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Easter Sunday
It has been a tradition with this blog to share a Mary Oliver poem each Easter. I didn’t realize, when I first started doing it, that a number of Oliver’s poems are actually modeled on the Resurrection story, which explains why I have found them so appropriate.
Occasionally thorns enter into the drama, an allusion to the crown of thorns the Romans soldiers used to torment Christ. For Oliver, the thorns often function as metaphors for her depression, which weighs her down and cuts her off from the ecstatic connection with the divine that she seeks. In “Egrets,” for instance, Oliver describes her own road to Calvary as follows:
Where the path closed
down and over,
through the scumbled leaves,
fallen branches,
through the knotted catbrier,
I kept going. Finally
I could not
save my arms
from thorns; soon
the mosquitoes
smelled me, hot
and wounded, and came
wheeling and whining.
After such travail, however, comes the dawn, along with three egrets that “opened their wings softly and stepped over every dark thing.”
I like “Morning Poem,” today’s lyric, because it suggests that the resurrection occurs daily, not only once in the past and once in the future. I am with those who believe that Jesus saw us building God’s kingdom on earth in the present. Therefore, even though the poet carries a thorn with her at all times—”it’s all you can do to keep on trudging”—she also knows that “somewhere deep within you” is “a beast shouting that the earth/ is exactly what it wanted.” After all, on this earth “[e]very morning/ the world/ is created” and “each pond with its blazing lilies/ is a prayer heard and answered.”
This occurs “whether or not/ you have ever dared to be happy.” But if you’re willing to pray—which is say, if you’re willing to open yourself to God’s world—then you will be rewarded with a profound happiness. Which is to say, “Thy kingdom come.”
Morning Poem By Mary Oliver
Every morning the world is created. Under the orange
sticks of the sun the heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches– and the ponds appear like black cloth on which are painted islands
of summer lilies. If it is your nature to be happy you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination alighting everywhere. And if your spirit carries within it
the thorn that is heavier than lead– if it’s all you can do to keep on trudging–
there is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted–
each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered lavishly, every morning,
whether or not you have ever dared to be happy, whether or not you have ever dared to pray.
The Ruthwell Cross (c. 9th century), combining Christian and pagan imagery, was partially destroyed by Scottish Presbyterians during the Reformation but reassembled
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Good Friday
Reprinted and revised from April 3, 2015
A remarkable poem in Old English tells the crucifixion story from the cross’s (or rood’s) point of view. Scholar Helena Tampierováne believes that the poem, while obviously Christian, is also rooted in Celtic and Anglo-Saxon veneration of the Tree of Life. Therefore, we see a merging of paganism and Christianity.
Tampierováne quotes medievalist Leeming Fee on the spiritual significance of trees in ancient mythologies:
Thus the tree both exists in this world and seems to transcend it, and therefore may be seen to symbolize the oppositions of life and death and of eternity and transience. Trees are most often associated with life-giving energy, and due to their longevity are quite often thought to be repositories of wisdom: the Egyptian Osiris and the Greek Adonis, as resurrection gods, both are associated with trees, and the Buddha was born again in the wisdom he found under the Bodhi Tree. Sometimes both in the Indic and Norse traditions, a tree is thought to represent life and death on a cosmic scale, symbolizing the full manifestation of the universe.
Of these traditions, I am most familiar with the cosmic tree in Norse mythology (Yggdrasil). One can see various areas of overlap. Odin willingly hangs himself from the tree in order to gain knowledge of other worlds, just as Christ hanging from the cross crossed over into death and then back to life. And the cross, like Yggdrasil, finds itself scarred by the forces of death, yet emerges to be a source of new life.
Like all religions, in other words, Christianity is syncretistic, drawing on local legends in order to provide people with a symbol system that addresses their deep spiritual needs. As Tampierováne sees it, when pre-Christian England encountered missionary stories of the cross, it associated it with its own cultic trees. The tree in the poem regards itself working with Christ, even though they seem to be at odds—just as, a few centuries later, pagan stories about a green man (in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) sought to to regenerate a Christianity that the poet sensed was becoming static.
Some scholars regard the cross as a loyal retainer, faithful to his lord to the end. But it can also be seen as feminized (“that he might mount upon me”), with the crucifixion working as a marriage of Christ and the church. Regardless of how one sees it, in the end the rood is triumphant:
Now the time has come That far and wide on earth men honor me, And all this great and glorious creation, And to this beacon offers prayers.
Here’s the rood telling the story in his/her own words:
From The Dream of the Rood
“It was long past – I still remember it – That I was cut down at the copse’s end, Moved from my root. Strong enemies there took me, Told me to hold aloft their criminals, Made me a spectacle. Men carried me Upon their shoulders, set me on a hill, A host of enemies there fastened me.
“And then I saw the Lord of all mankind Hasten with eager zeal that He might mount Upon me. I durst not against God’s word Bend down or break, when I saw tremble all The surface of the earth. Although I might Have struck down all the foes, yet stood I fast.
“Then the young hero (who was God almighty) Got ready, resolute and strong in heart. He climbed onto the lofty gallows-tree, Bold in the sight of many watching men, When He intended to redeem mankind. I trembled as the warrior embraced me. But still I dared not bend down to the earth, Fall to the ground. Upright I had to stand.
“A rood I was raised up; and I held high The noble King, the Lord of heaven above. I dared not stoop. They pierced me with dark nails; The scars can still be clearly seen on me, The open wounds of malice. Yet might I Not harm them. They reviled us both together. I was made wet all over with the blood Which poured out from his side, after He had Sent forth His spirit. And I underwent Full many a dire experience on that hill. I saw the God of hosts stretched grimly out. Darkness covered the Ruler’s corpse with clouds His shining beauty; shadows passed across, Black in the darkness. All creation wept, Bewailed the King’s death; Christ was on the cross….
“Now you may understand, dear warrior, That I have suffered deeds of wicked men And grievous sorrows. Now the time has come That far and wide on earth men honor me, And all this great and glorious creation, And to this beacon offers prayers. On me The Son of God once suffered; therefore now I tower mighty underneath the heavens, And I may heal all those in awe of me. Once I became the cruelest of tortures, Most hateful to all nations, till the time I opened the right way of life for men.”
Refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa headed for Italy (Oct. 2022)
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Thursday – Passover
Years ago, a New Yorker podcast alerted me to a refugee poem by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. Poet Ellen Bass, who discussed the poem with New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon, said that her family always reads the poem during their Passover seder.
Although the poem appeared in the 1990s, it is timeless since refugees are always with us. One thinks, for instance, of all those who venture aboard boats to face “a salty oblivion” in the Mediterranean. Zagajewski mentions “the nettles that methodically overgrow/the abandoned homesteads of exiles,” and he chillingly observes,
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere, you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
Bass says that the second line brings to mind Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, about murderer Gary Gilmore.
Zagajewski struggles to find something to praise in this veil of tears. If the world is horrifically mutilated, can we find something in it to praise?
Try to Praise the Mutilated World By Adam Zagajewski
Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere, you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.
I love the way that the poem veers between tragedy and beauty, revealing how thin is the line that separates the two. I think of how, after my son died, I looked out at the catbrier bordering the yard (our nettles) and marveled at how they kept growing. They were simultaneously barbed and green, life pulsing forth in a season of death.
I am also put in mind of the tribal medicine man’s healing words in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony as he seeks to cure Tayo of his war scars:
“But you know, grandson, this world is fragile.”
The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love.
In “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” Zagajewski chooses each word carefully and, in doing so, reminds us of the beauty that surrounds us, however fragile and evanescent. We must praise this beauty if we want to hold on to our humanity.
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Wednesday
I found myself thinking of the bloody battle of Bakhmut as my faculty study group continued its examination of The Iliad this week. Homer captures the horror of war like nobody else, which brought home to me the horror of what is happening in Ukraine.
Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, has described Bakhmut as “a slaughter-fest for the Russians,” and in that way it is proving a boon to the Ukrainians, who are “attriting” the invading forces in ways that will pay off later. As they have throughout the war, Ukraine has been making full use of NATO intelligence to pinpoint and destroy Russian attackers, which brings me to The Iliad.
In the sections my group is currently discussing, the Greeks—like the Ukrainians—are hunkered down behind barricades as the Trojans attack. But the Greeks, like the Ukrainians, have superior intelligence, although in their case the intelligence comes through satellite technology and reckless Russian cell phone use but Athena.
The situation is as follows. Facing a dire situation, wise counselor Nestor figures that the Greeks must know more about Trojan intentions. He expresses the need as follows:
O my friends, is there no man who, trusting in the daring of his own heart, would go among the high-hearted Trojans? So he might catch some enemy, who straggled behind them, or he might overhear some thing that the Trojans are saying, what they deliberate among themselves…
Diomedes (the muscle) and Odysseus (the brains) volunteer and use night as cover to scout behind Trojan lines. In an unnerving scene, we see the two of them picking their way “through the carnage and through the corpses.” It’s a scenario that those fighting over Bakhmut know only too well.
Now, it so happens that the Trojans are doing the same but, like the Russians, their intelligence-gathering is inferior. It takes the form of one Dolan who, failing to take the same precautions and carrying weapons that are useless for close hand-to-hand combat (a bow and a throwing spear), is detected by the Greeks and easily captured. Odysseus proves a skilled interrogator and extracts valuable information about enemy locations, which in turn leads to the Greeks’ own slaughter-fest:
Grim sounds rose from there as they [the Trojan allies] were stricken with the sword, and the ground reddened with blood. As a lion advancing on the helpless herds unshepherded of sheep or goats pounces upon them with wicked intention so the son of Tydeus attacked the Thracian people until he had killed twelve.
Also like the resourceful Ukrainians, the Greek warriors know when to fall back after an incursion. This knowledge comes from Athena, who advises Diomedes,
Think now, son of the great-hearted Tydeus, of getting back to the hollow ships; else you might go back with men pursuing if there should be some other god to waken the Trojans.
Of course, the Greeks will ultimately use wily tactics—the Trojan horse—to win the war. We will see if Ukrainian tactics can bring about the same end.
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Tuesday
A fascinating New Yorker article about “The Unexpected Grief of a Hysterectomy” has brought to mind a couple of Lucille Clifton poems that express similar sentiments. Clifton expresses poetically what Anna Holmes, writer and founder of the feminist website Jezebel, articulates discursively.
Holmes tells the story of how, although facing a serious problem with fibroids, she resisted a hysterectomy, even though that operation made the most sense. Instead, Holmes chose to have the fibroids surgically removed, only to see them return. At that point, a hysterectomy was her only option.
What puzzles Holmes is why she was so attached to her uterus. She has never had children, nor did she have plans to have any. Nevertheless, she concluded that her uterus “felt important to my identity as a woman.”
Logically, this did not make sense to her. “As a feminist,” she writes, “I’m not supposed to attach so much meaning to my reproductive organs—I am more than my uterus, I would probably argue. For another, did this mean I believe that having a uterus makes me a woman? No, I would certainly say. I don’t.”
And yet, there she was, feeling that losing her uterus was a blow to her female identity. In the article she quotes a wise friend who tells her, “Isn’t it often the case that we can’t believe about ourselves what we can believe about others?”
Holmes mentions various ways people have used to say goodbye to their uteruses (uteri?). There was, for instance, advice from a friend:
“Your uterus has been kind of a dick,” she said. “I want you to write a breakup letter to it and then take a bat to the piñata I’m going to buy and say goodbye to it forever.”
And then there are “celebratory and humorous” approaches:
A few weeks ago, I took a brief glance at Amazon’s Web site. In addition to books about hysterectomies, there are at least half a dozen coloring and activity books (“Don’t Ovary-Act” and “See You Later Ovulator”) and journals (“All My Hysterectomy Shit” and “I’m Sorry Your Uterus Tried to Kill You”). There are T-shirts that say, “Peace Out, Cunt” and “Adioso Uteroso.”
It so happens that none of these worked for her. I’m thinking, however, that the poetry of Lucille Clifton, a fellow African American, might prove effective. Here, for instance, is Clifton’s poem about her own hysterectomy:
poem to my uterus
you uterus you have been patient as a sock while i have slippered into you my dead and living children now they want to cut you out stocking i will not need where i am going where am i going old girl without you uterus my bloody print my estrogen kitchen my black bag of desire where can i go barefoot without you where can you go without me
This poem may or may not resonate with Holmes since, unlike Clifton, she has not used her uterus to have children. “Barefoot” may allude to the phrase “barefoot and pregnant,” which expresses the belief that childbearing is a woman’s chief role—which Clifton, who saw being a professional poet as no less central to her identity as being a mother, would disagree with. Still, childbearing plays a major role in this poem.
But why I think Holmes would find solace in Clifton is that, motherhood aside, Clifton takes seriously the idea that female biology is important to female identity. Clifton, in fact, broke important ground by making female biology a fit subject for poetry, starting with “homage to my hips” and “what the mirror said” (“somebody need a map to understand you,” the speaker tells herself). She continued on with a number of poems about kidneys, breasts, and menstruation. A poem that might speak particularly powerfully to Holmes is one about menopause.
That’s because Clifton articulates a drama not unlike Holmes’s. For all the problems that Clifton’s unusually heavy periods have caused her, she’s sorry to see them go, just as Holmes is sorry to see her fibroid-infested uterus go. Clifton imagines herself as a grandmother looking back and—well, read the poem for yourself:
to my last period
well, girl, goodbye, after thirty-eight years. thirty-eight years and you never arrived splendid in your red dress without trouble for me somewhere, somehow.
now it is done, and i feel just like the grandmothers who, after the hussy has gone, sit holding her photograph and sighing, wasn’t she beautiful? wasn’t she beautiful?
Holmes, who turned the Biblical hussy Jezebel (so the Bible depicts her) into an in-your-face feminist icon, would probably appreciate the analogy. Shaking your head in fond remembrance without denying all the trouble she brought you is a powerful way to move on to your next stage of life.
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Monday
It appears that Rupert Murdoch, upset with the way Trump and Trump-endorsed politicians keep losing elections, wants to move on to another candidate, specifically Florida governor and Trump wannabe Ron DeSantis. People like me worry that DeSantis is just as authoritarian as Trump and could do even more damage since, unlike Trump, he appears disciplined. A Florida judge shares my fears of his authoritarian bent, recently equating with DeSantis with George Orwell’s Big Brother.
The ruling came in response to one of DeSantis’s many attempts to bend Florida education to his will. At issue was a bill that, in the words of NPR, wants to prohibit
schools and workplaces from any instruction that suggests that any individual, by virtue of their race, color, sex or national origin, “bear responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress” on account of historical acts of racism. The bill also forbids education or training that says individuals are “privileged or oppressed” due to their race or sex.
In response to the bill, a group of eight Florida professors “sued representatives of the state higher education system over the bill, calling the legislation ‘racially motivated censorship’ aimed at stifling ‘widespread demands to discuss, study and address systemic inequalities.’”
It was in agreeing with them that the judge cited 1984. Echoing Orwell’s opening line—“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”—Tallahassee U.S. District Judge Mark Walker wrote,
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” and the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of “freedom.” This is positively dystopian.
The reference to “freedom” is to the bill’s title. While the bill used to be called the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” (the acronym stood for “Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees”), it is now known as Individual Freedom Act. The bill became effective in July.
