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Wednesday
My faculty reading group has just finished discussing the Odyssey, and the voice of Odysseus confronting the suitors is still ringing in my ears. His words could easily be directed towards Donald Trump.
The suitors violate one of the most sacred tenets of ancient Greek society. Like Paris in The Iliad, who abducts his host’s wife and triggers the Trojan War, they abuse the laws of hospitality. Meanwhile Trump and the rest of their crew are determined to violate the Constitution, the rule of law, and America’s expressed commitment (in The Declaration of Independence) to equity and fairness. Among the president’s most egregious actions on his first day was
–pardoning all those who invaded the Capitol and assaulted police on January 6; –decreeing an end to birthright citizenship; –halting refugee resettlement, including Afghans who supported us in the war there.
Trump is also withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organizing, thereby relinquishing American leadership in addressing the most pressing problems facing the world. Joe Biden made important steps in fighting climate change, which is pounding us all, and the United States played a key role in stopping or limiting Ebola and Covid. These threats won’t go away just because Trump decides to ignore them.
We can add to these measures Trump’s determination to turn that United States into Trump, Inc. From crypto to Trump-endorsed products to naked bribery, he’s willing to listen to anyone who directs cash his way. It’s difficult to imagine anything more sordid.
In Book XXII of Homer’s epic, Odysseus, who has returned to his house disguised as a beggar, is appalled at the desecration he witnesses. After first shaming the suitors by being the only man in the room who can bend his great bow, he throws off his beggar’s cloak and reveals himself with the following speech:
You yellow dogs, you thought I’d never make it home from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder, twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared bid for my wife while I was still alive. Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven, contempt for what men say of you hereafter. Your last hour has come. You die in blood.
America was founded upon certain Enlightenment ideals, and while we haven’t always lived up to them (as any number of minority groups can testify), they have been at the foundation of our greatness as a nation. This administration feels nothing but contempt for these ideals and for what people will say of it hereafter.
We have other ways of settling conflict than bloodshed and there’s no one person that can stride in and restore us. But a reckoning is coming, in one form or another.
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Tuesday
Here’s a new literary allusion to add to our political lexicon. People who enable narcissists, such as the one we just put in the White House, are being called “flying monkeys.”
According to Adam England in a VeryWellMind article, flying monkeys are people “who carry out the work of a narcissist or an abusive person.” Narcissists will use these monkeys, England explains, “as spies, or to spread rumors, making them act as substitutes for themselves.”
The reference, of course, is to The Wizard of Oz—or maybe now, to Wicked.
Licensed clinical psychologist Lauren Kerwin notes that it’s often difficult to recognize a flying monkey “as they may seem like normal people who are simply taking sides in a disagreement or conflict.” She provides the following list of tell-tale signs:
–They side with the narcissist no matter the situation or evidence presented to them; –They spread gossip or rumors about you; –They gaslight or manipulate you; –They dismiss or trivialize your feelings; –They pass on information about you to help the narcissist harass you.
In L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, one finds more than a few resemblances between the flying monkeys and Trump’s ardent supporters. In the case of these supporters, they were initially drawn in because they found Trump entertaining—they reveled in how he insulted groups they didn’t like—but in the process they got pulled into something darker. Like storming the Capitol, for instance.
We learn from the head monkey that the monkeys too started out as fairly harmless pranksters. He tells Dorothy how they insulted Quelala, fiancé of the beautiful princess Gayelette:
My grandfather was at that time the King of the Winged Monkeys which lived in the forest near Gayelette’s palace, and the old fellow loved a joke better than a good dinner. One day, just before the wedding, my grandfather was flying out with his band when he saw Quelala walking beside the river. He was dressed in a rich costume of pink silk and purple velvet, and my grandfather thought he would see what he could do. At his word the band flew down and seized Quelala, carried him in their arms until they were over the middle of the river, and then dropped him into the water.
“‘Swim out, my fine fellow,’ cried my grandfather, ‘and see if the water has spotted your clothes.’”
No ultimate harm is done, but while Quelala laughs the incident off, Gayelette is less forgiving:
The princess was angry, and she knew, of course, who did it. She had all the Winged Monkeys brought before her, and she said at first that their wings should be tied and they should be treated as they had treated Quelala, and dropped in the river. But my grandfather pleaded hard, for he knew the Monkeys would drown in the river with their wings tied, and Quelala said a kind word for them also; so that Gayelette finally spared them, on condition that the Winged Monkeys should ever after do three times the bidding of the owner of the Golden Cap. This Cap had been made for a wedding present to Quelala, and it is said to have cost the princess half her kingdom.
