Apples at Ricker Hill Orchards, my cousins’ Maine apple farm
Thursday
Here’s a lovely Helen Hunt Jackson poem to usher in the first day of September. Jackson, an exact contemporary of Emily Dickinson, hits all the right notes in describing the season, including the way September stands at the intersection of summer and fall. As Jackson puts it, “With summer’s best of weather,/ And autumn’s best of cheer.”
After having captured the loveliness of the month, however, Jackson then takes a further step and says that it brings about something even lovelier: “a thing which I remember.” We aren’t told what this thing is. It’s a secret that the poet leaves up to our imagination.
September By Helen Hunt Jackson
The golden-rod is yellow; The corn is turning brown; The trees in apple orchards With fruit are bending down.
The gentian’s bluest fringes Are curling in the sun; In dusty pods the milkweed Its hidden silk has spun.
The sedges flaunt their harvest, In every meadow nook; And asters by the brook-side Make asters in the brook.
From dewy lanes at morning The grapes’ sweet odors rise; At noon the roads all flutter With yellow butterflies.
By all these lovely tokens September days are here, With summer’s best of weather, And autumn’s best of cheer.
But none of all this beauty Which floods the earth and air Is unto me the secret Which makes September fair.
‘T is a thing which I remember; To name it thrills me yet: One day of one September I never can forget.
Julia and I have inherited my parents’ house, and while we are thrilled, we are also discovering that it is no small feat to clean out the detritus of 74 years—not to mention all the stuff that my parents inherited from their parents and grandparents. We’re trying to be careful—you never know when you’ll open an envelope and find a letter from Pete Seeger, which we just did—but it can feel overwhelming at times.
I think of Thoreau, who at one point in his Walden sojourn found himself overwhelmed by three pieces of limestone. The episode occurs in a reflection on people always wanting bigger houses and more stuff.
The passage starts with longing for the simple life of the uneducated Arab or Indian. (Anthropologists tell us that their life is far from simple but let that pass.)
Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man’s providing a certain number of superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab’s or the Indian’s?
And then there’s the fact that the great prophets—Jesus, for example—did not carry furniture around with them:
When I think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any carload of fashionable furniture…At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work undone.
At this point we learn of Thoreau’s dislike of dusting:
Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.
Alan Dillingham, my American lit teacher in grad school, pointed out that Thoreau has another option: he could just leave the rocks dusty. Dillingham was making the point that Thoreau was obsessed with purity, starting with Walden Pond itself. So yes, anyone living in the woods needs to get over a dirt phobia.
But set that discussion aside. Right now, I’m relating to Thoreau’s desire for an uncluttered life. Before I get there, however, there are mounds and mounds of stuff standing in my way.
Bad news about the climate is coming at us thick and fast, including reports that melting Greenland icebergs will cause seal levels to rise a foot and would so so even if we capped carbon emissions tomorrow. I focus today, however, on lakes and rivers drying up because of an H.P. Lovecraft story about that happening.
In case you haven’t heard, China’s largest lake has gone dry as temperatures in the country hit record highs. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Colorado River has been reaching dangerously low levels, threatening both agricultural and energy production. Meanwhile, in an ironic twist that is characteristic of climate’s change’s extreme weather events, over 1000 people in Pakistan have been killed by horrific flooding, while flash floods have been creating havoc in southern California’s mountains and deserts.
But back to Lovecraft and global warming. In “Till A’ the Seas” (1935), a story he co-wrote with R. H. Barlow, the earth is getting hotter, although in this case it’s not humanity’s fault. Rather, at a date a few thousand years in the future, the earth has started to fall into the sun. It’s a gradual process, which means that everyone doesn’t die at once. They just die over a period of time, and we watch the last man on earth, desperately seeking water, fall into a dry well and die.
Disconcertingly, the story captures some of the weather-caused behaviors that we are seeing today. It may well be that climate change caused the war in Syria, as farmers whose lands were devastated by drought flocked into the cities. Some of Central America’s northward migration, especially from Guatemala, has also been caused by drought. The story, which was written during the Dust Bowl years, socks us with the stark picture from the get-go.
