waking up - freeing ourselves from work

It’s important to remember that the ancestors have been working on the questions that absorb us for quite some time, and that their collective work is like a Great Commons of Creation, ever evolving, ever becoming itself. And while I’m certainly not suggesting that there’s some ‘end-point’ the great communal mind is aiming for, I do believe that the ancestors’ collective ‘longing’ for their work to be claimed, found ‘good,’ and then used and improved, is the ‘source’ of our questions, our dissatisfaction, and our probing of the world.

In the trades it’s very frustrating when your work gets torn out and it all has to be redone. Guys may say, “hey, it all pays the same,” but when you put love and attention into ‘making it pretty,’ getting the bend right, finding the perfect route, and then you’re told to just tear it out and throw it on the bone-pile, well, it can feel like stormy weather.

On the other hand, if you’re coming behind somebody, and you discover that they took time with their work, that they thought about you, who came after – and so the wires are long enough to make up, the boxes are set flush with the sheetrock, the connections are solid, the locknuts are tight – well, it feels good: human solidarity has been honored.

But human solidarity is more than a pact with the living – it’s a pact with the dead and unborn as well. Their presence is with us, whether we know it or not, whether we care or not.

The more one tries to live in the present, it seems, the more one learns the inseparability of time, the artifice of our construction of the trinity of experience; yesterday, today, tomorrow meld into one another, blur in and out. We move between them at the speed of memory or of anticipation. Trying to remain in the moment is like living in three dimensions, in sheerly physical space; the mind doesn’t seem to be whole unless it also occupies the dimension of time, which grants to things their depth and complexity, the inherent dignity and drama of their histories, the tragedy of their possibilities. What then can it mean to “be here now”? That discipline of paying attention to things-as-they-are in the present seems simply to reveal the way the nature of each thing is anchored to time’s passage, cannot exist outside of time. (Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast, p. 7-8)

Yet we live in a system that does everything it can to rip us out of time. When you want to make slaves of a people, you must rob them of their pasts.

In every slave society, slave owners attempted to eradicate the slave’s memory, that is, to erase all the evidence of an existence before slavery. This was as true in Africa as in the Americas. A slave without a past had no life to avenge. No time was wasted yearning for home, no recollections of a distant country slowed her down as she tilled the soil, no image of her mother came to mind when she looked into the face of her child. The pain of all she had lost did not rattle in her chest and make it feel tight. The absentminded posed no menace…Manta uwa made you forget your kin, lose sight of your country, and cease to think of freedom. It expunged all memories of a natal land, and it robbed the slave of spiritual protection. Ignorant of her lineage, to whom could the slave appeal? No longer able to recall the shrines or sacred groves or water deities or ancestor spirits or fetishes that could exact revenge on her behalf, she was defenseless. No longer anyone’s child, the slave had no choice but to bear the visible marks of servitude and accept a new identity in the household of the owner.
It was one thing to be a stranger in a strange land, and an entirely worse state to be a stranger to yourself. (Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother, p. 155, 157)

And while the formal slave system is foul food, recall it comes from the capitalist pot, and the point of a capitalist system is to make us all strangers to ourselves, to rob us all of memory, of meaning, and of all allegiance except to those who pretend to rule us.

Elaborate strategies to detach the captured and enslaved from their memories of home were necessary, from a podrunk view, because ‘home’ – structures, customs, traditions – had been built with their own hands. What the enslaved are required to ‘renounce,’ to ‘forget,’ is their power, their ability to be self-determinative.

But once capital has made for itself a world in its own image, once we no longer have “our own things,” our own places, customs, and traditions, made with our own hands, once disempowerment is built into the constructed environment itself, overt violence is no longer necessary.

Our diminishment, our reduction to single cells with the sole allegiance ‘work,’ means we’re not only stripped of our ancestors, we’re stripped of our place within the web of the human story. We aren’t cherished as children, honored as elders, or sought as ancestors.

My son’s favorite books as a small child and adolescent were a series by Liverpool writer Brian Jacques (pronounced ‘Jakes’). The heroes are brave mice along with their numerous woodland friends – otters, hares, moles, badgers, beavers, voles, squirrels, hedgehogs – that made, with their own hands, a village behind fortress walls called Redwall Abbey.

Early on in Redwall, the tapestry is introduced:

This was the pride and joy of Redwall. The oldest part had been woven by the Founders of the Abbey, but each successive generation had added to it; thus the tapestry was not only a priceless treasure, it was also a magnificent chronicle of early Redwall history.
The Abbot studied the wonderment in Matthias’s eyes as he asked him a question, the answer to which the wise mouse already knew. “What are you looking at, my son?”
Matthias pointed to the figure woven into the tapestry. It was a heroic-looking mouse with a fearless smile on his handsome face. Clad in armor, he leaned casually on an impressive sword, while behind him foxes, wildcats and vermin fled in terror. The young mouse gazed in admiration.
“Oh, Father Abbot,” he sighed. “If only I could be like Martin the Warrior. He was the bravest, most courageous mouse that ever lived!” (Brian Jacques, Redwall, p. 14)

To put the warrior way into perspective, the Abbot explains:

“We are mice of peace. Oh, I know that Martin was a warrior mouse, but those were wild days when strength was needed…So fierce a fighter was Martin that he faced the enemy single-pawed, driving them mercilessly, far from Mossflower…Then something seemed to come over him. He was transformed by what could only be called a mouse miracle. Martin forsook the way of the warrior and hung up his sword…That was when our Order found its true vocation. All the mice took a solemn vow never to harm another living creature, unless it was an enemy that sought to harm our Order by violence. They vowed to heal the sick, care for the injured, and give aid to the wretched and impoverished. So was it written, and so has it been through all the ages of mousekind since…Today, we are a deeply honored and highly respected Society. Anywhere we go, even far beyond Mossflower, we are treated with courtesy by all creatures. Even predators will not harm a mouse who wears the habit of our Order. They know he or she is one who will heal and give aid. It is an unwritten law that Redwall mice can go anywhere, through any territory, and pass unharmed. At all times we must live up to this. It is our way, our very life.” (Brian Jacques, Redwall, p. 15-6)

Later in the story, when the mice of the Abbey are forced to become warriors again, in order to resist enslavement, Matthias has a moment of uncertainty and returns to the tapestry to ask for guidance and restore his self-confidence:

Feeling at a loss, he wandered up into the Great Hall and stood in front of the tapestry. Without consciously realizing it, he found himself talking to Martin the Warrior.

“Oh Martin, what would you have done in my place? I know that I’m only a young mouse, a novice not even a proper Redwall member yet, but once you were young too. I know what you would have done…But alas, those days are gone. I have no magic sword to aid me, only the advice of my elders and betters, to which I must listen.”
Matthias sat down upon the cool stone floor. He gazed longingly up a Martin the Warrior, so proud, so brave… (Brian Jacques, Redwall, p. 60)

The idea of being part of a living tapestry of yesterday, today and tomorrow, that life is a river, ever-flowing – rich, turgid, and radiant – deeply moved my son.

The idea of capturing the history of a community in cloth, caught in the web of our invention – in oral tradition, in song, dance, story and myth – in all our artistic creations – resonates particularly with children because they’ve come freshly from that river, its droplets still cling to their ankles, their feet long for the feel of it between their toes.

And when all of us lie on that beach and soak up that sun, we soak up memory too; we remember how it was, before masters made our life a misery, a mockery of real life.

The power of the ancestors isn’t only in their written or spoken words. It’s in the hymn they made of their lives when they loved.

When you linger in ancient places, touch the wood that long-dead hands planed, drink their reverence for ancient forests or communal lands or traditional herbal remedies, you’re absorbing their thought too. Their passion, love, and longing, brims in what they leave behind, is their legacy to us. That is what calls to us if we are to “claim [our] own at any hazard!”

When you know – and the ancestors can help you know – that the current system in all its manifestations is a dead-end, then options become visible you may not otherwise see.

What the ancestors whisper in your ear is that no one else can tell you what work you’re here to do.

Was E.D. Morel’s ‘work’ pushing paper in a shipping office? Or was it in the Congo, in putting pen to paper, in asking questions – in hearing screams four thousand miles away?

What if E.D. Morel had never asked his questions, the ones he was here to ask?

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity. (Albert Einstein)

Questioning is holy.

It means full engagement with the world, with “the mysteries of eternity, of life.”

When you engage fully, you become a hymn in praise of the universe. The more we probe our questions – ask them of all those who’ve worked on them before – the closer we get to our true work.

But full engagement is structurally impossible in a regimented culture. ‘Jobs’ have a way of narrowing us, making us small. But if we recognize that our true work is to honor our questions, seek answers, become large, then whatever we have to do for a wage (for now), whatever petty tasks the bosses impose, falls into its’ proper place – in the corner with all the other dust. Sweep it out of your mind! It’s an irrelevance on our long, circuitous path to freedom. If you know that, if you know that your true job is to become large, and to seek out the ancestors that will assist you with that, it can help to erase the self-negation tapes that jobs iterate.

The job teaches us that we’re expendable, that we’re ‘on our own,’ small, minimized to the point of irrelevance. And the longer we’re in a job, the smaller we get.

I’m sure we could make a formula of it:

Size of the soul = the reciprocal of number of years worked times the ratio of total deferred dreams to the number of days of work-related depression.
(I’m starting to feel depressed just thinking about it.)

But the ancestors remind us that we are large and infinite. They draw us to the depths and heights, beyond the reach of podrunk spite.

As we follow our questions out, picking up the breadcrumbs the ancestors drop for us, we begin to feel their presence, begin to be aware of their longing for us to become bigger...and bigger still – always iterating, reiterating, “we are far too big for jobs,” far too deep for the shallow categories of podrunk-think.

In Detroit, twenty-seven years ago, when I was twenty-seven, on the second anniversary of my father’s death:

A man stopped me in the street as I came back from the store…He was wearing a red-checkered woolen coat and a hat. His face was youthful, though he talked as if he’d been living a while. A smiling, friendly, white face. He wondered if I might know where the old mortuary school was that used to be in this neighborhood years and years ago. He said he wanted to get hold of his records, but that he’d used another name then, a different social security number, because, well, those were the times, you had to eat, and an egg was more precious than money. (What times were these? Where did he come from, this man, with such a youthful face?) He said, well, he’d find it, and he went along, wishing me luck with my studies. (How did he know I studied?) He turned back to say to me: “Always keep studying. Take your time and keep at it, even if it takes a hundred years, at least you’ll be moving with the times and you’ll be able to understand them.”
So odd, this happening today. It was like receiving a gift from my father. Take your time, he said, as if he could see into my brain, into my soul. (Journal entry, 1981)

I recall the encounter as eerie, like an encounter with a ghost. I guess because most white men would not assume that a Black woman walking the streets of urban America, hauling her groceries home, studied anything more challenging than her nails.

It was a gift, though, ghost or no ghost. The certainty of his words rang true.
“Always keep studying,” he said.

But how do you do that, in a job?

Another way of asking the question is: “how do you keep studying when you’re a slave, a ‘worker,’ stuck in a box on an auction block?”

Continue to "The Two Winds" - Part 8

Nascence to End Work

waking up - freeing ourselves from work

Chapter II: The Two Winds (Part 7)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work