Literacy: Reading

Reviews or reflections of writers, e.g. Emily Dickinson, Margaret Atwood

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Pity the Nation

      I remember a biblical quotation at the top of the editorial page of Newsday when I was in junior high school: “Where there is no vision, the people perish”  (Proverbs 29:18). As a young, professing Christian it was both remarkable and exciting to me to see the biblical juxtaposed with the contemporary. The voice of the prophet had found a niche in journalism.

     I refer to the prophet who speaks truth to power, who invokes standards of judgment higher than what society has deemed “norms.” This is not the Nostradamus kind of prophet or the Greek oracles with their dire predictions.  The Old Testament prophet who warned kings and the elite of Jerusalem is different from the messianic visionaries. The traditional prophet foresaw the seeds of downfall in the moral decay of society. The theologian Walter Bruggemann says, “The prophets are imaginers, not predictors or social activists” ( Embracing the Prophets in Contemporary Culture, 2011)
     In times of physical, verbal, and social discord the voices of the prophets are still invoked to gain a perspective when moral bearings are slipping. The prophet Isaiah and his contemporaries have become especially relevant in an era of “spin,” when losses are turned into victories and “threats” are turned into “favors.” How well Isaiah understood human nature when he foreshadowed our spin-masters.
Ah you who call evil good and good evil,
Who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
Who put bitter for sweet and sweet bitter! (5:20)
     It was clear when Donald Trump asked President Zelenskiy for “a favor” that the request was a threat. The withholding of $400 million in arms was audibly juxtaposed with the “favor.”  The transcript implicitly reveals this, but Donald Trump insists it was all in the name of cleaning up Ukrainian politics.  The weapons were withheld for another five weeks while Mr. Trump waited for his “favor.”  The funds were released in September after the Democrats threatened to withhold the entire Pentagon funding of more than $5 billion dollars until Ukraine received its arms. Clearly the “favor” Trump requested had the kind of force implied when the mafia don asks for “a favor” from trembling victims.

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      This past week was not the first time I have seen Lawrence Ferlinghetti cited as a prophet for our times and certainly not the first time on Facebook. Once he  seemed radical to me,  espousing “democratic socialism.” But this morning he seemed to be paraphrasing the Old Testament prophets in “Pity the Nation” (2017) when he said, “people are sheep/ shepherds mislead them [Ezekial 34:8] . . .sages are silenced [Jeremiah 38:4-6] . . . whose breath is money [Micah 3:11]. . . the sleep of the too well fed [Amos 6:4] . . . My country tears of thee [Hosea 4:3]” These phrases are the backbone of his poem, which comments on the USA in 2017.
      Have we finally become this nation to be pitied? Is Ferlinghetti one of our contemporary prophets? Are we ignoring such voices at our peril?
      We may have thought that the ideals of the nation-embodied in the Bill of Rights and conforming international treaties– could shape and restrain our leaders, but the opposite has happened.  We have been formed in the image of our President. We have become more tribal, more suspicious, more divisive than we have been since the Vietnam Era. Even church leaders have despaired of democratic processes that have held our country together since 1776 and are ready to throw the gauntlet down with little provocation.  Reverend Robert Jeffress foreshadowed “civil war” over the invoking of a Constitutional procedure (impeachment), betraying his remorseless antagonism for his political opponents. The “Evangelical” churches have become pitted adversaries in their own community, depending on their political orientation.
       This take-it-or-leave-it discourse has come from the leadership of Donald Trump, for whom every criticism of decisions or policies is disloyalty or treason.  He punishes disloyalty (criticism) ruthlessly and charges treason against those he can not punish. He has led us to the abandonment of civil discourse. “Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own.”
       Encompassing this breakdown of civility is the distortion of language, so that words no longer mean what they are denoted to be.  Words like “favor” substituted for “threat” or “extortion.”
        As newspaper columnists proclaimed and echoed this week (October 7-11), the President operates on no principle, but what is good for himself (Dana Millbank Tuesday, Washington Post, Michael Gerson, Wednesday,Washington Post October 8-9, 2019) . On Tuesday, October 9, Jonah Goldberg, National Review: “There’s no halfway defensible ideological, intellectual or moral standard that Trump doesn’t violate, often routinely.”  The search for an ideology or governing principle of this administration has continued in vain, for Trump’s Twitter-feed merely offers the most self-aggrandizing comments of the moment.
         The ultimate control lies in the manipulation of language, such as “middle class tax cuts,” which primarily benefit the wealthy or the pursuit of “freedom,” which allow industrial polluters the license to foul the air and water. When newspapers expose such lies, they are blamed for “fake news.”  Thus the “vision” proclaimed by the news media is dismissed by the language of victimhood, fogging the truth.
    George Orwell was a modern prophet in the realm of language manipulation.  In 1984 he imagined the world of  “doublespeak,” where language could be perverted to mean what the Party wanted it to mean. The slogans of the Party were:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
(Orwell Reader, 398)
     When I read this classic in high school I remember thinking how warped the thinking of  (protagonist) Winston’s contemporaries must have been to believe such lies. In the 1960’s the practice of “spin” was less noticed.  Today we can see Orwell as a prophet who recognized how language could be abused for a political agenda. And in the last three years, we have seen how language can be abused for a personal agenda–to turn light into darkness on Twitter to cast a spell on your followers and anyone else who will disconnect their critical faculties and believe.
     We must not dismiss the words of the prophets as “fake news” or “socialist” or even “sexist” or “racist,” when they question our accepted ways of thinking. They may be our only way out of the murky discourse that surrounds us. We are victims of our own comfortable ways of  speaking.  We can trace this plight back 2500 years to Isaiah, the best known of our prophets:
Ah you who call evil good and good evil,
Who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
Who put bitter for sweet and sweet bitter! (5:20)

