Sir Gawain and Classroom Silences

By Robin Bates | Published: July 13, 2022
Antoni Gispert Pérez, detail from Execution of Torrijos

Thursday

The other day I came across an amusing website that featured classical paintings that are being used as comic memes. My favorite, above, makes use of Antonio Gisbert Pérez’s painting The Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga (1888), about the death of the Spanish revolutionary by the forces of Ferdinand VII in 1831.

My favorite literary example of embarrassing silences occurs in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. More on that in a moment.

As a student, I found classroom silences excruciating and would sometimes just blurt something out to break them up. I remember twice being called out for that, the second time by someone who would go on to become famous. Future Minnesota senator and legendary progressive Paul Wellstone, whose Introduction to Government class I took at Carleton College in 1970, once shouted at me, “Will you please just shut up!” when I gabbed on. (The other professor, who had shouted, “Bullshit!”, later explained to me that he was taking out his frustrations at the class on me, given that I was one of the higher performing students. So maybe Wellstone was feeling similarly frustrated.) In any event, classroom silences can seem like highly charged affairs.

Once, in a teaching workshop, the faculty participants were asked how long a silence the average teacher will tolerate before he or she jumps in with an answer. We guessed five or ten seconds but thought perhaps longer. The actual answer: between .7 and 1.5 seconds.

In other words, everyone finds agonizing those moments that often follow a teacher’s question. Which brings me to the 14th century romance. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an imposing giant “hurtles” into Camelot and, appearing to overlook the man sitting in the throne, asks, “Where is the captain of this crowd.” His disrespect for Arthur could not be made more plain:

This horseman hurtles in, and the hall enters;
Riding to the high dais, reeked he no danger;
Not a greeting he gave as the guests he o’erlooked,
Nor wasted his words, but “Where is,” he said,
“The captain of this crowd? Keenly I wish
To see that sire with sight, and to himself say
                          my say.”
          He swaggered all about
          To scan the host so gay;
He halted, as if in doubt
          Who in that hall held sway.

If they were up to the challenge, all the knights would be up on their feet shouting to avenge the insult. Instead, behaving like Uvalde policemen called to a school shooting, “stone-still they sat in a swooning silence”:

There were stares on all sides as the stranger spoke,
For much did they marvel what it might mean
That a horseman and a horse should have such a hue,
Grow green as the grass, and greener, it seemed,
Than green fused on gold more glorious by far.
All the onlookers eyed him, and edged nearer,
And awaited in wonder what he would do,
For many sights had they seen, but such a one never,
So that phantom and faerie the folk there deemed it,
Therefore chary of answer was many a champion bold,
And stunned at his strong words stone-still they sat
In a swooning silence in the stately hall.
As all were slipped into sleep, so slackened their speech
                              apace.

In the so-called “bob and wheel” that ends the stanza, the poet’s sarcasm is exquisite. Surely, it’s not dread that accounts for their silence. No, it’s got to be a matter of courtesy that they are handing all responsibility over to Arthur:

          Not all, I think, for dread,
          But some of courteous grace
          Let him who was their head
          Be spokesman in that place.

In other words, the knights are all thinking, “I’m sure glad someone else is in charge here.”

Nor does it get any better when the Green Giant informs Camelot that he’s there to challenge them to a beheading game: first a knight will cut off his head, after which he will return the blow. The silence which follows probably lasts longer than 1.5 seconds:

If he astonished them at first, stiller were then
All that household in hall, the high and the low…

This allows the Green Knight to pile up the insults:

“What, is this Arthur’s house,” said that horseman then,
“Whose fame is so fair in far realms and wide?
Where is now your arrogance and your awesome deeds,
Your valor and your victories and your vaunting words?
Now are the revel and renown of the Round Table
Overwhelmed with a word of one man’s speech,
For all cower and quake, and no cut felt!”
With this he laughs so loud that the lord grieved;
The blood for sheer shame shot to his face, and pride.

With none of his men willing to stand up for him, Arthur steps forward to take the axe—at which point Gawain saves Camelot’s honor by himself volunteering.

Speaking up in class shouldn’t be as hard as volunteering to take an axe blow (or facing a firing squad), but it may sometimes feel that way. A good teacher, however, will find ways to put the silence to good use. Sometimes excellent discussions are birthed by a pregnant pause.

Or in Camelot’s case, the knights will learn a little humility.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

In the Face of Death, the Small Things

By Robin Bates | Published: July 12, 2022

Wednesday

I’m grappling with the fact that we may be in the final days of my mother’s life. Hospice tells us that she is likely to die in two to four weeks, and though that seems pessimistic to me, given positive vital signs, it’s true that she is eating and drinking very little. I, who have always looked to the future, am having to learn how to embrace the preciousness of the now. It’s a difficult adjustment.

It helps me somewhat that a comparable situation is described in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, a book I used to teach in a 20th Century English-Language Literature survey. There we see a couple engaged in an impossible and forbidden love affair, given that he is an Untouchable and she a member of the merchant class.

Ammu and Veltha know that their affair cannot last. They are violating a taboo that is thousands of years old and inexorable. As Roy explains, the love story she tells

really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.

And how much.

Later, as we see the love relationship bloom, we are told,

Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other. As though they knew already that for each tremor of pleasure they would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken.

The way they handle things is the way I am determined to spend my remaining time with my mother. They focus on “the Small Things”:

Even later, on the thirteen nights that followed this one, instinctively they stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew that there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things.

They laughed at ant-bites on each other’s bottoms. At clumsy caterpillars sliding off the ends of leaves, at overturned beetles that couldn’t right themselves. At the pair of small fish that always sought Velutha out in the river and bit him. At a particularly devout praying mantis.

One small thing that particularly draws their attention is a spider that covers its body with bits of rubbish. This they come to call Chappu Thamburan or Lord Rubbish. “Without admitting it to each other or themselves,” Roy writes,

they linked their fates, their futures (their Love, their Madess, their Hope, the Infinnate Joy), to his. They checked on him every night (with growing panic as time went by) to see if he had survived the day. They fretted over his frailty. His smallness. The adequacy of his camouflage. His seemingly self-destructive pride.  They grew to love his eclectic taste. His shambling dignity.

Roy explains that they chose him because

they knew that they had to put their faith in fragility. Stick to Smallness. Each time they parted, they extracted only one small promise from each other.

Tomorrow?

Tomorrow.

They knew that things could change in a day. They were right about that.

Their ending, when it happens, is tragic and foreseen.

Death is even more inexorable than the Love Laws broken by Ammu and Verutha. One day in the near future, my mother will not have a tomorrow.

In the meantime, we can worship the God of Small Things.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

GOP Operatives as Dorian Gray

By Robin Bates | Published: July 11, 2022
Hatfield as Dorian Gray

Tuesday

Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I thought about that quotation recently when reading accounts of Mark Leibovich’s Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission and

Tim Miller’s Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell, two recent books by men intimately acquainted with Republican politicians.

According to Miller, a former GOP consultant-turned-Democrat, cynicism accounts for why many Republicans operatives stuck it out with Trump, even though they knew better. According to Jonathan Chait’s review, Miller contends that most GOP operatives  fail to “summon the imagination and moral courage to break free from their career path and social identity.” As a result, they rationalize away “the cavernous gap between the means of campaigning and the ends of governing.”  Any means, including voter suppression and the threat of violence, are acceptable if they result in winning.

While Chait acknowledges that some cynicism is inevitable in politics, the GOP has taken cynicism to a whole new level:

One would expect any seasoned political operative to exhibit some level of detachment from their field given that the work inevitably requires sanding down complex truths into slogans and taglines. But Miller reveals that he and his colleagues considered the whole enterprise fundamentally bullshit. Nearly to a person, they thought of politics as a game, and they considered the absence of ethics a mark of sophistication.

Miller shows how the pervasive cynicism among his party’s political class produced the conditions for its capitulation to Trump. The most evident form the cynicism took was ginning up popular rage to hide the GOP’s central policy goals, which as always are lowering taxes and removing regulations on business. For his part, Leibowicz points out that Trump outplayed the establishment cynics by ascending to new levels of cynicism. In Thank You for Your Servitude he observes, “The perverse beauty of Trump was that he could be weirdly forthcoming about how full of sh– he was.”

Pushing against the tide have been those few Republicans courageous enough to stand up for American ideals, most recently Cassidy Hutchinson,  the aide to Trump’s Chief of Staff who recently testified before the House January 6 Committee. Hutchinson is the exception rather than the rule, however, and cannot alone save the party from itself. Unfortunately, Chait gloomily contends, what we mostly have is “a soft pink wall of timorous apparatchiks.” That these people are not monsters, he observes, should make us even more afraid. That’s because they are “achingly human” in their untrustworthiness. It is “their humanness,” he writes, “that renders them so terrifyingly weak and vulnerable in the face of evil.”

Wilde explores such cynicism in Picture of Dorian Gray through the figures of Lord Henry Wotton and his protegé Dorian. For them, the game is not politics but beauty, but as with GOP politics, it is divorced from the human heart. The characters scoff at sentimentality and earnest belief, choosing instead to congratulate themselves on their exquisite taste. They know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Here’s Sir Wooten, for instance, talking about Sybil Vane, who has just committed suicide after Dorian has rebuffed her. He looks at the aesthetics of her death, not at the humanity:

She has played her last part. But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare’s plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare’s music sounded richer and more full of joy. The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away.

When everything is a game, then nothing is real—that is, until people get hurt. Or in Dorian’s case, when he has a moment of self-reckoning, gazing upon a lifetime of denying his humanity. Will Trump and Trump’s enablers ever reach such a moment? Will they gaze in horror in the shape their souls have taken in the course of their careers? Or have they been so hollowed out that anything genuine and true is forever beyond their grasp?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Is Twitter Headed for Bleak House?

By Robin Bates | Published: July 10, 2022
Court of Chancery in Bleak House

Monday

If you’ve been following news about Twitter recently, you will know that multi-billionaire Elon Musk is trying to pull out of his deal to buy the social media giant. I’m relieved since he had planned to reinstate Donald Trump’s ability to promote falsehoods—the former president’s lies about Covid and a stolen election may have been the most damaging—but otherwise I haven’t paid the story all that much attention. What caught my eye was the following statement by Twitter’s Board of Directors chair, which suggests that the man hasn’t read his Charles Dickens:

Bret Taylor, chairman of the Twitter board of directors, wrote that the social media platform is “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”

According to a Deadline article on the development,

Elon Musk’s attempt to terminate his Twitter acquisition will likely force the social network into a protracted legal battle and send its stock price diving — thrusting a new level of chaos upon the firm after months of public disputes have battered its reputation and employee morale.

Twitter’s board said that it was confident the company would prevail in court, but analysts warn — and employees fear — that Musk’s letter sets the stage for a turbulent period, which could carry new financial risks for the company and its workers.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought of Bleak House the moment we heard that Twitter was counting on a Court of Chancery to set everything right. I know the institution has evolved since Dickens’s time, but there’s still the potential that something like the following will happen:

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference out of it. Every Chancellor was “in it,” for somebody or other, when he was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers in select port-wine committee after dinner in hall. Articled clerks have been in the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers, the eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes, he observed, “or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr. Blowers”—a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and purses.

Although Jarndyce and Jarndyce is settled at the end of the novel, it’s only because the money runs out. Musk and Twitter may not run out of money, but many lawyers stand to get rich while the suit is underway.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Jean Valjean, Good Samaritan

By Robin Bates | Published: July 9, 2022

Spiritual Sunday

As the story of the Good Samaritan is today’s Gospel reading, I turn to one of literature’s great Good Samaritan figures. I’m thinking of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, whose selfless rescue of Marius—he carries the wounded man through the sewers of Paris in an epic journey—grips the reader as few stories do. The fact that Marius, as Jean Valjean sees it, robbing him of his beloved Cosette makes the Good Samaritan parallel all the stronger. He has reasons to dislike the young man but saves him anyway.

For a reminder, here’s the original story:

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, `Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25-37)

Rather than focus on Jean Valjean, however, I want to figure on another Good Samaritan figure, the bishop who teaches him Jesus’s message in the first place. Jean Valjean, who has spent years as a galley slave for stealing food for his hungry family, has stolen silver tableware from a kindly bishop. The bishop has taken him in when no one else would, leaving the ex-con bewildered at the prelate’s subsequent actions. Jean Valjean has just been captured by the police and brought before him:

“Ah! here you are!” he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. “I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?”

Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.

“Monseigneur,” said the brigadier of gendarmes, “so what this man said is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this silver—”

“And he told you,” interposed the Bishop with a smile, “that it had been given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had passed the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him back here? It is a mistake.”

“In that case,” replied the brigadier, “we can let him go?”

“Certainly,” replied the Bishop.

The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.

“Is it true that I am to be released?” he said, in an almost inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.

“Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?” said one of the gendarmes.

“My friend,” resumed the Bishop, “before you go, here are your candlesticks. Take them.”

He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the Bishop.

Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks mechanically, and with a bewildered air.

“Now,” said the Bishop, “go in peace. By the way, when you return, my friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with anything but a latch, either by day or by night.”

Then, turning to the gendarmes:—

“You may retire, gentlemen.”

The gendarmes retired.

Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.

The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:—

“Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man.”

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything, remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered them. He resumed with solemnity:—

“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

After a momentary lapse, which gets him into trouble again, Jean Valjean devotes the rest of his life to becoming a honest man. He becomes a beneficent factory owner, a beloved guardian to orphaned Cosette, and a savior to Javert, the policeman who has been relentlessly pursuing him. (Unfortunately, this act of pure Christian benevolence so upends Javert’s traditional view of world that, rather than having a Pauline road-to-Damascus conversion, the inspector commits suicide.) And then there’s the rescue of Marius.

Jesus’s radical vision of love, in other words, can have profound effects, rippling out into a world that desperately needs it. When we embrace it, we no longer belong to evil but to good.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Coates’s Message to White Allies

By Robin Bates | Published: July 7, 2022

Friday

Sometimes I’ll come across a passage in a novel that throws me back in my seat. This happened recently with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Water Dancer where the slave narrator (Hiram Walker) assesses a white plantation owner who is, contrary to appearances, a key figure in the underground railroad. If Corinne Quinn were discovered, she would lose everything—her privileged status, her wealth, probably her life. Why would a privileged woman, he wonders, risk everything for the sake of abolition?

Her own explanation is that she has grasped a truth that we also find in Hegel’s master-slave paradox, where the master is enslaved by his enslaving. Here’s how Quinn puts it:

Power makes slaves of masters, for it cuts them away from the world they claim to comprehend. But I have given up my power, you see, given it up, so that now I might begin to see.

Hiram, however, has a more cynical interpretation. While he admires Quinn’s work, he does not see it as selfless. In fact, he detects an element of vanity in it:

Corrine Quinn was among the most fanatical agents I ever encountered on the Underground. All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because if offended a basic sense of goodness that they believe themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their position was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.

I am reminded here of Brother Jack and the Brotherhood in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. In a dig against Communism, Ellison objects to the way that a grand ideology, even one with laudable objectives, sometimes cannot see actual people. Ellison captures this blindness by giving Jack a glass eye.

To be sure, Hiram doesn’t dismiss Quinn quite so thoroughly since he values her as a fellow combatant. In fact, I think Ta-Nehisi Coates is working through his own ambivalence about white liberal allies. On the one hand, he sees elements of privilege and selfishness behind their actions. On the other, he realizes that liberation can only be achieved if Blacks and socially conscious Whites work together.

The message for Whites is to realize, like Quinn, that you are only free when everyone is free—and to also realize that the very freedom to pick your battles is a privileged position. The oppressed  don’t have that luxury.

I saw political scientist John Stoehr make a similar point recently in a column where he complained about white liberals sitting out elections. Often they don’t see the urgency of voting because their white privilege cushions them against the horrors of rightwing authoritarians coming to power:

White liberals, even now, after a preponderance of the evidence to the contrary, still believe that it’s up to the leaders of the Democratic Party to give Democratic voters a reason to vote in November. If they lose, white liberals say, the Democrats will only have themselves to blame.

What does enthusiasm have to do with self-preservation?

I don’t know about you, but when someone’s drowning, I don’t want the lifeguard asking beachgoers to inspire him to do his damn job.

In short, stop complaining that the Democratic Party isn’t catering to your every position. Stop thinking that Joe Biden has to be perfect. Forget about disillusion and consider what will happen to non-Whites if fascism prevails. And then recall the words of Saadi Shrazi, in a poem that I also owe to a Stoehr column:

To worship God is nothing other than to serve the people.
It does not need rosaries, prayer carpets or robes.
All peoples are members of the same body, created from one essence.
If fate brings suffering to one member
The others cannot stay at rest.

See people as people in their own right, not just as comments on yourself. Then let your concern for them drive your political action.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Help! My Mom’s Having Trouble Reading

By Robin Bates | Published: July 6, 2022
Delphin Enjolras, Woman Reading by Window

Thursday

In today’s post, I’m asking readers for advice. My 96-year-old mother has had a stroke and can no longer manipulate the pages of a book with her right hand. She has a tablet, given out to Chattanooga Times subscribers when the paper went digital, but the print is too small. Listening to books on disk, meanwhile, is not her cup of tea. Does anyone have other suggestions?

Imagine how traumatic this must be. My mother has been an avid reader all her life. She devoured the Little Pepper, Raggedy Ann, and Oz books when she was a girl—she recalls reading some of them by the light of the streetlamp when she was supposed to be asleep—and the passion never subsided. She was an English major at Carleton College, although unfortunately her professors—in the grip of modernism and the New Criticism—didn’t appreciate the intensity of her literary immersion into 19th century fiction. My father, who was at Carleton with her, could see it, however.

He knew, for instance, her deep love of Jane Austen, who helped shape her own wry sense of humor. (When that humor reemerged a day after her stroke, I knew we were going to be okay for a while.) I think she’s read virtually every Dickens novel (Pickwick, Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit excepted), and the only one she didn’t like was Dombey and Son. I once figured out that she’s read 17 of Anthony Trollope’s 51 novels. A couple of months ago she fell in love with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Robert Louis Stevenson has always been high on her list.

She doesn’t only read classics. She loves mystery novels, whether old (Dorothy Sayers) or new (Louise Penny). In short, she has spent her life in books, only to be denied them now.

She has a reading cushion, constructed to sit in the lap, that can hold individual pages, so if I have to print magnified versions of online books, I’ll do that. But if you have other suggestions, please send them in.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments closed

Sickness Strikes Again

By Robin Bates | Published: July 6, 2022
Gustave Doré, iléus. from Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Wednesday

No sooner had Julia and I recovered from Covid-omicron than we went down with sinus infections. I don’t know if this is normal but it has made caring for my invalid 96-year-old mother difficult. Whenever I get flattened by a sickness this way, I always think of Marlow’s sickness in Heart of Darkness.

To be sure, the two sicknesses can’t really be compared since Marlow almost dies whereas we, thanks to Moderna and Pfizer, knew we had every prospect of emerging healthy and whole. Nevertheless, “impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor” approximates what I felt.

In Marlow’s case, his physical sickness becomes a metaphor for his soul sickness, forcing him to confront various existential questions that he cannot answer. Foremost among these is “What is my life’s purpose?”

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.

Further in the passage Marlow talks about “a vision of grayness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things—even of this pain itself.”

As it turns out, Marlow thinks that Kurtz, the man he has been sent to fetch, does have something to say. His admiration for this idealist-turned-fascist does not speak well for Marlow.

Incidentally, I can now report that Pfizer’s marvelous new pill, Paxlovid, has one downside: while you’re taking it, an awful taste resides in the mouth, something like metallic grapefruit. It doesn’t leave until the regimen is completed. Although the analogy is not exact, I thought of a passage from Rime of the Ancient Mariner as I was taking it:

And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.

A temporary unpleasantness beats death, however. And cinnamon candy helps counteract the taste.

Wish us well. My mother has been somewhat neglected during our second bout of illness, but we anticipate being able to devote more attention to her shortly.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Inheriting My Mother’s Poetry Column

By Robin Bates | Published: July 4, 2022
Eugene Carriere, Woman Reading Newspaper

Tuesday

Over the past two weeks, life in our household has become very complicated. I will share in future posts the challenges of caring for my 96-year-old mother, who has become bedridden after three strokes. Today I report on how I have become heir to her poetry column in the Sewanee Mountain Messenger.

I owe equal parts to my father and my mother when it comes to my character and interests. My father was a literature professor who loved reading to us as children. I aspired to be like him and became a professor in turn. My mother, meanwhile, started the weekly town newsletter (it was the Sewanee Siren before it was the Messenger), which helped shape my desire to reach non-academic audiences. Working together with my father, she would begin every issue with a poem or timely quotation.

She and my father continued with practice in The Messenger, authoring a column they called “From Bard to Verse.” Usually they tried to find a poem that had some tie-in with Sewanee events. The beginning of the school year got a poem, as did the various holidays, election day, visiting speakers, weather events, seasonal changes, and of course Commencement. This very blog owes something to their column.

Yesterday, however, I had to inform the editor that, while my mother had chosen the topic for this week’s poem—the Sewanee Summer Music Festival—she is no longer able to provide poems for her column. I offered to continue in her place, and it appears that the editor is agreeable.

For the record, I excerpted from John Dryden “Song for St. Celia’s Day, 1687,” which rhetorically asks, “What passion cannot music raise and quell!”

The poem is not entirely appropriate since the Summer Festival focuses on symphonic instruments whereas Dryden is most enamored of the organ. The poem concludes,

But oh! what art can teach
         What human voice can reach
The sacred organ’s praise?
Notes inspiring holy love,
Notes that wing their Heav’nly ways
         To mend the choirs above.

Orpheus could lead the savage race;
And trees unrooted left their place;
                Sequacious of the lyre:
But bright Cecilia rais’d the wonder high’r;
         When to her organ, vocal breath was giv’n,
An angel heard, and straight appear’d
                Mistaking earth for Heav’n.

Still, Dryden also features trumpets, drums, flutes, and violins in his poem so I figured it would work.

Many people have told me that, upon obtaining their copy of the weekly Messenger, the first thing they do is turn to last page, where my mother’s column appears, and read the poem. I will most honor the tradition she established if the column continues to draw such attention.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed