The Stone Is Rolled–I’m Whole, I’m Held

By Robin Bates | Published: April 15, 2023
Bouguereau, Three Marys at the Tomb (1890)

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Spiritual Sunday

The story of doubting Thomas is fertile ground for poets and novelists since grappling with uncertainty is what literature does. For instance, to Jesus’s declaration, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus he is setting impossibly high standards and not accounting for human weakness.

Thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a miracle. But Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracle he rejects God too; for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous.

And:

Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him forever. But Thou didst think too highly of men therein…I swear, man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! Can he, can he do what Thou didst? By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him—Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter. 

In “A Doubting Thomas Sort-of-Sonnet,” Jill Alexander Essbaum finds a way to dismiss miracles of any sort and, with them, God. And then, unexpectedly, God enters. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who is the creation of the intellectually brilliant brother Ivan and who believes in human manipulation, doesn’t acknowledge this possibility.  

A Doubting Thomas sort-of sonnet
By Jill Alexander Essbaum

Sometimes I think belief is obsolete.
                  The sky is empty. God does not exist.
That there’s no point to life, and wishing it
                  won’t make it true. That miracles and feats
arrive by way of science. Cures and healings?
                  Just suave doctoring. And soul’s a quick
and nitwit way of naming all the tricks
                  our hocus-pocus human brains complete.
And death’s the end of everything, full stop.
                  And heaven’s ever-after is a ruse.
And we’re no more than broken, bloody dopes
                  who pray to ghosts. But. Sometimes something not-
myself pervades the walls of my heart’s room,
                  goes boom, then wracks and blacks and blues my bones.
The stone is rolled. I’m whole. I’m held. It’s hope.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

The Sleepy Sound of a Tea-Time Tide

By Robin Bates | Published: April 13, 2023
Anglesey, Wales

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Friday

We spent yesterday traveling around Wales with John Beech (a third cousin) and his wife Sue. I thought of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as we entered the country from the Cheshire direction since the 14th century poem was probably composed in the area, with Gawain possibly venturing into the Welsh wilderness to meet up with the Green Knight. At Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesey Island we toured a 4000-year-old burial mound, and I could imagine such ancient Celtic structures inspiring the poet in his creation of “the green chapel,” where Gawain has his final showdown with GK.

But we were mostly in Wales to visit places where Julia’s ancestors had lived. Robert and John Jones (her great-great grandfather and great-grandfather) at one time resided in Llangwyfan, an out-of-the-way farming community, and we visited the church they may have attended. (There were lots of Joneses buried there but, given how common the name is, that in itself means nothing.) Today we’re in Holyhoke, from where the Joneses left for America somewhere between 1851 and 1854, ultimately ending up in Yellow Springs, Iowa. (Julia’s grandmother, Mary Jones, would marry Ira Miksch—Julia’s maiden name—and join the Grace Hill Moravian community in Iowa.) To reach Llangwyfan we squeezed our way down one-way lanes, bordered by high hedgerows, that sometimes went on for miles.

We’ll be visiting the Anglesey shoreline later today so here’s a poem by English poet John Betjeman about the bay. Apparently Betjeman was excited to learn that he too had Welsh ancestry and, like Julia, visited places where his family had lived.

The poem reminds me of W.B. Yeat’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” with the waves gently lapping (or in Betjeman’s language, sometimes sleepily slapping, sometimes sweetly susurrating). We too have seen Mount Snowdon, which is still capped with snow. As in the poem, all appears quiet and peaceful.

A Bay In Anglesey
By John Betjeman

The sleepy sound of a tea-time tide
Slaps at the rocks the sun has dried,

Too lazy, almost, to sink and lift
Round low peninsulas pink with thrift.

The water, enlarging shells and sand,
Grows greener emerald out from land

And brown over shadowy shelves below
The waving forests of seaweed show.

Here at my feet in the short cliff grass
Are shells, dried bladderwrack, broken glass,

Pale blue squills and yellow rock roses.
The next low ridge that we climb discloses

One more field for the sheep to graze
While, scarcely seen on this hottest of days,

Far to the eastward, over there,
Snowdon rises in pearl-grey air.

