Lit in Andre Agassi’s Life

By Robin Bates | Published: January 30, 2023

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951 at gmail dot com and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Monday

Among the many achievements registered by champion Novak Djokovic in this year’s Australian Open, one stood out to me, even though everyone else will ignore it: he surpassed the number of consecutive games won at the tournament, originally set by Andre Agassi. And the only reason I notice it is because I’ve just finished reading Agassi’s Open (2009), lauded as one of the greatest sports autobiographies. While it’s a genre that I don’t normally care for, I couldn’t put this one down.

It didn’t hurt that Agassi managed to mention James Agee’s Death in the Family and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”

Agassi in his day was my favorite tennis player, filling in the gap left by Bjorn Borg. Just I have had to suffer in recent years as first Rafael Nadal and then Djokovic surpassed my beloved Roger Federer in open titles, so in Agassi’s time I saw my heart broken time and again by Pete Sampras. When Agassi lost his final match at the U.S. Open, I stood up in front of the television set and joined the New York crowd in applauding him.

The book presents us with a riveting drama, starting with an abusive immigrant father whose shadow darkens much of Agassi’s life and including Agassi’s early success, followed by his falling to 146 in the rankings, to his clawing back up to achieving the Golden Slam (all four Open slams and the Olympic gold medal) and #1 in the world. Among the pivotal moments in Agassi’s life was a meaning with Nelson Mandela and it is within that context that the Agee passage appears.

Agee is inspired by Mandela’s powers of endurance, and a friend, hearing this, directs him to the thoughts of the recently widowed Mary. I quote a bit more of the passage than Agee does to provide context:

When grief and shock surpass endurance there occur phases of exhaustion, of anesthesia in which relatively little is felt and one has the illusion of recognizing, and understanding, a good deal. Throughout these days Mary had, during these breathing spells, drawn a kind of solace from the recurrent thought: at least 1 am enduring it. I am aware of what has happened, 1 am meeting it face to face, I am living through it. There had been,, even, a kind of pride, a desolate kind of pleasure, in the feeling: I am carrying a heavier weight than I could have dreamed it possible for a human being to carry, yet I am living through it. It had of course occurred to her that this happens to many people, that it is very common, and she humbled and comforted herself in this thought. She thought: this is simply what living is; I never realized before what it is…She thought that she had never before had a chance to realize the strength that human beings have, to endure; she loved and revered all those who had ever suffered, even those who had failed to endure.

Agassi’s burden, of course, is far less than Mandela’s years in prison. Yet his inner demons exact a tremendous toll, and the lure of the book is watching him overcome them.

Tennyson’s famous poem makes an appearance the night before the French Open final, when the aging Agassi finds himself tormented with self-doubt. After all, he is aging (he’s 29) and hasn’t won for a while. Unable to sleep, he calls a friend in the middle of the night and asks him to “please, please, talk to me for a few minutes about anything but tennis.” The friend figures Agassi needs a poem about another aging warrior. Their interchange is fun because Agassi initially thinks that poetry can’t do him any good.

[Friend:] Are you OK?
Anything but tennis.
OK. Well. Let’s see. How about I read you a poem? I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately.
Yeah. Good. Whatever.
He goes to his bookshelf, takes down a book. He reads softly.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I fall asleep without hanging up the phone.

Agassi goes on to win the French Open, becoming the first man to win the grand slam on three different surfaces. In citing Agee and Tennyson, he implies that literature deserves some credit in the accomplishment.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Lifting for a Little While the Veil

By Robin Bates | Published: January 28, 2023
The Sermon on the Mount

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951 at gmail dot com and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Spiritual Sunday

Today’s readings from the Bible are particularly rich, with instructions from Micah and Jesus functioning themselves as poems. I therefore share them both, along with a Malcolm Guite sonnet inspired by the Beatitudes.

While it’s hard to rank favorite passages in the Bible, the reading from Micah (6:6-8) is in my top five. The prophet, writing in the 8th century BCE, concludes with words that are powerful in their simplicity. After raising expectations sky-high about what God wants (burnt offerings, year-old calves, thousands of rams, rivers of oil, our firstborn), Micah surprises by presenting requirements that are well within the reach of all of us and that therefore strike with the force of revelation. The shift in perspective arrives like a moment of grace.

