Here’s a Rainer Maria Rilke poem that expands both mind and spirit in eight short lines. While different readers will take away different things, for me at the moment it captures the opening up that comes with aging—or should I say, that can come with aging if we resist the impulse to close down and retreat into safe and familiar spaces.
As regards Rilke’s concluding question, I want to answer, “All of the above.” Here’s the poem:
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I will give myself to it
I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?
The first stanza reminds me of the passage in Tennyson’s “Ulysses,”
I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move.
Ulysses in the poem is determined to live his life in widening circles, even though he is old (“tho’ much is taken, much abides”). Refusing to stop exploring, he resolves to continue journeying on until he either touches the Happy Isles or the gulfs “wash us down.” Ulysses, however, focuses solely on self whereas Rilke’s vision encompasses all humanity throughout all of time. We all of us have been circling something that is at once fixed and mysterious.
And unlike Yeats’s famous falcon, which cannot hear the falconer, we never lose touch with the primordial tower. Although we can never know its exact nature, we recognize it as our guide and our passion. We know that, through us, it sings a great song.
Since today the fall colors are exploding all around us, and since today is also the birthday of poet e.e. cummings, I share a wonderful autumn poem by the poet who loves playing with punctuation, line spacing, capitalization rules, and sentence syntax generally.
The poem begins with the contrast between the glory of fall colors and the dust that they are about to become. “the last immortal leaf is dead,” the poet tells us before further observing, “this is the passing of all shining things.” What has been “glory” is seen as a last spasm of life before we pass “blandly into receptive earth.”
Rather than lament our death, however, cummings counsels us to step into it: “O let us descend.” In fact, he invites “the shimmering wind” to take
these fragile splendors from us crumple them hide
them in thy breath drive them in nothingness
After all, this is how creation works, and our best response is to welcome death (“for we would sleep”), stepping into it without lingering and without a backward glance. If we enter into the “serious steep darkness” with “straight glad feet” and “glory girded faces,” we will ruin fear. Recall that the earlier reference to glory—those gorgeous fall colors—now lightens up our faces as we move into the great unknown.
the glory is fallen out of the sky the last immortal leaf is dead and the gold year a formal spasm in the
dust this is the passing of all shining things therefore we also blandly
into receptive earth, O let us descend
take shimmering wind these fragile splendors from us crumple them hide
them in thy breath drive them in nothingness for we would sleep
this is the passing of all shining things no lingering no backward- wondering be unto us O
soul, but straight glad feet fear ruining and glory girded faces
lead us into the serious steep darkness
The poem brings other poems to mind. For instance, Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” laments that passing of the glory—in this case, the glory of early spring
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
I also think of Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods” and wonder if she was influenced by the cummings poem:
Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of
of light are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment…
The poem moves on from this image to one of now anonymous ponds (because no longer filled with light and color), leading the poet to conclude,
Every year everything I have ever learned
in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss…
The poem I most think of, however—in fact, I think cummings is having a dialogue with it—is Percy Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” Like cummings, Shelley uses the word “drive” as he addresses the wind:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
The “leaves” here function as pages of poetry as well as tree leaves. Whereas Shelley imagines the dead leaves leading to new life, however, cummings wishes to remain asleep. So while Shelley ends with the rhetorical question, “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” cummings appears content with winter.
In this respect, he is more like Oliver, who also embraces death when the moment arrives. Here’s how her poem continues on:
…the black river of loss whose other side
is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world
you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it
against your bones knowing your own life depends on it: and, when the times comes to let it go, to let it go.
However you see the future, note that all these poets believe we should fully embrace nature’s color when they are at their most intense. Which in Sewanee at the moment is right now.
Here’s a belated post in honor of National Coming Out Day, which was this past Monday. This awareness day, which encourages closeted members of the LGBTQ community to emerge into the daylight, hopes to encourage acceptance. After all, once people realize that there are far more in that community than previously thought—including friends and family members—then a new norm can be established.