Upon an eroded cliff-top rested the man, gazing far across the valley. Lying thus, he could see a great distance, but in all the sere expanse there was no visible motion. Nothing stirred the dusty plain, the disintegrated sand of long-dry river-beds, where once coursed the gushing streams of Earth’s youth. There was little greenery in this ultimate world, this final stage of mankind’s prolonged presence upon the planet. For unnumbered aeons the drought and sandstorms had ravaged all the lands. The trees and bushes had given way to small, twisted shrubs that persisted long through their sturdiness; but these, in turn, perished before the onslaught of coarse grasses and stringy, tough vegetation of strange evolution.
If humans have flourished as a species, it’s we are so adaptable, finding ways to survive both in the very hot and in the very cold. Lovecraft and Barlow point out that adaptability can go take us so far, however:
The ever-present heat, as Earth drew nearer to the sun, withered and killed with pitiless rays. It had not come at once; long eons had gone before any could feel the change. And all through those first ages man’s adaptable form had followed the slow mutation and modeled itself to fit the more and more torrid air. Then the day had come when men could bear their hot cities but ill, and a gradual recession began, slow yet deliberate. Those towns and settlements closest to the equator had been first, of course, but later there were others. Man, softened and exhausted, could cope no longer with the ruthlessly mounting heat. It seared him as he was, and evolution was too slow to mold new resistances in him.
In the story, as in our present time, some people stay put and some people emigrate. In those who stay, we see both the confidence of humans in their adaptive capacities and their tendency to deny what the experts are telling them (which we can recognize only too well):
Yet not at first were the great cities of the equator left to the spider and the scorpion. In the early years there were many who stayed on, devising curious shields and armours against the heat and the deadly dryness. These fearless souls, screening certain buildings against the encroaching sun, made miniature worlds of refuge wherein no protective armor was needed. They contrived marvelously ingenious things, so that for a while men persisted in the rusting towers, hoping thereby to cling to old lands till the searing should be over. For many would not believe what the astronomers said, and looked for a coming of the mild olden world again. But one day the men of Dath, from the new city of Niyara, made signals to Yuanario, their immemorially ancient capital, and gained no answer from the few who remained therein. And when explorers reached that millennial city of bridge-linked towers they found only silence. There was not even the horror of corruption, for the scavenger lizards had been swift.
Those who flee fare scarcely better:
Steady, universal, and inexorable was the great eviction of man from the realms he had always known. No land within the widening stricken belt was spared; no people left unrouted. It was an epic, a titan tragedy whose plot was unrevealed to the actors—this wholesale desertion of the cities of men. It took not years or even centuries, but millennia of ruthless change. And still it kept on—sullen, inevitable, savagely devastating.
Yet just as the slowness of climate change—at least in human terms—allows people to rationalize away climate disasters, so those in the Lovecraft/Barlow story deny what is happening:
[W]ater was scarce, and found only in deep caverns. There was little enough, even of this; and men died of thirst wandering in far places. Yet so slow were these deadly changes, that each new generation of man was loath to believe what it heard from its parents. None would admit that the heat had been less or the water more plentiful in the old days, or take warning that days of bitterer burning and drought were to come.
At the end of the story, we watch the death of earth’s last inhabitant.
Lovecraft/Barlow take their title from a Robert Burns poem, “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose.”
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I; And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry;
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun; I will luve thee still, my dear, While the sands o’ life shall run.
We see no love in the short story, however, which means that its title is darkly ironic. When everyone is dying, no one is making love.
“Till A’ the Seas” provides one consolation, however: this future is thousands of years off. I’m currently reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, however, that places that dry future in the year 2024. But that will be the subject of a future post.
