Zelensky as Hugo’s Enjolras

By Robin Bates | Published: January 2, 2023
Tveit as Enjolras in Les Misérables

Monday

If you haven’t watch Volodymyr Zelensky’s inspiring New Year address, I highly recommend it. Along with reviewing Ukraine’s year from hell, Ukraine’s president also presented a hopeful view of the future. (You can watch it here). I’ve devoted around 30 or so posts to the Russo-Ukrainian war this past year and have appended links at the end of today’s essay to most of them. Given Zenlensky’s address, I thought it would be appropriate to repost one where I compared Zelensky to the figure of Enjolras in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Both are visionary leaders but unlike Enjolras (and this seemed impossible to imagine when I blogged on it in March), Zelensky actually has a good chance of success.

Reposted from March 17, 2022

Seeking to balance the inspiring leadership of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky with the grim reality of the war, David Ignatius recently write in his Washington Post column,

Zelensky has taken the West with him, emotionally, to the barricades of Kyiv. He evokes the idealism of the popular uprisings that swept Europe in the 19th century and inspired Victor Hugo’s classic novel, “Les Miserables.” We know the rousing chorus of the musical version: “Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men? It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again!”

But this isn’t a musical. And it would be a mistake not to cast a cold, unsentimental eye at the Ukraine crisis before it damages the world irreparably. Even as we try to support Zelensky and his noble fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin, we should understand the dangers ahead.

The song in the musical rises out of an inspiring speech given by character Enjolras, who Hugo shows leading an aborted 1832 Paris insurrection that ends with the deaths of most of the insurgents.  A year ago I applied the speech to those Myanmar, Belorussian, and Hong Kong citizens fighting against oppression. Today, it’s easy to imagine Zelensky delivering Enjolras’s words.

In the novel, Hugo observes Enjolras’s vision has grown in the course of the insurrection, and we could say the same of Zelensky’s vision. When the former actor and comedian speaks now, he sounds like a leader, not a politician. Like Enjolras, he speaks for democracies everywhere:

[F]or some time past, he [Enjolras] had been gradually emerging from the narrow form of dogma, and had allowed himself to incline to the broadening influence of progress, and he had come to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution, the transformation of the great French Republic, into the immense human republic…. Enjolras was standing erect on the staircase of paving-stones, one elbow resting on the stock of his gun. He was engaged in thought; he quivered, as at the passage of prophetic breaths….A sort of stifled fire darted from his eyes, which were filled with an inward look. All at once he threw back his head, his blond locks fell back like those of an angel on the somber quadriga [chariot] made of stars, they were like the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of a halo, and Enjolras cried:

“Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves? The streets of cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest, human conscience become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the school, for sole penalty and recompense fame, work for all, right for all, peace over all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers!

Enjolras, like Zelensky, declares that the meaning of the struggle is self-determination:

Citizens, whatever happens to-day, through our defeat as well as through our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create. As conflagrations light up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the whole human race. And what is the revolution that we shall cause? I have just told you, the Revolution of the True. From a political point of view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty.

Following a mini lecture on the social contract, Enjolras sets forth a Jeffersonian vision of the importance of education. Think of such education as a guard against the constant mendacity and brainwashing that authoritarians and their minions engage in:

[L]egally speaking, [equality] is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity; politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously, it is all consciences possessed of the same right. Equality has an organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet, that is where the beginning must be made. The primary school imposed on all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From an identical school, an identical society will spring. Yes, instruction! light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns.

Yes, light! light! everything comes from light!

To our sorrow, we know Enjolras’s next prediction will not occur. The 20th century, rather than being happy, will be one of the bloodiest in history. Nevertheless, the ideal is one worth striving for. And to give Enjolras credit, from World War II up until now, the European Union and NATO have accomplished some of what he envisions:

Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall no longer, as today, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events. One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy. The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet around the light.

Sadly, when I wrote my earlier version of this post a year ago, I didn’t have to put in the qualifier “up until now.” In fact, with the exception of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, it appeared that Europe’s post World War II order had brought an end to the wars that have ravaged the continent ever since, well, the Pax Romana. Unfortunately, it appears we made the mistake of complacency. We forgot about how precious, and how fragile, democracy can be. Putin has reminded us.

