Gods Speaks through the Imagination

By Robin Bates | Published: October 8, 2022
Jan Zyrzavy, Sermon on the Mount

Spiritual Sunday

I’m current running the Adult Sunday Forum at our church, and today I share with you a talk from two weeks ago on Jesus’s literary imagination. Our theme this year is “community,” and Rev. Scott Lee, once a Sewanee College English major, contended that Jesus used his parables to prod communal imagining. Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats both showed up in the talk.

Because the first half of this year’s program is devoted to a historical take on religious community, Scott entitled his talk “Community in the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus.” After setting forth some of the sociological aspects of the period, he then laid out Jesus’s challenge.

This was to get people to imagine a very different community than the community they were used to—which is to say, to imagine the kingdom of God come to earth. Or as the Lord’s Prayer puts it, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” To do so, Jesus needed people to think outside of their narrow confines. His major teaching tool was imaginative storytelling in the form of parables.

At this point in his talk, Scott turned to theories of the imagination as expressed by Coleridge and Keats. As Coleridge saw it, the primary imagination is

the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.

Since we are made in the image of God, Coleridge believes we can repeat or echo a version of God’s own act of creation on earth. One particularly powerful way of doing this is through the arts, including poetically crafted stories. As Scott said of the parables, “they are an invitation, a doorway, into the mind of Christ—which is to say, into the kingdom of God.”

Scott also quoted Keats in the passage where, drawing on a scene in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam dreams of Eve and then awakes to find her a reality:

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth . . . The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream —he awoke and found it truth. . .

Here’s are the passages from Milton that Keats is referencing. The speaker is Adam:

Pensive I sat me down; there gentle sleep
First found me, and with soft oppression seized
My drowsed sense, untroubled, though I thought
I then was passing to my former state
Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve:
When suddenly stood at my head a dream,
Whose inward apparition gently moved
My Fancy to believe I yet had being,
And lived…

In his dream, Adam first tours the garden with God and then witnesses Eve’s creation:

Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape [God]
Still glorious before whom awake I stood;
Who stooping opened my left side, and took
From thence a rib, with cordial spirits warm,
And lifeblood streaming fresh; wide was the wound,
But suddenly with flesh filled up and healed:
The bib he formed and fashioned with his hands;
Under his forming hands a creature grew,
Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair,
That what seemed fair in all the world, seemed now
Mean, or in her summed up, in her contained
And in her looks, which from that time infused
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before, 
And into all things from her air inspired
The spirit of love and amorous delight.

Drawing on the passage, Keats says that Adam’s dream

seems to be a conviction that imagination and its empyreal [celestial] reflection is the same as human life and its spiritual repetition…

The artist’s challenge—like the prophet’s—is to convey celestial vision to earthbound minds. Scott noted that Jesus sets forth that challenge in Matthew 13:10-12. If one opens oneself to the parables, as one does to a work of art, one will “know the secrets of heaven.” (And by the same token, if one doesn’t, one won’t.):

Then the disciples came and asked him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.

Scott added that Jesus elaborates on the idea a few verses later (Matthew 13:13-15). If one remains stuck in conventional understanding—if one’s heart has grown dull and one’s ears are hard of hearing—one will miss out on the vision. One must therefore use one’s imagination:

The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says: ‘You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn— and I would heal them.’ But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.

Coleridge and Keats, of course, see their poetry as their attempt to reflect and repeat divine creation. Scott set up exercises to show us that Jesus’s parables are set up to do the same. Dividing us into four groups, he gave us the parables of (1) the lost sheep and the lost coin; (2) the unfair wages; (3) the mustard seed and the yeast; and (4) the sower. His goal was to show us how these artistically complex creations pull us into their creative vortex and set our imaginations at work.

From our discussions, we discovered that the parables are not just simple one-dimensional formulae but instead rich avenues for spiritual growth. Sometimes parables are enigmatic or even uncomfortable—there’s never just one interpretation—but that’s deliberate. After all, Jesus is trying to jolt people out of narrow vision so that they experience much more.

For instance, I suddenly realized—in discussing the parable of the sower—that the sower would have appeared to this agricultural society as a fool. After all, no prudent farmer would cast his seed on stony ground. Jesus is challenging his audience, however, to think of God as so generous that he gives all of us a chance to experience spiritual growth, even those of us with stony hearts. It was a dimension of the story I have overlooked.

All the groups experienced similar interpretive flexibility and similar revelations. In some of the parables, it’s not clear which character God is. Or put another way, sometimes God appears as different characters depending on the reader/listener. Like all great literature, the parables intend to inspire us to embark on our own spiritual journeys.

Years ago I reported on another talk presented to our Adult Forum, this one by noted C.S. Lewis scholar Rob McSwain, a member of Sewanee’s School of Theology. McSwain contended that the Anglican/Episcopal church conducts its most powerful spiritual explorations through literature, not through systematic theology. Our “theologians” are not Thomas Aquinas or Martin Luther but poets like John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lewis, and Mary Oliver. Scott’s talk this past Sunday provided me with further confirmation of that view.

He also confirmed my decision, in this blog, to at least once a week apply literature to spiritual matters.

