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First Sunday in Advent
My dear friend Pastor Sue Schmidt alerted me to a Rilke poem that provides a beautiful entry into the Advent season. Advent is a time when, in the face of darkness, we search and pray for the numinous. When the poet says of himself, “I am dark. I am a forest,” I think of the opening of Dante’s Inferno:
Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. How shall I say
what wood that was! I never saw so drear, so rank, so arduous a wilderness! Its very memory gives a shape to fear.
Death could scarce be more bitter than that place! (trans. John Ciardi)
In Rilke’s telling, however, the numinous is always present, even though we don’t always notice it. “Of all who move through the quiet houses, / you are the quietest,” he writes, and “your shadow falls over the book we are reading/ and makes it glow.”
This glow enters the dark forest as well:
Often when I imagine you your wholeness cascades into many shapes. You run like a herd of luminous deer…
The poem concludes with an image of a wheel “whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,/ revolve me nearer to the center.” Always with Rilke there is this play of dark and light that is central to Advent . Sue writes, “I really like the idea of moving into the center of the wheel – to God – and then seeing that all I do widens. When I work with God, then what I do has so much more impact.”
Let this poem bring light to you as the days get colder and darker and as the world, whether in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, or here at home, does what the world too often does. Listen for that presence that comes and goes, swinging the door so gently that it closes “almost without a shudder.”
You Come and Go By Rainer Maria Rilke
You come and go. The doors swing closed ever more gently, almost without a shudder. Of all who move through the quiet houses, you are the quietest.
We become so accustomed to you, we no longer look up when your shadow falls over the book we are reading and makes it glow. For all things sing you: at times we just hear them more clearly.
Often when I imagine you your wholeness cascades into many shapes. You run like a herd of luminous deer and I am dark. I am a forest.
You are a wheel at which I stand, whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up, revolve me nearer to the center. Then all the work I put my hand to widens from turn to turn.
(Poem 45 from The Book of Hours, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
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Friday
Gil Duran of the FrameLab blog has written an interesting reflection on how American fascists are appropriating George Orwell’s 1984 for their own purposes. The claim should be preposterous, of course, since Orwell is targeting totalitarianism, not democratic rule. Still, we shouldn’t be surprised: claiming that 2+2=5 is, as Orwell famously points, basic to authoritarian rule.
Duran concludes his piece with a set of suggestions on making sure we get our arithmetic right.
The article begins with Winston Smith’s declaration that freedom is “the freedom to say two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
This, of course, is not what Big Brother’s party asserts:
In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it … For, after all, how do we know two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable?
Duran then provides examples of American authoritarians quoting Orwell’s novel:
“We are living Orwell’s 1984,” wrote Donald Trump’s son, Don Jr., to his millions of followers on Twitter after the platform banned Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Free-speech no longer exists in America.”
In October, Elon Musk — currently promoting the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory on Twitter — posted a photo of his new t-shirt, which was emblazoned with the words “What would Orwell think?” alongside a Big Brother-like eye.
In response, Duran quotes Max Fawcett in Canada’s National Observer, who is 2021 wrote that these “Orwell-enthralled conservatives” think 1984’s critique of authoritarianism
validates their maximalist view of free speech on anything from COVID-19 conspiracy theories to bigotry directed at minorities, immigrants and the LGBTQ community. Any attempt to curtail hate speech or contain the spread of misinformation is, in their eyes, a textbook example of the ‘thought police’ from the book’s fictional superstate of Oceania.”
Duran elaborates further:
The skewed conservative interpretation of Orwell holds that freedom means the freedom to spread lies about topics like the 2020 election, COVID, vaccines or anything else. It depicts any effort to challenge falsehoods as an attack on this supposed freedom, and as a form of “thought control” in line with 1984’s totalitarian Big Brother. It vilifies fact-checkers, journalists and social media content moderation policies as enemies of freedom. According to its twisted upside-down logic, liars are defenders of liberty and truth is a form of oppression.
