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Thursday
My father loved Christmas—we had elaborate Dickensian celebrations every year until he died at 90—and Christmas poems such as the one of his I shared yesterday were part of that. Interestingly, my father wasn’t Christian, but he loved the creativity of religious symbolism and the way that different religions freely borrow from each other in their efforts to touch the divine.
As Scott Bates saw it, the Christmas nativity story was particularly powerful because it has embedded within it narrative elements borrowed from Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Persian religions (Zoroastrianism). In “Flight into Egypt,” about Joseph, Mary and Jesus fleeing to escape Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, my father imagines the holy family picking up other influences along the way.
Flight into Egypt By Scott Bates
The falcon’s eye above the pyramid Moves with the weary travelers far below, The queen, her consort, and the solar god, And through the desert on their beast they go
Beneath the sphinx of Gizeh guarding the dead, Past Isis in her temple nursing her child, Her silver serpent turning his diamond head To see them riding westward, into the wild
Land of Mithra and Dionysus, far from the stable and the kings of Bethlehem, No dove above them like a guiding star— But Hathor on the horizon watching them,
Her forehead crowned with stars and double horn, As they ride towards her on their unicorn.
The falcon’s eye belongs to Horus, the Egyptian god of kingship, healing, protection, the sun, and the sky. He is looking down at the holy family, described as the queen (Mary), her consort (Joseph), and the solar god (Jesus, the son and sun).
The resurrection, Egyptian style, is captured through the sphinx of Gizeh, who looks over the dead, and the mother goddess Isis, who resurrected her slain brother and husband Osiris. The family is also traveling through the lands of Mithra, the Zoroastrian divinity associated with light, the sun, justice and truth, and of Dionysus, a Greek fertility god. And instead of the star of Bethlehem, they are traveling under the watchful eye of Hathor, a sky deity who was mother or consort of Horus and of the sun god Ra.
The ass they ride on, meanwhile, Scott Bates describes as a unicorn because of that beast’s special symbolism for early and medieval Christians. As the Brittanica informs us, the early Christian bestiary Physiologus states that
the unicorn is a strong, fierce animal that can be caught only if a virgin maiden is placed before it. The unicorn leaps into the virgin’s lap, and she suckles it and leads it to the king’s palace. Medieval writers thus likened the unicorn to Christ, who raised up a horn of salvation for mankind and dwelt in the womb of the Virgin Mary.
Bill Pregnall, a former rector, once told me—this when I was wrestling whether to join the church—that there are many roads to the top of the mountain. Christianity is far from the only religion to set important renewal celebrations in the heart of bleak midwinter, when the sun appears to be dying a slow death. These powerful symbols point towards hope in the darkest of times.
Arthur Boyd Houghton, Mother and Children Reading (c.1860)
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Wednesday – Christmas
Every Christmas my father would write a poem, which was published in Sewanee’s local newspaper and also sent out as the family Christmas card. Over the years I’ve shared a number of these poems in my blog—you can go here to find them—but I don’t believe I’ve ever included the one below, taken from the “Letters from the North Pole” series.
The letters, composed by my father in his later years, were supposedly written by Mrs. Santa Claus, who my father imagined bore the name Aurora Borealis. Aurora is an environmental warrior and supporter of both the activist group Greenpeace and the feminist National Organization of Women. For Christmas, however, she’s taking a break from fighting the good fight, choosing instead to settle down with some good books.
Only these books, as my father makes clear, have an environmentalist theme so Aurora isn’t leaving her activism after all. My father read all of these to my three brothers and me (except for Animal Farm) when we were growing up. The works mentioned are George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, Syd Hoff’s Sammy the Seal, Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle, Robert Lawson’s Story of Ferdinand, the Grimm Brothers’ “Frog Prince,” Felix Salten’s Bambi, Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit, Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.
When, in the poem, my father talks of settling down by a fire and “reading our favorite books from our library shelves,” I am taken back to our Sewanee living room after supper. There I felt safe and loved and in thrall to stories.
