The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake

Source of book: I own this.

 

Many years ago, my wife and I visited the Huntington Library when they had on display a selection of William Blake’s illustrations for Paradise Lost. Although we all likely had to read “The Tyger” - his most famous poem from Songs of Innocence and Experience - fewer people realize how great of an artist he was as well. One of my several copies of Divine Comedy has the Blake illustrations, and I can attest that they are stunning in person. 

 

A couple of years ago, the Getty had a temporary Blake exhibit, and it worked out to take a day off work and combine that with an LA Phil concert. One of the works displayed was the original of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The pictures were, of course, amazing. The text was a bit odd, but intriguing enough that I went ahead and found a slim paperback volume that had reproductions of the art along with a printed version of the text to make it easier to read. 

 

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is fairly brief, with a succinct argument in favor of Blake’s own mystic and even revolutionary views on religion and philosophy. It was largely written as a response to Emanuel Swedenborg’s book of theology, Heaven and Hell. I didn’t go back and read that book, but glanced at a bit of Wikipedia regarding the author and his views. For his time, Swedenborg was himself a bit of a progressive in some ways, and in other ways seems to have been a proto-Joseph Smith with his visions of angels and claims of direct inspiration. 

 

In any case, Blake disagreed strongly with Swedenborg’s idea that good and evil were completely black and white, totally separate. Blake, rather, saw lines as blurry, and also that God must have created evil if he created everything, which, well, is basically a sticky wicket for monotheism. Swedenborg, like Blake, seems kind of interesting as person as well, so I might have to do a little reading there some day. 

 

So, on to the book. Unlike Songs of Innocence and Experience, this book isn’t strictly poetry. It has poetry to be sure, but also some prose. And a lot of art. It is a hybrid work in that sense. 

 

I’m not going to try to summarize the book at all - I recommend reading it for yourself. Because the art and the poetry and the ideas are all facets of its meaning, I think it really has to be experienced as a whole. 

 

That said, I will quote a few lines that I thought were particularly interesting. They are, alas, out of context, but perhaps a taste will be enough to get people reading this book.

 

First is the introduction, a poem that echoes Biblical prophetic poetry. 

 

THE ARGUMENT

Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air, 

Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

 

Once meek, and in a perilous path 

The just man kept his course along 

The Vale of Death. 

Roses are planted where thorns grow, 

And on the barren heath Sing the honey bees.

 

Then the perilous path was planted, 

And a river and a spring 

On every cliff and tomb;

And on the bleached bones 

Red clay brought forth:

Till the villain left the paths of ease 

To walk in perilous paths, and drive 

The just man into barren climes.

 

Now the sneaking serpent walks 

In mild humility; 

And the just man rages in the wilds 

Where lions roam.

 

Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air, 

Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

 

A later section is entitled “The Proverbs of Hell.” There are two pages of them, but I will highlight a few. These two echo the Bible - the Proverbs.

 

In seed-time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

 

I love that one. The application of the cycle of growing to knowledge. 

 

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

 

This one is a direct pushback against centuries of “christian” theology that explicitly taught that female bodies were shameful and dirty and defiling to a man. 

 

The cistern contains, the fountain overflows.

 

That too is a good one. Be a fountain…

 

Think in the morning, act in the noon, eat in the evening, sleep in the night.

Not bad advice in many cases. Definitely think before acting. And after acting, refresh body and soul. 

 

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

 

Oof. I think that one may be a bit too accurate. And this one, which is a pretty good description of projection. (See: MAGA)

 

As the air to a bird, or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.

 

There is later a passage discussing the Prophets, imagining a conversation with Isaiah and Ezekiel (two of my favorites.) Blake asks a question that I too have pondered. 

 

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them, and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, and so be the cause of imposition.

Isaiah answered: “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception: but my senses discovered the infinite in everything; and as I was then persuaded, and remained confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.”

 

 

I mean, isn’t it plausible that the ancient writers didn’t think they were writing a book that would later be venerated as the very words of God? That maybe they were, like writers now (including, perhaps, me) who are just trying to tell truth as we see it and believe it? And Isaiah’s righteous indignation at the mistreatment of the poor can indeed be seen as the voice of God, not because of a literal voice, but because of the nature of God as defender of the poor?

 

A later conversation occurs between the author and an angel. Perhaps the best line in the book is this one:

 

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

 

The book ends with another profound observation, with I think theologians and politicians (and all of us) would do well to ponder. 

 

One law for the lion and ox is Oppression.

 

This was definitely a fascinating book, and one I may return to from time to time just to savor the proverbs and ideas. 

 

Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

Source of book: I own this

 

Back in 2020, during the height of the Covid pandemic, our book club went to meeting on Zoom for safety and legal compliance. Somehow or another, we ended up reading Parable of the Sower, which felt disconcertingly relevant. 

 

Well, here we are again. We decided to read the sequel, Parable of the Talents, which just happens to have a demagogic president who wraps himself in the flag and violent fundamentalist religion. And literally uses “Make America Great Again” as his slogan. 

 

Likewise, you can find out of control wildfires in the Los Angeles area, driven by climate change, people losing themselves in virtual reality and AI, and even measles out breaks in….wait for it…March of 2025. Not to mention a pointless invasion of Canada. 

 

Octavia Butler died in 2006, and this book was published in 1998. So yes, she was a bit of a prophet. 

 

Not that MAGA is a new slogan. All Trump has done is recycle all of the old KKK rhetoric and slogans from a century ago. After all, the Klan never went away. It just rebranded under names like The Heritage Foundation. And, it has become clear, Evangelicalism. (“Christian America” as the book calls it…)

 

Ursula Le Guin pointed out in her preface to The Left Hand of Darkness that ““Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” In this sense, Butler had no need to “predict” the future. All she did was notice the here and now, reimagine it. 

 

The two “parable” books form a series and should be read in order. They follow the continuing adventures (if that is the right word) of Lauren Olamina, the founder of the Earthseed cult during a time of incredible social upheaval. The second book references the events of the first book a lot, so I strongly recommend reading Sower before Talents.

