To Orin,
and to Adam, Rob, Marshall
On the Occasion of the Debut of
The Rag and Bone Shop Poetry Theater
February 20, 2010
at
The Other Side of Utica
Over the rising beer-fueled din
In the bar we love,
After your reading,
A friend told us where he’d been that night -
A concert at the Aud with 2 remaining Dead.
The Grateful Dead! Rivals to Yeats’ poems
While your doughty cast surprised us,
In the tiny theater dedicated to Her - the Muse -
And to all who’d be so unsavvy, so punily destined
As to follow Her in this town so bloody far from Hollywood,
In this butthole kind of place,
Irishly unwanted -
As distant from “the real” on TV screen
As real stench to its description,
As my real heart to Valentine trinkets
Arrayed in bright discounted piles at RiteAid,
As a man - 61 and steeped in that Sixties ecstatic stew -
Getting up first time to read on stage -
Stage-scared, his customary persona fled -
to the icon Yeats, his poems today unread.
I cannot imagine how ridiculous the world
handed down must seem to our young -
Its mockery of heroism, its erase of humble men and women bent on
Virtue, kindness, honor to the gods whose traces
Linger, though not encouraged, in every human breast -
Where Holocaust survivors and Tiger Woods parade
Before us in celebrity, as though knowledge were value-free,
Accrued in our poor besieged brains by electronic grace.
Can such a world even behold
Acts done purely for devotion’s sake,
Out of love for Her and for those few who in their age
lent Her their voice?
Muse, Great Mother, Goddess:
All names for the One in whose orchard we must
Learn to walk.
In each incredibly humble bite
Of her apple,
Using voice and body and word,
The truth -
Like food for the starving in Port-au-Prince -
Leaks through
Barriers of blindness allied with greed:
All souls of equal worth!
And fight we must to bring each one -
My child, and yours; none purely welcomed -
To manger birth.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
Suffering for One’s Life (As Art)
“I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?” Ernest Becker
“I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch
A blind man battering blind men...
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!” W.B. Yeats
“On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise and know of no other sort of love.” Dostoevsky
"Life is suffering," Buddha’s central teaching, upon which hung all the rest of that religion, was incomprehensible to me back in 1978 when I was taking my first and only world religion class at Yale University as part of my program for a Masters in Divinity from Yale Divinity School. I was very concerned with the oppression of women, and of people of color. I admired liberation theology even though I was handicapped by my lack of a faith in God, but I was completely baffled as to Buddha’s meaning. Probably I assumed it came from the fact he was addressing those poor Asian people, people whose lives were ground down, I imagined, by poverty, short lives, many children, like I’d read about years earlier in The Good Earth.
My cluelessness was not an accident. The American attitude toward suffering, as I have experienced it and observed it, is complex: for instance, the suffering of “dumb animals” appears to be less tolerable than third world suffering, which we tell ourselves in the face of the staggering problems, “we can only do so much about.” Many stories about this anomaly come to mind, but in particular I remember a young man who used to come to our Café in Utica daily with his young daughter, before he moved away with his family several years ago. During all seasons, he parked his big Great Pyrenees out in front, tied to a newspaper box, but it was in winter that this practice caused disturbance for passers by. He was remonstrated by people from their cars as they drove by, and even received phone calls on the Café phone from people distraught over the suffering of the animal. He would patiently explain that the dog was made for the cold, and much preferred it to being indoors.
But as for human suffering, as far as I can tell, nice Americans like myself aren’t supposed to know anything about it personally. It is entirely something for other people.
True to my culture, I remained a virgin to suffering until, in 1995 or so, during a prolonged and agony-filled period when I was undergoing treatment in intensive psychotherapy, I realized that I had suffered in my childhood. I say “I” had suffered, but to this day I think of the one who suffered as “the child.“ Memory of the terror and the rage had persisted in my body for 40 years, though I had been unaware as I pursued a strenuously ambitious life of career, family, & activism. Gradually, through therapy, I learned to recognize and own those feelings instead of short-circuiting them by means of obsessive compulsions. But the fact that I am the kind of person who by cultural definition is not one who suffers, and who in fact enjoyed in many respects an ideal childhood, remains a strong influence on my perceptions, and vies continually with the truth of my actual experience.
I am interested in the notion my culture clings to, that some of us are not supposed to suffer, because of the serious obstacle it makes to important self-knowledge. Maybe if we were not so culturally predisposed to consider ourselves the luckiest, most blessed (exceptional) people on the face of the earth, we would not be so hard on ourselves, and not being so hard on ourselves might make it possible to be kinder to other people. Why is it that “exceptionalist America” is automatically accompanied by thorough saturation.in the diabolical art of suppression of feelings?
Going back to that Eureka moment in the 90's, the recognition that I had suffered as a child amounted to the same thing as learning I had feelings, just as other people have. In the instant of knowing my suffering, I knew such pain was not unusual or unthinkable, but the common thread binding humanity together. The knowledge humanized me in a way I have ever since been immensely grateful for. I had not known how cut off I was from the human community, from connection with all at a very deep level, until this discovery of my suffering. My story was now changed forever; or rather, I had found my story. I had learned a major truth that took me outside the boundaries of my culture: To be in a body, that is, to be human, is to suffer. In the end it is not the suffering endured that makes one ill, but the fact that suffering is not recognized, not allowed, in the American vocabulary that I grew up with. Not only does this taboo make healing from certain kinds of woundings next to impossible, it contributes to the building of the “shadow American” character that is not so benevolent and generous as we like to think.