Some freedom! But of course, the word is also perverted by “the Ministry of Truth” in Big Brother’s society. Winston Smith notices the Ministry’s building, which features, “in elegant lettering,” the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Today we would call Big Brother a rightwing troll or gaslighter. Orwell’s great observation—gleaned from having observed Hitler and Stalin—is that authoritarians pervert language as a way to test loyalty. If you don’t agree with their version of freedom, no matter how absurd, then you are with the enemy. In their world, you either accept that clocks strike thirteen or you are a traitor.
In American politics, Trump perfected this but DeSantis appears to be taking lessons. Fortunately, in this case a judge called him out.
James Tissot, Procession in the Streets of Jerusalem
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Palm Sunday
Yesterday, as a member of our church’s Altar Guild, I spent the morning folding palm crosses in anticipation of today’s services. To further honor the day, I share Mary Oliver’s “The Poet Thinks about a Donkey.”
The donkey Oliver has in mind is the one mentioned in the account of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem in anticipation of the Passover celebrations. Here is Matthew’s account (21:1-11):
When Jesus and his disciples had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, `The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,
“Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,
“Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!
Oliver doesn’t normally allude to the Bible in such a specific way—generally her spiritual imagery is more generalized—so this poem stands out. Note how the introverted poet identifies more with the donkey than with the celebrating crowds:
The Poet Thinks about the Donkey
On the outskirts of Jerusalem the donkey waited. Not especially brave, or filled with understanding, he stood and waited.
How horses, turned out into the meadows, leap with delight! How doves, released from their cages, clatter away, splashed with sunlight!
But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited. Then he let himself be led away. Then he let the stranger mount.
Never had he seen such crowds! And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen. Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark, obedient.
I hope, finally, he felt brave. I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him, as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped, as he had to, forward.
The stanza in italics, the second one about horses and doves, captures Oliver’s inner feelings. Her poetry is filled with moments of such spiritual ecstasy, which invariably accompany nature sightings, whether of breaching whales, egrets at dawn, or small wild plums. But as far as her outer action goes, she feels she has far more in common with the “small, dark, obedient” donkey.
Notice that the donkey finds Jesus’s touch to be light and loving. To celebrate the entry of love into one’s soul, dancing isn’t essential. One has but to open one’s heart.
I’m pretty sure that the poem was inspired by one of the great Palm Sunday poems, G.K. Chesterton’s “The Donkey.” The similarities make the contrasts particularly interesting. Here’s Chesterton:
When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil’s walking parody On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth, Of ancient crooked will; Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb, I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour; One far fierce hour and sweet: There was a shout about my ears, And palms before my feet.
Chesterton’s donkey expresses the repressed resentment of one who has been abused whereas Oliver’s articulates the quiet humility of one who doesn’t particularly mind that it’s been overlooked–but who, nevertheless, is grateful to have this chance to serve.
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Friday
A week ago Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker observed that we seem to be stuck in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot as we await a Trump indictment. For years, we have been wondering whether the former president would ever be held accountable for his dodgy behavior as for years he has gotten away with everything from fraud to sexual assault to corruption to an attempted coup d’etat. In the play, Godot—perhaps an allusion to God—never shows up, and we’ve been wondering if, in our case, it will be the same with justice.
As Parker puts it,
His arrest could happen any day now. . . . Or, like Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, we could wait forever for Trump to have his day in court.
In the play, the closest we get to hearing from Godot is from a messenger boy who, towards the end, conveys a message:
BOY: (in a rush). Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow.
This is like all the hints of possible or pending indictments that we’ve been hearing about for years.
Only, as of yesterday, Godot really has shown up. In the words of The Washington Post account,
A Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict former president Donald Trump, making him the first person in U.S. history to serve as commander in chief and then be charged with a crime, and setting the stage for a 2024 presidential contest unlike any other.
