End Title for a Blog: There Are No Angels in America, or How the Great Work Begins

I never much cared for blogging.

I hate the idea of having my words published for any eye to see and judge.  Well, no, not judge.  Judging is okay.  Human.  But being my own worst critic, the thought was horrifying, to say the least.

Well, here I am, ten weeks wiser, ten weeks older, and I survived.  We all have.  And that's funny, to word it that way, when we have spent all of our time speaking of one the greatest survival stories in the entire world...the survival of this country.  This America.

Let's get right down to the meat on those bones, shall we?

Part I, or Surviving the Soul:

Mather and Hawthorne are first, On Witchcraft and Young Goodman Brown, respectively, both distinctly separate entities, and yet, both unequivocally tied to the same Faith, the same Fear.

Part II, or Surviving the Body:

Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative not only bridges the gap between the American Soul and the American Body, it serves as the perfect introduction into the later texts of The Conquest of New Spain and The Coquette.

Part III, or Surviving the Mind:

That leaves Mr. Poe and Ms. Dickinson, acolytes of the Mind and of Thought, if not always of Reason.  They are, of course, the two figures who bring all three parts together to form one American Whole, the whole reason I'm here now, about to explode, I mean, explore, why we even bothered at all...

To be honest, I never cared much for America.  Can't say I do, still.  But that does not, in any shape or shapeless form, translate to an indifference or disrespect.  This country has me in awe, and I find myself more and more aware of the fact that it is, in fact, growing on me...slowly, one could almost say imperceptibly, but there it is.  My first of a few confessions.  What could have I expected out of a country born of so many contradictions, a hodge-podge of so many faces and cultures, of so many dying civilizations and so many new ones just opening their eyes to the big, bright world!  This country IS paradox, IS change...and so, refuses any names, and demands all of them, all at once, and never again.  At first you have the Sinning (at the hands of an angry God, of course), and anyone who tells me this country was born out of Love is shitting me and deserves the very punishment they are denying the Puritans inflicted on this land.

Yes, the punishment, because that is all Mather talks about in his rambles.  The punishment of ignorance and how it punishes the intelligent few keen enough (and sage enough) to walk off that proverbial beaten path and...and what?  Be damned, be sent to Hellish places, be lied to, be treated like Children with no mind and no conscience.  Be mind-drugged and sedated, be made into nameless sheep in the herds upon herds on which this America would be built.  Are we really still surprised today that Religion is not only Public Enemy but also Public Savior No. 1?  Of course it is!  That's the greatest paradox this country has to offer: a quiet little war between both sides of the coin, neither right or wrong, but both stubbornly refusing to give in, killing millions of innocent people in the process (yes, millions), because a death does not just have to end in funerals...it too can end in the snuffing out of thinking, of questioning.  In silence.  Is this not, at least in part, what Hawthorne talks of?

Goodman Brown, after all, is left condemned, damned as he was, and damned as he wasn't.  There IS no solution or resolution, there is only the inescapable cycle of viciousness and irony, of knowing America is the product of its own vices and virtues, and that it cannot (will not!) escape its own trappings until its inhabitants find a way to come together as American Citizens and fight what they themselves are doing to it.  9/11 should not be our only call to arms.  In a way, it was more than a wake-up call...it was a warning bell to what had been there all along.  America began on a rock so many years ago, and before we had even stepped onto fresh land, America's soul was already at stake, already on the verge of being lost...

People fought back.  Entire civilizations really.  Ask Ms. Rowlandson.  Ask any of the other women taken captive by the Native Americans, a clear response to the very violence and the very injustice done to them, the 'Reds', by these foreign creatures, these 'Whites'.  And the color play is amazing, is it not, that Red is blood and White is pure and yet it is the White that kills first and the Blood that tries for bargaining before anyone else.  This country knows no order, just continues to feed itself by the very notions it destroys and creates from that destruction, a Phoenix rising over and over from the very ashes it wishes to obliterate.  And then came the Conquistadors, to prove that it isn't just the Puritans, but also the Spaniards (and the Portuguese, and the French, etc. et etc....) that want a piece of this American Body, this American Flesh.  Oh yes, there will be blood...and I harbor no secret when I say The Conquest of New Spain is my prime example for how we turned out the way we did (we being America).

Please do refer back to my blog on that one, no sense in repeating myself when there's still so much to cover!

Which brings me to The Coquette, perhaps an even more damaging violence committed to America, and one, sadly, which rings truer day by day (even if we have learned to hide it better all the same).  Martin Scorsese once called his adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence "the most violent movie I've ever made."  It should be of no great consequence then, that it was that violence of which he speaks of that most critically wounded this country: the violence to our Free Will.  And yes, we have the Amendment, don't we, but writing down that you have Liberty does not guarantee it so (hey, slavery never happened here, right?  Surely not!).  Sometimes, this country provides the punchline to the jokes from which it tries to hide...from which it tries to protect itself from.  Eliza was doomed from the start, by trying to choose with her heart and her mind, with her soul, and in that long end, finding herself unable to penetrate the frigid heart of a society uncaring and uninterested in responding as individuals, in accessing themselves as cohesive beings that could, potentially, talk and react as more than just One People, as true fellows...as Americans.

This is what happens when we create things on Idea alone.  This is what happens when we create things in a Place of Fear.  The stink lingers on, and once we've learned the poisoned lessons, the sting is hard to wear off, if it ever does at all...

Then came Poe and Dickinson, like antidotes, much akin to Thoreau and Emerson, to Whitman, and to the Greats who we didn't mention or talk about.  They ARE America too...and the reasons why it works, why this fucking country works, even when ill put-together, even when struggling against its own ambivalences and ambiguities...even when struggling to just survive.  And what a journey it's been, from Fear to Violence to Silence back to Fear and Ignorance and back to Violence and Bloodshed and back to that Silence, back to that Quietness, but always returning, time and time again, to these wonderful Pieces of the Written Word of America, figures so illustrious and everlasting, they don't need the country's weaknesses to make them strong...they stand defiantly by themselves, each one of them a Colossus of this Land.  Because they refused to leave their room, because they refused to deny the perversities of their own mind's eye (and reveled in it, enthralled audiences with its uncanny familiarity and strangeness), because they defied civilization and lived in a cabin in solitude...because they were themselves, and because it is to them who we owe this American Identity we proudly emblazon on our bodies, hearts, on our beating, wingless souls.

I may not like America, but I love America, and I may not understand how it got here, but I see how it came to be how it is.  I may not have always been there, sound mind and spirit, in class or out of class, but I could always see the road, the mythical, destructive, beautiful, terrifying, stupefying, infuriating, blessed, miraculous, infernal, wordless, soundless, faceless road where I walked, and where the Native Americans walked, and where each and every Slave walked, and where Washington stood his ground, and where Lincoln changed minds, and where I arrived, safe at home, and yet not at home, to sit and talk and listen and hope, that these great minds, these Gods, could teach us all, could learn us all, and could shine the light on this America, and why, why, it reigns over us, why it will never die, even as it kills, even as it sings, even as it feels, and even as it clears itself of all possible feeling...it's perhaps too on the point, too ironic (or not ironic enough) to mention, but America is just a baby.

And all babies know nothing except what they want, and what they don't want, reacting with their emotions, only to find, in their adult life, that it is in the retrospective where we derive our meaning, our purpose.  And perhaps that's the rub, the Key...

Maybe we need to let America grow up.  Let it sink in, let it simmer.  And I hope, I so hope, I can live in this America and know, without any doubts or confusion, that it has learned the lessons, the hard and well-fought lessons, from which it grew its Name.

In the meantime, I have nothing but more explosions, more rage, more love...and one more quote, perhaps the most important one I can give.  The one that holds truest today, and the one that changed my American life...enjoy.

"I hate America, Louis.  I hate this country.  It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you.  The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing.  He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it.  That was deliberate.  Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me...I live in America, Louis, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it.  You do that.  Everybody’s got to love something." - Belize, Angels in America by Tony Kushner

Goodbye, readers.  Thank you for obliging.

To our great works, and to the works behind us...to you, to me, to us...may the best be yet to come, and may our Revelations unfold...one Mighty Word at a time...