In 1904 the great mystical poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote “The Last Supper” after seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s painting. I like how he helps me see the picture anew: Rilke contrasts the grounded Jesus (“like a sage resolved to his end”) with the worried disciples (“they flutter anxious”) but also notes how alone he feels.
The disciples are understandably concerned about the news he brings them. In Rilke’s analogy, he has delivered a shotgun blast into their midst and they, like frightened birds, flutter anxiously around as they “try to find a way out.”
But there is no way out. Jesus is “everywhere like a twilight-hour” with night coming on inexorably. Fortunately, after night, the dawn.
The Last Supper By Rainer Maria Rilke
They are gathered, astounded and disturbed round him who, like a sage resolved to his end, takes himself away from those he belonged to, and who alien past them flows. The only loneliness comes over him that reared him to the doing of his deep acts; now again will he wander through the olive grove, and those who love him will take flight before him.
He has summoned them to the last supper and (as a shot scatter birds out of the sheaves) he scatters their hands from among the loaves with his word: they fly across to him; they flutter anxious through the table’s round and try to find a way out. But he is everywhere like a twilight-hour.
Mihály Munkácsy, Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to His Daughters
Friday
I report today on a vivid dream that visited me Wednesday night. In it, I was working my way up an icy hill to retrieve my son Toby, who in the dream was a child visiting friends (he’s now an adult). When I got to the house late, I saw that he was sleeping in the hallway, but he awoke when I entered and gave me a joyous smile. The reason: lying next to him, also asleep, was his beloved older brother Justin, who died 22 years ago.
Then Justin too awoke and smiled his characteristic smile. Tall and lanky with blond hair that flopped over his eyes, he assured me he was back when I told him, “I thought we’d lost you.” As I knelt to hug him, however, I woke up.
I haven’t cried about Justin in two decades but, after telling Julia about the dream, I cried. I also recalled John Milton’s “Sonnet 23,” where he describes a similar dream.
In Milton’s case, he is dreaming of Katherine Woodcock, his second wife who died from childbirth complications after they had been married for only two years. Invoking the story of Heracles (“Jove’s great son”) journeying to Hades to rescue Admetus’s wife Alcestis, Milton says that, for a moment, he thought that Woodcock had been similarly restored to him. Although “her face was veiled,” Milton writes,
yet to my fancied sight Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined So clear, as in no face with more delight.
That’s how it was with Justin as well. In his expression, I read pure delight. He always was an expressive child, and in my dream good humor radiated off of him.
And then, like Milton in the poem, I woke up:
But O, as to embrace me she inclined, I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.
“Night” works double here as Milton was blind by this time. In fact, he never physically saw his wife. But he saw her in his dream—in darkness—before awaking to what for him was eternal night:
Methought I saw my late espoused Saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave, Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave, Rescued from death by force though pale and faint. Mine as whom washed from spot of childbed taint Purification in the old law did save, And such as yet once more I trust to have Full sight of her in heaven without restraint, Came vested all in white, pure as her mind: Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined So clear, as in no face with more delight. But O, as to embrace me she inclined, I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.
I find myself wondering whether this dream has been triggered by grief for my recently departed mother. She adored Justin (and he her) and, as I was talking to her in her final hours, I told her that she’d be seeing Justin soon. Maybe the dream was to reassure me that I wasn’t feeding her an empty wish fulfillment.
Sometimes poetry’s gift to us is letting us know that others have felt what we are feeling and experienced what we are experiencing. I certainly found that to be true after Justin died, when I was comforted by the fact (so poems like Mary Oliver’s “Lost Children” and Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” let me know) that I was not alone in my suffering. Milton’s ability to articulate his heartbreak and to find beauty in the midst of it cushions the rest of us.
Poetry, in short, helps us through unbearable pain.
As news out of Ukraine continues to give us gruesome tales of Russian torture, shelling of civilian areas, and wholesale slaughter of prisoners and villagers, one of the most graphic literary images I’ve ever encountered comes to mind: a Russian army officer ordering a prisoner skinned alive to get him to talk. We encounter “Boris the Manskinner” in Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Boris explains the origins of his tactics to the Japanese prisoners he has captured in the latter days of World War II. He blames it all on the Mongolians:
They love to kill people in ways that involve great difficulty and imagination. They are, shall we say, aficionados. Since the days of Genghis Khan, the Mongols have enjoyed devising particularly ruel ways to kill people. We Russians are painfully aware of this. It is part of our history lessons in school. We study what the Mongols did when they invaded Russia. They killed millions. For no reason at all.
Except there is a reason, as he goes on to explain. They do it because they enjoy it. And because no one in command tells them not to.
Which sounds like the situation in Ukraine. The Russians aren’t committing war crimes as an intimidation tactic. They’re doing so because they can.
According to Australian general Mick Ryan, whose analysis on Ukraine I’ve been following, armies that commit war crimes to this extent are, barring other factors, generally headed for defeat. Such behavior points to a lack of the discipline needed to carry out effective military operations. In a series of tweets Ryan observes,
[T]his behavior by the Russian soldiers is further evidence (as if we needed any more) that the Russian Army is professionally corrupt & morally bankrupt. The entire Russian Army chain of command, because of the leadership environment they have nurtured, is responsible.
An army that either explicitly (or implicitly) permits such behavior will never be capable of fighting as an effective and cohesive force. Wars still have rules. An army that operates with an ‘anything goes’ ethos is just not an army. It is an armed group of criminals.
This is why, Ryan goes on to say, “the study of the profession of arms, ethics, and the profound responsibility of exercising lethal force on behalf of one’s nation, is such an important area of study and indoctrination in military institutions.”
Such reasoning leads Ryan to inveigh also against “rough justice and retribution.” The courts, not vengeful Ukrainians, must decide the fate of Russians who commit war crimes. “These murderous scumbags,” he writes, “must be tried and made an example of, so that others know we will never allow them to get away with it.”
Ryan concludes with an important reminder:
Remember, there is a reason Ukraine is fighting for its sovereignty, and why we are supporting it. They are fighting for their existence, and for a world where such acts are not permitted nor tolerated.
In the novel, Boris loses touch with reality when he tortures the innocent son of a high Community Party official. Stalin’s forces, in other words, turn on themselves because thuggish behavior is calling the shots. While the fictional Boris himself escapes, the army that Stalin built up—and that Soviet and Russian leaders ever since have boasted of—has been exposed as a hollow shell, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.
Or as Ryan puts it, “professionally corrupt & morally bankrupt.”
For further reading, check out my post where I compare Vladimir Putin to Boris.
An interesting article in the latest New Yorker addressed the age-old battle of the sexes at a time when toxic masculinity is on the rise, even though feminism appears firmly entrenched. Zoe Heller reviews two books arguing that too often the debate between feminists and patriarchs is a zero-sum game–which is to say, it’s bad for both the women and the men.
An even-handed fictional account of the tension appears in an unfinished novel by a dear friend, the now deceased Rachel Kranz, that has stuck with me for years. I share an excerpt with you because, in addition to acknowledging the problem, Rachel points to a possible solution.
Zoe Heller reviews French historian Ivan Jablonka’s A History of Masculinity From Patriarchy to Gender Justice and British columnist Nina Power’s What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents. I focus here on Power’s book.
Power worries that exaggerated complaining about male toxicity (say, about mansplaining or manspreading) has become “a kind of tribal habit among women.” What is lost in the demonization of men, she believes, is that which is “valuable and generative in male and female difference”:
In our haste to declare masculinity a redundant artifact, she says, we have lost sight of some of its “positive dimensions”—“the protective father, the responsible man.” Although we’re often told that modern societies have outgrown the need for male muscle and aggression, we still rely on men to do the lion’s share of physically arduous and dangerous jobs, including the fighting of wars….If we still expect men to do the dirty work, Power asks, shouldn’t some value be attached to male strength? Women in heterosexual relationships, she claims, respect a degree of responsibly channelled aggression in their partners. “However tough you feel, however independent you might be, when it comes down to it, you would like a man to be able to stand up for you, physically at least,” she writes. “Violence is not as far away from care as we might like to imagine.”