Multiple lark-song, whispering bents,
The thymy, turfy and salty scents

And filling in, brimming in, sparkling and free
The sweet susurration of incoming sea.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Heaney and the Good Friday Agreement

By Robin Bates | Published: April 12, 2023

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Thursday

Julia and I will be missing Joe Biden by a few days as we head for Ireland this weekend. Biden is currently visiting the two Irelands to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the 1998 Good Friday agreement, negotiated by Bill Clinton, which persuaded the Protestant unionist parties and the Catholic nationalist parties to renounce violence and share power. Over 3500 people died during the three decades of strife, known as “the troubles,” before the agreement was signed.

In a recent Washington Post article, Clinton examined what it took to arrive at the historic agreement. In the course of the piece, he remembers turning to “The Cure at Troy,” by Irish Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, when the American president was seeking a solution.

I wrote in depth about “Cure at Troy” when Joe Biden quoted from it in one of his closing ads of the 2020 presidential race. I’m repurposing that essay here to second Clinton’s point that sometimes unsolvable problems can in fact be solved. While the future is somewhat worrisome, what with the UK’s withdrawal from the EU complicating relations between Ireland and Northern Ireland, Clinton is right to applaud how “an entire generation in Northern Ireland that has grown up largely free from the horrors of sectarian violence, free to focus on solving problems and seizing opportunities.

And indeed, Julia and I would not be traveling to Belfast without the Good Friday agreement.

At a time when Northern Ireland was still experiencing violence, Clinton cited Heaney in his bid for peace:

In 1995, when I made my first visit to Northern Ireland, I stood before a crowd of thousands in Derry and recited the lines of one of its favorite sons, Seamus Heaney: “History says, Don’t hope / On this side of the grave. / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme.”

Now, 28 years later, Clinton cites another line from the poem:

On this anniversary, the people of Northern Ireland and all their friends around the world have much to celebrate. I hope this moment of shared memory will allow them to continue the work of peace and inspire others to believe, as Heaney wrote, in “miracles / And cures and healing wells” and find their own way forward.

“The Cure at Troy” occurs in Heaney’s verse translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (it was extracted and retitled as a separate poem). In the play, Heaney has the chorus imagining a time when, in the line beloved by both Clinton and Biden, “the longed for tidal wave/ Of justice [will] rise up/ And hope and history rhyme.” Here it is:

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another.
They get hurt and get hard,
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that the farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and birth-cry
Or new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

The line about getting hurt and getting hard recalls an earlier Irish poem about Irish fanaticism that Heaney would know well. In “Easter 1916,” William Butler Yeats writes of the Irish nationalists, “Too long a sacrifice/ Can make a stone of the heart.” Heaney probably had the Irish troubles in mind when he wrote his version of Philoctetes in 1991.

At the center of the play is a young man who rediscovers his principles and stands up for what is right. Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, is on a mission with Odysseus to persuade the archer Philoctetes to return to the Greeks since the Trojan War cannot be won (so they have learned) without the famed archer’s legendary bow. This after the Greeks have marooned Philoctetes on an island because his repulsive injury and incessant moans are driving everyone crazy.

The crafty Odysseus, knowing that the embittered Philoctetes will never listen to him, figures that the wounded archer may come to trust the young and innocent Neoptolemus. To that end, he persuades Achilles’s son to pretend he too has been shunned by the Greeks, thereby winning Philoctetes’s sympathy.

Because Neoptolemus considers such subterfuge a violation of his integrity, he balks at first but then reluctantly goes along. After all, what are one’s moral qualms when the fate of the Greeks is at stake? The ploy works, Neoptolemus gets hold of Philoctetes’s famed bow, and the transactional Odysseus regards the mission as accomplished. He has gotten what he wanted and now feels free to jettison the archer.

Neoptolemus, however, has second thoughts and returns the bow to Philoctetes. Odysseus is furious:

Odys: What has you so worked up? Why can we not
Just rise and go? What’s on your mind?
Neop: I did a wrong thing and I have to right it.
Odys: What was that?
Neop: I did this whole thing your way.
Odys: We were Greeks with a job to do, and we did it.
Neop: I behaved like a born liar.
Odys: But it worked!
It worked, so what about it?
Neop: Not for me.
And I’m not leaving til the thing’s put right.
Odys: It’s the bow. You’re having second thoughts.
Neop: What else?
Odys: You mean you’re going to just give it back?
Neop: The scales will even out when the bow’s restored.

