{"id":1503396,"date":"2024-02-16T06:36:45","date_gmt":"2024-02-16T06:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=313695"},"modified":"2024-02-16T06:36:45","modified_gmt":"2024-02-16T06:36:45","slug":"fuggedaboud-hope-trust-your-melancholy-utopia-or-bust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/02\/16\/fuggedaboud-hope-trust-your-melancholy-utopia-or-bust\/","title":{"rendered":"Fuggedaboud Hope. Trust Your Melancholy. Utopia or Bust."},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

This is how [Octavia] Butler finds her way in a world that perpetually demoralizes, confounds, browbeats: she writes her way to hope.\u00a0 This is how she confronts darkness and persists in the face of her own despair.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

\u2013 Jesmyn West, Introduction to Bloodchild,<\/i> by Octavia Butler<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[Octavia Butler’s] primary characters refuse to deny the better aspects of their humanity.\u00a0 They insist on embracing tenderness and empathy….\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013 Ibid<\/i>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n

\u201c…the only possible utopia [is where] a person will have a private, perfect utopia every night \u2013or an imperfect one…I think if people go to a….well, a private heaven every night, it might take the edge off their willingness to spend their waking hours trying to dominate or destroy each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Octavia Butler, The Book of Martha<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I would really really<\/i> like to invite everyone on the liberal spectrum into my pathology.\u00a0 I think we can get someplace with peace in the world using depression as starting place.\u00a0 If there’s one thing missing in the liberal mind that, being restored, could bring them\/us the energy needed to drop the compromising servility to free markets, it’s proper valuation for Saturn’s domain.\u00a0 The conventional attitude toward depression \u2013 nobody wants it, it’s debilitating, people avoid you, etc.-\u00a0 keeps its true value hidden. Though millions suffer from it, it’s usually (and understandably) treated by relieving the symptoms, not seeking out the origins<\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0 This makes sense; treating the psychic roots of mental illness is expensive, out of reach for most people, plus pharmaceuticals are quicker (but at the cost of truth).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Moreover, even though depression is strongly associated with artistic creativity,\u00a0 even this awareness does not shake customary dyed-in-the-wool prejudice. Most of us figure it’s normal not<\/i> to be an artist, but socially unacceptable to be depressed. So we adjust,\u00a0 projecting on successful artists the glamor and exalted worth that is each one’s forfeited creativity, <\/i>one’s legitimate non-monetizable happiness<\/i>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Not a good idea for any who stubbornly insist a better world can<\/i> be!\u00a0 I’m with Octavia Butler on this: utopia cannot be made one-size-fits-all; it’s realizable \u2013 yes! –\u00a0 but only by means of the private, individual dreaming that is the well-spring of art.\u00a0 Properly understood \u2013 and here’s where depression comes in –\u00a0 art-making is necessity and duty, both.\u00a0 What my fellow peaceniks ought to be up to, counter-intuitively – is popularizing<\/i> art-making, take up the cause of creative genius, its right to exist, in everyone, including those who see it as a distraction from attaining the 6-figure job.\u00a0 The\u00a0 obstacle?\u00a0 Untreated depression<\/i>,\u00a0 that sucks the energy up into addictions, compulsions,\u00a0 neuroses instead of fueling creative freedom, evidence of its dispiriting effects pervasive now in liberal lesser-evil America.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

With the popularity of anti-depressants on the market these days, not to mention the ballooning of real-world causes for deep depression (take your pick \u2013 another Trump presidency!\u00a0 Another Biden Presidency! The planet heating up!\u00a0 The slaughter of Palestinin innocents, Ukraine, etc.) it shouldn’t be hard to find recruits for a social movement that promises to de-stigmatize the depressed and re-valuate depression; we could have legions in no time!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Science, no less,\u00a0 is showing us the way to properly appreciate our malady.\u00a0 Studies in neuroscience show depression to be \u201cthe pathological loss of the capacity to rationalize away reality.\u201d (Robert Sapolsky, Determined<\/i>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Surely we can make this pathology a plus! We – the incurably depressed \u2013 have it in our means to encourage others to lose their bondage to triumphant progress, its state-of-the-art technological advancements and glitzy Superbowl ads.\u00a0 Our catchphrases might be between something like \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d and the snake oil sales patter that sells miracle cures. (\u201cWin with woe?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cMelancholy Matters?\u201d<\/i>) Only it’s not snake oil we’re peddling but the very real miracle of corrected illusion. Even though it’s not in our power to induce anyone to follow, at least the way can be pointed out: your illness may be the means to break your chains.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

