Southern Bookman

Contemplating "kairos" for Holy Week and Easter

The ancient Greek word kairos means the decisive moment for taking action.

In the Gospels, kairos designated the time of conversion, when a believer accepts God's grace.

I've been contemplating the word's various meanings since coming across it in Karen Cooper's review in the Times Literary Supplement of Simon Goldhill's book, "The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity (Greek Culture in the Roman World)."

The word is similar to "ephiphany," originally referring to the Wise Men's visitation of the Christ child. The term was later associated with James Joyce's  short stories in "The Dubliners," defining the sudden insight that changes a character's life.

Cooper in her review used kairos in discussing Cassandra's awareness in Aeschylus' play "Agamemnon" that she and her husband Agamemnon would be murdered by Clytemnestra, the Greek leader's first wife.

Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by the god Apollo. When she refused Apollo's advances, he gave her the curse that none of her predictions would be believed. She foresaw the fall of her native Troy to the Greeks, but the Trojans didn't believe her.

Kairos originally meant the right time for the archer to release the arrow to hit his target. 

For Cassandra, kairos meant an awareness of a horrible, unavoidable fate.

It's one of those words that contains multiple meanings and deep relevance to our lives. It's the point of no return, the time of decision when a course of action is irrevocably pursued.

The word holds extraordinary symbolism for Holy Week and Easter. Kairos can arrive in the silence of our hearts.

 

W.H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" still speaks to world

"For poetry makes nothing happen," W.H. Auden claimed in his 1939 poem "In Memory of W.B. Yeats."

Yet, I reread Auden's elegy each January, believing against all odds that his message can change the world.

Yeats, who wrote "The Second Coming," which again resonates in our apocalyptic times, died on Jan. 28, 1939. Later that year, at the start of World War II, Auden wrote a companion poem pleading for human compassion, "Sept. 1, 1939."

The close of "In Memory of W.H. Auden" eerily describes the world's current situation, so similar to other times of looming crisis throughout history. Putin's troops on the Ukraine border. Rising totalitarianism. Pandemics and economic uncertainty. The corruption of political language.

Auden. Yeats. Orwell. Their voices ring with clarity and truth beyond today's babble of words.

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

 

 

Andre Dickens begins a new era for Atlanta

During my years in Atlanta, I've grown familiar with many of the city's institutions.

Piedmont Hospital, where my children were born, and my life saved from Afib. Grady Hospital, where I was taken after suffering a stroke in Lenox Station.

MARTA, whose trains I rode for years working at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's then downtown headquarters.

The Omni, later the CNN Center, where I ate too many fast-food lunches and covered the Atlanta Knights hockey team.

Peachtree Center, the downtown library. Georgia Tech, where my son attended baseball camp and I saw the Yellow Jackets, Atlanta's skyline rising beyond Grant Field.

Sacred Heart, where I was an earnest catechumen. Christ the King Cathedral, where I was married and our children raised in the church. Peachtree Presbyterian, where our children went to day care, and played basketball, and where I worked out at the health club.

Sarah Smith Elementary, Sutton Middle School and North Atlanta High. The High Museum. The Symphony. The Northside library. Chastain Park. NYO. Bobby Jones and other city golf courses.

During our years in Atlanta, several mayors have come and gone. With the new year, Andre Dickens begins his administration, representing a new generation that has risen, as has happened throughout Atlanta's history.

Driving down Peachtree for the first time this year, I couldn't believe that I'd lived in Atlanta for so long. The brilliant sunshine and blue skies made me glad to be here for a new chapter.

 

 

 

Flannery O'Connor's life, work examined in PBS American Masters documentary

Flannery O'Connor exhibited a saintly devotion to her writing and Catholic religion even before suffering from lupus.

After the debilitating and eventually terminal disease forced O'Connor to return to her Georgia home, she followed a daily ritual of prayer and writing. She bravely led a constricted life of intense pain, living with her mother on a remote farm in Milledgeville, Ga. 

She died of the disease at age 39, leaving behind several daring novels and a collection of masterful short stories. Her letters to friends such as Atlanta resident Betty Hester are considered spiritual classics.

O'Connor's courage and commitment to her work dominate the uneven PBS American Masters documentary "Flannery," which examines her career  through interviews, rare films and photos, readings from her work and a rare TV interview.

Enthusiastic readers Tommy Lee Jones and Conan O'Brien join writers Mary Karr, Mary Gordon,William Sessions, Hilton Als, Alice Walker, Alice McDermott and Tobias Wolff in giving appreciations of O'Connor's novels and stories.

Actress Mary Steenburgen reads from O'Connor's writing, and cartoonish sequences illustrate "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and her final story, "A Revelation."

O'Connor's longtime publisher, Robert Giroux, and friend and mentor Sally Fitzgerald talk about O'Connor's personality. Fitzgerald's recollections come from a three-hour session with her conducted by filmmaker Chris O'Hare, the genesis of the documentary.

The bizarre "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" illustrations aptly illuminate the story's themes. The accompanying excerpts indicate that the story's strangeness might alienate today's readers.

O'Connor's happy, if unconventional, childhood was shadowed by the early death of her father, also from lupus.

After attending an all-girls college in Milledgeville, O'Connor was accepted at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, where she stood out with her thick Southern accent, devotion to religion, and literary genius. She embarked upon a literary career in New York City, falling under the sway of the erratic poet Robert Lowell, whom she met at Yaddo.

Along with Elizabeth Bishop, O'Connor was one of Lowell's platonic literary loves, although the show indicates that she had deep romantic feelings for him. He was married to Elizabeth Hardwick at the time, following his disastrous first marriage to Jean Stafford, like O'Connor an accomplished short story writer not as well-regarded for her novels.

In the early signs of his manic-depressiveness, Lowell converted to Catholicism, which attracted O'Connor. He enlisted her in a nutty rebellion against Yaddo director Elizabeth Ames, whom he accused of harboring communists. Not one of O'Connor's brighter moments, as Gordon says.

After showing debilitating signs of lupus, O'Connor was forced back to Georgia. The black writer Walker's family lived nearby, but she never met O'Connor.

Deceived by her mother that she was suffering from arthritis, O'Connor was forced to use crutches because of bone damage from the cortisone she took. Fitzgerald at last told her the disease was lupus. Aware of her terminal condition, O'Connor wrote until the day of her death in 1964.

The film, produced in cooperation with O'Connor's estate, openly examines O'Connor's racism, keying in on her refusal to meet James Baldwin in Georgia.

Als, a black writer who's developed a mini-career interpreting white women writers (Hardwick, O'Connor and Joan Didion) unconvincingly defends O'Connor with a convoluted claim that she couldn't defy Milledgeville's white supremacy and maintain her artistic integrity.

He also says her physical condition wouldn't allow her to meet Baldwin elsewhere, although the documentary shows the rare TV interview conducted in New York City and details her visits to universities.

O'Connor's work once galvanized young readers like Jones and O'Brien in their college days. Her "Christ-haunted" Southern world looks even stranger today, a foreign country where people's acts and language are incomprehensible.

The documentary makes an earnest case that O'Connor's work remains vital. But many now likely find her work forbidding.

 

 

Christopher Hitchens' widow, agent seek to stop independent biography of writer

Christopher Hitchens is still stirring controversy, nearly a decade after his death.

In a hyped-up literary feud that Hitchens would have mocked, his widow and literary agent are seeking to halt a planned biography of the writer.

Carol Blue-Hitchens and Steve Wasserman sent an e-mail to Hitchens' associates asking them not to cooperate with author Stephen Phillips, who has a contract with W.W. Norton to publish "Pamphleteer: The Life and Times of Christopher Hitchens" in 2022.

The rarefied dispute gained momentum with a New York Times article Tuesday, following biographer David Nasaw's condemnation of Blue-Hitchens and Wasserman in a recent essay in the Nation.

Nasaw, the award-winning biographer of Andrew Carnegie and Joseph P. Kennedy, accused Blue-Hitchens and Wasserman of engaging "in a kind of censorship" and pointed out that efforts to control a subject's image through authorized biographies often backfire.

Calling Hitchens a significant figure of his times, Nasaw defended Phillips' effort to present opposing views of him.

A longtime writer for the Nation, Hitchens broke with his leftist colleagues over his support for the Iraq war and his increasingly misogynistic writing. A gifted raconteur, Hitchens frequently appeared on TV and as a public speaker.

As a leftist writer earlier in his career, Hitchens gained notoriety for books exposing Mother Teresa and Henry Kissinger. A noted atheist, Hitchens reportedly shunned religious conversion while dying of cancer in 2011.

The email by Blue-Hitchens and Wasserman sounds like something from a satirical novel by David Lodge or Richard Russo, or even Evelyn Waugh, if e-mails had existed during his life.

"Dear Family, Friends, Colleagues, Fellow Scribblers, Brothers & Sisters, Comrades:

We are aware that a self-appointed would-be biographer, one Stephen Phillips, is embarked on a book on Christopher. We read his proposal and are dismayed by the coarse and reductive approach. We have no confidence in this attempt at the man in full. We are not cooperating and we urge you to refuse all entreaties by Mr. Phillips or his publisher, W.W. Norton.

Feel free to contact us with any questions as you may have.

In solidarity,
Carol & Steve

Carol Blue-Hitchens, Executor of the Estate of Christopher Hitchens
Steve Wasserman, Literary Agent"

As The New York Times article pointed out, the email is self-defeating because it would silence those with the most favorable views of Hitchens. And those close to Hitchens are resisting; Hitchens' brother, Peter, a British conservative columnist, talked with Phillips, the Times article said

It's unlikely that Phillips can find many new revelations about Hitchens. He himself wrote the revealing and entertaining memoir "Hitch" before his death and has appeared in memoirs and a recent novel, "Inside Story," by his close friend Martin Amis. Former colleagues like Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn attacked Hitchens in print.

Phillips' title, "Pamphleteer," does seem limited. Hitchens was much more than that. But he wrote in the spirit of old-time pamphleteers like Thomas Paine. Perhaps the title is metaphorical.

Hitchens was a public intellectual who courted controversy. Blue-Hitchens and Wasserman's dubious campaign against Phillips runs counter to Hitchens' ideals.

Charlie Brown holiday classics headed to public TV

A bit of good news emerged amid Trump's scorched earth exit and the raging Covid 19 pandemic.

The beloved Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and Christmas specials will be shown on public television this year as well as Apple's subscription-based streaming channel.

Broadcast on commercial networks for years, cartoonist Charles Schultz's TV classics were to be shown only on the Apple + channel until public outcry resulted in Apple reaching a deal with PBS to broadcast the shows.

The Thanksgiving show will air on PBS Sunday, and the Christmas special featuring Vince Guaraldi's haunting jazz score Dec. 13. The shows will also be offered on Apple +, including times of free viewing.

Alas, the agreement arrived too late for the Charlie Brown Halloween special and the Great Pumpkin, absent from the public airwaves this autumn. Maybe next year, big boy.

Charlie Brown's Christmas includes a Bible verse and the singing of "Hark the Herald Angels Sing."

But the widespread love for the show likely will head off any protest about it being shown on a channel partially funded by taxpayers.

We only hope that PBS avoids any temptation to carry out pledge drives.

 

 

Barrett hearing reflects degradation of political language

The Amy Coney Barrett hearings showed that political speech no longer bears any relation to the truth.

That a law professor from the leading Catholic university could spread such a web of evasions and falsehoods before a U.S. Senate committee is sickening.

With the GOP railroading Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court, the degradation of the U.S. Senate and the judiciary is complete. The Democratic members of the committee shamefully capitulated to Lindsay Graham and the other Republican apparatchiks.

"Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true," Robert Penn Warren said in the opening line of his poem "A Way to Love God."

In the Barrett hearing, the shadow spread further across the American republic.

 

 

Flannery O'Connor's racism doesn't detract from her artistry

Flannery O'Connor was among the long list of venerated authors who expressed racist views.

While her racist slurs and opposition to black civil rights have long been documented, author Paul Elie in a June 22 New Yorker article accuses O'Connor's followers of seeking to evade her racism.

O'Connor's adherents have denied Elie's claims. Amy Alznauer, in a better argued article published by The Bitter Southerner,  says that O'Connor's racism has long drawn fire from critical commentators.

Elie, who included O'Connor in his survey of Catholic writers "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," asserts that O'Connor's supporters try to justify her views with the dubious argument that she was a product of her times. But he overstates her native Georgia's racial progress in the last years of her life, when the state's opposition to segregation hardened.

Elie's article coincides with the publication of Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's "Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O'Connor." Alznauer expresses outrage at Elie's cursory dismissal of O'Donnell's work.

Black authors like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison have condemned O'Connor's racism while admiring her fiction, Alznauer says.

As Elie points out, O'Connor like C.S. Lewis is one of those writers passionately followed because of her religious outlook. O'Connor's letters and essays with their spiritual reflections are as celebrated by many readers as her short stories and novels.

O'Connor's exalted position as a literary saint demands a reckoning with her racism, Elie says. He contrasts O'Connor with poet Philip Larkin, also exposed for casual racism.

"Unlike, say, the struggle over Philip Larkin, whose coarse, chauvinistic letters are at odds with his lapidary poetry, it’s not about protecting the work from the author; it’s about protecting an author who is now as beloved as her stories," Elie says.

An artist like O'Connor needs no such protection, no matter how condemnable her views.

 

 

 

Memories of Lisboa and Porto

Young male clerk wearing John Lennon glasses
at Livaria Bertrand, world's oldest bookstore,
stamps my books: Virginie Despentes and Pessoa.

"How did you get here so fast," I ask him
when he's already at the door,
without glasses, as I leave.
"I'm like that," he answers,
his smile like the sun on the Tagus.

Guitarist and trumpet player on the sidewalk.
playing Amy Winehouse songs.
Joyful music by young men in suits;
an old schizo joins their dance.

Smiles of women with dark hair,
the embrace of the female doctor
in her lab coat,
who takes my pulse
and assures me
my heartbeat is OK.

Small children in their school uniforms
at Sanhora do Rosario.
Community center for kids who grow up
wild on Porto's streets.
The director with his stutter
speaks of holiday barbecues,
afternoons playing football
with the young men.

At the nursing home, an old woman
wails in the corner as the elderly priest
awakens in a dusty glow
floating through the windows.
Doors flung open reveal
Christ on his cross, his downcast eyes.

How beautiful their Portuguese voices
searching for English words.
The man with legs bent backwards
begging on the Avenida de Liberdade,
men selling chestnuts on the street,
smoke rising in the light
reflected from the slippery sidewalks
made of yellow tile.

The happiness of old and middle aged men
gathered for lunch, hugs and kisses
cheek to cheek. The rain, changing to sun,
changing to rain, changing to sun,
the rivers, rushing to the Atlantic.

The suave guide John,
handsome as a rock star,
leads us to the castle,
tells how Ulysses founded Lisboa,
Tall pine trees, shaped like arrows,
cork held between our fingers.

Stylish young woman
guides us through
the immigration center.
Solemn faces of refugees
as they wait
in the enormous room.

Walking in the darkness
from the hotel to the airport,
5 a.m. departure.
Old oak trees, broken sidewalk.

As we sit on the bus,
to take us to the plane,
a song fills the space:
"I see fire burning the trees."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Historic Atlanta landmark threatened as Rock Spring Presbyterian disbands

The Tudor Revival Rock Spring Presbyterian Church rises above the commercial clutter of Piedmont Road, a vision from a vanishing culture.

After years of declining membership and finances, the church founded in the 1870s by some of Atlanta's most illustrious pioneer families has decided to disband, according to a report by Channel 11's Jeff Hullinger, himself an Atlanta institution.

The fate of the church designed by Welsh architect Charles  H. Hobson and completed in 1923 remains unclear. A developer bought surrounding acres from the church for $1.9 million in 2018 to build nine high-end houses, as reported by The AJC's all-time great freelance writer, H.M. Cauley.

Lovers of the old church and its historic cemetery fear the building will be torn down for commercial uses. The landmark was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990, which might save it.

The church's demise will end its many community services, as well as the live Nativity scenes that marked the Christmas season for generations of Atlanta families. Those programs didn't bring in money as the church's membership aged and young families moved to more dynamic congregations.

Following the campaign to save the historic 152 Nassau Building downtown, where Fiddling John Carson recorded the first national country and western hit record in the 1923, Atlanta risks losing another essential landmark. Rock Spring, named like nearby Rock Springs Road for a spring that once flowed in the area, could be purchased by a more thriving congregation, or converted into an arts center or concert hall.

I've never visited the church, but its commanding presence as I drove down Piedmont Road gave the comfort of faith and tradition. The church on the hill was one of those places that defined my conception of Atlanta as a true city. The building's destruction would take away another piece of Atlanta's soul.