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Spiritual Sunday
Since both last Sunday’s Gospel reading and today’s mention the moment when the Holy Spirit, like a dove, enters Jesus, I share today the greatest of all poems using that metaphor. But to set you up for it, here’s a portion of today’s lesson:
And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur” draws on images of industrialization to capture a “bent” world that has lost its way. By contrast, the poet depicts God’s grace through images of nature in all its freshness. Then, at the climactic moment, this grace is compared to a dove, which both sustains us and lifts us up.
God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
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Friday
As we watch the crazies take over the House of Representatives, there’s one Congresswoman who stands out to me when it comes to selling one’s soul for power. Elise Stefanik was once a moderate Republican from New York, but—to the horror of many who thought they knew her—she abandoned her previous moderation for Trumpism in 2019. She has become one of the leading election deniers, claims to see fraudulent votes everywhere, talks of the “Biden Crime Family,” and at one point contended that no president has ever been a stronger supporter of the Constitution than Donald J. Trump.
The question arises whether Stefanik actually believes what she professes or is just a cynical politico willing to do and say anything anything to advance herself. I write about her today because I learned recently that she was an English major at Harvard.
According to a Washington Post profile, among Stefanik’s favorite courses in college were Shakespeare in Politics and The English Novel. I don’t know what novels she read in the latter course but it’s likely that she has encountered Macbeth and Julius Caesar, if not in the Shakespeare course then elsewhere.
Her case allows us to address the issue of whether immersion in classic literature makes one a better person. Will it help us to hold onto our moral compass when confronted with the temptations of power, wealth, and other inducements? Or are even the greatest works–at least in some instances–no more than sound and fury, signifying nothing?
And what would Allan Bloom think of Stefanik? I recall the broad claims made by the Chicago humanities professor about the significance of Shakespeare when he was defending the canon and attacking political correctness (today called wokeness) in the early 1990s. Bloom became a hero amongst American conservatives for his book The Closing of the American Mind, but I have in mind an earlier work entitled Shakespeare’s Politics.
In it, Bloom observes that Shakespeare “shows most vividly and comprehensively the fate of tyrants, the character of good rulers, the relations of friends, and the duties of citizens.” By doing so, he argues, the bard moves “the souls of his readers, and they recognize that they understand life better because they have read him; he hence becomes a constant guide and companion.”
Among the plays Bloom examines is Julius Caesar, which he says functions as a workshop on political leadership. As Bloom sees it, Caesar himself is the ideal politician, one who draws on the wisdom of both the high-minded Stoics and the material-focused Epicureans. In other words, he knows how to balance idealism and pragmatism.
The tragedy of conspirators Brutus and Cassius, Bloom argues, is that they cannot comprehend such a combination. Following Bloom’s argument, we can see Brutus as the impractical idealist, Cassius as the cynical pragmatist.
Bloom doesn’t altogether dismiss the two conspirators. Brutus, “the noblest Roman of them all,” will inspire future revolutionaries, and the two together have become
the eternal symbols of freedom against tyranny. They showed that men need not give way before the spirit of the times; they served as models for later successors who would reestablish the spirit of free government. Their seemingly futile gesture helped, not Rome, but humanity.
Having made this concession, however, Bloom faults Brutus and Cassius for their limited vision, and his critique would apply to those successors of theirs who fail to maintain a balance. History is strewn with corrupted rebels.
Stefanik resembles Cassius far more than Brutus. Like the former, she has a “lean and hungry look.” One imagines her realizing, in 2019, that to rise in Republican ranks required attaching herself to the Trump train. And unlike Cassius, she succeeded in her rebellion, ousting the more principled Lynn Cheney and taking her place as the third ranking Republican.
Perhaps, as she prepared to strike her blow against Cheney, Stefanik thought of Brutus’s oft-quoted passage,
The irony is that, by taking advantage of what appeared to be a rising tide, Brutus set course on a destiny that resulted in his death. Will Stefanik consider that possibility? Or, if she thought about it, would she rather conclude that Brutus ultimately was not ruthless enough—that he should have killed Marc Antony rather than allowing him to speak, which could well have cemented his advantage. Did she conclude that Brutus’s elevated nature is an impediment, that being the noblest Roman of them all is a consolation prize for losers.
If she wanted a Shakespearean model for overriding all moral qualms, there is, of course, Macbeth. After all, he actually gains a kingship, albeit at a tremendous spiritual and existential cost. He and his wife don’t acknowledge that cost, however, until they are steeped in blood.
