Kesey, Spokesman for Reactionary Men

By Robin Bates | Published: April 18, 2022
Nicholson as McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Tuesday

Last week my mother and I visited our local CVS and got our fourth Covid shot, which means that we are now doubled vaxxed and double boosted. As I strode out, feeling empowered and immune, a scene from Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest came to mind.

It’s the pose that McMurphy strikes after going through a series of electroshock treatments. Despite the toll they take on him, he appears as confident and arrogant as ever. As narrator Chief Bromden reports, McMurphy claims the treatment supercharges his sexual powers:

They gave McMurphy three more treatments that week. As quick as he started coming out of one, getting the click back in his wink, Miss Ratched would arrive with the doctor and they would ask him if he felt like he was ready to come around and face up to his problem and come back to the ward for a cure. And he’d swell up, aware that every one of those faces on Disturbed had turned toward him and was waiting, and he’d tell the nurse he regretted that he had but one life to give for his country and she could kiss his rosy red ass before he’d give up the goddam ship. Yeh!

Then stand up and take a couple of bows to those guys grinning at him while the nurse led the doctor into the station to phone over to the Main Building and authorize another treatment.

Once, as she turned to walk away, he got hold of her through the back of her uniform, gave her a pinch that turned her face red as his hair. I think if the doctor hadn’t been there, hiding a grin himself, she would’ve slapped McMurphy’s face.

I tried to talk him into playing along with her so’s to get out of the treatments, but he just laughed and told me Hell, all they was doin’ was chargin’ his battery for him, free for nothing. “When I get out of here the first woman that takes on ol’ Red McMurphy the ten- thousand-watt psychopath, she’s gonna light up like a pinball machine and pay off in silver dollars! No, I ain’t scared of their little battery-charger.”

As I reread the scene, I thought of Jack Nicholson playing McMurphy in Milos Forman’s film version of the novel. In his Oscar-winning performance, Nicholson vibrates with life energy, seemingly impervious to anything that the medical bureaucrats can do to him.

Unfortunately, rereading Kesey’s novel also reminded me of just how sexist and racist it is. A domineering woman and Black security guards emasculate the white male inmates (oh, and Chief Bromden), leaving it up to McMurphy to fight for white masculinity. Seen that way, the book would be more aptly applied to the latest cause taken up by Fox’s Tucker Carlson: the collapse of testosterone levels in American men.

The collapse is actually world-wide and may be attributable to rises in male obesity, but Carlson, of course, attributes it to liberals and the Democratic Party. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports on Carlson’s “documentary”:

There’s the usual racist fearmongering: After the trailer shows several fit White bodies, the first Black body to appear is obese (as President John F. Kennedy intones that “there is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children”), and an image from a street riot is used to convey “weak” America. There’s obsession with gender and sexuality: A shirtless man throws a javelin that turns into a flaming rocket; a man squeezes a cow’s udder; and other men, several also shirtless, exercise, fire a gun, wrestle, flip a tractor tire, swing an ax, swallow raw eggs and, of course, stand naked in front of red lights.

There’s the Trump right’s celebration of masculinity as aggression rather than chivalry or gentlemanliness, a notion promoted lately by Sen Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka. In the trailer, words appear on the screen over President Biden stumbling on Air Force One’s stairs and Democratic senators kneeling in tribute to George Floyd: “Good times made weak men; weak men made hard times.”

Although Kesey was a forerunner of the counterculture, his 1962 novel also anticipates the rightwing reaction to the advances made by women and people of color later in the decade—a reaction that would eventually propel Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980. We can also see in Kesey the white male resentment that would fuel Trump’s candidacy, not to mention the current GOP’s anarchistic embrace of a politics of chaos. In McMurphy’s rebellion, women and Black men are to be put in their proper place.

Of course, it’s just an act of bravado that has McMurphy claiming that electroshock will light up his lovemaking. Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, uses his documentary to endorse claims that “red light therapy” will increase testosterone levels. He’s touting junk science but when has that ever stopped Fox pundits?

