The Call To Step into That River

Verrochio and Leonardo Da Vinci, The Baptism of Christ

Elizabeth S.

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Sunday

We’re in Epiphany season, a special time to focus on those moments when the secular world glimpses the numinous. Which is to say, when it experiences an epiphany.

One of those moments is when Jesus, while being baptized by John, grasps in a new way that God dwells within. Think of the dove as his inner realization. Here’s the account that Luke gives of the moment, which comes right after John the Baptist announces, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire”:

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:21-22).

Milton provides a version of the story in the opening book of Paradise Regained. The “Great Proclaimer” is John:

Now had the great Proclaimer, with a voice
More awful than the sound of trumpet, cried
Repentance, and Heaven’s kingdom nigh at hand
To all baptized. To his great baptism flocked
With awe the regions round, and with them came
From Nazareth the son of Joseph deemed
To the flood Jordan—came as then obscure,
Unmarked, unknown. But him the Baptist soon
Descried, divinely warned, and witness bore
As to his worthier, and would have resigned
To him his heavenly office. Nor was long
His witness unconfirmed: on him baptized
Heaven opened, and in likeness of a Dove
The Spirit descended, while the Father’s voice
From Heaven pronounced him his beloved Son.

And now to the incomparable Malcolm Guite, who as always has a sonnet about the occasion:

The Baptism of Christ
Beginning here we glimpse the Three-in-one;
The river runs, the clouds are torn apart,
The Father speaks, the Spirit and the Son
Reveal to us the single loving heart
That beats behind the being of all things
And calls and keeps and kindles us to light.
The dove descends, the spirit soars and sings
‘You are belovèd, you are my delight!’
In that swift light and life, as water spills
And streams around the Man like quickening rain,
The voice that made the universe reveals
The God in Man who makes it new again.
He calls us too, to step into that river,
To die and rise and live and love forever.

Jesus recognizes that the voice that made the universe delights in all his creatures and accepts it has his mission to communicate the truth that each of us is God’s beloved child. The voice that made the universe is calling out for us all to have this epiphanic breakthrough.

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Orwell Foresaw the Dangers of AI

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Friday

I’ve just learned of a 1947 essay by George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” which predicts that authoritarian societies will increasingly use AI (Artificial Intelligence) to produce prose. Orwell doesn’t use the phrase AI, of course, and he’s talking more about assembly-line production of writing than anything as powerful as our modern cyber systems. Still, he proves prescient about what we are seeing today.

When he talks of literature and the threats to literature, Orwell means all kinds of writing, not just Literature. “The destruction of intellectual liberty,” he writes, “cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order.” He predicts that “if the liberal culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary art will perish with it.”

The sequence he sets up indicates that the more explicit a piece of writing is, the more likely it is to suffer censorship. That’s why journalism is first and poetry as last. And indeed, poets have generally been escaping wrath of our current book banners, with the exception of Amanda Gorman. Novels, on the other hand, are as much under attack as works of history.

Orwell imagines that, in the future, novels will be written by “a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.” In fact, he saw the process already underway in his time with regard to “the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines”:

Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically.

He then examines how such processes could be operationalized by an authoritarian government:

It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible — would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.

The rewriting would be necessitated because of Literature’s commitment to truth. In the past I’ve described Literature as a “no bullshit zone,” an idea that was inspired by a powerful Salman Rushdie essay. In it, the Anglo-Indian author declares that great novels and poems are necessary because they push against the authoritarian urge to create its own self-serving reality:

[A]s far as writers are concerned, we need to rebuild our readers’ belief in argument from factual evidence, and to do what fiction has always been good at doing—to construct, between the writer and the reader, an understanding about what is real. I don’t mean to reconstruct the narrow, exclusive consensus of the nineteenth century. I like the broader, more disputatious view of society to be found in modern literature. But when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most.

AI, despite the growing sophistication of ChatGPT and Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms, will never be able duplicate what Literature does. Kazuo Ishiguro arrives at a parallel conclusion in his novel Klara and the Sun.

Klara, the narrator, is an AF or Artificial Friend, which is say a solar-powered care robot assigned to the sick girl Josie. When the girl’s mother, fearful of losing this child as she has lost her first, turns to an robotics engineer to start grooming the AF to take her place, the question arises whether this is in fact possible. Can something artificial become indistinguishable from the genuine article?

Dr. Capaldi, who has been creating a mock-up of Josie which Klara is to “inhabit” when the girl dies, believes that it’s possible. “You see what’s being asked of you, Klara,” he says. “You’re not being required simply to mimic Josie’s outward behavior. You’re being asked to continue her for Chrissie [the mother]. And for everyone who loves Josie.”

Addressing Chrissie, he then goes on to argue against her generation’s old-fashioned belief that

there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now….There’s nothing there. Nothing inside Josie that’s beyond the Klaras of the world to continue. The second Josie won’t be a copy. She’ll be the exact same and you’ll have every right to love her just as you love Josie now. It’s not faith you need. Only rationality. I had to do it, it was tough but now it works for me just fine. And it will for you.

At first Klara thinks she will be able to succeed. Even learning the complexities of Josie’s heart will not be beyond her, she believes. But by the end of her life—which is to say, when her batteries start to die—she thinks differently.

It so happens that the experiment never happens as Josie, thanks to Klara’s efforts, gets well and Klara is jettisoned. But from her position in the graveyard where old AFS are stashed, she concludes that it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Her explanation to the store manager who sold her—and who is looking up her former products—is akin the Rushdie’s argument for the necessity of Literature:

I did all I could to learn Josie and had it become necessary, I would have done my utmost. But I don’t think it would have worked out so well. Not because I wouldn’t have achieved accuracy. But however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach. The Mother, Rick, Melania Housekeeper, the Father. I’d never have reached what they felt for Josie in their hearts. I’m now sure of this, Manager.

And:

Mr. Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr. Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn’t have succeeded.

In short, the growing pervasiveness of AI-generated texts, and its usefulness to authoritarians, makes Literature more essential than ever. Because of its insistence on truth, those who crave dictatorial power will invariably attack it, along with the libraries that house it and the teachers that teach it. As I point out in my book Better Living through Literature, in the end no great author is safe, including Shakespeare himself and certainly not figures like Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood. Even 1984 has appeared on recent American banned book lists. And Rushdie, of course, had a fatwa issued for his assassination.

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Red Wind in California

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Thursday

The horrific fires that are devastating parts of Los Angeles, spread by wind gusts of up to 60 mph, are prompting some to invoke Raymond Chandler’s 1938 novella Red Wind. You need only to read the famous opening paragraph to understand why:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.

Just as anything has been happening to Santa Monica homeowners, so does anything happen on the novella’s first page, when detective Philip Marlowe, enjoying a quiet beer in a cocktail lounge, witnesses another patron casually gun down another man who comes in looking for a woman. Chandler uses the wind as atmospherics for a story that involves deception, betrayal, blackmail, murder, police corruption, and various sordid relationships. In other words, modern life in America, at least according to Chandler and the noir genre.

Today, the corruption involves the fossil fuel industry and their bought politicians. The oil companies have long known that their products were resulting in the climate change that is leading to these wildfires. Columnist Heather Digby Parton Digby, who alerted me to the Chandler quote, points to a 2015 article in Rolling Stone that explains the science:

The national data is as clear as it is troubling: “Climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970,” according to a Forest Service report published in August. In the past three decades, the annual area claimed by fire has doubled, and the agency’s scientists predict that fires will likely “double again by midcentury.”

The human imprint on the bone-dry conditions that lead to fire is real — and now measurable. According to a major new study by scientists at Columbia and NASA, man-made warming is increasing atmospheric evaporation — drawing water out of Western soil, shrubs and trees. In California alone, the epic drought is up to 25 percent more severe than it would have been, absent climate change. And this impact doesn’t respect state borders. The study’s lead author, Columbia scientist Park Williams, tells Rolling Stone, “There’s the same effect in the Pacific Northwest.”

Now, thanks to the GOP, there’s a concerted effort to make sure the hydrocarbons keep on coming. Trump looks poised to reverse the fight against climate change and his followers appear to be fully on board. To cite one instance, forces in Oklahoma are trying to prevent further attempts to develop green energy there, even though the state has made impressive strides in recent years.  

So imagine you’re viewing these attacks on the environment with Chandler’s red wind blowing in the background. Here are a few of his passages to capture the mood:

–The wind was still blowing, oven-hot, swirling dust and torn paper up against the walls.

–When I went in with the drinks she had a gun in her hand. It was a small automatic with a pearl grip. It jumped up at me and her eyes were full or horror. I stopped, with a glass in each hand, and said: “Maybe this hot wind has got you crazy too.”

–The hot wind boomed against the shut windows. Windows have to be shut when a Santa Ana blows, heat or no heat.

–Perhaps the hot wind did something to him. It was booming against my shut windows like the surf under a pier.

–Then I went out to the kitchenette and poured a stiff jolt of whiskey and put it down and stood a moment listening to the hot wind howl against the window glass. A garage door banged, and a power-line wire with too much play between the insulators thumped the side of the building with a sound like somebody beating a carpet.

–“Goddam, thees hot wind make me dry like the ashes of love,” the Russian girl said bitterly.

–I blew cigarette smoke jerkily. The wind pounded the shut windows. The air in the room was foul.

–[Marlowe is about to be shot by a corrupt cop]: My mouth felt suddenly hot and dry. Far off I heard the wind booming. It seemed like the sound of guns.

Trumpism is an ill wind that blows nobody good (except for the fossil fuel industry). With global warming, the winds will only increase in intensity.

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MAGA Militias and Nazi Collaborators

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Wednesday

The latest novel in my Kate Atkinson binge is Transcription, which is about a British operation during World War II designed to track German sympathizers. It seems eerily relevant given the rise of rightwing militias and the influence of Vladimir Putin over segments of the GOP. In fact, the in-depth ProPublica account of a man who infiltrated AP3 (American Patriots Three Percent) and the Utah Oath Keepers reads a lot like an Atkinson novel, with the added benefit that it’s true.

An extended side note on my Atkinson enthusiasm: How could I not fall in love with an author who has her characters routinely cite literature? My favorite is Reggie, who appears as a genius-level orphan in When Will There Be Good News? and as a cop in Big Sky and who at one point applies a Doctor Faustus line to a sunset: “See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament.” She turns to Christopher Marlowe’s play again when she finds herself in an explosive situation involving two rescued trafficking victims, their two traffickers, and an unhinged man with a gun seeking revenge. “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,” she says to herself.

Meanwhile Atkinson’s recurring hard-boiled private eye, Jackson Brodie, goes on an Emily Dickinson kick in Started Early, Took My Dog. (The title itself is taken from a Dickinson poem.) One of his life’s motivators is the murder of his teenage sister when he was a child, which leads to such lines as, “His sister couldn’t stop for death, so he had, very kindly, stopped for her.” We learn that Brodie, having barely survived a train accident (Reggie, still a child at the time, saves his life), feels compelled to catch up “with some of the things he had missed out on in his impoverished education. Like culture, for example.”

Although novels don’t do much for him, poetry does:

Fiction had never been Jackson’s thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things—death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale. But poetry had wormed its way in, uninvited. A Toad, can die of Light! Crazy. So that here he was, thinking of his long-dead, long-lost sister, bolstered by a woman who felt a funeral in her brain.

But back to our current problem with rightwing militias and those higher-ups besotted with foreign autocrats. In Transcription, mole Juliet finds herself hobnobbing at ritzy parties with ladies in pearls who enthuse about Hitler, talk of international Jewish conspiracies, and load her with anti-Semitic tracts. Here’s a sampling:

It was a Saturday afternoon and here they were, Juliet thought, Englishwomen doing what English women did best wherever they were in the world—taking tea and having cozy chats, albeit the topic of conversation on this occasion was treason, not to mention the destruction of civilization and the British way of life, although no doubt Mrs. Scaife would have claimed to be a vigorous defender of both.

And:

“It’s all part and parcel of one and the same plan,” Mrs. Scaife explained assiduously to Juliet. “The plan is secretly operated and controlled by world Jewry, exactly on the lines laid down by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Do you have a copy, dear?”

“I don’t” Juliet said, although she did. Perry had lent her his own copy so that she could “get the measure of what these people believe.”

“Let me find you one,” Mrs. Scaife said, ringing a little bell on the tea tray.”

And one more passage:

“I wish to save Britain,” Mrs. Scaife declared, adopting a rather heroic pose over the teacups.

“Like Boadicea,” Mrs. Ambrose suggested.

“But not from the Romans,” Mrs. Scaife said. “From the Jews and the communists and the Masons. The scum of the earth,” she added pleasantly….

Mrs. Ambrose had begun to nod off, and if she wasn’t careful, Juliet thought, she would too. Mrs. Scaife droned on, her proselytism soporific. Jews here, Jews there, Jews everywhere. It sounded quite absurd in its wrongheadedness, like a mad nursery rhyme.

There were no English maids or clinking teacups in the AR3 meeting that Williams secretly recorded, but there were American equivalents:

Over six hours, the men set goals and delegated responsibilities with surprisingly little worry about the federal crackdown on militias. They discussed the scourges they were there to combat (stolen elections, drag shows, President Joe Biden) only in asides. Instead, they focused on “marketing” — “So what buzzwords can we insert in our mission statement?” one asked — and on resources that’d help local chapters rapidly expand. “I’d like to see this organization be like the McDonald’s of patriot organizations,” another added. To Williams, it felt more like a Verizon sales meeting than an insurrectionist cell.

And:

“We’re making progress locally on the law enforcement,” Coates added. He said that at least three of them can get “the sheriff” on the phone any time of day. Like the last time, Coates didn’t give a name, but he said something even more intriguing: “The sheriff is my tie-in to the state attorney general because he’s friends.” Williams told me he fought the urge to lob a question….

Closing out the day, Kinch summarized their plan moving forward: Keep a low profile. Focus on the unglamorous work. Rebuild their national footprint. And patiently prepare for 2024. “We still got what, two more years, till another quote unquote election?” He thanked Williams for coming and asked if they could start planning training exercises.

Atkinson provides the charged context in which the British collaborators operate:

Denmark had just surrendered and the Germans had taken Oslo and set up a government under Quisling. Poland, Norway, Denmark—Hitler was collecting countries like stamps. How long before he had the full set?

And then, in a passage that applies to the man we just re-elected and to his billionaire sidekick:

The future was coming nearer, one relentless goose step after the next. Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. (“The clowns are the dangerous ones,” Perry said.)

Will we be hearing goose steps from people like this? We’ll know soon enough if Trump pardons the leaders of January 6 and if a Kash Patel-led FBI gives the green light to paramilitary groups, providing Trump with his own Brown Shirts or SS troops.

Then again, our own rightwing yahoos may prove to be as inept as the Nazi sympathizers in Atkinson’s book. At the end of Transcription, some in the administration are wondering whether too much attention was paid to these people, most of whom were arrested. That’s certainly what I hope.

But I’m not complacent on the matter. After all, in Atkinson’s novel Winston Churchill is heading the country, not a Putin-directed Donald Trump. In our case, the enemy has penetrated higher levels than Atkinson’s Hitler fans could ever dream.

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Going Gently into That Good Night–Or Not

Flemish School, Young Woman on Her Death Bed (1621)

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Tuesday

For reasons I’m not at liberty to discuss, I’ve been recently thinking about sickness and death. Suffice it to say that, at 73, I have observed several instances of death and dying close-up. I spent my final days with my parents not knowing if the loving words I was saying to them were getting through. I sang a lullaby to my dead son after divers pulled him from the waters of the St. Mary’s River. I spent months talking about life and death with a colleague—a philosophy professor—who was dying of cancer.

Death remains as much a mystery as ever. I think of Mary Oliver’s observation about

the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.

I know that, from the moment we are born, we are also dying. Dylan Thomas, whose life ended at 39, wrote, “Time held me green and dying, /Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” For Thomas, life is something to be fought for, and he memorably advises us to “not go gentle into that good night.” Old age, he declares, “should burn and rave at close of day.”

For all its advice for the elderly, “Do Not Go Gentle” strikes me as a young person’s poem. General Sternwood, the father in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, captures more what it’s like to be old and sick. Rather than raging against the dying of the light, he is focused just on surviving. As he tells Philip Marlowe,

“You are looking at a very dull survival of a rather gaudy life, a cripple paralyzed in both legs and with only half of his lower belly. There’s very little that I can eat and my sleep is so close to waking that it is hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider…

Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has his own version of the final struggle—or non-struggle—in Heart of Darkness:

 I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.

If that’s what dying (or nearly dying) looks like from inside, here’s how it appears to outsiders. D. H. Lawrence’s account of watching Mrs. Morel die comes close to what it was like when Julia and I were attending my mother in her final hours:

Annie huddled into the dressing-gown, Paul wrapped himself in a brown blanket. It was three o’clock. He mended the fire. Then the two sat waiting. The great, snoring breath was taken—held awhile—then given back. There was a space—a long space. Then they started. The great, snoring breath was taken again. He bent close down and looked at her.

“Isn’t it awful!” whispered Annie.

He nodded. They sat down again helplessly. Again came the great, snoring breath. Again they hung suspended. Again it was given back, long and harsh. The sound, so irregular, at such wide intervals, sounded through the house. Morel, in his room, slept on. Paul and Annie sat crouched, huddled, motionless. The great snoring sound began again—there was a painful pause while the breath was held—back came the rasping breath. Minute after minute passed. Paul looked at her again, bending low over her.

“She may last like this,” he said.

And further on:

At last Annie crept out of the room, and he was alone. He hugged himself in his brown blanket, crouched in front of his mother, watching. She looked dreadful, with the bottom jaw fallen back. He watched. Sometimes he thought the great breath would never begin again. He could not bear it—the waiting. Then suddenly, startling him, came the great harsh sound. He mended the fire again, noiselessly. She must not be disturbed. The minutes went by. The night was going, breath by breath. Each time the sound came he felt it wring him, till at last he could not feel so much.

This will go on for another four to six interminable hours until the end finally comes.

In the face of such suffering, one can understand why John Keats, who saw his brother die of tuberculosis and who died of it himself, would write (this in “Ode to a Nightgale”),

                                                 for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
         To take into the air my quiet breath…

Again, no raging against the dying of the light here. Just an infinite sadness.

When my friend and former colleague Dana Greene was dying of ALS, her husband read her “Let Evening Come,” which Jane Kenyon wrote while dying of leukemia. It so happens that Dana, just months before coming down with the illness, had completed a biography on Kenyon so the reading must have been particularly poignant:

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

Was Kenyon, to borrow from “Do Not Go Gentle,” one of those wise ones who “at their end know dark is right”? Thomas contends that even these ones rage against the dying of the light, but I’m dubious. Maybe framing a gentle poem like this—or reading a gentle poem like this —eases us through the transition from life to death.

In any event, this transition resists all efforts at understanding. With literature, however, we can come closer to penetrating its mysteries than with any other kind of language. If we have read a lot, we can call upon multiple poems and stories for their assistance in such moments.

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Playing Whack-a-Mole with Jan. 6


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Monday

A year ago today Donald Trump and his minions unleashed (to borrow from W.B. Yeats) “mere anarchy” upon America. I like Yeats’s use of the adjective because “mere” undermines their boasting. Trump and his ilk like to see themselves as big and bad, but in many ways January 6 was pathetic. Although many of those they attacked were scared and a number hurt, the Capitol invaders were no more than yahoos. To puff them up is to give them more substance than they warrant.

To be sure, they did drown “the ceremony of innocence”—the peaceful transfer of power that has been America’s pride and joy ever since its founding—and yes, January 6 undermined democracy. Anarchy puts ultimate power in the hands of bad actors. But it can be countered by people forcefully standing up for what is right. Grendel, an embodiment of the kind of anarchistic resentment that characterizes the MAGA movement, seems unbeatable until someone with firm resolve fights back. Then he retreats whimpering to his cave.

Unfortunately, anarchy prevails if people surrender in advance or if they make excuses for it, which is what the GOP has been doing. While some Republicans are filled with passionate intensity—including those who egged on the coup attempt—many more “lack all conviction.” They recognize Trump as a threat to the nation but prize their electoral prospects more. They remind me of a character in the Kate Atkinson detective novel Big Sky, which I’ve just finished reading.

Andy Bragg is helping to run a human trafficking ring, but his complicity is complicated by a Catholic conscience. How does he reconcile the two? The way many Republicans have managed to rationalize January 6. Here is Bragg delivering two women to the organization:

“It’s better inside,” Andy said. “You’ll see. Come on, now, out of the car.” He was a shepherd with two reluctant sheep. Lambs, really. To the slaughter. His conscience sprang up again and he hit it back down. It was like playing Whack-A-Mole.”

Each time a qualm about Trump’s coup attempt springs up, the GOP finds ways to whack it down. The rioters, they tell themselves, were actually Antifa activists or they were egged on by the FBI or they were just harmless tourists (although many were carrying weapons) or it wasn’t a big deal because nobody died (although some did) or it wasn’t a real coup attempt since it didn’t succeed or there was election fraud somewhere so it was okay or…or…or…

Liberals hope that conservatives can’t play Whack-a-Mole indefinitely. Indeed, Andy buckles in the end, doing something decent after he has been shot. But they may be overly optimistic on this score. After all, there were Germans who found ways to live with the concentration camps for years, facing up to reality only following military defeat. I use this example because my father witnessed it in action: one of his jobs as a member of the armed forces at the end of World War II was to take Germans through Dachau to show them what their government had done. Nothing made him angrier (I’ve read his letters home at the time) than their refusal to take responsibility.

In other words, people have amazingly accommodating moral compasses when self-interest is involved. As cynic Ambrose Bierce defines “moral” in his Devil’s Dictionary, “adj; conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.” Or as Oscar Wilde put it, “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”

Some are predicting that Trump, after pardoning the Capitol invaders (which he promises to do “on day one”), will attempt to turn January 6 into a national holiday, just as he’s attempting to turn insurrectionist Ashley Babbitt into a martyr.  In the post I wrote on the first January 6 anniversary, I wondered if Trump could achieve with his coup attempt what the banana plantation owners do with the massacre of 3000 workers in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude:

The official version, repeated a thousand times and mangled out all over the country by every means of communication the government found at hand, was finally accepted: there were no dead, the satisfied workers had gone back to their families, and the banana company was suspending all activity until the rains stopped. Martial law continued with an eye to the necessity of taking emergency measures for the public disaster of the endless downpour, but the troops were confined to quarters. During the day the soldiers walked through the torrents in the streets with their pant legs rolled up, playing with boats with the children. At night, after taps, they knocked doors down with their rifle butts, hauled suspects out of their beds, and took them off on trips from which there was no return. The search for and extermination of the hoodlums, murders, arsonists, and rebels of Decree No 4 was still going on, but the military denied it even to the relatives of the victims who crowded the commandants’ offices in search of news. “You must have been dreaming,” the officers insisted. Nothing has happened in Macondo, nothing has ever happened, and nothing ever will happen. This is a happy town.” In that way they were finally able to wipe out the union leaders.

As far as the GOP is concerned, Trump’s electoral victory means that January 6 never happened. Their inner moles have given up.

Further thought: A recent article in Atlantic notes another form of erasure that today’s governments have at their disposal. “The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine,” observes the headline, with the follow-up, “A rationale is always a scroll or a click away.” Self-justifying whack-a-mole, in other words, has never been easier.

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The Gift That Only You Can Give

Albrecht Dürer, Adoration of the Magi

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Sunday

Integral to the Epiphany story is the long and difficult journey involved. T.S. Eliot emphasizes this in the most famous poem about the magi’s journey, having the speaker observe,

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.

That’s the way it is with vision quests: to penetrate the veil that separates the numinous from the everyday requires discipline and dedicated effort. But as forbidding as this may sound, there are ways to keep from being overwhelmed. In “For Those Who Have Far to Travel,” poet Jan Richardson notes that “one of the mercies of the road” is that

we see it only by stages
as it opens before us,
as it comes into our keeping
step by single step.

Richardson alerts us to the various guides to which we have access:

to be faithful to the next step;
to rely on more than the map;
to heed the signposts of intuition and dream;
to follow the star that only you will recognize;
to keep an open eye for the wonders that
attend the path;
to press on beyond distractions
     beyond fatigue
     beyond what would tempt you from the way.

And at the end, the poet tells us, what you offer up is the gift “that only you can give.” What is this gift? Christina Rossetti tells us in her “Christmas Carol”:

What can I give Him,
  Poor as I am? —
If I were a Shepherd
  I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man
  I would do my part, —
Yet what I can I give Him, —
  Give my heart.

Sometimes it takes a journey to discover this heart.

For Those Who Have Far to Travel
By Jan Richardson 

If you could see the journey whole
you might never undertake it;
might never dare the first step
that propels you
from the place you have known
toward the place you know not.

Call it one of the mercies of the road:
that we see it only by stages
as it opens before us,
as it comes into our keeping
step by single step.

There is nothing for it but to go
and by our going take the vows 
the pilgrim takes:
     to be faithful to the next step;
     to rely on more than the map;
     to heed the signposts of intuition and dream;
     to follow the star that only you will recognize;
     to keep an open eye for the wonders that
     attend the path;
     to press on beyond distractions
          beyond fatigue
          beyond what would tempt you from the way.

There are vows that only you will know;
the secret promises for your particular path
and the new ones you will need to make
when the road is revealed by turns
you could not have foreseen.

Keep them, break them, make them again:
each promise becomes part of the path;
each choice creates the road
that will take you to the place
where at last you will kneel to offer the gift
most needed— the gift that only you can give—
before turning to go home by another way.

Previous Posts about Epiphany Poems
Dudley Delffs: Seeking Our Heart’s Desire
Bruce Monroe Robison: “A Baby’s Cry, A Big Bang”
Scott Bates: The Epiphany from a Camel’s Point of View
Scott Bates: Epiphany Sunday and the Arabian Nights
Scott Bates: The Real Story of Christmas
T.S. Eliot: A Cold Coming We Had of It
Mary Oliver: The Wonder of First Snow
Madeleine L’Engle: The Stable Is Our Heart
Joseph Brodsky: Three Beams Closing In and In on the Star
George Mackay Brown: A Light on the Darkling Road
Rainer Maria Rilke, Denise Levertov, Leonard Cohen: What I Heard Was My Whole Self
John Thorkild Ellison: A Pause in Time and the Soul’s Awareness
Scott Bates: Christmas at the Courthouse
John Milton: What Is Dark in Me Illumine
Scott Bates: A Season for Miraculous Breakthroughs
Muriel Spark: Where Do We Go from Here?
Scott Bates: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Nativity:  
Malcolm Guite: The Dove Descends, The Spirit Soars
William Butler Yeats: An Uncontrollable Mystery on the Bestial Floor

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Lit Packs a Powerful Punch

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Saturday

This year has been momentous in many ways but, on a personal level, the major event was the publication of my book. Last July I announced its forthcoming release while situating it in the context of other like-minded works that have been appearing. I’m not the only one arguing that literature can pack a dangerous punch.

Reprinted from July 3, 2024

I recently completed proofreading the galleys (if that’s what they’re still called) of my forthcoming book, which of course is tremendously exciting. Then I had the slightly unnerving experience of reading a New York Times essay about another soon-to-published book that explores some of the same themes and includes many of the same thinkers and ideas.  Like my book, Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality is concerned with the recent spate of book bannings, and we both note that there is a long history (2500 years long) of people freaking out over stories.

When similar books come out at the same time, it’s often because authors are tapping into the same zeitgeist or spirit of the times. Nor are Gold and I the only ones: in 2022 Yale Comp Lit Professor Peter Brooks’s published Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative. 

It’s good there’s a cluster of such books since they’re more likely to capture people’s attention that way. My book will be appearing (I think) sometime this summer whereas Gold’s is slated for an October release.

In today’s post I compare my ideas with Gold’s, especially noting how we arrive as almost diametrically opposite conclusions. Gold notes that the fear of fiction is a cyclical phenomenon, waxing and waning, and she points to various eruptions over the centuries. Then, as I do, she does a deep dive into Plato’s anxieties, which led him to ban the stories of Hesiod and Homer from his utopian republic. In my view, one reason why Plato banned Homer was because he himself was in love with the poet and was frightened over the effect that The Iliad and The Odyssey had over him. When he was in the grip of Homer’s mesmerizing fictions, he had difficulty exercising his “right reason,” which for Plato is philosophy’s highest aim.

Gold believes that fiction causes panic most commonly in democracies. That’s because

the inner lives and motives of others matter a great deal in a democracy, arguably more so than in other political systems where people have less direct control over their social experience — and less freedom of expression. In a democracy, your fellow citizens can organize for social progress or encourage the passage of draconian laws that terrorize minorities. Fear of other people, and how they might work together to shift reality, is the reason the contest over written language so often extends to the realm of make-believe — of fiction. Fiction is the story of other people; this is what makes it dangerous.

I agree with Gold’s point but approach it from the opposing angle, seeing fiction as a powerful tool for progressives. Looking at how Romantic poets like Blake and Wordsworth celebrated the lives of chimney sweeps, shepherds, leech gatherers, and other lower class figures, I write that

the door had been opened for poets and writers to use the Imagination to step beyond their own narrow class boundaries in ways that would have been, well, unimaginable in earlier times. Through literature authors have entered the lives of the marginalized (Walt Whitman), the urban poor (Charles Dickens), American slaves (Harriet Beecher Stowe), Dorset dairy maids (Thomas Hardy), French coalminers (Émile Zola), Nebraska pioneers (Willa Cather), Harlem residents (Langston Hughes), African American sharecroppers (Jean Toomer), African American homosexuals (James Baldwin), bankrupted Oklahoma farmers (John Steinbeck), Laguna Pueblo war veterans (Leslie Marmon Silko), transplanted Pakistanis (Hanif Kureishi), West Indian immigrants (Zadie Smith), American lesbians (Alison Bechdel), and on and on.

Like Gold, I also examine why MAGA is attacking certain books. For instance, if they have repeatedly attacked the novel Beloved, it’s because Toni Morrison addresses two of their sore spots (to put it mildly), America’s dark racial past and a woman claiming control over her own body. (The slave owners steal Sethe’s breast milk and then whip her to an inch of her life.) In the 2021 Virginia governor’s race, a Republican operative complained that her son had been traumatized by being assigned the book in high school, and candidate Glenn Younkin used the story as the final argument in his successful bid.

Gold and I both look at two works that played a role in slave times and the Jim Crow south, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Clansman (which became Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation)Where we differ, however—and it’s a major difference—is that she wants to draw hard and fast lines between literature and life whereas I want to dismantle them. Gold writes,  

Fiction writers can insist on having their work judged on its merits and not on whether it provides moral instruction or inculcates the right social value. This isn’t an anti-political stance but, rather, a highly political one. It tells readers to go get their values elsewhere, to stop demanding that fiction provide the difficult labor of soul-making — to do that work themselves.

Now, I agree that literature should not be yoked to an ideological agenda. In fact, a number of thinkers I explore argue specifically against doctrinaire literature, including Sir Philip Sidney, Karl Marx, Frederic Engels, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Terry Eagleton. But by potentially changing the way people see the world, literature (so I argue) sometimes changes history and so can hardly be separated from morality or social values. In fact, soul-making is exactly what fiction does.

Percy Shelley provides specific examples. The great poets of the past, he says, have sowed the seeds for the ending of slavery and the liberation of women. “It exceeds all imagination,” he writes, “to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place.”

“Poets,” the Romantic poet concludes, “are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Or to quote someone who is not an activist poet, Harold Bloom makes a compelling case that Shakespeare changed the fundamental way that humans see themselves. Whereas fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Johnson “ideograms,” Bloom writes in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human that the Bard created characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, thereby inventing “human inwardness.” Personality as we understand it, Bloom explains, is “a Shakespearean invention…Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater…”

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, meanwhile, argues that literature is essential in a multicultural democracy for producing informed voters. How else are we to empathize with fellow citizens who are otherwise unlike us?

Sounds like soul-making to me.

Further thought: Gold appears to throw in her lot with the “art for art’s sake” crowd and elevate aesthetics above all, concluding her piece with Oscar Wilde’s contention, in his preface to Picture of Dorian Gray, that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

But Wilde’s novel was profoundly moral, providing deep comfort to many closeted gay men when it came out, some of whom had it all but memorized. For that matter, the Aesthetic movement was itself a protest against capitalism, which dismissed anything (such as art) that could not be monetized. Wilde makes this clear in his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism.”

In my own book, I describe a constant tension between literature as a fun activity (aesthetic delight) and literature as a practical tool. Matthew Arnold talks of lit as sweetness and light while John Stuart Mill makes it his goal to balance utility and beauty. The best literature, I contend, is always both/and, never either/or. Soul-construction AND a delightful romp.

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To Stay Sane in 2025, Read Rasselas

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Friday

For much of this week I have been reposting essays from this past year about how literature can be a comfort, support,and guide in dark times. I’m struck by how literature reinforces a recent set of tips on how to keep democracy alive, courtesy of American philosopher and linguist George Lakoff.

Among these tips are: be brave, cultivate empathy, stay focused, foster real connections, avoid brain rot and lies, demand accountability, and support artists and the arts. Great literature touches on all these areas in one way or another, providing us with forums where courage, truth, and justice are prized, where accountability is demanded, where empathy is fostered, and where focus is required. The best poems, plays, and stories engage our best and fullest selves, providing us with a lodestar that will direct our steps when we find ourselves faltering.

This past July, looking for a pick-me-up, I turned to Samuel Johnson’s philosophic novel Rasselas: A Prince of Abyssinia. The following essay was the result.

Reprinted from July 12, 2024

Uncertainty about the 2024 election is driving Democrats mad at the moment. Why does the race continue so close, we wonder, given that Joe Biden has created a stellar economy while Donald Trump attempted a coup and is now—with his threats of retribution and Project 2025—promising a fascist takedown of American democracy if reelected? While the situation is worrisome, however, worrying ourselves sick over the matter is not going to change things.

When I find myself consumed by despair over this state of affairs, I sometimes think of Samuel Johnson’s astronomer in his philosophic novel Rasselas. 

Rasselas is on a journey to discover the secret of happiness and thinks he has found it in a learned scientist who has given over his life to studying the heavens. This man spends as much time charting interstellar space as political junkies spend surfing the internet, a comparison I make because similar results ensue. First, here’s Rasselas’s mentor Imlac reporting on the astronomer:  

I have just left the observatory of one of the most learned astronomers in the world, who has spent forty years in unwearied attention to the motion and appearances of the celestial bodies, and has drawn out his soul in endless calculations.

And now here’s the result, which Imlac discovers after noticing the astronomer’s depression and pressing him on it. The astronomer reveals that he does not possess the key to happiness after all:

Hear, Imlac, what thou wilt not without difficulty credit.  I have possessed for five years the regulation of the weather and the distribution of the seasons.  The sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds at my call have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command.  I have restrained the rage of the dog-star, and mitigated the fervors of the crab.  The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto refused my authority, and multitudes have perished by equinoctial tempests which I found myself unable to prohibit or restrain.  I have administered this great office with exact justice, and made to the different nations of the earth an impartial dividend of rain and sunshine.  What must have been the misery of half the globe if I had limited the clouds to particular regions, or confined the sun to either side of the equator?

Just like many who follow the ups and downs of politics, the astronomer doesn’t differentiate between worrying about cataclysmic events and having actual control over them. And while he acknowledges he can’t prove his power, he trusts his vibes:

I…shall not attempt to gain credit by disputation.  It is sufficient that I feel this power that I have long possessed, and every day exerted it.

After describing the encounter, Imlac warns the Rasselas party,

He who has nothing external that can divert him must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is?  He then expatiates in boundless futurity, and culls from all imaginable conditions that which for the present moment he should most desire…and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion.  

The problem is particularly acute, Imlac says, for those who have a strong sense of responsibility and who feel guilty for not doing more:

“No disease of the imagination,” answered Imlac, “is so difficult of cure as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt; fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other….[W]hen melancholy notions take the form of duty, they lay hold on the faculties without opposition, because we are afraid to exclude or banish them.

Those who take their citizenship duties seriously may find conscience mixing with fantasies of power—we all have them—and consequently finding themselves plunged into melancholy or depression.

So what is to be done? Part of the problem is solitude, so Rasselas and his party pull the astronomer out of his observatory and get him to join them in a variety of activities, which include conversing with their lovely handmaiden Pekulah. In other words, they offer him perspective and a sense of proportion. Once they do, he comes to realize that he is doesn’t carry the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. As Imlac sums it up,

Open your heart to the influence of the light, which from time to time breaks in upon you; when scruples importune you, which you in your lucid moments know to be vain, do not stand to parley, but fly to business or to Pekuah; and keep this thought always prevalent, that you are only one atom of the mass of humanity, and have neither such virtue nor vice as that you should be singled out for supernatural favors or afflictions.

For concerned citizens, flying to business can include contacting members of Congress, writing postcards, knocking on doors, and donating money, and of course voting. Other versions of flying to Pekuah, meanwhile, include romantic outings, partying with friends, exercising, and so on. The key is stepping away from the black hole that is the political internet.

This remedy works with the astronomer, who reflects,

I now see how fatally I betrayed my quiet, by suffering chimeras to prey upon me in secret…I hope that time and variety will dissipate the gloom that has so long surrounded me, and the latter part of my days will be spent in peace.

To which Imlac replies, “Your learning and virtue may justly give you hopes.”

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