Arrested Grief: Liberal America’s Moral Problem?

Life is not possible without an opening to the transcendent; in other words, human beings cannot live in chaos.  Once contact with the transcendent is lost, existence in the world ceases to be possible.

–Mircea Eliade, quoted in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by James Cone

In Hinduism, the term Kali Yuga refers to the last of four “world stages,” a period of strife, discord, and destruction that was the necessary precursor if the cycle was to start again.

–Clark Strand, Waking Up To the Dark: The Black Madonna’s Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse

I was powerfully impressed by two of  director  Kenneth Lonergan’s films we watched earlier in December, Manchester-By-the-Sea and Margaret, both having a subject not guaranteed to sell tickets: grief. In Manchester,  a man grieves the loss of his children in a fire caused by his own irresponsibility.  In the latter a teenage girl, Lisa Cohen,  grieves the death of a stranger who dies in her arms after an accident the girl had caused.  Both movies reveal the difficulty of working through grief, especially when mixed with guilt, and how much of the feeling part of the process looks like explosive rage (some of it self-destructive), rather than vulnerable grief.  Moreover, as time passes in the movies, grieving doesn’t look like a process but rather an inescapable condition of that wounded person.  (After a point in Margaret, I became desperate for Lisa to stop unloading on everybody!)  I wondered, is Mr. Lonergan saying something about America’s soul?

“Human beings cannot live in chaos,” Eliade wrote. That is, they cannot live – as we attempt to do –   in the meaninglessness that is the absence of self-transcendence, and remain human. So I ask: Inasmuch as the problem for white liberal America is meaninglessness, is it possible grief may be key to healing that  “deficit” which leaves us floundering morally, incapable of engaging with anything more profound than party loyalty?  I mean, yes, I too see a Trump Presidency as all about everything for the rich and as little as possible for everybody else.  But how can a political problem be addressed by people who, like our elected officials  lack a basis in meaning – that miracle of heart and imagination – when, like our leaders, we’re stuck with logic, the rational mind working solo?

I have often wondered why grief – the deep, cleansing kind – is so difficult to reach when, upon reaching it, tears spilling involuntarily down the cheeks, it feels so like the most priceless sweetness, as though one has reached a shore in a new land where all will be well; the arrival at a “homier” home than one has ever known.  The problem is deep grief is not accessible using the ordinary logical thought processes by which we talk about sadness and grief without actually feeling it. So, if thinking doesn’t get you there, would it be amiss to conclude it’s the heart that hosts this “scene” of self-transcendence,  entered only with difficulty, and only according to terms set by the heart in imagination?  In other words, what’s mysterious to left-brain-oriented me,  may be “child’s play” to the heart.  Although I  share the problem with grief I’m discussing, I have been there.  And having been there, I know the rapture of grief, shown so movingly in the scene between Lisa and her mother at the end of Margaret.  The restoration of the truth of human connection, of love, of meaning. 

With grief not being given its due as a  health requirement, our society is stuck in aggrievement. And what is aggrievement, with its potential for rage, resentment, projections, and plain indifference to the suffering of others – its shaky moral basis that wants to blame –  but a derailment of the process of grief?  What if this aborted grieving process is the way to restore the imagination of the heart, and with it, the truth of all-connected,  now so endangered?  After all, though we wish success for ourselves and others we care about, success is not what binds people to one another.   We are bound by our wounds, failures, the in-common but under-acknowledged experiences that both threaten all meaning and – I’m asserting – make it possible.  

In some ways supreme among the horrors today that defy meaning is the ongoing genocide in Gaza; we know terrible suffering is being inflicted on children, and also that we are helpless to stop it. But keeping  in mind the fact – and this is a fact substantiated by neuroscientific trauma research – that both the infliction of atrocity and the need to justify it are symptoms of trauma, we could say  meaning –  its retention or loss – is not entirely dependent upon ending or ameliorating a particular catastrophe. This is not to shrug and say what can one person do, or call it “God’s will.”   But the reality of trauma means the so-called good guys as well as the bad guys are all  traumatized; all handling unconscious trauma in different ways, all adding up to keeping things the same, leaving the odds stacked against meaning – i.e., connection, love.  

But what if the “good guys,” us, opted for meaning, instead of accepting the reality we’re in as if there’s no other?  That is, the possibility for meaning remains, despite everything, in the individual human heart, in its capacity for transcendence.  And for transcendence, one must know one’s undeserved suffering. Meaning, that is, is in the hands of individuals who will seek it, even unto entering the darkness within oneself.

The experience of black  Americans of inconceivable suffering during the Jim Crow era, theologian James Cone points out, gave meaning to the symbol of the cross that, in white churches, with white supremacy unchallenged, was in effect meaningless. That capacity to transform suffering into energizing belief fed and led the powerful civil rights movement. Not dogmatic belief, not necessarily Christian or other specific ideology,  but experience of the transcendent allows the divine energy of all-connected unity to work on human beings. The results will be different – not everyone has the same genius in them, but moral vision, the truth of all-one, can be attained when suffering is not denied and grief can reach its truth.

I do not expect America to alter its course by my speaking this way.  Suffering, as I’ve noted many times, doesn’t make a great lure.  But knowing what we now know about trauma, each of us has a basis for transcendence within, in personal darkness. Each one, in realizing one’s trauma, suffering undeserved,  now has ground for seeing one’s life as a revolution, without ideology or hierarchy, overturning the American way of life that has been constituted in order to deny that very truth (for white people).

As I write about grief, into my mind come memories of that “grief shaman,” Robert Bly, who would weep unashamedly before an audience, over, for instance, the death of a friend such as he did for the poet Etheridge Knight. Not just a quick watering of the eyes and tremor in the voice, but full-out weeping, loss of control!  By now, the heart inside most of us could justifiably feel reproachful towards  ego’s demand for stony control.  One can imagine the heart even saying, on those rare occasions when we experience that mystery of grief, what took you so long?    

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Earlier this month we read Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities in our book club.  Here’s a story of what happens when aggrievement stays at that unrecognized stage, no redress is made, and a collective target for the outrage is present. Under such conditions, which in 18^th century pre-revolutionary France included starvation,  human beings can allow their consciousness to “drop” to the bestial, less than human.  In Dickens’s portrayal, we see the terrifying mob mentality play itself out, not in one incident, but in a relentless stream of carnage over years.   

When I read the Tale the first time – probably in high school –  I’m not sure I took in the fact that the poor starving oppressed masses for whom I felt such sympathy – such that that in my heart I could not help but cheer for their cause – became monsters.  Back then, I could not hold two such contradictory realities in my head at the same time.  In the aftermath of the assassination of United Healthcare CEO billionnaire Brian Thompson, in a nation in which so many of us have experienced “deny, defend, depose,” etc., it’s tempting to harbor a hope that this might be it – the spark that could overturn wretched Capitalist reality, bring about a system centered in the needs of the people. Maybe that is what it takes to overthrow a rotten, corrupt and thoroughly defended system. Apparently that was Luigi Mangione’s conclusion, and he’s certainly not the first.

But there’s a danger. One begins to hear those “echoing footsteps;” easy to imagine a mob arising to “fix” the injustices of our self-enriching healthcare system that leave so many people suffering, their loved ones smoldering in impotent rage.  One can imagine the rage erupting, exploding into something with a life of its own, relentless, chewing up the innocent along with the guilty.   What would happen, I wonder,  if, instead, far-fetched as it sounds,  people were to feel their long-postponed grief?  I think particularly of us white liberals, if we were to follow that process of grief into the dark unknown of oneself?  What would happen if many, not just one or two, took the revolution to a more intimate location in the heart? 

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Midway in  A Tale of Two Cities, the cynical dissolute Sydney Carton confesses to the woman whose perfection (what else can we call it?) has shone to him his better self.  His aspiration, his noble character, has been long buried under his habit of self-disparagement. He confesses to her not because he intends to change but because he knows he can’t.  Why not?  We’re not to know the cause.  In  pre-Freudian times, such tendency to self-destruction was left mystery.  For the story, it’s enough that his true nobility of character –  the transcendent meaning of his life – is achieved in his final, famous sacrifice.   

Though the story uses a literal sacrifice, the theme of achieving nobility via transcendence ought not to be tossed out as a quaintness of Victorian times. The transcendent  is irrelevant only for those who’ve found a way – via determined ignorance or via white supremacy or by liberal faith in this world as the best of all possible ones – to mask the unbearableness of the world, its cruelty, madness and terror, its chaos. 

Today Sydney would have a PTSD- diagnosis;  he knows the Terror – the reality that refuses to be ameliorated with sympathy or goodness – because he’s already acquainted with it through some experience we’re never to know about. Consciously or not, in his experience of undeserved suffering, the world has “ceased to be possible.” At the same time, in that experience of chaos is the opening to the transcendent.  The two realities are connected, and both necessary, like night and day, darkness and light.    

What would it take to take on  the sacrifice that without exaggeration could be called one’s ”cross?”  The cross is a symbol not only for such undeserved human suffering as that of black people historically in America (as in the title of James Cone’s book), but for another suffering, lesser known, and generally denied. And, though I do not refer here to the suffering of the white underclass resentful of the liberal elite’s blindness to their own power, liberal blindness is indeed evidence of this other, off-the-radar suffering.  Unseen and unacknowledged it accounts for the absence of motivation in the white liberal heart to seek full human, moral nobility of character.  Dickens’s characters – Lucie and Dr. Manette, Charles Darnay are indeed “too good” to be true, but still, interestingly, even in our times of moral  ambiguity we can recognize virtue, purity of heart,  when we see it.

Today,  nobility of character seems an aspiration most of us are fine with seeing it go to the exceptional few, a Ralph Nader, Daniel Ellsberg, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Eduardo Galeano, an Ursula LeGuin. Not that we do not personally know any admirable people. But virtue seems narrowly proscribed,  a quality that awaits us ordinary people mostly  unused, perhaps never to be picked up.  Though consciously we’re on the side of the oppressed, want justice and peace,  a kind of “gumption” to make what we could of ourselves morally remains out of reach for most of us.  Arrested in our process of grief, not having attained the heart’s “scene” of grief and rapture, keeps us in moral ambiguity, at one with neoliberal  totality rather than with the heart.  

Neoliberal reality is no different from any other informing reality in any time that favors power and wealth over the masses of the vulnerable.  The goal, the grail,  must be to find one’s own vulnerability, that truth, that other that has been waiting for your recognition. That truth has power in it.    And I’m not the first to point to it.

The door was closed:
“Who is it?”
“It’s me.”
“I don’t know you.”
And the door remained closed.
The following day:
Who is it?”
“It’s me.”
“I don’t know who you are.”
And the door remained closed.
Then the following day:
“Who is it?”
“It’s you.”
And the door opened.

–from Persian poet Farid al-Din Attar, born in 1142, collected in Children of the Days, by Eduardo Galeano

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