Wordsworth, Foucault, and President-Elect Obama

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
–William Wordsworth, 1807

Just over two hundred years ago, Wordsworth wrote, The World is too Much With Us, and until this last decade of my life, I didn’t fully understand what he meant. How can the world not be with us? We are of the world; the world is ours, and it is the summan bonum of life to make it–getting and spending–and become, as Tom Wolfe wrote in The Bonfire of the Vanities, masters of the universe…isn’t it?

The last ten years have been difficult and graphic experiences of the world being too present have been rapidly accumulated by every living human being around the world. Personally difficult, yes–that goes without saying, and the challenges and callings of Pysche have become more and more demanding. Aging itself is often discovered to be a bittersweet experience: one may more clearly realize one’s purpose and begin to uncover ones authentic self while simultaneously watch the sand running out of the hourglass leaving so little time, it seems, to attend to such an evolving consciousness. But things have become even more difficult on a cultural and international stage. America, indeed the world, seems to have cut loose from its moorings and drifted into a bizarre simulacrum of itself wherein that which is stated is the opposite of what is meant, a world wherein the things professed to have value are in practice scorned, and a world wherein one may, under the banner of divine love, encourage and enforce cruelty, bigotry, and xenophobia. Yes, things have been difficult lately, perhaps not too difficult, but just enough so that I am sometimes very tired.

So it was with weary eyes (and a nervous stomach) that I watched election events unfold Tuesday night and when, a little after 9 PM, Barack Obama was declared to be the president elect, it just hit me: what a curious, vexing, confusing, and ultimately, what an unutterably beautiful thing the human spirit is. My hopes overflowing that my darling, sleeping daughter will wake up to a new world, and the old one that I inhabit, the world turned upside down by blustering, unreflective, incurious certainty is irrevocably changed for the better by the elevation of a vigorous, intelligent, polyethnic young man with a dazzling smile and preternatural understanding of the social, geopolitical, and historical moment. Surprisingly deep and tender feelings have grown in me for this very decent man that we as a people have chosen to lead us, at last really lead us rather than feed our national narcissism while simultaneously fueling our personal nightmares, and as a result I can’t help but identify with Walt Whitman’s stirring reflections on Abraham Lincoln:

I saw him on his return, at three o’clock, after the performance was over. He was in his plain two-horse barouche, and looked very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness underneath the furrows. (I never see that man without feeling that he is one to be become personally attached to for his combination of purest, heartiest tenderness, and native Western form of manliness.)

Like Whitman’s affection for Lincoln, I am realizing that I never see Obama without feeling more and more personally attached to him–all the more so for his unselfconscious exhibition of the same constellation of qualities that Whitman ascribed to Lincoln.

When I was a kid, I remember visiting so many houses that had, in a place of importance hanging on a wall, a portrait of JFK. I was consistently overawed by the professions of love and the tender reminiscences that Kennedy inspired in the adults around me, and I grew to love him with the same kind of love that a son feels for a father. I had not imagined I could experience a similar depth of feeling for a political leader again–until now. I have watched in amazement as the machinery of destiny mingled with Obama’s own courage and aspirations to create a unique moment in the history of the world; it feels to me as if Arthur has returned to mend the battered walls of Camelot.

That this single event reverberates around the world is because of its unique ability to offer a glimpse of a hidden reality supporting a deeper truth that, as Wordsworth writes, makes one feel less forlorn, less out of tune; it opens ones heart to a profound gratitude and an inescapable sense that change is at hand, that the old determinants of fear and savage power will no longer define the world. The language and emotion surrounding the man, Obama, and his achievements often carry an unmistakable tone of religious devotion and hope, or apocalyptic caution (I heard a woman on NPR refer to him, with all seriousness, as the Anti-Christ), a tone that has been often criticized by both detractors and admirers alike during the course of his campaign, but such spiritual hyperbole is understandable in both historic and archetypal traditions.

From an historical perspective, slaves and abolitionists alike depended on a variety of liberation theology to sustain and embolden them, beliefs that gave them hope of a heavenly existence yet to come while simultaneously providing comfort while living in a hell on earth. There is something of the numinous surrounding Obama in his appearance apparently out of nowhere and his rapid ascent, and it is not difficult at all for anybody, not only minorites, to see the fulfillment of a divine promise of equality in which the last is now first, the slave is now the leader, and the stone the builders rejected has become the capstone.

Archetypally speaking, there is a powerful promise of collective renewal and rebirth embedded in the action, in the expression, in the behavior of electing this man; a promise removed from the purely conceptual, intuitive realm and established in the embodied, manifest world. Perhaps something approaching autofécondation interieure, the rebirth and renewal of a suppressed ancient soul, an awareness of a connection to each other, the world, indeed the universe itself, is occurring in the unconscious collectivity of the American electorate.

Senator Obama has been referred to as the first post-partisan president elect. I might also offer that he is the first post-identity (I’ll have to come up with a more mellifluent phrase) president, rejecting the politics of identity and identity groups and the cultural particularism that has increasingly, and perhaps unintentionally, given rise to the coarseness, bellicosity, and narcissism leading to the death of discourse in this country.

Late in his life, Michelle Foucault reevaluated his thinking about the negative consequences of subjectivity, what he called, “the hegemony of man.” Previously he had believed that the only solution to this tyrannical mode of being, a way of being that separated and elevated humankind above everything else on the planet, was through adopting an ethos of radical transgression–a delightfully appealing postmodern notion. Later, however, Foucault began to legitimatize the Greco-Roman notion of aesthetic subjectivity and “the choice of a beautiful life:”

What strikes me is the fact that in our society art has become something which is related to objects and not to individuals, or to life….But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?

The beauty of Foucault’s thought is that one need not nostalgically long to be, nor try to become as Wordsworth wrote, a Greco-Roman “pagan” in order to see the world yield up its miracles. Miracles are available to anyone anywhere as soon as one gives up identity and particular expectations of reality–still a radical transgression it seems, but at exactly that moment, the gods appear. I think this is what has touched me most deeply about this recent and miraculous presidential election: possibility became reality and at least for a season, Americans envisioned their lives as a work of art.