The Fire Next Time

THEY DROPPED a book from the Bible some time back.

It was the Gospel of Saint Thomas, a book way too mystical, too insistent on the autonomy of each soul, it seems, for a regime (the Church, I mean) that, like all authorities, is only interested in the order it imposes—and, as in Trump’s America, the disorder it seeds and fosters to warrant in fearful minds, the regime’s own authority.

The book records a series of logia, sayings, Jesus is said to have uttered to a certain Didymus Judas Thomas—almost the perfect name for an unreliable memoirist, containing as it does hint of betrayal in Judas and of doubt in Thomas, and many scholars dispute the reliability of the text. It seems to emanate somehow from Syria. And it is a real book, and nicely written. I first learned of it from my readings years ago in Joseph Campbell.

In The Gospel of Doubt and Paradox, then, you’ll find these words that Jesus—my kind of Jesus, I confess—spake unto Thomas, and they often come to mind, and they come to mind for me again watching America set fire to itself. A loose translation: “If you bring out that which is within you, it will save you; if you do not bring out that which is within you, it will destroy you.” Here, truly is a faith for introverts and non-conformists.

Spun the way Carl Jung spun it, each of us carries a shadow; it swills like a deep sea, like a bathos, inside us; it is all that we cannot bear to face or understand or name or inhabit in ourselves—a distillate of trauma and shame and want and pride and ambition and stifled hope and hurt. It grows toxic in its own darkness, and it will corrode us if we cannot name it as (part of) our Self; if we can, we may seem less perfect to ourselves, less beautiful, but we will become what we were scared to be, and we may just set ourselves free.

I know there is that realm in me, too much of it yet unexplored, but not uninhabited. It may be the terra nullius of my soul—a sacred place I regard, in the poverty of my imagination, as empty (MT). Finding it, I’ll fathom myself. That work waits. It always waits. It is all the Ithacas that Cavafy had in mind.

2.

THIS I KNOW, and not only from the doubtful Saint Thomas: we hate in others what we cannot bear—to understand or accept—in ourselves.

This is a thing James Baldwin always so well understood. Many things taught him: the luck of a good education, his childhood poverty and the violent racism he grew up in and the hymns he sang and the faith he failed to hold, and his not being straight, and, above all, literature. For reading and making literature will ask you to drop down deep into yourself, deeper than yourself, and deep into your shadow where you are, from time to time, awake to the humanity you share with all others.  What he learned he hoped, through his fiction and his essays and his elegant ranting, all Americans, black and white, might come to see: “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”

Racism—and all forms of tribal cruelty, such as that which parents sometimes visit on their children and on their exes when a marriage ends, rather than come to terms with their grief and loss and their own part in something that ended—is what psychologists call enmification: visiting on some species of Other human being all that one cannot accept about oneself or in one’s lot; it is scapegoating. All that is not right in my life I make wrong in someone else’s. All that is also more free or beautiful in some set of people (women or men or brown people or wolves or Syrians or first peoples or the descendants of slaves) than one feels capable of oneself, one chooses to see as Other—this you call ugliness, or grossness, or moral turpitude, all manner of culpability in the other, and you feel self-righteous about condemning. Crucifying, even.  And for a moment you may feel better. But it is oneself one loathes, if one chooses to hate. And that’s just not a project that’s going to end well. Not for you and not for the Other (who is yourself).

3.

This—this refusing to bring out and live out what is within you—is what St Thomas’s Jesus, and James Baldwin, seemed to know. To refuse all that one is, is to project it, like a child one has abandoned, denied and neglected, onto others; it is to murder them in the street or call them looters and shooters.

Hatred is what it looks like to refuse to forgive yourself—or anyone else—for being human. It’s a failure to be.

Poetry—refusing as it does dogma and platitude and self-deception and cant—is good for inducing the kind of wisdom and courage each of us, and all of us, always seem still to need to find in our lives. The image of the Miami police down on one knee: that is a moment of poetry. Of compunction. Of acceptance. Of grace. And in it there is hope.

Meantime, I wish the world would read.

In all cultures, literature, especially poetry, will out the inner dark of human life and let us recognise in it our own; literature, an enactment of empathy, will teach you empathy, beginning with yourself. Literature forgives us—though it condemns all inhumanity—for being human. All we ever needed to know about ourselves is written down in the poems and parables and some of the novels of the world. Read them. Set fire to your soul, not to the streets. No one ever needed psychology or the confessional; there were always the books.

And start, if you will with this: James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” published in The New Yorker in November 1962, published in his The Fire Next Time (are these the fires next time?), and published again today in The New Yorker, as America—the nation where all our human natures seem to be amplified and dramatized, sometimes in hysteria, sometimes in grace—burns and rages. And where some of the violence is justifiable outrage and some—by the police and by the protestors—is the shadow of all ourselves, unacknowledged, acting out.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind?

4.  

Nero, it’s said, fiddled, while Rome burned; Trump tweets. But music, even tuneless, rarely induced or incited violence or fanned flames; Trump, on the other hand, is a digital arsonist. The world has this figure at its helm, with a phone in his hand, and all the wisdom of all the world’s literatures lost on him. He embodies what happens to all of us—and because of us, if we cannot find the courage to be kind and clear. Trump is the least of all that we are, our humanity corrupted by privilege and meagreness of mind, and we have him, I’m thinking, because we’ve failed to know more about, and ask more of, ourselves. (We do get, I’m afraid, the politicians we deserve, and if we don’t like them, let’s make ourselves worthier of better ones.) Trump is chaos, and he is violence, and he is unbounded gas emissions, and he is enmity, and so are we all if we cannot find what’s lost in us; if we cannot transcend our tribe and find kinship with all beings, and not merely the human ones.

On the evidence to hand, it seems too late for poetry to find the leader of the “free” world; it seems too late for a little self-awareness to trump his grandiosity. But it’s never too late for the rest of us. Start with James Baldwin. Start with Jane Hirshfield. Start with Anna Akhmatova. Start with Rumi: read a poem, and die a little to your shallow self; come back plural, a whole lot less certain and a whole lot more beautiful, and a whole lot less eager to condemn in others what literature will school you to love now in yourself.