Birds as Heavenly Messengers

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Tuesday

As I watch birds cluster around our birdfeeders—recently we had a cardinal and a pair of purple finches join the titmice, nuthatches, chickadees, and goldfinches we are accustomed to—I find myself returning to a magical poem written many years ago by my father. An enthusiastic birder as well as a poet specializing in light verse, Scott Bates combined two of his passions in “The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner.”

Although it seems straightforward enough, the poem is actually about mystical transformation. Multi-colored birds, drawn to a feeder, turn an adjoining cedar into a Christmas tree.   Partaking of a feast that appears miraculously, the birds themselves become a feast for the soul.

The transformation, my father writes, occurs “trysmegistically.” Wikipedia informs us that Hermes Trismegistus was a legendary figure from ancient Greece that originated as a combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. The wisdom attributed to this figure “combined a knowledge of both the material and the spiritual world, which rendered the writings attributed to him of great relevance to those who were interested in the interrelationship between the material and the divine.”

In ancient times, birds were seen as having the power to move between heaven and earth, just as did messenger-of the-gods Hermes. The winter solstice for pagan cultures and Christmas for Christian cultures are seen as a time when the membrane separating the mystical and the mundane is particularly porous. In the Christmas story, angel (to apply the words of the Edmund Sears Christmas carol) bend “near the earth to touch their harps of gold.” Such is also the case in my father’s poem, where we see angel-like birds “feasting and flying and doing a show/ For watchers on the earth below.”

We watchers, struggling through cold, dark days, live in hope that the world will be mystically transformed. “Peace on the earth, good will to men and women”: that is what midwinter rituals like Christmas are all about.

The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner
By Scott Bates

You can’t exactly call it greed
 When birds at feeders feed and feed
 On endless quantities of seed;

It’s sleeping in the cold all night
 And doing prodigies of flight
 That gives a bird an appetite.

They wait their turns with impatience
 Perched on the cedar by the fence
 Like so many Christmas ornaments,

Cardinal, goldfinch and chickadee,
 Turning it, trismegistically,
 Into an ancient Christmas tree

With angels hurrying to and fro
Feasting and flying and doing a show
For watchers on the earth below.

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Pickwickian Anger at Dems’ Surrender

Mr. Pickwick’s Trial

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Monday

Like many who fear Donald Trump’s authoritarian desires, I have been appalled at how Democrats are “bending the knee” to him. I feel like I’m Mr. Pickwick from Charles Dickens’s first novel, knowing he’s innocent while his lawyer praises opposing counsel for a job well done.

Actually, it’s worse than that. While Pickwick doesn’t understand England’s adversarial system of justice, it’s a system that at least has rules. Both plaintiff and defendant have the right to counsel, and lawsuits are settled by judges and juries who see it as their responsibility to be impartial as they settle cases. They may rule incorrectly, as occurs with Pickwick, but the idea of fair play underlies the system.

In our case, by contrast, Trump has proved conclusively that he doesn’t believe in fair play. He will throw out the rules when he doesn’t win, and most of the GOP is on board with this: to be a current day member of the GOP, you must ascribe to the “big lie” that Trump won the 2020 election. Indeed, when Republicans lose, they are sometimes prepared to run the same playbook, as we are currently seeing in a North Carolina judges race.

Yet in spite of this, Democrats are blithely behaving as though the threat isn’t there. In an enlightening segment the other night, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes pointed to a number of instances where Democrats are surrendering in advance to the incoming Trump administration. These include Joe Biden inviting Trump to the White House for a friendly fireside chat; John Fetterman praising the selection of Elise Stefanik for U.N. ambassador because of her support for Israel; Representative Ro Khanna endorsing Trump’s cost-cutting commission; and Democratic Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado supporting anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy as Trump’s choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

Since Hayes’s article came out, we can add Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal praising Elon Musk as a free speech advocate, even after we’ve just seen Musk twist the power of Twitter (now X) to help elect Trump. And there’s also Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is doing all he can to appear conciliatory, as though democracy itself is not threatened.

Schumer could, if he so chose, announce that Democrats will vote against any of Trump’s cabinet picks who refuse to acknowledge that Biden won the 2020 election—which is to say, anyone who denies the legitimacy of democratic elections. Is loyalty to the Constitution too much to ask of people seeking to lead major government agencies?  

