The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,111

religious language credibly and effectively in postmodern fiction without having to submit to a vague egalitarianism, or to a kind of late-twentieth-century environmental spiritualism, or to the modernist/feminist school of the goddess-body adored, or to a loose, undiscriminating conviction of the innate divinity of all living things, or to the biblical/political scholasticism of the more entrenched and dictatorial wings of contemporary religious institutions—none of which, it seems to me, represents the everyday practice of nineteenth-century African Americans and their children, nor lends itself to postmodernist narrative strategies. The second problem then is part of the first: how to narrate persuasively profound and motivating faith in and to a highly secularized, contemporary, “scientific” world. In short, how to reimagine paradise. (The question that surfaces immediately—Why reimagine it at all, since the ablest geniuses have already and long ago provided unsurpassed and unsurpassable language to describe it?—is a question I will address in a moment.) Right now I want to outline what my problem is and then tell you why I have it.

Paradise is no longer imaginable or, rather, it is overimagined—which amounts to the same thing—and has thus become familiar, common, even trivial. Historically, the images of paradise, in poetry and prose, were intended to be grand but accessible, beyond the routine but imaginatively graspable, seductive precisely because of our ability to recognize them—as though we “remembered” the scenes somehow. Milton speaks of “goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit, / Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue, /…with gay enameled colours mixed”; of “Native perfumes”; of “that sapphire fount the crispèd brooks, / Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold”; of “nectar, visiting each plant, and fed / Flowers worthy of Paradise…”; “nature boon / poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain”; “Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm; / Others, whose fruit, burnished with golden rind, / Hung amiable—Hesperian fables true, /…of delicious taste; / Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks / Grazing the tender herb”; “Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose”; “caves / of cool recess, o’er which the mantling vine / Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps / Luxuriant.”

Such a beatific expanse, in this the last decade of the twentieth century, we recognize as bounded real estate, owned by the wealthy, viewed and visited by guests and tourists, or it is regularly on display for the rest of us in the products and promises sold by various media. Overimagined. Quite available if not in fact, then certainly as ordinary unexceptional desire. Let’s examine the characteristics of physical paradise—beauty, plenty, rest, exclusivity, and eternity—to see how they are understood in 1996.

Beauty of course is a duplicate of what we already know, intensified, refined. Or what we have never known articulated. Beatific, benevolent nature combined with precious metals and jewelry. What it cannot be is beauty beyond imagination.

Plenty, in a world of excess and attending greed that tilts resources to the haves and forces the have-nots to locate bounty within what has already been acquired by the haves, is an almost obscene feature of paradise. In this world of tilted resources, of outrageous, shameless wealth squatting, hulking, preening itself before the dispossessed, the very idea of plenty, of sufficiency, as utopian ought to make us tremble. Plenty should not be regulated to a paradisiacal state, but to normal, everyday, humane life.

Rest, that is the superfluity of working or fighting for rewards of food or luxury, has dwindling currency these days. It is a desirelessness that suggests a special kind of death without dying.

Exclusivity, however, is still an attractive, even compelling, feature of paradise because certain people, the unworthy, are not there. Boundaries are secure; watchdogs, gates, keepers are there to verify the legitimacy of the inhabitants. Such enclaves are cropping up again, like medieval fortresses and moats, and it does not seem possible or desirable for a city to be envisioned in which poor people can be accommodated. Exclusivity is not just an accessible dream for the well-endowed, but an increasingly popular solution for the middle class. “Streets” are understood to be populated by the unworthy and the dangerous; young people are forced off the streets for their own good. Yet public space is fought over as if it were private. Who gets to enjoy a park, a beach, a mall, a corner? The term “public” is itself a site of contention. Paradise as exclusive terrain therefore has a very real attraction to modern society.