“What could be more Orwellian,” Duran follows up, “than claiming Orwell would have supported authoritarians and lies?” Indeed, Orwell would be horrified at how fascists are using his book. After all, as a socialist he fought against the fascists in Spain while as a lover of democracy he wrote Animal Farm and 1984 to call out Stalinism. Duran notes the author “clearly believed that objective facts do exist — and that those who deny the existence of objective facts are the villains.”
In point of fact, Trump appears to be using Big Brother’s playbook, not Orwell’s novel, to guide his own behavior, whether it’s claiming that Barack Obama was born in Kenya or insisting that he actually won the 2020 election. He went further than any previous president, including Nixon, in attempting to weaponize the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Internal Revenue Service against his opponents, yet he complains incessantly that these entities have been weaponized against him. It has become common practice for him and his followers to accuse their opponents of doing what they themselves do or want to do. As many have noted, with them every accusation is a confession.
Orwell’s most penetrating insight is one that Trump has thoroughly internalized. The main point of his lies is not to change minds but to test loyalty. The more outrageous the lie, the bigger the chance to prove you are a true believer. As Orwell explains, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Believing the lie that Trump beat Biden has become the entry exam for today’s Republicans. If you don’t reject the factual evidence, you’re out.
Rejecting evidence, it so happens, is Winston’s official job. Behaving like many in today’s GOP, he deletes select facts from the official archives on behalf of the Ministry of Information. As Duran explains,
The goal of the Ministry of Information is to eliminate unsavory facts and truths, thus changing history to suit the whims of the totalitarian dictatorship. Its chilling motto — “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” — makes clear that true power is the power to manipulate the perception of reality.
In 2018, Trump’s non-stop lying prompted Indian author Salman Rushdie to write a New Yorker article on our need for the literary classics, which are defined in part by their commitment to truth. Seeing literature as essentially a “no bullshit” zone, Rushdie wrote that the job of contemporary writers is “rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality.”
Literature can’t save us by itself. But it’s an indispensable ally in our efforts to save democracy.
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Wednesday
For my weekly report on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, I look at what he says about Hamlet, the current focus of my faculty reading group. As Fletcher sees it, Shakespeare’s play invented a new way to grieve.
In fact, if the play proved the most popular of Shakespeare’s tragedies in the 17th century—and if it continues to pack a punch today—it’s because (Fletcher says) it aids us in this most challenging of all emotions.
Fletcher begins his discussion of Hamlet as a “Sorrow Resolver” with a look at previous plays that grappled with grief. Foremost of these are many of the great Greek tragedies. As he notes,
Greek tragedies revolved around characters who’d lost parents, siblings, children. And although those bereaved characters responded to loss in different ways, a common pattern quickly emerged: mourning took the form of a plot.
Greek audiences, Fletcher notes, especially liked the revenge plot.
I am put in mind of the words of Beowulf after watching Danish king Hrothgar lose himself in despair after Grendel’s Mother kills his best friend. “It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning,” he declares, before setting off to confront the monster in her underwater lair. Greek tragedy appeared to agree as it came up with elaborate revenge stories. For instance, there’s Agamemnon, where Clytemnestra lures her husband “into a bathtub, entangles him with a net, and then drops an axe upon his head.” From then on, Fletcher says, revenge plots “grew steadily more elaborate”:
A quarter century after the Oresteia, Athenian audiences were introduced to Euripides’s Medea, a barbarian princess who delivered comeuppance to her unfaithful Greek lover by stabbing his two sons, assassinating his new wife with a poisoned wedding gift, and finally , escaping in a dragon chariot hijacked from the gods.
The theater of Shakespeare’s time was in love with revenge plays. As Fletcher notes,
There were plots where avengers tricked their victims into kissing venomed skeletons. There were plots where revengers surprised their victims with lethal stage props. There were plots with hobnail hammers, scalding cauldrons, and falling trapdoors. There were plots and plots and plots and plots.
Shakespeare even put his hand to the genre with the gruesome Titus Andronicus. So when Shakespeare’s audience was greeted with Hamlet for the first time, it fully expected a traditional revenge tragedy. Claudius has killed Hamlet’s father so now it’s payback time.
