The article you are about to read is a review of Paul Cudenec’s debut play The Good in Our Hearts.
It was written by W.D. James, a philosophy professor and essayist who recently joined Substack.
W.D. James, who describes his philosophy as “egalitarian anti-modernism” started contributing to the Winter Oak Press blog back in July of this year.
He describes his basic stance as including:
Anti-Modernism
Anti-Globalism
Deep respect for pre-modern wisdom traditions, including religious traditions
Liberty
Defense of the opportunity for a good life for everyone
A critique of the modern state
Grounding in nature/reality, intellectually, morally, and existentially
WHAT IS WINTER OAK PRESS AND WHAT IS ANARCHO-PERENNIALISM?
Winter Oak Press, if you didn’t know, is the anarchist publishing house founded by Paul Cudenec, who many of us now see as the originator of a new intellectual movement which synthesizes spiritual and political philosophy.
Pending the adoption of a punchier name, we call this movement anarcho-perennialism.
Although Paul now also publishes here on Substack, the Winter Oak blog is still highly recommended.
It is the only place that you will find The Acorn, an excellent quasi-monthly green anarchist bulletin which offers commentary on current events as well as thought-provoking short-form essays, action reports, and more.
We are pleased to welcome W.D. James to Nevermore Media and look forward to future collaboration. A friend of Winter Oak’s is a friend of Nevermore’s.
Without further ado I present:
An Afternoon in Eutopia:
A Review of Paul Cudenec’s The Good in Our Hearts: A play in one act
By: W. D. James
With the publication of The Good in Our Hearts: A play in one act (Winter Oak, 2023), social theorist and novelist Paul Cudenec makes his debut as a playwright. In this brief play, we are presented with a drama of human encounters as five characters take the stage on a simple set centered on two benches in a London park on a summer day.
Given that Cudenec appends a description of ‘organic radicalism’ to the end of the play, it is clear he intends for this work to be seen in the context of his overall project as a social theorist and activist, not something apart from that.
I think the play can constructively be read as an example of literary utopia, of a particular sort. The setting in a park points to Arcadia, as do all parks. It is also reminiscent of the setting and simplicity of Waiting for Godot where the whole play takes place by a tree along a country road. However, where that play focuses on the absence of salvation (as at least one possible interpretation among many others), Cudenec’s play can be seen as centering the prospect of salvation. One meaning of ‘u-topia’ is ‘no-place’. In this sense, the dreamed for perfect world is always absent, except in the imagination. In the tradition of utopian literature (back to at least Thomas More), ‘u-topia’ also evokes ‘eu-topia’, the ‘good-place’.
While Cudenec’s e/utopia is infringed upon by the dystopia of facial recognition drones, well, droning overhead, and the specter of total modernization and ‘smart cities’, in this little almost non-existent spot, good things come about. Plato, the father of utopias, famously presented his picture of a good society as being the soul writ large, so as to better ‘see’ what justice would like in it. Cudenec, I would suggest, is doing just the opposite: he is taking a number of the big social problems of modern society and writing them small into the interactions of a handful of characters. This is something of an upside down take on e/utopia (but definitely not its dystopian opposite). Here, issues that divide people at the grand scale are brought down to earth, to the personal level, where people can really interact with one another authentically. Cudenec would probably say the ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ level. So, the drama of the play can be seen as a microcosm of society as a whole.
The five characters are introduced one at a time as they sequentially enter the stage and become part of the social magic that is unfolding there. First to appear is George, who launches into an extended monologue on the miseries of his own life and on the ugliness of the modern world (as above/so below; as outside/so inside). All of the characters will have ‘a gripe’ against the modern world. George’s is primarily aesthetic. He’s a moderately successful middle-class film producer. He dreams of a life and a society “inspired by a love of beauty, of high-minded values, of some kind of sense of balance, of aspiration, of dignity.” The modern world, and specifically the urban eyesores it spawns, is the opposite of this.
Then we meet Jim, a sort of vagrant who was laying under a pile of cardboard under one of the park benches, where he has overheard George. Jim is a miserable failure and he knows it. He’s from a solid working-class background but has fallen downward. He recounts a dysfunctional family life as a child and an adult life of never quite making it at anything. He sees George’s critique as superficial. Yeah, the modern world is ugly, but that’s because underneath it’s evil. It’s a world motivated by “greed” and capitalism. “I have always known George,” Jim remonstrates, “not from my head or my eyes or my nose, but from my guts, my lungs, my back, my arse!—that this world we live in is a pile of shit.” George and Jim are divided by class, but draw closer to one another in their shared humanity and disdain for the modern world.
Next to enter the scene is Denise, who has just come from some sort of feminist rally. She quickly launches into an attack on George and Jim and their sad lamentations. She points out that they are of different social classes, but of the same gender. She comes on strong with an attack on their exclusively masculine take on things, but also missteps in her surmises about them. Jim points out, “You leapt to the wrong conclusion because you began with the wrong premise [that all men are the same].” The mistake turns out to be something of a ‘happy fault’, in that now the three of them are shaken loose from canned ways of interacting and have to fall back on being real people interacting with other real people. Whatever Denise may lack as a logician, she more than makes up for as a metaphysician. Apparently, Denise is an adherent of some sort of essentialist second-wave feminism. This allows her to hold a holistic view of gender whereby differences are complementary and valuable. Her critique of ‘patriarchy’ is basically that it is a sin against complementarity in that it elevates the male gender above the female. She and Jim and George are able to largely agree in this view.
