Art, Activism, and Temperament
In the past few weeks, I’ve been coming to terms with the tension between finding and doing one’s own purposeful work and, especially in distressing times, deciding to take action against atrocity or calamity. Of course, such work and action can be one. One’s calling could be - straight up, in Jewish terms - tikkun olam: your vocation is steeped in direct, practical repairing or improving the world.
Also, such work and action can be distinct, but overlap: the designation of “purposeful” presumes good will generally, because coming to purpose is a spiritual process of discovery and soul-listening - the call of the higher. (Granted, people can be hellbent on revenge or tyranny, but that’s incontinence, not purpose.) Often art and politics overlap, maybe too often: even more apparently so, then, is there a tension, an internal tension, between two demanding aims. Whatever the work, you’re the artist and activist of your own life according to how sensitively and staunchly you respond to this tension of purpose.
As you can note in my most recent entry, the issue is deeply personal.
Let not heroes dissuade us from our own style of action and living. As promised last time, I’m excited to lift up the inspirational energies of Jamie Raskin and Rosa Gutiérrez Lopez. Each of them dazzle my mind with their indefatigable courage. I worked as co-leader on Congregation Action Network’s advocacy team for Rosa1 in Sanctuary at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda. As part of CAN, I was liaison with my own Temple Micah’s Sukkat Shalom group, which gave unstinting support to Doña Rosa’s care and cause; also, I acted as a link to Sanctuary DMV (where I was a core organizer), which offered less tactful, more agressive strategies. We were in repeated contact with congressional leaders regarding her case. With tact and political savvy, Congressman Raskin proved himself human and responsive to Rosa’s plight, ready to grapple with our asks. I’m impressed by that kind of patience: we were dedicated to pushing him and other politicians. In communion with her vast number of supporters, he celebrated on Zoom (midst of the pandemic shutdowns) Rosa’s first Stay of Removal, beginning of a process which eventually allowed her and her children to leave sanctuary free from the threat of her deportation. Something about Zoom’s combining of screen remoteness/framing with interactive proximity highlighted certain aspects of how they reached each other, how they faced each other fatefully in a sea of faces; scenes of those heightened moments in that specialized light stick with me and fuel my musings on what powers the long struggle for one’s own dignity and that of others: glimpses, just enough, giving access to character.
In my capacity for this Substack project, it wouldn’t ever have been more than a vignette, my treatment of Raskin on the topic of commitment and social action. Nor is it necessary - I discovered last week! - to do anything more than zero in on exactly what I’m trying to figure out here: how he found it in himself to fight the second impeachment fight right in the weeks following untold, heartbreaking, immeasurable personal tragedy. No profile necessary in this space: within a year, he’s already written and published a whole book about it all, case in point with regard to his tirelessness and resiliency: Unthinkable. I hope he had a ghostwriter! Please, dear reader, take that in the non-twisted way it is meant. His capacity unthinkable to me at any rate.
On December 31st, 2020, New Year’s Eve, Jamie Raskin’s son Tommy killed himself at the age of 25. His family buried him on January 5th. Jamie Raskin went into the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, to perform what he considered his duty to certify the Electoral College votes. Then - insurrection, and life endangerment to himself and the loved ones who accompanied him on that day.
It is excruciating to contemplate losing a child to suicide. It’s probably a weakness on my part - in my writing, in my thinking - to feel as taboo the words of the thing, much less the images, the imagination of what a parent would have to endure. Storm cloudy notion, amorphous edge of meaning, dark shapening of fear; forget a focus of the mind, dread contours of a picture, only a somatic nudging of the concept is all it takes to know that I don’t know how I’d manage to go on or function in such an aftermath. Too abstract? To approach such inklings torques my windpipe. I’ll confess that my judgment early on wasn’t all that generous: as much as I admired Raskin’s strength and brilliance throughout the impeachment trial, I had to suspect there must be some lack, some unrelatable hardness there - to keep him so sharp and pointed, to keep him performing so well. Numb, compartmentalized; that’s fair. But I couldn’t fully understand. Yet, now it’s easy to see with the dates set out above: New Year’s Eve, January 5th, January 6th - beyond the national desecration, what a personal affront to his grief, to his endurance in entering the building to do his duty (worthy of the Stoics), was the assault of the mob on the Capitol. He honors his grief and his love, rampant, by ramping up his purpose. That’s what keeps him going. And what keeps him going is what will save our democracy: to hold the right people accountable, all the way to the top. In the preface to his book, Raskin describes how Nancy Pelosi had an almost preternatural insight into what he needed to get through his desolation; she “threw me a lifeline,” he says, by asking him to become lead impeachment manager for the team prosecuting Trump in the Senate. The assignment “was akin to a challenge, a dare to rise up from my despondency and to bring others along with me.”
But what sort of imperviousness, what natural indomitability (though above I said “rampant” I’m not going to indulge “leonine”), what - uh-oh! - temperamental steel did he backbone with him into the arena in the first place? A mystery remains.
