Serena and Venus Transformed Tennis

By Robin Bates | Published: September 5, 2022
Serena Williams bows out

Tuesday

Last week, as we watched the greatest woman tennis player of all time play what is probably her last professional match, we could only marvel at how she and her sister transformed the sport. Fox Sports commentator Nick Wright spoke for many of us when he opined that Serena Williams is “the most dominant in her field of any athlete I have ever seen.” Wright added that Serena belongs on the Mount Rushmore of greatest athletes ever, up there with Muhammad Ali, Usain Bolt, and only one or two others. In every way, she has been extraordinary.

Speaking for myself, I was always amazed at how Serena could win clutch points when the whole match hung in the balance. She seemed absolutely fearless at such moments.

The late poet Tony Hoagland wrote a poem that captured how she and Venus changed the sport in a poem appropriately titled “The Change.” The speaker in the poem is a man with unconscious racial biases who finds himself enthralled by a Williams match in spite of himself. While he is watching Venus play, he could just as easily be describing Serena.

Expecting deference from Black women, he’s struck by how Venus was

hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation
down Abraham Lincoln’s throat,
like she wasn’t asking anyone’s permission

The poem makes some factual errors: the match the speaker appears to have seen was Venus defeating Belgian Justine Henin, who indeed was a “tough little European blonde,” in 2001. (Technically, 2001 is still the 20th century, so “the 20th century almost gone” is accurate.) Furthermore, the match was held on the green grass of Wimbledon, not the red clay of the French Open. (The only time Venus reached the French Open finals, she lost to Serena.) In 2001, George Bush would have been “the new president [who] proves he’s a dummy.”

The speaker also garbles the name by mixing up Venus with Aphrodite while joining it with a caricatured Black name: in the poem she becomes “Vondella Aphrodite.” (“Say her name correctly,” I imagine Black Lives Matter protesters saying.) And I have no idea what it means that the speaker gets the Williamses’ hometown wrong. Maybe he has confused Compton, California (their actual home) with Compton, Alabama, or maybe he has projected a primal civil rights drama onto the match. At any rate, even though he finds himself rooting for the white women—”because she was one of my kind, my tribe, with her pale eyes and thin lips”—he can’t help being riveted by Venus’s power and her “to-hell-with-everybody stare.” Incidentally, Venus won the match 6-1, 3-6, 6-0. Or as the speaker puts it,

that black girl wore down her opponent
then kicked her ass good
then thumped her once more for good measure

Unfortunately for the Williams sisters, simply winning in those early years didn’t change hearts and minds. Many Americans rooted against them, especially Serena, because of their unapologetic dominance. Furthermore, Black athletes have never won White hearts simply by being good. If anything, stereotypes are sometimes reinforced, not changed, by their success.

Given how white the tennis world was in 2001, however, it’s remarkable how much the Williams sisters have transformed it. Players of color, like Naomi Osaka, Coco Gauff, and Francis Tiafoe (the latter two having reached the U.S. Open quarterfinals this year) now travel the road that Serena and Venus blazed. In that way, the speaker in the poem is absolutely correct: the sport can’t be “put it back where it belonged” because we ourselves have been changed.

The Change

By Tony Hoagland

The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine.
In the park the daffodils came up
and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade.

Sometimes I think that nothing really changes –

The young girls show the latest crop of tummies,
and the new president proves that he’s a dummy.

but remember the tennis match we watched that year?
Right before our eyes

some tough little European blonde
pitted against that big black girl from Alabama,
cornrowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms,
some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite –

We were just walking past the lounge
and got sucked in by the screen above the bar,
and pretty soon
we started to care about who won,

putting ourselves into each whacked return
as the volleys went back and forth and back
like some contest between
the old world and the new,

and you loved her complicated hair
and her to-hell-with-everybody stare,
and I,
I couldn’t help wanting
the white girl to come out on top,
because she was one of my kind, my tribe,
with her pale eyes and thin lips

and because the black girl was so big
and so black,
so unintimidated,

hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation
down Abraham Lincoln’s throat,
like she wasn’t asking anyone’s permission.

There are moments when history
passes you so close
you can smell its breath,
you can reach your hand out
and touch it on its flank,

and I don’t watch all that much Masterpiece Theatre,
but I could feel the end of an era there

in front of those bleachers full of people
in their Sunday tennis-watching clothes

as that black girl wore down her opponent
then kicked her ass good
then thumped her once more for good measure

and stood up on the red clay court
holding her racket over her head like a guitar.

And the little pink judge
had to climb up on a box
to put the ribbon on her neck,
still managing to smile into the camera flash,
even though everything was changing

and in fact, everything had already changed –

Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone,
we were there,

and when we went to put it back where it belonged,
it was past us
and we were changed.

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Think of Work Sweat as “Odorous Oil”

By Robin Bates | Published: September 4, 2022
Bumpei Usui, The Furniture Factory

Monday – Labor Day

Today America celebrates the nobility of work while giving its workers a day off from same work. Nor is it only Americans who regard work as practically something holy. I share today a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning which shows the Victorians having the same view of it.

Many trace this back to the Protestant work ethic, which as Weber argued has its roots in fear-driven Calvinism. Believing that whether we are headed for heaven or hell has already been predetermined by an all-knowing god, Calvinists/Presbyterians obsessively scrutinized their own lives to find evidence that would prove that they were amongst the elect rather than the damned. If their lives turned out prosperous, they hoped this meant that God favored them, so they did everything they could to make money.

(To be sure, this is an example of flawed logic. In addition to the flawed assumption that you can tilt the playing field by anything you do, why should material prosperity be a sign of God’s election rather than other things in life? Nevertheless, the belief was psychologically satisfying in that doing good and doing well could be seen as one and the same. Such belief is foundational to prosperity theology, the power of positive thinking, and other variants that have taken hold in various American Protestant denominations.)

Puritan self-scrutiny, at least when it came to Great Britain’s shores in the 17th century, led to intense journaling, which in turn (so argues Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel) led to the novel, a form of literature that can focus intensively on small details in the lives of ordinary people. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Journal of the Plague Year are great examples of this, as are the novels of Samuel Richardson. Crusoe’s intense efforts to develop his desert island are driven by guilt over having disobeyed his father and a fear of damnation, and his material achievements so caught people’s imaginations that for 200 years Robinson Crusoe was Europe’s most popular novel.

I offer this as backdrop for Barrett Browning’s “Work.” Her image of tending vines and the heat of the day, furthermore, must be a reference to Adam and Eve before the fall in Milton’s Paradise Lost. In those blissful hours before all hell broke loose (literally in Milton’s imagery), the couple clip a few vines here or there and then, when they get tired, retire to rest. In the following passage, Eve has just mentioned to Adam that they could prune more efficiently if they split up—after all, the vegetation seems to be growing faster than they can it back—to which Adam replies that “irksome toil” is not “the end of human life.” Rather work, in moderation, provides us the same kind of delight as eating, having meaningful conversations, and looking into each other’s eyes:

Yet not so strictly hath our Lord imposed
Labor, as to debar us when we need
Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
Of looks and smiles; for smiles from reason flow,
To brute denied, and are of love the food;
Love, not the lowest end of human life.
For not to irksome toil, but to delight,
He made us, and delight to reason joined.

Essentially, Eve has attempted to introduce the Puritan work ethic into Eden, only to be told to relax. And if she’s really worried about the vines getting out of control, Adam points out, there will soon be kids to help them out:

These paths and bowers doubt not but our joint hands
Will keep from wilderness with ease, as wide
As we need walk, till younger hands ere long
Assist us…

 After the fall, of course, it’s a different matter as God puts the hammer down:

Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife,
And eaten of the tree, concerning which
I charged thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat thereof: 
Cursed is the ground for thy sake; thou in sorrow
Shalt eat thereof, all the days of thy life;
Thorns also and thistles it shall bring thee forth
Unbid; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread…

Oh, and God adds that Adam, Eve, and their descendants will have to keep working this way until they die:

Till thou return unto the ground; for thou
Out of the ground wast taken, know thy birth,
For dust thou art, and shalt to dust return.

Back to Barrett Browning’s poem. There will be no leaving one’s vine-tending, she tells us, “till Death’s mild curfew shall from work assoil.”

