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Thursday – Halloween
For Halloween I’m sharing one of the scariest poems that I know. It’s about a childhood nightmare involving a cat that Robert Graves recalled after being wounded at the Battle of the Somme in World War I.
Graves remembers being declared dead after his body was retrieved from “a crater by High Wood” and being loaded on board a train, which is when the dream came back to him. (For years after he was traumatized by trains.) It came back to him again when, in a morphine-induced state (and probably PTSD), his mind returned him to the battlefield.
A Child’s Nightmare By Robert Graves
Through long nursery nights he stood By my bed unwearying, Loomed gigantic, formless, queer, Purring in my haunted ear That same hideous nightmare thing, Talking, as he lapped my blood, In a voice cruel and flat, Saying for ever, “Cat!… Cat!… Cat!…”
That one word was all he said, That one word through all my sleep, In monotonous mock despair. Nonsense may be light as air, But there’s Nonsense that can keep Horror bristling round the head, When a voice cruel and flat Says for ever, “Cat!… Cat!… Cat!…”
He had faded, he was gone Years ago with Nursery Land, When he leapt on me again From the clank of a night train, Overpowered me foot and head, Lapped my blood, while on and on The old voice cruel and flat Says for ever, “Cat!… Cat!… Cat!…”
Morphia drowsed, again I lay In a crater by High Wood: He was there with straddling legs, Staring eyes as big as eggs, Purring as he lapped my blood, His black bulk darkening the day, With a voice cruel and flat, “Cat!… Cat!… Cat!… Cat!…” he said, “Cat!… Cat!…”
When I’m shot through heart and head, And there’s no choice but to die, The last word I’ll hear, no doubt, Won’t be “Charge!” or “Bomb them out!” Nor the stretcher-bearer’s cry, “Let that body be, he’s dead!” But a voice cruel and flat Saying for ever, “Cat!… Cat!… Cat!”
If one were to analyze this dream from a Jungian perspective, one could see the cat as a devouring anima figure, the warrior’s female side which becomes toxic when his male side seeks to suppress all that is effeminate. But no amount of analysis can counter the absolute terror found in the image.
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Wednesday
On Monday, as I watched “the fearful bending of the knee” (Richard II) by the owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times,I posted Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Old Ironsides.” In the poem, the poet decries what he thought was the planned desecration of the fabled warship, the U.S.S. Constitution.
Dana Milbank, one of the many Washington Post columnists who protested owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to pull the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in deference to Donald Trump, has asked us to nevertheless keep faith with the newspaper. In his argument, he draws on Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.” More on that in a moment.
Although I have canceled subscriptions in the past, most notably the New York Times for its hatchet job on Hillary Clinton in 2016, I am swayed by the case Milbank makes.
He notes that Bezos has, before this, been a remarkably hands-off editor. And although the Post, like other major newspapers, has been guilty of sane-washing Trump, Bezos is no Rupert Murdoch or Elon Musk. Since he bought the newspaper in 2013, Milbank notes, it has won
18 Pulitzer prices, including for its coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, its exposure of Trump’s phony charitable work, revelations about secret surveillance at the National Security Agency and lapses at the Secret Service, and its reporting on police shootings, poverty, abortion, racial justice and climate change. Just two weeks ago, The Post won two Loeb Awards, the top prize in business journalism, including for my colleagues Heather Long and Sergio Peçanha’s editorials on post-pandemic revival of America’s downtowns. All three finalists in the commentary category were from The Post.
The problem is that such journalism is expensive. The paper lost $77 million last year, which only a billionaire like Bezos can shrug off.
The question is how the Post will behave in the future, and here’s where Kipling comes in. Milbank draws on one of Kipling’s lines about reliance in his inspiring poem “If”:
Those of us working in the news business for the last quarter century know what it’s like to “watch the things you gave your life to, broken/ And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools” as Kipling put it. For all its flaws, The Post is still one of the strongest voices for preserving our democratic freedoms.
Incidentally, “If” has other good advice for us in the final week of this election season. When you see people panicking and disagreeing, when you see political actors lying and hating, consider the following:
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise…
And how about this for campaign volunteers pushing themselves to the limit to save democracy:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
And then there’s this rousing conclusion, which could use a gender addition but is otherwise perfect for the occasion:
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Returning to the subject at hand, Milbank gives the go-ahead for canceling subscriptions if the Post does indeed become broken beyond repair. As he puts it,
If this turns out to be the beginning of a crackdown on our journalistic integrity — if journalists are ordered to pull their punches, called off sensitive stories or fired for doing their jobs — my colleagues and I will be leading the calls for Post readers to cancel their subscriptions, and we’ll be resigning en masse.
But it’s not that broken yet, even with the sane-washing we have witnessed, and good pro-democratic work is still being done. Canceling subscriptions will not address the bigger issue, which is that Trump is trying to turn us into another Russia, where oligarchs kowtow to the strongman in charge. If we get to that point, we’ll have bigger issues than a pulled endorsement.
In the meantime, I leave you with these final sentiments, also drawn from the poem and which conclude with the line Milbank shares:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools…
When it comes to deciding who to vote for, this is no time for choosing the perfect (“dreams”) over the good (Voltaire) or letting ideology–“thoughts”–triumph over practical reality. Knaves, helped along by AI and Russian bots, are twisting the truth non-stop, and sometimes it may feel that democracy’s traditional tools have been broken. But whether or not we prevail in this election, the fight will go on. No Triumph and no Disaster is ever the final word.
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Wednesday
I’m teaching King Lear today, and as Donald Trump, with each passing day, increasingly behaves like a mad ex-monarch, I thought I’d repost one of my essays comparing the two. There have been many such essays (as you will see by the links I provide at the end) but this should come as no surprise. Given that Lear is one of literature’s greatest depictions of a narcissist, it makes sense I would have turned to the play to get Trump’s measure.
The post reprinted below was written in the first six months of Trump’s presidency, and I must say that it holds up fairly well—except that, while Lear breaks out of his solipsistic prison to find love in the end, I’m more skeptical than I was in 2017 that Trump will ever escape.
There’s one other thing I noticed in rereading Lear, which is that the king’s loyal follower Kent is not unlike General Mark Milley or Liz Cheney, who have reminded us that members of the military and elected leaders swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. In Kent’s case, his loyalty is to the kingdom and so he remains faithful, not to Lear, but to King Lear. He is therefore willing to call out Lear–speak truth to power–for abandoning his kingship responsibilities, even though it gets him banished. And then to continue to serve King Lear, in disguise, despite the banishment.
Likewise, he calls out sycophantic followers in one of literature’s great invective rants. Think of Goneril’s steward Oswald as one of the grifters who will follow Trump as long as the former president commands an audience–and who will abandon him for another rightwing gravy train the moment that Trump no longer has sway:
The following post was written, however, when the Oswalds of the world were feeling pretty good. And who were, as happens in the play, putting Republicans not loyal to Trump in metaphorical stocks.
Reprinted from May 31, 2017
This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post comparing Donald Trump to King Lear. The more I think about it, the more disturbing the parallels appear.
To set up my further thoughts, I quote from a remarkable Rebecca Solnit article that pulls from Pushkin’s story of the golden fish, The Great Gatsby, and The Picture of Dorian Gray to capture the horror that is Trump. In her description one sees Lear as well:
Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws [Alert! J. Alfred Prufrock reference] upon the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching, reaching for more, a carrion crab, a lobster and a boiling lobster pot in one, a termite, a tyrant over his own little empires. He got a boost at the beginning from the wealth handed him and then moved among grifters and mobsters who cut him slack as long as he was useful, or maybe there’s slack in arenas where people live by personal loyalty until they betray, and not by rules, and certainly not by the law or the book. So for seven decades, he fed his appetites and exercised his license to lie, cheat, steal, and stiff working people of their wages, made messes, left them behind, grabbed more baubles, and left them in ruin.
Lear too is possessed by “bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting.” Shakespeare’s tragedy gives us a picture of the damage Trump could do to America while also showing what it would take for Trump to find his soul again. (For Lear it requires imprisonment and the love of an estranged daughter.)
First of all, if you have any remaining hopes that Trump can grow into the role of president—that he can become presidential—look at Lear and forget about it. Lear’s narcissism is so profound that he is willing to plunge his country into civil war to deal with his insecurities.
Underlying all of Lear’s bluster is the fear that he is insignificant. He plays his “love” game because he suddenly realizes that all the power in the world won’t save him from aging and death. He knows deep down that he needs love but, since he is used to having everything his own way, he tries to get love on his own terms (to quote from Trump’s favorite movie Citizen Kane).
What he gets instead, of course, is people telling him what he wants to hear. Then, when he no longer has power, he discovers that all their words were empty. At that point, he can no longer evade his loneliness.
Solnit explains why tyrants are invariably lonely:
I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful in their lives that there is no one to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures…
Some use their power to silence that and live in the void of their own increasingly deteriorating, off-course sense of self and meaning. It’s like going mad on a desert island, only with sycophants and room service. It’s like having a compliant compass that agrees north is whatever you want it to be. The tyrant of a family, the tyrant of a little business or a huge enterprise, the tyrant of a nation. Power corrupts, and absolute power often corrupts the awareness of those who possess it. Or reduces it: narcissists, sociopaths, and egomaniacs are people for whom others don’t exist.
This is why Cordelia refuses to go along with Lear’s game. She knows that true love involves give and take and she won’t participate in a charade. Give and take, as Solnit points out, is also how democracy works:
We keep each other honest, we keep each other good with our feedback, our intolerance of meanness and falsehood, our demands that the people we are with listen, respect, respond—if we are allowed to, if we are free and valued ourselves. There is a democracy of social discourse, in which we are reminded that as we are beset with desires and fears and feelings, so are others; there was an old woman in Occupy Wall Street I always go back to who said, “We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.” That’s what a democracy of mind and heart, as well as economy and polity, would look like.
Once Lear divides his kingdom into two, civil war is inevitable, and tensions between Cornwall and Albany arise immediately. We can note that Trump too has ridden divisiveness to the presidency and has made no attempt—as all previous presidents have done—to reach out to the other side. Incidentally, nothing terrified Shakespeare more than civil strife, which is present in practically all of his history plays and in a fair number of his tragedies. The horrors of his recent history, the War of the Roses and the Catholic-Protestant clashes, loomed large in his mind.
The good news for Trump is that even Lear gets his humanity and his soul back. It takes real adversity for it to happen, however, with his darkest moment proving to be his salvation. Only when he suffers does he learn what love is.
If Lear were given a choice between all his years as king and his last day, he would choose those final moments with Cordelia. Everything else seems trivial in comparison.
It seems strange to think that impeachment or imprisonment might be the best thing that could happen to Trump, but I think it might be true. Solnit talks about the deep yearning for limits that she saw with her fellow college students who came from wealthy families:
The rich kids I met in college were flailing as though they wanted to find walls around them, leapt as though they wanted there to be gravity and to hit ground, even bottom, but parents and privilege kept throwing out safety nets and buffers, kept padding the walls and picking up the pieces, so that all their acts were meaningless, literally inconsequential. They floated like astronauts in outer space.
Maybe disgraced and rejected, Trump could find a genuine relationship with one of his children, laughing together at things they used to take seriously:
Come, let’s away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out; And take upon’s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out, In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by the moon.
As long as he continues to be buoyed by his enablers, however, Trump will remain in the hell of loneliness. One could feel sorry for him only, like Lear, he makes everyone around him pay for his unhappiness and, like Lear, he has the power to do a lot of damage.
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Monday
To ward off fascism, the number one rule of Yale historian and authoritarianism expert Tim Snyder is “Do not obey in advance.” Snyder points out that, when Hitler came to power, most Germans voluntarily surrendered their allegiance to him. He observes that
doing what Trump wants in advance only makes it more likely that Trump will have power, and only teaches him that you are easy to intimidate. You are giving the authoritarian power he would not otherwise have.
Unfortunately, the owners of the Washington Post and the L.A. Times are already doing just that, breaking with custom by refusing to endorse a presidential candidate in this most consequential of elections. In the process they are trashing the reputations of two of journalism’s crown jewels. The Post, which once exposed corruption at the highest levels, has suddenly capitulated to a dictator wannabe, perhaps because owner Jeff Bezos is worried that Trump’s plan to levy tariffs will devastate Amazon. Maybe he thinks that if he plays nice with Trump now, Trump will back off if he regains office.
The Post’s best columnists are in full revolt—apparently the editorial endorsing Kamala Harris was being penned when Bezos pulled it—and the editorial page editor of the L.A. Times resigned as well after its owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, pulled the same stunt.
When push comes to shove, in other words, billionaire newspaper owners will abandon their sacred trust and put their commercial interests first. So much for the Times’s declaration that “our mission is to inform, engage and empower.” Or the Post’s that “democracy dies in darkness.”
People have been pointing out that the corporate media has been sane-washing Trump for a while now, and these editorial decisions make clear the reason why. Editorial boards, even when faced with a fascist who attempted a coup, have been trying to hold off their owners.
In the end, sadly, all that placating has come to naught.
I think of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s rage when he heard (erroneously, as it turned out) that another fabled institution was about to be desecrated. In 1830 the Boston Globe mistakenly reported that the U.S.S. Constitution—a.k.a. Old Ironsides—was going to be scrapped. Holmes’s poem helped make sure that the fabled warship would be saved from the scrap heap, and it is now the oldest commissioned naval warship still afloat.
We need such poems today to save our newspapers. Here’s the poem:
Old Ironsides By Oliver Wendell Holmes
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high, And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky; Beneath it rung the battle shout, And burst the cannon’s roar;— The meteor of the ocean air Shall sweep the clouds no more!
Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood Where knelt the vanquished foe, When winds were hurrying o’er the flood And waves were white below, No more shall feel the victor’s tread, Or know the conquered knee;— The harpies of the shore shall pluck The eagle of the sea!
O, better that her shattered hulk Should sink beneath the wave; Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave; Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every thread-bare sail, And give her to the god of storms,— The lightning and the gale!
The Washington Post was a meteor of the ocean air when it took on Richard Nixon, and it has done notable service since. This time, however, harpies of the shore have gotten to it. Plucking eagles is a specialty of Trump-enabling billionaires.
Update: Jonathan Last of the Bulwark informs us that it’s not tariffs but a rocket company that Bezos is worried about–and that he knows that “bending the kneed to Trump” is a smart play with no downside:
What Trump understood was that Bezos’s submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet. Because the point of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was to send a message to every other businessman, entrepreneur, and corporation in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.
And Last adds,
The Bezos surrender isn’t just a demonstration. It’s a consequence. It’s a signal that the rule of law has already eroded to such a point that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can protect him.
Bezos has therefore “sought shelter in the embrace of the strongman.”
Duccio di Buoninsegna, The Healing of the Blind Man
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Sunday
Each time the Gospel reading in our church features an account of Jesus curing someone, I turn to Lory Hess’s essential book When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey through Healing Stories in the Bible. Hess responds to each of these stories with a poem, a spiritual interpretation, and an account of how the story has addressed her own version of the illness. With the story of blind Bartimaeus, Hess shows how we don’t have to be blind for Jesus’s healing miracle to be applicable.
The story occurs in Mark 10:46-52:
Jesus and his disciples came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
Hess notes that blindness can be spiritual as well as physical:
The greatest danger for the human today…is that we will lose our sense of life, that we will no longer be able to choose life over death because we cannot tell the difference between them, or we actually prefer the state of death to life. It is a crisis of perception and discernment that requires us to assess the way in which we see.
Hess goes on to say that there are two kinds of seeing,
one that is suited to the sense world and one to the spiritual world, and neither is better than the other. The sickness, or the ‘guilt’, comes in when we confuse the two, when we cannot pass from one to the other when necessary or apply them in appropriate ways. True sickness lies in not knowing one is sick, and true blindness in not knowing one is blind.
Through healing Bartimaeus, Hess contends, Jesus was also conveying a lesson to his disciples. When Jesus’s death robs them of his “sense-perceptible presence,” she says, it is uncertain whether they will be able to manage their vision of Christ. Healing Bartimaeus, then, is “a final instruction for them to look upward.”
She then turns to her own sickness, which involved migraine headaches and a serious gallbladder problem. Blind to the messages her body was sending her, she says, it took her a long while to muster up the courage to listen to the “hidden wisdom deep inside me.” Only these was she able to “navigate the next steps toward finding out what it was that my true self really wanted.”
Hess’s poem, told from the perspective of Bartimaeus, is about opening ourselves to this inner light:
Blind Bartimaeus By Lory Hess
It’s a heavy fate, a child born blind. Everyone wonders what sin runs so deep it even tainted the seed in the womb. Everyone turns their eyes away, not wanting to look on the luckless one and maybe be marked by his sightlessness.
As a child, I didn’t know what I lacked. I felt the closed-in, lowering gloom that you call ‘dark’, and the lifting, expanding, opening up, the radiance of ‘light’. I felt the sun rise, when the world sang for joy, and the chill as a shadow crossed its face.
Light streamed to me from my mother’s face, her smile, her laugh, her gentle kiss. Darkness fell when she turned from me with silent tears, my future her grief.
My father illumined my mind with words, opening to me the book of our people, the story of how God called all things to be and become, beginning with light. He told how that light was so often lost – obscured in the foolish hearts of men, exiled from Eden for doubting God’s love, losing faith in the wilderness, blindly stumbling after false gods.
But the light will come to us again. He will always be there, beyond the clouds, creating, illumining, turning his face to shine upon us, calling us to remember our name, to lift up our hearts, to ourselves become light.
My father taught me to stand upright in spite of the weight of my destiny, accepting my fate as a sign of trust. So what if I couldn’t live on my own, and had to beg for my daily bread? No man survives alone. We are all, every one, beggars before the mercy of God, dependent on grace, and may God help the one who is blind to that truth.
That’s what I tried to show my people as I sat each day by the side of the road, my bowl held open to heaven’s gifts.
But their eyes were closed. They didn’t see the sun that had risen in their midst, the light of the world, the face of God.
I wouldn’t have asked him for sight for myself. I was used to the dark, and it suited me. I could wait for the day when all things would cast off their earthly garments, and stand in his light.
But I could see he wanted to show them – the ones whose hearts were not all stone, the ones who might yet be brought to the light by seeing a blind man seeing again.
So I called to him, as he called me. I threw off my covering and leapt into light, following him on his way into shadow.
Let the blind man die. Let him be reborn, made new in a new world, called by the Word that created light:
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Friday
A recent NPR article by Lesley McClurg about how Medicaid will start covering traditional Native American healing practices in four western states coincides nicely with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, which I’m currently teaching in my “Post-colonial Anglophone Literature” class. The news item backs up Silko’s major contention that Western medicine by itself is not enough to provide Indians with the therapy they need. Indeed, Whites may need these medical breakthroughs as much as Indians do.
The article begins with the story of a young Navajo man—Emery Tahy—who was entangled in depression, alcoholism, and drug-related seizures. As he was contemplating suicide, his family intervened and a court sent him to a psychiatric ward. While there, he learned of a Native-led recovery program in San Francisco, which he attended upon release. The new therapy was life-changing:
A traditional practitioner did prayers for me. They shared some songs with me. They put me in the sweat lodge and I could identify with those ceremonies. And from that day moving forward, I was able to reconnect to my spiritual and cultural upbringing.
McClurg writes that the program, which is currently in a two-year pilot phase, is desperately needed as Native American communities suffer from some of the highest rates of addiction and overdose deaths in the country. Health experts observe that Western medicine cannot handle all the problems.
I have included Ceremony in my course because I want the students to see the process of literary hybridization at work. As in agriculture, hybridization occurs when two different entities join to form a third. Silko has merged Laguna Pueblo folk tales, myths, and accounts of tribal ceremonial practices—all of which have been part of an oral culture—with the novel form and with lyric poetry. The result is something altogether new.
Hybridizing provides Ceremony not only with its form but also with its content, which has mixing as a major theme. Instances include the mixed bloodline of the protagonist (Tayo is half Indian, half White); crossbreeding in cattle (Tayo’s uncle crossbreeds Mexican cattle, which can live in desert conditions, with American cattle, which produce more meat); and intersections between Indian and White culture. This hybridization preserves Indian culture from the assault of White culture, which threatens erasure through assimilation.
Returning to the question of mental health, Silko’s novel indicates that a hybrid approach to psychological issues may be more effective than either Western or Indian medicine alone. In the novel we see Tayo undergo treatment from three medical professionals: a doctor at a military hospital, the local Laguna medicine man, and a Navajo medicine man who lives on the border between the Indian reservation and the city of Gallup, New Mexico. Only the third treatment provides a lasting cure.
To dramatize what Tayo is up against, I listed for the class everything that is messing with his head. These include:
–trauma from having been abandoned by his mother, who leaves him with her siblings on the reservation; –shaming from his aunt for what her sister has done; –bullying from his Indian classmates for being mixed blood –PTSD from having been captured by the Japanese in World War II and seeing them kill his cousin and best friend; –survivor guilt from having returned when his cousin didn’t (both he and his Aunt believe that he is the one who should have died); –guilt over having (as he sees it) abandoned his uncle, the man who raised him, to go off to war; Josiah is dead by the time Tayo returns home; –guilt for having cursed the rain while in the Philippine jungles, thereby (so he believes) causing the region’s six-year drought; –low self-esteem caused by White racism and White superiority, which has led him to look down upon himself and his people; –trauma caused by the destruction that White culture is visiting upon the earth, which includes bother environmental destruction and the threat of nuclear war,.
The question that Silko puts to herself, I told the students, is whether a healing ceremony can address all of this.
The White doctor can’t do much with a practically comatose Tayo, but he does get him talking and he takes him off the drugs that have plunged him into a white fog.
The second doctor is the local medicine man, Ku’oosh, who gets him on his feet again using age-old methods. But Ku’oosh admits that there are parts of Tayo and the other Indian veterans that he can’t reach. The old scalp ceremonies no longer work given the new forms that warfare has taken. Launching mortar shells and dropping bombs has made death anonymous in ways that Ku’oosh can’t understand.
The final medicine man, Betonie, lives between the two worlds and so understands both. After using a version of Freud’s talking cure, which he combines with traditional ceremonies such as sand painting, chanting, dancing, and dream vision, he sends Tayo on a grail quest. Tayo is to follow the stars, search for a mountain and a woman, and retrieve Josiah’s cattle.
In the process, like the man featured in the NPR article, Tayo reconnects with his spiritual and cultural upbringing. He is also able to bring that reconnection back to the elders, who themselves are renewed as they see the next generation carrying on the tribe’s identity.
To be sure, the process is not exactly like it was in the old days, which some see as a problem:
“There are some things I have to tell you,” Betonie began softly. “The people nowadays have an idea about the ceremonies. They think the ceremonies must be performed exactly as they have always been done, maybe because one slip-up or mistake and the whole ceremony must be stopped and the sand painting destroyed. That much is true. They think that if a singer tampers with any part of the ritual, great harm can be done, great power unleashed.”
Betonie explains, however, that a changing world requires changed ceremonies:
At one time, the ceremonies as they had been performed were enough for the way the world was then. But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong.
The medicine man concludes that “things which don’t shift and grow are dead things.”
Silko is like Betonie in that she lived on the edge of a reservation when she was young and is of White American, Native American, and Mexican descent. According to her Wikipedia entry, her one eighth Laguna blood prevented her from participating in various Laguna rituals. Yet she has used this mixed identity to her advantage, creating a hybridized Ceremony that speaks to White readers as well as Indian readers. Western culture, which has become alienated from the land and obsessed with dead things, stands to gain much from Indian healing ceremonies.
And as for Emery Tahy, he appears to be doing well. The NPR article reports that
he hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since starting therapy at Friendship House. He now holds a full-time job as an evaluator for the native American Health Center in San Francisco. Soon he will complete a master’s degree in American Indian studies. And, a few months ago, he completed the San Francisco marathon.
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Thursday
Last month blogger Thom Hartmann of Substack’s Hartmann Report wrote two illuminating essays (here and here) on the libertarianism of some of our Trump-supporting billionaires. Why would figures such as Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk be signing on to a philosophy that wants to strip Americans of basic social safety net protections and regulations? Their views, Hartmann contends, can be traced back in part to two highly influential novels, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
As an added bonus, Hartmann also alerts us to Trump’s enthusiasm for The Fountainhead.
Given that these billionaires are very close to achieving their dream—their acolyte J.D. Vance in the White House with a declining Donald Trump—it’s important to look closely at what the novels say and how they came to be written. But first let’s remind ourselves of the GOP’s 40-year love affair with libertarianism.
That’s how long it’s been, Hartmann points out in the first of his two essays, since rightwing billionaires began
pouring money into libertarian ideas, setting up think tanks and funding hundreds of college professors nationwide to preach their libertarian ideology. They have also “set up organizations nationwide and in every state to bring Republican legislators together with lobbyists to craft libertarian ‘corporate friendly’ legislation that consistently enriches the top 1% and screws average Americans.”
Billionaire David Koch, who ran for vice-president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, advocated privatizing the post office, ending all public schools, giving Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, ending all taxation on the wealthy, terminating all forms of welfare, regulating all corporate oversight, and selling off much of government land to billionaires and large corporations.
While Koch never won public office, he found a sympathetic ear in Ronald Reagan, who did win in 1980. While railing against government programs, Regan began the massive shift of wealth from the American middle class to the wealthiest Americans, which accounts for the Gilded Age kind of imbalances we see today.
Trump continued this trend. Hartmann notes that libertarians got a taste of what was possible in 2017, with Trump
installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, a billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department.
And then there was Trump’s chief of staff, who (Hartmann points out) “said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven died) would actually be a public good.”
In addition to making the rich richer and everyone else poorer, however, there is also a mean streak to libertarianism. Hartmann lays out some of the results in the form of a series of questions:
How is it that Republicans so often embrace casual cruelty like tearing mothers from their children or throwing pregnant women in poverty off public assistance? Why have 11 GOP-controlled states refused to this day to expand Medicaid for their 30 million minimum-wage working people when the federal government covers 90 percent of the cost? Why are Republicans so committed to destroying Medicare and Social Security?
I’ve long known that the Reaganite maxim that “greed is good” has its roots in Ayn Rand’s novels, but until I read Hartmann’s essay I didn’t know that she based Howard Roark, the protagonist of Fountainhead, on the most notorious psycho killer of the 1920s.
I also didn’t know that Trump himself was a fan of The Fountainhead although, if there’s any book I could imagine him reading (besides the speeches of Adolph Hitler, which first wife Ivana reports he kept by his bedside), it would be this one. After all, it’s about a maverick architect who is enthusiastic about skyscrapers and who has contempt for “the collective” that pressure him to conform to their vision. Roark also gains the adoration of a woman after raping her. Here’s a section from that scene:
[S]he felt the blood beating in her throat, in her eyes, the hatred, the helpless terror in her blood. She felt the hatred… She fought in a last convulsion. Then the sudden pain shot up… …and she screamed. Then she lay still.
It was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. It could be the act of a lover or the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman. He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him–and she would have remained cold, untouched by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted.
In a poster of the 1949 King Vidor film, incidentally, we see Gary Cooper holding a struggling but yielding Pat Neil in his arms with the tagline, “No man takes what’s mine!” Toxic masculinity on steroids, one might say.
In an interview with USA Today’s Kirsten Powers, Trump said of Fountainhead, “It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to … everything.” He told Powers that he also likes how Roark “rages against the establishment.”
In the book, Roark is kicked out of his architecture school because he refuses to do what everyone else is doing and then proceeds to have a rocky career because he insists on his own vision. When someone makes changes to one of his designs, he blows the building up. In the end, however, he gains adherents and builds a skyscraper that serves as a monument to human achievement. He and his former rape victim (now his wife) meet atop the building at the book’s close.
What Rand wrote about Roark at the time also applies to Trump:
He has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.
Now, for the psycho killer. In 1927 a man named Edward Hickman kidnapped a girl, demanded a ransom from her father, killed her,, and then staged her to look like she was still alive when the father showed up with the ransom money. But while the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s,” Rand was entranced. As she saw it, Hickman’s greatest quality was “his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.” This was why the public demonized him, she said, noting in her diary,
It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”
Perhaps Rand saw, in Hickman, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov aspires to be a Nietzschean Übermensch and seeks to prove to himself that he is superior to others by his ability to kill—in his case, an old lady pawnbroker. But unlike Rand’s flat characters, Raskolnikov has a complex inner life, which includes self-doubt and guilt. It’s as though Rand saw in Hickman a successful Raskolnikov, one who could confidently and coldly say at his trial (as she observed in her notes), “I am like the state: what is good for me is right.”
But if Roark is a successful Raskolnikov, Rand is a failed Dostoevsky. Both had traumatic early experiences: while he was almost executed as a nihilist, spared only at the last moment, she saw her father’s pharmacy looted by the Bolsheviks. But whereas he developed a depth of soul following the incident, she was left only with implacable resentment and a desire to make others pay.
Could it be that Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Musk see themselves as supermen themselves, superior to democracy and the mob and entitled to treat the country as their plaything. Certainly reading The Fountainhead could bolster them in that belief. Whether or not they, like Trump, are Rand fans, they have signed on to a movement that she helped set in motion and that her novels, never out of print, continue to promote.
My favorite response to Rand is by blogger John Rogers, who accounts for the success of Rand’s other novel (Atlas Shrugged) as follows:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
In Trump, we certainly have all the qualities of someone unable to grow up. If he and these billionaire supporters succeed in imposing their will on the United States, God help us all.
One other thought: In a thoughtful but depressing Atlantic essay yesterday, former Republican Tom Nichols attributes Trump’s enduring popularity to a Rand-type resentment and believes that nothing Kamala Harris does will be able to penetrate it. As he puts it,
For millions of the GOP faithful, however, Trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring. They want Trump to be awful—precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins. If Trump’s campaign was focused on handing out tax breaks and lowering gas prices, he’d be losing, because for his base, none of that yawn-inducing policy stuff is transgressive enough to be exciting….
Some Trump voters may believe his lies. But plenty more want Trump to be terrifying and stomach-turning so that reelecting him will be a fully realized act of social revenge. Harris cannot propose any policy, offer any benefit, or adopt any position that competes with that feeling.
“The hard choice of civic virtue,” Nichols concludes, “will never match the rush of racism, hatred, and revenge that Trump offers in its place.”
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Wednesday
I’m slowly but surely getting a sense of the “Post-colonial Anglophone Literature” class I’m currently teaching at the University of Ljubljana. It’s a wonderfully international class, with students from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Macedonia and Turkey joining the Slovenian students. I’m also finding that my (admittedly limited) acquaintance with Slovenian literature is coming in handy because I’m able to note how Slovenia too once used literature to find an identity separate from the Austro-Hungarian empire that once controlled it.
Last week we looked at two Nigerian novelists, Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in the light of the post-colonialist theories of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon. Said describes how the West has Orientalized other parts of the world, imagining cultural features that confirm in it its own superiority. In my first week with the class, we talked about how H. Rider Haggard in She and Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness depicted Africa as both repulsively barbaric and strangely alluring, with beautiful women in the heart of the dark continent casting their spell over white explorers.
We also talked about Fanon’s insight that colonized people are brainwashed into seeing themselves through Western eyes. It’s bad enough for others to see you as barbaric and inferior, but the problem is compounded when you see yourself that way. I talked about how colonialist indoctrination was a form of soft power, which supplemented the hard power of armies with rifles. William Blake’s compelling image for such soft power is “mind-forged manacles” (from his poem “London”).
To counteract such brainwashing, Fanon called for a “literature of combat,” writers who would help create a new national consciousness. One of the writers he had in mind was Achebe, whose Things Fall Apart gave names and stories to African characters. In this novel about the tribal Igbo at the time of the British incursion, we get a very different picture of native villagers than we do from Heart of Darkness. Indeed, in an important post-colonial essay entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Achebe calls out Conrad for his two-dimensional depictions of Africans and for his shuddering horror that he shares something in common with them. Achebe finds objectionable what for Conrad is a great revelation: that the heart of darkness lies not only in Africa but in civilized England as well.
My own view is that Conrad has much to teach us about Europe’s existential crisis at the time—how its view of itself as Christian and enlightened clashed with its brutal grab for Africa’s natural resources. But I agree with Achebe that, in using Africans as no more than props in this internal drama, Conrad dehumanizes them. In class I contrasted Conrad with Shakespeare, who always grants characters their full humanity.
In any event, Fanon, had he lived to see Achebe’s essay, would have applauded. And he probably did read Things Fall Apart, which would qualify in Fanon’s eyes as “literature of combat.” Fanon complains about those native writers who write for the colonizers rather than for the colonized, but this cannot be said for Things Fall Apart, which played a role in Nigeria’s liberation two years later.
For proof of the book’s impact on a native Nigerian, we have the example of a next-generation Nigerian author. When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was a girl, she read only English-language stories, especially (so her Wikipedia entry tells us) the racist and sexist stories of British author Enid Blyton. Many of Blyton’s stories were typical of British attitudes in the 1920s to 1950s, including (to cite one particularly obnoxious story) The Little Black Doll. In it, a dark colored doll is considered ugly and is mocked by the other dolls until a shower of “magic rain” washes his face clean—at which point he is welcomed back into the fold. When Fanon talks about colonial culture teaching Africans to hate their bodies, these are the kinds of stories he has in mind.
Having been raised on such fare, Adichie experienced Things Fall Apart as a revelation when she read it at 10. Indeed, Achebe’s novel worked just as Fanon said combative literature should work, instilling in Adichie a liberating sense of national pride. (Other works that aided in her awakening were Camara Laye’s The African Child, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child and Buchi Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood.) Adichie’s first novel Purple Hibiscus, in a nod to Achebe, opens with the line, “Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja did not go to communion…” Her new sense of national pride also led Adichie to continue learning Igbo along with English, even though she could have dropped it. And indeed, Purple Hibiscus is scattered throughout with Igbo phrases.
We talked about this feature of her novel. If, as Fanon announced, authors should write to the colonized rather than to the colonizers, shouldn’t they use tribal languages instead of English? It’s an issue that many African authors have wrestled with. Achebe said he chose English because he found Igbo to be too wooden and perhaps too because he wanted to reach beyond the Igbo—not only to the rest of Nigeria but to all of Africa and to all of the world. Indeed, many readers in other African countries consider Achebe to be their Shakespeare.
Salman Rushdie addresses the issue of writing in the language of the conqueror. In India’s case, English is much of what gives the country, which features 122 major languages, any sense of unity. (Nigeria for its part has 525 different languages.) If one must use the language of the colonizer, then the question becomes how to make it your own, what cultural historians call hybridization. This week I will be looking at how the Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko creates hybrid forms with the aim of simultaneously honoring tribal history while dealing with a changing world.
By sprinkling Igbo throughout her book, Adichie gestures toward her own country’s indigenous culture. And unlike Achebe, she doesn’t provide a glossary. The phrases can generally be figured out from the context, however. And then there is always google, and the mixture of old with new characterizes modern Nigeria itself.
I find it fascinating to compare and contrast Purple Hibiscus with Things Fall Apart. In both, one finds a toxic masculinity, an autocratic father who beats his family, along with a rigid Christianity that distorts the culture. In Purple Hibiscus, the fanatically Catholic patriarch breaks with his own father, who is a “pagan,” and narrator 15-year-old Kambili finds herself torn between her desire to please her father and her longing for the far richer life of her grandfather. Her wise aunt, a liberal Catholic, observes at one point that
Papa-Nnukwu was not a heathen but a traditionalist, that sometimes what was different was just as good as what was familiar, that when Papa-Nnukwu did his itu-nzu, his declaration of innocence, in the morning, it was the same as our saying the rosary.
The grandfather himself is baffled by the Catholics who have converted his children, reporting at one point,
One day I said to them, Where is the God you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission? They said he was the son, but that the son and the father are equal. It was then that I knew that the white man was mad. The father and son are equal? Tufia! Do you not see?
Interestingly, whereas in Things Fall Apart the accepting and ethnographically-open missionary Brown is followed by the rigidly orthodox and destructive Smith, in Purple Hibiscus the priests are reversed. At first there’s the orthodox Father Benedict, who degrees that services must be in Latin rather than in Igbo and who bans clapping in church. His sensibility is that of Kabili’s abusive father, but he is followed by the far more humane Father Amadi, who helps Kabili develop a sense of self and to build her self-confidence.
One striking difference between Achebe and Adichie is in their handling of female characters. Whereas they are two-dimensional in Things Fall Apart, they are richly textured in Hibiscus. The liberation struggle described by Fanon, in other words, doesn’t only involve liberation from the colonizers but continues on in other battles. Adichie is writing her own literature of combat.
One other thought: Because peaceful transfers of power are on my mind these days (as I noted in Monday’s post about Shakespeare’s Richard II ), I note that Nigeria, after five years of democratic rule, experienced a long succession of military coups, along with a bloody civil war. But rather than see this as a vindication of colonialism, Kabili’s professor aunt sees a process at work:
There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.
In other words, there’s still work for Nigerian literature to do. It doesn’t stop being important once freedom from the colonizers is achieved.
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Tuesday
An article in Literary Hub by literary scholar John MacNeill Miller has introduced me to a fascinating British novelist from the 19th century that I didn’t know about. Harriet Martineau, he contends, “foresaw ecology, environmentalism, and realist fiction.”
Miller notes that we’ve long known that Victorian novelists “pioneered the use of storytelling to reveal interwoven social networks,” a strategy that we see in everything from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth to David Simon’s The Wire. What sets Martineau apart, however, is how she shows people’s lives impacted by changes, not just in other people, but in the environment. He points out that her stories involve “lives upended by unexpected patterns of rainfall, by the felling of trees, by the importing of new crops, and by the movements of fish.”
In short, Martineau’s work is ecological along with being sociological. More than another other novelist he can name, Miller says, she looks into “the entanglements that draw the fates of humans together with those of trees, water, grain, cattle, and fish.”
What is significant about this? Miller says that “it wasn’t until the late twentieth century and the rise of environmentalism that novelists began, slowly, to reconnect their stories of human lives to the material changes in the nonhuman world around them.” He finds Martineau remarkably astute when it comes to recording “the surprising ways interspecies connections affect us all.”
Miller attributes this sensitivity to Martineau’s relationships with political economist Thomas Robert Malthus and biologist Charles Darwin, two men who studied environmental shifts. This focus leads to “intricate interspecies plotting” that “far exceeds the simplistic moral and economic lessons she tags onto the end of each novella.”
Think of it this way: Rather than focus on individuals’ emotional and mental lives, which is what we normally expect from novels, Martineau’s stories instead look at “the extent to which all our lives are shaped by circumstances beyond our control, circumstances that arise from both human and nonhuman events unfolding around us.” They focus more on human exteriority than interiority.
As a result, we begin to notice “all the ways humans are bound into much larger networks of beings.” And when we do so, we elevate the nonhuman world, which is normally consigned to the margins. We stop “treating plants and animals as mere surroundings with little impact on the stories of our lives.”
Miller concludes,
By downplaying all the widely glorified aspects of being human, Martineau refocuses readers’ attentions on all the ways humans are bound into much larger networks of beings. She reminds us that our individual and communal lives are not really so different from the lives of the animals and plants who share our planet. And in this age of extinction, that is a lesson we still desperately need to learn.
Although Martineau’s work has largely been forgotten, it was much admired in its time by writers such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Miller recommends novels Illustrations and Deerbrook as must reading in this era of climate change.