In Beckett’s absurdist vision, the non-appearance of Godot is a comment on the human search for meaning. We look and we look for some deeper significance to our lives, only to come up with nothing. By invoking the play, Parker foregrounds the issue of whether our society and our system of government has any higher meaning. If those with wealth and power are unaccountable, then our ideals ring hollow.
We may have become so cynical concerning Trump as to fear that nothing will change. Even with this indictment, we may fear that Godot, in showing up, will fail to infuse our lives with new meaning. Perhaps Godot is nothing more than a two-bit actor, talking a good game but empty of substance.
Given how cavalier Trump has been about the rule of law —including how he used the presidential pardon to ensure the silence of his corrupt friends—our cynicism is understandable. And we could wish that this particular Trump indictment had been more consequential. Why couldn’t we have started off with his attempt to carry out a coup?
Nevertheless, if justice is shown to apply to all, then the ideal of all being equal before the law will have been served. Justice is a transcendent ideal of the kind that Beckett is questioning. If even a former president can be indicted, perhaps we don’t entirely live in an absurd world.
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Thursday
A month ago a friend (Bruce Baird) alerted me to a New Yorker article about “The End of the English Major.” Actually, Nathan Heller’s essay is about the arts and humanities generally, with English serving as a metonym for all those majors that aren’t social science, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), or degrees connected with vocations. According to Heller, collegiate study of English and history has fallen by a third over the past decade while humanities enrollment overall has declined by 17%.
With the ruthless thoroughness of a New Yorker writer, Nathan Heller shares all the explanations for this state of affairs that he has encountered. To share you any suspense, I can tell you he arrives at no clear answer. Among the reasons given are the following, some of them related:
1. Skyrocketing tuition costs
With college growing increasingly expensive, students are more vocationally minded and want degrees that are clearly linked with specific jobs and careers. The article notes that, while English majors on average “carry less debt than students in other fields,” they also take longer to pay off their debt. As a result, even students drawn toward the humanities sometimes choose others majors just to be safe. As one student put it, the humanities are often seen as “hobby-based” for those who can afford it.
2. Relatedly, a precipitous drop in state funding
This means that universities have to choose where to invest their resources. Often, they are more interested in shinier fields of studies than the traditional humanities.
3. The rise of social media
Many are worried that books can’t compete with the texts, videos, and podcasts available on the internet. As one English professor, who himself admits he reads less fiction now than formerly, observed to Heller, “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” To which Heller adds, “Assigning Middlemarch in that climate [is] like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.”
4. The seeming lack of clear performance metrics in the humanities
One student interviewed by Heller put it this way:
“I think the problem for the humanities is you can feel like you’re not really going anywhere, and that’s very scary,” he said. “You write one essay better than the other from one semester to the next. That’s not the same as, you know, being able to solve this economics problem, or code this thing, or do policy analysis.” This has always been true, but students now recognized less of the long-term value of writing better or thinking more deeply than they previously had. Last summer, Haimo worked at the HistoryMakers, an organization building an archive of African American oral history. He said, “When I was applying, I kept thinking, What qualifies me for this job? Sure, I can research, I can write things.” He leaned forward to check for passing traffic. “But those skills are very difficult to demonstrate, and it’s frankly not what the world at large seems in demand of.”
–Failure of English departments to link literature to students’ life experiences
Needless to say, this is a major concern of mine, although it’s probably not the reason for the precipitous drop in humanities enrollments. I’ll have more to say on this in a future post.
–Overspecialization
This has long been a complaint but, again, it wouldn’t account for why other humanities majors are also seeing enrollment declines.
–Too much focus on “disenchantment”
Some are accusing English professors of taking the enchantment out of literature. I suppose the critics here are referring to deconstruction or historical criticism although the idea that scholars are ruining literature by systematically dissecting it goes back at least to the early part of the 20th century, when German philology invaded British literary studies. To quote Terry Eagleton in “The Rise of English,” the discipline was irrevocably changed when it ceased to be regarded as “idle gossip about literary taste.” Eagleton writes that colleges faced the difficulty of knowing “how to make [English] unpleasant enough to qualify as a proper academic pursuit” but adds, “This, it might be said, is one of the few problems associated with the study of English which have since been effectively resolved.”
