The Poetry of Holy Bread

By Robin Bates | Published: June 10, 2023

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Spiritual Sunday

I share today a (somewhat long) talk I gave for the adult portion of our Vacation Bible School on “The Poetry of Bread.”  This year’s theme was “Manna in the Wilderness” and mine was one of three talks. The others were an examination of Biblical references to bread—everything from wilderness manna to the Last Supper—and a personal account by a Chattanooga trafficking survivor on an organization she founded 18 years ago to help women in trouble. Mimi Nikkel, founder of Love’s Arm, repeatedly used the manna image as she talked about what helped pull her out of her own downward spiral. Love’s Arm, meanwhile, has reached into prisons and the streets to help others.

In my own talk, I presented poems that feature bread—some overtly religious, others not—and we discussed them as a group. Here, with some comments added that draw on our discussions—is that talk.

Talk for Parish of St. Mark & St. Paul, Sewanee, June 6, 2023

If we see bread as a basic necessity, the archetypal food and symbol of our grounding in the world of matter, then bread provides a powerful means of exploring the point where the material and the spiritual meet.

This, it so happens, is the way that Jesus uses bread. When he says, “I am the bread of life, they who come to me shall not perish,” he is saying that the spiritual life he represents is as foundational to our existence as bread is. In fact, Jesus is a poet at such moments, just as he is skilled author of fiction in the way that he shapes his parables.

For instance, when he breaks bread with his disciples, he is using the bread metaphor in multiple ways. In the breaking and share of the bread, he is giving the disciples a powerful symbol of community, in which people care for each other. When Jesus says, “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me”—and when we say at the eucharist, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven—the disciples take in both his spiritual and his physical presence. At such moments, we are at the threshold of the spiritual world but, as physical beings, we need something that we can taste and see.

All of which is to say that, when we encounter mentions of bread in poetry, it is always going to be much more than bread.

A quick survey of the times that Jesus mentions bread might have us calling him a “bread poet” given the importance of it. Here are a few key instances:

–Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst.—John 6:35

–“I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh.” – John 6:51

–But He answered [to Satan] and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.’”—Matthew 4:4

–While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.” – Matthew 26:26

–And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.”—Luke 22:19

–“I am the bread of life.”—John 6:48

–Then He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed them, and broke them, and kept giving them to the disciples to set before the people.—Luke 9:16

–“Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.’”—John 6:31

–“Give us this day our daily bread.”—Matthew 6:11

Turning to bread poems, I start with one of the most familiar poetic mentions of bread, attributed to the 12th century poet, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher Omar Khayaam, who was maybe a Sufi mystic, maybe a Zoroastrian, maybe an atheist. In any event, one can say that bread figures into his vision of heaven on earth:

From The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
XI
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”

Poetry, bread and wine, and a singing companion—the kingdom of God brought to earth.

In Christian poetry, there are a number of poems that take up Jesus’s bread metaphors and explore them further. Friend and colleague John Gatta alerted me to one by the American Puritan poet Edward Taylor (1642-1729), who meditates on Jesus’s declaration (John 6:51) that “I am the living bread.”

Edwards is writing in the tradition of the metaphysical poets, who pushed their metaphors to the limit. John Donne is the most famous example although it’s worth noting that not everyone was a fan. Samuel Johnson once wrote that, in metaphysical poetry, “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” 

Anyway, in the poem Edwards compares the soul to a bird of paradise trapped in a wicker cage that is doomed to famish because it has pecked at the forbidden fruit. As a result, it has fallen into “celestial famine.” Edwards says that it can neither fill its hunger from earthly grain nor—and this is significant—from angel food, which is to say, purely spiritual bread. Don’t go knocking on heaven’s door, the poet admonishes us, because the angels have “no soule bread.” We need something that is at once spiritual and earthly and we get it delivered to us (warning!) straight from God’s bowels. I pick up the poem from the final stanzas:

From Meditation on John 6:51: “I am the living bread”
By Edward Taylor

In this sad state, Gods Tender Bowells run
Out streams of Grace: And he to end all strife
The Purest Wheate in Heaven, his deare-dear Son
Grinds, and kneads up into this Bread of Life.
Which Bread of Life from Heaven down came and stands
Disht on thy Table up by Angells Hands. 

Did God mould up this Bread in Heaven, and bake,
Which from his Table came, and to thine goeth?
Doth he bespeake thee thus, This Soule Bread take.
Come Eate thy fill of this thy Gods White Loafe?
Its Food too fine for Angells, yet come, take
And Eate thy fill. Its Heavens Sugar Cake. 

…
This Bread of Life dropt in thy mouth, doth Cry.
Eate, Eate me, Soul, and thou shalt never dy.

Although many in the Middle Ages and Renaissance saw angels as higher that humans in “the great chain of being”—after all, they are more spiritual—Taylor points to the importance of bringing the earlty and the spiritual together. In last year’s Vacation Bible School lecture last year on literary angels, I observed that Philip Pullman makes a similar point in his Golden Compass Trilogy. There we see angels who are jealous of humans’ abilities to interact with the world of the senses.To eat “Heavens Sugar Cake,” as it were.

The English Anglo-Catholic mystic Evelyn Underhill has a wonderful “Corpus Christi” poem that similarly explores eucharistic bread imagery. Sewanee chaplain Peter Gray informs me that it’s particularly appropriate today (June 11, 2023) as it is the Face of Corpus Christi, which celebrates the real presence, in the Eucharist’s bread and wine, of the body and blood, soul and divinity, of Jesus.

Underhill draws a connection between the harvested wheat—“torn by the sickles”—and the crucified Christ. But in a mystical revelation, Underhill realizes that out of this “mystic death” arises a “mystic birth.” The poem at this point alludes to mother earth and the seasonal cycles:

I knew the patient passion of the earth,
Maternal, everlasting, whence there springs
The Bread of Angels and the life of man.

Now, “blind no longer,” Underhill sees God’s plan behind human suffering. Though, like Jesus, we may be “reaped, ground to grist, crushed and tormented in the Mills of God,” ultimately we ourselves are “offered at Life’s hands, a living Eucharist.”

