Was Emerson Pointing to Indigenousness?
[Achille] Mbembe said that his project was ‘to look into ways in which we can render politically fruitful the critique of religion while taking very seriously religion itself as critique – especially a critique of ‘the political’.
–Kevin Okoth, reviewing Brutalism by Achille Mbembe, in London Review of Books (LRB) 7/10/25
What your heart thinks great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.
–RW Emerson, Spiritual Laws
This was the power Plath had discovered – towering, revolving, in brass feathers and fire. It was not that she really flew. It was that she had gone underground but did not stay there.
–Patricia Lockwood, Arrayed In Shining Scales, LRB7/10/25
As I understand it, this “going underground” and not staying there, the power Sylvia Plath discovered, is the mythic – or soul – journey, that entered popular consciousness a few decades ago via the mythologist Joseph Campbell’s PBS series, poet and mythopoetic men’s movement leader Robert Bly, and a flock of writers and psychoanalysts influenced by depth psychology. Again, in my understanding, to do it “right,” you go there, collect the reward, and you come back and try to figure out how to bring the “new life” you discovered underground, through tests and trials, into your real life, into the community that without new life is stagnant and conforming (dying). If we think of aliveness as creativity, connected somehow with the hero’s honesty and courage, this makes art essential if communities are to be other than beggars at the trough of large corporations, chains, and state funding, to be instead independently fertile cultural soil for living with abundance for all.
If I may be so bold as to put myself into the same sentence with her, like Plath, whose poetry I read many years ago but not recently, I was an underground sojourner who did not stay there. Differently from her, in relation to that underground experience, I learned to understand it (the Unconscious) in modern psychotherapeutic terms as spiritual transformation; a downward path that had the promise of an upturn. The idea, as I learned it, is you can avoid getting stuck there in what is essentially the terrain of madness if you keep walking, like, in The Lord of the Rings (which I’m currently reading at long last) Frodo and Company fulfilling their responsibility to the Ring.
By now there must be a significant number of people around who share this transformational understanding of “soul recovery” and ‘soul journey,” including many who know a lot more about it than I do from my singular experience. But my “return” took a heretical direction. Equipped now with a “2-fold” vision, it stayed within the limitations in my given circumstances: living in Utica, remote from cultural “hubs,” precarious financially, married with family. Had I had imbibed Emerson-like wisdom?: “What we call obscure condition or vulgar society is that condition and society whose poetry is not yet written, but which you shall presently make as enviable and renowned as any.” Or this: ‘The pretense that [a man] has another call, a summons by name and personal election and “outward signs that mark him extraordinary and not in the roll of common men” is fanaticism…’
These limitations were self-imposed in the land of boundless freedom and opportunity; that is what made them always suspect. After all, acceptance of these limitations was a complete departure from received wisdom; I could have, perhaps should have, said yes at least to some way that would have brought me a more respectable income even if it would have felt like compromise to my William Blake-inspired soul. Had I shot myself in the foot? Did the fact I was not drawn to any career option disprove Emerson? The coffeeshop, that we started in 2002, said no! Vision, outsiderhood, anti-establishment, counterculture, art, beauty, fine coffee from a conscientious coffee roaster and jazz, all good! Couldn’t get no better. Get thee behind me thou Father of Lies! For 20 years the Cafe held back the avalanche of self-hate still potential in me.
Living within these limitations I relied on my own imaginative interpretation of inward events; I was forced into radical self-trust. I learned, firsthand, to appreciate the fact that, Emerson-like, this trust in imagination – which importantly, was the basis for the Cafe – is the basis of all religion. Thus I’d been initiated into what came to be called “New Age Spirituality.” I was part of a trend that, as I see it now, was simply recapitulating Emerson but without crediting him. Too old-fashioned. Too much talk about God and virtue.
The new age seemed to confirm for modern post-religious westerners that religion per se is unnecessary to spiritual life. For now, with the aid of knowledgeable guides, it’s possible to make the underground voyage and avoid falling into the madness that overcame Sylvia Plath. In other words, those following Emersonian advice – trust thyself – all the way – can be granted the chance to interpret the experience as union with the divine, as surely Emerson did; it is salvific. But is the new freedom really all win-win? Mustn’t the things lost along the way be accounted for?
Emerson never considered separating spirituality from religion (“O my brothers, God exists!”), while today, in my experience, the New Age spiritual adepts are generally unsupportive of self-limitation. Spirituality is about expansion, not to lead to the life ways of contraction in a society that teaches no limits to growth. Religion, on the other hand, has specific “application:” the building and maintaining of face-to-face embodied families and community, local, stable over time, ways of life that, arguably, in some way or other reflect the interdependence of creation by putting limits on human freedom. Application of the truth of necessary self-limitation is arguably the basis for the kind of interconnected life that draws its life from the perennial utopian dream. Religion thus cannot be stepped out of like an old pair of shoes without a certain amount of hypocrisy as long as we still talk about and profess to long for peace and justice.
What if religion were to be honored as an act of honestly owning our real history? For all its abuses and hypocrisies, “the church” has kept a protected separate space in which that One Truth experienced in the “underground” reality of psychospiritual transformation – is preserved. While making no apologies for the Church’s becoming a political animal, its egocentric mission to Christianize the world, surely it must now be apparent: at the same time as some of us are freed from the need for “organized religion,” all of our collective way of life depends this day and every day upon conformity at the expense of new life. (“the man who fits himself to the customary work or trade he falls into ..is part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.”) It depends upon tacit complicity with the exploitation of the vast majority of the earth’s human beings and the earth itself. Not a win-win.
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Emerson, who is mistakenly thought to have been congratulating us on being Americans, free and independent and non-conformist, was actually telling us not that we had the key to the kingdom of freedom already, but how to find it within. What has happened instead, with the exception of some artists and poets and prophetic individuals who will defy the general rule established by corporate capitalist economy – Americans have largely conformed, including ones with the education and the means supposedly not to conform. Obviously, conformity is simply not, as we like to think, the observable kind: allegiance to brands, the worship of celebrity and wealth, the trends, gadgets and fashions. Its not all those sheep trooping off to sabbath services.
Conformity – the “soul of it” – is the absence of soul. The most famous call to conformity is to a temporary condition – when in Rome, etc. It assumes one has beliefs, customs or sense of purpose one sets aside temporarily in order to meet another standard of acceptability that otherwise one would not do. Thus conformity depends upon avoidance of a truth existent prior to conforming – a truth that is such that, when you hear it, or see it in practice in a fellow human being in any degree, you immediately recognize. Reading Emerson’s words, one knows, even 175 years later, he spoke truth. Ditto for Thoreau – or for Jesus, Buddha, MLK, jr., and edgier ones like William Blake and Allen Ginsburg, etc. and many others by means of whose words and art one feels the revivifying power of truth spoken. Although most of us, lacking the talent perhaps, will only realize it partially, upon everyone it makes its claim for goodness or, what Emerson called “virtue.” Kindness, doing unto others, greater blessedness in giving than in receiving, all simply subpoints under the larger truth. The larger cannot be met by simple, conforming obedience to a rule of “be nice.” It is all-inclusive, a privilege of imagination. The rule is, rather, “All connects. Behave accordingly.”
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As anyone can see who reads my essays, I believe in the truth of myth. And, further, advocating for the practice of art and the soul journey as I do, that mythic narrative is not spectacle! These days, still in post-Cafe crisis mode, I cling to these hardwon truths as to a piece of flotsam after the ship has sunk. My crisis is with “the facts of life.” Having given over so much of my consciousness to the expansion of meaning via imagination, many days I seem to have lost the capacity to deal with the naked lunch at the end of my own fork. That “lunch” threatens up close with chaos, with which it seems every day I must grapple. It seems often as if I cannot think beyond the thinking required to tackle my current struggles and to attain tiny victories essentially at survival level, with some, yes, aimed higher – “goods” of family and friendships; the surplus”good” of The Other Side, and of course, my writing. The constant, plaguing fear has opened the door to my old terror and its original “solution” in obsessive, self-negating thoughts, threatening to paralyze my capacity for thinking. Only in writing can I keep them at bay.
I know, I know, I defy new age wisdom in saying what I said about thinking. We’re supposed to be coming down into our body, not seeking the escape into “head stuff.” But I like head stuff, I respond! It seems to have a claim on me, not against my embodiment, but as a way of hanging in in embodiment – not perfectly, but making sense to myself. Bodies are housing for the soul in a context within which the soul’s anarchistic perspective is not just “freeing,” but to which it is anathema. If this were not so, why would Emerson make such a big deal of conformity? If the “thinking” work of critique is demeaned, freedoms are worthless.
The crisis is real; because of it I’m back in therapy for the first time in over 25 years! And already I antisipate I will have to explain myself. Will even she get it that for me thinking is not a head thing, but a necessary head-heart thing? My life has lost the “power head” – that is, the social identity and a kind of status that could hold its own with the hoi polloi of Utica the Cafe gave me. I’m seeing how that Cafe and the identity that came with it and the enchanting aura with which it imbued all who were part of it, kept me out of this personal chaos. Or, rather, did its holding pattern allow me to interrupt the journey to identity that is never encapsulated, leaving it somehow unfinished? This, I figure now, is the bottom line life challenge and why I’ve returned to Emerson in my need. And he says unequivocally: “Whatever he knows and thinks, whatever in his apprehension is worth doing, that let him communicate or men will never know and honor him aright.”
I do not know for sure how other people navigate without seemingly touching down into this grimmest, starkest layer of the self, but as I write about it I suspect the avoidance has to do heavily with denial, for the basic facts are grim. Maybe it’s best to “not go there,” to leave that whole dimension, the awfulness, somewhere out there with all the nasties, but I can’t see how mass denial, or unconsciousness has actually worked out well in the long run. No, I think the nastiness is precisely there so we don’t miss the lifesaver that’s tossed to us in imagination. And we’re not supposed to miss it. Religion at least recognized the reality of evil, and was supposed to point to the lifesaver. But life for us white middle class people is so comfortable, once we conform to it, it’s easy to forget the reality – the contrariness and unacceptability of life’s given terms.
Will she make it? Lord knows. But at times I suspect there is something coming to meet me from “the other side” (and coincidentally or not, from The Other Side, our non-profit arts space) Last night, the young teacher, Luigi, taught the first of his “Peoples’ Classrooms” in our space. He began in a way that was emphatically not “gradualist,” with a “peoples’ history” of Palestine! In so doing, and in a very short space of time, he took the 40 or so people who showed up through the history up to and into the current genocide. He spared us very little of unbearable awareness. At the same time, the event lifted me. It feels to me like a certain flowering of the original purpose that has been so difficult to consistently realize here in Utica – that is, to be a connection with “the global,” the whole truth.
This talk was made possible by The Other Side’s newest and youngest members, all under 40, all local. We who are“stuck” in Utica- that is, those of us who are always wondering if we should have”reached for the stars,” have a need to know something that is denied practically everywhere, no place more so than in Utica that’s trying to be as good as instead of simply being what we are – not a brand, but something innate to ourselves. The Other Side’s saying “here is the center here is the holy here is what’s worth defending.” Was Emerson urging us to become indigenous?
