When I was a sophomore in college (1955), I took a course in English Romantic Poetry.  When we were introduced to the romantic hero, our teacher gave us a standard definition, i.e., someone who rejects establishment norms and conventions and may be rejected by society but carries on because of some compulsion to follow his/her own moral system.  As an assignment over the weekend, she asked us to think about whether there was anyone currently alive in this country who fit that definition.  Significantly enough, I was watching some national news on the sorority’s black and white TV that weekend and saw a national clip about a young black preacher named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  He was being interviewed by one of the big national TV stations and I was impressed by his clear statements about what he and his group were doing by employing nonviolent strategies to win wider acceptance of black people in the South.  The clip included scenes of white people shouting nasty, violent things at this man and his followers, while white police stood by to prevent them from marching peacefully.  It suddenly occurred to me that I was watching someone who fit my professor’s definition of romantic hero perfectly.

The following Monday in class, when we were asked to share any names that might have occurred to us about living heroes, I naively said “My choice is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”  The professor thanked me and quickly moved to the next student.  What usually happened when that class ended was I and three classmates went off to the student cafeteria to have coffee and talk about what we’d learned about romantic that day.  I noticed that my group was very quiet as we made our way, but didn’t think much about it until they did not join me at our usual table but went off to another one far away, leaving me alone and puzzled.  Though I asked them next class what was the problem, I never got a straight answer and we never again processed our responses to Byron or Shelley or Keats.  As my own racial consciousness found language, I came to realize that I had committed a particular sin when I suggested that a “Negro” could possible qualify for status as a hero of any kind.  I became what is known as a “race traitor,” i.e., a white person who “sides” with a black person, thereby rejecting the dominant view of blacks.  

I remain seriously grateful for the confluence of my poetry class assignment and my seeing/hearing Dr. King for the first time, and I remain even surer that he really does embody what those 19th century English poets thought of as heroic.  Were I taking that class today and were I given that assignment, however, I would know the name I would offer:  Bryan Stevenson, the black lawyer/justice worker in Montgomery, Alabama, who helps prisoners living under unacceptable conditions (often solitary confinement or consignment to death row).  He is also the force behind the recent opening of the memorial remembering  lynching of black people in this country.  Reading about his commitment to this justice work, beginning when he was mostly working out of his car and alone, amazes me.  He never seems exhausted, though he says he feels that way at the end of some very long days.  But his personal exhaustion doesn’t prevent him from taking on yet one more case of a prisoner who knows s/he is innocent of the crime for which s/he is serving extended and cruel sentences.  And his absolute passion to get the lynching memorial and adjacent museum built takes on the quality of Herculean feats in the face of individual and institutional resistance. 

When I first heard about his book, Just Mercy, I was drawn to the double meaning of the title.  On one hand, Stevenson was asking that we humans “only” extend mercy and things will get better.  On the other hand, he is suggesting that there are different kinds of mercy, one of which has to do with justice.  His accounts of trying to overturn blatantly false convictions of blacks, the poor, and children have been met by granite walls thrown up by Alabama lawyers, prison officials, judges, sheriffs and other putative law enforcement officials.  Yet Bryan Stevenson keeps expecting and asking for “just mercy.”  When he gets it, I can feel his jubilation, just as I can feel his deep disappointment in his profession and his country when he doesn’t.  Yet he persists and it is that very persistence that lifts him to the top of my list of heroes.

If I could ask Bryan Stevenson one question it would be this:  From what source do you draw your faith and strength so that you can continue no matter how many virulently prejudiced roadblocks are laid in your path?

I recently read an article about the famed ballerina, Natalia Osipova, and her signature role as Giselle in the story ballet of that same name.  She has performed in the past with the American Ballet Theatre and, more recently, with the Royal Ballet Company in London.  While the reviewer praised Osipova’s work in general, he found most remarkable her ability to bring new emotional tonalities to each evening’s Giselle.  These comments have stayed with me, prompting me to think about the value of change or mutability.  As I enter my eighties, I sometimes find myself missing things like my old stick shift Toyota Tercel or stopping by the office at work to pick up a paper receipt of my latest salary deposit.  Or I inveigh against people who “communicate” via small electronic devices instead of speaking face to face with each other.  So I have let myself do what I so often do when I’m in a muddle–I remember a writer who can help me not just lament the loss of some imagined “better” state of affairs.  And that process has brought me to a seldom referenced work published in 1609.

In that year the English poet, Edmund Spenser, published “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie,” that were to become part of his enormous work, “The Faerie Queene.”  The word “mutability” means that state in which something or someone is subject to frequent change.  Its negative connotation is best expressed by the word “fickleness” and for many people the word carries with it uneasiness and at times bitterness.  Change isn’t always welcomed by us, especially when it involves losing someone or something precious to us.  I remember resisting Spenser’s “take” in his cantos because I studied the poem not too long after my father had died between breakfast and dinner on New Year’s Day in 1954.  The morning after his sudden death, I remember being furious with God and the universe because it was a beautiful if chilly sunny day. 

So I located my heavily annotated copy of the cantos and have reread the elaborate debate between Proud Change, a female force, and the petty gods.  Spenser offers a radical conclusion in which he argues that though all things in life surely fluctuate, their essence is preserved and so mutability is not our enemy.  His own words ring deep and true, I think:  “I well consider all that ye have sayd,/And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate/And changed be: yet being rightly wayd/They are not changed from their first estate;/But by their change their being doe dilate:/And turning to themselves at length againe,/Doe work their own perfection so by fate:/Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne;/But they raigne over change, and doe their states maintaine.”

That’s what Osipova is illustrating as she refuses to duplicate her character’s emotional state as she dances first her passion for her lover and eventually her supreme grief over his death.  Her Giselles are never quite the same–and yet each fluctuation enlarges upon a central essence or truth, i.e., great love can be both devastated by events and yet preserved at its very heart.  All around me I find examples that seem to be “changes” that might disturb me and that do disturb many around me but which, if I embrace Spenser’s final understanding of change, I can see as expansions upon the original.  I offered a blog here recently about going to see a local dance group I so admire who had teemed up with a rock band which made their performance very “different” from what I expect from them.  By staying open to the mutations this collaboration produced, I agreed with Spenser and experienced the power of the altered movements.  And for the past year or so, I’ve been facilitating discussions of Greek drama with a group of lively adults who managed to read every word Shakespeare ever wrote.  As they neared the end of this daunting exercise, they said they didn’t want to split up the group, so would I read Greek plays with them.  I hadn’t thought much about Greek plays since my undergraduate days when I took the usual survey course in classical literature.  But I didn’t want to stop listening to their responses, so I agreed.  Our first few months felt pretty rocky because the plays were unfamiliar to me.  I couldn’t be the deep resource I’d been on all our Shakespeare evenings.  I was just someone who was doing mounds of reading of secondary material and adapting my skills at helping eager minds talks about great writing.  I realize now that I somewhere counted on a Spenserian essence that would be preserved even though “changing” the textual basis of our discussions unsettled me in serious ways.

One of Spenser’s strongest arguments for not resisting or fearing change comes in a series of stanzas in which he takes us through a calendar year, month by month, season by season.  And Dame Nature argues that it would be terrible if there were only January days or August days.  She insists that change and mutation make our lives infinitely more beautiful and cherished.  And when John Milton came to write his epic Paradise Lost, he made it clear that Eden with its total lack of variety is not the desired state for humans. So the great Fall became “fortunate” so that the Adam and Eve who depart their idyllic garden are much richer and more complex creatures than they were when they just weeded, ate, slept, and had sex.  

Mutability then offers us humans the possibility to keep growing so we do not get “stuck” because to be stuck is to become frightened and narrow in our perspectives on the marvelous world of possibility.