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Friday
Obsessed as it is with fighting culture wars, MAGA’s new boogeyman is “wokeness.” Although rightwing Republicans have difficulty defining it, it seems to operate the way that the “political correctness” charge used to. If you’re sensitive to the needs of certain marginalized populations—especially to the needs of people of color and the LGBTQ community—you’re woke.
But that’s just me trying to figure out GOP objections. Often when asked, right-wingers have difficulty explaining the concept, leading Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu to tweet, “Since Republicans are unable to define woke, I’m going to offer a definition: “Being a good neighbor and not a jerk.” In other words, we all should see being awake as a good thing.
John Donne certainly thinks it is in “Good Morrow.” There we see a lover talking about having been asleep previously and now awaking into a glorious new reality. It appears that the two lovers have spent the night together (also the situation in Donne’s “Sun Rising”), with the man marveling at their bond. Were we not babies before, he asks, before moving on to the asleep/awake theme:
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
The seven sleepers story involves seven Christian youths who hid in a cave around AD 250 to escape Roman persecution, only to fall asleep and awake 300 years later, somewhat like Rip Van Winkle. Upon emerging, they were astounded to discover that everyone around them was Christian. The story goes that they reported to the bishop about their miracle story and then died praising God.
Donne is somewhat irreverent in his handling of the seven sleepers, imagining them snoring (or snorting), but he’s on board with what must have been their amazement upon awaking. A world with the Christian message accepted by all would have been beyond their wildest dreams. Likewise, whatever dreams Donne’s speaker has had of his beloved are but pale imitations of the flesh and blood version before him:
’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.
Seeking to find words for the world he has awoken to, the speaker taps into the excitement generated by the exploratory voyages of his age. Discover his love, he says, is like discovering a new world. It’s an image that Donne also uses in “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” where he refers to his beloved as “Oh my America, my new found land.” Only here, he goes one step further: who needs to go anywhere when he has all the world he needs right before him?
And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.
Looking into his lover’s eyes, he sees the reflection of his own image, just as she sees hers in his. And because they are so perfectly balanced (he’s using an image from alchemy here), there can be no declining. They have found eternal heaven in the here and now:
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.
Returning to the present, think of the woke among us as looking at others and seeing in them their full humanity. That is how we can have a harmonious world.
By contrast, those who embrace hemispheric division will find the world divided into sharp north and declining west, which leads to slackening and death. These are the ones who watch one another out of fear. Suckled on the childish pleasures of grievance politics, they snort away in their sleep.
Back when I taught college classes, I often told my students that the tragedy experienced by racists is that they deny themselves the richness that comes with befriending people unlike ourselves. There are worlds on worlds out there that we can discover without ever leaving our communities.