Hayes notes that there’s a “similar vibe from the titans of industry,” what with both Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Jeff Bezos of Amazon and the Washington Post donating a million dollars each to Trump’s inauguration. And now ABC is giving Trump $15 million to settle a frivolous defamation suit.

Pickwick is as appalled at lawyer behavior as Hayes is at Democratic buckling. In his case his landlady, misinterpreting a compliment as a marriage proposal, brings a breach of promise suit against him when he doesn’t follow through. Knowing that he never proposed, Pickwick refuses to pay damages, even after a jury finds him guilty and he is threatened with prison. He is particularly appalled at how his own lawyer sees this as business as usual.

Dodson and Fogg are opposing counsel and, while Pickwick regards them as unscrupulous, his own counsel is impressed with their tactics:

‘By Jove!’ said Perker, taking both hands out of his pockets, and striking the knuckles of his right against the palm of his left, emphatically, ‘those are the cleverest scamps I ever had anything to do with!’

When Pickwick calls them scoundrels, Perker replies, “That’s a matter of opinion, you know, and we won’t dispute about terms; because of course you can’t be expected to view these subjects with a professional eye.”

Given our current political situation, I imagine Democrat politicians saying something similar to those of us who are complaining. Rather than see Trump as an evil man, they regard him as a clever scamp who deserves grudging admiration for having come up with a successful campaign strategy. Forget about all their previous accusations that Trump has been assaulting the Constitution. Looking at the campaign “with a professional eye,” they now see him as having been more successful at the game than they were.

The admiration for Dodson and Fogg continues later in the novel. Perkins and his legal assistant Lowten admire how the landlady’s lawyers throw her into debtor’s prison for her inability to pay their legal fees. It’s a shrewd move as it’s the only way they can get any money out of Pickwick, who out of principle has chosen to go to prison rather than pay the judgment against him. And their tactic works: because he feels compassion for the woman, Pickwick coughs up the money, thereby getting both of them out of prison.

Rather than being appalled at their hardball tactics, Perker and Lowten are impressed:

‘The sharpest practitioners I ever knew, Sir,’ observed Lowten.

‘Sharp!’ echoed Perker. ‘There’s no knowing where to have them.’

‘Very true, Sir, there is not,’ replied Lowten; and then, both master and man pondered for a few seconds, with animated countenances, as if they were reflecting upon one of the most beautiful and ingenious discoveries that the intellect of man had ever made. When they had in some measure recovered from their trance of admiration, [messenger] Job Trotter discharged himself of the rest of his commission. Perker nodded his head thoughtfully, and pulled out his watch.

While Perker and Lowten are lost in admiration, however, Pickwick lets Dodson and Fogg know what he thinks of them:

“You are a couple of mean—’
‘Remember, sir, you pay dearly for this,’ said Fogg.
‘—Rascally, pettifogging robbers!’ continued Mr. Pickwick, taking not the least notice of the threats that were addressed to him.
‘Robbers!’ cried Mr. Pickwick, running to the stairhead, as the two attorneys descended.
‘Robbers!’ shouted Mr. Pickwick, breaking from Lowten and Perker, and thrusting his head out of the staircase window.

While I love Joe Biden and am grateful for all he has done for us, does he now retract his assessment that “America itself is at stake”?  Will he continue to send out signals that this is a presidential transition like any other? Will these other Democrats continue to behave as though Trump isn’t prepared to dismantle the institutions of the republic itself? Chris Hayes says they will pay a price for their early surrender:

The rejection of democracy is still alive and well. Democrats bending the knee to Trump because they agree with him on Israel or cutting government spending is not going to address the problem. My strong belief is that everyone trying to will us toward normalcy by acting like everything is normal is in for a rude awakening.

Or as Pickwick puts it, “Robbers!”

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Advent as a Final Notification

Adrienne Rich

Sunday

While I don’t think Adrienne Rich’s “Final Notification” was written as an Advent poem–although Rich was raised Episcopalian by her mother, her father was Jewish and she self-identified as a Jew– it works as one. Granted, the poem is deliberately obscure and you are free to disagree. If this were one of my student essays, I would mark “vague referent” every time she uses the word “it.” The poem, however, invites readers to provide their own noun. So imagine, for “it,” substituting “God’s presence,” which entered humanity through the medium of Jesus.