As it turns out, Denise had been chased from the feminist rally by members of a transgender counter-rally. Enter Trevora, a trans “woman” with a beard. As each new interlocutor is introduced, their preconceived ideological worldviews are broken down so that genuine human dialogue can occur. Trevora (who was not named Trevor earlier in life), rages on stage ranting about transphobes being Nazis, introducing himself as a member of the Trans Justice Squad, and calling Denise a “terf slut”. To get a sense of Cudenec’s writing, and to illustrate when it comes to contentious or ‘triggering’ issues, he does not hesitate to take it head on, I offer this example:
TREVORA: And what does that mean? What are you implying? Are you suggesting that in my case the fact that I don’t have a womb somehow disqualifies me from being a woman?
JIM: Not as such. It’s more the fact that you’re a man that disqualifies you from being a woman. Mate.
TREVORA: You’re, you’re, you’re…
DENISE: Well said Jim. For all my dislike of testosterone-fuelled patriarchy, I do like a man with balls.
JIM: I’d return the compliment and say I also like a woman with balls, if I didn’t think it might give our friend here the wrong idea!
This might seem like ‘beat up on the transexual time,’ but that is definitely not Cudenec’s style. Getting the issues starkly presented, that is his style. As the exchange continues, Trevora comes into focus as a genuine, likeable, human being. Fortunately, the other three interlocutors are pretty well versed in the psychological theories of Carl Jung. Trevora starts to think there might be a way to holistically integrate his anima into his personality, so that he does not feel forced to reject large aspects of himself. He could be a man with a well developed feminine side. His identity would be in harmony with his objective reality. To an extent, all the characters go through this sort of transformation toward greater wholeness throughout the play. In fact, there is a way in which Trevora may be the character most connected to some of the underlying ideas in this and other works of Cudenec. As Trevora recounts his life and move towards becoming a transexual, his well-developed imaginative faculty is highlighted. Elsewhere Cudenec writes:
If our everyday experience is of traffic jams, shopping malls and office blocks, if our minds are constantly filled with images of consumerism, domination and war, how are we to see the world as “a vast organism in which natural things harmonise and sympathize between themselves”? The answer is in our imagination. (Nature, Essence & Anarchy, 2016).
Trevora observes that imagination was the “theme tune” of his own story. He is probably the most imaginative of the characters and if my e/utopian reading of the play is on track, imagination is central to the whole work.
The final character to make their entrée is Ashok, “A man of Indian appearance and accent, in his 70s, with a long white beard and wearing a green robe,” who emerges from a tree. I suspect this would just be too discordant for many readers. However, I think it makes sense. This name, with roots in the Bhagavad Gita and other Eastern scriptures, means one without sorrow, or happy and content, and has connotations of balance. I’m not sure of the author’s intent here. It could well be that in the world of the play Indian mystics pop out of trees in London. Why not? With his green robe he may be a representative of the mythical Green Man that Cudenec has written about elsewhere. He also seems reminiscent of an Eastern mystic (this time more Sufi seeming) who is central to another of Cudenec’s fictional works, his 2016 novel The Fakir of Florence.
Or, perhaps he is meant to represent something like a shared social and spiritual awareness that the characters are moving toward and which is emerging from their interactions: a sort of benevolent geist taking shape. Ashok speaks a spiritually authoritative condemnation of the modern world and the effect it has on modern people whose physical actions “all point to death, to destruction, to dissolution.” He is the voice of Traditional wisdom. The world, he says, is “currently ruled by evil.” But, “although evil rules the world from above, good survives below in decent, ordinary people like you, in the hearts of the victims of deceit…”. I think Ashok is meant to be a sort of manifestation of the developing Enlightenment of the characters, but I also think he is just an Indian mystic who popped out of a tree.
The overall themes of The Good in Our Hearts, reflect themes Cudenec has developed in his non-fiction. For instance, The Withway (Winter Oak, 2022), speaks of the “beauty of the archetype we hold in our hearts” in contrast to the ugliness of the contemporary world. It also presents itself as a project aimed at “re-establishing connections – social, natural and metaphysical – which have been stolen from us over a long period of time.”
The play is not without its problems, however. There is probably just too much going on here to be covered in a one act play. I’m sure Cudenec knows that. He could have put it in a novel or written a longer play. So, the compactness is intentional, and that does have its merits, but it also still feels a bit ‘cramped.’ Further, while I can accept a group of diverse strangers happening upon one another in a London park and delving into Jungian analyses, and Indian gentlemen emerging from trees, some of the lines don’t seem to quite fit the characters. An example would be the bourgeois George lamenting that he is missing “a world ruled not by money and power but by shared humanity”. The sentiment may well be George’s, but the phrasing strikes me as not quite right.
On the flip side, the play also has its literary merits. George, Jim, Denise, and Trevora, though only developed over about 70 pages of dialogue, are now distinct, full-fledged, characters living in my imagination. Cudenec does not hesitate to go into contentious social territory, and he doesn’t pull his punches. However, he sustains a strong dose of humor throughout the play. That takes skill and humanitas. It also takes bravery.
To return to the theme of e/utopia…. So, we have a sort of pastoral utopia with an inverted structure such that the focus is on the social being worked out at the personal level. From the outer to the inner. An oft neglected aspect of literary e/utopias is that they are therapeutic texts. For the classical Greeks, therapy was a healing force. Plato’s Republic is a therapeutic text: it does not just present information on the page to be appropriates in a detached manner. It is meant to affect the reader; to change them, to move them toward healing as they work their way through the text. I think e/utopias all have this characteristic (that is, they aren’t road maps to perfect societies you are supposed to go build, but primarily have an imaginative function). Between the non-existence of the ideal (no-place) and the goodness and beauty of the vision (eu-topia) our imaginations are engaged to envision a better world, which in turn makes our interior places a bit better and more beautiful. It is a salvific vision. We are changed. I think The Goodness in Our Hearts is meant to perform a similar healing by refocusing some our outward looking, and ideology corrupted, attention back to the psyche where healing may begin.