Workin’ Out at the Misfitness Gym, or, Dreaming Big

Faced with a rapid disintegration of the class equilibrium due to the developing structural crisis of capital, key sectors of monopoly-finance capital—including fossil capital, the new tech-finance elite, and the military-industrial complex—turned to neoliberalism, and then when that began to fail, increasingly to neofascism.  

– Gerald Home, writer for Monthly Review

The present oneness of the totality feels spurious as hell….Surely some day soon some real opposition will begin to cohere. A new movement will appear based on both solidarity and difference…Why not dream big?  

–Peter Lamborn Wilson, Preface to 2^nd edition of T.A.Z. (2003)

…the spontaneous teaching of the cultivated soul, in its secret experience and meditation, could be more powerful than armies. 

–RW Emerson

It happened to me again: someone – a woman –  looking to me to assure them as to their experience of ‘diminishment’ in the presence of an impeccably liberal-credentialed speaker who somehow left them feeling invalidated.  This time it was the environmental scientist, an academic, speaking at The Other Side last month.  Speaking on “rural resistance to government solutions to CO2 production in farming” he smoothly diverted several audience questions that pointed to any sort of personal/lifestyle responsibility for global warming, or to (this woman’s point) the hidden environmental costs of government solutions (solar collectors) such as lithium mining.

So, even if those who spoke up could have sounded as if they were shaming the people who drive cars, fly in airplanes, go green, etc., there was something not being said.  Everybody knows cars and airplanes contribute to CO2 levels rising.  Why did she who spoke up feel shamed?  I believe it is because membership in the cult of neoliberalism is unconscious.  In effect,  such discourse – although all the speaker was doing was staying focused on his topic –  feels, to a sensitive soul, like being reduced to a bit of flotsam.

In my experience it is women who pick up on this unconsciousness.  Not all of us are feistily attuned to nuance,  but we want to hear something that was not being said.  And we don’t know immediately what it is. Perhaps what we want is someone standing firmly and unambiguously on the side of the common man and woman, of relatedness and relationship, of All One.  If, for the sake of this bit of heartening, a speaker has to denounce corporate greed, Zionist genocide, war profiteers, electric cars, the American Dream, the whole unwelcome dark side, so be it!  

All this is to say the default reality of liberalism makes itself well-nigh impenetrable for ordinary people; it’s so easy to believe there is just this one reality, the one we’re in, no matter how we feel in it.  It is so fucking easy to discount one’s true feelings – thus I’m grateful to these women who shared theirs with me.  Is this totalitarianism worse than it has every been?  Peter Lamborn Wilson suggested the acute monism of our time is consequence of the end of the Cold War dialectic, the “tweedle dee vs. tweedle dum of Capitalism vs. Stalinism.” Before this – although each side viewed the other through the twisted lens of enmity, one “real,” the other the epitome of evil – two worlds existed.  

Growing up in conservative upstate NY white reality,  it was possible to know nothing of this duality; here the one reality already ruled without much contest.  Or maybe this was just my house, where network TV  had risen to obliterate the opposing world that religion or real culture could (but often did not) provide; we, who should have known,  did not know who Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were or what the big deal of their execution was about.  But unknown to us in our cocooned suburban lives, other than easily ignored references by some teachers to “dangerous pinko kooks,”  there was this contest between two worlds. 

Today, it seems there’s little that can dislodge confidence in the One Liberal Reality and its two pseudo opposition camps, both supportive of the neoliberal status quo,  from which it is nearly impossible to be de-programmed.  I had to be taken far into mental illness before I could be dislodged from bedrock liberal certainty.  That experience acquainted me with what I had not known: my life thus far had been  a fragile overlay covering a drastic incapacity to feel safe due to early childhood trauma.  The overlay was liberal reality itself.  Not until “going to pieces” could I let go of keeping up that pretense that came as close as I believed it was possible to feeling safe.  Up to that great shattering, it had not been a pretense, but reality as I knew it.  

