Butler’s Theology in Parable of the Sower

By Robin Bates | Published: August 27, 2022
Millet, The Sower

Spiritual Sunday

I’m currently in the process of reading Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower–an early instance of dystopian climate fiction (or cli-fi, as Dan Bloom calls it)–and am attempting to sort out the protagonist’s theology. Daughter of a pastor, 15-year-old Lauren is developing her own version of God as she struggles for survival in 2024 California, where climate change has decimated society. Water and food are scarce, forcing people to live behind walls to protect themselves against gangs and thieves. Arson and murder are daily occurrences.

While the older generation laments the passing of the good old days, Lauren sees it as imperative that she creatively adapt to the conditions. She sets forth her theory of life/theology in jottings that she will one day assemble into a book called Earth Seed: The Books of the Living.

At one point, in an attempt to understand God, Lauren writes,

God is Power–
Infinite,
Irresistible,
Inexorable,
Indifferent.
And yet, God is Pliable–
Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos,
Clay. God exists to be shaped.
God is change.

In her own version of Darwinian evolution, Lauren sees humans working in conjunction with God to survive and flourish in a desolate landscape. Doing so, however, takes effort on the part of the individual. If one is passive, one remains “God’s victim, God’s plaything, God’s prey”:

A victim of God may,
Through learning adaption,
Become a partner of God,
A victim of God may,
Through forethought and planning,
Become a shaper of God.
Or a victim of God may,
Through shortsightedness and fear,
Remain God’s victim,
God’s plaything, God’s prey.

At another point, sounding a little like the non-scriptural “God helps those who help themselves,” she distinguishes between two different kinds of belief:

Belief
Initiates and guides action–
Or it does nothing.

Throughout the book, Lauren periodically attempts to spell out her relationship with God. If I understand her correctly, while she sees God as a potentially creative and generative force in the universe, to release that potential we must creatively and openly ourselves to God. This is what she means by shaping Him/Her/It.

Lauren rejects the idea that God will do good things for us if we pray. “Prayers only help the person doing the praying,” she says, “and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person’s resolve.” And yet, if we use prayers to focus our resolve, then they indeed help us “to shape God and to accept and work with the shapes that God imposes on us.”

Struggling with her articulation, Lauren sometimes veers into possible contradiction. On the one hand, she says, “God is power, and in the end, God prevails.” Yet she then adds,

But we can rig the game in our own favor if we understand that God exists to be shaped, and will be shaped, with or without our forethought, with or without our intent.”

Lauren contrasts this vision with that found in Job, her favorite book in the Bible. As she puts it,

I’m not some kind of potential Job, long suffering, stiff necked, then, at last, either humble before an all-knowing almighty, or destroyed. My God doesn’t love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.”

 Working with what might be seen as a Darwinian Christianity, Lauren differentiates between a blind evolution and one that humans can make happen. Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, describes this as “the cognitive revolution,” which he says superseded biological evolution 70,000 years ago in that our cognitive capacities influenced evolution in a new way. As Lauren puts it,

We are Earthseed
The life that perceives itself
Changing

And elsewhere:

Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.

Working in conjunction with God—or with this impersonal force—brings about significant change:

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only last truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

Change, however, can be dangerous, meaning that we must approach God with openness and creativity. As Lauren warns,

A gift of God
May sear unready fingers.

It’s worthwhile at this point to remind ourselves of Jesus’s parable of the sower because it gives us further insight into Lauren’s vision:

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake.Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people stood on the shore. Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear.”

The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”

He replied, “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.

And later:

Blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.

Lauren is determined to accept the earth seed as it falls upon her–which is to say, to hear what God has to say and to follow what God directs. As she puts it,

All successful life is
Adaptable,
Opportunistic,
Tenacious,
Interconnected, and
Fecund. Understand this. Use it.
Shape God.

Although I haven’t finished the novel yet, I’ll conclude with one last observation from Lauren’s book. It’s a declaration of what it means to be both conscious and sentient in God’s universe:

We are Earthseed. We are flesh—self aware, questing, problem-solving flesh. We are that aspect of Earthlife best able to shape God knowingly. We are Earthlife maturing, Earthlife preparing to fall away from the parent world. We are Earthlife preparing to take root in new ground, Earthlife fulfilling its purpose, its promise, its Destiny.

