, and the mountain lakes
hear snowflakes come on those winter wings
only the owls are awake to see,
their radar gaze and furred ears
alert. In that stillness a meaning shakes;

And I have thought (maybe alone
on my bike, quaintly on a cold
evening pedaling home), Think!–
the splendor of our life, its current unknown
as those mountains, the scene no one sees.

O citizens of our great amnesty:
we might have died. We live. Marvels
coast by, great veers and swoops of air
so bright the lamps waver in tears,
and I hear in the chain a chuckle I like to hear.

I’m intrigued by how, after being brought to tears by the beauty of life, the poet hears “in the chain a chuckle.” Could this be, I wonder, an allusion to T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land:“But at my back in a cold blast I hear/ The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.” Eliot’s line, in turn, is a riff off Andrew Marvell’s carpé diem poem “To His Coy Mistress”:

      But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

I think that Stafford, in a poem that talks of life as a great amnesty, is telling us (like Marvell) to savor the moments we have been granted. The chuckle of the chain is a reminder that the bike can break down. Even as, in our joy, we veer and swoop, our vehicle lets us know that it won’t last forever.

But rather than the chuckle (or rattle) detracting from the moment, the poet likes to hear it, believing that it enhances the experience. Nothing like a little rattle to focus the mind since, with our senses sharpened, we can hear what only the mountain lakes can hear and see what only the owls can see.

In the stillness of new falling snow, the poet tells us, “a meaning shakes.” Maybe we are not alone as we sense a scene that no one sees.

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Florida’s Latest Author Ban: The Bard

By Robin Bates | Published: August 9, 2023
Danes, DiCaprio in Romeo and Juliet

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Thursday

I figured it was only a matter of time before MAGA went after Shakespeare. Reports out of Florida’s Education Department are that Macbeth, Hamlet, and especially Romeo and Juliet are on its target list. The Tampa Bay News reports that

some Florida school districts are shying away from Shakespeare, along with other classic and popular materials. They say they’re attempting to comply with new state law restricting books with and instruction about sexual content.

So Shakespeare is going the way of AP psychology—I guess Florida disapproves of how the field of psychology no longer regards same sex attraction as a disorder—and historical accounts of slavery being bad. And the Christian right has long had problems with mentioning evolution in biology classes.

But back to Shakespeare. We’re being told not to worry because teachers will still be allowed to teach excerpts. This way, the schools “can teach about Shakespeare while avoiding anything racy or sexual.” The Tampa Bay News says that Tanja Arja, a spokeswoman for the Hillsborough County school district, attributes the changes to

the newly expanded Parental Rights in Education Act. The measure, promoted and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, tells schools to steer clear of content and class discussion that is sexual in nature unless it is related to a standard, such as health class.

I’ve been anticipating that, sooner or later, Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedies (Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Merchant of Venice) would end up in MAGA’s crosshairs. I didn’t foresee, however, that the tragedies too would be facing bowdlerization.

For the record, Thomas Bowdler was a 19th century physician who, in 1807, published The Family Shakespeare, a version that “cleaned up” the Bard so that he would be acceptable to women and children. To cite some examples (I owe these to Wikipedia), in Bowdler’s Hamlet the death of Ophelia is called an accidental drowning, not a possibly intended suicide; prostitute Doll Tearsheet is omitted from Henry IV, Part II; and “God!” as an exclamation is replaced throughout with “Heavens!”

Bowdler has been a figure of derision ever since, and it appears that Ron DeSantis and Florida’s Education Department are about to join him. As Gaither High School reading teacher Joseph Cool noted when interviewed,

I think the rest of the nation — no, the world—is laughing at us. Taking Shakespeare in its entirety out because the relationship between Romeo and Juliet is somehow exploiting minors is just absurd.

Cool also took issue with the assault on Macbeth, but this makes perfect sense when you think about Ron DeSantis’s own Macbethian aspirations. Perhaps the play cuts a little too close to home with a man who will trample immigrants, Black voters, LBGTQ+ folk, women who want abortions after 15 weeks, and others to gain the presidency. As Cool described the impact of the play on his students,

It gave them a sense of connection between stuff that happened in the past and things that are not necessarily in the past. The choices that we make, power struggles, delusions of grandeur. It is so rich in content and things that you can have discussions about, academic and scholarly discussions.

The article concludes,

When asked if students could have that caliber of experience through excerpts, [Cool] said, “absolutely not.”

Imagine all the sex talk excised from Romeo and Juliet, from the young bucks at the beginning of the play (whose badinage resembles that exchanged daily in America’s high school locker rooms) to the nurse, who mentions Juliet nursing at her teats and foresees her, in years to come, having sex with a man (“Thou wilt fall backward when thou comest to age, wilt thou not Jule?”). Imagine leaving out Hamlet’s sexual (and nasty) comments to Ophelia: “[I]f thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.”

Or imagine the Scottish play without Lady Macbeth’s famous declaration as she works herself into a mindset to kill Duncan:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’ effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts
And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief.

Actually, perhaps it’s Shakespeare’s very power that frightens MAGA parents. Perhaps they want the Bard to be presented to students as nothing more than a dusty museum piece, in which case he’s been neutered and rendered harmless. In the hands of a good teacher, however, Shakespeare explodes into life and has students addressing life’s biggest questions. Romeo and Juliet is filled with everything that teenage parents fear, with testosterone and hormones ready to blow everything apart. As Friar Lawrence observes,

These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume…

Take, for instance, Juliet as she’s anticipating a night of lovemaking with Romeo. While she’s certainly in love with him, she’s just as much in love with the new sense of power that love has awakened in her. Suddenly her passion is as big as the sky, which is why she can command the sun to “gallop apace”:

Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus’ lodging: such a wagoner
As Phaethon would whip you to the west,
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That runaway’s eyes may wink and Romeo
Leap to these arms, untalk’d of and unseen.
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties…

Is Florida going to eliminate the following passage, where Juliet imagines having sex with her lover? Keep in mind that “die” is a reference to the “little death” experienced after sexual intercourse:

Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

I recently watched the Netflix documentary on Toni Morrison, whose works have been banned as much as any author’s in recent years, especially her masterpieces The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. Yet rather than be upset, she regards this as a compliment. If her novels shake people up, it’s because her words have power.

MAGA America doesn’t want its sons and daughters to be moved by books because then it can’t control them. It doesn’t want them to know their history or to understand their psychology or to be empowered by literature. It prefers authoritarian indoctrination.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you William Shakespeare, leader of the resistance.

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The Joys of August Blackberries

By Robin Bates | Published: August 8, 2023

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Wednesday

I reprint an essay I wrote twelve years ago about how, on a hot August day, our family experienced wondrous news: my son Toby proposed to Candice Wilson, whom he had met at the University of Pittsburgh (he in English, she in Film Studies). Four children later, the marriage has proven to be as fruitful as Mary Oliver’s August blackberry bushes, her poem about which I included in the post. Here it is.

Reprinted from August 2, 2011

My original design for this post was to open with a story about my youngest son when he was a toddler, after which I would lead into a Mary Oliver August poem about blackberries. A momentous development in the Bates household has occurred since then, however. Not to be deterred, I’ve woven the news into my post.  Hang with me and all will be clear.

First, the story.  When we lived in our first Maryland house, we had large blackberry bushes in our yard that attracted the 18-month-old Toby.  He was passionately fond of the berries but didn’t know how to handle the thorns.  At one point I remember seeing him stuffing fistfuls of blackberries into his mouth, crying because of the prickles, then grabbing more berries and thorns, crying again, and so on.  Pleasure and pain were all wrapped up together.

Now the poem.  In Mary Oliver’s “August” there is a similar mingling of pain and pleasure.  While she describes “cramming the black honey of summer into my mouth,” she also mentions the hurt involved.  Nature’s gifts may be available to all, but they are invariably accompanied by ripped arms and dark creeks. Rather than detract from the delight, however, the obstacles only enhance it. Life is a bear’s paw, thinking of nothing but that honey as it darts among “the black bells, the leaves.” “All day my body accepts what it is,” she tells us as she surrenders to the moment. Here’s the poem:

August
By Mary Oliver

When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.

Now for our news.  Toby took his Trinidadian girlfriend to Church Point last night (her name is Candice Wilson) to see the phosphorescent lights given off by the jellyfish in the St. Mary’s River. Under a full canopy of stars, he asked her to marry him and she accepted. We are all very, very happy.

Candice has a mixture of Carib and African ancestry, so at the moment I’m thinking of her as the black honey of Toby’s summer. To this association I add a story that Candice told me when I was describing Toby’s encounters with blackberries. When she was a teenager in Trinidad, she once cut down a tree (it was already on its way to falling) in order to retrieve a peewah fruit that was growing high in its branches.  She miscalculated, however, and nearly had the tree fall on her. Luckily, because she had much experience with falling out of trees as a child, she had already calculated where she needed to jump if anything went wrong.

Candice gouged her finger (she still bears the scar) but was otherwise all right. The peewah, she said, was delicious.

So Toby and Candice, may you reach high for delicious fruit, even when it seems inaccessible. Don’t settle for anything less than a rich pleasure. Of course, there will be thorns and falling trees. You know this well, Toby, since the “dark creek” next to which you proposed carried away your oldest brother eleven years ago. But your love will carry you through the bad times as well as the good.

There will always be this happy tongue.

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Lear, Trump Rage Against Their Enemies

By Robin Bates | Published: August 7, 2023
Benjamin West, King Lear

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Tuesday

In the past I’ve compared Donald Trump to King Lear, two narcissistic leaders who are so focused on indulging their own insecurities that they plunge the realms they head into chaos. With this weekend’s back and forth between Trump and special counsel Jack Smith over the recent indictment, I’ve found another comparison: both Lear and Trump, when pushed into a corner, lash out with violent language.

In Smith’s request for a protective order following Trump’s threats, he notes that the former president is using social media to go after “witnesses, judges, attorneys, and others associated with legal matters pending against him.” Trump’s first attack was fairly general:

IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!

He directed his second attack against his formerly sycophantic vice president, who witnessed first hand how Trump tried to overturn election results and will probably testify against him in his trial:

WOW, it’s finally happened! Liddle’ Mike Pence, a man who was about to be ousted as Governor Indiana until I came along and made him V.P., has gone to the Dark Side. I never told a newly emboldened (not based on his 2% poll numbers!) Pence to put me above the Constitution, or that Mike was ‘too honest.’ He’s delusional, and now he wants to show he’s a tough guy. I once read a major magazine article on Mike. It said he was not a very good person. I was surprised, but the article was right. Sad!

Finally, there’s an attack on the judge:

THERE IS NO WAY I CAN GET A FAIR TRIAL WITH THE JUDGE ‘ASSIGNED’ TO THE RIDICULOUS FREEDOM OF SPEECH/FAIR ELECTIONS CASE. EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS, AND SO DOES SHE!

Compare this to King Lear after he learns that his two daughters have stripped him of his retinue. First, he curses Goneril:

Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful.
Into her womb convey sterility.
Dry up in her the organs of increase,
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honor her. If she must teem,
Create her child of spleen, that it may live
And be a thwart disnatured torment to her.
Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth,
With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks,
Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits
To laughter and contempt, that she may feel
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child.

Later, when he addresses both daughters, he sounds like a little child throwing a temper tantrum. He threatens them with the “terrors of the Earth” but can’t provide specifics since he has already given away all his power:

No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the Earth! You think I’ll weep.
No, I’ll not weep.
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart 
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep.—O Fool, I shall go mad!

Narcissists go mad when they are confronted with concrete evidence that the world does not revolve around them. If they lack concrete means of revenge, they resort to bombastic language.

Which in Trump’s case is delivered in all caps.

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