(the good Dr. Cornel West speaking at UVA)
Been trying to shift back into a pro-creative zone lately, despite the buzzing negativity of the developed world around me, which has quieted down my ability to hear my heart’s natural vibrations a little too much. Last week though, I was blessed with a pair of positive influences on the heart buzz, one which really set the energies open to the second.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Brother Ali
lately, having shifted away from all the strange rules I put around sound
listening on my daily commute, bumping a good amount of earlier stuff but
really playing his latest – All the Beauty in This Whole Life – mostly. It’s a
beautiful album – nothing that will get any Pitchfork Year End listings likely,
because it’s more about the message than the image. But the message is a
spiritual one, yet not crappy. It seems like when music moves towards
spirituality, it has to compromise quality, and the contrarian response to that
is to never show any spiritual spice to your music for fear of being cast into
that lot with shitty Christian rap. Brother Ali has a little more freedom from
that, being Muslim instead of Christian, but his music is still thick with
spirit. As someone who has been helped (and healed) immensely in recent years
by Islamic philosophy, All the Beauty in This Whole Life resonates with me
pretty strongly, and I find myself wishing there was an entire genre of Brother
Ali music. (If you put it into the algorithm boxes, they give you suggestions
which have very little actual spirituality, but seem likely to share a
progressive event’s stage with Ali. It’s not quite the same, but the post-(meta?)modern
algorithm – despite being developed by the noted ancient Baghdad House of
Wisdom scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi – lacks real world fluency in its
current Yakubian applications.
All this Brother Ali music over the course of the
past week primed me for attending a Dr. (Brother) Cornel West talk. This was
literally two buildings over from where I work, so once the work day was done,
I sat in secret pavilion gardens scribbling sonnet gibberish to kill a little
time, then walked over to get near the front of the admission line. This
ensured a really great seat just beyond the designated V.I.P. section (of which
I have never been invited, in any form, my entire life). I expected a lot from
Dr. West, but they opened it up with a piano performance by a Dana Kristina-Joi
Morgan, who absolutely pummeled the grand piano into transmission of full
lounge, perfectly combining classical training with intuitive ability. The
piece was amazing. Then this classically trained singer Terrence Tarver (who
was wearing a nice suit… I am a not a suit guy, not even close, but my man
looked sharp) who did “We Shall Overcome”. He had a strong style, and I’m not
attuned to classical style singing, nor appreciation for the strong style he
rocked, but the traditional song was fine, and added layers to the event, and
then he and Morgan combined for a duet on the theme of letting your voice be
heard, and the shit was so beautiful – despite being outside my preferred modes
of musical appreciations – that I couldn’t help but be moved by it. That’s real
fuckin’ art, when it hits you not in a blind spot but from an angle you think
you’re impervious from, but it gets you anyways.
The experience of the performances had me thinking
about what Ta-Nehisi Coates described as the black elegance he saw in his My
President Was Black piece from a year ago. Coates has a rambling style that
goes too long at times (as if I have any right of all people to complain about
that, lol), but that idea definitely bounced around my head (and heart) as I
took in the evening. From a social scientific standpoint, I am white, though
that label feels awkward and clunky to me a lot of times when lumped into
certain concepts of whiteness as applied in this post-(meta?)modern
civilization we currently occupy. I’m not really into the idea of having to
categorize my upbringing or lay out my own personal history in order for
outside people to deem my claims of self-identity true or not, but let me just
say, despite my socially scientific whiteness, I do not feel comfortable at a
very basic level in many stereotypical white environments. I felt far more comfortable
at this event, with its strong element of black elegance, than I do in most.
And I don’t mean I felt like it was for me, but it spoke to me in ways most
academic or intellectual events don’t. (In fact, I write a daily gambleraku –
three lines of seven syllables each – in a little notebook, and as I sat there
I wrote “more black intellectuals / more poor intellectuals / less same
intellectuals”.)
The good Dr. Brother West worked through so many
themes and issues, all at once, and in a meandering story-telling way, that it
would do a disservice to his style to try and explain it. If you have a chance
to see the man speak, I cannot encourage it enough. But one point he drove home
was that the importance of diversity comes from the fact there are more
traditions than the one dominant tradition we know (or the two dominant ones –
if you think of it politically, or three or seven or thirty-six most dominant
traditions). This applies not only to countering the traditional white
supremacist (as it has come to be known) tradition of United States
imperialism, with African and Latin traditions, as well as indigenous ones,
which were the traditional before European colonialism upset the continental
balance and created a new “traditional”, but also to even our concepts of whiteness,
as white supremacists from the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder are
essentially tools for the powerful.
But the thing I loved most about Dr. Brother West’s
talk was how it was all love. It came from the heart, and that was by design
and purpose. When the man entered the auditorium, he was hugging everybody he
even barely knew. As he spoke, he called out a number of people he knew, many
in the V.I.P. section at first, but as he went, calling out a person here or
there out in the commoner crowd, who had met coming in, or talked with briefly
somewhere along the way, or I don’t really know. But you could tell that Dr.
West loved people, and love The People, and was down for both.