Think of this as an FAFO moment (F–k around and find out), which many are predicting for those who voted for Trump.
Quelala makes minimal use of the cap—he tells the monkeys to stay out of Gayelette’s sight, “which we were glad to do”—but the wedding gift becomes far more dangerous when the Wicked Witch of the West gets hold of it.
If we see the transition in ownership from Quelala to the Witch as Trump’s transition from entertainer to fascist, then what begins as a joke turns lethal. The Witch uses the monkeys to enslave the Winkies, drive Oz out of the Land of the West, and capture or destroy Dorothy and her friends. For his part, Trump, as stochastic terrorist, has been inciting certain of his followers to violence, and he now appears prepared to trigger punitive deportations and to weaponize the Department of Justice against his enemies. If he gets a compliant Secretary of Defense, maybe he’ll even order the military to shoot protesters in the legs.
The Witch too incites violence:
Some of the Monkeys seized the Tin Woodman and carried him through the air until they were over a country thickly covered with sharp rocks. Here they dropped the poor Woodman, who fell a great distance to the rocks, where he lay so battered and dented that he could neither move nor groan.
Others of the Monkeys caught the Scarecrow, and with their long fingers pulled all of the straw out of his clothes and head. They made his hat and boots and clothes into a small bundle and threw it into the top branches of a tall tree.
The remaining Monkeys threw pieces of stout rope around the Lion and wound many coils about his body and head and legs, until he was unable to bite or scratch or struggle in any way.
We can think of the Golden Cap as the red MAGA cap, holding our own winged monkeys in thrall. Pray that our drama ends as Baum’s novel does, with the powers of the cap getting used up and the monkeys returning to their harmless play in the jungle. Until that happens, however, we—like the Winkies, Dorothy, and all who run afoul of our own Wicked Witch—are in peril.
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Monday – Martin Luther King Day
I will be far from the only one noting the terrible irony of a white supremacist being sworn in as president on Martin Luther King’s birthday. For me, however, there’s one silver lining, which I’ve had to do some deep internal diving to discover.
That silver lining comes in the form of increased understanding. The frustration I have felt watching Donald Trump escape accountability time after time—and seeing him be reelected even after staging a coup—would not have been unfamiliar to King. But it is new to me.
Why have I been blind? Well, my privileged white background has allowed me to think that the rule of law applies in the United States. People of color in this country, by contrast, have had no such illusions, and they have been trying to awaken me for years through literature. Which is to say, through the poetry of Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Audre Lorde; through the fiction of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison; through the plays of August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, Imamu Baraka; and many, many others. Their shouting has finally managed to penetrate.
To be fully human, it is important for me to see this reality. But there’s something even more at stake for me. I have five grandchildren of color—one Asian, four Afro-Caribbean—and if I am to support them as fully as I want to, I must understand what they will be going through. My sons and daughters-in-law, in ways that are age appropriate, are doing all they can to alert them to the reality they will be facing. But it will not be easy.
I’ve had one professional relationship with a noted poet of color who tried to awaken me to her reality. For years I was fortunate to have Lucille Clifton as a colleague at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. I admired her immensely and taught her poetry in my classes, but occasionally I was aware of her frustrations with me. I’ve written about a poem in which she had me in mind (I know because I asked her and she confirmed it). In “note to self,” starting off with a Baraka quote (“I refuse to be judged by white men”), she writes
or defined. and i see that even the best believe they have that right, believe that what they say i mean is what i mean as if words only matter in the world they know, as if when i choose words i must choose those that they can live with
She follows up by noting that she has been called on to deal with racism experienced by our students of color that their white professors were blind to:
as if i have not reached across our history to touch, to soothe on more than one occasion
Now, when Lucille compiled a collection of her poems, she chose not to include this one. Perhaps she feared it was too personal a complaint. (It of course appears in the complete collection of her poems put together after her death.) I, however, made a point to always teach “note to self” in my Intro to Literature classes, talking about my own learning curve.
