August 2, 2024
No one expected what happened when Joe Biden withdrew from the election contest and threw his support behind Kamala Harris. Like a fountain suddenly erupting from underground, there was an outburst not just of excitement, which was understandable, but of an emotion that time after time in various articles has been described as “joy.” Language is an amazing phenomenon. Every word or syntactical construction reaches down into depths beneath consciousness, and bears shadings and connotations that we do not quite know we know. Everyone has reached without thinking for the word “joy,” and it is the right word.
What is joy? I would define it as the reaction to a new sense of possibility. Something, perhaps many things, seem possible now that seemed unbelievable before. We may fight it, distrust it, try to dismiss it as too good to be true. And it may be: joy is a risk, as love is a risk. We must risk committing to what we feel—and feel rightly—might be an illusion. It is perfectly possible that this newsletter may look hasty and naïve a month from now—even a week from now. That’s okay. The new sense of possibility is political, but the sudden twist in the political narrative has catalyzed a sense of possibility much more widespread and powerful. For a moment, people have experienced an intuition that the reality principle itself may not be what we thought it was, a law of inevitable, ironic limitation to which we must resign ourselves as “realistic” adults. Just now, millions of people are feeling that, if this can happen, anything can happen. The theme of this newsletter is that they just might be right.
If they do turn out to be right, it will be in part because this inspiration of joy, this moment of a kind of grace, could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have written recently about collective consciousness as the threat we presently face. In a panic, goaded by fear and hate, close to half the people of the United States have succumbed to the mass consciousness of an authoritarian cult, losing not only their individuality but a good deal of their humanity. It is time to right the balance by admitting that there is a good collective consciousness which I, like many intellectuals, perhaps, have dismissed prematurely, in thrall to an overly skeptical “reality principle.” For joy too, like fear and hate, is contagious, can spread swiftly across vast numbers of people, and has done so historically in times that bear an illuminating resemblance to the present moment. We are convinced that reality has its limitations, most of them grounded in physical constraints. Humanity has what Maslow called basic needs and Northrop Frye called primary concerns: we all need food and drink, safety, love, and a sense of power and autonomy. We hold it to be self-evident that all human beings have a right to these things, despite ideological forces that say otherwise. But the constraints that deny the gratification of these needs or concerns to much of humanity are not inevitable, merely ideological. The big lie, which is the root of all the other lies, is that the reality principle contains limitations that make that denial unavoidable. In his powerful poem “London,” William Blake walks the streets of London at night and sees “marks of weakness, marks of woe” on every face he passes. These marks are inscribed by systems of oppression. The women he sees are prostitutes, trapped in an economic system forcing them to sell themselves to survive. Some of the men are soldiers, forced to be warrior drones sacrificing themselves for the supposed good of the state, whose coercions are blessed by the Church. But these are what the central phrase of the poem calls “mind forg’ed manacles.” Most of the misery of the human race is not “reality” but a set of assumptions by which we have been conditioned to passive obedience. By learning how to detach from those assumptions, we learn how to change reality itself, which is mentally created, not merely given. This is the Romantic theory of the imagination, that “expanding eyes” may see an expanded world.
But the intuition is much older than Romanticism. It is inherent in the form of comedy, in which (unless it is an ironic or revisionist comedy) an unanticipated twist leads to a reversal, or what Aristotle called a peripeteia, a turning point, that results in the happy ending, which is accompanied by a “festive” mood that is an equivalent of joy. That reversal is implausible, seems to defy our mature sense of what is possible or at least likely to happen in this world—and yet it happens, and, when it does so, changes not just the outcome for the main characters but the nature of their reality. The obstructive characters are dislodged, resulting in a society that becomes free of the harsh rulings of arbitrary power. Freed from the mind forg’d manacles of their neuroses, the characters unite in love and friendship. At the end of his career, Shakespeare wrote four “romances,” comedies raised to a higher power, in which the fates of characters who have been suffering and struggling for an entire generation are suddenly changed. Romance is a literary form ruled by a sense of “wonder,” and that word is constantly on the lips of the characters as the lost are found, the good are vindicated, and the redeemable are changed for the better as if by magic—indeed, in the last of the romances, The Tempest, Prospero, the character who brings the transformations about, is an actual magician. But the pattern is far older than Shakespeare. In the Odyssey, which can be considered the first romance in the Western tradition, the one thing that everyone agrees to be complete wish-fulfilment is that Odysseus could ever show up again after 20 years. This assumption makes his enemies, the suitors, complacent, and complacency makes people stupid, a fact that Odysseus uses to his advantage. There is a political moral here that anti-Trump forces may want to contemplate. But even the good people are stuck in a “too good to be true” mentality. When Odysseus drops his disguise and reveals himself to his son, Telemachus at first refuses to believe it, bursts out with an angry denying speech full of pain, because, if he believes that his longed-for father is standing before him and it turns out to be a lie, it might break his heart.