As Rich tells us, “it will take all your thought/ it will take all your heart, / it will take all your breath.” Or in the words of Jesus, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

There are, to be sure, other candidates for the pronoun, including “death” and “love.” But they too hint at some form of all-encompassing fulfillment. In any event, the poem points towards final transcendence.

Final Notification
By Adrienne Rich

it will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simple

it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
it will not be long, it will occupy your thought
as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our lives

it will be short, it will take all your breath
it will not be simple, it will become your will

The image of an occupied city reminds me of John Donne’s famous “Sonnet 14.” In it, Donne laments that he has allowed Satan to usurp his mind (“I, like an usurp’d town to another due”) and he prays for God to liberate him and occupy the city in turn. “Batter my heart three personed-God,” he begs and then later, “That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend/ Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.”

There’s a nice contrast between a city being occupied and a bed being occupied, the first denoting conquest, the second comfort and safety. Allowing Christ to enter our lives will indeed take our breath away, but it is also what we always wanted. While we may resist surrendering ego, in the end “you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you.”

The “final notification” assures us that becoming one with the divine will become our will.

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Trumpism and Penelope’s Suitors

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Friday

My faculty group has been discussing The Odyssey and now, thanks to the insights of our brilliant young member Ross Macdonald, I realize it applies to some of our own critical issues. A key theme in the epic is the violation of social norms.

Of the many norms that Donald Trump has violated, none is more critical than the peaceful transfer of power. If candidates don’t concede elections they have lost, the very foundation of democracy is threatened. In Homeric society, meanwhile, there were accepted norms about how to treat strangers: the whole system of intercourse between kingdoms was put at risk if the laws of hospitality were breached. Travelers had to know that they could trade goods and information, not be killed, enslaved or eaten, when they visited other lands.

The Trojan War was fought over an egregious violation of hospitality—Paris eloping with his host’s wife—and in The Odyssey we see some who violate and honor the practice. The Phaeacians load Odysseus down with gifts and the swineherd Eumaeus, even though he does not recognize his king, opens up his table to him. The barbaric cyclops Polyphemus, by contrast, plans to have him for dinner.

The most notable violators, of course, are the suitors, who descend on Odysseus’s household in droves. They are in the process of devouring all of his wealth when he returns to the island.

The suitors are particularly infuriating in how they accuse others of sponging off of Odysseus’s riches, even while they are doing so themselves. They are like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, two billionaires charged with cutting the budget: even as they themselves have benefited greatly from Trump’s tax cuts and various federal subsidies, they have set their sights on American entitlements like Social Security and Medicare as well as welfare programs for the poor. In Odyssey, the most obnoxious of the suitors lambastes disguised-as-a-beggar Odysseus. Note that the handout he is begrudging Odysseus belongs not to himself but to Odysseus:

But here Antínoös broke in, shouting:
                                                                    “God!
What evil wind blew in this pest?
                                                                     Get over,
stand in the passage! Nudge my table, will you?
Egyptian whips are sweet
to what you’ll come to here, you nosing rat,
making your pitch to everyone!

In their subsequent interchange, Antínoös heaves a stool at Odysseus, adding to his breach of hospitality decorum. The violation makes the other suitors nervous:

But now the rest were mortified, and someone
spoke from the crowd of young bucks to rebuke him:
“A poor show, that—hitting this famished tramp—
bad business, if he happened to be a god.
You know they go in foreign guise, the gods do,
looking like strangers, turning up
in towns and settlements to keep an eye
on manners, good or bad.”
                                                But at this notion
Antínoös only shrugged.

Two other tightfisted leaches are the beggar Iros and the goatherd Melánthios. Iros, who has a comfortable relationship with the suitors, sees Odysseus as competition while Melánthios, who delivers Odysseus’s goats to feed them, is like one of those Trump supporters who thinks his proximity to power gives him license to insult and deride. Both remind me of those Americans who want government-subsidized programs for themselves but not for others, especially not for African Americans.