Poet Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” applies to LGBTQ folk along with others who have been marginalized. As “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” (so she described herself), Lorde understood well what it means to be marginalized. In her poem, she sees herself “at the shoreline/ standing upon the constant edges of decision/ crucial and alone.”
The marginalized, Lorde says, often do not have choices in what we do (“cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice”). We must take what life offers to live our lives. Even as our own dreams die, however, we do what they can to keep our children’s hopes alive.
Unfortunately, Lorde continues, what this means is that our fear controls us. At first this fear, learnt at the mother’s breast, seems to be a friend because it appears to keep us safe. If we stay silent, then perhaps we will survive. And for a moment, that survival seems to validate the behavior. For one who was “never meant to survive,” this represents a temporary triumph.
Fear turns out to be a false friend, however, dominating and ruining every aspect of our lives. Although we stay silent on the belief that their words “will not be heard nor welcomed,” the fear remains with us even in our silence.
And if that’s the case, we may as well speak out. If it is indeed that case that “we were never meant to survive,” then we can draw strength from that. Those who have nothing to lose have nothing to fear.
As millions have discovered when they came out, the relief that comes from that act is far preferable to lives governed by fear. And by coming out as they have, members of the LGBTQ community have radically changed society’s beliefs. We are not home free yet—that’s why it’s important to continue observing National Coming Out Day—but the change in public perception has been remarkable.
A Litany for Survival
For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children’s mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours;
For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid
So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.
From time to time, I share material that appears on the twitter feed of my college professor son. Tobias Wilson-Bates, who teaches English at Georgia Gwinnett College, is always stimulating and always fun. (I know I’m prejudiced but others find him so as well.) Recently, he promised that, if his twitter followers reached 7000—stratospheric for a twitter feed that focuses on 18th and 19th century British literature—he would give us his top ten British poems from 1800-1900.
Having attained the 7000-follower mark yesterday, he shared his list. After apologizing for not including other traditions on his list (American, Australian, Indian), and sounding relieved that the century mark meant that he could exclude Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (which contains Tintern Abbey, “Kublai Khan,”and Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner), he came up with the following list, along with his rationale for choosing it. I’ve included the excerpts he attaches from the less familiar poems:
10. I’m immediately going to cheat with a tie at 10. Light verse often doesn’t make these kind of lists but “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1870) by Edward Lear and “Jabberwocky” (1871) by Lewis Carroll are two of the most enduring and mind-expanding poems of the century.
9. A poet mostly remembered as a novelist, who I always read instead as a poet. [After all, Emily Bronte] once wrote a prose poem so long that they called it a novel instead. Emily Bronte’s “No Coward Soul is Mine” (1846). A poem that tears at the fabric of life and meaning. Incredible.
No coward soul is mine No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere I see Heaven’s glories shine And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
O God within my breast Almighty ever-present Deity Life, that in me hast rest, As I Undying Life, have power in Thee
Vain are the thousand creeds That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain, Worthless as withered weeds Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by thy infinity, So surely anchored on The steadfast rock of Immortality.
With wide-embracing love Thy spirit animates eternal years Pervades and broods above, Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears
Though earth and moon were gone And suns and universes ceased to be And Thou wert left alone Every Existence would exist in thee
There is not room for Death Nor atom that his might could render void Since thou art Being and Breath And what thou art may never be destroyed.
8. George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862) 16 sonnets to grow old and die with. Lines that feel like they have left lacerations across my skin.
Sonnet 1
By this he knew she wept with waking eyes: That, at his hand’s light quiver by her head, The strange low sobs that shook their common bed Were called into her with a sharp surprise, And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes, Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes Her giant heart of Memory and Tears Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat Sleep’s heavy measure, they from head to feet Were moveless, looking through their dead black years, By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall. Like sculptured effigies they might be seen Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between; Each wishing for the sword that severs all.