D. H. Lawrence describes something similar when a piano recital brings back memories of sitting under his mother’s piano as a child:
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor With the great black piano appassionato. The glamor Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
I sought to recreate the evening reading experience with my children and have seen them doing the same with their own. Here’s the poem:
Dear Friends
I wish I had time To tell you of how I’m riding with Greenpeace And working for NOW
With our Reindeer Warrior In the arctic night How we’re fighting for whales And for women’s rights
But I’ll tell you instead Of our new reading kick… When the factory work Gets too hairy for Nick
And he gets really tired From making the toys He comes to the castle With Blitzen and the boys
And we sit by the fire As the blizzard blows Reading aloud With the fawns and the does
We eat cookies and hay As we read to ourselves Our favorite books From the library shelves
Here are the things We especially like
In Animal Farm When the animals strike
When Mowgli lets in the jungle And Tigger finds Winnie the Pooh When Sophie the seal gains her freedom And Dolittle opens his zoo When Ferdinand stages his sitdown And the Princess beds down with the Frog And Faline I courted by Bambi And Bard puts an arrow through Smaug
When the Snark turns into a Boojum And Toad is cured of his cars When the Who’s get rescued by Horton And The Little Prince travels to stars
We’re having a ball And we wish you the same May the Animals win In the Whole Earth Game
And may all of you have A big book-reading year
Best wishes Aurora and the Rainbow Reindeer
When I wish you “good reading” in my weekly newsletter, you now know the source. (“Good reading” is also meant to be an echo of Mowgli’s “Good hunting,” which the Bastable children use in the E. Nesbit Treasure Seekers series.) My love of literary enchantment comes from a deep place and, like my father, I want to pass it on to you.
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Tuesday
Yesterday I wrote about how Kate Atkinson, a writer I’ve just discovered and have fallen in love with, scatters literary allusions throughout her works. In A God in Ruins, her use of past literature gives her a powerful way to explore the mystery of dying, a daunting subject to say the least. Perhaps Leo Tolstoy handles the subject best in The Death of Ivan Ilych, but Atkinson does a pretty good job herself.
In my post I said that her handling of literary fragments reminds me of how T.S. Eliot relies on such fragments in The Waste Land. In that confusing and complicated poem, Eliot draws on Dante, Andrew Marvell, William Shakespeare, James Joyce, William Blake, Thomas Kyd, and many others in an attempt to counteract what he sees as the disintegration of culture following the horrors of World War I and the chaos of modernity. He reveals his project towards the end of the poem when he writes, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
Perhaps Atkinson had this passage in mind when she came up with the title A God in Ruins. Its predecessor, Life after Life, begins in Victorian England and the two novels proceed to describe the horrors of both world wars and their impact on English life. The “God” in the title is in part a deity that people have a trouble believing in following the carnage, in part a faltering belief in the old English ways that have been disrupted. In other words, Atkinson—who sets much of her action in Eliot’s time period—is responding as he does to the same state of affairs.
God in Ruins reaches a kind of crescendo at the end with the death of Teddy, who represents the old-fashioned decency and civility that seems to be disappearing. In his final hours, his granddaughter doesn’t turn to God but to literature. After reading Trollope to him (see yesterday’s post), she turns to passages from various poets. Or as she puts it, “scraps from her ragbag because words were all that were left now.”
First she thinks of Edmund Spenser’s “The Ministry of Angels.” Although she herself is not religious, she is momentarily hopeful at the poet’s assurance that God sends angels to care for us:
How oft do they their silver bowers leave, To come to succour us that succour want! How oft do they with golden pinions cleave The flitting skyes, like flying pursuivant, Against fowle feendes to ayd us militant! They for us fight, they watch, and dewly ward, And their bright squadrons round about us plant; And all for love, and nothing for reward…
Bertie wonders,
Were Spenser’s bright squadrons of angels waiting to welcome him? Were all the mysteries about to be revealed? They were questions that no one had ever answered and no one ever would.
The Spenser allusion is followed up with the “scraps” that Bertie shares with her grandfather, imagining them as coins that he could pay Charon to cross over the River Styx. The phrases, while they may seem to be randomly chosen, work together to form a kind of narrative. Or as Hippolyta in Midsummer Night’s Dream would describe it, “a great constancy.” Here’s the list:
Perhaps he could use them to pay the ferryman. Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Full fathom five thy father lies. Little lamb, who made thee? Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie. On that best portion of a good man’s life, his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love. Farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
The first passage is from John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and the second from Gerard Manley’s Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur.” These two capture the richness of the world, which Teddy has loved. Then there’s a shift to Ariel’s song in The Tempest, informing Ferdinand that his father has drowned. (Eliot also draws on the passage in the Waste Land.)
The passage from Tempest is followed by Blake’s assurance that God created the marvelous little lamb, which captures some of the same wonder at creation found in Keats and Hopkins:
Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing wooly bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice!
Delight, however, is followed by grief as we get a second Hopkins poem (“Spring and Fall”), this one asking a young girl why she is grieving. The answer is that she has just realized that death will one day come for us all:
Márgarét, áre you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leáves like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you wíll weep and know why.
But though Teddy will die, while alive he has carried out many quiet acts “of kindness and of love,” which make up “that best portion of a good man’s life” (Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”). The list concludes with the mystical final lines of Edmund Thomas’s “Adlestrop,” where the speaker looks out at an empty train station in the middle of nowhere—the train stops for only a minute–and finds himself entranced and captivated by the surrounding countryside:
And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
This has been Teddy’s life, which was like a momentary stop in a countryside that he loved and wrote about in a nature column. I love how the poem, through the mist, opens out to full-heartedly embrace all creation. The poet is well-chosen for this novel because he himself was killed in the Battle of Arras (1917), meaning that his own stop in life was short.
Atkinson is not finished with her poetic scraps. As the novel shifts from Bertie’s to Teddy’s perspective, we get again a line from Hopkin’s “God’s Grandeur,” with its amazing vision of the Holy Ghost hovering over God’s creation:
The air rippled and shimmered. Time narrowed to a pinpoint. It was about to happen. Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Although Teddy too is not a believer—the war has ruined God for him as well as for others—the power of Hopkins’s image suggests that the universe may not be an empty void after all.
Teddy’s thought processes continue:
Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment. Life was a fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, fleeting as the bluebells in the wood. It didn’t matter, he realized, he didn’t mind, he was going where millions had gone before and where millions would follow after. He shared his fate with the many.
And now. This moment. This moment was infinite. He was part of the infinite. The tree and the rock and the water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer. Now.
In the carol, the holly reenacts the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, blending nature’s life cycle and the Christ narrative into a single story. The words that Teddy recalls occur in the chorus:
The rising of the sun And the running of the deer, The playing of the merry organ, Sweet singing in the choir.
Then Atkinson shifts to Prospero’s famous speech in The Tempest, regarded by many as Shakespeare’s own farewell speech to the theater. I’ll start with the speech so that you can see how Atkinson uses it to describe Teddy’s final seconds:
The trumpets sound the end of the revels. The baseless fabric begins to disintegrate. The stuff that dreams are made of starts to rend and tear and the walls of a cloud-capped tower tremble. Little showers of dusty begin to fall. Birds rise in the air and fly away.
In this final moment, Teddy is imagining himself back inside the plane that was shot down over Berlin—except that, in his imagining, he didn’t jump but was plunged with the plane into the North Sea:
Teddy sank to the silent sea-bed and joined all the tarnished treasure that lay there unseen, forty fathoms deep.
In an alternative ending where this in fact happens—Atkinson regularly imagines different narratives for her characters, thereby calling attention to their fictionality—Teddy’s mourning sister Ursula finds some comfort in quoting the follow-up line to the Ariel passage: “Those are pearls that were his eyes.” Here’s the passage in full, which turns death into a mystical transfiguration:
Teddy having died, Atkinson then informs us that her own novel will suffer the same fate:
And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into the thin air and disappear. Pouf!
Prospero’s “great globe itself” could be our world or it could be the Globe Theater. In the end, it’s impossible to tell the difference between life and literature given that we ourselves are such stuff as dreams are made on. Where does the physical Self end and the imagined Self begin? Where is the dividing line between body and soul? As Bertie notes, these are questions “that no one had ever answered and no one ever would.”
But we can use literature, which goes as far as language can go, to ask the questions. That’s a start.
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Monday
I’m a newcomer to the fiction of Kate Atkinson, whose novels I’ve just discovered. Among the pleasures I get from reading this author of period pieces and unconventional crime novels is her use of literary allusions. There’s a certain satisfaction in being able to identify the passages she sprinkles liberally through her books.
She does something special with these allusions in A God in Ruins, a sequel of sorts to Life after Life. In both novels she follows the fortunes of the Todd family, including favorite child Teddy. Teddy grows up to become a revered bomber pilot during World War II, miraculously surviving when his plane is shot down over Berlin. He is interned in a German prisoner-of-war camp, then returns to live a quiet life as nature writer and reporter for a rural newspaper. In the end, he relives his harrowing war experiences as he is expiring of old age in a nursing home.
