June Is Short and We Must Joy in It

By Robin Bates | Published: May 30, 2023
Francis Ledwidge, Irish World War I poet who died in 1917

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Wednesday

To welcome in June, I share today an absolutely gorgeous poem by Francis Ledwidge, and the lyric takes on even more power when one learns about the author. That Ledwidge, who came from a poor Irish family, was killed by a German shell during World War I gives a special meaning to the lines,

…for June is short
And we must joy in it and dance and sing,
And from her bounty draw her rosy worth.

Indeed, the next line– Ay! soon the swallows will be flying south—may allude to John Keats’s ominous final line in “Ode: To Autumn”: “And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” Ledwidge follows up his dark forecast with a powerful conclusion:

The wind wheels north to gather in the snow
Even the roses spilt on youth’s red mouth
Will soon blow down the road all roses go.

I don’t know whether this carpé diem or “seize the day” poem was written before World War I or during—both are possible—but it certainly forecast Ledwidge’s own end. He died at 29.

June
By Francis Ledwidge

Broom out the floor now, lay the fender by,
And plant this bee-sucked bough of woodbine there,
And let the window down. The butterfly
Floats in upon the sunbeam, and the fair
Tanned face of June, the nomad gipsy, laughs
Above her widespread wares, the while she tells
The farmer’s fortunes in the fields, and quaffs
The water from the spider-peopled wells.
The hedges are all drowned in green grass seas,
And bobbing poppies flare like Elmo’s light
While siren-like the pollen-stained bees
Drone in the clover depths. And up the height
The cuckoo’s voice is hoarse and broke with joy.
And on the lowland crops the crows make raid,
Nor fear the clappers of the farmer’s boy,
Who sleeps, like drunken Noah, in the shade.

And loop this red rose in that hazel ring
That snares your little ear, for June is short
And we must joy in it and dance and sing,
And from her bounty draw her rosy worth.
Ay! soon the swallows will be flying south,
The wind wheel north to gather in the snow
Even the roses spilt on youth’s red mouth
Will soon blow down the road all roses go.

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Moby Dick and Whales with a Grudge

By Robin Bates | Published: May 29, 2023
A boat sunk off the coast of Portugal by orcas

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Tuesday

While I admire Moby Dick, I’ve always questioned whether a whale would seek vengeance the way that Moby Dick does. After all, it isn’t only Ahab that prolongs their battle to three days. Isn’t Melville guilty of anthropomorphizing Moby Dick when he has the whale stick around to finish off Ahab and his vessel?

Recent news reports of killer whales attacking boats have me questioning my view, however. According to an article in Scientific American, some whale experts have speculated that the attacks “may be a response to a bad past experience involving a boat”—say, from sustaining injuries from a collision or becoming entangled in a fishing line.

To be sure, there are other hypotheses, including that “the killer whales have invented a new fad, something that subpopulations of these members of the dolphin family are known to do.”

In any event, there appear to be increasing instances of orca-boat contact, with 49 instances recorded in 2020 alone. According to the article,

the orcas preferentially attack the boats’ rudder, sometimes scraping the hull with their teeth. Such attacks often snap the rudder, leaving the boat unable to navigate. In three cases, the animals damaged a boat so badly that it sank: In July 2022 they sank a sailboat with five people onboard. In November 2022 they caused a sailboat carrying four to go down. And finally, in this month’s attack, the Swiss sailing yacht Champagne had to be abandoned, and the vessel sank while it was towed to shore.

The whale in Melville’s novel seems to have it in for Ahab and his crew. On the first day of the chase, the author attributes a “malicious intelligence” to Moby Dick as the whale “shoot[s] his pleated head lengthwise beneath the [whaling] boat.” Melville notes that the whale “dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way.”

By the third day, Moby Dick has associated the hunt with the mother ship and so decides to take that boat out as well. We are told that the whale is driven by revenge:  

From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.

The Scientific American article observes, however, that the Mediterranean orcas, unlike Melville’s sperm whale, don’t appear to transfer their grudge (if it is in fact a grudge) from boats to humans. They haven’t gone after people who ended up in the water.

Still, the vindictive aspect of Moby Dick isn’t quite a far-fetched as I once thought it.

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A War Hero Who Derided Memorials

By Robin Bates | Published: May 28, 2023
Soldier, poet and author Siegfried Sassoon

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Monday – Memorial Day

One of the key monuments memorializing the war dead is the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing, which is dedicated to the 55,000 unnamed British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the five World War I battles while defending the so-called Ypres Salient. (Over a million soldiers lost their lives in those battles.) One man who was not impressed was poet soldier Siegfried Sassoon.