To enhance the drama, English translations essentially have Micah’s concluding words delivered in three anapests (short-short-long} followed by two slow and deliberate trochees (long-short). What does God require of us? Think of “to do,” “to love,” and “to walk” as elided into single syllables with “to walk” simultaneously concluding an anapest and commencing a trochee. God requires nothing of us “but to do jús-tice/and to love kínd-ness/and to walk húm- [shift into trochee] bly/ wíth your/ Gód:

The flurry of words, like the flurry of activities, slows down to remind us what is most important. The final stress ends, as it must, upon God:

“With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?

Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings,
with calves a year old?

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?

Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1-12) has its own poetic power, with the word “Blessed” casting its blessed influence over all the rest. That rest, meanwhile, consists of a series of apparent contractions that open up revolutionary new possibilities:

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

Guite, the Anglican rector who seems to have a sonnet for every Sunday reading, certainly has one for Sermon on the Mount. In his image, Jesus helps us momentarily to see that, beyond the veil—beyond hopeless longing, grief, and persecution—“the kingdom coming and the Son returning.” Like many poets, most famously John Donne, Guite puns on the word “Son.” We may feel trapped in “this pre-dawn dark,” and yet Jesus’s words, like “a lovely lantern on a hill,” lighten darkness and dispel doubt.

Beatitudes
By Malcolm Guite

We bless you, who have spelt your blessings out,
And set this lovely lantern on a hill
Lightening darkness and dispelling doubt
By lifting for a little while the veil.
For longing is the veil of satisfaction
And grief the veil of future happiness
We glimpse beneath the veil of persecution
The coming kingdom’s overflowing bliss
 
Oh make us pure of heart and help us see
Amongst the shadows and amidst the mourning
The promised Comforter, alive and free,
The kingdom coming and the Son returning,
That even in this pre-dawn dark we might
At once reveal and revel in your light.

The darkest hour is just before the Son rises.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Alice, Victorian Rebel

By Robin Bates | Published: January 26, 2023
Tenniel, illus. from Alice in Wonderland

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951 at gmail dot com and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Friday – Lewis Carroll’s Birthday

In honor of Lewis Carroll’s birthday—he was born on January 27, 1832—I repost an essay I wrote nine years ago when I was teaching the Alice books in a British Fantasy class. I used the post to sort out some of the ways that Carroll uses fantasy to protest life in Victorian England.

Reposted (and slightly revised) from March 12, 2014

…Alice is like the Gulliver of Book I insofar as she is an innocent observer wandering through a fantastical world that points to significant problems in our own. Like Gulliver, Alice herself doesn’t judge—in fact, she’s a good girl who believes what she is taught and does what people tell her to do—so it is up to us as readers to apply judgment.

And what do we find problematic? Here’s a partial list:

–the new 19th century obsession with time (the White Rabbit, the Mad Tea Party);
–boring history teachers (such as the Mouse, who helps all the animals get dry by telling them the driest story he can think of);
–utilitarian fact-based education (satirized by Alice’s wonderful distortions);
–censorious adults who order children around, making them recite poetry and follow rigid rules (the Caterpillar, the Duchess, the Mock Turtle, the Queen of Hearts);
–boring adults who pontificate (Robert Southey’s Old Father William, parodied by Carroll);
–dogmatic poetry which must be memorized for the sake of a child’s salvation (“How Doth the Little Busy Bee”);
–dominating women and timid men (the Queen and King of Hearts);
–obnoxious little boys (who are much preferable as pigs);
–the loss of childhood innocence.

Innocent child though she may be, however, Alice is also subversive. Time and again she finds ways to strike back, although always in spite of her best intentions, which allows her to retain her purity. For instance:

–she unintentionally offends the disagreeable Mouse, who has fallen into the pool with her, by talking about her cat’s hunting habits;
–she unintentionally exposes heavy-handed religious instruction for children by revising “How Doth the Little Busy Bee”–with its appalling line “For Satan finds some mischief still/For idle hands to do”–into a poem about a seemingly kindly but actually voracious crocodile, who “welcomes little fishes [children?] in with gently smiling jaws”;
–forced to recite poetry for the authoritarian caterpillar, she unintentionally ridicules both teachers and those students who take them seriously by transforming Southey’s stodgy Father William into a man who turns back somersaults in at the door and balances eels on the end of his nose;
–she exposes the Queen and King of Hearts as uttering nonsense in the trial.