What I find special in God in Ruins is how Atkinson uses past literature to capture Teddy’s death. There is, first of all, her call out to Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, which first Teddy and then his granddaughter turn to in his last days and hours. Then she begins citing fragments from many poems, using them as T.S. Eliot uses scraps of literature to make sense of a senseless world (and what seems more senseless to us than our death?). “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Eliot writes in Waste Land.
First to Trollope, which Teddy’s beloved granddaughter Bertie reads to him in his final hours. Julia and I did the same with my mother. While we didn’t read Trollope, we perhaps should have given that he was my mother’s favorite novelist.
If Atkinson gives prominence to Trollope in God in Ruins, it’s perhaps because his depictions of multigenerational families in rural England, who are sometimes described lovingly and sometimes satirized, provide a model for her own writing. The first reference to Trollope occurs when Teddy learns that he is being interviewed by “the warden” of a nursing home he doesn’t want to retire to, which prompts him to think of The Warden, the first of the Chronicles of Barsetshire series. While warden Septimus Harding, a lovely character, bears no resemblance to the warden in the nursing home, his decency and kindness have a lot in common with Teddy.
Later in God in Ruins, we find Teddy turning to Trollope after a bout of pneumonia. His daughter Viola discovers “that he’d been reading the first chapter of Barchester Towers [the second book in the series] over and over again, looping round and coming to it fresh each time.”
Is it sad or is it wonderful that the book is constantly refreshed?
Then, in the final hours of Teddy’s life, we learn that granddaughter Bertie
had brought a copy of the Last Chronicle of Barset with her and sat by Teddy’s bedside reading to him. She knew it was one of his favorite books and she supposed it didn’t matter much whether or not he could understand the words because it might be soothing for him to read the familiar rhythms of Trollope’s prose.
Could Atkinson be thinking of the passage in Last Chronicle when Harding’s daughters are sitting by his own deathbed:
During the whole of the morning Mrs. Arabin and Mrs. Grantly were with their father, and during the greater part of the day there was absolute silence in the room. He seemed to sleep; and they, though they knew that in truth he was not sleeping, feared to disturb him by a word.
And a little later:
“It is so sweet to have you both here,” he said, when he had been lying silent for nearly an hour after the child had gone. Then they got up, and came and stood close to him. “There is nothing left for me to wish, my dears;—nothing”…
There was no violence of sorrow in the house that night; but there were aching hearts, and one heart so sore that it seemed that no cure for its anguish could ever reach it. “He has always been with me,” Mrs. Arabin said to her husband, as he strove to console her. “It was not that I loved him better than Susan, but I have felt so much more of his loving tenderness. The sweetness of his voice has been in my ears almost daily since I was born.”
When my mother was dying, she didn’t share any last words, but I found myself thinking about all that she was, all that she had done, and all she had meant to those who loved her. And I thought of her deep love of literature, which gave her special resonance in how she saw the world and interacted with it.
I’ll have more on how Atkinson uses literature to negotiate the byways of death in tomorrow’s post.
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Sunday
For our Advent Study, our church read Mary of Nazareth: The Mother of Jesus as Remembered by the Earliest Christians by Christopher Bryan, who used to teach at the School of Theology here in Sewanee. Bryan takes issue with those who see Mary as meek and mild.
After all, this is a woman who was willing to question an angel before going along with the plan and who undertook a 175 kilometer journey to consult with her cousin Elizabeth (who was carrying the future John the Baptist) when she herself was newly pregnant. Her “Magnificat,” meanwhile, has inspired the Liberation Theology movement. Here’s her declaration, which is also today’s Gospel reading:
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
This, as one liberation theologian cited by Bryan, observes,
is a concrete manner in which to live the gospel: inspired by the Holy Spirit, and in solidarity with all people before the Lord. In this sense the Magnificat is a pattern for every prayer, every praise of God; at the same time it is one of the New Testament texts with the most strongly political and liberating content. It calls on us to take the words totally concretely and to fight against oppression in order to take seriously the Lord of history.
Bryan isn’t the only one to challenge the characterization of Mary as “meek and mild.” As Denise Levertov observes in “Annunciation,”
No one mentions courage.
The engendering Spirit did not enter her without consent. God waited.
She was free to accept or to refuse, choice integral to humanness.
And further on:
She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’ Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’ She did not submit with gritted teeth, raging, coerced. Bravest of all humans, consent illumined her. The room filled with its light, the lily glowed in it, and the iridescent wings. Consent, courage unparalleled, opened her utterly.