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Indigenous Authors May Save Us

By Robin Bates | Published: October 6, 2022
Leslie Marmon Silko, Laguna Pueblo author

Friday

In honor of Indigenous People’s Day, which in some states has already occurred and in others takes place this coming Monday, I share a poem from Leslie Marmon Silko’s superb novel Ceremony.  I do so in part because it deals with the devastating impact of white colonialism on America, a fact that a number of jurisdictions have recognized by replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Person’s Day. But I am more interested in how Silko foresees extreme weather events in our future. To be sure, she has drought in mind while I am thinking of Hurricane Ian, whose impact climatologists tell us was supercharged by warming gulf waters. But Silko clearly sees our abuse of the environment resulting in devastating consequences.

If you’re worried that she’s just out to guilt-trip White people, however, rest assured. Silko isn’t interested in victim narratives, and she even criticizes Indians who blame Whites for all their problems. In fact, the book’s chief villain, a full-blooded Laguna Pueblo, does just this. For Silko, by contrast, our problem is more a case of noxious Whites encountering noxious Indians and the two together destroying both the environment and human society. In the poem I’ve chosen, the noxious Indians are witches, who represent the dark forces at play in Indian society.

These witches show up in a story that a wise shaman (Betonie) tells protagonist Tayo. Talking about Indians who have lost their bearings, he says they

want us to believe all evil resides with white people. Then we will look no further to see what is really happening. They want us to separate ourselves from white people, to be ignorant and helpless as we watch our own destruction. But white people are only tools that the witchery manipulates; and I tell you, we can deal with white people, with the machines and their beliefs.

As Betonie sees it, Whites and Indians are not separate but exist in the game together. Rather than feeling helpless and passively surrendering to environmental destruction, therefore, Indians should be proactive. Unlike White society, which believes it is living in a world filled with dead objects, Indians have a rich tradition of honoring the Earth. If White society could only see this vision, Betonie believes, it would reject the sterility of contemporary life and collaborate with Indians in charting a positive path forward. Betonie’s view is not unlike that articulated in the Lucille Clifton’s poem “after kent state”:

oh people
white ways are
the way of death
come into the
black
and live

For healing to occur, however, we must first acknowledge that we are sick, and Silko’s poem lays out multiple instances of White alienation. These instances are presented in a conference attended by Indian witches that seek to undo each other in evil. The evil includes

Dead babies simmering in blood
circles of skull cut away
all the brains sucked out.
Witch medicine
to dry and grind into powder
for new victims.

The witch that wins, however, foregoes such clichés, choosing instead to tell the story of the European conquest. For these invaders, the earth is a dead object to be exploited:

Caves across the ocean
 in caves of dark hills
 white skin people
 like the belly of a fish
 covered with hair.

Then they grow away from the earth
 then they grow away from the sun
 then they grow away from the plants and animals.
 They see no life
 When they look
 they see only objects.
 The world is a dead thing for them
 the trees and rivers are not alive
 the mountains and stones are not alive
 The deer and bear are objects
 They see no life

They fear
 They fear the world.
 They destroy what they fear.
 They fear themselves.

The wind will blow them across the ocean
 thousands of them in giant boats
 swarming like larva
 out of a crushed ant hill.

They will carry objects
 which can shoot death
 faster than the eye can see.

They will kill the things they fear
 all the animals
 the people will starve.

They will poison the water
 they will spin the water away
 and there will be drought
 the people will starve.

They will fear what they find
 They will fear the people
 They kill what they fear.

Entire villages will be wiped out
 They will slaughter whole tribes.

Corpses for us
 Blood for us
 Killing killing killing killing.

and those they do not kill
 will die anyway
 at the destruction they see
 at the loss
 at the loss of the children
 the loss will destroy the rest.

Stolen rivers and mountains
 the stolen land will eat their hearts
 and jerk their mouths from the Mother.
 The people will starve.

Evil though they may be, the other witches are horrified by such depravity. Even as they award first place to the witch, they ask him to take the story back:

So the other witches said
“Okay you win; you take the
prize,
but what you said just now–
it isn’t so funny
It doesn’t sound so good.
We are doing okay without it
we can get along without that
kind of thing.
Take it back
Call that story back.”

The witch informs them, however, that the story, once set in motion, the “can’t be called back”:

But the witch just shook its
head
at the others in their stinking
animal skins, fur and feathers.
It’s already turned loose.
It’s already coming
It can’t be called back.

Although Silko’s novel was written in 1977—in other words, before we were aware of climate change—she sees other ways that humans are destroying the earth. These include pollution, habitat destruction, and “spin[ning] the water away.” Since uranium is being being mined from Indian land, she also includes nuclear holocaust, which is particularly timely as Russia’s Vladimir Putin seeks to unnerve Ukraine with nuclear saber rattling:

Up here
in these hills
they will find the rocks,
rocks with veins of green and yellow and black.
They will lay the final pattern with these rocks
they will lay it across the world
and explode everything.

In short, humans represent a clear and present danger to the Earth’s future. Silko’s novel, however, concludes on a hopeful note by assuring us that it doesn’t have to be this way. Tayo, who as a World War II veteran suffering from PTSD has been feeling alienated himself, reconnects with the earth through his tribe’s rituals, and Silko brings that vision to the rest of us through her novel.