To return to the subject of Kamala Harris, although the majority of political opinion writers are on board with her, some usual suspects have struck the pose of knowing skeptic, too worldly wise to fall for this ill-advised crowd emotion. Their objections take two forms: (1) the Harris people are excited about is not real, only a wish-fulfilment construct hiding a weak and flawed candidate, and (2) whatever she is, the movement united behind her will fail, because that’s what happens. Briefly, for what it’s worth, the Harris people presently perceive seems real enough. As others have explained, her failed 1919 run for the presidency was mostly bad timing. Black Lives Matter had just occurred, and, as a moderately tough law-and-order figure, Harris was in an impossible position. As vice president, she was invisible, mostly in the background, because that is what vice presidents are supposed to do, not upstage or challenge the president.
But it is true that inspiring leaders suddenly appear out of nowhere. It is part of the myth that the hero is an ugly duckling, comes from a humble background, seems least likely to succeed. Who is going to lead the Hebrews out of Egyptian slavery? Moses, that foundling left in a basket, that guy with a stutter is going to stand in front of the Pharaoh and say, “Let my people go?” But Moses solved the problem: he got his brother Aaron to speak for him. Joe Biden lacked that luxury. Nor was the unlikely leader of the Exodus an Old Testament one-shot. The greatest of the judges, figures who rose to leadership of the Israelite tribes out of charisma during an emergency, was Samson, described by Northrop Frye as an overgrown juvenile delinquent. Some scholars think the original folklore figure out of which Samson was fashioned was a Trickster. People love a bad boy who grows up and reforms himself into a leader under the pressure of an hour of need. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal plays the role deliberately, pretending to be a ne’er-do-well until it is time to take the reins from the hands of his dying father. Who was David, Israel’s first and greatest king? A shepherd boy who played the harp, whose weapon of choice was a slingshot. I mean, really? And of course there was the carpenter’s son born in a stable. Parsifal, who achieved the Grail quest after knights in more shining armor had failed, began as a naïve clown, a buffoon. They are all nobodies, and come out of nowhere.
I am not saying the Harris is going to grow to the stature of such enormous figures, but it is worth inquiring why the mythical pattern is so pervasive. The individualism of our culture leads us to think of heroic leaders fashioning themselves by force of will, but in fact it often seems as if it is the moment of crisis that seizes upon and transforms someone into a leader, much as a muse may seize mere ordinary human beings and turn them into poets. Thus, Abraham Lincoln was in a sense summoned into being by the crisis of slavery and the Civil War, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was summoned by the need to cope with the double threat of a Depression domestically and a world war abroad.
Mind you, there is no guarantee that a saving figure will appear, and, if one does, there is a danger that the cure will be worse than the disease. A crisis situation sets loose a charge of psychic energy, sometimes called charisma or mana (a Polynesian word). The leader is possessed by such energy, and draws people by a kind of magnetism. In the early 20th century, the sociologist Max Weber defined charismatic authority, contrasting it with traditional authority and rational authority. The danger is that the charismatic leader may easily succumb to what Jung calls “inflation,” may be possessed by psychic energy and turned into a megalomaniac, thinking he is godlike and convincing his followers as well. The modern examples are obvious, from Hitler and Mussolini to Donald Trump, but the Romantics knew the type in Napoleon, who turned from liberator into emperor, causing Beethoven to tear out the dedication page of the Eroica symphony, originally dedicated to him. The psychic energy is power, and it is power that possesses and corrupts Sauron, Saruman, and Gollum in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, that causes Anakin Skywalker to go over to the dark side of the Force and become Darth Vader. The conclusion of some thinkers is that all charisma is bad: Weber thought in terms of an evolution from charismatic to traditional to rational authority, but I wonder whether the charismatic and the other two types should not rather be considered Contraries in the Blakean sense. Tradition and rationality are necessary to rein in charismatic energy, but I do not think society will outgrow the need to be energized and inspired. Without Lincoln and FDR, what would have happened to this country?
I say this rather sadly, in a way, because Joe Biden is one of Weber’s rational leaders. The best president of my lifetime, he has accomplished an astonishing amount, far more than I or anyone else dreamed he would, but his tragedy—long before the recent neurotic fixation on his age—is that he is not charismatic. He is warm and deeply human, but he does not inspire. In normal times, he would be much more popular—in fact, it is ironic that he was chosen, at another political moment that has been forgotten, precisely because his normality was reassuring. But, although Biden was brilliant, even transformative, in the administrative aspects of his job, both domestic and abroad, his genial but non-charismatic personality does not reassure people terrified by the negative charismatic leader who is on the verge of toppling democracy. That is what is behind the unnecessary fixation on his age and supposed debility. So Biden was ruthlessly forced out. I am impatient with all the glowing praise of his noble sacrifice. There is a lot of hypocrisy there. He was given no choice but to endure a humiliating unofficial impeachment. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to see the news dominated by the euphoric relief that you’re gone. For four years, he has been given almost no credit for accomplishing more than any president of our time, soldiering on despite being unpopular from the very first minute. We have not deserved him.
That does not keep me from sharing the joy of the present moment. Many people have said that the last time they felt this way was in 2008, when we elected our first Black president, a man who was charismatic and who spoke of the audacity of hope. People believed him, and the enthusiasm generated an energy that swept all obstacles from its path. At least we have that memory. It shocks me to realize that my students do not. They were between 2 and 5 years old when the news that Obama had won demonstrated that the impossible is not always impossible. There is so much unfair complaining about my students and their sensitive-snowflake mental health issues. What moment of being surprised by joy have they ever had? All they have known are the years devastated by two deadly contagions, Trump and Covid. If Harris wins, this will be their moment of possibility, and such moments are permanent, beyond time, no matter what the disappointments and failures to follow.
There are advantages to being old, and the best one is having lived through so much history. “May you live in interesting times” is supposed to be a curse, but interesting times, in which the world returns, as it periodically does, to the Chaos out of which it first arose, are periods of possible renewal and rebirth. The mythical imagery of rebirth is that of fire and water. The world may rise from the waters of “the deep,” like Atlantis. Or, like the phoenix, it may be reborn out of fire. The former gives us the imagery of baptism, the latter of the purgatorial fires that are prefigured in the Old Testament by the three men walking with “the form of the fourth” amidst the fires of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. Like all imagery, the imagery of transformative fire and water has ironic counterparts, in this case the imagery of mere destruction. We are presently enduring the destructive fire and water of climate change, the summers of record heat, the super-storms and flooding. There are also the fires of war, just as there were when Dylan Thomas wrote “Ceremony after a Fire Raid” during the Blitz in World War II. This destructive imagery culminates in the Bible in the Book of Revelation, which adds plague to the list—well, we’ve had that too in the last few years. The Book of Revelation has been read—and admittedly lends itself to being read—as a litany of hate, violence, and revenge. Just you wait, you enemies of the Lord. That is what happens when neurotic ideology gets hold of an archetypal complex, as it has in Christian nationalism. As it is read by someone like William Blake, in the 9th Night of his epic The Four Zoas, it is exactly the opposite. The fabric of the fallen world is being rent, the structures of oppression toppled. “If I had my way, I would tear this building down,” as the great old gospel song shouts it. It is not the triumph of hate and revenge: hate and revenge are buried in the rubble. Schiller’s Ode to Joy, set to music in the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, has been played to celebrate the rebirth of freedom and the falling of walls. Leonard Bernstein performed it after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I lived in interesting times, those that we call the 60’s. The greatest legacy of the 60’s is the memory of joy, the joy whose symbols were the Summer of Love and Woodstock, dominated by the pastoral symbolism of a return to paradise. It was such sense of joyful possibility of making a new world that we pitted against the neo-colonial warmongers prosecuting the war in Vietnam, against the sheriffs and police dogs of the march in Selma and demonstrations elsewhere, But without that joy, no change. You can construct the evidence to conclude that it was all hopelessly naive. Or you can construct it to conclude that the arts provide models and inspiration for activism that, yes, has to accompany the folksong army. The famous footage shows Bob Dylan and Joan Baez performing during Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. Bob Dylan captured the mood of a positive apocalypse in one of his greatest, though lesser-known songs, “When the Ship Comes In.” It could be, and it should be, an anthem for the present time:
And the words that are used For to get the ship confused Will not be understood as they're spoken For the chains of the sea Will have busted in the night And be buried on the bottom of the ocean
It is not a gospel song, but the last stanza shows that Dylan knows that his imagery derives from the Biblical tradition—which can be used for liberation, not merely to enforce reactionary ideology, as it so often is:
And they'll raise their hands Sayin', "We'll meet all your demands" But we'll shout from the bow, "Your days are numbered" And like Pharoah's tribe They'll be drowned in the tide And like Goliath, they'll be conquered
There are immediately those who begin to insinuate the niggling doubts, as they already are doing with Harris. Not so much the trolls, whose attacks are crude and obvious, but the pundits and what Paul Krugman dryly calls Very Serious People. About the March on Washington, they would say, “Yes, and five years later they just shot the guy. Who, by the way, was a womanizer who plagiarized his dissertation, and whose philosophy of non-violence is hopelessly naïve. The MLK of the holiday is just an ideological fiction, useful to the establishment for preventing real radical social change.” This is the voice of what Blake called the Idiot Questioner, “who is always questioning and never capable of answering.” It worms its way into our heads and becomes a reflex of habitual reductionism. But the energy of joy, to borrow Dylan’s imagery, lifted all boats. It is no accident that the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, modern feminism, the beginning of the gay rights movement in Stonewall, all occurred within a few years of one another. Those gropings for change are not connected causally, but they are connected systemically: a ripple of energy in the network of social life travels everywhere. It is no accident that popular music exploded into extraordinary innovation at the time, that comics, the graphic novel, and modern fantasy and science fiction all blossomed during that brief period. So it all failed? Easy to cite the failures, but in fact we are living in the world the 60’s created, and, for all its flaws, it is a better world by far than it would have been otherwise.
I first learned about the Romantics and their theory of an imagination that was not merely escapist or wish-fulfilment but world-transforming in a Romantics course in the spring of 1970. That May, I was a hitchhiking hippie in a trucker’s cab when I learned from the radio of the shooting of four students at Kent State—from which I was hitchhiking, my usual obliviousness having saved me from even knowing there was a demonstration. But it helped shock me into realizing the parallels between the Romantics’ situation and my own. For all the Romantics, the harbinger of joy was the French Revolution, which seemed to show that authoritarian government could be overturned and society transformed. Wordsworth, who actually went to France briefly and worked for the revolution, recounts the mood of joy in justly famous lines of his autobiographical epic The Prelude:
Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy! For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood Upon our side, we who were strong in love! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!
How 60’s can you get? The passage continues into a Woodstock moment about getting back to the Garden:
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth, The beauty wore of promise, that which sets (As at some moment might not be unfelt Among the bowers of paradise itself ) The budding rose above the rose full blown. What temper at the prospect did not wake To happiness unthought of? The inert Were roused, and lively natures rapt away!
Those lively natures were called upon
to exercise their skill, Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,—the place where in the end We find our happiness, or not at all!
It all failed, of course, as Wordsworth goes on to explain, sparing the Idiot Questioner the trouble. The French Revolution was drowned under a wave of the wrong kind of collectivism, disintegrating into mob violence and the Reign of Terror, providing an excuse for Napoleon to step in as a law-and-order savior and become emperor. In the same way, the 60’s collapsed into, first, Nixon and Agnew, then into the Reagan counter-revolution that put in power the reactionary forces we face right now. Hippies became yuppies, and liberal thinkers became the reactionary conservative pundits and “philosophers” of today. Wordsworth himself became a relative reactionary in his old age. The more it changes, the more it remains the same. So let’s just sit home and bitch about the price of groceries?
A great poem of liberation from the mind forg’d manacles is Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound of 1819. What is interesting is that Shelley is a second-generation Romantic, too young to have experienced the joy of the French Revolution’s early days, which happened right at the time he was born in 1792. By 1819, it was all over. Napoleon had been defeated and governments all over Europe were busy backlashing in reactionary hysteria. Like my students, Shelley had never known the great momentary joy, the sense of standing on the brink of possibility. Yet, like all the great Romantic poems, it is an analysis of why the uprising failed, what were the grounds of hope, and how might the imagination work, underground as it were, to prepare for when it all comes round again. In Shelley’s retelling, Prometheus originally failed in his rebellion against Jupiter because he was infected with the virus of hate. Prometheus was nailed to his rock, but cursed Jupiter—and it is that curse, he now realizes, that keeps Jupiter in power. When he withdraws his curse, an unknown power called Demogorgon appears from an unknown realm below, scoops Jupiter from his throne like a badly-behaved child, and hauls him offstage. The earth blossoms into paradise, and even human nature changes to a degree. The poem’s last lines are not just la-la-la. Shelley is quite aware of the cyclical pattern of rise and fall that seems to rule history, quite aware that the empire has a habit of striking back. But if and when it does, there are what he calls “seals of that most firm assurance / Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength”:
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free The serpent that would clasp her with his length; These are the spells by which to reassume An empire o’er the disentangled gloom.
What are “these”? “Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance.” As the previous newsletter pointed out, the Romantics were by no means averse to allegory so long as it was attached to, and not a substitute for, deeper mythological and archetypal symbolism. I have quoted the poem’s final lines before, and will doubtless do so again, because they are a touchstone:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
This counterbalances the admittedly slightly giddy joy of the 4th act. Shelley was writing, not in that dawn in which it was bliss to be alive, but exactly at a time when power seemed omnipotent. In the 2010’s, Arab Spring, a series of revolutionary uprisings, spread across the Middle Eastern world and generated a great deal of hope. But it dried up like dew upon the grass, and the desert returned.
The politics of paranoia says that repeated failures show that the enduring reality is power, the conclusion being a kind of cynical Realpolitik. But what if the failures are not really failures, but rather turnings of the wheels that move a vehicle forward? What if there is a progressive rhythm in history that operates through the cycles of rise and fall?
When I taught Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown about the myth of Orpheus, I asked my students why, in a musical about a movement for social change, an uprising against the big boss Hades, Mitchell would choose as her vehicle a tragic myth in which the hero fails. Why end the musical with a final number that talks about how, nevertheless, we keep singing Orpheus’s song, over and again? The contagious moment of joy is well captured in that musical, the sense that it finally may all change. Yet the moment is lost. But if it happened once, it will happen again. I have always disliked George Orwell’s 1984, the work of a powerful Idiot Questioner. The suggestion that there could, with modern technological methods of surveillance, spying, and indoctrination be a dictatorship that really would plant its boot upon the human face forever seems to me a harbinger of the paranoid politics of the coming Cold War. Regimes of the Big Brothers of the world may successfully resist revolution, true—but they collapse of their own internal weakness. The leaders are psychotic; the oligarchs decimate themselves through infighting; the corruption and cronyism eventually destroy the economy. No, the fact that the wheel turns is not always a bad thing. Evil dies of its own inherent entropy, falls into its own black hole, like the Roman Empire, like the Soviet empire, and flowers grow in the cracks of the ruins.
The Romantics in turn were mindful of the earlier example of Milton and the failure of the Puritan revolution in the 17th century. Once again—or once previously—a monarch was deposed in the name of liberty, resulting in the English Civil War, a revolutionary Puritan government—and then failure and the eventual Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, of which Milton bitterly complained that the English people had chosen “a captain back for Egypt,” in other words decided to return to their slavery under the Pharaoh. Which, indeed, the Israelites were constantly on the verge of doing throughout the Exodus. But the revolution had its moment of joy and sense of possibility earlier. In his great prose work Areopagitica, when possibility was still in the air, Milton wrote in 1644:
Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full middday beam; purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.
So they had their pundits back then too, with their envious, negativistic gabble. As Bob Dylan said, “Something is happening, and you don’t know what it is, / Do you, Mr. Jones?” They had their reductive lovers of twilight as well, contrasted with the eagle, who, according to folklore, could stare directly into the sun without being blinded. This phoenix-like solar bird is also, metaphorically, a sleeping giant, whose mighty locks suggest the Samson about whom Milton would later write a tragedy, and whose awakening suggests the myth of Arthur sleeping underground, prophesied to awaken at England’s hour of need, which Milton had in his youth contemplated as the subject of an epic.
We are tracing the pattern of spontaneous uprising and its joyous mood back to its headwaters, and those, in Western cultural history, are Biblical. In our society, Christianity has been kidnapped by a social establishment that has used it as an instrument of control for so long that most people think that is what Christianity is. Where Jesus said, “Go and sin no more,” Paul spoke of an iron law by which God, for incomprehensible reasons that we may not question, denies grace, thereby making it impossible for some people not to sin, and then damns them for it. The Catholic Church of the Middle Ages and Renaissance used threat of hellfire to impose obedience to authority. Meanwhile, the Popes and princes of the Church lived like the kings with whom they were in league, wallowing in luxury, siring children out of wedlock, poisoning rivals, raising armies. The Protestant Reformation revolted against these abuses, but in England the Anglican Church was hand in glove with a corrupt monarchy, and the dissident Puritans, adopting Calvinistic theology, became obsessed with accusations of sin and guilt. The evangelical movement that broke with all this had its moment of “enthusiasm,” a taste of joy, but has now degenerated into “Christian nationalism” that wants to install a theocracy in the United States. We wonder why so many people, especially young people, want nothing to do with Christianity, or for that matter with any form of institutional religion? How should they be attracted to a religion that still cannot bring itself to affirm the rights of women, of LBGTQ+ individuals, of non-Christians, indeed seems to be at times regressing? My own Baldwin Wallace University was founded by a joyful Methodist, John Baldwin, nicknamed “the barefoot millionaire” because he lived so simply. Under Baldwin, we were among the first, in the 19th century, to admit women and people of color—Baldwin even went to the unheard of length of recruiting an Indigenous student. But as of several years ago, Baldwin Wallace severed its ties with a Methodist Church that condemned homosexuality. I am proud of my school, but it would break John Baldwin’s heart.
Like James Joyce, who fictionalized his experiences in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I grew up within a pre-Vatican II Catholicism that taught that non-Catholics were going to hell, that you too could go to hell for such terrible things as masturbation or missing Mass on Sunday. Yet even while still a child I had somehow an intuition of a true Christianity that began as a possible religion of joy. The Roman authorities had no idea what to make of this obscure Jewish sect, as they saw it, that was setting off a wave of hope and joy so great that it could enable early Christians to endure martyrdom without fear. They regarded it as seditious, and, despite Christ’s counsel to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, there is no doubt that the Romans surmised correctly enough. In the Gospel of Luke, when the angel announces to Mary that the child she is carrying is the Messiah, she bursts into a song of sudden joy known as the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55). It says of this longed-for figure:
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. | He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
The Magnificat has been influenced by the Song of Hannah (I Samuel 2:1-10) in the Old Testament. When Hannah is told that she will bear Samuel, the kingmaker, she sings a song suggesting how the work of an invisible power may shatter not only the social power structure but the limits of the fallen world itself:
The Lord killeth, and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up. | The Lord maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low, and lifteth up. | He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among the princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory: for the pillars of the world are the Lord’s, and he hath set the world upon them.
It is the season of the birth of the miraculous child that most retains the memory of what Christianity once was, perhaps still could be, spiritually if not institutionally. We sing “Joy to the World,” sensing that a mysterious power has entered our fallen reality and that, as Leonard Cohen put it in a passage from his novel Beautiful Losers that was set to music by Buffy Saint-Marie, “God is alive, magic is afoot.” Joy sweeps up and carries everyone, unites despite differences no matter how the ideologues disapprove. Only joy can create the solidarity necessary for real social change. It is a hopeful sign that the factions of the Democratic party instantaneously united behind Kamala Harris, leaving off their favorite activity of gnawing one another’s vitals, and there can be no better cadence to a discussion of joy than the words of a Jewish (and Canadian) writer, from a novel partly about a real Indigenous Christian saint, Catherine Tekakwitha of the 17th century, sung by an Indigenous woman of our own time:
God is alive, magic is afoot God is alive, magic is afoot God is afoot, magic is alive Alive is afoot, magic never died….Though his shrouds were hoisted, the naked God did live Though his words were twisted, the naked magic thrived Though his death was published 'round and 'round the world The heart did not believe….But magic would not tarry, it moves from arm to arm It would not stay with them, magic is afoot It cannot come to harm, it rests in an empty palm It spawns in an empty mind, but magic is no instrument Magic is the end….This I mean to whisper to my mind This I mean to laugh with in my mind This I mean my mind to serve 'til service is but magic Moving through the world And mind itself is magic coursing through the flesh And flesh itself is magic dancing on a clock And time itself, the magic length of God
Add Santa Claus to your syncretism, with his big, joyous laugh more boisterous than Kamala Harris’s, and there you have it. Very silly, but “silly” was once selig, and meant both “holy” and “full of joy.”