How to Make Peace On Earth: Go Transfigure!

Civilization de-personalizes.  The emancipation of the personality, which civilization claims to achieve, is fatal to personal originality.                                                                                                              

–Nicolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of History

Every creative artistic act is a partial transfiguration of life.

–Ibid

“…pick up on some kind of redemption of your own consciousness, become mindful of your own friends,your own work, your own proper meditation, your own art, your own beauty, go out and make it for your own eternity.”  (italics mine)

–Allen Ginsberg (reprise)

There is probably no more powerful way to be stripped of self-confidence than to be reminded of those less fortunate than yourself, who cannot attain the same benefits, as when Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ( the current selection in our book club) reminds cocky, brazen McMurphy – the newcomer on the psych ward who’s making demands for some changes – of the “old guys,” who can’t hear if the volume on the annoying piped-in music is turned down, can’t play cards, etc. At every turn, we must be mindful of others,  remember those who suffer, who are in want, who are being oppressed or bombed.  Most people, including post-Christians,  hear the love thy neighbor louder than the “as thyself;” overlooked is that one must love thyself first or all other love is spurious.
This is not Ayn Randian self-love I speak of.  Philosopher-mystic Nicolai Berdyaev calls this love for oneself “Divine love,” and distinguishes it from egoism, suggesting, radically, that positive identification with oneself is identification with health and completeness, rather than with the deficiency or defectiveness that goes with membership in bourgeois society. It is release into the very possibility of love for others.

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At one point during preparation for ministry in the liberal Unitarian-Universalist church, late 70’s,  I took some kind of psychological assessment test.  All I remember about it was being told (not the precise words) that I was more inwardly focused than outwardly.  I don’t know, now, why this landed so hard on me –  they were telling me I was an introvert! – but I took it as somehow being a disqualification for a profession that, in the end, was a wrong fit for me. Had I been able to be on my own side, on the side of my person, I could have heard this as Good News instead of Bad.  Even so, what this religious professional might have said to take any onus off my introversion,  was that if human beings were incapable of inwardness there would be no mysticism, no metaphysical belief, no religion!  Impossible as it was, then, for me to know what my true aspiration might have been, I indeed ended up in a profession that demands muchextroversion, and very little mysticism, except for an expectation the minister would sprinkle readings from established mystics – i.e., biblical poetry, poets, prophets – into Sunday services.  

No, it was not communicated to me that religion is based essentially in a personal experience  –  sopersonal it cannot be communicated except creatively, in myth (a form of poetry) or metaphor.  Let alone did anyone suggest to me the way to have this experience except in the cognitive, sanctioned, secondhand way of belief taken for granted in Divinity school.  Symbols were left to be symbols of what we were told they were symbols of.  This was as close as one could get to metaphysical reality via mainstream channels.  That is to say, not close at all.

This exclusion, still in place,serves at least one major purpose: it eliminates the most effective check coming from the people, upon bourgeois power – power based in the experience of the oneness of being; in the God of love.   Earlier, in the 1960’s, a bridge to metaphysical reality had been found via LSD experimentation.  One saw it expressed in the hippie counterculture, in its flamboyant, outward show of anti-establishment, anti-bourgeois, non-conforming weirdness, of antiwar politics,  of deliberately performed not fitting. But dropping acid was not one of the curricular offerings at Yale Divinity School!

Whereas, hanging out on the fringes of the counterculture,  I might have gained metaphysical awareness,  instead, I feared its strangeness.  Incapable of being on the side of my person –   not knowing what that meant – I  knocked on the wrong door – the mainstream one.  My choice of a professional direction in life had indicated I was drawn to something else, to which bourgeois reality – the reality of school, of TV, of everyday social intercourse, of higher education provided me not a clue.

The something else, I realized decades later, was the invisible reality my father engaged with passionately in his art, to which he not only did not provide a clue, but mysteriously kept obscured. The “bliss” he’d met and found was his and his alone, not transferable,  not for kids!  

