View From the Precipice: Archive

 

December 2024

 

 

Reflections on the Election: Women Deific, Dead, Defiant

 

 

 

               Howle, howle, howle, howle!

 

                                 --Lear, King Lear

 

 

               When one fled past, a maniac maid,
              And her name was Hope, she said:
              But she looked more like Despair . . .

                                  --Percy Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy

 

 

A few days ago my wife and I visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to catch the visiting Georgia O’Keefe/Henry Moore exhibit.

 

We arrived early and decided to join a two o’clock museum tour until our entry time came up.

 

In the Asian Art wing the docent gathered us in front of a sculpted relief of Durga, a Hindu deva (goddess), in the act of slaying Mahishasura, the asura (demon) of ignorance. Mahishasura was depicted emerging from the head of a water buffalo, a beast of burden traditionally considered dull-witted.  

 

It only occurred to me later that Durga would make a fine cult deity for docents.

 

I’ve never met, or even laid eyes on, a male docent. Tour guides, yes, of course, and trip leaders, and teachers—at least, after I left grade school. (In the Dark Ages of my childhood, the only adult male spending all day in a grade school was the principal.) Docents slay ignorance, and most of them are, like Durga, women. (Or at least they seem to be. These days, in some cases, it’s hard for me to tell.)

 

Durga was still on my mind when I sat down to write this essay two weeks after the presidential election. The parallels are not far to seek.

 

The Hindu Trimurti (trinity) of the supreme gods—Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—had created Durga and endowed her with all their powers and attributes in order to save Heaven, for the armies of the invincible Mahishasura had thus far defeated all who stood in his way. Durga was the Trimurti’s last defense against complete annihilation and the triumph of evil everywhere and forever.  In German mythology this moment goes by the name of Götterdämmerung: “The Twilight of the Gods.”

 

Today, the Asura of Ignorance has orange hair and his Army of Ignoramuses is threatening to annihilate what nearly half the American electorate considers Heaven, politically speaking. The Trimurti of the old order, of The New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement—Efdiar, Emelkay, Elbijay—are facing their own Götterdämmerung and are on the verge of extinction.

 

And our Durga? The Woman Warrior in whom we invested our last hope?  Where is she?

 

Enter Lear, howling, on the stage of my mind, the morning after the election.

 

But who is that dead woman he holds in his arms?

 

Vice President Kamala Harris has survived her encounter with Mahishasura. She gave her all to slay the avatar of ignorance, but it was not enough. She lives to fight another day. Perhaps that limp, pale figure represents all that remains of her future viability.

 

If not Kamala, then who? Who is that dead woman? Cordelia was no woman warrior, but she did speak truth to power. Perhaps her fate is a warning to anyone who would do likewise.

 

Or is this the figure of Liberty, her torch extinguished and her book of laws torn and scattered on the field of battle?  Is it the corpse of our compassion? Of working class solidarity? Of a woman’s right to control her own body? Or (let’s get real) is it the body of Josseli Barnica, who on September 7th died of sepsis in a Houston hospital when, after a miscarriage, she was denied an abortion until the fetal heartbeat had ceased?

 

The figure of Cordelia in my mind is, as the psychoanalysts would say, overdetermined. There are so many candidates for what she symbolizes that no single candidate will suffice.

 

Lear poses an opposite challenge to the interpreter. In his case, every candidate seems unsatisfactory. The easy sell is that he represents the Man Who Would Be King, our very own orange-haired water buffalo. The Orange One, after all, bears ultimate responsibility for the catastrophe about to overtake us. And isn’t he mad as a hatter, just like Lear?

 

But why would the Asura of Ignorance be howling? No, no. He’s dancing on Cordelia’s dead body, not weeping over it.

 

Who then weeps for the death of Liberty? Democracy? Women’s rights?

 

The enemies of Mahishasura, that’s who. I mourn, along with 74,617,099 other Americans, as the cortege draws near.

 

The fit is nearly perfect, except for one thing: we saw this coming and did all we could to stop it.

 

Neither Mahishasura nor his enemies fit the role of King Lear. What we need is a tragic hero. What we need is a hero who is ignorant of the damage he has done, until it’s too late.

 

The essence of tragedy is what Aristotle called anagnorisis: the Reveal. It’s that moment when Oedipus realizes he’s murdered his father and slept with his mother, and there’s nothing left for him but to gouge out his eyes, because appearances are deceiving. It’s that moment when Agamemnon realizes, as he steps into the bath and the sword pierces his heart, that his wife Cytemnestra has not forgotten it was he who had their daughter killed to please the gods. And it’s that moment when Lear realizes that the daughter who had nothing to give him except her love has died, a victim of the forces unleashed by his ignorance of her gift’s immeasurable value.

 

“Nothing will come of nothing,” says Lear, when Cordelia confesses she has nothing but her love to give.

 

How wrong he was.

 

Tragedy is all about ignorance, and its consequences. It’s about the kind of ignorance that doesn’t know it is ignorance until everything it loved and cherished is lost. The kind of ignorance that is obdurate, stubborn, disingenuous, prideful, aggressive—even violent—or, worse yet, passive and complacent and uncaring. “Culpable ignorance,” the nuns called it, as I remember.

 

The kind of ignorance displayed by those who voted for Donald Trump. Ignorance as asura. Ignorance invincible.

 

Until it’s not. That “aha” moment comes when the tragic hero looks down at what he holds in his arms.

 

The election of Donald Trump may be a catastrophe, but it’s not yet a tragedy, and won’t be until MAGA Nation’s Social Security checks stop arriving in the mail and its government subsidized health care is suspended and its air becomes unbreathable and its water undrinkable and its food poisonous for lack of government oversight. It won’t become a tragedy until MAGA Nation’s homes have been incinerated by wildfires, or inundated by coastal flooding, or washed away by torrential rains, or blown away by hurricanes so often that home insurance is no longer affordable, or even available. It won’t become a tragedy until what MAGA Nation pays for food, clothing, and shelter skyrockets under the pressure of punitive and unnecessary tariffs on foreign goods, and its food rots in the fields for lack of harvesters, and the next pandemic mows down its loved ones for lack of an effective vaccine, because the man in charge of such things believes vaccination is of the Devil.

 

And for the rest of us? All of that, but without the tragedy, because we knew what was coming and tried to prevent it.

 

There remains the consolation of “I told you so,” meagre as it may be.

 

And the consolation of despair.

 

Percy Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, from which my second epigraph is taken, describes a dream vision that came to the poet during the reactionary aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Bonaparte had been defeated, clearing the way for the re-establishment, across the face of Europe, of the despotisms, monarchies, and oligarchies that had prevailed a quarter of a century earlier, before the French Revolution rose up to challenge them with its promise of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

 

In England, a new kind of oppression was brewing on top of the old. It took the form of a nascent, unregulated capitalism violently opposed to workers’ rights and dedicated to the proposition that some people were created unequal in order to fulfill God’s purpose, namely, that they be worked to death in England’s “Satanic Mills” (the words are William Blake’s) for the betterment of their country.

 

On August 16, 1819, a crowd of some 60,000 working class men, women, and children gathered at St. Peter’s Field near Manchester to demand voting rights and to protest their government’s oppressive legislation, which promoted the interests of capitalists and landowners at the literal expense of those who worked for them. These laws included tariffs on foreign wheat that had driven the price of bread beyond the reach the laboring poor, for whom it was their chief source of nourishment. The authorities ordered the local cavalry to disperse the crowd. They charged in on horseback with sabres drawn. Eighteen people were killed and some 700 injured, including women and children.

 

The Masque takes its title from a courtly entertainment of the same name, an allegorical play or procession in dumbshow intended, during its Renaissance heigh day, to extol and flatter the reigning king, whom Shelley represents in his poem as Anarchy. For the poet, any mon-arch or sole ruler, like George III of England, claiming absolute power without check or restraint, is in fact an an-arch, a figure of lawlessness, because he serves no law but his own whim.

 

As Anarchy, disguised as Monarchy, rides down the streets of London on his steed, trailing servile ministers and toadying appointees in his wake and terrifying the assembled onlookers into silent acquiescence or awing them into stupid admiration, it seems that any possibility of ever making England the “green and pleasant land” of Blake’s prophetic imagination has been lost, utterly.

 

Enter . . . no, not Lear bearing Cordelia, and no Woman Warrior either, but a “maniac maid.”

 

In a world swarming with figures in masks, Hope, too, wears a mask. The word “maniac” comes from the Ancient Greek mania, a cousin of manes, the spirits of the dead, which were thought to have divine powers. To be a “maniac” was to be possessed by them. Out of her mind with despair, Hope is driven by the ghosts of Anarchy’s innumerable victims to do the only thing left to do. She lies down before the oncoming horses with “a patient eye,” expecting to be trampled like the women and children of St. Peter’s Field. In doing so, however, she brings the procession to a screeching halt. In an instant, Anarchy is discovered lying dead on the ground.  

 

I’ll leave it to my readers to decide if the blood through which Hope walks “ankle-deep” when she next appears is that of Anarchy or the crowd at St. Peter’s Field. Stanza 35 implies it was shed by the latter, the “Sons of England.”

 

Shelley was an unwearying advocate of non-violent resistance. His writings shaped the political philosophies of Thoreau and Tolstoy, as well as Ghandi, who often cited The Masque during his campaign for a free India. Hope’s desperate act of self-sacrifice illustrates the wisdom of Thoreau’s exhortation in Civil Disobedience: “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.” Hope never dies, but its actions may, when all seems lost, look like Despair.

 

That said, counter-friction can take many forms besides lying down and letting yourself be trampled to death. Letters to the editor. A silent protest. Teaching your children well. Providing refuge. Serving dinner at a homeless shelter. “Do the duty which lies nearest thee, which thou knowest to be a Duty,” wrote the Scottish philosopher, Thomas Carlyle. “Thy second duty will already have become clearer.”

 

Unlike the frustrating ambiguities of Durga or Lear, the relevance of Shelley’s allegory to our present crisis is, I believe, unmistakable, as are the roles to be assigned.

 

If not, I’ll spell them out:

 

Anarchy is Donald Trump.

 

Hope is you. And me.