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The Fascist Right Goes for Sendak

By Robin Bates | Published: April 17, 2022
Images from Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen

Monday

When do we start attaching the word “fascist” to America’s authoritarian Christians? From jailing a woman for a self-induced abortion (although the charges have been dropped) to attacking school libraries for possessing The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Handmaid’s Tale and Cider House Rules to firing teachers for purportedly teaching Critical Race Theory to supporting Donald Trump’s coup attempt to, now, attacking public libraries, there appears to be no limit to how far these people will go. If democracy obstructs their vision of establishing God’s kingdom on earth, then goodbye democracy. One of the latest casualties of their efforts is Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, one of my children’s favorite books when they were growing up.

A Josh Dawsey article in the Washington Post about a Texas library tells the story. Apparently someone wrote to the Llano library complaining of “pornographic filth”:

“It came to my attention a few weeks ago that pornographic filth has been discovered at the Llano library,” wrote Bonnie Wallace, a 54-year-old local church volunteer. “I’m not advocating for any book to be censored but to be RELOCATED to the ADULT section. … It is the only way I can think of to prohibit censorship of books I do agree with, mainly the Bible, if more radicals come to town and want to use the fact that we censored these books against us.”

On her list of 60 objectionable books were books

 about transgender teens, sex education and race, including such notable works as Between the World and Me, by author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, an exploration of the country’s history written as a letter to his adolescent son. Not long after, the county’s chief librarian sent the list to Suzette Baker, head of one of the library’s three branches.

“She told me to look at pulling the books off the shelf and possibly putting them behind the counter. I told them that was censorship,” Baker said.

In subsequent action, Judge Ron Cunningham, who heads the governing body of Llano County, took it upon himself to become an official censor:

Cunningham, a two-term judge who was once part of the security detail for then-Gov. George W. Bush, acted quickly on the complaints. He strode into the main library a few weeks later and took two books off the shelves — Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen— because some parents had objected to the main character in the story, a little boy, appearing nude — and It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health, a sex education book for parents and children ages 10 and up, that includes color illustrations of the human body and sex acts.

He also ordered librarians to pause buying new material and to pull “any books with photos of naked or sexual conduct regardless if they are animated or actual photos,” emails reviewed by The Washington Post showed.

According to the Post article, Cunningham had previously questioned “whether public libraries were even necessary.”

When my three sons were small, we read Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen so many times that we all have lines we still remember and will quote at a moment’s notice. These include “Milk in the batter, milk in the batter, we make cake, and nothing’s the matter,” and “I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me. I’m Mickey!” The story is a wild dream in which Mickey one night falls out of his bed and out of his clothes, landing in the batter of the night cooks. Just as they’re about to push him into the oven, he fashions an airplane out of the dough (which I guess makes him a “doughboy” to make the World War I pun), flies up to the top of a giant milk bottle, and delivers the milk the bakers need.

So yes, he’s naked for parts of the book, which is part of the pleasure. If you’ve had kids, you know there are times when, early in life, they love to run around naked. It’s a sensuous book, filled with touch, taste, sights, smells, and wonderfully rhythmic language. Mickey is also a confident kid who, after escaping being devoured by someone else’s project, asserts his autonomy at the end: he crows like Peter Pan atop the milk bottle before sliding down and back into bed, having made everyone happy. It’s wild and crazy Sendak, on a par with Where the Wild Things Are and Outside Over There.

Here’s the thing: my kids, now parents themselves, were not corrupted by the book. They are the kind of people you want running your businesses (Darien) and teaching your kids (Toby). Between them, they have five children of their own, to whom they have read In the Night Kitchen and who are themselves well on their way to developing into integrous individuals. The only sickos around are those repressed fundamentalists who see perversion everywhere.

Oh, and guess what. Suzette Baker, the head Llano librarian who warned about censorship, has been fired. Meanwhile, this has happened:

“God has been so good to us … please continue to pray for the librarians and that their eyes would be open to the truth,” Rochelle Wells, a new member of the library board, wrote in an email. “They are closing the library for 3 days which are to be entirely devoted to removing books that contain pornographic content.”

[Lelia] Green Little [member of a local anti-censorship group] said little is known about what administrators did during the time the libraries were closed. The book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a work about systemic racism by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson, has mysteriously vanished, and the fate of several other works remains unknown, she said.