Corpus Christi
By Evelyn Underhill

Come, dear Heart!
The fields are white to harvest: come and see
As in a glass the timeless mystery
Of love, whereby we feed
On God, our bread indeed.
Torn by the sickles, see him share the smart
Of travailing Creation: maimed, despised,
Yet by his lovers the more dearly prized
Because for us he lays his beauty down —
Last toll paid by Perfection for our loss!
Trace on these fields his everlasting Cross,
And o’er the stricken sheaves the Immortal Victim’s crown.

From far horizons came a Voice that said,
‘Lo! from the hand of Death take thou thy daily bread.’
Then I, awakening, saw
A splendor burning in the heart of things:
The flame of living love which lights the law
Of mystic death that works the mystic birth.
I knew the patient passion of the earth,
Maternal, everlasting, whence there springs
The Bread of Angels and the life of man.

Now in each blade
I, blind no longer, see
The glory of God’s growth: know it to be
An earnest of the Immemorial Plan.
Yea, I have understood
How all things are one great oblation made:
He on our altars, we on the world’s rood.
Even as this corn,
Earth-born,
We are snatched from the sod;
Reaped, ground to grist,
Crushed and tormented in the Mills of God,
And offered at Life’s hands, a living Eucharist.

I turn now to one my favorite characters in all of literature, who at one point does a riff on the parable of the loaves and the fishes that is so outrageous that her audience can only gawk in wonder. Some background us useful to put Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in perspective.

Alison is one of only two women of Chaucer’s 30 pilgrims, and making her position even more uncomfortable is the fact that she has had five husbands. She desperately wants to be taken seriously by her fellow pilgrims, however, and as a result goes on a long, rambling, and sometimes wild self-defense of herself. Since she sees those around her drawing lessons from the Bible—sometimes to condemn her for her sexual appetites—she tries to interpret the Bible so that it supports her.

Her reasoning is dubious but that’s almost beside the point because it’s so much fun. Meanwhile, her lust for life comes through—she’s a far more attractive character than some of those who condemn her, like the hypocritical pardoner and the lecherous friar—and the fact that she sees herself as a version of “the bread of life” makes her perfect for this talk.

As Alison sees it, Chris is white bread while she is “hoten barly breed.” And although she acknowledges that it would be nice to be the first, she says the world needs both—which means that she sees herself as a Christ figure doing her own kind of refreshing. Incidentally, calling Christ a virgin, while technically accurate true, is nuts, but it serves to draw a contrast with herself:

Christ was a virgin and shaped like a man,
And many a saint, since the world began;
Yet lived they ever in perfect chastity.
I will envy no virginity.
Let them be bread of pure wheat-seed,
And let us wives be called barley-bread;
And yet with barley-bread, Mark can tell it,
Our Lord Jesus refreshed many a man.

One sees, from such passages why Chaucer felt the need to issue a retraction and an apology towards the end of his life for Canterbury Tales. Alison, however, is more than a figure of fun for him but a vital life force. She is also a figure centuries ahead of her time: ultimately, she is asking no more than R-E-S-P-E-C-T from her fellow pilgrims.

Our next poem, Lynn Ungar’s “Blessing the Bread,” connects bread-making with the rhythms of life. In an intricate set of associations, she sees the lines of her hands etched into the bread she is molding. And while she says that she does “not believe in palmistry,” nevertheless she finds herself looking for “signs of life” in the imprint. Comparing kneading bread with massaging, she mentions that a kind of imprint also can be seen “on the bodies we have touched.”

Drawing on an image from palmistry, she sees a miraculous (eucharistic?) transformation arising from this tactile connection with the bread dough:

This is the lifeline —
the etched path from hand
to grain to earth, the transmutation
of the elements through touch…

However unwilling we may be to be believe in miracles (Ungar, a Unitarian Universalist minister, worries about superstition), something miraculous occurs in the transformation of earth to grain to hand to the bread that we bless and eat. God is present in that transformation and for that we offer up thanks:

Blessing the Bread
By Lynn Ungar

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam,
hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz.
[Praised be thou, eternal God,
who brings forth bread from the earth.

Surely the earth
is heavy with this rhythm,
the stretch and pull of bread,
the folding in and folding in
across the palms, as if
the lines of my hands could chart
a map across the dough,
mold flour and water into
the crosshatchings of my life.

I do not believe in palmistry,
but I study my hands for promises
when no one is around.
I do not believe in magic.
But I probe the dough
for signs of life, willing
it to rise, to take shape,
to feed me. I do not believe
in palmistry, in magic, but
something happens in kneading
dough or massaging flesh;
an imprint of the hand remains
on the bodies we have touched.

This is the lifeline —
the etched path from hand
to grain to earth, the transmutation
of the elements through touch
marking the miracles
on which we unwillingly depend.

Praised be thou, eternal God,
who brings forth bread from the earth.

Denise Levertov has a poem which, while not specifically about bread, concludes with a bread image that is so striking that I include it in this talk. Written in the 1960s when feminists were charting new paths (“stepping westward”), Levertov is trying to define herself as a woman—what it means when she is contradictory, what it means when she is steadfast.

The final image is one of her carrying bread—traditional woman’s work—but coming to see this nurturing role as a gift as well as a burden. While the weight may hurt the shoulders, it also means that she is “closed in fragrance.” That buoys her up, even though she doesn’t appear able to stop and fully enjoy it. As she puts it, “I can eat as I go.”

Stepping Westward
By Denise Levertov

What is green in me
darkens, muscadine.
If woman is inconstant, good,
I am faithful to
ebb and flow, I fall
in season and now
is a time of ripening.
If her part
is to be true,
a north star,
good, I hold steady
in the black sky
and vanish by day,
yet burn there
in blue or above
quilts of cloud.
There is no savor
more sweet, more salt
than to be glad to be
what, woman,
and who, myself,
I am, a shadow
that grows longer as the sun
moves, drawn out
on a thread of wonder.
If I bear burdens
they begin to be remembered
as gifts, goods, a basket
of bread that hurts
my shoulders but closes me
in fragrance. I can
eat as I go.

