Nous Sommes les Lapins

 The first heavy casualties of the French Revolution were rabbits. On March 10 and 11, 1789, the villagers of Neuville formed themselves into platoons, armed with clubs and sickles, and searched meadows and woods for their prolific little enemies. What dogs they had accompanied them, and the shout of "Hou, hou" signified to the rest of the hunting party a satisfactory kill...Disregarding the game laws that had protected birds and animals, and the brutal "captaincies" that enforced them, hobnail boots trampled through forbidden forests or climbed over fences and stone walls. Grass was mown in grain fields to reveal the nests of partridge and pheasant, snipe and woodcock; eggs were smashed or fledglings left to the dogs. Warrens were staved in, hares rooted out from behind rocks. In daring villages, pit traps were even set for the most prized game, which was also the most voracious consumer of green shoots: roe deer. The most spectacular assaults were on those chateaux in miniature: dovecotes, from which the peasantry had seen aerial raiding parties launched against their seed, returning in absolute safety to their seigneurial compound. They were, said one cahier, "flying thieves."...It could hardly be called poaching since there was nothing furtive about the onslaught. In some cases, the slaughtered game was hung from poles like trophies and paraded about the village...[There] were simply too many determined peasants who, with their winter crop destroyed by the climate, were not prepared to see their spring crop turn into rabbit fodder. In some places...villagers simply ignored the laws and hunted at will. When they ran into gamekeepers...they shot them dead on the spot.

From Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama

Think carefully on this. At first, it is almost comical, the notion that the Revolution began in earnest with the killing of previously protected game. It may even seem justified, said game having been allegedly responsible for depleting the stores of the farmers. This description occurs on pages 322 and 323 after Schama has spent considerable time explaining the economics behind what became the bloodiest revolution in modern history, and it is not hard, after all that, to mentally cheer on the proto-citizens as they explode in violence after so long being oppressed. 

But it doesn't take long to see a problem here. After all, soon (Schama dates it to less than 3 weeks) the rampant killing moves from birds and game to the gamekeepers. These people were, after all, not only keeping the law but their families fed and cared for.

In little time one of the cahiers (meaning "a list of grievances" but better understood today as a broadsheet explaining actions to the general public and written by pamphleteers) "insisted that it was 'the general will of the Nation that game should be destroyed...and this is the intention of our good King who watches over the common good of his people and who loves them.'" 

Most of us think of the French Revolution as breaking the backs of the monarchy and nobility, and there's justification to it as they were the people who famously paid with their lives. The King referred to here as being the motivator of the uprising is the selfsame Louis XVI guillotined with his wife, Marie Antoinette, just a few years later. 

But while we think of the Revolution as being an anti-elite whirlwind force that swiftly swept up innocents and guilty alike, robbing all of them of their most basic rights, it began with people who thought they were doing the (unacknowledged) will of the King. When I began reading Schama's book I did not expect to identify the initiators of the Terror with the followers of trump; in fact, I assumed contemporary Neuville villagers would be the ones stamping out, not woodcocks and rabbits, but rethuglicans. 

But instead, as we often find, history doesn't quite repeat as it slant rhymes. The contemporary Neuvillier is likelier to see immigrants as the doves of today, the "aerial raiding parties launched against their seed" (metaphorical today, given the far right conspiracy of replacement both in citizenship and jobs) and more than happy to smash eggs, stave in warrens, set the dogs on fledglings because it is what their King expects them to do. In Schama's words, "It was as though...the people had produced the assumption that the King now licensed what had been unlawful...Killing game [and gamekeepers] was not only an act of desperation, it was, by the lights of 1789, Patriotic." 

Is it difficult to see that trump's blanket pardon of nearly every January 6th offender is in that same line of thinking, at least to those who follow him? Do I exaggerate? I hope so. But Schama's recitation of greater and greater chaos finally devolving into blood does not encourage me. But for the immediate future, I fear we are the rabbits.

 

 

What I'm reading

The book that changed my direction toward the moments described best by poetry is one I happened to begin a couple weeks ago, Danse Macabre, a biography of Francois Villon by French historian Aubrey Burl. I vaguely remember reading Villon many years ago, mostly because I was reading a lot of erotic or bawdy poetry then as much of my own poetry was focused there. 

But Burl writes of him

Villon was born in an age of turbulence, a time of vast contrasts in wealth and poverty, in piety and villainy, in barbarity and artistry. It was a period of change during which he rejected the sterility of [common] verse in favor of sharply realistic poetry...Villon was himself a contrast...Many of his verses are remarkable descriptions of the decent delights and indecent depravities of the Paris that he knew so well: bishops and brothels; priests and prisons; clerics and criminals; Te Deums and taverns; ladies of the nobility and ladies of the streets. This empathy with everyday life and his awareness of its brevity enabled him to write poetry so ingeniously crafted that it seems to speak without art, person to person, to his readers.

I don't claim, as Burl also writes, "artistic brilliance" as a condition of my writing, although there was a period when I wrote formal poetry. It made me appreciate the work that goes into that. Here is a bit of Villon.

When I consider the dry bones 

In charnel houses, skulls lacking name, 

Which were the poor or the wealthy ones?

Masters of Requests, men of fame

Or common porters? Now the same.

King's man, merchant, soldier, baker, 

To this none-ness they all came,

Bishop like a candle-maker.

My other primary read, or rereading, is Poets on Street Corners, an anthology of Soviet dissident poets by Olga Carlisle, with her husband half the team known for translating Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. This 1970 paperback was the place where I'd first found the Anna Akhmatova poem I quoted in my last post, and it has remained with me since at least the early 80s when I bought it for the .25 cents penciled on the cover. Aside from Akhmatova the other poet I remember best from this book is the controversial Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose opening to "Babi Yar" still haunts me.

There are no monuments on Babi Yar, 

A steep ravine is all, a rough memorial. 

Fear is my ground--

     

 

 

 

We can't just mark a ballot

Before becoming a minister, my field was literature.  The most important lesson in criticism is not to criticize a work for what it's not. I published a recent sermon a few days ago which garnered many responses on one of the FaceBook pages I link to, most of them negative. My sermon was not intended to be a call to the barricades. I would love to storm the Bastille, but tell me where it is in 22nd century America. Is it in the school board? The town hall? The state capitol? Congress? The White House? It's a genius of democracy that power is diffuse, and to use it we need to know who to address. I know my congregation audience. One response I especially appreciated was a friend coming forward to say she, who had never been to a public protest in her life, would attend the next one with me. That's the best I could want.

I'm uninterested in responding to the criticism. Again, from literature, the work stands or falls on its own. But it did leave me wanting to make a stronger statement about the responsibility we have as people of faith to call it as we see it. This administration is actively involved in crafting and doing evil to the people least able to defend themselves among us: immigrants, children, the undocumented, non-Christians, women, people who work with their hands, gays and lesbians, members of the trans~ community, the poor who rely on government services and the poor who work for minimum wage and less, the homeless, the mentally ill, native Americans, the sick and the dying. In short, the members of the Beloved Community who most need community.

We're reaching a vote soon that can do some real good, that can put into place the actors we're counting on to move the country back in the direction of helping, not hurting. Of giving, not greed. But even if we win every single seat we hope for it means nothing without our involvement. When Obama was elected, our work had only started, and it was going to be a long, hard slog, even with an ally in the presidency, to accomplish what we need to. When he won reelection, we needed to continue working, maybe work harder.

We have been lazy, leaving it to others to do the things we need done, as if we can mark a ballot every couple years and that does it. That's why one of the greatest presidents of my time has been followed by one of the worst, why he has taken it as his mission, and his supporters' mission, to dismantle even the few good things we accomplished to help people who need it. 

We can't change that direction with cobblestones or bullets, even by overturning tables in the temples. We have to work together, understand one another and our friends, and make the changes necessary. And then we have to pay attention. 

"They promised us poetry! Where's the poetry!"

As I've mentioned before, I have been reading this book for over three decades. I finished it on the most recent New Year's Eve, just a few hours short of midnight, determined that I should not carry it around another year, or let it become four decades.

Do I recall much of the plot? No, but I don't think that matters much. What I retain is the flavor of post-war Paris, or at least as De Beauvoir and her circle experienced it. As I've also said before, I like to envision myself living the life of a commentator on what goes on in people's daily lives, noting the minutia of street and cafe life. I'm currently reading The Mauve Decade by Thomas Beers and Absolute Friends by John Le Carre, both of which provide glimpses into lives and times I couldn't otherwise know anything about, early 21st century cultural life in the case of the former, mid-century British post-colonial individual experience in the latter. I've often pointed out, to myself if no one else, the reason I read is to experience lives I couldn't otherwise.

This is the passage that, in my final days of reading The Mandarins, resonated most with me. In it I hear the sound of what it was like in those days in that place.

The Communist papers had announced the reading of a masterpiece in four acts and six scenes in which Lenoir "reconciles the demands of pure poetry with the concern for delivering a broadly human message to mankind." Julien intended to sabotage the meeting in the name of the old para-human group. In the articles written by Lenoir since his conversion, there was such a servile fanaticism, and he had put his friends and his own past on trial with such malignant zeal, that Henri was looking forward without displeasure to seeing him put in his place...
The auditorium was overflowing. The whole Communist intelligentsia was gathered together--all the old guard and many new recruits. A year earlier, many of those neophytes were indignantly denouncing the errors and faults of the Communists. And then suddenly, in November, they understood--they understood that it could help to belong to the Party. Henri went down the centre aisle in search of a seat and, as he passed, faces filled with hateful disdain. In that respect, Samazelle was right: they weren't the least appreciative of his honesty. All the year long, he had laboured mightily defending L'Espoir against the pressures of the Gaullists, had firmly taken his stand against the war in Indo-China, against the arrest of the Madagascan deputies, against the Marshall Plan. All in all, he had taken exactly the same position as theirs, but that didn't stop them from calling him a liar and a traitor. He went as far as the front rows. Scriassine looked up at him and smiled, but the young people grouped around Julien eyed Henri with hostility. He retraced his steps and sat down on a stairway in the back of the auditorium.

Eventually Lenoir reads a very dull, very conventional poetry/play that is broken up by shouting from Julien and his supporters, in which Henri joins. As he leaves the place later, he's joined by Lambert, a fixture at L'Espoir, who says, "I was hoping it would be more fun." Henri replies, "As a matter of fact, it wasn't any fun at all." The cause of writing and what it was meant to accomplish, and how, is deadly serious in this time and in this place, and even the disruption of an opposing faction is political and deadly serious. I can't say I miss that but being in the center of a situation where the reading of "a scene written in Alexandrine metre [in which a] young man was bemoaning his melancholy state...Parents, teachers, friends, each urged resignation, but he swept aside all bourgeois temptations while a chorus commented on his departure in sibylline stanzas..." That such an entertainment could overflow an auditorium, think of how seeing that must feel. I don't want to attribute it to some Gilded Literary Past in which the Word takes on divine powers--the audience is there more out of a sense of duty, some at witnessing the spectacle and some at making it a farce. But that enough people had read about it and cared enough to show up for whichever reason: Now there is something.

fool for christ

some days ago I was coming home from seeing my counselor when I drove past an older woman on the opposite side of the road, taking a photograph of the geese who hang out at one of the local restaurants.  I noted she had several knapsacks, so I figured her to be traveling.  I swung around at a gas station and pulled up and rolled down my passenger window. "sister," I said, "can I offer you a ride somewhere?"

she was about my age, maybe a little older. glasses, long hair in a ponytail down her back, streaked with grey.  ankle-length denim skirt, hightop sneaks, a flannel shirt rolled up to her elbows.  she giggled when she answered.  she said, "I was just taking pictures of the geese.  you never know when you'll see something like this again."

she asked where I was going and I said, "well, I'm heading home, but where are you going?"  she asked how far minneapolis was and I told her it was about an hour.  "oh," she said.  "I guess I'd have a long walk."  she asked again how far I was going and in that moment I could have told the truth and said I was heading about 20 miles further (I did need some dog food there) and dropped her off at the border without an ounce of guilt.  but something suggested I go the extra 40 miles and I said, "sister, I'll take you to minneapolis."

so she tossed her things in the back seat and got in and we exchanged names.  hers was kora (it might have been "coral").  I was facing north when I picked her up and she was surprised I turned around and headed back to the interstate:  "isn't minneapolis that direction?" she said, pointing back the way she'd been walking. "no," I said, "it's west of where we are."  "oh, I would have had a very long walk and gotten nowhere!" she said.

almost immediately she told me she was a street preacher who ministered to the homeless, that god had told her to leave her home a year and a half ago and go out on the road.  I said I was also a preacher.  we asked what each was.  she was "just christian," she said, "just jesus out of the book."  she had heard of unitarian universalists and had met a few and been impressed by them.  she filled up nearly every second of our drive with talk and questions and confessions.

she had left her abusive husband, she said, 5 years ago and back outside denver.  she'd started out 3 days before at a truckstop in south dakota and had been approached by a jamaican woman whose husband was a trucker and asked if she'd come home with them to help her get herself together.  but then this woman had stopped taking her meds, she said, and progressively got more and more aggressive, yelling and berating her, finally literally throwing her bags out of the truck when they'd stopped for gas at the station where I turned around.  she'd camped for 2 nights in the woods nearby, to pray and settle herself, before heading back out, and then had attended midweek services at a lutheran church not far out of town--I know the place, it's a few miles from my house--where she'd heard from people there that there are a lot of homeless people in minneapolis.  so she'd decided to head there (but apparently hadn't a very good idea of where it was from the part of the rim she was on).  I told her she'd likely been driven through minneapolis by the trucker and his wife.

she had been born in alsace-lorraine, she said, but couldn't speak more than rudimentary french and german, and her mother was long dead but her father was ungodly and so dead to her.  she'd grown up somewhere out west, she was very vague about it, and mentioned a daughter who was married.  I tried on occasion to ask about her family but it was like trying to blow into a whirlwind.  she was a talking machine, sometimes punctuating sentences with "praise god!" and "lord, that's your way!" and sometimes girlish giggles.  she was attending an online bible college out of australia run by an evangelical couple that gave 2 types of courses, free and paid for.  she was taking all of them free so she wouldn't get a degree but she didn't think that was important for the ministry she was doing.  she had no idea where she was going or what she would do when she got there except to preach the word to people as she could and if they'd listen and rely on their goodness.  she said that god and jesus had kept her safe and healthy all her time on the road.  she didn't care much, she said, of what anyone else's opinion of her was, she would just be as crazy as jesus wanted her in order to do his work.  I said she was being a fool for christ.  she allowed she'd never heard that phrase but she thought it suited her perfectly.  she repeated it several times during our ride.

she asked me about uuism and I gave her a short answer about no one knowing about an afterlife but we know we have this one and it's important how we treat each other here.  she thought that was wonderful and wanted to experience a uu service so I told her where the nearest congregation was in the area where I was dropping her off.  she'd mentioned her reliance on libraries several times so I told her the perfect place I could think of to drop her off at was on one end of nicollet mall by the county library.  she said that sounded perfect.  when we got there I pulled off to the side of the street and helped her unload and then shoulder everything, we exchanged hugs and "god bless you"s, and I watched her waddle around the corner before driving off and heading back out to the rim.

later, my wife would ask me "do you think she was crazy?" and I'd answer, "yes."  she'd mentioned refusing to take mental health exams in order to receive social services, claiming that second timothy says you can't be crazy and a christian, so since she was christian she wasn't crazy.  but did I think she was a danger to herself or other people?  not for a second.  she seemed to have a solid understanding of life on the road, and if she didn't have it when she started, by this time she had.  she seemed to know how to stay safe--she said she'd never been physically harmed by anyone and I believe her--and when to recharge her energies.  after all, she'd spent a couple nights alone in order to pray and "get herself together."  and she didn't seem too concerned about getting anywhere in particular or getting something done.  she wasn't upset when she found she'd been heading in the wrong direction.  she was content to drift along, going where her god sent her and doing what she thought her god wanted her to do, and from what she told me it seemed what her god wanted wasn't very different from what my god wants me to do:  serve people and help them be as human as possible.  she didn't want anyone to stop doing anything he or she wasn't interested in stopping, just maybe to think about doing something else and being with them while they went about their lives.  she seemed extraordinarily happy and she said she wasn't on any meds--not being crazy--and didn't do drugs or alcohol or smoke.  she just liked people, she said.

Sunday Morning, Cuers, France

in the process of clearing out an upstairs room and getting rid of several years' worth of essays and research from students, I came across a batch of poems I wrote in the late 90s and thought I should let see the light of day (quite literally). I'll present 1 every little 1ce in a while. this one is a poem written about a mass killing in france.

Sunday Morning, Cuers, France

You'd have thought he was hunting birds,

each shot placed just so on an imaginary horizon,

each shot made to count. He worked with the precision of the practiced hunter,

which is what I took him for when he ambled past my shop.

He walked calmly. He wasn't in a hurry. The rifle

cradled in his arms, as if he were working out the best place to find pheasants.

The first to go, of course, was his family--parents, brother--bludgeoned with a hammer,

the way you take care of extra kittens. Why leave them the shame?

An old widow walked her dog on the opposite walk. Her husband had fought

with DeGaulle at Lucerne. I happened to look as a rose opened below her eye.

She dipped to pull up a stocking. Then she was down.

He shot the dog too, although no one seems to have noticed that.

There was a man with a limp, a regular customer of mine,

who preferred the smell of loose tobacco to cigars or cigarettes;

he dove through the glass door of the cafe a little harder than necessary

and went right through the glass. He did not get up.

Even then I had not placed the boy with the rifle.

There was no sound, I saw it all from the window of my shop

as a pantomime. Even then I had not thought to tell anyone what was happening.

It all seemed so familiar. My own boyhood in the fields outside Cuers had included

just this flush, this flash and drop; but here there was no retrieval.

He was well-placed beside the war monument in the square.

One woman, who had bokught a packet of chewing gum from me, and her friend,

ducked, I thought to hide. But when it was all over they stayed put too.

Finally, another man, who played boules with the pensioners for beer,

dropped his ball and his stance. Absurdly, I thought, That's surely a poor way to bowl.

Sure enough, the ball swooped, swung wide, rolled into the street.

The old man lay on his back, looking at the sky. His lips fluttered.

The boy stepped over. He was very calm, very poised.

He put the gun to his shoulder, held his gun steady, adjusted his aim

and fired. The old man's lips were gone, and much of that portion of his face.

Then it was over. The boy moved on, chose the seclusion behind a delivery van

to put the rifle in his own mouth. People cluttered the streets like feathers after a storm.

When I turned to the telephone, I could not open my fists to pick it up.

(photo: eric borel, the shooter)

to mask and unmask

I've spent the past couple days wondering why I'm so interested in this issue. I've written on it several times in the past but I've no clear connection to it: I'm not muslim, I'm not a woman, and I'm not even french.

it doesn't entirely strike me as an unfair law, one which puts greater emphasis on 1 segment of society than on others: society has a legitimate interest in people not concealing who they are in public (although it's notable that such things as motorcycle helmets and traditional masked costumes are exempt from the law). a few years ago marvel comics made exactly this argument the basis for their year-long civil war event and a part of what made that a good storyline was the reality that such laws would have just such an impact on the fantasy worlds of masked superheroes.

but it also strikes me that there is a more fundamental right involved, and that is the obverse to the traditional argument that "your rights end at my nose." my rights extend to my nose (literally in this case). I should be able to dress as I want--or to be undressed if I want--so long as I opt out of those activities where society has a legitimate stake in making my identity public (driver's licenses and id cards, for instance). this is less a libertarian stance and more anarchic: anarchy doesn't devolve other people's rights but raises an individual's right (while not harming others) until the individual becomes the state.

burqa update

france's senate has just passed its bill that will make wearing a full burqa a crime. in a world where people fear even things they can see such legislation is understandable but no less wrong. it is not my place, nor france's, to tell someone else what to wear or what not to wear. oddly, some places in france have also reserved the right to ban the traditional patristic right of bare chests. I say "oddly" because france is also renowned for its liberal view of public nudity. there is a schizophrenic mindset in france today: the state wants to tell people to cover up but not too much.

american women wearing the niqab

impressive article, well-researched and humanizing. I especially love the opening...

french burqa ban closer to law

this remains a bad idea. however many valid reasons a government might find for restricting the freedoms of individuals--and there are valid reasons, most involving identification--the practice remains unethical. states should not determine what individuals can't wear any more than what they must wear. once one state determines that for certain reasons its citizens must not wear something (like a burqa) it can't morally argue against another state determining that its citizens must wear something (like a burqa).

FRANCE'S BURQA BILL

out here on the rim, we don't see a whole lot of burqas. I've had a number of enburqa'd students in the Citites (although none of them have been veiled, but I've spoken with some in passing and admit it can be disconcerting--none of the cues we're used to) and it's not a very frightening sight. the fear of the unknown takes a lot of forms and for one to be afraid because one can't see all of someone else is understandable. but one's fear is no reason someone else ought to change her peaceful behavior.