Bryan observes that Mary not only obeys and is faithful but is “eager and diligent” in pursuing the meaning of her pregnancy, which is why she journeys to see Elizabeth. “Nowhere in Israel’s entire Scripture and records of God’s servants,” he adds, “is there an acceptance quite so powerful and unqualified as this.”
He also quotes C.S. Lewis, who notes that in Mary we find “a fierceness, even a touch of Deborah, mixed with the sweetness in the Magnificat to which most painted Madonnas do little justice.” Theologian Ann Loades, meanwhile, points out,
A woman who will quiz an archangel, give her (rapturous? enthusiastic?) assent, or agreement to the divine spirit working within her, risk scandal and single parenthood is, one might think, something of a risk-taker, and by no means a model of submission, subordination and passivity.”
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Friday
Here’s a Mary Oliver poem to mark the winter solstice, which occurs tomorrow. For the poet, connecting with nature is always an ecstatic experience. She’s not interested in naming and analyzing the natural world but instead simply losing herself in it.
Or as she puts it, “I love this world, but not for its answers.”
Snowy Night By Mary Oliver
Last night, an owl in the blue dark tossed an indeterminate number of carefully shaped sounds into the world, in which, a quarter of a mile away, I happened to be standing. I couldn’t tell which one it was – the barred or the great-horned ship of the air – it was that distant. But, anyway, aren’t there moments that are better than knowing something, and sweeter? Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dark trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more than prettiness. I suppose if this were someone else’s story they would have insisted on knowing whatever is knowable – would have hurried over the fields to name it – the owl, I mean. But it’s mine, this poem of the night, and I just stood there, listening and holding out my hands to the soft glitter falling through the air. I love this world, but not for its answers. And I wish good luck to the owl, whatever its name – and I wish great welcome to the snow, whatever its severe and comfortless and beautiful meaning.
Julek Heller, illus. from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
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Thursday
This past week I gave a Sunday Forum talk at our church on how (I believe) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was a response to the Black Plague. Since we ourselves suffered from a plague recently (albeit one far less deadly), I find it valuable to explore how literature comes to our aid at such moments.
The Black Plague, also known as the Black Death or the Bubonic Plague, was one of history’s greatest natural disasters, killing an estimated 40-60% of the European population when it struck in 1348-50. It was followed up by a second plague in 1361-62, this time killing 20% of the survivors. This means that the anonymous author of Sir Gawain, which we think appeared around 1375, would have had either firsthand or secondhand experience with the plague.
Yet despite going through this hellish nightmare, he managed to compose an Arthurian romance with a compelling story, memorable characters, gorgeous nature imagery, and a wondrous sense of humor. His aim, as I see it, was to reconnect his audience with the natural world, about which they had understandably become leery. He realized that the defense mechanisms that society had set up to guard against this natural disaster had hollowed people out. For instance, there was a rise of flagellant movements and of pogroms massacring Jews. People came to view God as a savage punisher rather than a savior, and many rejected this world in favor of the next one.
There was also a surge of interest in England’s pagan past, especially in the Green Man, a Celtic fertility god. Indeed, Christianity had never entirely displaced this deity, which can be found carved into medieval churches all over England. The phenomenon of a culture turning to old gods because the new god can’t save them is something we find also in Beowulf, written 500 years earlier. In response to nightly troll attacks—or to an internal violence problem that the society can’t solve—the Beowulf poet reports,
Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed offerings to idols, swore oaths that the killer of souls [Satan] might come to their aid and save the people. That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell. The Almighty Judge of good deeds and bad, the Lord God, Head of the Heavens and High King of the World, was unknown to them.
The poet feels the need at this point to offer a comment. “Oh cursed is he,” he writes,
who in time of trouble has to thrust his soul in the fire’s embrace, forfeiting help; he has nowhere to turn. But blessed is he who after death can approach the Lord and find friendship in the Father’s embrace.
It’s understandable why people would become suspicious, both of Christianity and of nature and nature’s delights. Given how nature had betrayed them, why should they ever trust it again? But when we deny our connection with nature and with our bodies, we end up in a sterile space. This is where Camelot appears to be in a poem.