We are currently witnessing, in Vladimir Putin, a graphic example of how the authoritarian mindset works: it will go for Chechnya and then Georgia and then Belorussia and then Crimea and then the Donbas and then Kyiv and Mariupol and Odessa. Fascists push and, when they sense a lack of resistance, push some more. In America, fundamentalist Christians may start with critical race theory and transgender individuals and abortion but, before long, they are attacking any mention of America’s slave past and all LGBTQ rights and birth control itself. They will use the system when it benefits them and violate the system when it doesn’t. They, no more than Putin, can be placated because, as they see it, they answer to a higher call than the American Constitution and the needs of a multicultural democracy.

Public schools and public libraries are just the opening salvo. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

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Out of Black Ponds, Water Lillies

By Robin Bates | Published: April 16, 2022
Van Gogh, Water Lillies

Spiritual Sunday – Easter

It has become somewhat of a tradition with this blog to share a Mary Oliver lyric every Easter. That’s because suffering followed by grace is a regular theme in her poetry. In “Morning Poem” every dawn is a resurrection following the ashes of the night.

Before turning to it, let’s look at that miraculous morning when, in John’s account, Mary encountered the risen Jesus at the tomb (John 20:11-17):

But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, and seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him. And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master. Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God. (John 20:11-17)

In “Morning Poem,” resurrection—the kingdom of God on earth—is ready to hand if only we open ourselves to it.  This vision is available to us even if, like Oliver, we suffer from depression—even if

your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead.

We may fight against the happiness that is there for us, just as we may fight against prayer. Perhaps we resist because we fear we are setting ourselves up for disappointment. But Oliver is reassuring. Deep within us, she says, there is “a beast shouting that the earth/is exactly what [you] wanted.” And we know this is true because, inexorably, the black ponds produce—as if in answer to a prayer—blazing water lilies:

Morning Poem
By Mary Oliver

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches–
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead–
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging–

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted–

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

Let the joy of new creation surge within you on this Easter day. The lillies are blazing, whether you pray or not.

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Passover Originated in Poetic Vision

By Robin Bates | Published: April 14, 2022
Domenico Feti, Moses before the Burning Bush

Friday

As Passover week comes to an end, here’s a Passover poem, recommended to me by my best friend from graduate school, poet and literary scholar Norman Finkelstein. In the past, I’ve shared Norman’s own Passover poem, which you can read here. This year he suggested the title poem from the collection Mountain, Fire, Thornbush by Harvey Shapiro, for whom Norman is the literary executor. Here it is:

Mountain, Fire, Thornbush
By Harvey Shapiro

How everything gets tamed.
The pronominal outcry, as if uttered in ecstasy,
Is turned to syntax. We are
Only a step from discursive prose
When the voice speaks from the thornbush.
Mountain, fire, and thornbush.
Supplied only with these, even that aniconic Jew
Could spell mystery. But there must be
Narrative. The people must get to the mountain.
Doors must open and close.
How to savor the savagery of Egyptians,
Who betrayed the names of their gods
To demons, and tore the hair
From their godheads
As lotus blossoms are pulled out of the pool.

The poem seems to be about how an encounter with the divine evolves to the Passover narrative. The encounter occurs when Moses hears God’s voice from a burning thornbush. The “pronominal outcry” (pronominal meaning “relating to a pronoun”) is God’s assertion, “I am that I am.” Shapiro describes this as an ecstatic outcry—divinity announcing itself as a fiery assertion—but what starts off as poetic images (mountain, fire, thornbush) becomes a collection of words (syntax) and then meaning in the form of discourse.

In other words, a poetic sense of the divine gets translated into language. Even an aniconic Jew like Moses–I think “aniconic” means literal minded and non-metaporical—senses mystery in those powerful images. In any event, that divine spark eventually leads to the exodus narrative: God calling upon the Israelites to rebel against the “savagery of the Egyptians,” to close their doors behind them (with all the door imagery that one finds in the Passover seder), and to journey to the mountain and freedom.  Savoring Egyptian savagery is an unexpected twist to the poem but maybe it’s a reference to how the Passover narrative, to be compelling, needs a good villain.

In his opening declaration that “everything gets tamed,” Shapiro also seems to hint that something gets lost in the translation. The poetic ecstasy of encountering the divine dwindles to a story.

