Perhaps You’ve Forgotten Who You Are [UNEDITED]
by Marcelle Cendrars with Fintan O’Toole contributing involuntarily
Written in the midst of Haitian horror on top of horrific history.

“children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more” — from E.E. Cummings’ Anyone Lived in a Little How Town [boldface mine]

About fifteen years after his death, Richard Brinsley Sheridan spoke to a young black boy in Baltimore. Frederick Douglass, then a house slave around twelve years old, had persuaded some white boys to teach him to read. He had heard his white friends talk of a schoolbook from which they were learning to recite. With fifty cents he had earned from blacking boots he bought the book and spent every spare moment absorbed in its pages. There he found one of Sheridan’s great rhetorical arguments on behalf of the oppressed Catholics of his native Ireland. As Douglass put it in his autobiography, “I met with one of Sheridan’s mighty speeches on and in behalf of Catholic emancipation. These were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance…. What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation of slavery and a powerful vindication of human rights.”

You are not a person who dies.

There’s an ancient Hiindu angle which presents God as a being who breaks The Self up into many trillions of little pieces… making The Self forget that He did so. So as to create the perception of danger, its possibility. So that the perfect harmony of The Self is relieved from being… predictable. For fun. [Can you relate?]

As Alan Watts explained, “You never die because you were never born. You’ve just forgotten who you were.”

People usually look for who they are outside of themselves. It’s particularly fascinating because they never really go outside of themselves, just look for external advice, inspiration. We don’t generally lose ourselves in others. But we do permit ourselves to be other-directed.

Activists are no exception.

Activists try to figure out the pulse of things. Try to get a bead on what citizens are thinking, feeling… to determine what might be possible in solidarity. They become anal-retentive sociologists, refusing to venture onto ground which seems unsupported by NUMBERS. “Look how few did this,” they say. “Look how many have said that,” they add. They add and subtract until they’ve become as cynical and resigned as the people who they’re trying to help out of the doldrums and danger.

This helps no one, including the misguided activist.

If one looks at the daunting figures facing anyone trying to, say, have a hit record or secure a major league baseball contract… well, one just has to give up before one starts. Ditto with creating a revolution of values… or any other kind of revolution.

Mild reformers do well with figures and such for all that helps them to put together voting blocs. [Pause.] But, as Zinn always says, “If voting could change anything it would be illegal.”

Human nature, so poorly understood, is often cited as an obstacle to considering this or that. Like a world without war. But such citations are usually based on immersing oneself in some kind of morbidly misguided quantitative analysis of past events and profiles. [I believe Zinn's Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology is essential reading on this count. His Just and Unjust War chapter addresses the question about human nature.]

You cannot control what others will do. And you must not look to them for your vision.

For your vision is truly spot-on smack in the middle of your soul. And for most “Americans” that’s all lost by about… Middle School, if not before.

I was named after Richard Brinsely Sheridan, and my parents never stopped talking about his radical politics. But as a Professor of Dramatic Art — for four decades — none of the departments I taught in at any university drew one bit of attention to his influence on Douglass, the American Revolution or anything of the sort. He was just the best playwright of his generation. That was it.

Well, that wasn’t good enough for him. And it shouldn’t be good enough for us. [Pause.] Personal success on the mundane plane.

I’m all for paying attention to personal survival issues. But, then, there’s the soul… which is connected to the survival issues of others. To other souls. Do you see them as us?

Regardless, look at what Edna St. Vincent Millay had to say at the end of her Renascence, a poem she began writing when still a teenager:

“The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,— 205
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through. 210
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.”

Richard Martin Oxman can be reached at tosca.2010[at]yahoo.com

The individual as individual is necessarily set against society and against other people as members of society. It is in the individual’s unique responses that the value of life inheres. One does much what others have always done, but with a difference, and one does it oneself, one’s own way, with one’s own feelings. These unique responses are always distrusted and feared by the group. The group needs communication and regularity of behavior in order to function as a group and so necessarily rejects what is most individual about the individual. But what is comprehended by all is no longer alive, no longer a living idea or feeling. That said, ultimately we connect with others — for the collective benefit — by honoring what we all feel in common… at — for want of a better expression — three o’clock in the morning. No one is going to tell you what to do within the realm of TOSCA… though it may seem to call for group thinking in its plea for action in solidarity. When all is said and done it is just about letting the face of God shine through.

Supplementary reading, not to use your heartbeats on in lieu of action:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/14/us_policy_in_haiti_over_decades
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/14/naomi_klein_issues_haiti_disaste r_capitalism