Although the conservative red states receive proportionately more of the federal budget than do the blue states—the blue state pay more in, the red states take more out—our Melánthioses swagger around, boasting of their independence. (Perhaps their sense of perpetual grievance comes from their secret knowledge that they are dependent.) Here’s the shepherd berating the swineherd for escorting beggar Odysseus to the hall:

                                               [N]o sooner
had he laid eyes upon the wayfarers
than he began to growl and taunt them both
so grossly that Odysseus’ heart grew hot:

“Here comes one scurvy type leading another!
God pairs them off together, every time.
Swineherd, where are you taking your new pig,
that stinking beggar there, licker of pots?
How many doorposts has he rubbed his back on
whining for garbage, where a noble guest
would rate a cauldron or a sword?

Like our Republican legislators, who insist on work requirements for welfare recipients while dipping into the public pot themselves, Melánthios has a proposition for the beggar:

                                                Hand him
over to me, I’ll make a farmhand of him,
a stall scraper, a fodder carrier! Whey
for drink will put good muscle on his shank!
No chance: he learned his dodges long ago—
no honest sweat. He’d rather tramp the country
begging, to keep his hoggish belly full.

The return of the king means a restoration of the sacred norms, although it cannot be accomplished without violence. In a dramatic entrance, Odysseus lets the suitors know how they have offended the gods before he begins his bloodletting:

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.

Just as the suitors have contempt for the gods, so Trump has contempt for democratic norms and for the Constitution that governs us. But whereas Odysseus resorts to violence, we must rely on our democratic norms to carry us through the next four years. We can expect a fair amount of suitor-like looting ahead of us as Trump attempts to establish his version of Putin’s kleptocracy—he has a number of American oligarchs in tow who are itching to get their hands on more of America’s wealth, starting with tax breaks—but in the past we been able to self-correct.

The way democracy works, we must be our own Odysseus.

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A Lovely Poem Celebrating Aging

Dudley Delffs


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Thursday

My good friend and neighbor, author Dudley Delffs, turned 60 last week and wrote a poem describing what it feels like. As his observations apply to anyone approaching the later years of life, I got his permission to share it here.

Dudley notes that life no longer feels as tempestuous as it did when he was young. “Turning sixty,” he observes, “isn’t the hurricane reaching landfall but angry waves out at sea kicking up.” While we may still encounter disasters, they take quieter and stealthier forms.

Maybe that‘s because we’re less likely to take adrenaline-pumping risks. Turning sixty means resisting “the urgent risk to accelerate on dead man’s curve.” Instead, we become “a steady hand turning the wheel.”  Rather than hitting the brakes on black ice, we “slow down to enjoy the/ ruddy winter sunset beyond a foreground of neon signs and electric lines.”

I’m thinking that those neon signs and electric lines may the the sign of a fatal car crash. But because we too are moving toward death, we make a point to enjoy sunsets and other of life’s small pleasures as we inch forward.

The other images in the poem, some of them deliberate clichés and meant to be seen as such, express similar sentiments. I also hear echoes of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulyssses.” Where Dudley writes, “And there is loss—how could there not be over six decades?—but the wins have surprised you,” Tennyson’s speaker reflects, “Though much is taken, much abides.” And where Dudley writes, “The dimming day is undeniable, but twilight embers ambient gold all around you,” we have Tennyson’s “The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: the long day wanes.”

It’s a lovely reflection to accompany one’s sixtieth birthday. Many happy returns, Dudley.

Sixty
By Dudley Delffs

Turning sixty isn’t the hurricane reaching landfall but angry waves out at sea kicking up.
Not the conflagration incinerating miles of forest but careless sparks catching dry tinder.
Not the loss of organs or limbs but unrelenting turn of letterpress embossing soft flesh.

Not the urgent risk to accelerate on dead man’s curve as much as a steady hand turning the
wheel. Turning sixty isn’t hitting the brakes on black ice as much as slowing down to enjoy the
ruddy winter sunset beyond a foreground of neon signs and electric lines. Turning sixty

isn’t the hard bridle of desire galloping into unspoiled wilderness again and again but a gentle
canter along a trail overgrown by weeds and untamed briers. Not the folly of going all in on
a pair of jacks but the wisdom to fold long before the bend in the river demands greater loss.

