Drums

A part of the Rituals of Exit series...

There’s a thread in one of Paul's letters that describes a pattern for the Ritual of Solidarity. After the breaking of bread and the passing around the wine, it ends rather ominously with the words, axri hou elthē — “until the coming”

This adds a sense of rather stirring consequence to the picture.

There is something profoundly here-and-now about this gathering: a fierce rooting in the tragic present; a world of broken bodies; a resolve to abide and to stay with the trouble. But something else, something profoundly and frighteningly other, is introduced by these three last words: axri hou elthē. Now there is some reference point that exists outside the community of outsiders. There is some looming event beyond the walls of the present, and yet umbilically attached to its sufferings. The table was not only a place of resilience, solidarity and alterity. It was energised by the hearing of something which was to come, over which they themselves had no control at all.

There’s a certain sass involved when someone says I know something you don't know. Do they? Are they bluffing? It becomes true as soon as it is said, because I don't even know if they really do know something I don't know. Prevailing powers commonly view themselves as the end of history toward which everything has always wandered. For this reason they may suffer from denial and future-blindness. The more uncertain the future the more violent the nostalgia for the past. On the other hand the community that breaks bread with the brutalised outside the city walls knows very well that history has not ended. The golden age is a false dawn because subjection abounds and nothing can be in subjection forever. This is an awkward clash of perspectives. The issue becomes acute when the oppressed say with ritual accord, axri hou elthē. They appear to know something the powers don't, and a cornered tyrant is a hellish thing.

Under the residential school system in North America, indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and subjected to colonial re-eduction. They were forced to cut their hair and westernise their appearance. They were given European names. They were forbidden from speaking their own languages. “Kill the indian to save the man,” as the saying went. In fact, unknown numbers of children were killed with mass graves being discovered on residential school sites up to the present.

Johnny Cash sang a song about it. I hear something of the axri hou elthē in the chorus; the sound of some approach, some coming event:

There are drums beyond the mountains

Indian drums that you can’t hear

There are drums beyond the mountains

And they're getting mighty near

There is something further at work here when the table listens for the drums. Messianic life is located among the gathered; in their solidarity with all that suffers and in their own experiences of suffering. On the other hand there is something profoundly other about this approaching event. In turning their gaze thus, the table recognises a reckoning that springs from beyond their own doings and powers. I think this is crucial (crux-ial): a creaturely deferral to the otherness of hope.

When Walter Benjamin described the violence of law he wrote about two kinds of violence: one was lawmaking violence and the other was law-preserving violence. Law-making violence would be the coup, or the conquest, or the revolution that established a new law by installing new masters. Law-preserving violence would be the political body, the mob, or the state which then polices that law through its monopoly on violence. Benjamin went on to speak enigmatically of a third kind of violence, marked by its otherness, its suddenness, and by its leaving no law after itself. What he described has puzzled and disturbed interpreters ever since, perhaps because he gave it such an unpalatable name. He talked about divine violence.

If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.

The hope of this ulterior community of resident outsiders was not resting on their own power to stage an uprising some day. If this were all there was then they would become a echo of whatever they overthrew. Their own act of establishing violence would set in place a new law which they themselves would be obliged to uphold as new masters. It was by lucid necessity that they threw themselves into a truthful degree of creaturely powerlessness. There was, and there is, no human act of controlling force that could end the world of debt, mastery and law without immediately recreating it. Anthropocentric redemptions are doomed to failure for their blindness. To recognise this is to be truthful to creaturely nature, and to refuse to don the garb of history with its string of defeats and fruitless victories.

Did they throw themselves into the arms of some pacifying religious fantasy that would never come about? I suppose it depends on what sort of time one is willing to live in. The messianic principle is written with calm certainty into the earth. Even the historical materialists knew it: nothing can remain in subjection forever. Oppression creates contradictions and imbalances that must all, somehow, be arighted in the end. This is the lore of the way things are. The indigenous activist Russel Means described something parallel:

Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, and this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where they started. That's revolution. And that's a prophecy of my people, of the Hopi people and of other correct peoples.

American Indians have been trying to explain this to Europeans for centuries. But, as I said earlier, Europeans have proven themselves unable to hear. The natural order will win out, and the offenders will die out, the way deer die when they offend the harmony by over-populating a given region. It's only a matter of time until what Europeans call "a major catastrophe of global proportions" will occur. It is the role of American Indian peoples, the role of all natural beings, to survive. A part of our survival is to resist. We resist not to overthrow a government or to take political power, but because it is natural to resist extermination, to survive. We don't want power over white institutions; we want white institutions to disappear.

Such is the political space of the outlaws carnival, abiding with tension across the table. The Messiah was among them in their brokenness, and yet the Messiah was an event approaching from beyond themselves also: from outside the community, gathered outside the city.

In the lore of Moses the Hebrews exit the cities of Pharoah where they had been slaves and wander into the indeterminate desert. And yet the God who had liberated them could not be met inside their camp, but another tent was set up outside the camp of outsiders. If one were to enter there to commune one might find that one had not journeyed out far enough, but would have to climb some mountain a little further. There, if you withdrew further still, hiding yourself in a rock, you might see the back of the liberating God, as they passed by.