God-Smuggling as Revolutionary Act
…we can see crises of liberalism as… a slackening of …imaginative power.
–Blake Smith, Just Another Liberalism? Hedgehog Review(spring 2025)
Embattled liberals too often seem to respond to [intolerances of the right that are] extensions of imagination merely with scolding, petulance and fear-mongering, forgetting the utopian function that Foucault set alongside fear of the state as the essence of liberalism.
–Ibid.
[W]hat Emerson regarded as a defect was perhaps his essential virtue: his unwillingness to deny a truth because it was inconsistent in appearance or in logic with other equally reputable truths….[h]is originality and imperfection marked the embryonic expression of a new culture.
– Lewis Mumford, introduction, Essays & Journals, by Ralph Waldo Emerson(1968)
The discussion of Emerson’s essays with the book club that meets at The Other Side, left me dissatisfied, so I asked if the group could meet one more time on the same author. Admiration had been expressed, but talk had not gone deeper personally than the exchange of quotations. Which is to say, we were not getting at Emerson where he has to be met, inwardly, in questions of meaning and purpose that may seem out of place in a book club (which, I do realize, is not a Buddhist retreat.) When the book club leader agreed on a second, “extra-curricular” Emerson meeting, at first, uncertain what I was asking for, I was uneasy. Finally I realized what I wanted was, somewhat obscurely, a conversation among those in the group who’d already made some kind of commitment to the spirit that had drawn us together – that of the defunct Cafe Domenico – in its surviving descendent, the non-profit The Other Side.
What I needed, more than to hear from them, was to follow Emerson’s implications for myself. That is, twist and turn as I might, if I am to take inspiration from Emerson’s words, I must fulfill my end of the bargain! Weak visionary that I am, I must trust myself such that my way can be revealed to me. Moreover, there’s evidence that I’ve been evading this meet-up with “destiny.” In our non-profit space, of which I am co-founder, I have convened gatherings, semi-secretively, for over a decade, called – mysteriously – “Temenos talks.” In these I advocate for the soul, and, even more secretly, for God, the God to whom I share allegiance with Emerson. Is the secretiveness as necessary as I make it? I am kind of a wack job, there’s no denying it. But, on my behalf, I’m not a swindler or snake-oil salesperson. I put up a reasonably respectable appearance that is, possibly, a necessary disguise when one is, secretly, an alien. For many years, Orin served as my protector in the world; his blunt outspoken Italian earthiness helped me keep my true wackiness secret. That role has ended. The respectability the bricks & mortar Cafe lent me is gone. I’m on my own.
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I take the bull by the horns: Keenly aware, as I write in the category of the “spiritual,” that avoidance of the G-word is safest, instinct – or is it just contrariness? – tends me toward using that unsafe word, rather than “Light,” or “Spirit,”etc., at least here in the creative act of writing. My experience of a healing, restoring, succoring vibe, inclusive and freely available as air makes use of the word God justifiable, even if I limit it, as I tend to do, to my writing. Importantly, using God, instead of the lighter substitutes, brings with it the aspect of judgement, and therefore of a utopian politics, based in otherworldly obligation, which has become so easy for people on the secular left to throw out in the bathwater of belief.
The vibe, including its judgment, is supposed to be experienced in church; that is why people go, I presume. It cannot be felt just anyplace (outside of nature, that is); more tellingly, it isn’t spoken of in liberal society as if it were missed. (Rather, – good riddance!) This is so, I believe, because the fear of being judged runs deep in the liberal heart: it implies a deep pervasive sense of wrongness that makes God – including Emerson’s – a threat, in the way immigrants are a “threat” to national security. This universally observed silence suggests to me need, in liberal hearts, for the inverse of liberalism: a deeper, more demanding and strenuous self-examination that, traditionally, is in religion’s domain and which has as definite a worldview – and thus a politics – as Jesus’s or ML King’s or Gandhi’s or abolitionist John Brown’s.
