Sacred Spaces and Southern Transcendentalism

           Only at night have I really experienced the most profound intuitions about the places I remember from the South.  The harsh sunlight seems to wash out into an indistinct haze any real perception of the places

I have visited from my youth—the streets of Savannah, the canopy of live oaks that covers the downtown squares, the architecture that echoes the days of Christopher Wren, the cobblestones that pave the descending street along Factor’s Walk, winding around and down to the edge of the piers where sailing vessels docked in the nineteenth century.  Somewhere in the fifth dimensional blend of centuries, the modern tugboats and ocean going ships meet the canoes of Native Americans paddling at a more leisurely pace along ancient pathways.  My imagination always has me joining these earlier peoples as they look out at the huge sailing vessels of the first Europeans who arrived on this coastline.  No memory can gainsay the impact of that first contact and clash of civilizations.  Yet nothing can compare in melancholia with the arrival of Africans in chains, their skins dark but not as dark as the hearts of the slave catchers and merchants who brought them here. Our history in that moment is cast into “the heart of darkness” from which, even today, escape and enlightenment is a constant struggle.

         Dreams were—and are—so much of my inner landscape that I cannot come near to “the meaning of being Southern” without these oneiric memories that remind me who I am and who we are as human beings.  So much of my life has been so far away from the South that my connection has been through an immersion—an involuntary baptism—in those visions from my past and from our communal past.  When I visit Savannah, I am lost and disoriented in the mundane light of day that sheds no light on these hidden sources of our moral and intellectual consciousness as we walk seemingly familiar streets, altered as they inevitably are by what Marguerite Yourcenar calls “that great sculptor, Time.”  Only driving around the streets of Savannah at night can I begin to get my bearings by the spirit compass, moved as it is by mysterious forces that point from phenomena to noumena, from appearances to underlying realities.