Amazing. I live in a country that won’t expand health care for needy children here at home, but is willing to bankrupt itself blowing up millions of innocents abroad.
As we drift toward breakdown and irrelevancy, the cruelty and stupidity is utterly mind-boggling. I can’t think of a single thing about the promulgated “us” to be proud of. Not one. But if I expand “us” to mean everyone, as in all souls on the planet, the picture changes. I think the only way out of this is to kill the “us” vs. “them” crap and feel the single field of consciousness we’re all a part of. The right choices then become obvious and automatic. This is what could have happened after 9/ll but didn’t. As Charles Shaw writes in a long essay about the phenomenon of the Zeitgeist movie [linked in sidebar],
After 9/11, The United States had the sympathy and support of most of the world and the nation was presented with a golden opportunity to collectively ask, why did this happen? What about us needs to change? While many citizens did ask (some of us over and over) and were waiting around for an answer, we had a ready-made justification rammed down our throats by our government: we are the victims, and we are now at war. They hate us for our freedoms. We must hunt them down and eliminate them wherever they are. This war will take generations to win.
We obviously just weren’t ready, and unfortunately, dueling intellects don’t get us there. It’s a perceptual shift. When it happens, you’ll be throwing away your anti-depressants. I know this for a personal fact. I still get depressed from time to time — the collective unconscious is awfully persuasive — but remembering when grace dropped the empathy bomb brings me back out into the open. There’s also something in me (ego, no doubt) that resists paradise. I feel it at the same time I feel the expansion, like a tug from a healing surgical incision, an almost poignant memory of tightness and limitation.
Look, I don’t just make this stuff up. It’s like snow on the mountain. Looking outside just now, I can see there’s been some melting. And so it goes.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Paradise is a delusion, Johannnes, and you SHOULD resist it. Dreaming of paradise in the secular sphere is the basis of fascism. Putting up with ordinary human unsatisfactoriness is the basis of democracy. Leave dreams of perfection to poets and mystics. Leave life in the world to all the rest of us clodhoppers.
I’m being provocative, of course. But isn’t it true that educated and sensitive types need to be on guard against a tendency to feel they’re philosopher kings? Don’t they have an unacknowledged lust to dictate to the masses?
We ought to be honest about this. Democracy means the masses, like it or not. If we don’t like it, that’s fine, but we ought to admit that if we have a problem here, it’s with our fellow human beings. As the poet said, “We must love one another or die.” Much of the American intelligentsia these days seems to want to die rather than love the unwashed – those who haven’t signed up for the cause de jour. Maybe if a Democrat gets into the highest office this will all change, and we can all go back to living our lives.
Paradise is not intended in the way you take it. Try “wholeness.”
You’re beginning to worry me here, K.J.
Sounds good in principle, but still has kind of a pious quality about it. I always wanted to shake off that stuff when I was young, and don’t detect any abatement in the principle as I get older. I kind of like worrying myself as well as you, my friend – barging about recklessly inside my soul just to see what turns up. Don’t like thinking stale thoughts beamed at me by the spirit of the age. Somebody (Robert Frost?) said that it was the desert places inside him that were the most fruitful. Well, I like that. Or maybe I just like the metaphor. Or maybe it’s just the cramped legacy of West Texas at work in me. Probably all of these things.
You have a “cramped legacy,” I have a legacy of body parts and abandonment. But these offer a way inside. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Frost carried tremendous pain as an individual. It comes through in everything he ever wrote, and I understand his “desert places” perfectly. It’s like the empty compartment in my own soul where the unconditional love was supposed to go. The great paradox of our wounding is that when we go back to the box office to get our money back, we find a winning lotto ticket in our pocket. That’s what he meant by fruitful: salvation is in the gaps. The ache of separation leads to where the goodies are. This involves the absolute essence of creativity. If Frost had had no desert places, none of us would have heard of him.
That’s a beautifully responsive rejoinder, old pal. We’re both fools for metaphors, it’s clear. I myself don’t believe much in unconditional love, however. It sort of helps us creatures to know we’ve got to work on the project of making ourselves lovable. There’s a touching line in an Auden poem: “If mutual affection cannot be / let the loving one be me”. Being on the giving side’s a bit more important than being on the receiving side, don’t you think?
My own desert places are so congenital and of long-standing that I don’t ever expect to see them draped in flowers. However, I don’t think of this as emptiness. For Frost it was his experience and therefore his material. It was bracing to him, stimulating and in that way “fruitful”. The bleaker the world got the more he liked it. “What but design of darkness to appal / if design govern in a thing so small?” Lord, how he relished the wit in that last line. Wit’s definitely a good anti-dote for the appalling.