Unlike her previous rebellions, however, this last act is not unintentional or innocent. She is no longer “a little girl” (as she describes herself to a pigeon) or “only a child” (the King of Hearts’ excuse for her) but suddenly “almost two miles high” (the Queen of Hearts). When she stands up to authority as if on equal terms, she is leaving childhood innocence and the fantasy life that accompanies it.

I used to find the card attack on Alice to be terrifying, perhaps because it echoed what I thought would happen to me if I stood up to adults. Alice has called out grown-ups for their absurdities and they react with fury.

But even more frightening to Carroll may be the fact that little Alice is growing up. He invested his imaginary world in her, and the danger of dull and stifling adult reality winning out is a dark theme running through both Alice books, especially the second. The world of imagination is in danger when little girls grow tall and claim that the world of the imagination is “nothing but a pack of cards.” Or when (in Alice through the Looking Glass), they change from pawns into queens and realize that their kittens are nothing more than kittens.

One senses his fear in the poem with which he ends Looking Glass. There we see a boat drifting inexorably toward the end of dreaming. Or as Carroll puts it at one point, “autumn frosts have slain July.” Note, incidentally, that assembling the first letter of each line spells out Alice’s full name: Alice Pleasance Liddell.

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?

In a sense, Carroll is using his dream of Alice’s childhood innocence to keep his own imagination alive. William Wordsworth famously lamented that “shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy,” and Carroll employed nonsense to hold that prison house at bay. Deep down, however, he knows that it is only a matter of time before adult common sense will collapse our fantasy imagining like a house of cards.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Integration’s Child Pioneers

By Robin Bates | Published: January 25, 2023
Me, Juliette Taylor, Doug Cameron and Charliss Burnett

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951 at gmail dot com and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Thursday

Last week, as part of a Black history unit, three of us whose families were part of a landmark Civil Rights case journeyed to Sewanee Elementary School—my alma mater—to tell a fifth-grade class what it had been like. The star of the show was Juliette Taylor, whose mother (Emma Hill) was determined to integrate schools in Franklin County, Tennessee, even if she had to send Juliette alone into the lion’s den to do it.

I should add that Emma, whom my family knew well, didn’t ask anything of her daughter beyond what she herself had done. As secretary of the local NAACP, she had known Rosa Parks, met Martin Luther King, marched in Selma, been one of the freedom riders, and spent time in jail. While she was working on behalf of civil rights, her husband was taking care of Juliette and her five siblings.

What I learned from Juliette last week is what happened after integration. The stories she told, and that I’ve heard from other child pioneers from the 1960s, remind me of a passage in Ruth Ozeki’s For the Time Being, which I’m currently in the middle of. Some background is useful before I turn to the 2013 novel.

In 1962, eight Franklin County families—four black and four white—sued our Board of Education for denying their children the right to attend integrated schools, as mandated by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling. The kids, including Juliette and me, were the plaintiffs in the case and we prevailed. The next year, African American children were admitted into formerly all-white classrooms.

Only integration occurred over a two-year period, not all at once. Juliette told us how, for a year, she was the only Black child in her class. On the first day of school, she was also the only Black child on her school bus, her little brother begging off sick at the last moment. There were a number of parents on the bus, whom she later learned were KKK members (they weren’t wearing robes at the time). Then, when she got to school, she remembered other Black families circling the school in their cars in order to determine whether Emma Hill’s daughter had actually shown up. Was the activist mother backing up her words with action?

The solitude continued. Juliette noted that she was the only Black girl on the basketball team—she showed us a team photo—but added that her fellow students weren’t as bad as the teachers. One woman called her a nigraresse—one step up from the n-word—and asked her why she wasn’t out picking cotton. After a couple of years of this, Juliette was so unhappy that her mother sent her up to live with relatives and finish out her schooling in Ohio.

In my own seventh grade class, we had one African American student that first year—Ronnie Staten—and I remember him once being called the n-word by a fellow student. I also remember how he just smiled in return, utterly deflating the bully. I learned years later that his mother, Sarah Staten, had coached her children to respond in just this way. So for Ronnie, it worked.

But it didn’t work with Jeffrey Patton, the only African American in my high school. In his case, he lasted for a semester before leaving. Five years ago, when I talked to him about the experience, he observed that the school had no plan to help him with the racism.

Nor had things gotten a whole lot better 15 years later. Juliette brought a friend, Charliss Burnett, whose daughter was so distraught by the racism of both a teacher and the principal of Sewanee Elementary that Charliss transferred her to another school down the mountain. When Charliss told me the name of the teacher, I realized that she’s someone I know and would have expected better of.