Note the use of the word “mild,” however. What seems like a curse to Adam becomes almost a blessing. “Sweat of thy face,” for instance, becomes “odorous oil,” which itself sounds like an allusion to the 23rd psalm: “Thou anointest my head with [odorous] oil.” Tears of misery, meanwhile, become “pure crystallines,” which those who are inspired by our example will “wear for amulets.”

In other words, Barrett Browning is telling us to work hard, patiently and cheerfully, because, by doing so, we will inspire others to do the same. “My cup runneth over,” the 23rd psalm goes on to say, while Barrett Browning writes,

The least flower, with a brimming cup, may stand.
And share its dew-drop with another near.

So work sweat has morphed first into odorous oil and now morning dew. Here’s her poem:

Work
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What are we set on earth for? Say, to toil —
Nor seek to leave thy tending of the vines,
For all the heat o’ the day, till it declines,
And Death’s mild curfew shall from work assoil.
God did anoint thee with his odorous oil,
To wrestle, not to reign; and He assigns
All thy tears over, like pure crystallines.
For younger fellow-workers of the soil
To wear for amulets. So others shall
Take patience, labor, to their heart and hand,
From thy hand, and thy heart, and thy brave cheer,
And God’s grace fructify through thee to all.
The least flower, with a brimming cup, may stand.
And share its dew-drop with another near.

It sounds like Barrett Browning is describing a process of socialization. By undertaking burdensome work with “brave cheer,” we convince others to take on that same work with the same cheer and so on through generations. And perhaps it’s true that work feels less arduous if we see it as the reason God set us on earth.

Only, according to Milton, God didn’t originally intend “odorous oil” for us but something gentler. We brought on the tears ourselves. Barrett Browning just seems to be making the best of it.

Labor Day intends to do the same. By celebrating the labor we do—and by giving us temporary relief from this labor in order to do the celebrating—it makes things a little easier. We get a brief glimpse of life before the fall every year at this time as we sit back and relax with family and friends.

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Pots Turned on the Wheel of Life

By Robin Bates | Published: September 3, 2022
Jost Amman, The Potter (1574)

Spiritual Sunday

As Julia and I are in the process of transforming my parents’ house into our house, we’re looking for ways to highlight our pottery collection. Silver we can do without—two of my brothers are taking that—but fine pottery is a passion of mine. My mother owns a number of wonderful pieces by local potters, as do we, and we’re clearing space so that guests and visitors can enjoy the collection as well.

All of which makes me interested in one of today’s Old Testament readings. In 18:1-11, Jeremiah imagines God as a potter. Longfellow, meanwhile, may have this passage partly in mind in his poem “Song of the Potter.”

First, here’s Jeremiah describing God as an angry potter. Envisioning Israel as a vessel in process, Jeremiah says that God can mess up humanity the way He messes up a pot. “I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you,” Jeremiah’s God tells humanity:

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.

Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it

And:

Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.

Presumably Israel will become a better pot if it listens to God.

Longfellow also imagines God as a potter, and at one point he seems to allude to today’s passage: “A touch can make, a touch can mar.” In the end, however, he is making another point: the rotating pot is like the great wheel of fortune or the cycle of life. Longfellow may also have in mind Ecclesiastes 3, the passage that begins, “To everything there is a season.” (“Turn, turn, turn,” I hear Pete Seeger singing.)

In this drama, the pot cannot demand an explanation from the potter since the ways of that potter—whether it is God or fate—are beyond our understanding. So just accept that it is of clay that we are made and it is to clay that we shall return.

Song of the Potter
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Turn, turn, my wheel! Turn round and round,
Without a pause, without a sound:
So spins the flying world away!
This clay, well mixed with marl and sand,
Follows the motion of my hand;
For some must follow, and some command,
Though all are made of clay!

Turn, turn, my wheel! All things must change
To something new, to something strange;
Nothing that is can pause or stay;
The moon will wax, the moon will wane,
The mist and cloud will turn to rain,
The rain to mist and cloud again,
To-morrow be to-day.

Turn, turn, my wheel! All life is brief;
What now is bud will soon be leaf,
What now is leaf will soon decay;
The wind blows east, the wind blows west;
The blue eggs in the robin’s nest
Will soon have wings and beak and breast,
And flutter and fly away.