 

The story picks up in Mendocino County, coastal northern California, where the group has settled on Bankole’s family land. They have built a community - Acorn - where they subsist on what they can grow or barter from nearby towns. 

 

But there is a threat. Violent religious fundamentalism (think Christian Al Qaida…or Doug Wilson perhaps) has found common cause with politician Andrew Jarret, who becomes president on a platform of restoring order and America’s greatness. He claims the crusader gangs that are out to exterminate other religions (including more liberal Christians) aren’t under his orders, but that seems unlikely. 

 

I hesitate to say more than that, because the plot twists are an important part of the experience of the book. I guess I will just hint that there will be some thinly veiled explorations of things from US history that many of my fellow white people would rather forget or deny. 

 

As I put it during our meeting, there is nothing in this book that Americans haven’t already done. Nothing. We just did it to “other people.” 

 

So, you have a peaceful village razed, its inhabitants enslaved, and attempts made to convert them to the “true faith.” 

 

You have a form of enslavement all too typical in our history, with regular rapes and beatings. 

 

You have “fine upstanding” white males with wives and children who also moonlight as slave guards and get orgasmic from their abuse of women of color. 

 

Yep, it’s all there. 

 

Like the other book, however, there is still a significant amount of hope. The human spirit lives on, despite those who sear their consciences and give themselves over to the abuse of others. 

 

The book also focuses on the life of Lauren’s daughter, Larkin (aka Asha Vere), who is stolen from her by Jarret’s raiders as an infant. 

 

Larkin never buys into the whole “Earthseed” idea - that of dispersing human civilization to the cosmos. And, interestingly, this is the one part of the book that seems most like a Musk wet dream. It is one thing to believe in “God is Change,” and quite another to strive for that heaven away from earth in outer space. 

 

The book itself explores that tension a lot, as the competing voices of Lauren and Larkin wrestle for control of the underlying narrative. 

 

There are so many great lines in the book. I found that Butler’s vision of fundamentalist religion was so very much in line with my own experience - and even more for my wife with the cult she was raised in and their terror of children reading books. (Her parents weren’t like that, but others very much were, and my wife was shunned in part because of her desire for a life outside of the cult.)

 

The book is psychologically perceptive, and the characters are complicated and nuanced. Even the best of people have flaws, and many more are a mix of good and bad. Hard times don’t always bring out the best in everyone. 

 

I did take a bunch of notes. I wish I could remember all of our discussion - we had a really good one this time at our club, including a couple of new participants who happen to be friends of mine. I’ll share a few of the things that stood out to me, though. 

 

First comes from the introduction by Toshi Reagon. She contrasts the Earthseed people with the Jarret people in a key way. If you believe in something beyond yourself, and can envision a future, you can work to create it. If you can accept and embrace change, you can work within it. Not so much for MAGA in fiction and in real life. 

 

But if you are not, you might find yourself in a oneness of fear and hatred, only wanting and serving one thing. You might think you own the elements themselves and all other living creatures must bend to serve your narrow-minded vision of domination. You might look at the map and, as slave masters did centuries ago, think it is a plaything for your pleasure only. You will never learn. 

 

Reagan quotes one of the “Earthseed Scriptures” - the poems written by Lauren in her book of the religion she founds.

 

Embrace diversity

Unite - 

Or be robbed,

ruled 

killed

By those who see you as prey.

Embrace diversity

Or be destroyed.

 

The prologue, in the voice of Larkin, is fascinating. In it, she expresses her frustration with who her mother was. 

 

I’ve never trusted her, though, never understood how she could be the way she was - so focused, and yet so misguided, there for all the world, but never there for me. 

 

This is a fascinating line. I think it holds true for many - probably most - of the children of great people. You know, the ones who change the world. Great artists, thinkers, writers, musicians, leaders. The kids tend to come second to the “great cause” which consumes them. That is what Larkin expresses here, and is a thread that runs through the entire book. As she points out later, Earthseed was Lauren’s favorite child, and Larkin would never have been her passion. 

 

Darkness

Gives shape to the light

As light 

Shapes the darkness.

Death

Gives shape to life

As life

Shapes death.

The universe

And God

Share this wholeness,

Each

Defining the other.

God

Gives shape to the universe

As the universe 

Shapes 

God. 

 

Near the beginning is also an interesting musing on The Pox, the mysterious disease that ravages the country before the first book. Bankole, the old doctor, has a perspective that fits all too well the experience of Covid, and will likely define the next pandemic even more, given Trump/Musk’s gutting of public health. 

 

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that this is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people. 

 

This is actually the MAGA and DOGE goal. Make like far worse for the masses of people, while transferring ever more to the obscenely rich. Who needs education? Who needs a living wage? Who needs public health or even access to healthcare? Who needs a planet, for that matter? There is money to be made and who cares about the rest…

 

There is another harrowing line later, when it becomes clear that Jarret will likely win. Lauren understands that even if they try to build relationships with the people that surround them, that will not save them if things get violent. 

 

I doubted that would prove true - at least not on a large scale. We would meet more people, make more friends, and some of these would be loyal. The rest…well, the best we could hope from them would be that they ignore us if we get into trouble. That might be the kindest gesture they could manage - to turn their backs and not join the mob. Others, whether we thought of them as friends or not, would be all too willing to join the mob and to stomp us and rob us if stomping and robbing became a test of courage or a test of loyalty to country, religion, or race. 

 

There is something appealing about the Earthseed religion (as Larkin later notes) and I would be rather down with the mutual aid parts of it, even if I didn’t buy into the space seed stuff. This line, perhaps, is the best argument in favor of such a religion. 

 

“It means that Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe. To us, that makes it the most powerful reality, and just another word for God.” 

 

Or, perhaps this one:

 

Beware:

At war

Or at peace,

More people die 

Of unenlightened self-interest

Than of any other disease.

 

The appeal of the community is genuine, and I thought this was a particularly interesting way Lauren describes her goal. 

 

“I was building a community - a group of families and single people who were still human.”

 

That’s one of the things I love about our book club. It really is a community that is still human. We don’t always agree on everything political, but we are committed to human empathy and reason and mutual care. 

 

Lauren further describes her “scriptures” in a way I wish we would view all sacred writings.

 

“I didn’t make it up. It was something I had been thinking about since I was 12. It was - is - a collection of truths. It isn’t the whole truth. It isn’t the only truth. It’s just one collection of thoughts that are true.”

 

Another line sure seemed appropriate to our own times. As America (in the book) lurches toward a catastrophic and pointless war with Canada, Lauren notes:

 

It shouldn’t be so easy to nudge people toward what might be their own destruction. 

 

I also made a note about the way that Jarret’s government removed children from families, usually because they were poor or homeless. And also because their parents were considered “heathens.” 

 

This is actually an accurate description of the reason that the Indian Child Welfare Act was enacted. Roughly half of all Indian children were being removed from their homes and placed in foster homes. Both because they were poor, and because that way their culture and religion could be taken away from them. As I said, nothing in this book hasn’t already been done. 

 

Further expanding this idea, Lauren notes that “a lot of people are convinced that cracking down on the poor and different is a good idea.” (That’s MAGA in a nutshell.) In a nod to the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, she notes the way children can be made to fabricate memories and falsely accuse their parents of abuse. 

 

The crusaders deliberately divided siblings because if they were together, they might support one another in secret heathen practices or beliefs. But if each child was isolated and dropped in a family of good Christian Americans, then each would be changed. Parent pressure, peer pressure, and time would remake them as good Christian Americans.

 

As Larkin puts it, “so much evil done in God’s name.” And also, “Breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.” After the enslavement episode, Lauren talks about the difficulty of trying to “put ourselves together as respectable human beings again.”

 

There is so much in Larkin’s “reeducation” experience that sounded familiar.

 

Quiet was good. Questioning was bad. Children should be seen and not heard. They should believe what their elders told them, and be content that it was all they needed to know. If there were any brutality in the way I was raised, that was it. Stupid faith was good. Thinking and questioning were bad. 

 

I have experienced this - and, oddly, increasingly so as I got older and my parents descended into moral stupidity. Stupid faith became mandatory, while thinking and questioning became bad. This next passage also resonates:

 

There was a mindless rigidity about some Christian Americans - about the ones who did the most harm. They were so certain that they were right that, like medieval inquisitors, they would kill you, even torture you to death, to save your soul. Kayce [Larkin’s foster mother] wasn’t that bad, but she was more rigid and literal-minded than any human being with normal intelligence should have been, and I suffered for it.

 

That feels right for my parents. Not bad enough to kill, but willing to kill the relationship with their child rather than consider change - too rigid and literal-minded to embrace even normal intelligence. 

 

Yet another bit that sounded so much like my wife’s cult experience was this one.

 

It was as though my teachers believed that all the possible stories had already been created, and it was a sin to make more.

 

And this description fits exactly the “Culture War Christianity” I was raised in, and is currently viewing Trump as their lord and savior. 

 

The purpose of Christian America was to make America the great, Christian country that it was supposed to be, to prepare it for a future of strength, stability, and world leadership, and to prepare its people for life everlasting in heaven. Yet sometimes now when I think about Christian America and all that it did when it held power over so many lives, I don’t think about order and stability or greatness…I think about the other extremes, the many small, sad, silly extremes that made up so much of Christian American life. 

 

The Jarret parallel to Trump is also far too accurate for comfort. (Although Jarret seems to lack the racial hatred which drives Trump and MAGA - it’s genuinely about religion for Jarret.) But the things people project onto both is similar, as is the truth about what they both are at heart. 

 

The religious sorts see Jarret as a “man of god.” Others see him as standing for “order, good jobs, honest cops” - law and order. 

 

Those who are not of his camp hate and fear him - and rightly call him a hypocrite. But who sees him the most accurately?

 

The thugs see him as one of them. They envy him. He is the bigger, the more successful thief, murderer, and slaver.

 

The book also describes the catastrophe of the war with Canada. 

 

Much blood was shed, but little was accomplished. The war began in anger, bitterness, and envy at nations who appeared to be on their way up just as our country seemed to be on a downward slide. 

 

And also, climate change meant the US was dependent on Canada for food. Just a stupid war. This ultimately led to Jarret’s downfall. 

 

In less than a year, Jarret went from being our savior, almost the Second Coming in some people’s minds, to being an incompetent son of a bitch who was wasting our substance on things that didn’t matter. I don’t mean that everyone changed their feelings toward him. Many people never did. 

 

And, as Lauren rallies her people again, even as she knows they must split up to stay safe, even with the true believers choosing delusion, this will pass. 

 

“Not everyone in this country stands with Andrew Jarret. We know that. Jarret will pass, and we will still be here. We know more about survival than most people. The proof is that we have survived.”

 

Late in the book, Lauren notes that with time, the popularity of Jarret’s religion has faded. What is left has settled into being just another denomination. Earthseed, meanwhile, continues to grow because it offers what Christianity can’t - or won’t. 

 

But Jarret’s kind of religion and Jarret himself are getting less and less popular these days. Both, it seems, are bad for business, bad for the U.S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the population. They always have been, but now more and more people are willing to say so in public. The Crusaders have terrorized some people into silence, but they’ve just made others very angry. 

 

I think we are seeing the start of this right now. Trump and Elon’s kind of “governance” is bad for business, bad for the Constitution, and really bad for most Americans. People are starting to wake up to that, and more will, particularly if the goal of ending Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid succeeds. 

 

While predicting the future is a fool’s game, I do believe that someday, Trump and Elon will be gone - probably dead or fled to Russia - and the American people will still be here. No one, no matter how powerful, can succeed in declaring war on most of their own citizens. 

 

Lauren ends up teaching wherever she goes. I definitely identify with that. Had I not been forced into law school because it was the only cult option, I likely would have become a teacher. These days, I teach for the local law school, for an adult class through our local community college, and find a lot of my practice is about education. 

 

Lauren says, “It seems I’ve always taught.” And so have I. I too taught my younger siblings. I am literally the reason they got an education in math and science during high school. But wherever I go now, I find myself educating. It is who I am. Even this blog is an attempt at education - and not in the sense of lecturing, but in enlightening, and encouraging learning through discussion and reading. 

 

Here is another poem that really spoke to me:

 

All prayers are to Self

And, in one way or another,

All prayers are answered.

Pray,

But beware.

Your desires,

Whether or not you achieve them,

Will determine who you become.

 

Prayer has always been a fraught topic for me. Maybe part of it is that my mother buried herself in prayer, and never understood why I couldn’t do the same. Definitely part of it is how Evangelicals treat prayer as a begging session. Just pester the Old Guy Upstairs enough, and you can manipulate him into loving you more than he does other people. 

 

I mean, that’s “the power of prayer,” right? God treats you better than other people. This always bothered me. And it certainly seemed to be a bad basis for a relationship. 

 

To be clear, I’ve always talked to God and the universe. Still do. But like Lauren, I think that the power of prayer is what it does to us. It helps us focus and think and sustains our determination to act. We pray. And we act. 

 

Toward the end of the book, Lauren ends up with a companion, Len, who came from an upper-middle-class upbringing, but with parents who played favorites and essentially abused and neglected her. 

 

This stemmed from the fact that she, like Lauren, is a “sharer.” This physical hyperempathy comes from the use of a performance-enhancing drug. In Len’s case, both parents used it. This exchange is illuminating. 

 

“Oh my. And you were the evidence of their misbehavior, the constant reminder. I suppose they couldn’t forgive you for that.”

She thought about that for a while. “You’re right. People do blame you for the things they do to you.” 

 

I think this is true about my parents, although I am not sure I entirely understand why. Certainly they bear some guilt for having denied me my own self-determination as to college and career. The way forward I ended up finding involved my wife working to have the steady paycheck and benefits so I didn’t have to grind out billable hours and never see my family like so many young lawyers do. 

 

Perhaps this is one reason my wife and I have been blamed so much. Why we have been scapegoated in our family as the black sheep. We are the constant reminder of what my parents did. And they can’t forgive us for that. 

 

I also want to mention another way that the American society of the book and MAGA line up really well. MAGA and the American right wing generally have never gotten over Brown v. Board of Education, and have been working to undermine and even destroy public education for decades. In the book, they get their way, and education is no longer free. Either you pay a private school, or you homeschool. With predictable results.

 

“So,” Nia said, ‘poor, semiliterate, and illiterate people become financially responsible for their children’s elementary education. If they were alcoholics or addicts or prostitutes or if they had all they could do just to feed their kids and maybe keep some sort of roof over their heads, that was just too bad! And no one thought about what kind of society we were building with such stupid decisions. People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wasting their tax money, educating other people’s children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn’t hurt them.”

 

I know people who think this way. Hell, I was raised in this subculture. As if we weren’t all in a society together. 

 

For right wing homeschoolers of my generation (and following), there is a genuine hostility to the very idea of public education. In part, this is based on the problem that reality skews to the left - it turns out that white males aren’t the undisputed superior humans, for example, and LGBTQ people exist as a part of nature. So any reasonable education that isn’t religious and ethnosupremacist indoctrination will be problematic for inveterate bigots. 

 

But there was something else, just barely below the surface. White conservative homeschoolers burned with resentment that their tax dollars were, as Confederate Robert Lewis Dabney put it, being used “to give a pretended education to the brats of the black paupers.” It really was just racism the whole way down. 

 

Larkin, despite growing up in Christian America, eventually loses her faith. I fully understand this, and it is an ongoing journey for me. 

 

But the truth is, I had lost whatever faith I once had. The church I grew up in had turned its back on me just because I moved out of the home of people who, somehow, never learned even to like me. Forget love. 

 

Ultimately, I have come to feel this way about my birth parents. I don’t think my mom ever liked me. Certainly not after I hit puberty and stopped being a little kid. There has been plenty of empty claims about love, but loving actions toward me and mine have been absent. 

 

As with Larkin who never saw her foster parents again after she left home, when I became estranged from my parents five years ago, they never bothered to pursue me. The most I have gotten is some threats of hell and blame for her own actions from my mom. It has been complete radio silence from my dad. I guess I never really mattered, did I? They never even learned how to like me for who I was. 

 

I’ll end with one line about Len, who seems kind of like me in a number of ways, not least her personality. 

 

Len is a likeable person to work with. She learns fast, complains endlessly, and does an excellent job, however long it takes. Most of the time, she enjoys herself. The complaining was just one of her quirks. 

 

At its core, the book is a uniquely African-American perspective. Which, I think, is why it is hopeful in the worst of circumstances. They have already lived this. As one of Carson McCullers’ (black) characters puts it, “So far as I and my people are concerned the South is Fascist now and always has been.”

 

 We white folk feel panicky because we really haven’t experienced this. We have been carefully protected and insulated from the effects of our systems of oppression and inequality. Which means that, like Len, we will have to work a bit harder to build the necessary resilience. 

 

As The Parable of the Talents asserts, the battle between good and evil never really ends, but it can be fought, and good can succeed. You need that seed. And you need to use your talents. May people of good will do it together in our time. 

Chess (Ovation Theater 2025)

Back in the 1990s, when I was a teen, my brother and I had a friend who was (for a time) REALLY into chess. Which meant that I got dragged in to a bunch of games, and even ended up being transport for some tournaments my brother played in. (He was the one actually good a chess - I never had the patience to practice and learn the openings and tactics. I kind of remember how to do endgames, and can explain the basic theory of openings, but darned if I can actually recall enough to actually get through those first ten moves accurately.) 

 

Part of being immersed in that world was learning about the personalities, past and present. These were the days when Gary Kasparov was the king of chess, taking on - and for a while defeating - the best computers they could throw at him. 

 

Interestingly, Kasparov has had a subsequent career in political activism, against ex-KGB thug Vladimir Putin. 

 

Which, come to think of it, is a lot less icky than the political trajectory of the best-known American chess champion, Bobby Fischer. Which, coincidentally, is the person who inspired one of the central characters in Chess. 

