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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Behold, He Lightens the Dark Clouds

By Robin Bates | Published: May 20, 2023
John Singleton Copley, Ascension (1775)

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Spiritual Sunday

Today being Ascension Sunday, I share John Donne’s “Ascension.” It is part of a seven-part sonnet sequence known as “La Corona” or crown, with each sonnet seen as a jewel in the heavenly crown. The jewels are “Annunciation,” “Nativity,” “Temple,” “Crucifying,” Resurrection,” and “Ascension,” along with an introductory sonnet.

To emphasize their connectedness, the last line of each sonnet furnishes the first line of the next one, and very last line of the sequence repeats the first, thereby joining the whole in a heavenly circle or crown.

Donne plays with the crown imagery in the first sonnet. The crown of thorns becomes a crown of glory, and what seems to be an end becomes the beginning of “endless rest”:

Thy thorny crown gain’d, that give me,
A crown of glory, which doth flower always.
The ends crown our works, but Thou crown’st our ends,
For at our ends begins our endless rest.

One finds a similar reversal in “Ascension,” with tears giving way to joy, dark clouds growing light, a strong ram becoming a mild lamb, and blood turning into a bright torch:

Salute the last, and everlasting day,
Joy at the uprising of this Sun, and Son,
Ye whose true tears, or tribulation
Have purely wash’d, or burnt your drossy clay.
Behold, the Highest, parting hence away,
Lightens the dark clouds, which He treads upon;
Nor doth he by ascending show alone,
But first He, and He first enters the way.
O strong Ram, which hast batter’d heaven for me!
Mild lamb, which with Thy Blood hast mark’d the path!
Bright Torch, which shinest, that I the way may see!
O, with Thy own Blood quench Thy own just wrath;
And if Thy Holy Spirit my Muse did raise,
Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise

The image of Jesus as a strong ram brings to mind one of Donne’s best known sonnets (#14), which opens with the line, “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” There Donne laments that his heart is so hardened that God will only be able overcome the resistance by battering down the gates. Now Donne wants Jesus to batter down the gates of heaven so that the poet can follow him through.

Yet Jesus then shifts from ram to lamb: “Mild lamb, which with Thy Blood hast mark’d the path!” This sacrificial blood has quenched God’s wrath and has become a guiding light to be followed. Meanwhile, the Holy Spirit—the advocate that Jesus promised his followers—will move within the poet, leading to this poetic crown of prayer and praise.

Conclusion: a mild lamb and a bright torch fare better with the Holy Spirit than a strong ram.

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Baldwin, Cop Sadism, and MAGA

By Robin Bates | Published: May 18, 2023
Ed Skrein as the sadistic cop in If Beale Street Could Talk

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Friday

Listening to James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), I was struck by his description of cop sadism, which we ourselves witnessed in the George Floyd murder and which occurs frequently, usually unrecorded, elsewhere in the country.

But it’s not only cops. Once you start giving people life or death power over others—which increasingly Republican legislators and Republican judges are doing through lax gun laws—you create the kind of power imbalance that Baldwin describes. Add in the grifters, media outlets, and social media platforms that make a living demonizing others, and you have all the ingredients you need for our epidemic of gun violence.

In Baldwin’s novel, Officer Bell has already killed a 12-year-old boy—I think of the Cleveland cop that shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice when he was playing with a water gun—and now he has singled out a 21-year-old sculptor, charging him for a rape he knows he did not commit. Tish, Fonny’s 18-year-old fiancé and the novel’s narrator, explains Fonny’s real crime:

That same passion [for art] which saved Fonny got him into trouble, and put him in jail. For, you see, he had found his center, his own center, inside him: and it showed. He wasn’t anybody’s nigger. And that’s a crime, in this fucking free country. You’re suppose to be somebody’s nigger. And if you’re nobody’s nigger, you’re a bad nigger, and that’s what the cops decided when Fonny moved downtown.

