The Shadow and Its Question

why it's so hard for us to wake up

I think this is a good place to start:

“How and to what extent have we betrayed our lives?”

It’s the question Jim Harrison smacks us across the face with in the opening line of his 1993 essay “Great Poems Make Good Prayers.” The question slaps us awake because the assumption it makes is that of course we have betrayed our lives, that this is obvious and goes without saying, and when we hear the question we realize this is so. Moreover, we realize, this has always been so, that we are betrayers even now of the person we are down deep, or hoped to be…of the people we love…of the world we claim to care about…of the principles and beliefs we put on bumper stickers and social media posts like that somehow makes them real. In the white hot sting of that one honest question, we realize that the cracks of our betrayal run so deep into the substrate of our identity we can’t even see where all the tiny fissures lead as they disappear into the unconscious. The jolt of this revelation shocks our bodies like a plunge in the ice-laden waters of a high mountain stream. We wonder how long we’ve been sleepwalking.

Meanwhile, even deeper than all that, tucked away someplace small and holy in our souls, there yet remains the innocent child in us keening out a poem in the dark:

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while

— May Oliver, from “Dogfish”

(Jim was right about the poems, by the way.)

But the past isn’t past, as the wise ones say, and whatever we try to shove into the shadows of forgetfulness rules us from there, and eventually returns, all the more bitter and foul for having been locked away and ignored.

This is as true for a nation as it is for an individual.

The long, dark shadow of these United States has risen from the darkness where we have all tried to lock it away, and even now in its appearing we are all trying every which way we can think of to disown it. It’s not us, it’s them. It’s not mine, it’s his. Watching the media feeds these days can give even the most erudite psychologist a PhD lesson in denial tactics.

But it isn’t only “them.” It’s our shadow too. The dark side of America belongs to all Americans. There are no scapegoats here, though we have a long and bloody history of manufacturing them, like we do our wars. Our scapegoats have never been anything more than shadow puppets we use to distract us from looking at ourselves in the mirror.

That mirror is in our faces once more, and this time I think it will not go away. Neither will the question our collective shadow is putting to us, until we either answer it honestly, or let the whole American Dream collapse under the weight of our pride.

How and to what extent have we Americans betrayed ourselves?

Whatever happens from here, to the light or the dark, it’ll be we who have done it.