Sunday, November 15, 2020
Modern Nobility Means Traumatic Detachment
Often twice and sometimes three times a week the two of them came to town and into the house - the foolish unreal voluble preserved woman now six years absent from the world - the woman who had quitted home and kin on a flood of tears and in a shadowy miasmic region something like the bitter purlieus of Styx and produced two children and then rose like the swamp-hatched butterfly, unimpeded by weight of stomach and all the heavy organs of suffering and experience, into a perennial bright vacuum of arrested sun - and the young girl dreaming, not living, in her complete detachment and imperviousness to actuality almost like physical deafness. - from Absalom, Absalom, by William Faulkner
Take this. Don't keep it at a distance. And eat. Let it become part of your body. Drink it into your lifeblood. Don't look at it as a beautiful spectacle, frozen in the historical past.
When you "take it and eat," how does it settle there? What do you feel and sense in your body? When you "drink it in," how do you see it shaping your identity, your desires, and the trajectory of your life?
Once, when I was visiting a farmer friend in the rural outskirts of Charlottesville, I went with him to deliver hay to a friend of his, whose property came up against a back gate of the Montpelier estate. I took in a sense of enticing mystery and honor, connection to the lore of our land and to one of its heroes. I "drank in" an aspiration to a nobility and dignity. In it, I sensed a calling to something higher.
Many years later, others have called, beckoned, and pointed me to parts of this estate, so to speak, that aren't included in this photograph. What I didn't see or take note of, what I didn't tend to when finding myself in close proximity to this shaping of elements of the earth in particular ways that are ordered to particular ends and to a particular vision for life (i.e. the Architecture), was the slave quarters and the shackles. This makes sense, because they're purposefully not included in the photograph. They aren't what we look to when we tend to either Montpelier or to our own lives. I look elsewhere.
The problem with this is that my entire vision was ordered in a particular direction, while what built and enabled what I was seeking after was something to which I was utterly blind. And history always carries forward into the present. I'm still shaped by this image of nobility and dignity built on the backs of those who are not accounted for as noble and dignified elements of the Architecture of our society.
As I've begun to tend to these desires and aspirations "within myself" to a nobility and dignity shaped in the particular ways that this photograph represents to and for us, I have begun to notice them at work in unexpected and surprising ways. For example, when I want to be, I'm pretty good at "argument," at critique, or "criticism." On my good days, I can exercise this muscle by making a point very effectively and clearly. On my bad days, if I'm honest, I'm good at making someone look like an idiot if I want to, or if I suddenly deem them worthy of that kind of treatment. Can you see how that's not unrelated to the hidden socio-political and economic dynamics embedded in this photograph? Who am I to judge that? Who died and made me master over them?
Related, I spent much of my life proud of how I was able to "think for myself," that I wasn't someone who just took things for granted as they were given to me by others. I didn't just "take in" what others handed me, you see. On resumes, this gets named "critical thinking skills." In popular culture and in current political antagonisms, it drives conspiracy theories (yes, I'm saying I can identify with the urge behind conspiracy theories). I recognize "within myself" this noble aspiration to "rise above the fray," to be able to control my own narrative for the world, to "see over" things in ways that others supposedly can't - or at least perhaps don't. I sense "in my belly" a primal desire for dignity disordered towards an image of myself as Master of the universe. Modern nobility means traumatic detachment.
If this wasn't so common, I probably wouldn't bother confessing it on Facebook or on my blog. I also probably wouldn't bother if it wasn't so easy to trace these aspirations I've taken into myself right through the honorable and noble desires of Southern Nationalist Plantation Theology - into which Trump has tapped. What I'm suggesting is that it is rather easy to connect the dots between the Classical Liberalism at the heart of conservative ideology and the unaccounted for and inevitable tensions born of our own racism at the heart of Southern culture, of Southern honor and shame relational dynamics, and of the individualism with which we identify and by which find ourselves in our theology that historically ran right through plantations just like this one.
How many times have you heard James Madison lifted up as evidence of the "Christianity" of our Founding Fathers and, thus, of the manifest destiny of America as a Christian Nation, a City on a Hill, a "light to the nations"? This can begin to sound a lot like it taps into my aspiration to a place "above the fray," can't it?
In the same way that slavery disappears from this photograph, our anti-Christian urge born of Enlightenment Revolutionary spirit to rise "above the fray" and, for example, "think for ourselves," or to be a "free thinker," or even to be consumed with fears and worries of whether or not I AS AN INDIVIDUAL "am saved," covers over the Supremacy at the heart of what animates the unaccounted for racial tensions in our history and our present, tensions Jesus himself calls us to heal and reconcile but which we instead choose to cover over with ideological narratives of individual Mastery over our own universe. I would say "me" rather than "we," but what I'm saying I'm seeing "within" myself, what I'm telling you I've "taken in," has too much explanatory power of our history and our present for me to try to pretend not to see it elsewhere, as well.
Why are those of us most apt to think of ourselves as "independent" or "free" or "self governing" also most apt to scapegoat "the left" rather than to confess and repent of our desires that don't order our lives toward the shared life of communion to which we are beckoned by and in God? Why are so many of us not only willing but itching to fight valiantly to the death to save a "freedom" or a Mastery against all that we perceive to impose on it, as though we're either still fighting against the Union Army or have decided to join in said fight? I'm aggravated with "the right," and I STILL, in a sense, have a tendency within myself to want to do this.
Why are we still actively working towards and for that which segregates and divides rather than that which heals and restores? Why do we scapegoat and fear "the rioters and looters" (most of whom are actually at least relatively peaceful protesters) rather than seek to see justice and mercy roll down like waters? Why is Sunday still the most segregated day of the week? Why are there so few black people in the rural South? Why did "The Great Migration" of the 1920's to the '70's happen (see link here, if you aren't aware of what this is), followed and accompanied by White Flight (see links here and here if you're wondering what I mean by "White Flight")? Why do we walk right up to the front of the Master's House rather than following in the footsteps of Jesus down to the slave quarters? Why do we have such a hard time facing, naming and owning our racism? Why is it still unaccounted for?
I would suggest that, in this very moment, you are "taking and eating" and that you are "drinking" a representation of the answer to those questions - in ways that aren't as obvious and easy as the ones that we can point to safely and distantly in a frozen history of the past. This history of our covering over of the trauma of our racial tensions with a narrative of above the fray detachment is actually even built into the foundational history the Montpelier Estate itself. The original house on the property was called "Mount Pleasant," and its history included an apparent murder of the Master by three of his slaves, followed by deadly and torturous retribution by the legal authorities (click here if you would like to dig into a bit more detail on this).
Though murder is never the answer in God, we should not all too easily imagine that the Master was murdered becuase his slaves experienced his yolk as easy and his burden as light there on Mount Pleasant. This history carries forward into our present racial tensions and protests of police brutality. This history that never died and is our present is why our white middle class suburban houses here in Virginia look like Colonial Plantation Houses. It's also why the neighborhoods where the descendants of slaves are over-policed to keep them "in their place" and out of sight of our contmepory Master's quarters.
This kind of sader meal of the story of my time and place came to me as I reflected on how basically all of the social, character, and narrative dynamics of Absalom, Absalom hinge, unnamed, around slavery. Of course, this wouldn't mean much if Absalom, Absalom, centering around the building and life of a Southern Plantation in Mississippi, wasn't about us, our world, our land, and our story.
Modern nobility means traumatic detachment. I say this as I reflect on my own noble aspirations that have shaped my life as a Southern white male here in Virginia. As the people of God, how are we called and invited to respond to these conditions?
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