–The Obamas
By focusing so much on STEM and the arts with nothing in-between, Barack and Michelle (so the complaint goes) weighted the scales against the humanities. This criticism isn’t really fair, however, since the former president constantly sang the praises of Toni Morrison. And in any event, the arts are suffering from the general decline along with literature.
–The humanities actually aren’t doing that poorly, only their successes are hidden
As Heller explains,
One idea about the national enrollment problem is that it’s actually a counting problem: students haven’t so much left the building as come in through another door. Adjacent fields aren’t included in humanities tallies, and some of them are booming. Harvard’s history-of-science department has seen a fifty-per-cent increase in its majors in the past five years. The humanities creature who recites Cavafy at parties might fade away, but students are still getting their vitamins. There’s a lot of ethics in bioethics, after all.
–Traditional literary study has become stale
Heller:
Some have resigned themselves. “The age of Anglophilia is over,” one late-career English professor told me. “It’s like thinking back to when Latin was the center of the world—the memorization of lines and competing with your friends at Oxford and Eton in quips.” The great age of the novel had served a cloistered, highly regionalized readership, but that, too, had changed. “I don’t think reading novels is now the only way to have a broad experience of the varieties of human nature or the ethical problems that people face,” he said.
There has been some imaginative rethinking here, however. Heller reports that some in the humanities are recommending that their departments
match majors to topics that resonate in the current moment, like climate change and racial justice[.] I wondered aloud whether that was a moving target—the concerns in our headlines today are different from those fifteen years ago—but Kelsey insisted that some causes were here to stay. “I would like to see us come out with better platforms for studying the environmental humanities, migration and ethnicity, and the medical humanities,” he said.
–Changing student demographics, with more students from working class backgrounds
Such students understandably want clear paths to jobs. And in fact, my English Department at a state college (St. Mary’s College of Maryland), with its high percentage of first-generation college students, addresses this issues by emphasizing internships, externships (where students shadow former majors in their jobs), and colloquia where alumni visit campus to tell their experiences in the job world. Nevertheless, as Heller notes,
It is only slightly awkward, then, that this opening of the field has nudged educational incentives away from humanities study. The students whom universities most seek are the ones likeliest to require immediate conversion of their degrees into life change. They need the socioeconomic elevator that college promised them. And they need it the instant they lose institutional support.
–Advanced Placement courses
As Heller explains,
Smart humanities-oriented kids are taking the A.P.s, or studying English or history at community college, so, by the time they make it to four-year colleges, they’ve placed out of humanities requirements: classes in which students often fall in love with the field. In that way, too, students whom the universities are keenest to recruit are pre-sorted away from the humanities.
Fortunately, Heller notes, there is some good news for the humanities. “Career studies,” he points out,
have shown that humanities majors, with their communication and analytical skills, often end up in leadership jobs. To that extent, the value of the educated human touch is likely to hold in a storm of technological and cultural change.
He also notes that those with humanities backgrounds are less likely to be replaced by Artificial Intelligence:
There has been much hand-wringing about ChatGPT and its ability to replicate some composition tasks. But ChatGPT can no more conceive Mrs. Dalloway than it can guide and people-manage an organization. Instead, A.I. can gather and order information, design experiments and processes, produce descriptive writing and mediocre craftwork, and compose basic code, and those are the careers likeliest to go into slow eclipse.
Because I taught at Maryland’s liberal arts college, I have long been aware of the difficulties of convincing students to major in literature. My own efforts to relate literature to my students’ lives led to this blog, where I now try to spread the word more generally. As I see it, this will always be an uphill battle.
But since, as Heller too believes, it is imperative that students have some acquaintance with the humanities, I agree with those who believe we need to reimagine the discipline and to join with other disciplines to get the word out. Rather than despair, humanities teachers just need to be creative.