Does this convey a disappointment with the Passover seder? Is it no more than a demon, an icon, when compared with that initial thornbush moment? Is pulling lotus blossoms out of the pool a version of separating them from the life source? I confess to not really understanding the last four lines and would like help.

Yet it seems to me that, even if something is lost or betrayed following that initial encounter with the divine, not everything is lost. The Passover narrative retains at least an echo of the ecstatic meeting with God that birthed it. Tradition, after all, always starts off as poetic vision.

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Jane Austen, Fountain of Youth

By Robin Bates | Published: April 14, 2022
Jane Austen

Thursday

Apparently there’s a new book out by an 89-year-old, one Ruth Wilson, that is right up my line: The Jane Austen Remedy: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book can change a life (Allen and Unwin, 2022). A recent article by Wilson in The Guardian (credit to Rebecca Adams for the alert) gives us some insight into her thinking. There she writes,

Thanks to a rereading of Jane Austen’s fiction I have experienced a rejuvenation of spirit and energy that has transformed my life. Re-reading for the sheer pleasure of Austen’s language and characters when I experienced some depression in my 60s initiated a process that became more serious as I continued to re-read the novels in my 70s and became more and more curious about the relationship between reading, learning and the imagination.

In the process of writing The Jane Austen Remedy, Wilson said that she experienced

waves of exhilaration while my level of wellbeing soared beyond anything I had previously known. While writing the memoir, reading, writing, and rereading occupied my days and gave them added meaning.

I love the way she sees reflecting on what she reads and rereads to be an integral part of the process. To be sure, Wilson wasn’t entirely surprised. She reports that she has been

a “reading and response reader” since childhood, feeling my way into books and emerging sometimes as a different person; often a happier one, having experienced the sweetness and usefulness of literature described by the Roman poet Horace.

She then quotes Louise Rosenblatt, an early reader response theorist with whom I should be more familiar. I totally buy what Wilson takes from Rosenblatt:  

From the beginning I was reading in spirals, a concept devised by the reading theorist, Louise Rosenblatt. She imagines a series of arcs as readers shift their attention from the words on the page to their own reservoir of experiences and memories; then back to the words before continuing with a deeper sense of engagement.

In the literature assignments I give my students, I use a sandwich rather than a spiral analogy but the idea is the same: use the two slices of bread (the introduction and conclusion) to introduce and conclude the personal associations triggered by the work, I tell them, while using the ham and cheese portion to explore the work. It’s important to keep the parts of the sandwich somewhat separate, I add, because one needs to give each its own voice. One doesn’t want to make the work a subset of the life or the life a subset of the work; there must be a dialogue between the two. Once there is, however, remarkable insights almost always emerge.

Because a reader changes over time, that means the insights will also change upon rereading a work. Wilson shares some instances of this happening. For example:

Vivian Gornick, novelist and literary critic, recalls her responses to the novel Sons and Lovers at different ages: reading D. H. Lawrence’s coming-of-age story in her late teens she identified with Miriam, young Paul Morel’s virginal girlfriend. In her thirties, following a failed marriage and the discovery of her own sexuality, she identified with Paul’s erotic mistress. And later still she identified with a more mature Paul, the male protagonist who learns the value of self-scrutiny and embarks on a quest for self-knowledge.

Wilson notes that this has happened with her as well. As a result of reading and rereading Jane Austen’s novels, she reports that they

have offered me the richness and complexity required to help me re-assess where I am in my life, the quality of my relationships past and present, and the values at stake in my life choices.

For instance, here’s how the meaning of Pride and Prejudice has changed for Wilson over time:

When I read Pride and Prejudice at the age of 15, I read it as a domestic comedy; I loved the Bennet sisters because they were lively and, for all their bickering, they were having fun. The girls bore with their mother’s nerves and tolerated their father’s sarcasm without giving way to resentment. That helped me as an adolescent.

Rereading the same novel in my 30s when I was assailed by ambivalent feelings about where I was in my life I put my attention elsewhere. I paid serious attention to the nature of intimacy, considering whether prudence should override passion as Mrs Gardner counsels her niece Elizabeth; or whether I could reconcile myself to Charlotte Lucas’s view that happiness in marriage is a matter of chance.