Officer Bell marks out Fonny and Tish after Tish is harassed by a man in a grocery store and Fonny comes to her rescue. Bell is prepared to arrest Fonny on the spot, but the store owner explains what has happened, forcing Bell to back down. After that, Fonny is a marked man. Tish describes Bell:

I had certainly seen him before that particular afternoon, but he had been just another cop. After that afternoon, he had red hair and blue eyes. He was somewhere in his thirties. He walked the way John Wayne walks, striding out to clean up the universe, and he believed all that shit: a wicked, stupid, infantile motherfucker. Like his heroes, he was kind of pinheaded, heavy gutted, big assed, and his eyes were as blank as George Washington’s eyes.

It is these eyes that particularly catch Tish’s attention. They must also be the eyes of our mass killers and, for that matter, the eyes of anyone who denies the humanity of another human being. Fascist eyes, in other words:

But I was beginning to learn something about the blankness of those eyes. What I was learning was beginning to frighten me to death. If you look steadily into that unblinking blue, into that pinpoint at the center of the eye, you discover a bottomless cruelty, a viciousness cold and icy. In that eye, you do not exist: if you are lucky. If that eye, from its height, has been forced to notice you, if you do exist in the unbelievably frozen winter which lives behind that eye, you are marked, marked, marked, like a man in a black overcoat, crawling, fleeing across the snow. The eye resents your presence in the landscape, cluttering up the view. Presently, the black overcoat will be still, turning red with blood, and the snow will be red, and the eye resents this, too, blinks once, and causes more snow to fall, covering it all.

Tish remembers seeing those eyes at work when, prior to the arrest, she and Fonny encounter Bell:

Sometimes I was with Fonny when I crossed Bell’s path, sometimes I was alone. When I was with Fonny, the eyes looked straight ahead, into a freezing sun. When I was alone, the eyes clawed me like a cat’s claws, raked me like a rake. These eyes look only into the eyes of the conquered victim. They cannot look into any other eyes. When Fonny was alone, the same thing happened. Bell’s eyes swept over Fonny’s black body with the unanswerable cruelty of lust, as though he had lit the blowtorch and had it aimed at Fonny’s sex.

To explain Trump’s popularity, Atlantic writer Adam Serwer has famously remarked, “The cruelty is the point.” In his book with that title, Serwer sees that dynamic at work in the persistence of the Lost Cause, in anti-immigrant behavior, in the many faces of anti-Semitism, and in police culture. What Serwer describes sociologically and historically, Baldwin makes present through narrative and character study.

Because Bell is wired this way, Fonny is all but waving a red flag in front of a bull when he looks into the cop’s eyes:

When their paths crossed, and I was there, Fonny looked straight at Bell, Bell looked straight ahead. I’m going to fuck you, boy, Bell’s eyes said. No you won’t, said Fonny’s eyes. I’m going to get my shit together and haul ass out of here.

The first time Tish herself directly looks into Bell’s eyes, she experiences what Joseph Conrad calls “the fascination of the abomination.” If one allows oneself to get drawn into this mentality, one is lost:

I looked into his eyes again. This may have been the very first time I ever really looked into a white man’s eyes. It stopped me, I stood still. It was not like looking into a man’s eyes. It was like nothing I knew, and–therefore–it was very powerful. It was seduction which contained the promise of rape. It was rape which promised debasement and revenge: on both sides. I wanted to get close to him, to enter into him, to open up that face and change it and destroy it, descend into the slime with him. Then, we would both be free: I could almost hear the singing.

Sadism, masochism, and absence of any restraint mix together in that realm of toxic slime.  Yes, there’s something that feels freeing in this moment, which helps explain Donald Trump’s popularity amongst a certain segment of the population. His secret power lies in how he gives people permission to dip deep into their ids and to act out—or to imagine acting out—dark fantasies. It’s why he receives cheers when he mentions his recent sexual assault, why his MAGA supporters lionize murdering vigilantes, why weapons of mass destruction sales are soaring.

Baldwin’s deep humanity is a counter to this. In Fonny, Tish, their families, and their friends, we see the nobility that people can ascend to even in the most trying of circumstances. The way that Tish’s parents and sisters support her in her pregnancy and support Fonny is his imprisonment does not fit Trump’s depiction of urban population centers as “hellholes.” The intricate support networks we see in Beale Street provide a vision of a hopeful future.

Baldwin’s novel ends on an ambiguous note. We see Fonny out of prison working on his sculpture but don’t know if this is real or a dream. We hear a baby crying and crying, which reminds us (as Baldwin puts it in “Sonny’s Blues”) that “the world wait[s] outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretche[s] above us, longer than the sky.” In other words, Baldwin gives us neither facile optimism nor fatalistic despair. Instead, we get to know wondrous human beings doing their best in a world where the odds are stacked against them.

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How Proust Saved a Prisoner’s Soul

By Robin Bates | Published: May 17, 2023

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Thursday

If I have been writing a lot recently about Daniel Genis’s Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison, it is largely because someone who respects great novels as much as I do has special insight into a question I have long wrestled with: can literature carry us through the darkest of times and situations?

It’s an issue I recall encountering in Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age, which I read 35 years ago, where a character in an Albanian jail finds solace in books and writing. Having had himself exchanged for his partner’s daughter, who has been locked up as a political hostage by the authoritarian regime, Anthony Keating finds prison-with-books as almost a relief from the cutthroat world of business in which he has been engaged. I’ve always wanted to know how realistic this was.

It’s a version of Richard Lovelace’s declaration in “To Alithea, from Prison”:

Stone walls do not a prison make,
        Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
        That for an hermitage…

In Lovelace’s case, it is thoughts of Alithea rather than books that transform his imprisonment, but still. In any case, Genis shows me a flesh-and-blood person, not a literary character, exploring the issue.

From Genis we see that it’s not enough to have an innocent and quiet mind. In his final bout of solitary confinement, as I noted yesterday, Genis finds himself paired with a schizophrenic roommate who becomes convinced, by the cover art on Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, that Genis is “crazy, satanic, and gay.” Confined with Radar for 23 out of 24 hours, Genis thinks of Sartre’s No Exit, about a coward, a lesbian, and a nymphomaniac yoked together forever in hell:

Sartre wrote No Exit to make a miserable point that I had rejected years earlier as a younger man. As a student at NYU, I could hardly taker seriously his simplistic idea of the French existentialist that “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” [“Hell is other people.”] I loved people, and people loved me. But locked in a room with Radar, ironically almost duplicating the conditions of the play, I realized that what I once thought was facile nihilism was in fact a terrible truth.

Proust, however, provided Genis with a more uplifting vision. To set the background, Genis tells us how he used literature in his search for meaning. As he notes, “After passing the halfway point of my bid [time in prison] and my thirtieth birthday, I ceased reading to learn more about things. I decided that a finer reason to read is to learn meanings. Of life, for example.”

Genis first tried out philosophy before discovering (this has also been my experience) that it is too abstract. Like me, he discovered that he needs plot, characters, setting, imagery and fiction’s other attributes to conduct such a search:

Douglas Adams said that that meaning is forty-two [in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy], which is as good an answer as any. I explored Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger, reading the latter on an exercise bike to double my pain. The philosophy of ethics particularly interested me, but the truth was that I was too dense to apply what I learned from these German philosophers to my own situation. Literature was easier for me to digest, so I found myself in The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. It was in these great psychological novels of the nineteenth century that I discovered my flawed person. My narcissism and cowardice and compromises were all there, but the solutions—or at least a solution for me—were absent. The redemption I craved, the meaning of my ill-spent life, was not provided by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. I did not believe in god or destiny; only I was responsible for my actions, and it wasn’t forgiveness I craved but meaning.

Genis says that for a while he considered Stoicism, as encountered in Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full. But this too was not enough:

Wolfe led me to reread Epictetus after my first exposure almost twenty years earlier. It helped, especially when I suffered from being treated unjustly. But I was no lifer, and as my remaining time dwindled, I realized I needed a better answer to the question of the meaning of my life. Stoicism understandably gives a man condemned to live out his life behind the wall a way to continue living in the face of hopelessness. But I was soon to be released to go live with my wife in Brooklyn. I needed more than the stiffest upper lip in the world.

