Community

The community I live in -- specifically in Central Florida, but generally somewhere inside the techno-fundamentalist schism of America in the first decade of its twenty-first century -- is an increasingly flaccid, distanced, voracious and dangerous one. Clogged roads, suburban isolation, schools failing, little accountability, zilch civitas: All of this is lends a worrisome gravitas to the spirit of the age, auguring the slow sure fall of the American empire. Not itself a bad thing, surely in the eyes of the rest of the world; and perhaps not bad either for local in the sense that little moves forward that has not hit bottom first; but it does make days suck.

There are flash-points which reveal how bad things have gotten. On Saturday night a Hummer crashed another vehicle in western Orlando and everyone in the Hummer split the scene, leaving the driver of the other vehicle terribly wounded and alone. A sheriff’s department spokesman said it was a new low, to have so many run off without rendering help. A couple days back a traffic cop was mortally wounded when a speeding driver failed to yield and crashed into him and sped on; he had to have a leg amputated and then died a day later. Yesterday a Haines City cop was killed in a hit-and-run. They’ve apprehended all of the drives and it turns out that none of them had licences.

The murder rate in this area is off the map, too, they say -- home invasions, drug wars, family splats (recently a divorced man hacked his exwife to death with a sword and then went after his son, to the horror of neighbors). Amid all that developments are spreading like cancer, hurling up these 5,000 sq-foot behemoths of comfort priced in the $600 thousand range. Our population will swell from 2 to 8 million by 2050.

Temps near 100 yesterday, joining the country’s overall misery, Hurricane Chris now forming west of Puerto Rico, churning towards the southeastern United States; such natural excesses call on communities to pull together, conserving on energy and helping out where disaster strikes: But community is a wounded thing these days, not likely to fix itself.

A ways back (1992, in my first marriage), I essayed on the notion of community and imagined a healing that was alchemical: I could dream a physic, though making one a reality has proved too elusive. Maybe alchemy is underway now, though its horrible to experience.





COMMUNITY: an alchemy

October 1992

This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.

Wendell Berry, “Work Song”

I. NIGREDO (blackness)

In the first stage, the initial material (prima materia) is dissolved, calcinated, pulverized and washed. This is the most dangerous part of the operation, for poisonous vapors often develop and the unstable material can easily explode. According to old texts, there lives in the prime material "an impudent demon who can cause a sickness of the spirit, or lunacy." The operator feels bewildered and may fall into a deep melancholy. It is as if he has been delivered unto hell.

Orlando is a haven for fallen dreams. Many move here; many leave. Many like me wonder why we stayed. Few would call it a community in the sense of the type we’ve known elsewhere, from childhoods lost. Bereft of the communities we left behind, we come here to pursue dreams, better life, private passions. This extended suburb we call a city is its own form of anesthetic, measured in doses of shopping malls, tourist attractions, beachfront condos: landscaped boulevards of ease.

That’s what I wanted, flying south from Washington State in 1980. I had dreamed of palms and crystal water on so many frozen, northern nights. The torrid affair of sun and water seduced me into coming here. The first Orlando neighborhood I lived in was a community of singular paradises, each with a beautifully trimmed yard, brilliant flowers, a swimming pool, a brace of luxury cars in the driveway. But each lovely house was silent, utterly separated from its neighbors.

Something about such paradise however is injurious to community. It infects us with a jagged and mean spirit. I’ve resented the intrusion of others here, and resented that I could ill afford the grander pleasures. I wanted it all for myself. Addicted to my private corner of sunshine, I hoarded every ray.

Multiply this attitude by several hundred thousand and you get Orlando and others of its ilk: Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Phoenix, Houston and the rest of the Sun Belt. These communities show much use but little care. The turbines of development are cranked to the max, leaving in their wake a mullet-eyed, drunken sprawl of subdivisions and overtaxed roads.