7. I forgot another caveat that poets only get to appear once on the list, so sorry in advance to Keats (obvs) At 7, is this [Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” 1842] even a poem? No idea but it’s may be the most teachable and memorable poetic character of the century.
6. Recent discourse has gotten me back into wanting to reignite my research on a poem that got packaged w/ a paper cover bc it sold as pornography and by some estimates circulated 500,000 copies when that was an INSANE number. Byron’s pervert epic (or epic perv) Don Juan (1819)
5. It’s important w these lists to remember that the 20th century has been SHAMELESSLY stealing 19th century poets for years. Yeats gets remembered for 2nd Coming, but “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is arguably a much better poem.
4. ok, look, lists are hard, and I am only a baby who just learned how to read. Gerard Manley Hopkins could have at least 4 poems on this list (Windhover, Pied Beauty, Spring & Fall etc), but I personally have never recovered from encountering As Kingfisher’s Catch Fire (1889):
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
3. Same with this poet. Odes, Autumn, Beauty, Eve, Chapman’s Homer. Stunning poem after stunning poem. But Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) feels like the most POEM poem I have ever read. Surreal, shocking, lovely nightmare of a meditation.
First stanza:
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
2. Ok, poems are weird, twisty objects that we encounter in our trauma and that give voice to our joy/suffering at existence. I am crying now just reading Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ (1821) again. I don’t think anyone would put it here over Ozymandias, but such is life.
From Stanza LXII
He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird; He is a presence to be felt and know In darkness and in light, from herb and stone…
1. If you have not read this poem, log off and read it. If you have read it and are in a position to make others read it, please don’t hesitate to do so. Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) is the poem of the century. Funny, scary, sensuous, dazzling shape of a dream.
And then come Toby’s apologies:
OK OBVIOUS APOLOGIES TO AURORA LEIGH and IN MEMORIAM and THE PRELUDE and DOVER BEACH and DARKLING THRUSH and the list goes on and on and on and on. An impossible task. Please make your own lists!
Actually, the only poem omitted from the list that I think he needs to apologize for—given that it is also omitted from the apologies—is Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality. But okay, such lists are hard. They may be most interesting in what they tell us about the list maker.
For instance, when noting how he had to drop Lyrical Ballads from the list, Toby noted that his favorite poem from the collection is not Ancient Mariner or Tintern Abbey but “We Are Seven.” I explore here why the poem means so much to Toby, which has to do with his oldest brother, who died in a freak drowning accident 22 years ago.
Likewise, the stanza Toby chose from Shelley’s Adonais is the passage on Justin’s tombstone.
Top ten lists are also like love notes, telling our favorite poems how much we cherish them. And they work as invitations for others to express their own gratitude.
Journalist Josh Marshall recently said of Russia’s Monday attacks on civilian centers,
It may be an over-optimistic analog but I get a strong V1/V2 vibe about these cruise missile strikes in Ukraine.
As I interpret the comment, he thinks Putin bombing Kyiv recalls Hitler’s desperation in the final months of World War II when he targeted Antwerp and London with his V-1 and V-2 rockets. My own association with those rockets, however, is Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
The novel is set in 1944 England when Hitler’s rockets are raining down on London’s civilian population. Protagonist Tyrone Slothrop, an American lieutenant working for British intelligence, contrast Hitler’s old buzzbombs with the new supersonic variety. After a while, he recalls, one got used to the former: buzzbombs:
A lot of stuff prior to 1944 is getting blurry now. He can remember the first Blitz only as a long spell of good luck. Nothing that Luftwaffe dropped came near him. But this last summer they started in with those buzzbombs. You’d be walking on the street, in bed just dozing off suddenly here comes this farting sound over the rooftops—if it just keeps on, rising to a peak and then passing over why that’s fine, then it’s somebody’ else’s worry…but if the engine cuts off, look out Jackson—it’s begun its dive, sloshing the fuel aft, away, from the engine burner, and you’ve got 10 seconds to get under something. Well, it wasn’t really too bad. After a while you adjusted—found yourself making small bets, a shilling or two, with Tantivy Mucker-Maffick at the next desk, about where the next doodle would hit…
At this point, Slothrop is like the resilient Ukrainians, who keep on bouncing back. Reports were that the cafes of Kyiv filled once again no long after the early morning bombing, which was targeted at a playground, a university building, and a historic city bridge.
