An Inheritance of Light
By Niall Twohig
Intro
This collection builds thematically upon the last. What becomes clearer here is the shape of the Monster and the shape of what escapes Its grasp. Let me first trace their outlines as a way of guiding you into the easy essays that follow.
Shape of the Monster
There is a dark force for destruction within us, which someone has called the ‘death instinct.’ It is a terribly powerful thing, this force generated by our own frustrated self-love battling with itself. It is the power of a self-love that has turned into self-hatred and which, in adoring itself, adores the monster by which it is consumed.
- Thomas Merton
The enemies of man are not man himself. The enemies are intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred and discrimination which lie within the heart of man.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I take, as a given, that a Monster lurks behind our suffering. Behind poverty, warfare, ecological crisis. Behind our feelings of self-loathing, loneliness, and hate. This monster is cunning. It hides in shadows. It compels us to blame ourselves or others for the pain It inflicts, the traumas It leaves behind.
We must be careful when naming that Monster. It’s not enough to call It capitalism, the elite, the Deep State. These are but symptoms of an older malevolence in man. A death instinct, as Thomas Merton says. Bad seeds, as Thich Nhat Hanh says. A Shadow within man that becomes more than man himself. A shadow that extends beyond him, looming larger generation by generation.
In our time, this shadow has congealed into a monstrous system rooted in, and guided by, man’s worst tendencies: a hubristic economy that functions so that a few false gods amass obscene wealth through mass suffering, institutions that value cold algorithmic efficiency over human warmth, a war machine that puts man’s most violent instinct – the death instinct – into constant horrific action.
This Monster, Dr. King reminds us, has three heads: racism, extreme materialism, and militarism. Giant triplets, King calls them. Elsewhere, he describes these “three evils” in terms of sickness: as plagues unleashed. But I see fire. Fire spewing from the Monster’s three heads, raining down upon the “shirtless and barefoot people of the world.” The poor, those in ghettos, sweatshops, war zones, open-air prisons. They are exposed to fire, but none of us are free of the Monster that unleashes it. We are all in its grip. And that grip is powerful. It threatens to crush some of our bodies but all of our souls.
It's important to remember that this Monster has not always been this powerful. “We are born into a period of backlash,” I tell students. And what came before the backlash? A time when movements stood against this Monster, a time when they moved against Its deathly force with another force. A force of Love. A Soul force. But the Monster had a response made clear in the assassinations of President Kennedy, Dr. King, and others who embodied that force. Those acts sealed, in blood, the fact that the Monster allows reforms but will not tolerate that which threatens Its existence. When threatened, It simply erases the revolutionary, as one might swat a fly, while incorporating their demands in reforms rolled back by a pen stroke.
Here we are: 2023 going on ’24. Far from the revolutionary movements, we find ourselves caught in the Monster’s centripetal force, in Its thing-orientation. We feel it pushing us apart from each other, propelling us forward in a race for crumbs, pulling us away from that which gives us life, pushing us towards a receding horizon of Success, bending and breaking us with constant work, shaking us with unnatural crises, weighing us with unspeakable grief. Such widespread feelings are signs that the Monster has us. Like Charybdis, the beastly whirlpool from The Odyssey, the Monster sucks us downward into abyss and ruin. The proof of this lies in the generations drowned by these forces. It lies in all those drowning around us. “My parents sacrificed so much for me to be here,” students tell me, often through tears. “I’ll make sacrifices so that my kids end up in a better place than me.” But when do the sacrifices end? And who is the true beneficiary of our sacrifice: us, spiraling downward or the Monster that sucks us in and feeds on our ruin?
Shape of That Which Escapes
The shape of that which escapes the Monster can be seen in the shape of a fallen leaf. Let me share a passage that taught me this. It’s written by the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh. As you read, imagine the exiled monk seated peacefully under a tree in the French countryside during the autumn of 1968. Several thousand miles from his seat, his Motherland, Vietnam, is drowned in the Monster’s “sea of fire.” For now, his awareness moves to a single leaf.
I asked the leaf whether it was frightened because it was autumn, and the other leaves were falling.
The leaf told me, ‘No. During the whole spring and summer I was completely alive. I worked hard to help nourish the tree, and now much of me is in the tree. I am not limited by this form. I am also the whole tree, and when I go back to the soil, I will continue to nourish the tree. So, I don’t worry at all. As I leave this branch and float to the ground, I will wave to the tree and tell her, ‘I will see you again very soon.’
That day there was a wind blowing and, after a while, I saw the leaf leave the branch and float down to the soil, dancing joyfully, because as it floated it saw itself already there in the tree. It was so happy. I bowed my head, knowing that I have a lot to learn from the leaf.
How many of Nhat Hanh’s Vietnamese brothers and sisters, peace-workers, had fallen by 1968? Yet his lineage had given him eyes to see that the fall is never the end. Eyes to see that the leaf continues in other forms. Its non-leaf elements flow back to earth and tree. Likewise for his fallen friends: their elements continue beyond the destruction of their physical form. Just as the nourishing elements of a leaf go back to the tree, so too for the nourishing elements of the non-violent revolutionary.