Sassoon sees the memorial as scant compensation for Ypres’s “dim defenders.” Given that the memorial is honoring nameless soldiers, Sassoon points out the irony in its claim that “their name liveth forever.” While Sassoon himself acted heroically in the war, at one point single-handedly capturing a German trench and scattering 60 German soldiers, he eventually turned pacifist and came to oppose the war, barely avoiding court martial. As he saw it, what had started out as a war of defense became a senseless slaughter for dubious ends.

In “On Passing the New Menin Gate,” written years later in 1927, he imagines the dead returning to deride “this sepulcher of crime.” Those responsible for the war think they can pay off the dead with “a pile of peace-complacent stone.”

It is a sentiment reminiscent of Wilfred Owen, whose poetry Sassoon encouraged and, after Owen’s death in the last week of the war, promoted. I’m thinking particularly of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” where Owen savagely attacks the notion that “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” In “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” meanwhile, Owen says that passing bells are inadequate “for these who die as cattle.”

For Sassoon’s part, in “Menin Gate” he speaks of “the unheroic dead who fed the guns.” No one can “absolve the foulness of their fate,/ Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones”:

On Passing the New Menin Gate
By Siegfried Sassoon

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
the unheroic dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,-
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

    Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
    Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
    Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
    The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
‘Their name liveth for ever’, the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
as these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulcher of crime.

While war memorials are important, we prove ourselves deserving of derision if we do not do all in our power to prevent the wars that make them necessary.

Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing, Ypres, Belgium
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Cormorant Delivers Pentecostal Message

By Robin Bates | Published: May 27, 2023

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Spiritual Sunday – Pentecost

Reprinted (and slightly amended) from June 12, 2011

Today is Pentecost, which falls 50 days after the Resurrection and ten days after Jesus ascended to heaven.  As the disciples were coming together to pray, they experienced a sound that “came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind.” Tongues of fire danced above their heads, and “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”

To mark this day, I offer up a fine Pentecost poem by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.

I’m no theologian or Biblical scholar, but I regard Pentecost as the third step in an evolution of consciousness.  This three-step process finds metaphorical expression in the figure of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  At one point in history, God was seen as external.  Then an extraordinary man, Jesus of Nazareth, discovered that he—and therefore all of us–had God within him.  The “Counselor” that Jesus spoke of sending to humankind was the revelation that we are all of us “sons of light” (John 12:36), transcendent beings as well as material men and women. As Jesus told the disciples (John 14:12), “He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father.”

But just as people were once dependent on an external God, the disciples were at risk of becoming dependent on a physically present Jesus.  They had to learn to listen to the guide they carried within.  As Jesus explained (John 16:7), “it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.”

The Counselor may be always present, but we spend much of our lives shutting him/her/it out.  Walcott’s poem captures our sense of being lost through images of “rootless concrete” and snow-covered city sidewalks.  Here’s his poem:

Pentecost
By Derek Walcott

Better a jungle in the head
than rootless concrete.
Better to stand bewildered
by the fireflies’ crooked street;

winter lamps do not show
where the sidewalk is lost,
nor can these tongues of snow
speak for the Holy Ghost;

the self-increasing silence
of words dropped from a roof
points along iron railings,
direction, in not proof.

But best is this night surf
with slow scriptures of sand,
that sends, not quite a seraph,
but a late cormorant,

whose fading cry propels
through phosphorescent shoal
what, in my childhood gospels,
used to be called the Soul.

Walcott may be having a conversation with “Little Gidding,” T. S. Eliot’s own Pentecost poem.  Eliot’s poem also begins in “the dark time of the year” with a brief and glowing afternoon sun “flam[ing] the ice, on pond and ditches” as it attempts to “stir[ ] the dumb spirit”:

The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year.

But where Eliot, writing in the early days of World War II, finds images of a painful but ultimately cleansing purification in the fire of the London blitzkrieg, Walcott turns to his Caribbean childhood, spent in Santa Lucia and Trinidad, to find God.  It is as though his mind must travel there because he is having trouble hearing God in the cities, with their cold streetlamps lining the regulated sidewalks. 

While Walcott surely would not be experiencing snow during this time of year, he could well be thinking of winters in Boston, where he taught and where sidewalks regularly disappear beneath a blanket of snow. Snow functions as a metaphor for a deadening of the spirit in both Eliot’s Waste Land, where the poet talks of “forgetful snow,” and James Joyce’s “The Dead,” where we see “snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

The Spirit’s message hasn’t been entirely erased from this snowy landscape. After all, railings peer out from the snow, hieroglyphs that seem to be delivering some kind of message. But that message is nowhere near as powerful as that which the poet finds in the Caribbean.