The V2 rockets, on the other hand, are something else:
But then last September the rockets came. Them fucking rockets. You couldn’t adjust to the bastards. No way. For the first time he was surprised to find that he was really scared. Began drinking heavier, sleeping less, chain-smoking, feeling in some way he’d been taken for a sucker. Christ, it wasn’t supposed to keep on like this..
Fortunately, so far this has not seemed to be the general Ukrainian response.
At this point in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon veers from reality, albeit in a way that is thematically interesting. Slothrop has a long string of one-night stands, which he assiduously keeps track of on London map. It so happens that where he has his trysts coincide exactly where the rockets later land, with a mean lag time of 4 ½ days. British intelligence becomes aware of this and starts following him around.
To British intelligence officer Pointsman, Slothrop is a mystery. He could imagine Slothrop’s love life mirroring conventional rockets. But what about supersonic rockets, where the explosion occurs before people hear it?
[A]ny doodle close enough to make [Slothrop] jump out to be giving him an erection: the sound of the motor razzing louder and louder, then the cutoff and silence, suspense building up—then the explosion. Boing, a hardon. But oh, no. Slothrop instead only gets erections when this sequence happens in reverse. Explosion first, then the sound of approach: the V-2.
Rocket as phallus, incidentally, is the central trope of Stanley Kubrick’s black comic masterpiece Dr. Strangelove. And I think the Russian rockets are Putin’s attempt to regain his manhood after being humiliated by the Ukrainian military. Of course, if you think you can prove your alpha male bona fides by killing city dwellers, you’re on very thin ice. In fact, by overcompensating for your failures, you further reveal your insecurities, and Russia went all out in targeting Kyiv. There are reports that Russia used a billion dollars worth of “air-,sea- & land based missiles; ballistic missiles; surface-to-air missiles; reconnaissance & attack UAVs of Shahed-136 type.” With not one military target hit.
Slothrop himself doesn’t appear to male insecurity issues. But Putin, along with many of his supporters and cheerleaders, have them in spades.
Further thought: I omitted the opening paragraphs of Pynchon’s novel, which captures, as nightmare, some of the terror that accompanies a missile strike:
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall–soon–it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.
I write from memory today about Pierre Boulle’s Bridge on the River Kwai (1952), Unfortunately, I’ll not be able to quote from it since Sewanee’s library doesn’t have a copy, but episodes have been going through my head ever since I heard about the partial destruction of the Kerch Bridge connecting Russia with Crimea. I’ve even found myself whistling the memorable tune from the 1957 movie version.
It’s important to distinguish novel from film, however, because they have very different endings. In my view, the destruction of the Kerch Bridge is closer to the movie than to the novel.
As I say, I’m operating from memory but the French author, writing in the heyday of existentialism (the 1950s and 60s) appears to have written a novel that at once conveys an existential message and a parody of existentialism. In the story, the Japanese want their British captives to build a railway bridge. Obsessed with showing that the British are superior to the Japanese, Colonel Nicholson sets out to build a magnificent bridge. The irony, of course, is that this goal turns him into a collaborator.
We see how far he has lost perspective when, at the end, he prevents British saboteurs from blowing up “his” bridge. He has too much invested in it to allow it to be destroyed.
As I recall, a key difference between film and book is that, in the film, although he appears to have thwarted the saboteurs, he falls on the plunger as he is shot. As a result, the bridge comes down after all.