Beneath the preferred American identification with exceptional goodness of our character, a whole range of suffering occurs, and is tolerated, which is a result of unconsciousness, rather than of out and out Simon Legree-type cruelty. Such suffering is still suffering, but it is socially invisible, not remarkable, and becoming ever less so, I believe. My suffering as a child was apparently invisible to all who knew me. The many “tics” of my childhood - persistent bed-wetting, nail-biting, food neuroses and insomnia, did nothing more than earn me a single visit to a child psychologist at age 10. In a sense, I was the elephant in the family living room, whose pain, and therefore her reality, was denied by all. My pain was not truly hidden, given all of those neurotic behaviors, but no one around me was trained to acknowledge it as pain. None of the adults around me were trained themselves in compassion, or in the recognition of the suffering of others. In my turn, I simply learned to go with the program: okay, if we don’t talk about these things, then I will do my level best to help us bury them. Thus, I became trained in an ethos that does not recognize suffering, beginning with my own.
An aside about the children: It seems therefore to me eminently possible today that we take the “I’m okay” statements from our resilient children of divorced parents, children stressed out from constant structured activity and parental fears for their achievement and success, who no longer are held by networks of extended family and community, as true enough, and ignore the inconvenient pain growing in the souls of young people. Is it time we stop the blather about the kids being so much more (smart, mature, savvy, seasoned, global, fill in the blank) than we were, and ask ourselves tougher questions, at great inconvenience to ourselves, of course, about how well they are doing in their souls?
The idea I am working on here is that the cultural “face” that one learns to put on as a privileged white American (whiteness itself being the key privilege) plays a huge part in teaching us that we are not the ones that suffer. As one who is fairly steeped in New Age literature, and on a transformational spiritual path, I find that much of the literature of new age spirituality contributes to the persistence of this notion by preferring the word “compassion” to the word “suffering.” In general, it seems that if one is Africa American one is allowed to use the word "suffering," but if one is a member of the group defined by whiteness, one must talk about "compassion." Now I did not embark upon this topic with the idea that I was focused on race. But the distinction I’m talking about, and the suppression of knowledge of suffering entailed, has a direct impact on racism and racial discrimination. Because denial of one’s own feeling trains one to be, while perhaps intentionally kind and compassionate, unconsciously mean.
I believe there is no way around it. And this brings me to what it means to have an embodied, or body-centered spirituality, as many of us involved in transformational spirituality profess to have. Surely the embrace of the Goddess’s Life/Death/Life Cycles, means, centrally, living in one’s body, which means, in turn, suffering! I hazard this claim having myself made the perilous passage from the disembodied existence where suffering is not (consciously) known, to the one premised in feeling, which is emphatically "of the body."
From my earliest experiences with the language of transformational spirituality, the word compassion was given to me to help to explain the pain I was experiencing. I was growing a compassionate heart, these difficult changes would lead to a greater capacity for compassion for others. Such words were right on, in a way, but also they tended to leap over the intense suffering I was undergoing. In the 15 years since then, though I have done no formal study of it, I have observed that spiritual literature consistently prefers the word "compassion," with its high-toned connotations of eastern spiritual traditions, Buddhism in particular, to its poor disreputable cousin, "suffering." Of course, this is not a problem of Buddhism, but may lie in its translation by post-moderns who “choose” their religious tradition like a consumer commodity, taking what they like and leaving the messy parts back in Bhutan or Bombay. And there is the possibility that publishers recognize the greater market appeal of "compassion" as opposed to "suffering."
On the other hand, and directly in contrast to the association of “compassion” with the Buddha, the word and the concept of suffering are front and center in Catholic Christianity’s chosen archetype: the image of Christ on the cross is meant to evoke compassion in the beholder.
Which is not to defend Christianity, nor to make its case, but to make a case for individuals to become conscious of their suffering, and end the long practice of identifying only with the cheerier, more upbeat and optimistic version of ourselves. The case has already been made with the image of the man hung on the tree, but the point of Christ’s agony appears to be lost on many of the faith’s adherents. Being Americans first, and Christians second, means we’ll do our damndest to stay out of our bodies, in perpetual expectation of the heaven lying somewhere up ahead, that greater good, that growth and perfection surely attainable in the future. In the meantime, as best we can, we stay out of the moment, out of the eternal now, out of our bodies and our genuine feelings. As the tumult of violence and news of destruction becomes ever more clamorous, we remain outside it all, numbed and distracted by the pervasive media blitz, by shopping, electronic communication devices, and a slew of other distractions and addictions.
No wonder the rage of the Tea Partiers at the prospect of reduced expectations and a shrinking economy - no one ever told us we would have to suffer in this way during “peacetime!” The wonder is that they consistently fail to direct their rage at those who are not and will not suffer economically; they direct their rage at “government,” rather than at those who control and manipulate government through their power and wealth.
But I want to stay with my own “constituents;” the body of people who, to the extent that we call ourselves spiritual, are connected more with the transformational, “gnostic,” or esoteric wing of religion, rather than the institutional traditions or fundamentalist offshoots. Like the moderns or postmoderns we are, we indeed pick and choose from the traditions. However, if we are to trade “in-our-head” spirituality for heart-centeredness, if we are to follow the Goddess and learn to live in accord with Nature’s life/death/life cycles, if we truly want to stop the long habit of allowing nature, the earth, the diversity of animal and plant species, to suffer in our stead, we’d better start becoming acquainted with our own pain. And lest I be interpreted to mean that I am calling “ the victim” in everyone to stand up and be counted, I assure you I am not!