But Shakespeare, Fletcher believes, had good reason to deliver a play that would go deeper into the mourning process than anything the world had seen. Three years earlier he had lost his son Hamnet—a name, at the time, interchangeable with Hamlet—so this play was personal. And even though three years had passed, that doesn’t mean that he had gotten over it. In fact, watching Hamlet’s response to his father death, it seems clear that Shakespeare hasn’t.
That’s because he may have been suffering from “complicated grief,” which is
a grief that doesn’t resolve itself naturally over time. Instead, it persists and even deepens, triggering psychic disturbances such as depression, detachment, and rage. These disturbances are what entangle Hamlet, inciting him to brood, to drift, and to lash out. And in Shakespeare’s play, as is typically the case in real life, the source of complicated grief is guilt.
The guilt is over feeling that what we do for our lost loved one is not enough. Fletcher notes how, from the very first, Hamlet attacks others for trying to move on with their lives. They, meanwhile, chastise him for being stuck in his grief, which his mother sees as not “common” and Claudius regards as “peevish.” Hamlet runs around the castle clothed in black, and he swears to his father’s ghost that he will do nothing other than remember him, pushing aside all other concerns:
The play, as Fletcher sees it, finds several ways to deal with complicated grief. First, it dispenses with plot which, like Beowulf, deals with the problem of grief by doing something. But the point is that more action doesn’t end grief. Therefore Hamlet, unlike previous revenge tragedies, had “a plot that seemed to be no plot at all.” As Fletcher notes, we see Hamlet wandering around the castle with a book while delivering long soliloquies. He raves about his inner doubts and he vents his disgust at life. When the ghost tries to get him back on track with the revenge plot, Hamlet botches it. Fletcher points out,
Instead of getting revenge, he disposed of an innocent man in a stairwell, tricked two casual acquaintances into getting royally butchered, and then jumped inside a grave: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, a fellow of infinite jest.”
Although it breaks revenge tragedy conventions, however, the play does important grieving work. First of all, it acknowledges the depth of the hurt and how inadequate are our responses, including the revenge response.
It also points out the inadequacy of public testimonial, the testimonial being in this case the theatrical scene that Hamlet composes and has the players perform. As Hamlet observes, and as Shakespeare knew as well as anyone, writing a play will get you only so far in your grieving. Everything about play acting seems fake, Hamlet thinks as he watches players performing emotions—in this case, Hecuba weeping for Trojan king Priam:
As we watch a tormented Hamlet realize that neither revenge nor a public performance will assuage his grief, we feel grateful to Shakespeare. He understands the depth of our own grief.
And this recognition is what finally brings relief, how Hamlet works as a “sorrow resolver.” When we realize that others are suffering as we are, something lifts. Hamlet himself comes to this realization when watching Laertes, who after all has lost both father and sister. “For the first time since his father’s death,” Fletcher writes, “Hamlet acknowledges that someone else can feel like him”:
[A]lthough Hamlet initially accuses Laertes of feigned grief, he soon comes to grasp that the young knight’s suffering is genuine: “By the image of my cause, I see the portraiture of his.”
This is what happens, Fletcher says,
when we see our grief mirrored back by other people. The mirroring reveals that we’re not alone in our sorrow; there’s a wider public that understands what it is to lose someone who can never be replaced. And with their understanding, that public helps not only support us through our bereavement, but also to relieve our anxiety that we haven’t done enough to commemorate our dead.
And so, with his dying words, Hamlet tells Fortinbras to tell the story of his own death:
To which Horatio responds with what is, to my mind, the most beautiful farewell in all of literature. In the play W;t, Vivian’s former professor turns to the second line when Vivian succumbs to her cancer:
Now it is up to us to tell Hamlet’s story, which we return to century after century. We have found time to grieve in its “drifting, eddying, dilating story” and we have recognized our own disdain, dismay and even anger at “clichéd funerals and formulaic condolences”—and in doing so, we have been both able to honor “the uniqueness of the life departed” and found a way to move on.