The situation in Ozeki’s book gets at the cruelty of children towards someone who is different. One of the narrators is a girl whose father moves the family to Silicone Valley so that he can work for a dot.com start-up. When the bubble bursts in 2000, he is forced to return to Japan, where he can’t find a job. His daughter Nao, having been raised American, can barely manage Japanese and is consequently targeted by her classmates. The following scene occurs right after her father has dropped her off at school:

The minute he turned his back, they would start to move in. Have you ever seen those nature documentaries where they show a pack of wild hyenas moving in to kill a wildebeest or a baby gazelle? They come in from all sides and cut the most pathetic animal off from the herd and surround it, getting closer and closer and staying real tight, and if Dad had happened to turn around to wave to me, it would have looked like good-natured fun, like I had lots of fun friends, gathering around me, singing out greetings in terrible English—Guddo moningu, dear Transfer Student Yasutani! Hello! Hello!—And Dad would have been reassured to see me so popular and everyone making an effort to be nice to me. And it’s usually one hyena, not always the biggest one, but one that’s small and quick and mean, who lunges first, breaking flesh and drawing blood, which is the signal for the rest of the pack to attack, so that by the time we got through the doors of the school, I was usually covered with fresh cuts and pinching bruises, and my uniform was all untucked with new little tears in it made by the sharp points of nail scissors that the girls kept in their pencil cases to trim their split ends. Hyenas don’t kill their prey. They cripple them and then eat them alive.

The bullying continues throughout the day:

They would walk by my desk and pretend to gag or sniff the air and say Iyada! Gaijin kusai! [Gross! She stinks like a foreigner!] or Bimbo kusai! [She stinks like a poor person]. Sometimes they practiced their idiomatic English on me, repeating stuff they learned from American rap lyrics: Yo, big fat-ass ho, puleezu show me some juicy coochie, ain’t you a slutto, you even take it in the butto, come lick on my nutto, oh hell yeah. Etc. You get the idea.

Her attempts to tune out such voices may have been tried by Juliette, Ronnie, Jeffrey and Charliss’s daughter. They don’t work for Nao:

My strategy was basically just to ignore them or play dead or pretend I didn’t exist. I thought that maybe if I just pretended hard enough it would actually come true, and I would either die or disappear. Or at least it would come true enough for my classmates to believe it and stop tormenting me, but they didn’t. They didn’t stop until they’d chased me home to our apartment, and I ran up the stairs and locked the door behind me, panting and bleeding from lots of little places like under my arms or between my legs where the cut wouldn’t show.

The cuts may be invisible to outsiders but, as I learned from our panel discussion, the victims still feel them decades later.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

The Usefulness of “Let’s Pretend”

By Robin Bates | Published: January 24, 2023
Tenniel, Alice playing “Let’s Pretend” with her cats

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951 at gmail dot com and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Wednesday

Given that I have been praising (with only a few reservations) Peter Brooks’s recent Seduced by Story: On the Use and Abuse of Narrative, what do I make of his contention that “art is of no obvious use”? After all, both my blog and my life project are given over to documenting as many instances as I can find of people using literature to better their lives.

Indeed, Brooks’s statement is even stronger than the above because he frames it as a truth that everyone agrees with: “Since art is of no obvious use,” he writes, “an adaptive biological explanation doesn’t help much…” In other words, he doesn’t buy use theories of art, such as that we turn to it because it pragmatically helps us with cognition and social adaptation.

To say that literature is of no obvious use ignores that all those instances where it proves very useful. Many of Charles Dickens’s novels were written to call attention to the social evils of his day and some helped bring about significant change. And then there’s Aristotle arguing that tragedy helps develop good citizens, Sir Philip Sidney, contending that poetry inculcates virtue, Bertolt Brecht writing “epic theatre” designed to galvanize the working class, and many other theorists weighing in with their own ideas about literature’s effects.

In Brooks’ defense, he is a narratologist who is seeking to identify the deep purpose of all narrative, not just this or that author. And I will grant that some works are more focused on being of use (to quote Cider House Rules) than others. I’ll go further and acknowledge that it can be almost impossible to generalize about practical impact since responses to a work will vary from reader to reader. In fact, various readers will take away very different things from a novel like Oliver Twist.

In any event, Brooks ultimately concludes that art—and narrative—have the same purpose as play. So stories are useful after all, only they are useful in the way that play is useful. Quoting the German poet Friedrich Schiller, Brooks says that art belongs to the “play drive”:

Play, Schiller emphasizes, allows humans to fulfill their nature: “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.” That makes art the fullest realization of what it is to be human.

Fictional narrative, Brooks goes on to say, “is an exercise and emblem of human freedom in that it tells about the world in ways that may prove illuminating and even useful” (italics mine). In other words, the question is not whether stories are useful or not—Brooks has almost grudgingly admitted that they are—but how they are useful.

Narrative is useful, Brooks elaborates, in its “refusal to accept belief systems, its insistence on the ‘as if.’”

And why, we may ask, is this refusal important? To explain, Brooks looks at the importance of play in child development. Children, he says, use pretend as a way of dealing with an environment that threatens to overwhelm them. Quoting Playing and Reality by the noted pediatrician and psychologist D.W. Winnicott, Brooks notes that the “‘potential space’ between me and not-me in which the infant plays is the very precondition of adaptation to the world.” Without play, he warns,

we risk being overwhelmed by an inhuman world. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot writes in his Four Quartets. And Wallace Stevens says, in his Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction: “From this the poem springs: that we live in a place/ That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves/ And hard it is in spite of blazoned day.”

Brooks is careful to add that literature is not “a turning away from the world.” Rather, like the infant’s play, it is

an attempt to find a space in which the human mind can deal with reality, speak of it, reshape it imaginatively, ask “what if” questions about it.

In Brooks’s discussion, I am reminded of a conversation that Alice has with her literal-minded older sister in Through the Looking Glass. This is the sister who, in the first of the Alice books, we see reading practical books, leading Alice to wonder, “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?” This sister is also bemused by Alice’s fictions:

And here I wish I could tell you half the things Alice used to say, beginning with her favorite phrase “Let’s pretend.” She had had quite a long argument with her sister only the day before—all because Alice had begun with “Let’s pretend we’re kings and queens;” and her sister, who liked being very exact, had argued that they couldn’t, because there were only two of them, and Alice had been reduced at last to say, “Well, you can be one of them then, and I’ll be all the rest.” And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone.”

The Alice books make Brooks’s point nicely. Lewis Carroll used nonsense stories and poems to push back against what he regarded at his overly materialistic, pragmatic, no-nonsense society, upending humorless convention with delicious satire and parody. The immense popularity of the Alice books indicate that the public was hungry for his vision. Even though he was a math professor, he would have criticized our overemphasis on the STEM disciplines and our failure to honor the arts.

Obviously, given my own love of the Alice books, I don’t disagree with Brooks that literature is like play. I only note that that’s not all literature is about.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Avatar II’s Debt to Moby Dick

By Robin Bates | Published: January 23, 2023
Tulkun takes on whale boat in Avatar II

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951 at gmail dot com and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Tuesday

Although I am posting this before seeing the Oscar nominations, which will be announced tonight, I can confidently say that two of the likely award winners have been heavily influenced by Moby Dick. It so happens that my Faculty Discussion Group just wrapped up up a months-long discussion of Herman Melville’s famous novel so I am particularly attuned to the echoes.

I’ve written about Moby Dick’s influence on The Whale. While the film may not get nominated for Best Film, Brendan Fraser is sure to be in the running for Best Actor.

Meanwhile, the film I saw Saturday night manages to piece together Moby Dick, Apocalypse Now, Jaws, Free Willy, Titanic, Terminator, and various westerns, teenpics, nature documentaries, eco thrillers, and video games, all in stunning 3-D. The film, of course, is James Cameron’s Avatar II: The Way of Water.

Cameron has invented giant whale-like creatures, called tulkuns, which function as spirit guides for an indigenous Polynesian-like people. His film also features a crazed Marine captain, Miles Quaritch, who is determined to track down Jake Sullivan regardless of the cost. He is Ahab-like in this mission, prepared to sacrifice men and boat alike if that’s what it takes to capture the fellow Marine man who went native and abandoned the mission of conquest in Avatar I.

Having married a native woman, Jake now has a family. No longer safe in their forest environment, they flee to a part of the world resembling idealized South Sea Islands. To flush them out, Quaritch uses tulkun hunters as bait. If they kill enough tulkuns, then Sully and the islanders will attack. (Okay, so the plot here is rather iffy since the hunters want to kill all the tulkun they can anyway.)