Lauren’s (and probably Butler’s) vision is striking a chord in me. I too have never seen God in personal terms. When my eldest son died, I didn’t blame God or hold God responsible, nor did I think that God felt sorry for me. Rather, as I saw it, I had to work in conjunction with God to make sure that Justin’s death would not become a curse that blighted my life and those lives around me. I looked to God as a potentially creative force that would help me find new wellsprings of love and care in a world that had just wounded me to the core.

Bitterness would have been my version of Lauren’s “destructive fanaticism.” Without God, life would have meant “nothing at all.” God was Change, a new way of being in the world, and it was up to me to shape and be shaped by Him/Her/It.

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A Taoist Response to Grieving

By Robin Bates | Published: August 25, 2022

Friday

I received a comforting e-mail from an old friend in response to Monday’s post about my “intense busyness” in the face of my mother’s death. Steve Rhodes, artist and longtime resident of Iowa City, sent me a story told by 4th century BC Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu (a.k.a. Zhuang Zhou).

I had worried that I was using busyness to mask my grieving, with the result that I neglected self care. Steve wrote that the balancing act between public performance and private reflection is a difficult one, especially for the oldest child. As he put it,

The busyness of grieving is the lot of the eldest child or of the surviving spouse, who usually find themselves charged with the ceremony and ritual of collective grief, and with the dispensations and the legal formalities.

As he himself has twice been in this situation, Steve could speak with authority. “I am not sure whether this busy mode of grieving arises from something inherent in my own psychology of coping with strong emotions,” he wrote,

or if it is more like what we refer to as eldest-child syndrome, where the external circumstances of family are served by chance upon us, controlling our responses in these collective moments of deepest feeling. Was I drawn to positions of busy administration by internal inclination or by external  expectations?

Then he cited Chuang Tzu’s story, which as he said “has always sustained me at such times, providing lightness at a dark time.” This in spite of the fact that Steve says he still doesn’t fully understand it, even after 50 years. Here it is:

 “Tsu Sang Hu, Ming Tsu Fan, and Tsu Chin Chang were acquaintances. They said to each other, “Who can be together without togetherness and cooperate without cooperation? Who can soar up to heaven, wander through the clouds, and pass beyond the limits of space, unmindful of existence, forever and ever?” Then the three looked at one another and laughed. Having no disagreement among themselves, they became fast friends.

“After some time, Tsu Sang Hu died. Before the burial, Confucius heard of his death and sent his disciple Tsu Kung to attend the mourning. Tsu Kung found that one of the friends was composing a song and the other was playing a lute. They sang together in unison, ‘Oh Sang Hu! Oh Sang Hu! You have gone back to your true self while we remain as men. Alas! Alas!’

“Tsu Kung hurried in and said, ‘May I ask something? Is that appropriate, singing in the presence of a corpse?’

“The two looked at each other and laughed. ‘What does he know about ceremony?’ they said.”(Inner Chapters, trans. Feng and English, 1974, p. 133)

I too find the story consoling. In my case, I see Tsu Kung so blinded by the formalities of ceremony that he misses the meaning. Sang Hu’s friends, by contrast, know that their union with him is so transcendent that injunctions not to sing in the presence of a corpse are meaningless. After all, if they could be “unmindful of existence” while all three were alive, then the death of one is irrelevant.

The story brings to mind someone’s observation at the community gathering, where we filled up an entire hall with people who cared for my mother. She so loved company, and loved my daughter-in-law’s singing and my sons’ humor, that I noted her absence seemed all wrong. “She should be here,” I said, to which this friend replied, “She was here all right.” And I knew then that she was.

Steve ended his note with an avowal that I also found immensely comforting. Commenting on our decades-long friendship, he wrote,

I’m thinking of you as I remember Phoebe. What unlikely happenings brought us to each other. Having no disagreement among ourselves, we became fast friends.

Yes.

Further thought: Steve recently lost his wife Judy, who was Julia’s inspiring English teacher in her last year of high school. Judy recommended Carleton College, where she and Steve had met, and it was where Julia and I would meet three years later. Every time we visited Julia’s Iowa relatives, we would look up Judy and Steve and our children would play with their children.

Anyway, Steve said that Judy “often remarked how she learned the truth about death and grieving in Tristram Shandy.” I’ll explore this further in a future post but I suspect it has something to do with rejecting rigid formal responses (such as we are always getting from theory-obsessed Walter Shandy) and opting instead for lived experience—just as Sang Hu’s friends reject rigid ceremonial rules for a response that comes from deep within.

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Poems of Love in a Burning World

By Robin Bates | Published: August 24, 2022
A Kyiv building burning following Russian shelling on March 3, 2022

Thursday

Yesterday was Ukraine’s Independence Day, first held in 1991 to celebrate the country’s independence from the Soviet Union. I have experience with such independence days, having had my 15 minutes of fame when I appeared on national television during Slovenia’s 1994 celebration of V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day), commemorating the 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany. But Slovenia was really celebrating its independence from Yugoslavia, just as Ukraine yesterday celebrated Vladimir Putin’s failure to subjugate the country in 2022. The battle, of course, is still ongoing and, while things look promising for Ukraine, there’s a lot of suffering and bloodshed ahead..

To mark the occasion, I am sharing a poem by Katie Ferris, who is the partner of  Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky, whom I have cited in the past. For Ferris, who is battling cancer, “burning world” may refer to her radiation treatment, but it’s also allude to Russia’s artillery attacks on Ukrainian cities. In any event, her poem focuses on how to respond when one finds oneself “in the midst of hell.”

The key, she says, is to stand in the interstices between that which is hell and that which isn’t—between a bald and cancerous body and a body that is still beautiful. It’s as though (to use her metaphor) there’s a loose step to the front porch but the house is still standing. And in this house there’s a door open between hell and “what isn’t hell” that one is propping open. One “stand[s]/ within its wedge/ a shield.”

That’s why one offers poems of love to a burning world.

Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World   

To train myself to find, in the midst of hell
what isn’t hell.

The body, bald, cancerous, but still
beautiful enough to
imagine living the body
washing the body
replacing a loose front
porch step the body chewing
what it takes to keep a body
going—

This scene has a tune
a language I can read a door
I cannot close I stand
within its wedge
a shield.

Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself, in the midst of a burning world
to offer poems of love to a burning world.

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Trump Beats Adam in Blame Shifting

By Robin Bates | Published: August 23, 2022
William Blake, God’s Judgment of Adam and Eve

Wednesday

Miltonists may experience a shock of recognition as they watch Donald Trump attempt to wriggle out charges that he stole government documents upon leaving the presidency. After all, Adam in Paradise Lost turns to some of the same excuses when God questions him about eating the forbidden fruit. Adam, however, has nothing on Trump.

John Tures of the Missouri Independent lists a few of the excuses provided by either Trump or his defenders. I’ve added a few more, and there are probably some that we’ve missed. I don’t need to add that all the excuses are bogus:

  1. The “raid” (it was actually a search) was a wildly inappropriate move, a Gestapo-type tactic by an authoritarian president;
  2. There was nothing really important amongst the documents and Trump would have returned them if asked so a “raid” was unnecessary;
  3. Trump didn’t realize that the documents were important—he just wanted some mementoes from his time in the White House;
  4. Conditions were so chaotic in the presidential transition that the documents were accidentally thrown into boxes and transported to Florida;
  5. The documents were planted by the FBI;
  6. Trump was just bringing his work home, like so many hard-working Americans; 
  7. Other presidents, especially Obama, have taken classified documents after leaving the White House;
  8. These documents were declassified by Trump by virtue of a “standing order” (which no one recalls);
  9. The documents shouldn’t have been classified in the first place;
  10. Mar-a-Lago is actually a safer place for the documents than elsewhere—and the law only pertains to destroying the documents, not storing them;
  11. Trump needed them for his memoirs;
  12. If the documents were so important, government officials should have come for them earlier so they’re the ones who are really negligent.

Add to these a Fox pundit’s accusation the judge who signed off on the search was an acquaintance of sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell (he wasn’t) and the threat by Trump’s lawyer that violence could erupt from indicting the president. There’s also the drumbeat amongst many on the right that if they did it to Trump they’ll do it to you! In short, you have an exercise in blame shifting worthy of a teenager caught smoking pot in his room.

Or of Adam when caught out by God. Adam’s blame shifting is in response to a direct question from God:

[H]ast thou eaten of the Tree
Whereof I gave thee charge thou shouldst not eat?

In reply, Adam starts by wailing that he has been put in an impossible position Either he must take the full blame or accuse “the partner of my life”:

O Heav’n! in evil strait this day I stand
Before my Judge, either to undergo
Myself the total Crime, or to accuse
My other self, the partner of my life;
Whose failing, while her Faith to me remains,
I should conceal, and not expose to blame
By my complaint…

Upon further consideration, however, he argues that he doesn’t deserve the full blame and prepares to blame Eve. First, he blames her indirectly: rather sneakily, he suggests that God already knows that she’s guilty, so Adam is less blameworthy for throwing her under the bus. Notice that he never accepts any of the responsibility himself:

[B]ut strict necessity
Subdues me, and calamitous constraint
Lest on my head both sin and punishment,
However insupportable, be all
Devolv’d; though should I hold my peace, yet thou
Wouldst easily detect what I conceal.

Then comes Adam’s accusation, which deflects blame in two ways. Not only did Eve tempt him but God is also guilty for having foisted Eve on him in the first place (“This Woman whom thou [emphasis mine] mad’st to be my help”):

This Woman whom thou mad’st to be my help,
And gav’st me as thy perfect gift, so good,
So fit, so acceptable, so divine,
That from her hand I could suspect no ill, 
And what she did, whatever in itself,
Her doing seem’d to justify the deed;
She gave me of the Tree, and I did eat.

In other words, he’s the victim here. This is as Trumpian a maneuver as one could imagine.

God, however, is having none of Adam’s bullshit:

Was she thy God, that her thou didst obey 
Before his voice…

For a dramatic contrast, Eve confesses straight up after God turns to her:

So having said, he thus to Eve in few:
“Say Woman, what is this which thou hast done?”

To whom sad Eve with shame nigh overwhelm’d,
Confessing soon, yet not before her Judge 
Bold or loquacious, thus abasht repli’d.

“The Serpent me beguil’d and I did eat.”

Forget about ever getting a similar confession from Trump or anyone around him. In fact, the next move I expect from the former president is for him to employ Adam’s tactic of blaming someone else. Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows should be very worried.

For Trump and Trump cultists, confessing is a sign of weakness. Instead, they pretend never to have said what they said and simply go on to the next excuse.

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Intense Busyness: One Way to Grieve

By Robin Bates | Published: August 22, 2022
Jones and Duvall as Call and Gus in Lonesome Dove

Tuesday

With my mother’s death, I am reminded that we all grieve differently and that one person’s grieving may rub another person the wrong way. My own grieving for my mother has taken the form of intense busyness: for weeks I have been working simultaneously on preparing for the memorial service while putting her house in order. But whereas I wanted to distribute as much of her worldly goods to my brothers and other relatives as I could when they showed up, one of these brothers and one of my sons wanted to focus soley on their sadness and postpone matters of property division to another day. Once I realized that we were all grieving in our own particular ways, I felt better about the anger I encountered.

I compare my own path with that taken by Captain Woodrow Call in Larry McMurtry’s western Lonesome Dove. Call is one of two legendary Texas rangers who is outliving the heroic age of the wild west. In an epic trek, he and fellow ranger Augustus McCrae have taken a herd of cattle from Texas to the fertile grazing lands of Montana. In doing so, however, they have tamed the west even more, making themselves even more irrelevant. As Gus puts it before he dies of a gangrenous leg caused by an Indian arrow, “Look there at Montana. It’s fine and fresh, and now we’ve come and it’ll soon be ruint, like my legs.”

Because Gus understands his partner well, he makes an outrageous deathbed request: he wants Call to reverse his trek and bury Gus’s body where they started out, in Lonesome Dove, Texas. Call can’t believe what he’s heard but Gus explains his reasoning:

“My God,” Call said, thinking his friend must be delirious. “You want me to haul you to Texas? We just got to Montana.”

“I know where you just got,” August said. “My burial can wait a spell. I got nothing against wintering in Montana. Just pack me in salt or charcoal or what you will. I’ll keep well enough and you can make the trip in the spring. You’ll be a rich cattle king by then and might need a restful trip.”

Call looked at his friend closely. Augustus looked sober and reasonably serious.

“To Texas?” he repeated.

“Yes, that’s my favor to you,” August said. “It’s the kind of job you was made for, that nobody else could do or even try. Now that the country is about settled, I don’t know how you’ll keep busy, Woodrow. But if you’ll do this for me you’ll be all right for another year, I guess.”

Gus then jokingly worries that Call may die of boredom before he sets out, in which case Gus will have to settle for a Montana grave.

While Call’s 3000-mile journey back to Texas is not quite as epic as the journey to Montana, it poses serious challenges. Before he’s done, the buggy carrying the body has fallen apart, the donkey pulling it has died, and the coffin, almost lost in a river crossing, is leaking salt. Towards the end, Call must bundle the body in a tarp and drag it travois style behind his horse. At one point he is also shot by an Indian so that he has a leaking wound when he finally arrives back at Lonesome Dove. He may not live much longer.

Gus, however, has achieved his major aim: which is not to be buried in Texas but to give Call the way to mourn that suits him best.

I don’t know if intense busyness has been the best way to mourn my mother, but I feel that it has kept me going. Now that the family has dispersed and my responsibilities have diminished, I’m experiencing a void, somewhat like Call at the end of his second trek.

But it’s a void that now seems bearable.

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Surveying the Books of My Childhood

By Robin Bates | Published: August 21, 2022
James Charles, Girl Reading

Monday

Many of the memory-sharing conversations I had with my brother this past weekend—they were in town for our mother’s memorial service–involved the books that absorbed us as children. These books occupy 22 three-foot-long shelves, with the topmost ones accessible only by means of a special library ladder. I learned that sometimes we had similar reading experiences and sometimes not, which is only to be expected as my youngest brother Sam is nine years younger than I am.

For my own archival purposes, I’m listing some of our favorite books and book series. Please let me know if any of these are on your own life list:

–Louisa Mae Alcott’s Little Men. For some reason, this was the book we had, not Little Women, so I missed the back story.
–James Barrie, Peter Pan. Absolutely magical although unexpectedly dark.
–Betsy Bates, Beans in Your Ears and six others. Betsy Bates was my aunt so we recognized when she used my cousins in her fiction. Her books came out when I was older so I missed their magic.
–L. Frank Baum, the Oz Books. We had 20 of them, passed down from my grandmother to my mother. Especial favorites were The Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and Rinkitink of Oz.
–Francis Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Both were among my very favorites. Later I came across The Little Princess, which I also enjoyed but not as much.
–Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, The Little Lame Prince. A disturbing but fascinating fairy tale.
–The Maxfield Parrish illustrated version of The Arabian Nights. Absolutely magical but, as it was abridged for children, lacking the sex that I discovered later when reading adult versions.
–Paul Berna’s The Knights of King Midas. One of my favorite novels growing up, largely because it’s a group of kids working together.
–Michael Bonds Paddington books, which I enjoyed as a child but discovered I couldn’t read to my own kids because they were so repetitive.
–We have three or four of Walter Brooks’s Freddy the Pig books. We devoured the complete collection in the American Library in Paris.
–We have eight or nine of the Thornton Burgess animal books, which my father loved as a child but which I could never get into myself.
–The N.C. Wyeth-illustrated versions of James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and The Dearslayer. I’ve come to appreciate Mohicans but preferred Dearslayer as a child.
–Jean Craig’s My Side of the Mountain and the sequels. My kids loved these growing up.
–We have most of Roald Dahl’s children books—I missed them as a child but read them to my own children, who loved them.
–C. Day Lewis’s The Otterbury Incident. One of my favorites, and the copy we own is the exact copy that I used to check out from the library—and which my parents bought for me at a library sale.
–Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. In the pantheon of children books I loved, this ranks very close to the top.
–Mary Mapes Dodge’s Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates. Also much beloved.
–Milt Gross’s Nize Baby. My father used to read this example of Jewish humor to us with a fake Yiddish accent, which I now find myself wondering about.
–Ryder Haggard, She, King Solomon’s Mines, and Alan Quartermain. Wonderful adventures, especially the second.
–Lucretia Hale, The Peterkin Papers. These 1880 comic stories about a family which is always getting into trouble were somewhat formulaic but we loved them. The family is always set straight but a “lady from Philadelphia,” who bails them out with common sense solutions.
–Brian Jacques, Redwall and other books in the series. These came along in time for me to read them to my kids, who loved them.
–We have a complete collection of May Justus’s books, most of them autographed and one dedicated to me and my brothers. May Justus was a mountain woman from Grundy County, Tennessee and a good friend. Although she was shunned by many for supporting integration, the local library is now named after her.

It’s getting late so I’ll finish up with the rest of the collection later this week.

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A Stevenson Poem for My Mother

By Robin Bates | Published: August 20, 2022

Spiritual Sunday

Yesterday the Sewanee community filled our parish hall to remember my mother. It was an emotional occasion and I found myself in tears for much of it. I led off with the following remarks, concluding with a Stevenson poem.

Welcome to this community celebration of Phoebe Robins Strehlow Bates—or “mama,” as her children called her. I am Robin Bates, the oldest of her four sons. I was three when Phoebe and Scott moved to Sewanee in 1954, so Jonathan, David, and Sam and I all grew up here, attending Sewanee Public School, as it was known at the time, and then the Sewanee Military Academy (later Sewanee Academy).

Many of you know about Phoebe’s intense dedication to making the Sewanee community work. How she helped start the Sewanee Chorale and the Sewanee Crafts Fair, how she and my father participated in the suit that integrated Franklin County Schools, how she founded the Sewanee Siren—now the Sewanee Mountain Messenger—and ran it for 18 years, laboriously typing it up on stencils every Wednesday night.

What you may not know is that she spent much of her life with back pain, having been in a car accident as a teenager and, even before that, having been told by a doctor that she would have back problems all her life. I was in awe at how she refused to let the pain get in her way and how she seldom complained. In addition to multiple back surgeries, she partly held the pain at bay by a vigorous swimming regimen—she’d been a champion swimmer in high school—and would sometimes swim a mile a day.

Since many of you know her chiefly through her “Bard to Verse” column in the Messenger, I thought I’d focus my remarks on her love of literature. She started the tradition of a weekly poem in the Siren, each issue of which started out with a poem, and she co-edited Bard to Verse in the Messenger for years until my father died, at which point she edited it herself up until two weeks before her death. She was also a voracious novel reader and especially loved 19th century novels, especially those of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. We once figured out that she’d read 17 of Trollope’s 51 novels.

I think what she loved about Trollope and Austen was their focus on community—about how, if you live a principled life, the community thrives, while if you don’t, things fall apart. She loved the extensive network of family and community relationships that is to be found in those novels. And while she was sweet and civil to everyone, she could be critical of people who were just out for themselves. She shared Austen’s and Trollope’s satiric eye for those who sacrificed others for their own convenience, and she also shared their wit. As she saw it, Sewanee was filled with colorful characters who could have stepped out of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or Trollope’s Can Your Forgive Her.

Returning to poetry, Mama used to say that she thought that people underestimated Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry, especially the Child’s Garden of Verses.  I’ve therefore chosen a poem from that collection. Although it’s about a child launching toy boats, I think it also sums up the way that what you do in life has ripple effects that continue on long after your death. I like to think this is my mother’s legacy:  

Where Go the Boats?
By Robert Louis Stevenson

Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,
Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating –
Where will all come home?

On goes the river
And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
Away down the hill.

Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.

Bon voyage, mama.

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Don’t Mourn, Visit Paris Instead

By Robin Bates | Published: August 18, 2022

Friday

Today’s post will be short as I’m busy preparing for the community celebration of my mother’s life, which occurs Saturday. The high point for me will be when my daughter-in-law Betsy, who has a gorgeous voice, will sing the same French song that that she sang at my father’s memorial service nine years ago.

The song is Jacques Prévert’s “Two Snails on Their Way to a Funeral,” put to music by Jacques Kosma. My mother selected it for my father’s ceremony and loved Betsy’s performance—and because she, like him, was fluent in French and a fan of Prévert’s poetry, it seems right to sing it at her own ceremony.

The idea of having a drink and visiting Paris rather than spending time mourning is perfectly in keeping with how she lived her life (although she would choose white wine over the beer recommended in the poem). I imagine the moon in the poem watching over her as it watches over the two snails.

Song of Two Snails on Their Way to a Funeral
By Jacques Prévert

Two snails were going to the funeral of a dead leaf.
Their shells were shrouded in black,
and they had wrapped crepe around their horns.
They set out in the evening,
one glorious autumn evening.
Alas, when they arrived
it was already spring.
The leaves who once were dead
had all sprung to life again.
The two snails were very disappointed.

But then the sun, the sun said to them,
“Take the time to sit awhile.
Take a glass of beer
if your heart tells you to.
Take, if you like, the bus to Paris.
It leaves this evening.
You’ll see the sights.
But don’t use up your time with mourning.
I tell you, it darkens the white of your eye
and makes you ugly.
Stories of coffins aren’t very pretty.
Take back your colors,
the colors of life.”
Then all the animals,
the trees and the plants
began to sing at the tops of their lungs.
It was the true and living song,
the song of summer.
And they all began to drink
and to clink their glasses.
It was a glorious evening,
a glorious summer evening,
and the two snails went back home.
They were moved,
and very happy.
They had had a lot to drink
and they staggered a little bit,
but the moon in the sky watched over them.

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Immersed in Krook’s Rag and Bone Shop

By Robin Bates | Published: August 17, 2022
“Phiz,” Krook in his Rag and Bone shop

Thursday

As relatives show up for my mother’s Saturday memorial service, we are sifting through masses of correspondence, financial records, income tax filings, old newspaper clippings, useless remote controls, outmoded technology (such as slide projectors, light tables, and manual typewriters), and tons of flotsam and jetsam. As we sort through it, keeping some and jettisoning some, I think of Krook’s Rag and Bones Shop in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Here’s a description:

In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old rags. In another was the inscription BONES BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another, WASTE-PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBES BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold there. In all parts of the window were quantities of dirty bottles—blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles; I am reminded by mentioning the latter that the shop had in several little particulars the air of being in a legal neighbourhood and of being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law. There were a great many ink bottles. There was a little tottering bench of shabby old volumes outside the door, labelled “Law Books, all at 9d.” Some of the inscriptions I have enumerated were written in law-hand, like the papers I had seen in Kenge and Carboy’s office and the letters I had so long received from the firm. Among them was one, in the same writing, having nothing to do with the business of the shop, but announcing that a respectable man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to execute with neatness and dispatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr. Krook, within. There were several second-hand bags, blue and red, hanging up. A little way within the shop-door lay heaps of old crackled parchment scrolls and discoloured and dog’s-eared law-papers. I could have fancied that all the rusty keys, of which there must have been hundreds huddled together as old iron, had once belonged to doors of rooms or strong chests in lawyers’ offices. The litter of rags tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged wooden scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have been counsellors’ bands and gowns torn up. One had only to fancy, as Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking in, that yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean, were the bones of clients, to make the picture complete.

Apparently rag and bone men once literally collected bones, which were boiled down for glue, but the expression came to mean unwanted household items. While my mother differed from Krook in that she was a tidy lady—her checkbooks dating back to the early 1980s are all neatly filed—she was reluctant to throw anything away. Now her children are faced with doing so.

Chaotic though Krook’s Rag and Bone Shop may be, it has a copy of the most recent will in the Jarndyce v Jarndyce case. In other words, the nightmarish lawsuit that has ruined the lives of countless individuals could have been solved instantly had this actual will not been buried under mounds of stuff.

In our own searching, we have unearthed correspondence that my father had with Bill Moyer, Pete Seeger, Robert Penn Warren, poet Elizabeth Alexander, and others. We too have struck gold amidst all the junk.

It’s nothing that will have an impact on anything. But then, neither does the long-lost Jarndyce will. That’s because, by the time it’s brought to court to clear everything up, the case has just ended, legal legal expenses having exhausted all the money tied up in the lawsuit.

I’m not sure what the moral is here other than that the living should focus on living rather than be ruled by the dead hand of the past. My mother’s hand wasn’t heavy but we’re committed to throwing away anything that is of no use to anyone. Krook, by having dwelt so long in the junk of the past, spontaneously combusts—Dickens controversially insisted this was scientifically possible—and we’re determined not to let that happen to us.

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