Photo by Christopher Campbell
Reason…binds us to mortality because it binds us to the senses, and divides us from each other by showing our clashing interests; but imagination divides us from mortality by the immortality of beauty, and binds us to each other by opening the secret doors of all hearts. [Blake] cried, again and again…that nothing is unholy except things that do not live—lethargies, and cruelties and timidities, and denial of imagination... Passions, because most living, are most holy…and man(sic) shall enter eternity upon their wings.
–W.B. Yeats, on William Blake
…Nietszche said somewhere, one cannot understand disease unless one has been sick….[The essential position] is to have been sick and to have gotten better. This and only this constitutes true strength…otherwise there can only be ressentiment, bad conscience, masked slavishness (i.e., victimhood).
–Peter Lamborn Wilson, Why I Hate the Bourgeoisie
In the sci-fi movie Silent Running (1971) four crew members staff a space station – one among several, apparently, devoted to preserving forests after their complete devastation has occurred back on earth. Suddenly, word comes down from command that the project is over, all the cultivated “space forests” have to go. Three of the guys quickly adapt to the news – happy to be going home to America where there now are “jobs for everyone” – as they have adapted to eating the synthetic space food instead of the cantaloupes grown by the crew’s botanist, “Lowell.” In his harangue at his friends for not caring about the trees, Lowell (played by Bruce Dern) berates them, “But you have to have a dream!”
Today, although on earth in some places forests have made a comeback and tree-huggers abound, Lowell’s idealism, his defense of dreams and imagination, in our era of “lesser-evilist” politics on the so-called “left,” looks just plain quaint. Neoliberalism has produced a “spiritual void” (called so by British journalist and environmental activist George Monbiot) that is host to the epidemic of despair we feel in ourselves (or I do) and the destructive behaviors – drug abuse, suicide, etc. – we see all around us. Going beyond the settled resignation of “lesser evilism” today takes more even than the extreme risk of voting for Jill Stein! It will take – as the wacky 60’s-era film insisted – dreams and imagination.
How one is to be guided by one’s own dream inspiration and not only inspired by inspirational others – is the heart of the matter – not simple for us who’ve been raised in the neoliberal spiritual void. Even as I – and as all of us – become drastically less safe amidst the multiple threats and precarious future of our times, I have to feel safe. This is what imagination – my imagination alone – can do for me!
Our Cafe Domenico, now no more, was the living embodiment of such naïve idealism. It was a business born, unabashedly, crazy-Yeats-style, out of “the Land of the Living Heart,” Orin and I as off-the-wall as any who believe in magic, little people, enchanted lakes and “Divine hands.” Standing by one’s passion for things that are merely beautiful, merely “nature,” merely emotional attachment – foolish Utopianianism! – was, we were convinced, the very sanest action we could take; it gave us a place that felt safe. And by safe, I mean safe to have dreams that kept me properly energized, less capable of being seduced by lesser-evilist war mongers and financializing oligarchs, more capable of knowing when I’m being bamboozled by lying liberal politicians more compelled by career than concern for people. I mean safe – even if barely – for a still-functioning heart and soul.
I’m not sure how seriously anybody took us back in the Cafe’s heyday when we spoke of its divine origins. But now the Cafe has joined the invisibles, no longer clothed in its bricks-and-mortar-and –coffee-bean dress, does this mean that the American Dream, money the measure of all value, has no local rival? More personally, does it mean my dreamsmust now be limited by the existing political parameters, and that precious safety never again can be?
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At The Other Side in early October we re-launched our speaker series called The Big Conversation after a five-year pandemic-caused hiatus. The series had been conceived back in the 20-teens as talks to continue “the conversation” on matters connected with peace and social and environmental justice. In starting it up again, we make our bid to connect with the Cafe’s original idealism, to see if it still could speak to people after the Cafe’s demise. It’s so easy these days to believe most liberals are happy with the “synthetic foods” of virtual community, “full employment” and that take-no-prisoners warrior, Kamala Harris. I wanted to know, frankly, if the Cafe’s idealism could still speak to me.