The key element cultivated by such a revolutionary is Love, a Soul Force, gathered like the life-giving light absorbed by the leaf. When the body of the revolutionary dies this element goes back to the people, back to those who continue the lineage. It nourishes and innervates them. Nhat Hanh describes this more directly when he writes of one who fell that same year:
They thought they could reduce Martin Luther King into nothing, but they are wrong, because he continues to be with us, in other forms. His energies can be felt, can be touched today. And we are his continuation. Therefore, the true nature of King, like that of the leaf, is the nature of no birth and no death.
I read this quote to students at the end of each quarter. I remind them that we learned about Dr. King and the Freedom Summer, not as a history lesson, but as a way of feeling the energies that those in the movement embodied. A way of feeling Agápē. Feeling Soul Force. Feeling the Wholeness denied us by a monstrous system that sets us apart from each other, from Nature, from our own inner being and conscience.
So much of life, as shaped by the Monster, denies us the very ability to feel. Its crises and convulsions weary and numb us. It shrouds us in a fog of anxiety punctured only by artificially stimulated dopamine bursts. How redemptive it is, then, to feel what Dr. King describes here, to feel that
we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. [To feel that] whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. [To feel that] I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. [To feel] the interrelated structure of reality.
To feel what King describes here is to become what is described. To become what is described is to continue that which the Monster attempts to erase. But Its violence can never touch the garment to which we are bound. It can pull our thoughts and senses from it. It can build barbed wire fences and virtual walls that bar us from each other. It can tear communities and bodies apart. But it cannot touch those energies that flow along hidden routes to those who will resurrect Soul Force in new forms.
One of my greatest joys as a teacher is to see this process unfold, to witness the energies of the dead nourishing a new generation. To see students feeling that energy. To see them becoming that energy. One of my greatest joys, and challenges, as a writer is to articulate this unfolding, to inscribe it in words.
Light Words
One of the awful facts of our age is the evidence that it is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable.
- Thomas Merton
Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The Easy Essays that follow were written in the shadow of war. A war where the death instinct, described by Merton, is horrifically clear in the ruins of Gaza where over twenty thousand people, babies among them, have been incinerated by U.S. weapons. The count continues to increase as I write, word by word, body by body.
This war, like all wars, brings Dr. King’s three-headed Monster into relief. Behind the suffering: an industry that profits off the deaths of a people whose very corpses are questioned as real by mainstream media and an American President.
What concerns me here, as I lead into these Easy Essays, is that language has been neutralized by the Monster. Its force-field twists our words into cold algorithmic things that, at best, feed Its profit-driven logic and that, at worst, allow Its mass killing to go unchecked. A troubling example of the latter is way the phrase “cease fire” has become largely unspeakable in this country. In mainstream media, it is only uttered by glib reporters who say it as an object of fascination, sprinkled safely next to commercials curated for their liberal or conservative audience. To utter it on campuses is to risk being labeled antisemitic, a charge that hijacks the word.
When words like “cease fire” become unspeakable, it becomes impossible to name what Merton describes as the Unspeakable. The Monster remains in the shadows, outside of language. If a thing can’t be named, it can’t be restrained in society or in ourselves.
We must write and say “cease fire!” We must act for what that word entails. Our very act of writing or speaking becomes what Merton calls a raid on the Unspeakable, an incursion against the Monster. Here I am reminded of the courageous act of revision made by a group of Jewish American activists whose banners, unfurled before the Statue of Liberty, read “Never Again for Anyone.” Such speech is a weapon aimed, not at man or his scapegoats, but at the True Enemy within us and our system. Such speech is a weapon of Love. Or, as a friend more aptly says: an Unweapon.
The unspeakable must be spoken. This is what I realized this quarter. That “must” is not a command from some outside authority. It doesn’t come from social pressure to sound woke. It is an imperative of conscience.
I felt that imperative as I sat quietly these last ten weeks. Occasionally I heard a whisper. The still small voice. It spoke words that must be written. Words that must be spoken. Light words.
To speak light in dark times is dangerous. To live light in dark times is dangerous. The fate of Dr. King and JFK teach us this.
But to deny such words would be to deny our richest inheritance. It would be to deny the light that rests beside our darkness. To embrace such light, especially in perilous times, ensures victory over the Monster is already won.
What does all of this have to do with academic writing, which is what I teach? The academy, in an ideal sense, is a space of learning. When we think of learning, real learning, our minds likely conjure images of light or words like enlightenment. How much do these metaphors of light hold up on campuses where so many students live out of cars, can’t meet basic needs, are crushed by dehumanizing standards and impossible expectations? How much do these metaphors apply to universities that look and operate like Silicon Valley tech hubs, where slick brand images and corporate prestige overshadow the well-being of students, teachers, and communities they might serve?
If the academy is to become more than a tool of the Monster, if academic writing is to become more than just a hollow algorithmic thing, we must bring light into our academic work. Only then can our disciplines illuminate what lurks in shadow, what shapes the crises knowledge must confront.
My personal discipline has become the Easy Essay, these little raids on the Unspeakable. These essays are not “academic” in the usual sense. They are personal and poetic. They are written with an immediacy and intimacy that allows the Unspeakable to be spoken. But they are academic in another sense: tangible points of light in a constellation that points toward future research and praxis.