I say that the novel is existential because of how it shows Nicholson finding a sense of purpose in a meaningless universe. One theme of existential writers, from Dashiell Hammett to Ernest Hemingway to Albert Camus, is that the universe is absurd and that the only way we can find meaning is to adhere to a personal code, no matter how small it seems. As Sam Spade says in Hammett’s Maltese Falcon,
Listen. This isn’t a damned bit of good. You’ll never understand me, but I’ll try once more and then we’ll give it up. Listen. When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.
Another famous example is Camus’s “Myth of Sisyphus,” where the absurdity of eternally rolling a rock up a hill—the gods have arranged it so that it rolls back down every time—is counteracted by the devotion to the task itself. As Camus concludes his essay, “The struggle itself … is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Put another way, we must find meaning in the task itself since there is no ultimate or transcendent meaning.
So it appears that Nicholson has found meaning in the task itself. As he says at one point, “We shouldn’t hesitate to adopt a principle of the enemy’s if it happens to be a good one.”
I say that the novel is a parody of existentialism, however, because there is a self-evident higher purpose in this particular situation. After all, the drama is a clearcut battle of good against evil, heroic Brits against villainous Japs. Higher meaning is achieved if you sacrifice everything for that good, including your own ego. Nicholson wants to be an existential hero whereas the war situation calls for him to be a conventional hero. What he should do is attempt to sabotage the bridge project, perhaps in subtle ways.
Now, existential war stories do exist. My favorite is Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, where the game is rigged to make sure that the common serviceman always loses. The bad guys are those in charge of the rules, and the only chance one has is to opt out of the game altogether. Bouille has not set up that such a theme in Bridge on the River Kwai, however.
Nor is the Russo-Ukraine war an existential narrative. When a fascist who appears to have overwhelming force attempts to annex a smaller country, with his troops committing mass atrocities in the process, moral purpose is very clear: one must do all one can to repel the invaders. In fact, Putin would like nothing better than for people to declare the situation absurd and and walk away as that would allow him to get his way.
In the movie of Bridge on the River Kwai, the bridge comes down, giving the good guys a meaningful victory. If the downing of the Kerch Bridge helps the Ukrainians expel the Russians, there will be nothing absurd about it.
I’m current running the Adult Sunday Forum at our church, and today I share with you a talk from two weeks ago on Jesus’s literary imagination. Our theme this year is “community,” and Rev. Scott Lee, once a Sewanee College English major, contended that Jesus used his parables to prod communal imagining. Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats both showed up in the talk.
Because the first half of this year’s program is devoted to a historical take on religious community, Scott entitled his talk “Community in the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus.” After setting forth some of the sociological aspects of the period, he then laid out Jesus’s challenge.
This was to get people to imagine a very different community than the community they were used to—which is to say, to imagine the kingdom of God come to earth. Or as the Lord’s Prayer puts it, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” To do so, Jesus needed people to think outside of their narrow confines. His major teaching tool was imaginative storytelling in the form of parables.
At this point in his talk, Scott turned to theories of the imagination as expressed by Coleridge and Keats. As Coleridge saw it, the primary imagination is
the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.
Since we are made in the image of God, Coleridge believes we can repeat or echo a version of God’s own act of creation on earth. One particularly powerful way of doing this is through the arts, including poetically crafted stories. As Scott said of the parables, “they are an invitation, a doorway, into the mind of Christ—which is to say, into the kingdom of God.”
Scott also quoted Keats in the passage where, drawing on a scene in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam dreams of Eve and then awakes to find her a reality:
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth . . . The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream —he awoke and found it truth. . .