But whatever progress I made, it took the helplessness I have felt in the Trump era to make the next step. So this is what it feels not to have power. The realization is making me a better grandfather.
Martin Luther King is inspirational in the way that he refused to give up, even in the face of tremendous odds and heartbreaking reversals. We can use this quirk in the calendar as a symbolic reminder that he wouldn’t have given up in the face of Trump’s reelection. As the gospel hymn-turned-protest song puts it,
We are soldiers in the army. We have to fight although we have to cry. We’ve got to hold up the bloodstained banner. We’ve got to hold it up until we die!
My mother was a soldier. She had her hand on the gospel plow. But one day she got old; couldn’t fight anymore. She said, “I’ll stand here and fight anyhow.”
I conclude today’s post with a poem of Lucille’s that I have always admired. She often liked to say that her job as a poet was “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable,” so here’s a case of her doing the latter:
whose side are you on? By Lucille Clifton
the side of the busstop woman trying to drag her bag up the front steps before the doors clang shut i am on her side i give her exact change and him the old man hanging by one strap his work hand folded shut as the bus doors i am on his side when he needs to leave i ring the bell i am on their side riding the late bus into the same someplace i am on the dark side always the side of my daughters the side of my tired sons
I am on the side of my granddaughters and my grandsons, and I am willing to undergo any education I still need to be the support they need.
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Sunday
My friend Rebecca Adams alerted me to a Diane Butler Bass essay about celestial fire that shares two powerful fire poems. Bass observes that, with the California fires raging, it can be unsettling to encounter John the Baptist’s prediction for Jesus: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” As Bass observes, fire “is a horror of torture and destruction, apocalypse and hell. We know the spiritual implications. We’ve seen the pictures. Perhaps we’ve even experienced the threat or the flames.”
But then she notes that fire
is something else as well — it burns off the chaff of delusion, falsity, and self-hatred. With this fiery baptism three things are revealed: the true self, the central meaning of existence, and a holy welcome. Identity, love, and acceptance.
In her essay, Bass notes that our first impulse, when confronted with fire, is to run towards it. She notes that “every person I knew in New York City on 9/11 ran toward the Twin Towers to help.” The same has been true with the California fires:
There was a man who attempted to save his entire block with a garden hose. Neighbors who rescued pets. A few people who watered down their houses in order to protect not only their property but an entire neighborhood behind their homes. A friend of mine whose house in Malibu burned mourned not for her loss but for the losses of her neighbors. And still others I know, evacuated from their own homes, occupied themselves by feeding, serving, and comforting other evacuees. Yes, they fled. But not before helping — and not before thinking about and trying to do something for their relatives, friends, neighbors, and even strangers.
“Fire is like that,” she writes. “Before running away, we often run toward.” Her two poems are both about running towards.
First, there’s David Whyte’s “Fire in the Earth,” about Moses walking towards the burning bush. Whyte compares it to losing one’s house in a fire, which far too many people can relate to these days, whether in California or Gaza. What seems like the end, however, Whyte describes as a beginning. Your old life must burn away if you are to embrace your life’s mission:
Like the moment you too saw, for the first time, your own house turned to ashes. Everything consumed so the road could open again.
At such moments, one becomes a living flame:
Your entire presence in your eyes and the world turning slowly into a single branch of flame.
Here’s the poem:
Fire in the Earth By David Whyte
And we know, when Moses was told, in the way he was told, “Take off your shoes!” He grew pale from that simple
reminder of fire in the dusty earth. He never recovered his complicated way of loving again
and was free to love in the same way he felt the fire licking at his heels loved him. As if the lion earth could roar
and take him in one movement. Every step he took from there was carefully placed.
Everything he said mattered as if he knew the constant witness of the ground and remembered his own face in the dust
the moment before revelation. Since then thousands have felt the same immobile tongue with which he tried to speak.
Like the moment you too saw, for the first time, your own house turned to ashes. Everything consumed so the road could open again.
Your entire presence in your eyes and the world turning slowly into a single branch of flame.
The other poem, by Mary Oliver, has to do with erotic passion. When one falls in love, does one play it safe or walk directly into the danger?