The talk that was to be our “reset” was on the redlining practices that went on in Utica, Rome and suburbs beginning in the early 20th century, by a local professor and friend, Jack. So far, so good. Jack began his talk with a reminder of the meaning of home ownership in America, offered without irony. The investment in the home, once the mortgage is paid off, gets you past just “keeping up with the bills” into a different bracket – the grail of middle classdom. So to disqualify people from being able to enter that bracket through discriminatory exclusions is unjust.
He’d done his work; he showed ample documentation of deliberate exclusions of people of color going back to early 20th century from buying homes in developing neighborhoods, including names of developers most of whom now must be dead. Stubbornly, perversely, “thoughts” that came to me as I listened, tended to be but why do we think this is all in the past? Thoughts about what I have experienced, in reversing the trend, buying a home in an inner city neighborhood that was less assured as “an investment,” sending my children to a city school which nobody who’s hoping to give the kids a leg up into the middle class does. My thoughts, that is, diverged from the speaker’s line of thought but could not quite arrive at what was it I wanted to say. I did not know. In that context, I could feel no other than in my habitual way – muddled, and likely wrong.
I won’t bother to make excuses for myself. At 73, I should be able to speak my mind! (Probably I need to take an improv class, learn to trust what pops into my mind!) Not until I’d “slept on it” could I conceive the situation in a way that cut through my timidity, which I associate with the kind of unaliveness William Blake had no patience for, that I am vulnerable to.
What it took for me was writing, and remembering the Cafe.
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In a recent essay in the Guardian (10/5/24), How Israel Has Made Trauma a Weapon of War, Naomi Klein deplores Israel’s official commemorations of the Oct 7 trauma that have heightened and manipulated the trauma, and hastened its absorption into “memory culture.” She wrote, “In Hebrew, zochrot means “remembering,” and unlike the re-traumatization currently passing for commemoration, remembering in its truest sense is about putting the shattered and severed pieces of the self together (re-member-ing) in the hopes of becoming whole.”
In Israel, now, we see trauma being used cynically and manipulatively in the nationalist cause – in the cause, one might say, of keeping people dis-membered, dis-integrated. How can remembering work potently, to heal rather than to re-traumatize, to make a real sense of safety instead of pretending? It seems to me we must have meaningful memory that, “binding us to immortality” (i.e., do this in remembrance of me) we are not just remembering in the way that so easily gets co-opted by hate and victimhood.
However it may be put to evil use by unscrupulous demagogues, trauma -as science now tells us – is embedded in our social reality; its inclusion, rather than its denial, is necessary for meaningful memory. “True strength comes from having been sick and gotten better.” In contrast, (neo)liberal reality is a mutual reassurance – an effective fortress – against anyone, ever having been sick, (except for those other unfortunate ones!) Liberal reality closes one off from the remembrance of personal trauma each carries in his/her soul, that is intergenerational and thus more than personal. It encloses one in an exclusive safety that is not true safety but a defended state, a victim condition, unholy. Awareness of one’s trauma is needed in order to be released from centuries-old habits that nurture and pass on the victim identity. And imagination (art) is equally needed for true strength: without creativity all there is between oneself and unhinged despair is to go on being “the injured party.”
The day after the Big Conversation event, I wrote to the friends who are co-organizing this series. The part that helped me re-member was when I recalled Jack’s mention of the Cafe and The Other Side; in doing so he brought into the discussion the Cafe’s reality, its intrinsic beauty and our in-common loss. I wrote: Without a doubt, these places would never have existed if we (Orin and I) had not put the American Dream into reverse.
The Cafe’s meaning is incompatible with bourgeois assumptions that leave out ourselves – as if we make no contribution to the ongoing reality of white supremacy. Negating the very reasonable premise of equality, that appeals to (some) people’s sense of fairness, but not to the “living heart,” the Cafe remembered demands a different conversation entirely. Seductive as it is, easy to grasp the benefits of, the materialist American Dream – even if it were made possible for everyone to attain it – in fact denies the only basis there is for the impossible dream that community is.
