Photograph Source: Cunhal94 – CC BY-SA 4.0
[I] was quite content…to let everything about me go on, unquestioned, like a great machine – that was its habit and mine – to take it all for granted and consider it all right…there was nothing wrong in my world – or, if anything, not much – or, little or much, it was no affair of mine.
–Mr. Morfin, dutiful employee-turned-whistle-blower at Dombey & Son in Dicken’s Dombey and Son (1848)
We perform in rituals, and doing becomes believing.
–Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days
The April speaker at The Other Side’s Hamilton speaker series, a retired professor of music, a musician and a black man, played videos for us of several tunes to illustrate his topic: Why Do Songs Matter? In the video of gospel singer Hezekiah Walker’s It Will Get Better, we watched groups of people located in different places all over the country and the globe, singing and clapping and repeating the word “Better!” Is it mindless optimism thus to sing, clap your hands and move until you feel it? Not, as “Doc” Woods pointed out, if your life circumstances give you little-to-no reason for hope but still one must get up, go to work, live with some kind of spirit. But – and I ask this despite the video, which, like a beer commercial, included all races and colors, and many nationalities, can white people experience the benefit of such resurrection optimism? Might it be good for us? Kind of like the beer commercial, it looks good, especially now in Trump’s America, but isn’t there something one must be suspicious of? How does one leave the known surety of secular liberal skepticism for the unknown of joyful noise-making?
Supposing there’s a key here to defeating (not all at once, but over an unquantifiable period of time) fascism and white supremacy? Would you take it? What if there’s something to this kind of earned optimism, to transformation, a gift of the spirit? D.H. Lawrence told us, “As long as there have been men,” “too little joy” has been felt. And this is our “original sin.” William Blake, another prophet of the heart, told us “Exuberance is beauty.” But here, surely, is a wide river to cross for those of us raised in virtuous, puritanist, delayed gratification. And not for us heirs of protestantism only. Many who are quick to grab feel-good joy, sinless and free, also miss its deeper, sorrow-drenched significance.
There’s a connection, I think, between liberal mistrust of joy, and the puzzlement, even embarrassment, many white people – churchgoers and unchurched as well – feel about Easter. Still a holiday on our calendars, still inaugurating the spring vacation for schoolkids, with Good Friday, no less! – so one has to make the attempt. Some of us suspect, a little uneasily, it must be about more than insipid bunny and pastel egg-and-chick decorations, or even the coming of spring, since most of us aren’t pagans. But we’re unable to do anything about it. Is this a mystery worth looking into?
What I’m calling resurrection optimism comes, I venture, with paying the cost, which is “undeserved suffering,” the suffering of the powerless. Of a certain kind of suffering, white people, being higher caste, remain innocent. By that I mean not that we don’t experience pain and loss, but not as the shared experience of oppression, never the kind that would point to the need to supplant, or subvert our world. Irreducibly hierarchical, triumphantly best, the world of white liberal reality in which we’re contained and privileged, optimistic that“what’s broken can be fixed,” keeps us both separate and in our separateness, innocent about suffering. This reassuring innocence can never be uprooted except by the individual’s experience of powerlessness; coincidentally, as I write on Easter morning this is the Easter message.
How innocence is maintained is simple: Death, the universal teacher and keeper of the truth of powerlessness, has been long overruled in liberal reality. Not that anybody disbelieves in the fact of death, but its reality cannot touch us in the sense of allowing one to grasp one’s life in its true finiteness. Without that grasp, white liberal innocence cannot be escaped. There’s nothing to force one into imagination. The denial of death is foundational to liberal optimism and to its discounting of the personal soul. This is what makes liberal reality a danger to those not privileged in it. It is a formula for the passivity that innocently deals out undeserved suffering, letting it flourish in someone else’s back yard. Most of us, understandably, would prefer not to have revealed that which is denied; we prefer not to turn inward and encounter that forboding dark malice at the edges of consciousness, to see what it wants; liberal reality conveniently gives us a pass on such honest self-reflection. It provides the way for white people, unaware their truth is partial, to turn “whistling past the graveyard” into colonialism and empire building. And shopping.
Black people who’ve gained spiritual power through powerlessness, gained it through the death of hope, under centuries of oppression. Jesus learned it on the cross. Alcoholics gain spiritual power by confessing they cannot stop drinking by an act of will. From what or whom can we learn what appears to be a necessary truth about transformation, about changing what can be changed, when Death is denied? It seems now the answer to that question may have arrived in the form of Donald Trump. He’s working away at destroying liberal optimism; its possible we can make this defeat, like a martial arts move, work in our favor, if each of us can absorb the fearful message: nothing can save us.
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The lessons of finality, the baby thrown out with the bathwater of religion, need to be relearned. Fortunately for us, even though liberal reality is a blanket over all unpleasantness except what sells insurance or news, a few (poetic, wholer) truths make it past its obliterating power and provide affirmation for the heart. Besides in poetry, this truth exists also in fairytales, stories originally told commonly among common people who suffered. Unabridged (even allowing for the fact that no extant fairytale is the “original”), they are remnants from a time when consciousness included death. I mean the tales many people find too dark to read their children, like discovering the hamburger was made from a large cud-chewing animal with kind eyes that was first stunned with an electric shock and then slaughtered. If, as a parent, one were respecting the whole truth, the truthful response to a young child declaring herself a vegetarian would be, “Eat the chili con carne I made for you.” For, unless the parents are vegetarian, this is the moment to teach the child something she needs to know about finality. But it would not be the liberal way.
Fairy tales take finality for granted. What they offer to children, the grittiness sparing the child nothing, possibly inducing nightmares, is a deeply knowing perspective that provides room – and invitation – for the child to trust her survival instincts and enlarge her imagination. They tell us that to take the irremediable darkness out of the story – “Disneyizing” – is a bad idea. It’s not the story that has to change, but ourselves. That some animal – or plant – had to die in order for me to live is not just about me, but this is how organic life works. Reality is larger than the self and one’s self-limiting, ego-
Such tales are important counter to liberalism’s compulsive smiley-face messaging: i.e., “things are a little rough right now but we’ll all be okay” (words spoken by President Obama at nearby Hamilton College in his recent visit). The reassurance works, but not to truly convince people. It keeps them absorbed in shopping, messaging, and performing their jobs, instead of speaking truth that is whole.
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One of the consequences of liberal innocence is that some of us – including myself – learn to hold onto the benefit of the doubt no matter what, to disbelieve what our eyes see, ears hear, and to ignore the acute discomfort that comes from repressing anger in our prophetic, truth-craving soul. We can, like Mr. Morfin, “let everything go on, like a big machine.” Sunk in the relativism that comes with the denial of death, how can we tear away the veils of bamboozlement? How may we know who are our true heroes and saints? Who may give us heart? This is important, for the saints are the ones that remain faithful to the truth our souls know. Corporate mass media and corporate-dominated politics will never confirm whistleblowers Reality Winner (a documentary about whom we watched recently) or Edward Snowden as heroes, nor will Vatican politics and mass media allow us to call Pope Francis a saint, as surely he was. Must we wait one hundred years to celebrate them as truthtellers?
Fairy tales, which I refer to here because of their familiarity to everyone, can teach the child something liberal reality cannot teach – i.e., that there can be just anger. Reading children stories in which the animal protagonist is eaten by the wolf, or Jack faces the threat of becoming food for the ogre, or the horrific Baba Yaga nabs hapless children to cook them in her soup confirms truth the child’s soul already knows. I have no PhD to credential my saying this (and few reputable PhD’s would say it anyway), the unconscious, the soul, the organism, carries this awareness of nature’s rule – life feeds on life; it is ancestral and not escapable. This is why, however terrifying may be the harshness portrayed in the fairytale, the refusal of it is worse. Denied, as it is in every corner of media-saturated liberal reality, we live under various threats of human-caused catastrophe that have grown “hidden in plain sight.” We have lived to see the return of fascistic barbarity, the horror many of us – whistling in the dark – believed was buried forever in a Berlin bunker in 1945. Liberal reality, denying soul’s truth and its anger, by its bracketing of religious consciousness, poses no challenge to moral relativity.
That is, unfaced, kept in the dark, refused, thanatos, Freudianism
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Fairy tales, which recollect the truth of instinct and intuition, are reminders the soul, given in nature, is nature; it is our guide to life conscious of its own vulnerability, of our helplessness against the fact of death, but not helpless. Help cometh from the soul; over centuries of institutionalized religion, hierarchy, racism, wealth-seeking heedlessness and bourgeois self-satisfaction, the personal relation to the soul has been severed. Without it, we pretend contentment, believe personal troubles are the sum total of what we must contend with, success or failure the only serious categories by which to measure a life. But it is in one’s power to restore it, by making strange life choices, by making the soul’s pain conscious. The soul caries the wounds of trauma, but is also the means for transcendence (Easter!) Fortunate for us, the means are not really objectionable. The soul only asks that she be given her voice, through the transcendence of making art.
Many times I’ve told people The Other Side, a non-profit arts space and adjunct to our Cafe, and still existing since the Cafe’s sale, shared the Cafe’s origin in Orin’s and my utopian idealism, what today I’ll call our “resurrection optimism.” Earlier in April, a young woman friend who’s on our Board scheduled a session of Ukrainian egg decorating to take place there. I planned to go, bringing granddaughter Cora, who loves arts and crafts. Word about it had gotten out late; privately I thought it might be just the 3 of us. In fact, over 20 came, ages from under 1 to mid-70’s, making it necessary to add on tables and chairs until the room was fairly full of people contentedly sitting, talking quietly, learning the somewhat complicated procedure. It was not just another sip ‘n paint-type craft workshop, but felt, to my soul, like peace. Something new is unfolding after the loss from which, for many months, I could not imagine myself recovering.
This ritual of decorating eggs is not something I could have led. Coming from this young woman, who mourns the loss of the Cafe as much as I do, I’m beginning to allow myself to feel its inspiration is from the same vision, in a different form. Thus for those couple of hours, the space was filled with quiet joy. Something died, something new so gently and reverently taking its place.
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