Turn, turn, my wheel! This earthen jar
A touch can make, a touch can mar;
And shall it to the Potter say,
What makest thou? Thou hast no hand?
As men who think to understand
A world by their Creator planned,
Who wiser is than they.

Turn, turn, my wheel! ‘Tis nature’s plan
The child should grow into the man,
The man grow wrinkled, old, and gray;
In youth the heart exults and sings,
The pulses leap, the feet have wings;
In age the cricket chirps, and brings
The harvest home of day.

Turn, turn, my wheel! The human race,
Of every tongue, of every place,
Caucasian, Coptic, or Malay,
All that inhabit this great earth,
Whatever be their rank or worth,
Are kindred and allied by birth,
And made of the same clay.

Turn, turn, my wheel! What is begun
At daybreak must at dark be done,
To-morrow will be another day;
To-morrow the hot furnace flame
Will search the heart and try the frame,
And stamp with honor or with shame
These vessels made of clay.

Stop, stop, my wheel! Too soon, too soon
The noon will be the afternoon,
Too soon to-day be yesterday;
Behind us in our path we cast
The broken potsherds of the past,
And all are ground to dust at last,
And trodden into clay.

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September Days Are Here

By Robin Bates | Published: August 31, 2022
Apples at Ricker Hill Orchards, my cousins’ Maine apple farm

Thursday

Here’s a lovely Helen Hunt Jackson poem to usher in the first day of September. Jackson, an exact contemporary of Emily Dickinson, hits all the right notes in describing the season, including the way September stands at the intersection of summer and fall. As Jackson puts it, “With summer’s best of weather,/ And autumn’s best of cheer.”

After having captured the loveliness of the month, however, Jackson then takes a further step and says that it brings about something even lovelier: “a thing which I remember.” We aren’t told what this thing is. It’s a secret that the poet leaves up to our imagination.

September
By Helen Hunt Jackson

The golden-rod is yellow;
The corn is turning brown;
The trees in apple orchards
With fruit are bending down.

The gentian’s bluest fringes
Are curling in the sun;
In dusty pods the milkweed
Its hidden silk has spun.

The sedges flaunt their harvest,
In every meadow nook;
And asters by the brook-side
Make asters in the brook.

From dewy lanes at morning
The grapes’ sweet odors rise;
At noon the roads all flutter
With yellow butterflies.

By all these lovely tokens
September days are here,
With summer’s best of weather,
And autumn’s best of cheer.

But none of all this beauty
Which floods the earth and air
Is unto me the secret
Which makes September fair.

‘T is a thing which I remember;
To name it thrills me yet:
One day of one September
I never can forget.

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Longing for Walden-Like Simplicity

By Robin Bates | Published: August 30, 2022
Walden Pond

Wednesday

Julia and I have inherited my parents’ house, and while we are thrilled, we are also discovering that it is no small feat to clean out the detritus of 74 years—not to mention all the stuff that my parents inherited from their parents and grandparents. We’re trying to be careful—you never know when you’ll open an envelope and find a letter from Pete Seeger, which we just did—but it can feel overwhelming at times.

I think of Thoreau, who at one point in his Walden sojourn found himself overwhelmed by three pieces of limestone. The episode occurs in a reflection on people always wanting bigger houses and more stuff.

The passage starts with longing for the simple life of the uneducated Arab or Indian. (Anthropologists tell us that their life is far from simple but let that pass.)

Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man’s providing a certain number of superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab’s or the Indian’s?

And then there’s the fact that the great prophets—Jesus, for example—did not carry furniture around with them:

When I think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any carload of fashionable furniture…At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work undone.

At this point we learn of Thoreau’s dislike of dusting:

Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.

Alan Dillingham, my American lit teacher in grad school, pointed out that Thoreau has another option: he could just leave the rocks dusty. Dillingham was making the point that Thoreau was obsessed with purity, starting with Walden Pond itself. So yes, anyone living in the woods needs to get over a dirt phobia.

But set that discussion aside. Right now, I’m relating to Thoreau’s desire for an uncluttered life. Before I get there, however, there are mounds and mounds of stuff standing in my way.

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Lovecraft Foresees Our Future

By Robin Bates | Published: August 29, 2022
Dongting Lake, China’s largest freshwater lake

Tuesday

Bad news about the climate is coming at us thick and fast, including reports that melting Greenland icebergs will cause seal levels to rise a foot and would so so even if we capped carbon emissions tomorrow. I focus today, however, on lakes and rivers drying up because of an H.P. Lovecraft story about that happening.

In case you haven’t heard, China’s largest lake has gone dry as temperatures in the country hit record highs. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Colorado River has been reaching dangerously low levels, threatening both agricultural and energy production. Meanwhile, in an ironic twist that is characteristic of climate’s change’s extreme weather events, over 1000 people in Pakistan have been killed by horrific flooding, while flash floods have been creating havoc in southern California’s mountains and deserts.

But back to Lovecraft and global warming. In “Till A’ the Seas” (1935), a story he co-wrote with R. H. Barlow, the earth is getting hotter, although in this case it’s not humanity’s fault. Rather, at a date a few thousand years in the future, the earth has started to fall into the sun. It’s a gradual process, which means that everyone doesn’t die at once. They just die over a period of time, and we watch the last man on earth, desperately seeking water, fall into a dry well and die.

Disconcertingly, the story captures some of the weather-caused behaviors that we are seeing today. It may well be that climate change caused the war in Syria, as farmers whose lands were devastated by drought flocked into the cities. Some of Central America’s northward migration, especially from Guatemala, has also been caused by drought. The story, which was written during the Dust Bowl years, socks us with the stark picture from the get-go.

Upon an eroded cliff-top rested the man, gazing far across the valley. Lying thus, he could see a great distance, but in all the sere expanse there was no visible motion. Nothing stirred the dusty plain, the disintegrated sand of long-dry river-beds, where once coursed the gushing streams of Earth’s youth. There was little greenery in this ultimate world, this final stage of mankind’s prolonged presence upon the planet. For unnumbered aeons the drought and sandstorms had ravaged all the lands. The trees and bushes had given way to small, twisted shrubs that persisted long through their sturdiness; but these, in turn, perished before the onslaught of coarse grasses and stringy, tough vegetation of strange evolution.

If humans have flourished as a species, it’s we are so adaptable, finding ways to survive both in the very hot and in the very cold. Lovecraft and Barlow point out that adaptability can go take us so far, however:

The ever-present heat, as Earth drew nearer to the sun, withered and killed with pitiless rays. It had not come at once; long eons had gone before any could feel the change. And all through those first ages man’s adaptable form had followed the slow mutation and modeled itself to fit the more and more torrid air. Then the day had come when men could bear their hot cities but ill, and a gradual recession began, slow yet deliberate. Those towns and settlements closest to the equator had been first, of course, but later there were others. Man, softened and exhausted, could cope no longer with the ruthlessly mounting heat. It seared him as he was, and evolution was too slow to mold new resistances in him.

In the story, as in our present time, some people stay put and some people emigrate. In those who stay, we see both the confidence of humans in their adaptive capacities and their tendency to deny what the experts are telling them (which we can recognize only too well):

Yet not at first were the great cities of the equator left to the spider and the scorpion. In the early years there were many who stayed on, devising curious shields and armours against the heat and the deadly dryness. These fearless souls, screening certain buildings against the encroaching sun, made miniature worlds of refuge wherein no protective armor was needed. They contrived marvelously ingenious things, so that for a while men persisted in the rusting towers, hoping thereby to cling to old lands till the searing should be over. For many would not believe what the astronomers said, and looked for a coming of the mild olden world again. But one day the men of Dath, from the new city of Niyara, made signals to Yuanario, their immemorially ancient capital, and gained no answer from the few who remained therein. And when explorers reached that millennial city of bridge-linked towers they found only silence. There was not even the horror of corruption, for the scavenger lizards had been swift.

Those who flee fare scarcely better:

Steady, universal, and inexorable was the great eviction of man from the realms he had always known. No land within the widening stricken belt was spared; no people left unrouted. It was an epic, a titan tragedy whose plot was unrevealed to the actors—this wholesale desertion of the cities of men. It took not years or even centuries, but millennia of ruthless change. And still it kept on—sullen, inevitable, savagely devastating.