Cornel West was one of the clergy who was in town
last month to counter-vigil the August 12th alt-right neo-nazi rally. He’s the
most prominent voice who has spoken up since then about how antifa efforts are
not morally equivalent to neo-nazis, and how antifa likely saved lives that day
(and weekend) that the local police were standing down from helping. So I found
it interesting that, as Dr. West expounded upon the hypocrisy of elected
officials for holding onto the spirit of what originally moved them to try and
help The People, that a vacant seat in the V.I.P. section was filled almost an
hour late by a local politician who has been directly complicit in the events
that helped create the environment conducive to having the August 12th mayhem
happen. Dr. West spoke very directly, before this politician arrived, about
alleged servants of The People who say all the right words, but fail in their
actions, and are motivated by ego, greed, and worse. It seemed to me, as a
bystander of both the night’s presentation as well as the events of August 12th
weekend (and the Klan rally the month before), that this local politician
probably wouldn’t have been hurt by having Dr. West’s words wash over him. But
he was an hour late, and missed the build-up of energy that had already
transpired, not only in Dr. West’s portion but in the musical performances
directly preceding. A flow of energy had been established, and had caused a
number of standing ovations at appropriate parts. How this was lost on the
late-arriving attendee was obvious when, after a line by Dr. West, he stood to
begin a standing ovation, but no one else stood with him. The energetic levels
had been previously established, and we were not at an apex.
Dr. West spoke of people telling him he was an
optimist, and he answered, “As a 64-year-old black man in America, I’m not an
optimist,” and described his philosophical nature as being “a prisoner of hope.”
This, too, emanates from the heart, and echoed his statements throughout his
talk about us living in a time of a “spiritual blackout”. (And for me, having
just been absorbing all that Brother Ali all week, that was something that
vibrated strongly in me.)
After his talk was over, Dr. West opened it up to
questions from the crowd, and in true man-who-is-down-for-The-People fashion,
he picked from raised hands way up the common sections. A student asked about
how to think about Thomas Jefferson’s history, both good and bad, and Dr. West
had already talked about how important humility and piety was for everyone,
because we were all fallible. He had described himself earlier as a “recovered
sinner with gangster proclivities,” and in turn – in acknowledging the enigma
of Thomas Jefferson having fathered children with an enslaved woman (who he
took over ownership of in patriarchal way as Sally Hemings – the enslaved woman
– was inherited by Jefferson’s wife) and denying that branch of family’s rights
to him as a forebear, with the scene of Huey Newton having Jefferson’s words
read in 1966 when the Black Panthers were making a public claim to
self-determination for black communities. You can’t demonize the historical
individual entirely, suggested Dr. West, but you also can’t elevate them onto a
pedestal and pretend that good side absolves them of their transgressions.
The local politician had his hand raised whenever
Dr. West called for another question, but West seemed intent on picking people
from further out amongst the masses than down front in the V.I.P. section. He
held his hand up, hard and straight, during the second part of one of West’s extemporaneous
answers, and I should also mention this local politician had been messaging
through his smart phone throughout the short time he was there, even during the
beginning of the answer to the question he ended up having his hand raised to
ask the next one after. As someone who comes from roundtable oral tradition
(drunks standing around a picnic table or old truck, talking shit), there is
nothing worse than the person you can see standing there loaded to shoot
themselves into the free-form conversation, attached to some moment somewhere
upstream of the group stream of thought, and refusing to let it go that they
must be heard. It’s a telltale sign of ego.
No worries though, because Dr. West was scanning
the higher reaches of the auditorium for the last question before we all had to
shut down for the night, AND THE LOCAL POLITICIAN (who had already arrived
nearly an hour late) STOOD UP AND FORCED HIS QUESTION INTO THE AIR. Cornel West
is a lover though, and he once the local politicians introduced himself and his
role locally, West acknowledged him with love. When he had initially asked for
questions from the audience, I thought to myself, “Do I have a question?” and I
legit couldn’t think of one that I needed answered that didn’t feel like it
would’ve just been me forcing myself to be part of the talk. But this local
politician’s question sounded very much like somebody attempting to hear
themselves say something out loud and be answered by a famous person than
someone with a legitimate philosophical inquiry. He asked about how to battle
white supremacy while dealing with white fragility, and also whether elected
officials can do this through policy (which was obviously a self-serving
question for him, and one that had been previously addressed partially during
the portion of the talk he missed by being fashionably late).
Dr. West answered the policy part very simply,
that no, it cannot be done without The People helping from the outside with
their sheer strength of presence. Done on the inside alone, every politician
soon becomes indebted to the mechanizations of politics, and the corporate
hands that drive those machines. The irony was not lost on me of this answer
when considering this local politician had very recently had public meetings
overtaken by The People, who were demanding the immediate resignation of
himself and all this political compadres for allowing the August 12th weekend
to happen the way it did.
But in answering the white supremacy/fragility
part, Dr. West went back to that theme that there are more than just the
dominant tradition we easily recognize in this post-(meta?)modern world, even
when it comes to “white traditions”. Dr. West mentioned Myles Horton and the
Highlander Folk School, as well as others taught at the Union Theological
Seminary in New York, including a white guy sitting three spots to the left of
this local politician, and how not everyone is fragile nor oblivious to the
larger, obvious truths of an empire and its Yakubian tricks of white supremacy.
And this was where the event ended, and I was
thankful for the entire performance because it helped me be okay with being a
prisoner of hope and not feel like a fool. And I tried to take the spirituality
of it – letting my heart do more thinking for me – to, for lack of a better
term, heart, even when it came to the local politician who, so obviously from
this essay, bothered the fuck out of me with his oblivious hypocrisy. To be
human means to be fallible, and we’re all fucked up and problematic in probably
more ways than one. That local politician is no exception, and I’m definitely
no exception to that. But we can’t let that stop us from trying to cultivate a
more heartfelt society that tends and cares for one another. There’s not really
any sign it’s working, or we’re getting any closer to that, and in fact all data
seems to suggest that the opposite is a more sensible conclusion. But just for
the simple fact that I can’t give up on existence, and can’t give up on the
basic pure and beautiful human potential that exists in every one of us who as
a collective make up The People, I have to keep being a “prisoner of hope”. So
I will, without shame.
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