Although Odysseus threatens dire repercussions, Neoptolemus remains firm.

Having reestablished trust with Philoctetes, Neoptolemus then attempts to persuade him to return to the Trojan war. The archer is understandably suspicious—is this just a new trick?—but Neoptolemus is now speaking to him as a friend. The young man tells Philoctetes that, having been so damaged by Greek rejection, so filled with resentment, he no longer can see his higher destiny—something which certainly could have been said of those Unionists and Catholic activists involved in the troubles:

Your courage has gone wild, you’re like a brute
That can only foam at the mouth. You aren’t
Bearing up, you are bearing down. Anybody
that ever tries to help you just gets savaged.
You’re a wounded man in terrible need of healing
But when your friends try, all you do is snarl
Like some animal protecting cubs.

Philoctetes isn’t buying, however, and insists on Neoptolemus keeping his promise to take him home. Having given his word, Neoptolemus agrees and the Greek cause appears to be doomed.

According to Clinton, developing trust was key to the 1998 Friday agreement. He notes that

the political leaders on all sides showed real courage in making sacrifices and compromises with their adversaries and committing to inclusivity, knowing perfectly well that they were putting their own political futures at risk. Trust was built slowly but surely through years of confidence-building measures, such as prisoner releases and cease-fires.

In Sophocles’s play, when trust has been developed at a human level, the gods intervene to bring about the desired end. Therefore, following the budding friendship of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes, we have divine intervention from Hercules, a deus ex machina who tells Philoctetes that he must return to Troy.

Hercules doesn’t literally speak from the sky in Heaney’s version as he does in Sophocles’s. Rather, his words represent Philoctetes’s internal breakthrough:

Philoctete (crying out): Hercules:
              I saw him in the fire
Hercules
                was shining in the air
I heard the voice of Hercules in my head.

Hercules is thematically important as a man who has achieved divinity, and a god speaking is a sign of miraculous healing. As the chorus puts it,

If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and birth-cry
Or new life at its term.

Referring to his fabled labors, Hercules explains to Philoctetes (through the chorus),

I have opened the closed road
Between the living and the dead
To make the right road clear to you.
This is the voice of Hercules now.

Here on earth my labors were
The steppingstones to upper air:
Lives that suffer and come right
Are backlit by immortal light.

As I read these lines, I think of how emerging from the troubled decades must have felt like escaping from an abusive relationship. After facing unending threats of violence, Northern Ireland could begin to dream again. Hercules (through the chorus) tells Philoctetes that he must think higher than simply returning home to safe and sound Scyros:

So let my mind light up your mind
You must see straight and turn around.
You must complete your oath-bound course
You cannot yet return to Scyros [his home].

Go, Philoctetes, with this boy,
Go and be cured and capture Troy.
Asclepius will make you whole,
Relieve your body and your soul.

Go, with your bow. Conclude the score
And cruel stalemate of our war.

North Ireland’s troubles might not be the only conflict Heaney had in mind since apartheid South Africa was on the cusp of its own miraculous breakthrough when he wrote the play. This may be why Heaney–again departing from Sophocles’s script–warns against reprisal killings and shrine violations from the forces of liberation. Continuing with his instructions to Philoctetes, Hercules says,

            But know to shun
Reprisal killings when that’s done.

Then take just spoils and sail at last
Out of the bad dream of your past.
Make sacrifice. Burn spoils to me.
Shoot arrows in my memory.

And, Neoptolemus, you must be
His twin in arms and archery.
Marauding lions on that shore,
Troy’s nemesis and last nightmare.

But when the city’s being sacked
Preserve the shrines. Show gods respect.
Reverence for the gods survives
Our individual mortal lives.

In South Africa there would be the Truth and Reconciliation process, which sought for forgiveness and healing, even as it insisted also on accountability and justice. I don’t know if Northern Ireland has had anything comparable, but in the play Philoctetes feels like a new person when he sheds his resentments. Suddenly love of country overrides his grievances:

Philoctetes: Something told me this was going to happen.
Something told me the channels were going to open.
It’s as if a thing I knew and had forgotten
Came back completely clear. I can see
The cure at Troy. All that you say
Is like a dream to me and I obey
Neoptolemus: And so will I.
Hercules (through chorus): Then go, immediately.
The winds are blowing and the tides are high.