In other words, she would tell us that to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day by looking forward, not back. In 1977, when she wrote Ceremony, the novel played a role in the Native American and environmental movements and helped prompt President Jimmy Carter to put large swathes of wilderness under government protection. In the current environment, although we have witches manically working to destroy the Earth, we also see (for the first time in our history) Native Americans in Congress, and these have been part of the push for a Green New Deal.

All is not lost.

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My Literary Introduction to Eels

By Robin Bates | Published: October 5, 2022
Pauline Baynes, illus. from The Silver Chair

Thursday

Yesterday I just happened to stumble across an article on eel smuggling, which apparently is big business in parts of the world. For the second time this week, I was put in mind of a Narnia novel. I suspect all Narnia lovers will instantly know which one.

First, here’s the story as it appeared in The Guardian:

Spanish police have arrested 29 people after seizing 180kg of critically endangered young European eels with a value on the hidden market of €270,000 (£237,000).

The Guardia Civil said the operation, in collaboration with Europol, had also led to 20 arrests elsewhere in Europe.

The elvers, or glass eels – prized as a delicacy in Spain and parts of east Asia – were found after officers carried out almost 3,000 checks and inspections in ports, airports and other transport hubs.

A Wikipedia essay puts the crime in a larger context:

Freshwater eel poaching and smuggling have emerged in recent years as a direct response to the sustained popularity of eels as food, combined with the eels’ low population, endangered status, and subsequent protections….The life cycle for eels has not been closed in captivity on a sustainable level, and any eel farms rely entirely on wild-caught elvers (juvenile eels). These elvers are caught from their native ranges in North America and Europe and are smuggled into East Asian eel farms, where they are often relabeled as the native Japanese eel to subvert legislation.

Growing up, the only reason I knew that people even ate eels was because of a scene in The Silver Chair. The children need a guide for their quest to save Prince Rillian and get a Marsh-wiggle, which is a more-or-less human figure but sporting webbed feet and hands. Puddleglum is (as his name suggests) perpetually gloomy and pessimistic, which we see from the first when he announces his intention to catch some eels:

“I’m trying to catch a few eels to make an eel stew for our dinner,” said Puddleglum. “Though I shouldn’t wonder if I didn’t get any. And you won’t like them much if I do.”

As it turns out, he catches several eels. Also contrary to his prediction, the children enjoy the fare:

When the meal came it was delicious and the children had two large helpings each. At first the Marsh-wiggle wouldn’t believe that they really liked it, and when they had eaten so much that he had to believe them, he fell back on saying that it would probably disagree with them horribly. “What’s food for wiggles may be poison for humans, I shouldn’t wonder,” he said. 

I missed the part about the eels being delicious when I was growing up. It’s as though I took Puddleglum at his word and then applied a chain of associations—marshes, Marshwiggles, and the smoke from Puddleglum’s pipe—to arrive at the conclusion that eels are nasty. It so happens that Puddleglum’s pipe smoke, which does some wriggling of its own, is nasty:

In spite of his expectation of catching no eels, he had a dozen or so, which he had already skinned and cleaned. He put a big pot on, mended the fire, and lit his pipe. Marsh-wiggles smoke a very strange, heavy sort of tobacco (some people say they mix it with mud) and the children noticed the smoke from Puddleglum’s pipe hardly rose in the air at all. It trickled out of the bowl and downwards and drifted along the ground like a mist. It was very black and set Scrubb coughing.

“Now,” said Puddleglum. “Those eels will take a mortal long time to cook, and either of you might faint with hunger before they’re done. I knew a little girl—but I’d better not tell you that story. It might lower your spirits, and that’s a thing I never do. So, to keep your minds off your hunger, we may as well talk about our plans.”

I’ve learned much more about eels since that first fictional encounter. They are extraordinary creatures, especially in the way that they migrate over 3000 miles–all the way across the Atlantic Ocean–to spawn off the North American coast in the Sargasso Sea. There’s nothing glum about them at all.

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When News Resembles an Onion Headline

By Robin Bates | Published: October 4, 2022

Wednesday

It’s not often that The Onion, perhaps America’s foremost publication for comic parody, gets serious, but it got serious recently—or at least semi-serious—when it supported a man who had been jailed for, well, parody.

According to Institute for Justice, here’s what happened. Anthony Novak, long-time resident of Parma Ohio, created a mock Facebook page imitating that Facebook page of the Parma police department. After receiving 11 complaints, the police arrested Novak, even though it didn’t take much to recognize his creation as parody (starting with its satirical slogan, “We no crime”). Among its items were the announcement “of an ‘official stay inside and catch up with family day’ to ‘reduce future crimes’ during which anyone caught outside would be arrested.”

Unamused, the Parma Police Department

obtained a warrant for his arrest, searched his apartment, seized his electronics, and charged him with a felony under an Ohio law that criminalizes using a computer to “disrupt” “police operations.” Anthony had to spend four days in jail before making bail. He was prosecuted, but after a full criminal trial, a jury found him not guilty.