I conclude, as seems appropriate, with an excerpt from Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to Bread.” As is characteristic of the Chilean poet, it is both earthily sensual and socialist in spirit (bread should be shared with all).

Bread, as Neruda describes it, is like a mother’s rounded womb but also the product (when put in the oven) of a revolutionary fertility:

there’s the joining of seed
and fire,
and you’re growing, growing
all at once

In the end, bread represents

humankind’s energy,
a miracle often admired,
the will to live itself.

And because it is connected with the will to life, it must be shared:

Because we plant its seed
and grow it
not for one man
but for all,
there will be enough:
there will be bread
for all the peoples of the earth.

Nor does Neruda stop with bread. This staple of life becomes a symbol for all our foundational needs:

And we will also share with one another
whatever has
the shape and the flavor of bread:
the earth itself,
beauty
and love–
all
taste like bread
and have its shape,
the germination of wheat.

Here’s the excerpt:

From Ode to Bread
By Pablo Neruda

Bread,
you rise
from flour,
water
and fire.
Dense or light,
flattened or round,
you duplicate
the mother’s
rounded womb,
and earth’s
twice-yearly
swelling.
How simple
you are, bread,
and how profound!
You line up
on the baker’s
powdered trays
like silverware or plates
or pieces of paper
and suddenly
life washes
over you,
there’s the joining of seed
and fire,
and you’re growing, growing
all at once
like
hips, mouths, breasts,
mounds of earth,
or people’s lives.
The temperature rises, you’re overwhelmed
by fullness, the roar
of fertility,
and suddenly
your golden color is fixed.
And when your little wombs
were seeded,
a brown scar
laid its burn the length
of your two halves’
toasted
juncture.
Now,
whole,
you are
mankind’s energy,
a miracle often admired,
the will to live itself.

O bread familiar to every mouth,
we will not kneel before you:
men
do no
implore
unclear gods
or obscure angels:
we will make our own bread
out of sea and soil,
we will plant wheat
on our earth and the planets,
bread for every mouth,
for every person,
our daily bread.
Because we plant its seed
and grow it
not for one man
but for all,
there will be enough:
there will be bread
for all the peoples of the earth.
And we will also share with one another
whatever has
the shape and the flavor of bread:
the earth itself,
beauty
and love–
all
taste like bread
and have its shape,
the germination of wheat.
Everything
exists to be shared,
to be freely given,
to multiply….

Our church has a program for getting food to people in the surrounding community who need it, and we were all encouraged to bring in loaves of bread as donations. Neruda’s poem was very appropriate to that end.

But bread, as the poems note, is never just about bread but about so much more.  

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A McEwan Passage to Raise Your Spirits

By Robin Bates | Published: June 8, 2023
Ian McEwan

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Friday

I’m traveling at the moment and so will confine myself today to sharing an upbeat passage I liked from Ian McEwan’s novel Nutshell (2016). It’s a very strange work that tells a modern version of the Hamlet story from the point of view of a Hamlet who is still in utero. Part of the inspiration for the novel comes from Hamlet’s declaration, “Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.”

In a crazy personal account that reminds me of Tristram Shandy, we see a fetus that has consciousness, language, and adult knowledge while being alert to the sensory clues that come to him via his mother’s biology and through the walls of her womb. In the process, he picks up on Claude and Trudy’s plan to murder his father. If ever there was a novel that requires willing suspension of disbelief, this is it, but once you suspend, there’s fun to be had in identifying the Hamlet allusions and other Shakespeare passages.

I’m sharing a passage where fetus Hamlet protests a grim 20-minute lecture that his mother is listening to on the radio. After delivering a long list of things going wrong in the world, the expert concludes that (in Hamlet’s summation),

these disasters are the work of our twin natures. Clever and infantile. We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed. Twenty minutes. Click.

Hamlet, however, counterargues with a surprisingly optimistic view of things that I share to brighten your day. He starts with a takedown of pessimism:

Anxious, I finger my cord. It serves for worry beads. Wait, I thought. While it lies ahead of me, what’s wrong with infantile? I’ve heard enough of such talks to have learned to summon the counterarguments. Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies. And now in commentaries. 

Then he lists what’s right with the world:

Why trust this account when humanity has never been so rich, so healthy, so long-lived? When fewer die in wars and childbirth than ever before—and more knowledge, more truth by way of science, was never so available to us all? When tender sympathies—for children, animals, alien religions, unknown, distant foreigners—swell daily? When hundreds of millions have been raised from wretched subsistence?  When, in the West, even the middling poor recline in armchairs, charmed by music as they steer themselves down smooth highways at four times the speed of a galloping horse? When smallpox, polio, cholera, measles, high infant mortality, illiteracy, public executions and routine state torture have been banished from so many countries. Not so long ago, all these curses were everywhere. 

The list of modern blessings continues:

When solar panels and wind farms and nuclear energy and inventions not yet known will deliver us from the sewage of carbon dioxide, and GM crops will save us from the ravages of chemical farming and the poorest from starvation? When the worldwide migration to the cities will return vast tracts of land to wilderness, will lower birth rates, and rescue women from ignorant village patriarchs? What of the commonplace miracles that would make a manual laborer the envy of Caesar Augustus: pain-free dentistry, electric light, instant contact with people we love, with the best music the world has known, with the cuisine of a dozen cultures. We’re bloated with privileges and delights, as well as complaints, and the rest who are not will be soon.

The novel’s whipsaw shift from pessimism to optimism may be inspired by Hamlet’s own summary on the lows and highs of humankind:

I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? 

So take your choice: Quintessence of dust or paragon of animals. Pessimism or optimism?

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Poetry and Our June 8, 1973 Wedding

By Robin Bates | Published: June 7, 2023
Julia and I after the ceremony

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Thursday

Today is our 50th wedding anniversary. On June 8, 1973, Julia and I got married following Carleton College’s commencement.