At the age of 90 (almost!) I reread, ponder and console myself with Elizabeth Bennet’s words, “till this moment I never knew myself.” This is the moment I have been waiting for.

In my case, my favorite Jane Austen novel keeps changing. Early on, it was Pride and Prejudice and then it was Persuasion. Currently it is Emma, partly because I find it a more profound exploration than, say, Pride and Prejudice of how, even when (in our arrogance) we screw up, we can recover if we remain in integrity.

While I don’t think I’ll ever list Mansfield Park as my favorite, my appreciation for Fanny Price has steadily grown over the years.  

One reason I love Continuing Education courses is that elderly students have a far different take on works than do young adults of college age. As a result, I too learn new things from the works.

And then there is the way that works mean different things to readers from different epochs. Reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss eloquently captures this phenomenon in the following passage:

A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period. It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue. It is much more like an orchestration which strikes ever new chords among its readers and which frees the text from the substance of the words and makes it meaningful for the time…A literary work must be understood as creating a dialogue…

The dialogue, we learn from Wilson, can have you feeling young at 89.

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Who Has the Real Problem with Sex?

By Robin Bates | Published: April 12, 2022
Peters and West as Othello and Iago

Wednesday

It’s a fairly reliable rule of thumb that those people most obsessed with sexual perversion are those most associated with it. Recently, members of the GOP, taking their cues from QAnon cultists, have been charging Democrats with being soft on pedophilia, if not being actual pedophiles. Yet many more prominent Republicans have been associated with pedophilia than Democrats, starting with the former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert and Florida Representative Mark Foley. We could also mention Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, who closed his eyes to trainer abuse when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State, and Donald Trump, who would wander through the backstage dressing rooms of the Miss Teenage beauty pageant and who spoke sympathetically about how his friend Jeffrey Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” And then there is Alabama judge and Senate candidate Roy Moore, with his long history of hitting on teenage girls.

Oh yes, and there’s also GOP firebrand Lauren Boebert, who is married to a man who, at 24, exposed himself to two young women in a bowling alley. (Lauren, who was 17 at the time, was present when this happened but that didn’t prevent her from later marrying him.) And let’s not pass over those Republican legislators in my home state of Tennessee, who came very close to passing a pathway to marriage without minimum age limits, relaxing guardrails that were in place to protect minors from predatory behavior and abuse. Only public outcry has gotten them to back off.

I thought about this as I was teaching Othello recently. Republican hypocrisy—or projection—alerted me to Iago’s own obsession with sex. On Monday I examined why Iago hates Othello to the degree that he does, chalking it up to “ressentiment” or resentment. But his sexual hang-ups may enter into the dynamics as well.

Consider Iago’s obsession with Othello’s sexuality. Early in the play, he rouses Desdemona’s father by saying that “an old black ram is topping your white ewe” and that “your daughter [is] covered with a Barbary horse.” If this isn’t stopped, Iago warns the father, “you’ll have your nephews [grandchildren] neigh to you; you’ll have coursers for cousins and gennets [donkeys] for germans [close relatives].”

Later, in a curious comment, Iago tells us that he hates Othello because he has slept with Iago’s wife Emilia. We have no evidence that this has in fact occurred. It sounds much more like a classic case of projection, with Iago so obsessed with Othello’s sexuality that he imagines it entering his own bedroom:

For that I do suspect the lusty Moor
Hath leap’d into my seat; the thought whereof
Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards…

There’s also the strange story Iago invents about Cassio’s dreaming. As evidence that Othello’s former lieutenant is cuckolding him, Iago gives the following account:

I lay with Cassio lately;
And, being troubled with a raging tooth,
I could not sleep.
There are a kind of men so loose of soul,
That in their sleeps will mutter their affairs:
One of this kind is Cassio:
In sleep I heard him say ‘Sweet Desdemona,
Let us be wary, let us hide our loves;’
And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand,
Cry ‘O sweet creature!’ and then kiss me hard,
As if he pluck’d up kisses by the roots
That grew upon my lips: then laid his leg
Over my thigh, and sigh’d, and kiss’d; and then
Cried ‘Cursed fate that gave thee to the Moor!’

What’s striking about this is not so much that Iago has invented it but that he indulges in such graphic details. It’s as though he’s fantasizing. The point of the story—that Cassio is in love with Desdemona—almost gets sidetracked by Iago’s description of what Cassio is doing to him physically.

