Currents
Movements, Shorelines, and What Lies Ahead
In memory of Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), Eugene Taylor (1946-2013), Berta Cáceres (1973-2016 ), Erica Garner (1990-2017), and Sonny Rollins (1930-2026)
“We bathe in an atmosphere traversed by spiritual currents. Many resist, but others open themselves wide and thus allow themselves to be influenced by these beneficent breezes.”—Henri Bergson, introduction to the French translation of William James’s “Pragmatism”
“Morality is imagination . . . Once the imagination is left to caprice, there is a price to pay.”—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
“Suppose that the world’s author put the case to you before creation, saying: I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own ‘level best.’ I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It’s a real danger, yet it may win through. It’s a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?”—William James, “Pragmatism”
“To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”―Simone Weil, Waiting for God
“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”—Matthew 7:16
Self-creation, a rarified art
Among the books I inherited from various offices, libraries, and storage units Jamesean scholar Eugene Taylor left strewn about Boston following his untimely death in 2013 was Jason Gary Horn’s Mark Twain & William James: Crafting a Free Self. Inside the book jacket is a simple inscription from the author expressing appreciation for Eugene’s assistance: “For E. Taylor. I hope you continue with the work you do so well—especially the James matter.” Taylor’s formidable scholarship (a brilliance intimidating countless colleagues over the course of a tempestuous life) concerning all things relating to James is discussed at several points in Horn’s study. James and Twain became friends during the last decade of their respective lives. Both were members of the Society for Psychical Research and shared pacifist sensibilities as well. Upon their initial meeting in Florence, Twain secured a copy of James’s Principles of Psychology, following this up with a copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience. These books, along with letters that flowed back and forth between these two turned-on, likely manic-depressive souls influenced Twain’s latter work in fascinating ways.
Horn categorizes Huckleberry Finn, as a “novel of consciousness.” The first chapter (“Developing the Introspective Link”) considers the gradual evolution of both conscience and character as Huck floats down the Mississippi River (a metaphorical Stream of Consciousness and Time) in the company of Jim, a runaway slave in an Antebellum South. Aficionados will recall Twain’s homespun dialogue and, also, the development of Huck’s emerging conscience and self as he observes moral tensions, ambiguities, and shipwrecks amid the various drifters, authorities, and ne’er-do-wells he encounters along the riverbanks en route. Characters he finds, ethically-speaking, not essentially different from those he observes among society’s polished, refined representatives inhabiting more effete settings further inland. As the two companions drift downstream, Huck comes gradually to an awareness of his own unique self and, inextricable from this, his evolving connection to Jim.
Along the way, Huck retreats periodically to a covered “wigwam” aboard the raft, a makeshift shelter he and Jim have fashioned for protection against the elements. These wigwam “moments” are times when images, thoughts, and affects coalesce, in James’s words, into a “spiritual self”—that “intimate part of the self” from whence new patterns of being and pursuance arise. Within the “inner sanctum” of the wigwam, feelings and thoughts intermingle within what James calls a “palpitating inward life”:
“No more apt image of James’s spiritual self could be found than that of Huck sitting and thinking alone within the wigwam aboard the raft as the entire structure drifts downstream on the Mississippi River. Within this floating citadel, Huck sits down to think and in thinking finds that peculiar presence of mind James describes as the core of being, the phenomenally known self.”
—Jason Gary Horn, Mark Twain and William James: Crafting a Free Self
As internal and external journeys ensue, a sensitive, searching youth slowly matures and a more genuine understanding of, and compassion for, Jim ensues—something unthinkable without their shared voyage downstream. Movements of heart and mind foreshadow demonstrable acts of conscience and courage, which occur as a consequence of thoroughgoing immersion in those Jamesean “streams of consciousness” afforded by their journey. This wigwam sanctuary provides respite from conventional patterns of thought and routine, constituting a sort of Sinai experience within the mind and breaking up a monotony of conventional patterns of discernment and action. Quite literally, a Dylanesque “shelter from the storm,” which May (who disappeared annually to his metaphorical wigwam—an old farmhouse on Squam Lake in New Hampshire) refers to as “the significance of the pause.”
Exemplars and self-transcendence
In “Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment,” an essay originally published in 1880 in the Atlantic Monthly, William James poses a question for would-be rebels, indeed each of us given to speculation concerning first principles, conundrums, and planetary possibilities: “What are the causes that make communities change from generation to generation?” James observes advisedly: “The difference is due to the accumulated influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and their decisions.” James, like May, was fascinated by “great” human exemplars—rarified spirits whose lives are spent, as theirs would be also, in “doing and suffering and creating.” Those who ennoble others by virtue of their own rarified presences and acts. Jim, etherial in his essential decency and willing to break the law in order to be reunited with family, functions in exactly this manner for Huck. (“There is always the law,” I recall May informing his students, tapping into similar ethical wavelengths; “but first do what’s right.”) Jim, embodiment of higher planes of comportment and being, unsettles yet ultimately guides his young friend in life journey and course.
Eighty-five year old Bob Dylan (currently on yet another leg of his “Never Ending Tour,” which commenced on June 7, 1988) spawned myriad moments and movements even by the end of the first decade of what has been a staggeringly creative career and oeuvre from the start. Still, as Joan Baez points out, he never shows up at any rally for whatever cause. (“Is he coming?” is the question she regularly encounters at numberless demonstrations she herself has attended over many years; “He never comes,” is her steadfast reply.) Even so, the chilling effects of John Brown, Masters of War, Chimes of Freedom, Oxford Town, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and so many others among those “finger-pointing” songs from Dylan’s early years have reverberated through the corridors of a collective planetary consciousness and conscience since the earliest moments of their terrestrial arrivals.
A rendition of A Hard Rain A-Gonna Fall (originally written in 1962 in the midst the Cuban missile crisis) by Patti Smith at the ceremony in Stockholm honoring Dylan’s receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature left several in the audience in tears. Quantum physicist Thors Hans Hansson, on hand that evening to bestow the Nobel Prize in physics and appropriately attired in white tie and tails, sang along quietly:
“Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son? And what did you see, my darling young one? I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’ I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’ I saw a white ladder all covered with water I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children”
—Bob Dylan, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Smith was so nervous that, seasoned performer though she is, she flubbed several lines of a song she knew intimately before finishing her performance with moving humility and grace. The song, with its hypnotic succession of apocalyptic verses and images written down long ago in the midst of planetary crisis by a 21 year old seer, continues to hold knowing audiences rapt. Sixty years following its emergence out of nuclear crisis and subconscious depths, its creator continues to roam with rarefied countenance amid his own personal daemons and visions, functioning as seeming medium and guide through both the high notes and horrors of human endeavor for those of us within earshot. “If there’s a god,” Dylan had quipped in his youth, “the river’s him.” Asked during those early years whether he was “a Christian,” Dylan responds evocatively: "Well, first of all, God is a woman, we all know that."
Watching the river flow
As I set down words issuing from my own flow of internal images and thoughts (“a mind enclosed in language,” cautions Simone Weil, “is in prison”), I find myself listening to Triplicate, Dylan’s 2017 compilation from out of the pages of the Great American Songbook. It was suggested during an interview at the time of the album’s release that its title recalled a Sinatra recording, Trilogy: Past, Present, Future. Dylan, typically evasive and thoughtful, demurs that he had Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia (a treasured dramatic work for Rollo May) also in mind. Dylan is a poet and sometimes prophet who looks back as much as ahead. (Read Thucydides, he counsels years before Xi Jinping’s recent suggestion for Trump, and we would understand ourselves and adversaries far better than we do.) From Sinatra to Aeschylus to Thucydides in the flash of an uncommonly observant mind. This had been been an astonishingly attentive soul from the start, one inspiring innumerable movements within an infinity of minds upon a broader world stage:
“And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’ But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’ And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall”
—Bob Dylan, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
If we would contribute to the repair of a world torn increasingly asunder, we will have to rally around our most visionary minds and embodied exemplars. Our private “wigwam” moments (moments unconcerned with notoriety or personal vanity) are key. Upon being ejected from Freud’s circle, Otto Rank (a psychoanalyst May especially admired) settled first in Paris and then in the States. Upon his arrival in America, he was immediately stripped of his psychoanalytic credentials for the cardinal sin of thinking too much and going his own way. Asked by an attendee at one of his “American lectures” (a collection of essays endorsed by May as a “readable Rank”) which of his books she should read, Rank responded with fitting modesty: “Read my books and put them away. Read Huckleberry Finn; everything is there.” Postcards sent to friends in Europe were signed simply “Huck.”
In Pragmatism, James writes of “turning-places” and “workshops of being”—wigwam moments whereby mere beliefs may become “actual things”:
“Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should we not take them at their face-value? Why may they not be the actual turning-places and growing-places which they seem to be, of the world—why not the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making, so that nowhere may the world grow in any other kind of way than this?”
—William James, “Pragmatism and Religion”
Attentiveness, inward scrutiny, self-creation. Conscience and the stirrings of a Jamesean/Twainian consciousness within. Resolute embodiments of “wigwam moments” upon whatever stage one finds oneself during the ever-shifting movements of a world gone considerably wrong. In Varieties of Religious Experience, James envisions an activation of “transmundane energies,” energies presaging “a wider world of being than that of our every-day consciousness.” And, so, we become Jamesean water drifters (like Jim and Huck, free-spirited yet mindfully principled) along inner waterways no less than upon those high seas of Existence even as the world becomes a forbiddingly disoriented place.
Musical coda:
Dylan performs “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” with the Tokyo New Philharmonic Orchestra in Nara, Japan (May 22, 1994) as the poet emerges once again from the shadows and wigwam with words of grave substance to convey:
References
Dylan, B. ( 1963). The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Columbia. [CD]
Dylan, B. (2017). Triplicate. Sony. [CD]
Kramer, R. (1999). A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures [of] Otto Rank. Princeton University Press.
Horn, J. G. (1996). Mark Twain and William James: Crafting a Free Self. University of Missouri Press.
James, W. (1908) The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Longmans, Green, and Co.
James, W. (2000), Pragmatism and Other Writings. Penguin Books.
May, R. (1982). Freedom and Destiny. Norton.
Sinatra, F. (1980). Trilogy: Past, Present, Future. Warner Bros. [CD]
Taylor, E. (1993). Our Roots: The American Visionary Tradition. Noetic Sciences Review, 20th anniversary issue, 27.
Twain, M. (1981). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Bantam Classics.
Weil, S. (2009). Waiting for God: A Study of Human Transcendence. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
