I was recently at a performance of Streetcar Named Desire. A few days before I was asked if I was looking forward to the evening. My reaction was mixed. I do like the theatre, but Tennessee Williams is not celebrated as a diseur of happiness. My cursory reply was: “Act 1, sad; Act 2, disturbing; Act 3, distressingly tragic. William’s work is where the American dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness announces its effete dysfunctionality, its need for therapeutic analysis”.
That therapy, however, seems never to have reached a resolution. The liberty, the freedom, envisioned in the American adaptation of the Enlightenment’s espying of happiness is a lonesome pleasure. It is rather like Blanche Dubois, a solitude all dressed up with nowhere to go. For all the socially sanctioned bedizenment of sociality supposedly resident in that liberty, communality is blaringly lacking. The American dream sinks into an apotheosis of the individual, the “me”. Despite voices from the neo-orthodox to the less-than, from the Niebuhrs to the hippies, a corrective of the dream has not taken root. It remains a naïve fixation on the pleasure principle. It never evolves beyond the infantile eye and mouth ever seeking out something to suckle, something to feed upon and by which to find comfort. It is an absorber of experience. It is not nurturing, simply a need to be nurtured.
Now, more than two generations past those prophetic voices for maturation, the dream seems dead, as does the cry for therapy. It is become, at best, an item mourned whilst in-sanity creeps into every corner and corner office. Were this simply a matter of one nation’s distress, this dis-ease, this dis-ease of the American soul, might be controllable, even curable. The American dream, however, carries a certain universal gravity. As a politically potent attempt to incarnate the Enlightenment’s notion of “freedom, fraternity, equality,” American hegemony has caused it to metastasize on global scale. This catastrophic carcinogenic, in its misapplication of “fraternity”, of community, has genetically tied freedom, not to its proper sphere—humankind as a species of nature–but to the inalienable right of the individual, in business, in society, in world, and world comity. The Enlightenment’s vision of man admittedly can be in this manner construed, but such interpretation is superficial and therein inherently erroneous. The Enlightenment saw man as social, as all equal partakers of a singular pedigree within nature. It was about the worldly family of humankind, not about solitary pursuit of profit or happiness. Individuality was exactly the point it was a revolt against. Thus, in accord with the Enlightenment’s perceived call-to-arms, on the French soil of its birth, they who had set their own profit and happiness above that of the commons felt the blade of the guillotine. From Hume to Rousseau we read the challenge to reinvent or reinvigorate the mediaeval vision of the community of man and nature. In the unfolding of a new free-thinking world it proved difficult to not be teased and tantalized by the fear, distrust, and animosity that can arise in the solitary sequestering of soul. Yet most acknowledged—in varied degree and nuance–that nature itself required of humankind it could only be a community, not merely an association of individuals. From the analysts of the 17th and 18th centuries it may seem a slow trod to Darwin’s writing out On Origin of the Species, and from there an anfractuous progress to present day environmentalism and globalism, but even before Darwin’s day, whilst Napoleon was trying to recreate Europe within Enlightenment contours, Blake made note of the satanic mills unbridled individualism and its capitalism had set loose upon a sacred green and verdant land made doubly worthy in being once touched by the very foot of God. Alas, indeed “did those feet in ancient time…”! As so often in my work noted, we are social to the core—environmentally, spiritually, biologically, neurologically, psychologically. We are interwoven one into the other, a species of a single planetary nature.
The American dream matters because, whether it be counted as vivifying or horrifying, it is a dream that has deeply infiltrated the dreams of the species. Its spectre stirs to carry forward dreams more ancient than those of the 18th century. It may have a visible root in Judeo-Christian ideals, but the unity of humankind and its unity within nature, the vision of our tellurian commonality, is there from our dawn as a species. Its trace resides in ancient tales and cultic acts. Genesis’ notion of human dominion “over the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and all the beasts, and over every living thing that lives upon the earth” may have long been taken as the unalienable right of an aristocratic laissez faire, but lordship is not about self-interest, self-pleasure, or self-aggrandizement. (Ask HM.) Having dominion is about care-for, being careful of and responsible-for. Creation, the universe, the world, is not man’s; it is an item man is immersed in, out of whose dust he arose, and for whose tending he is made answerable, figuratively given the sacred breath that he may speak-up. If he cannot abide this truth, if as with the tree of knowledge he wants to pick and manipulate, he shall find all nature revolts. He will find his nature is in self-revolt. He will know his deprivation, his nakedness, his separation from other, his aloneness. Because of this he will know wanting, and burden, and pain without the balm of his truth, his oneness in otherness. Here, in the opening lines of the sacred text of two great cults, is an ancient warning writ large.
Where, then, are we now and whence do we go? As a man of faith and prayer I ought to be ever optimistic. My eyes ought to be lifted-up “to the hills whence comes my salvation”. Yet, I find myself saying “My soul, why art thou so heavy?” Why? Because we walk in a valley of death and heed not where we step. We amble along in a valley filled with shops distilling an endless array of items to self-define ourselves. We walk in shadows wherein hordes of celebrity clowns and poisonous politicos clamour, like all false gods, for our adoration and emulation. We trod the lowlands surfeit with stadiums brimming bright with games and teams offering us meaning and belonging but merely distracting us from a richer sense of who we are and are called to be. Soul itself is heavy because it is choked with stuff. It is not open, not free into its other, its truth, its intimacy with all others: this one world which we are, the oneness of nature for which we are but fleeting—responsive and responsible—part.
Bonhoeffer, shorty before he was executed at Flossenburg, ask of his God, the absoluteness of other: “Who am I?” His salvation he saw rested in one fact: “I am yours”. No one belongs to himself. No man is himself. No man is meant to be of, in, or by himself. The self is hidden from the individual. There is a dispossession, a poverty, a nakedness, a shame one encounters in hiding from the other. The self, the truth of being, is found only with-out-of self, only in the other—that being the other, the world, the absoluteness of otherness, that unfathomable height and depth beyond all which yet pulses ever in every cosmic particle and soul. Each being is something more than a “one”, a unit, an individual. That is our radical truth. We are one. Reality is one. That sociality, the communicity at the core of reality, Christianity celebrates in the sacred icon of a divine trinity, a wholistic community as the fountain-head and final incarnation of all reality, a vivifying commonalty become—in Spirit–a society beyond any cosmic confinement, BEING truly ONE.
Can we make the critical turn of heart from self-interest to care-fulness of all? Can we, in religious language, repent? Can we with ancient Adam make the joyous cry of “this–in-deed–is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh”. Can we stop wanting, and make the first utterance of heart and soul a joyous gratitude for life and limb and being? Can we find the eye within that knows the intimacy of our being in this world and be glad of it? Can we capture the ancient wisdom still alive in corners of this world too often discountingly dubbed primitive, under-developed, un-sophisticated? Can Christians with Jesus look out upon the deepest needs of world, give thanks, and offer to its soul: “This is my body given”? Can Christianity rise-up to be the truly, the authentically, eucharistic (thankful) leaven of the world? Can Christians be so saturated in the absoluteness of our otherness (in traditional terminology: baptized into God’s caring of his world) that we can walk in this world in harmony with it in all its varied parts as once upon a time it was said we were meant with Adam to do?
Time is not cyclical; not literally as thought the ancients, not systematically as thought Spengler. Yet, in our experience of history, themes do seem to replay in time. But themes are of our own making, our own allowance. Have we made done with this theme that comes over us more and more like waves in a deluge? Have we made done with the delusions spun out of the dream of inexhaustible individualness? Can we dream something better, something healthsome? Can we? Will we? Dare we?
As Blanche Dubois is led off to a sanitorium she confesses: “I have always relied upon the kindness of strangers”. In this her sickness is revealed. The stranger is a commodity, possibly reliable, but not relatable. The stranger is a stranger only as he is the not loved, the not received with open heart and mind and hand. Time and fate deliver us all from a critique of Streetcar. On my desk sits a ticket to a performance of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot in which the final solo paean has the frozen soul melt as it sings: “Conosco il nome dello straniero! Il suo nome è Amor! [I know the name of the stranger! His name is Love!]” Ah! Theatre! We actors all, but free our roles to choose. As I have chosen in this forum to be a writer “on religion”, allow me to close with paraphrase of that bridge twixt 1 Corinthians 13 and 14: whatsoever be your goals in life, before and above any, choose to love.