Granted, at first glance it doesn’t seem sterile. The poem begins with a sumptuous Christmas feast, complete with music, gift-giving, games, and lots of food. Observing Christians, like pagan cultures celebrating the winter solstice, is an assertion of hope at the darkest time of the year. Nevertheless, Arthur senses that something is missing and declares that the feast cannot begin until
he had heard first Of some fair feat or fray some far-borne tale, Of some marvel of might, that he might trust,By champions of chivalry achieved in arms, Or some suppliant came seeking some single knight To join with him in jousting, in jeopardy each To lay life for life, and leave it to fortune To afford him on field fair hap or other.
As if in response, a green giant riding a green horse and carrying an axe and a holly branch (as a sign of peace) enters Camelot and challenges the knights to “a Christmas game”: some member of the court is to use his axe to cut off his head, after which he will return the blow. Following a delay that reflects badly on the court, Gawain steps forward and swings the axe. The knight then retrieves his head, which instructs Gawain to meet him at “the green chapel” in a year’s time for completion of the game.
Knowing that he won’t be able to survive the return stroke, Gawain finds himself in the situation of a patient who has received a terminal diagnosis. Given how unreliable life had become at the time of the plague, many must have felt similarly, certain that inevitable death was just around the corner. While the poem then proceeds to depict unhealthy responses to this situation, it also provides us with a positive alternative.
The unhealthy response is to turn our backs on life, pretending that it doesn’t matter whether we live or die. Christians even have an escape hatch, dismissing life as a veil of tears while putting all their hopes in a heavenly hereafter. As he prepares to set off for the green chapel, Gawain shrugs his shoulders as if his upcoming death is no big deal:
There was much secret sorrow suffered that day That one so good as Gawain must go in such wise To bear a bitter blow, and his bright sword lay by. He said, “Why should I tarry?” And smiled with tranquil eye; “In destinies sad or merry, True men can but try.”
This dismissal of death is one of several instances of denial that we see in the poem. Others include spending much of the year not thinking about what’s going to happen and performing his regular knightly duties as though nothing has changed. It is only when he is a few days away from his rendezvous with death that we see Gawain falling into deep despair.
I’ve written in the past (for instance here) about the many ways the poem shows us a man grappling with mortality and grief. Suffice it to say that, in the course of the poem, the Green Knight gets through to Gawain, showing him that he cares for his life after all. By the end of the work, all of Camelot is wearing green ribbons in honor of Gawain’s encounter. It’s as though heaven-oriented Christianity and earth-oriented paganism have reached an accommodation.
For our purposes, it’s a reminder to love and cherish the earth and our bodies, making the most of the time we have. As Robert Frost puts it in “Birches,” “Earth’s the right place for love./ I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” Denying life, the poem makes clear, is a coping strategy driven by fear. Those in the grip of this fear and angry at life’s transience are often those willing to sacrifice the planet.
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Wednesday
By re-electing a man who attempted a coup, the American electorate has challenged the world view of many of us. Heretofore we thought that, for all America’s flaws, its citizens would see through this gfiting crook, that justice would ultimately prevail, and that democracy would survive, self-correcting if things started going off the rails.
I’m aware that my own optimism is partly due to my privileged background. Other groups, especially African Americans and Native Americans, are less surprised them I am at recent developments. But it’s not only a life of privilege that has shaped my world view. I realize that my childhood reading has also contributed to my belief that all will come out right. Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest captures the vision I grew up with.
We see Cecily’s governess venturing into literary theory following a confession she makes to her pupil that she once wrote a three-volume novel. An impressed Cecily opines, “I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.” To which Prism replies,
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
Wilde’s satiric point is that when we turn fiction into didactic moral lessons–which many of those who ban books want–we get a distorted view of life.
It was such shallow didacticism that Thomas Hardy challenged in his novels, including one in which his “pure woman”—as he provocatively subtitled Tess of the d’Urbervilles—is hanged at the end. I think of what Fielding says at one point in Tom Jones:
There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
There’s one work that I read as a child that disturbed me by not altogether fitting the formula and that I am now recalling in the wake of Donald Trump’s comeback. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, one the world’s great adventure tales, involves a grand expedition where Jim Hawkins and his fellow treasure seekers overcome a mutiny and ruthless pirate attacks to attain a treasure. Although their quest is successful, there was one detail that stuck in my throat.
The lead pirate, he who orchestrates the mutiny and who at one point cold-bloodedly breaks a man’s back with his crutch, gets away scot-free.