Meanwhile the chorus tells us that, while we should suspect “too much sweet talk”—another phrase for facile optimism?—nevertheless we should always keep an open mind:

Now it’s high watermark
And floodtide in the heart
And time to go.
The sea nymphs in the spray
Will be the chorus now.
What’s left to say?

Suspect too much sweet talk
But never close your mind.
It was a fortunate wind
That blew me here. I leave
Half-ready to believe
That a crippled trust might walk

And the half-true rhyme is love.

May we all carry the hope, as we look to the future, that a crippled trust might walk again.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Fighting Back against Book Censors

By Robin Bates | Published: April 11, 2023

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Wednesday

When I learned recently that GOP legislators in Florida were working on a bill that would prevent educators from talking about menstruation in elementary school (these days, it’s not uncommon for girls nine or ten to begin getting their periods),  I immediately thought of Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.  The novel, which features middle schoolers talking about the menstrual cycle, has long been popular amongst children—and that for the simple reason that it tells them things they need to know. That it does so with an interesting story and a relatable character makes it all the more powerful. For decades, stories have abounded of children secretly passing it around amongst themselves in schools where it has been banned.

In a recent Variety interview, Blume speaks forcefully about book bans of the sort we’re currently witnessing in Florida (where Blume lives) and in Texas. Blume knows a lot about such bans, having also seen them applied to her novel Deenie, where teenage girls learn about and engage in masturbation, and Forever, where a high school girl grapples with sexual anxieties before entering into her first serious relationship.

In other words, she writes books that speak to teenagers’ pressing concerns.

Blume says that censorship began to soar following Ronald Reagan’s election. Her first experience came when her children’s elementary school principal refused to put Margaret on the library shelves: “He believed that menstruation wasn’t a topic that girls should read about, never mind how many kids already had their periods.”

At least in the 1980s, however, censorship was not coming from the government. Today, Blume points out, librarians “can go to prison if [they are] found guilty of having pornography on their shelves. Try and define pornography today and you’ll find that it’s everything.”

Among the examples she cites is Jessica Love’s Julian Is a Mermaid, which is about a boy

who likes to dress up in fancy clothes, and he has a wonderful grandmother who has all kinds of beads and feathers. She’s supportive of him. If you go back to the ’80s, it was Heather Has Two Mommies [by Lesléa Newman]. That picture book was banned everywhere. Well, there’s a lot of kids who have two mommies or two daddies, and that book is important! Today, they’re considered pornographic by some legislatures.”

When legislators claim that they’re protecting kids, Blume asks,

What are you protecting your children from? Protecting your children means educating them and arming them with knowledge, and reading and supporting what they want to read. No child is going to become transgender or gay or lesbian because they read a book. It’s not going to happen.

Books prove valuable, Blume says, when a child says, “Oh, this is just like me. This is what I’m feeling and thinking about.” Or “I’m interested in this because I have friends who may be gay, bi, lesbian.”

Blume points out that such books teach empathy. Such was the effect on her of Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, which Blume notes is “probably the No. 1 banned book in America right now.” Blume’s response was that “this young person is telling me how they came to be what they are today. And I learned a lot…”

Which leads to the question of fighting back. Blume mentions the National Coalition Against Censorship, which she says is “right there on the front lines.” “If a teacher, librarian, parent or student needs help as books are being challenged in their classrooms,” Blume says, “NCAC is on the other end of the phone to help.”

A recent Washington Post column describes other ways to resist. It’s important in these battles, Alyssa Rosenberg points out, to remember that censorship

isn’t popular. Fifty-six percent of respondents to an August 2022 survey disagreed with the statement: “If any parent objects to a book in the public school library, that book should be removed, even if other parents like the book.” A poll published in March 2023 by Wall Street Journal-NORC found 61 percent were more concerned that “some schools may ban books and censor topics that are educationally important” than by the prospect that instructional materials might offend students or parents. That skepticism isn’t partisan, either.

What’s important, however, is that library advocates “tailor their campaigns to their communities.”

Rosenberg suggests, for instance, that

library supporters can point out that censorship has costs and wastes public resources. Libraries have been sued for removing books or restricting access to them on the grounds that it is illegal for public facilities to favor one political viewpoint over another. Towns can’t ban books because they’re Marxist, or use internet filters that restrict access to gay rights websites while letting users browse conversion therapy ministries. Even if a library or school system wins a case, defending it costs money, and damages can be substantial. Recently, reminders of the risks of litigation helped library advocates temper a censorship policy in League City, Tex.

Advocates can also point out that making librarians legally liable for distributing certain material can lead to higher municipal insurance costs. Also expensive are special tip lines since they tend to get flooded with witty anti-censorship spam. 

Some book activists find ways to show that censorship cuts both ways:

One puckish censorship opponent in Utah challenged the Bible on the grounds that it contains “incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide.” Talarico recently lamented that the Texas books bill could evict Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove from schools, denying students access to one of the masterworks of Texas literature.

And sometimes just showing up can matter:

That strategy paid off in Tammany Parish in Louisiana. A local woman challenged several books as being “harmful to minors.” She didn’t come to a crucial meeting about the volumes. People who believed the books were important did. The library control board voted to keep some of the targeted texts on shelves.

As always, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Books that open minds and change lives are at stake.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

For England, Buttercup > Melon Flower

By Robin Bates | Published: April 10, 2023

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Tuesday

Today, if all goes well, Julia and I will be landing in England. Putting England and April together, of course, brings to mind Robert Browning’s beloved poem “Home Thoughts, from Abroad,” which begins, “Oh, to be in England, now that April’s here.”

In the coming days you can be sure to encounter references here to Wales, Ireland, and Scotland as well since Julia is on a roots quest tracking her mother’s family.. There’s was the Jones family, which she has traced back to Angelsey, Wales, and the Pickens family, of Scots-Irish origin, which lived at one point on the outskirts of Glasgow, at another in Belfast. We’ll also be visiting my own cousins, John and Sue Beech, who live in Coventry, England.

“Home Thoughts” may have been written by Browning soon after he moved to Italy with his invalid wife, poet Elizabeth Browning. One doesn’t realize until the final line that the virtues of an English spring are set up in contrast with Italian flowers that Browning considers too luxurious. The poet longs for simple elm leaves, pear blossoms, and buttercups and for a field “rough with hoary dew.” All are superior, he indicates, to “the gaudy melon flower.”

Judging from references to flowers in English poetry, I’m forced to conclude that there’s something ascetic in the national imagination. I think of Wordsworth’s “violet half hidden from the eye” and his “meanest flower that blows”; of Thomas Gray’s flower that is born to blush unseen,/And waste its sweetness on the desert air”; of Blake seeing heaven in a wild flower; and of Tennyson using a “flower in a crannied wall” to grapple with the great existential questions.

Anyway, we are soon the see the British isles in full bloom. I’ll report back what we see.

Home Thoughts, from Abroad
By Robert Browning

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossom’d pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

On Proust and Living Life to the Fullest

By Robin Bates | Published: April 9, 2023

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Monday

I have completed my Lenten project, which was to read Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love (the first volume of In Search of Lost Time). I chose it in part because my French professor father spoke lovingly of it, in part because my dear friend and philosophy colleague Alan Paskow turned to it when he was dying. As I read it, I couldn’t help but see it through Alan’s eyes.

I’ve written previously about how, in my weekly visits to Alan, I talked about the vivid nature imagery in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Gawain is a man who also knows he only has a short time left—he knows he cannot survive a return axe blow from the Green Knight—and as a result, the poet’s description of the seasonal cycle jumps off the page. When one is seeing one’s final spring or summer, they take on special meaning:

And so this Yule to the young year yielded place,
And each season ensued at its set time;
After Christmas there came the cold cheer of Lent,
When with fish and plainer fare our flesh we reprove;
But then the world’s weather with winter contends:
The keen cold lessens, the low clouds lift;
Fresh falls the rain in fostering showers
On the face of the fields; flowers appear.
The ground and the groves wear gowns of green;
Birds build their nests, and blithely sing
That solace of all sorrow with summer comes ere long.
And blossoms day by day
Bloom rich and rife in throng;
Then every grove so gay
Of the greenwood rings with song.