From that realization,  I made a “promethean” conceptual leap all on my own based upon now knowing I clearly hadsuffered trauma: I conceived that if I’d been traumatized, then others, even if showing zero sign of it, must have been traumatized in this benign liberal reality as well. Here, I’d been raised by extraordinarily good people,  no physical abuse, no poverty, no divorce to mar my upbringing, who, though they were a source of frequent irritation, I could find no serious fault with. In particular, my mother continually expanded in her liberal beliefs and commitment, though never quite going all the way to socialism, an exemplar for all her children of enlightened anti-war, pro-civil-rights, feminist consciousness.  But my soul’s truth was, I was terrified.

As well as acquainting me with my terror my ‘breakthrough’ experience had opened my imagination to the spiritually real.  This insight revealed to me that a priceless part of my human heritage had been hidden from me, despite my education and my nice family. The very heritage I’d been biased toward in my education and in my upbringing as daughter of an artist – that of the arts and humanities –  had been taught to me as the unattainable realm of genius, suitable for worship of its brilliant practitioners but not for inclusion of myself.  This cruel omission,  its exclusivity, I discovered only by falling through the trap door of trauma. That experience led me to a grand “other” world, located in myself, in which I felt safe beyond any assurance of safety I’d ever known.  Moreover, I saw, this reality, accessible through creative expression, with its wondrous inclusivity, its polytheistic aliveness, is  “spiritual” reality.  Like the mystics and prophets, like Emerson, I had tasted the Divine Soul “which also inspires all men” (sic) for myself!

These discoveries opened up for me the giant hole in golden liberal reality.  Its confident belief in progress, its blindness to the suffering of others upon which its triumphs depend, and most of all, its totality, is the coverup for the truth that belies it, which is trauma, i.e., wounds to the soul.

Having a “promethean” insight is one thing; bringing it to others is another matter!  For even if creative people, artists and left-leaners may find something in my words that causes them to feel seen/empowered, my insistence on the centrality of trauma, its radicalizing otherness, depends upon lifting a veil most cannot/will not do unless forced to it by pain, and even pain won’t do it for everybody.

Even so, I must advocate for this realization, its crucial importance to social consciousness.  By opening the way for an individual soul to discover its own transcendence, trauma moves activism on behalf of others to a more radical vision.  One’s own soul, its need for safety, will call for building the new world on top of the old, anarchist-style.  This discovery of the exalted part of one’s nature, connected as it is to extreme vulnerability, functions, imaginatively speaking, in the way it must have been for commoner Mary of Nazareth discovering she was going to give birth to the son of God. Me? Really? Uh, I don’t know….Wait! Yes!  The change is imaginative.

Without, that is, knowing that in me lies the means for transcendence, there’s no way out from the false belief that leads one like me, existing in the one-world condition of commonness = worthlessness, to place myself among the “unelect.” There is no way out of this wrong and self-punishing distinction based in the egoic effort to deny one’s trauma, unless one comes to understand creative expression not only as the call of one’s special talent, but as obligation to the unjustly and cruelly wounded soul.  

Wonder of wonders is, that by engaging with what feels like my bliss,  “my” art serves more than my ego; it serves inclusivity.  Imaginative identification supports a different way of being, one that can “oppose the Final Enclosure and create our own Outside.” (PLW)  By extrapolation everyone could achieve connection to their genius, to the safety of a spiritual (immaterial) realm we’d once supposed only the chosen could attain.  Everyone who similarly had been seduced (misled) by liberal reality could know another reality – an existing world as valid and real as this one; every one can bring the two worlds together by incarnating. 

+++

This perch in the immaterial realm doesn’t come without a price: in Christianity, belief in Jesus’s incarnation led to the Social Gospel.  Likewise, the soul conscious of its trauma can only serve the better world; it has to “create its own Outside” because it has to feel assured of immediate safety for itself.   Speaking soul to soul, it has to serve souls.  For that, a different world has to be, one that must be built from the inside out, beginning in the intractables of one’s most intimate reality;  it must start with making the unsafe safe at home. 

Assume, as we now must do, that each soul has this genius, this process of natural unfolding, a process that constantly gets stuck and for which there’s no “mechanic” who can fix it and get it going again.  In that case,  there is much we do not know and have yet to learn if we are going to make a world of interdependence, a world safe for souls.  Up to now we of enlightened western consciousness have learned, instead of how healing works,  to bypass, escape, distract from, blame, divorce, move on,  move away, to make relationships transient as they become inconvenient.  Although we cannot, like the theocrats, demand topdown rules to be enforced by the state,  at the same time, we can honor tradition and custom – as liberalism has disciplined us not to do – constraints that teach the wisdom of living within nature’s bounds.  For it is nature-in-us ( the soul) that is undone by the lies we consume in liberal reality.