Long John Silver dominates the book as Donald Trump dominates our political landscape. Throughout the novel he plays a shifting game, in the end double-crossing his own mutineers to curry favor with the winning side. Yet instead of ending up in irons and headed for the gallows, he
was allowed his entire liberty, and in spite of daily rebuffs, seemed to regard himself once more as quite a privileged and friendly dependent. Indeed, it was remarkable how well he bore these slights and with what unwearying politeness he kept on trying to ingratiate himself with all.
And then, he’s gone. The marooned Ben Gunn—he who has led the treasure seekers to the treasure—is still so terrified of Silver that he helps him escape. Think of him as Mitch McConnell, who helped Trump do his own escaping when the Senate was prepared to bar him from ever seeking public office again:
Ben Gunn was on deck alone, and as soon as we came on board he began, with wonderful contortions, to make us a confession. Silver was gone. The maroon had connived at his escape in a shore boat some hours ago, and he now assured us he had only done so to preserve our lives, which would certainly have been forfeit if “that man with the one leg had stayed aboard.” But this was not all. The sea-cook had not gone empty-handed. He had cut through a bulkhead unobserved and had removed one of the sacks of coin, worth perhaps three or four hundred guineas, to help him on his further wanderings.
I think we were all pleased to be so cheaply quit of him.
As a child it bothered me that Silver wasn’t held to account, and I have been similarly shocked at how Trump too gets away with crime after crime. But I understand the relief of everyone on board the ship. After all, this was a man prepared to murder anyone who got in his way.
There’s much discussion about how much damage Trump can do as president, with worst case scenarios involving tearing apart financial regulations, thereby plunging us into another great depression; savaging the environment and hastening climate change; imprisoning millions of immigrants and tearing apart families; implementing a nationwide ban on abortion; and so on.
But above all, Trump wants to turn the presidency into a money-making operation, even more so than before when he was charging the Secret Service exorbitant rates to stay at his golf resorts and taking bribes from autocrats around the world. Large companies are already lining up to give him money and he’s not even president yet. If he discovers that people with money don’t have the same agendas as the ideologues who crafted Project 2025–and sometimes they don’t–then we know which way Trump will go. He won’t hesitate to double-cross former allies it’s to his advantage.
In other words, the lesson I learned from Stevenson’s novel may be a good one: sometimes there are worse things than a bad guy getting away with his crime. If Trump chooses to abscond with 400 guineas rather than kill everyone on board ship, then we have gotten off cheap.
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Tuesday
As I watch birds cluster around our birdfeeders—recently we had a cardinal and a pair of purple finches join the titmice, nuthatches, chickadees, and goldfinches we are accustomed to—I find myself returning to a magical poem written many years ago by my father. An enthusiastic birder as well as a poet specializing in light verse, Scott Bates combined two of his passions in “The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner.”
Although it seems straightforward enough, the poem is actually about mystical transformation. Multi-colored birds, drawn to a feeder, turn an adjoining cedar into a Christmas tree. Partaking of a feast that appears miraculously, the birds themselves become a feast for the soul.
The transformation, my father writes, occurs “trysmegistically.” Wikipedia informs us that Hermes Trismegistus was a legendary figure from ancient Greece that originated as a combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. The wisdom attributed to this figure “combined a knowledge of both the material and the spiritual world, which rendered the writings attributed to him of great relevance to those who were interested in the interrelationship between the material and the divine.”
In ancient times, birds were seen as having the power to move between heaven and earth, just as did messenger-of the-gods Hermes. The winter solstice for pagan cultures and Christmas for Christian cultures are seen as a time when the membrane separating the mystical and the mundane is particularly porous. In the Christmas story, angel (to apply the words of the Edmund Sears Christmas carol) bend “near the earth to touch their harps of gold.” Such is also the case in my father’s poem, where we see angel-like birds “feasting and flying and doing a show/ For watchers on the earth below.”
We watchers, struggling through cold, dark days, live in hope that the world will be mystically transformed. “Peace on the earth, good will to men and women”: that is what midwinter rituals like Christmas are all about.
The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner By Scott Bates
You can’t exactly call it greed When birds at feeders feed and feed On endless quantities of seed;
It’s sleeping in the cold all night And doing prodigies of flight That gives a bird an appetite.
They wait their turns with impatience Perched on the cedar by the fence Like so many Christmas ornaments,
Cardinal, goldfinch and chickadee, Turning it, trismegistically, Into an ancient Christmas tree
With angels hurrying to and fro Feasting and flying and doing a show For watchers on the earth below.