Delacrois, Attila the Hun and His Barbarian Hoards
Monday
It was just six months ago that Russia invaded Ukraine—invaded it a second time, I should say—soI’m sharing Thomas Peacock’s famous mock epic lyric to mark the occasion. Actually, reading “The War-song of Dinas Vawr” with Russia’s invasion in mind makes it a little less funny. That’s because there are Russians who actually think this way.
In normal times, the poem seems to be an over-the-top parody of epic warrior behavior such as one finds in, say, The Odyssey. Whatever darkness that that the poem may stir inside a reader is undercut by its comic use of feminine rhymes: for instance “blood enough to swim in/orphaned many women.” (Feminine rhymes are those where the end rhyme falls on an unstressed syllable rather than the final stressed one.) The straight matter-of-fact way in which we are told brutal details also comes as a shock of the black comedy variety, such as (another feminine rhyme) “ere our force we led off/ others cut his head off.”
It’s one thing, however, to imagine warriors of old behaving this way, while quite another to see modern nations doing so. Now Peacock’s poem sounds like it was written by a Russian seeking to reestablish the old Russian empire. Fortunately, “War Song of Dinas Vawr” describes a Putin wish fulfillment rather than what is actually happening. Ukraine may look sweet to Russian eyes, but the smaller nation has refused to be quelled or overthrown, and the Russians have not been able to behead Zelensky.
The invasion has produced many widows and orphans, however. Here’s the poem:
The mountain sheep are sweeter, But the valley sheep are fatter; We therefore deemed it meter To carry off the latter. We made an expedition; We met a host, and quelled it; We forced a strong position, And killed the men who held it
On Dyfed’s richest valley, Where herds of kine were browsing, We made a mighty sally, To furnish our carousing. Fierce warriors rushed to meet us; We met them, and o’erthrew them: They struggled hard to beat us; But we conquered them, and slew them.
As we drove our prize at leisure, The king marched forth to catch us: His rage surpassed all measure, But his people could not match us. He fled to his hall-pillars; And, ere our force we led off, Some sacked his house and cellars, While others cut his head off.
We there, in strife bewild’ring, Spilt blood enough to swim in: We orphaned many children, And widowed many women. The eagles and the ravens We glutted with our foemen; The heroes and the cravens, The spearmen and the bowmen.
We brought away from battle, And much their land bemoaned them, Two thousand head of cattle, And the head of him who owned them: Ednyfed, king of Dyfed, His head was borne before us; His wine and beasts supplied our feasts, And his overthrow, our chorus.
I’m currently in the process of reading Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower–an early instance of dystopian climate fiction (or cli-fi, as Dan Bloom calls it)–and am attempting to sort out the protagonist’s theology. Daughter of a pastor, 15-year-old Lauren is developing her own version of God as she struggles for survival in 2024 California, where climate change has decimated society. Water and food are scarce, forcing people to live behind walls to protect themselves against gangs and thieves. Arson and murder are daily occurrences.
While the older generation laments the passing of the good old days, Lauren sees it as imperative that she creatively adapt to the conditions. She sets forth her theory of life/theology in jottings that she will one day assemble into a book called Earth Seed: The Books of the Living.
At one point, in an attempt to understand God, Lauren writes,
God is Power– Infinite, Irresistible, Inexorable, Indifferent. And yet, God is Pliable– Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay. God exists to be shaped. God is change.
In her own version of Darwinian evolution, Lauren sees humans working in conjunction with God to survive and flourish in a desolate landscape. Doing so, however, takes effort on the part of the individual. If one is passive, one remains “God’s victim, God’s plaything, God’s prey”:
A victim of God may, Through learning adaption, Become a partner of God, A victim of God may, Through forethought and planning, Become a shaper of God. Or a victim of God may, Through shortsightedness and fear, Remain God’s victim, God’s plaything, God’s prey.
At another point, sounding a little like the non-scriptural “God helps those who help themselves,” she distinguishes between two different kinds of belief:
Belief Initiates and guides action– Or it does nothing.
Throughout the book, Lauren periodically attempts to spell out her relationship with God. If I understand her correctly, while she sees God as a potentially creative and generative force in the universe, to release that potential we must creatively and openly ourselves to God. This is what she means by shaping Him/Her/It.
Lauren rejects the idea that God will do good things for us if we pray. “Prayers only help the person doing the praying,” she says, “and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person’s resolve.” And yet, if we use prayers to focus our resolve, then they indeed help us “to shape God and to accept and work with the shapes that God imposes on us.”
Struggling with her articulation, Lauren sometimes veers into possible contradiction. On the one hand, she says, “God is power, and in the end, God prevails.” Yet she then adds,
But we can rig the game in our own favor if we understand that God exists to be shaped, and will be shaped, with or without our forethought, with or without our intent.”
Lauren contrasts this vision with that found in Job, her favorite book in the Bible. As she puts it,
I’m not some kind of potential Job, long suffering, stiff necked, then, at last, either humble before an all-knowing almighty, or destroyed. My God doesn’t love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.”
Working with what might be seen as a Darwinian Christianity, Lauren differentiates between a blind evolution and one that humans can make happen. Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, describes this as “the cognitive revolution,” which he says superseded biological evolution 70,000 years ago in that our cognitive capacities influenced evolution in a new way. As Lauren puts it,
We are Earthseed The life that perceives itself Changing
And elsewhere:
Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.
Working in conjunction with God—or with this impersonal force—brings about significant change:
All that you touch You Change.
All that you Change Changes you.
The only last truth Is Change.
God Is Change.
Change, however, can be dangerous, meaning that we must approach God with openness and creativity. As Lauren warns,
A gift of God May sear unready fingers.
It’s worthwhile at this point to remind ourselves of Jesus’s parable of the sower because it gives us further insight into Lauren’s vision:
That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake.Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people stood on the shore. Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear.”
The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”
He replied, “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.
And later:
Blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.
Lauren is determined to accept the earth seed as it falls upon her–which is to say, to hear what God has to say and to follow what God directs. As she puts it,
All successful life is Adaptable, Opportunistic, Tenacious, Interconnected, and Fecund. Understand this. Use it. Shape God.
Although I haven’t finished the novel yet, I’ll conclude with one last observation from Lauren’s book. It’s a declaration of what it means to be both conscious and sentient in God’s universe:
We are Earthseed. We are flesh—self aware, questing, problem-solving flesh. We are that aspect of Earthlife best able to shape God knowingly. We are Earthlife maturing, Earthlife preparing to fall away from the parent world. We are Earthlife preparing to take root in new ground, Earthlife fulfilling its purpose, its promise, its Destiny.
Lauren’s (and probably Butler’s) vision is striking a chord in me. I too have never seen God in personal terms. When my eldest son died, I didn’t blame God or hold God responsible, nor did I think that God felt sorry for me. Rather, as I saw it, I had to work in conjunction with God to make sure that Justin’s death would not become a curse that blighted my life and those lives around me. I looked to God as a potentially creative force that would help me find new wellsprings of love and care in a world that had just wounded me to the core.
Bitterness would have been my version of Lauren’s “destructive fanaticism.” Without God, life would have meant “nothing at all.” God was Change, a new way of being in the world, and it was up to me to shape and be shaped by Him/Her/It.
I received a comforting e-mail from an old friend in response to Monday’s post about my “intense busyness” in the face of my mother’s death. Steve Rhodes, artist and longtime resident of Iowa City, sent me a story told by 4th century BC Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu (a.k.a. Zhuang Zhou).
I had worried that I was using busyness to mask my grieving, with the result that I neglected self care. Steve wrote that the balancing act between public performance and private reflection is a difficult one, especially for the oldest child. As he put it,
The busyness of grieving is the lot of the eldest child or of the surviving spouse, who usually find themselves charged with the ceremony and ritual of collective grief, and with the dispensations and the legal formalities.
As he himself has twice been in this situation, Steve could speak with authority. “I am not sure whether this busy mode of grieving arises from something inherent in my own psychology of coping with strong emotions,” he wrote,
or if it is more like what we refer to as eldest-child syndrome, where the external circumstances of family are served by chance upon us, controlling our responses in these collective moments of deepest feeling. Was I drawn to positions of busy administration by internal inclination or by external expectations?
Then he cited Chuang Tzu’s story, which as he said “has always sustained me at such times, providing lightness at a dark time.” This in spite of the fact that Steve says he still doesn’t fully understand it, even after 50 years. Here it is:
“Tsu Sang Hu, Ming Tsu Fan, and Tsu Chin Chang were acquaintances. They said to each other, “Who can be together without togetherness and cooperate without cooperation? Who can soar up to heaven, wander through the clouds, and pass beyond the limits of space, unmindful of existence, forever and ever?” Then the three looked at one another and laughed. Having no disagreement among themselves, they became fast friends.
“After some time, Tsu Sang Hu died. Before the burial, Confucius heard of his death and sent his disciple Tsu Kung to attend the mourning. Tsu Kung found that one of the friends was composing a song and the other was playing a lute. They sang together in unison, ‘Oh Sang Hu! Oh Sang Hu! You have gone back to your true self while we remain as men. Alas! Alas!’
“Tsu Kung hurried in and said, ‘May I ask something? Is that appropriate, singing in the presence of a corpse?’
“The two looked at each other and laughed. ‘What does he know about ceremony?’ they said.”(Inner Chapters, trans. Feng and English, 1974, p. 133)
I too find the story consoling. In my case, I see Tsu Kung so blinded by the formalities of ceremony that he misses the meaning. Sang Hu’s friends, by contrast, know that their union with him is so transcendent that injunctions not to sing in the presence of a corpse are meaningless. After all, if they could be “unmindful of existence” while all three were alive, then the death of one is irrelevant.
The story brings to mind someone’s observation at the community gathering, where we filled up an entire hall with people who cared for my mother. She so loved company, and loved my daughter-in-law’s singing and my sons’ humor, that I noted her absence seemed all wrong. “She should be here,” I said, to which this friend replied, “She was here all right.” And I knew then that she was.
Steve ended his note with an avowal that I also found immensely comforting. Commenting on our decades-long friendship, he wrote,
I’m thinking of you as I remember Phoebe. What unlikely happenings brought us to each other. Having no disagreement among ourselves, we became fast friends.
Yes.
Further thought: Steve recently lost his wife Judy, who was Julia’s inspiring English teacher in her last year of high school. Judy recommended Carleton College, where she and Steve had met, and it was where Julia and I would meet three years later. Every time we visited Julia’s Iowa relatives, we would look up Judy and Steve and our children would play with their children.
Anyway, Steve said that Judy “often remarked how she learned the truth about death and grieving in Tristram Shandy.” I’ll explore this further in a future post but I suspect it has something to do with rejecting rigid formal responses (such as we are always getting from theory-obsessed Walter Shandy) and opting instead for lived experience—just as Sang Hu’s friends reject rigid ceremonial rules for a response that comes from deep within.
A Kyiv building burning following Russian shelling on March 3, 2022
Thursday
Yesterday was Ukraine’s Independence Day, first held in 1991 to celebrate the country’s independence from the Soviet Union. I have experience with such independence days, having had my 15 minutes of fame when I appeared on national television during Slovenia’s 1994 celebration of V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day), commemorating the 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany. But Slovenia was really celebrating its independence from Yugoslavia, just as Ukraine yesterday celebrated Vladimir Putin’s failure to subjugate the country in 2022. The battle, of course, is still ongoing and, while things look promising for Ukraine, there’s a lot of suffering and bloodshed ahead..
To mark the occasion, I am sharing a poem by Katie Ferris, who is the partner of Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky, whom I have cited in the past. For Ferris, who is battling cancer, “burning world” may refer to her radiation treatment, but it’s also allude to Russia’s artillery attacks on Ukrainian cities. In any event, her poem focuses on how to respond when one finds oneself “in the midst of hell.”
The key, she says, is to stand in the interstices between that which is hell and that which isn’t—between a bald and cancerous body and a body that is still beautiful. It’s as though (to use her metaphor) there’s a loose step to the front porch but the house is still standing. And in this house there’s a door open between hell and “what isn’t hell” that one is propping open. One “stand[s]/ within its wedge/ a shield.”
That’s why one offers poems of love to a burning world.
Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World
To train myself to find, in the midst of hell what isn’t hell.
The body, bald, cancerous, but still beautiful enough to imagine living the body washing the body replacing a loose front porch step the body chewing what it takes to keep a body going—
This scene has a tune a language I can read a door I cannot close I stand within its wedge a shield.
Why write love poetry in a burning world? To train myself, in the midst of a burning world to offer poems of love to a burning world.
Miltonists may experience a shock of recognition as they watch Donald Trump attempt to wriggle out charges that he stole government documents upon leaving the presidency. After all, Adam in Paradise Lost turns to some of the same excuses when God questions him about eating the forbidden fruit. Adam, however, has nothing on Trump.
John Tures of the Missouri Independent lists a few of the excuses provided by either Trump or his defenders. I’ve added a few more, and there are probably some that we’ve missed. I don’t need to add that all the excuses are bogus:
The “raid” (it was actually a search) was a wildly inappropriate move, a Gestapo-type tactic by an authoritarian president;
There was nothing really important amongst the documents and Trump would have returned them if asked so a “raid” was unnecessary;
Trump didn’t realize that the documents were important—he just wanted some mementoes from his time in the White House;
Conditions were so chaotic in the presidential transition that the documents were accidentally thrown into boxes and transported to Florida;
The documents were planted by the FBI;
Trump was just bringing his work home, like so many hard-working Americans;
Other presidents, especially Obama, have taken classified documents after leaving the White House;
These documents were declassified by Trump by virtue of a “standing order” (which no one recalls);
The documents shouldn’t have been classified in the first place;
Mar-a-Lago is actually a safer place for the documents than elsewhere—and the law only pertains to destroying the documents, not storing them;
Trump needed them for his memoirs;
If the documents were so important, government officials should have come for them earlier so they’re the ones who are really negligent.
Add to these a Fox pundit’s accusation the judge who signed off on the search was an acquaintance of sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell (he wasn’t) and the threat by Trump’s lawyer that violence could erupt from indicting the president. There’s also the drumbeat amongst many on the right that if they did it to Trump they’ll do it to you! In short, you have an exercise in blame shifting worthy of a teenager caught smoking pot in his room.
Or of Adam when caught out by God. Adam’s blame shifting is in response to a direct question from God:
[H]ast thou eaten of the Tree Whereof I gave thee charge thou shouldst not eat?
In reply, Adam starts by wailing that he has been put in an impossible position Either he must take the full blame or accuse “the partner of my life”:
O Heav’n! in evil strait this day I stand Before my Judge, either to undergo Myself the total Crime, or to accuse My other self, the partner of my life; Whose failing, while her Faith to me remains, I should conceal, and not expose to blame By my complaint…
Upon further consideration, however, he argues that he doesn’t deserve the full blame and prepares to blame Eve. First, he blames her indirectly: rather sneakily, he suggests that God already knows that she’s guilty, so Adam is less blameworthy for throwing her under the bus. Notice that he never accepts any of the responsibility himself:
[B]ut strict necessity Subdues me, and calamitous constraint Lest on my head both sin and punishment, However insupportable, be all Devolv’d; though should I hold my peace, yet thou Wouldst easily detect what I conceal.
Then comes Adam’s accusation, which deflects blame in two ways. Not only did Eve tempt him but God is also guilty for having foisted Eve on him in the first place (“This Woman whom thou [emphasis mine] mad’st to be my help”):
This Woman whom thou mad’st to be my help, And gav’st me as thy perfect gift, so good, So fit, so acceptable, so divine, That from her hand I could suspect no ill, And what she did, whatever in itself, Her doing seem’d to justify the deed; She gave me of the Tree, and I did eat.
In other words, he’s the victim here. This is as Trumpian a maneuver as one could imagine.
God, however, is having none of Adam’s bullshit:
Was she thy God, that her thou didst obey Before his voice…
For a dramatic contrast, Eve confesses straight up after God turns to her:
So having said, he thus to Eve in few: “Say Woman, what is this which thou hast done?”
To whom sad Eve with shame nigh overwhelm’d, Confessing soon, yet not before her Judge Bold or loquacious, thus abasht repli’d.
“The Serpent me beguil’d and I did eat.”
Forget about ever getting a similar confession from Trump or anyone around him. In fact, the next move I expect from the former president is for him to employ Adam’s tactic of blaming someone else. Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows should be very worried.
For Trump and Trump cultists, confessing is a sign of weakness. Instead, they pretend never to have said what they said and simply go on to the next excuse.
With my mother’s death, I am reminded that we all grieve differently and that one person’s grieving may rub another person the wrong way. My own grieving for my mother has taken the form of intense busyness: for weeks I have been working simultaneously on preparing for the memorial service while putting her house in order. But whereas I wanted to distribute as much of her worldly goods to my brothers and other relatives as I could when they showed up, one of these brothers and one of my sons wanted to focus soley on their sadness and postpone matters of property division to another day. Once I realized that we were all grieving in our own particular ways, I felt better about the anger I encountered.
I compare my own path with that taken by Captain Woodrow Call in Larry McMurtry’s western Lonesome Dove. Call is one of two legendary Texas rangers who is outliving the heroic age of the wild west. In an epic trek, he and fellow ranger Augustus McCrae have taken a herd of cattle from Texas to the fertile grazing lands of Montana. In doing so, however, they have tamed the west even more, making themselves even more irrelevant. As Gus puts it before he dies of a gangrenous leg caused by an Indian arrow, “Look there at Montana. It’s fine and fresh, and now we’ve come and it’ll soon be ruint, like my legs.”
Because Gus understands his partner well, he makes an outrageous deathbed request: he wants Call to reverse his trek and bury Gus’s body where they started out, in Lonesome Dove, Texas. Call can’t believe what he’s heard but Gus explains his reasoning:
“My God,” Call said, thinking his friend must be delirious. “You want me to haul you to Texas? We just got to Montana.”
“I know where you just got,” August said. “My burial can wait a spell. I got nothing against wintering in Montana. Just pack me in salt or charcoal or what you will. I’ll keep well enough and you can make the trip in the spring. You’ll be a rich cattle king by then and might need a restful trip.”
Call looked at his friend closely. Augustus looked sober and reasonably serious.
“To Texas?” he repeated.
“Yes, that’s my favor to you,” August said. “It’s the kind of job you was made for, that nobody else could do or even try. Now that the country is about settled, I don’t know how you’ll keep busy, Woodrow. But if you’ll do this for me you’ll be all right for another year, I guess.”
Gus then jokingly worries that Call may die of boredom before he sets out, in which case Gus will have to settle for a Montana grave.
While Call’s 3000-mile journey back to Texas is not quite as epic as the journey to Montana, it poses serious challenges. Before he’s done, the buggy carrying the body has fallen apart, the donkey pulling it has died, and the coffin, almost lost in a river crossing, is leaking salt. Towards the end, Call must bundle the body in a tarp and drag it travois style behind his horse. At one point he is also shot by an Indian so that he has a leaking wound when he finally arrives back at Lonesome Dove. He may not live much longer.
Gus, however, has achieved his major aim: which is not to be buried in Texas but to give Call the way to mourn that suits him best.
I don’t know if intense busyness has been the best way to mourn my mother, but I feel that it has kept me going. Now that the family has dispersed and my responsibilities have diminished, I’m experiencing a void, somewhat like Call at the end of his second trek.
