Another Poem about Bread

By Robin Bates | Published: June 18, 2023

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Monday

As we just attended our 50th Carleton reunion, I share a poem that one of my former hall mates alerted me to. Mike Hazard, a remarkable photographer and filmmaker from the twin cities read last Sunday’s post about bread poetry and informed me that I omitted one of the best.

It’s by Tom McGrath, who grew up on a North Dakota farm and often focused on working class themes. (You can watch Mike’s documentary on McGrath on Amazon Prime.) In my bread post, I said that Jesus was a poet in the way that he used bread as a key metaphor for his ministry.  Like some of the other poems I mentioned, McGrath takes Jesus’s assertion that he is “the bread of the world” and runs with it.

The poem begins by comparing a kitchen table to “Christmas white plains” and detects the resurrection story in the image of bread rising. As with those other bread poems, McGrath moves between the earthly and the transcendent aspects of bread. For instance, after alluding to the mystery of the risen Lord, McGrath moves on to another mystery which he finds no less profound:

But we who will eat the bread when we come in
Out of the cold and dark know it is a deeper mystery
That brings the bread to rise:

it is the love and faith
Of large and lonely women, moving like floury clouds
In farmhouse kitchens, that rounds the loaves and the lives
Of those around them…

But that, McGrath adds, is a “workaday story”—and because he is writing on a Friday, he wants to emphasize the transcendent weekend dimensions of bread.

Here’s the poem:

The Bread of the World
by Thomas McGrath

On the Christmas white plains of the floured and flowering kitchen table
The holy loaves of the bread are slowly being born:
Rising like low hills in the steepled pastures of light —
Lifting the prairie farmhouse afternoon on their arching backs.

It must be Friday, the bread tells us as it climbs
Out of itself like a poor man climbing up on a cross
Toward transfiguration.

And it is a Mystery, surely,
If we think that this bread rises only out of the enigma
That leavens the Apocalypse of yeast, or ascends on the beards and beads
Of a rosary and priesthood of barley those Friday heavens
Lofting…

But we who will eat the bread when we come in
Out of the cold and dark know it is a deeper mystery
That brings the bread to rise:

it is the love and faith
Of large and lonely women, moving like floury clouds
In farmhouse kitchens, that rounds the loaves and the lives
Of those around them…

just as we know it is hunger —
Our own and others — that gives all salt and savor to bread.

But that is a workaday story and this is the end of the week.

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Song Born from Newly Freed Throats

By Robin Bates | Published: June 17, 2023
Fisk Jubilee Singers, 1875

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Spiritual Sunday

Here’s a fine sonnet sonnet by Tyehimba Jess for tomorrow’s celebration of Juneteenth. (Thanks to the blog Art and Theology for alerting me to it.) The poem is part of a sonnet sequence known as a crown, in which the last line of each poem is the first line of the next one and so on in a circle. I recently shared a John Donne poem from his own crown sequence.

Apparently it took Jess eight years to write his sequence. It’s about the famous Fisk Jubilee singers, a group organized in 1871 to raise money for Fisk College that popularized the Negro spiritual tradition. As Jess makes clear, the music that came from “newly freed throats” was a music of freedom. The poem mentions how the music grew out of slavery, how it was birthed from “storied depths of American sin” and “scored from dawn to dusk with coffle and lash” (note the musical pun). But it also emphasizes the joy of freedom, with “each note bursting loose from human bondage.”

Punning off of Psalm 96 (“O sing unto the Lord a new song”), it opens, “O, sing . . . undo the world with blued song.”

The poem appears in Jess’s collection “Olio,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Fisk Jubilee Proclamation
(CHORAL)
By Tyehimba Jess

O sing unto the Lord a new song . . . (Psalm 96)

O, sing . . . undo the world with blued song
born from newly freed throats. Sprung loose from lungs
once bound within bonded skin. Scored from dawn
to dusk with coffle and lash. Every tongue
unfurled as the body’s flag. Every breath
conjured despite loss we’ve had. Bear witness
to the birthing of our hymn from storied depths
of America’s sin. Soul-worn psalms, blessed
in our blood through dark lessons of the past
struggling to be heard. Behold—the bold sound
we’ve found in ourselves that was hidden, cast
out of the garden of freedom. It’s loud
and unbeaten, then soft as a newborn’s face—
each note bursting loose from human bondage.

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A Li-Young Lee Poem for Father’s Day

By Robin Bates | Published: June 15, 2023
Guido Reni, St. Joseph with the Infant Jesus (c. 1635)

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Friday

For Father’s Day, which is Sunday, here’s one of the sweetest father-and-son poems that I know. I once heard poet Li-Young Lee read it at the college where I used to teach.

In the act of removing a splinter from his wife’s hand, the poet recalls a moment when his father did the same for him. He associates his father’s hands with tenderness, whether they were cupping his son’s face in his hands or bringing them together to pray for him. Perhaps the “flames of discipline/ he raised above my head” are an allusion to the Pentecostal flames since Lee’s remarkable father eventually turned to the ministry.

From a distance, it appears the father is “planting something in a boy’s palm,/ a silver tear, a tiny flame,” and in fact he is. We know that what he has planted has grown to fruition years later as Lee shows the same tenderness towards his wife.

The calming effect of the father—the adult Lee can “hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer”—keeps his son from resorting to melodrama (“Death visited here!”). Instead, the son returns to his father a gift of the same order that he has received: he tenderly kisses him.

The Gift
By Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

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McCarthy: Dark, Occasionally Hopeful

By Robin Bates | Published: June 14, 2023
Cormac McCarthy

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Thursday

Cormac McCarthy died on Tuesday, leaving behind him works that are indelibly imprinted on my mind. From the two that most stand out to me, I conclude that there were two McCarthys—one who believed that one could hold on to one’s dignity and sense of self in the face of the grimmest of challenges, the other that we all risk being annihilated by human darkness. All the Pretty Horses is my favorite in the first category while Blood Meridian still gives me nightmares as perhaps the bloodiest book I have ever read.

In Pretty Horses, 16-year-old John Grady Cole sets off for an open-ended adventure in Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. The start of their adventures, which contains a nod to the final lines of Paradise Lost (“the world lay all before them”), is positively lyrical:

They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

If, like Adam and Eve, they are in fact leaving a world of innocence, they discover soon enough the darkness of the world. Eventually they see a 13-year-old boy who has joined them executed—he has killed a man to retrieve his stolen horse—and they themselves are thrown into a grim prison where they almost die. Yet in spite of it all, Grady holds on to what gives his life meaning, which is his love of horses and his love of a young woman he meets. Here’s a passage on the first love:

That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid neither horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.

Later, having lost the woman but retrieved his horse, he reflects on the tradeoffs he has made:

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

In Blood Meridian we see the blood of multitudes in excruciating detail. “The Kid” finds himself a member of the Glanton gang, a group of scalp hunters who have been given carte blanche to massacre Indians and then, having been unleashed, turn their violence on all they encounter. At the core of the group is Judge Holden, a seven-foot albino psychopath who takes on mythic proportions as the book progresses. Highly educated and highly skilled, he appears the very archetype of violence, one who is timeless and impossible to kill. As the judge sees it, war is at the foundation of life:

This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.

Having recently immersed myself in William Faulkner, I see the Mississippi author’s influence on McCarthy. Just as Faulkner reveals America’s dark history with regard to African Americans, so McCarthy does so with native Americans and in the settlement of the west generally. Harold Bloom, who regards the author as a worthy successor to Herman Melville (especially Moby Dick) and sees Blood Meridian as “the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed,”  says of Holden that he seems to “judge the entire earth,” one who holds sway “over all he encounters.”

McCarthy’s ability to look unblinkingly at human horror can have a cathartic effect, reports Will Carthcart, a reporter who has witnessed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine first hand. Cathcart was in Mariupol when the Russians attacked, was captured and then released, and then fled to Tbilisi, Georgia, where his pregnant wife awaited him. Cathcart writes,

Just before dawn, the Ukrainians seized a bridge that allowed us to escape. The drive out of Kherson still haunts me. So much of what I saw, heard, and smelled invoked a Cormac McCarthy novel. I had nothing else to compare it with. No one should.

Further on, quoting from McCarthy’s last novel The Passenger, Cathcart says that

Cormac McCarthy had provided me with a context, even a language, to internalize the things I saw and cannot unsee. Segments of human beings were stacked along the road between the smoking-bombed-out war machines.

“The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise.”

Kherson is now free. But it will never be free of what happened. “A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.”

At this point in the article Cathcart also quotes Judge Holden:

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

Cathcart sums up some of the lessons he has taken from McCarthy:

If the proper authorities ever caught wind of the narcotic potency of such novels, all books would be banned, repackaged, and sold by prescription to inhabitants of wealthy countries.

Reading The Road, Suttree, and Outer Dark on those maddening plastic mattresses hovering above the bleached linoleum was a reminder that things could be worse. If McCarthy could stash poetic elevation and transformative prose in such awful worlds, I figured I could find it.

In college, I gleaned that Blood Meridian is a life guide for the futile brutality of Western civilization. Is there anything more distinctly American than MacGyvering your own gunpowder out of piss and bat shit to kill a bunch of Native Americans?

His son having been born soon after Cathcart escaped to Georgia, he also sees specific lessons to be learned from The Road. He quotes from an interchange between the dying father and the son, who are trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland:

When Ethan asks me, “What’s the bravest thing you ever did?”
I will cough and spit blood onto the road. “Getting up this morning,” I will say to the boy.
I will tell him “To carry the fire.” And when he says he doesn’t know where the fire is.
I will tell him, “Yes you do. It’s inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”

Dark though McCarthy seems, Cathcart sees him as an important reality check:

For 60 years, beginning with The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy has explored social decay and taboo with the radiant darkness of his poetic prose. It was up to us to find the light.

Even at his bleakest, he is holding back—leaving room for hope in the inconceivable tragedy. He provides us with the tools for us to fashion that hope or with the realization that we must let it fall into place like the ashes of a nuclear winter.

All of which leads Cathcart to a personal note of affirmation:

Once I wondered if it was insane to deliberately cause a new human. Now I wonder if it is insane not to.

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Authoritarians Long to Act with Impunity

By Robin Bates | Published: June 13, 2023

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Wednesday

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of the world’s foremost authorities on fascism and authoritarian leaders, has written an insightful article on why the GOP is always willing to give Donald Trump a pass, even when his crimes are flagrant. While an urge to sheep-like conformity and a fear of Trumpian retribution are key motivators, Ben-Ghiat mentions an even more disturbing reason:

Something else drives [South Carolina Senator Lindsay] Graham and other GOP Trump devotees: the thrill of partnering with an amoral individual for whom there are no limits or restraints. Enablers of authoritarians always imagine the power they can wield when the rule of law has been vanquished.

Freedom from all limits or restraints is the central theme of H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man, and the novel is so applicable to authoritarian personalities in today’s America that I’ve written versions of today’s post on three previous occasions.

Trump showed Republicans what was possible in 2016 with his Access Hollywood pronouncement, “And when you’re a star, they let you [kiss beautiful women]. You can do anything… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” The fact that he paid no price for that seemed to prove him right: when you have power and have dispensed with normal checks and balances, you can do anything.

On June 9, 2020, I applied Invisible Man to out-of-control cops. When the law routinely buries instances of them shoving, beating, and even killing people, I noted, they will continue to do so.

I reprinted the post again in June, 2021 on the six-month anniversary of Trump’s January 6 coup attempt. At the time I feared that Trump would escape all accountability for what happened. If he can operate in the world with absolute impunity, I warned, like Wells’s invisible man, he will repeat the same behaviors.

Few maxims are truer than “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It’s no accident that, upon learning the secret of invisibility, Wells’s protagonist immediately starts violating social norms. It’s an aspect of human nature that Plato explores in the Gyges ring parable that inspired Wells’s story.

The parable appears in Book 2 of The Republic. Arguing with Socrates that people behave justly only because they fear the consequences of not doing so, Glaucon recounts how the shepherd Gyges, after finding a ring that renders him invisible, proceeds to seduce the queen, murder the king, and become king himself. While people might publicly applaud a good man that didn’t take advantage of such a ring, Glaucon says, they would in actuality regard him as a fool.

Socrates counters that, rather than such freedom making Gyges happy, he will always be slave to his appetites. While I believe this to be true, this is of scant consolation to Gyges’s victims, just as George Floyd finds scant consolation in the fact that his killers may never find deep peace. Wells, however, has a different focus, the one mentioned by Ben-Ghiat: it can feel delicious to act out one’s dark impulses.

Griffin describes a “feeling of extraordinary elation” when he realizes that people can’t see him. Confiding his history to his college friend Kemp, he says he immediately burned down the house so that others wouldn’t discover his secrets:

“You fired the house!” exclaimed Kemp.

Fired the house. It was the only way to cover my trail—and no doubt it was insured. I slipped the bolts of the front door quietly and went out into the street. I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realize the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.

He uses the word “impunity” again further on:

Practically I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose, everything—save to give away my secret. So I thought. Whatever I did, whatever the consequences might be, was nothing to me. I had merely to fling aside my garments and vanish. No person could hold me.

Griffin proceeds to engage in the same range of behavior that we are seeing from bad cops, from shoving to outright killing. At the beginning, his social infractions are minor:

My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.

When Kent asks about “the common conventions of humanity,” Griffin replies that they are “all very well for common people.”

As Griffin’s madness grows, so do his dark ambitions. Thinking he has successfully enlisted Kemp, he plots ways to wield total power:

“And it is killing we must do, Kemp.”

“It is killing we must do,” repeated Kemp. “I’m listening to your plan, Griffin, but I’m not agreeing, mind. Why killing?”

“Not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying. The point is, they know there is an Invisible Man—as well as we know there is an Invisible Man. And that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror. Yes; no doubt it’s startling. But I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must take some town like your Burdock and terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways—scraps of paper thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend them.”

Note that he uses one of Trump’s favorite words here: “dominate.” He’s prepared to use violence if necessary.

A sadistic thrill comes with asserting your dominance over others, as rapists know well. The satisfaction does not go as deep as serving humankind—this is Socrates’s point—but Griffin, racist cops, and authoritarians like Trump don’t care. They prefer the rush of acting with utter freedom.

Or as Ben-Ghiat says of Congressman Jim Jordan, who is currently seeking to weaponize the House Judiciary Committee against his enemies: “[H]is “beady eyes positively gleam with anticipation.”

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Trump, His Enablers, and “The Third Man”

By Robin Bates | Published: June 12, 2023
Cotten, Welles as Martins, Lime in The Third Man

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Tuesday

Greg Olear of the substack Prevail has written a smart essay comparing Trump and his enablers to Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Olear draws on both the 1949 film and the Graham Greene unpublished novella on which it is based (Greene wrote the work so he’d have a narrative basis for his screenplay) as he uses Lime’s monstrosity to cast a light on Trump’s.

 While I think Olear’s observations are spot-on, I want to push the parallels further since Greene depicts different levels of complicity with Lime’s crimes. In doing so, he provides insights into those who enable monstrosity as well as those principled souls who, despite previous loyalty, turn their back on it. We see examples of all of these in the Trump saga.

Let’s start with the monster first. Newly discovered penicillin is like gold in a post-World War II Vienna that is divided between the Americans, the British, the Soviets, and the French. Major Calloway, a member of Scotland Yard, explains shortages of this life-saving drug have led to it first being trafficked on the black market for exorbitant prices (“a phial would fetch anything up to seventy pounds”) and then, even worse, being diluted with water or sand. The consequences are horrific:

That isn’t so funny, of course, if you are suffering from V.D. Then the use of sand on a wound tht requires penicillin—well, it’s not healthy. Men have lost their legs and arms that way—and their lives. But perhaps what horrified me most was visiting the children’s hospital here. They had bought some of this penicillin for use against meningitis. A number of children simply died, and a number went off their heads. You can see them now in the mental ward.

Lime is no more concerned for these victims than Trump is for the victims of his various grifts. In the famous scene where Lime and his childhood friend Rollo Martins (Holly in the movie) are gazing down from the vantage point of Venice’s giant ferris wheel, the monster explains his reasoning:

Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. The only way you can save money nowadays.

And further on:

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans, and so have I.

To which Olear, referring not only to Trump but to those who enable him, bursts out,

Who are these people? How do they sleep at night? Why are their moral compasses so defective? And why has our society allowed monsters like this to accumulate so much power, money, and influence?

Like Lime, Olear observes, there are people in today’s GOP who don’t think in terms of human beings. They “rally around blastocysts and their brutal version of Jesus,” he writes, “but mobilize against living, breathing humans who are refugees, or immigrants, or trans people, or rape victims.”

Olear observes that Greene “served in the British intelligence services in the war and knew a thing or two about human nature’s dark underbelly.”

As I say, however, there are levels of monstrosity, which is important if some of these people are to be peeled away from today’s extremists. Here’s how the different character’s in Greene’s novella shake out, along with their Trumpist equivalents:

–Holly Martins is a principled man who initially is willing to punch anyone who criticizes his childhood friend. When he hears about the penicillin scam and sees pictures of the children, however, he turns on Lime and helps the police track him down. Think of him as the former Republicans who have broken, not only with Trump, with his GOP enablers—which is to say, with most members of the GOP.

–Anna Schmidt is so in love with Lime that she cannot leave off her affection for him, even when she discovers what he has done. In the film (although not in the novella), she warns Lime that the police are looking for him. Think of her as those who feel so loyal to Trump that they are willing to keep supporting him, even though they wish he didn’t do some of the things he does. They also refuse to countenance Lime’s enemies, just as Anna in the film’s last scene gives Martins the cold shoulder.

–The other characters, more prominent in the novella than in the film, are those grifters who benefit from Lime’s schemes. Baron Kurtz is hand in glove with Lime, as is Winkler, a doctor involved in helping Lime fake his death early in the story. Think of them, perhaps, as the Roger Stones, Steve Bannons, and Rudy Giulianis of the Trump circle. On the other hand, Major Calloway thinks that the American military officer Cooler, while a beneficiary of Lime’s crimes, is not fully immersed in them. At any rate, Calloway lacks evidence  that “he was in on the penicillin racket.”

Finally there is Herr Koch, an innocent bystander who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In his case, he’s seen enough of Lime’s fake death to cast doubts on the affair and so must be bumped off. See him as one of the countless multitudes that have been harmed by Trump placing his own needs above those of his country.

Lime, Kurtz, Winkler are lost causes. But Calloway gets Martin to turn on his own friend and Cooler would rather be with the winners than the losers.  With Anna, I suspect, it will be a matter of time before she breaks with the man she loved—she needs time to grieve—but his crimes are so substantial enough to eat away at her loyalty. And with Koch, as with those Americans who think they can stay out of politics, we see that there is no safety to be found in just keeping one’s head down. Better to align oneself with those who represent responsible governance.

The NeverTrumpers represented the first schism in Republican ranks. Third Man shows that, when the pressure is ramped up, more schisms can arise.

Further note: Apparently the most famous quote from the film was written by Orson Welles rather than Greene.  It is chilling in its amorality:

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

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Pilfered Files, Eustace Diamonds

By Robin Bates | Published: June 11, 2023

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Monday

Julia and I are listening to Antony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds as we drive north to our Carleton reunion, and the novel is interacting in unsettling ways with the recent indictment of Donald Trump over pilfered documents. Lizzy Greystock Eustace, a young widow, insists that a precious diamond necklace worth 10,000 pounds belongs to her as a gift from her husband. The Eustace family, on the other hand, insists that it is a family heirloom that should remain in the family.

Although we’re only a third of a way into the novel, I already find myself being driven mad by her non-stop insistence that the jewels are hers. A peer who has proposed marriage threatens to withdraw his offer unless the diamonds are restored to the family, and even her sympathetic cousin Frank thinks that returning them will be better for her peace of mind.  She, however, is determined to retain possession. The more people push, the more she digs in:

“Peace!”—she exclaimed. “How am I to have peace? Remember the condition in which I find myself! Remember the manner in which that man [her fiancé] is treating me, when all the world has been told of my engagement to him! When I think of it my heart is so bitter that I am inclined to throw, not the diamonds, but myself from off the rocks. All that remains to me is the triumph of getting the better of my enemies. Mr. Camperdown [the Eusatace family lawyer] shall never have the diamonds. Even if they could prove that they did not belong to me, they should find them—gone.”

“I don’t think they can prove it.”

“I’ll flaunt them in the eyes of all of them till they do; and then—they shall be gone. And I’ll have such revenge on Lord Fawn before I have done with him, that he shall know that it may be worse to have to fight a woman than a man. Oh, Frank, I do not think that I am hard by nature, but these things make a woman hard.” 

Enraged at those who (in her eyes) want to rob her of what is hers, Lizzy fantasizes about various forms of punishment, especially against Lord Faun:

“But what right has he to treat me so? Did you ever before hear of such a thing? Why is he to be allowed to go back,—without punishment,—more than another?”

“What punishment would you wish?”