If one adds to this Iago’s anti-women diatribes, along with his mistreatment of his wife Emilia, one begins to wonder if his hatred against Othello stems from a frustrated homoerotic attraction: perhaps he is in love with Othello and feels betrayed by the Moor’s marriage to Desdemona and his preference for Cassio. Maybe the “cursed fate” in Iago’s story of Cassio’s dream is not the Moor taking Desdemona from Cassio but of Desdemona taking the Moor from Iago. It’s like the way that Olivia takes Sebastian from Antonio in Twelfth Night.

To explain Iago’s extreme hatred of Othello, consider that hate often burns hottest when it starts off as love. In any event, while Iago complains about others being obsessed with sex, it appears that he is the real obsessive.

Which also appears to be the case with the GOP. Nor should we be surprised. It makes sense that the party that talks most about childhood innocence–that accuses Democrats of killing unborn babies, running global child trafficking rings, and giving overly lenient sentences to those who download child porn–is the party that has the bigger problem with actual pedophiles.

Additional thoughts: I should make it clear that pedophilia isn’t confined to Republicans. There are undoubtedly pedophiles amongst Democrats and Independents as well. But Democrats are better at policing their ranks. There is also a link between fascism, with its insistence on purity and control, and pedophilia.

As regards Iago’s possible homosexual tendencies, it should be clear to regular readers of this blog that I’m not saying that homosexuals are more likely to be evil than heterosexuals. (We don’t make Macbeth stand in for the latter.) Evil can be found across the gender preference spectrum. It is true, however, the sexual repression can breed monsters. On a historic note, men sleeping with men in Shakespeare’s time was not the big deal it became in later times. Some of the world’s greatest love sonnets (Shakespeare’s) were written by one man to another.

 

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Dancing in the Face of Darkness

By Robin Bates | Published: April 11, 2022
Degas, The Star (1878)

Tuesday

Because the news is so dark these days, here’s a Jane Kenyon poem that may pick you up. Gazing at the evening sun as the world prepares to sink into night, the poet flashes back to a childhood memory. At this moment between light and dark, she remembers an ecstatic moment when, wearing a yellow dress, she made a perfect circle as she whirled around in “the ochre light of an early June evening.”

And even though she was a child, she sensed that she would need to hold on to this memory in order “to live and to go on living” when sorrows beset her. Kenyon certainly faced such sorrows, wrestling with depression and then dying of leukemia at 47. Yet the poem declares that, in that ecstatic moment, she grasped that sorrow would never “consume my heart.” She grasped this truth even as it was happening:

Evening Sun
Jane Kenyon

Why does this light force me back
to my childhood? I wore a yellow
summer dress and the skirt
made a perfect circle.
Turning and turning
until it flared to the limit
was irresistible….The grass and trees,
my outstretched arms and the skirt
whirled in the ochre light
of an early June evening.
And I knew then
that I would have to live,
and go on living: what sorrow it was;
and still what sorrow ignites
but does not consume
my heart

The poem, written in 1983, reminds me of a Lucille Clifton poem written a decade later. In Clifton’s case, an elusive sun once more plays a supporting role, helping her recover from the trauma of sexual child abuse at the hands of her father. Only after he died, she writes, did she remember how one can catch a glimpse of the sun even in darkness. “Only then,” she writes,

did i remember how she [the moon]
catches the sun and keeps most of him
for the evening that surely will come;
and it comes.
only then did i know that to live
in the world all that i needed was
some small light and know that indeed
i would rise again and rise again to dance.

Although the evening invariably comes, the heart doesn’t have to surrender to it.

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Iago Resentment Is Destroying America

By Robin Bates | Published: April 10, 2022
Solomon Alexander Hart, Othello and Iago (1857)

Monday

I have written frequently about what I regard as America’s (and the world’s) Grendel problem. This is the resentment that eats away at people, causing them to act violently against their fellows or, at least, to countenance socially disruptive behavior. While Grendel is my go-to literary archetype for resentment, I also see Milton’s Satan as a worthy candidate and now, after having taught Othello for a second time, would like to add Iago to the mix.

That’s because my students, especially Bo Sain, have been helping me see the extent to which Iago is driven by such resentment. But first, we need a handy definition of the resentment I have in mind—or “ressentiment,” as German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson have called it.

According to Oxford Reference, “ressentiment” is a “vengeful, petty-minded state of being that does not so much want what others have (although that is partly it) as want others to not have what they have.” Nietzsche applied the concept to the powerless—notably to early Christians—but I prefer Jameson’s reworking of the concept. As Jameson noted, you can have power and still feel resentment towards the powerless. In the words of Oxford Reference, Jameson saw the ruling bourgeois elite as filled with ressentiment, which they use “to simultaneously justify their privileges and rationalize the denial of those same privileges to the poorer classes.” I would add that ressentiment often rears its ugly head when the poorer classes make forward strides.

Ressentiment is as good an explanation as I can think of for Iago’s unhinged hatred for Othello. We learn in the very first interchange of this hatred—”Thou told’st me thou didst hold him in thy hate,” Roderigo says to Shakespeare’s consummate villain—and later on Iago says directly, “I do hate him as I do hell-pains.”

The explanation Iago gives is that Othello has promoted Cassio over him:

I know my price, I am worth no worse a place:
But he; as loving his own pride and purposes,
Evades them, with a bombast circumstance
Horribly stuff’d with epithets of war;
And, in conclusion,
Nonsuits my mediators; for, ‘Certes,’ says he,
‘I have already chose my officer.’
And what was he?
Forsooth, a great arithmetician,
One Michael Cassio…

Yet this explanation does not fully account for Iago’s subsequent scorched-earth campaign of destruction. After all, people get passed up for promotion all the time without setting off fireworks. Other explanations also fall short, such as Iago’s sexual feelings of inadequacy: Iago sees Othello as a “black ram” and imagines (with no proof given) that he has slept with Iago’s wife. But again, why would this cause Iago to go all in to destroy the moor?

Some have argued that Iago loves Othello (there are hints in the play of homosexual desiring) and that he feels betrayed and abandoned when Othello marries Desdemona. This is more plausible to me in that a sense of betrayal, of love turned to hate, is the kind of thing that could account for the intensity of Iago’s emotions. But for my money, the play doesn’t give us enough evidence to support such a claim.

Ressentiment, on the other hand, makes a lot of sense. As my student Bo and I discussed, Iago can’t forgive Othello because Othello makes him feel small. As a Venetian citizen, he believes he is entitled to feel big, yet this foreigner of color enters the scene, promotes someone over him, seems to have a potency that Iago lacks, marries brilliantly (outshining Iago’s marriage), and in general acts as though he deserves it all. At the same time, we see signs of Iago’s insecurity in the fact that he has married a doormat of a wife—my student Merrit Newton wrote on this—and this insecurity is compounded by Othello’s belief in his own superior qualities. He’s a proud man who believes he belongs where he is. As a result, Iago is willing to take immense gambles—gambles which prove self-destructive as he is headed for the torture chamber by the end of the play—to bring about Othello’s fall.

We saw such ressentiment at work in the eight years that Barack Obama was president, with gun sales rocketing and rightwing hate groups proliferating. The haters were gratified by Donald Trump’s birth certificate nonsense, which was a way of knocking Obama—with his position, his talented wife, and his classy behavior—off his high horse. It surfaced again in the unhinged attacks on Joe Biden’s immensely qualified Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court. It didn’t matter that both Obama or Jackson are immensely skilled—in fact, their merits just make the haters feel smaller. Trump, by contrast, won the haters’ immense gratitude by seeming to vindicate their feelings–so much so that they were willing to storm the Capitol on his behalf. Many have ruined themselves in the process, but feeling small is so painful—the ressentiment runs so deep against those whom they blame for (as they see it) casting their lives into shadow—that they will risk their businesses, their comfortable lives, and their own futures to give it vent.

Grendel is still my favorite archetype for ressentiment. But Milton’s Satan and Shakespeare’s Iago are tied for second.

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Join in the Joyful Symphony

By Robin Bates | Published: April 9, 2022
Anonymous Cameroonian artist

Spiritual Sunday

Today being Palm Sunday, I share two Palm Sunday poems that I’ve written about before, one by contemporary poet Lucille Clifton, one by 17th century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan. Since both poets love nature, it stands to reason that they would both emphasize the vegetation imagery.