The tongues of fire that can rouse us from our stupor and put us once again in touch with soul are the fireflies that light a crooked street. The Holy Spirit is “the jungle in the head,” speaking to Walcott through the remembered cry of a (not quite an angel) cormorant.  The Pentecostal wind of the night surf, with its “slow scriptures of sand,” sends the cry.  Or put another way, the adult poet remembers that cry, now fading with time, and is taken back to the phosphorescent shoal of his childhood when God seemed alive and present.

Pentecost is a day that reminds us that “what used to be called the Soul” continues to walk amongst us.  Or rather, within us.

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In Censoring Gorman, We Censor Hope

By Robin Bates | Published: May 25, 2023
Amanda Gorman at the presidential inauguration

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Friday

Thanks to a mother with far-right views, Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb,” which the poet read at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, is no longer available to elementary school students in a Florida K-8 school. According to a Washington Post article, following Daily Salinas’s complaint, the Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes restricted elementary school access to Gorman’s book, although it did “deem the book suitable for middle school students,” saying that it had “educational value because of its historical significance.”

In other words, the school would keep the poem from my grandson, who was eight at the time the poem came out and whose reaction to it was “Wow!”

Alban and I examined the poem together as part of a “civics through poetry” unit I had put together for him. (His school during the Covid shutdown was encouraging family members to help with their kids’ educations.) I gave Alban poems both old and new, everything from Longfellow and Whitman to Gorman and Langston Hughes—and speaking of the latter, I note that, thanks to the mother’s objections, the school has also restricted Love to Langston.

Since Salinas voiced her objections, her political background has come to light. She apparently attended at least one rally of the Proud Boys, members of whom have been convicted of seditious conspiracy for the January 6 attack, and she attended a school board protest last year with Moms For Liberty, a rightwing group that has been seeking to ban books around the country. She has also posted a summary of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic forgery that Hitler used to justify the Holocaust, on her Facebook page. (She has since apologized for that.) One book that she does support, according to Daily Beast, is Mike Huckabee’s The Kids Guide to Ron DeSantis.

While admitting that she had not read Gorman’s poem in its entirety, Salinas complained that it contained “indirect hate messages.”

Salinas can believe what she believes, of course. What is troubling is how a school system will buckle to rightwing voices (one rightwing voice in this case). Saying that it “erred on the side of caution” in limiting student access, it has opened itself up to further bullying.

I share below some of the blog essay I wrote when examining the poem with Alban two and a half years ago. At one point I quoted what Washington Post’s Karen Attiah had to say about Gorman’s reading:

[S]he was not a luxury. The purifying power of poetry has existed as long as humans have wielded words. And for women especially, as [poet Audre] Lorde said, poetry “is a vital necessity of our existence.” Biden’s inaugural words about unity and coming together were good and helpful and presidential. But it was Gorman’s truth that was the necessary one.

Necessary for Black women in America. In a country that so loves to profit from our political, cultural and emotional labor, Gorman reminded those of us who live at the intersection of sexism and racism that we do not have the luxury of settling for hollow #BlackWomenWillSaveUs platitudes. Not when this country is unable to save us from discrimination, police brutality or dying in childbirth.

I was struck by how readily Gorman rose to the challenge of occasional poetry (poetry written for a special occasion), which used to be a common expectation and income source for poets in centuries past but has fallen out of fashion. She succeeded in part by channeling the voice of previous African American orators and poets. Her “we will rise” refrain, for instance, echoes both Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (“this nation will rise up”) and Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.”

America as a city on a hill, of course, has a long tradition, stemming back to John Winthrop’s injunction to build a civilization where “the eyes of all people are upon us.” John Kennedy invoked the image shortly after being elected, as did Ronald Reagan. Gorman’s focus is on climbing that hill, climbing having its own rich history within the African American community, from the Negro spiritual “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder” to Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son.” Hughes’s poem concludes,

So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now —
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

And then there’s the late Naomi Long Madgett’s “Midway,” which I have written about, which concludes with the line, “Mighty mountains loom before me and I won’t stop now.”

In Gorman’s poem, my grandson particularly liked the lines,

[B]eing American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into
and how we repair it.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation
rather than share it,
that would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy,
and this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can periodically be delayed,
it can never be permanently defeated.

Alban also felt inspired and personally challenged by the closing lines:

[W]hen the day comes we step out of the shade
aflame and unafraid,
the new dawn blooms as we free it,
for there is always light
if only we’re brave enough to see it,
if only we’re brave enough
to be it.

Think of how much we want young people to encounter this idealism.