The speaker sounds as though she has been emotionally bereft, a cold city and a motionless heart. Perhaps a loveless childhood has made opening herself up to her feelings feel like a cataclysm, which means that she must go back if she is to go forward. Internally aflame, she must run into the fire to find the door:
The Fire By Mary Oliver
That winter it seemed the city was always burning – night after night the flames leaped, the ladders pitched forward. Scorched but alive, the homeless wailed as they ran for the cold streets. That winter my mind had turned around, shedding, like leaves, its bolts of information – drilling down, through history, toward my motionless heart. Those days I was willing, but frightened. What I mean is, I wanted to live my life but I didn’t want to do what I had to do to go on, which was: to go back. All winter the fires kept burning, the smoke swirled, the flames grew hotter. I began to curse, to stumble and choke. Everything, solemnly, drove me toward it – the crying out, that’s so hard to do. Then over my head the red timbers floated, my feet were slippers of fire, my voice crashed at the truth, my fists smashed at the flames to find the door – wicked and sad, mortal and bearable, it fell open forever as I burned.
Of course, in the case of actual fires, run in the opposite direction. Metaphorical fires are a different matter.
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Friday
When the founding fathers insisted on freedom of the press, could they have foreseen how billionaires would take over the news, bending it to their own purposes? Much of what has gone wrong with America in recent decades can be traced to Rupert Murdoch’s “fair and balanced” Fox News, which amplified a steady stream of rightwing lies, and to Elon Musk’s X, which opened its doors to hate speech and Russian trolls while helping reelect Donald Trump. Founding fathers such as Benjamin Franklin must be rolling in their graves.
I mention Franklin because today is his birthday (January 17, 1706) and because, as a printer, he was an outspoken advocate of a free press. He even wrote a poem, “On the Freedom of the Press,” arguing its necessity. It begins with the contention that virtue and freedom are the results of a press “free from force.”
On the Freedom of the Press By Benjamin Franklin
While free from force the press remains, Virtue and freedom cheer our plains, And learning largesses bestows, And keeps unlicens’d open house. We to the Nation’s public mart Our works of wit, and schemes of art, And philosophic goods, this way, Like water carriage, cheap convey. This tree which knowledge so affords, Inquisitors with flaming swords From lay-approach with zeal defend, Lest their own paradise should end.
The press from her fecundous womb Brought forth the arts of Greece and Rome; Her offspring, skill’d in logic war, Truth’s banner waved in open air; The monster superstition fled, And hid in shades in gorgon head; And awless pow’r, the long kept field, By Reason quell’d, was forc’d to yield.
This nurse of arts, and freedom’s fence, To chain, is treason against sense: And liberty, thy thousand tongues None silence who design no wrongs; For those who use the gag’s restraint, First rob, before they stop complaint.
To our jaded sensibilities, the idea that reason and logic could frighten “monster superstition” (let’s call it fabricated news) and “awless power” (power that doesn’t think it can be awed) seems quaint and naïve. But for an Enlightenment thinker like Franklin, it was an article of faith that to chain “this nurse of arts and freedom’s fence” would be to commit “treason against sense.” Would that we still had his faith that Truth’s banner will be waved in open air.
Whether it’s the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and L.A. Times pulling their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris or billionaire Musk driving from his platform people who don’t agree with him, we’re seeing plenty of efforts to apply “gag’s restraint.” These media owners are robbing and then stopping a free press.
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Thursday
I’ve just finished reading James Shapiro’s fascinating Shakespeare in a Divided America, a book that explores how people have relied on the plays at critical points in American history. “For well over two centuries,” Shapiro writes, “American of all stripes—presidents and activists, writers and soldiers—have…turned to Shakespeare’s works to give voice to what could not readily or otherwise be said.” The Bard, he notes, is one of the few areas where partisans have been able to find common ground—although that being said, they have used Shakespeare to advance widely divergent and often conflicting agendas.
To demonstrate how this has been the case, Shapiro focuses on seven moments in American history where historical players invoke Shakespeare’s plays:
–in 1833, Othello played a role in tensions between pro- and anti-slavery forces, especially when it came to characterizing and performing the protagonist. There were also unexpected responses: for instance, former president John Quincy Adams, even though he opposed slavery, was horrified by Desdemona’s passion for Othello and felt that she was asking for trouble when she married him. Miscegenation (or amalgamation, as they called it back then) was regarded as an abomination.
–in 1845, Othello also played a historical role but for reasons of gender more than race: forces sent to Corpus Christi, Texas to fight an expansionist war against Mexico were drawn to the play’s handling of infidelity, which was a concern of their own. In the army production, incidentally, the part of Desdemona was almost played by an effeminate-looking Ulysses S. Grant, who only later would grow the beard we see on the $50 dollar bill (perhaps to appear more masculine). From this mention of cross-dressing, Shapiro goes on to discuss how Shakespeare’s plays raised multiple gender issues at the time, especially Romeo and Juliet, where cross-dressing actresses would sometimes play the part of Romeo.
–in 1849, bloody class warfare was triggered by two competing versions of Hamlet: a British actor who portrayed an introspective Hamlet drew the fire of nativist, anti-British, and anti-elitist forces, who preferred the macho Hamlet of an American actor. The crowd attacked the Astor Theater when the play was being performed there, and it took the militia firing into the mob to disperse them.
–in 1865, a Shakespeare-loving Lincoln was assassinated by Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth. Whereas Booth identified with Brutus in Julius Caesar, Lincoln—in an eerie premonition of his death—saw himself in Duncan, murdered by Macbeth. Lincoln had a lifelong love for Shakespeare, could recite long passages by heart, and often debated with producers and actors about their artistic decisions. This love was acknowledged at his funeral, where Macbeth’s words about Duncan were read and were also used to comfort the grieving public:
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against The deep damnation of his taking-off.
–in 1916, Shakespeare became a symbol of Anglo-Saxon superiority and was used to push forward anti-immigrations laws and racial quotas, even though he himself—in his play Thomas More—had written passionately and empathetically on behalf of immigrants. (See my post here on the passage.)
–in 1948, Taming of the Shrew became popular, in part because returning veterans’ anxiety over the women who had taken over their jobs during the war. Shapiro goes into depth about the creation of the musical Kiss Me Kate, which found a way to thread the needle between outright misogyny and what the age regarded as strident feminism.
–in 1998, Shakespeare in Love won multiple Oscar because it managed to thread its own set of needles, these involving same-sex love and adultery. The question of whether Shakespeare has fallen in love with a man is suggested but quickly withdrawn in the movie, and he is also described as having been “banished” by his wife, thereby making his adultery acceptable. The film came out when the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair was blowing up. And indeed Lewinsky used a passage from Romeo and Juliet, run in a Washington Post Valentine’s Day ad, to reconnect with Clinton. Addressed to “Handsome” and signed “M, the passage was Romeo’s declaration to Juliet that true lovers cannot be kept apart:
With love’s light wings did I o’er perch these walls For stony limits cannot hold love out And what love can do that dares love attempt.
Lewinsky later reported that “the President said he had seen her Valentine’s Day message,” “talked about his fondness for Romeo and Juliet,” and gave her a book of poetry. After which history was made.
–Shapiro concludes his book, which was published during Trump’s second year in office, with an account of the Delacorte Central Park Theatre’s production of Julius Caesar. Because Julius Caesar was modeled on Trump. Trump supporters falsely claimed that audiences cheered when Caesar is murdered and took to threatening everyone connected with the production. Although the director thought that the production could lead to nuanced debates about how to respond to authoritarianism—after all, Brutus and Cassius’s belief that violence can be used to save democracy is proved to be spectacularly wrong—America isn’t doing nuance very well these days.
And because of this, Shapiro worries about the future of Shakespeare in America, which he says
is as precarious as it ever has been in this nation’s history. There has always been a tug-of-war over Shakespeare in America; what happened at the Delacorte suggests that this rope is now frayed. When one side no longer sees value in staging his plays, only a threat, things can unravel quickly.
Lest we think that Shapiro’s fears are overblown, he points out that the Puritans closed all British theatres only a few decades after Shakespeare had packed the Globe.
Shapiro’s historical examples challenge a premise that underlies both this blog and my book, which is that great literature is good for us. Can one really assert this confidently when Shakespeare is used to argue both for and against slavery, American imperialism, immigration, women’s rights, gay rights, etc. While I myself would argue that Shakespeare read rightly always expands the possibilities of human liberation—and that the devil can cite the Bard as well as Scripture to his purpose (to quote from Merchant of Venice)—it is unsettling to see Shakespeare’s Brutus as the inspiration for the assassination of Lincoln. For that matter, the depiction of Shylock (so Harold Bloom believes) has done more damage to Jews than the noxious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, used to justify the Holocaust.
In any event, Shapiro confirms another point that I make regularly: that in the toolkit we need for dealing with life, Shakespeare is a necessary accessory. One is just never sure how the tools will be used.
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Wednesday
Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has just announced that Donald Trump, had he not been just reelected president, would have been prosecuted for the January 6 coup attempt. One of Donald Trump’s special powers has been his ability to escape accountability, which he has accomplished by abusing the law in the manner of his mentor Roy Cohn, stacking the Supreme Court, and playing a special brand of resentment politics. So are we to conclude that he has gotten away with everything?
In Anthony Trollope’s Small House at Allingham, which I’ve just finished, the author addresses this very question. Although young and stylish Crosby has promised to marry the wonderful but penniless Lily Dale, a week later, blinded by the lights of high society, he makes a second marriage proposal, this time to the daughter of a peer. While Lily’s friends and families are infuriated at the way Crosby appears to escape all punishment, Trollope points out that he doesn’t escape at all.
That’s because Crosby is miserable in his mercenary marriage, with a wife that doesn’t love him and an aristocratic family that bullies him. How much more joyous his life would be, he thinks, had he married the loving and caring Lily, despite her lack of money. While Lily’s friends are described as “wretched in thinking that this man was escaping without punishment,” Trollope assures us that he’s suffering “as much as they could desire.” They just don’t realize it:
Those who offend us are generally punished for the offence they give; but we so frequently miss the satisfaction of knowing that we are avenged! It is arranged, apparently, that the injurer shall be punished, but that the person injured shall not gratify his desire for vengeance.
So is Trump being punished in ways we cannot see? After watching Trump attack fire-ravaged California and direct a volley of hate tweets at Jack Smith, television comic Seth Meyers, and California Governor Gavin Newsom, I was struck by just how miserable he is. He appears shackled to those he attacks.
I borrow the image from a recent New Yorker article about Paradise Lost, which notes how Milton’s Satan is tied to his victims. I’ve compared Trump to Satan multiple times—they are both supreme narcissists—and author Merve Emre observes that, for all his success in making humans miserable, Satan never experiences the joy of true freedom. Emre describes Milton’s view of such freedom as follows:
In his 1654 treatise “The Second Defence of the People of England,” Milton wrote, “Know that to be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and lastly, to be magnanimous and brave.”
Satan, by contrast, has a debased version of freedom:
By the sun’s blinding rays, we can perceive how depraved Satan’s freedom is. By one hand, he is bound to himself, to his impiety, his recklessness, his envy and pride, his guilt and spite. “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell,” he laments. By the other hand, he is bound to the Almighty, whom, as the critic John Guillory has observed, Satan imitates. But God’s authority tends toward reason and grace; Satan’s is a poor, perverse copy. His every thought is shaped in reaction to God’s glory. It is as if God had never lifted Satan’s chains.
For his part, Trump is a slave to his resentment. Satan’s line “myself am hell”—which is inspired by Mephistopheles’s line in Doctor Faustus “why this is hell, nor am I out of it”—is Trump’s existential state. When Satan says, “The mind can make a heaven of hell or hell of heaven,” he accurately describes how both he and Trump have made perpetual hells for themselves.
One should note that Marlowe in his turn borrows from Dante to describe Mephistopheles’s condition. As the devil puts it,
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells, In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?
Dante’s damned have consigned themselves to everlasting torment because they choose their compulsions over God’s love. Some are aware of what they have done, others just blindly writhe. For all the similarities between Satan and Trump, Satan appears more self-aware. Trump seems to be in hell without knowing it, more Grendel in this regard than Satan.
While I believe Trump is suffering, I draw no pleasure from it. That’s because I’m far more concerned about the effects of that suffering: those who are miserable often do all they can to make others miserable. “For only in destroying I find ease/ To my relentless thoughts,” Satan says, providing a profound insight into why Trump behaves as he does.
