The Highwayman Accosts Us; Prepare Yourself to Meet Him
“The reason why the highwayman masters the traveler is not his pistol, but his personality. If the party attacked really had the superiority in character and love, he could really conquer without arms. But he must be so charged and surcharged with love that he is as good a highwayman as the highwayman. You shall not match the pirate with a goody, but with a pirate (i.e., in natural force), and more determined and absolute by dint of his heart than by help of his arms.”
–Ralph W. Emerson, Journals, 1850
“[Of an American feminist academic, a character in the novel] Her followers loved her for her bitterness, and even if she wanted to let joy in, she couldn’t because she would lose the applause. And anyway it would have to be joy as resistance. Or joy as a subversive anti-patriarchy project. Never just joy. As joy.”
–Chimimanda Ngosie Adichie, Dream Count
“It wasn’t even that they (“American liberals”) felt offended; it was that offended was the only thing they felt.
–Ibid.
As the Trumpian peril mounts it is beginning to be clearer to me just what is the purpose this small band of friends who make up a tiny non-profit space for arts in Utica – offshoot of the Cafe that no longer exists – serve here in this community. Throughout the 17 years of The Other Side’s existence, during the everlasting “purple haze” of blue v red neoliberal politics, I’ve struggled to name what we are in words that would distinguish us from similar organizations while avoding getting us labeled as commies. But what I truly wanted was to identify the non-profit in a way that suggested its transgressive nature, art as disobedience to the chains binding imagination in the neoliberal totality, as anarchist, anarchism being the “pirate” that is match – by dint of heart, not might – for the pirate that is neoliberalism.
The impediment to such an about face, to being “as good a highwayman as the highwayman,” is imaginations so reduced in liberal reality that most people, most of the time, can’t escape the simplifications of polarized thinking and distinctions that keep us acting from fear instead of from “character and love:” i.e., better avoid sounding too radical or we’ll lose our support. “Real” or “imaginary,” bad or good, loser or winner, poor or not-poor, red or blue, etc. – all of these oppositions, including those of religion, keep imagination immobilized.
The very real threat of Trump’s “vision” for America, presents us at last with the recognizable armed highwayman who has stopped us in our tracks. As anti-Trump rallies proliferate, I see emerging a different identity for idealisticorganizations in forgotten places such as Utica. No question that Trumpian fascism must be opposed. But is it not now time to be the difference, instead of obediently playing our part on the “Blue side,” that is not different enough to assert itself against rising fascism? That is, fascism means lynchings, Ku Klux Klan rallies, deportations and concentration camps, terrible deeds no liberal could ever conjure up. But what does the liberal conjure beyond No to the actions of the wealthy and powerful right-wingers – what, that is, of equal decisiveness – even ruthlessness – in the service of a definite goal? Were not the wealthy and powerful liberals highwaymen – if you look at all the consequences of free markets, of ceaseless wars and bombings, of inaction on climate change – which we’ve grown accustomed to considering tolerable? Different for those who want to see a difference, but alike in abandoning the common good as the good that must be served first.
Belief, on both sides, is defensive; neither is “charged and sur-charged with love.” The interior “wall” erected egoistically against knowing the darkness in the soul keeps both sides acting from aggrievement and offendedness. In the liberal case, the wall keeps us this side of full idealism, ever short of full Big Dream-energized will such that every action is taken in and strengthened by conscious relation to it, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. engaged “soul force” in the struggles of black and poor people for social justice.
Back in the 1850’s Emerson urged Americans to be “self reliant,” by which he meant to look not outside ourselves for legitimation, but to “believe your own thought, believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men.” Despite his being read by nearly every school kid, very few in the more than a century-and-a-half since have followed his prophetic guidance. Rather we adapt, few among us achieving trust in what he told us to trust (“thyself”). We participate in the diminishment of our very souls, passing on the diminishment generationally. We shrink souls to fit the American success model, normalizing neuroses, depression, addictions, etc. Because of the soul’s very wildness it must be kept domesticated, or colonized. Politically, this makes us fit to be Party faithful, but not conscience faithful. And now we are shocked that there is nothing to stop the highwayman, the courts cannot stop an illegal deportation, fascism is unopposed. We’re shocked that billionaires are openly running the government, as if moneyed interests had not been the major driving force in America’s development since its earliest times.
How this devotion to profits over goodness manages to remain a secret has to do with the other secret, racism, with which it is interwoven from pre-revolutionary days. A recent Counterpunch piece, “We Continue to Haunt Hamilton,” by the poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, about the play he wrote and produced off-off Broadway in answer to the hit Broadway musical, Hamilton! reminds us of the darker truth. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton’s story has more damning content than was brought out in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s play. Hamilton was pro-abolition on record, but in actual practice, he was a slaveowner and seller of human beings. In response to the evidence that came out supporting Reed’s more complicated picture, Miranda excused himself for having left out such qualifying details, (which of course, if included, would have meant, no hit musical!)
Another voice, more modern than Emerson, that urged more strenuous, inclusive consciousness, not only to alleviate personal mental suffering, but to come to grips with social evil, was that of archetypal psychologist C. G. Jung. Nazi evil, he pointed out, was consequence of the unexamined shadow existing in the human Unconscious, both personal and collective. And, more accessible than Jung’s work, and perhaps even more persuasive in urging confrontation with personal and collective shadow, are the writings of former slaves, and colonized peoples, voices speaking from the social shadows such as the epigraphs above that were sent to me by a friend. (I have not read any books by this Nigerian author. Googling her, I discovered she is globally famous; colleges appear to be scrambling to give her her next honorary degree. Such perceptive voices ought to be heard, but at the same time, you will not make right your business with “thine own” soul by hearing truth from these others.)
One way to counter neofascism is to see that our white middle class children are given the social advantage of attending multicultural urban schools! But deeper change is needed if our hearts, blinded after centuries of soul subordination, are to regain their sight. We fault our congresspeople for being spineless, but our spines are squishy from the absence of a moral ultimacy demanding “character and love.” Without obedience to the more inclusive reality, our “disobedience” can be little more than sibling squabbling. I believe strongly that if liberalism is to move out from unworthy and ineffective tactics such as “cancel culture” and social bullying, with “offendedness” the lead emotion, it can do so only if individuals will move to the soul ground pointed to by Emerson.
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At the most recent board meeting of The Other Side, the issue was raised, as it has been more than once, of providing insurance for artists exhibiting in our gallery. Apparently some artists have declined to exhibit with us because of this “insecurity.” Mind you, due to its being multi-use, and without paid staff, our gallery cannot be guaranteed “safe” or “secure,” but in over 17 years has never suffered a theft or act of vandalism. Suddenly, listening to this conversation getting replayed, I found myself saying “Art is not safe!” spontaneously. It felt so good speaking the words, that I repeated them. Where did they come from? Since ordinarily I am not spontaneous with spoken words, I conclude they came from my soul. Although nobody spoke to my point, it seemed to answer something for them, too. People nodded, and we went on to the next item on the agenda.
Undoubtedly there are people who speak their soul’s truth more readily than I. Some kind of crooked passageway exists between my heart and my spoken voice. For people like me, it can be life-changing to realize a relationship can be made to the knowledge in one’s soul, built sediment-like over the inconceivable expanse of human history, unobtainable by ordinary consciousness. I’ve found we can learn the soul’s needs. They must have creative expression of some kind. But moreover, they want to feel joy, overflowing gratitude, and they persist in this purpose despite all one’s hedging and dodging. The joy is in the escape (transcendence) from habitual dualism, from the trap of offendedness and aggrievement that keeps us in red v blue purple haze, in perpetual standoff with “the enemy.” Not safety, precisely, but joy is relief from defensiveness and need for security.
Safety – security – is not something the world – or even God – can offer, but humans need something that can take it’s place; transcendence is available to every person by means of art. Art is not the only means to make contact with the soul – there are hallucinogens, there is psychotherapy. Having been discounted for so many millennia, outside of indigenous cultures and a scattering of poets, prophets, mystics and artists across the ages, the soul now manifests as “mental illness.” For many people self-reliance will call for assistance from the modern soul doctor – the psychotherapist. Ultimately, however, the contact must be personal; can only come from the individual’s assent to take what the soul tells her as her truth, and trusting in her own subjectivity, find her purpose and her destiny.
Woe to me if I make this sound like for me, it’s a “done deal.” I write, always, to be the voice I need to hear to keep myself in “self-trust.” But as a matter of fact, so did Emerson, without ever explicitly acknowledging it was the art of writing itself that was the medium for self-reliance.
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As a writer, in order to talk about the red-blue purple haze that smothers liberals’ capacity to confront the highwayman, I rely heavily on the two terms: liberals or liberalism, and whiteness. I do this in the interest of bringing people “not to me, but to themselves.” (Emerson) Most white liberals I know take these aspects of identity for granted. That is ourcontribution to the haze. Not that we can’t see the limitations of liberal politics (voting the lesser evil, etc.) and not that we do not grasp the genocidal, colonialist, brutal part of our history, and desire to rid our nation of white supremacy, but we do not see how secular liberalism works, how it imposes sanctions upon the heart’s imagination. Thus, with hearts so blinded, we’re no match for the highwayman when he stops us with his superior arms.
The third term I use, a little archaic and abstract for most people, but as a way of talking about liberal distrust of imagination, is soullessness. For me, it’s no abstraction! Invisible yes, abstract, no! American soullessness is not just about the society built upon consumerism, though it is that. It’s not even only about lack of depth of feeling, the way it is talked about in normal discourse. America’s soullessness is based in hostility to and fear of the real-existing soul, for it terrifies us. In a couple of journal entries about night dreams, Emerson reveals his knowledge of this terror. He wrote: “Our life is so safe and regular (this was the 19th century in white Concord!) that we hardly know the emotion of terror… And yet dreams acquaint us with what the day omits. [Making ready for your night’s sleep], lie on your back, and you may, in the course of an hour or two, have this neglected part of your education…supplied. (He tells his dream, which terrified him) “After I woke and recalled the impressions, my brain tingled with repeated vibrations of terror; and yet was the sensation pleasurable…a sort of rehearsal for Tragedy.”
In another journal entry he wrote: …there is [prophecy] in dreams….the soul in dreams has a subtle synthetic power which it will not exert under the sharp eyes of day. It does not like to be watched or looked upon…If in dreams you see…luxurious pictures, an inevitable tie drags in the sequel of cruelty and malignity. If you swallow the devil’s bait, you will have a horizon full of dragons shortly.” Emerson understood dreams’ compensatory function, the means the soul has to make terror a “rehearsal for Tragedy.” Or, as I might say, to show us the original terror, the traumatic soul wound that, once acknowledged and “absolved,” (okay, I see you!) leaves one free to match the pirate with a pirate.
However it is known or seen/not seen in our community, The Other Side is a safe space for souls, as was the Cafe before it. In that sense, as much “church” as art gallery, but church as I like to think Emerson would have envisioned it. More than a “space for the arts,” it is an enclosure protected by belief I hold to as Emerson instructs – “with fear and hope beneath it. ” It honors idealism in all its indefensible foolishness, creativity because it is divine, and above all, it holds that I’m meant to do that which I do in “self-trust.” And answering the question I began with, in secular liberal reality could one possibly be more transgressive, anarchist in the full sense, as good highwaymen as the highwayman, than to be a “church?