AMERICAN POET, LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (B. 1919

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Hag-Seed: Profile of the Incarcerated

 

Attending a season of plays by the Prison Performing Arts Program in Missouri, I have witnessed the achievements of incarcerated adults in the performance of classical theater with individual flair.  I have seen versions of Macbeth, Pride and Prejudice, and Animal Farm performed in the spirit of hope and recovery.  I have listened to the personal stories of the performers, how they have embraced collaboration by learning to trust their fellow inmates in a common effort. I have heard their guileless tales of redemption.

A similar narrative is told by Margaret Atwood in her novel Hag-Seed set in a fictional prison in contemporary Canada. Felix Phillips, a has-been director,  has swallowed pride enough to direct the incarcerated and teach a class in drama. Considering a Shakespearian play to perform within the walls of a prison invites some traditional choices: the lessons of ambition in  MacBeth, the quality of mercy in The Merchant of Venice,  or the comedy of amateurs in performance of Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.

Not so much The Tempest. In the play, a shrewd magician named Prospero plans revenge on his enemies, who abandoned him on an island.  The ultimate prisoner of Prospero’s island is Caliban, often referred to as “the monster” or “hag-seed” (alluding to his mother, the witch  Sycorax). The element of revenge and the character of the detestable prisoner would not reinforce the theme of redemption you would hope for in a prison performance.

Rarely has a Shakespearian character been imagined with more distaste than the imprisoned figure of Caliban. Inmates would certainly not identify with him. Or would they? In Atwood’s novel, the monster is improbably redeemed. Not so much in the performance of the play, but in the imagined post-mortem, where each acting team gets to imagine how their assigned character emerged following the final curtain.

After his class’s final video-taping of The Tempest, Felix breaks the actors into teams and charges them with imagining the fate of their assigned characters.  The leader of Team Hag-Seed, Leggs, summarizes his group’s conclusions following their production.

Hag-Seed, I mean Caliban–nobody’s on his team. Even his so-called friends and allies, those two drunk assholes–they’re not loyal to him, they make fun of him and call him names, they’re out to make a buck off him. So inside the play, he don’t have a team.” [ Hag-Seed 270]

Leggs and his team propose three possible fates for Caliban, the first two predictable for those who only see the monster in Caliban. “But that was too dark for us,” says Leggs. His team speaks hopefully for redemption.

Why should the others in this play get a second chance at life, but not him? Why’s he have to suffer so much for being what he is? If like he’s you know, black or Native or something. Five strikes against him from Day One. He never asked to be born. [272]

So Leggs spins a tale of redemption for Caliban, something that could only come out of a culture of punishment  and struggle for rehabilitation. He invents a scenario in which the master sorcerer Prospero is actually the father to Caliban, but does not acknowledge him.  Instead he apprentices Caliban in culture and sorcery, but he has to imprison him when he tries to take advantage of Prospero’s daughter, Miranda.