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Tuesday
Greg Olear of the Substack blog Prevail has written another wonderful essay on a literary work, this one on Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” a poem he ranks among Britain’s ten greatest lyrics. Before I go further, here it is:
The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
While he admires the poem, Olear also points out how strange it is. The speaker, rather than using the occasion to focus all his love and attention on his love, instead laments the decline of western civilization. Even the most famous line of the poem doesn’t say what we normally think is says, Olear observes:
For a long time, I read the “let us be true” line as hopeful, where “true” means what it means when it modifies the word “love.” But then I realized I was wrong. He means “true” as in “brutally honest.” What Arnold’s really saying is, “Look, babe, let’s not bullshit each other.” And then: “I know it seems lovely that we are here in this beach house on this moonlit night, listening to the sound of the ocean that’s so relaxing, years from now Sharper Image will make it a standard setting on their noise machines. But I’ve taken the red pill, you see, and I know that’s just an illusion. In reality, the world is a dark, cruel, awful place, and we are all fucked.”
Olear doesn’t mention “Dover Bitch,” the Anthony Hecht parody of the poem, but Hecht makes a related point. Thinking of the scene from the woman’s point of view, he remarks,
To have been brought All the way down from London, and then be addressed As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort Is really tough on a girl…
Olear finds genuine power in the final eight lines, however, regarding them as
all too relevant to the current climate in the United States—a country Arnold much admired, incidentally. We may as well swap “America” for “this world” in the final stanza. Our second largest city and cultural capital is on fire, our media has willfully rejected truth, our so-called leaders have capitulated one by one to the returning despot, and we await the coming of Trump Redux a week from tomorrow.
To which Olear adds, “It’s not just at night when the ignorant armies clash.”
He then, however, manages to find a hopeful message to the poem:
While writing this “Sunday Pages,” I realized that I have misremembered one of the last lines of “Dover Beach.” I thought it was And we are here alone on a darkling plain, where “darkling” is a fancy way of saying “dark and growing darker.” But it’s actually And we are here as on a darkling plain. In Arnold’s darkling view of the world, joy and love and light and certitude and peace and the relief of pain do not…exist. But the one word he never uses is alone. The plain may be darkening, the confusion sweeping, the clashing armies of ignorance and artlessness and stupidity and hatred causing the rest of us to struggle and flee. But it’s we who are here on that plain. We, all of us good guys. We are not alone. And we will be true to one another.
In other words, the main takeaway from the poem is that we don’t have to face this world all by ourselves. Olear concludes,
[I]f we rewind the poem and read it again, keeping all this in mind, we understand that the sea remains calm and the night-air sweet. The eternal note of sadness we let in can also be let out. The tide that withdraws also returns, replenishing the Sea of Faith. And if we stay together, the ignorant armies will expend all their energy attacking one another, and the world really can and will be new and beautiful and various, full of unironic sweetness and light: a land of dreams.
Olear makes one other point which I also make in the chapter I devote to Arnold in my recent book. For all the pessimism expressed in “Dover Beach,” Arnold believed that poetry can save us. As he writes in “Study of Poetry,”
More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
Arnold even had a plan for bringing this about: universal education. Arnold’s day job was a school inspector and he believed that, if teachers taught poetry in the schools, we would experience a new Renaissance. Describing poetry (and cultural generally) as sweetness and light, he writes that
we must have a broad basis, must have sweetness and light for as many as possible. Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people’s life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive. Only it must be real thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light.
There’s only one point on which I differ from Olear. While he focuses on Arnold’s egalitarianism, emphasizing how culture should be extended to “as many as possible,” the poet also believed in class hierarchy. As Terry Eagleton points out in Literary Theory: An Introduction, Arnold wanted to use culture to maintain the existing class structure, with the middle class ascendent and the working class content with their lot in life. To quote from my book,
Each class will behave properly, he believes, if culture is the basis of the state. The aristocracy will act responsibly, giving up its ancient but now out-of-date privileges, while a cultured middle class will command the moral sway once held by the aristocracy. A cultured populace, finally, will refrain from “rowdy” behavior. In other words, all classes will read poetry, embracing its sensuous images (sweetness) and lofty sentiments (light) to create a more peaceful society.
“Notice who comes out ahead in this formulation,” I go on to say. “The upper class gives up power, the lower class ceases to strive for power, and the middle class takes power. Literature’s role is to make everyone happy with this situation.”
Or as Eagleton memorably sums up Arnold’s view, “If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.”
