Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World

SEVEN. Subjectivities: Meaning Making in the Changing South

c h a p t e r s e v e n Subjectivities Meaning Making in the Changing South subjective experience is the subject of this chapter, expressed in such areas as dreams, spiritualism, and the arts. How do such expressions reflect global influences? Does globalism penetrate only economics, politics, and public spheres, such as commemorations of race relations, institutional worship, and architecture and city planning? Or do global influences reach into private spheres, into the inner life, as in dreams and spiritual quests, and efforts at popular expression of experience, such as the arts? If so, how, in what forms and contexts? And how may subjective expressions enrich and shape global identities? These questions are at once revealing and difficult: revealing because only if the “far away” penetrates the “deep within” does it profoundly 156 Subjectivities 157 shape identity, and difficult because the “deep within” is hidden, expressed in symbols that must be interpreted. Here, I offer only the beginnings of such interpretation, enough, I hope, to capture emerging currents of experience and sketch some themes and trends suggested by a sampling of expressions. I begin with spirituality, then consider dreams, and finally turn to the arts and how they give popular—local or global—expression to inner concerns. Concluding, I explore the place of subjectivity itself in the emerging global identity of the South. Spirituality Robert Sardello and Cheryl Sanders, founders and codirectors of the School of Spiritual Psychology in Greensboro, North Carolina, lead a workshop of some fifty persons for the Triangle C. G. Jung Society, an organization devoted to the study of subjects related to the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. A majority of those attending are white women; one man is black, and several are white. Most of the people are middle-aged or older. They meet at Binkley Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, but the context is Jungian. Robert and Cheryl open the session with several questions and a statement : “How can you find your way through the collective consciousness of a materialistic fear-based culture without being oppositional or feeling like a victim? Where can you go for an anchor point? You go to the place of soul and spirit.” The group is asked how to get to that place. A woman remarks, “I go quiet, I am, but feel as in a battle zone.” Another woman adds, “Also the natural world is a catalyst, grounding me through my feet even more than my breath, even after seventeen years of meditation .” A man continues, “like water in a vessel, seeking balance by seeing both sides of it.” Joe, from Smithfield, a regular attendee of the Jungian meetings, remarks: “Sardello speaks of fear around us, as an autonomous entity, not confined to events. As Roosevelt said, we fear fear itself.” Robert asks what silence is like. A woman, a Quaker, says it is like taking a bath; it “differs when you are alone or in a group.” A man added 158 Meaning and Action that it was “as if the group puts fear on a shelf.” Joe said that he would hear an energy sound. The woman then added that silence was “a place from which I can attend, pay attention.” Cheryl instructs us to go mentally into our “homes,” be present to things that hold memory. Next Cheryl and Robert shift to finding silence by relation to the dead. Cheryl asserts, “The dead wait for us to remember them holistically.” A man (Tom, the younger one, seated next to the black man) asks, speaking in a country accent, “How can I separate demons from gods?” Cheryl replies that he should ask her angel to contact his angel . Robert tells of a patient whose uncle was successful. The man tried to emulate his uncle but failed at everything. He was fixated on a stuck piece of that uncle when he needed to remember the dead holistically. Robert stresses that we should try to see the dead from their viewpoint, not ours. He advises: “Cry for older people, that’s painful for them; cry for children, that’s soothing for them. God cried first.” (Dreams of the crippled, sick, or dead depict them as whole, as well, because the soul is whole.) Now Robert prompts an exercise: “Close your eyes and enter darkness .” Then he reflects, saying that this darkness is luminous, infinite yet intimate...