And there is loss—how could there not be over six decades?—but the wins have surprised you
just as much, never the lottery but an occasional scratch card to keep you going, a go-bag of
barely enough just in the nick of time. Moments when you kept your appointment with your

self and showed up early. Sixty years smother some dreams and kindle others, revealing what’s
worth killing and what’s worth living for. The dimming day is undeniable, but twilight embers
ambient gold all around you, a gilt frame glimmering, fading slant hope into the darkness.

©Dudley Delffs. Printed with permission of the author

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Nikki Giovanni, R.I.P.

Nikki Giovanni

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Wednesday

When a great poet dies, as Nikki Giovanni did this past weekend, I always use the occasion to revisit poems I have enjoyed over the years. The two I share today, both personal favorites, reflect two different sides of the African American poet.

The first, “Rosa Parks,” points to her activist side, which was honed in the civil rights battles and the Black militancy movement of the 1960s, earning her the title “the Poet of the Black Revolution.” While the poem celebrates the woman who set off the Montgomery bus boycott while paying homage to Emmitt Till, it also honors some of the invisible members of the Black community—the Pullman porters—who were also important in the struggle for racial equality.

And then there is “Nikki-Rosa,” a poem written in the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker—which is to say, Black authors who were less interested in the Black-White struggle than in relationships within the Black community. The problem with always focusing on the struggle is that it can appear that Whites are central to Black identity whereas, sometimes, we Whites are just irrelevant. And that’s fine.

Both poems focus on aspects of Black life that most outsiders do not see.

Rosa Parks

This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender to the Black Americans in the South so they would know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birthplace of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954 when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “separate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in 1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grandchildren on his knee telling them about his summer riding the rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money, Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unacceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago, where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordinary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama, who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would
there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs. Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system, the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not being able to stand it. She sat back down.

Nikki-Rosa

childhood remembrances are always a drag   
if you’re Black
you always remember things like living in Woodlawn   
with no inside toilet
and if you become famous or something
they never talk about how happy you were to have   
your mother
all to yourself and
how good the water felt when you got your bath   
from one of those
big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in   
and somehow when you talk about home   
it never gets across how much you
understood their feelings
as the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale
and even though you remember
your biographers never understand
your father’s pain as he sells his stock   
and another dream goes
And though you’re poor it isn’t poverty that
concerns you
and though they fought a lot
it isn’t your father’s drinking that makes any difference   
but only that everybody is together and you
and your sister have happy birthdays and very good   
Christmases
and I really hope no white person ever has cause   
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy

Thank you for sharing your passion and your vision with us, Ms. Giovanni. Rest in peace.

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How to Live under Authoritarianism

Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert

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Tuesday

One of my favorite bloggers is Greg Olear at Prevail because he periodically applies literature to current events. Recently he alerted me to a great lyric by Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, who gives us advice about how to handle dictatorial regimes. He knows whereof he speaks, having lived in Poland under first Hitler and then Stalin and the Soviet Union. We may well need his guidance in the coming years.

In “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” Herbert begins by setting the parameters of what we are to do when authoritarians control our lives: we must be like Jason and the Argonauts, who sought the golden fleece. Unlike the Greek myth, however, the fleece is described as “nothingness,” which captures the major theme of the poem: Herbert is counseling us to do what is right, even if it doesn’t achieve the results we want. The quest is more important than the attainment.

This is important as we see many already bending the knee to Donald Trump, despite the uncertain attainments to be gained in doing so. These include multiple figures in the corporate media, who are “obeying in advance,” thereby violating historian Timothy Snyder’s #1 rule about dealing with dictator wannabes. Herbert counsels us to “go upright among those who are on their knees” and also “among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust.”

I’m thinking that the backs are turned to avoid meeting our eyes—“eyes one dare not meet,” T.S. Eliot writes in “The Hollow Men”—while those toppled may be past tyrants. The important thing is to maintain one’s moral compass.

You were saved from corruption, Herbert informs us, “not in order to live” but in order to bear witness. He tells us to

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important

As the poem progresses, Herbert calls for anger and scorn to be directed at “the informers executioners cowards” who insult and beat down others. And although the oppressors may ultimately throw lumps of dirt as our caskets are lowered into the earth while rewriting our biographies to remove our critical comments, Herbert assures that winning is not the end goal. Nor should we forgive because “it is not in your power/ to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn.”

By this point in the poem, Herbert realizes he runs the risk of counseling us to become self-righteous judges so he shifts. “Beware however of unnecessary pride,” he says, and then, as a humbling exercise, he advises us to “keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror.” He even questions (like Moses) why he himself has been called to deliver the message. “Weren’t there better ones than I,” he asks.

Since perpetual anger can hollow out even the most committed idealists, turning them into dry and bitter souls, Herbert reminds to focus on life’s tiny blessings:

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak

light on a wall the splendor of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

And then Herbert tells us again that the journey is not ultimately about attainment. It’s about holding on to our humanity as we cross the desert.

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

In many ways, this is not a comfortable poem. In fact, whether through mockery or through violence, the “informers executioners cowards” will punish those who take principled stands. Herbert ends with an image of cold skulls and of heroes who, while they died heroically, nevertheless died. Hector and Roland were killed while fighting in hopeless battles while Gilgamesh learned that immortality is out of his reach:

and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

So is life a kingdom without limit or a city of ashes? Fortunately for us, the marching orders are the same in both cases. In the end, Herbert tells us what we must do to live a meaningful and authentic life:

Be faithful Go

Here’s the poem in its entirety:

The Envoy of Mr. Cogito
By Zbigniew Herbert
Trans. by Bogdana and John Carpenter

Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

let your sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards—they will win

they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak

light on a wall the splendor of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

Be faithful Go

Olear tells us that Robert Haas wrote that Herbert was “an ironist and a minimalist who writes as if it were the task of the poet, in a world full of loud lies, to say what is irreducibly true in a level voice.” It wasn’t easy to do so in the years of German and Soviet rule, but Herbert didn’t sign up for easy.

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Apologies for Press Handling of Gaza

Ammiel Alcalay

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Monday

An artist friend who lives in Assisi, Lani Irwin, alerted me to Ammiel Alcalay’s “My Apologies,” a poem about the horrific killing that never seems to stop in Palestine. I have Israeli and Jewish friends who are as horrified as the rest of the world at how Israel’s leaders are perpetrating slaughter in their name. They are far from the only ones to believe their democracy has been hijacked by authoritarian wannabes.

Alcalay is the son of Sephardic Jews who immigrated to the United States from Serbia. In his poem apologizing for how America is enabling the slaughter, he cites the important Iraqi poet Bulunda al-Haidari, who wrote his own poem entitled “My Apologies.” Reading the first apologies poem allows us to better understand Alcalay’s follow-up.

Haidari, a Kurdish poet from northern Iraq who was forced into exile by Saddam Hussein, helped modernize the Arabic literary tradition. According to biographical notes on the All Poetry website, what distinguished Haidari’s poetry and “makes it so brilliant” is the way that he uses his intimate knowledge to express the impact of political violence and the sorrow of living in exile.

In Haidari’s “My Apologies,” the poet expresses his sadness at how Hussein has destroyed the nation that produced The Arabian Nights. “We used to have a sea, shells, pearls and the hour of birth,” he laments. (I’m thinking “hour of birth” refers to Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of civilization.) While the Hussein’s television propaganda (a.k.a., “the newsreader”) proclaims the country’s mythical greatness, Haidari sees the truth: “There is no sea in Baghdad”—only “burnt up shadows of the midday sun”:

My Apologies
By Bulunda al-Haidari

My apologies, my honored guests,
The newsreader lied in his last bulletin:
There is no sea in Baghdad
Nor pearls
Not even an island,
And everything Sinbad said
About the queens of the jinn
About the ruby and coral islands
About the thousand thousands flowing from the sultan’s hand
Is a myth born in the summer heat
Of my small town
In the burnt-up shadows of the midday sun
In the silent nights of the exiled stars.
We used to have
A sea, shells, pearls
And a polished moon
And fishermen returning in the evening;
We used to have,
Said the newsreader’s last bulletin,
An innocent, dream paradise;
For we, my honored guests,
Lie to be born again,
Lie to stretch in our long history
The myth told by Sinbad –
We used to have
A sea, shells, pearls
And the hour of birth.

My apologies, my honored guests,
The newsreader lied in his last bulletin:
There is no sea in Baghdad
Nor pearls
Not even an island.