So far, the Right has the corner on serious disillusionment with liberal ideology, but because there it’s channeled into grievance instead of constructive critique \u2013 i.e., it’s all the fault of the liberal elite, they the ones that need to be brought down there, etc. – it’s misdirected and exploited by depraved people like Trump. On the liberal end, the illusion is still powerful enough to keep the young just entering the job world, and many of the old who should know better, enthralled, spellbound.\u00a0 <\/i>These are apt terms for an illusion that so few of us, equipped only with logic based upon an insane premise (i.e., that people don’t matter), can \u2013 or will \u2013 see through.\u00a0 Seeing the illusion as spell <\/i>means that to \u201cdis-spell\u201d calls for irrational means.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Not that liberalism’s historical successes have not been significant \u2013 as a woman I have much to be thankful for! – but we depressives can’t take our eyes off the downside: expected lifespan in the West is shrinking.\u00a0 The gap between rich and poor widening.\u00a0 Icecap melting. White supremacy still in place.\u00a0 Genocide begetting more genocide.\u00a0 Moreover, local places and economies, marvelous home-grown personalities once enriching the soil of human culture,\u00a0 are defended more in reaction than by people following serious dreams of interdependence, sustainability, justice, and peace. Without the crisis of depression, even the dreamers can be easily diverted by the dominant illusion: things are meant<\/i> to get better (and secretly are<\/i> getting better,\u00a0 read the NYTimes and be reassured. Bad stuff happens but not to me!)\u00a0 To break such a spell, not no<\/i> illusion, but a better one<\/i> is necessary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

+++<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Last month Orin and I went to the elementary school where our grandchildren attend – and before them, our children –\u00a0 for a science fair.\u00a0 While there, we were given a tour of the library by the librarian, Alicia,\u00a0 a longtime employee of our Cafe.\u00a0 Now, since she’s had this real job,\u00a0 she works for us still, but only during summer.\u00a0 Under her direction, the school library has become a beautiful, book-loving space \u2013 it even managed to look inviting on that rainy, gray, January day visible through the long wall of windows facing us as we walked in.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Orin particularly admired the large central fireplace \u2013 empty of fire of course –\u00a0 dating to the school’s 1925 origins, framed by tiles depicting scenes of Dutch boys and girls, wooden shoes and skates, distinctive caps, quaintly white in contrast to the majority of Hughes students!\u00a0\u00a0 Alicia pointed out the learning area \u2013 three rows of handsome wooden tables and chairs to our left with the big flat screen on the far wall and there <\/i>was the fire, blazing merrily!\u00a0 Of course, I was seeing the room empty of children, but I could imagine its beauty having an influence on even the most damaged and recalcitrant.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

(A necessary note: Alicia confided that what she’d done with this library \u2013\u00a0 I see it as her work of art – is due to the influence of our Cafe on her.\u00a0 Clear to me then, is when\u00a0 public spaces are built from the Big Dream, testiments to the mattering of the imagination, they become centers, like the heart.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

It turned out the ‘damaged and recalcitrant’ were on Alicia’s mind (and on the minds of all the teachers in the Utica system, as I’d\u00a0 learned reading the local paper.)\u00a0 She traces the resurgence of\u00a0 behavior problems, vexing (and frightening) for teachers, to the 2019 NYS bail reform act.\u00a0 I share her concern: no doubt the surest accomplishment of these kinds of reforms will be more and more people joining the Trump camp.\u00a0 Serves Dems right: the bleeding heart of liberal reality is not the live fire (of compassion), but the flat screen image.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

As Alicia sees it, reform’s no good if there is no firmness in the justice system; if kids can get away with murder, some very damaged ones will do so.\u00a0 Where, however, can firmness be found in liberalism’s flattened reality, with its distinct absence of either Absolute or absolution? Why can there be no firmness that is not harsh and punitive?\u00a0 It’s as if in the liberal mind strictness is confused with rigidity, with type-A personality, with harsh and brutal fathers.\u00a0 On the other hand, we have in our society for real a fair amount of brutal or negligent fathers, of abusive male authorities, of cynical liars raised to the pinnacles of authority and power who claim allegiance to Christian love and hierarchy.\u00a0 On either side, evidence is rare of the Love demonstrated in sci-fi author Octavia Butler’s protagonists who,\u00a0 though no strangers to human depravity, refuse to deny \u201cthe better aspects of humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

+++<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Octavia Butler never abandoned truth – depressive reality – to make a cheap hope.\u00a0 In her short story \u00a0The Book of Martha, <\/i>the <\/i>eponymous protagonist, a writer, suddenly finds herself in heaven.\u00a0 God tells her she’s been summoned to \u201chelp humankind to survive its greedy, murderous, wasteful adolescence. Help it to find less destructive, more peaceful and sustainable ways to live.\u201d Out of all the problems facing humanity, Martha decides she’ll use her new power to take on over-population.\u00a0 But God quickly points out the complications that \u2013 people being human – will defeat her plan of limiting everybody to 2 children.\u00a0 Moreover,\u00a0\u00a0 He <\/i>(at first white and white-bearded, God morphs into a black man and then into a black She<\/i> as Martha gradually loses her religious conditioning)\u00a0 chides her for her plan that could lead to extinction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Liberal minds might agree with \u201cGod\u201d here, that humankind cannot be transformed out of its \u201cadolescence\u201d by re-instituting more commandments.\u00a0 Nor will restoring traditional hierarchy do it.\u00a0 But neither will maturity be achieved by top-down liberal-type decrees mandating fairness and inclusivity!\u00a0 However, there is<\/i> a way for humankind to get beyond adolescence, for an adult kind of hope to exist. Fictional Martha’s final proposal, that nighttime dreaming be reality for everyone, carries the powerfully irrational suggestion that people might return to the influence of their imaginations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Being a black woman, Butler doesn’t have to spell out the truth of depressing reality. Implied then, is the fact that dreams derive their meaning not from liberal illusion but from reality that’s \u201cdetermined.\u201d That is, including dark as well as light, equally,\u00a0 reality pays no attention to the rational concern of fairness.<\/i>\u00a0 Liberal reality, on the other hand, highlights fairness at the cost of repressing dark, trauma-truth.\u00a0 So that, for dreaming to have influence on white liberals and their desperate hold on hope,\u00a0 imagination’s faculty has to be released from egoic control.\u00a0 For this, depressing reality must be not denied, but confessed, its truth allowed.\u00a0 Otherwise the ego is entirely comfortable with prolonged adolescence wherein its authority is never challenged, the body’s energy locked in depression, never released into creative expression but serving questionable ends of status-quo liberal reality.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Commonly, even liberals can be vulnerable to the fear\u00a0 – though we usually associate it with the law and order, pro-capital punishment crowd – that if punishments and the threat of punishment are removed society will \u201crun amok.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 As if to prove the point,\u00a0 in actual liberal reality, with its reflexive fondness for \u201ctolerance\u201d and sympathy for underdogs, things do run amok, hence, the teachers’ laments.\u00a0 However, the most malignant consequence of liberal tolerance is not \u201cmurder and mayhem\u201d (though that’s bad enough), but the flourishing of evil under the guise of goodness, the reduction of human good to banality.\u00a0 When I don’t know my own suffering (trauma) then I don’t know its release;\u00a0 \u00a0at a level unknown to myself I am unredeemed; I can have the passion of my group (partial and partisan good) but not of my own compromised heart.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

+++<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Understandably, depression is not something one wishes for; I doubt I can change anybody’s mind on that.\u00a0 But would we think differently if we knew depression were means to a higher good which allowed one consistently to discern the demoralizing, confounding, bullying bamboozlement used to maintain society’s terrible inequalities?\u00a0 Without the gift of their depression,\u00a0 white liberals,\u00a0 forever vulnerable to bondage to the hope that veils from white liberal \u201cnormality\u201d the wretched reality in which most people on the planet live, are unwittingly kept in service to evil.\u00a0 In that \u201cnormality,\u201d for example,\u00a0 war criminals and despoilers of the indigenous world are still held up as heroes.\u00a0 People vote the lesser of two evils. As long as one is among the \u201cnot depressed,\u201d\u00a0 living in hope, then the capacity to \u201crationalize away reality,\u201d and thus qualify one’s passion for the good-for-all, is unopposed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Learning to trust one’s depression one has to learn to mistrust ego’s wily guises \u2013 the voice that insinuates I’m good-for-nothing, or the voice that, overwhelmed by bleakness, declares everything is hopeless.\u00a0 It means trusting the fact there’s no longer any good reason to give up \u2013 or qualify – my authentic, \u201coriginally whole\u201d self,\u00a0 though I learned to do so 70-plus years ago for reasons that were valid at the time.\u00a0\u00a0 No hero myself,\u00a0 I need the company of the heroes \u2013 Octavia Butler, James Baldwin,\u00a0 etc.,\u00a0 prophets who saw reality unblinking. Their practice of their art legitimizes the hope that is\u00a0 the heart’s illusion<\/i> rather than solely ego’s. Such hope may shine its light into one’s day for an hour or two, or light up the intention to make the urban school library into a haven, charmed and charming.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In Butler’s story, Martha wishes to use her \u201cGod-power\u201d\u00a0 to create the reality in which all people have \u201ctheir own personal best of all possible worlds,\u201d\u00a0 reality transformed according to imagination’s miraculous power.\u00a0 She decides against universalizing this kind of utopia after God (by this time, a black woman) tells her, although it will help, such change will also \u201cdo other things…they are inevitable.\u00a0 Nothing ever works smoothly with humankind.<\/i>\u201d Inasmuch as reality is determined \u2013 an assertion science supports \u2013 hope is legitimate only when it’s individually attained.\u00a0 Art must inspire art, not unearned hope. The task of standing by my depression, breathing life into my hope, belongs to me in the privacy of my heart.\u00a0 Not \u201cfree will choice,\u201d this is surrender to the reality of wholeness and interconnection that is determined<\/i> in the template of the soul.\u00a0 Legitimate hope,\u00a0 utopia-built-for-one, is at least a place to start.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The post Fuggedaboud Hope. Trust Your Melancholy. Utopia or Bust.<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is how [Octavia] Butler finds her way in a world that perpetually demoralizes, confounds, browbeats: she writes her way to hope.\u00a0 This is how she confronts darkness and persists in the face of her own despair. \u2013 Jesmyn West, Introduction to Bloodchild, by Octavia Butler [Octavia Butler\u2019s] primary characters refuse to deny the better More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Fuggedaboud Hope. Trust Your Melancholy. Utopia or Bust.<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":203,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503396"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/203"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1503396"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1503397,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503396\/revisions\/1503397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1503396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1503396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1503396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}