A number of underwater scenes capture the grace and power of the tulkuns. For his part, Melville captures the grace and power of Moby Dick, especially in this scene where he is seen from the vantage point of a whale boat:

As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side.

The whalers gaze in awe:

A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale….On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once leaving him, then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings….

And thus, through the serene tranquilities of the tropical sea, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia’s Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. 

Cameron is also Melville-like in his focus on the over-the-top technology that is used to hunt these magnificent creatures. There are speedboats, small submarines, crab-like vehicles that grab, and a gigantic ship.  The novel also features the latest technology, although in this case it is the on-board factory used to process the whale. Melville compares it to an Inferno as he describes the fires that light up the night.

At least, the whalers in the novel use the entirety of the whale. In the film, the men are after only one small thing, which is a yellow fluid that, we are told, stops the aging process. A single container-full, they know, will fetch millions if not billions of dollars. While there is no exact equivalent in Moby Dick, we do learn of a substance called ambergris, a fluid generated by a sick whale. Stubbs, the second mate, discovers it in one whale corpse:

“I have it, I have it,” cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in the subterranean regions, “a purse! a purse!”

Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash color. And this, good friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls were obtained…

In the next chapter we learn about the uses to which ambergris is put:

[A]mbergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.

The last portion of the film involves an all-out battle, with the Sully family and the native islanders pitted against the whalers and the marines. Oh, and one of the tulkuns gets involved as well. As with the whale in Moby Dick, the hunted becomes the hunter, with the tulkun taking advantage of the cable stuck in its flanks to destroy those chasing him. We see the tulkun first leap upon the mother ship, causing untold damage, before returning to the sea and then leaping one of the whaling boats to entangle it in the cable. Here’s the scene where Moby Dick attacks the Pequod:

[All the crew’s] enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces…. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.

And here’s where he goes after Ahab’s whaling boat:

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.

Numerous though the allusion are, I think Cameron missed a great opportunity to echo one of the novel’s most memorable scenes. Imagine Quartitch meeting his death the way that Fedallah the Parsee does. Fedallah is a mystical figure aboard the Pequod who mysteriously disappears on the second day of the chase, only to make an unexpected reappearance on the third day:

While [harpooners] Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.

Instead, Cameron brings Quaritch back to life after he appears to have been drowned by Sully in hand to hand combat.  Apparently, he needs to be the villain in Avatar III as well.

It’s not surprising that the filmmaker most responsible for keeping alive the Hollywood epic tradition would draw heavily on one of America’s greatest epic novels.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Silko Foresaw Arizona’s Water Crisis

By Robin Bates | Published: January 22, 2023

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951 at gmail dot com and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Monday

The apocalyptic future that Laguna Pueblo novelist Leslie Marmon Silko predicted for Arizona in 1991 is coming to pass. Actually, Silko makes a lot of dire predictions in her dystopian novel Almanac of the Dead, and some are closer to being actualized in 2023 than others. And perhaps it doesn’t take a genius writer like Silko to foretell that the state would one day have water problems.

The particular development I have in mind involves Scottsdale, located on the outskirts of Phoenix, cutting off water to some of its border communities. As the Washington Post reported,

On Jan. 1, the city of Scottsdale, which gets the majority of its water from the Colorado River, cut off Rio Verde Foothills from the municipal water supply that it has relied on for decades. The result is a disorienting and frightening lack of certainty about how residents will find enough water as their tanks run down in coming weeks, with a bitter political feud impacting possible solutions.

The reason: A historic drought has led to shrinking reservoirs and “unprecedented restrictions in usage of the Colorado River.”

Oblivious to such a future, however, for decades residents have been gobbling up land in the Sonora Desert, leading poet Richard Shelton to lament (in “Requiem for Sonora”),

men are coming inland to you
soon they will make you the last resort
for tourists who have
nowhere else to go
what will become of the coyote
with eyes of topaz
moving silently to his undoing
the ocotillo
flagellant of the wind
the deer climbing with dignity
further into the mountains
the huge delicate saguaro

what will become of those who cannot learn
the terrible knowledge of cities

In Silko’s novel, Tucson has a particularly irresponsible realtor who dreams of constructing a green oasis in the desert. She will call it Venice and wants it to have the Italian city’s water associations, with canals, fountains, and lush golf courses. She pooh-poohs the idea of having special desert golf courses

No deserts in Venice, Arizona, not for an instant, and certainly not for eighteen holes of golf. Tucson had enough desert. It was ridiculous for longtime residents to try to pretend Tucson wasn’t any different from Phoenix or Orange county. People wanted to have water around them in the desert. People felt more confident and carefree when they could see water spewing out around them.