Here’s are the passages from Milton that Keats is referencing. The speaker is Adam:
Pensive I sat me down; there gentle sleep First found me, and with soft oppression seized My drowsed sense, untroubled, though I thought I then was passing to my former state Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve: When suddenly stood at my head a dream, Whose inward apparition gently moved My Fancy to believe I yet had being, And lived…
In his dream, Adam first tours the garden with God and then witnesses Eve’s creation:
Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape [God] Still glorious before whom awake I stood; Who stooping opened my left side, and took From thence a rib, with cordial spirits warm, And lifeblood streaming fresh; wide was the wound, But suddenly with flesh filled up and healed: The bib he formed and fashioned with his hands; Under his forming hands a creature grew, Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair, That what seemed fair in all the world, seemed now Mean, or in her summed up, in her contained And in her looks, which from that time infused Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before, And into all things from her air inspired The spirit of love and amorous delight.
Drawing on the passage, Keats says that Adam’s dream
seems to be a conviction that imagination and its empyreal [celestial] reflection is the same as human life and its spiritual repetition…
The artist’s challenge—like the prophet’s—is to convey celestial vision to earthbound minds. Scott noted that Jesus sets forth that challenge in Matthew 13:10-12. If one opens oneself to the parables, as one does to a work of art, one will “know the secrets of heaven.” (And by the same token, if one doesn’t, one won’t.):
Then the disciples came and asked him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.
Scott added that Jesus elaborates on the idea a few verses later (Matthew 13:13-15). If one remains stuck in conventional understanding—if one’s heart has grown dull and one’s ears are hard of hearing—one will miss out on the vision. One must therefore use one’s imagination:
The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says: ‘You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn— and I would heal them.’ But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.
Coleridge and Keats, of course, see their poetry as their attempt to reflect and repeat divine creation. Scott set up exercises to show us that Jesus’s parables are set up to do the same. Dividing us into four groups, he gave us the parables of (1) the lost sheep and the lost coin; (2) the unfair wages; (3) the mustard seed and the yeast; and (4) the sower. His goal was to show us how these artistically complex creations pull us into their creative vortex and set our imaginations at work.
From our discussions, we discovered that the parables are not just simple one-dimensional formulae but instead rich avenues for spiritual growth. Sometimes parables are enigmatic or even uncomfortable—there’s never just one interpretation—but that’s deliberate. After all, Jesus is trying to jolt people out of narrow vision so that they experience much more.
For instance, I suddenly realized—in discussing the parable of the sower—that the sower would have appeared to this agricultural society as a fool. After all, no prudent farmer would cast his seed on stony ground. Jesus is challenging his audience, however, to think of God as so generous that he gives all of us a chance to experience spiritual growth, even those of us with stony hearts. It was a dimension of the story I have overlooked.
All the groups experienced similar interpretive flexibility and similar revelations. In some of the parables, it’s not clear which character God is. Or put another way, sometimes God appears as different characters depending on the reader/listener. Like all great literature, the parables intend to inspire us to embark on our own spiritual journeys.
Years ago I reported on another talk presented to our Adult Forum, this one by noted C.S. Lewis scholar Rob McSwain, a member of Sewanee’s School of Theology. McSwain contended that the Anglican/Episcopal church conducts its most powerful spiritual explorations through literature, not through systematic theology. Our “theologians” are not Thomas Aquinas or Martin Luther but poets like John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lewis, and Mary Oliver. Scott’s talk this past Sunday provided me with further confirmation of that view.
He also confirmed my decision, in this blog, to at least once a week apply literature to spiritual matters.
In honor of Indigenous People’s Day, which in some states has already occurred and in others takes place this coming Monday, I share a poem from Leslie Marmon Silko’s superb novel Ceremony. I do so in part because it deals with the devastating impact of white colonialism on America, a fact that a number of jurisdictions have recognized by replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Person’s Day. But I am more interested in how Silko foresees extreme weather events in our future. To be sure, she has drought in mind while I am thinking of Hurricane Ian, whose impact climatologists tell us was supercharged by warming gulf waters. But Silko clearly sees our abuse of the environment resulting in devastating consequences.
