The Garden of Literature: "Lincoln in the Bardo"

The bardo is a Buddhist concept of a place between the death of the body and the death of the soul where the spirit lingers until it has accepted what must be. Reincarnation, if I understand the concept correctly, then follows.  

            Lincoln is, if any one person deserves the title, the 'soul' of America. He is not a Jeffersonian deist, Enlightenment intellectual, and wealthy slave-owner like TJ himself, who got along wonderfully with the French and wanted to buy everything he saw there and send it back to Virginia.

            Lincoln is a struggling believer, a self-made man, a poor frontier-born American striver, whose mind glimpsed higher things and whose gifts and determination enabled him to immigrate from dirt farmer to the world of power and responsibility.

            What a risky business to imagine his suffering soul into a piece of serious fiction, and what a wholly original piece of fiction "Lincoln in the Bardo" by George Saunders proves to be.

            In the darkest year of his presidency, Abraham Lincoln appears as one of a relatively few living characters in George Saunders' novel of death, mourning, and resolution, set largely inside the cemetery where his 11-year-old son Willie is interred after a typhoid fever takes his life.

            To the loss of a child, and Willie was apparently everybody's favorite little boy, parents are seldom (and never easily) reconciled. Nor are human beings of any age easily reconciled to their own passing.

            The author of a number of highly praised collections of short stories, Saunders is clearly not afraid of taking on big subjects in his first novel.

            He's also not afraid of inventing a new way to write a novel; or even, perhaps, inventing a new kind of novel.

            In February of 1862, the spirits of the departed who have not yet found the will or courage to let go of their former lives discover a new inmate being delivered to their cheerless home inside the cemetery fence, an unusual new arrival because so young.

            The inmates of this intermediary zone -- the "bardo" of the title; which may also be seen as a kind purgatory, perhaps, a place of penitential suffering -- whose status also accords with the common, unscientific term 'ghost' are highly interested in new arrivals. Many of them have idled here many years. One of the book's many clever bits is their out of touch dialogue over the identity of the occupant of the White House. They've never heard of this fellow Lincoln, or of the great fraternal conflict that is tearing their former earthly home apart.

            Among the distinguishing characteristics of those lingering in the bardo is they don't like thinking of themselves as dead. Comic dialogue arises around this evasion and the reliance on unique euphemisms. Their remains do not dwell in coffins. Rather these are "sick-boxes." The cause of death is rendered as 'the sickness' that sent them here.

            Here's a snatch of dialogue between the two central fictional characters, who serve as dual narrators for much of the novel's ghostly action, though they also receive a great deal of assistance from other nowhere-land spirits who force their way into the oddest predicaments, enabled by the advantages of no longer needing to carry around a material form. The two central speakers are a middle-aged man who dies by a freak accident before he can consummate his love for his young bride; and a young man whose unacceptable 'predilection' for other young man leads him to slash his wrists.

            Hans Vollman: "A bean from the ceiling came down, hitting me just here, as I sat at my desk.... A sort of sick-box was judged -- was judged to be --"

            Roger Bevins iii: "Efficacious."

            Vollman: "Efficacious, yes. Thank you, friend."

            Bevins: "Always pleasure."

            Vollman: "There I lay, in my sick-box, feeling foolish..."

            Bevins: "And yet all things must be borne."

These two are an unconscious vaudeville team, endless in their misguided attempts to evade their own -- 'situation' (fate might be the more 'efficacious' term) -- as they attempt to save the child who has fallen into their midst from making the serious mistake of avoiding his own necessary step.

            A great deal of the book's pleasure lies in the author's ability to render the voices of all his ghostly speakers with enough formality, excessive politeness, and reliance on circumlocutions and euphemism to avoid speaking bluntly on any subject that would violate pre-Civil War 19th century conventions of modesty, courtesy, or sensitivity. The central twosome are darlings in their well-intended busy (un)bodying.

            Other speakers of the bardo are blunt, profane, immodest, needy, pathetic, drunk and disorderly, heart-breaking, put-upon, or still white-hot with outrage over the horrors imposed on them in the course of their earthly existence. They are young, old, male and female, victims, fighters, black, white (some white supremacists among them), and they are unreconciled to the injustices that were visited upon them.

            Even the souls of the damned, who make appearances here in demonic form, are articulate in their own self-defense. I never asked to be born, they say in effect, in circumstances and with such tendencies as would drive me to commit various terrible acts. I too, these voices say, am a victim.

            The pleasure and profundity of Saunders' novel lies in his ability to allow every voice of the departed to articulate an un-dismissable point of view.

            The living, too, eventually attain the same quality. Willie, his ghostly character consistent with the plaudits given him by those who knew him in life, makes a spiritual progress that impacts the living, especially his father. How Saunders' novel connects the place of the irreconciled departed with the great tragedies of the living, to which we all (it is fair to say) remain at a loss to understand or accept is a measure of this novel's deep ambition.

            Because of course it's Lincoln, the unmatched "soul of America" among major national figures, who in this book must confront the complex tragedy of human life as, by the testimony of history, he did in the blood-strewn actuality of his life and fate. Until the nation's history has something worse in store for us (and the odds on that question have surely undergone a recent shift), our Civil War remains America's single greatest, bloodiest tragedy.

            We still have to ask ourselves, perhaps, what would we have done in his place?

The Garden of History: England's Peasants' Revolution of 1381:Heads Rolled, Commoners Slaughtered Kingpins, Knights Slaughtered Commoners, and the Royals Emerged Back on Top

           

It could have happened in almost century, or any country, you can think of. Poor people tired of being abused by a small wealthy upper class who own everything including, in a significant way, them, and outraged by their government's collaboration through judges, sheriffs, police, the church, tax collectors, and lawyers in a vast array of institutionalized shakedowns of the poor to the benefit of the rich, simply can't take it any more. They throw down the plow, pick up their scythes and pitchforks, and take the law into their own hands.
           Life for a medieval English peasant (as for the lower-classes everywhere else) was death by a thousand humiliations, oppressions, injustices, and that particularly larcenous depredation visited upon those who have little or no money -- unfair taxes.
             So when the English government once again, as it did every year, ran out of money to prosecute its totally unjustified, wasteful, impractical and endless farrago -- the war in France (think Iraq, or Vietnam) -- the king's advisors came up with a splendid idea: Let's put a head tax on every peasant in the country.
             This way, the reasoning went, we won't have to ask the merchants to pay for the war, as we did last year; or the church to cut us in on the rents imposed on tenant farmers to grow the nation's food (think 'real estate'); or, good gracious no, the wealthy private land-owners then called 'the nobility' (think billionaires). Let's tax the serfs. We hear some of them are doing well these days.
             In fact, the serfs, called 'villeins' by the laws that bound them, had for some been making progress in freeing themselves from the chains of the ancient oppression of serfdom because in the previous century the killer plague called the Black Death reduced the country's population by between a third or even a half. By the laws of economics, the reduction of the supply of labor significantly increased its value. It became hard to insist that a commoner was 'bound' entirely to the service of Lord X, when Lord Y in the next estate over was willing to pay him twice as much to help with the harvest. So commoners had succeeded in loosening the bonds of the feudal system. But while many were improving their material lot, it is hardly accurate to say the peasantry was getting fat. Fat remained the condition of lords and churchmen. 
            The rebellion against the new 'poll tax,' as it was called, imposed upon them in the summer of 1381, is described by author Dan Jones in "Summer of Blood: The Peasants' Revolt of 1381" (published in 2010) in these words:

 "... a sudden and violent uprising against the country's richest and most powerful lords... the Peasants' Revolt was one of the most astonishing events in the Middle Ages. Led by the mysterious general Wat Tyler and a visionary preacher called John Ball, the Peasants' Revolt was organized with military precision, and fired by genuinely revolutionary zeal of the sort that we seldom associate with this far-removed period of history."
           I picked up his book because while I have often come across references to this early political and social crisis, I knew little about the course of events. I wanted someone to take me through the historical record. The record, as  reported and interpreted by Jones in this book, lives up to his judgment: "astonishing."
           Huge 'armies' of unlettered commoners -- or 'mobs' -- marched on London, pulled hated officials, including some of the king's closest advisors, out of their homes, hiding places, or cathedrals, even -- shockingly -- the Tower of London, and cut off their heads in public. They also burned down their mansions, sometimes even dragging targeted victims out of churches. For England's ruling class it was a week-long 'reign of terror,' to make an obvious comparison to another revolution, that Jones for some reason does not take up.
           The 'mob' remains an image of evil in American iconography, because of its tendency to visit base instincts upon helpless victims. Mark Twain analyzes, ridicules and condemns the mob in "Huckleberry Finn" and elsewhere. Atticus Finch stands up to one in "To Kill a Mockingbird" -- everybody's favorite 20th century morality play -- and saves an innocent black man's life (temporarily).
           But when the 'law' being taken into the hands of a society's clear, oppressed majority is simply the creed of privilege that 'superior birth' imposes on those 'inferior' by birth for the benefit of the few to the clear detriment of the many -- well, then my sympathies tend to march along with those who call for the guillotine.
           The march of the peasants from the countryside and villages surrounding London who sought freedom from the oppression of 'the law' was led by those few names that have come down in history: Wat Tyler, John Ball, and Jack Straw.
            The first was a man with sufficient organizational skills and command presence to keep an army of untrained, unlettered men armed with farm implements from dissipating into widespread looting and drunken rioting when, as it appeared, and was in fact reality for a few days, the city of London was defenseless against them. The state's armed forces were engaged in those expensive border wars, in both France and Scotland. The king's men of military experience were off with them; his remaining advisors counseled conciliation toward Tyler's demands; the king himself (Richard II) was a young teenager; and what forces he had stood by while several of his closest advisors, hated by the rebels, were called out as 'traitors' and murdered.
           The balance of power only changed when the King gave leave to London's sheriff to gather his men of arms, renounce all conciliation, and attack the peasants' leaders. The sheriff's men murdered Tyler during a negotiation session (generally not considered the sporting thing). Leaderless, the rebel mass began to fragment and proved unable to stand up to the assault of greatly outnumbered, but far better armed handfuls of knights and soldiers. The upper class wins, in effect, because they're better equipped and far more accustomed to visit violence upon their enemies.
          Loosed by a now vengeful king, the forces of the state, both military and judicial, then inflict a long reign of terror on the social class and regions responsible for the rebellion -- thousands (Jones estimated between 1,500 and 7,000) die through punishment raids and the legal lynching of what we now call 'show trials.'
         After reading this account, I remain impressed by the egalitarian impulse of the rebels, at least of the more far-seeing ones. Why should some men be born to lives as 'lords' to live at ease off the labors of others? The argument of the state is that the social order is God-given. This is the Middle Ages for you, when the tyranny of the popular mind is the business of religion. 
          In order to overthrow or even modify the status quo, you have to break the ancient bad-faith conjunction of church and state. It's a long road between 1381 and the American Revolution and the French Revolution, whose leaders will say 'No, God does not desire King George (or King Louis) to impose his will over all his fellow men and women. That's merely an arrangement a few humans have concocted.' 
          What will stay with me the longest from the political morality play and bloody theater of the Peasants' Revolt, is the shrewd, compelling teaching of the rebel priest John Ball. His attack on the religious justification of the class system is beautifully expressed in two lines:
"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who then was the gentleman?"
           Nothing in your Bible, Ball reminds us, justifies social or economic injustice. And the institutions of state, society, and the church are all ultimately the creations of human beings. We may change them as we see fit. 

The Garden of Verse: Poems About Trees Just Keep Reaching for the Sky

My poem titled "As A Tree," appearing in this month's Verse-Virtual.com, takes root from the backyard oak tree that was also the inspiration for last month's post on catkins. Entitled "The Garden of the Trees: What is that 

THESE PHOTOS: The top two were taken by Bev Ness of Plymouth Library at my recent reading at the library. I read from new book of poems, "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty." My thanks to Bev and to Plymouth Library director Jen Harris.

 The next three photos illustrate some of my favorite flowering trees. They were taken earlier this spring at Arnold Arboretum in Boston.


        The final image, found online, is a photo of catkins, those male oak tree flowers that littered many people's yards this spring, on their way to spreading pollen all over the world in the hope that some of it will make contact with oak tree female flower parts.

Brown Stringy Stuff Falling From My Oak Tree?" the post begins:

            "Oak trees have the same unblushing approach to reproduction that characterizes the plant world's expression of all necessary physical functions, including growth, nutrition, birth and death. Green plants do the weirdest things, and you never see them sweat."

            Oak trees produce male flowers, called catkins, and this year a bumper crop of the fuzzy brown covered about a quarter of our garden while releasing the pollen necessary for oak tree reproduction -- which also happens to make us sneeze. My poem is only glancingly about catkins and tree reproduction. Nevertheless I try to get everything else in. Here's the poem: 

As A Tree


Tannish tassels smudging the plants,
bedecking leaves like off-color tinsel,
a plague of dust tarnishing the green.
Mannish flowers these, gifts of the oak,
a thing made all of secrets.
You never see it sleep, or shout, or breathe, or blow, or natter
or rumble, or do anything.
The wind 'does.' The birds leap and shout.
Leaves appear. Branches fall.
Catkins parachute softly in the spring,
a daring raid behind enemy lines; success assured by numbers.
The oak is ever that which is, not that which shows
in its becoming.
It is always being a tree.
Surely we all have heard this moralized explanation of 'giving' --
these theatrically magical seeds
these time-lapse photographs of 'stages':
the seedling with the corny hat, a sproutling, a slender sapling (like a boy with a bat),
branches that shoot outward like crosses
held against the terrors of a world of fire, seething winds, clinging ice,
quaking thunder, shaking earth.`
Time passes through the tree.
It perseveres in thereness, wise in the way of treeing.
We encounter, witness, regard, visit,
become what we will, in our endless evolutions.
The oak always was what it will be
whenever I behold it: then is now.

             Please take a look at the July 17 issue currently up at verse-virtual.com. I have two other poems up in this issue, one about a dear family member turning 90, and the other about some of the things people have in common with the natural world, especially in spring. Many other fine poets offer excellent work as well.
http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html

The Garden of the Unknowable: 'Ancient Light' by John Banville

            "Since it seems that nothing in creation is ever destroyed, only disassembled and dispersed, might not the same be true of individual consciousness?" John Banville's narrator, an aging actor, asks himself this question in his 2012 novel "Ancient Light." And continues:

            "Where when we die does it go to, all that we have been?"

            Don't we all ask ourselves this question?

            There really are no suitable answers, are there? Perhaps, even, no 'reality.'

            And maybe thinking this way is something of an occupational hazard for the profession of 'fiction writing.'

            The Irish novelist (and also literary journalist, writing book reviews and literary articles for an Irish newspaper) -- has written so many remarkable, beautifully phrased and thought-provoking sentences that's it's a mistake to get hung up on any one sentence or  passage (or even one book) as the quintessential Banville.

            Still, I particularly love the concluding phrase in this perfectly formed question: "all that we have been."

            If I had to come up with an answer to a question on the subject of this, or any, of this author's novels, this might be it. What are John Banville's novels about? 'All that we have been.'

            Or, perhaps, might have been. Since, as many others have pointed out, his narrators are always of the unreliable sort. And their tales have been skewed, undercut, overlaid, wrapped and themselves, with a trail of little time bombs going off here and there with the effect of blowing up any confidence that what we are hearing is intended as the 'simple truth.' There is no simple truth.

            Given this author's freedom with the post-modernist philosophical -- one might almost say 'post-Einsteinian,' or 'post Quantum Theory' -- skepticism that abounds in the storytelling of our times, it is almost a naive question to ask of his book "what happens?"

            Yet I can't escape a brief attempt to summarize the plot of "Ancient Light."

            In the book's most beautiful passage the dawn light enters the room as just the right angle to create a perfect reflection of itself on the bedroom ceiling: a mirrored or twin universe. Is this the "Ancient Light" of the title? Or does the title simply acknowledge that source of some of the light reaching our solar system originates from galaxies millions or billions of light years away. From the distant past, that is, of other worlds. 

            That passage follows the novel's opening in which we learn that the narrator spends his nights walking the dark passages of his ancient house in search of his endlessly weeping wife. Are we in the House of Usher? Or the House of Atreus where some ancient tragedy is afoot?

            In fact, the cause is that both parents are unreconciled to the death of their daughter by apparent suicide in circumstances that could be judged mysterious, but which reason would simply term 'unknowable.' The daughter, we learn, was always a little disturbed.

            For seemingly unrelated reasons, our narrator has chosen to examine in detail all of his fully fleshed-out memories of his teenage initiation into adult sexuality by the mother of his best friend. Their enigmatic affair (why should she do such a thing?) persists for many months, leading to inevitable discovery and the Mom's ruin. Or so the boy believed. I remain astonished by the author's detailed reconstruction of a fifteen-year-old's state of mind and conduct during these Rabelaisian backseat and abandoned-hut encounters; perhaps because at that age I was still working on my first kiss.

            I am less assured these revisitations have anything to do with mourning or investigating the death of his daughter, or his own current life. Ah, we think, but the connection is thematic, philosophical, having to do with the nature of time, the role of memory, the possibility of ever knowing 'what really happened.'

            In the third stand of the novel's action, our narrator, a retired stage actor, is summoned out of the blue by a Hollywood producer to play the lead in a film about a morally compromised European literary critic of the post-structuralist 'critical theory' school. I cannot find words to express how unlikely it is that an American film company would make a movie about a 'critical theory' academic, however compromised. Still, a troubling coincidence connects this figure to the time and place of the daughter's death.

            Yet it almost beyond the point -- and sometimes wholly pointless -- to worry about the plotting of Banville's novels.

            In an interview with Paris Review, the author himself states that the central concern of his fiction is the construction of beautiful English sentences. He says:

            "It’s only now and then, maybe once every three or four days, that I manage to write a sentence in which I hear that wonderful harmonic chime that you get when, say, you flick the edge of a wine glass with a fingernail. That’s what keeps me going."

            The art lies, that is, in the way you put the words together. The play of the syntax. The rhythm of the phrases winding through the resources of Banville's sometimes head-scratchingly wide vocabulary. The sound of the words melding finely with the changing and always nuanced tone of their narration.

            For me, the singular 'chime' in Banville's unrivaled prose is the boffo, self-mocking play of words weaving themselves into a fully intelligible declaration, the various possible meanings of which can be expressed in no other words than those still resounding in the reader's ear and mind.

            Here's our narrator recalling his 15-year-old self 'in love' -- can that be the fitting phrase? Well, contentedly busy, at least, with the occupation of enjoying the charms of his adult mistress.

            "Certainly she granted me full freedom of her body, that opulent pleasure garden where I sipped and sucked, dazed as a bumble-bee in full-blown summer."

            I have seen such bumble bees in their capacity as eager visitors to the flower garden of my own full-blown summers. At times they appear dazed indeed by the wealth of opportunity offered them; for the most part they show little hesitation in getting on with the job. And, yes, I sometimes envy them. 

The Garden of Verse: Where Do the Poems Come From?

       

     Poets in the June 2017 edition of Verse-Virtual took on the mystery of where poems come from.

            "Writing the Poem," a fabulous poem by Dick Allen (fables galore in here), is a bravura response to the never-stated theme of writer's block. The answer? You let the poem write itself. Things just happen, but they happen in so lively and picturesque, and unexpected, a way that the reader can't wait to see what happens next: 
".... The poem
will start singing 'One bright morning, I’ll fly away'
or jump from a Walmart roof...
the poem will make friends with furniture salesmen,
and eat avocados just arrived from Monday."

            I'll take my avocados from Monday any day of the week. I liked every high-jumping, sky-dying line here, but I also wish to pay special mention these:
"Poet naïf, poet of the corner store
with your mind set upon camera lenses and canary yellow,
are you in your right mind?"

            'Poet of the corner store' strikes me as a marvelous image. Next time I go to the corner store, I'll try to see where it takes me. 
This is a poem that demonstrates by its own construction where poems come from. Sometimes the 'wrong' mind might be the right one.

            The mystery of inspiration wafts over some other poems I admired in June's Verse-Virtual. CJ Clark introduces us to the enigma of the Skogmo Cafe, accompanied by a black-and-white photo that made me think "JFK." The poem asks, "Wasn't this once called the Skogmo Cafe?" Neither party knows the answer.
"Instead we order soup
And sip the chowder, the broth
Of our separate winters..."

            I love this poem for the image of spooning up "the broth
Of our separate winters..." Not the bread of affliction, nor the shortcake of romance, yet a piquant and, I suspect, highly personal taste.

             I don't know the "Line From Merwin" alluded to by the title of Judy Kronenfeld's poem, but I don't need to in order to feel myself surrendering to the sensations of ephemeral beauty and sorrow evoked by the language of this poem.

"Each day on the long drive home
how easily the sky
soars into profundity,
like silent music."

              The profundity of "silent music"? Another mystery, perhaps But we probably know in our own hearts what the phrase means. This is a poem built on short lines of exactly right words.

              Jim Lewis offers a wise and clever interpretation of a painting by Firestone Feinberg (pictured above) in "the color of your songs." The poem repeats lines, or parts of lines, from the end of one stanza to the first of the next, echoing the repetition of imagery in Feinberg's paintings. I particularly admire the alliterative music in this stanza that renders the whole more playful in tone than a literal summing up of 'meaning' could possibly do:

"sonata for serpent
where bass clef crawls
along the floor
and treble spreads its trouble
all across the couch cushions
below watchful eyes..."

           Joan Mazza's poem "On Being Asked How I Write a Poem Every Day" provides another answer to the question posed implicitly by the theme of a writer's block.

           Like some of these others, it's a poem that demonstrates in its own creation the 'point' it appears to be making. The way on, the poet tells us, develops from a seamlessly sustained comparison for working a vein and digging in an earth that is always there:

"Some days I wear a hat, boots, and work gloves,
and push the wheelbarrow over logs and mud,
ruts and roots that trip along the way..."

            We all know about that mud, those 'ruts and roots' (two words that call to one another). And if there are indeed logs lying across the floor of your personal forest, you have my deepest sympathies. I have entered such forests and gone nowhere in them. But Mazza's poem takes us swiftly to black soil "under old oaks," and we sigh with remembrance and know that we're onto something now.

            June V-V is onto something too. It's simply more fine poetry.

             These poems and many others can be found at http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html