Mikhail Bulgakov, Ukrainian author of The White Guard (1925)
Thursday
For those seeking a better understanding of Ukraine, this past July Atlantic magazine recommended Bulgakov’s The White Guard. I’ve finally gotten around to reading it and I can understand the shout out.
The novel takes place during the final year of World War I. Russia pulled out of the war following the Bolshevik Revolution, but that didn’t mean all fighting stopped. In White Guard, there’s a struggle over who will control Kyiv: White Russians, Bolsheviks, Germans and Ukranian Nationalists all fight for control of Kiev. We see the action through the eyes of the Turbin family, who are drawn into messy alliances as they try to sort out their way through the chaos.
Reading it with the current Russo-Ukrainian War in mind is sobering. Check out this passage early in the book, which seems to be about the weather but could be about a northern invasion as well:
Their life had been darkened at its very dawning. Cold winds had long been blowing without cease from the north and the longer they persisted the worse they grew. The eldest Turbin had returned to his native city after the first blast had shaken the hills above the Dnieper. Now, they thought, it will stop and we can start living the kind of life they wrote about in those chocolates melling books. But the opposite happened and life only grew more and more terrible. The snowstorm from the north howled and howled, and now they themselves could sense a dull, subterranean rumbling, the groaning of an anguished land in travail. As 1918 drew to an end the threat of danger drew rapidly nearer.
At one point, one of the characters turns to his local priest for consolation. The man let’s the Bible fall open and, unfortunately, it falls upon the following passage from Revelation 16:4:
‘And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood.
The Turbin family has allied with the Germans to fend off the Ukrainian nationalist, but that’s a choice that is proving increasingly problematic. One thinks of the cities and towns seized by Russia early in the current war in the following passage:
Only someone who has been defeated knows the real meaning of that word. It is like a party in a house where the electric light has failed; it is like a room in which green mould, alive and malignant, is crawling over the wallpaper; it is like the wasted bodies of rachitic children, it is like rancid cooking oil, like the sound of women’s voices shouting obscene abuse in the dark. It is, in short, like death.
After much death and suffering, the novel ends in an almost mystical haze with a series of dreams. There we encounter this passage:
The snow will simply melt, the green Ukrainian grass will grow again, braid the earth…lush seedlings will come out…the heat will quiver above the fields and no more traces of blood will remain.
Optimistic though this sounds, with its image of new life, it is then somewhat by qualified the subsequent two sentences:
Blood is cheap on those red fields and no one would redeem it.
No one.
If Ukraine prevails in this war, it will be up to the survivors to make good on the promise of freedom that so many have died for.
While liberating Balakliya, Ukrainian soldiers discover a Shevchenko poem behind a Russian billboard
Wednesday
Here’s an instance of poetry stepping out of the pages of a book and onto the battlefield. As Ukrainian troops were tearing down Russian propaganda signs in liberated Balakliya, which had been occupied since March, they discovered that the invaders had papered over a passage by Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko. Ukrainian tweeter “Ipa” alerted me to the incident—you can view it here—along with a translation of the passage and its history.
Imagine that you have just liberated an area and suddenly the following lines blaze forth to greet you:
And glory, mountains blue, to you, In ageless ice encased! And glory, freedom’s knights, to you, Whom God will not forsake. Keep fighting — you are sure to win! God helps you in your fight! For fame and freedom march with you, And right is on your side! (Trans. John Weir)
The poem can be read in its entirety here. “Ipa” glosses it as follows:
This poem dates back to 1845. The leading theme of it is the passionate denial of the tsarist war in the Caucasus. Shevchenko created a sharp satire on the political, social, and ideological foundations of tsarist Russia: autocracy, serfdom, and Orthodoxy.
The poet eloquently debunks the colonialist essence of Russian imperialism with its hypocritical official demagoguery, soullessly cruel army, and docile bureaucratized church.
The poem is too long for me to discuss it in detail but here are a few thoughts. “The Caucasus” begins with an allusion to Prometheus, who stole divine fire for humanity and was chained for eternity to a rock, with an eagle daily eating his liver. In linking Ukraine with the Greek figure, Shevchenko reverses the story’s emphasis by noting that Prometheus never succumbs, despite the constant torture. Rather, he bounces back every day. The “sateless one” in the poem is never-satisfied tsarist Russia:
Mighty mountains, row on row, blanketed with cloud, Planted thick with human woe, laved with human blood. Chained to a rock, age after age Prometheus there bears Eternal punishment — each day His breast the eagle tears. It rends the heart but cannot drain The life-blood from his veins — Each day the heart revives again And once again is gay. Our spirit never can be downed, Our striving to be free. The sateless one will never plow The bottom of the sea. The vital spirit he can’t chain, Or jail the living truth. He cannot dim the sacred flame, The great god’s fame on earth.
Invoking both the Babylonian captivity (in the Book of Jeremiah) and St. Paul’s prediction in his letter to the Romans (“every knee will bow before me; every tongue will acknowledge God”), Shevchenko foresees a time when “liberty and right” will prevail. He then adds, however,
But in the meantime, rivers flow, The blood of men in rivers! Mighty mountains, row on row, blanketed with cloud, Planted thick with human woe, laved with human blood.
This dark picture recalls the civilian massacres and prisoner torture we have been witnessing for the past six months. With scathing sarcasm, Shevchenko talks how the tsarist forces have found
Poor freedom hiding ’mid the crags (A hungry thing, and all in rags), And sick’d our dogs to drag her down.
The tsar then thanks God for his victory, and in those lines one can’t help thinking about how the head of the Russian Orthodox Church has endorsed Putin’s invasion:
Temples and chapels, icons and shrines, And candlesticks, and myrrh incense. And genuflexion, countless times Before Thy image, giving thanks For war and loot and rape and blood,– To bless the fratricide they beg Thee, Then gifts of stolen goods they bring Thee, From gutted homes part of the loot!
Counter to this, however, is the passage appearing on the sign—“Keep fighting—you are sure to win!”—which in the full poem is followed by a passage that reminds me of a speech President Zelensky gave two days ago. I find myself wondering whether Zelensky was channeling Shevchenko when he delivered the lines since they echo both the poet’s defiance and his characteristic sarcasm. In the poem, Shevchenko says that Ukrainians don’t need much so long as they are free to make their own decisions:
A hut, a crust — but all your own, Not granted by a master’s grace, No lord to claim them for his own, No lord to drive you off in chains.
Zelensky’s speech came after Russia had bombarded several power stations, a war crime that left parts of the country in the dark. I frame Zelensky’s speech as a poem to reinforce the parallels:
Read my lips: Without gas or without you? Without you. Without light or without you? Without you. Without water or without you? Without you. Without food or without you? Without you. Cold, hunger, darkness and thirst aren’t as scary and deadly for us as your “friendship and brotherhood.” But history will put everything in its place. And we will be with gas, light, water and food And WITHOUT you!
Russians may claim Ukrainians as friends and brothers—in fact, their extreme cruelty against Russian-speaking Ukrainians may be spurred by their disappointment at not being greeted as liberators—but Ukrainians have no such illusions. They have experienced the Russian yolk for centuries.
Attributed to Francesco Fontebasso, Roman Soldier and Woman Fleeing Man Armed with a Shovel (18th century)
Tuesday
What a turnabout we are seeing in the Russo-Ukrainian War. For the longest time, it appeared that the two sides had settled into a prolonged war of attrition, only for the Ukrainians to mount an impressive counteroffensive and recapture, in a week, land that Russian had taken two months to subdue. Military analyst Lawrence Freedman cited a passage from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises to describe the turn of affair of affairs:
“How did you go bankrupt?”
“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Freedman explains,
As with bankruptcy so with military defeat. What appears to be a long, painful grind can quickly turn into a rout. A supposedly resilient and well-equipped army can break and look for means of escape. This is not unusual in war. We saw it happen with the Afghan Army in the summer of 2021.
For the past few days we have been witnessing a remarkable Ukrainian offensive in Kharkiv. We have the spectacle of a bedraggled army in retreat— remnants of a smashed-up convoy, abandoned vehicles, positions left in a hurry, with scattered kit and uneaten food, miserable prisoners, and local people cheering on the Ukrainian forces as they drive through their villages. The speed of advance has been impressive, as tens of square kilometres turn into hundreds and then thousands, and from a handful of villages and towns liberated to dozens. Even as I have been writing this post paragraphs keep on getting overtaken by events.
Stories are emerging of Russian soldiers throwing away their guns and running, and perhaps you’ve seen this video of a panicked Russian tank, shedding soldiers clinging to its turret as it careens down the road before finally running into a tree. A running joke is that Russia has now become the leading supplier of armaments to Ukraine because of all the equipment that fleeing troops have left behind. Another joke—this one directed at spin from the Russian Minister of Defense—imagines him reporting that the Russian troops have retreated victoriously while the Ukrainian army is running after them in panic. Although one must be careful not to read too much into these reports, Ukrainian advances in the north have been impressive.
Which is why I’ve been thinking about the scene in Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage where the protagonist is himself seized with panic, throwing down his rifle, and fleeing in blind fear. The seeds are sown on his way to his first battle. I imagine the Russian soldiers looking out at a forest as he does:
Absurd ideas took hold upon him. He thought that he did not relish the landscape. It threatened him. A coldness swept over his back, and it is true that his trousers felt to him that they were no fit for his legs at all.
A house standing placidly in distant fields had to him an ominous look. The shadows of the woods were formidable. He was certain that in this vista there lurked fierce-eyed hosts. The swift thought came to him that the generals did not know what they were about. It was all a trap. Suddenly those close forests would bristle with rifle barrels. Ironlike brigades would appear in the rear. They were all going to be sacrificed. The generals were stupids. The enemy would presently swallow the whole command. He glared about him, expecting to see the stealthy approach of his death.
He thought that he must break from the ranks and harangue his comrades. They must not all be killed like pigs; and he was sure it would come to pass unless they were informed of these dangers. The generals were idiots to send them marching into a regular pen. There was but one pair of eyes in the corps. He would step forth and make a speech. Shrill and passionate words came to his lips.
Although he withstands the first round of fire from the enemy, the second proves too much, draining him and those around him of all resolve:
A man near him who up to this time had been working feverishly at his rifle suddenly stopped and ran with howls. A lad whose face had borne an expression of exalted courage, the majesty of he who dares give his life, was, at an instant, smitten abject. He blanched like one who has come to the edge of a cliff at midnight and is suddenly made aware. There was a revelation. He, too, threw down his gun and fled. There was no shame in his face. He ran like a rabbit.
Others began to scamper away through the smoke. The youth turned his head, shaken from his trance by this movement as if the regiment was leaving him behind. He saw the few fleeting forms.
He yelled then with fright and swung about. For a moment, in the great clamor, he was like a proverbial chicken. He lost the direction of safety. Destruction threatened him from all points.
Directly he began to speed toward the rear in great leaps. His rifle and cap were gone. His unbuttoned coat bulged in the wind. The flap of his cartridge box bobbed wildly, and his canteen, by its slender cord, swung out behind. On his face was all the horror of those things which he imagined.
And:
He ran like a blind man. Two or three times he fell down. Once he knocked his shoulder so heavily against a tree that he went headlong.
Since he had turned his back upon the fight his fears had been wondrously magnified. Death about to thrust him between the shoulder blades was far more dreadful than death about to smite him between the eyes. When he thought of it later, he conceived the impression that it is better to view the appalling than to be merely within hearing. The noises of the battle were like stones; he believed himself liable to be crushed.
As he ran on he mingled with others. He dimly saw men on his right and on his left, and he heard footsteps behind him. He thought that all the regiment was fleeing, pursued by those ominous crashes.
In his flight the sound of these following footsteps gave him his one meager relief. He felt vaguely that death must make a first choice of the men who were nearest; the initial morsels for the dragons would be then those who were following him. So he displayed the zeal of an insane sprinter in his purpose to keep them in the rear. There was a race.
Fear can be contagious, especially amongst troops that (like the Russians) are badly trained, badly equipped, and badly led. While there’s probably still a lot of fighting ahead, the last few days appear to have been a turning point.
The latest word is that Russia is having trouble getting troops to volunteer for the war—and to reenlist—leaving Putin with few options. After all, if he mobilizes the country as a whole, he will face increasing resistance. Russia’s war in Afghanistan brought down the Soviet Union and this war could well bring down Russia’s current dictator.
With all the ills that beset us, the most worrisome remains climate change, which is currently wreaking havoc in Pakistan, with its catastrophic flooding, and California, with its record temperatures and uncontrollable wild fires. Extreme climate events have also led to international incidents, such as the Syrian civil war (begin in 2011) and the northward migrations of Central Americans.
Science fiction author Octavia Butler predicted such incidents in her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, set in 2024. Two weeks ago I posted on the narrator’s spiritual vision in the novel. Now that I’ve finished reading it, I can talk more about Butler’s vision of the havoc climate change will wreak upon social relations.
In some ways, Sower reads like a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, like Walter Miller’s Canticles for Liebowitz and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, dystopian visions of people living in a world that has experienced nuclear holocaust. Novels that have followed Butler’s have been Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. All of these novels feature a society that has descended to the state of nature described by political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 work Leviathan:
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
In Sower, urban communities retreat behind walls to protect themselves from marauders, nihilists, and young people high on “pyromania,” a drug whose effects are enhanced by watching fires. As a result, there are non-stop cases of arson, along with wholesale slaughter. Lauren Oya Olamina, an African American teenager living in the outskirts of Los Angeles, is the only one in her family to escape when homicidal pyromaniacs assault her compound. She therefore sets out for Washington or even Canada, where climate change hasn’t wiped out the water supply. No one knows who is trustworthy—people may appear to be friends, only to murder you in your sleep for your shoes and bottled water—but she manages to assemble a community, which fend off attacks as they journey northward.
Complicating Lauren’s challenges is the fact that, because her mother abused drugs during her pregnancy, Lauren is hyper-empathetic, which means that she feels the pain of those around her. This means that, when she uses violence against those attacking her, she feels her own blows. I suspect she is a stand-in for the super-sensitive author, who acutely feels people’s assaults on the environment and on each other.
What sets Butler’s novel apart from other post-apocalyptic fiction—and makes it more interesting—is how she looks to the next generation for hope. Lauren, the narrator, is developing a philosophy/religion called Earth Seed, which she hopes will help people survive and once again flourish. She sets about building a community around these principles.
A least one member of her traveling group, her future husband, is skeptical. Older, he can’t understand why Lauren has hope. Here’s an interchange between the two that gives you a sense of their challenges:
“There’s been so much dying. There’s so much more to come.”
“Not for us, I hope.”
He said nothing for a while. Then he stopped and put his hand on my shoulder to stop me. At first he only stood looking at me, almost studying my face. “You’re so young,” he said. “It seems almost criminal that you should be so young in these terrible times. I wish you could have known this country when it was still salvageable.”
It might survive,” I said, “changed, but still itself.”
“No.” He drew me to his side and put one arm around me. “Human beings will survive of course. Some other countries will survive. Maybe they’ll absorb what’s left of us. Or maybe we’ll just break up into a lot of little states quarreling and fighting with each other over whatever crumbs are left. That’s almost happened now with states shutting themselves off from one another, treating state lines as national borders. As bright as you are, I don’t think you understand—I don’t think you can understand what we’ve lost. Perhaps that’s a blessing.”
And further:
He sighed. “You know, as bad as things are, we haven’t even hit bottom yet. Starvation, disease, drug damage, and mob rule have only begun. Federal, state, and local governments still exist—in name at least—and sometimes they manage to do something more than collect taxes and send in the military. And the money is still good. That amazes me. However much more you need of it to buy anything these days, it is still accepted. That may be a hopeful sign—or perhaps it’s only more evidence of what I said: We haven’t hit bottom yet.”
Counter to this is Lauren’s vision, which she expresses through poetry. Here’s one instance:
Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change— Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving— forever Changing. The universe is God’s self-portrait.
And elsewhere:
Embrace diversity. Unite— Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity Or be destroyed.
And finally:
Kindness eases change.
I have not yet read the 1998 sequel, Parable of the Talents, but you can see how prescient Butler was by the Wikipedia description. Not only does she predict the ravages of climate change, but she foresees a MAGA dictator, bolstered by white Christian nationalists, seizing control of America:
The novel is set against the backdrop of a dystopian United States that has come under the grip of a Christian fundamentalist denomination called “Christian America” led by President Andrew Steele Jarret. Seeking to restore American power and prestige, and using the slogan “Make America Great Again,” Jarret embarks on a crusade to cleanse America of non-Christian faiths. Slavery has resurfaced with advanced “shock collars” being used to control slaves. Virtual reality headsets known as “Dreamasks” are also popular since they enable wearers to escape their harsh reality.
According to the Wikipedia article, Butler had planned to write further books in the series but felt overwhelmed by the amount of research involved. I suspect the emotional toll that her vision took upon her also played a role. She reminds me in this way of Lucille Clifton—they must have known each other—since Clifton also sometimes felt her extreme empathy to be a burden. Clifton’s “water sign woman” could describe Lauren (only Lauren has to be on the move):
the woman who feels everything sits in her new house waiting for someone to come who knows how to carry water without spilling, who knows why the desert is sprinkled with salt, why tomorrow is such a long and ominous word.
they say to the feel things woman that little she dreams is possible, that there is only so much joy to go around, only so much water. there are no questions for this, no arguments. she has
to forget to remember the edge of the sea, they say, to forget how to swim to the edge, she has to forget how to feel.
Like Lauren, however, Clifton pushes back against the naysayers. She too says that, if one is patient and looks at the beauty of the world, “water will come again”:
the woman who feels everything sits in her new house retaining the secret the desert knew when it walked up from the ocean, the desert,
so beautiful in her eyes; water will come again if you can wait for it. she feels what the desert feels. she waits.
Lauren might disagree only with the waiting part. Although she too believes patience is necessary, she also counsels action. Or as she puts it,
Belief Initiates and guides action– Or it does nothing.
And elsewhere:
A victim of God may, Through learning adaption, Become a partner of God, A victim of God may, Through forethought and planning, Become a shaper of God.
Better that than being a victim, whether of climate change or the other ills besetting society. Completing this last poem, Lauren lays out the alternative:
Or a victim of God may, Through shortsightedness and fear, Remain God’s victim, God’s plaything, God’s prey.
The choice between visionary planning and reactionary withdrawal, in other words, is up to us.
Twice in the past I’ve shared the series of poems that Lucille Clifton wrote in response to the September 11 attack on New York and Washington. In her poems, Clifton draws on her religious roots to process the trauma. While raised Christian, however, Clifton shows her expanded vision of spirituality, so in her poems she embraces Judaism and Islam as well as Christianity.
At the time she wrote the poems, Lucille was a colleague of mine at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and we have posted all of them on plaques around St. John’s Pond, which sits in the middle of our campus. As one walks around the pond, one can read the sequence in its entirety.
The first poem turns on its head what it means to believe that God has blessed America. Worried about people who claim that America has a special relationship with God—and who might use the attack by Sunni Egyptians as an excuse to embark on a revenge holy war against all of Islam—Clifton shifts the conversation. Americans can learn something precious from what has just happened.
What they can learn is that, as a wealthy and safe country, we are mistaken if we think we are “exempt” from the suffering experienced “in otherwheres/israel ireland palestine.” Note that, for her “otherwheres,” Clifton names three peoples who have historically experienced more than their share of persecution: Jews, Irish Catholics, and Palestinian Muslims. God may have blessed America with prosperity, but with the attacks, we received a different kind of blessing, one that is in line with Jesus reaching out to the wretched of the earth. God has blessed us with the knowledge of what these “otherwheres” regularly experience:
1 Tuesday 9/11/01
thunder and lightning and our world is another place no day will ever be the same no blood untouched
they know this storm in otherwheres israel ireland palestine but God has blessed America we sing
and God has blessed America to learn that no one is exempt the world is one all fear is one all life all death all one
In Wednesday’s poem, Clifton reminds us that Muslims no less than Christians are God’s children. God has multiple names and many tongues. This is not the time to focus on divisiveness, she says, either anger against Muslims or anger against those targeting Muslims. This is a time to pray together under one flag, “warmed by the single love/ of the many tongued God.”
2 Wednesday 9/12/01
this is not the time i think to note the terrorist inside who threw the brick into the mosque this is not the time to note the ones who cursed Gods other name the ones who threatened they would fill the streets with arab children’s blood and this is not the time i think to ask who is allowed to be american America all of us gathered under one flag praying together safely warmed by the single love of the many tongued God
Thursday’s poem uses a passage from Genesis (28:12) to honor the firemen who gave their lives. There we read that, while dreaming, Jacob “saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.” Jacob’s dream captures those moments when the divine and earthly touch:
3 Thursday 9/13/01
the firemen ascend like jacob’s ladder into the mouth of history
Friday’s poem refers to the historical suffering of oppressed groups and passes along to all Americans an insight Clifton has struggled to learn as an African American woman: victims are not to blame for their suffering. While, following the attacks, various rightwing preachers like Jerry Falwell said that they were in retribution for America’s toleration of homosexuality, Clifton reassures Americans that we have done nothing “to deserve such villainy.”
4 Friday 9/14/01
some of us know we have never felt safe
all of us americans weeping
as some of us have wept before
is it treason to remember
what have we done to deserve such villainy
nothing we reassure ourselves nothing
Saturday’s poem invokes Jesus and asks whether there is a higher purpose at work in our suffering. Following her embrace of persecuted minorities—perhaps in reaction to what she was hearing at the time from reactionary pastors like Falwell—Clifton notes that Jesus was a Jew and suffered as Jews have suffered throughout history. But perhaps there will be similar miracles of love in store for those who are suffering now, she observes, even as she acknowledges that the intention of “the gods” is difficult to understand:
5 Saturday 9/15/01
i know a man who perished for his faith. others called him infidel, chased him down and beat him like a dog. after he died the world was filled with miracles. people forgot he was a jew and loved him. who can know what is intended? who can understand the gods?
Sunday’s poem is dedicated to Lucille’s new granddaughter, born five days before the attacks. As she looks over the St. Mary’s River that flows by our campus, Lucille is struck by the calm, which is in marked contrast with the attacks. While she is well aware of humanity’s history of injustice and the many reasons to hate—she is “cursed with long memory”—she chooses to love instead.
Her granddaughter, she notes, is born innocent into a violent world. While Bailey will become aware of the bad, however, she will also become cognizant of the good. Buoyed by new life, Lucille talks about how she loves all of the world, despite “the hatred and fear and tragedy.” Ultimately, love trumps all.
6 Sunday Morning 9/16/01 for bailey
the st. marys river flows as if nothing has happened
i watch it with my coffee afraid and sad as are we all
so many ones to hate and i cursed with long memory
cursed with the desire to understand have never been good at hating
now this new granddaughter born into a violent world
as if nothing has happened
and i am consumed with love for all of it
the everydayness of bravery of hate of fear of tragedy
of death and birth and hope true as this river
and especially with love bailey fredrica clifton goin
for you
It so happened that Rosh Hashanah fell upon September 17 in 2001, prodding Lucille to find symbolic significance in the Jewish new year and the supposed anniversary of Adam and Eve. While human evil emerged from the Garden of Eden, so did human love. Lucille writes that “what is not lost” from that original connection with God “is paradise.” In the sweet and delicious image of “apples and honey,” we see that Lucille believes that not all has been lost:
7 Monday Sundown 9/17/01
Rosh Hashanah
i bear witness to no thing more human than hate
i bear witness to no thing more human than love
apples and honey apples and honey
what is not lost is paradise
And so we continue on, finding something to salvage in even the grimmest of times.
“The king is dead. Long live the king.” I remember first encountering that apparent paradox when reading Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper as a child. Combined, the two declarations emphasize both ending and continuity. Tom in this passage is the pauper who has been mistaken for the king:
“The King is dead!”
The great assemblage bent their heads upon their breasts with one accord; remained so, in profound silence, a few moments; then all sank upon their knees in a body, stretched out their hands toward Tom, and a mighty shout burst forth that seemed to shake the building—
“Long live the King!”
The paradox doesn’t work when the monarch is a queen, however. Nor, for all the coverage that Queen Elizabeth II’s death is getting, is there as much at stake as there was in days of old. When British monarchs wielded real power, transitions often raised extravagant hopes and overblown fears.
In recent years I’ve found myself thinking more about Queen Elizabeth than I normally would, largely because she interested my late mother, the two having been born less than a year apart. (Both died at 96.) We watched The Crown together, along with other programs featuring British royalty. My mother admired Elizabeth’s class and her propriety, qualities that she possessed as well.
So now we are set to have the first Charles since the 17th century. To celebrate the ascension of Charles III, I share two noteworthy poems about the previous two. Charles I was beheaded following the Puritan revolution, an event that is mentioned in Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.”
Marvell is somewhat ambivalent about Charles’s execution since he sees Cromwell as the better man. The poem praises Cromwell’s successful campaign against the Irish (Marvell doesn’t mention its brutality). Charles, he suggests, could not have been so successful. Perhaps tradition has been broken but “Nature”—which is to say, natural talent, natural law—must win out.
Come to think of it, this is the way some Trump fanatics defend their leader’s violation of precedent, law, and democracy itself. When force is changing history, the old rules seem expendable–or empty, as Marvell puts it:
Nature that hateth emptiness Allows of penetration less, And therefore must make room Where greater spirits come.
As the greater of the two men, Cromwell successfully lured Charles to Carisbrooke Castle, where he captured him and bore him off to “the tragic scaffold.” The execution was necessary, Marvell suggests: “This was that memorable hour/Which first assur’d the forced [Parliamentary] pow’r.” But he goes on to add that Charles at least died with class:
That thence the royal actor borne The tragic scaffold might adorn, While round the armed bands Did clap their bloody hands. He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene, But with his keener eye The axe’s edge did try; Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite To vindicate his helpless right, But bowed his comely head Down as upon a bed.
Having given Charles some credit, however, Marvell then returns to praising Cromwell again. He, not Charles, is what Britain needs at this moment:
And yet in that the state Foresaw its happy fate. And now the Irish are asham’d To see themselves in one year tam’d; So much one man can do That does both act and know. They can affirm his praises best, And have, though overcome, confest How good he is, how just, And fit for highest trust; Nor yet grown stiffer with command, But still in the republic’s hand; How fit he is to sway…
The second Charles comes off even worse, at least in the verse of John Wilmot, who had a love/hate affair with the king while serving essentially as court jester. One poem he wrote about Charles–“A Satyr on Charles II”–got him banished from court for a while. You just have to glance at the first stanza to figure out why. Wilmot contrasts Charles with the “French fool” Louis XIV, with one being too warlike and the other too easygoing:
In th’ isle of Britain, long since famous grown For breeding the best cunts in Christendom, There reigns, and oh! long may he reign and thrive, The easiest King and best-bred man alive. Him no ambition moves to get renown Like the French fool, that wanders up and down Starving his people, hazarding his crown. Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such, And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.
The poem concludes by referring to Louis XIV as a hector (a bully) and Charles as a cully (an easy mark):
All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on, From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.
I prefer Wilmot’s other poem about Charles, however, because of its pithiness. Wilmot posted it on Charles’s bedroom door:
Here lies our sovereign lord the king, Whose word no man relies on; He never says a foolish thing, Nor ever does a wise one.
In hindsight, the relaxed Charles II may have been a better king than Wilmot gives him credit for. His decision to go easy following his restoration to the monarchy may have been what the country needed following its civil war. Charles I, on the other hand, appears to have been rather inept. Marvell wasn’t wrong to associate him with “emptiness.”
Given how the monarchy has evolved, Charles III won’t have the opportunity to do great good or great harm. As a result, he is unlikely to trigger any memorable poems, either of praise or of condemnation.
Nomvete and Córdova as dwarf and elf in Ring of Power
Thursday
Given the objection of some Tolkien fans to dwarfs and elves of color in Amazon’s Ring of Power—a prequel to Lord of the Rings based on other material Tolkien wrote—I am reposting a past post on Tolkien’s politics. As you will see, I don’t deny that Tolkien had blind spots, which also show up in his groundbreaking scholarship on Beowulf. That an author has some of the prejudices of his place and time should surprise no one. At the same time, I also believe that great literature transcends both author and time.
And because of this, film adaptations have a lot of leeway in how they handle the source material. We see this all the time in Jane Austen films—Anne Elliot in the latest Persuasion is much more socially assertive than Austen’s original but the strength of character is similar—and one could say the same about Tolkien’s drama. Is anything lost by making Middle Earth multicultural? If anything, Tolkien’s drama is already moving in a multicultural direction by the contrasts it draws between dwarf and elf culture. The need of the dwarfs and elves to unify in the face of a common enemy cries out for casting decisions that upend racial tribalism.
It sounds like those accusing Ring of Power of wokeness are people who dream Hitler’s dream of white purity and his fears of white replacement. If they are looking Tolkien to bolster fascist leanings, however, they should think twice. After all, in Lord of the Rings Tolkien based Sauron and his Nazgul on German fascists. For that matter, by the end of the trilogy hobbits must move beyond their xenophobia, which has trapped them in a limited world, and open themselves to a globalist perspective.
Reprinted from October 10, 2019
My son Toby Wilson-Bates just alerted me to a Dorothy Kim article about how J.R.R. Tolkien, even as he brought general attention to Beowulf, also circumscribed how people interpreted it. The Oxford don could only see it as a white, male hero story and, more disturbingly, he shut out scholars of other races who might have interpreted it differently.
While I find the article overly opaque and convoluted, it does alert us to Tolkien’s prejudices. It also provides me an opportunity to reflect on how literary works are more complex than the writers who authored them or the scholars who study them. This is certainly true of Beowulf and somewhat true (because it’s a lesser work) of Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien’s landmark essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” elevated the epic from an interesting historical document to the masterpiece that launched Britain’s literary greatness. Since then, however, Kim says that critics have read it “through the white gaze and a preserve of white English heritage.” Tolkien, she argues in an elliptical and not altogether convincing manner, regarded Grendel as a black man. I’m less skeptical that his concern was “solidifying white Englishness and English identity.” While he “abhorred fascism and antisemitism,” he “upheld the English empire’s white supremacy.”
Kim then contrasts Tolkien’s vision with Toni Morrison’s. While the white author focuses on Beowulf, the black author focuses on Grendel and his mother, regarding them as “raced and marginal figures.” In Morrison’s view, Grendel represents the dispossessed, one who yearns “for nurture and community.” I haven’t read Morrison’s essay but, by Kim’s account, it sounds like she regards him as a Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son.
That Tolkien has racial prejudices I am willing to grant, to which I would add gender and class prejudices. In Lord of the Rings, the good guys are Nordic-looking Rangers of the North (Aragorn), elves that resemble British yeomen out of the Robin Hood stories, and the very white Riders of Rohan while the bad guys (the Orcs) are Slavic-looking proles who threaten to overwhelm the comfortably middle-class Shire. Women, meanwhile, are in scarce supply.
I also grant that his interpretation of Beowulf is lacking, especially as it omits any discussion of Grendel’s Mother. (In other words, he overlooks women once again.) This is why diversity in academic scholarship is vital: women and people of color spot things overlooked by scholars with Tolkien’s demographics.
But Beowulf is greater than either his or Morrison’s interpretations of it, and I believe that Lord of the Rings transcends Tolkien’s racism, classism, and sexism as well. Beowulf is one of the great literary works about violence—it ranks up there with the Iliad—while Lord of the Rings changed the course of fantasy fiction.
As I see it, Beowulf captures how violence hollows us out and distorts our souls. Tolkien may or may not have regarded Grendel as black, but the monster’s resentful rage maps easily on to our white supremacists, who themselves feel dispossessed.
Grendel’s Mother, meanwhile, I regard as the vengeful rage that wants others to experience the hurt she feels. To apply one instance of Tolkien’s own countrymen yielding to her rage, Britain firebombed Dresden, an open city for refugees of no strategic importance, in revenge for the bombing of London.
The Beowulf poet could create this timeless monster because he had seen up-close his culture’s endless blood feuds. If he imagined this monster as a woman and a mother, it’s because no rage seemed fiercer to warriors than that of a mother who has lost her son. Think of it as Mother Bear rage.
In other words, I don’t see Beowulf’s monsters as limited to any demographic but rather as archetypes of our most destructive impulses. In his society, the monstrosity could consume disaffected warriors (Grendel resentment), grieving warriors (mother vengeance) and paranoid rulers (dragon rage). Every age and country has its own version of these three monsters.
To touch briefly on Lord of the Rings, it suffers from some of the author’s blind spots. Fantasist Terry Pratchett’s Snuff, for instance, exposes Tolkien’s one-dimensional depiction of goblins by giving them personalities, even as British gentry hunt them down or ruthlessly exploit them. But Rings also shows, through compelling storytelling, the seductive lure of power. Having witnessed Europe’s 20th century madness from the front row, Tolkien created a drama that can be used to expose Britain’s Brexit arrogance and anti-immigrant reaction as much as it reveals Hitler’s or Stalin’s ambitions.
To reiterate my basic point: while we should call out literary works for their shortcomings, we should not overlook their greatness in the process.
Sorting through my parents’ children’s books—and the books I read as a child—is proving to be more emotionally fraught than I anticipated. The past weighs heavily so that each choice—whether to keep, to move on, or to throw—tears at me. Given that there are hundreds of such books, you can imagine my mental state.
Our collection includes books that meant something to my paternal grandparents and my great aunt Rose but probably not to my father. And books that he loved as a child but that seem no more than interesting historical artifacts to me. And books that I loved to death as a child that will mean nothing to my children when, in 10-30 years, they will have to deal with them if Julia and I don’t dispose of them first.
And then, of course, there are the books that were meaningful to them, which I’m being careful to keep.
All of this culling is occurring after my three brothers, my niece, and my nephew went through the collection. Nephew Fletcher took the Doctor Doolittle books and he and his sister split the Oz books (all 30 of them). Brothers David, Sam and Jonathan picked at books here and there, including the Tintin and Asterix books (in French). But it feels like they did no more than pick up a few pebbles from the shore.
I’ve mentioned before that, by having so many books, my parents essentially buried them so that I—and perhaps they—forgot they existed. Some obviously have not been handled since the day they were put on the shelves.
I have Proustian moments with some of what I’m seeing for the first time in decades. For instance, a colorful book on children from around the world stands out to me because I was given it when I woke up from a tonsillectomy at age 7. My throat was horrifically sore but this brightly colored book helped compensate. I’ve come across some beloved books, illustrated although not authored by Maurice Sendak, that I’d forgotten about, such as “What Can You Do with a Shoe?” (Wrong answers only follow.) I’ve also discovered some Winnie the Pooh books that are so worn that they are held together with rubber bands. My father had them as a child and read them to me.
So here’s a question: Do I hold on to them for sentiment’s sake, even though I have exact modern replicas in much better condition? And if I do, should I make sure to revisit them periodically rather than allow them to be buried? Or is enough to recall, somewhere in the back of my mind, that they lie somewhere in the collection, perhaps to be rediscovered in the future as I am rediscovering them now? I really don’t know.
The same question applies to my grandfather’s complete collection of Robert Louis Stevenson. These old leather bound books would fall apart if I opened them up to read them, and since I own modern editions of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island, and A Child’s Garden of Verses—and since I can find all the rest on line or in the library—should I hold on to them? Or do I just display them as one does an antique china vase that one doesn’t use. Or, for that matter, an elegant clock that no longer works. (We have several of these.) Please tell me what you think.
Returning to our collection of children’s books that I began reporting on last week, memories are flooding back about the following:
–Rudyard Kipling was very important to us as children, especially the Just So Stories, The Jungle Books, and Captains Courageous. Returning to a story like “How the Elephant Got His Trunk” years later, I was astounded at the violence. Everyone flogs the little elephant for his “insatiable curiosity” but boy does he make them pay once he gets his trunk.
–Selma Lagerlof’s Wonderful Adventures of Nils, about a boy who shrinks in size and then flies all over Sweden on the back of a goose, introduced me to sadness and death, which I hadn’t encountered before in children’s literature. Still, I was enthralled by the adventures, which function as a Swedish geography lesson.
–Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Doolittle books were special to us, in part because my nature-loving father was so in love with them. He read all six or so of them to us.
–George MacDonald was big in my life (as he was in C. S. Lewis’s), especially The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. I was intrigued by At the Back of the North Wind but ultimately felt it to be suffocating, given the North Wind is a figure of death.
–And speaking of Lewis, I can’t leave out the Narnia books. Along with sThe Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, they towered over all other books of my childhood.
–All the Pooh books were also very big when I was younger, and I may owe my name in part to Christopher Robin. (“Robins,” with an “s,” is also a family name.) Many of the poems in When We Were Very Young and Now I Am Six I had memorized.
–E. Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers, The Would-Be-Goods, and The New Treasure Seekers taught me the importance of point of view since the narrator—who tries unsuccessfully to hide his identity and pass himself off as a neutral reporter—is the older brother (as was I). That the five children in the family are all book lovers, especially of The Jungle Books, helped me identify with them. My youngest brother Sam, on the other hand, was more drawn to Nesbit’s fantasy novels, like The Five Children and It, The Book of Dragons, and The Phoenix in the Carpet.
—We own all of Mary Norton’s Borrower books, along with Bedknob and Broomstick (although I didn’t encounter the latter until later in life). I found them fun although not compelling.
–On the other hand, I was riveted by The Scarlet Pimpernel, which was just the kind of dashing adventure and love story that would appeal to a bookish kid like me. I remember the joy I felt when I discovered there were sequels.
–If we don’t own all 26 of the Lucy Fitch Perkins’s twin books, we certainly own most of them, almost all in first editions. Perkins’s books about twins of different nationalities and historical periods were immensely popular, and I especially liked the ones with adventures (like The Twins of the War of 1812).
–Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (upon which the movie Braveheart is based) strikes some as overly long, but I recall receiving this novel about William Wallace’s rebellion against the British as a Christmas present staying up all night reading it. The N.C. Wyeth pictures contributed.
–Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons and its many sequels is a series about kids who have sailing adventures. I found the series somewhat tame (except one where they have to escape modern-day pirates) but my two youngest brothers loved them.
–I couldn’t get enough of Margery Sharp’s Miss Bianca books when I encountered them in 8th grade. We have all of them.
–We also have all of my mother’s Little Pepper Books. I enjoyed the first but wasn’t drawn to read the sequels, as she did.
–My father used to read us Booth Tarkington’s Penrod books, about a misbehaving boy who is partly modeled on Tom Sawyer. I wasn’t that kind of boy—I followed all the rules—but I was intrigued by his misadventures.
–Speaking of Tom Sawyer, we have not only that book and Huckleberry Finn but two further sequels, Tom Sawyer Aloft and Tom Sawyer Detective. All of which I loved.
–We enjoyed Jules Verne’s adventures. My brother Jonathan was drawn to his science fiction, like 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, but I preferred Around the World in 80 Days.
–We have all of E.B. White’s children’s books although the only one I remember reading was Charlotte’s Web. That one, however, haunted my imagination, especially Garth Williams’s image of the father going after Wilbur with an axe.
–I conclude with one of my very favorites, T.H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose. Lilliputian citizens, kidnapped by the 18th century captain who rescues Gulliver from sea, escaped and have been living ever since on an estate. Maria discovers them and then, together, they thwart her wicked guardians.
I can’t overstate the pleasure that these books brought me, and I have confined myself to noting the better ones. I haven’t even touched on others books we own, like ones from the Hardy Boy, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins, and other series. And these are only the children’s books, not all the novels, plays, and poetry and essay collections. And then there are all the cartoon books and the mysteries and the art books and the literary theory and the travel books and the history books and the biographies and the nature books and the books on feminism and civil rights and…
We can’t keep them all—or rather, we technically could but then we’re back to my original problem, which is that too many books–or too many things–means that you can’t fully appreciate them.
So what would you do? Or what have you done? I’m hungry for answers.
Last week, as we watched the greatest woman tennis player of all time play what is probably her last professional match, we could only marvel at how she and her sister transformed the sport. Fox Sports commentator Nick Wright spoke for many of us when he opined that Serena Williams is “the most dominant in her field of any athlete I have ever seen.” Wright added that Serena belongs on the Mount Rushmore of greatest athletes ever, up there with Muhammad Ali, Usain Bolt, and only one or two others. In every way, she has been extraordinary.
Speaking for myself, I was always amazed at how Serena could win clutch points when the whole match hung in the balance. She seemed absolutely fearless at such moments.
The late poet Tony Hoagland wrote a poem that captured how she and Venus changed the sport in a poem appropriately titled “The Change.” The speaker in the poem is a man with unconscious racial biases who finds himself enthralled by a Williams match in spite of himself. While he is watching Venus play, he could just as easily be describing Serena.
Expecting deference from Black women, he’s struck by how Venus was
hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation down Abraham Lincoln’s throat, like she wasn’t asking anyone’s permission
The poem makes some factual errors: the match the speaker appears to have seen was Venus defeating Belgian Justine Henin, who indeed was a “tough little European blonde,” in 2001. (Technically, 2001 is still the 20th century, so “the 20th century almost gone” is accurate.) Furthermore, the match was held on the green grass of Wimbledon, not the red clay of the French Open. (The only time Venus reached the French Open finals, she lost to Serena.) In 2001, George Bush would have been “the new president [who] proves he’s a dummy.”
The speaker also garbles the name by mixing up Venus with Aphrodite while joining it with a caricatured Black name: in the poem she becomes “Vondella Aphrodite.” (“Say her name correctly,” I imagine Black Lives Matter protesters saying.) And I have no idea what it means that the speaker gets the Williamses’ hometown wrong. Maybe he has confused Compton, California (their actual home) with Compton, Alabama, or maybe he has projected a primal civil rights drama onto the match. At any rate, even though he finds himself rooting for the white women—”because she was one of my kind, my tribe, with her pale eyes and thin lips”—he can’t help being riveted by Venus’s power and her “to-hell-with-everybody stare.” Incidentally, Venus won the match 6-1, 3-6, 6-0. Or as the speaker puts it,
that black girl wore down her opponent then kicked her ass good then thumped her once more for good measure
Unfortunately for the Williams sisters, simply winning in those early years didn’t change hearts and minds. Many Americans rooted against them, especially Serena, because of their unapologetic dominance. Furthermore, Black athletes have never won White hearts simply by being good. If anything, stereotypes are sometimes reinforced, not changed, by their success.
Given how white the tennis world was in 2001, however, it’s remarkable how much the Williams sisters have transformed it. Players of color, like Naomi Osaka, Coco Gauff, and Francis Tiafoe (the latter two having reached the U.S. Open quarterfinals this year) now travel the road that Serena and Venus blazed. In that way, the speaker in the poem is absolutely correct: the sport can’t be “put it back where it belonged” because we ourselves have been changed.
The Change
By Tony Hoagland
The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine. In the park the daffodils came up and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade.
Sometimes I think that nothing really changes –
The young girls show the latest crop of tummies, and the new president proves that he’s a dummy.
but remember the tennis match we watched that year? Right before our eyes
some tough little European blonde pitted against that big black girl from Alabama, cornrowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms, some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite –
We were just walking past the lounge and got sucked in by the screen above the bar, and pretty soon we started to care about who won,
putting ourselves into each whacked return as the volleys went back and forth and back like some contest between the old world and the new,
and you loved her complicated hair and her to-hell-with-everybody stare, and I, I couldn’t help wanting the white girl to come out on top, because she was one of my kind, my tribe, with her pale eyes and thin lips
and because the black girl was so big and so black, so unintimidated,
hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation down Abraham Lincoln’s throat, like she wasn’t asking anyone’s permission.
There are moments when history passes you so close you can smell its breath, you can reach your hand out and touch it on its flank,
and I don’t watch all that much Masterpiece Theatre, but I could feel the end of an era there
in front of those bleachers full of people in their Sunday tennis-watching clothes
as that black girl wore down her opponent then kicked her ass good then thumped her once more for good measure
and stood up on the red clay court holding her racket over her head like a guitar.
And the little pink judge had to climb up on a box to put the ribbon on her neck, still managing to smile into the camera flash, even though everything was changing
and in fact, everything had already changed –
Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone, we were there,
and when we went to put it back where it belonged, it was past us and we were changed.