Likewise, Doña Rosa. Her valiancy fired up the instant she had to endure placement of an ankle monitor on her body after living in the United States for over a decade without incident (including being granted a work permit in 2014). Along with the sympathy her emotion and faith provoked when I heard her speak of this, there was something key - I was struck by admiration, she was an examplar of vulnerable daring - in her indignation-snagged refusal to accept the violation of her person. She told how she cried unabashedly in front of the ISAP2 government contractors who affixed the shackle to her leg. Forced to allow the shackle-bite on her flesh, she revolted against its stigma of criminality on her spirit: how dare any authority impugn her basic decency? Hence, she was staunch when in late 2018 ICE ordered her to buy a plane ticket to El Salvador and prepare for deportation. CAN immediately found her a hosting congregation at Cedar Lane and she bravely entered sanctuary with her three U.S.-born, American citizen children. She simply would not give in to the unjust idea that there could be any reason for her to be forced from her children or her life in this country. She had to carry in her soul a sure, magnificent sense of motherhood and her dignity as a human being to defend her determination to stay. What secret store of dynamism bolted her spine? She embodied an act of freedom, singularly; and by accepting the help of her community as well, creating a community around her, by permitting her trouble to become ours, she gave her society a chance to demonstrate what transgressions from above it was unwilling to bear. Her greatest courage was, is, to put all her trust in right.
Doña Rosa and Congressman Raskin - sources of inspiration. I raise them up and, in my exulting in their virtue, risk getting flighty. Obvs! “Rampant,” “leonine”? Another tension here in my weighing of praises versus stringency, to keep it real.
An aside. I’ll mention a wonderful poet of praises who, as a French diplomat, also happened to hold that tension between art and politics. Saint-John Perse:
Ô j’ai lieu! Ô j’ai lieu de louer! … I have cause! Oh, I have cause to praise!
My intention is to reach for some of this exemplary fortitude and yet explore also, without affirming indifference, what there is to affirm in difference. Epic, relentless ways of being aren’t accessible to everybody.
After training, volunteering, and organizing with a variety of groups - CAN, SDMV, Sukkat Shalom and various offshoots sprouting according to the situation, such as pop-up Migrant Transit Support programs in 2018-2019 (relief for busloads of migrants being shipped to destinations all around the country with little food, water, or guidance, pre-"Remain in Mexico” policy), and the Food Justice Initiative once the pandemic hit - it seems inimical to me to glorify any one way of engaging. Such variety of how people worked, such weariness, exhaustion, such overwork. Styles of how people showed up as variable as their physiognomies, even as most converged ideologically. Ineluctable modality of the physiological. More than the counting of ancient humors based on bodily fluids, settled into Medieval four temperaments, there have to be four hundred nuances, physical and psychological shadings of nature. Nevertheless, two stark types distinguish themselves in the acivist world: the doer and the empathizer. The activist doers get things done, absolutely; they get their way as well, and can sometimes be callous and even culpable (white savior complexes are common), no time for sensitivities. The empathizers, truly sensitive, reach people they’re trying to help on a core/coeur level, and that reverential human contact can be more sustaining than practical, material support. But these are the ones who burn out quickly and suffer with the suffering; at worst their neediness competes with those in need. To be sure, these are two poles on a continuum, and most everybody experiences burnout and, in the brunt of trauma, needs to tend to their own self-care. Strengths and weakness to both types, and each subject to intolerances.
Some of this can be attributed to a deep motive dichotomy between solidarity and charity. Otherwise, it’s more about constitution, temperament, physiology, humor than a matter of commitment or determined will - free will, best intentions, and free choice molded by natural determinants.
As with art, constraint in life - personal constraints, personality constraints - can be what shapes creativity and freedom. Examples of tirelessness can help us go on, make that first or next crucial step. Yet, it’s good to take one’s own pulse.
Lest you think I’m getting too high falutin, too exhortative as to purpose, integrity (artistic and/or moral), and social conscience - know that I know all too well, dear reader, this ain’t poetry, this ain’t soaring. More like skimming over brackish foam. Heaviness, moody ponderous ponderings, pinions ill-equipped to escape gravity. “What happened to these damn wings?” - squawking lament of an earth-stranded angel after death of God. They aren’t taking him where he wanted to go. How ‘bout some recommended reading?: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Time for Everything. Angels regress (literal de-evolution from the Renaissance onwards) from their formidable, sublime, terrifying guise into cherub-babies and then into - now - scavenging seagulls.
“One far oftener appears to have a decided character by persistently acting in accordance with temperament than by persistently acting in accordance with principles.” - Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Aphorism 485
I’m going to go ahead and remain comfortable referring to Rosa Gutiérrez Lopez as Rosa or Doña Rosa, even if I don’t refer to Jamie Raskin as Jamie, out of the respect and affection all of us had who worked with her, and out of congruence to the official designation of her support, the project at Cedar Lane know as “Sanctuary for Rosa” and our team specifically designated as “Advocacy for Rosa in Sanctuary at Cedar Lane.”
The abusive Intensive Supervision Appearance Program.
Thank you for this post! Jamie Raskin and Rosa Gutierrez Lopez are indeed heroes. Your activism is truly from the heart and resonates with your poetry.