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Wednesday
My faculty reading group has plunged into Hamlet, and our engagement with the work has given me insights into a disturbing story I read recently. According to Ed Kilgore of The Atlantic, Joe Biden may not have the advantage over Trump with young voters that many of us have been assuming. With the caveat that the election is still almost a year away, Kilgore fears that Trump could carry the youth vote—or if not win it outright, at least considerably shrink the margins that Hillary Clinton and Biden racked up in the past two elections.
The article put me in mind of another I read recently—I can’t find it at the moment—that believes that young people don’t have the same kind of belief in the institutions of democracy that are sacred to people like me. And because they don’t, some may be drawn to Trump’s increasingly fascistic alternative.
Now, one shouldn’t panic too early. After all, Trump and the GOP are still on the wrong side of many issues that young people care about, from abortion to student loans to LGBTQ+ rights to climate change to gun control to economic fairness. Still, we can’t foreget that Hitler managed to generate a fair degree of enthusiasm amongst disaffected young people. (Think of all you’ve heard about “Hitler youth.”) The unimaginable could happen here.
Rereading Hamlet has given me insight into our situation. The prince of Denmark returns home from college to discover that his previously stable world has been turned upside down. His revered father is dead and, instead of his mother grieving as he thinks she should, she has married his dissolute uncle. (As he puts it, “The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”). He’s in love with Ophelia but Polonius uses her to spy on him. She, obedient to a fault, goes along with her father, prompting Hamlet to wonder if all women are untrustworthy. (“Frailty, thy name is women,” he tells his mother at one point.) Two old friends, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, have also been commissioned to spy on him. There’s even a foreign threat, with Fortinbras longing to revenge Norway’s defeat at the hands of the Danes.
And to top it all off, there’s a ghost in the form of his father telling him that “murder most foul” has been committed and that he must revenge it. It’s not initially clear whether this ghost is to be believed, but Hamlet’s “mousetrap”—staging a play in which the murder is reenacted—elicits tangible truth that the ghost is telling the truth.
Still, murder is not something that one does easily, even with the facts, and young people today may be similarly confused about their options. That’s why I’m sympathetic. For the past seven years, our youth have watched Trump turn the world upside down and, with the impatience of their age, imagine that the Democrats’ measured response is a sign of weakness. After all, why is someone who tried to overthrow the government still leading the GOP. Furthermore, there are other ways that Biden (like Hamlet, Sr.) seems unable to protect them—they’ve seen the Supreme Court override him on matters of abortion and student debt. Like Hamlet, generation Z is living in a world where their elders appear helpless, hapless, and worse. Like Hamlet, they see something rotten in the state of Denmark.
In their response, we’re seeing some of the behavior we also see in Hamlet. First of all, the prince is surly with authority figures (the king and the queen). Then he feigns madness (although he may not need to do much feigning since he feels half crazed as it is). He famously contemplates suicide—or as he puts it, taking up “arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.” He curses the fact that all the responsibility seems to be on his shoulders (“Oh cursed spite, that ever I was formed to set it right”). He lashes out against his girlfriend and his mom in some ugly ways. He also lurches from underreaction to overreaction—he comes up with a reason for not killing Claudius when he sees him praying and then impulsively puts a sword through someone behind a curtain (“I took thee for thy better,” he tells the dead Polonius). His revenge against the two hapless friends who are required to spy on him is out of proportion to their actual sins.
If our young people are acting a bit mad at times, should we be surprised? I am reminded of my own days in college (1969-73). Our generation had seen multiple assassinations, witnessed Jim Crow violence, watched riots on television, and seen the suffering caused by a war that no one could explain or justify—all the while being scolded for acting out in the various ways that we did. Hysterical Hamlet spoke for us.
Hamlet does find his bearings at the end of the play and attempts to reconcile with Laertes. He learns to see beyond his own confusion into the pain of another man. As it turns out, his efforts come too late—the wheels have already been set in motion that will end in his death—but we see that madness doesn’t get the last word.