For people to find this direction, in a society increasingly moving away from reading, solitude and self-knowledge, there need to be spaces friendly to the Vibe, in defiance of the liberal rule against judgment. Such a space existed in the now-defunct Cafe Domenico in Utica because we – Orin and I – made it intentionally, conscious of its anomalism, our coffeeshop a home-made shrine for the arts, full of images – of art and artists of all genres and of our own ancestors – complete with Orin-curated jazz “soundtrack.” We got away with smuggling God into mainstream society! I have testimonies to the fact the Cafe was a balm and an encouragement for creative, questing, curious and thoughtful souls, especially of young people.
Routinely, liberal society discourages contact with the Vibe, leaving people in a severely deprived mental state that’s no match – speaking psychologese – for the constant jockeying and battling for supremacy by ego that feeds off trauma in a toxic society that values profits over people. Conveniently, liberal society denies pervasive trauma, believing it happens, if at all, only to combat veterans and severely abused children. Minds thus left unbearably divided, have no haven except the reassuring arms of neoliberalism. Emphatically, the Vibe cannot enter minds/bodies already occupied by liberal intolerance for the real existence of imagination. Hence the “slackening” historian Blake Smith refers to. Having lost its “utopian function” – that is, its politics – liberals lost the protection of imagination against the usurpments of ego; liberalism could become neoliberalism, and neoliberalism, fully predictably, extruded Trump.
Though I owe a debt of gratitude to liberal tradition for the mental freedom I prize, the greater responsibility I feel is to make it possible for myself and others to see beyond the intolerance that makes liberalism hypocritical and conformist. Incapable of allegiance to the utopian dream, liberals cannot escape the flattening confines of neoliberalism unless/until people find imagination’s door. The challenge now for awakened imagination goes beyond keeping the emotional balance Foucault saw as necessary to liberalism, between a sufficient and peaceful private life and fear of state power. Imaginations now must in themselves hold the equilibrium, the oppositions and contrarieties, the light and the dark, God and Devil, existing in the soul.
Powerful imagination, after all, is available to every person in the natural state. Religion, until relatively recently, engaged nearly everyone to some degree or other; peoples’ imaginations are what gave to its preposterous, irrational notions life and energy, making them real. The science of psychology assures us the source of this imaginative power, the Unconscious – poetically, the soul – is real. But the reality cannot be known on authority either of religion or of science. It comes from direct experience, the soul whose existence, in its fuller imagination-expanded sense, is neither corroborated in the social environment nor supported, in its true condition of alienation, in churches.
Moreover, where its otherness is first inchoately perceived is in our fear of it: souls contain a darkness more fearful, because both intimate and invisible, than the power of the state. State power and its potential for abuse in the world is undeniably real. As well, like all of objective reality, it exists as metaphor in imagination. As metaphor, state tyranny stands in for the more primordial, close up and personal object of terror – the soul. Denied and outcast in secular reality, the alienated soul evokes fear that manifests in fear of (tyrannical) authority (or, for some, of immigrants and darker people). At the same time, as deepest fear remains unconscious, liberal positivity – its reassurance and light – is irresistible.
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Every age produces extra-religious geniuses – poets, artists, mystics, saints, prophets and madmen who acquainted themselves – some courageously, some as if they were unaware of a choice – with the other within, stirring peoples’ imaginations to the point where we believed those visionaries; we believed in them, formed cults of worship around them culminating in museums and university libraries. Missing has been the last step (or is it the first?) in reclaiming imagination’s power – the Emersonian one – that is, taking upon oneself the direct relationship with the soul, the role of the visionary. Doing so, speaking from experience, one discovers meanings in a host of words that one had assumed one knew the meaning of, such as God – and including peace, justice, interdependence, now understood as morally compelling, compelled not by tyranny but by love.
To see the need for fundamental social change not (alone) because one has been stirred by the words of an identifiable prophet or genius, Jesus or Marx, Martin Luther King or Emerson – but because one’s soul can settle for nothing less than the utopian ideal – makes art the fundamental, liberating revolutionary act, for art-making directly connects with the creative soul. Practiced intentionally, it brings acquaintance with the soul’s most intimate darkness, that is, its trauma. Painfully coming to know the trauma that through no fault of one’s own has kept one from the delight of imaginative knowing, provides an additional gift: it gives the lie to reassuring, dogmatic liberal optimism. The reality of unintended evil is outed.