If I’m right,  I was drastically misled by my father.  My quest for the ‘golden thread’ of creativity and meaning was bamboozled from the beginning. Over and over I knocked on the wrong door; over and over nothing “clicked,” again and again I concluded the fault was in my person.  Much later, as I’ve told it so very many times, grace finally squeezed through my defenses, following painful  mental breakdown.  Out of that process of healing and recovery, came the experience only possible via one’s imagination – that of direct experience of  poetic meaning, transformative and potentially transfigurative.

I imagine transfiguration as a vibe. It allows people to feel the presence of an alternate reality, to be forever affected by it.  Mystical, transformative experience is only  “potentially” transfigurative because just having the experience is not enough.  As the mythologist Joseph Campbell taught, and as myths indicate, the real puzzle is what to do with the experience once you’ve had it!  How will one make it matter – materialize –  in this world?   In it is something wanting to be real, like Pinocchio.  In my case, at first it seemed the form must be church. No longer having a problem with belief in God,  and now able to “read” myth as deep history, meaningful to me personally, I converted to Catholicism.  This form, for me,  happy as it made me for a few years, was doomed not to last; in the Catholic church, faith speaks to the person,  but not to the person who must be original.    How, then, other than in practicing my writing, a solitary act,  could I make the experience  authoritative for my this-world life?

The next form worked better:  the vision of a coffeeshop business in Utica,  the Cafe Domenico, a vision I shared with my husband.   He, too, in the 1990’s was undergoing intensive inner work; he brought into our community of two the influence of poet-mystic Robert Bly, and of Bly’s mythopoetic men’s movement.  Thus, with Orin’s assent to the spiritually real, plus his real world practical competence and extroversion, this for me was sufficient authority to build from a vision in this world.  Out of this union in full anti-bourgeois, anti-war spirit, we joyfully created the Cafe.   

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I use the word joyful  purposefully here, in this season that empties the word of meaning in order to employ it for commercial use.  A rule of joy is this: not all sacrifice leads to joy, but if something is to have joy in it, there has to be sacrifice.  The Cafe was joyful because it said yes to something visionary and no to the materialist bourgeois “more, better” reality that, by means of its plentiful and easily attained (with sufficient cash) allurements,  rejects the visionary. That is, we sacrificed being comprehensible to others for the sake of our idealistic vision. We rejected a basic tenet of bourgeois faith that any need for sacrifice – other than on battlefields – has been long overcome.

Re-reading Kesey’s novel, I’m struck with parallels in the psych ward setting to the joy-robbing Christmas season, a robbery undergone under the aegis of “giving,” i.e., of sacrifice.  With the season now “ratcheting up,” one must march through it as through a gigantic hazing, not unlike Nurse Ratched’s group therapy.  For in paying allegiance to the Christmas regime change one makes one’s choice; once siding with Christmas (against what? Suddenly the other options appear pathetically unrealistic), there’s no breaking ranks.  It only makes matters worse if one longs privately for a sweeter, serener reality, like the one pictured in every nativity scene ever seen. Christmas, though, is not extraordinary;  it simply presents a more vivid realization of the madness of the bourgeois world,  of its reassurance sacrifice is nevernecessary,  to which we adapt as if it were ultimatelyauthoritative.  Gradually, both sacrifice and joy are emptied of meaning.

It was no small thing, our Cafe’s saying no to bourgeois reality, against the same kind of pressure to conform that drives Christmas insanity.   In the grasp of that insanity we, like the “mental defectives” in Kesey’s novel, are kept in terror of the strength and the power residing in our personal  selves, in the depths of our being.  Having lost the Cafe, those of us who knew it have lost a bulwark against the insanity, the McMurphy-like clue that this screen-fed, scurry-scurry de-personalization  is bullshit and that something elsefar better exists. Are we now stuck, defenseless, in bourgeois America?

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Probably needless to say, I was as attracted to the hippie counterculture as much as I feared it. The reaction of fear toward those who flamboyantly  embraced the way of art and originality arose I’m sure from the fact I had learned, as told above,  obedience to the bourgeois erasure of personal originality.  However, even though my circumstance having an artist father makes my experience a minority one, terror of inward personal depth is far from rare. My individual case may offer a clue to understanding why conformity usually wins the day over identification with the personal, in the creative act, which is the only means – aside from hallucinogenics and certain meditation practices –  for meeting unmediated Spiritual reality.  Psychology tells us this fear is the ego’s fear of loss of control.  Myths and fairy tales represent this fearsome truth with ogres and horrible, devouring hags.  But, in their greater wisdom, the tales wisely refrain from conveying a bourgeois  message, which would be don’t climb that beanstalk, don’t go up those stairs on your 16^th birthday, don’t bite that apple! Rather, they tell what happens when Jack, or Sleeping Beauty/the Prince  – takes up their quest to pursue reality outside ego control.  Divine reality isobjectively terrifying. That’s what makes it the sacrifice of “the hero’s journey.”

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Kesey’s psych ward is a picture of establishment reality in which basic physical  needs are met, and as well,  requires there be innocent suffering that is justified, i.e.,”the horrific bombing of innocent civilians was necessary to end the war.” Like Harding’s. Without an intervention, without some sign another reality exists, the need to belong is so undeniable one is relatively helpless not to adapt in the only social collectives available.  Some collectives provide nobler goals that sound closer to peace and love, such as socialism and anarchism. But still they leave one adapting in the materialist  bourgeois reality in which neither love nor creativity is ultimate, still prone to divisiveness and defensiveness.

For Orin and me, the drive to manifest spiritual vision led not to a pre-existing community or cause, but to our Cafe.  Our creation was authentically anti-civilization and anti-bourgeois.  We said no to many of the taken-for-granteds in capitalist reality in order to say yes to the all-inclusive, poetic spiritual reality. “We did everything wrong and it was right.”   In doing so, the Cafe,  was “both a historical and a metaphysical reality;” it spoke to human depths.  We (and not only we two!) surely had created a safe home on earth for souls.

But, in its aftermath, minus the Cafe’s transfiguredreality, gone for me is that precious feeling of safety.  I write, still claiming for myself that safe place of imaginative reality, but the roiling and tumult has not yet ceased.  Mentioning this to my friends on the The Other Side board last week, hearing me tell this story, some heard me as me being hard on myself.  I do confess that failing! But as well I know my struggle is real and there is no comfort for my soul in the given social reality that cannot defend the depths where goodness resides.  It must have its Sacco and Vanzetti, its innocent victims, among which is my own soul – with me its only protector.  

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Last night,  our book club met at The Other Side to discuss the Kesey book (which I failed to finish in time!) Toward the end, after some talk about mental illness, one young man asked if YouTube “doom-swiping” was not a kind of psychopathology.  We talked about the ways screens were transforming reality, the way people – especially young people – in relating so intensely to screens, forgo old-fashioned, more effortful stimulations like reading, joining voluntary activities, calling old friends and making new ones, etc. – the kinds of activities that culture encourages.  Another young man, a first-timer,  confessed he came to the book club specifically to force himself to read books again, essentially to resist, I gathered, the siren call of the screen.  As we talked, I remembered that here we were, the book club as well as The Other Side, very much offspring of the Cafe, in the very act of resisting the irresistible force of bourgeois civilization.  

For a moment, the meaning flashed clear.  Honestly, a tiny emanation of joy entered my soul with that realization. Is it only me who has such a hard time seeing what we do,  for instance, in drawing people together to talk with each other about books –  as the meaning? One woman spoke about that awful pull, especially on a cold winter night, to stay at home – with a book (or a screen!).  Coming out to meet with others is sacrifice.  Meanwhile, following Berdyaevian distinction, civilization continues to gain relentlessly against culture, more irresistibly than ever abetting the non-life of screens over the awful effort – the sacrifice – to be culturally, humanly, personally, alive.  The Cafe  told us which side to be on, even if to do so makes us, like McMurphy, a kind of martyr.

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