The failure of community is revealed in the vices that replace it. Orlando’s a lot like Illyria of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night — a sterile and affected land, lost to the pursuit of idle pleasures. The citizens of Illyria only play at life. The Duke Orsino sighs,

If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again. It had a dying fall;
O; it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more.
‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That, not withstanding thy capacity,
Receiveth as the sea. Naught enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute. (I,i,14)


The fall of our community is a consequence of such pleasures. Paradisal appetites easily turn pornographic, a siren song for suckers and marks and rubes. Look on Orange Blossom Trail on any night -- there are plenty of these parched souls out on liberty, desperately salting their wounds. It wouldn’t really bother me if these grail seekers would stay in their iniquitous bushes, but their dark hearts direct their pickup trucks into my neighborhood to call on my wife and daughter. Dangerous misogynies as these are frightening. It is a vampirism, victims turning predatory, a curse lengthening down generations. Today there aren’t enough jails to hold these voluptuaries.

Still, there's a glint of silver in all this gloomy musing. Writing about alcoholism — one of many paradisal addictions — Carl Jung proscribed an alchemical cure: spiritus contra spiritus, spirit cures spirit. Likewise, our paradisal pathologies find healing in the work and communion of community.


II. ALBEDO (whitening)

The elements are thoroughly separated and then brought together. The stage is called a whitening because all colors and all elements cook together. The forge must be tended carefully, lest the fire grow too great and scorch the elements, or fall to low to hold the bond together.

Our perception of community suffers from pervasive changes that have occurred in this century. First, community has lost its connection to place, and expansive notions of community now prevalent don’t have enough appeal to pull us into them. The former outlook viewed community like a field tended for generations; place is the traditional boundary of community. But how has this tradition fared with our frontier history and excessively mobile present? And as we race into the next century our borders become even less distinct. Linked by media and technology, the rhythms and colors of polyculture swirl and ferment. Tokyo and Hollywood, Nabibia and London, Harlem and Amsterdam: all these weird tandems pepper the new cultural polyglot.

Prejudice and xenophobia try to resist these changes by clinging nostalgically to lost (and mythical) glories. But there's a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous that once you've been pickled you can't go back to being a cucumber. There’s no return to Mayberry. Our way lies ahead, in a wider, more exciting, more frightening community. All the sticks and stones of neo-Nazi goons can’t chase the new order away.

Second, the context of community has changed from accord to plurality. The mind naturally dreams of utopia, which is a sort of universal self-replication. The American Founding Fathers envisaged a like-minded human community, united by ideals and functioning indivisibly. Unfortunately, the same mind that dreams of utopia also suffers the nightmare of spiritual tyranny. The Great Society becomes a Brave New World of bitchy divisions, windy polemics, political correctness and dull petrification. Biosphere II is contaminated not by airs but humours.

We move from utopian accord toward the community of pluralism. Here one and all are welcomed to the great carnival of Diversity. This community embraces a spirit of openness that has no mean or limit. Without measure there can be no discrimination; moral and right are relative (the more zealous would call these virtues carrion of the old patriarchy). But diversity also has a short half-life. Radical openness foments polygamies, indiscretions, indiscriminate spending, inconstancy, unjust means justified by just ends. You can't hear anything in the riotous cacophony of welcome.

Between these dynamics of place/borderlessness and accord/plurality there is a tempering force that may attune us to community. The constancy, surprisingly, is eros. Eros can harmonize the the polarities. In a different age, a king married his land, and his subjects understood themselves in relation to the king's stewardship. Eros held the kingdom together.

Unfortunately, we've skewered the meaning of eros. The secularization of society placed a terrible burden on human relationship. We turn to mates and lovers to fill our own spiritual holes. By spiritualizing eros we remove it impossibly from reality, and strew marriages and children helter-skelter in the search for a more perfect union.

We have also so sexualized eros that it is perceived only in genital terms: self-gratification. This is adolescent stuff, really -- boy Cupid firing his arrows indiscriminately and torturing the populace with undesired passions, rending the social fabric. This sexualizing darkens love into downward-winding pathologies — incest, pederasty, voyeurism, don juanism, rape. Eros becomes the torch of Amor pointed downward, and our sweet torture is on love’s rosy bed of thorns.

By returning eros from these spiritual and sexual extremes we discover the true temper of community. Between agape and concupiscence there is a love for humanity. The organ for such love lies between brain and liver: the heart with its quaternity of chambered humours, plunging and receiving blood in a balanced circulation, one half spiritualizing, the other sexualizing, one white side distancing to find perspective, one red side passionate to engage. This heart is where home is: here we stand at community’s door. We feel it knocking in our chest.


III. RUBEDO (reddening)

The heat is brought to its highest intensity, the King and Queen come together in the “chymical marriage” and the gross material is transformed into gold. The work comes to an end, the retort is opened and the lapis begins to radiate a cosmically healing effect.

The Latin root for community is communis, formed of the roots com (“with,” “together,” “mutual”) and munis (“service” or “gift”). The Sanskrit root is mayate, “he exchanges.” Community then is a commonwealth formed by an exchange of gifts. Were we better attuned to etymology, we would know that our "selfish community" is oxymoronic. Community is created by and maintained through sacrifice; hence, suburbia is nothing more than a willed exile, a deliberate self-abnegation.

In community there is a vibrant and alternating current between individual and whole. Community ceases to exist without the contribution of its individuals. At the same time, it may lay no condition on such a gift. Else it is mere taxation.

To return to community we must shift the balance back from our dogged individualism. I’m not saying our capitalist, liberal heritage has been wrong. Through wave after wave of ethnic and economic self-assertion, more of the human community today has access and voice. But such progress clarifies our differences and readily twists dialogue into a caterwaul. Other positions become merely oppositions, obstacles in the path of righteousness. The desire for equality bears the shadow of conquest.

Paradoxically, experience has shown that the harder I fight for my needs the more distant they become. Community suggests a radically different way. William Blake wrote, “The most sublime act is to set another before you.” To do for others is to do most for one self, for such sacrifice implies self-possession. You can’t give up what you don’t already own.

A community is a squared circle: opposites living together under the same roof. Like a marriage, it’s often a raucous household. When community is a conscious act we come to it painfully aware of our isolation from and need of it while also painfully aware of what it demands in return for its sustenance.

Although we are asked to sacrifice our individuality for community we must never abandon it. The blissed-out communes of the '60’s reflect the falling-in-love myth, the fantasy of returning to the oceanic and unencumbered unity of the womb, washed clean of persona and shadow. Sad to say but infancy is forever lost to us. There is no going back, neither in the arms of the Beloved nor by mainlining on the Nostalgia Channel. We give community our mature individuality and suffer a dual responsibility of nourishing and relinquishing our selves. Ranier Maria Rilke wrote in his Letters to A Young Poet:

Love does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent-?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves...may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.

Community uproots us from our selfish addictions and private therapies and turns us into citizens. The post-Jungian thinker James Hillman talks about the pathology of an individualism that conceals its ills in closets and consulting-rooms. When individuals go out there in the world it’s just business as usual, everything peachy, keenly over-lit to shade our human frailties. Hillman suggests that if our ills were taken public and made into political issues, then civic responsibility would become a form of therapy. It isn’t just “my” problem anymore, it becomes my world’s, and healing becomes our common cause. The rite of passage for the political animal is the right to vote, and the call to serve is a far more sublime and mature eros than the passion to possess and rule.


CONCLUSION

As Rilke says, we may hardly be mature enough as a species to live in community. Our terrible and brutal need of paradise has eradicated traditional community. Our community lacks a core, else we would not be so starved, so crazed. We stand between ages, terrified to let go of the past but even more afraid to open the door ahead. Darkness sings sweetly in every corner, and it would be so easy just to let it all fall.

But that is not our fate. Out of our brokenness, out of our surrender of the perfect, out of the bittersweet acceptance that we are who we are as we are, we become ready to rejoin community with our lives. Out of alchemical hellfire, gold. We are ready to begin the work. I offer a final quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet which discusses the love relationship in terms that parallel my notion of community:

...this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.”