Malleable Forms by Meeka Walsh

Author:Meeka Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: essays
ISBN: 9781927886618
Publisher: ARP Books
Published: 2022-05-12T19:54:06+00:00

The Ineffable

A Moral Place in the World

Incredulous, exhausted by disbelief, I, among others, find myself speechless in this time when the necessity for speech is urgent. Donald Trump and his cabinet of mean-minded compatriots in the White House—what is there to say about a situation willed by millions of American voters? Alarming that there was a consensus sufficiently broad to bring this dangerous, limited, vulgar man and his ilk to power. It’s a situation of statehood about which others have said this: “The unbridled naked materialism and cynicism and appetite for cruelty and violence in the United States is very disturbing. It’s the acceptance of vulgar and anti-idealistic values. I’m not trying to idealize the past or say that it’s so much better elsewhere, but I think that when you get a society which doesn’t even have any decent hypocrisies anymore, in which people are so shameless in their meanness and their selfishness and their avidity and the willingness to judge almost everything by criteria of material gain, then you are certainly on the way toward a society in decline. A society can’t operate, I think, so cynically and continue to prosper. It can’t teach its citizens to be so selfish and call that individualism.”

And this: “Contemporary man is being afflicted with contradictions and perplexities, living in anguish in an affluent society. His anxiety makes a mockery of his boasts. Passing through several revolutions simultaneously his thinking is behind the times. High standards of living, vulgar standards of thinking, too feeble to stop the process of the spiritual liquidation of man.”

These two sections are not from last week’s edition of the New Yorker, not from the New York Times or Harper’s Magazine or the Washington Post—all publications full of justified and cautionary alarms at the state of the country in which they are publishing their worried and informed critiques. The first is from an interview Border Crossings published in April 1988 with the American writer Susan Sontag. Ronald Reagan was the president of the United States and was near to completing his second term in office. The second quotation is by Polish-born scholar, writer, and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, who escaped to America in 1940, where he lived until his death in 1972. The essay from which this was taken, titled “What We Might Do Together,” was first published in the journal Religious Education (March–April, 1967).

Deeply concerned and engaged in the social and political environments in which they lived, each wrote from their individual present, speaking to the future we now inhabit. Twenty years separate these pieces, one from the other. Neither writer is alive today. Would they be bereft and despairing to know that their worry and caution had apparently been futile? Fifty years since Heschel wrote his words; twenty-nine since Susan Sontag delivered hers.

I think the present is an age of acute loneliness. We are lonely because we are selfish, self-serving, seeking to satisfy our personal needs first. Or we are selfish and looking to satisfy our own needs because we are alone, lonely, and have only ourselves.

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