This is the title Olive the cat created for this post by settling her furry bum on the warm keyboard (it's 5 degrees outside, and the chill seems to creep inside in spirit, if not in fact). The little sweetheart has spared me the effort of dreaming up an alternative for these musings about Obama, who will be inaugurated in three days.
(Here her attention
has been deflected to pawing cream out of a pitcher beside the computer:)
I want to talk about the interstices of personal and national states of spirit, how they effect each other without our being aware. Henry James once observed that "a novel is a novel as a pudding is a pudding, and . . . our only business with it could be to swallow it:" The meanings I take from this for the nonce are (a) that the blend of novelistic elements should be so homogeneous, so inevitable, that they draw no attention to themselves per se,and (b) as in the novel, so in life. Our own psychological states and that of the nation are generally so commingled that we swallow them whole and don't even think to tease them out. (Like, if you forget yourself and drink orange juice right after brushing your teeth, you don't think toothpaste + orange juice = bad, you just shudder.)
It so happens that over the last eight years, my personal gloom and that of the nation were such a pudding. It's name was Anomie. I've felt alienated and purposeless whenever I've thought about this country's condition. I think that my personal obstacles would have felt far less daunting if the national scene were bracing me up, and I have a sneaking suspicion I've not been alone in this. . . . (I mean, sure, there have been the happy ones all along, but they're another story.)
All this to come to the present, and a look at the optimism that I find myself sharing with the rest of the country. (A political ignoramus, I state up front that I'm not dealing with a sophisticated political data bank, but rather with [my own] intuitions.)
I've found my pre election cynicism and loathing of all candidates and media displaced by a growing appreciation of the President Elect. Specifically, of his intellect. I like the way he seems to entertain polarities of thought within a mentality free of Procrustean mutilations of same. His choices of Cabinet members and inaugural speakers (as well as the list of his prior associations)--appalling to so many--suggest to me a breadth of intellectual engagement.
[Somewhere, during the campaigns, I saw a black and white photo of a surly Obama, clad in black leather jacket and slouching outside his NYC digs when he was at Columbia, but now I can't find it to insert here.]
It is as if Obama's thinking operates within one of Vonnegut's chronosynclastic infundibula, those loci within the cosmos where all truths coexist.
And here I am, feeling a fellow breadth of possibility because there's so much that's not being edited out. It's a kind of peace, in and of itself, for the mind. It's kind of a freedom--a permission--for the lions and the lambs of thought to lie down together while they're all considered dispassionately.
I am happy and hopeful because this seems true to me now. I, too, as I assume for Obama, was initiated into this freedom of intellect at Columbia (and, first, Barnard, for me). I also learned how this realm demands more of the thinker within it than any biased position ever does, be it political, theological, ideological, or whatever else. I, in my putterings about, am no less lazy in meeting intellectual demands than I need be. But Obama now has the screws on him tighter than anyone else on the planet. The question arises whether he'll find the intellectual strength to be true to his intellect--in addition to the political strength to defend it.
Maybe this time and place just days before the Inauguration is a brief hiatus wherein I can think optimistically, as I describe here. Perhaps I delude myself. Has my general political ignorance left a gap that admits soft thoughts? My daughter K emails me that Obama "prevaricates, discusses, weighs, circumbilivaginates (if I may quote my old pal Rabelais), but he does not have any gut-felt morals or convictions, and those are what it takes to lead." Perhaps my daughter is right, and I simply succumb to wishful thinking. But perhaps not. No, come to think of it, both. Mustn't forget the infundibula. . . .