To be “worthy of our suffering,” a phrase attributed to Dostoevsky, we have now to learn our own joyful song. To accomplish such a soul triumph, victim identity is useless, and so is resolute optimism. Suffering is fearful because it threatens to destroy the meaning some of us have identified with for so long, the “sunny side of the street” optimism that we learn to carry like a potent talisman against the dark. In a sense this is true, but one must trust that giving up that identification will yield something far greater and more valuable. The voice you will have obtained in knowing your suffering, and must now use, is the voice of the artist, the mystic, the poet, the prophet that is you; contact with that forgotten one in you makes your more authentic voice manifest. To be “worthy of our suffering” each of us must learn what her/his song is and offer it to the community, where it is wanted and needed for the long healing.
As the world hurtles toward destruction, we cannot anymore leave the depth and the soul of our humanity, the pain of being human, to be lived out disproportionately by “the others,” the “less fortunate.” We come to know our wounds and our suffering not to withdraw in resentment and self-pity, but to fulfill the complete and magnanimous template we were given at birth. To have any hope at all of being able to “suffer with” those others, and with the planet, we must cross over and learn the rest of what we know, but have not only been afraid to acknowledge, but actively discouraged from attempting by dominant aspects of our American culture. If, at the deepest levels in ourselves, we do not know our suffering then we do not know the joy of connection either, its that simple. The most profound act of love is the one we direct to our own suffering; all else issues from that.
“I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?” Ernest Becker
“I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch
A blind man battering blind men...
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!” W.B. Yeats
“On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise and know of no other sort of love.” Dostoevsky
"Life is suffering," Buddha’s central teaching, upon which hung all the rest of that religion, was incomprehensible to me back in 1978 when I was taking my first and only world religion class at Yale University as part of my program for a Masters in Divinity from Yale Divinity School. I was very concerned with the oppression of women, and of people of color. I admired liberation theology even though I was handicapped by my lack of a faith in God, but I was completely baffled as to Buddha’s meaning. Probably I assumed it came from the fact he was addressing those poor Asian people, people whose lives were ground down, I imagined, by poverty, short lives, many children, like I’d read about years earlier in The Good Earth.
My cluelessness was not an accident. The American attitude toward suffering, as I have experienced it and observed it, is complex: for instance, the suffering of “dumb animals” appears to be less tolerable than third world suffering, which we tell ourselves in the face of the staggering problems, “we can only do so much about.” Many stories about this anomaly come to mind, but in particular I remember a young man who used to come to our Café in Utica daily with his young daughter, before he moved away with his family several years ago. During all seasons, he parked his big Great Pyrenees out in front, tied to a newspaper box, but it was in winter that this practice caused disturbance for passers by. He was remonstrated by people from their cars as they drove by, and even received phone calls on the Café phone from people distraught over the suffering of the animal. He would patiently explain that the dog was made for the cold, and much preferred it to being indoors.
But as for human suffering, as far as I can tell, nice Americans like myself aren’t supposed to know anything about it personally. It is entirely something for other people.
True to my culture, I remained a virgin to suffering until, in 1995 or so, during a prolonged and agony-filled period when I was undergoing treatment in intensive psychotherapy, I realized that I had suffered in my childhood. I say “I” had suffered, but to this day I think of the one who suffered as “the child.“ Memory of the terror and the rage had persisted in my body for 40 years, though I had been unaware as I pursued a strenuously ambitious life of career, family, & activism. Gradually, through therapy, I learned to recognize and own those feelings instead of short-circuiting them by means of obsessive compulsions. But the fact that I am the kind of person who by cultural definition is not one who suffers, and who in fact enjoyed in many respects an ideal childhood, remains a strong influence on my perceptions, and vies continually with the truth of my actual experience.
I am interested in the notion my culture clings to, that some of us are not supposed to suffer, because of the serious obstacle it makes to important self-knowledge. Maybe if we were not so culturally predisposed to consider ourselves the luckiest, most blessed (exceptional) people on the face of the earth, we would not be so hard on ourselves, and not being so hard on ourselves might make it possible to be kinder to other people. Why is it that “exceptionalist America” is automatically accompanied by thorough saturation.in the diabolical art of suppression of feelings?
Going back to that Eureka moment in the 90's, the recognition that I had suffered as a child amounted to the same thing as learning I had feelings, just as other people have. In the instant of knowing my suffering, I knew such pain was not unusual or unthinkable, but the common thread binding humanity together. The knowledge humanized me in a way I have ever since been immensely grateful for. I had not known how cut off I was from the human community, from connection with all at a very deep level, until this discovery of my suffering. My story was now changed forever; or rather, I had found my story. I had learned a major truth that took me outside the boundaries of my culture: To be in a body, that is, to be human, is to suffer. In the end it is not the suffering endured that makes one ill, but the fact that suffering is not recognized, not allowed, in the American vocabulary that I grew up with. Not only does this taboo make healing from certain kinds of woundings next to impossible, it contributes to the building of the “shadow American” character that is not so benevolent and generous as we like to think.
Beneath the preferred American identification with exceptional goodness of our character, a whole range of suffering occurs, and is tolerated, which is a result of unconsciousness, rather than of out and out Simon Legree-type cruelty. Such suffering is still suffering, but it is socially invisible, not remarkable, and becoming ever less so, I believe. My suffering as a child was apparently invisible to all who knew me. The many “tics” of my childhood - persistent bed-wetting, nail-biting, food neuroses and insomnia, did nothing more than earn me a single visit to a child psychologist at age 10. In a sense, I was the elephant in the family living room, whose pain, and therefore her reality, was denied by all. My pain was not truly hidden, given all of those neurotic behaviors, but no one around me was trained to acknowledge it as pain. None of the adults around me were trained themselves in compassion, or in the recognition of the suffering of others. In my turn, I simply learned to go with the program: okay, if we don’t talk about these things, then I will do my level best to help us bury them. Thus, I became trained in an ethos that does not recognize suffering, beginning with my own.
An aside about the children: It seems therefore to me eminently possible today that we take the “I’m okay” statements from our resilient children of divorced parents, children stressed out from constant structured activity and parental fears for their achievement and success, who no longer are held by networks of extended family and community, as true enough, and ignore the inconvenient pain growing in the souls of young people. Is it time we stop the blather about the kids being so much more (smart, mature, savvy, seasoned, global, fill in the blank) than we were, and ask ourselves tougher questions, at great inconvenience to ourselves, of course, about how well they are doing in their souls?
The idea I am working on here is that the cultural “face” that one learns to put on as a privileged white American (whiteness itself being the key privilege) plays a huge part in teaching us that we are not the ones that suffer. As one who is fairly steeped in New Age literature, and on a transformational spiritual path, I find that much of the literature of new age spirituality contributes to the persistence of this notion by preferring the word “compassion” to the word “suffering.” In general, it seems that if one is Africa American one is allowed to use the word "suffering," but if one is a member of the group defined by whiteness, one must talk about "compassion." Now I did not embark upon this topic with the idea that I was focused on race. But the distinction I’m talking about, and the suppression of knowledge of suffering entailed, has a direct impact on racism and racial discrimination. Because denial of one’s own feeling trains one to be, while perhaps intentionally kind and compassionate, unconsciously mean.
I believe there is no way around it. And this brings me to what it means to have an embodied, or body-centered spirituality, as many of us involved in transformational spirituality profess to have. Surely the embrace of the Goddess’s Life/Death/Life Cycles, means, centrally, living in one’s body, which means, in turn, suffering! I hazard this claim having myself made the perilous passage from the disembodied existence where suffering is not (consciously) known, to the one premised in feeling, which is emphatically "of the body."
From my earliest experiences with the language of transformational spirituality, the word compassion was given to me to help to explain the pain I was experiencing. I was growing a compassionate heart, these difficult changes would lead to a greater capacity for compassion for others. Such words were right on, in a way, but also they tended to leap over the intense suffering I was undergoing. In the 15 years since then, though I have done no formal study of it, I have observed that spiritual literature consistently prefers the word "compassion," with its high-toned connotations of eastern spiritual traditions, Buddhism in particular, to its poor disreputable cousin, "suffering." Of course, this is not a problem of Buddhism, but may lie in its translation by post-moderns who “choose” their religious tradition like a consumer commodity, taking what they like and leaving the messy parts back in Bhutan or Bombay. And there is the possibility that publishers recognize the greater market appeal of "compassion" as opposed to "suffering."
On the other hand, and directly in contrast to the association of “compassion” with the Buddha, the word and the concept of suffering are front and center in Catholic Christianity’s chosen archetype: the image of Christ on the cross is meant to evoke compassion in the beholder.
Which is not to defend Christianity, nor to make its case, but to make a case for individuals to become conscious of their suffering, and end the long practice of identifying only with the cheerier, more upbeat and optimistic version of ourselves. The case has already been made with the image of the man hung on the tree, but the point of Christ’s agony appears to be lost on many of the faith’s adherents. Being Americans first, and Christians second, means we’ll do our damndest to stay out of our bodies, in perpetual expectation of the heaven lying somewhere up ahead, that greater good, that growth and perfection surely attainable in the future. In the meantime, as best we can, we stay out of the moment, out of the eternal now, out of our bodies and our genuine feelings. As the tumult of violence and news of destruction becomes ever more clamorous, we remain outside it all, numbed and distracted by the pervasive media blitz, by shopping, electronic communication devices, and a slew of other distractions and addictions.
No wonder the rage of the Tea Partiers at the prospect of reduced expectations and a shrinking economy - no one ever told us we would have to suffer in this way during “peacetime!” The wonder is that they consistently fail to direct their rage at those who are not and will not suffer economically; they direct their rage at “government,” rather than at those who control and manipulate government through their power and wealth.
But I want to stay with my own “constituents;” the body of people who, to the extent that we call ourselves spiritual, are connected more with the transformational, “gnostic,” or esoteric wing of religion, rather than the institutional traditions or fundamentalist offshoots. Like the moderns or postmoderns we are, we indeed pick and choose from the traditions. However, if we are to trade “in-our-head” spirituality for heart-centeredness, if we are to follow the Goddess and learn to live in accord with Nature’s life/death/life cycles, if we truly want to stop the long habit of allowing nature, the earth, the diversity of animal and plant species, to suffer in our stead, we’d better start becoming acquainted with our own pain. And lest I be interpreted to mean that I am calling “ the victim” in everyone to stand up and be counted, I assure you I am not!
