Better Living through Beowulf

What No Eye Has Seen, Nor Ear Heard

By Robin Bates | Published: February 5, 2023

Valentin de Boulogne, *St. Paul Writing His Epistles*

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Spiritual Sunday

I had a jolt today as I was looking over today’s epistle reading, from St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. One of the passages, I realized, gets parodied—or at least alluded to—in Midsummer Night’s Dream. This give us an opportunity to explore in some depth what Shakespeare is up to.

Paul is writing about the difference between human wisdom and God’s wisdom. Only those who have experienced the Holy Spirit, he writes, can “understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.” By contrast, those who rely only on the senses, the intellect, and the heart are “doomed to perish.” Here’s the passage:

Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the human heart conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—
these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.

Compare this with “Bottom’s Dream,” in which the self-confident amateur actor attempts to describe his tryst the night before with the queen of the fairies:

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,–and methought I had,–but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream
was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom… (emphasis mine)

Bottom is not the only buffoonish Shakespeare character to capture a brief glimpse of ethereal realms. Consider Caliban, at his most lyrical, telling two other buffoons, Stefano and Trinculo, about the island:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

In both Midsummer and Tempest Shakespeare explores his profound longing for something intangible and expresses his deep frustration that he cannot capture that something in his poetry. In Midsummer we encounter his frustration in the gap between a playwright’s aspiration and what shows up on stage. After Hippolyta complains about the play performed by the local townfolk—“This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard”—Theseus observes that even “the best in this kind are but shadow.”

If Shakespeare, who wrote “the best in this kind,” sees even his own efforts as “but shadow,” what hope for the rest of us?

For his part, Prospero in Tempest talks about the fragility of our attempts to capture our dreams. The “great globe” undoubtedly alludes to the Globe theatre as well the earth. In any event, all will melt into thin air:

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

St. Paul, articulating a vision that seems—certainly to the worldly wise—to be just as evanescent, says that, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, we will find ourselves able to “speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden.” Whereas if we rely on that which is only human, we will grasp no more than “the human spirit that is within.”

Years ago, before I joined Julia in attending church services, I used to say that I didn’t need religion because I had literature. While I no longer it’s a case of either/or—both have become vital to me—I wasn’t entirely wrong. Both attempt to put us in touch with a spiritual realm that continually eludes us. I think that’s what Shakespeare is telling us through his allusion to Paul’s letter.

What clinched my decision to start attending church was rector Bill Pregnall, a wise man who never once pressured me to join, telling me that he sensed that I longed for mystery. That truth hit me like a thunderbolt and I have been involved in church ever since. This weekly Sunday column is part of my never-ending exploration of that mystery.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Letter to the Corinthians, Midsummer Night's Dream, St. Paul, Tempest, William Shakespeare | Comments closed

Kipling’s Stellar Advice for Leaders

By Robin Bates | Published: February 2, 2023

Emanuel Leutze, *Washington Crossing the Delaware* (1851)

Friday

Sewanee College, where I serve as an occasional visiting professor, has just chosen a new president—and given that I submit a weekly poem to the town newspaper, I chose Rudyard Kipling’s “If” to greet the news.

I remember being put off when I encountered the poem in high school, what with its patriarchal “you’ll be a man, my son!” finale. It struck me as overly macho. When I read it now as I enter my 70s, however, I applaud the quality of the advice. The poem provides essential leadership tips for men and women alike.

Kipling’s balancing act is brilliant, especially in such lines as trusting yourself but remaining open, dreaming while not getting lost in dreams, thinking but not getting hung up on your conceptual framework.

And then there’s the advice, which Wimbledon offers to players (they can read it on the wall as they enter center court), to regard both Triumph and Disaster with equanimity. And when disaster strikes, to stoop and rebuild “the things you gave your life to,” even if you must do so with “worn-out tools.”

We probably don’t want our presidents risking everything on one throw of the dice (although sometimes large gambles must be taken). On the other hand, presidents need Kipling’s next piece of advice: to “force heart and nerve and sinew/To serve your turn long after they are gone” and to exhort yourself to “hold on” even when you’d rather give up.

It’s also wise to neither get stampeded by the “crowds” (staff, faculty, students, the public) nor lose yourself in an elitist bubble (trustees, big donors). And not to be hurt when people behave according to their institutional roles in their dealings with you. When I headed my department, I found it particularly hard to acknowledge that people who knew me previously were suddenly responding to me as chair, not as Robin Bates.

Kipling’s next piece of advice—don’t let either friends or foes get you down—reminds me of a witty interchange in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Feste the fool tells us he is made better by his foes and worse by his friends, explaining to Orsino,

Marry, sir, [my friends] praise me and make an ass of me; now my foes tell me plainly I am an ass: so that by my foes, sir, I profit in the knowledge of myself, and by my friends, I am abused: so that, conclusions to be as kisses, if your four negatives make your two affirmatives why then, the worse for my friends and the better for my foes.

