Eve, Adam and the Serpent in the garden by William Blake, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
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.
– William Butler Yeats, on William Blake
“Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”
– Kamala Harris, acknowledging her defeat with her supporters 11/6/24
In the area where I live, Deep Red upstate NY, more Midwest than Metropolitan, we take it for granted the further out of our city you drive, the more Trump, Brandon Williams and Elise Stefanik signs one will see. (Also more stars. Hmmm…. Coincidence?) In general, though Trump’s support came from all walks of life, both genders and various races and ethnicities, rural white areas are especially receptive to his populist-style messaging.
Feeling the full force of the Trump landslide, might not stars, formerly invisible to most peoples’ eyes, now become visible? I think of those utopian, anarchist-leaning ideas I espouse, “stars” too dim to be noticed by the majority of liberal voters in the light pollution of a Democratic administration. For example, the idea of decentralizing, refusing the upward career trajectory in favor of establishing roots and building culture up where we live. To “take back the local,” go native, is a meaningful political act, a sacrifice white people can make that offers potential for having something – a culture – to defend! We must start. Living in our places in place, we will be forced to deal with the reality of otherness – whether the world’s true ethnic, racial, religious and gender diversity or, going deeper, the true “otherness” of any two or more people committed to living in accord with one another over lifetimes, or deeper still, the otherness of one’s “wild twin!”
Another star that appears more visible now as darkness descends on America, and which holds the key to any possibility of “going backward” to live locally in place: Yeats’s words, which I’ve been meditating a lot on recently summing up William Blake’s ardent Romanticism, prophetic and so relevant to the disaster America now faces. To me at least, it’s clear that the dominance of reason over imagination, which has brought us all the marvelous benefits of science – and of bureaucracy, technocracy and Empire – has also brought down on us a disaster now affecting not only the colonized but the middle class beneficiaries of colonization ( equally colonized, but more comfortable). By now, imaginations are so subdued that the opening they provide to mythic meaning is nearly totally blocked; they cannot function as they’re “designed” to do for the health of the human organism and of human community.
We wonder why the left is paralyzed? Look no further. In these post-Marxian times, with no ideal to put up against Capitalist Democracy (neoliberalism), nothing to passionately defend, the Democratic left is without ideas, as Kamala’s candidacy exemplified. If one has read enough about 1930’s Germany during the rise of Hitler and Nazism, the many ways people had of denying what was happening, the weakness of Social Democratic leadership, one can only shudder.
Might we now agree that voting “lesser evilism” for the past several elections was a catastrophic error?
Stunted liberal imaginations cannot even tell us “what we could have done differently.” Our existentially lonely but at the same time highly defended consciousness leaves us unable to get it right. A star exists up there in the firmament – commonly called love, also relatedness, interdependence, in-commonness – but we’re stripped of any way for imagining love as absolute. This, a task for individual hearts, will take an amount of self-reflection and solitude for which we’re simply not prepared. That we/they have hearts is not in doubt (except to the Trump-followers, who believe the liberal elite are heartless monsters, and the Democratic loyalists who believe the same about the Trumpies) but never have we seen what it would be like if many people trusted his/her own heart’s wisdom to lead the way, i.e, creating a landslide for Jill Stein or Cornel West, the only candidates who could possibly appeal to hearts! In an article on Counterpunch (The One Thing Needful: Some Post-Election Reflections, 11/13/24) Kierkegaard scholar M.G. Piety writes about the vitriol she received from a friend for having voted for Jill Stein, as if that vote – the vote of conscience – were to blame for the Trump landslide! This is how far we’ve come from the authority of our hearts!
As a matter of fact, writing this on Veteran’s Day, I declare my preference for the word “heart” over “conscience.”The latter has been co-opted so that by now it would seem that only soldiers act nobly, from conscience, while other kinds of nobility – for famous example, whistle-blowers Edward Snowdon, Julian Assange, or – less famously – those who vote for Jill Stein – go unrecognized as such, even among many white liberals. Is it that such “star-following,” some of it entailing enormous sacrifice, including loss of friendships – generates terror as much as admiration in demoralized liberal hearts trapped inside the reality of “clashing interests”?
Many of us love being spooked by horror films. But does the suggestion of an “invisible” which gives rise to acts of sacrifice on behalf of a greater good spook us in an especially uncomfortable way? Does the higher allegiance noble behaviors point to make us uneasy? We who do not see the whistle-blowers – or the Stein voters – as traitors can appreciate the deed, but is the mysterious motivation for sacrifice something that separates us from them, rather than allies us with them? What if whatever spoke to them, asking for their sacrifice, asks it of me?
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Something else is left out when heroism, the embrace of ideals entailing sacrifice, is exemplified solely by the soldier giving his life for his country. Nobility is not exclusive to the patriotic warrior; it is exemplified as well in the struggle in the individual heart that wants to initiate; to fulfill its particular destiny. Although some might understand this struggle as a private matter, it is not. Initiation is foremost a public good, serving the whole society. In a society that initiates its young to their personal destiny (rather than to patriotic service or to a particular orthodoxy) , initiation is for the purpose of spiritual transformation from youth to adulthood. The initiate is pulled into its “fire” by the allure of desire. Out of the fire comes a human prone to reflection, creativity, mutualistic social relations, sacrifice for the good of the whole. The journey of one’s soul has its own singular purpose: to take one beyond the binarism of “clashing interests” that defines our – or any – political world, into the larger, unifying reality in which all souls are connected in imagination’s matrix.
Big plus: It makes poor soil for the growth of fascism.
What is the difference between initiated and uninitiated imagination? How does one know if one has been initiated? Answer (the best I can come up with): Imagination that does not know the worst already happened, defended imagination that won’t go there to the memory of trauma embedded in the body, has not been initiated. It has to defensively serve the ego that in turn serves the status quo; in an evil system, even goodness serves evil. If you are one who can hear these words from me, if they resonate with you, yours is a soul that knows depression. Perhaps you struggle mightily with depression. That depression, its darkness, holds the key to your health. Follow it down to its origins in oneself. Go back down into the dark cave underworld and find the soul that is captive there. Find the illumination darkness makes possible.
I assure you, this strange talk is talk I have walked! It is the walk demanded of a different, but commonly available kind of heroism. As much an act of conscience as serving one’s country on the battlefield – or of being a brave whistleblower or a street protestor – is the work of creating new life here, in place, in relationships, restoring the center that’s been lost to globalization, to Walmart and Dollar stores, a way of life that needs to be before it can be defended. Our Cafe in Utica, now gone, was such an act of conscience. Although it was easier for most people to regard our sacrifice for our Cafe as like that of other business people – demanding hard work but for the recognizable rewards of affluence – retirement and travel – it was not that. It was sacrifice for a vision.
Every once in awhile, I am surprised by someone else’s recognition of the Cafe as a vision. Leaving an exhibition of photographs at the Utica Public Library last Monday, I encountered a couple, familiar faces but not genuine acquaintances on the library’s long marble staircase. The husband was familiar to me from my days in the Catholic Church, and I believed, a customer of the Cafe. Back in the lobby we exchanged pleasantries. The husband alluded to the Cafe’s end and what we were doing in retirement. I answered, as I often do, equivocally at first – “We’re okay, getting used to it,” but switched to adding, “But we miss our Cafe terribly.” The husband, appearing to be glad, rather than confused, by my words, said, “Yes, it was your life!” At least in some part he captured the feeling one has in sacrificing for the greater good of one’s dream which in our case happened to be in the guise of a business that served an ideal: community. In so serving, our Cafe gathered a community that had not existed previously.
This was not the first time a religiously observant person showed me the capacity to appreciate the “star” invisible to others! He, I assume, is focused on one – Jesus, that is – who rose above and served nobly. But we liberals often fail to read the mythic meaning sent by religion we no longer practice: We (conveniently) take it for granted that only a few will rise above and serve nobly. The fact that most businesses serve no ideal but that of profits and growth does not make that the full truth of what creating a business is and can be. The call rarely heard – the star undiscerned – is to one’s bliss, what Yeats called “the immortality of beauty.” The sacrifice was real, but what was created was something “binding us to each other.”
Where has it gotten us, the liberal class, to leave genius to that precious few to devote themselves to “the immortality of beauty?” Where does it get us content ourselves with the shadows on the cave wall? We limit ourselves to sensible reality – to what we can see amidst the light pollution of enlightenment because as far as we know, there’s no such thing as spirit, or God in the religious,” “higher power” sense. We remain stuck inside reason’s inevitable “clashing interests;” traitors if we vote for Stein, we shrug and vote lesser evil. Our imaginations so confined to the physical material measurable “machine” reality as the sole “real,” that the actual prospect for the future of physical, material, biological existence looks bleak indeed.
And now we collectively face the ominous uncertainty of the second Trump presidency. My prescription for this moment is we must take seriously how greatly this prospect terrifies our liberal hearts. The frightened imagination that wants to raise terrifying images from what you know of fascism, of the power of the state connected with military and corporate power and with vindictive mobs has always been scared. The fears conjured by the prospect of Trump’s promises, Project 2025, are not just paranoia run wild. In your heart you already know that under neoliberalism human beings do not count. The dismaying truth Harry Lime pointed to in Orson Welles’s The Third Man, that famous view of the tiny ants from the top of the Ferris wheel. Your imagination is telling you yes, that’s how bad it is. The worst could happen. You could lose your social security. Your grandchildren could be marching in “MAGA Youth.” As the beneficiaries of western enlightenment we’ve clung to illusion, the illusion of Democracy, of America’s goodness and good intentions, the illusion that one’s (white)self will be spared in any coming conflagration, and, beneath all the other illusions, that of the happy, or at least not too unhappy childhood.
The friend who accused M.G. Piety of causing the Trump landslide with her vote for Stein knows deep down that Democrats will not make the world safe for human beings. But the friend cannot know what she (?) knows. Why? Fear of knowing what’s there, intimately, in one’s own heart and soul keeps imaginations confined, capable only of serving ego’s interests rather than heart, shrugging and voting once again for the lesser evil. Automatically, without pausing to think, we’re likely to say Love is what’s there in my heart! But love in us is severely distorted by the unacknowledged trauma of having been raised cultureless, in a social context that does not value each human being. We are as capable of cruelty as of kindness. Rightly we fear Trump’s ascendance, his threats, and the “monsters” he is putting into positions of power that will affect us directly. But fear of facing the traumatized soul within is the bottomline source of paralysis that in the end, will keep those of us on the white liberal left from acting from the heart. In truth, we need the darkness; otherwise we’ll never see the stars.