So could it be that Stefanik is using her college Shakespeare class as a tyrant’s guide on how to achieve political power? Given the heady smell of power, who cares if one’s life is
Maybe, as Sir Philip Sidney warns in Defense of Poesie and Terry Eagleton cautions in Literary Theory: An Introduction, great literature can be used for ill as well as for good. Maybe Stefanik learned the wrong things from Shakespeare, hearing in the plays only what she wanted to hear.
Former American poet laureate Charles Simic died on Monday at 84. As someone who once joked that his travel agents were Hitler and Stalin—he was a World War II Serbian refugee—Simic’s poems are often dark and always surreal, jolting the mind with unexpected associations. “Poem without a Title” is one of his more straightforward poems but powerful nonetheless.
I say to the lead Why did you let yourself Be cast into a bullet? Have you forgotten the alchemists? Have you given up hope In turning into gold?
Nobody answers. Lead. Bullet. With names Such as these The sleep is deep and long.
Why does no one answer? Perhaps because the bullet has done its work. Or perhaps because, in allowing oneself to “be cast into a bullet,” one loses touch with one’s humanity.
Leopold von Kalckreuth, The Artist’s Wife Reading in Bed
Wednesday
Okay, this will be my last post about Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness. I’m in love with it because it knows me so well.
I relate deeply, for instance, to what it says about bedside reading. The passage occurs right after the character “Book” (the novel takes the form of a conversation between 15-year-old Benny and the book that is telling his story) informs us that, above all, books “dislike neglect”:
Picture, for a moment, your own bedside table. Imagine what it feels like to be the top book on your stack, occupying pride of place and enjoying your nightly attention. Sure, the days are long, but we look forward to the moment when you slip between the sheets, prop yourself up on the pillows, and turn on your reading lamp. That small soughing sound you hear as you open the covers and turn the page is a sign of relief. Then imagine our dismay when another volume comes along and tops us, often before you have even read our last page! Imagine the humiliation we feel as, book by book, we slip down to the bottom of your pile, knowing that we have failed to hold your attention and have been replaced, often by lighter, more “relatable” reads.
“More relatable,” Book goes on to explain, may mean turning from a challenging book to a formulaic genre:
Sadly, genre-ism is a form of bigotry, and one that is endemic in libraries and bookstores, any place where books gather.
To be sure, this dislike of formulaic fiction is its own kind of prejudice, as Book observes elsewhere:
Biases abound on library shelves. The scholarly tomes disparage the more commercial books. Literary novels look down on romance and pulp fiction, and there is an almost universal disregard for certain genres, like self-help.
Shifting gears, here’s another beautiful observation:
The first words of a book are of utmost importance. The moment of encounter, when a reader turns to that first page and reads those opening words, it’s like locking eyes or touching someone’s hand for the first time, and we feel it, too. Books don’t have eyes or hands, it’s true, but when a book and a reader are meant for each other, both of them know it…
I also like this one:
Strange things happen in Libraries, Benny. The Public Library is a shrine of dreams, and people fall in love here all the time. Maybe you don’t believe this, but it’s true. Books are works of love, after all. Our bodies may not be made to enjoy the mysteries of corporeal conjugation, but even our driest tomes, the most unromantic among us, can make your dreams come true.
Given my love affair with Slovenia, I perked up when I encountered a Slovenian émigré poet in Ozeki’s pages. An old bagman who must get around in a wheelchair, he serves as a mentor to the younger characters, dispensing such reflections as the following. Benny has just asked Slavoj why he invokes God if he doesn’t believe in God:
“God is a story,” he said. “I believe in stories, and God knows this. Stories are real, my boy. They matter. If you lose your belief in your story, you vill lose yourself.”
And:
“Ze truth about stories is that is all we are.” A famous Cherokee writer named Thomas King once said this. We are ze stories we tell ourselves, Benny-boy. We meck ourselves up. We meck each other up, too.
Here’s one last passage, this one referring to intertextuality. I like the vision of all the books we have read operating as a “rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness” that “knits the world of thought together”:
Is it odd to see a book within a book? It shouldn’t be. Books like each other. We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoying a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness and knits the world of thought together. Think of us as a mycelium, a vast, subconscious fungal mat beneath a forest floor, and each book a fruiting body. Like mushrooms, we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we, our, us.
Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Book of Form and Emptiness. You too may recognize yourself in its pages.