Yet just as the slowness of climate change—at least in human terms—allows people to rationalize away climate disasters, so those in the Lovecraft/Barlow story deny what is happening:

[W]ater was scarce, and found only in deep caverns. There was little enough, even of this; and men died of thirst wandering in far places. Yet so slow were these deadly changes, that each new generation of man was loath to believe what it heard from its parents. None would admit that the heat had been less or the water more plentiful in the old days, or take warning that days of bitterer burning and drought were to come.

At the end of the story, we watch the death of earth’s last inhabitant.

Lovecraft/Barlow take their title from a Robert Burns poem, “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose.”

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry;

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;
I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

We see no love in the short story, however, which means that its title is darkly ironic. When everyone is dying, no one is making love.

“Till A’ the Seas” provides one consolation, however: this future is thousands of years off. I’m currently reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, however, that places that dry future in the year 2024. But that will be the subject of a future post.

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The War Song of Vladimir Putin

By Robin Bates | Published: August 28, 2022
Delacrois, Attila the Hun and His Barbarian Hoards

Monday

It was just six months ago that Russia invaded Ukraine—invaded it a second time, I should say—soI’m sharing Thomas Peacock’s famous mock epic lyric to mark the occasion. Actually, reading “The War-song of Dinas Vawr” with Russia’s invasion in mind makes it a little less funny. That’s because there are Russians who actually think this way.

In normal times, the poem seems to be an over-the-top parody of epic warrior behavior such as one finds in, say, The Odyssey. Whatever darkness that that the poem may stir inside a reader is undercut by its comic use of feminine rhymes: for instance “blood enough to swim in/orphaned many women.” (Feminine rhymes are those where the end rhyme falls on an unstressed syllable rather than the final stressed one.) The straight matter-of-fact way in which we are told brutal details also comes as a shock of the black comedy variety, such as (another feminine rhyme) “ere our force we led off/ others cut his head off.”

It’s one thing, however, to imagine warriors of old behaving this way, while quite another to see modern nations doing so. Now Peacock’s poem sounds like it was written by a Russian seeking to reestablish the old Russian empire. Fortunately, “War Song of Dinas Vawr” describes a Putin wish fulfillment rather than what is actually happening. Ukraine may look sweet to Russian eyes, but the smaller nation has refused to be quelled or overthrown, and the Russians have not been able to behead Zelensky.

The invasion has produced many widows and orphans, however. Here’s the poem:

The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it

On Dyfed’s richest valley,
Where herds of kine were browsing,
We made a mighty sally,
To furnish our carousing.
Fierce warriors rushed to meet us;
We met them, and o’erthrew them:
They struggled hard to beat us;
But we conquered them, and slew them.

As we drove our prize at leisure,
The king marched forth to catch us:
His rage surpassed all measure,
But his people could not match us.
He fled to his hall-pillars;
And, ere our force we led off,
Some sacked his house and cellars,
While others cut his head off.

We there, in strife bewild’ring,
Spilt blood enough to swim in:
We orphaned many children,
And widowed many women.
The eagles and the ravens
We glutted with our foemen;
The heroes and the cravens,
The spearmen and the bowmen.

We brought away from battle,
And much their land bemoaned them,
Two thousand head of cattle,
And the head of him who owned them:
Ednyfed, king of Dyfed,
His head was borne before us;
His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,
And his overthrow, our chorus.

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Butler’s Theology in Parable of the Sower

By Robin Bates | Published: August 27, 2022
Millet, The Sower

Spiritual Sunday

I’m currently in the process of reading Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower–an early instance of dystopian climate fiction (or cli-fi, as Dan Bloom calls it)–and am attempting to sort out the protagonist’s theology. Daughter of a pastor, 15-year-old Lauren is developing her own version of God as she struggles for survival in 2024 California, where climate change has decimated society. Water and food are scarce, forcing people to live behind walls to protect themselves against gangs and thieves. Arson and murder are daily occurrences.

While the older generation laments the passing of the good old days, Lauren sees it as imperative that she creatively adapt to the conditions. She sets forth her theory of life/theology in jottings that she will one day assemble into a book called Earth Seed: The Books of the Living.

At one point, in an attempt to understand God, Lauren writes,

God is Power–
Infinite,
Irresistible,
Inexorable,
Indifferent.
And yet, God is Pliable–
Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos,
Clay. God exists to be shaped.
God is change.

In her own version of Darwinian evolution, Lauren sees humans working in conjunction with God to survive and flourish in a desolate landscape. Doing so, however, takes effort on the part of the individual. If one is passive, one remains “God’s victim, God’s plaything, God’s prey”:

A victim of God may,
Through learning adaption,
Become a partner of God,
A victim of God may,
Through forethought and planning,
Become a shaper of God.
Or a victim of God may,
Through shortsightedness and fear,
Remain God’s victim,
God’s plaything, God’s prey.

At another point, sounding a little like the non-scriptural “God helps those who help themselves,” she distinguishes between two different kinds of belief:

Belief
Initiates and guides action–
Or it does nothing.

Throughout the book, Lauren periodically attempts to spell out her relationship with God. If I understand her correctly, while she sees God as a potentially creative and generative force in the universe, to release that potential we must creatively and openly ourselves to God. This is what she means by shaping Him/Her/It.

Lauren rejects the idea that God will do good things for us if we pray. “Prayers only help the person doing the praying,” she says, “and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person’s resolve.” And yet, if we use prayers to focus our resolve, then they indeed help us “to shape God and to accept and work with the shapes that God imposes on us.”

Struggling with her articulation, Lauren sometimes veers into possible contradiction. On the one hand, she says, “God is power, and in the end, God prevails.” Yet she then adds,

But we can rig the game in our own favor if we understand that God exists to be shaped, and will be shaped, with or without our forethought, with or without our intent.”

Lauren contrasts this vision with that found in Job, her favorite book in the Bible. As she puts it,

I’m not some kind of potential Job, long suffering, stiff necked, then, at last, either humble before an all-knowing almighty, or destroyed. My God doesn’t love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.”

 Working with what might be seen as a Darwinian Christianity, Lauren differentiates between a blind evolution and one that humans can make happen. Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, describes this as “the cognitive revolution,” which he says superseded biological evolution 70,000 years ago in that our cognitive capacities influenced evolution in a new way. As Lauren puts it,

We are Earthseed
The life that perceives itself
Changing

And elsewhere:

Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.

Working in conjunction with God—or with this impersonal force—brings about significant change:

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only last truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

Change, however, can be dangerous, meaning that we must approach God with openness and creativity. As Lauren warns,

A gift of God
May sear unready fingers.

It’s worthwhile at this point to remind ourselves of Jesus’s parable of the sower because it gives us further insight into Lauren’s vision:

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake.Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people stood on the shore. Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear.”

The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”

He replied, “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.

And later:

Blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.

Lauren is determined to accept the earth seed as it falls upon her–which is to say, to hear what God has to say and to follow what God directs. As she puts it,

All successful life is
Adaptable,
Opportunistic,
Tenacious,
Interconnected, and
Fecund. Understand this. Use it.
Shape God.

Although I haven’t finished the novel yet, I’ll conclude with one last observation from Lauren’s book. It’s a declaration of what it means to be both conscious and sentient in God’s universe:

We are Earthseed. We are flesh—self aware, questing, problem-solving flesh. We are that aspect of Earthlife best able to shape God knowingly. We are Earthlife maturing, Earthlife preparing to fall away from the parent world. We are Earthlife preparing to take root in new ground, Earthlife fulfilling its purpose, its promise, its Destiny.

Lauren’s (and probably Butler’s) vision is striking a chord in me. I too have never seen God in personal terms. When my eldest son died, I didn’t blame God or hold God responsible, nor did I think that God felt sorry for me. Rather, as I saw it, I had to work in conjunction with God to make sure that Justin’s death would not become a curse that blighted my life and those lives around me. I looked to God as a potentially creative force that would help me find new wellsprings of love and care in a world that had just wounded me to the core.

Bitterness would have been my version of Lauren’s “destructive fanaticism.” Without God, life would have meant “nothing at all.” God was Change, a new way of being in the world, and it was up to me to shape and be shaped by Him/Her/It.

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