 

I mention this chess experience because some of the lines in the musical make more sense if you know some of the terminology. For example, the reference to the “King’s Indian” - a modern defense for black that my friend liked to play, particularly against opponents of limited experience, at least if they opened with D4. (Bobby Fischer and Kasparov had success with this opening.) He preferred the Sicilian Defense against E4.  

 

Yeah, sorry, nerdy for a bit there. I can’t help it. 

 

And likewise, I was silly enough to try to see if the actors were playing any actual chess. Unfortunately, no, but even grandmasters are unlikely to be able to sing while playing…

 

Anyway, I really was not familiar with Chess at all. And it was my wife who particularly wanted to go see it (not that I ever have an objection to going out to a musical with her.) This was a bit of a surprise to me, because 80s music is more a thing me and my eldest kid are into, not my wife. 

 

Interestingly, this was literally the first time Chess has been done here in Bakersfield. The director, Hal Friedman, grew up with the concept album that led to the musical, and had this as a bucket list show he wanted to do. 

 

The primary draw, I must admit, for us, was that Shawn Rader was in it. He’s just unfairly good at whatever he does on stage, whether portraying Seurat, or camping it up in drag. Since he was playing the “Bobby Fischer” character, we knew we would get a show. 

 

I’m always interested in the scores for musicals, having played a number myself over the years, and being a musician interested in music. Chess is interesting because it combines that 80s rock sound with some surprising avant garde composing techniques. There are a lot of unexpected modulations, unusual chords, and ambiguous unresolved song endings. This makes it challenging to sing.

 

The lyrics are also not the easiest. Most of the show is sung, rather than spoken, so more like a opera than a typical show. 

 

Speaking of which, there are actually two rather different versions of this musical. The first is the British version, which opened on the West End. Later, there was an American version on Broadway, with a completely different song order, and a reworked plot. 

 

We got the British version, which I personally think is better, both because the plot makes more sense as historical fiction and because we get “One Night in Bangkok” to open the second act, rather than buried in the middle of the first act. 

 

The story is very loosely based - or maybe “inspired” by goings on in the chess world back in the 1970s. 

 

The cold war was always intertwined with the international chess scene. Most of the best players then (and often now as well) were Russian (or Soviet), and when Fischer took down Spassky in 1972, it felt like the moon landing, or the 1980 Olympic hockey match. It was a classic underdog story and a triumph of American democracy over Soviet totalitarianism. 

 

Well, kind of. By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s belligerent approach to statecraft was wearing a bit thin, and the “good versus evil” narrative was increasingly looking all too simplistic. Vietnam tore the scab off and revealed a United States that had its own issues with moral depravity and cynical disregard of the citizens of the third world. 

 

Chess is firmly in the “cynical” camp here. Everyone is playing a game, heedless of the people that get hurt. 

 

So, the two main chess characters are based on Bobby Fischer (Fredrick) and Viktor Korchnoi (Anatoly). But the central chess showdown was very loosely based on Fischer’s decision to forfeit his match against Anatoly Karpov. In addition, the character of Florence appears to be drawn from Fischer’s Hungarian mistress, Zita Rajcsányi, who was a grandmaster herself. 

 

Other than that, well, the story is fictional, and takes many of the usual stage musical turns. You have the love triangle between Fredrick, Anatoly, and Florence. You have the bitter first wife of Anatoly. 

 

And, because of the Cold War, you have political skullduggery. Anatoly (like Korchnoi) defects, and offers Florence information about her long-lost father as well as some state secrets. (purely fictional) 

 

How will Anatoly decide? Will he stay with Florence, or return to his wife? Can he exchange information for the return of Florence’s father? Will he throw the match, or choose to win because he respects the purity of the game? 

 

All of this can be a bit confusing at first, in no small part because so much of the exposition is sung, and the lyrics aren’t always direct. It is rewarding, however, to let the music itself tell much of the emotional story. 

 

A bit about this production is in order. When I first saw the set, I immediately thought of Q*Bert, that 1980s staple of arcades and home consoles. It turns out that the set designer also had that in mind. Children of the 80s! Anyway, it was both a great nod to the chess board and also to the constantly changing game everyone is playing. You can’t stop moving, you just keep jumping from one square to another, and hope you win in the end. 

 

I thought this production was also notable for having multiple male characters with outstanding voices. Shawn Rader, of course, was excellent. At times, his voice was on the ragged edge, particularly on the high notes - but this actually fit perfectly with his slightly unhinged, coked up character. 

 

Jesse Magdaleno, as The Arbiter (and occasional narrator) was excellent. He is a friend of one of my kids, and watching him grow as a performer over the last several years has been fun. He’s become a reliably solid actor and singer in a wide variety of roles. 

 

Finally, Dylan Struck as Anatoly. What an amazing voice he has - it can go from operatic to quietly powerful, and has such a silky tone. He had to play the straight man in this musical, and opposite the manic Rader, this was a definite contrast. He brought it all night, and it felt like he could even have hit even higher “money notes” had the score called for it. A very enjoyable performance. 

 

Christina Friedman played Florence, and I thought she acted the part well. She had a few pitch struggles early on, but settled in. As I said, it is a challenging score to sing, and she often got the more difficult modulations. 

 

Those are the performances that most stood out, but top to bottom, good singing and dancing. Given the small space and cast, the overall vision worked well. 

 

I’ll end by mentioning a few lyrics that were particularly interesting to me. Obviously, “One Night in Bangkok” is a classic - and the lyrics make more sense in context. Fischer, I mean Fredrick, has decided to sit the tournament in Bangkok out, instead providing color commentary and generally promoting himself as usual. And Rader was stunning for this song - I could have watched that performance over and over. 

 

A couple of other songs though, also stood out. First is “Pity the Child.” This is where the Bobby Fischer connection is particularly poignant. Fischer had a difficult relationship with his mother. She raised him and his sister as a single parent, after she fled Europe to the US due to antisemitism. She was homeless when he was born, although she eventually found financial stability. Most likely, Fischer suffered from mental illness, which, despite his mother’s efforts, was never properly diagnosed. So, the situation is complicated to say the least. Fischer’s difficulties with his mother may have been a significant factor in his eventual rejection of Jewish identity and embrace of antisemitism later in life. 

 

The song is clearly from Fredrick’s point of view, and one wonders what his mother’s perspective would have been. As one who has a difficult relationship with my own mother, some of this resonated. 

 

When I was nine I learned survival

Taught myself not to care

I was my single good companion

Taking my comfort there

 

He never asked "Did I cause your distress?"

Just in case they said yes

 

I took the road of least resistance

I had my game to play

I had the skill, and more -- the hunger

Easy to get away

Pity the child with no such weapons

No defense, no escape from the ties that bind

Always a step behind

 

Pity the child but not forever

Not if he stays that way

He can get all he ever wanted

If he's prepared to pay

Pity instead the careless mother

What she missed

What she lost when she let me go

And I wonder does she know…

 

As I said, interesting perspective. 

 

The other is the cynical “Nobody’s Side.” It actually feels more accurate now than it did when the musical came out. (Which is why the news monitors in this production played a clip of Trump’s ambush of Zelinskky during the reprise…nice touch.) It makes one nostalgic for the Cold War days. You know, when we didn’t have a Russian asset in the White House…

 

Everybody's playing the game

But nobody's rules are the same

Nobody's on nobody's side

Better learn to go it alone

Recognize you're out on your own

Nobody's on nobody's side

 

And that, right there, is the core of the musical. Everyone is playing a game, and poor Florence finds herself just a pawn. Expendable, exploitable, and ultimately just one move in everyone’s bigger games. 

 

This show runs one more weekend, at Ovation. 

 

   

 

Pale Rider by Laura Spinney

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

First of all, this book was published in 2017. This is important for a number of reasons, as will become apparent. Covid had not yet happened. Yet, this book accurately predicted the main challenges of a pandemic, including the way that public health has become politically toxic for a significant portion of our society. 

 

The prediction was possible, because all of the issues we faced with Covid were issues during the 1918 influenza pandemic, the subject of this book. 

 

As Spinney notes at the beginning of the book, the two world wars have essentially sucked up all the oxygen in our consciousnesses regarding the first half of the 20th Century. Which is likely completely backwards. As horrible and awful and bloody and traumatic as the wars were, there was actually a greater source of human death, injury, and suffering than either war. 

 

Although exact numbers are impossible to know for certain, the best estimates of the death toll from the 1918 epidemic certainly exceeded either of the world wars individually, and very likely exceeded the combined death tolls of both wars. 

 

How many died? In the two year period between March 1918 and March 1920, somewhere between 50 and 100 million died of the disease. That’s somewhere between 2.5 and 5 percent of the world population. And, I might mention, significantly more in both numbers and percentages than Covid. 

 

So why is this pandemic less familiar? As Spinney discusses, wars tend to get all the press during and soon after their dates. Pandemics take longer to be remembered, but they endure far longer. 

 

As an example, how many can recount the events of the 100 Years War? (A few nerds can, of course, but not the average person.) In contrast, how many know about the Black Death, which occurred at the same time? And, these days, the 100 Years War is of less interest to historians than the Plague, which killed an appalling percentage of the population of Europe, and had a far more lasting effect on the trajectory of history than the war. 

 

But that only became apparent in retrospect. Forget the Spanish Inquisition: nobody expected the end of Feudalism. 

 

The book covers a lot of ground, starting with a quick history of influenza and humans. It has plagued our species ever since we began keeping livestock - it is a disease that jumps to humans from birds, mostly, often with pigs or horses as the intermediate step. 

 

Thus, pandemics have swept through the human species regularly, and, as the result of larger populations and greater contact through global travel, have increased in size and impact. 

 

The 1918 epidemic was the worst we have seen, but it also was the first that was documented well enough for there to be useful data. Which eventually led to incredible advances in microbiology and epidemiology. 

 

It is no exaggeration to say that the reason Covid-19 was unable to kill the way that the 1918 flu did was because we used our knowledge from the prior epidemic to prevent transmission and create vaccines and treatments that saved countless millions of lives. 

 

Although technology did not enable us to actually see viruses until later, the 1918 flu demonstrated that there was some pathogenic agent smaller than bacteria, that was able to infect humans and transmit disease between them. Even without knowing what viruses were, we were able to track how they spread, and determine how best to prevent transmission. 

 

We also, eventually, were able to use vaccination technology to grow viruses and create new vaccines, which would eventually virtually eliminate deadly diseases like Polio and Measles from many countries. These vaccines would also greatly reduce the mortality and morbidity from influenza and, yes, Covid-19. 

 

After giving the background, most of the book looks at the various facets of the pandemic around the world. It ends with a discussion of public health, and the measures necessary to keep future pandemics in check. 

 

There is a lot of fascinating stuff here, and it seems particularly relevant in understanding the Covid pandemic as well as preparing for future pandemics. 

 

It is also a bit chilling, because we are looking at a potential new pandemic jumping from birds to humans, at the same time that the Trump/Musk administration is gutting public health here in the United States. We could very well find ourselves in a position where we suffer greatly disproportionate deaths from the rest of the world because of our self-inflicted stupidity. Sigh. 

 

I will also note with approval that Spinney ties in a lot of interesting cultural references - while the 1918 pandemic never became truly constant in the writing and art of the time the way Covid seems to have done, there actually are more references than I realized. I will try to highlight a few of them. 

 

Let’s start with this one. Everyone knows Edvard Munch’s evocative painting, The Scream. It was created just after an earlier flu pandemic, when the artist was still feeling tired and ill from his own bout with the illness.

 

I want to note, once again, that this book was written and published before Covid. But check out this bit. Apparently, Covid was not the only virus to have caused sensory issues, and also long and lingering effects. 

 

People reported dizziness, insomnia, loss of hearing or smell, blurred vision…Many patients remarked, on regaining consciousness, how washed out and dull the world appeared to them - as if those cyanosed faces had drained all the colour from it.

 

Any of that sound familiar? While I myself haven’t had Covid (shocking, I know, even though I have been vaccinated according to recommendations), this matches what others have said - and the way the colorlessness lingers for months afterward. I remember similar things from some particularly terrible bouts of flu from my childhood. 

 

Bound up with the pandemic itself was the public health response. Spinney takes a look at Brazil, and the problems that face any government trying to treat or prevent pandemics. In that case, a dictator in the 1900s ordered mandatory smallpox vaccinations. Since he was unpopular, vaccines became unpopular, as did social distancing, masks, and other public health measures. This lead to catastrophe during the 1918 pandemic.

 

On 12 October, the day that the flu spread through the elegant guests at the Club dos Diaros, the satirical magazine Careta (Grimace) expressed a fear that the authorities would exaggerate the danger posed by this mere limpa-velhos - killer of old people - to justify imposing a ‘scientific dictatorship’ and violating people’s civil rights. 

 

Does that sound familiar? In reality, the 1918 flu turned out to be a killer of young people - those in the 20s and 30s - not just the old. Covid likewise struck down a shocking number of otherwise young and healthy people. 

 

One of those was another artist, Egon Schiele, whose work is some of my favorite of the era. (I have a bookmark with one of his portraits on it.) In one of his very last paintings, The Family, he portrays himself, a pregnant woman (probably modeled after a former lover, not his actual pregnant wife at the time), and a small child. The book includes this picture.

 

Soon after, his wife contracted the flu, and died along with the unborn child. Schiele would follow a few days later. He was age 28. So much for a “killer of old people.” 

 "The Family" by Egon Schiele

Other governments took a different approach, which likewise led to problems.

 

The 1918 pandemic is often referred to as the “Spanish Flu.” What it was was certainly NOT Spanish. As the book explores, there are several plausible sources for the disease - we will never know for sure - but none of them were Spain. 

 

The possible origins include China, two different places in the United States, and one in northern France. The reason Spain became associated with the pandemic is that it was one of the first - and only - European countries to track and accurately report the disease. Because Spain was neutral in the war, it had no reason to hide casualties in the name of morale. Both the Axis and Allied powers suppressed the devastation of the flu as it burned through the trenches of the Western Front. 

 

Whether trying to preserve morale, or actively trying to stop the spread, governments faced an uphill battle. Then, as now, a high percentage of the population rejected germ theory as the true explanation for contagious disease, instead seeing pandemics as a judgment from God. Or worse, as the result of “those dirty people.” 

 

As the book notes, Apartheid in South Africa got its start in the pandemic, with segregation of neighborhoods justified on the grounds that it was those filthy black people who spread the flu. (Incorrect, but in truth the impoverished always die at higher rates than the rich - being half starved or suffering from mining diseases exacerbated the flu.) 

 

Other methods are far more effective. One of which is the quarantine. Which comes from “40 days” - the time that infected ships were kept at anchor before being allowed to disembark at Venice. 

 

Speaking of quarantines, one of the reasons that Covid got a foothold in the United States was that Trump - who clearly believes in the “those dirty people” theory of disease - kept Chinese travelers out, while letting in Americans returning from China and elsewhere without testing or isolating. A friend of mine, infected with Covid - he had a positive test in Asia - was told to just come on back in. He did the right thing and self-isolated until he was well, but countless others spread the disease. 

 

The book goes into marvelous detail about the way disease spreads, and the need to isolate “superspreaders” - those who for various reasons tend to infect dozens. (People who shed lots of viruses, and those who are particularly social tend to do this. Knowing how many are infected and how many remain vulnerable is also important.

 

Here is an interesting bit:

 

Two years [before 1918], in his ‘theory of happenings,’ the British malaria expert and Nobel laureate Ronald Ross had come up with a set of differential equations that could help determine, at any given time, the proportion of a population that was infected, the proportion that was susceptible, and the rate of conversion between the two (with some diseases, infected individuals could return to the susceptible group on recovery). A happening, according to Ross’s definition, was anything that spread through a population, be it a germ, a rumour, or a fashion. 

 

And here we get into how this applies to addressing a pandemic. Remember, this was written before Covid!

 

Ross’s work, along with that of others, illustrated in hard numbers something that people had long understood instinctively - that a happening will begin to recede when the density of susceptible individuals falls below a certain threshold. An epidemic will run its course and vanish on its own, without intervention, but measures that reduce that density - collectively called ‘social distancing,’ - can both bring it to an end sooner, and reduce the number of casualties. 

 

This is what I never could get right wingers to understand. Slowing the spread of a pandemic through distancing actually makes the pandemic shorter, not longer. And a lot less deadly. 

 

You can think of the area under the epidemic curve as reflecting the total amount of misery that it incurs. Now, picture the difference in size of that area when the curve is high and broad - that is, without intervention - and when it is low and narrow, with intervention. That is potentially the difference between an overwhelmed public health infrastructure, where patients can’t get treated, doctors and nurses are pushed beyond exhaustion and dead bodies accumulate in morgues, and a functioning system that, though stretched to its limit, is still managing the flux of the sick. 

 

Covid was right on that ragged edge. My wife was on the frontlines, and worked absurd hours under difficult conditions, and still has trauma from that. A look around the world shows that the US probably had around a million extra deaths (and far more hospitalizations) because of its poor response to the pandemic. We weren’t the worst, but we weren’t great. 

 

And, with Trump and RFK Jr. continuing to undermine trust in public health, vaccines, and quarantine measures, the next pandemic will almost certainly end up in the catastrophe described above. As if we were in the fucking Middle Ages again. 

 

Again, re-read that paragraph. This was written before Covid, and it was totally prophetic. 

 

Another thing that was familiar? The 1918 flu likely killed in a similar way as Covid, through a “cytokene storm” - the immune reaction that overwhelms the patient’s body. 

 

“Long Flu” - like “Long Covid” - was also a reality. The book looks at some studies which show significantly elevated rates of depression and chronic fatigue. 

 

The flu virus may act on the brain, causing depression, but depression is also a common response to bereavement and social upheaval. How to disentangle the two?

 

Because of the limits of diagnosis at the time, it isn’t possible to completely link this to the flu, but there is significant spike afterward. We will have a similar problem in our own time. How do we separate the lingering effects of Covid from the effects of Trump and MAGA and their destruction of the world order, the Federal government, and the rule of law? That will be an interesting thing for future generations to determine…

 

Yet another issue that resonates with our times is the problem of scientific authority. Back then, to be clear, the flu and viruses generally were poorly understood at best. Although things were moving in a positive direction. 

 

One mistake made was that at one point, a bacterium was thought to cause flu - and it was given the name Haemophilus influenzae. The mistake was understandable, because the flu often leads to secondary bacterial pneumonia - and Haemophilus is one cause of that. 

 

As the result of this mistake, a vaccine was developed for the bacteria. This was a good thing, because it prevented some disease. In fact, my kids and I have received that vaccination, because it is still in use. 

 

That said, a lot of what mainstream medicine thought it knew at that time turned out to be incorrect. And much mainstream treatment of the 19th Century turned out to be not merely wrong but harmful. 

 

By 1918, the medical establishment was barely becoming able to do better than alternative treatments. It still lacked the credibility to convince many people, unfortunately. 

 

One rather humorous incident arising out of this involved another artist, Gustav Klimt. He was commissioned in 1901 to decorate a university ceiling: the theme was to be the triumph of light over darkness. Klimt’s painting, instead, had Death apparently triumphing not only over life, but over medicine. 

 

This isn’t entirely wrong - death comes for us all - but it created a big stir. The university refused to use the painting, so Klimt demanded it back so he could sell it elsewhere. The university claimed it was state property, and sent agents to seize it. Klimt drove them off with a shotgun…and kept the painting. 

 

At this point, I will mention that Spinney is British, not American, so her perspective on health care systems is from outside the American Exceptionalism bubble. A case in point is the chapter entitled “Healthcare for All.” 

 

If health authorities had learnt anything from the pandemic, it was that it was no longer reasonable to blame an individual for catching an infectious disease, nor to treat him or her in isolation. The 1920s saw many governments embracing the concept of socialized medicine - healthcare for all, free at the point of delivery. 

 

Man, that would be so fucking nice to have, wouldn’t it? But we can’t have nice things here because a majority of white people in this country are racist as fuck, and would rather die than see black people have equal access to healthcare. But the rest of the First World did it. 

 

Likewise, the 1918 epidemic led to the roots of the World Health Organization, first under the League of Nations, and eventually under the United Nations. 

 

And, of course, Trump/Musk withdrew us from WHO, because sharing health information with the rest of the world for the good of all and to save millions of lives is too fucking “woke” for them. Best to just set ourselves up to get crushed by the next pandemic that we will not see coming and fail utterly to prepare for. God, people are so stupid. 

 

The chapter on the artistic fallout of the pandemic was particularly interesting to me. I have, naturally, read a number of the works of the era that touch on the flu. You can read my thoughts on Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter - the source of the title of the book (which ultimately comes from The Book of Revelation - the four riders of the apocalypse.) 

 

Other authors touched on the subject. D. H. Lawrence suffered from long term effects of the disease. Luigi Pirandello, Samuel Beckett, and Franz Kafka all lived through it, and scattered references throughout their works. 

 

The devastating effects of the flu in China led reformers like Lu Xun to push for Western medicine rather than the ineffective traditional remedies. 

 

I want to finish, as the book does, with a couple of thoughts on how we need to act to address the next pandemic. Because there WILL be one, probably sooner rather than later. While no pandemic is predictable in all its details, there are things that can and should be put in place to address it. 

 

In fact, these things were what prevented Covid from becoming the same level of catastrophe as the 1918 flu. 

 

Despite all the uncertainty, there are things we can do to prepare. The 2016 GHRF report called for governments and private and philanthropic bodies to stump up around $4 billion a year for pandemic preparedness, and it recommended that the money be invested in four main areas: a skilled and motivated public health workforce; robust disease surveillance systems; effective laboratory networks, and engagement with communities. 

 

Note that all four are on the DOGE chopping block, and have long been targeted not merely by Trump, but by the Republican Part - for decades. 

 

I believe, based on growing up largely around Republicans - white Evangelicals in particular - that this is based in large part on a tribalist belief that God will spare the “good people,” so there is no need to invest tax dollars in preventing disease. In fact, maybe we should just let the world burn - we’ll be fine, right? 

 

Of course, this is horseshit on a stick. In reality, churches that refused to close their doors lost many members to Covid - I am familiar with local instances and there are many across the nation. The death rates among Republicans were, adjusted for poverty rates, higher than for Democrats. This was directly due to refusals to use masks, distance, and get vaccinated. 

 

Nobody is exempt from a pandemic, because germs don’t check your theological beliefs before infecting you. Our strength lies not in a social darwinistic belief that “good people survive” but in preparing and caring for everyone. 

 

During the 1918 flu pandemic, and in Covid as well, survival rates tracked the willingness to sacrifice individually for the good of all. This requires trust, something that has been systematically undermined by the American Right Wing my entire lifetime. 

 

Trust broke down between the two parties - or rather, was never built up. But trust is not something that can be built up quickly. If it is not in place when a pandemic declares itself, then however good the information being circulated, it probably won’t be heeded. 

 

This is why I am concerned that the next pandemic will be particularly catastrophic here in the United States. Rather than working to build trust, half our nation is actively tearing it down, in the mistaken belief that they will be exempt from the pain. They imagine themselves like the young people in The Decameron, riding out the death from the comfort of their luxurious vacation homes, while the world burns around them. 

 

In reality, what will happen is that they will find themselves instead in an Edgar Alan Poe story, “The Masque of the Red Death.” The plague will be among them before they realize it. 

 

I very much recommend reading this book. Understanding the past is one key to changing the future for the better. Covid was not the first pandemic. Neither was the 1918 flu. And neither will be the last. 

 

What we can do is prepare for the next one. And part of that is being prepared to use and share the knowledge of how pandemics spread and how that spread can be stopped. This book is a good start in that understanding.