Meditation at Lagunitas

By Amelia Klein

In the not-too-distant past, people’s sense of belonging was intimately bound to place. One belonged somewhere, and to be displaced from that place was to court ruin. Industrialization changed all that, for better or for worse. Wordsworth is the English poet who most thoroughly charts the disintegration of an older (idealized) order, in which one’s ties to the land strengthened one’s ties to other people. In one of his longer lyrics, Michael, the Michael of the title, a shepherd, is wedded to the land he works:

Those fields, those hills—what could they less? had laid

Strong hold on his affections, were to him

A pleasurable feeling of blind love,

The pleasure which there is in life itself.

Michael hopes to bequeath that feeling to his son, but it doesn’t quite work out that way. The winds of change carry his child afar.

I grew up in Brooklyn, a child of second and third generation immigrants. And although, as a child, I used to imagine that I lived inside a particular mountain in the Athabasca River Valley, I’m not sure that it’s ever occurred to me to ask where I belong. I’ve never really believed that there is a place awaiting my arrival, as a homecoming.

Not places but people have always defined home for me. As far back as I can remember, I was always of a mindset similar to that conveyed by the lyrics of that Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros song: “Home is wherever I’m with you.” Or the Talking Heads song, “This Must Be the Place,” in which This gestures towards both the vagary and the specificity of home. “You’ve got a face with a view,” sings David Byrne, and that view, that face – your view and your face – are what makes this place the place.

Belonging to someone, or to others, then, as the criterion for belonging. Wherever someone we love is, there we belong. Home, then, is wherever you are together. An ancient, nomadic principle – older, perhaps, than the idea of belonging to or in a place – however attenuated it has become in our modern age: today it’s not the whole tribe that stays together, but only you and your chosen companion, and perhaps your children (until they, too, grow up and depart). Together you effectuate home wherever you may land.

It’s not hard to see that this conception of belonging is, on the one hand, a kind of freedom. I’ve got no strings on me!—as a recent ad for wireless headphones joyfully exclaims. And yet, in the modern world, it also lends itself quite readily to the kind of radical self-centeredness epitomized by Milton’s Satan, who declares that “The mind is its own place, and in it self, / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” Not coincidentally, this (for Milton, of course, fatally mistaken) version of absolute imaginative freedom is also – in its full consonancy with the mechanisms of global capital, which fashion each of us as mobile, fluid, atomized entities – a form of subjugation. Transformation, adaptability, and autonomy may be individualistic ideals, but they are also corporate ones. We are today, all of us, human capital, cogs in the wheel, commodities encouraged to believe that our commoditization proceeds in tandem with our self-actualization.

We witness this ambiguity in the contradictory ways diaspora is represented in contemporary art and discourse: in some places, in field reports of refugee camps, for example, we encounter diaspora in all its violence and cruelty; elsewhere, however, we encounter it as giddy fantasy, part of the neoliberal myth that we are free to pursue our ambitions to the edges of the earth, leaving behind the people and places dearest to us in our efforts to “realize” our true “potential.” Some of us are even willing to leave the earth itself behind: consider the flood of applicants eager to be shot into space to live the rest of their lives on Mars, never to return. (These would-be cosmonauts might do well to remember the caution offered by Robert Frost’s “Birches”: “Earth’s the right place for love. / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”)

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Migration, by choice or by force, or by some subtle amalgam of the two, is by now a central aspect of the modern human condition.  Depending upon who and where in the world we are, how disempowered or how privileged, the deracinating pressures of globalization may appear either to open a vista of endless possibilities, or to be unambiguously destructive. But whether we embrace this state of flux, or experience it as an affliction—or do both by turns—it is profoundly disorienting.

Beneath the first world’s celebration of rootlessness as an expression of personal and imaginative freedom (which it may or may not be; it is certainly an expression of capitalist imperatives), there is a deep and often unspoken uneasiness. One way we attempt to compensate for, rather than confront, our disorientation – which stems, essentially, from our uncertainty as to where, if anywhere, or to whom, we belong, or if perhaps we may not in fact belong anywhere or to anyone after all – is by accumulating belongings. As if the weight of things could hold us down, provide a center of gravity for a life otherwise caught in the vicissitudes of fortune, the up- and downdrafts of the market.

Another way we grapple with disorientation is via fantasies of some simpler past in which kin stayed put, and strangers stayed out. This is nothing new; there are plenty of historical instances of this kind of nostalgic “blood and soil” tribalism. [This piece was already mostly written when neo-Nazis demonstrating on the campus of the University of Virginia actually chanted the very phrase “blood and soil,” to mine and any thinking person’s horror.] Heidegger’s notions of dwelling are often filed under this heading, and while the nuances of his thinking exceed such an interpretation, it’s fair to say that he provides ample fodder for those who wish to imagine dwelling as a kind of cozy, xenophobic proprietorship. It’s not just who lives in the Shire that matters, but who doesn’t.

While there is always an element of farce to such fantasies (which, of course, doesn’t prevent them from becoming fatal), the present moment of American politics has really outdone itself in this respect. To follow the news today is to stand aghast at the sight of the “silent majority” – disenfranchised several times over by industrialization and its disintegration – exalting in base nationalism and a xenophobia of brutally transparent scapegoating, all in pursuit of the subjugation and suppression of the most underprivileged among us. Rather than turning a critical eye on those who do own the means of production—as Bernie Sanders urged Americans to do—a significant portion of this constituency has chosen to buy into the idea that others – specifically those with the least social, political, and economic “capital” – are instead to blame for the current state of affairs.

And as a backdrop of all of this: the myth of the heterogenous, clean past—a homecoming of sorts into a white supremacist utopia equated with, of all things, the Greatness of America.

In this reactionary notion of belonging – a belonging suffused with origin myths, of purity and precedence and the right to lay claim to a plot of ground, a nation – we encounter the idea of belonging conceived of as a method of exclusion: to belong is to exclude others from belonging. (It is perhaps of the nature of belonging, as a word, that it confounds the idea of being in the right place with the idea of ownership—which in turn implies that somebody else does not belong, that this place isn’t theirs.)

It seems paradoxical, and not a little tragic, that a nation founded by immigrants and initially framed in accordance with the principals of the Enlightenment—a nation whose founding charters embraced free inquiry, celebrated rational thought, and provided, at least theoretically, a framework for fundamental, universal human rights—should find itself in the grip of the blistering xenophobia and rabid anti-intellectualism that our current president embodies, and that inform the central tenets of the conservativism of this moment in American history. Tragic and paradoxical it is, but certainly not surprising. After all, didn’t the Enlightenment promise to put everything in its right place, to create a just and fully rational society? History has exploded that dream. Nightmares and terror flourish in its aftermath.

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Psychologists tell us that we cannot do without a sense of belonging, that without it we cannot feel happy or fulfilled. But there are some senses of belonging I believe we ought to do without, however comforting they may be, because they traffic in falsehoods, in prejudice, in paranoia. Others, more difficult, less comforting, we desperately need.

Class consciousness is now, as it was when Marx first called for it, the enemy of the status quo. “The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights,” writes historian Tim Snyder. The biggest wallet will pay any amount of money, and resort to the most deplorable of tactics, to prevent class consciousness from coming into being. The biggest wallet also has a vested interest in promoting bad ideas about belonging—ideas that fracture and inflame societies along, for instance, racial and religious lines—precisely because the biggest wallet doesn’t want anyone to notice how much it possesses, how much continues to be quietly stuffed into it, while we fight amongst ourselves for scraps.

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow gives us a searing illustration of just this, showing how, ever since abolition, rich whites have quite deliberately sewn division between poor whites and blacks, ostensibly natural allies in the fight against an exploitive system. As Alexander shows, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, in the late nineteenth century, a nascent populist movement was structuring common cause across racial lines. That movement was stopped in its tracks by politicians who played to prejudices of poor whites, encouraging them to see black people as their inferiors, even their enemies. Sound familiar?

Class consciousness is one version of belonging that might help us to effect real change. For it is precisely when people begin truly to see themselves as part of an economic group that cuts across differences and has a common interest in resisting the rapaciousness of the ruling class, that we become a force to be reckoned with, and a sea change might actually transform the face of society. I might even have to give up some comforts of my own.

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Meanwhile, a literal sea change is occurring. Ocean temperatures are rising. Plankton, upon which the entire ecology of our oceans – and thus, in a very real sense, on which all life on earth – depends, are dying off. It is hard for human beings to see their own lives as implicated in the fate of such a tiny, foreign organism (did you know this already? Am I boring you?). But nothing will remain untouched by the consequences of such silent disappearances. Better—nothing is untouched. Our world and our lives are already transformed in ways imperceptible to most of us, though to be sure becoming increasingly apparent by the day. We are, as Timothy Morton writes, enmeshed, all of us tangled together in uncanny intimacy with things that are not ourselves, indeed are utterly unlike us. The fate of these unknowable others is materially bound up with our own.

Now, here is another idea of belonging, one that has nothing to do with tribe, one yet more encompassing than class or even species, though having in common with class consciousness a clear-eyed attention to who controls and disposes of material resources. Here is an idea of planetary belonging, a way of imagining and feeling ourselves not idly but vitally and irrevocably bound up with all kinds of others.

What might it mean to live each moment with an acute sense of belonging to the earth? Such a sense of belonging must involve acknowledging one’s intimate proximity to living relatives from whom we have departed to lesser, and greater, degrees over the aeons. It must involve a setting aside of all of our cozy notions of belonging, and the taking on of an awareness of ourselves as interpellated, crossed through, by others on whom our lives depend.

At the end of Wordsworth’s Michael, Michael’s son has died an ignominious death, and when his wife, Isabel dies, the estate “went into a stranger’s hand.”

—yet the oak is left

That grew beside their door; and the remains

Of the unfinished Sheepfold may be seen

Beside the boisterous brook of Greenhead Ghyll.

Wordsworth might have left off by mourning the loss of an older, simpler, patriarchy, but instead he contextualizes human effort and ambition within something larger and (perhaps) more durable. The incomplete sheepfold isn’t so much a tragic symbol as it is an admission of the limitations of human powers, and their dependence upon the nonhuman (the oak, the brook), the pleasure which there is in life itself, even if that life goes on without us. We might all do well to remember what Jorie Graham reminds us of: “the sounds the planet will always make, even if there is no one to hear them”.

First published in MAKE 17—Belonging, March 16, 2018. Image courtesy of the issue’s graphic designer, Joshua Hauth.