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Emerson so decisively articulated the necessary “soul revolution” that 175 years later, it’s as if he’d foreseen the no exit from neoliberal totality, except via alive imagination. The first step in the revolution is the one Emerson advocated: solitude and self-reflection, such as the retreat on Walden Pond made famous by his friend Thoreau. Emerson retreated to his writing, the medium his soul used for its expression. But there’s no completion of this “revolution;” it insists on movement; it seeks – or did in my case – unmediated spaces (sanctuaries?) wherein the vibe can reach people (some ready and some not), which are then up to the visionaries to build. This is the second step.
My experience with our Cafe taught me this: making a “breathing space” for imagination that is not revolutionary, that’s “apolitical” is not possible. Every jazz space, every art space, every “Cafe” where “community” is encouraged is inherently a traitor to neoliberal reality. When people are unconscious that they are making a political stand, trying to keep art respectable and funding-worthy, the convivial coffeeshop in line with conventional business ‘wisdom,’ they risk obstructing the vibe and the (non-violent) revolution that is called for in the soul that is bypassed, scorned, and discounted – nonexistent – in soulless liberal reality.
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What we (The Other Side) are at this point is, somewhat vaguely for my taste, an “arts space,” but I think each one of us knows in his/her heart that we are more than just this. Though we have much in common with the other galleries and art spaces existing on the fringes of Queen Munson, we are not just like them. And although many of our programs and exhibitions do not signal anything beyond that they are acceptable – laudable, even – we are more than the sum of our programs. In a time when one has little evidence that other people are thinking (genuine thinking being always outside the box!) we have more to say than can be said in or through our programs.
The fact the arts are not spoken of as anomalous, in the way I do, the effort to make the arts respectable, is due to people (I speak of white, educated, middle class liberals like myself) no longer able to discern neoliberalism’s tearing, gnashing teeth. Or they do see its evil but in a fragmentary way, their seeing always checkered by the need for corroboration/recognition from society. Shocked by the arrival of Trump, and the unwanted glimpse of the apocalypse he’s sign of, they fail to see his ascendancy as inevitable given the moral/imaginative vacuum in liberal society. By now we can see the society in which “all is permitted” is as repressive as the old patriarchal rules for sexual behaviors and gender identities, only in a different way. Restoration of order now has to be bottom up, beginning in individual act, in solitude, creatively.
The moral demands on each of us for the world that should be in terms of how people treat each other and the earth and what obligation we have to that vision are real. The shallow basis for liberal identity masking the underlying and destructive belief in personal worthlessness, propagated in the ego, protected by liberal fear of judgment, transferred to “God” of which people largely are ignorant, leaves no redemption except success on liberalism’s market-determined terms. Though the confidence affluence gives does not actually convince the heart, hence all the compulsions, addictions, insatiable travel and near-total conformity, it serves to keep neoliberalism’s dehumanizing order going. The God “problem,” never God’s but ours, is lack of need. No matter how bad things get, liberal reality buoys its believers; those who can say the answer is “Vote for Democrats!” never have hit bottom.
Inasmuch as I’d wish it otherwise, my belief – because it is conscious, and inasmuch as it is – is the basis for the different space The Other Side is. I submit the arts, speaking morally, ought to be practiced with awareness of the source, that one is engaged in “God-smuggling,” whether or not one speaks of it socially. Given the awesome god-like power to create, to attribute it to luck, or one’s teachers, or “I was just born to be an artist,” making exceptions of the gifted, is tyrannical belief – Emerson’s idea, not mine! That most of us, not among the lucky, will only be able to discover our creative power through the portal opened in the facing of personal trauma, is not the worst fate. Discovering, at cost of painful truth, that gift was given to me I then can know it was given to everyone; therein is ground for judgment against liberalism’s lie and the cause for which to do the Sisyphean work of keeping a space sacred for people the vast majority of whom aren’t in need.
*Kim C. Domenico, reside in Utica, New York, co-owner of Cafe Domenico (a coffee shop and community space), and administrator of the small nonprofit independent art space, The Other Side. Seminary trained and ordained, but independently religious. She can be reached at: [email protected].
Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/06/god-smuggling-as-revolutionary-act/