But every prisoner has his own version of a his crime, so Leggs says,

but whose fault was it anyway, letting Miranda prance around in full view?  Prospero should’a seen it coming. Should’a locked her up, if it was that important. Prospero should eat some of the blame for that number.[273]

This is perhaps a strong measure of rationalization in Leggs’ version, Even the master magician Prospero has things to learn in a Shakespearian comedy.  Team Caliban quotes Shakespeare’s own dialogue in support of Caliban’s redemption:

But, by the end, Prospero’s learning that maybe not everything is someone else’s fault. Plus he sees that the bad in Caliban is pretty much the same as the bad in him. So he owns up: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” That’s what he says and that’s what he means. [274]

Literary critics have hung their interpretations on less textual support than this inference that Prospero is the actual father of Caliban so Felix, director and instructor,  accepts the interpretation.  Later, continues Leggs, Prospero will set up Caliban as a musician in Milan, and the converted monster will make his fame in a musical group called “Hag-Seed and the Things of Darkness.”

The post-mortems of The Tempest in  Hag-Seed prove that the Bard has much to teach 21st Century inmates and, moreover, embittered directors with an ax to grind against treacherous rivals. The actors, as well as Felix, gain some enlightenment about their predicament, and one  of them even gets a shortened sentence on Felix’s recommendation.

Atwood’s novel is a tribute to the rehabilitative potential of theater.  The “hag-seed” becomes the celebrated musician, and the director is restored to his embezzled position in the summer theater.  The inmate actors not only have acquired employable skills, they have the bravado of free men, which they render in a song they composed for Felix:

Freedom, high-day, High-day freedom! Freedom, high-day freedom!

Get outta my cage, now I’m in a rage–

No more dams I make for fish, Nor fetch in firing

At requiring.

As Leggs’ extra-credit song continues, we recognize this is not just about Caliban, but about the “returning citizens,” many of whom enter society with a chip on their shoulders.  They have paid their debt, and they want to be accepted as equals by the free society. Their personal dignity has been restored by their theatrical achievement.

Nor scrape trenchering, nor wash dish;

Ain’t gonna any more like your feet

Or walk behind you on the street,

Ain’t gonna get on the back of the bus,

And you can give our land right back to us! (277-78]

It reminds me of the outcomes of Prison Performing Arts.  One is the rehabilitation of the incarcerated, the other the rehabilitation of the audience.  We are also better citizens for having witnessed their achievements.  If we accept Shakespeare’s claim that, “All the world’s a stage,” these performers are prepared for a world that has also been prepared for them.  We can welcome the company of returning citizens to the stage of free people.

 

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First Impressions

First Impressions

What impressions could I expect

Of two dozen incarcerated women

Impersonating British gentlemen and ladies?

Most never laid eyes on Pride and Prejudice

Until they were handed the cumbersome dialect,

Adapted for the stage.

Some admitting they could not finish the book,

Several preferring the zombie-enhanced movie,

They collapsed the courtships of the Bennets,

Laced with their frank impressions,

Into ninety minutes.

Jane Austen would have been charmed.

The inmate-dramatist  Oscar Wilde

Would have roared his pleasure.

For me, pride and pathos overflowed,

So amazed at the clarity and pace of the dialogue,

So delighted by the futile match-making of adults,

By the meaningful Bennet-glances

To ward off clueless suitors,

Other sisters charging into matrimony.

The actors made me proud

As if they had been my students.

And how do I explain the pathos

That squeezed tears from me

Over a comedy of manners?

Because

I could not forget where I was

Who these dauntless women were

How much confronted and overcome,

How much risked and renounced

To deliver a two hundred-year old drawing room comedy

With spirited excess.

Two dozen stories, within this story,

Grabbing at my heart.

 

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Much Ado About Nothing

The pre-performance lecture by Felicia Harrison Londre at the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival’s rendition of Much Ado About Nothing raised the question of how to view the drama, as comedy or tragedy. The hilarity of the acting seemed to answer “comedy,” but did Shakespeare believe it was all “about nothing” or might he be asking how human nature could turn it into “something.”

We were were thoroughly entertained by the broad comedy of the Sunday night performance (Kcshakes.org, June 24, 2018).  The roles of the mocking rivals, Benedick and Beatrice, were performed with gusto, and Dogberry and the night watchmen were worthy of the Keystone Cops and the Three Stooges.  Shakespeare was never so fresh and modern on the fickleness of love.

