Crisis 22

Rivers

Politics & Metaphor - Religion & Metaphor - Rivers & Ocean - Alternate Courses - Rivers of Blood

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Politics & Metaphor

While it’s easy to see complex metaphor in writers like Bulgakov and Keats, figurative language isn’t only used by poets, playwrights, and novelists. It’s also used in our daily lives to describe people (He’s gone over to the dark side; She’s a ray of sunshine, etc.), in our relations (It’s like watching a trainwreck about to happen; What tangled webs we weave, etc.), and in our view of politics and the state of the world (It’s a gong show; It’s a dog eat dog world; But there’s a silver lining, etc.). A political commentator might easily say, Russia has let loose the dogs of war, even though it was originally a literary metaphor created by Shakespeare: in Julius Caesar, Mark Antony says, “Cry Havoc!, and let slip the dogs of war.” Like many of Shakespeare’s verbal inventions, this metaphor has become part of our everyday, practical language.

An effective use of literary language in the practical world of politics can be seen in the words of the Ukrainian representative at the United Nations Security Council on October 31, 2024. The representative turns the otherwise common metaphor of crossing a red line into an extended metaphor which incorporates numerous symbols (which are themselves metaphors with a deeper meaning): ❧ a carpet (of welcome), ❧ a river (of sustenance, change, etc.), ❧ blood (the lives of a people, here Ukrainians), and the colour red, which here symbolizes ❧ blood as well as ❧ Russia and ❧ Soviet communism:

We have heard now and then that Russia would never cross this or that red line of the civilized world. But open your eyes: Russia is not crossing your red lines. Russia is walking down a red carpet, a carpet woven from weak responses, unfounded hopes, and complacency. In truth, it is not even a red carpet, but a river of blood, one that began flowing the moment that Russia was given the Soviet seat in this chamber in 1991. Do I need to remind anyone whose blood flows in this river?

Instead of urging us to see Ukrainian genocide in terms of statistics or abstract principles like independence and survival, the representative urges us to see it in poetic, emotional, historical terms. He urges us to see Russia as a nation that dyes the life-source of freedom, turning the Dnipro a ghastly crimson even after the Soviet Union dissolved. The specific references meld into the poetic and metaphoric, giving a symbolic and suggestive weight to the words he wields against the Russians on the Security Council and on the battlefield.

Mixing specific words such “the Soviet seat in this chamber” with a line that becomes a carpet, a carpet that becomes a river, and a red river that becomes Ukrainian blood, he conjures the violent, coercive power that has harried Eastern Europe since WW II. His words also suggest that Russia was once red and communist and it’s now red and bloody.

In looking at this map of the Warsaw Pact, we see that the Baltic nations and Ukraine weren’t included as distinct nations. At that time Russia the Red was tinting the Vitava in Prague and the Blue Danube in Budapest, creating an eery purple flow. Yet in Ukraine and the Baltic States the imperial power of Russian might be seen in terms of a different water metaphor: Russia wasn’t so much dying their rivers red as it was a red tide that had already covered their lands.

The representative’s words aren’t consistently specific, but that’s the point: they don’t need to be specific, as long as the original thing or starting point is clear — in this case, the violence Russia is inflicting on Ukraine. Metaphor and symbol work this way. They dig deep into our thoughts and feelings through the power of evocation, suggestion, and subtle linkage of one thing to another.

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Religion & Metaphor

While politicians sometimes use powerful water metaphors, it’s in the realms of literature and religion that these metaphors find their deepest and most extensive expression. This point may seem rather abstract, and may seem to be of more interest to mystical poets than politicians and average citizens. Yet this point has a very concrete application: when politicians use religion in their rhetoric, as the Kremlin has been doing, or when preachers use their metaphors to sway politics, as the Russian Orthodox Church is doing, then metaphors can have a deep impact on the body politic. This type of spiritualized political rhetoric can motivate people more than speeches about historical treaties and international law.

Natalia Dubtsova notes the following in her article “From pulpit to propaganda machine”:

It would have been naive to expect acts of resistance from the head of the Russian Orthodoxy, who just over a decade ago called Putin’s era a “miracle of God”. However, the extent of the involvement of the Church and its Patriarch in Russia’s wartime propaganda machinery has been more flagrant than even the most jaded observer might have predicted.

Four rhetorical themes emerge in Kirill’s statements: downplaying peace, the metaphysical struggle myth, exhortation to sacrifice, and allusions to historic victories.

— Reuters/Oxford Institute, February 2024

The Russian Orthodox Church’s support for the Kremlin has also led to a critical break with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This split may be seen as positive in that Ukraine is standing up for itself. Yet it’s also negative, since it signals a gap in spiritual understanding and aspiration, especially when it comes to the notions of love, compassion, and forgiveness — all of which are desperately needed if Russia is to have compassion for Ukrainians, and if the Ukrainians are to forgive the Russians for the suffering they’ve inflicted. Instead of talk about the love of Jesus and the forgiveness of God, we’re likely to hear the Holy War rhetoric that goes back at least to the Crusades. Once priests start saying that God wants us to fight the evil enemy, it’s hard to find a way back to sanity.

We can see a type of insanity in the image above, from a December 2024 article in The Economist. To me, the image suggests that Patriarch Kirill is a warlike magician, brandishing candles as swords, conjuring all the supernatural powers of the people’s faith to ensure victory.

If saints could see this, they would be horrified. They would stand in disbelief, like Hobbits watching Saruman raising his army of Orcs from the mud.

I imagine the dismay of Dostoevsky’s saintly Father Zosima, from The Brothers Karamazov. Zosima is a man who believes that Russian spirituality can be an example for the world:

“[…] the Lord will save Russia, as he has saved her many times before. Salvation will come from the people, from their faith and humility […] the poorer and lower our Russian man is, the more one notices his gracious truth […] Let us preserve the image of Christ, that it may shine forth like a precious diamond to the whole world […]

In the following passage — from the same “Talks and Homilies of the Elder Zosima” — the aged monk uses poetic language involving birds and ocean to get at his vision of heaven on earth:

Anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance. My young brother asked forgiveness of the birds: it seems senseless, yet it is right, for all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world. Let it be madness to ask forgiveness of the birds, still it would be easier for the birds, and for a child, and for any animal near you, if you yourself were more gracious than you are now, if only by a drop, still it would be easier. All is like an ocean, I say to you. Tormented by universal love, you, too, would then start praying to the birds, as if in a sort of ecstasy, and entreat them to forgive you your sin. Cherish this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to people.

Both the power and the problem of this sort of poetic language comes from the fact that it moves people at their core. It moves them to see the world in a certain way, and to act on this vision.

Some religious people are convinced that their spiritual survival depends on treating spiritual metaphors — about, say, the innocence of birds or the oceanic love of God — as if they were realities. In literature, the implicit comparison that defines a metaphor is always recognized as a comparison, and rarely seen as an equation. In religion, metaphor tends to slip into equation: the Eucharist’s blood of Christ becomes more than a symbol; it becomes the blood of Jesus Himself. Walking on water isn’t seen as a fanciful, poetical image of God’s transcendent power, but as a concrete action that proves God’s imminence in the world. It’s partly for this reason that believers are more likely than poets to act, and even kill, in the name of their words.

Believers don’t see the word heaven as a metaphor for peace or happiness, as it is for the poet. They see the paintings of angels and clouds and believe that such a place exists. They believe these invisible metaphorical places are actual metaphysical places, where the faithful — and those who fight and die for their faith — go after the battle is fought. What matters isn’t how much you suffer in this life, as long as you end up in Heaven, where all suffering ends. And, in the worst of cases — as in the words of Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin — it doesn’t matter who you kill, because your cause is holy, and holiness will open the gates of the blissful afterlife.

When Father Zosima urges us to ask forgiveness of the birds and to partake in the ocean of God’s love, he moves us deeply. But the metaphors can work in the other direction: politicized priests can convince their congregations that they don’t need to ask for forgiveness, and that the rivers of Ukraine and the waters of the Black Sea only touch them insofar as they are incorporated into the patriarchy of Greater Russia.

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Alternative Courses

Rivers may turn to blood, as the Ukrainian representative observed, yet they can also lead toward a democratic peaceful state. They can lead to a democratic and tolerant understanding of the way peoples, cultures, and nations can relate to each other. If Russia were to change its course, and think in a more positive direction, they might recuperate something of the Christian charity advocated by Father Zosima, the saintly figure of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. They might accept Zosima’s version of a loving, forgiving, nationalistic religion, and use it for peace rather than war.

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Looking into the way river metaphors work, and into how they link to religion and to symbols like the sea, we can see the power of metaphoric language. By being specific in their structure, metaphors can direct our thinking in a particular way, and by being vague in their application, they can apply to a wide range of ideas and feelings. In the next several paragraphs I explore the psychological and religious significance of river metaphors, stressing the link between the free flow of ideas and the free flow of religious belief and political expression. I’ll also return at several points to the representative’s metaphor of the flow of Ukrainian blood.

River metaphors are very common in literature, and can mean many things: the flow of life, the flow of language, a watery bridge to the afterlife (the Styx, the Euphrates, etc.), change, time, life, a culture (the Tigris, Tiber, Seine, Thames, etc.), a religion (the Jordan, the Ganges, etc.), the source of life, great sorrow (a river of tears), a stage in a progress (another river to cross), etc. Rivers can also be used to describe literature itself. This isn’t surprising, since literature reflects life, and water is literally the source of life — whether in the form of rain, snow, glacier, river, spring, lake, reservoir, or groundwater. The fundamental psychological link between our human nature and water is perhaps why we talk of the welling-up or gushing of emotion, the founts or springs of inspiration, the flow or current of thought, etc. In terms of literature, one might even say that writing springs from inside us, and flows into three major currents: ❧ poetry (including long poems and epic poems), ❧ plays or drama (including theatre, film, TV, trilogies, tetralogies, etc.), and ❧ fiction or fictional prose (including short stories and novels, as well as linked stories, trilogies, tetralogies, etc.).

Literature can also be seen in a more abstract sense as multiple river currents which run into the ocean and are fused with other currents. Rushdie uses this extended metaphor in his 1990 novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, in which he explicitly borrows from the Sea of Stories Somadeva writes about in 11th century Kashmir. Rushdie fuses this Hindu metaphor with Attar’s Islamic metaphor about a flight of birds toward God, thus bringing together watery deep and celestial height. En route, he brings together the two major religious systems of the Indian subcontinent, systems that are better known for opposing each other than for getting along. This is only one example of where literature can operate in a free and open space, unifying what in our usual understanding appears irreconcilable. Rushdie appears to be writing a children’s story, yet behind it is the conflict between authoritarianism in Iran (which put a fatwa on his head and which still allows the death penalty for blasphemy) and liberal systems which allow people to say what they want. The same conflict is found in Russia today, where journalists are thrown out windows or frozen to death in northern prisons, and where opposition parties don’t exist because they aren’t allowed to exist. In this sense political authoritarianism operates much like the old religious authoritarianism which gave us such things as inquisitions and auto-da-fés.

Historically, Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) advanced scholarship and operated universities, ye they also used dogma to impede the free flow of information and ideas. Not that orthodoxy always prevailed. There were of course mystics and ecumenicals, who tended to break away from orthodox thought in poetic and subtle ways. There were also the more traditional type of Abrahamic believer, who attempted to transcend dogma. For instance, the Jesuit priest in Brian Moore’s Black Robe (1995) starts off as a dogmatic priest yet slowly, in the course of the novel, realizes that love is more important than dogma. Yet it’s not clear if he ever divests himself from the exclusive notions that ❧ the Abrahamic source of religion is the best source, and ❧ Christians have the only true relationship with God.

One could argue that Christianity is universal because anyone can be baptized or become Christian. This is more inclusive than the Hindu notions that ❧ people are born into castes, and ❧ certain castes are unable to fulfill the highest spiritual roles (sort of like women in the Catholic Church). Yet in terms of tolerance, the problem still remains that the Abrahamic religions are distributaries of the Hebrew source notion that ❧ God can have a Chosen People, and ❧ the tradition starting with Adam and Moses is the only true religion.

Hindus, Buddhists, and Daoists on the other hand believe that other religions may not be as good as theirs, yet they can in their own ways attain the highest religious truths. In this sense, they think like Italian chefs who believe that Italian and American food are the same type of thing, although the latter may not be as tasty or nutritious. Both are basically cibo or food. Abrahamic believers on the other hand are more like French chefs who think that American food misses the point entirely; it might be called food but never cuisine. My point is that there are different religious currents in the world, but they don’t necessarily allow the thoughts of their believers to flow in the same way. Few of them are as liberal as the Daoists, who believe that making distinctions in philosophical matters is proof of not seeing clearly. For them, God or the Way is like water: “because water excels in benefiting the myriad creatures without contending with them and settles where none would like to be, it comes close to the way."

My overall point here is that Russia is acting like a high priest in the Abrahamic tradition. It sees itself as superior to Ukraine. It feels free to use its considerable power to change Ukraine, to convert it to its singular belief in a Greater Russia. And it feels justified in punishing Ukraine if it doesn’t obey.

In The Incredible Brazilian (1972), Zulfikar Ghose draws a portrait of two Jesuit priests: one is open to the knowledge of the Amazonian tribes and encourages a respectful and loving cultural exchange; the other looks down on everything Native and uses his power to abuse them mentally and physically. Russia, unfortunately, is acting like the second priest.

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Rivers of Blood

Literature, like history, contains many types of currents: epic and ordinary, sacred and profane, peaceful and violent, unitary and divisive. Among the violent and divisive currents we find the long, the far too long history of Rivers of Blood. This history starts in the warring city-states of early Mesopotamia. It flows, deep in red gore, gauged in cuneiform, Phoenician, Roman, and Cyrillic, to the present massacres in Bucha and Mariupol.

Literature can freely explore all of these currents, good and bad, then and now, because literature doesn’t insist that any one river metaphor is the river — or that any one limit is the final red line, or that any one action is the last straw. Atrocities run left and right, and have occurred throughout history: the Mongols sacked Nishapur; the Germans bombed Holland and England; the Japanese bombed China; American soldiers massacred about 400 civilians in My Lai and American planes dropped over seven million tonnes of bombs on Indochina; tanks moved in a line toward Kiev; Russians massacred civilians in Bucha and Russian planes dropped 500 kg glide-bombs on Ukrainian power stations, hospitals, etc. We wish this to be the last straw, but there are probably haystacks to come.

Just as religious, philosophical, and poetic narratives have many sources and many directions of flow, so do social and political narratives. In today’s polarized world — where algorithms give us tidal flows of information but also tend to direct into particular streams of thought — literature offers extensions, extrapolations, divergencies, and exit doors. It offers tributaries and distributaries, a million streams leading us further afield, to different perspectives and different paradigms.

The one thing literature insists upon, however, is freedom of expression. This means the freedom to read and access information of all kinds, as well as the freedom to write, speak, and participate in the management of an open, free society. We must encourage tolerance, but not tolerate those who, like the villain in Rushdie’s children’s tale Haroun and the Sea of Stories, poisons and stops the stream of stories. Literature is a borderless merging of disciplines and perspectives that requires the freedom to delve into any topic, including politics, global conflict, and war.

This is perhaps the cause of the present political crisis: Putin is corralling the thought of his population, channelling all their creativity into one stream and blocking all the others. He is of course free to shape his narrative of history and Russia, yet he shouldn’t be free to stop writers, artists, reporters, and politicians from offering alternative streams. While he often presents himself as open and reasonable, his grand words often boil down to the reality that his beliefs are the only official — and permitted — beliefs. Unfortunately, he also seems to believe that the land around the Dnipro River should either be his Little Russia or a river of blood.

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