Discussing the poem in light of the Capitol Hill seditionists, Alban and I found comfort in Gorman’s confidence in the future. (Alban said, “Wow!” while watching a video of her delivering the poem.) We also looked at the poem’s style. While written in free verse (no regular rhyme or rhythm), it does have a few rhymes (the best ones are often female, such as “inherit,” “repair it,” and “share it”), along with puns and alliteration. I challenged Alban to find the largest alliterative cluster, which he did (“to compose a country committed/ to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man”).

“The Hill We Climbed” deepened my grandson’s patriotism and his belief in the American promise. To rule that the poem is not appropriate for kids his age is an abomination.

Here’s the poem in its entirety:

The Hill We Climb
By Amanda Gorman

When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We’ve braved the belly of the beast
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace
And the norms and notions
of what just is
Isn’t always just-ice
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished
We the successors of a country and a time
Where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one
And yes we are far from polished
far from pristine
but that doesn’t mean we are
striving to form a union that is perfect
We are striving to forge a union with purpose
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and
conditions of man
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us
but what stands before us
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside
We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms
to one another
We seek harm to none and harmony for all
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew
That even as we hurt, we hoped
That even as we tired, we tried
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious
Not because we will never again know defeat
but because we will never again sow division
Scripture tells us to envision
that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
And no one shall make them afraid
If we’re to live up to our own time
Then victory won’t lie in the blade
But in all the bridges we’ve made
That is the promise to glade
The hill we climb
If only we dare
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into
and how we repair it
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation
rather than share it
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy
And this effort very nearly succeeded
But while democracy can be periodically delayed
it can never be permanently defeated
In this truth
in this faith we trust
For while we have our eyes on the future
history has its eyes on us
This is the era of just redemption
We feared at its inception
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs
of such a terrifying hour
but within it we found the power
to author a new chapter
To offer hope and laughter to ourselves
So while once we asked,
how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?
Now we assert
How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was
but move to what shall be
A country that is bruised but whole,
benevolent but bold,
fierce and free
We will not be turned around
or interrupted by intimidation
because we know our inaction and inertia
will be the inheritance of the next generation
Our blunders become their burdens
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy
and change our children’s birthright
So let us leave behind a country
better than the one we were left with
Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,
we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one
We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the west,
we will rise from the windswept northeast
where our forefathers first realized revolution
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states,
we will rise from the sunbaked south
We will rebuild, reconcile and recover
and every known nook of our nation and
every corner called our country,
our people diverse and beautiful will emerge,
battered and beautiful
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it

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Reading “Jabberwocky” to a Dying Child

By Robin Bates | Published: May 24, 2023
Tenniel, illus. from Alice through the Looking Glass

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Thursday

Yesterday’s Washington Post had a moving story about a woman who used poetry to comfort a son that was dying from a rare form of cancer. One poem in particular, Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” caught my eye. Josie Glausiusz says she recited it to her son as he lay comatose in her arms and only a few hours from death. It reminded me of the lullaby that I sang to the body of my own dead son after they had retrieved him from the river where he had drowned.  

Glausiusz reports that her son knew the poem by heart because she had often recited it to him and his twin sister at bedtime. She notes that, as a “brave, bright, imaginative, optimistic boy, he loved the drama of the poem and the courage of the ‘beamish boy’ as, with his ‘vorpal sword’ in hand, he defeats his ‘manxome foe.’ (The full poem can be found at the end of today’s blog.)

“Jabberwocky” was not the only poem that Glausiusz read to her son:

One evening in the hospital in mid-February, I read him some of my favorite poems, poems that my own mother had read to me as a child. “Cargoes” by John Masefield (“Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir / Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine …”) and a Shakespeare sonnet (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes …”). He listened, rapt and smiling. Then we talked about the meaning of the poems.

Poetry consoled the mother as well, who said that poems offered her an anchor. During her son’s illness, she started a poetry group called “Poetry Is Medicine” on WhatsApp,” where she received and shared poems with friends. “With just a word or a phrase,” she discovered, “a poem can reach the hidden places that prayers or well-meaning advice cannot.”

Glausiusz also shares some of the poems that comforted her after her son died, including Luis Alberto de Cuenca’s “Moses.” I find a fascinating connection between it, “Jabberwocky,” and the lullaby I sang to my own son. Glausiusz says she read it aloud beside her son’s grave:

Moses
Luis Alberto de Cuenca
Trans. Gustavo Pérez Firmat

Give me your hand. We have to cross
the river and my strength fails me.
Hold me as if I were an abandoned package
in a wicker basket, a lump that moves
and cries in the twilight. Cross the river
with me. Even if this time the waters
don’t part before us. Even if this time God
doesn’t come to our aid and a flurry of arrows
riddles our backs. Even if there is no river.

“Jabberwocky” and “Moses” share a vision of venturing out into the unknown. Just as the speaker in Cuenca’s poem is prepared to enter the wilderness with a loved one, so the father in Carroll’s poem is watching his son enter a strange and forbidding landscape to confront the jabberwock:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
      And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
      The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
      The frumious Bandersnatch!”

Because of the anxieties, the joy is especially intense when the son safely returns. “Come to my arms, my beamish boy!” the father cries out.  It is this drama of venturing out into the unknown, and then returning safely, that is at the heart of the lullaby I sang to my dead son. It was a song I had sung to him many times when he was little:

Baby’s boat’s a silver moon,
sailing through the sky,
Sailing through a sea of sleep
As the stars float by

Sleep, baby, sleep
Out upon that sea
Only don’t forget to sail
Back again to me.

Baby’s fishing for a dream
Fishing near and far
His line a silver moonbeam is
His bait’s a shining star

Sleep, baby, sleep
Out upon that sea
Only don’t forget to sail
Back again to me.

Our lives are shattered when our children venture out and don’t sail back. But maybe, just maybe, we will join hands again or enfold them in an embrace.

Here’s “Jabberwocky”:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
      And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
      The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
      The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
      Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
      And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
      The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
      And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
      He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
      Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
      He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
      And the mome raths outgrabe.

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The Bard Fails to Prevent Genocidal Horror

By Robin Bates | Published: May 23, 2023

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Wednesday

I had an unsettling experience recently while reading Edna O’Brien’s Little Red Chairs, her 2015 novel about survivors of the Bosnian war and immigrants in general: I realized that I was one degree of separation from one of her genocidal characters. Or rather, from the character he is modeled on.

And this in turn means that I am two degrees of separation from the book’s villain.

I share this anecdote even though it isn’t the main thrust of today’s post, which is to explore why love of Shakespeare failed to prevent someone from becoming a homicidal psychopath. But more on that in a moment. First, the story.

In 1987, I received to Fulbright to teach in Yugoslavia, during which time I traveled around the country. At one point I spent several days teaching American literature in Skopje, Macedonia, and I remember overhearing a conversation about Nikolai Koljevič, a Bosnia Serb who taught at the University of Sarajevo and who was respected for his Shakespeare scholarship. (Shakespeare the Tragedian had come out a few years before.) My colleagues at the University of Ljubljana also mentioned him and, while they admired him, they were put off by his Serbian nationalism.

As well they should have been since, five years later, he would join the Bosnian Serbs when they launched war on the newly declared republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (they wanted to remain attached to Serbia). What followed were unspeakable atrocities, including the wholesale slaughter of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica and the three-year siege of Sarjevo, which resulted in 11,541 deaths. For much of the war, Koljević was a close confidant of Radovan Karadžič, the “Butcher of Bosnia” upon whom the villain in O’Brien’s book is based and who was himself a poet as well as a psychiatrist.

O’Brien takes liberties with history. Whereas in real life Karadžič disguised himself as a doctor in herbal medicine and hid out in Belgrade to escape from the International Criminal Court in the Hague, in Little Red Chairs he flees to rural Ireland, where he sets himself up a New Age healer and therapist. Taking the name Dr. Vlad, he achieves a fair degree of success—he even gets the childless protagonist Fidelma pregnant—but then the authorities catch up with him and imprison him. Eventually we learn of the horrific acts of brutality conducted under his watch and sometimes at his command.

(Fidelma, meanwhile, pays a price for her encounter. Three of Vlad’s former fellows, feeling betrayed by him, discover her pregnancy, kidnap her, and abort her with a crowbar, leaving her half dead. Her husband, meanwhile, turns on her for her infidelity and she flees to London, finding refuge in the immigrant community.)

The passage that caught my eye was a dream that Vlad/Karadžič has involving a conversation with the Shakespeare scholar my colleagues had mentioned, who is referred to as “his old friend K.” K/Koljević notes that Vlad has stopped writing poetry  and observes, “It stands to reason, with so much going on you had no time to reflect and maybe no wish to.” He then goes on to talk about their shared love of Shakespeare.

At one point, K takes a passage from Hamlet and twists it to apply to the slaughter at Srebrenica.  The passage is:

I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum. 

Somewhat perversely, K understands this to mean that Hamlet would sacrifice 40,000 men for Ophelia’s sake:

As I say, I read more while the siege went on. I re-read Hamlet and thought for all his protestation of loving Ophelia more than forty thousand brothers, he too was a specialist in the macabre.

Then there’s a reference to Brutus’s famous quote about needing to strike when the tides are high. The reference, of course, is to killing Caesar:

You raved, you ranted, your Utopia, that diamond city enfolded in hills was beginning to slip from your grasp. Everyone was betraying you, the whole world was against you and you resolved on even greater conquest. There were more territories to be taken. Ethnic purification must happen, even if in the end you ruled over a land of ghosts. Shakespeare must have come to your mind—that tide in the affairs of man, yet you mastered any doubts you might have had. So came the next bonanza. Srebrenica. A killing spree.

The K in Vlad’s dream goes on to reminisce about their carefree student days:

[B]etween us there was that oath, we were brothers, best friends in our youth and university days, a little competitive in our reverence for William Shakespeare. We loved Goethe and Musil, but Shakespeare was God….[We would cycle] through snug little towns and to the amazement of people, spouting Shakespeare. We loved our country and vowed to leave it a better place than when we had been born into it. But poetry came first.

There are certainly Shakespeare plays that touch on what happened with Koljević and Karadžič—Macbeth, Richard III—but at this point in the dream K shifts to Conrad. Few characters in literature lose their way as thoroughly as Kurtz, and K quotes from Heart of Darkness when he feels that his former blood brother is tuning him out:

So I began, as things unraveled up there in our lair, to talk to you, as in the old days, to talk of literature and why not, since we both loved it so. I said, “Do you remember Mr. Kurtz?” and you said of course, because that time in the mountain, along with Goethe and Musil and Shakespeare, we read every word of Heart of Darkness. Who wouldn’t. We followed the pallet on which the dying Kurtz was carried and pictured the crazy woman, who came abreast of the steamer, with her wild incantations, her necklaces of glass and I said to you, “Do you remember Kurtz’s last words?” and you went silent and I spoke them to you, The horror! The horror! And I put it to you if Kurtz was not trying to expiate his own horror and ask for remission of some kind.

And at this point, K says, he realizes that Vlad is inexorably lost, that the rope binding them has been severed:

You looked at me and I trembled because I knew that for you, at that moment, my death was as necessary and as meaningless as all the other death that had gone before.

In real life, Kolejević, whom the Americans and Europeans had been hoping would succeed Karadžič as the most moderate member of the leadership, blew his brains out. The K in the book explains why:

As time went on my nausea worsened. That warehouse [in Srebrenica], with its seven thousand men of reproductive age, kept coming into my mind, along with the leitmotif of the spattered roses on the square [a Sarajevan girl killed by sniper fire]. I began to believe I could breathe better dead than alive. You see, we all became unhinged in our bastion.

So does literature have any impact on psychopaths? Even if it doesn’t necessarily prevent evil, can it at least bring about remorse? Of course, Dr. Vlad and K are just literary characters, not actual Bosnian Serbs, but it’s still worth looking at O’Brien’s thoughts.

Her answer seems to be: in some cases yes, in others no. Fidelma detects no sign of repentance when, during Vlad’s trial, she gets a private interview with him. Instead, as we saw K observe, Vlad may even have twisted Hamlet to suit his own ends: after all, Hamlet doesn’t want to kill 40,000 men to save Ophelia. And if Vlad has in fact taken Brutus as his model, he sees only the assassination and none of Brutus’s tortured reflections.

In other words (to riff off a passage from Merchant of Venice), he’s a devil who can quote Shakespeare for his purpose.

K differs from Vlad (at least in Vlad’s dream) since literature eventually alerts him to the enormity of what he and his comrades have done. Although Kurtz, once the apogee of European Christian enlightenment, has descended into a desire to “exterminate the brutes,” at least (as narrator Marlow points out) he catches a glimpse of how far he has fallen. Maybe in the end he rediscovers his soul.

There are two other mentions of Shakespeare in the novel. In a dream fantasy, Fidelma imagines confronting the imprisoned Vlad with a passage from As You Like It:

“You remember in Cloonoila,” she begins. “One day, in the classroom, you read the children a speech from Shakespeare about the Seven Ages of Man—They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.You must have known it then that you had chosen the wrong part, the worst part, the way you know it now…that it could all have been different, you might be the poet you boasted of being and no one of the damned…it will find you yet…in all that solitude…it always does…”

“Don’t go,” he says and in that moment he is almost repentant, the mendicant, the broken Faustus, finally at a loss.

But this is only a dream and perhaps as overly hopeful one at that. And as one Bosnian Serb, a man who at one point followed orders to kill and at another deserted, tells Fidelma, “You want answers…Explain himself…you won’t get it…he can’t…feelings not the same, from where you are to where he is…carnage…Go home.”

In other words, her dream that literature will prompt a moment of truth-telling is illusory.

But Shakespeare also proves to have healing properties, and this novel, with its graphic accounts of unspeakable horror, ends with the immigrant community finding temporary peace in a performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Although their production is a “very free interpretation,” in the end the magic comes through as “wrongs were righted, true love and its virtuous properties restored. Nuptials were celebrated, twine rings exchanged, and packets of rice wantonly thrown on the heads of the eternally betrothed.”

There’s also an additional finale in which the word Home, so longed for by the immigrant community, is sung and chanted in the 35 different languages of the performers. At first it appears the moment will fizzle, but then

one woman stepped forward and took command, her voice rich and supple, a wine-dark sea filled with the drowned memories of love and belonging. Soon others followed, until at last thirty-five tongues, as one, joined in a soaring, transcendent Magnificat. Home. Home. Home. It rose and swelled, it reached to the rafters and through the walls, out onto the lit street, to countryside with its marsh and meadow, by graveyard and sheep fold, through dumbstruck forests, to the lonely savannahs and reeking slums, over seas and beyond, to endless, longed-for destinations.

In this novel with its heartrending accounts of people forced from their homes, a transcendent moment is reached. As O’Brien concludes,

You would not believe how many words there are for home and what savage music there can be wrung from it.

And that’s a good way to describe O’Brien’s own novel: savage music.

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As in 1984, Neo-Fascists Redefine Freedom

By Robin Bates | Published: May 22, 2023
Still from 1984

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Tuesday

For those puzzled about how rightwing authoritarians can use the word “freedom” so loosely, it’s worth taking another look at what George Orwell says about freedom in 1984. After all, Big Brother announces, in large letters on a public building, that “Slavery Is Freedom.” Before exploring what’s going on with this, there’s a useful recent essay by New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie that’s worth looking at.

Bouie recalls the “four freedoms” of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which were “freedom of speech and expression,” the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” the “freedom from want” and the “freedom from fear.”

In his 1941 State of the Union address, Roosevelt called these freedoms “the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.” Bouie notes that those freedoms were “the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.”

How can Republicans claim to be in favor of freedom, Bouie asks, if they ban abortions, promote child labor, attack course curriculums (especially when it comes to race and LGBTQ issues), and seek to turn America into a shooting gallery? Their four freedoms are very different from Roosevelt’s:

There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.

There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.

There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.

And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.

Which brings us to 1984.

“Freedom is slavery” is, of course, only one of the three official tenets, the other two being “War is Peace” and “Ignorance is Strength.” At first, it appears as though Big Brother is just gaslighting or trolling the public. It’s as if he wants to “own the libs,” saying outrageous things so he can get a kick out of their horrified reaction.

If so, he gets such a response from his arch-enemy Goldstein, as least according to the propaganda film he puts out. In one of his party rallies engineered to fan the flames of hatred (called “the Hate”), he has Goldstein sounding like Roosevelt or the Constitution:

He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed.

But owning the libs isn’t a sufficient explanation for the “slavery is freedom” declaration. For one thing, it doesn’t make much sense, as the freethinking and soon-to-be vaporized Symes explains to Winston:

How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

As we will learn, the fact that the slogan is nonsense is the point. It’s not logic that is being tested but loyalty. When Big Brother asserts an absurdity—an even better example is 2+2=5— you show you are a good party member by agreeing. As Orwell explains,

Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as DOUBLETHINK.

Trump understood this in a foundational way from the very beginning of his presidency when he asserted that his inauguration drew more people than Obama’s, even though photographs told a different story. “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

An alarming number of Republicans are believing Trump, especially when it comes to his assertion that he won the 2020 election. Loyalty is more important than truth and freedom means whatever rightwing extremists declare it to mean. That’s because the final goal is not truth or democracy or policy but power, a point Big Brother towards the end of the novel:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

The good news is that we haven’t descended into a 1984 reality altogether, as the defeat of Trump in 2020 indicates. But it’s also true that authoritarianism is making a move, with certain American conservatives holding up Hungarian strongman Victor Orban as a model to follow and Vladimir Putin as a leader to be celebrated. Orwell accurately foresaw that there would be this pull, even if he overestimated its success. At least, we’re not there yet:

The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations—not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.

The progressives Orwell has in mind are Stalin’s fellow travelers in the west, which in 1948 were a real thing, and we can be happy that most leftists and liberals are no longer cheering for authoritarian regimes. We can also be happy that, despite Orban and Putin fever amongst the Tucker Carlsons of the world, many Republicans still support Ukraine, NATO, and democratic governance.

Still, we must be vigilant when it comes to defining real freedom.

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Kingsolver Exposes Child Hunger

By Robin Bates | Published: May 21, 2023

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Monday

My recent reading has been throwing me back into my childhood. Two weeks ago Swann’s Way by Proust had me revisiting a childhood playmate—my Gilberte Swann was Chris Mayfield—and now Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead  is prompting me to remember Johnny, who was in my class from first through seventh grade.

At 11, Damon, whose mother has died and whose stepfather wants nothing to do with him, is placed with a foster family that doesn’t adequately feed him. Aside from school lunch, Demon gets one-fast food hamburger at night, along with a few fries. As a result, he becomes a scavenger:

At school I cruised the lunchroom with some other guys, picking off extra fries or whatever we could score….Our lunchroom visits never lasted long. I always downed my lunch fast and then hung out by the kitchen shelf thing where we put our trays. Some people and especially girls would bring back their lunch basically untouched, drop the tray, and waltz away like food grew on trees. Apples without one bite out of them, milk cartons not even opened. It killed me to think how this was happening at other lunch periods without me there to grab it. I mean, first graders, probably throwing away the best stuff. You want to cry for the waste.

And then there were the weekends, where he obsessed about food:

I had dreams about fod that went to the extreme. Like I’m eating a large pizza with pepperoni, smelling that peppery meat smell, the cheese with the great rubber feeling in my teeth, and then, bang! Awake. Back in the dog room [his bedroom is the dog’s former space, hungry. I’d go through the dirty clothes pile looking for edibles. Haillie sometimes would leave a box of Junior Mints or something in the pocket of her little shorts. I’d sniff it out like a dog.

Complaining to his social worker does no good, he discovers:

I’d already complained to Miss Barks, and she discussed it, but the McCobbs acted all shocked, saying they fed me night and day, how could a boy still be hungry after eating as much as I did? Miss Barks bought their story. She said if I didn’t get enough, for goodness’ sake, ask for seconds. If it even crossed her pretty head that these people were lying, stealing cheats, she was short on options. She had to let it go.

Damon finally gets some relief when Mr. McCobb, expecting him to pay his own way (at 11!), finds him a job at Golly’s Market:

The place had snacks and food so I could eat my dinner there free as part of my pay, which turned out to be the one good thing…Mr. Golly said it was a shame how much he always had to throw out in the way of hot dogs and such that he’d put under the heat lamp for the day. So I got to be his trash can, yes!

Of course, Damon has to work for this privilege. His job consists of sorting through garbage:

People could pay a small price to dump their trash in the lot out back. That was the separate business, with boys hired to pick through it. Anything worth money like aluminum cans went in one pile, plastic bottles in another. Batteries another.

Of course, there’s other stuff as well:

If I say I had to sort through people’s filthy, crappy trash, I’m saying there were diapers. Human shit. If I say there were rats, I don’t mean we saw one or two.

The episode reminds us that Republican legislatures in various states are trying to bring back child labor, and while I don’t know whether this will result in garbage sorting, I can imagine that it might. After all, they’ve discovered children working in various meat picking Anyway, in Sewanee Public School, Johnny and one other kid (Jackie) had to work to earn their free school lunches. While the rest of the class were diagramming sentences in the 20 minutes before lunch (this was when we were all 12), they would be excused to go down to the lunchroom to sweep, set up tables and chairs (the space doubled as the gym), and do other chores. I would see them behind the serving stations when we went down.

I remember one meal we had when the dessert they served up that day was so rich that no child would eat it—which you have to figure was extreme since most children will eat anything sweet. Yet I saw Johnny, with a bowl full of the stuff, chowing it down.

And maybe I noticed it because of something even more powerful that I had witnessed a year or two before. In fourth or fifth grade we had an Easter egg hunt—no separation of church and state for us—which most of the boys didn’t take seriously.  I did so, however, being one who always tried to please his teacher. I’m almost positive I found the most eggs, but Johnny, hearing my number, claimed he had found one more. The teacher didn’t bother to count our eggs but presented him with the prize, which was a large popcorn rabbit stuck together with caramel.

I felt cheated until I saw what Johnny did next. He tore into the rabbit like a ravenous beast—I can see it still today. There was no taking it home to show to anyone or even nibbling around the edges. As a result, at 10 or 11 I received the first inkling of my life what real hunger looks like. And I had a revelation that is unusual for a pre-teen: I thought, “He needs first prize much more than I do. I’m glad it worked out this way.”

Things are better than they used to be in the 1960s. Now the public schools have free breakfasts along with free lunches and children don’t have to work to receive them. There are also special programs to make sure that kids get fed during the summer, some of them state run. These are all welcome developments.

Sadly, many Republican legislators want to return to the days of Oliver Twist. Scrooge appears to be writing their bills.

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