To be “worthy of our suffering,” a phrase attributed to Dostoevsky, we have now to learn our own joyful song. To accomplish such a soul triumph, victim identity is useless, and so is resolute optimism. Suffering is fearful because it threatens to destroy the meaning some of us have identified with for so long, the “sunny side of the street” optimism that we learn to carry like a potent talisman against the dark. In a sense this is true, but one must trust that giving up that identification will yield something far greater and more valuable. The voice you will have obtained in knowing your suffering, and must now use, is the voice of the artist, the mystic, the poet, the prophet that is you; contact with that forgotten one in you makes your more authentic voice manifest. To be “worthy of our suffering” each of us must learn what her/his song is and offer it to the community, where it is wanted and needed for the long healing.
As the world hurtles toward destruction, we cannot anymore leave the depth and the soul of our humanity, the pain of being human, to be lived out disproportionately by “the others,” the “less fortunate.” We come to know our wounds and our suffering not to withdraw in resentment and self-pity, but to fulfill the complete and magnanimous template we were given at birth. To have any hope at all of being able to “suffer with” those others, and with the planet, we must cross over and learn the rest of what we know, but have not only been afraid to acknowledge, but actively discouraged from attempting by dominant aspects of our American culture. If, at the deepest levels in ourselves, we do not know our suffering then we do not know the joy of connection either, its that simple. The most profound act of love is the one we direct to our own suffering; all else issues from that.
Friday, February 12, 2010
The Most Necessary Liberation Struggle of All
The honoring and the freeing of the individual soul is the necessary liberation story for our time. Society has made gains based upon the willingness of individuals identified with an oppressed group, such as women, black people, gay people and other minorities, including holocaust survivors, to voice their pain and to force recognition of their experience of oppression. These groups, in some settings and discourses, are even privileged to speak from their pain, as in a way that people are discouraged from doing in the general society,.
Last night, at The Other Side in Utica, we heard a talk by an African American professor of classics and Africana studies at Hamilton College in which she set the matter of Cleopatra’s contested ethnicity straight. In the course of her establishing the fragile basis for our concept of Cleopatra - a few writers in antiquity who came along well after her death, the insistence by many modern scholars of her being “Greek,”against all the evidence - the speaker interlaced her own story of growing up black in America. For example, one experience she shared was of having been told in 9th grade by her world history teacher that Asia and Africa had made no contributions to history.
Reflecting on all of this as I lay in bed this morning - a powerful time for such reflection for me - I thought of the speaker’s vulnerability in bringing up such stories, in settings where people are not predisposed to consider the suffering of others. Except where it is part of the program as in church or academe, or during times of particular catastrophe, such as the earthquake in Haiti, or Hurricance Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, this is pretty much everywhere in society. I knew, recollecting from my own experiences in graduate school, that in academia, stories of oppression as a gay person or a black or Asian person are treated very differently. A special place is given to them, their voices are welcomed, in a sincere effort to balance the burying of their stories and their suffering in mainstream society and official history. Such prizes as grants and fellowships can be more readily obtained if one can speak from the pain of being a member of one of these groups.
Let me be clear that in no way whatsoever do I make light of the pain that is inflicted on gay people , black people, Latino people, etc by our society. I’m not a racism denier, nor am I anti-Affirmative Action. Nor do I believe that oppression ended with Civil Rights legislation in the 1960's, as I suspect many people do. For example, the students where I teach, at a local branch of the state university, tend to voice the facile, optimistic cliche that “things are better now,” which frees them, I suppose, and all of us to the degree that we buy it, to pay attention to more important things, like the next text message coming in on the cell phone.
I simply believe that the underlying oppression which all other oppressions arise from is the intolerance for the reality and the expression of the human soul. The individual is the most unprotected “group” within the human species; prejudice, hatred, and violence, including violence against the earth, other species and indigenous cultures, stem from this fundamental spiritual oppression that characterizes pretty much all of modern, post-enlightenment, rational, developed “civilization.”
This oppression, because it is based within the individual, is very different from the others. For one thing, it emphatically includes the “privileged” classes and groups. White, northern European, affluent men, for example, have not been exempted. Although patriarchal predations and brutalities, with its assumptions of privileged status, can never be excused or condoned, men too are a member of this”group“ whose individual natures are violated by their enslavement to a soulless system in turn constructed and maintained by partial humans alienated from their souls.. The oppression of souls is also different in that it is not so much a political condition as an archetypal one. Although there are those who profit, (most definitely!) from the oppression of souls (or simply “soul,” since it is the ground of being that humans share with all other life forms) the focus of the struggle is not on oppressors as such, but on the responsibility of the individual to free her own portion of soul.
Another feature of this soul oppression that makes it different is, as you can see from what I have already said, that the “truth claims” of the individual cannot be backed up with empirical facts. It is a part of the special oppressive condition that that which needs defending is invisible, and thus does not fall into our standard categories of those things that possess “rights.” Like trees and other plant and animal species that cannot speak for themselves, but are accumulating more and more defenders today, the soul has not been granted full legal status. Like a wife in the bad ol’ days, it can be treated pretty much any way its master likes.
And who is its “master?” Well, I am the master of my own soul, as you are of yours. And, as masters, we are likely to be (with exceptions of course) as ignorant of the beauty, worth and dignity of our personal souls as was an antebellum slaveowner of his slave’s personhood, or a drunken abusive husband of his wife’s. We are not reliable persons to be in control of a vulnerable thing like a soul. The reason for this lies in another feature of “soulist” oppression..
Unlike other situations of oppressed peoples, the individual soul is oppressed first by those entrusted with its original care. It receives its initial wounding not from the society, nor from any power-drunk, privileged group or class or gender, but from its human parents within the supposed safety and loving embrace of the family nest. Thus, defense of the soul requires that one let go of the most precious assumption we by-and-large possess: the one that says, in a way that forbids any opposing possibility, “my parents loved me.” And here let me add, that the issue is not whether or not one’s parents really did love their children, but whether or not one can tolerate, based only upon the evidence supplied by one’s subjective feeling and experience, the possibility that they did not. The evidence for this unacceptable knowledge is obtainable only through communication with the deepest level of the soul, depths which by and large our society keeps us from entering. Thus, most of us are thwarted from discovering, let alone freeing, the soul that is silenced and captive within our being.
I sense skepticism budding in the minds of my readers at this point. I wish I could leave out that part about the parents, but I cannot. I want to soften the message so you will not reject it, and me along with it. On the other hand, there is no need to get hung up on that part. Though obtaining the knowledge that your parents did not love you as you assumed they had is essential to defense of the soul, the process does not end with hatred of one’s parents, for that is not the point of the soul’s purpose. The soul’s purpose is to be allowed its measure of expression by its human vehicle, the “you” or the “me” chosen for its time on this earthly plane. The unintentional cruelty of parents, like other more recognized oppressions, is incidental to the larger meaning that the soul is.
With a group of other readers meeting at The Other Side, I have been re-reading the classic tale of a woman’s soul journey, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. There are those who would disagree with me, but this story is less focused on the story of racial and gender oppression than on the archetypal journey of the human soul from its initial condition of being buried in matter to the gradual increase of light, and eventual release/expression of the soul incarnate in the person, in this case, Janie Crawford.
Janie is pressured into her first marriage at age 16 by her grandmother, who raised her and who fervently desires for her to be taken care of. Two marriages later, Janie looks back at her grandmother, and sees the relationship differently than she had as a girl. “Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon - for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you - and pinched it into such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love....She (Janie) had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the marketplace to sell.”
As long as Janie believed, in the conventional way, that her grandmother did what she did out of love, the only possible identity for Janie is the ungrateful, undeserving, unworthy (grand)daughter. She has to be able to defend her own spirit, the jewel of her aspiring soul, against the voice that would call her ungrateful and bad. She has to come to know this yearning for more life that is within her, the sense that she must put into language who she is, and “gleam” herself before other people, as sanctioned, or blessed. Such a blessing can come not from any social or familial source, but only from within herself, from the authoritative voice of her own soul. It is not enough for her soul’s journey that she reject the selfish, loutish versions of love offered by her first and second husbands; she must also see through the self-sacrificial love of her grandmother, as even the stronger imprisoning force.
One writer who might agree with my claim that the soul is the most oppressed “group” in contemporary society is John Taylor Gatto, whose prophetic voice against compulsory public schooling authored the book Dumbing Us Down. As it happens, I am using an essay of his in a writing class I teach. I say “as it happens,” because the essay is anthologized in the text, and I was not aware of it when I ordered it. I’m happy to be using the essay and confronting my students with his challenging, passionate ideas about schools and education, but I did not choose it as such.
Yesterday, in fact, I asked the class what they thought about Gatto’s essay, called “Against School.” We were looking for things like “thesis” and “major ideas” in preparation for writing a summary paper. Here is an essay, mind you, that begins by alluding to the pervasive boredom in high schools, a boredom, Gatto emphasizes, shared by students and teachers alike. There could be not one person in my classroom who did not know the boredom referred to, including from their experience right there in my classroom!. However, very few spoke up to comment, or to analyze the argument with me. It was clear that several did not so much want to analyze as object. While a couple of women in the front row voiced unqualified approval, a young man, also up front, wanted to defend some schools, some “excellent teachers,” against Gatto’s charges.
Towards the end of the essay, Gatto writes, “After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.” With this astonishing opinion, he meets the expected objection, one he has heard many times I’m sure, that says some students are just not talented enough to be given the kind of freedom/responsibility for following their own interests and passions that he is suggesting. Sure enough, the young man brought up the very objection, and I pointed out Gatto’s statement to him. He remained unconvinced. And indeed, how does one support this generalization with measurements and verifiable facts? Surely, Mr. Gatto can provide example after example of remarkable, but altogether ordinary students he has known, each capable of following his or her “genius.” But swallowing the statement whole requires one to swallow a formidably large “lump.” Most of us are more comfortable holding to the assumption we’ve been taught: genius is rare, and the rest have been assigned life’s grunt wor, which has consequences for achiever and “underachiever” alike..
Rationally we can grant the argument of differing abilities, but what does it mean to the soul to accept that assumption, an acceptance aided and abetted by the unconsciousness of schools, which ignores the Janie Crawford-like yearning in every human soul for expression of its unique voice and calling?
Our society becomes ever more adept at tuning out that fragile but ultimately powerful voice of the soul. By means of prescription drugs, a deluge of cable and satellite TV channels, constant connectability via cell phones and Internet, unchallenged assumptions about the world and the way it works, whether liberal or conservative, mass schooling, and a thousand other ways, the soul is kept in its place. Everywhere we can see soul pain, the pain of not being seen: we see it in youth suicide, in pervasive violence, and in drug and other addictions, in depression and other mental illness symptoms, in the emptiness of modern living that never satisfies the deeper human need for connection and community, or for a social-political-economic world that reflects our caring and our humanity. We see it in our alienation from nature, in nature subjugated and plundered for its resources as though Nature, the Mother of us all, existed for our benefit.
The good news is that the soul buried in the prison of each body never ceases, and never stops tugging at our coattails to gain our scattered attention. Silenced for lifetimes, she (archetypally, the soul is always represented in feminine form) can awaken and remind us of our individual longing and destiny, the genius in each of us that is “common as dust.” She can reach us through night time dreams, through chance images crossing our awareness, and through the learnings contained in some psychic pain, and other kinds of pain and loss. But the good news is potential only. The release of the soul from captivity is a lifetime journey. It might be wise to remember the words of one who spoke for a people long oppressed:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
.
The honoring and the freeing of the individual soul is the necessary liberation story for our time. Society has made gains based upon the willingness of individuals identified with an oppressed group, such as women, black people, gay people and other minorities, including holocaust survivors, to voice their pain and to force recognition of their experience of oppression. These groups, in some settings and discourses, are even privileged to speak from their pain, as in a way that people are discouraged from doing in the general society,.
Last night, at The Other Side in Utica, we heard a talk by an African American professor of classics and Africana studies at Hamilton College in which she set the matter of Cleopatra’s contested ethnicity straight. In the course of her establishing the fragile basis for our concept of Cleopatra - a few writers in antiquity who came along well after her death, the insistence by many modern scholars of her being “Greek,”against all the evidence - the speaker interlaced her own story of growing up black in America. For example, one experience she shared was of having been told in 9th grade by her world history teacher that Asia and Africa had made no contributions to history.
Reflecting on all of this as I lay in bed this morning - a powerful time for such reflection for me - I thought of the speaker’s vulnerability in bringing up such stories, in settings where people are not predisposed to consider the suffering of others. Except where it is part of the program as in church or academe, or during times of particular catastrophe, such as the earthquake in Haiti, or Hurricance Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, this is pretty much everywhere in society. I knew, recollecting from my own experiences in graduate school, that in academia, stories of oppression as a gay person or a black or Asian person are treated very differently. A special place is given to them, their voices are welcomed, in a sincere effort to balance the burying of their stories and their suffering in mainstream society and official history. Such prizes as grants and fellowships can be more readily obtained if one can speak from the pain of being a member of one of these groups.
Let me be clear that in no way whatsoever do I make light of the pain that is inflicted on gay people , black people, Latino people, etc by our society. I’m not a racism denier, nor am I anti-Affirmative Action. Nor do I believe that oppression ended with Civil Rights legislation in the 1960's, as I suspect many people do. For example, the students where I teach, at a local branch of the state university, tend to voice the facile, optimistic cliche that “things are better now,” which frees them, I suppose, and all of us to the degree that we buy it, to pay attention to more important things, like the next text message coming in on the cell phone.
I simply believe that the underlying oppression which all other oppressions arise from is the intolerance for the reality and the expression of the human soul. The individual is the most unprotected “group” within the human species; prejudice, hatred, and violence, including violence against the earth, other species and indigenous cultures, stem from this fundamental spiritual oppression that characterizes pretty much all of modern, post-enlightenment, rational, developed “civilization.”
This oppression, because it is based within the individual, is very different from the others. For one thing, it emphatically includes the “privileged” classes and groups. White, northern European, affluent men, for example, have not been exempted. Although patriarchal predations and brutalities, with its assumptions of privileged status, can never be excused or condoned, men too are a member of this”group“ whose individual natures are violated by their enslavement to a soulless system in turn constructed and maintained by partial humans alienated from their souls.. The oppression of souls is also different in that it is not so much a political condition as an archetypal one. Although there are those who profit, (most definitely!) from the oppression of souls (or simply “soul,” since it is the ground of being that humans share with all other life forms) the focus of the struggle is not on oppressors as such, but on the responsibility of the individual to free her own portion of soul.
Another feature of this soul oppression that makes it different is, as you can see from what I have already said, that the “truth claims” of the individual cannot be backed up with empirical facts. It is a part of the special oppressive condition that that which needs defending is invisible, and thus does not fall into our standard categories of those things that possess “rights.” Like trees and other plant and animal species that cannot speak for themselves, but are accumulating more and more defenders today, the soul has not been granted full legal status. Like a wife in the bad ol’ days, it can be treated pretty much any way its master likes.
And who is its “master?” Well, I am the master of my own soul, as you are of yours. And, as masters, we are likely to be (with exceptions of course) as ignorant of the beauty, worth and dignity of our personal souls as was an antebellum slaveowner of his slave’s personhood, or a drunken abusive husband of his wife’s. We are not reliable persons to be in control of a vulnerable thing like a soul. The reason for this lies in another feature of “soulist” oppression..
Unlike other situations of oppressed peoples, the individual soul is oppressed first by those entrusted with its original care. It receives its initial wounding not from the society, nor from any power-drunk, privileged group or class or gender, but from its human parents within the supposed safety and loving embrace of the family nest. Thus, defense of the soul requires that one let go of the most precious assumption we by-and-large possess: the one that says, in a way that forbids any opposing possibility, “my parents loved me.” And here let me add, that the issue is not whether or not one’s parents really did love their children, but whether or not one can tolerate, based only upon the evidence supplied by one’s subjective feeling and experience, the possibility that they did not. The evidence for this unacceptable knowledge is obtainable only through communication with the deepest level of the soul, depths which by and large our society keeps us from entering. Thus, most of us are thwarted from discovering, let alone freeing, the soul that is silenced and captive within our being.
I sense skepticism budding in the minds of my readers at this point. I wish I could leave out that part about the parents, but I cannot. I want to soften the message so you will not reject it, and me along with it. On the other hand, there is no need to get hung up on that part. Though obtaining the knowledge that your parents did not love you as you assumed they had is essential to defense of the soul, the process does not end with hatred of one’s parents, for that is not the point of the soul’s purpose. The soul’s purpose is to be allowed its measure of expression by its human vehicle, the “you” or the “me” chosen for its time on this earthly plane. The unintentional cruelty of parents, like other more recognized oppressions, is incidental to the larger meaning that the soul is.
With a group of other readers meeting at The Other Side, I have been re-reading the classic tale of a woman’s soul journey, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. There are those who would disagree with me, but this story is less focused on the story of racial and gender oppression than on the archetypal journey of the human soul from its initial condition of being buried in matter to the gradual increase of light, and eventual release/expression of the soul incarnate in the person, in this case, Janie Crawford.
Janie is pressured into her first marriage at age 16 by her grandmother, who raised her and who fervently desires for her to be taken care of. Two marriages later, Janie looks back at her grandmother, and sees the relationship differently than she had as a girl. “Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon - for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you - and pinched it into such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love....She (Janie) had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the marketplace to sell.”
As long as Janie believed, in the conventional way, that her grandmother did what she did out of love, the only possible identity for Janie is the ungrateful, undeserving, unworthy (grand)daughter. She has to be able to defend her own spirit, the jewel of her aspiring soul, against the voice that would call her ungrateful and bad. She has to come to know this yearning for more life that is within her, the sense that she must put into language who she is, and “gleam” herself before other people, as sanctioned, or blessed. Such a blessing can come not from any social or familial source, but only from within herself, from the authoritative voice of her own soul. It is not enough for her soul’s journey that she reject the selfish, loutish versions of love offered by her first and second husbands; she must also see through the self-sacrificial love of her grandmother, as even the stronger imprisoning force.
One writer who might agree with my claim that the soul is the most oppressed “group” in contemporary society is John Taylor Gatto, whose prophetic voice against compulsory public schooling authored the book Dumbing Us Down. As it happens, I am using an essay of his in a writing class I teach. I say “as it happens,” because the essay is anthologized in the text, and I was not aware of it when I ordered it. I’m happy to be using the essay and confronting my students with his challenging, passionate ideas about schools and education, but I did not choose it as such.
Yesterday, in fact, I asked the class what they thought about Gatto’s essay, called “Against School.” We were looking for things like “thesis” and “major ideas” in preparation for writing a summary paper. Here is an essay, mind you, that begins by alluding to the pervasive boredom in high schools, a boredom, Gatto emphasizes, shared by students and teachers alike. There could be not one person in my classroom who did not know the boredom referred to, including from their experience right there in my classroom!. However, very few spoke up to comment, or to analyze the argument with me. It was clear that several did not so much want to analyze as object. While a couple of women in the front row voiced unqualified approval, a young man, also up front, wanted to defend some schools, some “excellent teachers,” against Gatto’s charges.
Towards the end of the essay, Gatto writes, “After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.” With this astonishing opinion, he meets the expected objection, one he has heard many times I’m sure, that says some students are just not talented enough to be given the kind of freedom/responsibility for following their own interests and passions that he is suggesting. Sure enough, the young man brought up the very objection, and I pointed out Gatto’s statement to him. He remained unconvinced. And indeed, how does one support this generalization with measurements and verifiable facts? Surely, Mr. Gatto can provide example after example of remarkable, but altogether ordinary students he has known, each capable of following his or her “genius.” But swallowing the statement whole requires one to swallow a formidably large “lump.” Most of us are more comfortable holding to the assumption we’ve been taught: genius is rare, and the rest have been assigned life’s grunt wor, which has consequences for achiever and “underachiever” alike..
Rationally we can grant the argument of differing abilities, but what does it mean to the soul to accept that assumption, an acceptance aided and abetted by the unconsciousness of schools, which ignores the Janie Crawford-like yearning in every human soul for expression of its unique voice and calling?
Our society becomes ever more adept at tuning out that fragile but ultimately powerful voice of the soul. By means of prescription drugs, a deluge of cable and satellite TV channels, constant connectability via cell phones and Internet, unchallenged assumptions about the world and the way it works, whether liberal or conservative, mass schooling, and a thousand other ways, the soul is kept in its place. Everywhere we can see soul pain, the pain of not being seen: we see it in youth suicide, in pervasive violence, and in drug and other addictions, in depression and other mental illness symptoms, in the emptiness of modern living that never satisfies the deeper human need for connection and community, or for a social-political-economic world that reflects our caring and our humanity. We see it in our alienation from nature, in nature subjugated and plundered for its resources as though Nature, the Mother of us all, existed for our benefit.
The good news is that the soul buried in the prison of each body never ceases, and never stops tugging at our coattails to gain our scattered attention. Silenced for lifetimes, she (archetypally, the soul is always represented in feminine form) can awaken and remind us of our individual longing and destiny, the genius in each of us that is “common as dust.” She can reach us through night time dreams, through chance images crossing our awareness, and through the learnings contained in some psychic pain, and other kinds of pain and loss. But the good news is potential only. The release of the soul from captivity is a lifetime journey. It might be wise to remember the words of one who spoke for a people long oppressed:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
.
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