If you’re worried that she’s just out to guilt-trip White people, however, rest assured. Silko isn’t interested in victim narratives, and she even criticizes Indians who blame Whites for all their problems. In fact, the book’s chief villain, a full-blooded Laguna Pueblo, does just this. For Silko, by contrast, our problem is more a case of noxious Whites encountering noxious Indians and the two together destroying both the environment and human society. In the poem I’ve chosen, the noxious Indians are witches, who represent the dark forces at play in Indian society.
These witches show up in a story that a wise shaman (Betonie) tells protagonist Tayo. Talking about Indians who have lost their bearings, he says they
want us to believe all evil resides with white people. Then we will look no further to see what is really happening. They want us to separate ourselves from white people, to be ignorant and helpless as we watch our own destruction. But white people are only tools that the witchery manipulates; and I tell you, we can deal with white people, with the machines and their beliefs.
As Betonie sees it, Whites and Indians are not separate but exist in the game together. Rather than feeling helpless and passively surrendering to environmental destruction, therefore, Indians should be proactive. Unlike White society, which believes it is living in a world filled with dead objects, Indians have a rich tradition of honoring the Earth. If White society could only see this vision, Betonie believes, it would reject the sterility of contemporary life and collaborate with Indians in charting a positive path forward. Betonie’s view is not unlike that articulated in the Lucille Clifton’s poem “after kent state”:
oh people white ways are the way of death come into the black and live
For healing to occur, however, we must first acknowledge that we are sick, and Silko’s poem lays out multiple instances of White alienation. These instances are presented in a conference attended by Indian witches that seek to undo each other in evil. The evil includes
Dead babies simmering in blood circles of skull cut away all the brains sucked out. Witch medicine to dry and grind into powder for new victims.
The witch that wins, however, foregoes such clichés, choosing instead to tell the story of the European conquest. For these invaders, the earth is a dead object to be exploited:
Caves across the ocean in caves of dark hills white skin people like the belly of a fish covered with hair.
Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and animals. They see no life When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and rivers are not alive the mountains and stones are not alive The deer and bear are objects They see no life
They fear They fear the world. They destroy what they fear. They fear themselves.
The wind will blow them across the ocean thousands of them in giant boats swarming like larva out of a crushed ant hill.
They will carry objects which can shoot death faster than the eye can see.
They will kill the things they fear all the animals the people will starve.
They will poison the water they will spin the water away and there will be drought the people will starve.
They will fear what they find They will fear the people They kill what they fear.
Entire villages will be wiped out They will slaughter whole tribes.
Corpses for us Blood for us Killing killing killing killing.
and those they do not kill will die anyway at the destruction they see at the loss at the loss of the children the loss will destroy the rest.
Stolen rivers and mountains the stolen land will eat their hearts and jerk their mouths from the Mother. The people will starve.
Evil though they may be, the other witches are horrified by such depravity. Even as they award first place to the witch, they ask him to take the story back:
So the other witches said “Okay you win; you take the prize, but what you said just now– it isn’t so funny It doesn’t sound so good. We are doing okay without it we can get along without that kind of thing. Take it back Call that story back.”
The witch informs them, however, that the story, once set in motion, the “can’t be called back”:
But the witch just shook its head at the others in their stinking animal skins, fur and feathers. It’s already turned loose. It’s already coming It can’t be called back.
Although Silko’s novel was written in 1977—in other words, before we were aware of climate change—she sees other ways that humans are destroying the earth. These include pollution, habitat destruction, and “spin[ning] the water away.” Since uranium is being being mined from Indian land, she also includes nuclear holocaust, which is particularly timely as Russia’s Vladimir Putin seeks to unnerve Ukraine with nuclear saber rattling:
Up here in these hills they will find the rocks, rocks with veins of green and yellow and black. They will lay the final pattern with these rocks they will lay it across the world and explode everything.
In short, humans represent a clear and present danger to the Earth’s future. Silko’s novel, however, concludes on a hopeful note by assuring us that it doesn’t have to be this way. Tayo, who as a World War II veteran suffering from PTSD has been feeling alienated himself, reconnects with the earth through his tribe’s rituals, and Silko brings that vision to the rest of us through her novel.
