Wednesday
So after years of Donald Trump periodically citing various experts in support of his actions (whom he never names), he has finally gotten around to my profession. Apparently English professors are telling him that his rambling talks are “the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.” I guess this means we professors are putting his stream-of-consciousness gibberish—what he calls “the weave”—up there with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
I’ll share his quote in a moment, along with how my own mind has woven together our current political situation and Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony. But before I go on, let me reassure readers that this post will be less about Trump’s inanities and more about mending the torn fabric of our nation. I believe, on the basis of what Silko says about the healing process, that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have the potential to make some significant progress in that endeavor.
To start us off, here’s Trump’s quote:
I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things and they all come back brilliantly together. And friends of mine who are, like, English professors, they say: “That’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen!” But the fake news, you know what they say? “He rambled.” It’s not rambling. What you do is you get off a subject, mention another little tidbit, then you get back onto the subject. And you go through this, and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.
First, I doubt seriously that Trump has any English professor friends. (It’s an open question whether he has any friends at all but put that aside.) Second, while it’s true that the musings of Leopold Bloom and Clarissa Dalloway are all over the map, they are engaging in private thoughts, not public performances. Neither one, when talking to someone else, would deliver anything comparable to the following, voiced during a recent Trump rally:
You take a look at bacon and some of these products. Some people don’t eat bacon anymore. And we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down — you know, this was caused by their horrible energy — wind, they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.
John Stoehr of the blog Editorial Board, drawing on first-hand experience with a close family member, believes that Trump’s “weaving” is a sign of dementia, with his denials an attempt to hide it. “He knows he’s rambling so he covers it up saying he’s not rambling,” Stoehr contends before adding,
He must prove it’s not happening. He does this by repeating himself. It’s as if the sheer volume of verbosity will make it real. It’s as if getting us to believe he’s still big and strong and tough will stop the inevitable.
Silko sees herself as a weaver of stories, transcribing what “Thought-Woman, the spider” puts in her head. What initially put me on to Ceremony was Silko’s own description of out-of-control stream of consciousness. In her case, she’s describing the PTSD thoughts of Tayo, a World War II veteran who has seen Rocky, his cousin and best friend, killed when the Japanese held them captive. Early in the novel, Silko uses the metaphor of tangled threads to capture his state of mind:
He could get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present, tangled up like colored threads from old Grandma’s wicker sewing basket when he was a child, and he had carried them outside to play and they had spilled out of his arms into the summer weeds and rolled away in all directions, and then he had hurried to pick them up before Aunti found him. He could feel it inside his skull—the tension of little threads beingp ulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more. So Tayo had to sweat through those nights when thoughts became entangled; he had to sweat to think of something that wasn’t unraveled or tied in knots to the past…
Later, when Tayo goes to the local medicine man searching for healing, we learn about the fragility of a weave, in this case a spider’s early morning web:
“But you know, grandson, this world is fragile.”
The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the story for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way.
We also learn about how easily those threads can be destroyed:
The old man only made him certain of something he had feared all along, something in the old stories. It took only one person to tear away the delicate strands of the web, spilling the rays of sun into the sand, and the fragile world would be injured.
From the start of his first presidential campaign, Trump has been tearing apart norms and institutions, most notably the peaceful transition of power, respect for military veterans, respect for the rule of law, and, recently, the rituals of Arlington National Cemetery. Nothing to him is sacred. Indeed, the line describing Big Jim in Bob Dylan’s “Jack of Hearts” often comes to me when I think of Trump:
With his bodyguards and silver cane and every hair in place
He took whatever he wanted to and he laid it all to waste
I promised you a more positive turn to this post so here it is. Tayo is on a healing quest—for himself and for the world—and he searches for a pattern that will address the sickness that has set humans against the environment, Whites against Indians, and Indians against Indians. In the end, he finds it in an inner peace that refuses to get drawn into the world’s hatred, anger, and fear, what Silko calls witchery. It’s like the way that Harris insists on joy and hope in the face of Trump’s racism and misogyny.
This peace is captured in beautiful patterns that one finds in Pueblo blankets and Navajo sand paintings. Ultimately Tayo finds that pattern in the stars:
Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars. But there were others who would be working this night, casting loose countermotions to suck in a great spiral, swallowing the universe endlessly into the black mouth, their diagrams in black ash on cave walls outlining the end in motionless dead stars. But he saw the constellation in the north sky, and the fourth star was directly above him; the pattern of the ceremony was in the stars, and the constellation formed a map of the mountains in the directions he had gone for the ceremony. For each star there was a night and a place; this was the last night and the last place, when the darkness of night and the light of day were balanced. His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun, in the pattern of the stars. He had only to complete this night, to keep the story out of the reach of the destroyers for a few more hours, and their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them.
It so happens that the witchery does in fact collapse in upon itself as the forces seeking to destroy Tayo, baffled by his refusal to engage with them, instead turn on each other. I wonder if something similar will eventually happen to Trump and Trumpism. The racists and fascists that Trump has emboldened have already destroyed the traditional GOP. Will they eventually cannibalize each other? Silko concludes the novel with the following poem:
Whirling darkness
started its journey
with its witchery
and
its witchery
has returned upon it.
Its witchery
has returned
into its belly.
Its own witchery
has returned
all around it.
Whirling darkness
has come back on itself.
It keeps all its witchery
to itself.
It doesn’t open its eyes
with its witchery.
It has stiffened
with the effects of its own witchery.
It is dead for now.
It is dead for now.
It is dead for now.
It is dead for now.
And then, on the last page:
Sunrise,
accept this offering,
Sunrise.
Or as the Rev. Al Sharpton put it in his speech at the Democratic National Convention:
[W]eeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. We’ve endured January 6th. We’ve endured conspiracy theories. We’ve endured lies and areas of darkness. But if we stay together, Black, White, Latina, Asian, Indian American, if we stay together, joy, joy, joy, joy coming in the morning.
Believe it.