In Search of Lost Time provided him with the answers he longed for:

I never argue that Proust has the answer to the eternal question for everyone, but I will eagerly assert that it was Marcel who spent three thousand pages explaining the meaning of my life to me. I found redemption and sanity while I read the longest novel of them all in the box while Radar raged on the cot beneath me.

Genis notes that Proust was “the culmination of a many-years-long effort to read the longest books of world literature.” These books included Joyce’s Ulysses, Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov (which “contains all possible novels within it”), Murakami’s 1Q84, Musil’s The Man without Qualities, and Mann’s four-volume Joseph and His Brothers (which he says enlarged his understanding more than the Torah of what it meant to be a Jew). But Proust “gave meaning to my experience, to my time, my pain, to the whole lot.”

Proust spoke to Genis because of how he handles time, memory, and art. Time first:

Proust describes it as the destroyer of joy in life and sapper of meaning. I simply had years of it to do, though in Proustian terms, we are all “doing” life sentences. The years are obviously the commodity taken away from a prisoner. They stand between him and happiness in the most concrete of ways, but Time is also the opponent of all life. Every passing second erodes whatever joy one has found and carries one closer to the end. The fact that the passage of time inevitably leads to our deaths makes the conduct of our lives mean nothing.

Genis notes that this fact depressed Proust so much that “he retired to a cork-lined room, drank morphine cordials, and masturbated under a sheet when paid rent boys came to perform before him.”

At first, memory appears to offer a solution, especially memories of childhood:

Not by coincidence, the happiness of childhood is the set of memories that torments prisoners as well. Every prisoner is a memory artist, a maestro at remembering. Much of Marcel’s quest for happiness is as a memory master as well, even though the only cage in which he’s locked is the present.

Initially Genis is attracted to how Proust summons up happy memories as a way to be happy:

Perfect recollection of the perfect moment seems to be a supernatural process available to those sensitive enough to do so There are almost psychedelic episodes throughout the narrative that seem to show a flicker in space-time when an instance resonates in synchronicity with a prior one and an ecstatic unity across time and space is achieved.

Because prisoners are generally unable to attain such epiphanies, Genis writes that he read Proust “with an eye toward practical use of his methods.” And in fact, he says that has “had more sex in my head than in bed, and savored fine meals hundreds of times, clutching the memories even as time clawed at them.”

In Proust’s final volume, however, he undercuts the idea that memory is the key to meaning and happiness. As Genis puts it, “No matter how good one is at remembrance, it is a barren occupation. It creates nothing, and mimics time in eating away one’s allotment of years….The essence of life that even the best memory artist can squeeze out is vapid. The only power it has is to pervert and decay. Compulsively remembering revives joy into hysteria, wonder into obsession, and love into jealousy.”

The answer then—at least as far as Genis is concerned—is Art, which alone (as Shakespeare repeatedly tells us in his sonnets) can defeat Time. Genis notes that In Search of Lost Time concludes

with Marcel going off to write the novel that the reader can begin reading anew. Even linearity is thus discarded. The novel ends with the author inviting the reader to return to the beginning. Many do, reading Proust continually throughout their lives.

Genis took away from this that, “to save myself, to make meaning of my life, I had to write.” As he puts it, “My bid was the perfect manifestation of the predations of Time, but there was an answer. Art would redeem the loss. Art alone could save my life.”

Speaking for myself, Art is only one of several ways I find meaning in life, others being relationships, family, nation, world community, religion, and nature. Of course, all these areas are interrelated, but I agree with Genis that literature provides powerful access to them. When Dante, for instance, defines God as “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars,” this is an instance of poetry articulating something that is both beyond us and at the core of our being.

In short, one could do worse than turn to literature to ferret out the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

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Selling Dead Souls in an American Prison

By Robin Bates | Published: May 16, 2023

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Wednesday

Sometimes, when one is reading two books at the same time, the works talk to each other. That’s been happening as I read Daniel Genis’s Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison while listening to James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk on Libby. Genis’s grim account of prison life makes me realize what Fonny Hunt, locked up on a bogus rape charge by a corrupt cop, must be going through.

Today’s post, however, continues the series I’ve been writing on how Genis used literature to cope with prison life. As I noted yesterday, there’s one dramatic instance where two novels, Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, got Genis into more trouble.

Midway through Sentence, Genis casually mentions that he once was confined to solitary—or rather, solitary with one other, a schizophrenic—for selling “dead souls.” I wondered whether this was some kind of prison slang since I only associate the phrase with Gogol’s novel, where a conman buys dead serfs from landowners so that the latter won’t have to pay taxes on them. (Taxes are based on the census, conducted when these serfs would have been still alive.) In the novel, Chichikov plans to take out a large loan against these dead souls, which he will then pocket.

As it turns out, the Russian-American Genis is in fact drawing partly on Gogol, partly on Mann’s version of the Faustus story, which also involves a soul transfer. Genis’s soul-selling was partly a joke, partly a practical measure to keep his fellow prisoners from bleeding him dry.

Genis, who is NYU educated and solidly middle class, was in the enviable position of having parents who sent him $100 a month. The other prisoners knew this, however, and Genis became besieged by requests, some of them accompanied by threats. At that point he thought of Adrian Leverkühn, who in Mann’s novel gets “twenty-four years of genius in exchange for the gift of syphilitic creativity, after which he was punished with madness.” In other words, he sells his soul for brilliance.

Genis found himself relating to Leverkühn:

For my soul-sucking criminal compromises with my own morals, I got half the time Leverkühn did [and] probably none of the genius…In any case, as the disease that Leverkühn deliberately contracted ate away at his mind, the composer embraced the Mephistophelian figure with whom he began to interact, the metaphorical buyer of his souls. Mann wrote the character with aplomb. The devilish is always appealing to those of a bohemian bent, and even though I was but a half-assed Rimbaud locked away in a place of simple values and harsh rules, my sense of play never left me.

I wrote in yesterday’s post about how this sense of play was vital to Genis and how he turned to literature to bolster it. In this case, however, he got into trouble when he decided to exchange gifts for his fellow inmates’ souls. He typed up contracts very professionally on his typewriter, and the ploy worked since, once having sold their (one) soul for something, the prisoners couldn’t ask for more favors. The the prison administration stepped in:

My skill on the typewriter was part of my undoing: my contract for souls just looked too real in the eyes of the cops, who were horrified by what they had discovered. The document simply stated that in exchange for a desired item, which was a cup of coffee in three of the five cases, the seller would transfer ownership of his immortal soul to the buyer, me. It took me only ten minutes to type up these one-page contracts. I used the legal jargon that was inescapable in prison and added in little bits of sarcasm to amuse myself.

All probably would have been well had not the contracts caught the attention of a fire-and-brimstone evangelical cop, who made sure that Genis was put away. As Genis observes, “Josef K. would have had an easier time getting acquitted from that kangaroo court.” I note as an aside that, of the five books that Genis was initially allowed to take with him, one was the work I would take if I were in similar straits: Shakespeare’s collected plays:

I decided to use the time to read the lesser-loved plays of Shakespeare, as well as a thick volume of science fiction for when I had no attention span. I consumed fifteen plays in fifteen days, enjoying Coriolanus and All’s Well That Ends Well, works I probably would never have read without having absolutely nothing else to do. I also did push-ups. Clips of a hundred between every scene at first, then after every act when I found the pace was unsustainable.

Ninety days in solitary—or in solitude with “a bunky”—was bad enough, but Genis also almost lost three months of “good time,” which is to say time he had built up for good behavior. Fortunately, this time he didn’t run up against any hardcore fundamentalists:

Luckily, when the day came for me to explain myself to a Time Allowance Committee in another prison, it happened to be Halloween, and the group’s members found the story humorous enough to ignore the penalty. I did not try to blame Thomas Mann or Nikolai Gogol for my misconduct, and went home on time.

Another work that Genis read in those final 90 days was Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, read while his schizophrenic roommate “raged on the cot beneath me.” Tomorrow I’ll report on the profound impact Proust’s novel had on him.

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Reading in Solitary Confinement

By Robin Bates | Published: May 15, 2023
Prisoner reading book in prison cell (Berlin 1895)

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Tuesday

I’ve been reporting on a book that Oberlin librarian Valerie Hotchkiss sent me, an account by former dope addict and now writer Daniel Genis about how he read 1000 books (1046 to be exact) while serving a ten-year prison sentence. For the most part, literature proved a godsend although there were some notable exceptions. But first to some of the positives.

For instance, literature helped Genis handle solitary confinement, which he experienced four times while in prison:

Torture is not illegal in the United States; it is used with abandon every time a prisoner is put iin solitary. I had the escape route of a literary bent, which allowed me to spend my box bits in the castle turrets of [Mervyn Peake’s fantasy series] Gormenghast and the drawing rooms of [Thackeray’s] Vanity Fair and on the tennis courts of Infinite Jest. Most of the boxed population, however, was barely literate. To this day I can summon the shrieking and howling, punctuated by teenage madmen banging the walls with their foreheads, that was the accompaniment to my reading.

Not all literature proved to be equally useful, as he discovered when, as a prison job, he served meals and facilitated discussions amongst “a crew of honest-to-God monsters.” These were men with severe mental disabilities, some of whom had committed horrendous crimes but whom he came to love. Novels didn’t help him better understand them, however:

Many of the works I consulted dealt with neurotic malaises that poorly corresponded with the real-life examples with whom I was eating my meals. Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities meandered over the gradual erosion of a sense of self, while The Brothers Karamazov explored murderous rages and how one can come to them quite rationally. Crime and Punishment provided the best justification for murder ever penned, and anyone who is convinced by its conclusion, and Raskolnikov’s inability to live with the crime, is too easily cajoled. I read de Sade to try to understand if there was truly any aesthetic to evil, and followed that up with Michel Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles. The French author made an argument for the humanity and even nobility of perversion. Antonin Artaud tried to do the same for cruelty, and the foibles of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi made a mocking sense of madness and evil that was delightful to read about but utterly unnerving when it was housed in the cell next to yours. The truth is that these sophisticated interrogations of psychosis provided little illumination regarding the mentally ill men around me. These were men who cut off the ears of their kidnapped victims rather than their own.

Genis mentions one book that got closer to the truth:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next was a more accurate look into the world in which I was living, with its simpleminded obsessions, petty cruelties of the orderlies, and horror for the person with moments of lucidity interspersed with his blessed madness.

Fortunately, literature reminded Genis of the importance of humor and helped him hold on to a sense of play. As he notes, during his ten years in prison he “laughed as much as possible, feeling that every chuckle was a moment stolen back from the Department of Corrections.” He said he picked up the idea from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago,

where the innocent prisoners laugh at political jokes that are treacherous because of the informants all around, but laugh nevertheless to remind themselves that they are more than just zeks. Central European, as well as German, literature is remarkably suited to jailhouse reading. They have a native sense of absurdity, a condition I walked around in for years. Having seen men attempt suicide in toilet bowls and murders committed a dozen feet from me, what could I do but put on the same sardonic smile that I imagine Bruno Schulz wore when his brilliant brains were blown out by a callous SS officer. I loved his Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass….Perhaps it was the blood that soaked the soil of these authors’ heimland, but I also adored Hermann Hesse, especially The Glass Bead Game, better titled in the original as Das Glasperlenspiel. German writing on man and his place in this ungainly life of ours appealed to me when I was so lost in this one. Kafka’s Castle, with its cruel absurdities and nightmare bureaucracies, felt like an apt metaphor for prison life. I went further down this rabbit hole and discovered other Czech literature to revel in. Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk taught me how to laugh off the world life has to offer. Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts suggested that any oppressed underclass has a certain power.

But this sense of humor, which literature helped keep alive, also got Genis into trouble. Tomorrow I’ll share how a harmless joke, inspired by Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, led to Genis being locked up in solitary confinement for 90 days.

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