Here’s today’s reading:

When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, saying, “Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.'” So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” They said, “The Lord needs it.” Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying,

“Blessed is the king
who comes in the name of the Lord!

Peace in heaven,
and glory in the highest heaven!”

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” (Luke 19:27-40)

Clifton retells the story using traditional African American imagery. I love how she refers to Jesus as “the brother”:

palm sunday

so here come i
home again
and the people glad
giving thanks
glorying in the brother
laying turnips
for the mule to walk on
waving beets
and collards in the air

For his part, Vaughan calls upon palm trees to lend him their shades and freshness, just as Jesus’s followers turned to palms to express their joy upon his entry into Jerusalem.

It is clear that the poet is really addressing himself as he addresses the “trees, flowers & herbs; birds, beasts & stones” that have been groaning since man’s fall. After all, it is only humans that groan. Seeing himself as a “humble flower,” he says that today is the day for such flowers to leave their fields and secret groves to come and join in the joyful celebration.

Incidentally, the unexpected inclusion of “stones” in his list refers to the rebuke of the pharisees that concludes today’s passage. When they complain about the multitude celebrating Jesus as “the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”, Jesus replies, “I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” As Vaughan sees it, he is called upon to cry out in joy with the rest of creation.

Still struggling to be joyous, however, he then he tells the plants/himself to take inspiration from the children who cried “Hosannah” as they strewed the palms. I have no doubt that Wordsworth had this stanza in mind when he wrote about the shepherd boy in Intimations of Immortality, and the comparison is clarifying. Just as Vaughan is fighting against gloom, a depressed Wordsworth feels himself rebuked by the happy shouts of the boy:

                              Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts,
thou happy Shepherd-boy.

Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call
                    Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
     My heart is at your festival,
          My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
               Oh evil day! if  I were sullen
               While Earth herself is adorning,
                    This sweet May-morning,
               And the Children are culling
                    On every side,
               In a thousand valleys far and wide,
               Fresh flowers…

An image of joy is not enough to entirely lift Vaughan out of his dark thoughts, however. He also needs an image of sacrifice. His attention therefore turns from the children to the ass that bore Jesus, and he wishes that he were that derided beast of burden. He resolves to be as meek as the ass, as the children, and as the palm fronds over which Jesus rides. Then it will not matter whether he bears the sorrows of Job.

In the lovely final line, he combines an image of life with an image of purity. All that matters, he says, is that he secure “but one green branch and a white robe.” 

Palm Sunday
By Henry Vaughan

Come, drop your branches, strew the way
                              Plants of the day!
Whom sufferings make most green and gay.
The king of grief, the man of sorrow
Weeping still, like the wet morrow,
Your shades and freshness comes to borrow.

Put on, put on your best array;
Let the joy’d road make holiday,
And flowers that into fields do stray,
Or secret groves, keep the highway.

Trees, flowers & herbs; birds, beasts & stones,
That since man fell, expect with groans
To see the lamb, which all at once,
Lift up your heads and leave your moans!
                              For here comes he
                              Whose death will be
Man’s life, and your full liberty.

Hark! how the children shrill and high
                              “Hosanna” cry,
Their joys provoke the distant sky,
Where thrones and Seraphim reply,
And their own Angels shine and sing
                             In a bright ring:
                              Such young, sweet mirth
                              Makes heaven and earth
Join in a joyful symphony,

The harmless, young and happy ass,
     Seen long before this came to pass,
Is in these joys a high partaker
     Ordained, and made to bear his Maker.

Dear feast of palms, of flowers and dew!
     Whose fruitful dawn sheds hopes and lights;
Thy bright solemnities did show,
     The third glad day through two sad nights.

I’ll get me up before the sun,
     I’ll cut me boughs off many a tree,
And all alone full early run
     To gather flowers to welcome thee.

Then like the palm, though wrong, I’ll bear,
     I will be still a child, still meek
As the poor ass, which the proud jeer,
     And only my dear Jesus seek.

If I lose all, and must endure.
     The proverb’d griefs of holy Job,
I care not, so I may secure
     But one green branch and a white robe.

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