It was a very busy day as my roommate and one of Julia’s close friends got married before commencement (they provided breakfast). That was followed by my induction into Phi Beta Kappa, then commencement, and then we provided lunch prior to the wedding. I’m not sure what we were thinking.

In today’s blog I share the wedding ceremony that we composed earlier in the week, along with some context.

To set the scene, Julia wore a long cotton dress embroidered with mushrooms (a reference to nature, not to drugs) and I wore an embroidered peasant shirt  (also of cotton), along with blue jeans and sandals. Julia’s mother and sister had made both. The marriage took place in an open green space that was adjacent to Carleton’s Japanese garden.

As you read the ceremony, you might keep in mind that I felt somewhat defensive about getting married, given that my advisor was an old Marxist historian (Carl Weiner) that I thought might disapprove. After all, many of us in those days thought of marriage as a “bourgeois institution.” Thus, the ceremony was in part my explanation–to him, to the world, and most of all to myself–about why it was okay that we were having a wedding at all.

We opened with the hymn “Morning Has Broken,” more because it was in the Moravian hymnal (Julia was a Moravian at that time and her Moravian minister married us) than because it had been recently popularized by Cat Stevens. Our parents were then asked for, and gave, their permission (it seemed important to us to have everyone on board), after which we had a classmate and a poetry professor (Keith Harrison) read erotic poems.

The first was a passage from Song of Songs (2:1-16), one very much in the spirit of the hymn. The passage includes the lines,

My beloved spake, and said unto me,
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

The second poem raised a few more eyebrows as it featured copulating turtles. I had fallen in love with the poetry of D.H. Lawrence my senior year, which spoke to our sexual awakening. “Tortoise Shout” captured my amazement at how I was casting off solitude and throwing myself into a primal relationship with another human being. The poem concludes with these lines:

Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence
Tearing a cry from us.

Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps,
calling, calling for the complement,
Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found.

Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost,
The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment,
That which is whole, torn asunder,
That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.

As I say, copulating turtles is not a normal wedding theme. Perhaps part of me wanted to shock, and perhaps partly I was using the poem to prove I was not bourgeois after all. But I think the deepest reason for its selection was to tap into something deeper than ourselves. As I was not particularly religious, I needed a way to articulate the mysterious currents that I sensed were at work.

Next came my “defense of marriage,” which I set up as an interchange between the minister (Erwin Boettcher) and the congregation. I quoted two poems in the process, Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” and W.B. Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter.”

In the first MacLeish, arguing for images over expository prose and asserting that “a poem should not mean but be,” says that love can be conveyed by “the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea.”

Meanwhile Yeats, whom I had encountered in an Irish Renaissance class, taught me the significance of ritual and ceremony. Which is to say, he provided me with a reason why Julia and I should get married rather than just shack up together. Praying for his infant daughter, in the last stanza he imagines her husband bringing her to a house

Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

I’ll also note that my articulation of the tension between self and couple probably owes a lot to Lawrence, especially his Studies in Classic American Literature (although the tension also shows up in much of his poetry). There’s also a Marxist dialectic at work. Anyway, here’s the argument for marriage that I set forth:

Minister: The marriage bond is a bond between two individuals. It does not entail a merging of one into the other, for in merging the individuality is lost.
Congregation: There must be a tension of difference. Without the tension, there can be no growth.
Minister: From the tension, this man and this woman will grow to new awarenesses and reach new syntheses. Marriage can be beautiful because it provides a unified form in which to search.
Congregation: Marriage is like a sonnet. As a fixed form, it endows a heightened beauty on the infinite number of variations within.
Minister: The bond is the attraction between two stars revolving around each other, caught in each other’s orbit but resisting an incorporation which would burn brightly but die quickly.
Congregation: “Love is the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea.”
Minister: If we are gathered together today, it is because through ritual we ascertain the symbolic nature of the bond. And only through symbolism can we touch upon the beauty and the innocence.
Congregation: “How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.”

This interchange was followed by “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day,” a traditional English carol and the minister’s admonition. Then he said (this also was our wording),

You are gathered here because the bond to be made is not only between Julia and Robin. It is also between them and you, who are representative of the larger community. Are you willing to accept in that community a new member?
Congregation: We are. (or We aren’t.)

I felt I needed to give the congregation a choice (thus the “we aren’t”), and in fact my contrarian mentor told everyone afterwards that he opted for the latter choice. I don’t know if he was joking.

We then went on to exchange vows and rings, after which a classmate played Vaughan Williams’s “The Call” on a lute and we were presented to the community.

Looking back on this, I see myself turning to poetry in an attempt to make sense of this big life step that we were making. Since, unlike Julia, I was not part of a rich religious tradition—her ancestors had been Moravian missionaries—I needed to search elsewhere for spiritual grounding, and poetry provided it. (Her religious upbringing also explains why she gave me a freehand in composing the ceremony. She realized I needed an explanation more than she did.)

I wouldn’t include Lawrence if I were to do it over again, but then, I was 21 at the time. On the other hand, I’m struck that we got right the part about two people supporting each other in their own individual growth.

Fifty years later, we’re still holding to that commitment.

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Warning to Fans of Authoritarianism

By Robin Bates | Published: June 6, 2023
Illus. from “The Frogs Who Wished for a King”

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Wednesday

I concluded Monday’s post about Joe Biden with a reference to Aesop’s fable “The Frogs That Wanted a King” and am now thinking I could have done more with it. First of all, I could have noted that, if Trump is the predatory stork, then Joe Biden would be the log. Aesop, who wrote in the 6th century BCE, also anticipates a very interesting point that Atlantic writer and former Republican Tom Nichols makes about modern-day America.

In the fable, Aesop says that the frogs were tired of governing themselves:

They had so much freedom that it had spoiled them, and they did nothing but sit around croaking in a bored manner and wishing for a government that could entertain them with the pomp and display of royalty, and rule them in a way to make them know they were being ruled. No milk and water government for them, they declared. So they sent a petition to Jupiter asking for a king.