In other words, she would tell us that to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day by looking forward, not back. In 1977, when she wrote Ceremony, the novel played a role in the Native American and environmental movements and helped prompt President Jimmy Carter to put large swathes of wilderness under government protection. In the current environment, although we have witches manically working to destroy the Earth, we also see (for the first time in our history) Native Americans in Congress, and these have been part of the push for a Green New Deal.
Yesterday I just happened to stumble across an article on eel smuggling, which apparently is big business in parts of the world. For the second time this week, I was put in mind of a Narnia novel. I suspect all Narnia lovers will instantly know which one.
First, here’s the story as it appeared in The Guardian:
Spanish police have arrested 29 people after seizing 180kg of critically endangered young European eels with a value on the hidden market of €270,000 (£237,000).
The Guardia Civil said the operation, in collaboration with Europol, had also led to 20 arrests elsewhere in Europe.
The elvers, or glass eels – prized as a delicacy in Spain and parts of east Asia – were found after officers carried out almost 3,000 checks and inspections in ports, airports and other transport hubs.
A Wikipedia essay puts the crime in a larger context:
Freshwater eel poaching and smuggling have emerged in recent years as a direct response to the sustained popularity of eels as food, combined with the eels’ low population, endangered status, and subsequent protections….The life cycle for eels has not been closed in captivity on a sustainable level, and any eel farms rely entirely on wild-caught elvers (juvenile eels). These elvers are caught from their native ranges in North America and Europe and are smuggled into East Asian eel farms, where they are often relabeled as the native Japanese eel to subvert legislation.
Growing up, the only reason I knew that people even ate eels was because of a scene in The Silver Chair. The children need a guide for their quest to save Prince Rillian and get a Marsh-wiggle, which is a more-or-less human figure but sporting webbed feet and hands. Puddleglum is (as his name suggests) perpetually gloomy and pessimistic, which we see from the first when he announces his intention to catch some eels:
“I’m trying to catch a few eels to make an eel stew for our dinner,” said Puddleglum. “Though I shouldn’t wonder if I didn’t get any. And you won’t like them much if I do.”
As it turns out, he catches several eels. Also contrary to his prediction, the children enjoy the fare:
When the meal came it was delicious and the children had two large helpings each. At first the Marsh-wiggle wouldn’t believe that they really liked it, and when they had eaten so much that he had to believe them, he fell back on saying that it would probably disagree with them horribly. “What’s food for wiggles may be poison for humans, I shouldn’t wonder,” he said.
I missed the part about the eels being delicious when I was growing up. It’s as though I took Puddleglum at his word and then applied a chain of associations—marshes, Marshwiggles, and the smoke from Puddleglum’s pipe—to arrive at the conclusion that eels are nasty. It so happens that Puddleglum’s pipe smoke, which does some wriggling of its own, is nasty:
In spite of his expectation of catching no eels, he had a dozen or so, which he had already skinned and cleaned. He put a big pot on, mended the fire, and lit his pipe. Marsh-wiggles smoke a very strange, heavy sort of tobacco (some people say they mix it with mud) and the children noticed the smoke from Puddleglum’s pipe hardly rose in the air at all. It trickled out of the bowl and downwards and drifted along the ground like a mist. It was very black and set Scrubb coughing.
“Now,” said Puddleglum. “Those eels will take a mortal long time to cook, and either of you might faint with hunger before they’re done. I knew a little girl—but I’d better not tell you that story. It might lower your spirits, and that’s a thing I never do. So, to keep your minds off your hunger, we may as well talk about our plans.”
I’ve learned much more about eels since that first fictional encounter. They are extraordinary creatures, especially in the way that they migrate over 3000 miles–all the way across the Atlantic Ocean–to spawn off the North American coast in the Sargasso Sea. There’s nothing glum about them at all.