And in fact, desert golf courses don’t sit well with out-of-state visitors:

Even the celebrity golfers [Senator Max Blue] had brought around had been too tense and nervous to play well. The desert was too close for most of the Californians and New Yorkers. Texans could not swing their irons for fear of rattlers they imagined coiled on the fairway.

Leah, meanwhile, parrots what is a fairly common refrain for many in her profession:

Tell me they are using up all the water and I say: don’t worry. Because science will solve the water problem of the West. New technology. They’ll have to.”

In other words, it’s someone else’s problem.

Leah’s water ideas help her compete with giant home-building corporations that are pushing luxury communities. The novel explains that her “water gimmick”

had really worked in Scottsdale and Tempe. A scattering of pisspot fountains and cesspool lakes evoked memories of Missouri or New York or wherever the dumb shits had come from. Leah wanted Venice to live up to it name. She planned each detail carefully. No synthetic marble in the fountains. Market research had repeatedly found new arrivals in the desert were reassured by the splash of water. They are in the real estate business to make profits, not to save wildlife or save the desert. It was too late for the desert around Tucson anyway. Look at it. Pollution was already killing foothill paloverde trees all across the valley.

Leah’s elaborate plans involve purchasing deep-well rigs on the cheap from bankrupt Texas old-fields and tapping into the aquafer. Unfortunately for her, even with these rigs she can only get salt water. Still, being a realtor, she has a way of spinning setbacks:

Leah had not worried. If the canals and lakes of Venice, Arizona, ran with salter water that lent authenticity; salter water could be used to flush toilets. For drinking water, Leah would provide bottled glacier water from the Colorado Rockies.

In Silko’s dystopian future, however, the real estate market eventually collapses and Arizona depopulates and goes into bankruptcy. Nor is that all that goes wrong in the area. There are unstoppable mass migrations of Indian descendants moving northward, prepared to reclaim the land that the Whites took from them centuries ago. (Silko sees the 500 years of White domination as only a blip in the Indian timeline.) In Mexico, meanwhile, extreme income inequality has led to gated communities, which hire private armies to defend them against gangs while the country itself descends into civil war. In addition, America also has anarchistic hackers planning to take down its power grid. Whee!

But back to Arizona’s water troubles. In my recent visit to the Sonora, I saw only too clearly the reasons for Shelton’s despair. “Oh my desert,” he concludes in “Requiem to Sonora,” “yours is the only death I cannot bear.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Out of Pain We Feed This Feverish Plot

By Robin Bates | Published: January 21, 2023
Italian artist (Milan of Genoa), c. 1325, Calling of Peter and Andrew

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951 at gmail dot com and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Spiritual Sunday

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus calls upon Peter and Andrew to follow him and fish for people. I don’t know if Mary Oliver has this passage in mind in “The Fish,” but I wouldn’t be surprised. Much of Oliver’s power lies in the way she draws on the Christian narrative of death and resurrection.

First, here’s the relevant excerpt from the Gospel reading:

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

In “The Fish,” Oliver describes the agony of a dying fish, which appears to have traumatized her at a young age. I note that I had the same experience after watching my first fish gasp for life. Eating it later salvaged the situation somewhat but I stopped fishing after that.

In addition to the fish’s agony, however, Oliver also sees beauty in its death (“the slow pouring off of rainbows”).  It is in the second half of the poem, however, where the parallels with Christ’s death and resurrection become apparent.

Getting ready to eat the fish, the poet echoes the Last Supper. Note first the ceremonial way she goes about preparing the moment:

Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him.

Or as the server says every Sunday when presenting us with the eucharist, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven.”

For Oliver, eating the fish is about much more than simple consumption. Rather, it puts her in touch with the great mysteries of creation. That process involves pain, as we know all too well, but it also moves us past our individual selves into something greater. Using such Biblically charged terms as “risen” and “fall,” Oliver writes,

Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea.

It is all part, she tells us, of a “feverish plot,” feverish working here as another word for passionate. “We are nourished,” she concludes, “by the mystery.”