The challenge in thus hunkering down into in-commonness, in living in the local, is interdependence now is more than just a word.  The connection between body and mind is not just words for selling New Age self-help books.   A troubled marriage, as example, does not defy the origin story of universal trauma; it confirms it.  Trauma isn’t cured, it is recognized, included, its healing a process never finished.

Much has to be unlearned.  Due to the radical unsafety I felt as a small child, I learned to handle precarity by taking responsibility for it:  Beginning at age 6, I “managed” trauma with insomnia and obsessive compulsive behaviors that left the original trauma untouched and unconscious, my soul incapable of feeling safe. For trauma does not invite its uncovering, it forbids it in a most terrifying way. Without the repeated experience coming from another “walking wounded,” my partner in marriage,  I might never have learned to recognize a change in the immediate vibe coming from the other, nor to be able to discern where from, from him or me?  Having learned through years of inner work I am not responsible for the terror at the heart of me, I can resist – though it’s hard – the powerful, god-like, non-verbalized  suggestion that this change in vibe – the terrible unsafety –  is my fault.   

Why I tell you this, is to say: we’re taught in progressive liberal optimism that certain miseries are optional, for losers; the truth is escape from them in the “approved” ways will not challenge liberal reality.  The one-worldism I took in from my conservative upstate TV-informed suburban upbringing was entirely in agreement with the inner sense of worthlessness that comes with  unacknowledged trauma. More important than the risk of pain Orin and I took in going through the door trauma opened for us, is the gain in energy and vitality that inspired us to create the Cafe, the “autonomous, outsider space” that made the experience visible to others.   When Orin and I brought the Cafe to life in Utica, it became incarnation of another world existing, another reality of pluralism, of othernesses, of the deep underlying truth of the unity of souls.  It became a genuine opposition, a place safe for souls. 

+++

The Cafe’s safety was not illusory, at least not as far as my soul and body are concerned.  Staying faithful to that other reality now that the Cafe is gone has been hard.  Orin, his soul’s “business” delayed by years of running the Cafe,  continues to work through his childhood trauma, a mostly wordless process that’s reminiscent of the massive flip-flopping of a dying dinosaur.  Because mind and body are connected,  his trauma affects him emotionally, cognitively, and physically. It makes him unintentionally dangerous, as it does every traumatized soul.

Who knows but what I am witnessing, in Orin, in micro, the death throes of the dying one-worldism of capitalism, the ruin it has brought universally, its tendrils reaching into the soul of every man and woman who accepts the totality of one (capitalist) world?   A dying which, we’re told in myth and fairy tale, can lead to the release of the terrorized souls, bringing unity, peace and prosperity. Wounds to the soul, though unrecognized and unacknowledged in the liberal totality, have real effects.  Orin’s working class, ethnic soul, wounds and all, remains clearer than mine in its resistance to neoliberal lies. But most white liberals like me, their soul’s trauma unrecognized,  will accommodate to the reality that holds Kamala Harris the new savior, not simply she-who-is-acceptable to the powers in charge of assuring nothing changes.    

+++

For readers who are baffled by my emphasis on trauma I want to say, if I made sense, I’d be misleading.  Mine is a circuitous sense – to get it, one must go the long way, touching down into that part of the mind/body that yearns for poetic reality.  The fact that few people today read poetry kind of says it all!  The point is, human soul wholeness does not fit in the given reality or in its vocabulary and syntax.  Saying that, I don’t mean if you feel like a misfit must be you’re “Okay” and everyone else isn’t.  It means misfittingness is what you must grow down into; it is your wholeness and your health, the completeness the soul grows us towards.  To cultivate that growth it helps to maintain a mistrust toward everything the one world reality – with its contempt for the soul – takes for granted.  Not quite in the sense of that pretentious Unitarian bumpersticker that said Question Authority.  A better one would read: Stop looking for bumperstickers you agree with.  Be misfit, in accord with your soul.

The post Workin’ Out at the Misfitness Gym, or, Dreaming Big appeared first on CounterPunch.org.