View from the Precipice

 

       Alone, alone, all, all alone,/ Alone on a wide, wide sea.

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FEAR

 

by Roman Sympos

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Fear at my heart, as at a cup,

My life-blood seemed to sip!

 

                                Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

 

 

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

 

                                Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Inauguration Speech, March 4, 1933

 

           

 “Ye are many—they are few.”

 

                                Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy

 

 

If you’re like me, you don’t believe in things that were “meant to be.” Despite our lazy attribution of evolutionary progress and decline to “natural selection,” I doubt that nature has the slightest idea of the array of species, vast or narrow, fit or flaccid, it can choose from, let alone the appropriate criteria for choosing. Not even Noah had the liberty of choice. He had to fit two of every species into the Ark. (Not counting sea cucumbers, of course.) The peacocks and the slime molds, the bunnies and the skunks, the edible, inedible, and poisonous, the good, the bad, the ugly. And think of the microbes!

 

Oh, and himself and his family.

 

Which, I guess, just proves my point.

 

How human beings could have been “selected” to evolve from stewards of the Ark we call “Earth” to our planet’s deadliest predators and despoilers is a question I’ll leave to the advocates of Nature’s Plan and its pious sibling, Intelligent Design. I think they’ve got their work cut out for them. As for me, I remain unburdened by the need to explain anything. I’m happy to describe, though often appalled at what I’m describing.

 

On one thing, however, I think we can all agree. Evolution walks on two feet: lust and fear.

 

Yes, yes—hunger, thirst, respiration, sleep, line them up with all the rest, all the habitual drives that are satisfied at more or less regular intervals. Three meals and eight glasses of water a day, so many breaths per minute, 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night. Satisfying these homeostatic needs maintains life in each of us long enough, barring disease or accident, to enable us to reproduce. But it’s only then—in the moment when our genes get reshuffled as we pass them on to our offspring—that chance variations in the genetic code can occur which, over vast spans of time, may eventuate in a new species.

 

Lust, which is supposed to help this process along, is by contrast irregular. Yes, estrus in the female follows a lunar cycle, but the male sex drive is relentless and opportunistic, a monkey wrench in the otherwise smooth reproductive machinery of female receptivity.

 

As for fear . . . .

 

But wait, you say, what does fear have to do with reproduction?

 

Nothing directly, but indirectly a great deal.

 

There’s no denying that fear is a survival mechanism, a drive like hunger and thirst that enables the specimen to live long enough to perpetuate the species. Lust does nothing to help us in this respect. In fact, as the praying mantis and the femme fatale teach us, lust tends to ignore or minimize danger. Fear drives us to fight, flee, or freeze. Or, if the threat isn’t immediate, to plan or prepare for it.

 

As with any of the other drives, including lust, satisfying fear’s demands restores homeostasis, “a state of well-being.” Once escaped from the jaws of the lion, the gazelle returns to its regular routine of eating or drinking or sleeping. Or defecating. Or just staring.

 

Fear, however, like lust but unlike the other drives, is occasional and irregular. It’s stimulated by random events external to the biological processes that sustain the individual organism, rather than from simply being alive. Hunger, thirst, breathing, and sleep (and excretion) demand that we act. Fear, like lust, demands that we react.

 

In short, fear and lust are social drives. They direct our attention to other people as potential enemies or allies, and as potential mates.  They are a mechanism for the survival of the species as a whole, not just of its individual specimens.

 

These reflections come to me as I try to cope with my own fear in the face of Donald Trump’s threat to the survival of my species—the human race—and to the many groups within it to which I’m affiliated, whether by blood or by choice: my family, my political party, my religion, my nation, my generation, and, yes, my income cohort.

 

For let’s not fool ourselves: some of us are better positioned than others, financially, to survive the hurricane of woe and outright idiocy unleashed by the current administration—and amplified with every passing day—on our natural environment and our democratic institutions.  In fact, I’m embarrassed to admit that my retirement portfolio has never looked better.

 

Fear helps us identify our enemies (unless it’s stoked by malice or ignorance, often fellow travelers) and motivates us to look for allies, without whom we are, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, “Alone, alone, all, all alone,/ Alone on a wide, wide sea!”

 

The Ancient Mariner arrives at this moment of existential peril through no (obvious) fault of his own, except a criminal degree of indifference to Nature and his fellow human beings. He is the only member of his crew to survive the “curse” of yellow fever, personified by the allegorical figure of Death. But his physical isolation is only a symbol of his spiritual and psychological isolation. Alienated from Nature by killing the gentle albatross in a fit of what Shakespeare would call “motiveless malignity,” he is condemned to a fate worse than death, becoming thrall to “the Nightmare Life-in-Death.”  This is a state of despair so deep that the Mariner’s dead shipmates, their corpses re-animated by spirits, appear to be zombies, “a ghastly crew,” “rais[ing] their limbs like lifeless tools”:

 

The body of my brother’s son

Stood by me, knee to knee:

The body and I pulled at one rope,

But he said nought to me.

 

As a more recent poet once put it, more succinctly, “People are strange, when you’re a stranger,/ Faces look ugly when you’re alone.”

 

Not just other people, but the universe itself seems to the Ancient Mariner nothing but a vast, rotting corpse:

 

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

 

Trapped in severe states of hopelessness and social dismemberment like these, we experience fear as a vampire, sipping away our “life-blood,” our will, agency, and joy in life, and turning us into what we behold: the walking dead. Overtaken by fear, with nowhere to flee and seeing no chance of prevailing in a fight, we freeze, our spiritual temperature dropping to the absolute zero point of Life-in-Death.

 

Fear itself is something to fear, apparently. That’s where I am this morning, as I contemplate, still again, the murders of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti. There but for fortune, I think, go you or I.

 

The cure, of course, is to begin pulling at the same rope, “knee to knee,” shoulder to shoulder, with others. Help get the ship back to port. That’s how the Ancient Mariner finally made it home, a man transformed.

 

His moment of amazing grace occurs when he finds himself moved by the beauty of the earth, and of all its creatures, even the “slimy things” crawling “upon the slimy sea” as they coil and swim in glimmering green and blue bioluminescence, and "flash[es] of golden fire":

 

O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessed them unaware:

Sure my kind saint took pity on me,

And I blessed them unaware.

 

The self-same moment I could pray;

And from my neck so free

The Albatross fell off, and sank

Like lead into the sea.

 

 

We don’t have to buy in to Coleridge’s faith in the redemptive power of natural beauty to recognize that the Mariner’s blessing entails a blessing on his fellow human creatures as well. Once he and his zombie mates complete their voyage home, each crew member falls to the deck and the Mariner beholds, standing “on every cor[p]se,” “a man all light, a seraph-man”:

 

This seraph-band, each waved his hand:

It was a heavenly sight!

They stood as signals to the land,

Each one a lovely light;

 

This seraph-band, each waved his hand,

No voice did they impart—

No voice; but oh! the silence sank

Like music on my heart.

 

But soon I heard the dash of oars,

I heard the Pilot's cheer;

My head was turned perforce away

And I saw a boat appear.

 

In each of us there dwells a “seraph-man” who “signals to the land,” connecting us to the world of living, breathing human beings, a “seraph-band” of lights, even when we find ourselves groping blindly in a great darkness. We need only let our own little light shine to assure ourselves we are not alone.

 

So get off your duff, join the seraph band! As FDR said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

 

Oh, how I long for the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt! True, compared to FDR’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—The Great Depression, The Dust Bowl, The Rise of Fascism, and World War II—ours look like Four Scary Clowns on a Merry-Go-Round—carrying Uzis. How can you take the Chief Clown seriously? You don’t have to. But you do have to duck.

 

FDR had big, fat, stationary targets that nearly everyone could identify as “The Enemy.” Ours keep moving, like those rotating clowns. And no one seems to know which clown to tackle first.

 

But, hey, let’s do what we can. Choose one. And don’t forget: there’s strength in numbers. That’s what not fearing fear itself is all about, isn’t it?

 

Not quite.

 

In his first Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4, 1933, FDR was talking about the threat to lives and livelihoods posed by a series of bank panics that had plagued the nation during the previous two years—the last two of Herbert Hoover’s administration—and turned what looked like a temporary, if severe, downturn in the economy following the stock market crash of 1929 into what came to be known as the Great Depression.

 

Roughly a quarter of the US workforce was unemployed the year FDR took office. People and corporations with cash were hoarding it, not buying or investing with it, which meant GNP and consumer spending had plunged, which meant companies were firing and not hiring, which meant consumers had even less cash to spend . . . and so the spiral continued. Meanwhile, strapped working families were withdrawing their bank savings in record numbers, savings that, in many cases, existed only on paper, not cash reserves.

 

As bank insolvencies skyrocketed, customers' fears turned to panic and the run on the banks accelerated like a wind-driven forest fire up a mountainside. 

 

A pivotal scene in the Christmas movie classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, illustrates the result.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's a Wonderful Life, dir. Frank Capra, 1943

 

In it, George Bailey, played by James Stewart, tries to placate an angry crowd of bank customers demanding their money back. Bailey quiets them by pointing out how much better off they all are with the improvements to the town, including their homes, that the bank’s loans have financed, loans underwritten by their (now depleted) savings.

 

The American public was not so easily reassured. Hoover was no James Stewart. His own advisors urged him to declare a bank holiday, closing all banks until the panic subsided long enough to sort the wheat from the chaff, then letting the healthy banks reopen while keeping the insolvent banks closed permanently. Hoover refused.

 

Thirty-six hours after delivering his Inaugural Address, FDR did what needed to be done.

 

From all reports, the public accepted the government’s week-long banking hiatus with few protests or complaints. If no one could get their hands on their money, there was no reason for any individual citizen to fear there’d be nothing left when it was their turn to step up to the cashier’s window.  The only fear we needed to fear was, it seemed, the other guy’s fear of losing the shirt off his back.

 

This is a far cry from how most of us interpret FDR’s famous remark. His bank holiday didn’t inspire people to gird up their loins and slay the dragon within whose fiery breath was driving them all to panic. It simply made the dragon disappear--like Puff, its legendary counterpart. The only fear we all feared—which was that other people shared our fear—now demanded of us no extraordinary act of courage to face down because it was no longer there to face down.

 

My fear is different from what FDR had in mind. It’s not that my fellow citizens won't act with the same restraint as I do. It’s that a truncheon or a taser or a stray bullet not made of rubber will, eventually, by design or by accident, find its way to me, among all the picketers in front of the ICE field office in Burlington, MA. It’s that I will be recorded, identified, docketed, targeted for arrest and, without meaning to, find my way to a jail cell or a fenced-in pen topped with barbed wire in a desert in West Texas and remain there for the foreseeable future, or until the wheels of justice have ground their way to a happy terminus in under four or five years, or I’m illegally deported to a hell-hole in Guatemala, duration uncertain.

 

So far these fears haven’t kept me from letting my little light shine on “No Kings” days, in solidarity with the vast seraph bands of protestors across the nation, or planting the appropriate lawn sign in my front yard. As fears go, they are, after all, pretty far-fetched. But the murders of Goode and Pretti, along with the illegal beatings and incarcerations of American citizens and immigrants alike by agents of our own government, bring them well within walking distance of my imagination. If things continue as they have, what now looks far-fetched may begin to appear a good bet. That’s the fear that I fear. Cowardice is the fear I fear. FDR can’t help me with that. Neither can Coleridge.

 

You can't overcome your fear of fear by contemplating the beauties of nature or taking a bank holiday. You have to let yourself be fooled into thinking you're invincible. For that purpose I can't think of a better elixir than Percy Shelley’s allegorical poem, The Masque of Anarchy, which is almost uncanny in the ways it anticipates our current crisis.

 

Shelley wrote The Masque in response to a violent attack by the King’s cavalry on a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in St. Peter's Field, in Manchester, England, on August 16, 1819. The protestors, more than 60,000 of them by some estimates, were asking for extension of the voting franchise to the landless classes—the working poor—who had experienced plummeting living standards and loss of income from government policies enacted in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. These policies benefited only the wealthy, enfranchised ten percent of the male population and their families. They did nothing but worsen living conditions for the rest of the nation.

 

Some six hundred people were seriously injured that August day, eighteen of whom died of their wounds, including four women and a two-year-old child. The attack became known as The Peterloo Massacre, named after the Battle of Waterloo that had decisively defeated Napoleon and his army four years previously. This time, however, the side that won the battle ended up losing the war. The Peterloo Massacre and the firestorm of horror and condemnation it ignited became the historical pivot point from which a long series of legislative reforms unfolded throughout the rest of the century, in voting rights, in the rights of labor to organize and strike, and in the rights of the enslaved throughout the British empire to liberty, equality, and human dignity.  

 

The poet was living in Italy when he heard the news of Peterloo and sent his cry of protest to his friend Leigh Hunt to be published in Hunt’s radical weekly, The Examiner. Hunt refused, however, saying the “public at large” would not “do justice” to it. He may have been thinking principally of its rather obscure first half, in which King George and his ministers parade through the streets of London as allegorical personifications of Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy, and Anarchy—the last of whom, for Shelley, was epitomized by the King himself. For where there is no law but the whim of an absolute ruler (sound familiar?) there is, practically speaking, no law—which is what, etymologically, “an-archy” means.

 

The poem ends with the death of Anarchy.

 

It may have been the allegorical demands of the poem’s first half or its subversive subtext—even to “compass” or imagine, in writing, the death of the King was a capital crime in those perilous times —that persuaded Hunt not to publish The Masque of Anarchy. Or it may have been the ending, which is anything but obscure and calls upon the dispossessed and exploited of England to stand their ground without flinching until Anarchy is no more. In any case, the poem had to wait another thirteen years to appear in print.

 

The most interesting feature of The Masque, however, for me anyway, and what contributes most to my sense of its contemporaneity, is that Shelley also cautions the demonstrators not to retaliate. With the events of August 16th firmly in mind, he writes:

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"And if then the tyrants dare

Let them ride among you there,

Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew,—

What they like, that let them do.

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"With folded arms and steady eyes,

And little fear, and less surprise,

Look upon them as they slay

Till their rage has died away."

 

 

Percy Shelley was one of our earliest advocates and philosophers of non-violence, as both a political strategy, hand in hand with civil disobedience, and a way of life, as evidenced by his strict vegetarianism. The Masque went on to become required reading for more famous students of political non-violence and civil disobedience like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

 

Shelley understood that violence only begets violence, that real strength in numbers was not physical but mental, and moral: knowing you are not alone and feeling yourself to be part of something bigger than you, something that will outlive you--a healthier, more robust genetic variant in the history of ideas that places you higher in the moral evolution of the human race. He also believed that poets—and by that he meant artists in general—are “the unacknowledged legislators of mankind,” not because they make laws, but because they help perfect our otherwise dim awareness of a higher law than that of governments. Also, I think, because only poets can suspend our fear of death long enough to persuade us that an idea might, like ones bloodline, be worth dying for.

 

This may be what Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, had in mind when, citing the The Masque of Anarchy in an interview, he said that “poetry, music, literature, contribute very special power" to movements for freedom. Members of both the British and American labor movements, he noted, often read Shelley’s poem to each other for inspiration.

 

Shelley also understood, even in its infancy, the power of the press and, by instinct, what it would become: the mass mediation and accelerating dissemination of information that is now our daily bread. Within days of Peterloo, the caricaturist, George Cruikshank, would skewer the King's yeomen with a cartoon captioned, "Britons Strike Home!"

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George Cruikshank, Britons Strike Home!

 

Of the King’s sabre-slashing guardsmen, Shelley writes,

 

 

"Then they will return with shame

To the place from which they came,

And the blood thus shed will speak

In hot blushes on their cheek.

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"Every woman in the land

Will point at them as they stand—

They will hardly dare to greet

Their acquaintance on the street.

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"And the bold, true warriors

Who have hugged Danger in wars

Will turn to those who would be free,

Ashamed of such base company."

 

But although poets may suspend our fear of death long enough to send us to the barricades, their words, noble and stirring as they are, cannot protect us once we’re there. In this respect, as a talisman to ward off evil, an inspiring poem works no better than a rabbit’s foot or pro patria more—“to die for one’s country”—the slogan of warmongers everywhere.

 

In the end, like all choices, this one is up to you. Resist the illusory feeling of empowerment or open yourself up to it. Refuse to play the fool and remain alone on the “wide, wide sea” of your inaction, or grab that rope and start pulling for dear life. Keep your little light under a basket or join the seraph-band. You’re going to die eventually, either way.

 

Here, let me help you decide.

 

On second thought, let’s decide together.

 

 

"And that slaughter to the Nation

Shall steam up like inspiration,

Eloquent, oracular;

A volcano heard afar.

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"And these words shall then become

Like Oppression's thundered doom

Ringing through each heart and brain,

Heard again—again—again—

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"Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number—

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you—

Ye are many—they are few."