“To keep them quiet and make them think they had a king,” Aesop writes, Jupiter throws down a huge log. As first the frogs, thinking the log to be a fearful giant, hide themselves, but eventually they discover “how tame and peaceable King Log was.” After that, the younger frogs use him for a diving platform while the older frogs “made him a meeting place, where they complained loudly to Jupiter about the government.”

Be careful what you wish for. Jupiter next sends a crane to be their king, who proves to be far different from King Log:

He gobbled up the poor Frogs right and left and they soon saw what fools they had been. In mournful croaks they begged Jupiter to take away the cruel tyrant before they should all be destroyed.

“How now!” cried Jupiter “Are you not yet content? You have what you asked for and so you have only yourselves to blame for your misfortunes.”

Then comes the moral: “Be sure you can better your condition before you seek to change.”

There are certainly Republicans who see Biden as a senile old log. After the president got Republicans to agree to raise the debt ceiling, South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace tweeted, “Washington is broken. Republicans got outsmarted by a President who can’t find his pants.” Others contend that he is suffering from dementia and should step down. They want their crane back.

A number of Biden’s defenders, on the other hand, say that his low-key approach is his secret power. He doesn’t have to hog the spotlight or create constant drama; it’s enough to be doing the people’s work. While he may appear to be a log, he is a log that gets things done.

Biden embraces the ethos that Nichols advocates in Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy. If we are seeing the rise “of illiberal and anti-democratic movements in the United States,” Nichols says, the problem—as in Aesop’s fable—lies within ourselves. Here’s Amazon’s book description:

Nichols traces the illiberalism of the 21st century to the growth of unchecked narcissism, rising standards of living, global peace, and a resistance to change. Ordinary citizens, laden with grievances, have joined forces with political entrepreneurs who thrive on the creation of rage rather than on the encouragement of civic virtue and democratic cooperation. While it will be difficult, Nichols argues that we need to defend democracy by resurrecting the virtues of altruism, compromise, stoicism, and cooperation–and by recognizing how good we’ve actually had it in the modern world.

To quote again from the opening of the fable, “They had so much freedom that it had spoiled them, and they did nothing but sit around croaking in a bored manner and wishing for a government that could entertain them.”

Donald Trump certainly entertained us as millions of Americans, supporters and foes alike, were glued to cable television during his presidency. He, meanwhile, was crane-like in his management of the pandemic: tens of thousands died of Covid that wouldn’t have had to.

We also have his crane-like declaration about what he will do if he is re-elected president: he promises he will visit “retribution” on his enemies.

Unlike Aesop’s frogs, we can’t say we haven’t been warned.

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Pretending that Slavery Wasn’t a Big Deal

By Robin Bates | Published: June 5, 2023

Acc. to the Southern Agrarians, slavery was peripheral to Southern history

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Wednesday

Recently I have been exploring my sudden fascination with William Faulkner, which has been furthered by Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War.  Gorra compares Faulkner’s allusions to the war with what actually happened in order to figure out the accuracy and the honesty of the author’s vision of slavery and Jim Crow oppression. While occasionally Gorra catches the novelist sharing some of the South’s twisted versions of history, for the most part he says Faulkner gets things right.

He certainly is more accurate than the Southern Agrarians, a literary movement of poets and authors who celebrated the Lost Cause. I find Gorra’s reflections on the movement particularly interesting since I was personally acquainted with some of its leading figures, albeit only peripherally. Poet Alan Tate, one time editor of the Sewanee Review, became friends with my father after he retired to Sewanee, and Andrew Lytle, a later editor, was a prominent figure in Sewanee life. In fact, I was in a high school Latin class with Lytle’s daughter.

The Agrarians embraced the idea that the white rural South nobly resisted the encroachments of the North’s industrial capitalism. In doing so, Gorra says, the they downplayed or even ignored slavery, despite it having been the South’s primary economic engine:

[The Agrarians] made no apology for the Southern past or indeed for slavery itself, “a feature” that [poet John Crowe Ransom] described as “monstrous enough in theory, but, more often than not, humane in practice.” Instead, they pit a mythified Southern culture against what they saw as modernity’s dominant mode of life, defining an opposition between a pre-capitalist agricultural community on the one hand and a mechanical market-driven society on the other….They believed that the South [offered] the chance of a distinctive way of being, a separate line of historical development….Those who worked the soil remained identified with a particular spot of ground in a way that city folks could never be, and the Agrarians saw the subsistence farmer as the culture’s typical figure.

Gorra goes on to describe Lytle’s views after wryly observing that the novelist “spent far more of his own life in academia than he did on the farm.” Focusing on these farmers rather than on “the courtliness of plantation life,” Lytle portrayed them as having had “hardly anything to do with the capitalists and their merchandise.” In his idealized vision, they

work their own two hundred acres, churn their own butter, and make their own soap, and at midday they eat in such an unhurried fashion that an office worker would grow nervous. No “fancy tin-can salads…litter the table,” but there is always plenty of pot-likker.

Gorra notes that the Agrarians were influenced by Eliot and Yeats, who also dreamed of “a vanished wholeness, a lost organic world.” In other words, like Eliot (some of whose poetry the Sewanee Review published), they embraced poetic modernism to oppose modernity.

While Faulkner shared their enthusiasm for modernism (think how his narratives shift between different points of view and proceed often by doubling back on themselves), he had none of their sentimental nostalgia. Therefore, Gorra says Faulkner stayed away from the Agrarians, even though they admired him immensely:

[T]heir picture of the agricultural world is entirely without the extremity of his own: without the violence, or the sex, or the hatred, without the hunger and the bitter poverty; without the weather, and the laughter too. And their vision of the South lacks one thing more, one thing on which much though not all of the Yoknapatawpha cycle depends.  Ransom writes that “abolition alone could not have effected any great revolution in society,” and the South that he and his fellows envision is in essence a South without black people. If abolition brought no change, then African-Americans are not an integral part of the culture; they can be simply written out, their presence suppressed in an appeal for tradition and stability.

In her book of essays Playing in the Dark, African American novelist Toni Morrison explains the effects of this suppression, noting how an “Africanist” presence  is (I quote Gorra’s summation here)

deliberately pushed to the margins of American culture, a process that then allows that culture to be “positioned as white.” African Americans might be physically present but they carried no weight in the world that Ransom and his colleagues imagined: their very existence stood as an ideological blind spot, a fact of Southern life that the Agrarians worked hard to ignore.

If Morrison admires Faulkner as much as she does, it may be in part because he understands the fragility of White identity. As I’ve noted in recent posts, Faulkner shows how thin the line between White and Black is and how Whites often turned to acts of horrendous violence to bolster the distinction. Put another way, Whites used violence to back up their insistence on the separation of the races because they feared the separation was not as absolute as they claimed.

The Agrarian urge to minimize slavery helps explain how Sewanee Public School taught me Tennessee History in seventh grade. My teacher Fred Langford barely mentioned it and insisted that the war was caused by economic factors (as though slaves didn’t figure into the economy!). Although I have grappled with racism a lot since then, and even taught courses in Black literature, Faulkner is teaching me that there are even deeper levels of repression and denial than I realized.

Why should this be of interest to anyone other than a septuagenarian returning to his hometown in the South to retire? Well, the country as a whole still hasn’t faced up to its racial history, and currently there are reactionary forces everywhere that are trying to keep it that way. This is what people mean when they say that Critical Race Theory—by which they mean the country’s racial history—shouldn’t be taught in schools. It’s not only southerners saying this.

One last thought: I recently watched the Netflix Dutch series Ares, which (spoiler alert) deals with the corruption that arises when a culture represses a shameful history. In the Netherlands’ case, this history is the 17th and 18th century slave trade, which is at the basis of the nation’s current prosperity. Repressing this history has led to a monstrous black sludge, which monied interests attempt to keep hidden (it is in their interests to avoid an accounting). To lead the organization, one must kill whatever is pure or precious in oneself.

Closing our eyes to our racist past generates its own black sludge. What racists kill in themselves is the acknowledgment that their fellows are human beings, not monsters. Faulkner understood this in a way that great artists understand our essential being, and in his novels he seeks to find a language for it and to show its impact.

His fiction—unlike the works of the Agrarians—will be relevant for a long time to come.

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Joe Biden as a Tom Robbins Character

By Robin Bates | Published: June 4, 2023
80-years-old and still going strong

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Monday

As Joe Biden continues to chalk up unlikely wins while wrestling with a party uninterested in governing, his opponents, some of his allies, and several mainstream media outlets are obsessing about his age.  After the president tripped on a sandbag left on a stage, for instance, the New York Times ominously intoned, “Anyone can trip at any age, but for an 80-year-old president, it inevitably raises unwelcome questions.”

“Raises unwelcome questions,” I’ll point out, are weasel words which fail to consider a number of factors, including the benefits of immense experience and a calm demeanor.

Anyway, the complaints brings to mind Jitterbug Perfume (1984), my favorite novel by the whacky Tom Robbins. In it, a king rebels against his culture’s discomfort with elderly rulers. In this case, discomfort leads to death since the king is executed upon “the debut of wrinkles or gray hairs.” As the novel explains,

Regarding its rulers as semidivine—god-men upon whom the course of nature depended—the clan believed widespread catastrophes would result from the gradual enfeeblement of the ruler and the final extinction of his powers in death. The only way to avert those calamities was to kill the king as soon as he showed symptoms of decay, so that his soul might be transferred to a vigorous young successor before it had been impaired.

Upon finding his first white hair, King Alobar suddenly concludes that the whole system is unfair. And he’s got reason to since he has been a very successful king. As his consort Wren points out, he has ruled not through his physical prowess but through his intelligence:

There are men inside these city walls more powerfully built than you, Alobar; more adept with the spear. Men who can run faster, hurl a stone farther, face an awesome enemy with an equal absence of trembling, and pacify a harem with as sturdy a shaft. But you, well, while I cannot imagine how you acquired it, you have a brain. Time and time again, you have demonstrated your unusual ability to see inside of men and to interpret the silent pleas they aim at the stars. In the past, many kings have ruled this people. You have governed them.

We learn from Wren that the village necromancer—which is to say, the so-called expert—resents what he sees as an encroachment on his domain:

The heroics of past rulers only kept your kingdom in a state of agitation. You have calmed it. And Noog resents you for that, because as a result of your reasonable leadership, the necromancer is less necessary and less admired.

We’ve seen what four years of constant agitation brought us. Biden’s promise to return us to normalcy should be a relief to all those who prefer their leaders to be more interested in problem solving than in reality television-style theatrics.

Our white-haired president has brought back competence and integrity to the White House. Anyone who wants something else would do well to remember Aesop’s fable of “The Frogs Who Wished for a King.”

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The Trinity: Beyond, Beside Us, and Within

By Robin Bates | Published: June 3, 2023
Hendrick van Balen the Elder (1620s)

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Trinity Sunday

If you’ve ever been confused by the Holy Trinity, welcome to the club. There are those who see Christianity as a polytheistic religion because it appears to have multiple gods, and there are those who have been deemed heretics (the Arians) because, reasoning the matter out, have concluded that Jesus is not co-eternal with God. After all, if he has been begotten from “the Father,” then he must be subordinate to him.

To such minds, I would imagine, the Nicene Creed dances around the issue with its “begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.” And the same would go for the Holy Spirit, who we are told “proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.” If two of the three gods come second or third, how can there not be subordination?

To be sure, there are those who dismiss the use of reason altogether in articulating the nature of the Trinity. Thomas Browne in the 17th  century, drawing on the 3rd century Christian writer Tertulian, said, “I believe because it is absurd” and that, if anything, Christianity is too logical. “Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith,” he writes in The Religion of a Physician (1643). But this strikes me as the kind of self-complacent thing one can say only if everyone around one is a Christian. 

I, who need some rational explanation, understand the Trinity as an expression of our evolving understanding of God, whom we first saw as a being outside ourselves, then potentially existing within an extraordinary individual, and finally as potentially within all of us. But I should emphasize, as I engage in this discussion, that I am no theologian. Far deeper minds that mine have grappled with the nature of the Trinity.

I also understand that Reason has limits. While I don’t leave my reasoning mind at the door as I enter a church—that way lies superstition—neither do I think that one can understand God through Reason alone. Recently I have started wondering whether there is more of a poetic truth than a literal truth to the Trinity—which is to say, a truth that provides glimpses of something more profound than expository prose can provide. In other words, perhaps we should look first to poets and artists rather than to logicians for understanding.

I started thinking this way about the Trinity after reading a lyric by the remarkable Malcolm Guite, an Anglican priest and poet who writes sonnets for all the church’s festivals. In “Trinity Sunday,” which we Anglicans celebrate today, he revels in the apparent contradictions.

For Guite, there’s a beginning but it’s “not in time or space.” God is “three in one and one in three, in rhyme,/In music, in the whole creation story.” God gave us the gift of imagination and so we “sing the chord that calls us to the dance,/ Three notes resounding from a single tone.” We have poetry and music to “sing the End in whom we all began,” a line that may echo T.S. Eliot’s “in my beginning is my end” (Four Quartets). Our God is “beyond, beside us and within.”

Rationally, this may not seem logical. Poetically, however, it coheres and carries a kind of conviction.

Trinity Sunday
My Malcolm Guite

In the Beginning, not in time or space,
But in the quick before both space and time,
In Life, in Love, in co-inherent Grace,
In three in one and one in three, in rhyme,
In music, in the whole creation story,
In His own image, His imagination,
The Triune Poet makes us for His glory,
And makes us each the other’s inspiration.
He calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance,
To improvise a music of our own,
To sing the chord that calls us to the dance,
Three notes resounding from a single tone,
To sing the End in whom we all begin;
Our God beyond, beside us and within.

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English Patient Taught Me about My Father

By Robin Bates | Published: June 1, 2023
Andrews as Kip in The English Patient

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Friday

An episode from The English Patient, which I finished listening to on Tuesday, has helped me understand a pivotal point in my father’s life. I think I now know why, at 22, he turned away from his religious upbringing and became an ardent pacifist, a fatalistic determinist, a member of the War Resisters’ League, and a lifelong activist. It involves the concentration camp at Dachau, which he witnessed three days after it was liberated, although this is not the pivot point I have in mind, traumatic though it was.

Before getting to his World War II experiences, here’s the episode in Michael Ondaatje’s novel. Four individuals—a Canadian nurse named Hana, a Sikh bomb expert nicknamed Kip, a Canadian-Italian thief, and a severely burned “English patient”—have formed a community within a partially destroyed Italian monastery following Victory in Europe day. A love relationship is developing between Hana and Kip who, despite his brother’s admonitions against ever trusting Europeans, has come from India and joined a British bomb squad. All seems well until Kip hears a piece of news on the radio:

She sees him in the field, his hands clasped over his head, then realizes this is a gesture not of pain but of his need to hold the earphones tight against his brain. He is a hundred yards away from her in the lower field when she hears a scream emerge from his body which had never raised its voice among them. He sinks to his knees, as if unbuckled. Stays like that and then slowly gets up and moves in a diagonal towards his tent…

It so happens that Kip is going for his rifle. Seemingly unhinged, he brings it into the sickroom, apparently prepared to shoot the English patient. When he finally speaks, it is out of disillusion and a deep sense of betrayal:

I grew up with traditions from my country, but later, more often, from your country. Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world. You stood for precise behavior.

And further on:

You and then the Americans converted us. With your missionary rules. And Indian soldiers wasted their lives as heroes so they could be pukkah [gentlemen]. You had wars like cricket. How did you fool us into this? Here…listen to what you people have done.

The news on the radio is about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about which Kip says,

When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an Englishman. You had King Leopold of Belgium and now you have fucking Harry Truman of the USA. You all learned it from the English.

Kip’s anger is not only at the British but at himself for ignoring his brother and believing in what he sees as their false claims to a higher civilization:

My brother told me. Never turn your back on Europe. The deal makers. The contract makers. The map drawers. Never trust Europeans, he said. Never shake hands with them. But we, oh, we were easily impressed—by speeches and medals and your ceremonies. What have I been doing these last few years? Cutting away, defusing limbs of evil. For what? For this to happen?

Kip then walks out of their lives, never to be seen by them again.

So here’s my theory of how Hiroshima and Nagasaki traumatized my father. Some background is needed first. One of his jobs when he was stationed in Munich in 1945 was to take Germans on compulsory tours of Dachau. This way they had to confront what their nation had done rather than writing it off as American propaganda. The horror was so immense that they did everything they could to shift responsibility.

In fact, the only time that my wonderfully kind father ever expresses any anger in his letters home is over their attempts to escape blame. As he wrote on Sept. 17, 1945,

…the Germans seem to think they were liberated from [the ardent Nazis], instead of conquered with them. They aren’t afraid of the rest of the world; they just think it silly that the rest of the world should feel that way about them…

After August 6 and 8, the Germans that my father was taking around Dachau suddenly had new leverage. As my father used to tell me, “They said, ‘You say we were bad, but look at what you did.’” In other words, they used a form of “whataboutism” to feel better about themselves.

Only, with my father, it worked. Like Kip, he had thought he was fighting a battle of good against evil—Dachau showed him evil beyond imagining—only to see his own country unleash Armageddon on two civilian populations.

I knew that Hiroshima and Nagasaki hit him hard, but reading about Kip’s reaction gave me a better sense of just how deep his own sense of betrayal went. Having believed fervently in the war, at 22 he lost faith in his own country and never entirely regained it.

Fortunately, he turned that disillusion to good ends. He broke politically with his Republican family and would spend the rest of his life fighting against the white, male, straight, upper class, warmongering establishment. When I got arrested in an anti-war demonstration following the Kent State killings, he chided me for not having forewarned him. He said would have come up to Minneapolis and gotten incarcerated along with me.

But despite his having made the best of the situation, I was always vaguely aware of the scar. English Patient helped me put my finger on it.

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Faulkner Understood How Racism Works

By Robin Bates | Published: May 31, 2023

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Thursday

I reflect today upon why I have become riveted by William Faulkner this past year. My fascination started with Intruder in the Dust, moved on to Absalom, Absalom! (which I first read in a Carleton College English class), and has concluded with Sanctuary, Sound and the Fury, and Light in August. (I gave up on The Reivers because it seemed too lightweight.) I think the fascination has something to do with the racism that saturated the rural Tennessee environment in which I grew up, which sent me fleeing to a college close to the Canadian border when I turned 18.

To be sure, as a child I didn’t witness anything resembling the horrific acts recounted in Faulkner’s books. Because it is a university town, Sewanee was cushioned against racism’s worst excesses; the racism there was gentile, not violent lower class. Still, Sewanee was less than 20 miles from Estill Springs where, a mere 36 years before we arrived (which was in 1954) there had been a horrific lynching: a mob first tortured Jim McIlherron and then burned him alive. And throughout my childhood there was still an unofficial sunset provision in the county five miles from us (“no n— after sundown”). Also, we’re not far from Birmingham, Alabama, the church bombing there having occurred when I was 12.

Anyway, I grew up hearing the n-word daily. Some of my playmates would refer to the Black section of Sewanee as n—town, and there was a white girl with large lips that I remember being referred to as n—lips. I also recall non-stop n-jokes.

Some of this was still going on when I returned to the area prior to enrolling in graduate school. For instance, the publisher of the Winchester Herald-Chronicle—I was a reporter there in 1974-75—used the n-word daily. (I remember him being bitterly disappointed when Muhammad Ali defeated George Foreman.)  I wince every time that I hear the word, which means that I wince non-stop through Faulkner’s novels.

But for that reason, I feel that there’s something important to learn about the culture I grew up in. So I wince and read.

I’ve written in the past about my view that, while Faulkner himself was a racist, his novels are not, and this is nowhere so true as Light in August, which I finished last week. In dissecting his own culture, the author shows that the racial distinctions upon which people base their entire identities are paper thin. The very fact that they use the n-word without thinking—the way one breathes without thinking—makes anything that disturbs their comfortable certainty feel cataclysmic. Joe Christmas disturbs that certainty.

That’s because his racial identity is unclear. His mother is knocked up by a circus performer traveling through the area, but whether he is a Mexican or a Black man or a dark-skinned White man is never thoroughly established. By the standards of the American south, a Black father would make Joe Black, but Faulkner keeps it vague. Joe’s grandfather, however, has no doubts. Crazed by his fear of miscegenation, he won’t let a doctor administer to the mother, with the result that she dies in childbirth. Then he spirits the child away to a White orphanage.

White enough to pass, Joe grows up not knowing whether he’s Black or White and this uncertainty, which messes with his society’s racial certainties, messes with his own sense of himself as well. For parts of the book, he is at war with himself.

As long as the white community thinks he’s White, they are only mildly scandalized when he starts sleeping with a woman in the area. It’s a bit worse when he kills her, but even that is at a whole different level from when they conclude that he is Black. At that point,  it’s “a Black Man has killed a White woman!” and everyone, now knowing where they stand, goes into a frenzy. By having been racially ambiguous, Joe challenged their categories, but now they can engage in self-righteous and horrific acts.

One of those outraged is 25-year-old Percy Grimm, a member of the civilian military, who, upon Joe’s arrest, sets himself up as a guardian of the peace. Faulkner could be describing any number of our own fascist paramilitaries, who have been flourishing since the Obama presidency and who, encouraged by Trump (I’m thinking here of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers), were willing to invade the Capitol to keep him in office. Like Grimm, they feel a sense of validation when someone in authority gives them legitimacy:

It was the new civilian-military act which saved him. He was like a man who had been for a long time in a swamp, in the dark. It was as though he not only could see no path ahead of him, he knew that there was none. Then suddenly his life opened definite and clear. The wasted years in which he had shown no ability in school, in which he had been known as lazy, recalcitrant, without ambition, were behind him, forgotten. He could now see his life opening before him, uncomplex and inescapable as a barren corridor, completely freed now of ever again having to think or decide, the burden which he now assumed and carried as bright and weightless and martial as his insignatory brass: a sublime and implicit faith in physical courage and blind obedience, and a belief that the white race is superior to any and all other races and that the American is superior to all other white races and that the American uniform is superior to all men, and that all that would ever be required of him in payment for this belief, this privilege, would be his own life. On each national holiday that had any martial flavor whatever he dressed in his captain’s uniform and came downtown. And those who saw him remembered him again on the day of the fight with the ex-soldier as, glittering, with his marksman’s badge (he was a fine shot) and his bars, grave, erect, he walked among the civilians with about him an air half belligerent and half the self-conscious pride of a boy.

When Joe escapes from prison, Grimm gets his glory moment, first shooting and then castrating him:

When they approached to see what he was about, they saw that the man was not dead yet, and when they saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave a choked cry and stumbled back into the wall and began to vomit. Then Grimm too sprang back, flinging behind him the bloody butcher knife. “Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell,” he said.

Faulkner helps me make sense of what was going on in my world as a child—how, beneath seemingly innocuous daily life was a deep evil. Skin color in the United States defined a lethal caste system that gave every White immigrant—the wretched refuse of Europe’s teeming shores—automatic status. As a poor Irish or Italian or Slav, you might be treated as scum, but at least you weren’t Black, and your sense of dignity became dependent on those feelings of superiority. Take that away and you could feel like you were nothing. As President LBJ once put it, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

But it’s not only my past that is drawing me to Faulkner but the present as well. The author alerts us to how racism still plays a significant role in American life. Indeed, the Confederate flag, which I see daily on Tennessee pickup trucks, has migrated north. It even made an appearance in the January 6 coup attempt.

While I don’t think racists are in the majority, they exist in large enough numbers to have an impact on our nation. Novels like Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August reveal the dynamics at work.

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