Finally, Kipling advises that leaders should let “all men count with you, but none too much”—which I interpret as needing to respect everyone while maintaining a distance. So if you spend a full sixty seconds out of every minute putting these precepts into practice, all should go well.

Of course, as Kipling himself warns, disasters will still occur. But by following his advice, you’ll at least give yourself the best chance of success.

If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged "If", leadership, Rudyard Kipling, Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare | Comments closed

Literary Characters, Mirrors of the Soul

By Robin Bates | Published: February 2, 2023

William Robert Buss, *Dickens’s Dream* (unfinished)

Thursday

Yesterday I talked about how novels—and narrative in general—help us find meaning in life. According to comparative lit professor Peter Brooks, the novel “offers us our best understanding of what it means to live, to have lived, to construct a life.” He says something similar about fictional characters.

Chapter 4 of Brooks’s Seduced by Story—“The Allure of Imaginary Beings”—opens with a series of related questions:

Why do we invest so much time and emotional energy in our relationships with imaginary beings? Why are the aspirations, the errors, the inner turmoil and erotic daydreams of Emma Woodhouse and Emma Bovary so important to us. We know when we open the novels in which they figure that the persons we are going to meet aren’t “real,” yet that makes us no less eager to meet them, no less highly invested in how we feel about them, how we admire and criticize them, how we anticipate their emotional highs and lows, how we fear for their failures and hope for their successes.

Just as he follows the lead of Walter Benjamin (see yesterday’s post) when discussing the power of narrative, so in his discussion of character Brooks takes his cues from Marcel Proust. At one point, talking about his fictional painter Elstir and his fictional composer Vinteuil, the author of In Search of Lost Time explores how they appear to erase the real world. This leads Proust to reflect,

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit a range lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.

Elsewhere Proust says that intercourse with fictional creations opens up a deeper knowing than intercourse with actual people, explaining,

A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift….The novelist’s happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts [of real persons], impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate.

One way Brooks illustrates Proust’s point is by noting the difference between imagining a character and encountering a cinematic version. Noting that he’s never seen a satisfactory Emma Bovary on film, he writes,

Emma Bovary may be very difficult to literalize because she is herself a creature of daydream, fantasy, the wish to be other and elsewhere. Her virtue for us as readers lies partly in her noncoherence as a flesh and blood creature.

On Proust’s point about the challenges presented by actual people, Brooks writes,

To be inhabited in this manner by the fictional…allows us to discover in the space of a couple of hours what it would take us years to learn in life—or that we might not learn at all since the profound changes in life are hidden from us by the slowness of their process. The heart changes in life; that is our worst sorrow; but we know this change only in reading.

And further on:

Represented persons give us an understanding of life, and of ourselves, that real persons cannot. Why is that? In daily life what Proust calls “habit” fills us with a lazy blindness; the novel as optical instrument alone restores vision.

Habit—which is to say, pre-set categories into which we can comfortably slide—aren’t the only danger to seeing clearly. For dramatic effect, Brooks quotes Adam Smith on the need for imagination to preserve our humanity. The senses, the political economist says, will take us only so far. Brooks says that Smith’s passage on torture in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) should be required reading in the CIA:

Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers…. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.

Smith here is not talking about fictional characters but one can see how they provide us with (in Brooks’s words) “a fuller realization of another kind of being in the world.” Later in the chapter, after citing a passage by Keats, Brooks writes,

Readers, like poets and novelists, are also chameleon poets, taking joy in Iago as well as Imogen, provisionally giving up personal identity in order to be in and filling some other body…

And elsewhere:

That we can talk about Dorothea Brooke or Eugene de Rastignac beyond the boundaries of the pages we have read is testimony not so much to our wish that we could invite them to dinner with us as to our need to reimagine our own existences through their eyes…The ego learns its own shape by trying on others. The more cognitively challenging the process, the better. That’s why we need the novel.

“More cognitively challenging” is a tacit acknowledgement that great literature helps us reimagine more fully than not-so-great literature. The same distinction is implied in Brooks’s assertion that,

in the novels we value most, [becoming immersed is] not a passive or escapist process but one that has a cognitive and critical function. Character in the novel gives us, in the old yet still fresh words of Matthew Arnold, a “criticism of life.”

And finally,

[W]e need fictional representation of persons in order to understand the most elusive and consequential issues of our limited human existence.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged In Search of Lost Time, literary characters, Marcel Proust, Peter Brooks, Seduced by Story, Walter Benjamin | Comments closed

To Understand Your Life, Read Novels

By Robin Bates | Published: January 31, 2023

Wednesday

The more I read and reread Peter Brooks’s Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, the more impressed I am. As the Yale comparative literature professor sees it, we use novels to figure out the meaning of life. Drawing on cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, Brooks writes,

What readers look for in the novel is closed to them in their own lives: the knowledge of death that they cannot have in life and which alone confers meaning on life. It is with the end of a life that its meaning becomes apparent.

And then, talking about the significance of the death of a major character, Brooks directly quotes Benjamin:

The flame that consumes this stranger’s fate warms us as our own fates cannot. What draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life at the flame of a life he reads about.

