The Beloved Republic

Table of Contents

Introduction

A Whole Life

I. The Beloved Republic

The Beloved Republic

The Other Steve Harvey

Madre Luz

One Boy’s Luminous Skin

The Arc of the Universe

Eclipsing the Brand

Gatherin’ Around J. P. Fraley

The Political Personal Essay

A Laying on of Hands

II. Blood Mountain

Blood Mountain

Orphaned Souls

The Razor Blade

Living Midnight

Ya Mismo

The Book of Knowledge

A Vow of Poverty

Kindly Dark

Gratitude

Acknowledgments

About the Author

A Whole Life

The beech tree rising in our bow window finds its own shape without any help from me. It is a gift from my friend, the artist and naturalist Dale Cochran, who walked the woods with me before I built my house spotting which trees to keep. Definitely that one, he said pointing to the healthy beech sapling with a split trunk, each one about as wide as my arm, that I have watched bulk up mightily over the years. He was right. In the summer it sprouts lovely, light-green leaves that turn coppery in the winter and rattle in the wind, and the bark is a smooth gray with scars that mark any blow it has taken. The word book can be traced back to beech tablets where the ancients carved sacred texts in runes, and in German and other modern European languages the word for book and beech are the same. As I wrote the essays that eventually filled the collection called The Beloved Republic, the tree inspired me.

The Beloved Republic began as separate essays that over a quarter century of writing became a book. While I worked on it, I raised four children and enjoyed five grandchildren with one more on the way, taught at one college, played in one musical group with whom I still perform, and lived with my wife in this house where I have spent nearly half of my life. The book had no predetermined focus. While I wrote it, I became who I am, and it tagged along, and in the shadow of the tree that looms overheard, I slowly discovered what it was about. The essay as a form began in this desultory way, as a loose collection on random subjects that Michel de Montaigne called essais, the French word for attempts. Some of the finest collections in the past likewise grew organically out of the author’s life finding their shape over time. Many, like mine, began as magazine pieces and later, almost as an afterthought, were collected in books. This kind of nonfiction miscellany has fallen out of fashion, I fear. Contemporary readers and publishers apparently prefer a focused book that drives home one idea, predetermined or discovered early by the writer. These focused collections take the shape that the author consciously gives them in advance. Thoreau’s Walden with its theme of living deliberately boldly announced in its first essay is an example.

What I admire about the miscellany is that it is held together not by a vision, discovered early and pursued single-mindedly, but by a whole life. As essayists put together such collections written over decades, they do not explore a concept or a set of related concepts; rather, they reveal who they are, and, perhaps, why they are here. Like the beech, they grow into themselves over time. It is not easy for the reader who has to begin anew with each essay and in this the miscellany is much like a book of poems, meant to be read slowly, but as in poetry, the rewards can be great as reader joins writer on a quest to discover willy-nilly what one life is about. There is an intimacy in this method, a sense that the parts are cherished, glowing by their own light without ulterior motive.

But if the writer is lucky, the sum is greater than its parts, and a vision, as well as a life, can emerge, and that is what happened for me in my book. The glue, the ultimately unifying discovery of The Beloved Republic, is the old idea that creativity is valuable in itself, a view that goes in and out of favor. In an age when the planet and its people face unthinkable, unspeakable horrors, the need for social relevance is obvious, but as I wrote, I discovered that art generates meaning and offers beauty to a troubled planet, and in its very freshness, is profoundly spiritual and political. It generally brings out the best in us and helps us weather evil. Those who do this work form the Beloved Republic, a phrase E. M. Forster coined for the peaceful and fragile confederacy of kind, benevolent, and creative people in a world of tyrants, thugs, and loud-mouthed bullies. They form an invincible army of losers in the service of love. My book slowly opening in surprises over decades can be read as dispatches from this beleaguered land. It grew into the idea and, like the beech, took its own, sweet time.

I. The Beloved Republic

So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. Only Love, the Beloved Republic, deserves that… Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos…. Their temple, as one of them remarked, is the holiness of the Heart's affections, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.

—E. M. Forster, What I Believe

The Beloved Republic

In the shade of the Orchid Pavilion on KuiJi Mountain, Wang Xizhi and guests gathered to purge evil from their lives. More than sixteen hundred years ago, young and old partied against a backdrop of upland ridges, steep peaks, abundant forests, and groves of towering bamboo. Clear creeks glittered, rippling past the pavilion, the winding streams carrying candlelit cups of wine to those who lined the bank. When a cup arrived, the guest who drank from it composed a poem on the spot. Even without pipes or pipa to play, the poets were happy sharing wine at creekside, content to find words to match their feelings.

Wang Xizhi, the most famous calligrapher of all time, wrote his Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion that day while drinking wine himself, using his distinctive running script, the brush never leaving the page as he shaped each character with lines looping playfully or darkening by turns. When he thought about someone in the future writing about him and his friends long dead, the brush slipped so he blotted out the mistake, an error prized for its sincerity. Forming the characters bei fu for the bereaved he turned maudlin at the thought of all those loved ones long gone and stained the rice paper with his heavy stroke. Later he copied the Preface while sober but was unable to reproduce lines with the original emotions of that day centuries ago when the sky above the Orchid Pavilion was bright, the air clear, and a chance breeze delighted him and his guests. With a bountiful earth spread before them, the tipsy poets gazed into an expanding universe giddy, the outer world mirroring their joy. Cheeks flush with wine, they composed in a rush seeking words worthy of a day spent beside the rippling border of the Beloved Republic.

~  ~  ~

The Beloved Republic is the peaceful and fragile confederacy of kind, benevolent, and creative people that is necessary for civilized life in a world of tyrants, thugs, and loud-mouth bullies. During the darkest times, it sheds light and keeps us civil. Though the Beloved Republic has always been with us, E. M. Forster named and defined it in the essay What I Believe in 1939 when it was most under threat, putting his faith in the natural warmth of its happy and mutual reliability during the worst of times. Tolerance, good temper, and sympathy are its traits which, as Nazi Germany loomed, were no stronger than a flower, battered beneath a military jackboot, an image fast becoming a cliché for the hobnailed crunch of German conquest and occupation. In a radio address before the war started, Forster explained that thousands and thousands of innocent people had been killed, robbed, mutilated, insulted, and imprisoned. Millions more would follow. News reports of book burnings at the University of Berlin and the mass deportation of Jews prefigured the Age of Bloodshed that Hitler’s fanaticism would bring to Europe and the world. Against this backdrop of atrocity Forster argued for the existence, and persistence, of the Beloved Republic.

I don’t remember the first time I read What I Believe, but I do know the time that it brought the most comfort to me. It was after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. I had entered election night, like almost everyone, expecting a victory for common sense. We had long ago given up buying champagne after Al Gore’s loss in 2000 when a bottle of it went bad after eight years of waiting, but we were anticipating popcorn for sure. Then around 10:30 Trump won Ohio and the calls from my kids started rolling in, each beginning with an identical Dad?! I use the interrobang to indicate the mixture of incredulity and indignation in their voices. It came across over the phone like an accusation: Everything you ever taught us about America is coming apart, Dad. While I was reassuring them that it was still early and we had the blue firewall in the upper Midwest, Trump went on a roll: North Carolina, Utah, Iowa. I particularly remember telling my angry and hurt daughter Alice not to worry. We still had Pennsylvania which the Republicans almost never win. Then, a little after 1:35, Trump won Pennsylvania, and was ahead in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona.

I went to bed defeated and a little terrified, and when I woke the next morning Trump had won. The country had elected an authoritarian who modeled himself after Vladimir Putin to be President of the United States. A day or two later, still feeling vanquished and vulnerable—dazed, really—I looked up Two Cheers for Democracy and turned to What I Believe.

Forster claims that the Beloved Republic can be found everywhere, its citizens easily recognizable. They are not heroes or saviors or politicians who exude iron will, personal magnetism, dash, flair, and sexlessness. It does not consist of special people, but of ordinary folks with a creative, rather than destructive, bent. Forster describes this band of true friends this way: Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. Yes, I thought nodding in recognition. These people, he writes, amplifying on the idea, are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke. I thought about the inability of the President-in-waiting to take a joke, and knew that Forster had predicted it all, and then he offered a paradox that is both terrifying and comforting in its simple truth: The Beloved Republic make up an invincible army, yet not a victorious one.

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This invincible army of losers in the service of art, love, and friendship was famously on display on August 28 in 1963 during the March on Washington. The event is remembered for the I Have a Dream speech, but as one New Yorker writer put it, the music of the march became the dream songs of the Civil Rights era, and in them the Beloved Republic was reborn. Mahalia Jackson, wearing a flowered bonnet belted out How I Got Over accompanied by the rolling chords of a church organ. Marian Anderson, introduced The Whole World in His Hands in a soft-spoken manner, but her schoolmarm voice turned thunderous when she opened the lower registers to sing, drowning out the sirens of D.C. squealing in the background. Bob Dylan rasped When the Ship Comes In while Joan Baez supplied some background harmony. I’m on My Way, sang Odetta, her voice rising from a kind of rumble beneath the stage skyward like a cry for freedom, and The Freedom Singers rocked the park with the hymn, I Want My Freedom Now. Peter, Paul and Mary introduced Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind and Pete Seeger’s If I Had a Hammer to the world. An iconic photo of the group from the back shows Mary in white heels and a plain dress flanked by her bearded guitarists in tie and jacket standing before a crowd that stretches beyond the Washington Monument.

But the song that came to symbolize the racial harmony of that march and demonstrated, as Harry Belafonte put it, that freedom and justice are universal concerns of import to responsible people of all colors, was Joan Baez leading the crowd in We Shall Overcome. Only twenty-two at the time, she stood alone at the podium in her plaid skirt playing guitar and looking tiny before the throng, but her voice was magnificently commanding, a bell-like peal into the heat of a summer day. The best video of her performance is a partial version of the song in which she does not appear at all. It begins with crowd noise as marchers, black and white, stream onto The Mall, but quickly cuts to the fifth stanza at the line we are not afraid. The camera zooms out and we get a better sense of the size of the crowd, the screen filled to the edges with milling bodies. When it cuts back to close-ups of small groups, the power of the music to move and unite people becomes palpable. In one frame, a white man with a crew cut and wearing a white shirt stands with several young black men in suits and ties and a young black woman with a ribbon in her hair all singing together. The camera scans forward, each frame containing ten or eleven faces, some in the crowd fanning themselves with flyers to beat back the heat, and every person sings along.

There is majesty in We Shall Overcome that can be heard only when it is sung by a group—and the more voices, the greater the impact—so it is in the voices of the crowd that the measure of the moment comes clear. This power reaches full expression in each chorus when the voices rise on the phrase oh, oh deep, the harmonies opening on the high-pitched long e sound, before falling slowly on the words in my heart. This movement through the harmonic possibilities of a single, mighty chord gives a large gathering of voices room to swell and die together, and at this point in the last chorus in the video, the camera cuts to an engraving at the Lincoln Memorial that begins in this temple as in the hearts of the people before the lens descends to the statue of Lincoln himself gazing on the gathering. When the song ends on a few strummed chords, the camera returns to the Washington Monument where the Beloved Republic has been called to order once again.

~  ~  ~

The Beloved Republic wields one weapon: creativity. The people I admire, Forster wrote, want to create or discover something. For them, life is not a power grab and certainly not the art of the deal. Instead, they found religions, great or small, or they produce literature and art, or they do disinterested scientific research. Their creativity may express itself in more ordinary ways like helping others or raising and educating children to be decent human beings. They band together into creative groups such as E. M. Forster’s circle of friends at Bloomsbury, the youth mourning for Socrates in the Apology, the soirées of scientists meeting at the London home of Joseph Banks, the troubadour poets huddled in fear at Montségur before the advance of murderous crusaders, and the rowdy gang in the Chelsea Hotel in New York. They sing as one in the shadow of the Washington monument and gather at the Orchid Pavilion in ancient China.

Working in mysterious ways, creativity performs wonders. Wang Xizhi studied the sinuous movement in the necks of geese in flight to learn his calligraphic art, a style which he mastered and transformed, and over time he became a figure of legend. In one story he brushed a dot on his stomach every day, thus creating the belly button. In another he turned a pool near the pavilion black from cleaning his brush. A Taoist eager to own one of Wang Xizhi’s works of calligraphy and knowing the master’s affection for geese, raised a flock of them which he exchanged for a copy of the Huang Jing Ting, a famous Taoist meditation, considered the second-finest calligraphic work ever produced, after the Orchid Pavilion Preface, of course.

What Wang Xizhi learned from the geese was a flexibility of wrist movement that allowed the lines of his characters to catch the emotion of the moment as his hand moved down the page. The style requires fluidity and grace, more like the movement of a musician’s hands than a Western painter’s, to achieve the serenity necessary for the art, and as in music a single wrong note or misplaced gesture, can ruin the piece, but also as in music, improvising according to moods is prized, and lines, like blue notes, that move out of the fixed shape can be woven into the larger pattern in a way that only adds to the beauty. It is through this paradoxical mixture of daring and grace that Wang Xizhi was able to draw upon the beauty of his surroundings, the joy of those assembled there, and his own inebriation to create The Orchid Pavilion Preface.

The power of such art is ineffable, and when artists and innovative thinkers form a group, they create a heady mix of contraries marked by a fresh way of seeing things. The actual moments of discovery and creativity may have a serene intensity about them like the silence of a long-legged fly upon the stream, a phrase that the poet William Butler Yeats uses to describe moments of artistic creation and intellectual insight, but the artists themselves are not always serene. Spontaneity, intellectual playfulness, and improvisation born of a generosity of spirit are hallmarks of the Beloved Republic, and many of the artists who wander into this happy congress like a party. Often friendship, aided by intoxicants of various kinds, heats into love or ends in acrimony that frays the edges of the Republic’s banner, and ultimately all these various expressions of it come to an end, but the movement itself never goes away and is an on-going affront to the powerful who hope to control or destroy it.

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Like all that is beautiful the individual creations of the Beloved Republic are vulnerable to destruction. Once the creative spark is kindled, artists gather around the flame to protect, spread, and transform it. They give concerts and readings, refer to each other’s works, publish or show or