In his own “My Apologies” poem, written this year, the American-born Alcalay apologizes for America’s own newscasters, calling them “the petty stenographers of the crooked rulers.” I’ve written about how the corporate media sane-washed Trump, and Alcalay sees them as having done the same with (in his words) “the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Palestine.”

“Everything they say and write is a lie,/ about law and freedom, about equality/ and justice,” Alcalay writes before pointing out “the rubble of the bombs we make and sell” and “the silent cries of limbless orphans.” It’s an angry poem, driven to fury by his disillusion with an America that is betraying its ideals. His fury may be compounded by his Jewish anger at Israel’s own betrayal.

It’s a disillusion I remember experiencing as a college student during the Vietnam War.

Unexpectedly, however, Alcalay’s poem draws on al-Haidari’s original “My Apologies” to end on a note of hope. To read the first poem is to understand the concluding punch of the second.

My Apologies
By Ammiel Alcalay
after Bulund al-Haidari

To the hostages of our policies, my apologies—
the petty stenographers of the crooked rulers
in the once fancy now crumbling cities
of our fading Empire lied then.
They lied then and they lie now.
Everything they say and write is a lie,
about law and freedom, about equality
and justice, in the rubble of the bombs
we make and sell, in the silent cries
of limbless orphans, in the night
lit by white phosphorus and the
relentless sound of buzzing drones.
They tell us we used to have things of
value, even things we ourselves made,
and that it was a place like no other.
All I know is that Sinbad once sailed
to Gaza and so to Gaza he’ll sail once again.

In other words, don’t abandon your belief in mythic renewal.

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Notre Dame: Two Arms Raised in Prayer

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Sunday

Thanks to an extraordinary restoration effort, the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris opened its doors this week for the first time since the catastrophic fire five years ago. Back then I wrote a post on how Victor Hugo saved the cathedral in the 19th century with his novel Notre Dame de Paris, a.k.a. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831).

Théophile Gautier, the poet who popularized the cry “art of art’s sake” (“l’art pour l’art”), wrote a paean to the cathedral in the 19th century that captures much of its mystery. While it’s too long to share in its entirety—you can go here to read the whole thing—I have chosen a few of my favorite stanzas.

Gautier begins the poem by telling how, when feeling hemmed in by mundane life—by a world so small and stifling that he feels he can touch the horizon with his finger—he visits the cathedral at sunset. Note how he carries a copy of Hugo’s book when he does so:

Weary of this dead calm where faded in advance,
Like water that falls asleep, our years languish;
Tired of stifling my life in a narrow living room,
With young fools and frivolous women,
Exchanging banal words without profit;
Tired of always touching my horizon with my finger.

To make me whole again and widen my soul,
Your book in my pocket, at the towers of Notre-Dame;
I have often gone, Victor,
At eight o’clock, in summer, when the sun sets,
And its tawny disc, at the edge of the roofs it touches,
Floats like a big golden balloon.

Set against the darkening sky, Notre Dame seems to raise its twin towers to God before falling asleep:

As, for its good evening, in a richer hue,
The day that flees covers the holy cathedral,
Outlined in broad strokes on the fiery horizon;
And the twin towers, these stone canticles,
Seem like the two great arms that the city in prayer,
Before falling asleep, raises towards its God.

The cathedral’s famous flying buttresses Gautier accurately compares to a crab or a spider:

The blossoming nave, between its thin ribs,
Seems like a giant crab moving its claws,
An enormous spider, like networks,
Throwing to the front of the towers, to the black side of the walls,
In aerial threads, in delicate meshes,
Its tulles of granite, its lacework of arches.

Meanwhile, the stained stained-glass window, lit up by the setting sun, suddenly blooms like “a hundred magical flowerbeds”:

In the lead diamonds of the diaphanous stained glass window,
Fresher than the gardens of Alcine or Morgane,
Under a warm kiss of sun,
Strangely populated by heraldic monsters,
Suddenly a hundred magical flowerbeds bloom
With azure and vermilion flowers.

And then there are stone statues and stone carvings of gargoyles, dragons, basilisks, and other fantastical creatures, along with “myriads of saints”:

Mastiffs howling at the end of the gutters; tarasques,
Wurms and basilisks, dragons and fanciful dwarves,
Knights conquering giants,
Bundles of heavy pillars, sheaves of columns,
Myriads of saints rolled into collars,
Around the three gaping porches.