Today you get some more of my love affair with Ruth Ozeki’s Book of Form and Emptiness. In my blog’s masthead I talk about the power of literature to “change your life,” and “Book,” a character in Ozeki’s novel, qualifies and elaborates on that. Books can only change our lives if we let them, it tells us. Or as Book puts it,
Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it’s every person’s task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.
Later, Book explains that how books awaken us is a highly individual affair. Indeed, it’s impossible to predict which books will have which effects. When a book “ventures out in the world,” Book observes, a “commingling” occurs:
Because the reader is not a passive receptacle for a book’s contents. Not at all. You are our collaborators, our conspirators, breathing new life into us. And because every reader is unique, each of you makes each of us mean differently, regardless of what’s written on our pages. Thus, one book, when read by different readers, becomes different books, becomes an ever-changing array of books that flows through human consciousness like a wave.
And then, shifting to Latin before providing a translation, Book asserts,
Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli. According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their own destinies.
Put a great work together with a willing collaborator and all sorts of things are possible. But to increase your likelihood of finding the right book, keep reading.
Ruth Ozeki’s Book of Form and Emptiness held me in thrall as Julia and I flew to a Carleton College reunion event last week, causing the four-hour flight to Phoenix to feel like a matter of minutes. One of the characters is the book itself, which periodically reflects on how books work. This, of course, is a matter that interests me deeply.
At one point, Book talks about how humans began fashioning objects out of “the world of things.” As Book puts it, “Then life happened, and eventually you people came along with your big, beautiful, bisected brains and clever opposable thumbs.”
The resulting explosion of artifacts led humans to divide matter “into two camps, the Made and the Unmade.” The Unmade—let’s call it nature—was relegated “to the status of mere resource, a lowly serf class to be colonized, exploited, and fashioned into something else, something that was more to your liking.” At first, books benefitted from this arrangement:
Within this social hierarchy of matter, we books lived on top. We were the ecclesiastical caste, the High Priests of the Made, and in the beginning you even worshipped us. As objects, books were sacred, and you built temples for us, and later, libraries in whose hushed and hallowed halls we resided as mirrors of your mind, keepers of your past, evidence of your boundless imaginations, and testimony to the infinitude of your dreams and desires.
“Why did you revere us so,” Book asks before providing an answer:
Because you thought we had the power to save you from meaninglessness, from oblivion and even from death, and for a while, we books believed we could save you, too. Of course we did. We were flattered! We prided ourselves on being semi-living, breathed into life by the animating power of your words. We thought we were so special. What folly.
It was folly, Book explains, because books became relegated to the world of just things—or as Book explains, books eventually became to be seen as “convenient tools you used until the next new-fangled device came along.”
Book here appears to be lamenting how we live in a capitalist world where everything has become instrumental, prized only for its use value. As enrollments decline in humanities courses while vocationally-oriented majors soar, one understands Book’s pessimism. It proceeds to wax nostalgic in making a desperate plea for continued relevance:
Did not the sequential form of our folios give shape to your stories and compel you to tell a certain kind of tale? Long, sinuous, patient tales that wound through time, teased forth by the slow, forward turning of our pages. They were beautiful stories we nailed together. Weren’t they?
Then, however, it laments, “even as our numbers increase, our life spans diminish…No sooner are we made than we are discarded, left to revert into unmade, disincarnate stuff. You turn us into trash, so how can we trust you?
Book concludes by apologizing for its “rant”: “No reader likes a rant. As a book, we should know better.” This particular burst of pessimism, however, is not Ozeki’s last word on the subject. I’ll share some other passages from Book of Form and Emptiness in future posts.
For the moment, I’ll just note that a blog like Better Living through Beowulf—Beowulf being a metonym for all literature—may appear at first glance to relegate books to the instrumental category. Haven’t I surrendered to the capitalist mindset in my endeavor to make a practical case as to why we should continue to read poems and stories and watch and read plays? By arguing that, in a down to earth way, they make our lives better, have I robbed them of some of their mystical power?
Of course, my hope is that, by showing how they touch upon so many aspects of our lives, spiritual and existential as well as material, I am working to re-elevate them to that ecclesiastical caste that Book refers to. Or rather, I am going in the other direction, seeing them as foundational to our existence. Literature, as I say in my blog’s mission statement, is as essential to our lives as food and shelter. Without it we are lost—although sometimes we realize this only at those times when we are confronted with life-challenging events.
When death or natural disaster strikes, we turn to it in the same way we fill churches following a natural or human-made disaster. The key is realizing that we have this resource available at other times as well. Why wait for our life to fall apart before seeking out ways to enrich it?
