“Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.”

–George Carlin

My gratitude was immense when the young history teacher from a regional school –  “Luigi”- (his real name is Italian) petitioned us to use our little nonprofit space to teach a series of “Peoples Classrooms.”  At last, a confirmation of “Build It and They Will Come!”  The Other Side, Inc.’s intention to keep a speaker series going that would connect us with the Big Topics of our time, has been up against it since the pandemic.  Luigi’s offer, coinciding with an exhibition of paintings in our gallery that movingly highlights immigrant faces, by a talented local artist himself inspired by Howard Zinn’s Peoples’ History, was incredibly serendipitous.  To launch his Peoples Classroom Luigi gave a quite brilliant talk, referencing the paintings throughout, titled “The Other Side of Ellis Island: A Peoples’ History of Immigration in the U.S.”

His offer – and the event itself – were for me a greater morale boost than the No Kings! protest in Utica the following Saturday, though I was moved by the largest demonstration I think I’ve ever seen here.  Luigi’s talk made me aware of and grateful to those who, connected to a socialist or communist perspective, will dare speak truths now nearly entirely obfuscated in the general dumbing down, in the collapse into one big neoliberal reality.  At any rate, here in Utica, such deep left-wing public speech is rare (and in fact even on the private level, strong opinions from deeply held principles are rarely articulated in my hearing and could be – one can’t avoid a creeping paranoia – dangerous).

Thus we keep public occasions innocuous.

Even I, who welcome hearing from that rare person who’ll offer a bold, contradictory George Carlin-type unhypocritical opinion, based in moral truth – as Orin consistently did in days of old –  find myself wincing when a friend emits such a blunt opinion, truthful as it may be.  Somewhere between “what’s the use?” and “well, are you going to lead the strike?” – maybe is in that wince.  There’s not much fight these days, in my experience, among us “lefties,” but what does that mean?  Have the old truths changed so much?  Is it possible to speak truly “IRL” (an acronym I just picked up in the Gibson article quoted above) and not only from the safety of  virtual space? And if not, why is this so? What is making us so skittish and untrusting that one can’t seek a little sympathy talking about one’s latest ordeal – i.e., with the “healthcare” industry, or faceless customer service robots or with identity fraud (as just happened to me), – or with how unhappy one actually is when everything is shit – without being just simply tiresome – for what’s to be done?)

The answer’s Nothing: when one cannot trust one’s environment enough to say “everything is shit” there’s nothing to be done.  Why oh why must we keep being nice? Chris Hedges,  following Kierkegaard, suggests consciences have been eradicated under “the modern state” that seeks to “shape and manipulate individuals into a pliable and indoctrinated “public.” Has this been accomplished by means of this very compulsion to keep dark, unsettling, unhappy truth under a glass?

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For years I’ve kept semi-secret the occasional “Temenos talks” that I give at The Other Side.  Their critique of mainstream liberal reality – which I make not primarily as a political statement but as self-interested defense of my soul – is damning of middle class, bourgeois life ways, a judgment that spares no one – including me.  Such words however, to be other than simply churlish and mean, can only be spoken in defense of something greater.  Thus for instance, if I critique travel addiction, or careerism, or temporized relationships with people and place, or just “liberal reality” itself (i.e., “everything is shit”), I do it in order to distinguish between conforming life ways that suffocate the soul, and the (creative) behaviors that cultivate an alive soul.  I want the souls of people that come to my talks to feel like they found an oasis, where there’s no fear of speaking truth!  Though to most people they would come across as moralistic judgment, just as the jazz music we bring to the Other Side is pronounced “elitist” and difficult by a Reddit commenter, to others, troubled but stifled in liberal reality, unable to just say why they feel as they do, the words are freeing.

Were I to drop the critique of liberalism I’d lose the basis for my having any voice at all: I’m no spiritual guide, but someone who  must keep faithful to what’s was revealed to me in the only extraordinary experience of my mostly uneventful life, and must keep making – with words – a safe place for her soul, over and over.  I struggle continually against the tyranny of socialization – in which part of me is – and must be – comfortable – that continually blinds me against both dark, uncomfortable truth –  and the “truth that sets me free.”

Truth, as they say,  is indeed all one.   Losing contact with the part of myself I’m so bad at protecting –  my soul, the very me-ness of me –  I let go of its truth! That is, liberal hypocrisy not only supports the cruelty continually being inflicted upon others; in its complete disregard for beauty, truth and the politics of love, it inflicts famine on my soul that can be healthy only on a restrictive diet of truth. Loss of conscience really comes from this: acceptance of hypocrisy sickens the alive soul without which I can be no other than socialized and conforming. Which is not to say I wish to be any particular way, but rather, to know if I’m different, fit no categories, this is understood as part of a nature that is loving and good, not deviant for its own sake.

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Returning to Luigi’s talk, it’s clear to me that something more even than understanding the history of our social ills from a peoples’ perspective and being stirred by the impassioned call for solidarity with oppressed others is required to restore the democracy that’s been stolen from us – with – I have to add –  liberal cooperation and thanks to liberal cooperation.  The roots of “universality, ”which Marx called a “radical need” –  lie in the innermost self of the individual, not in the collective.  That is, the power of community – to be solidarity and not conformity –  has to be checked by the “othernesses” already rooted in their own soul’s truth, in Emersonian self-reliance.  I usually call this practice of root-development, of cultivation of soul, art-making; today I see it is, more precisely, “authorship.”

Reading the short piece called Comments in my first-ever issue of the Hedgehog Review made me realize there is one way in which I have fulfilled to near the best of my ability Emerson’s call to “self reliance” (most often heard wrongly as call to rugged individualism): that is, in my presumption of authorship.  Trained in my liberal education to study, respond to and comment upon the words of the great ones in the western humanities tradition, it went “against nature” to think I might be capable of original thought worthy of being published, a new-born bard of the holy ghost. Now that Toms Dicks and Marys much bolder than I do not think twice about the worthiness of their work for blog or podcast, many becoming influencers with more followers than Montaigne or Hedgehog Review or even Emerson will likely ever have, such a concern with the worthiness of one’s thought seems quaint, maybe just a personal hangup. In my heart of hearts I don’t really believe it is, but lack of self confidence is my default attitude, strongly returned in these 15 months since the loss of ourcoffeeshop business.

Rather, if “awe of authorship” is due to a personal hangup, the hangup’s shared with a great number of people who are not published and do not have the confidence or temerity to believe they have something of worth to say. More to the point, they do not believe they are called to speak that which will strengthen their inborn sense of truth.  The call to authorship is not the bullying kind of demand that’s supposed to correct excessive shyness.  It does not necessarily come with being a published scholar, unless the scholar has released herself from the obstruction that, before even the “opinion of others,” as Emerson so well understood, is within.   For the remarkable gift of being born white, gifted and lucky in liberal society brings with it a dark companion, its bottom line the unconscious shame of the rejected soul.

Thus, authorship – its “dance of death” – demands courage likely recognizable as such only to oneself; requiring one’s devotion to one’s own perspective despite personal misgiving, self-doubt and even fear.  Authorship – the act of creating as the Creator created – and, moreover,  understood as obedience – is the action by which the ordinary self can assert herself in society as herself. Or so I believe.  Having gained the marvelous glimpse of meaning contradicting liberalism’s assurances,  she can “come down” from ego’s isolating height ( paradoxically, a defense of shame) and exist as ordinary, in-common with all others.  Not that others will necessarily see her that way.  But seen by others or not, she may fulfill some shamanic social role that – like the “two-spirit” role that fulfilled a traditional third gender in indigenous societies (referred to in the movie Wildhood (2021) – has long been lost, replaced by shame, in western society’s upward, progressive trend away from embodiment.

Unlike appeals to collective Truth,  claiming authorship calls for release of the captive within, the soul,  from its condition of disauthorization, that begins for most of us in childhood, even at birth.   That one’s voice is consequence of an heroic struggle against its right to exist, and on behalf of its goodness,  authorizes it to to speak on behalf of the heart.  Authorship – or imagination imagined as duty –   makes possible heroic persistence in the “grind” of life that never works out as we’d hoped or expected it to  – the unglamorous life ways that we need to reclaim, carrying our grief on our backs,  if we are to pull back from the now promised extinction.  And, perhaps more importantly – for if humans are to perish who would feel that was a miscarriage of justice? –  authorship has the power to redeem humble, face-to-face “IRL-life,”  escaping machinehood to live as human beings, in right relation with the creation in which human lives are placed.

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Living in secular liberal society we’re freed from fear of divine judgment,  all indeed is permitted.  But “the permitted” is not just recognizable evil and criminality, not just conformity and banality.  One is permitted to refuse one’s personal destiny,  nobility and strength.  In our time, in our western consciousness, identity theft, at the level of the soul’sunderstanding – is a done deed; a theft unwittingly accomplished by oneself from oneself, guaranteeing most people can do no more than conform.

Emerson’s call is precisely for the rescue of self-fulfillment from monotheistic ego that cannot but aim at social success, either in obedience or disobedience to the limited moral vision offered in liberal society. That is, ego leads to either being “good,” conforming to the social good as defined by the society, or, disobeying, finding conforming  identity in outlaw non-conformism, that relies upon an easily kindled rebellious spirit, on aggrievement rather than on passion for the good.

Prophetically ahead of his time, Emerson appealed from and to the Unconscious, and with as much directness as was possible in printed word.  But printed or even spoken word – prose – cannot convey experience. For most people it is here – pre-experience – we get held up in our understanding of the Emersonian call, cutting it short of its utopian radicalism, authentic freedom, as oneself.

Today,  the experience of crossing over from conscious to unconscious, prose mind to poetic, is more available than it was 175 years ago:  psychotherapies influenced by depth psychology, transpersonal psychology, eastern practices of spiritual transformation, intake of  hallucinogens – are at least familiar to most.   Personal misery, loneliness, and depression that could serve as goad to find “some other way” are today the norm. It is not clear, however, that even having been provided with the means (access  to which is neither equally distributed nor equally available) or the motive, that a significant number of people have chosen or will choose inner-direction, with its more radical moral perspective.  It remains to be seen if people who can have the experience of the deeper, awakened, imaginative self, willhave it.

For those of us nurtured – to some degree or other – successfully in white liberal society, getting past that pre-experience “blockade” isn’t simple.  For me  it took being “selected” – completely unwillingly – by mental breakdown to do the trick!  Luckily, by the 1990’s  it had become easier – even here in Utica – to connect with New Age zeitgeist; otherwise I’d be in a psych ward somewhere.  This “ difference” that plucked me from ordinary single consciousness, a person with no artistic or poetic calling, brought me the alternative basis for knowing I write to and for.  Even so,  I must trust that there is room, in answering the Emersonian call, for really tough cases like mine; that in fact the call may be particularly aimed at ones like me who need all the assurance Emerson gives that self-trust is the divine path, even though self-ordained.

Most of us are wary of being that guy  pronouncing curmudgeon-like “everything is shit. ” I understand.  But there is truth to it, I’m sure you feel it, just as you did listening to George Carlin uttering words you’d never dream of uttering:  (i.e., “I am sick of hearing about “innocent victims”, there are no “innocent victims.” If you live on this planet you’re guilty. Period, f… you, end of report, next case, next f…ing case.”)

If you cannot pronounce such negativity, it’s not because it’s too negative; it’s because you’re equivocating, not yet fully on the side of your soul. You can wait for your breakdown, or you can begin to speak from your own authorship, born of authentic despair, willing to suspend disbelief in yourself and take the leap of faith. This is what I tell myself.