Oneida Lake at Sunset. Photograph Source: John Brighenti – CC BY 2.0
“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing! …The unadmitted, inadmissable government …rules the… society by stifling the individual mind.” [Contradicting Shevek who calls him“crazy,” Bedap continues] No, brother, I’m sane. What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality….The reality is pain…But it’s the lies, evasions of reality that drive you crazy…
–Bedap, reproving Shevek, in The Dispossessed by Ursula K.LeGuin
“A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.”
–Shevek, in Ibid
By turning away from spiritual truth—by which Guenon meant the esoteric truth at the heart of the ancient religions- modern humanity had guaranteed its descent into confusion and breakdown.
–Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine
Sorry – I’m not “over it!” The loss of our coffeeshop after 22 years was profound for me. Although something to be grieved, it has not completely fit the pattern of the loss of a beloved person. Perhaps an indigenous person mourning the loss of their land would best understand this kind of grief, though our Cafe was not snatched from us by trickery and force. Rather, the loss, at least in part, was due to the hazards of staying small and in-place in a “growth economy.” With my faith being so very individual, so “made up,” I could look nowhere for help for what is a spiritual problem. Through these couple of years I have clung to truths I’d learned from experience could keep me from spiritual drowning, one of which is more mundane – keep walking, keep my life and its projects going, trust “the process.”
The other means is not mundane. To speak of it I will use the metaphysically referential terms “horizontal,” referring to relationships on the social, this-world plane, and “vertical,” the spiritual dimension that reaches down to the depths of hell and upwards to heaven and so is “imaginal.”
With the vertical for me having become shaky, much of the spiritual danger comes from the perplexities of horizontal social being. When you’ve lost your compass, and in an ever forward-marching, de-personalized and de-humanizing “Machine” context (I use the term favored by Paul Kingsnorth and other modern-age poets and prophets) that compulsively assures you you don’t need the “hell of other people,” or the hell of your assumed gender or the hell of nature or any of the limitations of being human, horizontal social reality makes for extremely treacherous going – if you still dare to care about unity, that is, and staying human.
In some way, the Cafe’s sacred quality protected me from these dangers and now I must learn to navigate them in its absence, so that this other way I’ve found of dealing with that loss has been to keep a residual faith, no matter what confusions assault me in relation to the people in my life, or in the limited circumference of my life in place, in the inward condition that feels right to my soul. I cling to the rightness in the occasional respite of a relaxed gut, momentary tensionlessness, which feels like grace. It requires trusting that (in a relational, connected, interdependent universe) I’m not supposed to feel damned, forsaken, despised, unwanted, etc. – feelings against which I have no protection in the social world without verticality.
Thus, recovery from this loss of my ‘sacred land’ is a process of recovering inward strength – and I stress, this is the strength and the wisdom I need in order to keep my faith in the rooted, in-place, small-city, family-centered urban life in the Mohawk Valley of New York State I have chosen and that keeps me differentiated from and in resistance to the Machine. But though strength is the goal, much of the time I’m just righting my “boat” after its last capsize; staying in relation to that fearsome and powerful sea of the Unconscious but – so far! – not actually drowning in it.
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Last month I made it a point, with Orin in mind, to get to the talk about nearby Oneida Lake, over at the Oneida County History Center. Orin had strong associations with the lake from childhood – his great-uncle Patsy’s camp was the site of family reunions, Sylvan Beach, the most popular resort spot at the east end of the lake, was a regular destination for family picnics. The first summer after we were married his grandmother told us the story as we sat in her kitchen, about taking the canal barge to Sylvan Beach with her young women friends from the factory.
By the end of the talk, besides learning about the communities and traditional economies around the lake (since the native people had been removed, that is) we had been introduced to many worthy folks the speaker had come across in his 51 years (producing 5 books in all) of research on the lake. We were left convinced of the many fine, salt-of-the-earth types in the region; even the “criminals” the fishing pirates, who have defied the state’s fishing laws and the police sent to enforce them, sounded more like “rascals” than criminals. They’ve been largely supported by the communities around the lake in what sounded to me like it could have been a defense of “the commons.”
It took Orin to bring up the real criminals during the q & a, as I knew – or rather feared – he would do. Feared, not – I emphasize – due to his being associated with gangsters, but for a different reason in this post-Cafe phase of our marriage when we no longer share its protection and trust has become more difficult. He told the story I’ve heard countless times, the discovery on that day in 1957 that the stranger staying at Uncle Patsy’s camp, toward whom tough Uncle Patsy was inexplicably being so meek and nice, running to the store to get him cigarettes, etc., was the notorious mafioso Joe Falcone, hiding out from the Appalachin-era anti-crime sweep. The speaker did not pick up on Orin’s story – did he sense an endangerment to his own picture of America the way it used to – and should – be? Was that my fear as well – that is, am I back on the side of the respectable white folks?
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In a fabulism of my own, I imagine Orin’s social behavior as remnants of his Sicilian heritage, which, correct or off-base, helps explain their inexplicability to me. They seem to me not so much patriarchal egoism, but a capacity for coldness (or “god-likeness,” in the way the prince in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard put it, at very least indifference to social mores, at worst, there are murders in Orin’s family tree). Not until the morning after – which happened to be Easter morning – did I recall that Orin’s insistence upon bringing up the left-out “darker element” in such respectable social settings, was, in fact, a behavior I had long depended upon him for! It worked, always, like magic, to make me feel socially at ease. His habit of changing the discourse, of bringing his outsider input into the inside had been for me, raised in and entirely conditioned by the genteel, white, middle class, educated “inside,” a gift – maybe a god-like one.
For many years, I did not know why his imperviousness to “what people think,” though it so easily can be interpreted as arrogance, was, in the main such a comforting bulwark for me. It came as a surprise when I at last realized that my capacity to “fit” in the good white liberal social milieu, like glove to hand – sweet as such a harmony is at times – invariably does injury to my soul. That is to say, there’s a subtle but very high a price to the fitting. Down deep this sacrifice of my individuality causes pain. On my own, I have little-to-no defense against “what other people think.” Orin, and the Cafe business we made together, was my defense against feeling this pain. Partnered to that Sicilian taciturnity built upon centuries of deep peasant mistrust of church and state, enabled me to stave off the caving to the inevitability of the Machine, to say no to all the voices telling us how a business should be run, to behave just as if we were protecting something sacred.
In the microcosm of myself, the danger in having no onboard protection against the social status quo, is real. When the pain gets ignored, my soul naturally protests, but the protest has nowhere to go except against myself. This defenselessness makes me – and, I suggest, others who, like me, carry the trauma of “mother wound” – desperate to be seen, validated (loved), in the one world I know: white liberal (capitalist) reality. Thus embraced in liberal reality one is still capable of doing good, but its a good that has no power against the Machine. One’s resistance to tyranny will not go to its radical root – partnered with a Sicilian or no – unless, one reach transcendent truth – the metaphysicalreality that’s “independent of all our struggles and notions.” That reality is indiscernible except by those who have the strength of their own goodness, which is individuality.
Without “metaphysically authenticated” individuality, no matter how much money and influence one has attained, one remains a slave to the Machine. That is, indifference to the real pain that comes with loss of my autonomy keeps me on the side of the master – the ego, incapable of opposing the given in materialist techno-capitalism because I’m busy drowning in it! Maintaining social/economic insiderhood at the expense of one’s soul that wants its individuality one becomes an enemy to oneself.
I may just be an extreme case, of course. But if I’m not so extreme, then this dilemma I describe – this kind of “innate cowardice” may be, for those of us who “pass” in liberal white reality, the challenge for individuality under what the character Shevek in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed calls “unadmitted, inadmissible” government. In any gathering of the very best of “my people,” in my one and only social world, I can never trust the other in me is included, because it is not! Excepting my own social enclave consisting of people powerfully attracted to our coffeeshop over 22 years, there are precious few social encounters I can fully trust. In the story I tell myself, the problem for me now, after having relied upon Orin to provide that indifference to what other people think, which, no question, allowed our Cafe its sacred aspect, is to have my own protection.
Rereading The Dispossessed in our book club turned out to be timely indeed! LeGuin tells so well the story of that struggle to preserve “autonomy of conscience even at the cost of becoming eccentric.” This is the struggle of the protagonist, (motherless!) Shevek, and his friends, living in a separate Anarchist world on a separate planet. The fact that even an anarchist world could not grant individuality as a right tells me there is something about this struggle that is universal, macrocosmic, as well as personal and microcosmic. If my writing communicates anything of value to other people, may it be that others who find the path to authentic strength to be nearly insurmountably difficult be assured they are not alone! I suspect there are others who passively accept the pained (traumatized) insider as personal problem, treatable with medication if one is lucky, or they find some other way around the dilemma of strength – addictions work well – never able to manage the difficult feat of being both good and strong. Further, I suspect that a strength that does not need protection is not strength but some form or other of unquestioned obedience to the Machine-as-God.
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By now, the dark alternative to the kind of individuality that can protect the soul from the smiley-face oppressor, is obvious; it’s fascism, yes, but fascism is also the bogeyman we won’t fully believe in until the brownshirts come knocking on our door. The subtler erasures of human efficacy, the meaning of being/ doing things at the humanly interactive level, staying within the lowlier, “hands-on” human “wheelhouse” is what should alarm us now. Every turn to rescue by technology reels us in (or out), except insofar as we do not cease our obedient commitment to the soul’s verticality, to reclaiming behaviors and knowledge largely already lost. I refer to the lost arts of making by hand, but even more so, left with just horizontal relatedness, to loss of ability to protect/defend the sacred, the human, the vulnerable. That verticality, with its illogical and unnecessary veneration of tradition, of loyalty to places and people, of a backwards conservatism, a hierarchy of good, needs our consciousness or it will be hierarchy of the worst.
Late as it is in this steady process of machinification, to give our loyalty to the most threatened thing in us – to the vulnerable, imaginative soul where lies true strength – it’s not too late. It is both the lowliest and the highest, location of the meeting of vertical and horizontal, which is in Christian terms the cross. While it wreaks mental havoc in the individual when denied, when obeyed consciously, in conscious creativity, it enlarges the individual into full social being, which is to be, not merely “good,” but an avatar of love. That is, we’re called to be artists who “cannot hide anywhere.”
Anyone reading my work can see I have far to go in becoming more adept at not hiding! Fortunately for me, there are still reminders we gave ourselves, back in the Cafe’s heyday, a trail of bread crumbs leading back to soul’s truth. Among them, and still going, are The Other Side’s artistic productions, its ongoing cultivation of the creative soil in Utica. This winter-into-spring has brought the birth of a bi-weekly music jam in our nonprofit space, and a readers’ theater has also launched. Last Friday, the jazz series we’ve kept going for 16 years featured guest Marko Marcinko, from PA. His powerful drumming as leader seemed to call forth similar assertiveness from the other musicians. The space was filled with energy. It brought back to me that old feeling, the power and excitement of being in the room with people actively making art, vehicles for the creative spirit. As good an exemplification as one can find for the world that can resist the Machine – one enervated by joy.
