Carlin, Conrad, & the Cafe: Why We Must Have Our Trauma

I’m an outsider by choice, but not truly.  It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out.  I’d rather be in, in a good system.  That’s where my discontent comes from: being forced to choose to stay outside.            –George Carlin, preface, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?  The purpose of life in America…is to be free. Yet More

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I’m an outsider by choice, but not truly.  It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out.  I’d rather be in, in a good system.  That’s where my discontent comes from: being forced to choose to stay outside.           

–George Carlin, preface, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

 The purpose of life in America…is to be free. Yet freedom is a perverse goal, a broken Telos… To be human is to be social; … Once you understand that, then you understand that the American definition of freedom ends in despair.

–Chris Arnade, Can European Cafe Culture Cure America?(UnHerd)

This was not just a coffee stop. It was a cultural juke joint, one of those secret clubs like the chitlin circuit where blacks could listen to their music and not be afraid to be themselves.   This was revolutionary in a place like Utica. It made me feel GREAT in a deeply emotional artistic and political way…. I found a community to be part of and wanted to support it….Now that it closed after 20 years, it is a touchstone to something important. What you created shows us that the very idea of having the cafe as it was realized  – is possible – a realized picture of goodness.

–Lech Kowalski, film maker

July 14 was Boilermaker Sunday in Utica; this was the 47^th of Utica’s annual 15K roadrace, participated in by runners from around the globe and local runners, including 3 of the people at our dinner on the deck that evening.  As we talked, someone brought up the flyovers, the dazzling, popular and very noisy air force show that follows the race every year.  I said something about regretting the militarization of the event.  From the other side of the deck, I heard my son Nick’s voice, maybe picking up on what I’d said,  remarking, “Well, at least they’re not dropping bombs in Gaza or wherever.”  

Yes, at least.  Talk about unpleasantness!  No wonder we loved George Carlin!

And I love him more for the very ambivalence he expresses in the epigraph.  He’s not, he says, an outsider because he likes being oppositional but because he abhors unpleasantness, the very unpleasantness most of us put up with in order to have a life in the one system offered.  His is not that disgruntled populism whose  gripe is their unfairly meager share of the pie. He wants – as I want! – a better, more humane, just and kind pie.  

I know something of what it’s like to discover that one can make sense of the world only on one’s own terms, which, it turns out, makes an indictment of the system one did not start out intending to indict!  . In my case, the shedding of bourgeois compliance came perhaps harder than for Carlin.  The discovery was not made until mid-life, a result of a process of transformation not perhaps as dramatic as a story of recovery from drug addiction or childhood abuse, but life-changing nonetheless.  Long-practiced habits of self-condemnation were let go of to allow a more inclusive and self-forgiving view of myself that turned my lifelong defensive cynicism into renunciation.

Coming later in life, renunciation for me was not primarily enacted in activism in the usual sense.  Having chosen an in-place life in my hometown rather than in an enclave of the avant garde, my “revolution” subverts the “unpleasantness” but only “in a way.” It’s a revolution of depth; it does not overthrow the conventions of relationship, of custom and tradition, but only the understandings that either enliven or deaden those relationships, a matter for imagination.  Gaining a relationship to my imagination as source of spiritual enlivenment changed my life; it allowed me to understand my living in place, among family and in my native Mohawk Valley in all its Trump-leaning resentfulness as resistance.  It was the imaginative force behind the Cafe we opened in 2002.  At the moment in the aftermath of the Cafe’s demise my old faith is severely challenged; I write in order to sort things out.

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As liberal pundits debated the matter of Biden’s stepping down from the Presidential race, never did they point out Biden’s collaboration withongoing genocide in Palestine as any part of the argument, as – perhaps, as some of us actually believe –  a more urgent reason for him to step down than his senility?  Whose rule of politeness, or of not muddying the waters with irrelevancies, were they obeying?  Living in Utica, trying honestly to stay connected to global realities, attempting to hold my place locally, how am I to keep a moral compass anymore?  Here is my struggle.  For many years, our Cafe was my compass.  As long as it existed, the coffeeshop manifested our no thank you to America’s unpleasantness.  

What’s more, in keeping our moral compass oriented, the Cafe countered the American notion of freedom as freedom from everything that’s “holding you back.”  After all,  the potent “enemy” to America’s prized “freedom” (its libertarian emptiness more an incentive to find your brand, than your true individual expression) is not, as the rightwing would have it, “government,” or  taxation without representation.  It’s not the left’s critical race theory or green revolution, either.  It is, rather,  conscious celebration of social bonds, the gratitude that comes with knowing everything is connected.  Admittedly a difficult thing to feel these days! In fact, it demands a nearly ceaseless effort of consciousness which is what made a realization of that gratitude – such as our Cafe – feel like a sacred space. An “autonomous zone” in which even the prickly Mr. Carlin would have felt at home!    Even though the Cafe did not bring an end to the systemic unpleasantness, its orientation, like Nick’s Carlinesquely wistful remark, was to something better and truer, below the media-sustained political discourse, down at the level of souls that have not been sold out.  For our Cafe, Orin and I sacrificed our “freedom” daily.

I fear, despite our friend Lech’s reassurances,  the Cafe is irreplaceable, and not only for Orin and me.  Together, we’d hit upon a non-ironic, non-rightwing way to express conservative values that are actually human values, by founding our business not only upon a decent business plan but on a vision of – I’ll borrow Lech’s word – “goodness.” Our disagreement with neo-liberal reality – of both the leftwing and rightwing versions –  is that neither puts ultimate faith in – because neither believes in it –  the commons. We unashamedly did so, proclaiming our “hippie values” not from nostalgia, but from loyalty to the humanist tradition of poetry and literature and thinking that – I’m sorry – is what made the American ideal “great” as much as the heroic yeomanry of the farmers. This suggestion of a commons which includes human genius in its in-commonness is what made it possible to feel loyalty – love – for our coffeeshop, and  not just as a place to hang out with your computer.  It made those marginalized by their yearnings for more – the restless ones who cannot always discern if the problem is with their unhappy selves or with the world – to feel humanly at home. This was not because we were so avant-garde but because we risked being unfashionably sentimental!

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So little of the dominant liberal discourse speaks to me, a human being attempting to live meaningfully in a demeaned context.  I read hungrily the words of the prophetic voices of our times, who can dissect the schemes and machinations at the top.  They at least (and this is no small thing!) keep me knowing I’m not wrong for feeling “there is something fundamentally wrong with the world.” The best of them  go beyond the convenience of thinking exclusively in terms of what THEY (i.e, the Trumpies, the liberal elites, etc.) are doing wrong.  Instead, they point to illegitimate, nondemocratic power that neither NY Times editorials nor rightwing excoriations reveal.  

Journalist and ordained minister Chris Hedges names ultimate evil as corporate oligarchy and Christian fascists.  I do not dispute his accuracy or his calls for militant protest!  Nor can I add anything worth a dime to his prophetic analysis. But in answer to the problem of living meaningfully, i.e,  as if there were a good system, in Utica and other outposts of empire, I propose there is something one can do “at home,” that would allow one to make his/her personal choice to stay outside not only not only an act of defiance, but of complicity with deepest desire.  Were individuals to switch from automatic binary“they-vs-us” thinking to the inconvenience of self-reflective “me” thinking, though it may at first appear the height of uncaring, naval-gazing, apolitical wrongness,  they might find that sought-after meaning, even in the context of total absurdity!  They might encounter an “other” more fascinating than virtual reality, and more vivid than material reality stripped of its imaginative dimension.

In his essay Israel’s Willing Executioners, Hedges quotes from Joseph Conrad’s short story (An Outpost of Progress) about two “insignificant and capable” British officials occupying a remote African outpost, who gradually, Kurtz-like, disintegrate morally: “Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd…that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion.”  What Conrad describes is men who live without correcting the unpleasantness, and are themselves a part of it, men who live without imagination.  Hedges is right, of course, as to who is pulling the strings of the beast, but how might “men” (sic) be helped to come to realize a fuller truth, outside the“blind belief” that is habitual?

Conrad’s story suggests that blind belief is decisively disrupted by contact with something  (“primitive nature and primitive man”) that shakes the composure and confidence of so-called civilized men.  It takes the  “suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive….to excite the imagination.” What it takes to reawaken imagination, in other words, is trauma.  Although thought of as something extraordinary, it is the cruelty inherent in life.

In liberal reality, where imagination is trained to “know its (subordinate, decorative-only) place,” trauma must be denied and  poetic, “unitive” truth marginalized.  Most liberals will never (consciously) have the experience of disintegration in a remote outpost of empire.  Nor will they experience the jarring of normative reality by means of avant garde art.  Rather, they continue to believe in the irresistible force of our institutions by means of our gadgets, our agreeable standard of living, the force of “the crowd.”  A reliable – but not simple – place to start the process of awakening one’s imagination, thus, is with the simple clue of one’s own personal unhappiness.  Honesty, which is not achieved simply,  belies the uniformity of the crowd.   

It is just here where trauma provides the door to meaning.  Due to a social environment that relativizes infants’ absolute need to feel safe, childhood trauma is common in liberal society, and as commonly denied.  Because trauma is an absolute contradiction to the blind belief in the safety of one’s surroundings, contradicting the assumption of goodness, denial is customary and even demanded in the crowd.  Denial makes one ripe for the salvation offered in American freedom,and thus for loosening the hold upon oneself of any claim of obligations, of either family or place, or principles.  (Think of J.D. Vance, Trump’s v.p. selection, who once compared Trump to Hitler, as a consummate expression of this kind of freedom!)  In secular liberal reality, shorn of imagination’s power, all such claims of duty or obligation are relative, sheddable. I exist to be free, not to be constricted in a web of obligations and  pointless sacrifice.  

One doesn’t need an imagination to know in arhetorical way the bedrock truth of existence is not freedom from others.  But unless one knows the opposing truth via awakened personal imagination, the “web of interconnection” can only be felt as entrapment.  One is powerless against the allure of freedom, blind faith in progress, the relativization of relatedness and relationships (of love) that is gained through dogmatic belief in the safety of our surroundings, in the thinking of “the crowd.”

The journey to  rediscover imagination necessarily takes one into psychically dangerous territory – i.e., the risk of madness that befell Conrad’s colonialists.  Thus, it stands to reason we want the inward descent to be made without relinquishing or relativizing the human bonds/ties that provide the sense of safety left damaged beyond recognition by trauma. Fortunately, the advances that have been made in the understanding of trauma make it possible even for fragile westerners to experience things “uncontrollable and repulsive”  as being within human experience, not outside it.  Art, however, is necessary to pull that experience back into one’s own self-defined life.  Art (imagination) incorporates the reality of trauma in a way that allows one to live outside the unpleasantness, apart from the crowd but connected with the world on one’s own terms.

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By now, midway through an election year, when voting for the “lesser of two evils” looks like it means the Presidency will go to the greater evil, perhaps even the most virtuous and good-hearted liberals are seeing there’s something wrong with the lifelong accommodation to unpleasantness that,despite oneself, leaves one falling back on that convenient belief in the safety of one’s surroundings.   Without trauma’s awakening,  we have no foundation on which to stand in opposing Trump, the fascism for which he speaks and that he arouses in others.

But I confess, having lost the safe ground of our Cafe, I feel myself more vulnerable, less capable of  standing on my moral ground, even in my writing.  The Cafe’s goodness protected me, assuring others, like Carlin’s humor, that I’m an outsider, and also one of them.   What am I now?

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