So here’s hoping that our young and disaffected will come to see where their true interests—and where democracy’s true interests—lie. It may help that the one who sits on the throne is no Claudius but one who has come to his position legitimately. Joe Biden also genuinely cares for his Hamlets as Trump never will. That, in the end, may make a big difference.
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Tuesday
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic has a way of voicing much of what is on my mind, and in yesterday’s newsletter he articulated a recurring anxiety: that Joe Biden will lose the 2024 election to Donald Trump because people see him as boring. Even though the president has an impressive list of White House accomplishments to his name—as opposed to Trump, who had virtually none (and who attempted a coup to boot)—Nichols says that the American voter “has come to expect celebrity and excitement from the White House, and they pay little attention to policy.”
Which brings to mind a W.H. Auden poem about a boring man. I agreed with Auden’s satiric point when I was in high school, but now, in light of rising fascism, I see it very differently.
Before getting to it, however, let’s look at some of Biden’s accomplishments. I owe the following to Up North News, a Madison WI website that follows political matters.
When the Democrats held Congress during the first two years of his presidency, the president can be credited with lowering healthcare and drug costs (including insulin); fighting climate change; reducing energy costs; investing in mental health care; and investing in American manufacturing and infrastructure. During that time he also signed into law the most consequential federal gun safety legislation in decades, canceled up to $20,000 in federal student loans for millions of Americans, dramatically increased domestic microchip manufacturing, and reformed the U.S. postal service to ensure its long-term stability.
Oh yes, and he led the international effort to support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, oversaw the reauthorization of the Violence against Women Act, nominated the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, and pardoned all prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession.
I would go on and on only I’m afraid of, well, boring you. I’ll just add all those things the Biden has not done, including cost the country a million lives by botching a pandemic response, pardon cronies in jail, channel government money to himself, undermine NATO, cozy up to Vladimir Putin, stack the Supreme Court with rightwing ideologues, separate immigrant families from their children and, oh yes, incite his followers to attack the Capitol.
And if Biden is reelected, he will not try to end Obamacare, ban abortions nationwide, place millions of immigrants in camps, separate children from their immigrant families, make life hard for LGBTQ+ folk, prevent Muslims from coming into the country, and fill the Justice Department, the military, and the federal work force with rightwing extremists.
Of course, if Biden did do these things, he’d be far more exciting. But you get my point.
Now for Auden’s “Unknown Citizen.” Until I looked it up, I was sure that it was written during the 1950s, but it was actually composed in 1939, prior to World War II. “Prior” is important since I expect Auden would have been worried about other things than faceless bureaucrats once England, France and Poland started fighting the Nazis.
The poem became a hit in the 1950s when Americans were worried about faceless corporate jobs and cookie cutter housing developments. At the time we lamented that modern life and consumer culture were blotting out individuality. The idea, however, of someone who “served the Greater Community” in everything he did, who was pro-union, and who never interfered in his children’s education (in other words, assumed the teachers were professionals who could do their jobs) actually sounds pretty good these days. Here’s the poem:
The Unknown Citizen By W.H. Auden
(To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be One against whom there was no official complaint, And all the reports on his conduct agree That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint, For in everything he did he served the Greater Community. Except for the War till the day he retired He worked in a factory and never got fired, But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc. Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views, For his Union reports that he paid his dues, (Our report on his Union shows it was sound) And our Social Psychology workers found That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink. The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way. Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured, And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured. Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan And had everything necessary to the Modern Man, A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire. Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went. He was married and added five children to the population, Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation. And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education. Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
Of course, one of Auden’s targets here is the surveillance state—the “we” in the poem—and that is indeed something to be concerned about. Our ability to get information about individuals far exceeds Auden’s worst fears.
Otherwise, however, the poem describes many members of what NBC’s Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation.” If we can’t appreciate these men and women, Nichols believes, it’s because “bored and sated voters are more prone to reward showmanship, overblown promises, and made-for-TV rage than competence.” Auden undervalues Unknown Citizen’s ability to do his job well.