In response, Anthony filed a civil-rights lawsuit against the department, only to see the 6th U.S. U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals grant the officers qualified immunity and dismiss the case. He has appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which is where the Onion’s supportive brief enters the scene.

While solidly argued and filled with the relevant precedents, the Onion’s brief is unusual in that it performs parody to make its case. For instance, here’s how it describes itself:

The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.

In addition to maintaining a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires, The Onion supports more than 350,000 full- and parttime journalism jobs in its numerous news bureaus and manual labor camps stationed around the world…

And:

The Onion’s journalists have garnered a sterling reputation for accurately forecasting future events. One such coup was The Onion’s scoop revealing that a former president kept nuclear secrets strewn around his beach home’s basement three years before it even happened.

The brief goes on to explain The Onion’s reasons for supporting Novak’s lawsuit:

Americans can be put in jail for poking fun at the government? This was a surprise to America’s Finest News Source and an uncomfortable learning experience for its editorial team. Indeed, “Ohio Police Officers Arrest, Prosecute Man Who Made Fun of Them on Facebook” might sound like a headline ripped from the front pages of The Onion—albeit one that’s considerably less amusing because its subjects are real. So, when The Onion learned about the Sixth Circuit’s ruling in this case, it became justifiably concerned.

Its reasons are given in the spirit of the satiric publication:

First, the obvious: The Onion’s business model was threatened. This was only the latest occasion on which the absurdity of actual events managed to eclipse what The Onion’s staff could make up. Much more of this, and the front page of The Onion would be indistinguishable from The New York Times.

After that, however, the brief gets more serious. Governments having the power to punish those who make fun of them is a dangerous development, it asserts, adding that, in failing to defend parody, the court “imperils an ancient form of discourse.” What then follows is a smart explanation of how parody works. I won’t go into all of it, but key is that the parodist can’t signal parody ahead of time. To do so is to spoil the joke:

The court’s decision suggests that parodists are in the clear only if they pop the balloon in advance by warning their audience that their parody is not true. But some forms of comedy don’t work unless the comedian is able to tell the joke with a straight face. Parody is the quintessential example. Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of their target in order to exaggerate or implode it—and by doing so demonstrate the target’s illogic or absurdity.

“Parody functions by tricking people into thinking that it is real,” the brief explains. When readers “realize that they’ve fallen victim to one of the oldest tricks in the history of rhetoric,” they can then “laugh at their own gullibility.” For parody to announce itself as parody, therefore, strips it of “the very thing that makes it function.”

For an example, the brief goes on to cite the greatest parody ever written, although it does so in characteristic Onion fashion:

Assume that you are reading what appears to be a boring economics paper about the Irish overpopulation crisis of the eighteenth century, and yet, strangely enough, it seems to advocate for solving the dilemma by cooking and eating babies. That seems a bit cruel—until you realize that you in fact are reading “A Modest Proposal.” To be clear, The Onion is not trying to compare itself to Jonathan Swift; its writers are far more talented, and their output will be read long after that hack Swift’s has been lost to the sands of time. Still, The Onion and its writers share with Swift the common goal of replicating a form precisely in order to critique it from within.

As an aside, I’ll note that, when the publisher of Onion came to my college to speak, I asked him if Swift was a model for him and he essentially replied that Swift was the model. Regularly on this blog, usually on April 1, I’ve explored various Swiftian parodies, including “Meditation on a Broomstick,”

“The Last Speech and Dying Words of Ebenezer Elliston,”

and “Predictions for the Year 1708” (where he takes apart a noted astrologer by predicting his death—and then, in a follow-up essay, proving that, despite the man’s assertions to the contrary, he really did die on the date predicted). Gulliver’s Travels too is filled with parody throughout, starting with a parody of travel genre.

But back to The Onion. If parody did not mimic a particular idiom “in order to heighten dissonance between form and content,” it argues, “then no one would use it. Everyone would simply draft straight, logical, uninspiring legal briefs instead.”

The brief then gets to the heart of how The Onion uses parody.  By giving parodists the ability to mimic the voice of a serious authority, parody can

kneecap the authority from within. Parodists can take apart an authoritarian’s cult of personality, point out the rhetorical tricks that politicians use to mislead their constituents, and even undercut a government institution’s real-world attempts at propaganda.

It then cites two somewhat famous instances of authoritarian regimes who took Onion articles seriously:

In 2012, …The Onion proclaimed that Kim Jong-un was the sexiest man alive. China’s state-run news agency republished The Onion’s story as true alongside a slideshow of the dictator himself in all his glory. The Fars Iranian News Agency uncritically picked up and ran with The Onion’s headline “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama.”

And another example:

Republican Congressman John Fleming, who believed that he needed to warn his constituents of a dangerous escalation of the pro-choice movement after reading The Onion’s headline “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex.”

The brief has one last important point to make: “A reasonable reader does not need a disclaimer to know that parody is parody.” It goes on to point out all the ways that reasonable readers would have recognized Novak’s facebook spoof to be parody:

But the lack of an explicit disclaimer makes no difference to whether a reasonable reader would discern that this speech was parody. Just to be clear, this was not a close call on the facts: Mr. Novak’s spoof Facebook posts advertised that the Parma Police Department was hosting a “pedophile reform event” in which successful participants could be removed from the sex offender registry and become honorary members of the department after completing puzzles and quizzes; that the department had discovered an experimental technique for abortions and would be providing them to teens for free in a police van; that the department was soliciting job applicants but that minorities were “strongly encourag[ed]” not to apply; and that the department was banning city residents from feeding homeless people in “an attempt to have the homeless population eventually leave our City due to starvation.”  

And it then brings in another big hitter:

For millennia, this has been the rhythm of parody: The author convinces the readers that they’re reading the real thing, then pulls the rug out from under them with the joke. The heart of this form lies in that give and take between the serious setup and the ridiculous punchline. As Mark Twain put it, “The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.”

“You don’t want to be on the wrong side of Mark Twain, do you?” The Onion asks the court before darkly concluding,

The Onion intends to continue its socially valuable role bringing the disinfectant of sunlight into the halls of power….And it would vastly prefer that sunlight not to be measured out to its writers in 15-minute increments in an exercise yard.

Unfortunately, with the rising popularity of whacko conspiracy theories (like QAnon’s claims of Democrats as cannibalistic pedophiles), it sometimes seems that certain politicos are using The Onion to shape their political belief systems. Democracy relies on the idea that there are more reasonable people than crazies out there—an “educated citizenry,” in Thomas Jefferson’s worlds—and we must pray that such is the case.

It wasn’t the case with the Parma police department, unfortunately, but at least the jury ruled in Novak’s favor. So I guess that’s the good news.

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Will Putin Use the Deplorable Word?

By Robin Bates | Published: October 3, 2022
Pauline Baynes, illus. from Magician’s Nephew

Tuesday

As Ukraine’s brilliant armed forces, supported by advanced Western weapons systems, continue to claw back territory seized by Russia, people are speculating whether a desperate Vladimir Putin might resort to tactical nuclear weapons. When I hear such talk, a scene from C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew comes to mind.

Regarding such a response, most commentators I’ve read rate the possibility as low, although they do not rule it out altogether. That’s because, as former American ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul has observed, Putin himself seems increasingly unhinged. Just how far will a narcissist go when facing his own collapse? Lewis’s novel gives us an unsettling answer.

Through the use of magic rings, Diggory and Polly have chanced upon another world, one in which there is only one survivor. This is Jadis, queen of Charn, who once found herself pressed as Russian troops in Ukraine are currently being pressed. Like Putin, she too has a terrible weapon, which at one point she shows off to the two children:

The Queen let go of his hand and raised her arm. She drew herself up to her full height and stood rigid. Then she said something which they couldn’t understand (but it sounded horrid) and made an action as if she were throwing something towards the doors. And those high and heavy doors trembled for a second as if they were made of silk and then crumbled away till there was nothing left of them but a heap of dust on the threshold.

“Whew!” whistled Digory.

“Has your master magician, your uncle, power like mine?” asked the Queen, firmly seizing Digory’s hand again. “But I shall know later. In the meantime, remember what you have seen. This is what happens to things, and to people, who stand in my way.”

As this point in her story, Jadis is boasting what she is capable of. Unfortunately for Charnian civilization, she actually used that power in a wartime situation. She explains the situation to the children as they stand on the steps of the ancient palace:

“It is silent now. But I have stood here when the whole air was full of the noises of Charn; the trampling of feet, the creaking of wheels, the cracking of the whips and the groaning of slaves, the thunder of chariots, and the sacrificial drums beating in the temples. I have stood here (but that was near the end) when the roar of battle went up from every street and the river of Charn ran red.” She paused and added, “All in one moment one woman blotted it out forever.”

Then she elaborates and, like Putin, she blames the other side:

“It was my sister’s fault,” said the Queen. “She drove me to it. May the curse of all the Powers rest upon her forever! At any moment I was ready to make peace—yes, and to spare her life too, if only she would yield me the throne. But she would not. Her pride has destroyed the whole world. Even after the war had begun, there was a solemn promise that neither side would use Magic. But when she broke her promise, what could I do? Fool! As if she did not know that I had more Magic than she. She even knew that I had the secret of the Deplorable Word. Did she think—she was always weakling—that I would not use it?”

“What was it?” said Digory.

“That was the secret of secrets,” said Queen Jadis. “It had long been known to the great kings of our race that there was a word which, if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the one who spoke it. But the ancient kings were weak and soft-hearted and bound themselves and all who should come after them with great oaths never even to seek after the knowledge of that word. But I learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it. I did not use it until she forced me to it. I fought and fought to overcome her by every other means. I poured out the blood of my armies like water——”

“Poured out the blood of my armies like water” sounds like Putin throwing new Russian conscripts, often without equipment, armaments or training, onto the front lines. He has also been deaf to those Russian forces in Lyman and Kherson who are begging to be allowed to retreat. But back to the story:

“The last great battle,” said the Queen, “raged for three days here in Charn itself. For three days I looked down upon it from this very spot. I did not use my power till the last of my soldiers had fallen, and the accursed woman, my sister, at the head of her rebels was halfway up those great stairs that lead up from the city to the terrace. Then I waited till we were so close that we could see one another’s faces. She flashed her horrible, wicked eyes upon me and said, ‘Victory.’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘Victory, but not yours.’ Then I spoke the Deplorable Word. A moment later I was the only living thing beneath the sun.”

Jadis, of course, has the same callous regard for other people—even her followers—that we see in all dictators and narcissists, from Putin to Trump:

“But the people?” gasped Digory.

“What people, boy?” asked the Queen.

“All the ordinary people,” said Polly, “who’d never done you any harm. And the women, and the children, and the animals.”

“Don’t you understand?” said the Queen (still speaking to Digory). “I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will.”

“It was rather hard luck on them, all the same,” said he.

“I had forgotten that you are only a common boy. How should you understand reasons of State? You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny.”

To compare “the deplorable word” to nuclear armaments is not a stretch as Lewis undoubtedly had nuclear Armageddon on his mind in 1955, the date of the novel’s publication. Europe in the  1950s had already witnessed two world wars in the course of the century and could imagine only too easily a third, this one involving nuclear weapons. The end of all life on earth seemed a tangible possibility. 

Putin’s “high and lonely destiny,” as he sees it, is restoring the Russian empire of the tsars or the Soviets. It is a destiny he sees as inseparable from his own self-aggrandizement, and a narcissist experiences thwarted ambitions as a negation of the self. The good news is that he may realize that the use of a tactical nuclear strike, at this time, will lose him far more than it will gain him. Unlike the deplorable word, nuclear weapons won’t take out all life, and there will be repercussions that even a supreme narcissist could imagine.

Such people love threatening people with their nuclear might. It’s another matter, however, to actually use it.

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A Coal Poem for Attorney Woo

By Robin Bates | Published: October 2, 2022
Park Eun-bin as an autistic attorney

Monday

Julia and I have fallen in love with the South Korean series The Extraordinary Attorney Woo, available on Netflix. I mention it here because a recent episode included a fine poem by South Korean poet Ahn Do-hyun.

Although I know nothing about South Korean poetry or this particular poet, I was able to track down the poem because translator Tim Bowles, also taken by the episode, found and translated it. Attorney Woo is an autistic attorney who (at least so far) succeeds in the high-powered world of corporate law because of her extraordinary memory and her ability to think outside the box. In each episode we watch her surmounting the challenges and prejudice that those with her condition face.

Because she works for a corporate law firm, she’s not always on the side of the good guys. As her supervisor explains to her, the company’s job is to make the best defense for their client (and to pocket the fee) while letting judge and jury decide upon justice. In this particular episode she finds herself defending a company that discriminates against its female employees. Forced to downsize prior to a merger, the company pressures the wives of couples who work for it to resign, telling them that, if they do so, their husbands can continue working. “You don’t want to get in the way of your husband’s career, do you?” asks the company manager responsible for hiring and firing.

The case is taken up by a feminist attorney who has a sisterhood relationship with her clients. Attorney Woo experiences an emotional tug-of-war between the slimeball she is defending and the sympathetic plaintiffs. She is particularly struck by how, even after her firm wins the case—South Korean patriarchal society wins out—she is invited to a party held by the plaintiffs. They are buoyed up by having fought the good fight, even though they lost.

It is at this party that the following poem is read:

A Chunk of Charcoal
By Ahn Do-hyun
Trans. by David Bowles

There are many ways to say it,
but the meaning of life
is to become a chunk of charcoal,
willingly, for someone else.

From the day floors must be heated until spring arrives,
the most beautiful sight on the glorious streets of Korea
is a truck, loaded with charcoal,
struggling up a hill.

As if it knows its purpose,
charcoal burns on and on
once its body catches fire.
I refused to grasp the lesson
though I ate hot soup and rice each day,
for I was afraid that after loving
with all of my being, I’d be left alone—
just a lump of ash.

So far, I’ve never become charcoal for anyone.

Yet when I think about it,
life is about being broken
into chunks.

I never thought to spread myself upon the ice
so others might walk more safely
when the world is slippery
with early morning snow.

Despite the disclaimer—“I’ve never become charcoal for anyone”—the very fact that the speaker is thinking in these terms shows that he/she believes that such self-sacrifice is life’s purpose. That’s why the normally unromantic image of a coal truck lumbering uphill is so inspiring. We must throw ourselves into the fire because, if we hold back for fear of becoming a lump of ash, paradoxically we will indeed become a lump of ash. We will live life unloved and alone.

Throwing ourselves into the fire not only provides hot soup and rice for our fellow human beings but, again paradoxically, it means that we’ll burn on and on. As Lucille Clifton puts it in a poem written about Harriet Tubman (“to a dark moses”)

i am the bush.
i am burning.
i am not consumed.

Then, in another twist, Do-hyun essentially says it’s okay even if we are consumed. “Yet when I think about it,” he reflects, “life is about being broken into chunks.” After all, charcoal dust can be scattered “upon the ice so others might walk more safely.”

In the show’s episode, we see Woo developing serious doubts about her company after she encounters the feminist attorney and the sympathetic plaintiffs. In this first season, Woo is still a rookie attorney, attempting to figure out how both the world of law and the world of the non-autistic work. I look forward to seeing whether she will, as she matures, break with corporate law and align with the charcoal workers of the world. She appears to have both the idealism and the sensibility to do so. At the moment, however, she has enough on her plate simply to stay afloat.

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i beg what i love and leave to forgive me

By Robin Bates | Published: October 1, 2022
Maurycy Gottlieb, Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur

Spiritual Sunday – High Holy Days

Judaism’s High Holy Days come to an end Tuesday and Wednesday with Yom Kippur, a day of atonement when Jews ask for forgiveness from others and from God. While not necessarily a Yom Kippur poem, Lucille Clifton’s “i am running into a new year” can function as one.

The poems reminds us that there is often one other we must forgive and that is ourselves. I think that some of what Clifton is asking forgiveness for—some of what she said to herself and about herself decades earlier—is not even her fault (for instance, her father abusing her when she was a child). That part of herself is bound up with who she was, and it is this self that she wants to leave behind.

The purpose of the High Holy Days, of entering the Jewish New Year, is to focus on soul—which is to say, on what is most essential. Clifton’s poem works as a prayer that her past forgive her so that she need not obsess about it any longer. That way she can focus on starting anew.

i am running into a new year
by Lucille Clifton

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

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Remembering Summers Long Ago

By Robin Bates | Published: September 29, 2022
Edward Potthast, At the Beach

Friday

I have fallen in love with the poetry of Helen Mitsios, which I discovered after learning that she will be journeying to Sewanee next week to conduct a workshop and give a reading. The poem that I am sharing —and that I also shared today in my Sewanee Mountain Messenger poetry column—seems at first glance to be seasonally inappropriate, given how the weather has suddenly turned chilly here. But some of us may find ourselves wistfully looking back at summer as the poem’s speaker looks back at a beach excursion decades earlier:

Summer
 
We stared at the ocean because 
it was there like an empty box 
or an instrument we never learned 
to play. Sand drops and cocoa butter 
convex on your skin, worn flip flops 
dangling through drifting days 
of popsicle sticks and body boards 
ready to circumnavigate the world. 
Static on the old transistor radio, 
the click track of drums between
goose bumps and long walks 
on the beach where you smoked 
weed rolled with tobacco. 
We found a perfect shell 
then tossed it back thinking
there would always be another. 
In the corner of my eye,
I saw your ghost ship set sail.

Tiny details help us date the poem—the reference to transistor radios makes me think it is set in the 1960s or early 1970s—and the speaker seems to be in the flush of young love. Unpromising trivia, which at other times might detract from the magic, instead seem to enhance it: sand particles and cocoa butter on the skin, worn flip-flops, popsicle sticks, radio static. Such is new love that everything seems possible: boxes are there to be filled, instruments to be played. The speaker even imagines that she could circumnavigate the world on a bodyboard, and she thinks it’s okay to jettison a perfect shell. After all, there will always be another.

Yet although everything seems perfect—or perhaps because everything seems perfect—she senses that everything is about to end. At least that’s how I read the final lines, which land like a thunderbolt:

In the corner of my eye,
I saw your ghost ship set sail.

Something is leaving and, while it doesn’t yet have a person aboard—after all, he’s right there with the speaker—some part of him seems of be departing, just as some part of her can see it happening. I think of the opening line in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”

Who knows whether the speaker will ever find another perfect seashell or experience another such day. Fortunately, something perfect will remain. The memory.

Further thought: For some reason, an Audre Lorde poems comes to mind when I read Mitsios’s poem, perhaps because it also occurs on a beach and is also about a perfect moment that is about to come to an end. Strength, Lorde suggests in “The Seventh Sense,” lies in hoping and building, even in the face of seemingly inevitable destruction.  Strong men who live this attract strong women who live this.

The Seventh Sense

Women
who build nations
learn
to love
men
who build nations
learn
to love
children
building sandcastles
by the rising sea

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Think of Russia as Dr. Frankenstein

By Robin Bates | Published: September 28, 2022

Thursday

I came across a fascinating account by Harvard English professor Diedre Lynch about teaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Ukrainian students via zoom. One student was even taking the class while Russian soldiers prowled the streets outside.

Because Ukrainian education has been interrupted, the government set up these on-line classes for its students. Lynch says conditions were far from ideal but therefore all the more important:

Many of the students had fled the towns where they had been based while studying for their degrees in, variously, philology, law, and journalism, and with their families had taken refuge in safer locations more distant from the conflict zones. Many were lonely for that reason. Their internet connections were unstable, occasionally knocked out just by rainfall. By the end of June, the situation on the ground meant that the student in Kyiv, who had at first been feeling secure there, was having to do her Shelley reading in a bomb shelter. Another student, whom I worry about every day, was doing her reading while Russian soldiers patrolled the streets outside. The region where she and her family live had fallen under the control of the occupying army earlier in the spring.

Lynch writes that, for her twelve students, “talking and writing about Shelley’s monster story was a way both to examine and enact their commitments to education and community.”  My only disappointment with Lynch’s article is that I didn’t hear enough from the Ukrainian students to figure out how they were using the novel to process their experience. I have some theories, however.

That’s in part because of the way that Lynch sets up her piece, noting the the novel is about how Dr. Frankenstein’s creation

overcame his unpromising beginnings and, learning language, obtained the wherewithal to tell his story. The monster, the reader finds, must steal an education. He is not given one.

She then provides a useful reminder of how that education occurs:

After being abandoned by his creator, on the very night when Frankenstein’s science experiment first ushers him into his unnatural existence, the monster sets to wandering through the woods and fields, destitute and solitary. Eventually he happens upon a cottage with a ramshackle lean-to annexed to it. He takes shelter inside and, finding a gap in the boarding that joins the hovel to the cottage, realizes that he can peer through this aperture and, unseen, watch the inhabitants as they go about their daily lives. Having already experienced the antipathy his ghastly appearance provokes in human observers, he decides to make this hiding place his place of residence. The monster soon makes a momentous discovery: “I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds. […] This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it. 

Through various means, the monster achieves a liberal arts education, only to be spurned by society when people actually see him. Lynch says his determined efforts struck a chord with her students:

For Ukrainians in 2022, education has the same high stakes it is granted in Shelley’s novel, where the monster dreams that the language lessons on which he eavesdrops will, in giving him the means to tell his own story, enable him to elicit sympathy. He believes — in vain, it turns out — that this clandestine education will secure his entry into the human community.

Unfortunately, Lynch doesn’t go much deeper into how her students used the novel to process their experience. The most she says is the following:

Fiction-reading provided them relief from the pressures of a real world, in which choices had to be made and firm lines drawn between enemy and friend.

At the same time, the novel does bear some resemblance to the real lives these students and their compatriots have led since the Russian invasion. In Shelley’s fictional universe, disasters are always lurking, and one bereavement follows hard on the heels of another. For all its sensationalism, indeed even because of its sensationalism, the novel is, as the kids say, relatable. “When […] real disaster comes, even the innocent will suffer and there will always be many victims,” Anastasia wrote on our class discussion board, reflecting on the fate of one of the novel’s minor characters but in terms that resonated more widely. On some days I feared that Elizabeth, Victor Frankenstein’s fiancée, spoke for these students and their generation, as when she says to him, “Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice, that I read in books or heard from others, as tales of ancient days, or imaginary evils […] but now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood.”

I want to build more on this since Lynch doesn’t—with the caveat that I wasn’t teaching these students and so can only speculate. But I think the students identified with the monster because of the way that Russia, like Frankenstein, has denied them their humanity. Before Russia began its two invasions, many in Ukraine felt friendship for Russia. After all, most Ukrainians speak Russian, some of Russia’s greatest authors were either born in Ukraine or have strong Ukrainian ties (most notably  Gogol, Bulgakov, and Chekhov), and there are many Russian-Ukrainian intermarriages. In the novel, the monster is more than willing to let the scientist go his own way unmolested—all it wants is a companion for itself—but Dr. Frankenstein, like Russia, is unwilling to grant it autonomous rights. Instead, he tramples on all that the monster holds dear, thereby unleashing a bloody response. It is Russia/Frankenstein, not Ukraine/monster, that has set chaos into motion.

Remember, these students are reading about the enmity between Frankenstein and monster at the same time that they are witnessing war first hand between their country and Russia. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Russia refuses to give up its vengeful pursuit of the monster—a drama that he created in the first place—and the monster, like Ukraine, stays always just out of reach. It sounds like the students appear to see Dr. Frankenstein as the real monster.

Lynch, who wants a more nuanced response, seems somewhat taken aback by their black-and-white reading. She says that, before she taught the class, she thought that the novel’s “multiplication of points of view”

impedes the reader who might want to take sides. Before this summer I had thought of that as the book’s greatest asset, the very ground of its claim to be a cornerstone of a humanistic education.

With these Ukrainian students, however, she’s not so sure. In fact, it sounds like the students, without reservation, saw Dr. Frankenstein as the real monster. Lynch doesn’t want to fully acknowledge this—she claims that her students didn’t want to take sides—but reading between her lines, it sounds like they actually did, labeling Frankenstein as the evil one:

But with this group of students, who were reading from within a war zone, who were inclined — indeed, forced by circumstances —to use, unironically, words like “evil,” I felt less certain about that.

Readers shift from sympathizing with Victor — who, as he has recounted to Walton, lost his brother to this monster’s vindictive revenge — to sympathizing with the monster, who, after he takes up the narrative reins, makes the case to Victor that such “vices” are only “the children of a forced solitude that [he] abhor[s]” and that his “virtues will necessarily arise” as soon as he lives “in communion with an equal.”

Yes, Ukraine will cease hating and killing Russians once it is considered an equal. It would be surprising, given their circumstances, if the students read the novel in any other way. And now the situation in the novel appears to have reversed for these readers, with the monster chasing Frankenstein.

Russia, however, like Frankenstein, remains as arrogant and sure of its righteousness as ever. It has created a monster that may destroy it, even as its young men, like Frankenstein’s bride, are paying the price.

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