And then the season of summer with the soft winds,
When Zephyr sighs low over seeds and shoots;
Glad is the green plant growing abroad,
When the dew at dawn drops from the leaves,
To get a gracious glance from the golden sun.

I encountered a similar intensity in Proust. Everything vibrates and everything seems momentous when he takes on a subject, whether it be nature, the arts, love, interpersonal relationships, or the thinking process itself. I’ll focus here on one particular example, which is a little musical phrase that comes to take on great meaning for Charles Swann. Previous to hearing it, Swann’s life has seemed a barren desert:

He had so long since ceased to direct his course towards any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of ephemeral satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself, that he would remain all his life in that condition, which death alone could alter. More than this, since his mind no longer entertained any lofty ideals, he had ceased to believe in (although he could not have expressly denied) their reality. He had grown also into the habit of taking refuge in trivial considerations, which allowed him to set on one side matters of fundamental importance.

The piece of music, however, brings into Swann’s life “the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation”:

But now, like a confirmed invalid whom, all of a sudden, a change of air and surroundings, or a new course of treatment, or, as sometimes happens, an organic change in himself, spontaneous and unaccountable, seems to have so far recovered from his malady that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond all hope, of starting to lead—and better late than never—a wholly different life, Swann found in himself, in the memory of the phrase that he had heard, …the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe, but to which, as though the music had had upon the moral barrenness from which he was suffering a sort of recreative influence, he was conscious once again of a desire, almost, indeed, of the power to consecrate his life.

This revelation reminds me of Rainer Maria Rilke’s epiphany upon seeing the “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which leads him to declaim, “You must change your life.” And of James Wright’s comparable discovery while “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” and having an intense interaction with nature:

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   
Down the ravine behind the empty house,   
The cowbells follow one another   
Into the distances of the afternoon.   
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,   
The droppings of last year’s horses   
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

It so happens that Swann is unable to locate the piece after hearing it until he unexpectedly hears it played at an artistic salon he is attending. Because he is in love with a woman attending the salon (Odette), the musical phrase becomes bound up with the different stages of his love, from initial euphoria to jealousy and despair.

Even more than that, the phrase assures Swann that life, rather than being reducible to dust, has transcendent meaning. While strangers may be indifferent to our suffering, this “little phrase” sees in our seemingly mundane existence something

so far superior to everyday life as to be alone worthy of the trouble of expressing it. Those graces of an intimate sorrow, ’twas them that the phrase endeavored to imitate, to create anew; and even their essence, for all that it consists in being incommunicable and in appearing trivial to everyone save him who has experience of them, the little phrase had captured, had rendered visible.

Proust writes that Swann regards musical motifs as “actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable by the human mind.” Swann therefore comes to see music as more than

a miserable stave of seven notes, but [rather] an immeasurable keyboard (still, almost all of it, unknown), on which, here and there only, separated by the gross darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys, keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another…

Artists, he continues, do us an inestimable service

when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme which they have found, of shewing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that great black impenetrable night, discouraging exploration, of our soul, which we have been content to regard as valueless and waste and void….Even when [Swann] was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned.

Proust acknowledges that these artistic revelations may be dependent on us, the listeners, and therefore impermanent. As he puts it, “Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust.” But while this may be the case, as long as we are alive, music and the arts light up our lives as a lamp lights up a room, obliterating even the memory of darkness. Proust writes that the music phrase that so captivated Swann

has espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough. Its destiny was linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments.

And that leads Proust away from a material vision of life. To be sure, he concedes that perhaps “all our dream of life is without existence,” that what lights us up (reading literature for me) is “not being.” But if that’s true, then “these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either.” And because that is so hard to imagine, he works his way, very subtly, to a position beyond the material realm. “We shall perish,” he writes, “but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate.” And because these “hostages” are so divine, then “death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.”

Note that last “perhaps even less certain,” which has moved us from art as merely consoling us to art as taking us to a place beyond death. Proust does not say so directly but delicately hints that it is possible. Then, to emphasize the point, he resorts to angel imagery:

So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of view, it belonged, none the less, to an order of supernatural creatures whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognize and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down from that divine world to which he has access to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours.