Biden may not be, “in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word,” a saint. But he’s a lot closer than many in Washington. And as he himself is fond of saying, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”
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Monday
For the past few weeks, I’ve been fine-tuning my book manuscript for publication. Thanks to my periodical failure to record page numbers, the endnotes alone have taken me three weeks to complete and I had to master the Chicago Manual of Style to boot. Fortunately, I now can see the finish line.
For the most part, I’ve just been line editing but occasionally I’ve seen the need to add material. I report today on what I’m saying about Harold Bloom.
I include Bloom in the chapter about cultural conservatives. Previously, I had given him short shrift by not discussing his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Since my book is about how literature changes lives and since Bloom contends that Shakespeare invented personality as we now understand it, it’s essential that I say something.
I’m intrigued by the project itself. Bloom is famous for his notion that writers are anxious about being influenced, and it’s clear whom Bloom is competing with and has anxieties about: Samuel Johnson
In 1765, Samuel Johnson wrote what his Pulitzer-winning biographer Walter Jackson Bate describes as ““one of the landmarks in the history of literary criticism.” Johnson changed the way we see Shakespeare, placing him “above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.”
Johnson is particularly impressed by Shakespeare’s characters, observing,
His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.
It’s clear to me that Bloom felt, if he were to be the Johnson of our own age, he needed to write his own Preface to Shakespeare. And in fact, it’s the same kind of book, with a magisterial introduction followed by comments on the individual plays. I sense that Bloom wants to be for our time what Johnson was to “the Age of Johnson” (1745-1798).
Bloom also follows in the footsteps of Percy Shelley, the subject of Bloom’s early studies. I think he takes to heart what Shelley, in Defence of Poetry, says about authors who change the world. At one point Shelley writes that
it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place.
Thinking, like Shelley, that an author like Shakespeare can change “the moral condition of the world,” Bloom sets out to spell out how.
Bloom contends that Shakespeare “altered life” by changing the way we think about ourselves. Whereas fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Johnson “ideograms,” Shakespeare created characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, thereby inventing “human inwardness.” Elaborating on what he means by this, Bloom writes,
Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare’s greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness. Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater…
By “deplore,” Bloom is partly thinking of Shylock. Shakespeare’s powerful depiction of the Jewish money lender who literally demands a pound of flesh may, he thinks, have incited more anti-Semitism than The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (the infamous 1903 Russian tract about “Jewish global domination” that played a role in the Holocaust). In other words, once Shakespeare unleashed fully three-dimensional characters upon world, they didn’t always lead to good. Shakespeare may have changed the very way we experience feelings—Bloom says that he “pragmatically reinvented” us—but those feelings could have bad as well as good consequences.
So although Bloom is like Shelley in the way he sees Shakespeare as having changed history, unlike Shelley Bloom doesn’t connect the Bard with the struggle for social and political liberation. In fact, he has derided those who embrace a multicultural canon. Bloom speaks unapologetically about Shakespeare’s ability to transcend history, something which Shakespeare’s fellow playwright also noted when he said that he “was not of an age but of all time.”
Bloom is not at all a fan of various historical approaches to Shakespeare and speaks derisively of “Feminists, Marxists, Afrocentrists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists and Deconstructors.” Calling them “the school of resentment,” he attacks them for reducing figures like Shakespeare to their own narrow agendas.
In my experience, Bloom caricatures his opposition here. Most literature teachers I know tend to be rather eclectic in their approach to texts, using whatever tools seem most appropriate for the task at hand. There are relatively few doctrinaire feminists, Marxists, etc in the academy. Likewise, those who insist on Shakespeare’s universality are no longer adverse to looking at him through historical, psychological, and other lenses as well. In fact, a play like Merchant of Venice, which Bloom has problems with, cries out for an examination of how 16th century Britain regarded Jews.
But whatever reservations I have about The Invention of the Human—for instance, I think some credit for the invention should go to the Chaucer and, before him, to the great Greek playwrights—I share his admiration for figures like Hamlet, Falstaff and others. It really does feel like such characters actually existed.
As Bloom observes, “even if we never attend a performance or read a play,” Shakespeare has “made us theatrical,” changing our ideas “as to what makes the self authentically human.”
William Blake illustration from Songs of Experience
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Christ the King Sunday
Today is “Christ the King” Sunday, which celebrates the prospect of Jesus reigning “over the minds of individuals by his teachings, in their hearts by His love, in each one’s life by the living according to His law and the imitating of His example” (to borrow Pope Pius XI’s description). As I read over today’s Gospel reading from Matthew (25:31-46), I found myself wondering what Trump-supporting Evangelicals think of the passage.
After all, the way today’s MAGA Republicans seek to slash programs for the poor while cutting taxes for America’s wealthiest—all the while cheering on a man who dreams of creating vast detention camps for the “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country”—would seem to put them in Jesus’s goat category:
Jesus said, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
Perhaps some combination of prosperity theology and Calvinist predestination allows Trump “Christians” to think of themselves as sheep. Perhaps they imagine that they are bound for “eternal life” because they are amongst the elect while the poor deserve their punishment.
For me, Matthew’s passage is about the here and now rather than some future life-after-death. While I don’t much care for the monarchical metaphor, I read it as a vision of the paradise we should be working towards while still alive. The deep joy that comes with reaching out to those in need contrasts dramatically with the mental hell of resentment, anger and fear that arises when one ignores or contributes to suffering. The sadistic satisfaction that comes with watching Trump vent his spleen against his enemies ultimately leaves one feeling hollow, despite its temporary high. A deep love for others and a deep love for God (a.k.a. creation) is the only way to experience genuine peace and joy.
Which brings me to William Blake, who both calls out his hypocritical Christian society and imagines a world where the sun shines and thorn-free fields produce a bounty for all. Think of the sun here as an internal state. Despite their suffering, the children catch glimpses of it while they are singing their songs of joy. As Blake’s other “Holy Thursday” poem (the one in Songs of Innocence) describes the hymn-singing children, “Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song/ Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of Heaven among.”
Although we appear to be a rich and fruitful land, when it comes to our “many children poor,” we reveal ourselves as “a land of poverty.”
Holy Thursday
Is this a holy thing to see, In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reducd to misery, Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song? Can it be a song of joy? And so many children poor? It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine. And their fields are bleak & bare. And their ways are fill’d with thorns. It is eternal winter there.
For where-e’er the sun does shine, And where-e’er the rain does fall: Babe can never hunger there, Nor poverty the mind appall.
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Friday
In yesterday’s Thanksgiving sermon, our seminarian Michael Sturdy spoke about God’s greatest gift to us. Reflecting on Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians (9:6-15), Michael essentially said that, when we open our hearts to God, the gift we get back is an open heart. In other words, offering up thanks is not for God’s benefit. It’s for our own.
After the service, I mentioned to Michael that this is a truth that Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost fails to understand. Because he has made his ego his god and has projected this outward, Satan thinks God is a being that hungers for praise. By the same reasoning, he thinks that, when one praises God, one diminishes oneself. The passage I have in mind occurs in Book IV when, in a rare moment of introspection, Satan questions why he rebelled. After all, what could be easier than praising God?
He deserved no such return From me, whom he created what I was In that bright eminence, and with his good Upbraided none; nor was his service hard. What could be less than to afford him praise, The easiest recompense, and pay him thanks, How due?
Satan, however, wants all this praise coming to him. Being, as archangel, one step below God, he longed to be the highest. He also experiences “endless gratitude” as a burdensome debt that can never be paid back. In other words, he sees God, as creator, using gifts to reinforce His/Her superiority:
Yet all his good proved ill in me, And wrought but malice. Lifted up so high, I ’sdained subjection, and thought one step higher Would set me highest, and in a moment quit The debt immense of endless gratitude, So burthensome, still paying, still to owe…
What Satan has forgotten, he admits, is that God’s gift doesn’t work this way. When we pay with our prayers of thanksgiving, the debt is automatically discharged. “A grateful mind,” Satan says, “by owing owes not” and so “what burden then?”