Along these lines, Heller’s New Yorker article quotes from Manliness, a 2006 book by
conservative Harvard philosopher Harvey Mansfield, who regards protection as “a defining task of masculinity.” As he observes in his book, “A man protects those whom he has taken in his care against dangers they cannot face or handle without him.”
Power appears to want men to be both strong and considerate, assertive when necessary but otherwise committed to living “on terms of scrupulous equality the rest of the time.” To which Heller asks,
Is this plausible? Can women enjoy the warm embrace of he-men without having to endure bossiness and swagger? Harvey Mansfield didn’t think so. “Honor is an asserted claim to protect someone, and the claim to protect is a claim to rule,” he wrote. “How can I protect you properly if I can’t tell you what to do?”
Now to Rachel’s unfinished novel, which I find to be brilliant and which was to be a sequel to her first novel, Leaps of Faith. (The Long Wave in my opinion was 90% complete when she died.) In the novel, psychic Warren is working with a Wall Street bonds salesman who is encountering relationship problems. Warren, a sensitive gay man, doesn’t like Gary, who is everything he is not, but finds himself unexpectedly sympathizing his dilemma.
Gary’s girlfriend wants him to be both the man of the house and a little boy who leans on her for support, mixed messaging that leaves him thoroughly confused and angry. He says that, when he is aggressively assertive, she complains that he isn’t taking her needs into consideration, but that when he tries to be vulnerable and lean on her, she accuses him of being weak and whining. Here he is:
“She wanted to cut my balls off,” he says bitterly. “Well, maybe you’ll take her side. But I’m telling you—” His voice is harsh and trembling, and I can hear the way he must sound on the phone consummating a deal, angry, offended—when does he ever feel safe? “She said I wasn’t available enough, and what does that even mean? She was like, ‘Be home more, pay more attention to me, you never tell me anything,’ but you know if I had done it, she would have been all, ‘Oh, what are you complaining about, Gar, get the fuck over it.’ She said she wanted me to—to—lean on her more—but you know she didn’t mean it, it was like a game for her. She had no fucking idea what she was asking me to do, and if she had known, she wouldn’t’ve cared. She just wanted it both ways.”
And:
[W]hatever I do, she’ll never be satisfied. ‘Lean on me, lean on me’—that’s not the way you make money! Who the fuck is going to respect a man like that?” He swallows and I swallow, too. “She thinks I could just turn it on and off, like some fucking machine, like some fucking machine, when she wants me to be the man of the house and when she wants her little boy—”
“So,” he repeats softly, triumphant and resentful, “she’ll never be satisfied. Will she?”
All I can see is what he sees, and no, that woman won’t be, ever.
To break the impasse, Warren asks Gary to tell him what he wants, to which Gary replies, “I want her. But—not like this. Not where I have to go crawling back to her. I can’t live like that.”
Warren’s feels stymied but is aided by his psychic intuition. His suggestion is that the two work on the problem together as companions:
“Tell her,” I say slowly, “that you want to be her friend. Tell her—if it’s true—that you’re going to think about what she said.”
“And then what?”
“And then—think about it. See if—see if there’s a way—” I take a breath. “Not the man of the house and not the little boy,” I say finally. “Something—else.” I don’t know how else to help him, though it astonishes me how much I want to—Gary, of all people. Both his weakness and his strength seem so deadly to me.
But he’s nodding as he stands up, gathering his raincoat and briefcase, handing me a check. “What the hell,” he’s saying in a shaky voice. “It might work.”
I myself am not what you would call a manly man, but the urge to be my family’s protector and chief breadwinner runs deep in my psyche. Now, I’m a 71-year-old boomer so maybe things are different for the generations that grew up after the feminist revolution. Then again, the two books reviewed by New Yorker seem to indicate that the forces that shaped me are still alive and well.
But I also know that, as a result of the feminist revolution, Julia and I have practiced listening to each other throughout our married life. There have been breakdowns, of course, but our breakthroughs have occurred when we in fact heard what the other said.
Maybe Gary’s problem is that he feels as though he needs to solve everything himself, and maybe his girlfriend’s problem is that she both wants him to fix everything and is frustrated when he tries (and inevitably fails). Maybe, as I used to tell my writing students, they need to make the problem the subject.
Male-female tensions will probably continue to the end of time. But addressing those tensions together? “What the hell, it might work.”
Among the other things we learned (and had confirmed) from the January 6 hearings are that entitled people in power will use every means available to stay in power—and if they can’t do so legally, they will employ violence. Setting a mob loose on Congress and on Vice President Mike Pence was not Trump’s first option but it was his predictable last one.
I’ve been thinking about Trump-inspired violence in terms of Richard Slotkin’s 1992 study of the Western, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. As Slotkin observes, America has often framed political violence as a frontier drama. Although America is hardly the only country to experience violence—in fact, most countries have bloody histories—its particular way of processing its past is to frame it as a drama involving attempts to subdue a recalcitrant wilderness. What emerges is a myth—Slotkin calls it the American myth—of “regeneration through violence.”
Throughout American history, he says, there have been different versions of this myth, from the Puritans emphasizing
the achievement of spiritual regeneration through frontier adventure; Jeffersonians (and later, the disciples of Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” [seeing] the frontier settlement as a re-enactment and democratic renewal of the original “social contract”; [or] Jacksonian Americans [seeing] the conquest of the Frontier as a means to the regeneration of personal fortunes and/or of patriotic vigor and virtue.”
Trumpism is closest to the Jacksonian model, but in each case, Slotkin says, the Myth
represented the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or “natural” state, and regeneration through violence.
When Trump in 2017 gave his “American carnage” inaugural address, describing America as a nation under attack by forces domestic and foreign (Muslims, urban Blacks, Central American immigrants), he was invoking this myth, which may be why his vision has resonated with so many. When he has praised the tactics used by thuggish dictators like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un, or when he has pardoned Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher, the court-martialed psycho killer, so-called responsible Republicans could rationalize that his actions were the primitive means needed to regenerate American society. Trump might be crude, they often said, but sometimes a society needs such crudeness to shake things up.
It should be noted that, while the “regeneration through violence” myth had its origins in the Indian wars, it has mapped easily onto other American conflicts, including those involving race and labor movements. For instance, in D.W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece Birth of a Nation, one sees the KKK playing the role of the U.S. calvary, riding to the rescue of people under assault from, not Indians but rampaging ex-slaves. Because they do so, Northerners and Southerners can reunite after their bitter war and a new nation can be born.
One sees the myth played out in many of Hollywood’s greatest westerns, such as High Noon, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and others. In the 1970s, the western got transferred to urban settings but the theme was the same: Dirty Harry resorts to primitive means, with thugs now playing the role previously taken by Indians, as he deals out the violence necessary to restore civilization.
Slotkin focuses mainly on cinema in his study, but one finds literary westerns grappling with the same theme. Two novels that come to mind are Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. Lonesome Dove mourns (like Frederick Jackson Turner) the closing of the frontier, conveying a sense that the age of heroes is past once we’ve civilized the entire nation. While one is reading the novel, however, one cheers on Gus and Cal, the two Texas rangers who take the law into their own hands. Such actions are necessary in a landscape that includes a murderous Indian (Blue Duck) and a pathological gang of outlaws (the Suggs Brothers).
In the end, the rangers prevail, showing cattlemen that they can take their cattle from Texas to Montana’s green pastures. In their success, however, the rangers render themselves obsolete. Like John Wayne in a number of his movies, Cal cannot join the civilization he has helped bring about. In the process, however, the violence that he and Gus have resorted to has served its purpose.
Blood Meridian focuses less on the regeneration than on the violence as the murderous Judge Holden goes rampaging through the 19th century American west, killing Indians and settlers alike. In the end, he is proclaiming that he will never die, which may be how McCarthy sees America. Perhaps exposing the comforting myth that society can in fact be regenerated. McCarthy’s novel disturbs because it suggests that violence, not social order, always gets the last word.
Trump and Trumpism certainly focus more on violence than on social stability. Only an authoritarian leader, they claim, can bring the safety and security that people crave. The result is cult worship of a leader who praises violent crackdowns. It’s also a formula for perpetual violence.
I know of few poems that capture the feel of August better than this one by Lizette Woodworth Reese, Maryland’s poet laureate in the first half of the 20th century. As we enter the month, use Reese’s sonnet to reflect upon it the little life stirring in this intense heat.
August Lizette Woodworth Reese
No wind, no bird. The river flames like brass. On either side, smitten as with a spell Of silence, brood the fields. In the deep grass, Edging the dusty roads, lie as they fell Handfuls of shriveled leaves from tree and bush. But ’long the orchard fence and at the gate, Thrusting their saffron torches through the hush, Wild lilies blaze, and bees hum soon and late. Rust-colored the tall straggling briar, not one Rose left. The spider sets its loom up there Close to the roots, and spins out in the sun A silken web from twig to twig. The air Is full of hot rank scents. Upon the hill Drifts the noon’s single cloud, white, glaring, still.
I am doubly fortunate with regard to church today. In addition to serving as crucifer, I get to read one of my favorite passages from the Old Testament. Because it’s the passage from Ecclesiastes contending that all is vanity, I turn to Samuel Johnson’s most famous poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes.
To set the stage, here’s today’s reading:
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.
I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me — and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. So I turned and gave my heart up to despair concerning all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes one who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23)
The poem is actually an imitation of—or riff off of—a poem much admired by 18th century satirists, including Jonathan Swift. There’s little doubt, however, that Johnson also has the passage from Ecclesiastes much in mind.
I won’t do a deep dive in the poem here because I’ve done so in the past, when I applied Johnson’s satire to the early days of the Donald Trump presidency. (You can read that post here.) After providing a taste of the poem, which is quite long, I look at its Christian ending.
Since our family has just been through a death, here’s what the poem says on that score. Johnson that that if we wish for a long life, we are destined to be disappointed with old age. Or as he puts it, “life protracted is protracted woe.” In other words, wishing is vanity. For one thing, life can lose its savor as we get old:
Enlarge my life with multitude of days, In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays; Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know That life protracted is protracted woe. Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy, And shuts up all the passages of joy: In vain their gifts the bounteous seasons pour, The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flower, With listless eyes the dotard views the store, He views, and wonders that they please no more…
Johnson goes on in this vein for another 26 lines before presenting us with a second hypothetical. Suppose we have an ideal aging process. Johnson describes it as follows:
But grant, the virtues of a temp’rate prime Bless with an age exempt from scorn or crime; An age that melts with unperceiv’d decay, And glides in modest innocence away; Whose peaceful day benevolence endears, Whose night congratulating conscience cheers; The gen’ral fav’rite as the gen’ral friend: Such age there is, and who could wish its end?
“Yet ev’n on this her load misfortune flings,” Johnson laments. What misfortunes? Johnson tells us:
New sorrow rises as the day returns, A sister sickens, or a daughter mourns. Now kindred merit fills the sable bier, Now lacerated friendship claims a tear. Year chases year, decay pursues decay, Still drops some joy from with’ring life away; New forms arise, and diff’rent views engage, Superfluous lags the vet’ran on the stage, Till pitying nature signs the last release, And bids afflicted worth retire to peace.
Faced with the vanity of human wishes, Johnson concludes that our only hope lies with God. The only wishes that are not vain are wishes for a healthful mind, obedient passions, a will resigned, love, patience, and faith. For these we should “pour forth [our] fervors”:
Pour forth thy fervors for a healthful mind, Obedient passions, and a will resign’d; For love, which scarce collective man can fill; For patience, sov’reign o’er transmuted ill; For faith, that panting for a happier seat, Counts death kind Nature’s signal of retreat: These goods for man the laws of Heav’n ordain, These goods he grants, who grants the pow’r to gain; With these celestial wisdom calms the mind, And makes the happiness she does not find.
Only celestial wisdom can calm the mind and reconcile us to our inevitable unhappy state. In short, pray for God’s love.
While losing my mother at 96 is definitely not like Julian losing his mother in Flannery O’Connor’s “All That Rises Must Converge,” I can relate somewhat to his feelings of being adrift once she is gone. In his case, he is entirely dependent upon her, and embarrassed by her, and resentful of his inability to break away from her. Thus, when she dies suddenly after they descend from a bus, he finds himself launched into an unknown world:
Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again, walking as if one leg were shorter than the other. A tide of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him. “Mother!” he cried. “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” Crumpling, she fell to the pavement. He dashed forward and fell at her side, crying, “Mamma, Mamma!” He turned her over. Her face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed.
“Wait here, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. “Help, help!” he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.
O’Connor’s commitment to minute detail makes the death particularly unsettling, an instance of her Southern Gothic style. That captures Julian’s feelings in the moment. But they are then replaced by his horrified realization that, from this moment on, he is entirely on his own.
Or at least he will realize this once the initial shock dissipates.
Not having Julian’s love-hate relationship, I am not thrown off as much by my mother’s own death. Nevertheless, I have the an unnerving feeling that my buffer is gone. As long as a parent is still alive, it’s as though he or she is running interference, like a blocking lineman for the quarterback. Sooner or later, we’re all going to be sacked, but it appears that the sack will come more suddenly when the person in front of you goes down.
Jonathan Swift captures this situation in “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” one of the 18th century’s most remarkable poems. Imagining what people will say about him when he is on his deathbed, and then when he has died, Swift thinks that most will shrug it off fairly rapidly. For instance, here he is imagining himself the subject of gossip at the card table:
My female friends, whose tender hearts Have better learn’d to act their parts, Receive the news in doleful dumps: “The Dean is dead: (and what is trumps?) Then, Lord have mercy on his soul! (Ladies, I’ll venture for the vole.) Six deans, they say, must bear the pall: (I wish I knew what king to call.)
Even his special friends won’t mourn too long:
Here shift the scene, to represent How those I love my death lament. Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay A week, and Arbuthnot a day.
St. John himself will scarce forbear To bite his pen, and drop a tear. The rest will give a shrug, and cry, “I’m sorry—but we all must die!” Indifference, clad in Wisdom’s guise, All fortitude of mind supplies…
There is one group of people who will sincerely grieve, however—and it is those who, like me, feel that they have just lost their buffer against death:
The fools, my juniors by a year, Are tortur’d with suspense and fear; Who wisely thought my age a screen, When death approach’d, to stand between: The screen remov’d, their hearts are trembling; They mourn for me without dissembling.
Or as Gerald Manley Hopkins, in “Spring and Fall,” explains to a grieving Margaret, “It is Margaret you mourn for.”
Swift’s satiric point is that people will never feel as sorry for us as we feel sorry for ourselves, which I suppose is true. Julian may seem distraught over his mother’s death, but it is unclear whether the death upsets him as much as the fact that he is now on his own—which means, among other things, that he will have to find a job.
In my own case, I think I just take it for granted that we move somewhat quickly beyond the deaths of others, just as people will one day move more or less quickly beyond mine. It took me months before I was able to do so with my child, but in the end I realized that life needed me more than he did. The same is true with my mother and, because she was old, the acceptance comes much more quickly.
In any event, it’s important to have ritual to honor those we loved and to bring closure to their lives. Furthermore, they are never entirely gone but return in a wide range of memories. At the moment, I’m just grateful that I had as many years with Phoebe Bates as I did.
Listening to Dickens’s handling of the orphan boy Jo in Bleak House during our trip to Maine, I can’t help but apply it to the way that we treat immigrants at our borders or the homeless at home. We want them “out of sight, out of mind” and deputize law enforcement to make this happen.
It’s a centuries-old problem, as I learned when I took a Tudor England history class in college and learned about “the wandering poor.” We’re going to see much more wandering in the decades to come as extreme climate events disrupt whole populations while autocrats indulge in ruinous foreign wars and domestic crackdowns. Dickens gives us a close-up picture of one such person affected.
Jo is a poor and illiterate boy who sweeps the street every day for whatever pennies people will give him and then goes home to a wretched crawlspace in Tom-All-Alone’s, the poorest part of London. Though his actions hurt no one, those responsible for “public decency” insist that he “move on”:
Mr. Snagsby descends and finds the two ‘prentices intently contemplating a police constable, who holds a ragged boy by the arm.
“Why, bless my heart,” says Mr. Snagsby, “what’s the matter!”
“This boy,” says the constable, “although he’s repeatedly told to, won’t move on—”
“I’m always a-moving on, sar,” cries the boy, wiping away his grimy tears with his arm. “I’ve always been a-moving and a-moving on, ever since I was born. Where can I possibly move to, sir, more nor I do move!”
“He won’t move on,” says the constable calmly, with a slight professional hitch of his neck involving its better settlement in his stiff stock, “although he has been repeatedly cautioned, and therefore I am obliged to take him into custody. He’s as obstinate a young gonoph [pickpocket or thief] as I know. He WON’T move on.”
“Oh, my eye! Where can I move to!” cries the boy, clutching quite desperately at his hair and beating his bare feet upon the floor of Mr. Snagsby’s passage.
“Don’t you come none of that or I shall make blessed short work of you!” says the constable, giving him a passionless shake. “My instructions are that you are to move on. I have told you so five hundred times.”
“But where?” cries the boy.
“Well! Really, constable, you know,” says Mr. Snagsby wistfully, and coughing behind his hand his cough of great perplexity and doubt, “really, that does seem a question. Where, you know?”
“My instructions don’t go to that,” replies the constable. “My instructions are that this boy is to move on.”
Dickens at this point intervenes to deliver one of his characteristic lectures, lambasting Parliament for its failure to devise social solutions:
Do you hear, Jo? It is nothing to you or to anyone else that the great lights of the parliamentary sky have failed for some few years in this business to set you the example of moving on. The one grand recipe remains for you—the profound philosophical prescription—the be-all and the end-all of your strange existence upon earth. Move on!
Then Dickens makes a contrast between “move on” and “move off.” I think (but am not sure) that “moving off” would require some kind of policy prescription—as in “move off to ____.” As Dickens notes,
You are by no means to move off, Jo, for the great lights can’t at all agree about that. Move on!
From this perspective, I suppose it is to his credit that Donald Trump yesterday proposed a concrete solution, even though one that calls for forcible removal—which is to say, a crime against humanity. As Yahoo News reports, his own phrase is “move out”:
Donald Trump said homeless people should be forcibly removed from urban centers and moved to purpose-built camps on the outskirts of major United States cities during a speech at the America First Policy Institute’s summit in Washington this week.
“You have to move people out,” Mr Trump told an audience during his keynote address at Tuesday’s summit.
As Trump sees it, the homeless should be moved out—or off—to “large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the city.” And then, to make his idea slightly more palatable, he recommends housing them in “thousands and thousands of high-quality tents.”
Given GOP parsimony when it comes to the poor, I wouldn’t bet on high quality anything. The idea of cleansing our cities by forcibly relocating undesirables to internal refugee or concentration camps, however, is perfectly consistent with authoritarian thinking.
Towards the end of the novel, the constant moving on finally ends in Jo’s death, leading to a Dickensian denunciation, complete with savage sarcasm:
Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.
But at least in the grave where Jo asks to be buried—next to a poor scrivener who was kind to him—he will be out of sight, out of mind.