By following a dream Orin and I defied the rule that one must be preoccupied mainly with “the mere business of living” in the bourgeois way. Though I won’t rule out there was luck involved in our being able to follow a dream, our dream-following was also a decision to defy unspoken social rules of entitlement; including where and with whom one will live in this multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, equality-phobic society. It was a decision to at least partially subvert bourgeois logic and thereby pick up the truth of the world’s trauma. This trauma darkens every soul, though the fact is largely unknown to us whose awareness is blocked by the reasonableness, the entitlements, the totality of the American Dream for white people. Inasmuch as I do not remember my trauma I must repeat it: not only do I unthinkingly participate in white supremacist patterns – I lose my way to the soul’s native passion that lies the other side of the witch’s hut, i.e, through trauma. Instead of key to our aliveness, trauma is left to be disabling weakness, keeping us dreamless and unsafe; and thus grateful adaptees in white bourgeois reality.
Rather than supporting endless reproduction of “the American Dream,” the Cafe, remembered, makes appeal to imaginations, to hearts: we liberal white people who even though we critique its materialism can think of nothing better, can have our own dreams! In fact, if you follow William Blake, as Orin and I did, it’s one’s duty to have them, to care for our souls as if their immaterial reality were real as empirical reality, as “mad” Lowell cared for his forest in outer space.
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Today one cannot use such Yeatsian-like “extravagant” language, to claim, for example, the Cafe transformed its location into a holiness – and expect to be heard seriously. But consider this: our Cafe drew people magnet-like to buy their homes and to live within its nearest blocks. It caused other businesses to start up in a commercial area being abandoned to pizza stores, McDonalds and chain drugstores. Its loss left holes in peoples’ hearts, in their subjective being. So – maybe more acceptable would be “talismanic” or “symbolic” – but is that not holiness? What good are we doing for the world by disdaining to use such vocabulary the effect of which is, merely, we discount a power available to every man or woman with that “secret door in the heart?” What merit is there in downgrading metaphysical reality when all we can do then is believe in making the better investment? What must be built, or bought now is perhaps the worse investment, places built by walking the walk of passion, the passion for justice inseparable from passion for creating something beautiful.
To do this the American Dream has to be overturned, we white people the quintessential insiders becoming instead outsiders to it. As I wrote in that email: The answer to racism is white people changing, not black people – in this, James Baldwin agrees with me! But no political candidate running for any office, would agree. And I could not have brought this up [last night] without feeling I was putting Jack, our invited guest, on the spot. This is how truth gets sacrificed – i.e., by being nice – a habit I cannot shed! In fact, weak and people-pleasing that I am, if I had not, Blake-like, accepted my duty to my personal subjective joy (to my writing), the backlash of self-doubt would have undone me, just as it threatens me now in the Cafe’s cruel, debt-burdened aftermath.
Did we fail, then? I’m beginning to believe now that failure is the failure to remember. A couple of the friends who’d read my email expressed gratitude for what I’d said; I surmised that they had struggled with Jack’s talk as I had, and had not put their finger on what in it did not sit quite right with them. I can testify that though we may agree neoliberalism is a “spiritual void,” to actually keep oneself out of the general despair is a swim in a drowning sea. It is a constant act of remembering that by now, few can accomplish except those who know their dis-memberment.
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Those of us horrified by Israel’s pursuit of vengeance against Palestinian civilians, might perhaps now see how we, too, participate unwittingly in unholiness. There are not degrees to unholiness, really, anymore than there are “lesser” evils. There are differences in circumstance only. For people raised in the American way to fear financial failure more than death, if we are not to be eternally victims, prone to bitterness and resentment, souls need strengthening so that fear cannot disable, cannot make one part of the unholiness. The way, for our imagination-disabled, fear-