If there is a message in a comedy “About Nothing,” it is how fragile human love can be. Both the comedy and pathos thrive on the sudden changes of emotion in the characters. Claudio returns from war with a fierce longing for Hero. Benedick and Beatrice  maintain a suspicious taunting relationship that implies that love could be beneath the surface. Leonato dotes on his only daughter, Hero, delighted to see her engaged to Claudio. The cameraderie of  Don Pedro and his officers expresses the strongest manly affection.  Don Pedro even undertakes the challenge of bringing together the intractable rivals, Benedick and Beatrice, by friendly conspiracy with his officers and Leonato.

Soon after the play resumes from its intermission, Claudio has been poisoned with the suspicion of Hero’s infidelity, Leonato has turned viciously against  his daughter Hero on the same suspicions, Benedick has turned against his best friend Claudio to defend Hero’s honor, and Don Pedro has been alienated from Claudio by Hero’s vengeful father (Leonato).  The middle acts of the play threaten tragic outcomes, because of a diabolical plot to shame Hero and bring havoc on the brotherly affection of the soldiers.

The “About Nothing” of the story suggests how emotions can be turned on mere suspicions and outright falsehoods. You only have to recall Othello to note that suspicion and falsehood are not always exposed in time to avert tragedy. The main difference between the eternal villain Iago and the frustrated misanthrope Don John (the perpetrator in Much Ado) is that one successfully executes his conspiracy against Othello, and the other is caught by a comic device, the goofy night watchmen and their inarticulate captain, Dogberry. The likelihood of such devious plotting being caught by the 17th century Keystone Cops is faint. They are as probable as Inspector Clouseau capturing a brilliant jewel thief.

If we want to view Much Ado About Nothing as a cautionary almost-tragedy, we can recognize the fickleness and vulnerability of love, the romantic, the parental, and the filial. It can all collapse in a lie that easily undermines trust and turns devotion into scorn.  Analyzing too closely we see that no one questions the evidence that contradicts all their previous experience with their lover, their daughter, their comrades. That’s why it becomes funny when the sinister plot unravels, because everyone sees how easily they have been duped. That’s what makes good comedy.

But if we take the lecturer’s question seriously and see the tragic possibilities of the play, we learn that fickle love is illusionary love.  Essential love is not fragile or easily disillusioned. Othello’s jealousy is based on his inability to evaluate the reports he hears of Desdemona’s infidelity (in Othello). Claudio’s youthful insecurity makes him susceptible to the lie of the unlikely betrayal of Hero, who worships him. Benedick’s sudden infatuation with Beatrice makes him turn on his dear friend Claudio to please her. None of these characters challenge the illusion of infidelity, because they can not confront, and give a hearing to, the victims of these lies. How susceptible are we to false information and sinister plots against fidelity?

“Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.”(Othello, III, iii, 170-72)
Iago, the most subtle of all villains, warns Othello that he will be consumed by jealousy if he allows it.  Surely this is what almost happens in Much Ado About Nothing as Claudio, Leonato and even Benedick easily read betrayal into illusions, because they do not trust the ones they love.  How much domestic abuse is based on this lack of trust? How many broken relationships are never reconciled for lack of trust? How often are families permanently separated for lack of trust? How much ado is really about nothing?
Certainly Shakespeare went for the laughs in Much Ado About Nothing, but we know he understood  the pathos of misunderstanding as well, much more obviously in Othello. Although the Bard might have hoped after a few belly laughs about his comedy, we still reflect on the thin line separating it from tragedy: about “the Nothing” that leads to broken relationships.

 

 

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Unless we become as rogues . . .

When we read the parables of the Kingdom of Heaven in the Gospels, they are always feasting and partying, rather than standing in solemn choirs. In one parable when some of the invited guests do not show up, the master broadens the invitation:

…22 ‘Sir,’ the servant replied, ‘what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.’ 23 So the master told his servant, ‘Go out to the highways and the hedges and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full. 24For I tell you, not one of those men who were invited will taste my banquet.’”…(Luke 14:23)

These guests are probably not the Main Street Christians, but probably the rowdies of the community. You wonder if Emily Dickinson could be one of those romping outside the doors who get the second invitation.

Emily Dickinson apparently hung outside the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven, considering, but never ready to go in. Kristin LeMay quotes these obscure verses from the Dickinson manuscripts.

The Bobolink is gone–the Rowdy of the Meadow–

And no one swaggers now but me–

The Presbyterian Birds can now resume the Meeting

He gaily interrupts that overflowing Day

When opening the Sabbath in their afflictive Way

He bowed to Heaven instead of Earth

And shouted Let us pray–

In the chapter featuring this poem LeMay portrays Emily as critical of the austerity of the sermon, the pulpit, the overdressed congregants and swiping at their solemnity with her ironic commentary.

The pulpit was so high the minister was obliged to infer the effect of his sermon from the tops of the heads and bonnets before him (237).

But others, Dickinson’s niece for example, suggested it was more a sense of the absurd rather than deliberate sacrilege that motivated Emily.

“although Emily took liberties with the Puritan vernacular and dogma . . . these impish flashes were no more to the underlying God-consciousness of the real Emily than the gargoyle on the roof is to the heart of the cathedral within” ( 229).

Interesting analogy: Emily as gargoyle hanging off the side of the cathedral. The gargoyle is a functional appendage to a church, unlike the ornamental lines that glorify God:

In architecture, a gargoyle (/ˈɡɑːrɡɔɪl/) is a carved or formed grotesque[1] with a spout designed to convey water from a roof and away from the side of a building, thereby preventing rainwater from running down masonry walls and eroding the mortar between.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargoyle

In the same sense that the church is protected from the effects of moisture by the gargoyle, so its sacraments are protected by the grotesque, fearful and even comic representations of these water ducts. We might say the gargoyle not only protects the building from internal damage, but also protects it from taking itself too seriously, mocking the Presbyterian birds for their grave conduct of church business.  Hence the bobloinks’s “shouted”  “let us pray,” instead of intoning “in their afflictive Way.” Of interest are the alternative verbs to “shouted” Emily scribbled in the margins of her manuscript: “bubbled” and “gurgled” (LeMay 231).  A range of emotions for prayer runs between “gurgled” and “shouted.”  They suggest the emotions she might have felt in private prayer as distinguished from the “afflictive Way” she found within the church’s walls.

Presumably Emily abandoned the church, because her swaggering self was unwelcome. She could not play the bobolink among the Presbyterians, so she retired to the sanctuary of her second story bedroom.  Should rogues like her be allowed in the kingdom of heaven? Does Emily fit the pattern of those roaming the highways and hedges? How often have we conducted such rogues out the door, as the gargoyle conducts rainwater into the streets?

“Unless we become as Rogues, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” Emily was quoted to say.  Could rogues like her be the ones in the highways and byways compelled to fill the seats of God’s banquet?

 

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Emily and the Bible

Scripture  (from I told my soul to sing)

In her reflective commentary, Kristin LeMay argues that Emily Dickinson shows the influence of biblical language in her poetry. At one point when her aunt falls ill, Emily bitterly accuses God with scriptural language: “Whom shall I accuse? . .  . The enemy,’ eternal, invisible and full of glory.'” Probably does not reveal any reverence, but certainly familiarity.

“The Bible dealt with the center, not the circumference,” Emily comments in a letter to her friend Elizabeth Holland. So it becomes a pivot for her to spread out and explore subjects the Bible misses. Here is a poem LeMay quotes to suggest Emily’s relationship to the Bible.

I held a Jewel in my fingers–
And went to sleep–
The day was warm, and the winds prosy–
I said “Twill keep”–

I woke– and chid my honest fingers,
The Gem was gone–
And now, an Amethyst remembrance
Is all I own.

How many Bibles have merely symbolic significance in their homes?  They are a remembrance of Sunday School or simpler days or a life event (birth, marriage, funeral). Now the connection is more like a dream. Life doesn’t flow to the reader, just memories– the amethyst. So the Bible marks another time, a different awareness, a lost innocence.   Was this what Emily meant by this poem?

If the Bible does not speak to my circumference, it cannot stay at my center.

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Finding God with Emily Dickinson

Emily was a famous doubter in Christianity and the only one in her family not to proclaim belief in Christ as Savior, so I was curious about this book I found at the Dickinson House gift shop: I Told My Soul to Sing: finding God with Emily Dickinson.  It is not an evangelical rendering of Dickinson, but a personal connection among her poetry, letters and the author’s experience.

Kristin LeMay is a professor of writing at Ohio University, so this is not her dissertation or scholarly contribution. It may have no academic value whatsoever, but it has what I prize most: a struggle to unite things she loves, despite their apparent divergence.

Emily wrote, “I work to drive the awe away, yet awe impels the work:” a typical paradox in her style.  Her poetry is both inspired and exorcising, a dynamic similar and dissimilar to prayer.  LeMay’s thesis is that for Emily writing poetry was like a religious act, a struggle to believe and disbelieve. and it was her relentless struggle that inspired the beauty in her verse.

Here’s the first selection from Dickinson by LeMay:

I shall keep singing!
Birds will pass me
In their way to Yellower Climes–
Each–with a Robin’s expectation–
I–with my Redbreast–
And my Rhymes–

Late–when I take my place in summer–
But–I shall bring a fuller tune–
Vespers–are sweeter than matins–Signor–
Morning–only the seed–of noon–

The birds passing her suggest those eager for the transition, perhaps conversion to a better life, while the poet with “Redbreast” and “Rhymes” lags behind.  Yet the lagging yields better singing, “a fuller tune.”  The slow-forming verses produce the best result, “Morning–only the seed–of noon–” LeMay compares the daily worship of the Benedictine monks to the composing of a poem. The chanting produces better worship and a fuller life.  “Emily’s song–like the Monk’s prayer at Matins–is the means for the conversion it promises, just as its melody is itself the promise of a “fuller tune” she foretells in the final lines” (30-32).

LeMay almost reverently recalls her own pilgrimage to the “Emily Dickinson Room” at Harvard University and witnessing that small square writing desk to which Emily applied herself every morning, often before sunrise. I saw a reproduction of it at the Dickinson House in Amherst.  It is a very small space for small poems and expansive thoughts. In this small space a poet gathered the world in a few words. It is not hard to imagine it as prayer.

LeMay, Kristin. I Told My Soul to Sing: Finding God with Emily Dickinson. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2013.

 

 

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In Search of Emily

Cloudy and cool, occasional sprinkles today. Took the trail  across from my unit with Wizzy for a mile, spotting bright-colored fungi on a tree trunk

and what I’d call lichen on a white quartz rock. Kathy would have known what it was. Miss her.

The real quest today is the true Emily Dickinson, represented by her homestead in Amherst about sixty miles from here.

I’d seen “A Quiet Passion” this summer in which the director, Terence Davies, took some liberties with her story to tell his own (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/terence-daviess-truthful-fictions-about-emily-dickinson). For example, in one dramatic scene Emily refuses to declare her faith in Christianity in a public ceremony at Mt Holyoke Seminary for Women. She appears to stand alone, but I found out today that

Students were organized into one of three groups: those who professed, those who hoped to and those who were without hope. Dickinson was among eighty without hope when she entered and was among twenty-nine who remained so by the end of the year.  https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/node/134

The Dickinson Museum gives guided tours of her home and  the adjacent “Evergreen,” her brother Austin’s home. Colin, our tour guide,  gave fascinating background to each room in the house, along with at least one recitation per room.

He helped me separate fact from film, as we viewed original furniture and the reproduction of her tiny (about 20″ x 20″) writing desk.  Although very social growing up, she spent much time in her latter years in her room overlooking Main Street within sight of Amherst College.

In the movie Davies made it seem like Emily might have solicited publication in the Springfield Republican, a journal that did actually publish three of her poems, edited without permission. In truth Emily never voluntarily submitted to publication, and it was only through her sister, Lavinia, that her work was finally published posthumously.  https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/publication_question

Apparently contemporary devotees of Dickinson were most upset by the the exaggerated morbid detail the film devoted to her decline and death.  She is now thought to have suffered from hypertension, rather than “Bright’s Disease,” a kidney ailment.

We toured the ground floor of “Evergreen,” Austin’s home, which is substantially untouched from its original condition. Apparently Austin, an attorney in his father’s firm, entertained lavishly any artist or musician passing through, and his house became something of a salon. So late were the revels, his father was known to appear with a lantern and nightshirt at the window to summon Emily home at an unseemly hour.  Edward Dickinson, Emily’s father, was both state and federal legislator with an impressive record, but he lacked the humor that his wife and children were famous for.                          “Evergreen”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The hour tour was fascinating to me with my many false impressions of Dickinson.  Never so much enjoyed an historical home tour.

I bought a charming little book called “Envelope Poems” with photographs of envelopes she used for composition. I’ll try to reproduce a page here. Note the word “which” on the right-hand margin, intended to substitute for “that” in the text. Scholars believe she intended both alternatives to be valid versions of her poems.

Transcription

Original

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Apostro-plectic

Punctuation has limited material or spiritual benefits, except perhaps for editors, lawyers and some mechanically-inclined English teachers. Yet it seems to rise to cosmic importance occasionally in my Facebook community and even in the world news. I draw the line at apostrophes, however.

A grammar-obsessed vigilante — dubbed the “Banksy of punctuation” — is on a mission to put a full stop on rogue apostrophes in the UK, according to a report. The anonymous crusader risks doing jail time to roam the street at night, scrubbing grammatical miscues from businesses around Bristol, he told the BBC. “It’s more of a crime to have the apostrophes wrong in the first place,” he said.

What can you say about a crusader who defends the honor of apostrophes?  So gallant to protect the small and vulnerable? So selfless to edit without reward? So civil-minded to remove offense from the view of editors and proofreaders?  Do we all sleep better, knowing that apostrophes have found their place before or after the “s” or have been dislodged from their obscene pluralization’s [sic]?  Does this crusade touch our deep anguish for distasteful signage? Or is this obsessive-compulsive disorder under the veneer of cultivation?

This is a mark of punctuation that can be mistaken for a fleck on the page. A mark that hangs in space, swaying between letters that seem to disown it. An ambiguous mark that could mean a contraction, a plural, a possession, a plural possession, or, in its absence, a case of pronoun possession:

“It’s hard to know when ‘it’s’ loses its apostrophe.”

(In this example of a contraction (it is) and a pronoun possessive (its), the single quotation marks around “it’s” look suspiciously like apostrophes, adding to our despair.)

Some people find this exercise entertaining. They are variously called grammarians, linguists, grammar- Nazis, lawyers or obsessive proofreaders. They should be allowed their harmless recreations unless they inflict them on the casual and the carefree, the contented abusers of hanging commas. Then their obsession becomes our neurosis. We find apostrophes flitting through our prose with alarming inconsistency. We are haunted by the plural possessives and the plurals disguised as contractions. We pause, we parse, we puzzle, we perspire with perplexity.

And when these apostro-plectic crusaders afflict us with their preoccupation, I am driven to my own crusade: the banishment of apostrophes from English. After decades of circling “its” and “it’s” on student writing at every level of secondary and tertiary education, I am convinced the world would be a better place without apostrophes.

There are many languages which seem well-off without apostrophes. There are many devoted students of the English language who are still befuddled by them. There are many pluralized nouns that have been contaminated by them. There are many more cases of overuse than underuse of the annoying specks. There are many flecks on white paper that have been mistaken for them.

I cannot imagine how the absence of an apostrophe would confound my interpretation of a writer’s message. If I wrote “writers message,” I would have no trouble recognizing that phrase as a possessive, rather than a plural.  It only looks wrong, because we are conditioned to expect apostrophes. If I wanted multiple writers to have a message, I would say “writers messages” or the “message of many writers.” Without the apostrophe, plurals and possessives are identified by their context, the same way a programmed spell-checker recognizes and corrects them. The presence or absence of an apostrophe will never change how we pronounce words or interpret their intended use. How do we know that a word pronounced as “writers” in conversation is a plural or possessive? By its context in the sentence, not its spelling.

As for contractions, we know that “didnt” means “did not”, whether we acknowledge the absent “o” or not. If we abbreviate a word, for example as “Mr,” we don’t have to place an apostrophe to note the absence of four letters. We accept that the word can be abbreviated and pronounce it as if the letters were present. Contractions are nothing more than a special case of abbreviation.  The apostrophe is symbolic, but unnecessary.

The abolition of the apostrophe would save numerous characters in a manuscript, would acknowledge in written language what is already true in spoken language, would end the confusion of millions of writers of English, would relieve the wearisome labor of English teachers and editors, would save a week of language instruction in every academic year, and eliminate three pages of every stylebook for the end-users of English. The efficiency of the move is so mind-boggling, it is unfathomable what would prevent it.

Oh, yes, I forgot about the “Banksy of punctuation,” the ranters bereft of a reliable rant, the editors and lawyers whose work might be de-mystified, and the purists who declare wholesale change in English as moral depravity or, at best, sheer laziness. If this is the full catalogue of victims of the apostrophic rebellion, then I consider them collateral damage.

Its a pleasure to lay their troubled spirits to rest.

 

 

 

 

 

by

Jonah

It ain’t necessarily so, it ain’t necessarily so.

De t’ings dat yo’ li’ble to read in de Bible,

It ain’t necessarily so.

When you read the Bible as a child, you remember heroic and fantastic images that later challenge your credulity. In adulthood the authority of the Bible collapses in disillusionment as the narrator of “It ain’t neceesarily so” articulates. About Jonah, the songs says,

Oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale, oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale.
Fo’ he made his home in dat fish’s abdomen.
Oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale.

The part we all remember is the fish, which is mentioned in two of the forty-eight verses of Jonah. So the redemption of a prophet and a major capital of ancient civilization is reduced to this:

Jonah in the Belly

In my recollection Jonah was about a man who tried to run from God. [What a doofus!] He was confined to a whale for three days to get his head straight [Served him right!], and finally agreed to do his job: preach to the city of Nineveh. But he was a still a doofus, because he didn’t like God showing mercy on the Ninevites. The final chapters seemed like an epilogue and not very important.

But a re-reading of the story later in life evokes God’s mercy in ways we don’t see in other Old Testament literature. Psalmists extol God’s mercy, and historians explain forgiveness of the Hebrew people in light of God’s mercy, but mercy comes in waves in this story, one right behind the other. And the story spans the limits of the known world. Jonah himself seems like a minor character in a cosmic drama.

First there is the mercy the sea-farers had on Jonah, when it seemed like he was the inevitable cause of their ship perishing in the storm. It becomes obvious after their interrogation of Jonah that he is the cause and Jonah himself says to them:”I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you” (Jonah 1:12).  What did they do? “Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land” (13).  They didn’t want to take out their misfortune on Jonah, in spite of the fact he had spent the worst part of the storm sleeping below. They had mercy on him until finally they had no choice, but to rid the ship of him.

Once in the water, Jonah does not perish because “the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah”(17). This part of the story is usually read as the low point for Jonah, but the text says “the Lord provided,” so while the accommodations were not Five Diamonds, the story suggests that God has saved Jonah, rather than executing him.  Jonah says about this imprisonment:

I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever;

yet you brought up my life from the Pit,

O Lord my God.

So we are intended to read the fish incarceration as God’s mercy.

Next, God has mercy on Nineveh, “in which there are more than a hundred and twenty-thousand persons, who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals” (4:11).  This verse touches the heart of mercy, sparing a people who have directional confusion, a metaphor of pathetic helplessness. When we speak of people who don’t know their right hand from their left, it is inevitably in mockery. There are a lot of graphic metaphors indicating how stupid people are by their poor differentiation of one body part from another, and none of them imply we should have mercy on such people. Yet God Almighty does.

The entire fourth chapter of Jonah is devoted to a parable about how the prophet was embittered because God allowed a sheltering bush to perish in one day. God argued that a bush to Jonah was not nearly as significant as a mighty city was to God. Many people know about Jonah and fish, but few would recall Jonah and the bush, a story with far more ethical implications. This chapter is bursting with the news of God’s mercy on all mankind and not merely on his chosen people.

So God schools Jonah about the wideness of his mercy, filling the final chapter with a parable and an explicit conclusion, “should I not be concerned about Nineveh. . .?” This seems to be the point of the story, not that a huge fish kept Jonah hostage for three days. Often the trailer for the movie overrides the depth of its message. And so with Jonah.

Nineveh is often considered the precursor of the modern city, and so its redemption is a modern parable.  The king takes Jonah’s prophecy to heart and commands a city-wide repentance. “Who knows?” the king reflects. “God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish” (3:9).  The words suggest humility, not that the citizens will dissuade God, but that God will change his mind.  This has a whiff of the Prodigal Son who returned to his father, not to regain his previous place in the family, but to be accepted as a hired servant. The offender leaves the initiative up to God, while the repentance serves to answer the offense. Intellectually the idea of God changing his mind is unimaginable, but through faith, all things are possible. The king of Nineveh speaks for his urban descendants today. We may not know our right hand from our left, but God has not given up on us.

 

 

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