Domenichino Domenico Zampieri, Abraham Leading Isaac to Sacrifice
Sunday
I’m reposting a past essay on the horrifying Abraham and Isaac story as Julia and I are currently in Washington, D.C. attending the wedding of a close family friend. We will leave before our nation celebrates its 250th birthday, which our president has somehow confused with his own.
Reprinted from June 27, 2020
Is there a more horrifying story in the Bible than that of Abraham and Isaac, today’s Old Testament reading? Other stories feature more bloodshed (Noah’s flood) and raise comparable challenges (God allowing Satan to torment Job), but the intimacy of Abraham’s supposedly God-ordered sacrifice of his son sets it apart.
Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, host of The Velveteen Rabbi, imagines Abraham as a faulty interpreter of God’s word. Abraham, she notes, has a mixed history. On the one hand, he is a force for life: he has dug wells and has pushed back against God’s determination to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. He also has a violent streak, however, such as when he smashed idols. Barenblat wonders why he doesn’t consult Sarah in this instance. How does he know God’s voice is actually God’s voice?
Barenblat’s Abraham sounds like an abusive parent in the way he suddenly switches from violence to remorse. His terrible punishment is that “God never spoke to him again,” which explains the poem’s title:
Silence (Vayera) By Rachel Barenblat
Abraham failed the test. For Sodom and Gomorrah he argued but when it came to his son no protest crossed his lips.
God was mute with horror. Abraham, smasher of idols and digger of wells was meant to talk back.
Sarah would have been wiser but Abraham avoided her tent, didn’t lay his head in her lap to unburden his secret heart.
In stricken silence God watched as Abraham saddled his ass and took Isaac on their final hike to the place God would show him.
The angel had to call him twice. Abraham’s eyes were red, his voice hoarse he wept like a man pardoned but God never spoke to him again.
Barenblat appears to be calling for humility when it comes to what we think God is telling us. Far too many of us impose our own agendas on God rather than engaging in dialogue with God’s voice. As a result, throughout history God’s will has been invoked in countless acts of horror.
If we genuinely want to hear from God rather than our own egos, we must listen with our minds, our hearts, and our souls. We must also turn to others to help us hear.
Further thought: Last week I shared a Thylias Moss poem that imagined God changing once His divinity took on human form. Put another way, our vision of God becomes more humane as we evolve so that He (and now She) is no longer the avenging punisher that shows up in many of the Old Testament stories. Along these lines, the story of Abraham and Isaac has sometimes been seen as capturing Israel’s evolution from human to animal sacrifice.
Put another way, the bigger we become, the bigger God gets, something Jesus understood in a foundational way. To cite today’s Gospel’s reading,
Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple– truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward” (Matthew 10:40-42).
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 39th Installment
This memoir is finally reaching the present so the end is in sight, although I may include a few follow-up posts on particular themes. In today’s installment I go back to my last two years at St. Mary’s, the second of which included a brush with mortality.
In 2016 Julia moved to Sewanee to (1) be with my mother, who was depressed over having lost my father three years earlier and (2) spend half weeks in Georgia with our third granddaughter. Childcare was needed as our daughter-in-law Candice had been hired for a dual position in Film Studies and Asian Studies at the University of North Georgia while our son Tobias was teaching at Georgia Tech.
Living alone was already a challenge, and then in 2017 I contracted a case of myocarditis and pericarditis. If Julia had been in Maryland, she would have insisted that we drive to the emergency room when I started experiencing back pains in the middle of the night, but instead I gritted my teeth and made an appointment with my doctor the following morning.
She thought, as I did, that I had pulled a muscle playing tennis but sent me to the hospital for an EKG to make sure. I barely made the trip there—driving at 15 miles an hour, I was prepared to pull over and call 911—and then had to wait for 90 minutes for the EKG. Once the nurse saw the results, however, everything sped up as the emergency room physicians, fearing I was suffering from a heart attack, bundled me into a helicopter and flew me to a Washington hospital.
It turned out that all I needed was an anti-inflammatory, and I was well enough in the evening to post an essay, a point of pride since I hadn’t missed one since I began the blog three years earlier. (I’d had the presence of mind to bring my laptop with me.) When I recalled the feeling of iron bands squeezing my chest, the image that came to mind was Giles Corey being crushed to death as a suspected witch in The Crucible. As Elizabeth describes the scene,
Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. (With a tender smile for the old man): They say he give them but two words. “More weight,” he says. And died.
I visited many specialists in the following months, and they ultimately traced my episode to an infection picked up in a Bronx hospital when I was visiting a friend dying of ovarian cancer. I’ll write more about Rachel Kranz in a future post on friendship, but given how traumatized I was, I wondered at one point whether Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones offered a credible diagnosis. There we encounter a character who dies from a broken heart:
The doctor went directly to London, where he died soon after of a broken heart; a distemper which kills many more than is generally imagined, and would have a fair title to a place in the bill of mortality, did it not differ in one instance from all other diseases—viz., that no physician can cure it.
Although I was back again teaching two days later, the anti-inflammatories didn’t catch everything and I would have to another trip to the E.R. At this point I decided that I really should retire—at 67 rather than at 70, as I had planned—and gave notice.
There’s one other literature story connected with emergency room visits. In my final semester, I was teaching, for the first time, an ambitious world literature course on Magic Realism. After having read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Colombia)and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (India), my students were sucking wind. I realized this as I lay on the hospital bed at 3 am and decided then and there to drop Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum (Germany), replacing it with Laura Esquivel’s much shorter and more accessible Like Water for Chocolate (Mexico). The students were grateful.
The other works in the course, incidentally, were Toni Morrison’s Beloved (the U.S.) and Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Japan).
I was teaching my “Theories of the Reader” class that last year, using a rough draft of Better Living through Literature as one of my textbooks (along with the Norton Anthology of Literary Theory). I also taught Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, so that the students could see an author battling with a censorious readership, and Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, so that they could study his strategies of deliberate alienation.
The students’ final essays, meanwhile, opened my eyes to various works that had “caused a ruckus” (as I put it), including a fascinating study of why Tennessee parents had objected to a teacher teaching L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. My student learned that the book was far more feminist than she realized, which may explain why the parents objected to the good witches in the book. Baum’s suffragette mother-in-law provided a model for Glinda the Good, and he also saw Dorothy as a tough pioneer woman (which is not how Judy Garland plays her).
When my department asked me what I wanted in a farewell party, I prefaced my wish by telling a joke a German colleague had shared with me. Terrorists have taken over a plane filled with language professors headed for the annual Modern Language Association conference. To show they mean business, they announce they will throw three of them out of the plane—a Brit, a German, and an American—but will first grant each of them a final wish. The Brit asks for a spot of tea, the German asks to a lecture…and the American asks to be thrown from the plane before the German delivers his lecture. Invoking my mother’s German heritage, I said I wanted to deliver a lecture. Which is what I did, speaking for 20 minutes on literature’s life transforming potential.
Although I did some teaching after retirement—intro classes for Sewanee as well as some lifelong learning courses—I spent most of my time working on my book. Once I retired, I was able to work full time on my book, which I completed with the incredible assistance of Rebecca Adams. It is the culmination of my life’s work, and I have given readings at Sewanee, St. Mary’s, and the University of Ljubljana.
By retiring when I did, I missed having to teach remotely or grapple with AI. And I got to spend the Covid year, plus another three, with my mother. Then, once life returned to normal, I went on to head Sewanee’s Friends of the Library; delivered card-playing lectures on Jane Austen (speculation) and Alexander Pope (ombre); ran our church’s Sunday Forum (to which I also contributed numerous literature lectures); started a weekly faculty reading group to study Divine Comedy and other classics; joined (with Julia) a lectio divina group to discuss Biblical passages; joined (again with Julia) a monthly book group to discuss various works of fiction and non-fiction; visited Slovenia three times to teach Shakespeare and post-colonial literature courses (along with other assorted classes); lectured on Beowulf at our 50th Carleton reunion; and wrote countless political posts while participating in multiple anti-Trump marches. Oh, and I play tennis doubles five or six times a week.
In short, retirement is a lot like my life when I was working, only without the meetings and the grading.
While I don’t miss those last two, I do miss the students.
As we travel around the country, Julia and I have been listening to Stanley Kim Robinson’s New York 2140, a work of cli-fi or speculative fiction about climate disaster that should be enough to scare the bejeezus out of all of us.
In it, the world has been hit by two catastrophic sea level rises, known as Pulse One and Pulse Two. As a result, coastal cities all around the world have been inundated. The economic consequences include mass migrations and unimaginable property damage, with New York transformed into a Venice with collapsing buildings. (Venice itself, we can assume, is no more.)
I share today a passage where the author rants (his word) against the short-sightedness of humans. Given my interest in how literature changes lives and (sometimes) history, I note the author’s frustration that his science fiction is not having an impact:
It was that ocean heat that caused the First Pulse to pulse, and later brought on the second one. People sometimes say no one saw it coming, but no, wrong: they did. Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth’s entire previous five billion years (can we say “Anthropocene,” class?), and they searched the geological record for the best analogs to this unprecedented event, and they said, Whoa. They said, Holy shit. People! they said. Sea level rise! During the Eemian period, they said, which we’ve been looking at, the world saw a temperature rise only half as big as the one we’ve just created, and rapid dramatic sea level rise followed immediately. They put it in bumper sticker terms: massive sea level rise sure to follow our unprecedented release of CO2! They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of the civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece. Really. That’s how much those knuckleheads cared about their grandchildren, and that’s how much they believed their scientists, even though every time they felt a slight cold coming on they ran to the nearest scientist (i.e. doctor) to seek aid.
Along with the sarcasm directed at science skeptics, Robinson also goes after capitalists preaching “creative destruction”:
But hey. An end is a beginning! Creative destruction, right? Apply more police state and more austerity, clamp down hard, proceed as before Cleaning up the mess, a great investment opportunity! Churn baby churn!
By the end of his rant, the author throws up his hands and returns to his story:
Enough with the I told you sos! Back to our doughty heroes and heroines!
While literature is impactful, it has a mixed record when it comes to immediate changes in social policy. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, while it may have ushered in food regulation, didn’t directly lead to better working conditions in Chicago’s slaughter houses. Charles Dickens, the author most associated with social reform, didn’t bring a stop to child labor with Oliver Twist, transform the court system with Bleak House, norend laissez faire capitalism with Hard Times.
Literature works best at a leisurely pace, expanding consciousness so that people see new possibilities in how we imagine human relations. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, we need immediate action. A novel like New York 2140 can be used by activists but can’t bring about change on its own.
Authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny and On Freedom, has introduced me to an important new concept that helps explain the White House’s love affair with bombing, blowing up boats, ICE violence, and brutal detention: “utopia of violence.”
Utopians of violence believe that the overwhelming use of force “will always bring about what you desire, and that the only problem is that people will try to hold you back.” There’s an element of spectacle in this drama, which we can see clearly in how Trump responded to his Venezuela attack and how Pete Hegseth talked about the Iran attack. As they saw it, “Violence is amazing, war is divine”:
For those of us who listened to Trump call in to Fox and Friends right after the operation, it was clear that he was elated and wanted more. “I watched it,” he said, “literally like I was watching a television show.” Indeed he did, transfixed: “And this is something that, gee, I don’t know, it’s amazing.” And he wanted more of the amazing feeling: “We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us.”
This language was very close to something his Secretary of Defense had said: “Nobody can touch us. It’s not even close.”
Unfortunately, utopians of violence don’t limit themselves to foreigners and immigrants. Snyder observes that history
instructs us fairly clearly about how utopians of violence interpret defeat in foreign war: they blame an “enemy “at home for their own poor judgements and failures, and then claim that this enemy must now be defeated. The poor performance of the armed forces cannot be explained by their own ideological folly or their own manifest incompetence; it must be the fault of someone else. It will be quite easy for Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) to shift from their current (and risible) claim that we won the war to the claim that we would have won it if not for the stab in the back at home. And that way of seeing things then becomes the justification for putting soldiers (and ICE) on the streets during an election, or claiming that a terrorist attack (most likely a fake one) means that we have to have a state of emergency instead of an election, or something else along those lines.
Snyder talks about others who talk in these terms, including the collection Utopia of Terror, edited by Rory Yeomans, Jacques Semelin’s Purify and Destroy, and Jovan Scott Lewis’s Violent Utopia. To these I would add Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation, which contends that “regeneration through violence” is a foundational American myth, expressed through the western, both in novel form and in film.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we must acknowledge that it is only one strain within the American experiment. As Suzy Hansen notes in a recent New York Review of Books article, Trump and Hegseth are
heir to a tradition handed down from the Founders—not the noble, revolutionary ones in the history books but the ruthless, ragged genocidaires who went west…the primeval thugs of the heartland, who openly desire the submission of the most vulnerable.”
Perhaps no 21st century novel captures this better than Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, whose psychopathic protagonist, no less than Trump and Hegseth, revels in the spectacle of violence. Here’s a post I wrote applying Slotkin to the novel, and also to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, three years ago
Reprinted from Sept. 27, 2023
Increasingly I’m hearing Donald Trump described as a “stochastic terrorist,” which is someone who demonizes his or her enemies so that they stand a chance of becoming targets of violence. We saw him behaving as such, of course, when he got his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and now it appears that the former president is employing stochastic terrorism as a way to keep from going to jail. If he can use threats of retribution to intimidate his foes, perhaps he may once again escape accountability.
While this might strike us as un-American, we have seen instances of stochastic terrorism throughout our history. Violence has always been latent, awaiting individuals or events to trigger it. An author like Cormac McCarthy understands this well, as do William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”), James Dickey, Toni Morrison, and others. I focus here on McCarthy because, as a contemporary, he sensed where we are now. This essay draws on two past posts as it applies Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the Westto the dangers of Trumpian violence.
According to the recent Mitt Romney biography, Trump’s stochastic terrorism swayed votes during his impeachment hearings. Asthe Washington Post reports,
“One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety,” Coppins writes. “The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome?
“Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.”
Since his numerous indictments, Trump’s threats have only escalated. After one set of rulings, he sent out word, “If you come after me, I’m coming after you.” Pundit David Corn has other instances, including one that brings to mind the 2018 attack on a Pittsburg synagogue, in which 11 died. Corn points out,
In a Rosh Hashanah message posted on social media earlier this month, Trump railed against “liberal Jews”: “Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!”
Trump has also called Army General Mike Miller, whom the former president hates for standing up to him, “treasonous” and worthy of death. (Texas congressman Paul Gosar followed this up with his own instance of stochastic terrorism, writing in his weekly newsletter, “In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.”)
And then there are Trump’s attacks on NBC News, MSNBC and Comcast for committing “Country Threatening Treason.” As New York University’s expert on terrorism Ruth Ben-Ghiat recently pointed out,
it is clearer than ever that inciting political violence is Trump’s political project, and his campaign appearances and events must be seen in that light. Trump is a marketer… [N]ow his brand is violence, and his rallies and other events sell that violence, presenting it as the preferred way to resolve differences in society and as the only way to move history forward.
She writes that Trump’s visit yesterday to a gun shop to admire a customized “Trump 45” Glock “was inevitable.”
African Americans have long known that White elites turn to authoritarian violence to control them. Women, American Jews, Latinos, members of the LBGTQ+ community, and others have encountered their own versions of such coercion. What’s new, perhaps, is that (1) many of us thought America had left such violence behind and (2) now it is also straight White males who are being threatened. Whereas once White liberals such as myself had to take an imaginative leap into another perspective—that’s why novels by authors from diverse backgrounds are so important—now we are seeing up close what these others groups saw. On January 6, it was White members of Congress and White cops who were included in the targets. And it’s judges, lawyers, jury members, FBI agents, military personnel, journalists, and others who find themselves on hate lists.
I said I’d look back at American history before turning to Cormac McCarthy, and for this I draw on Richard Slotkin’s 1992 study of the Western, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. As Slotkin observes, America has often framed political violence as a frontier drama. Although America is hardly the only country to experience violence—in fact, most countries have bloody histories—it has had a distinctive way of framing the drama. For America, the myth involves subduing a recalcitrant wilderness. “Regeneration through violence,” Slotkin says, is the American myth.
Throughout American history, he notes, there have been different versions of this myth, from the Puritans emphasizing “the achievement of spiritual regeneration through frontier adventure” to
Jeffersonians (and later, the disciples of Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” [seeing] the frontier settlement as a re-enactment and democratic renewal of the original “social contract”; [or] Jacksonian Americans [seeing] the conquest of the Frontier as a means to the regeneration of personal fortunes and/or of patriotic vigor and virtue.
Trumpism is closest to the Jacksonian model—think of Jackson’s role in the Trail of Tears—but in each case, Slotkin says, the Myth
represented the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or “natural” state, and regeneration through violence.
When Trump in 2017 gave his “American carnage” inaugural address, describing America as a nation under attack by forces domestic and foreign (Muslims, urban Blacks, Central American immigrants), he was invoking this myth, which may be why his vision has resonated with so many. When he has praised the tactics used by thuggish dictators like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un or when he has pardoned the court-martialed Navy Seal and psycho killer Eddie Gallagher, so-called responsible Republicans could rationalize that his actions were the primitive means needed to regenerate American society. “Trump is crude,” they would say, “but maybe it takes someone like him to shake things up.”
It should be noted that, while the “regeneration through violence” myth had its origins in the Indian wars, it has mapped easily onto other American conflicts, including those involving race and labor movements. For instance, in D.W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece Birth of a Nation (1915), one sees the KKK playing the role of the U.S. calvary, riding to the rescue of people under assault from, not Indians but rampaging ex-slaves. Because they do so, Northerners and Southerners can reunite after their bitter war and a new nation can be born.
One sees the myth played out in many of Hollywood’s greatest westerns, such as High Noon, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and others. In the 1970s, the western got transferred to urban settings but the theme was the same: Dirty Harry resorts to primitive means, with thugs now playing the role previously taken by Indians, as he deals out the unregulated violence necessary to restore civilization.
Slotkin focuses mainly on cinema in his study, but one finds literary westerns grappling with the same theme. Along with Blood Meridian, which I’ll turn to in a moment, there’s Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer-prize winning novelmourns (like Frederick Jackson Turner) the closing of the frontier, conveying a sense that the age of heroes is past once we’ve civilized the entire nation. While one is reading the novel, however, one cheers on Gus and Cal, the two Texas rangers who take the law into their own hands. Such actions are necessary in a landscape that includes a murderous Indian (Blue Duck) and a pathological gang of outlaws (the Suggs Brothers).
In the end, the rangers prevail, showing cattlemen that they can take their cattle from Texas to Montana’s green pastures. In their success, however, the rangers render themselves obsolete. Like John Wayne in a number of his movies, Cal cannot join the civilization he has helped bring about. In the process, however, the violence that he and Gus have resorted to has served its purpose.
While McMurtry may think we have reached an end of the violence so that rangers are no longer necessary, however, McCarthy is another story. Forget about regeneration, I hear him saying as his murderous Judge Holden rampages through the 19th century American west, killing Indians and settlers alike. More of an archetype than a flesh-and blood figure, Holden by the end is proclaiming that he will never die, which may be how McCarthy sees America. Perhaps exposing the comforting myth that society can ever find stability, McCarthy’s novel disturbs because it suggests that violence is perpetual and social order hangs by a thread.
The novel is based on the carnage caused by John Joel Glanton and his ruthless gang of scalp hunters following the Mexican American War (1846-48). We first encounter Holden when, as if on a whim, he enters a revival meeting and fabricates a charge that turns the audience against the preacher. He’s a stochastic terrorist in this scene, behaving as Trump did on January 6:
Ladies and gentlemen I feel it my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival is an impostor. He holds no papers of divinity from any institution recognized or improvised. He is altogether devoid of the least qualification to the office he has usurped and has only committed to memory a few passages from the good book for the purpose of lending to his fraudulent sermons some faint flavor of the piety he despises. In truth, the gentleman standing before you posing as a minister of the Lord is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Oh God, cried the reverend. Lies, lies! He began reading feverishly from his opened bible.
On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years—I said eleven—who had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating while actually clothed in the livery of his God…
Let’s hang the turd, called an ugly thug from the gallery to the rear.
Not three weeks before this he was run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat. Yes lady, that is what I said. Goat.
Why damn my eyes if I wont shoot the son of a bitch, said a man rising at the far side of the tent, and drawing a pistole from his boot he leveled it and fired.
More shots are fired, someone seams the tent, and there follows a mass exodus, with people “pouring out, women screaming, folk stumbling, folk trampled underfoot in the mud.”
When the Judge later admits to having fabricated the charge, like Trump he is appreciated for his entertainment value. At that point, his auditors become complicit in his action. Maybe they, like Trump supporters, get a thrill from the judge’s sheer audacity, and also from his sadism:
Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him? You mean the Reverend Green? Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come out here. I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was. They looked from one to the other. Well where was it you run up on him? I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him. He raised his glass and drank. There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink.
I want to caution against pushing comparisons between Trump and the Judge, since Holden is a sophisticated, learned, and refined psychopath whereas Trump (in the words of Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien) is driven by nothing more complicated than “self-aggrandizement and self-preservation.” The former president, O’Brien observes, “thinks about money, food, sex, and revenge. Very little else. Maybe sports.” Both men, however, act with impunity.
What we get in the revival meeting is only a taste of what is to come as the Judge joins with the Glanton gang on their murder spree. The narrative sucks us in somewhat since, at first, they are battling “bad” Indians (bloodthirsty Comanches and Apaches). Then, however, we see them attacking peaceful Pueblo villages and Mexican townspeople. As an extra flourish, sometimes the Judge will casually break the neck of a child or drop a gift of puppies into a river.
By the end of the novel, the Judge is orchestrating a dance, which becomes a metaphor for the great human drama. Only the truly barbaric man, he tells the protagonist, can really dance this dance:
Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance…
The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps.
At the end, McCarthy reflects on the Judge and his dance:
His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
I have sometimes wondered what drives a writer to imagine worlds that lack any sympathetic characters. Why doesn’t McCarthy write more novels like All the Pretty Horses, which features a protagonist of unimpeachable integrity who stands up against the forces of darkness? Why Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men, with its cold-blooded and seemingly invincible killer Anton Chiguhr?
But if the world is truly becoming a place where stochastic terrorists such as Trump can thumb their noses at judges—if horror really does speak to humanity’s “inmost heart”–then maybe McCarthy is using the lawless and violent west to get at a vital truth. Perhaps he sees us as further gone than we realize.
At the very least, McCarthy’s vision tests those of us who like to think that civilization will triumph over barbarism in the great American democratic experiment.
Traveling has pushed back today’s post, but Julia and I are staying current with the World Cup results as we drive across the country, including Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé’s extraordinary feats. Here’s a soccer poem by Diane Ackermann, written after watching the New York Cosmos play in the 1970s. Former soccer greats Giorgo Chinaglia of Italy and Marinho Chagas of Brazil had come to America in the first concerted attempt to jumpstart soccer in this country.
We can see the long-term impact of such players on the U.S. today (along with Brazil’s Pele) as we watch America’s exciting team. At the time, few schools had soccer programs, and there weren’t the youth leagues we see today. As a result, most Americans found soccer fandom inexplicable and goal celebrations such as that witnessed by Diane Ackerman to be exotic.
Soccer at the Meadowlands By Diane Ackerman
Near the goal, head sunk into his shoulders as he sprints, Chinaglia takes the ball spat at his feet,
dribbles it around a thatch of yellow shirts and, sliding between the legs of two defenders, belts it hard
into that caged, invisible something beyond the green reason of the field into the netted calm no one enters.
The home crowd’s ear-splitting rant grows seismic. Screams blur to wind howl and cymbals.
A jig-step. Chinaglia raises his fists as laurels. In a walking faint, he gallops round the pitch,
leaping, as if lovesick, into Marinho’s arms, leaping to the hypnotic boom of the crowd.
Frodo, Sam and Gollum negotiating the Dead Marshes
Monday
Apparently I am not the only one who thought of Tolkien’s Dead Marshes as Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool saga got more, well, Trumpian. Someone even posted a picture of the Reflecting Pool as those marshes, with the Washington Monument murkily reflected and Frodo and Sam about to wade in. As the pool becomes an algae-infested swamp, it has provided as apt an analogy for the Trump administration as one could imagine. Minnesota governor Tim Walz summed it up well:
Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.
In case you haven’t been following the story, Trump has become obsessed with the long, oblong body of water that reflects the Washington Monument. After blaming Obama and Biden for neglecting it, he hired a supporter with no pool experience to paint the bottom “American flag blue” and fix the filtration system. Since then, there has been a major algae bloom, even as pieces of the coating detach and float to the surface. As one pool expert tweeted,
We would have never used epoxy on natural stone that had been submerged for 100 years. They didn’t even use a primer. For $12 million lol
Now Park Service employees are wading around in hip boots pouring in chemicals. Meanwhile, a passing bicyclist was arrested for sticking his hand in the water to see what was going on. Which brings us to Tolkien.
Frodo and Sam, with Gollum as their guide, must thread their way through the Dead Marsh on their way to Mount Doom. It’s a grim scene:
The fens grew more wet, opening into wide stagnant meres, among which it grew more and more difficult to find the firmer places where feet could tread without sinking into gurgling mud. The travellers were light, or maybe none of them would ever have found a way through.
At one point Sam stumbles:
He fell and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere. There was a faint hiss, a noisome smell went up, the lights flickered and danced and swirled. For a moment the water below him looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass, through which he was peering. Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry. ‘There are dead things, dead faces in the water,’ he said with horror. ‘Dead faces!’
The symbolism writes itself. As we approach our 250th birthday, Trump dreamed of a reflecting pool that looked like a suburban swimming pool, just as he wants American history to be scrubbed of anything that doesn’t look like his 1950s Leave It to Beaver image. The messy parts (slavery, land theft, labor unrest) are all to be left out. The past, however, refuses to die but comes oozing back. The melting pot as slimy green mess.
Ken Burns has given us a much more honest picture of the American Revolution than we will be getting in the coming days. While there were moments of extraordinary heroism, there were also moments of dark brutality, including deliberate genocide against Native American populations. In some ways, it was more civil war than revolution.
Here, meanwhile, is the history behind the dead faces that Sam sees:
‘Who are they? What are they?’ asked Sam shuddering, turning to Frodo, who was now behind him.
‘I don’t know,’ said Frodo in a dreamlike voice. ‘But I have seen them too. In the pools when the candles were lit. They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead. A fell light is in them.’ Frodo hid his eyes in his hands. ‘I know not who they are; but I thought I saw there Men and Elves, and Orcs beside them.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Gollum. ‘All dead, all rotten. Elves and Men and Orcs. The Dead Marshes. There was a great battle long ago, yes, so they told him when Sméagol was young, when I was young before the Precious came. It was a great battle. Tall Men with long swords, and terrible Elves, and Orcses shrieking. They fought on the plain for days and months at the Black Gates. But the Marshes have grown since then, swallowed up the graves; always creeping, creeping.’
I suspect that Tolkien surfaced some of these nightmare images from the World War I trenches in which he served, where sometimes the dead would be buried forever in the mud.
As we know from Freud and Jung, that which we repress returns as monstrosity. The Creature of the Green Lagoon is always creeping, creeping. Better to face our history outright.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Hagar in the Wilderness
Sunday
As I was working on today’s post about Hagar’s banishment into the wilderness, I got word from one of our dearest Sewanee friends that her husband, unexpectedly rushed to the hospital last week for emergency heart valve surgery, is dying. While God in the story consoles Abraham (not Hagar) that “I will make a nation of him,” right now all I can think of is Hagar’s sense of betrayal and abandonment:
So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept.”
This poem by Stacey Zisook Robinson, which I found on line, captures the pain of the moment. Her speaker, listening to her child cry, fails to find comfort in promises of a better future. “What of glory in a thousand years,” the speaker cries out, “while you thirst and I despair?” Words of consolation are no more than “tarnished gold and stolen silver.”
At such times, heaven feels “absent and empty.” Pray for our friends and all of us who love them.
Hagar’s Song: A Poem for Parashat Vayeira By Stacey Zisook Robinson
I hear the desert when you cry – wide and open, empty as Heaven.
I cannot hide from it, neither the desert nor your tears.
The angel bade me “Stay!” with words of tarnished gold and stolen silver.
What is greatness laid against your pain? What of glory in a thousand years, while you thirst and I despair?
I hear heaven when you cry – absent and empty, an echo of angels and the glory of God.
To honor Juneteenth, I have reconfigured a post originally written in June 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. The essay was originally set in motion after my wife received a note from a woman who was reassembling a women’s writing group that my then colleague Lucille Clifton gathered at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in the 1990s.
The woman wondered how Lucille would respond to the current state of affairs. The question sent me combing through Lucille’s Collected Poems (2012).
While Lucille didn’t write about all the racist killings we experienced in recent years–there have been far too many–the plight of Blacks in America was always on her mind. What stands out about Clifton’s poetry is her determined optimism.
It’s not a facile optimism, as is clear from her poem “jasper texas 1998,” in which she couldn’t do other than express her discouragement. But a poem about her father abusing her when she was a girl sums up her resilience. For years she had a special animus against the moon because she remembered it shining through her window and doing nothing. (In some ways it stood in for her mother.) At the time she identified her father with Wolf Man, changing into a monster when the moon waxed full. Although it took her years to process the abuse, after he died she revisited her prejudice and concluded,
only then did i remember how she catches the sun and keeps most of him for the evening that surely will come; and it comes. only then did i know that to live in the world all that i needed was some small light and know that indeed i would rise again and rise again to dance. (“the man who killed the bear”)
At multiple poetry readings I heard Lucille declare that her purpose in life was to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” and she never deviated, feeling free to afflict the formerly afflicted if they in turn become oppressors. She articulated her guiding principle in “whose side are you on?”
i am on the dark side always the side of my daughters the side of my tired sons.
Perhaps she would initially have written about George Floyd the way she wrote about James Byrd, the Texas man who in 1998 was tied to a truck by racists and dragged to his death. In her poem about him she spoke as though from Byrd’s dismembered head before calling out in anguish, “why and why and why/ should i call a white man brother?”
Lucille always wrote about what she was feeling at the moment, and in this instance people singing “We Shall Overcome” at Byrd’s funeral rang hollow. Feeling defeated, she concluded—as though from Byrd’s perspective but also from her own–“i am done with this dust. i am done.”
i am a man’s head hunched in the road. i was chosen to speak by the members of my body. the arm as it pulled away pointed toward me, the hand opened once and was gone.
why and why and why should i call a white man brother? who is the human in this place, the thing that is dragged or the dragger? what does my daughter say? the sun is a blister overhead.
if i were alive i could not bear it. the townsfolk sing we shall overcome while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth into the dirt that covers us all. i am done with this dust. i am done.
Sometimes one is just so fed up–hope has bled out–that one wants to give up. “I am done.”
Such discouragement was only momentary with Lucille, however, as it would have been after Floyd’s killing. Down one day, she would be back up the next. I imagine her, following the ICE killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, recalling “after kent state,” which she wrote in 1970:
only to keep his little fear he kills his cities and his trees even his children
Lucille is beloved because she taps into our strength as well as into our pain. Her own life was hard: in addition to being a Black woman in America and an abuse survivor, she lost children and a husband and underwent multiple illnesses, including cancer and kidney failure. That’s why “won’t you celebrate with me” has such power:
won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model, born nonwhite and a woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.
Clifton often made it clear that she didn’t owe her survival just to her own resilience, however. The black community always provided her with a bedrock of support. In “listen children” she invokes the oral tradition that kept hope alive:
listen children keep this in the place you have for keeping always keep it all ways
we have never hated black
listen we have been ashamed hopeless tired mad but always all ways we loved us
we have always loved each other children all ways
pass it on
Under Trump’s rule, privileged whites have finally gotten a glimpse of the powerlessness African Americans know well. I suppose that’s a “small light” of sorts, making it clear that solidarity is the only way forward.
To end today’s post with a poem that, in the spirit of Juneteenth, is not just about survival, here’s “new bones.” It envisions creating a new and better future:
we will wear new bones again. we will leave these rainy days, break out through another mouth into sun and honey time. worlds buzz over us like bees, we be splendid in new bones. other people think they know how long life is how strong life is. we know
When Lucille assures us that life is long and strong, I take heart. Pass it on.
My dear friend Valerie Hotchkiss just alerted me to a review of Naomi Kanakia’s recent book, What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You). Kanakiadefinitely sounds like a kindred soul.
As I’m currently traveling, I’ll confine myself to sharing some passages from Todd Shy’s review and then obtain the book when I return home. Shy notes that Kanakia tracks politically and culturally left (as do I) and observes that she’s not afraid to offer up political critiques of some of the masterpieces (as do I from time to time). In the end, however, the works transcend whatever their politics may be, a point that Wayne Booth, my favorite contemporary theorist, also makes. As Shy puts it,
Kanakia contends that Great Books have earned their status because of their integrity. They are, she writes, “unflinchingly honest.” They have self-searching “rigor,” “a certain seriousness,” and “sensitivity.” Reading them can cultivate the same in us. More refreshing and, for me, unexpected, is her insistence that our commitment to diversity should include the diversity of other times. This “conversation with the past” adds depth and dimension to our own perceptions of the world. Indeed, reading these classics helps us to better understand our embeddedness in a long and complex context.
Shy then cites the following passage from the book:
The moment we come into contact with other people, we realize that the world precedes us. We come into a rich world that’s already full of preexisting ideas, which we discover through conversation, through the media, and through books. We determine our morality not in isolation but in relation to this world and to the choices it offers us.
Kanakia apparently isn’t afraid to admit that great books can require committing to a project that is long and arduous. “Everyone who’s ever approached a difficult book has had the experience of not getting it at first and then suddenly getting it,” she writes. “That experience is exactly why you read these books.” To which Shy adds, “Why move on from Gone Girl to War and Peace? It’s not because Tolstoy is a better airplane or beach read.”
As our department’s specialist in 18th British literature, I regularly taught Henry Fielding’s challenging Tom Jones and saw many of my students (unfortunately not all) eventually come around to it. The same occurred with Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, a tougher read than Pride and Prejudice. And I required that my survey students grapple with Paradise Lost (although I admit we skipped over the long angelic lectures and the battle in heaven). The prolonged engagement with these classics ended up rewiring the student’s minds, acculturating them to the different rhythms and language patterns of older works.
Therefore, I entirely agree with Shy when he says that the real literary battle at the moment “is not whether Milton or Melville or Morrison belongs on a high school or college syllabus.” Or as culture war conservatives used to say, “Austen, not Alice Walker.” Rather, it is whether we can preserve the very practice of “patient reading.” “In high school,” he laments, “reading is too often treated as a skill to master rather than a lifelong habit to instill and inspire.”
Shy concludes,
What’s So Great About the Great Books? is a spirited, welcome argument about the value of reading—reading on your own time, with your own appetites and needs, with your desire to make something meaningful of your life after your formal education is behind you. It is an appeal for reading whole books, challenging books, old books, books that have survived scrutiny and even contempt, books that affirm without simplifying, books Kanakia is willing to call “great.” Here is a defense of ideas of goodness that aren’t pure preference, ideas of greatness that aren’t punching bags for critique.
In my own book I conclude by quoting a 2018 New Yorker article by the British-Indian author Salman Rushdie, who responded to the torrent of lies emanating from the Donald Trump White House by pointing out that the classics will always remain relevant because of their commitment to truth. Rushdie essentially sees the classics as a “no bullshit” zone. I suspect Kanakia would agree.