But set that objection aside for the moment and think about the impact of every child being introduced to literature. While we may not have achieved Arnold’s Renaissance, I believe that literature requirements have succeeded in opening young minds to new possibilities that they may not have otherwise contemplated. There’s a reason why rightwing authoritarians are attacking English teachers and librarians. Thoughts are blooming in language arts classrooms that are beyond parental control.
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Monday
When it comes to horrific disasters like the California fires, one can focus on the big picture, like I did in Thursday’s post, or one can zero in on individual tragedies, as I do today. Applying Raymond Chandler’s Red Wind to the fires led me to focus on the corruption that has contributed to them since social rot is at the basis of hard-boiled detective fiction. The noir crime novels of the 1930s were fueled by the Great Depression’s devastating impact on urban life and the rise of organized crime in response to prohibition. The genre resonates with us today because we have our own corruption, what with the fossil fuel industry and flunky politicians willing to sacrifice the planet for their own gain.
At the same time, on a more personal level we are witnessing heart-rending tragedies as people see their houses and all their possessions go up in smoke. They can therefore related to the sorrow of Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet upon seeing her own home burn down.
Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666
Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our house, July 10th. 1666. Copied Out of a Loose Paper.
In silent night when rest I took, For sorrow near I did not look, I wakened was with thund’ring noise And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice. That fearful sound of “fire” and “fire,” Let no man know is my Desire. I, starting up, the light did spy, And to my God my heart did cry To straighten me in my Distress And not to leave me succourless. Then, coming out, behold a space The flame consume my dwelling place. And when I could no longer look, I blest His name that gave and took, That laid my goods now in the dust. Yea, so it was, and so ‘twas just. It was his own, it was not mine, Far be it that I should repine; He might of all justly bereft But yet sufficient for us left. When by the ruins oft I past My sorrowing eyes aside did cast And here and there the places spy Where oft I sate and long did lie. Here stood that trunk, and there that chest, There lay that store I counted best. My pleasant things in ashes lie And them behold no more shall I. Under thy roof no guest shall sit, Nor at thy Table eat a bit. No pleasant talk shall ‘ere be told Nor things recounted done of old. No Candle e’er shall shine in Thee, Nor bridegroom‘s voice e’er heard shall be. In silence ever shalt thou lie, Adieu, Adieu, all’s vanity. Then straight I ‘gin my heart to chide, And did thy wealth on earth abide? Didst fix thy hope on mould’ring dust? The arm of flesh didst make thy trust? Raise up thy thoughts above the sky That dunghill mists away may fly. Thou hast a house on high erect Frameed by that mighty Architect, With glory richly furnished, Stands permanent though this be fled. It‘s purchased and paid for too By Him who hath enough to do. A price so vast as is unknown, Yet by His gift is made thine own; There‘s wealth enough, I need no more, Farewell, my pelf, farewell, my store. The world no longer let me love, My hope and treasure lies above.
While Bradstreet is attempting to find consolation in her faith—what are worldly possessions compared to the celestial mansion that awaits?—I’m struck by how intimately she describes what she has lost. Some of the objects are infused with memory: “And here and there the places spy/Where oft I sate and long did lie.” Other points to communal fellowship–“Under thy roof no guest shall sit,/ Nor at thy Table eat a bit”—and to sacred rituals such as weddings–“Nor bridegroom‘s voice e’er heard shall be.”
Side note: This last regret brings to mind the line from Yeats’s “Prayer for My Daughter”: “And may her bridegroom bring her to a house/ Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious.” Here too the house is more than a house.
After expressing her deep sadness, Bradstreet chides herself for placing so much value in earthly possessions. “All’s vanity,” she says, quoting Ecclesiastes, and then, “Didst fix thy hope on mould’ring dust?/ The arm of flesh didst make thy trust?” I suspect many of the California wildfire victims will not find comfort in such a vision and perhaps Bradstreet herself isn’t entirely convinced. But they at least have in the poet someone else who feels their pain.
Further note: My friend and colleague John Gatta, an Anne Bradstreet expert, writes in to mention one loss she did not mention:
Once reading further into the background of the house fire that Bradstreet describes, I was struck to learn that it also wiped out the unusually ample (for this time and place) book collection that the Bradstreets had gathered for themselves out in the wilderness. They considered these books, as you can well imagine, to be a precious link to the Old World Culture that had formed their personal identities. And they could surely not hope to replace them quickly or easily with an order sent to Amazon!