Forgetful what from him I still received; And understood not that a grateful mind By owing owes not, but still pays, at once Indebted and discharged—what burden then?
We only feel like poor debtors if we’re not grateful. Once we pour out thanks, we realize that doing so brings us ecstatic joy. Which is what God (or, if you will, the universe) has wanted for us all along.
Milton takes a stab at describing this ecstatic joy in the dance of the angels. Perhaps Dante’s Paradiso (see illustration above) is Milton’s inspiration here:
No sooner had th’ Almighty ceased, but all The multitude of angels with a shout Loud as from numbers without number, sweet As from blessed voices, uttering joy, Heav’n rung With jubilee, and loud Hosanna’s filled Th’ eternal Regions…
And then there is there harp playing—which, as any musician will tell you, is its own reward:
[T]heir golden harps they took, Harps ever tun’d, that glittering by their side Like quivers hung, and with preamble sweet Of charming symphony they introduce Their sacred Song, and waken raptures high; No voice exempt, no voice but well could join Melodious part, such concord is in Heav’n.
In short, giving general thanks for all our blessings is a lot of fun. Whereas keeping account of who owes what to whom is the quickest way to internal hell.
If you celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday, I hope you had a chance to experience the heaven that comes with expressing gratitude. And if, instead, you chose to spend the holiday in jealous resentment—well, that is the “lowest deep” that can devour you utterly.
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Thursday – Thanksgiving
For this week’s poetry column in the Sewanee Mountain Messenger, my Thanksgiving poem was somewhat unusual. Most people don’t think of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (full title below*) as a poem about a family coming together to express gratitude. But I think it works.
Wordsworth recounts revisiting a spot overlooking the banks of the Wye River after a five-year absence. While five years may not sound like a long time, in Wordsworth’s case it feels like a lifetime. That’s because, during those five years, he has witnessed the French Revolution, had an affair and a child with a French woman, seen the Revolution morph into a reign of terror, and fled back to England.
During his time away, he talks about how, when he needed peace, he would focus on memories of the Wye River prospect. He reports how
oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet..
Now he’s back and this time he’s not alone. His “dear, dear sister” Dorothy is with him. “In thy voice,” he says,
I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes.
To which he adds, “Oh! yet a little while may I behold in thee what I was once.”
So now it’s time for his prayer of thanks. Knowing that his joy in the Wye River landscape is deep and genuine—after all, Nature never betrays “the heart that loved her”—he predicts this moment will lead “from joy to joy” for the rest of their lives.
And they will need this memory given that they will face many dark moments. Wordsworth lists them:
— evil tongues, –rash judgments, –the sneers of selfish men, –greetings where no kindness is, –the dreary intercourse of daily life.
And a little later:
— solitude, –fear, –pain, –grief.
Luckily, the Wye River spot has now impressed them both with its quietness and beauty. Bolstered by lofty thoughts, the poet is confident that the bad times will never
prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings.
Here’s the excerpt I shared with Messenger readers.
For thou art with me here upon the banks Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings.
But the poem doesn’t end here. To this point, Wordsworth has been focused more on the two of them. Now he imagines that Dorothy, in her future, will be able to recall this moment for her own needs. When she does so, she will remember standing here with her brother and recalling how much the spot meant to him as well as her—not only because of its beauty but because he stood there enjoying it with her.
Isn’t an important part of a Thanksgiving gathering the later memories we have of it? In our other gathering today, I will come together with friends that shared a Thanksgiving with my family 67 years ago. When I was growing up, three faculty families—the Bateses, the Degens, and the Goodsteins—would gather every year for a joint meal. When my mother died a year ago, the last of the older generation left us, but our Thanksgiving this year will have two additional generations. As always, we will be together in our house in the beautiful Sewanee woods.
As Wordsworth puts it earlier in the poem, “in this moment there is life and food for future years.”
Here’s how the poem ends:
Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee: and, in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance— If I should be where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence—wilt thou then forget That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came Unwearied in that service: rather say With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
*Full title: “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798”