Here’s a Joseph Brodsky poem to mark the moment when the wisdom of the east recognizes that divinity has entered the world. Nor is it only wisemen or kings that arrive at this realization. An epiphanic awakening occurs when anyone discovers that even the most humble of homely objects–Brodsky mentions crockery, farm tools, and a cowbell–contain a spark of the sacred. I use the word “homely” to connect the idea with the poem’s theme of homelessness.
Brodsky himself experienced homelessness as a Jewish poet expelled from the Soviet Union, and perhaps we all feel homeless in those moments when the world appears alien to us. When Brodsky tells us to “imagine the desert—but the desert is everywhere,” I think of Robert Frost’s desert places, which I wrote about recently for the winter solstice post. When we are in a grip of desert depression, divinity seems impossibly far away.
Which Brodsky captures by imagining God Himself stranded in distance and darkness. God only becomes aware of the “cold cracks in the floor, the blankness of hunger,” the poet imagines, when, as spirit made incarnate, he experiences the world through us.
In Brodsky’s version, the epiphanic awakening doesn’t happen all at once but gradually—a match lit in a midnight cave. There is no peal of a celestial bell to celebrate the triumph of love over death with Jesus’s birth: we are told the baby has not yet earned it. Nevertheless, the “three beams closing in/ And in on the star” sounds as though wisdom if fumbling towards the epiphany, even though it’s not there yet.
It comes when we realize, fully, that divinity is all around us and within us. Our challenge is to open ourselves to it.
Nativity Poem By Joseph Brodsky
Imagine striking a match that night in the cave: Imagine crockery, try to make use of its glaze To feel cold cracks in the floor, the blankness of hunger. Imagine the desert – but the desert is everywhere.
Imagine striking a match in that midnight cave, The fire, the farm beasts in outline, the farm tools and stuff; And imagine, as you towel your face in the enveloping folds, Mary, Joseph, and the Infant in swaddling clothes.
Imagine the kings, the caravans’ stilted procession As they make for the cave, or, rather, three beams closing in And in on the star, the creaking of loads, the clink of a cowbell; (No thronging of Heaven as yet, no peal of the bell
That will ring in the end for the infant once he has earned it). Imagine the Lord, for the first time, from darkness, and stranded Immensely in distance, recognizing Himself in the Son Of Man: His homelessness plain to him now in a homeless one.
I see that Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus has citedMacbeth in a piece on Kevin McCarthy’s ambition to become Speaker of the House. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus might be a better choice, given the way the Republican Congressman appears willing to sell his soul, along with every shred of dignity, to gain the position. Still, it’s always good to remember what Shakespeare has to say about those who will do anything to gain power.
We get the phrase “vaulting ambition” from the passage, which reads,
I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself And falls on th’other.
Weighed against Macbeth’s ambition is the fact that Duncan is (1) his king, (2) his guest, (3) a kinsman, and (4) a good and humble man. In fact, Macbeth appears ready to change his mind, only to be egged on by his wife. When he worries, “If we should fail,” she replies, “
One wonders if there is someone similar egging McCarthy on.
Meditating on ambition, Marcus reflects that ambition “is a complex force, omnipresent, essential — and treacherous.” And she quotes Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode, who observes, “We see too little as a failing and too much as a sin. We dismiss those who lack it and despise those who misuse it.”
Marcus points to two things that make McCarthy’s craving “especially cringeworthy”:
first, that McCarthy seems to crave power for power’s sake, not for any higher purposes; second, that he is willing to debase himself so completely to obtain it.
But then, this is true of Macbeth as well. What differs is what they do in their quest:
Macbeth must kill and keep killing to slake his ambition. McCarthy must concede and concede even more to slake his own.
In other words, Macbeth at least elevates himself to tragic status through his ambition. McCarthy is just pathetic. One is tempted to say about him what Marx said about Napoleon III following his successful coup:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
Come to think of it, one could pair Donald Trump’s coup attempt with the Confederate South’s secession attempt and say the same thing.
Further thought: Pairing McCarthy up with Trump is appropriate since it may well be that what McCarthy is most remembered for is going to Mar-a-Lago after January 6, kissing Trump’s ring, and essentially rehabilitating his political influence when he was on the ropes. The Republican Party had the potential then to jettison Trump and blew it. Rather than comparing him with Macbeth, we should see him more as the political flunky Tiny Duffy in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.
As it happens, the hapless Duffy does manage to ascend to the governorship in the novel. And McCarthy may still become House leader. Duffy gains no glory from the achievement, however, and neither would McCarthy.
I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time yesterday and, as my friends predicted, it exceeded my already sky-high expectations. We can say of Nature what James Boswell said about Samuel Johnson upon hearing of his death: “He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up.” This “nothing” extends to the imagination, which also falters in the face of it. The Grand Canyon is not only bigger that we think but bigger than we can think.
Boswell’s contemporary Edmund Burke attempted to describe such immensity in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Drawing on the Roman theorist Longinus and the French theorist Boileau, Burke wrote that the sublime is something that, in its overwhelming power, transcends all preexistent categories.
An on-line blog essay by one Nasrullah Mambrol sums up Burke’s explanation for why the sublime draws us. Mentioning the Grand Canyon, Mambrol notes that the intense response we have
comes from the fact that the sublime is associated with pain, danger, and anxiety, but not pleasure. The experience of the sublime is one of intense relief. It is associated with scenes like those of the Alps or the Grand Canyon because our first, instinctive response is one of fear. We perceive altitudes or depths that could kill us; then we recall that our vantage point is one of comparative safety—they could kill us, but they will not. Delight is the exalting relief that we feel: We have been overwhelmed with some vehement negative passion, and we have recovered. The thrill of the sublime is that of danger courted and overcome. It is not a positive pleasure but a more intense and delighting experience of danger survived.
A poetic example of someone attempting to articulate the sublime is Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” where he describes feelings similar to what I experienced earlier today. Gazing at the mountain and the roiling waterfalls that produce the Arve River, the poet writes,
Thy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion, A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame; Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, Thou art the path of that unresting sound— Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime…
For more specific references to the Grand Canyon, I came across passages by two fine essayists, Bill Bryson and J.B. Priestly. Bryson first:
Nothing prepares you for the Grand Canyon. No matter how many times you read about it or see it pictured, it still takes your breath away. Your mind, unable to deal with anything on this scale, just shuts down and for many long moments you are a human vacuum, without speech or breath, but just a deep, inexpressible awe that anything on this earth could be so vast, so beautiful, so silent.
Even children are stilled by it. I was a particularly talkative and obnoxious child, but it stopped me cold. I can remember rounding a corner and standing there agog while a mouthful of half-formed jabber just rolled backwards down my throat, forever unuttered. I was seven years old and I’m told it was only the second occasion in all that time that I had stopped talking, apart from short breaks for sleeping and television. …
… The scale of the Grand Canyon is almost beyond comprehension. It is ten miles across, a mile deep, 180 miles long. You could set the Empire State Building down in it and still be thousands of feet above it. Indeed you could set the whole of Manhattan down inside it and you would still be so high above it that buses would be like ants and people would be invisible, and not a sound would reach your. The thing that gets you – that gets everyone – is the silence. The Grand Canyon just swallows sound. The sense of space and emptiness is overwhelming. Nothing happens out there. Down below you on the canyon floor, far, far away, is the thing that carved it: the Colorado River. It is 300 feet wide, but from the canyon’s lip it looks thin and insignificant. It looks like an old shoelace. Everything is dwarfed by this mighty hole.”
Now Priestly from Midnight on the Desert:
I have heard rumors of visitors who were disappointed. The same people will be disappointed at the Day of Judgment. In fact, the Grand Canyon is a sort of landscape Day of Judgment. It is not a show place, a beauty spot, but a revelation. The Colorado River, which is powerful, turbulent and so thick with silt that it is like a saw, made it with the help of the erosive forces of rain, frost, and wind, and some strange geological accidents; and all these together have been hard at work on it for the last 7 or 8 million years. It is the largest of the 18 canyons of the Colorado River, is over 200 miles long, has an average width of 12 miles and is a good mile deep. It is the world’s supreme example of erosion. But this is not what it really is. It is, I repeat, a revelation. The Colorado River made it, but you feel when you are there that God gave the Colorado River its instructions. It is all Beethoven’s nine symphonies in stone and magic light. Even to remember that it is still there lifts up the heart. If I were an American, I should make my remembrance of it the final test of men, art, and policies. I should ask myself: Is this good enough to exist in the same country as the Canyon? How would I feel about this man, this kind of art, these political measures, if I were near that rim? Every member or officer of the Federal Government ought to remind himself, with triumphant pride, that he is on the staff of the Grand Canyon.
To quote Shelley again, “Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime.”