In Oliver’s version of resurrection, however, we do not transcend our earthly existence but instead become more deeply immersed in it. Perhaps Oliver can be seen here as a Buddhist Christian—or Christian Buddhist—in that her epiphany is the deep knowledge that she is connected intimately with all the world. It is a connection that Ralph Waldo Emerson captures in “Each and All”:

As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet’s breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird; —
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

Oliver differs only in acknowledging that pain too is involved in this yielding. Before the resurrection, in other words, comes the crucifixion. And indeed, it is the conjunction of pain, death, and greater union that nourishes us. In our death, just as in the fish’s death, we become part of something larger.

Here’s the poem in its entirety:

The Fish
By Mary Oliver

The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.

“Nourished” is the perfect word here, merging the earthly and the spiritual. The risen Lord glitters within us.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Books Banned Because They’re Powerful

By Robin Bates | Published: January 19, 2023
Banned books installation (on Nazi book-burning site) by Marta Minujin

 Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951 at gmail dot com and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Friday

The authoritarian right continues its onslaught against books with Virginia’s Madison County School Board last week removing 21 works from the high school library, including some high-quality titles. Here’s the list:

  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  • The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
  • The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
  • Shatter Me series of 6 books by Tahereh Mafi (Defy Me, Ignite Me, Restore Me, Shatter Me, Imagine Me, Unravel Me)
  • Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
  • The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
  • Sula by Toni Morrison
  • Love by Toni Morrison
  • The Tale of the Body Thief by Anne Rice
  • Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
  • Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
  • Empire of Storms by Sarah Maas
  • Bag of Bones by Stephen King
  • 11/22/63: A Novel by Stephen King
  • It by Stephen King
  • Furyborn by Claire Legrand

What kind of pattern can be found in the selections? Well, there are books about female empowerment (Handmaid’s Tale); about negotiating interracial relationships (Part-Time Indian, Tar Baby, Bluest Eye, Love, Snow Falling on Cedars); and about the turmoil of adolescence (Part-Time Indian, Perks). There are also gothic thrillers (the novels by Anne Rice and Stephen King) and sword and sorcery novels (Shatter Me, Empire of Storms, Furyborn).

I would imagine that relatively few of the Morrison novels get checked out—they are not easy reading—but American conservatives love to beat up on the one African American author to win the Nobel prize. As for the gothics and S&S novels, I suspect that someone saw young people having just too much fun reading them and so decided they were bad. This, after all, is what happened with the Harry Potter novels.

Recent political developments show us that we can no longer assume that teaching mind-expanding works in our classes will go unchallenged. With the rise of Trumpist authoritarianism, we should expect that certain people will object when we instruct our pupils in critical thinking skills. What we thought was settled teaching practice now appears to be something we must fight for.

As one who experienced first-hand the desegregation battles of the 1960s, I remember the moment when I thought we could stop fighting. As a child, I had thought that segregation would go on forever, but as I was teaching a Minority Literatures class in the mid-1980s–and as I saw my Black and White students sitting together as though it were no big deal–I recall thinking, “For them, this is just the way the world is.” What seemed to me miraculous—and to this day still seems miraculous—they take for granted.

Unfortunately, nothing can be taken for granted, including gains we once thought were permanent. Fearful of what they see as fiction’s life-changing potential, authoritarian conservatives are doing what they can to squash it. And they’re not wrong in seeing the threat. Literature really can get kids to question old assumptions and open their minds to ideas that frighten their parents.

Fortunately, to really prevail, these parents would have to go to Fahrenheit 451 lengths and forbid reading altogether. No sooner will they ban one book then another will take its place. And then there are all those ways that kids find their ways to banned books in spite of parents. After all, there are bookstores and local libraries and the internet and book networks with friends. Still, teachers, librarians, and the rest of us need to do all we can to connect young people with the books they need.

For inspiration to keep fighting the good fight, here’s a Bertolt Brecht poem I have shared in the past:

The Burning of the Books
By Bertolt Brecht
Trans. Michael R. Burch

When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned and on all sides
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, a banished
Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the
Burned, was shocked to find that his
Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power
Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t my books
Always reported the truth? And here you are
Treating me like a liar! I command you:
Burn me

The good news is that not all the truth-telling books get burned. Many make it through the censors. Still, the banished writer’s point is a good one: good books pose a real and present danger to authoritarian regimes.

Detail from banned book installation (170 books represented)
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed