On Being an Artist

My third poetry book, EMU BLIS, BUMS LIE, BLUE-ISM, is at the printer — arriving in February. In the meantime, I’m tying myself in useless knots thinking about where I go next. I have a couple projects in progress, which is nice. But without strict deadlines, it’s hard to find my daily focus.

I think, for may writers, these in-between times can be fraught with matters of doubt, anxiety, worth, and so on — until the next project takes hold and all is fine again. Reading a collection of essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, American Originality, I came upon her reflections on being an artist.

In “The Cult of Healing” essay, she writes:

“The artist’s experience of his own work alternates panic and gratitude. What is constant, what seems to me the source of resilience (or fortitude), is the capacity of intense, driven absorption. Such absorption makes a kind of intermission from the self; it derives, in the artist, from a deep belief in the importance of art (though not necessarily his own art, except in the presence of it being made). At intervals throughout his life, the artist is taken out of that life by concentration; he lives for a time in a suspension that is also a quest, a respite that is also acute tension.”

Gendered generalized artist aside, Glück basically nails it, I think.

Same As It Ever Was?


Although I’m partial to Richmond Lattimore’s 1951 translation of The Iliad (the version I read in college), I’m enjoying reading Emily Wilson’s new and highly accessible translation of The Iliad (2023). In her Translator’s Notes at the start of the book, Wilson makes the observation that one of our oldest recorded books still matters immensely today. She writes:

“For a twenty-first century reader, there is nothing unfamiliar about a partisan society riven by constant striving for celebrity, dominance, and attention, where rage and outrage are constantly whipped up by extreme rhetoric and the threat of humiliation, and where grief and loss constantly bleed into yet more rage and aggression.”

Of course, the world of today is vastly different from that of the 12th and 13th century BCE. But human nature still tends to get stuck in troubling ruts. A key difference today, however, is the motivation for destructive behavior. What was once a matter of honor, glory, and renown, Wilson points out, now seems to be more a matter of seeking status, fame, and celebrity.

Much of The Iliad is painful to read — especially the treatment of women. But as I work my way through this cautionary tall of hubris and violence, overlaid with the complex question of free will and fate, I can’t help but think about our times. Maybe the gods are still messing with us, but I’m rooting for peace, love, and understanding.

On Adrift-ness and Poetry

 

I was invited recently by The Poetry Society of New Hampshire to read poems from my new book, Adrift. To give the reading an anchor, I agreed to connect the book’s loose theme of adrift-ness to notion of people finding ways to reconnect post-pandemic through poetry.

I would have been fine just reading any of my poems and letting people think what they will, but in retrospect I’m glad we did this exercise. Thinking about the theme has helped me think a bit more about how the past few wearying years — along with the too-real prospects of greater human havoc to come — have impacted my writing, as well as my reading of other poets. And it has given me this opportunity to reflect on the link between poetry and the kind of spiritual and moral connection I think we need in order to fuel hope in a time when hope is in short supply. 

I was in Ireland recently — a trip, speaking of connecting, that included a visit to my grandfather’s childhood village — and on a sign in front of a shop in the western Ireland was this William Butler Yeats quote:

 “The world is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our senses to get sharper.”

I searched the internet and my collection of Yeats’ poems for the source of this quote, but with no luck. Perhaps it’s not a Yeats’ quote after all, but one of those things that gets spread around the internet anyway. (If you know the source, please let me know; in truth, I don’t think it sounds like the kind of thing Yeats would write, at least not in a poem.) Whether this quote is Yeats’ or not, I found myself responding with a nod of understanding. I think it’s fair to say that the isolation and loss we’ve experienced during the pandemic, followed by the shocking affront of would-be tyrants in the political sphere, and the increasingly clear, and further shocking, knowledge of the damage we have done and continue to do to the natural world, has forced on us — or most of us, anyway — a different view of the world along with the need to find new ways forward, individually and collectively. For me, at least, everything feels more fragile and confusing and challenging. Maybe life has always been like this and I’ve just haven’t been fully attuned. But of late I’ve experienced moments of real rage and frustration — and have also occasionally slipped into a kind of post-rage emptiness. Like the folks in the London Underground in Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” I’ve been “distracted from distraction by distraction.” And I’m trying to understand what this means for the days ahead.

And I know I’m not alone in feeling more adrift and uncertain about where we are going and what we are collectively doing. That look of adrift-ness is easy to spot in others.

I think some drifting in life is essential. It’s a kind of time out from all the striving. A chance to regroup. But it’s a dangers place to settle for long because it leads to a kind of resignation. Knowing this, I try to countering the adrift-ness as best I can by focusing on understand these feelings, on the one hand, and on letting the world reveal more of itself, on the other. I’ve been both exploring what it feels like to be adrift and thinking about how adrift-ness informs, or can inform, my understanding of the natural and human world — and of art. In this way, I find myself aiming for deeper attentiveness of late — trying  to sharpen my senses, as Yeats’ suggests. The underlying question for me is: How should one respond to to our fractured society and our world-damaging behavior?

Of course, implied here is the question of how, as a poet, I can and should respond? What is art’s role here?

Many of the poems in my book were written before the pandemic. But putting the manuscript together during the pandemic influenced its shape, and probably some of the editing to follow — including pulling out of some poems and inserting newer ones that felt more thematic.

For me, I’ve come to realize, this adrift feeling has been about various forms of separation — from nature, from family roots and loved ones, from my younger self/former life, and from a society that itself is seriously adrift. Perhaps most troubling has been separation from my younger self’s unshakable sense of hope for the world — and from what I once thought of as my worldview.

This is big stuff piled on big stuff and can easily knock one off kilter. The voice in my head tries to right the ship by saying, Don’t be a hopeless idiot, dummy. But it takes a while to come around. My more useful response has been to push for greater awareness — to pay deeper attention to the natural world and to what I think truly matters in this complex thing we call human society. The adrift-ness, in other words, has encouraged what Carolyn Forché calls “the poetry of witness.”

When one travels to Ireland, one quickly becomes aware that it’s an such an inviting place to be. Yet one is also aware that Ireland is a nation with a complex and shocking history. The signs are everywhere; and as I traveled throughout both Dublin and County Kerry, I found myself thinking about just how cornered and desperate the Irish were under 300 years of English suppression. At the same time, I couldn’t really imagine how it felt to be living in such squalor and then, while already hanging onto the last threads of the proverbial rope, to enter a famine of shocking proportions that roiled on for a number years without relief. In the mid-19th century, the average Irish person traveled only within short distances of their home. But the Great Famine, if it didn’t kill them outright, suddenly forced so many Irish out into the world with a small bag of possessions and the wish to survive. So many of those who didn’t flee, died. So many who fled also died of disease on diseased-riddled ships. But many, including my grandparents, also made it to a new country and new opportunity. I imagine they experienced adrift-ness is a big way — literally and figuratively. Separated from all they knew and loved, they had to build new lives in new communities that didn’t want them and that treated them with disdain. They had to do all this while speaking the language of their centuries-long oppressors. Of course, this story has been matched in so many other nations over the years and continues to play itself out today — especially as the effects of global warming start to kick into gear.

Given my Irish roots, I also thought a lot about contemporary Ireland and its continuing efforts to fight its way to independence and then to find its identity as a young nation in a quickly globalizing society. Fintan O’Toole’s excellent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves, explores the question of modern Irish identity. For the Irish, there’s so much to collectively wrestle with these days, with the essential question being: How does a country that initially prided itself on being rural, Catholic, and independent — only to learn that these three elements would not, could not, lead to a flourishing nation — find its way forward?

It occurred to me that the question of “finding one’s way” is the question we’re all facing as individuals and citizens of every nation now. For all of us, of course, there are other forces beyond the personal that are driving feelings of adrift-ness. My list includes the obvious issues: global warming and our tepid response to date; political unrest and divide led by a plethora of politicians backed by people with enormous wealth who seem determined to erode our democracy (or maybe squash the whole concept of democracy) for personal power; the rise of AI and the growing sense that, increasingly, we are serving our machines; population growth and the pressures on resources; and the ongoing, dispiriting loss of biodiversity. But it also includes more generally that sense of the loss of what writer and activist bell hooks calls “the beloved community.”

In a recent interview for the American Academy of Poets,” Carolyn Forché said about poets working today that “…what we share in common is a sense of urgency regarding all that is at stake and under threat: the survival of our democracy, our humanity, our living Earth.”

 I know this fight isn’t the sole focus of poets — or that poets are the only ones who take these challenges seriously. I also know that this is not the only preoccupation of poets. But most of the poets I know do feel a sense of urgency about the role of poetry in addressing or highlighting or exploring the dimensions of these essential life matters. As for me, I’m trying to understand our collect human problems as best I can so that I can help contribute to a more humane response. As a poet, I want to spotlight what I think of as deeper truths —ones that I feel I’m seeing, or sensing, or approaching through greater attentiveness to the natural world, to the best of our literature past and present, to the revelations of the environmental science community, to the philosophers and theologists who have examined human nature from every angle to understand our drive and motivation, our gifts and shortcomings, our love and our hatred, etc. What can I create in response? How do I further the artistic conversations that date back to Homer and are threaded through Danté and Shakespeare and continue to blossom in the beautiful, varied, modern world of poetry?

Writing aside, I also find myself simply longing to learn more about the magic of the world — for the joy it brings, for the wonder it inspires, for the spiritual infusion it offers. I love discovering, for instance, that the largest living organism on earth is a fungi network in Oregon that weighs hundreds of tons and covers ten square kilometers and is between two and eight thousand years old. Or learning that dogs actually do see in color (but not the colors we see). Or that there are more bacteria in your gut than stars in the galaxy. Or that low-frequency whales songs can be heard across oceans. Or that spiders can tune their webs to various frequencies to attract specific insects. You know… the magical stuff. As I write in one of my poems, this sort of knowledge “starts some kind of solifluction of the soul.”

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel says, “Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be experienced.”

I do wish for humanity to buck up and behave better — and I have to believe we can — but I’m also onboard with this notion of just letting the non-human world in more, for the magic it offers and for the humility it inspires.

Jay Parini, in his book Why Poetry Matters, says that poetry is about seeking out patterns, scouring the dark, in order to discover the chinks in time that reveal the light. He also writes, “The poet is always a guest a great feast.”

In addition to attentiveness to the world is the matter of attentiveness to poetry and poetic forms — to the craft. As the late Mary Oliver says, “A poem that is composed without the sweet and correct formalities of language, which are what sets it apart from the dailiness of ordinary language, is doomed. It will not fly.”

We really really really need our poems to fly today. I guess that’s essentially what I’m thinking. In some cases, this means following in the fat footsteps of Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot. In other cases, it means finding that joyful, engaging structure of a Billy Collins or Wisława Szymborska poem. In some case, it means taking up Carolyn Forché’s call for poetry of witness. We filter all this art and craft and experience and insight as we aim to build our own structures, our own poetic purpose.

I want to add one more observation from my recent visit to Ireland. With all the collective suffering over three hundred years or more, there has also been some amazing art — including astounding poetry and music — in response. This is what artists and writers do. We bear witness to the world as it is. We don’t (can’t, really) offer solutions. We don’t tell people how to think or live. But we do hope that our art will help lead to a heightened sense of life, a better understanding of the world, a more humane humanity — and, if we’re lucky, to a more just, peaceful, and verdant world.

Irish writer Oscar Wilde says, “Poets are always ahead of science. All of the great discoveries have been stated before in poems.” This is a bit hyperbolic, but it’s true that poets and artists can and do help lead the way, can and do drive change.  

Wilde also says, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist. That is all.”

I write because I’d like to see more of us join that rare group of people aiming to truly live. We acknowledge the suffering — ours and others — but we find a way through to spotlight core matters of importance, including the beauty and magic.

Danté, at the end of The Divine Comedy, puts it this way:

The will roll’d onward, like a wheel

in even motion, by the love impell’d

that moves the sun in Heav’n and all the stars.

 

 

.

 

The Supreme Court, Race, and College Admissions

Like many of you, I’ve been digging into the details of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College — and reading articles, commentary, and other public responses to it. I also went back and re-read a piece I wrote for Teaching While White at the start of this lawsuit in support of Harvard’s admissions practices aimed at racial diversity.

If given the opportunity I might rephrase a few of my comments in that earlier piece. But it essentially sums up how I feel on this matter. All things considered, the U.S. Supreme Court decision rejecting affirmative action based on race boils down to a victory for privilege and power and represents another blow to democratic principles and justice.

At the start of the lawsuit, Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, told the New York Times that the use of race as a contributing factor in college admissions “falls afoul of our most basic civil rights principles, and those principles are that your race and your ethnicity should not be something to be used to harm you in life nor help you in life.”

This was essentially the view the majority of the Supreme Court justices would come to embrace as well.

While in the theoretical realm I imagine most of us would agree with the notion that one’s race or ethnicity should never be used for harm or gain, Blum’s overall position is such a disingenuous one to take when it comes to real-world college admissions. It has been clear for decades now that to be white is to have a leg up in various avenues in life, especially in college admissions. The whole point of affirmative action has been to make college access fair and just — and the statistics make it clear that these efforts have been paying off, even as racial injustice persists more broadly in our society. College admissions, in other words, has been a positive example of what a conscious commitment to racial justice can do in an otherwise stubbornly racist nation. And I think efforts on this front have encouraged colleges and universities to further refine their admissions policies for greater equity and justice all around. There is still plenty of room for improvement, of course, but the pathway is clear.

If Blum truly cared about justice, as his statement implies, he would not have attacked the one system that is working well and causing no harm. Rather, he would turn his attention to fighting the serious forms of racial discrimination that persist in housing, jobs, precollegiate education, the criminal justice system, health care, banking, and elsewhere. There’s plenty of evidence that racial bias in favor of whites in such systems actually do cause lifelong harm to others.

The goal of this lawsuit, it strikes me, was never about racial justice or civil rights, but about restoring a form of injustice that serves to preserve the inequitable status quo. I know that Blum has denied that this has been his goal. But it’s hard to see how attacking an admissions system that creates fair access and a racially diverse student body among a pool of fully qualified candidates can be viewed as a moral good.

A key argument in favor of dismantling affirmative actions is that we’ve come a long way as a nation and that the consideration of one’s race should no long apply. T’would be nice if this were true. But racial injustice and imbalance still tilt the scales toward white Americans. A key statistic is that of family net worth. At the start of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, the net worth of white families was ten times that of Black families. Today? The net worth of white families remains ten times that of Black families. When it comes to college admissions, I read recently that middle-class Black students are far more likely today to attend schools with fewer resources than their middle-class white peers. As a new study, highlighted in the New York Times, notes, even as top colleges and universities aim for greater diversity, they still favor the wealthy by a significant margin. In the years covered in the study, the wealthy were admitted to Ivy League schools at a more than twice the rate of the average applicant. So even when it comes to college experience, even in an era of affirmative action, Black students remain at a disadvantage.

There are plenty more statistics one could point to that demonstrate racial inequities in American life. If you are looking for a good source of information on race and economic justice, a great place to start is with Matthew Desmond’s recent book, Poverty By America.

As for Asian Americans, a majority disapprove of the Supreme Court decision and resent feeling as if they are being used as a wedge, in effect, to dismantle civil rights. Many leaders of the Asian-American community have also spoke out about the harm this decision will do to their communities. As Aarti Kohli, executive director of Advancing Justice’s Asian Law Caucus, noted, “This ruling will particularly harm Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian and Southeast Asian communities who continue to face significant barriers to higher education.”

I don’t want to go on here about what I see as the faulty and reductive logic in the court’s decision and in Justice Roberts’ argument. I imagine you have read plenty on the subject and have a clear opinion. I mostly wanted to go on record again in favor of admissions practices that aim to improve the make-up of the student bodies at top colleges and universities so they more closely represent the nation’s citizenship regarding race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomics, and more. I also want to go on record in support of colleges and universities in their efforts to create a broadly diverse student body — including matters of nationality, background, interests, talents, and experience — in order to offer a dynamic learning community. The research is clear on both fronts: creating diverse student bodies is both a just practice and smart educational policy.

As Harvard said in response to the decision, the university remains committed to “the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.”

We’ve come too far in our collective efforts to improve access to higher education to let this decision stop us in our tracks. We know that the results of such efforts have been positive and beneficial to the society as a whole. In fact, one recent pole notes that 63 percent of Americans support affirmative action in college admissions. The Supreme Court decision has created another hurdle to this work, but I know there are plenty of smart, caring folks who are working hard at the moment to develop new admission systems to achieve the desired outcomes.

I hope the rest of us will support them in finding this path forward. And I hope that all of us will do what we can in our lives to embrace and support antiracism broadly. Racism has been a central disease in our nation since its founding. It continues to thrive when we make no effort to counter it.

Toast to Toast

Diarmuid and Gráinne

I bought a nice loaf of GF cinnamon-raisin bread. These were the first two pieces out of the package. I know they are trying to tell me something about life — the tension of comedy and tragedy, the yin and yang of daily living. Or maybe it’s a short chapter in the saga of loneliness in which our protagonist is warned about the dangers of personifying slices of breakfast toast.

There’s a certain Muppet quality to these two. Since I was recently in Ireland, I’ve named them Diarmuid and Gráinne.

Sadly, they are gone now.

The Transformational Life: A Reflection on The Real World of College, by Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner  

 

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” — Dorothy Day

  

On a recent Wednesday, I ventured down to Cambridge. Massachusetts, to sit in on a public conversation with Howard Gardner and Wendy Fischman — regarding the findings in their new book, The Real World of College: What College Is and What College Can Be. As one who has engaged in the conversation on the central societal role of formal education for decades now, I was curious to see what these two Harvard researchers had to say about the state of college learning today — and, by extension, the role of our K-12 systems in preparing children for college life.

Gardner, of course, is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, developed in the 1980s and expanded and modified over the years since. But he has conducted plenty of other works as a member of the Harvard faculty in the Graduate School of Education. Gardner is the author of thirty books, in fact, and the senior director and principle investigator at Project Zero, an ongoing research center housed at Harvard whose mission is “to understand and nurture human potentials — such as learning, thinking, ethics, intelligence, and creativity.”

Wendy Fischman is a long-time project director at Project Zero. She has written numerous scholarly and popular articles on education and is the lead author of Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work (Harvard University Press, 2004). Since 1996, among other things, she has managed various aspects of the GoodWork® Project, specifically focused on the meaning of work in the lives of young children, adolescents, and novice professionals.

Fischman and Gardner’s latest project, resulting in their new book, has been to understand how various constituents view the college experience — especially addressing the question of why attend at all. What do students hope to learn? What did they learn? And, most important, what do they value in their college education? At ten colleges and universities — ranging from private institutions such as Duke University and Kenyon College to public universities such as Ohio State and the Bureau of Manhattan Community College, the research team interviewed 2,000 students and other constituents — including faculty, administrators, parents, and alumni — to get a 360-degree portrait of the values people see in attending college today.

My goal here is not to offer review of the book itself — though I will say that a number of reviews I read found it both insightful and provocative and, thus, worthy of wide attention. What matters most to me is that these kinds of conversations on education get more attention. Simply put, they are essential to the future of our democratic society. 

What caught my eye in particular — and what has felt like a steady problem in higher education for all of this century to date — are two key points. First, that the mental health of college students is at an all-time low. Too many students report feeling alienated and anxious. Caught in the grinding logic of the nation’s economic machinery, they see college primarily as a transactional endeavor designed to get them to the imagined promise land of financial security. As a result, the majority tend to focus myopically on grades and résumés. They believe they are in some kind of zero-sum competition with classmates — and wake each day worried about their futures.  

Meantime, the majority of college and university faculty members — and the leadership of these institutions — primarily believe that college should be about much larger and more fulfilling human transformation. In short, they see their profession to be about developing each student’s intellectual and social-emotional skills — higher educational capital (HEDCAP), as the Fischman and Gardner put it — to individually thrive and collectively deal with the complexity of human society in all its forms. This intellectual capital includes knowing how to succeed in the workplace, of course, but it runs far deeper to encompass the full-spectrum intellectual engagement — including inquiry, reflection, analysis, problem-solving, collaboration, moral attentiveness, and communication.

At the event, Fischman and Gardner made it clear that they want the leadership of all colleges and universities to take note of the gap between how the majority of students (and many parents) see the point of a college education and what the schools themselves believe is their raison d’être. Closing this gap is complicated business, of course. There is no precise formula. But we can certainly start by both acknowledging the gap and our culpability in creating it — and then use institutional resources to realign programs and missions so they focus on what school leaders say matters most.

These days, vociferous critics bark at colleges and universities from all directions. I don’t want to jump on any such bandwagon here. Educational institutions of every kind function within the larger society, and it’s very difficult to shake off all the pressures that come to bear on institutional decision-making. Much of the criticism about colleges and universities today — at least what I read in the press — strikes me as hyperbolic political posturing with little connection to institutional truth. But as Fischman and Gardner make clear, there are core issues that should be, and can be, addressed.

One central problem in higher education has been the kind of mission creep that, for many colleges and universities, has risen out of the need or desire to attract more students — sometimes simply to stay afloat and sometimes to raise a school’s profile as a highly selective institution. As a result, there has been a steady shift from a focus on college as an experience in human transformation toward college as professional training grounds — the transactional stuff. Essayist and cultural critic William Deresiewicz has written and spoken extensively on this topic, excoriating top colleges and universities for graduating what he describes in one book as “excellent sheep.” These are adults who can succeed at doing what they are told, but struggle immensely to think as individuals or to function collectively for the greater good of society. Too many colleges and universities, he says, inculcate students with a singular ideology rather than focus on developing individual thinkers. I don’t fully agree — I know plenty of free-thinking young college graduates — but there’s an element of truth here that rises from the shift toward high-end job prep and away from engagement with the humanities.

Like Deresiewicz, Fischman and Gardner generally describe the goal of college as place to develop knowledgeable, thoughtful, caring individuals. I’ve heard others describe college as place for the engagement with ideas. These views make sense to me. They outline the kind of college experience we want for own children, no doubt — and we know deep down this is the best pathway to personal and professional happiness and citizenship. But the short-term concern for financial security — fueled by an increasing wealth divide between the haves and have-nots in the nation (see Matthew Desmond’s excellent book, Poverty by America)  — has caused high anxiety about basic survival. The statistical reality is that a college degree in the humanities does prepare one well for the workplace as well as life. One’s earnings over a lifetime are as high or higher than those with professional degrees. But worry has a way of overriding such truth — as if students feel they can’t take any chances, especially given the high cost of a college education and the prospect of repaying loans. In short, students are scared about their futures.

The societal problems at play here run deep, of course. The whole overwhelming impact of social media has been an invisible tsunami swamping our collective boats in ways none us could have predicted at the start of the century. And the rise of AI will complicate matters — indeed, already is complicating matters — further. There’s also the problem of ongoing social injustices — primarily racial and economic injustices — that come to bear on life inside every college and university campus. And given our current political landscape (and the maddening soapbox of social media), the related conversations — and institutional decision-making — have gotten increasingly complex and fraught. I would also add that America, as I hint at earlier, increasingly sees itself not as a democracy but as a free-market economy. There’s a big difference. The latter should be answerable to the former, but we seem to be doing just the opposite. The more we see our lives in pure economic terms, the less we see each other as neighbors and citizens — as human beings. Our lives, in other words, keep slipping deeper into the capitalist maw, as if we gave the leadership of our nation over to a bunch of Wall Street chatbots.

Colleges and universities have an important role to play in response to all these matters — and, indeed, must respond, if they see themselves as moral institutions. In the academic arena, if colleges are places for the engaging in ideas, it’s also impossible not to engage with events in the world around them.

Clearly, I don’t mean that they should tell students what and how to think. I’m saying that a key way to address such matters — as Fischman and Gardner argue — is for a tighter focus on the core mission of helping students develop intellectual and social capital. For colleges and universities, this means taking a closer look at what they say they are doing — what they write and publish in their mission statements — ensuring that these words actually represent what they believe matters and, then examining how well their programs adhere to these words. After this, it’s a process of engaging in the realignment of the program. The schools need to ensure that they are sending out the right message to prospective students about what to expect from life in college, recruit based on that message, and then be clear to all students (in as many ways as possible, at every turn possible) about what the institution sees as the goal of learning. In short, if the goal is to be transformational, be transformational.

I realize that my description here is oversimplified. And I know that many critics will point to certain kinds of mission statements as a core problem, especially when they espouse a set of values that others see as political posturing or that hint at a single ideology. In this regard, I know the conversations are difficult. But I think it’s quite possible at the vast majority of colleges and universities to both clarify and strengthen the essential transformational mission. In particular, I’d like to see all colleges and universities to be crystal clear about one essential characteristic that is widely valued — and that is that all colleges and universities are learning communities. In such communities, the focus will be on connecting and supporting students as individuals who are in the process of developing their essential skills for life a democratic society.

Like others, I would argue that the best way to do so is through a strong core humanities and arts programs. But I’m fine with the idea of ensuring that the teaching of such skills are infused into all academic areas — so that students are truly developing and strengthening their humanistic skills along with their intellectual and discipline-specific skills. The goal should simply be that learning takes place within a community. 

The quote above from Dorothy Day seems apt for our rather splintered society today. We do live in an increasing transactional world. So it’s not hard to understand why college students would see college as another transactional engagement. But given what we know about the stress and depression and anxiety and loneliness that so many college students experience, the main steps school leadership can take is to counter the troubling patterns by building community, help students understand what you mean by a transformational learning experience — indeed, keep it front and center as a kind of institutional mantra — then work to ensure that your program is tightly focused on such learning.  

When I look back on my own college experience, I do recall moments of deep anxiety and uncertainty — and this in a time without social media. At one  point in my sophomore year, struggling for good grades in courses that meant little to me, I couldn’t figure out why I was in college at all. I seriously thought about walking away. What saved me was community. I developed a range of great friendships among students, of course. But I also connected with a number of faculty members — adults who saw me, challenged me, and seemed to appreciate my presence. That was enough. In my senior year, by chance, I ended up living in a house with two history professors. We went our own ways during the day, but for three nights a week, we each cooked a meal for the others and sat around the table together talking about life and learning. I was 20 and knew I had plenty to learn (including how to cook). But through these simple meals and conversation with two smart, caring men, I could start to see a path forward. I was happy, content, engaged, alive. I took my classes seriously, but without anxiety. I simply wanted to be there, to learn, to listen, to think. In all,  it was a thrilling year.

I don’t know how much intellectual capital I actually developed. But I came to understand that I was, for a time at least, a part of a caring community of learners, and that I was learning for something far more important than grades or jobs. Without knowing the term, I was suddenly in search of transformation from being a child to being an adult — and that I was done forever with the idea that school was transactional.

But I’m going on too much about myself….

Here’s what I want to say. I’m thankful for the research undertaken at Project Zero and Fischman and Gardner’s book, The Real World of College. I hope the book helps push the conversation at the collegiate level about aligning mission and practice so that more students — indeed, the majority — will, when asked, speak about the transformational nature of their learning experiences.

I also hope that these institutions will think more deeply about refocusing on their core missions and the process of recruiting and supporting students. In the event at Harvard, Wendy Fischman bemoaned the shortcomings in the precollegiate world that fails to prepare students to see learning as transformational. But much of the problem lies with college admissions process. The sooner high schools can step out of the college-admissions mindset and into the college-prep mindset, of course, the better. But it makes sense that student and parental anxiety about college admissions would push students to focus myopically on GPA’s, admissions testing, and résumé building — and that, as result, such efforts would exclude the kind of learning that might feel deeply meaningful. 

I’m not sure how we change the current system in which high school students must prostrate themselves in hopes of being invited for continued learning at the college level. But I know the high schools are far too caught in the grip of the university — and that the university needs to loosen that grip. The sooner we figure out what I can only describe as more fluid K-16 system, the sooner we’ll be able to focus in on the kind of transformational learning we all know matters most.

 I know there are efforts being made on all these fronts. But it seems clear there is plenty more to be done. The sooner we center these conversations, the sooner we can realign our actual programs with our missions of human transformation — which, for me at any rate, lies at the heart of what we call education.

 

 

Spring Poetry Update

Meant to write this earlier…

My second poetry book, Adrift (Grayson Books, 2023) has been released. Due to a weird ISBN issue, it’s available in paperback and hardcover through Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and your local independent bookstore.

I’m thrilled to announce that a third poetry book is due out in early 2024. And it looks like a chapbook will come out later this year, too. A busy poetry year!

I thought I’d share here some poems that have been published in various online journals recently:

Bending Spoons — Concision Poetry

The Blur — Open: Journal of Arts & Letters

Sixth Floor, Alley Window — Open: Journal of Arts & Letters

Identity Theft — Bowery Gothic

Night Elegy — Wild Roof Journal

“In the Meanwhile”— Posit

Unsettling the New Year

 

In his remarkable 1970 book, The Hidden Wound — an in-depth examination of the wound of racism on all of us — essayist, novelist, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry offered a nodded to the youthful rebellion of the day that was arguing vociferously for racial and environmental justice, and for the end to war. Critical of adult political and cultural leadership at the time, Berry writes, “The great moral tasks of honesty and peace and neighborliness and brotherhood and the care of the earth have been left to be taken up on the streets by the ‘alienated’ youth of the 1960s and 1970s.”

Reading The Hidden Wound recently, this passage caught my attention because I was one of those young people back then. I didn’t think of myself as alienated, just pissed off at the state of American politics, and yet full of hope for true and lasting change. In fact, at the time, I was sure that change was coming, and coming swiftly. I just knew it.

So I can’t help but wonder now why and how my generation’s passionate interest in racial and environmental justice, and in the common-sense question of peace and neighborliness, would slowly shift away from those beliefs over the coming years and more or less fall in line with the myopic focus on the primacy of individual economic gain and, for the religious type, obsession with personal salvation in the great beyond. The youth of the 1960s and ’70s may have been full of high moral idealism, but in time we didn’t get much of any of it right. In many ways, my generation not only succumbed to what writer bell hooks calls “the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” we happily took the reins of this cultural beast — and we’ve been driving it ever since, aiming for the foothills of Mount Doom.

If The Hidden Wound is of value today, I think it lies in this question of what derails us in our collective moral pursuits. I know it’s a bit foolish to talk about a generational “we” — as if all members of each generation see eye to eye on core moral matters. But I wonder why there wasn’t — and isn’t today — a collective majority voice that insists on these matters being the central issues of our time. There’s no question, except in the minds of those who profit from questioning it (and then, I believe, it’s mostly a matter of willful self-delusion), that attention to matters of peace, love, and harmony (Jesus’s thematic trinity) would make life better all around. Less war, less poverty, less racial division, less environmental destruction, and more focus on community and mutuality and reciprocity, are clear cultural goods, are they not? So why didn’t we succeed in the 1960s and 1970s — and why haven’t we made progress since? Efforts today for environmental and racial justice feel more focused today than in recent decades, but then so does the backlash working overtime to neutralize such efforts. And the backlash seems to be winning, again.

As Berry also says, it’s tough to write objectively from within a diseased culture. So it’s hard to know how deeply the disease is working within oneself. While from a fifty-year perspective, I can see some of the shortcomings and biases in Berry’s views (i.e., his literary references that only refer to white, male writers), and I worry about the shortcomings and biases in my own writing, I encourage the reading of The Hidden Wound today. I think the book can help in our efforts to establish a cultural blueprint for evolution toward a truly just society, assuming that this is still a key goal for American society. You know, the elements that can lead us toward “a more perfect union.” “Once you begin to awaken to the realities of what you know,” Berry writes, “you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and in the events of your own life.”

I also encourage the reading of Berry’s other seminal book of the 1970s, The Unsettling of America. It’s easy to overlook this book, thinking it’s meant for the nation’s farmers and agricultural specialists. But it’s primarily an extension of the argument Berry makes in The Hidden Wound, which is to say a thoughtful discourse designed to help us to understand what better living actually looks like. It’s asking us to shake off the mindset of the imperialists who unsettled the long-running cultural systems of North America and resettled them in their exploitative image. The result has been our ongoing history of exploitation in the name of freedom, but really in service to the exploiters’ personal wishes. The result is… well, you know: America in the 2020s, tied in knots by too much greed and fear. At the heart of this book are a few key points. One, that we really do depend upon the land, and that using it up recklessly, as we are doing, for short-term corporate profits and the convenience of those of us caught in a system, can only lead us toward ruin. Two, that the antidote to our exploiter/exploited binary is to focus on how true communities of care, kindness, and reciprocity function — then build them, nurture them, cherish them.

Berry argues that a central problem for us is that we are essentially a nation of specialists. The fact that we engage daily in the specialist work we were each trained to do in order to stay housed by and fed by (and indebted to) the corporate powers, while buying a little time of our own recreation and amusement, is a main reason why we can both see the trouble we’ve created and yet do little to address it.

The book does address agriculture, of course, as a reminder that the push for abundance of food, combined with the concept of efficiency and the economy of scale, is leading us — can only lead us — to the destruction of land and the end of abundance. Here, once again, the focus should be on supporting local communities (especially local, small farms that understand the need to protect and nurture the land). In fact, this should be a key focus on state and national government. The bottom line for Berry is that “a culture cannot survive long at the expense of its agriculture or of its natural resources.”

Ditto for the people.

The Unsettling of America predicted our current predicaments with shocking accuracy. And there have been many writers and thinkers since who have furthered this argument in various and important ways. As we enter a new year, injected with the hope that fuels so much human adventure, it would be good for us to reflect more deeply on where we have been and where we want go — and what we need to change to get there.

While it may be hubris to think my generation was going to change the world for the better in a single decade or two, it’s depressing now to realize that we’ve basically ended up driving the exploitive bus with great alacrity all these years. It pains me that my generation has collectively botched things up in the hollow name of short-term economic gain, fueled by an obsession with competition and individualism. It also pains me that, collectively, we’ve willingly given so much power to corporations, a move that makes it seem as if that only variable that matters in life is corporate profit — and that top-down economics is the way to run a democracy well. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how wrongheaded this has been.

Happiness, Berry argues, comes to us through connection, not competition. Culture is a matter of  “passion for excellence and order handed down to young people from older people whom they love and respect,” Berry writes. “The definitive relationships in the universe are thus not competitive but interdependent.”

What I hope will help younger generations drive the shift toward a better version of democratic living are the many writers and thinkers among us who have stayed committed to the essential morality of cooperation, reciprocity, and community — especially those who, like Berry, have reminded us over and over that there’s no us without a healthy natural world.

 

 

Toward an Ethic of Mutuality: The Work of bell hooks

In working on an essay recently about Wendell Berry and his book-length exploration of American racism, The Hidden Wound, I came upon a related collection of essays by bell hooks, belonging: a culture of place. In her book, hooks references Berry often and with deep respect. Turns out — though Berry is a white man and hooks a Black woman — they are both writers who share a number of core views that rise out of their childhoods in Kentucky, as well as their decisions as adults to return to live in the state. Their paths in academia, as students and professors, took them both to California, New York, and elsewhere. But in time, they felt the need to settle in Kentucky in order to reestablish a close connection to the land and to that all-important sense of community. This move also drove them both to write often about the link between environmental justice and racial justice.

Hooks’ essays in belonging: a culture of place were published in book form in 2009, though they were originally published at various points over the previous decade. In all, they are compelling, essential works for their insights into what it takes to build a racially just American society, as well as for their observations about the troubling impact of capitalism on our views of and connection to nature. As I read, I found myself jotting down numerous quotes and passages. One stood out for its direct link the work I do related to education — and that I know is in the hearts of all educators who are working for change in schools that will lead to more caring and engaged students and healthier communities.

In “Again — Segregation Must End,” hooks, who died in December 2021 at age 69, explains her return to Kentucky, particularly to the town of Berea, where she would eventually become a fixture in the community and serve on the faculty at Berea College. She admits she knew very little about Berea before her visit as a guest lecture years earlier. But she quickly embraced the town and university — which was founded in 1855 by John Fee, a white male abolitionist, and dedicated to the principles of antiracism. The work of antiracism is challenging everywhere in the nation today, of course, but the efforts being in made in Berea, and elsewhere, gave hooks the hope and energy that enabled her to dedicate her impressive life to this work.

In the end of the essay, hooks writes:

“Those of us who truly believe racism can end, that white supremist thought and action can be challenged and changed, understand that there is an element of risk as we work to build community across difference. The effort to build community in a social context of racial inequality (much of which is class-based) requires an ethic of relational reciprocity, one that is anti-domination. With reciprocity all things do not need to be equal in order for acceptance and mutuality to thrive. If equality is evoked as the only standard by which it is deemed acceptable for people to meet across boundaries and create community, then there is little hope. Fortunately, mutuality is a more constructive and positive foundation for the building of ties that allow for differences in status, position, power, and privilege whether determined by race, class, sexuality, religion, or nationality.”

My takeaway: When mutuality thrives, we thrive.

New Poems

My second poetry book, ADRIFT, is due out later this year or early 2023. In the meantime, I thought I’d share some poems that have been published in various online journals this year. Only two of these poems will be in the new book.

“By the Ferry Landing” and “Ice to Ice”— Narrative Northeast

“The Way She Goes” — Grand Little Things

“The Climbing” — Permafrost Magazine

“Before You (By Which I Mostly Mean I) Die” — The Decadent Review

“Feral Pigs” — Lit. 202: A Literary Journal

“Swimming” and “From Stockbridge to Lee” — The Broadkill Review

“December” and “Unstill Life with Hospital Cup” — The Pine Cone Review

“Identity Theft” — Bowery Gothic

Is Writing Dreary?

Colm Tóibín most recent novel, The Magician, is about the German writer Thomas Mann — or as the book’s jacket puts it, “[I]n a stunning marriage of research and imagination, Tóibín explores the heart and mind of a writer whose gift is unparalleled and whose life is riven by a need to belong and the anguish of desire.”

More on the book itself in a moment. What caught my attention this morning, what made me pause in my reading and stare off at the trees where late-August cicadas are singing themselves to death while the apples slowly find their autumnal sweetness, was one of Mann’s observations in the novel (as imagined by Tóibín). At this point in the story, between the first and second world war, Mann’s young adult children, Klaus and Erika, seem to be thriving on disintegration of German society. Or at least they are enjoying the shifting norms that allow them to be whomever they imagine. Klaus and Erika, as you may know, would go on to become writers of note on their terms. At this point, Klaus has written a play that focuses on two young men and two young women whose sexuality is clearly fluid.

More on this, too, in a moment. In the novel’s scene, Thomas Mann’s observation is just one of those passing thoughts. But, of course, it runs deep. Listening to Klaus talk so animatedly about his life in the city, his father comes to the realization “that writing, for Klaus, was a dreary process compared to the excitement of doing other things.” An interesting insight into a man who would go on to writer seventeen books, including Mephisto (1936), before dying in Cannes in 1949 of an overdose of sleeping pills — probably suicide, says Wikipedia, “because of financial problems and social isolation.”

I don’t know much about Klaus Mann. From what I’ve read in The Magician, his being gay clearly made him a target in Germany (and later in America, where he would become a citizen and serve in World War II). But Tóibín suggests that Klaus had his moments of joy, especially his close and meaningful relationship with his sister, Erika — who in time moved to Switzerland, met and married the poet W.H. Auden in a marriage of convenience that enabled Erika to become a British citizen, and then worked as a BBC war correspondent.

The whole Mann family saga is fascinating — thus Tóibín’s novel —but this question of whether or not writing is a dreary stopped me in my tracks.

It made me wonder: Do I think of writing as a dreary activity? Maybe, sometimes — especially when comparing it to, say, nights on the town with friends or a summer-afternoon bike ride along the Atlantic coast. But I don’t think “dreary” is the right word for what I feel most of the time. It’s more like a struggle, a difficult task, a confusing process — one that often leaves me exhausted, frustrated, and maybe a bit depressed, but that also can lead through the forest of tangled thoughts and emotions to something that feels close to clarity (with nonfiction) and art (with poetry and fiction).

I know the internet is abound with commentary on writing. Some of it is how-to stuff. Some of it is inspirational. Some of it focuses on craft. Some of it focuses on practices that keep us in our seat — the bird-by-bird metaphor, and so on. I know the world doesn’t really need my opinion on the writing life. But this question got me thinking, not just about writing, but also about how so many people are constantly looking for insights into writing — writing better, writing without worry, writing more consistently, writing successfully, writing for money. Personally, I try to keep it simple. My mantra is contained on a small note by my desk given to me by my daughter: “Talk less. Write more.”

But on occasion, I, too, find myself paying particular attention to what other writers say about the process of writing. I don’t know if any of it is helpful. I’m mostly looking for a sense community in the struggle, a sense that — at all these writing stations around the world at this exact moment — those of us who are engaged in this process of shaping words into sentences with some intent are not alone.

Maybe what I’m thinking, maybe the cicada-like buzz in my head, is that writing does feel dreary some days. Some days, I’d give anything to just be with friends and family and not worry about how I need to crowd the empty page with tiny symbols. Somedays, I find myself longing for a job that allows me to be attentive to the world around me in the moment — or just some professional activity that comes more naturally to me. I think it’s the daily need to close ranks around my thoughts in order to write that feels too heavy some days.

But then again, I like producing writing that enables human connection on another level, on another scale. I love the way literary art (like visual and performing art) functions in life to help elevate our sense of being. Maybe even impact the world for the better.

In Tóibín’s novel, one of the elements of the story that caught my attention is that Thomas Mann seems to write without fear, without deep struggle, without any sense of dreariness or doubt. This may simply be a flaw in novel. Or, since I’m only about a third the way through, perhaps Mann’s writing process will come to light later in the book. But, wow, do I feel enormous jealousy at the way Mann seems to churn out beloved, widely read novels with such seeming ease — and manages to win the Nobel Prize in the process.

At this point in my reading of the novel, though, the lack of description of Mann’s time spent writing feels like a shortcoming. Surely Mann wrestled longer and harder for every page than The Magician suggests.

The other thought that came to mind is that maybe the novel isn’t really about Thomas Mann the writer. It may not even be a novel about the Mann family, despite all the fascinating parallel stories. The way in which Tóibín glosses over the horrors of World War I — almost shockingly so — makes me wonder if this novel is deliberating keeping its distance from historical realities and the whole question of being a novelist and, instead, is a multi-pronged investigation of sexuality — a kind of proof of the truth embedded in the notion of sexual fluidity and the way society has in the past, and continues today, to punish those who find themselves outside the heteronormative bounds.

It seems odd for me to be writing this piece before finishing the novel, before having a solid sense of what I think the book is about. I don’t know if I’ve ever done this before. But, well, I felt compelled today to write this from a position of uncertainty. I suppose that’s because I increasingly live in sphere of personal uncertainty inside a world itself that feels caught in a whirlwind of confusion. For human society, it boils down to a question of what the hell are we doing and why? When I’m writing, that same question keeps shoving its way to the fore. Writing feels particularly hard these days because of the breadth of uncertainty.

But the writing isn’t dreary. It can’t be dreary as long as the stakes feel so high.

Amid all this, it also somehow helps to know that, whatever he felt about writing, Klaus Mann, like his father, kept writing.

 

Acadia National Park

I spent a few days in Acadia National Park. The poetry is everywhere.

Common merganser on Jordan Pond.

Common merganser with two chicks (on rock) in Jordan Pond.

Bubble Pond.

Peak of Cadillac Mountain on a cold and windy evening.

Lupines on one of the Porcupine Islands off Bar Harbor

One of the islands off Bar Harbor. Saw a bald eagle, harbor seal, porpoise, and black guillemots out here, too.

Now More Than Ever? On the Relevancy of Poetry.

In her Introduction to the Collected Lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Harper’s Perennial, 1959), which I found myself reading today, Millay’s sister Norma Millay Ellis writes,

“More than ever, it would seem, we need our poets, and their work should be as accessible as possible.”

This thought stopped me in my reading tracks because it’s a thought I’ve heard a lot lately — and one have said at various junctures in my life. But now, it makes me wonder: Is this “now more than ever” feeling one that arises in every generation? That we need our poets, of course, makes sense. But do we truly need them more than ever?

I imagine that what I feel today about the need for poetry is true for many attuned people of every generation. On the one hand, I suppose, it’s a response to the horrors we witness far too often — the shocking hubris of certain world leaders, the haughtiness of the ultra-rich, the growing injustices and the unalleviated suffering of the poor and powerless. On the other hand, it’s a more personal response to the feeling that, individually, we’re barely muddling along. It’s a kind of prayer for more depth in our lives, a wish to be better than we are, more connected, more attuned, wiser, kinder, thoughtful, caring. We want our poets to remind us of the complex beauty in life. We want to connect with that sense of awe. Find our better forms of passion.

In an interview after reading her poem “The Hill We Climb” at President Biden’s inauguration, Amanda Gorman said,

““Now more than ever, the United States needs an inaugural poem. Poetry is typically the touchstone that we go back to when we have to remind ourselves of the history that we stand on, and the future that we stand for.”

In the area of politics and poetry, my favorite speech is by a U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, speaking at the opening of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College over a half-century ago. In it, Kennedy said,

“Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.”

Last month, I read that we need Walt Whitman now more than ever. The author was referring to Whitman’s oeuvre, but particularly to those oft-quoted lines, “I am large/ I contain multitudes.” If nothing else, it’s a excellent reminder that, as individuals, we both influence and shape and are influenced and shaped by the people in our lives — and, indeed, by the greater human society and natural world. Despite any claims of independence, we are now and forever dependent on each other. In this latter regard, Whitman’s pronouncement is a poetic call to embrace a democratic society, knowing that our strength and joy and greatness lie in our diversity. You know, E Pluribus Unum.

Along with the varied statements about the importance of poetry are the questions: Do we need poetry? Does poetry matter? What is poetry’s value? In all cases that I’m aware of the answer is a resounding yes.

But then I remember that few people I know — outside of the circle of friends who write poetry — read poetry regularly, or at all, and fewer still talk about poetry or ever consider the question of its value. More people, far more people, are intensely focused on consuming news — or what calls itself news these days — in print, on the Internet, and on television. When people read creative works, they tend to read novels. The closest some come to poetry is through listening to popular songs.

This disconnect is a bit confusion, of course. If, indeed, we need poetry in our lives, now more than ever, why don’t we have more poetry in our lives — now more than ever? I suppose if I put down this question in writing here, I should be prepared to offer an answer. But I hesitate to do so, knowing that any response I give will simply echo the thousands of responses that are already out in the world claiming poetry’s importance for each generation — along with the few, always eager, contrarian voices.

My sense is that, for many people today, poetry feels unimportant or perhaps just uninteresting. They see it as another minor art form that certain people are obsessed with — say, like folks who only listen to polka music. A rather sad quip among poets these days is that more people write poetry than read it. Or perhaps its a one-to-one correlation.

I’m not here to make any large claims for poetry. I simply believe that it does matter. Maybe not more than ever. But it matters. And while I can’t speak for earlier generations encouraging the reading and contemplation of poetry, I would say we need it today (and yesterday and tomorrow) to help us:

  • know ourselves better:

  • address and mend the suffering we created for those living on the ragged margins of society;

  • center the collective need to heal a planet spinning toward its sixth extinction for just about all living beings;

  • deepen the thinking and understanding of those in positions of power — that, as Kennedy encourages, they may keep humility and love front and center in every decision made;

  • counter our worst impulses, individually and collectively; and

  • feed the nagging wish to lead lives that are both meaningful and threaded with joy.

I suppose poetry alone can’t fix the world. It is, after all, just words on the page. But I know it can be both a salve to our suffering and a valued guide to how we live each and every day. For those who are committed to reading and writing poetry, it serves as a kind of spiritual practice — a way of connecting heaven and earth.

In her poem, “Two Voices,” Edna St. Vincent Millay ends with these lines:

…let us leave our nests and flock and tell

All that we know, all that we can piece together,

of a time when all went, or seemed to go, well.



New Poems

A number of my poems have been published over the past year in a variety of literary journals, including some online editions. Here are few of the links:

“In the Meanwhile”— Posit

“Swimming” and “Stockbridge to Lee” — The Broadkill Review

“December” and “Until Life with Hospital Cup” — The Pine Cone Review

“The Whole Point,” Everything,” and “The Slant of Summer” — Revue {R}évolution

“The Climbing” — Permafrost

“Caesura,” “Ferrying,” “The Dead of Afternoon,” “What Now Is Was Then Tomorrow,” and “Alterity” — Wilderness House Literary Review

“Utopia” — Into the Void Magazine

Lear Is Near

“He is greater on his knees than on his throne.”

—    Marjorie Garber (on Lear at the end of the play)

 

I’m at it again — writing about Shakespeare as a non-Shakespearean scholar but as one who can’t get the Bard out of his mind for long.

For years after college, I claimed King Lear as my favorite Shakespeare play. I think, as a twentysomething, I was mostly attracted to the intensity of it all — the direct punishment of so many characters for their stunning displays of hubris, with the tragedy primarily being the collateral damage to those with purer hearts — especially Cordelia. But over time, I couldn’t really tell you much about the play. It just coalesced into a symbol of literary intensity — and perhaps a cautionary tale about the vicissitudes embedded in power.

So I reread it this ice-stormy winter to see how it all held up in the mind. What it sparked. How I felt about the great multi-generational mangle of the human spirit.

Perhaps the most startling part of rereading Lear is the realization that it speaks so clearly and directly to the times we live in now. I thought this back in college, too. And I now imagine that most readers of Lear have had this thought about the times in which they read the play. A play written in the early 17th century about a 7th-century BCE king speaks of both those times as well as the times in which the play is performed or read. I suppose the startling  part is to realize how humanity has failed to advance its collective emotional intelligence over the centuries. 

In Lear, there are numerous themes at play — madness, blindness, fools and folly, the existential sense of being and nothingness. But it’s hard to ignore the plays commentary on power, its necessity to the nation, and its human pitfalls. When King Lear tries to divide what probably shouldn’t be divided (the British kingdom) a hell of a storm — real and metaphoric — rises and rages on to the play’s broken denouement. 

At the start of play, the aging Lear thinks he’s doing a decent fatherly thing by gifting thick slices of his kingdom to his daughters and their chosen spouses. The arrogance in his thinking, what he is blind to, is that (1) it’s not really what kings do and (2) it’s not wise to base the details of such a sketchy decision on his daughter’s forced proclamations of love for their old man. In this move, Lear seems simply to be seeking flattery, looking for public proclamations of his greatness from his daughters so he can retire from the exhausting business of running this pre-Christian state. One wonders: Does he really expect the truth from all three?  

It’s easy to see from a distance (as the audience) how shortsighted and foolish Lear’s plan is. It’s not all that surprising that Regan and Goneril play along expertly, speak profusely of their love for their father, with the sole purpose of securing what they imagine is in their best interest. What’s surprising — and of course, what makes this a play worthy of centuries of readers — is that one daughter, the young Cordelia, refuses to flatter, believing that in a true father-daughter relationship such flattery has no place. In essence, her love for her father is far more real and deep than that of her sisters’. But by not playing along, she ignites Lear’s rather surprising rage and sparks his power to be a punitive jerk. 

Given that I’ve also watched the Succession series on TV recently, I can’t help but make a comparison between the show and the play, as others have no doubt done — and to think more on what the two tragedies tell us about human nature. In Succession, the three children of Logan Roy and his second wife are, like Regan and Goneril (with perhaps a smidge of true love in their somewhere), playing along in the Game of Succession (for three painful seasons, to date). The game is about flattery and pretense, with the hope of winning their father’s favor as the chosen beneficiary of his immense media empire. It’s so painful to watch. With each season, the three children, frozen in the worst of the middle-school mindset, seem only to succeed in digging themselves into deeper holes of injury and servitude. As one critic noted, they always lose, even when they think they are winning. So the three children slip into lives of sycophancy as well as a kind of fear and loathing for themselves and everyone around them. They are all broken, debased, morally empty. And, yet, they push on as if there is still something to gain. There isn’t. 

By the third season, all I could think was: Why don’t they just walk away? 

Though I was also thinking I don’t care anymore what happens to any of them. There’s no Cordelia in this sordid crowd.

Of course, I’m also thinking (though I’m trying to train myself not to) about a current real-life version of this tale  — the one in which so many in the political, corporate, and media chambers of America are currently climbing all over themselves like figures in a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape, eagerly selling their humanity and turning nastier by the day in an effort to appear worthy to one former American power figure. To what end? one wants to ask them. What can you possibly expect to gain? And what possible benefit is there for the nation?

In Lear, in Succession, and in American politics today, too many of the players somehow believe that sycophantic behavior will lead to great personal reward. But it can’t. It won’t. The central tragedy in Lear is that the false hope of power blinds us to what matters most. Only when the characters are broken by their own hubris do they begin to see this world more clearly. As critic Marjorie Garber writes about Lear near the end of the play, “He is greater on his knees than on his throne.”

I find myself staring out the window now, wondering why? Why can’t we see where our worst impulses lead? And what is it in human nature that makes such turns toward deception, manipulation, lies, and outright evil so inevitable — generation after generation? Why can’t we get to the late-play wisdom of Lear and Gloucester without repeating all their mistakes first?

Lear — unlike Logan Roy and, to date, the former American power figure in question— eventually sees the folly of his actions. We don’t really know what kind of king he had been. But there are glimpses of his better self that emerge as he slides from king into a powerless everyman. Though the play is set in a pre-Christian era, it carries with it plenty of Christian symbolism about the centrality of love and care and generosity and justice. There’s the obvious allusion to the Psalms — that one should be led by the heart, not bodily desire.

In Lear, three characters — Lear, Gloucester, and (to my surprise, really) Edmund — make the turn in the end toward the Christian spirit — not the kind we see playing out falsely in the American political arena these days, but the blessed-are-the-poor version, the one we’ve been encouraged to see in Christ and seek in ourselves. But, alas, in the play, it all comes too late.

 And speaking of too late: I can’t help but connect the storms in Lear to the awful climate-change-driven storms we’re seeing now — tornadoes, fires, hurricanes, blizzards — taking out or burying whole towns and villages, tearing away the shoreline. Three decades ago, we’d have been shocked by such storms. Now we seem to accept them as inevitable, just another ruined Tuesday. We may feel terrible for those who suffer directly, but we’ve yet to take the collective action to reduce global warming. 

It’s as if we’ve accepted a future date with destruction. 

Lear is here, still — not yet ready to accept the damage done by the cocktail of hubris and power.

What I had forgotten about Lear in the decades between readings is the essential role of the Fool  — including Edgar and Kent playing fool-like characters in their efforts to save Gloucester and Lear. As Marjorie Garber points out, these three truth-tellers are essential to Lear and Gloucester’s transformation in the end. Because they are given royal permission to challenge royal power and decrees, they serve as a check on the worst human impulses and aim to instill essential wisdom through a kind of charming Socratic word-play. As I closed my Riverside edition of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets once more, I found myself thinking, we need more such fools now — the ones with truly generous aims and open hearts, the ones who can help us all turn from the path of tragedy.

I’m not sure Lear remains my favorite Shakespeare play. I’ve become quite partial to The Tempest in recent years. But, once again, I impressed with how it speaks to us about civilization and its discontents, about the complexities in the human condition, about family love and drama, about the fragility of politics — and about what awaits each generation that can’t act on its better angels. In the end of Lear, there are bodies scattered all over the place. All we are left with is Edgar and Kent, who survive with their common-good values intact. We can only hope they — and their modern like — can build the world back better. 

 

Side Note

The Art of the Put Down

There are numerous, oft-quoted passages in Lear. But one of my favorite (and less often quoted) is when the Earl of Kent, banished by Lear and returning in the disguise of Caius, verbally takes down Oswald, a steward to Goneril:

“A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mungril bitch; one whom I will beat into [clamorous] whining, if thou deni’st the least syllable of thy addition.”