Lancets, pendants, warheads, slender clovers
Where the crazy arabesque hangs its lace
And its goldwork, crafted with great labor;
Gables with open holes, jagged spiers,
Needles of crows and angels surmounted,
The cathedral shines like an enamel jewel!

In the second part of the poem, Gautier recounts ascending the dark and narrow winding staircase to the top of one of the towers, something I have done five or six times in my life. Coming out of darkness into the blue, Gautier reports experiencing a “sublime vertigo.” He’s not the only poet to have had this reaction. In a poem comparing mounting the stairs to France groping through dark times, English poet Daniel Gabriel Rossetti writes,

As one who, groping in a narrow stair,
Hath a strong sound of bells upon his ears,
Which, being at a distance off, appears
Quite close to him because of the pent air:
So with this France. She stumbles file and square
Darkling and without space for breath…

Here’s Gautier: 

But what is this? when in the shadows you
Follow the slender staircase with countless spirals
And you finally see the blue again,
The void above and below the abyss,
A fear seizes you, a sublime vertigo
As you feel so close to God!

As under the bird that perches there, a branch
Under your feet that it flees, the tower quivers and leans,
The drunken sky totters and waltzes around you;
The abyss opens its mouth, and the spirit of vertigo,
Lashing you with its wing in sneering acrobatics
And makes the guardrails tremble at the front of the towers…

Gautier looks down at Paris from the high perch—the poem predates the Eiffel Tower and so is the highest building around—and says it is like seeing the core of a volcano:

Oh ! your heart beats, dominating from this peak,
Self, puny and small, a city thus made;
To be able, with a single glance, to embrace this great whole,
Standing up there, closer to the sky than to the earth,
Like the gliding eagle, seeing within the crater,
Far, far away, the smoke and the lava which is boiling!

Although the city is far away, still it’s a glorious sight. Remember, he’s seeing all of this at sunset:

How big it is! how beautiful ! the frail chimneys,
With their smoky turbans crowned at all times,
On the saffron sky trace their black profiles,
And the oblique light, with bold edges,
Throwing rich fires on all sides
In the mirror of the river enshrines a hundred mirrors.

As in a joyous ball, a young girl’s breast,
In the light of the torches lights up and sparkles
Under the jewels and finery;
In the light of the sunset, the water lights up, and the Seine
Cradles more jewels, certainly, than the queen ever
wears on her collar on great days.

The poet shifts in the third and final part, however. Beautiful though Paris is, it doesn’t compare with the cathedral. In fact, everything “sags and dies” when Gautier descends:

And yet, as beautiful as it is, O Notre-Dame,
Paris thus dressed in its robe of flame,
It is only so from the top of your towers.
When we go down, everything metamorphoses,
Everything sags and dies, nothing grandiose anymore,
Nothing left, except you, whom we always admire.

The poem concludes with Gautier lambasting Paris’s architectural taste. Like the British Pre-Raphaelites, he prefers medieval gothic (“Dantesque dress”) to Greek classical and other more recent architectural movements, finding it to be more spiritual. In his punchy final stanza, he goes so far as to say that Notre Dame surrounded by these “profane porticos,” “coquettish parthenons,” and “courtesan churches” is like “a chaste matron in the middle of whores!”

Who could prefer, in his pedantic taste,
To the serious and straight folds of your Dantesque dress,
These poor Greek orders which are dying of cold,
These bastard pantheons, copied in the school,
Antique thrift store borrowed from Vignole,
And, none of which outside can’t stand up straight.

O you! masons of the century, atheist architects,
Brains, thrown into a uniform mold,
People of the ruler and the compass;
Build boudoirs for stockbrokers,
And plaster huts for men of mire;
But houses for God, no!

Among the new palaces, the profane porticos,
The coquettish parthenons, courtesan churches,
With their Greek pediments on their Latin pillars,
The shameless houses of the pagan city;
It seems, to see you, Our Christian Lady,
A chaste matron in the middle of whores!

It was in this spirit that the cathedral was restored, often with materials that were the same as those destroyed and with original tools as well. Gautier could well have been pleased with the results.

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