“That he should be beaten within an inch of his life;—and if the inch were not there, I should not complain.”

“And I am to do it,—to my absolute ruin, and to your great injury?”

“I think I could almost do it myself.” And Lizzie raised her hand as though there were some weapon in it. “But, Frank, there must be something. You wouldn’t have me sit down and bear it. All the world has been told of the engagement. There must be some punishment.”

“You would not wish to have an action brought,—for breach of promise?”

“I would wish to do whatever would hurt him most,—without hurting myself,” said Lizzie.

“You won’t give up the necklace?” said Frank.

“Certainly not,” said Lizzie. “Give it up for his sake,—a man that I have always despised?”

“Then you had better let him go.”

“I will not let him go. What,—to be pointed at as the woman that Lord Fawn had jilted? Never!”

A little later in the interchange Trollope interjects an authorial comment that applies only too well to Trump:

“And there is to be no punishment?” she asked, with that strong indignation at injustice which the unjust always feel when they are injured.

When Frank recommends patience, he has no more luck than all those who have recommended moderation to Trump. Lizzy itches for retribution:

“If you carry yourself well,—quietly and with dignity,—the world will punish him.”

“I don’t believe a bit of it. I am not a Patient Grizel who can content myself with heaping benefits on those who injure me, and then thinking that they are coals of fire…. I’ll tell him to his face what he is. I’ll lead him such a life that he shall be sick of the very name of necklace.”

“You cannot ask him to marry you.”

“I will. What, not ask a man to keep his promise when you are engaged to him? I am not going to be such a girl as that.”

“Do you love him, then?”

“Love him! I hate him. I always despised him, and now I hate him.”

“And yet you would marry him?”

“Not for worlds, Frank…. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. He shall ask me again. In spite of those idiots at Richmond he shall kneel at my feet,—necklace or no necklace; and then,—then I’ll tell him what I think of him. Marry him! I would not touch him with a pair of tongs.”

Lizzy has as many reasons for keeping the necklace as Trump gives for keeping the documents. Trump tells us that the documents are his because he was president and that a president can declassify documents in his mind and that the Department of Justice has a double standard in that everyone else took documents while only he is being attacked (all untrue). Lizzy, meanwhile, says that to take the necklace from her would dishonor her husband’s wish and (showing maternal solicitude for the first time in the book) would rob their son of his inheritance.

In both cases, money plays a role, although it’s still unclear how in Trump’s case. We don’t yet know whether the $2 billion his son-in-law received from the Saudis or their decision to hold high-profile golf tournaments at Trump courses had anything to do with the secret Iran attack plans that the former president absconded with. It’s certainly possible that he sees money to be made in the stolen documents.

The Eustace family lawyer, meanwhile, is terrified that Lizzy will break up the necklace and sell the diamonds. After all, despite the generous provisions in her husband’s will, she is beginning to run into debt. He doesn’t trust that she will in fact preserve the necklace for her son (which would solve the problem by keeping the diamonds in the family).

Lizzy’s behavior provides insight into Trump in that narcissism is a strong enough motivator for both.  If others deny them what they think they want, they feel that they are nothing—that their identities have been erased—and so will sacrifice everything to achieve their ends. There’s seldom any long-term planning or strategic thinking in their burn-it-all-down obsession. As Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus puts it, Trump can be partly explained as an “eternal toddler”:

He wants what he wants. The papers are his toys, and he will not give them back. “I don’t want anybody looking,” Trump is quoted as telling his lawyer, in the lawyer’s damning memo-to-self. “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t.” My boxes. Mine, mine, mine.

Everyone agrees that the whole issue would have gone away if Trump had simply returned the papers, just as Lizzy can get married if she returns the necklace. But reason doesn’t hold much water with those who see their foundational identities under attack.

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The Poetry of Holy Bread

By Robin Bates | Published: June 10, 2023

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Spiritual Sunday

I share today a (somewhat long) talk I gave for the adult portion of our Vacation Bible School on “The Poetry of Bread.”  This year’s theme was “Manna in the Wilderness” and mine was one of three talks. The others were an examination of Biblical references to bread—everything from wilderness manna to the Last Supper—and a personal account by a Chattanooga trafficking survivor on an organization she founded 18 years ago to help women in trouble. Mimi Nikkel, founder of Love’s Arm, repeatedly used the manna image as she talked about what helped pull her out of her own downward spiral. Love’s Arm, meanwhile, has reached into prisons and the streets to help others.

In my own talk, I presented poems that feature bread—some overtly religious, others not—and we discussed them as a group. Here, with some comments added that draw on our discussions—is that talk.

Talk for Parish of St. Mark & St. Paul, Sewanee, June 6, 2023

If we see bread as a basic necessity, the archetypal food and symbol of our grounding in the world of matter, then bread provides a powerful means of exploring the point where the material and the spiritual meet.

This, it so happens, is the way that Jesus uses bread. When he says, “I am the bread of life, they who come to me shall not perish,” he is saying that the spiritual life he represents is as foundational to our existence as bread is. In fact, Jesus is a poet at such moments, just as he is skilled author of fiction in the way that he shapes his parables.

For instance, when he breaks bread with his disciples, he is using the bread metaphor in multiple ways. In the breaking and share of the bread, he is giving the disciples a powerful symbol of community, in which people care for each other. When Jesus says, “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me”—and when we say at the eucharist, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven—the disciples take in both his spiritual and his physical presence. At such moments, we are at the threshold of the spiritual world but, as physical beings, we need something that we can taste and see.

All of which is to say that, when we encounter mentions of bread in poetry, it is always going to be much more than bread.

A quick survey of the times that Jesus mentions bread might have us calling him a “bread poet” given the importance of it. Here are a few key instances:

–Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst.—John 6:35

–“I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh.” – John 6:51

–But He answered [to Satan] and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.’”—Matthew 4:4

–While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.” – Matthew 26:26

–And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.”—Luke 22:19

–“I am the bread of life.”—John 6:48

–Then He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed them, and broke them, and kept giving them to the disciples to set before the people.—Luke 9:16

–“Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.’”—John 6:31

–“Give us this day our daily bread.”—Matthew 6:11

Turning to bread poems, I start with one of the most familiar poetic mentions of bread, attributed to the 12th century poet, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher Omar Khayaam, who was maybe a Sufi mystic, maybe a Zoroastrian, maybe an atheist. In any event, one can say that bread figures into his vision of heaven on earth:

From The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
XI
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”

Poetry, bread and wine, and a singing companion—the kingdom of God brought to earth.

In Christian poetry, there are a number of poems that take up Jesus’s bread metaphors and explore them further. Friend and colleague John Gatta alerted me to one by the American Puritan poet Edward Taylor (1642-1729), who meditates on Jesus’s declaration (John 6:51) that “I am the living bread.”

Edwards is writing in the tradition of the metaphysical poets, who pushed their metaphors to the limit. John Donne is the most famous example although it’s worth noting that not everyone was a fan. Samuel Johnson once wrote that, in metaphysical poetry, “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” 

Anyway, in the poem Edwards compares the soul to a bird of paradise trapped in a wicker cage that is doomed to famish because it has pecked at the forbidden fruit. As a result, it has fallen into “celestial famine.” Edwards says that it can neither fill its hunger from earthly grain nor—and this is significant—from angel food, which is to say, purely spiritual bread. Don’t go knocking on heaven’s door, the poet admonishes us, because the angels have “no soule bread.” We need something that is at once spiritual and earthly and we get it delivered to us (warning!) straight from God’s bowels. I pick up the poem from the final stanzas:

From Meditation on John 6:51: “I am the living bread”
By Edward Taylor

In this sad state, Gods Tender Bowells run
Out streams of Grace: And he to end all strife
The Purest Wheate in Heaven, his deare-dear Son
Grinds, and kneads up into this Bread of Life.
Which Bread of Life from Heaven down came and stands
Disht on thy Table up by Angells Hands. 

Did God mould up this Bread in Heaven, and bake,
Which from his Table came, and to thine goeth?
Doth he bespeake thee thus, This Soule Bread take.
Come Eate thy fill of this thy Gods White Loafe?
Its Food too fine for Angells, yet come, take
And Eate thy fill. Its Heavens Sugar Cake. 

…
This Bread of Life dropt in thy mouth, doth Cry.
Eate, Eate me, Soul, and thou shalt never dy.

Although many in the Middle Ages and Renaissance saw angels as higher that humans in “the great chain of being”—after all, they are more spiritual—Taylor points to the importance of bringing the earlty and the spiritual together. In last year’s Vacation Bible School lecture last year on literary angels, I observed that Philip Pullman makes a similar point in his Golden Compass Trilogy. There we see angels who are jealous of humans’ abilities to interact with the world of the senses.To eat “Heavens Sugar Cake,” as it were.

The English Anglo-Catholic mystic Evelyn Underhill has a wonderful “Corpus Christi” poem that similarly explores eucharistic bread imagery. Sewanee chaplain Peter Gray informs me that it’s particularly appropriate today (June 11, 2023) as it is the Face of Corpus Christi, which celebrates the real presence, in the Eucharist’s bread and wine, of the body and blood, soul and divinity, of Jesus.

Underhill draws a connection between the harvested wheat—“torn by the sickles”—and the crucified Christ. But in a mystical revelation, Underhill realizes that out of this “mystic death” arises a “mystic birth.” The poem at this point alludes to mother earth and the seasonal cycles:

I knew the patient passion of the earth,
Maternal, everlasting, whence there springs
The Bread of Angels and the life of man.

Now, “blind no longer,” Underhill sees God’s plan behind human suffering. Though, like Jesus, we may be “reaped, ground to grist, crushed and tormented in the Mills of God,” ultimately we ourselves are “offered at Life’s hands, a living Eucharist.”

Corpus Christi
By Evelyn Underhill

Come, dear Heart!
The fields are white to harvest: come and see
As in a glass the timeless mystery
Of love, whereby we feed
On God, our bread indeed.
Torn by the sickles, see him share the smart
Of travailing Creation: maimed, despised,
Yet by his lovers the more dearly prized
Because for us he lays his beauty down —
Last toll paid by Perfection for our loss!
Trace on these fields his everlasting Cross,
And o’er the stricken sheaves the Immortal Victim’s crown.

From far horizons came a Voice that said,
‘Lo! from the hand of Death take thou thy daily bread.’
Then I, awakening, saw
A splendor burning in the heart of things:
The flame of living love which lights the law
Of mystic death that works the mystic birth.
I knew the patient passion of the earth,
Maternal, everlasting, whence there springs
The Bread of Angels and the life of man.

Now in each blade
I, blind no longer, see
The glory of God’s growth: know it to be
An earnest of the Immemorial Plan.
Yea, I have understood
How all things are one great oblation made:
He on our altars, we on the world’s rood.
Even as this corn,
Earth-born,
We are snatched from the sod;
Reaped, ground to grist,
Crushed and tormented in the Mills of God,
And offered at Life’s hands, a living Eucharist.

I turn now to one my favorite characters in all of literature, who at one point does a riff on the parable of the loaves and the fishes that is so outrageous that her audience can only gawk in wonder. Some background us useful to put Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in perspective.

Alison is one of only two women of Chaucer’s 30 pilgrims, and making her position even more uncomfortable is the fact that she has had five husbands. She desperately wants to be taken seriously by her fellow pilgrims, however, and as a result goes on a long, rambling, and sometimes wild self-defense of herself. Since she sees those around her drawing lessons from the Bible—sometimes to condemn her for her sexual appetites—she tries to interpret the Bible so that it supports her.

Her reasoning is dubious but that’s almost beside the point because it’s so much fun. Meanwhile, her lust for life comes through—she’s a far more attractive character than some of those who condemn her, like the hypocritical pardoner and the lecherous friar—and the fact that she sees herself as a version of “the bread of life” makes her perfect for this talk.

As Alison sees it, Chris is white bread while she is “hoten barly breed.” And although she acknowledges that it would be nice to be the first, she says the world needs both—which means that she sees herself as a Christ figure doing her own kind of refreshing. Incidentally, calling Christ a virgin, while technically accurate true, is nuts, but it serves to draw a contrast with herself:

Christ was a virgin and shaped like a man,
And many a saint, since the world began;
Yet lived they ever in perfect chastity.
I will envy no virginity.
Let them be bread of pure wheat-seed,
And let us wives be called barley-bread;
And yet with barley-bread, Mark can tell it,
Our Lord Jesus refreshed many a man.

One sees, from such passages why Chaucer felt the need to issue a retraction and an apology towards the end of his life for Canterbury Tales. Alison, however, is more than a figure of fun for him but a vital life force. She is also a figure centuries ahead of her time: ultimately, she is asking no more than R-E-S-P-E-C-T from her fellow pilgrims.

Our next poem, Lynn Ungar’s “Blessing the Bread,” connects bread-making with the rhythms of life. In an intricate set of associations, she sees the lines of her hands etched into the bread she is molding. And while she says that she does “not believe in palmistry,” nevertheless she finds herself looking for “signs of life” in the imprint. Comparing kneading bread with massaging, she mentions that a kind of imprint also can be seen “on the bodies we have touched.”

Drawing on an image from palmistry, she sees a miraculous (eucharistic?) transformation arising from this tactile connection with the bread dough:

This is the lifeline —
the etched path from hand
to grain to earth, the transmutation
of the elements through touch…

However unwilling we may be to be believe in miracles (Ungar, a Unitarian Universalist minister, worries about superstition), something miraculous occurs in the transformation of earth to grain to hand to the bread that we bless and eat. God is present in that transformation and for that we offer up thanks:

Blessing the Bread
By Lynn Ungar

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam,
hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz.
[Praised be thou, eternal God,
who brings forth bread from the earth.

Surely the earth
is heavy with this rhythm,
the stretch and pull of bread,
the folding in and folding in
across the palms, as if
the lines of my hands could chart
a map across the dough,
mold flour and water into
the crosshatchings of my life.

I do not believe in palmistry,
but I study my hands for promises
when no one is around.
I do not believe in magic.
But I probe the dough
for signs of life, willing
it to rise, to take shape,
to feed me. I do not believe
in palmistry, in magic, but
something happens in kneading
dough or massaging flesh;
an imprint of the hand remains
on the bodies we have touched.

This is the lifeline —
the etched path from hand
to grain to earth, the transmutation
of the elements through touch
marking the miracles
on which we unwillingly depend.

Praised be thou, eternal God,
who brings forth bread from the earth.

Denise Levertov has a poem which, while not specifically about bread, concludes with a bread image that is so striking that I include it in this talk. Written in the 1960s when feminists were charting new paths (“stepping westward”), Levertov is trying to define herself as a woman—what it means when she is contradictory, what it means when she is steadfast.

The final image is one of her carrying bread—traditional woman’s work—but coming to see this nurturing role as a gift as well as a burden. While the weight may hurt the shoulders, it also means that she is “closed in fragrance.” That buoys her up, even though she doesn’t appear able to stop and fully enjoy it. As she puts it, “I can eat as I go.”

Stepping Westward
By Denise Levertov

What is green in me
darkens, muscadine.
If woman is inconstant, good,
I am faithful to
ebb and flow, I fall
in season and now
is a time of ripening.
If her part
is to be true,
a north star,
good, I hold steady
in the black sky
and vanish by day,
yet burn there
in blue or above
quilts of cloud.
There is no savor
more sweet, more salt
than to be glad to be
what, woman,
and who, myself,
I am, a shadow
that grows longer as the sun
moves, drawn out
on a thread of wonder.
If I bear burdens
they begin to be remembered
as gifts, goods, a basket
of bread that hurts
my shoulders but closes me
in fragrance. I can
eat as I go.

I conclude, as seems appropriate, with an excerpt from Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to Bread.” As is characteristic of the Chilean poet, it is both earthily sensual and socialist in spirit (bread should be shared with all).

Bread, as Neruda describes it, is like a mother’s rounded womb but also the product (when put in the oven) of a revolutionary fertility:

there’s the joining of seed
and fire,
and you’re growing, growing
all at once

In the end, bread represents

humankind’s energy,
a miracle often admired,
the will to live itself.

And because it is connected with the will to life, it must be shared:

Because we plant its seed
and grow it
not for one man
but for all,
there will be enough:
there will be bread
for all the peoples of the earth.

Nor does Neruda stop with bread. This staple of life becomes a symbol for all our foundational needs:

And we will also share with one another
whatever has
the shape and the flavor of bread:
the earth itself,
beauty
and love–
all
taste like bread
and have its shape,
the germination of wheat.

Here’s the excerpt:

From Ode to Bread
By Pablo Neruda

Bread,
you rise
from flour,
water
and fire.
Dense or light,
flattened or round,
you duplicate
the mother’s
rounded womb,
and earth’s
twice-yearly
swelling.
How simple
you are, bread,
and how profound!
You line up
on the baker’s
powdered trays
like silverware or plates
or pieces of paper
and suddenly
life washes
over you,
there’s the joining of seed
and fire,
and you’re growing, growing
all at once
like
hips, mouths, breasts,
mounds of earth,
or people’s lives.
The temperature rises, you’re overwhelmed
by fullness, the roar
of fertility,
and suddenly
your golden color is fixed.
And when your little wombs
were seeded,
a brown scar
laid its burn the length
of your two halves’
toasted
juncture.
Now,
whole,
you are
mankind’s energy,
a miracle often admired,
the will to live itself.

O bread familiar to every mouth,
we will not kneel before you:
men
do no
implore
unclear gods
or obscure angels:
we will make our own bread
out of sea and soil,
we will plant wheat
on our earth and the planets,
bread for every mouth,
for every person,
our daily bread.
Because we plant its seed
and grow it
not for one man
but for all,
there will be enough:
there will be bread
for all the peoples of the earth.
And we will also share with one another
whatever has
the shape and the flavor of bread:
the earth itself,
beauty
and love–
all
taste like bread
and have its shape,
the germination of wheat.
Everything
exists to be shared,
to be freely given,
to multiply….

Our church has a program for getting food to people in the surrounding community who need it, and we were all encouraged to bring in loaves of bread as donations. Neruda’s poem was very appropriate to that end.

But bread, as the poems note, is never just about bread but about so much more.  

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A McEwan Passage to Raise Your Spirits

By Robin Bates | Published: June 8, 2023
Ian McEwan

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Friday

I’m traveling at the moment and so will confine myself today to sharing an upbeat passage I liked from Ian McEwan’s novel Nutshell (2016). It’s a very strange work that tells a modern version of the Hamlet story from the point of view of a Hamlet who is still in utero. Part of the inspiration for the novel comes from Hamlet’s declaration, “Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.”

In a crazy personal account that reminds me of Tristram Shandy, we see a fetus that has consciousness, language, and adult knowledge while being alert to the sensory clues that come to him via his mother’s biology and through the walls of her womb. In the process, he picks up on Claude and Trudy’s plan to murder his father. If ever there was a novel that requires willing suspension of disbelief, this is it, but once you suspend, there’s fun to be had in identifying the Hamlet allusions and other Shakespeare passages.

I’m sharing a passage where fetus Hamlet protests a grim 20-minute lecture that his mother is listening to on the radio. After delivering a long list of things going wrong in the world, the expert concludes that (in Hamlet’s summation),

these disasters are the work of our twin natures. Clever and infantile. We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed. Twenty minutes. Click.

Hamlet, however, counterargues with a surprisingly optimistic view of things that I share to brighten your day. He starts with a takedown of pessimism:

Anxious, I finger my cord. It serves for worry beads. Wait, I thought. While it lies ahead of me, what’s wrong with infantile? I’ve heard enough of such talks to have learned to summon the counterarguments. Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies. And now in commentaries. 

Then he lists what’s right with the world:

Why trust this account when humanity has never been so rich, so healthy, so long-lived? When fewer die in wars and childbirth than ever before—and more knowledge, more truth by way of science, was never so available to us all? When tender sympathies—for children, animals, alien religions, unknown, distant foreigners—swell daily? When hundreds of millions have been raised from wretched subsistence?  When, in the West, even the middling poor recline in armchairs, charmed by music as they steer themselves down smooth highways at four times the speed of a galloping horse? When smallpox, polio, cholera, measles, high infant mortality, illiteracy, public executions and routine state torture have been banished from so many countries. Not so long ago, all these curses were everywhere. 

The list of modern blessings continues:

When solar panels and wind farms and nuclear energy and inventions not yet known will deliver us from the sewage of carbon dioxide, and GM crops will save us from the ravages of chemical farming and the poorest from starvation? When the worldwide migration to the cities will return vast tracts of land to wilderness, will lower birth rates, and rescue women from ignorant village patriarchs? What of the commonplace miracles that would make a manual laborer the envy of Caesar Augustus: pain-free dentistry, electric light, instant contact with people we love, with the best music the world has known, with the cuisine of a dozen cultures. We’re bloated with privileges and delights, as well as complaints, and the rest who are not will be soon.

The novel’s whipsaw shift from pessimism to optimism may be inspired by Hamlet’s own summary on the lows and highs of humankind:

I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? 

So take your choice: Quintessence of dust or paragon of animals. Pessimism or optimism?

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