Life is Born of Great Eruptions

January 10, 2020, Freeport, Maine

Before we went into a strict quarantine a few weeks ago and stopped seeing the grandchildren, Finn announced he’d become fascinated by volcanoes.  Together, we sat in the living room and read about these great sources of life.  “There’s a volcano under a big city that is about to erupt any time,” he told me.  He couldn’t remember the name of the city.  I guess we know that name now.

Volcanoes lay the foundation for life on earth.  They are born in powerful opposition, of the slow forces of conflict and resistance. They are born in darkness, underground.   The great tectonic plates of the earth push against each other, one often plunging deep below the other.   In this state of oppression, miles below the surface of the earth or the ocean, heat rises, pressure builds, hot gasses erupt, massive explosions occur, and finally, rich minerals are spewed across the earth.  It is the earth’s way of recycling itself, of changing and surviving.  Life is born of great eruptions, of fire. 

Writing this now, I think, shucks, that boy always seems to get the metaphors of the moment just right, long before I do.   

On Wednesday, just before the volcano that would erupt that afternoon blew the roof off the day, I’d been sitting in my blue velvet chair doing telemed most of the day.  I’d awakened to the news that the first Black Senator from the South was declared the winner in Georgia, that the first Jewish Senator from Georgia was on the cusp of winning as well.  I’d no time to peek at my iphone to see whether the mayhem I feared for weeks had come to pass in D.C.  I went through the day, instead, on a cloud of jubilance, formed by the warm energy of the convergence of two ideas: that Mitch McConnell, the great obstructionist, was on his way to oblivion, and that the Senate could now pass laws long needed to support the well-being of the people of this country and of the planet.  The fact that the Black vote in Georgia had saved the Senate felt like a long overdue rebuke of racism, neon lit and blinking, like a gaudy Times Square headline. 

At 3:00, I opened my screen to see not the usually composed face of my 3 o’clock, but a face filled with agitation.  His dark eyes were full of worry, darting back and forth between me and the TV screen behind him.  His voice shook.  “I don’t think I can do this today. Have you seen the footage of what’s happening at the Capitol?”  “No, I’ve been off my media screen.  Tell me?” My arms went cold and numb, my heart raced.  “The Capitol is breached.”  

“Good bye,’ we said to each other.  “I don’t know what our world will look like when we meet again,” he said.  “Take good care,” I said and signed out of my virtual waiting room. 

I called to Bob in a voice filled with alarm, told him that he should turn on the TV.  We sat beside each other and watched for seven hours.  We watched Judy Woodruff calmly find language for the chaos.  Strangely, there was nothing surprising or shocking to me about the behavior of the mob.  We’d seen those mobs of white supremacists for years and years.  The President had been inviting them to overturn the election for the sake of truth and democracy for weeks.  He’d told them just hours ago that they needed to fight.  Honestly, I was surprised and relieved as each hour went by and there wasn’t more violence.

What surprised me, agitated me, left me feeling helpless and scared and suspicious was how long it took for any significant show of force to appear.  Hours and hours went by, a few police sirens were heard, tear gas blew over the steps of the Capitol, men hung from ropes to scale the walls, people carrying Confederate flags pressed through the entrance.   Capitol Hill police took selfies with the rioters, retreated.  A few threw themselves against the intruders.   Gradually it got dark, some rioters left, but it wasn’t until 6 pm that any significant display of force arrived in full riot gear and finally, finally, without making any but a few arrests, got control of the mob.

All those hours of watching gave me time to think, to recall the ebullience of the morning. 

“The two are completely related,” I thought.  This morning’s achievement of voting rights for Blacks, and the power shift that will result from it, has called forth this moment. ‘Poor planning’ for the control of this mob it is definitely not.  Whether consciously or unconsciously, the tectonic forces of resistance to this shift have allowed, indeed encouraged, secretly celebrated,  what I am seeing now.”

“What was hidden is now in plain view.  The problems in our country are cracked open, just like one of Finn’s volcanoes,” I think to myself.  

By some great good piece of serendipity, I’d read some of James Baldwin a few days before the eruption.  He explains this moment in beautiful, passionate language.  In “The Fire Next Time,” he writes that unless the white man faces:

 “… the flawed myths of the American Dream: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure”: America, as a democracy, will fail.”

“If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”

Baldwin was incredibly insightful, a sort of psychologist for the common man, the country’s soul.  He said that on an individual level the white man needs to see, feel, digest, confront the real story of the violence and dissociation we are capable of.  Essentially, he tells us that if we can face this part of ourselves, we can change.  If we can change, we will be capable of love and fully living.  And, we will save our country. 

The moment is here.  All the pieces are clear.  

Donald Trump hates to lose anything, admit to any failings, face any limits, repent for any past harm.  Doing any of those things is painful and threatens our very sense of our own wholeness, but unless we are capable of facing our own inner suffering and pain, we will become, like him, monsters.   He has lured his followers into thinking they don’t have to face their own harms, “I can do anything to them,” the harms done in the name of our country, the limits of our resources, the harm to the planet, the terrible economic inequality, the harm from the pandemic, and of course, the great ravages of racism.  Make America Great Again is a lure into the cave of the unreal, a Pied Piper’s song of death.  It’s a great diversion from the hard and painful experience of facing loss, guilt, reality. Trump waves his red hat at us: powerless, confused, frightened.  Come with me, follow me. I can take you to the top of the gold escalator.  Step right up.  Come with me for the ride.  

My experience of “facing the reality” of the pain I have caused while cruising through my life and the pain that cruising through life tossed my way is that there isn’t one moment when you are not facing reality and, suddenly, another when you are.  My experience is that it happens in waves, over time, until one day you feel as if your heart is broken and your love for what you have injured and what you have lost bursts into your life wearing bright colors and bearing armfuls of pink peonies. 

When I was a teenager, I took the Long Island Railroad to High School.  Twice a day, for four years, the train bisected the Black housing project in the town of Freeport. The buildings were concrete and brick, soulless. There were no trees.  No one else lived this way in my part of Long Island.  I didn’t see. I didn’t wonder.  I didn’t ache for the kids in rags, the empty grocery carts, the blown-out cars.  I didn’t feel anything.  I got older.  I went to graduate school.  I had Black patients, Black boyfriends.  I read Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes.  But it wasn’t until two years ago when I read “Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’ description of his fears for his son’s life, that I understood Racism from the center of my being and my heart finally broke open.  And Wednesday it broke a little more. 

Last night a friend who has been active in exploring racism in organizations, texted to ask how I was doing.  I told her I felt energized and hopeful that so much had been brought up into the light in the last few days.  She too said she was feeling a surge of energy.  “I see an opening and hope we take advantage.” 

For sustenance, for soothing, for hope, I’ve read one of Baldwin’s paragraphs of his essay "A Letter from a Region of my Mind" many times this week.  I offer it to you, reader, in hope it will break your heart. 

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And this is also why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change.”