Enjolras’s address concludes with assurances that the Ukrainians, and all of us, need to hear. The forthcoming sacrifices, he tells us, will not be in vain:

Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future. A revolution is a toll. Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up, consoled! We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the point of junction, of those who think and of those who suffer; this barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. Here misery meets the ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: ‘I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.’ From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are about to join and constitute our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.

Ukraine is fighting that we may all be free, whether of Russian imperialism or of creeping authoritarianism. Thanks to actual dictator Putin and wannabe dictator Trump, Enjolras’s speech seems as urgent now as it was in 1832, when Hugo set his book, and in 1862, when he wrote it.

Other Ukraine posts from this past year
Ukrainian Poet Kaminsky’s Call to Resist Oppression
On Stalin, Putin, and Orwell’s Napoleon
A Bakhtinian Reading of Zelensky
During War, Poetry a Necessity
Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down: What Russia Can Expect If It Wins
Cavafy, Adrienne Rich, and Ukrainians’ Decision to Stay or Leave
Putin, Like Milton’s Satan, Assaults Mankind
Vladimir Putin as Sauron
Did Russian Officials Recruit Gogolian Dead Souls
Comparing Housman’s Thermopylae with the Battle of Mariupol
Russian Poet Brodsky’s Controversial Take on Ukrainian Independence
Russia vs. Ukraine, Pushkin vs. Shevchenko
Brecht on Dictators Who Give War a Bad Name
Slovenia’s Preseren and the Importance of Poets to National Identity
The Russian Invaders as Tolkien’s Orcs
Cavafy’s Thermopylae and Mariupol
For Whom the Bell Tolls: Hemingway Would Understand Ukrainian Resistance
Russia Has Always Hated Ukrainian Lit
Which Poets Should Ukraine Honor?
Putin and Gaiman’s Good Omens
Farewell to Arms: Hemingway’s Insights into War Atrocities
A Murakami Villain Surfaces in Ukraine
Panic Reminiscent of Red Badge of Courage Gripping Russian Soldiers
A Shevchenko Poem Papered over by Russian Invaders
Bulgakov: Ukrainian Grass Will Grow Again
Ukraine Must United Athena with Poseidon
Think of Russia in Ukraine as Doctor Frankenstein
Will Putin Use Jadis’s “Deplorable Word”?
The Crimean Bridge and Bridge over the River Kwai
Russian Rockets, Male Insecurity, and Gravity’s Rainbow

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Ring Out the Old, Ring in the New

By Robin Bates | Published: December 31, 2022

Sunday – New Year’s Day

I’ve shared Tennyson’s “Ring Out Wild Bells” in previous New Year posts—it’s the archetypal poem for the occasion—but I thought that for today’s essay I’d provide some of the poetic context. Tennyson had to struggle to accept the hopefulness represented by the bells.

The verses appear in In Memoriam, Tennyson’s elegy to his bosom buddy Arthur Hallam. The poet spent 17 years writing it and it is one of the great poems in the English language. Like many people, Tennyson is particularly affected by the death at Christmas time.

The poet describes three Christmases in the course of the poem, and one can track the progress of his grief through his changing attitudes. Not surprisingly, the first Christmas is the hardest. Tennyson reports,

This year I slept and woke with pain,
I almost wish’d no more to wake,
And that my hold on life would break
Before I heard those bells again…

The Christmas bells confuse him because they mingle remembered joy with his current sorrow. He is almost sarcastic when he speaks of “the merry merry bells of Yule”:

But they my troubled spirit rule,
For they controll’d me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,
The merry merry bells of Yule.

As the family turns to the Christmas celebration, it finds that Hallam’s death weighs heavy:

At our old pastimes in the hall
We gambol’d, making vain pretence
Of gladness, with an awful sense
Of one mute Shadow watching all.

Tennyson writes “Ring Out Wild Bells” in response to the third Christmas, when the Tennysons find themselves in a new locale. The church bells therefore sound different:

A single peal of bells below,
That wakens at this hour of rest
A single murmur in the breast,
That these are not the bells I know.

Like strangers’ voices here they sound,
In lands where not a memory strays,
Nor landmark breathes of other days,
But all is new unhallow’d ground.

The change in locale is not the only difference, however, Tennyson resolves that, for this Christmas, neither his grief nor life’s petty cares will dampen the celebration:

No more shall wayward grief abuse
The genial hour with mask and mime;
For change of place, like growth of time,
Has broke the bond of dying use.

Let cares that petty shadows cast,
By which our lives are chiefly proved,
A little spare the night I loved,
And hold it solemn to the past.

Because of this change, Tennyson can now fully embrace the bells. He is prepared to  “ring out the old, ring in the new.” Significantly, ringing out the old includes ringing out “the grief that saps the mind,/For those that here we see no more.”

In other words, he is willing to look forward again and embrace optimism. The verses represent as affirmative a poetic declaration as to be found anywhere (although sometimes Percy Shelley gets close). This is why I regard “Ring Out Wild Bells” as the archetypal New Year’s poem.

So allow yourself to hope and dream again as you read these lines:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

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Worried about BS? Read Great Lit

By Robin Bates | Published: December 29, 2022
Isaac Israels, Reading Woman on a Couch

Friday

While I continue to enjoy Peter Brooks’s Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative (see my earlier post on it here), I find myself somewhat frustrated by its narrow ambition. When the Yale comparative lit scholar shows literary fiction at work, he focuses on what it reveals about the nature of fictionality whereas literature for me is about much, much more.

Brooks’s study is nevertheless important because he shows how we as a society are being taken over by stories. If we are to fight back against this, Brooks believes, we must understand how narrative works. This is the purpose for his book.

In showing how fiction works upon us, Brooks examines certain great works of literature that are particularly insightful. More on this in a moment. First, however, let’s look at what worries Brooks. With stories ascendent, Brooks fears that they are pushing out other forms of knowing. The emotional rush of story can overwhelm logic, judgment, and data analysis, products of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, politicians who traffic in popular fictions often command more influence than is healthy. As Brooks puts it,

[T]here is no guarantee that fictions will further human flourishing. We do not need to look far back in history to see what happens when certain fictions gain the status of dominant and all-explaining myths. Especially, perhaps, those myths that arise from resentment, from the sense of social exclusion or powerlessness. The unscrupulous seekers after power—who currently appear to outnumber those who seek power to do justice—promote and possibly themselves believe myths that enable their takeover and their exercise of totalitarian power.

In his conclusion, Brooks requotes the Game of Thrones passage that opens the book: Tyrion asserts, “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.” Or as Brooks puts it,

Lawful regimes crumble before the too-good story. Populations become largely submissive.

Brooks’s warning against fiction reminds me somewhat of a caution that appears in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy. Sidney contends that poetry is the most powerful vehicle for teaching virtue, but after making an impassioned case for the many ways it does so, he is forced to make a rather significant concession. Since no use of words “can both teach and move [towards virtue] so much as poesy,” he states, the opposite must also be true: a poetic use of words could also potentially move people towards vice. Or as Sidney puts it, “by the reason of [poetry’s] sweet charming force, it can do more hurt than any other army of words.” This danger, in fact, is why Plato banished poets from his rational utopia.

Because Sidney is defending poetry, he must qualify his endorsement. It is not poetry itself that is at fault, he writes, but those who misuse it. Sidney therefore contrasts poetry that is abused with poetry that is “rightly used.” He says that just as a physician can use his knowledge of physic to poison or to cure, just as a preacher can use God’s word to breed heresy or raise people up, just as a man can use a sword to kill his father or defend his prince, so one can use poetry for bad or for ill purposes.

But people like, say, Donald Trump are not going to be swayed by appeals to use fiction rightly. Our past president wields stories only to serve his own narcissistic purposes. The question, then, is how we are to resist the onslaught of his narrative and that of other manipulators. Brooks recommends training students as fiction skeptics. We should all become amateur narratologists.

There’s a double movement involved in Brooks’s recommendation: At the same time that we “celebrate the human capacity to imagine, to creative other worlds,” we should at the same time foster “a more critical attitude” toward narrative fictions. While fictions are good because they help us cope with a dark and chaotic reality, we must remain “on our guard against their capacity for ruin.”

In his training program, Brooks argues for the kind of literature program he set up decades ago at Yale, which was one in which literature students study fictionality itself. As I recall, key works in the course included Don Quixote—which is about a man deluded by chivalric romances—and Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories, which time and again explore how stories work.

Other useful works mentioned by Brooks are Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and the novels of Henry James and Honoré de Balzac. Lucy Snow in Villette, for instance, struggles against attempts by others to impose limiting fictions upon her. At the heart of James’s works, meanwhile, are nefarious attempts to manipulate others through the use of narrative.

While I don’t disagree with Brooks’s interpretations, which I find compelling, I part company with him in thinking that Introduction to Literature should be, first and foremost, an introduction to narratology. Before students are taught to distrust fiction, they must be encouraged to read it. They must first learn that literature provides profound insight into their most pressing issues and that the better the literature is, the more profound will be the insights it can provide.

In my own writing and teaching, I make distinctions that don’t (I believe) interest narratologists, such as the difference between great lit and pop lit (or, more accurately, not-so-great lit). The first, I contend, appeals to the intellect, the emotions, and the spirit whereas the second elevates the emotions above all. In other words, rather than having students study how fiction can be abused, I want them reading literature that helps them become wiser, more empathetic, and more spiritually grounded. Having developed head, heart, and soul, they will have the foundation they need to detect abuses.

Put another way, once students, through great literature, develop an expansive vision of human possibility, they will not be satisfied with shallow and manipulative fictions. Deep people don’t settle for trashy stories, whether from authors or politicians. Their very contact with sublime art enables them to see through bullshit.

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The Chaotic Joys of a Family Reunion

By Robin Bates | Published: December 28, 2022

Thursday

Yesterday joy reigned supreme in the Bates household as my eldest son flew down from Washington, D.C. with Alban (age 10) and my youngest son drove up from Georgia with Esmé (10), Etta (8), Eden (6) and Ocean (4). My brother Sam and his wife were already here—chased by the blizzard, they drove down from Madison on Thursday—and we had a zoom reunion with my other two brothers, along with their wives and one niece. As child energy exploded in our house, I felt some of it entering my bloodstream and felt young again.

African American poet Rita Dove, one-time National Poet, has a great poem about family reunions. In her case, it’s a summer barbecue, not a time when temperatures plunge to record lows. But the energy is the same, regardless of the time of year.  I identified with her report of how her relatives arrive from all over and instantly launch into animated conversations. Or as she puts it,

hordes of progeny are swirling
and my cousins yakking on
as if they were waist-deep in quicksand

In our case, for the first time we had a kids table, which proved wildly successful. The five grandchildren, who hadn’t seen each other for over a year, bonded instantly and had much more fun than they would have had they been sitting with us.

And then there are Dove’s comments on skin color. When she talks of mixed genetics, I wonder whether she is referring to grim stories of America’s slave past. Some of the coffee color she describes has undoubtedly been the product of white masters. In our case, the mixing is more benign: Toby’s children are Trinidadian American while Darien’s son is Korean-American. The “beautiful geometry of Mendel’s peas” (nothing grim about it in this case) has been at work.

While Dove’s relatives demolish cheese grits and tear into slow-cooked ribs, we did the same with a lamb shoulder, a honey-baked ham, mint chocolate chip ice cream, and Harry and David pears.  Like Dove and her relatives, we tacitly agreed this was not an occasion to worry about waistlines. Nothing pinched or hatchety about this gathering.

Here’s the poem:

Family Reunion
By Rita Dove

Thirty seconds into the barbecue,
my Cleveland cousins
have everyone speaking
Southern—broadened vowels
and dropped consonants,
whoops and caws.
It’s more osmosis than magic,
a sliding thrall back to a time
when working the tire factories
meant entire neighborhoods coming
up from Georgia or Tennessee,
accents helplessly intact—
while their children, inflections flattened
to match the field they thought
they were playing on, knew
without asking when it was safe
to roll out a drawl… just as

it’s understood “potluck” means
resurrecting the food
we’ve abandoned along the way
for the sake of sleeker thighs.
I look over the yard to the porch
with its battalion of aunts,
the wavering ranks of uncles
at the grill; everywhere else
hordes of progeny are swirling
and my cousins yakking on
as if they were waist-deep in quicksand
but like the books recommend aren’t moving
until someone hauls them free—

Who are all these children?
Who had them, and with whom?
Through the general coffee tones
the shamed genetics cut a creamy swath.
Cherokee’s burnt umber transposed
onto generous lips, a glance flares gray
above the crushed nose we label
Anonymous African:  It’s all here,
the beautiful geometry of Mendel’s peas
and their grim logic—

and though we remain
clearly divided on the merits
of okra, there’s still time
to demolish the cheese grits
and tear into slow-cooked ribs
so tender, we agree they’re worth
the extra pound or two
our menfolk swear will always
bring them home. Pity
the poor soul who lives
a life without butter—
those pinched knees
and tennis shoulders
and hatchety smiles!

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No Other Pear Can Compare

By Robin Bates | Published: December 27, 2022
Harry and David pears

Wednesday

Every Christmas my brother David and his wife Belinda send us Harry and David pears, thereby ruining our pear consumption for the rest of the year. After all, as Helen Mitsios writes in this poem about that sublime fruit, “there was never a pear as perfect as you.”

I’ve read many poems about fruit. There is, of course, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, probably the ultimate example. D. H. Lawrence’s aggressively erotic “Figs,” where he contends that “ripe figs won’t keep,” is his version of Robert Herrick’s “gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” Li-Young Lee explicitly compares eating a persimmon to a sexual encounter, and Mary Oliver goes into ecstasy over the “sensual inundation” of small wild plums. Mitsios, however, is the first poet I know who gives credit to the marketer.

Having done her homework, Mitsios identifies the Harry and David pears as “Royal Riviera.” One can feel the juice coursing down one’s chin in a line like “luscious and large, golden and blushed.” And then there’s the pun in a line that acts as a refrain: “no other pear compares to my love for you.” Here it is:

Ode to the Royal Riviera Pear
By Helen Mitsios

Royal Riviera Pear,
there’s no other pear
that compares to you.
Luscious and large,
golden and blushed,
like a cherub you arrive
on my doorstep in a box
with one pear wrapped in gold
foil. There was never a pear
as perfect as you.

Treasured
pear first grown in France,
Royal Riviera Pear and cousin
of the French Comice pear,
revered since 1856, buttery
rare, served to royalty
and known as the fruit
of kings. Or maybe eaten
while on a bench, a picnic,
or just anywhere. Royal
Riviera Pears are delicious
without compare.

Grown
in Southern Oregon since 1934,
picked at the perfect moment,
to arrive at the doorstep
as a gift or Christmas
tradition these 85-plus years.

Perfect
box of pears, eaten by folks
both big and small. Juicy
and scooped with a spoon
or on a plate at noon.
Royal Riviera Pears, of splendor
to eat right away or on
a special day, a feast, a treat,
or for your sweet.

Royal Riviera Pear, your shape
carved in gold for a throne,
or I could place you in a picnic
basket or on my mantle at home.

A tradition of old, like
the partridge in a pear tree
or starting anew just for you.
You can eat a box yourself
or gaze at a pear on a shelf.
Royal Riviera, perfect pears
fit to be painted in a still life,
I admire you while sitting
on my kitchen chair.

Legendary
pair, maybe Adam and Eve
ate a pear in the garden,
Homer’s pear, gift of pears to Greek goddesses.
Oh, Royal Riviera Pear, you are without compare.

I would carry you in my pocket
if I could or wear you on a chain
as a locket, most celadon
and fragile butterfly-winged
of fruits. No matter how
or where, nothing compares
to you, Royal Riviera Pear.

In sauces or butters, there
was never a pear as sweet
as you. Pear brandy not
as dandy without you,
baked pears, pears with nuts
and cheese, fruit of sweet
curves in pear bread,
baked or eaten iced or
raw. Oh, most perfect
Royal Riviera Pear, no other
pear compares to my love for you.

In the words of Rossetti’s goblins, “Come buy, come buy!”

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Maybe Books Choose Us

By Robin Bates | Published: December 26, 2022
Pierpaolo Rovero, Present, Past, Future 

Tuesday

I’m currently reading and very much enjoying Ruth Ozeki’s novel The Book of Form & Emptiness, including one passage that articulates something I’ve long suspected: that the book you most need at a critical point in your life will somehow find its way to you.

For years I’ve held this scientifically unprovable notion. I’ll be walking through a bookstore or library and somehow come across just the right book for the moment. In Ozeki’s novel, such a moment occurs in a craft store:

She needed to get started on the memory quilt project, so a quick stop [in the quilting aisle] would be motivating, but first she had to get past the books. This was her danger zone, and now she steeled herself… The last thing she needed was more books. She gripped the handle of her cart and pushed forward, but just as she was passing the New Releases table, the oddest thing happened. Maybe the table was rickety, or maybe she bumped it on her way by, but something caused one little book to jump off the pile and land inside her shopping cart.

The book is Tidy Magic: The Ancient Zen Art of Clearing Your Clutter and Revolutionizing Your Life, and I’m not far enough into Ozeki’s novel to know what role it will play in Annabelle’s life. But because Ozeki has made her novel itself into a character, with its own speaking voice, we get first-hand testimony that books do indeed have agency. Tidy Magic finds its way to a woman who needs it because that’s what books do:

Of course, it wasn’t actually the universe doing the providing. The universe can’t make a book launch itself off a table. Only a book can do that, although it is no easy feat. There are fables in our world of powerful tomes with the ability to levitate and move by themselves, but since few of us ever get to see this happen, we tend to assume these are just talltales. Books do migrate—look at the pile next to your bed—but lacking legs, we lack mobility, and generally we must rely on you to move us from place to place. To that end, we do our best to make ourselves attractive to you, with our gaudy covers and catchy titles, but Tidy Magic was not likethat. It was a quiet book, not pushy in the least, and yet, it had this extraordinary power to self-propel. Imagine the strength of purpose that requires! Needles to say, we [the collective world of books] were impressed.

So there you have it. We already are aware that books often know us better than we know ourselves. Now we learn that books have special ways of getting that information to us.

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Oliver on the Cruel Beauty of Cold

By Robin Bates | Published: December 25, 2022

Monday

It never—as in never—drops to 0 degrees in Tennessee, as it did this past Friday, and states to the north of us are even worse off. This means that it’s time to reach into the closet for Mary Oliver’s “Cold Poem,” which I’ve shared and then reshared in the past when America was pounded by “the arctic express.” At the very least, Oliver provides a glimmer of good that can emerge from this extreme weather event.

Reprinted from Jan. 8, 2014 and Jan. 31, 2019

Much of the United States is caught in extremely cold temperatures at the moment. Although this is causing a great deal of misery, poet Mary Oliver finds benefits to “tree-splitting” cold. For one thing, it gives us a chance to get real.

Cold Poem
By Mary Oliver

Cold now.
Close to the edge. Almost
unbearable. Clouds
bunch up and boil down
from the north of the white bear.
This tree-splitting morning
I dream of his fat tracks,
the lifesaving suet.
I think of summer with its luminous fruit,
blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,
handsful of grain.
Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we have always had, secretly
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe
that is what it means, the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.
In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest; we keep
ourselves alive,
if we can, taking one after another
the necessary bodies of others, the many
crushed red flowers.

I understand Oliver to be saying that, when we are in the grip of extreme cold–when we feel the breath of death upon us–that is when we value life the most. Just as the polar bear’s life-saving suet keeps it alive in extreme conditions, so we focus on our essential life at such moments as this. Dreaming of summer’s luminous fruit becomes an extraneous luxury.

Our “hard knife-edged love,” Oliver tells us, is for our “own bones,” for “the warm river of the I.” We must acknowledge the life force that burns within us.

That’s why we are so fascinated by “the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals”: we identify with this battle between life and death and know that, in this primal struggle, we need, no less than the shark, to take into ourselves the bodies of others. That’s why we find a beauty to cold.

The cold season, Oliver says, is a season of cruelty and of honesty. Hold that thought in your mind the next time you take a step out into sub-zero temperatures.

Later thought: As I honored Mary Oliver’s life following her recent death, I talked about her views of death and her views of Christianity. She was also an author of numerous depression poems, which stand in dramatic contrast to her ecstasy poems. (I wonder if, like many of our greatest poets, she had bipolar disorder.) Her insight in “Cold Poem” tracks with something that psychologist/philosopher Thomas Moore says in Care of the Soul about the value of depression:

Faced with depression, we might ask ourselves, “What is it doing here? Does it have some necessary role to play?”…

Some feelings and thoughts seem to emerge only in a dark mood. Suppress the mood, and you will suppress those ideas and reflections. Depression may be as important a channel for valuable “negative” feelings, as expressions of affection are for the emotions of love…Melancholy gives the soul an opportunity to express a side of its nature that is as valid as any other, but is hidden out of our distaste for its darkness and bitterness.

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What Shines Now in the Dark of Night?

By Robin Bates | Published: December 24, 2022
Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich, Adoration of the Shepherds

Spiritual Sunday – Christmas

Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Birth of Christ” emphasizes the simplicity of the event. “Were you expecting something greater?” the poet asks before observing that God “moves straight through all measurements we know, dissolving them away.”

The theme continues when Rilke observes that the gifts of the Magi are less astonishing than the baby in Mary’s arms. That gift does not “drift for a moment on the air” and “leave behind a vague regret.” That gift is the joy that is remembered forever.

May you all receive a taste of this joy during this holy-day season. Merry Christmas!

The Birth of Christ
By Rainer Maria Rilke
Trans. by H.D. Herter Norton

Without your simplicity, how could this
have happened — what shines now in the dark of night?
The God who thundered over the nations
makes himself mild and through you enters the world

Were you expecting something greater?

What is greatness? He moves straight through
all measurements we know, dissolving them away.
Even the path of a star is not like that.

Behold: these kings standing here are great
and drag into your lap rare treasures
that each believes to be the greatest.

Perhaps you are astonished at their gifts.
But look into the blanket in your arms,
how He already surpasses all of them.

Amber that is traded near and far,
rings of gold and costly spices
that drift for a moment on the air:
these are quickly fading pleasures
and leave behind a vague regret.

The gift He brings — as you will see — is joy.

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Jesus as Refugee

By Robin Bates | Published: December 22, 2022
Mastelletta, The Flight into Egypt 

Friday

On December 21—the darkest night of the year—Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a very Advent message to the American Congress. Advent includes both an acknowledgement of our grim present and the promise of a transcendent future, and the Ukrainian president touched on both.

On the one hand, Zelensky pointed to Russia’s assault on Ukrainian civilians—and as if we needed further confirmation, the New York Times has just published new information about the Russian paratroopers who carried out wholesale slaughter in Bucha last spring. On the other hand, Zelensky reminded Americans of the higher ideals, which led them to stand up against the British in the 1770s and against the Nazis in the 1940s.

Some of the best Christmas poems are those which look at the grim times in which Jesus was born. Given the Bucha slaughter, my father’s poem “Witness” is very timely. In it, one of Herod’s soldiers refuses to participate in the slaughter of the innocents, which was to include Jesus.

Witness
By Scott Bates

When it came down from HQ
The order to shoot the kids
We were stunned I mean really rocked
And I remember saying
Jesus we can’t do that and some of us
Felt like walking out but you don’t do that
In the army you don’t quit without a court-martial
So that was it we had to do it
And a lot of us did and it got very messy
And not pretty at all but we had to follow orders
You got to have discipline or you can’t do anything
Except me I couldn’t bring myself to do it
I couldn’t explain it I knew I was disobeying orders
Maybe it was because I have three kids myself and one
Of them is under two so when I found these poor people
Hiding in a barn with a new baby I couldn’t do it
I sure as hell couldn’t do it
I told them to cool it hit the road take off
For Egypt or somewhere and fast and not go back for anything
I took off pretty fast myself because the rest of the patrol
Was coming back and I would have got it for insubordination
And no questions asked bothers I would have had it
I mean for good
But I’m not sorry
I’m not sorry at all
He was a cute kid
I hope they made it

Meanwhile, at a time when almost three million Ukrainians have fled their country, Malcolm Guite’s sonnet “Refugee” reminds us that Jesus too was a refugee when his family fled the slaughter. Both poems put us in mind of the true Christmas spirit.

Refugee
By Malcolm Guite

We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,
Or cosy in a crib beside the font,
But he is with a million displaced people
On the long road of weariness and want.
For even as we sing our final carol
His family is up and on that road,
Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,
Glancing behind and shouldering their load.
Whilst Herod rages still from his dark tower
Christ clings to Mary, fingers tightly curled,
The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power,
And death squads spread their curse across the world.
But every Herod dies, and comes alone
To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.

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