And further:

Of all the gifts [the novel] offers, this is the most certain: the end….The novel is not important because it portrays the fate of a stranger for us, but because the flame that consumes the stranger’s fate warms us as our own fates cannot. What draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life at the flame of a life he reads about.

To which Brooks adds,

There we are again: in the forlornness of our modern condition, deprived of “counsel,” it is the novel that brings us warmth through its capacity to make us understand the end.

Of course, many novels do not end in a death, but Brooks is just using this extreme case to accentuate his point about novels helping us find meaning. Mentioning Samuel Richardson, Dickens, Balzac, Charlotte Bronte, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Henry James, and Proust, Brooks says that those novels that “best define the genre for us tend to be long…because their meanings must be played out over passing time: people age, make mistakes, regret decisions, choose new partners, perhaps learn something about life.”

At its most powerful, Brooks contends, the novel “offers us our best understanding of what it means to live, to have lived, to construct a life.” The chapter concludes,

Narrative may be the best discursive and analytic tool that we have for transmitting what we know about life, and for constructing a life in time as something that has shape and meaning.

Brooks also has fascinating things to say about the significance of literary characters but I’ll save that discussion for tomorrow.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged narrative, narratology, Peter Brooks, Seduced by Story, Walter Benjamin | Comments closed

“Paradise” Explains Nichols Killing

By Robin Bates | Published: January 30, 2023

The idyllic Black community in Toni Morrison’s *Paradise*

Tuesday

The horrific police killing of Tyre Nichols differs mainly from other police killings in that (1) so much about it, including police bloodlust, has been captured by recordings; (2) the police killers were all Black; and (3) the policemen were immediately fired and arrested. The second point has especially drawn attention. Isn’t this what integrating police forces was supposed to prevent?

The dark fact, however, is that when police forces are granted virtually unquestioned immunity, then individual police will take advantage of that power, regardless of their race. Toni Morrison is one author who understands the violence that Blacks are capable of when given power previously granted only to Whites. I have in mind her novel Paradise.

The novel follows the history of a town set up by African Americans in the 1890s, which is to say, after the failure of Reconstruction and the reinstatement of Jim Crow discrimination. Encountering racism from not only Whites but light-skinned Blacks, the group sets up their own town, which becomes a kind of dark-skinned paradise (light-skinned Blacks aren’t allowed in). Morrison makes it clear, however, that such splendid isolation will eventually recoil upon itself, which it does.

Faced with changing times in the 1960s, including militant young people and self-assertive women, the town fathers conclude that four women living in a former convent are the source of all their problems. What results in a murderous rampage, complete with lynchings, of the sort usually associated only with Whites. Here’s how the book opens:

They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need tohurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun.

They are nine, over twice the number of the women they are obliged to stampede or kill and they have the paraphernalia for either requirement: rope, a palm leaf cross, handcuffs, Mace and sunglasses, along with clean, handsome guns.

And further on:

Earlier, when they blew open the Convent door, the nature of their mission made them giddy. But the target, after all, is detritus: throwaway people that sometimes blow back into the room after being swept out the door. So the venom is manageable now. Shooting the first woman (the white one) has clarified it like butter: the pure oil of hatred on top, its hardness stabilized below.

Once one sees other people as “detritus,” all kinds of inhumane acts are possible. And just as the Black town fathers in Morrison’s novel believe that killing the Convent women will cleanse the town, Tyre Nichols’s killers may have thought the same. As Dr. Rashad Shabazz of Arizona’s School of Social Transformation observes, there is ample research

that suggests anti-Blackness is a factor in American policing. And Black officers, agents of an institutionally racist system, are affected by this. Anti-Blackness affects Black people too. And this might explain why Black police officers exhibit more anti-Black bias than the Black population as a whole.

America’s semi-fascist right, at the present, is keen to ban Toni Morrison novels from public school libraries and curricula. In doing so, they fail to appreciate how the Nobel Prize-winning author is not afraid to tell truths that challenge Black people as well as White.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Paradise, police killings, racism, Toni Morrison, Tyre Nichols | Comments closed

Lit in Andre Agassi’s Life

By Robin Bates | Published: January 30, 2023

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 "Ulysses", Alfred Lord Tennyson, Andre Agassi, Death in the Family, James Agee, Novak Djokovic, tennis | Comments closed

Lifting for a Little While the Veil

By Robin Bates | Published: January 28, 2023

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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 8^th 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 "Beatitudes", Malcolm Guite, Micah, Sermon on the Mount | Comments closed

Alice, Victorian Rebel

By Robin Bates | Published: January 26, 2023

Tenniel, illus. from *Alice in Wonderland*

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 19^th 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 Alice in Wonderland, Alice through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll | Comments closed

Integration’s Child Pioneers

By Robin Bates | Published: January 25, 2023

Me, Juliette Taylor, Doug Cameron and Charliss Burnett

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 Civil Rights Movement, desegregation, racism, Ruth Ozeki, Tale for the Time Being | Comments closed

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