The composer in this process, the author writes, draws aside the veil to render, for a brief moment, this other realm visible.

I think of Alan, who loved the arts—especially painting and literature—as feeling affirmed by this account. In his final months, he could revisit his deep love of Vermeer and Sophocles and find reason to believe that death’s finality is “less certain.” I imagine myself, when dying as some future date, looking back at my beloved authors—Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Austen—and knowing at some deep level that there is more in heaven and on earth than is dreamt of in our materialist philosophy.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Blazing Lilies, a Prayer Heard & Answered

By Robin Bates | Published: April 8, 2023

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Easter Sunday

It has been a tradition with this blog to share a Mary Oliver poem each Easter. I didn’t realize, when I first started doing it, that a number of Oliver’s poems are actually modeled on the Resurrection story, which explains why I have found them so appropriate.

Occasionally thorns enter into the drama, an allusion to the crown of thorns the Romans soldiers used to torment Christ. For Oliver, the thorns often function as metaphors for her depression, which weighs her down and cuts her off from the ecstatic connection with the divine that she seeks. In “Egrets,” for instance, Oliver describes her own road to Calvary as follows:

Where the path closed
   down and over,
      through the scumbled leaves,
         fallen branches,

through the knotted catbrier,
   I kept going. Finally
      I could not
         save my arms
            from thorns; soon

the mosquitoes
   smelled me, hot
      and wounded, and came
         wheeling and whining.

After such travail, however, comes the dawn, along with three egrets that “opened their wings softly and stepped over every dark thing.”

I like “Morning Poem,” today’s lyric, because it suggests that the resurrection occurs daily, not only once in the past and once in the future. I am with those who believe that Jesus saw us building God’s kingdom on earth in the present. Therefore, even though the poet carries a thorn with her at all times—”it’s all you can do to keep on trudging”—she also knows that “somewhere deep within you” is “a beast shouting that the earth/ is exactly what it wanted.” After all, on this earth “[e]very morning/ the world/ is created” and  “each pond with its blazing lilies/ is a prayer heard and answered.”

This occurs “whether or not/ you have ever dared to be happy.” But if you’re willing to pray—which is say, if you’re willing to open yourself to God’s world—then you will be rewarded with a profound happiness. Which is to say, “Thy kingdom come.”

Morning Poem
By Mary Oliver

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches–
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead–
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging–

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted–

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

The Cross Speaks

By Robin Bates | Published: April 6, 2023
The Ruthwell Cross (c. 9th century), combining Christian and pagan imagery, was partially destroyed by Scottish Presbyterians during the Reformation but reassembled

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Good Friday

Reprinted and revised from April 3, 2015

A remarkable poem in Old English tells the crucifixion story from the cross’s (or rood’s) point of view. Scholar Helena Tampierováne believes that the poem, while obviously Christian, is also rooted in Celtic and Anglo-Saxon veneration of the Tree of Life. Therefore, we see a merging of paganism and Christianity.

Tampierováne quotes medievalist Leeming Fee on the spiritual significance of trees in ancient mythologies:

Thus the tree both exists in this world and seems to transcend it, and therefore may be seen to symbolize the oppositions of life and death and of eternity and transience. Trees are most often associated with life-giving energy, and due to their longevity are quite often thought to be repositories of wisdom: the Egyptian Osiris and the Greek Adonis, as resurrection gods, both are associated with trees, and the Buddha was born again in the wisdom he found under the Bodhi Tree. Sometimes both in the Indic and Norse traditions, a tree is thought to represent life and death on a cosmic scale, symbolizing the full manifestation of the universe.

Of these traditions, I am most familiar with the cosmic tree in Norse mythology (Yggdrasil). One can see various areas of overlap. Odin willingly hangs himself from the tree in order to gain knowledge of other worlds, just as Christ hanging from the cross crossed over into death and then back to life. And the cross, like Yggdrasil, finds itself scarred by the forces of death, yet emerges to be a source of new life. 

Like all religions, in other words, Christianity is syncretistic, drawing on local legends in order to provide people with a symbol system that addresses their deep spiritual needs. As Tampierováne sees it, when pre-Christian England encountered missionary stories of the cross, it associated it with its own cultic trees. The tree in the poem regards itself working with Christ, even though they seem to be at odds—just as, a few centuries later, pagan stories about a green man (in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) sought to to regenerate a Christianity that the poet sensed was becoming static.

Some scholars regard the cross as a loyal retainer, faithful to his lord to the end. But it can also be seen as feminized (“that he might mount upon me”), with the crucifixion working as a marriage of Christ and the church. Regardless of how one sees it, in the end the rood is triumphant:

Now the time has come
That far and wide on earth men honor me,
And all this great and glorious creation,
And to this beacon offers prayers.  

Here’s the rood telling the story in his/her own words:

From The Dream of the Rood

“It was long past – I still remember it – 
That I was cut down at the copse’s end,
Moved from my root. Strong enemies there took me,
Told me to hold aloft their criminals,
Made me a spectacle. Men carried me
Upon their shoulders, set me on a hill,
A host of enemies there fastened me.

“And then I saw the Lord of all mankind
Hasten with eager zeal that He might mount
Upon me. I durst not against God’s word
Bend down or break, when I saw tremble all
The surface of the earth. Although I might
Have struck down all the foes, yet stood I fast.

“Then the young hero (who was God almighty)
Got ready, resolute and strong in heart.
He climbed onto the lofty gallows-tree,
Bold in the sight of many watching men,
When He intended to redeem mankind.
I trembled as the warrior embraced me.
But still I dared not bend down to the earth,
Fall to the ground. Upright I had to stand.

“A rood I was raised up; and I held high 
The noble King, the Lord of heaven above.
I dared not stoop. They pierced me with dark nails;
The scars can still be clearly seen on me,
The open wounds of malice. Yet might I
Not harm them. They reviled us both together.
I was made wet all over with the blood
Which poured out from his side, after He had 
Sent forth His spirit. And I underwent
Full many a dire experience on that hill.
I saw the God of hosts stretched grimly out.
Darkness covered the Ruler’s corpse with clouds
His shining beauty; shadows passed across,
Black in the darkness. All creation wept,
Bewailed the King’s death; Christ was on the cross….

“Now you may understand, dear warrior,
That I have suffered deeds of wicked men
And grievous sorrows. Now the time has come
That far and wide on earth men honor me,
And all this great and glorious creation,
And to this beacon offers prayers. On me
The Son of God once suffered; therefore now
I tower mighty underneath the heavens,
And I may heal all those in awe of me.
Once I became the cruelest of tortures,
Most hateful to all nations, till the time
I opened the right way of life for men.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Passover, a Time to Remember Refugees

By Robin Bates | Published: April 5, 2023
Refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa headed for Italy (Oct. 2022)

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Thursday – Passover

Years ago, a New Yorker podcast alerted me to a refugee poem by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. Poet Ellen Bass, who discussed the poem with New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon, said that her family always reads the poem during their Passover seder.

Although the poem appeared in the 1990s, it is timeless since refugees are always with us. One thinks, for instance, of all those who venture aboard boats to face “a salty oblivion” in the Mediterranean. Zagajewski mentions “the nettles that methodically overgrow/the abandoned homesteads of exiles,” and he chillingly observes,

You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.

Bass says that the second line brings to mind Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, about murderer Gary Gilmore.

Zagajewski struggles to find something to praise in this veil of tears. If the world is horrifically mutilated, can we find something in it to praise?

Try to Praise the Mutilated World
By Adam Zagajewski 

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

I love the way that the poem veers between tragedy and beauty, revealing how thin is the line that separates the two. I think of how, after my son died, I looked out at the catbrier bordering the yard (our nettles) and marveled at how they kept growing. They were simultaneously barbed and green, life pulsing forth in a season of death.

I am also put in mind of the tribal medicine man’s healing words in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony as he seeks to cure Tayo of his war scars:

“But you know, grandson, this world is fragile.” 

The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love. 

In “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” Zagajewski chooses each word carefully and, in doing so, reminds us of the beauty that surrounds us, however fragile and evanescent. We must praise this beauty if we want to hold on to our humanity.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed