Gerard van Honhorst, St. Peter Being Freed from Prison
Sunday
I was thumbing through my Collected Poetry of Denise Levertov yesterday and came across a wonderful poem that I had forgotten about. My late friend Dana Greene, in her biography of Levertov, spoke of the poet’s focus on “primary wonder,” and what I love about Levertov is that, for her, such wonder is not the end but the beginning. It’s after we experience divine revelation that the real work begins.
That’s how it was for the disciples after they encountered the risen Jesus and how it is for Peter in the poem that I share today. “St. Peter and the Angel” is a reflection on this episode, recounted in Acts 12: 5-11, about Peter’s miraculous escape from Herod’s prison. Here’s the passage:
Peter was therefore kept in prison, but constant prayer was offered to God for him by the church. And when Herod was about to bring him out, that night Peter was sleeping, bound with two chains between two soldiers; and the guards before the door were keeping the prison. Now behold, an angel of the Lord stood by him, and a light shone in the prison; and he struck Peter on the side and raised him up, saying, “Arise quickly!” And his chains fell off his hands. Then the angel said to him, “Gird yourself and tie on your sandals”; and so he did. And he said to him, “Put on your garment and follow me.” So he went out and followed him, and did not know that what was done by the angel was real, but thought he was seeing a vision. When they were past the first and the second guard posts, they came to the iron gate that leads to the city, which opened to them of its own accord; and they went out and went down one street, and immediately the angel departed from him.
And when Peter had come to himself, he said, “Now I know for certain that the Lord has sent His angel, and has delivered me from the hand of Herod and from all the expectation of the Jewish people.”
Somewhat like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Peter realizes that our most challenging task is handling the freedom we are granted. While the Inquisitor speaks of the fear, however, he omits the joy that comes with embracing that freedom. When we can no longer feel the angel, that’s when we hear our own footsteps and experience the “long street’s majestic emptiness”:
St. Peter and the Angel By Denise Levertov
Delivered out of raw continual pain, smell of darkness, groans of those others to whom he was chained–
unchained, and led past the sleepers, door after door silently opening– out! And along a long street’s majestic emptiness under the moon:
one hand on the angel’s shoulder, one feeling the air before him, eyes open but fixed . . .
And not till he saw the angel had left him, alone and free to resume the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of what he had still to do, not till then did he recognize this was no dream. More frightening than arrest, than being chained to his warders: he could hear his own footsteps suddenly. Had the angel’s feet made any sound? He could not recall. No one had missed him, no one was in pursuit. He himself must be the key, now, to the next door, the next terrors of freedom and joy.
When Bill Clinton, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, said, “We need Kamala Harris, the president of joy, to lead us,” I thought of some of the great poems about joy. They include two by William Blake and another by Kahlil Gibran.
Before looking them over, let’s first talk about this joy explosion that has broken out amongst Democrats. Fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat says that joy is critical in opposing dictators and wannabe dictators and that the Harris-Walz campaign are right to adopt the slogan “Joy and Hope.” The scholar notes that
positive emotions such as love, solidarity, and yes, joy, have been part of successful anti-authoritarian political strategies. Positive emotions motivate people to engage in politics when they might have grown apathetic or cynical about the possibility of change.
She therefore takes issue with a New York Times opinion column by columnist Patrick Healy when he “cringed a little” at Clinton’s words, opining, “”Joy is not a political strategy.” Rather than simply disagree with him, however, Ben-Ghiat goes further and analyzes his response. We’ve been so inundated by negative images and rhetoric “designed to evoke fear, contempt, hatred, and disgust with others,” she says, that the prospect of joy feels unfamiliar and even shocking. The purpose of Trump’s language has been, in part, to make us “feel hopeless and down, so that we lose our faith in ourselves and each other.”
One thinks of the “immigrants as rapists and murderers” speech with which Trump began his first presidential campaign; his “American carnage” speech at his inauguration; the ceaseless lying and demonization that we endured during his years in office; and the non-stop attacks in the years since on the judicial system that has been trying to hold him accountable. No wonder, then, that a newspaper columnist would be distrustful.
Fear, contempt, hatred, and disgust with others don’t necessarily get the last word, however. In his poem “Joy and Sorrow,” which appears in The Prophet, Gibran makes Ben-Ghiat’s point in another way. The joy that many of us are feeling at the moment, Gibran would explain, is a logical outgrowth of the sorrow we have been experiencing. The two are coin sides of each other:
Joy and Sorrow By Kahlil Gibran
Then a woman said, ‘Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.’ And he answered: Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that hold your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.” But I say unto you, they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed. Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy. Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced. When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.
Perhaps Trump has carved into our being, attempting to hollow us out with his knives. What he has wrought instead, however, is a lute that soothes the spirit.
Blake makes the same point–that joy and woe are closely linked–in a passage from his mystical “Auguries of Innocence”:
Man was made for Joy & Woe And when this we rightly know Thro the World we safely go Joy & Woe are woven fine A Clothing for the soul divine Under every grief & pine Runs a joy with silken twine
Blake doesn’t end the matter there, however. In his short poem “Eternity,” he feels the need to distinguish between different kinds of joy:
Eternity By William Blake
He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
The lyric serves as a good rejoinder to those who contend that Democrats are experiencing a sugar high, that Harris is having a honeymoon that can’t last, that “joy is not a political strategy.” And to give this observation some credit, this is the case when we “bind” ourselves to a certain feel-good moment. If we do so, then we do indeed destroy this winged thing, becoming disheartened when the feeling dissipates.
But if, instead, we kiss the joy as it flies—if we dedicate ourselves, in our multicultural democracy, to living fully each moment and honoring the full personhood of each person we meet—then the daily sunrise promises us new experiences and new treasures. When a joyful approach to life brings such rewards, why would we ever tire of it?
Citing a Biblical passage that Blake knew well, the Rev. Al Sharpton summed up my point today in his uplifting speech to the Democratic National Convention. Psalm 30 tells us, he told the delegates, that
weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. We’ve endured January 6th. We’ve endured conspiracy theories. We’ve endured lies and areas of darkness. But if we stay together, Black, White, Latina, Asian, Indian American, if we stay together, joy, joy, joy, joy coming in the morning.
Kamala Harris speaking at the Democratic National Convention
Thursday
Two days ago I was having a fun conversation on Spoutible about why English majors often make good lawyers, with my interlocutor–one Phil Boiarski—mentioning the rhetorical skills lawyers need to be successful. Then he asked me what I thought of Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech.
While rhetorical analysis is not a strength of mine, I know that I experienced a mood shift in the course of the speech. I started off feeling warm and fuzzy as Harris recounted her parents’ immigrant stories, along with how her mother and her neighbors combined to bring her up in a middle class Oakland neighborhood. Then, however, the tone shifted dramatically as Harris got serious.
Tomi T. Ahonen, who writes extensively about political speechifying, helped me understand what had happened. The speech, he noted, had two parts, the first recounting Harris’s life story, the second channeling Winston Churchill. About the latter, I’m assuming he particularly had in mind such passages as,
And know this: I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists. And I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim-Jong-Un, who are rooting for Trump. Because they know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors. They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable—because he wants to be an autocrat.
As President, I will never waver in defense of America’s security and ideals. Because, in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand—and where the United States of America belongs.
As I listened, I felt that a battle bugle had been sounded and that I was being marched into action. Or as I told my Spoutible companion in a reference that may have confused him, I felt like the jazz-playing brother in James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” when he’s back at the piano again.
Sonny has recently been released from imprisonment for heroin possession and for the first time is sitting down with his old band at a jazz club. Creole, the band leader, leads Sonny to the piano and at first allows him to focus on the positive:
[Sonny] seemed to have found, right there beneath his fingers, a damn brand-new piano. It seemed that he couldn’t get over it. Then, for a while, just being happy with Sonny, [the band] seemed to be agreeing with him that brand-new pianos certainly were a gas.
Similarly, as we listened to Harris, we were happy to join her in her immigrant success story, one of the foundational stories of our republic.
But we can’t remain in this space any more than Sonny can remain in his. The band leader is there to remind everyone why Sonny is there:
Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.
It’s for Sonny, as it is for Harris, to take leadership in this situation:
And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation. Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny’s blues. He made the little black man on the drums know it, and the bright, brown man on the horn. Creole wasn’t trying any longer to get Sonny in the water. He was wishing him Godspeed. Then he stepped back, very slowly, filling the air with the immense suggestion that Sonny speak for himself.
And speak for himself Sonny does:
Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.
The narrator, who has had his own sorrows, finds momentary relief in Sonny’s playing, even while he simultaneously realizes “that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.”
Harris pointed to our own challenges, even as she gave Democrats and a fair number of Republicans and Independents the confidence that she was the right person to lead us in that endeavor.
In her shift of tone and substance, I was also reminded of Obama’s 2009 inaugural address. Many came to it wanting to bask in his vision of hope and change and were startled when he talked instead of getting down to business. “We campaign in poetry but govern in prose,” New York Governor Mario Cuomo famously said, and Obama and Harris pointed to some of the prose that awaits us.
At the end of Baldwin’s story, Sonny’s playing results in a reconciliation between the two brothers, who have become estranged. For her part, Harris is managing—at least for the moment—to bring together progressives, liberals, moderates, and a significant number of center-right conservatives. Freedom lurks around us, she told us, and she can help us be free if we send her to the White House.
Increasing attention is being paid these days to the dangerous power of storytelling. In addition to my own book, I’m thinking of Peter Brooks’s Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative and Annalee Newitz’s Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, as well as Lyta Gold’s forthcoming Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality (I examine Gold’s ideas here and have posted a whole series of essays on Brooks, including this one. Today I turn my attention to Newitz’s book.
According to the publisher’s website, Newitz contends that “coercive storytelling” has always been America’s secret weapon, going all the way back to the American Revolution and reaching its apotheosis in the Cold War and twenty-first-century on-line influence campaigns. Operatives who shaped modern psychological warfare, she says, drew on their experiences as science fiction writers and in the advertising industry.
Powerful weapons will always find their way into bad hands, of course, and according to Newitz, culture warriors have used such storytelling to transform democratic debates into “toxic wars” over American identity. The villains in these noxious stories are people of color, feminists, and LGBTQ+ folk, who “are singled out and treated as enemies of the state.”
It gets worse. The ultimate purpose of the stories is less to persuade people of their views (although that’s certainly part of it) than to delegitimize the very idea of objective truth. As reviewer Mark Dery summarizes Newitz’s thesis,
The goal isn’t so much to persuade people as to disorient them or, as Russian psywar operatives like to call it, maskirovka—“baffling people with bullshit.” Under Putin, says Newitz, “government agencies flood social media with misinformation.” Russians “don’t trust their government; they don’t trust educators and scientists; and they don’t trust one another,” a US Army psyop instructor tells Newitz. America is beginning to look a lot like Putinland.
While fully acknowledging the dangers Newitz identifies, reviews of her book have been less impressed with her solutions. Kirkus Reviews writes,
In the obligatory how-to-fix-it conclusion, Newitz emphasizes tolerance, agreeing to disagree, and promoting evidence over emotion….Searching for alternatives, the author promotes spreading democratic ideals through storytelling in “applied science fiction” or a transformed, “rejuvenated” public library. “When we immerse ourselves in the silence of the library,” writes Newitz, “we learn the most fundamental defense against psyops. Our minds belong to us.”
Whether or not libraries will save us, this certainly helps explain the wholesale attack on libraries we are seeing around the country. For a recent example, an Idaho friend has just filled me in on the assault by her state legislators on public libraries: they have just passed a new law decreeing that if a library doesn’t remove and relocate a book challenged by a patron within 60 days, that patron can file a lawsuit. A library that violates the law faces a mandatory $250 fine.
Dery is equally skeptical of another Newitz “hopeful dream,” which is that skilled first responders at tech platforms will spot “propaganda outbreaks” and contain them “before they burn through the public mind.” To which Dery essentially responds, “Good luck with that.” After all, we’ve just seen Mark Zuckerberg regretting that he censored false Covid information on Facebook, even though censoring false medical information may have saved thousands of lives. Dery writes that the prospect of seeing any social media CEO “doing anything that cuts into their obscene profit margins are less than zero.”
But it’s not like others have better solutions. In a New York Times article, Lyta Gold may write that fiction writers should “insist on having their work judged on its merits and not on whether it provides moral instruction or inculcates the right social value.” Chances that readers will pay attention to such insistence, however, are also less than zero.
Oscar Wilde, for instance, tried this line of defense at his trial when the prosecution argued that Picture of Dorian Gray promoted homosexuality—or as the prosecutor put it, that “the affection and love of the artist of Dorian Gray might lead an ordinary individual to believe that it might have a certain tendency?” This led to the following interchange:
Carson–This is in your introduction to Dorian Gray: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.” That expresses your view? Wilde—My view on art, yes. C–Then, I take it, that no matter how immoral a book may be, if it is well written, it is, in your opinion, a good book? W—Yes, if it were well written so as to produce a sense of beauty, which is the highest sense of which a human being can be capable. If it were badly written, it would produce a sense of disgust. C–Then a well-written book putting forward perverted moral views may be a good book? W—No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists. C–A perverted novel might be a good book? W–I don’t know what you mean by a “perverted” novel. C–Then I will suggest Dorian Gray as open to the interpretation of being such a novel? W–That could only be to brutes and illiterates. The views of Philistines on art are incalculably stupid.
In Seduced by Story, Peter Brooks offers a different solution, advocating that students be required to take courses that focus on how narrative works. In so doing, his reasoning goes, they will be able to distinguish between harmful and beneficial uses of narrative.
My own recommendation is a variation of this: while I don’t think that every literature course has to focus on narratology, I believe that great literature has salutary lessons embedded in it because it gets us to grapples with life’s biggest question on an emotional, rational, and spiritual plane.
In other words, if one gets students excited about good literature, half the battle has been won. British-Indian author Salman Rushdie agrees. Responding in a 2018 essay to the torrent of lies emanating from the Donald Trump White House, he pointed out that the classics will always remain relevant because of their commitment to truth. Seeing literature as essentially a “no bullshit” zone, Rushdie wrote that the job of contemporary writers was “rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality.”
Unlike the toxic stories that Newitz describes, great literature has depth, nuance, complexity, and aesthetic power. Those who have had experience with such works are less likely to settle for the boring and one-dimensional stories that are the stock and trade of ideologues and political scoundrels. They’ll demand works that feed the soul, not fictions that prey on fear and resentment. Teachers and librarians are key to making sure they find these works.
Amanda Gorman at the Democratic National Convention
Tuesday
In days gone by, it was common to employ poets to compose poems for public events. Often such poems were an important source of income for the writers, especially if the occasion was a coronation or an important funeral. Occasional poetry (as it is called) was often written to flatter a wealthy patron, upon whom one’s livelihood depended.
To a large degree, occasional poetry has fallen out of favor. We’ve come to associate poetry more with the lyrical expression of personal emotions and feelings. Still, people will still compose poems for wedding and funerals or, more frequently, read the poems of other people. And of course, we’re accustomed now to hear poets reading at the inaugurations of Democratic (but not Republican) presidents: Robert Frost for Kennedy, James Dickey for Carter, Maya Angelou and Miller Williams for Clinton, Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco for Obama, and Amanda Gorman for Biden. Therefore, Democrats at last week’s convention were not surprised with Gorman once again stepped to the podum, this time to read a poem entitled “Dream Together.”
I’ve transcribed the poem from Gorman’s oral presentation so I don’t know where the line breaks and stanza breaks fall or what punctuation she employs. Feel free to rearrange the poem as you read it.
Also as you read it, see how many allusions you can identify to historically important American documents.
Dream Together By Amanda Gorman
We gather at this hallowed place because we believe in the American Dream
We face a race that tests if this country we cherish shall perish from the earth, and if our earth shall perish from this country.
It falls to us to ensure that we do not fall for a people that cannot stand together, cannot stand at all.
We are one family regardless of religion, class, or color for what defines a patriot is not just our love of liberty but our love for one another. This is loud in our country’s call because, while we all love freedom, it is love that frees us all.
Empathy emancipates, making us greater than hate or vanity. That is the American promise, powerful and pure. Divided, we cannot endure but united, we can endeavor to humanize our democracy and endear democracy to humanity.
And make no mistake, cohering is the hardest task history ever wrote. But tomorrow is not written by our odds of hardship but by the audacity of our hope by the vitality of our vote.
Only now, approaching this rare air, are we aware that perhaps the American dream is no dream at all, but instead a dare to dream together.
Like a million roots tethered, branching up humbly, making one tree this is our country, from many one, from battles won, our freedom sung, our kingdom come has just begun.
We redeem this sacred scene ready for our journey from it together; we must birth this early republic and achieve an unearthly summit
Let us not just believe in the American Dream. Let us be worthy of it.
I suspect you picked up echoes of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and Barack Obama’s signature campaign declaration (“the audacity of hope”). And there’s also the Lord’s Prayer.
Such references were particularly important for this convention, where the Democrats were attempting to reclaim a patriotic narrative that has, too often, been wrested from them by Republicans. As Kamala Harris pointed out in her acceptance speech, for the daughter of immigrant parents–one raised in a middle class community–to have a strong shot at the presidency is a quintessentially American story.
A story worth celebrating by a poet who dares us to dream together.
Given my professional interest in reading, I’m finding one contrast between the two political parties particularly resonant. As Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg puts it, “We want to ban assault weapons, they want to ban books.” Oprah Winfrey echoed that contrast this past Wednesday when she pointed out,
There are people who want you to see our country as a nation of us against them. People who want to scare you. Who want to rule you. People who would have you believe that books are dangerous. And assault rifles are safe.
Comedian Wandy Sykes had her own take on the culture wars. “Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, I think you’re focusing on the wrong shit.”
There have been so many stories about book bans that, as with mass shootings, I’ve stopped blogging on them. In recent months there have been the MAGA president of New College throwing out books from the discontinued gender studies program; an Oklahoma school system revoking the teaching license of a teacher after she posted the QR code of the Brooklyn Public Library’s catalogue of banned books in her classroom; the entire Utah school system banning works by Sarah J. Maas, Judy Blume, Rupi Kaur, Margaret Atwood and other authors (the books include Blume’s Forever, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Kaur’s poetry collection Milk and Honey); a South Dakota school district destroying copies of David Eggers’s The Circle, Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (among others); a Florida school decreeing that Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” (delivered at Joe Biden’s inauguration) is inappropriate for grade schoolers; and on and on. One frequent target of book banners is Toni Morrison, the only African American to have won the Nobel Prize for literature and one of America’s greatest novelists.
I mention Morrison because she has been particularly eloquent on the subject of book banning. It’s understandable, she writes in a short essay entitled “Peril,” why authoritarians ban unsettling writers. That’s because these authors “can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace.”
Or as she asserts elsewhere, “Fear of unmonitored writing is justified—because truth is trouble.”
Truthful writers, Morrison goes on to say, spell trouble for “the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources.” The suppression of writers, she contends, is
the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself. And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place. Cultural and political forces can sweep clean all but the “safe,” all but state-approved art.
I write about Morrison in my recently released book, Better Living through Literature: How Books Change Lives and (Sometimes) History, because of the way that Beloved became an issue in Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial race. There we saw Republican Glenn Youngkin run, as his closing ad, an account of a mother (a Republican operative, it turned out) complaining how her high school senior had been traumatized by Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Youngkin went on to win the election and then set up a short-lived hotline to report teachers teaching supposedly nefarious content
As I note in my book, certain people have reason to fear Morrison’s novel, which touches on two of the most volatile issues in American politics, race and a woman’s autonomy over her body:
In the work, … the pregnant slave Sethe is first sexually assaulted (White men suck milk from her breasts), then beaten savagely, and then, after she escapes and they come to reclaim her and her children, driven to kill the baby to save it from slavery. The novel is meant to be unsettling, and it can indeed challenge the worldview of those parents who don’t want their children facing up to the ugly history of racism and sexism. For Morrison as for William Faulkner, one of the authors on which she models herself, the past is not dead nor even past, and we see it return in the form of the ghost baby that haunts Sethe.
[I note as an aside that Morrison is censured in a way that Faulkner seldom is. In Sanctuary, to cite one of his works, a woman is actually raped with a corncob, but one doesn’t see it appearing on many, if any, banned book lists. Race, I suspect, plays a role in the discrepancy.]
Morrison could be talking about her own fiction when she writes about how writers are sometimes our only defense against deep trauma. She may have the long-term effects of slavery in mind when she writes,
Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
Morrison writes that if we deprive our students, and ultimately ourselves, of literature that addresses and names the chaos that we face, then we condemn ourselves to a “bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence.” Maybe MAGA parents and school administrators think that ideal students are comatose students—students who don’t grapple with issues they encounter in high school (Forever, Wallflower) or our corporate, climate-challenged society (Oryx and Crake)—but a price is paid for ignoring them. People become angry and resentful when the world defies all attempts to understand it, and those emotions can show up in socially dysfunctional ways. On the other hand, if you give them a narrative that helps them frame what they are experiencing, they feel empowered.
That’s why so many teachers teach Lord of the Flies, which gives high school kids a handle on bullying. And why Romeo and Juliet, which shows young teens negotiating and feeling buoyed by their powerful sexual urges is taught in first-year high school classes throughout the land. Just knowing that there’s a language to address what they’re going through—which after all is often unsettling—is comforting and enlightening.
For a while now we’ve been experiencing a golden age of Young Adult Fiction (YAL), and the fact that teachers and librarians are being forbidden to alert young people to these remarkable novels is an abomination. Teachers, professionally trained as to what their students need, are being targeted by MAGA politicos, some of whom (as Eggers observes) don’t even send their children to public schools.
Fortunately, communities are pushing back, with rightwing school board members being pushed out of their positions as people wake up and realize what is happening. But damage is still being done.
Few poems better capture for me the idea that we are created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27) than William Blake’s “Divine Image.” In the poem, distinctions collapse between God and humans, just as—at the end—so also collapse distinctions between people of different beliefs and faith systems.
Poet and pastor Malcolm Guite says that Blake’s poem captures the mystery of Christ’s incarnation. By taking on human nature, he says, God “becomes involved in, visits, redeems the whole of humanity, not just the chosen people…”
“And what is more,” the poet adds, “when the fullness of God comes to dwell in the fullness of Christ’s humanity, then that mysterious ‘image of God’ in which all humanity was made is at last restored.”
Heaven on earth, in other words, is people embodying Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love. Consider memorizing the poem so that, whenever people call upon you to hate others, Blake’s incantatory words will be within you, giving you the strength to resist.
The Divine Image By William Blake
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love All pray in their distress; And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is God, our father dear, And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is Man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine, Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form, In heathen, Turk, or Jew; Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell There God is dwelling too.
It’s been less than a month since I shared Maya Angelou’s soaring poem “Still I Rise,” but I turn to it again because I can think of no better lyric to celebrate the nomination of Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee for president. In my earlier post, I applied it Simone Biles, who has “And still I rise” tattooed on her chest and who used the poem as inspiration to win multiple medals in the Paris Olympics, including overall gold.
I can find an indirect connection between Biles and Harris. After the event, Biles trolled Donald Trump’s racist remark about immigrants taking “Black jobs” by tweeting out, “I love my Black job.” In Michelle Obama’s powerful convention speech Tuesday night, meanwhile, the former first lady dished out more of the same. Her zinger came after her observation that “Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us” and that “his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happened to be Black.” Then came the punchline. “I want to know,” she added. “who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”
While I don’t think that Harris has an Angelou tattoo, I have no doubt that she is well familiar with the poem, which takes on special resonance when applied to her.
For instance, the first stanza mentions African Americans being written down in history with “bitter, twisted lies.” Angelou, of course, is partly talking about racist attempts to erase slavery and Jim Crow from American history books, which we see happening in school districts throughout the south (and not only the south). But Angelou is also writing about her personal experience, as anyone who has read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings knows.
In Harris’s case, meanwhile, Trump’s lies are coming thick and fast, including that she’s “stupid” and “crazy” and that she only recently became Black and that she met with Vladimir Putin and begged him not to invade Ukraine shortly before he did. (Fact check: she has never met with Putin.) Despite it all, however, she keeps going:
You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
One thing that particularly grates upon Trump’s nerves is Harris’s laugh, which is full and unapologetic. It infuriates him that she assumes she has full rights to a place at the table. I suspect there’s a pun when Angelou says she walks as though “I’ve got oil wells/ Pumping in my living room.” Striding across the stage with the assurance of a “Bradford millionaire” (to borrow from T.S. Eliot), her legs pumping in high-heeled pumps, Harris confounds those who believe that a Black woman should know her place. In fact, she enters as naturally as, and with the force of, moons and suns and tides:
Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells Pumping in my living room. Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you? Don’t you take it awful hard ’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines Diggin’ in my own backyard.
One line of attack that has been directed at Harris is a relationship she once had with San Francisco mayor Willie Brown (both were single at the time), leading Trump supporters to label the Biden-Harris pair as “Joe and the Ho.” Rather than get defensive, however, Harris—like Angelou—is comfortable in her body:
You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I’ve got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?
And so we come to a moment in history where this descendant of Jamaican slaves rises up “from a past that’s rooted in pain” to vie for the most powerful position on earth. She is indeed “the dream and the hope of the slave,” and their gift to her is resilience in the face of adversity:
Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.
Harris had her own version of this confident self-assertion in last night’s acceptance speech. “My mother had another lesson she used to teach,” she told the assembled delegates. “Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.”
May Kamala Harris, and may we all, rise into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear.
Delphin Enjolras, Woman Reading in Front of the Fire
Thursday
In the dedication to my new book I write, “To Julia, from the man who loves the pilgrim soul in you.” In doing so, I know that I am slightly misusing W.B. Yeats’s “When You Are Old and Gray” since the Irish poet is writing to a woman who rejected him while I have been married to Julia for 51 years. Nevertheless Julia, like Maud Gonne, is now old and gray (as am I), and she too has what could be called a pilgrim soul. Here’s the poem in full:
When you are old and gray and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Is Yeats imagining that Gonne is regretting not having accepted the poet’s marriage offer? Perhaps. But he also seems to be acknowledging something she herself told him, that she served his purposes far better as a muse than she would have as a companion. She is quoted as having said to him,
you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.
As a result of the rejection, Yeats “paced upon the mountains overhead/ And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.” In other words, he attained lyrical poetic heights that a dull marriage might have blunted.
I am no lyrical poet so a dull marriage is fine with me–although I wouldn’t characterize our marriage as dull, even though it appears to the world as fairly conventional. That’s because I know, in a deep way, that Julia has a pilgrim soul. Propelled by a spiritual belief that she can help others touch their best selves, she gives her entire self over to teaching and mothering and grandmothering and community service and prayerful meditation. I sensed this when we first met at Carleton College all those years ago, but it has taken growing old and gray together for me to fully appreciate it.
So now, when we are sitting before our fire—or in the summer, on our screen porch overlooking Lake Eva—I sometimes watch Julia bending over a book and experience a wave of tenderness and admiration. The poem helps me frame what I am seeing.
