special blog for BKNation

Special blog for BKNation

1968 / TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT

That's anthropology for you,

ever casting buckets of mercy

into water thrice threatened,

pulling up

ice cubes that sizzle

under the heat

of the unknown,

knowing the answer before the advent of the question.

                1968 is not the only year in twentieth-century American history about which we can say "everything changed."  From diverse perspectives, 1909, 1929, 1941, 1945, and  1954 are exceptional  moments.  If we focus exclusively on the multi-leveled  histories of the Sixties, however, 1968 is the strongest candidate. A very short list of books published in that year invites us to construct a field or matrix for recalling what we must not forget in 2018:

N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn ---the implications of being at once outside and inside one's native land

Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi ---a woman's autobiography, with anthropological undertones, of her becoming in the fire of the Civil Rights Movement

James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA  ---any autobiographical account of scientific research and discovery is fraught with ethical obligations

John Henrik Clarke, ed. William Styron's Nat Turner:  Ten Black Writers Respond -- ideological manipulation of  iconic heroism, fact, and  history shall be subjected to withering scrutiny

Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History ---an electric kool-aid test of a book regarding the War in Vietnam

LeRoi  Jones and Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing --- works of black writing (essays, poems, fiction, and drama ) authenticate critical distance from the myth of Negro Literature

Through the lens of critical race theory, we detect what after 50 years is operative, challenging, baptized in blood as we struggle for human rights in the United States of America. Books from 1968 resonate in 2018.

                What we are discovering and re-discovering in 2018 is this: terms of engagement matter as greatly as the sanctity of Black Lives,  indeed as much as the sanctity of human life. The single words, phrases, or complete sentences we speak and write have weight in our presentations of self and our constructions of what we designate "reality" to be. The language we take for granted is central in struggles for social justice as well as in scientific propositions regarding the nature of Nature. Our endangered Constitutional  rights to enjoy liberty,  to speak with unconditional honesty, and to maximize our innate value must be rescued from people who, in the words of Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., idolize a value gap that deforms humanity and American democracy.

                Diagnosis of illness and health, critiques of vampire capitalism,  scrutiny of business contracts and the rule of law ---all of these  have overt consequences. The terms we embrace give voice to our ideological  concepts.  If we truly   believe  our integrity is more important than having commerce with correctness, we give priority to the meaning and significance of our language(s). Terms guide our physical and mental actions; they enable us to have relative control of our destinies; they signal the presence or absence of being well and necessitate  uncertainty about what's normal, what's abnormal. 

                Terms of  engagement are not random, but they have become increasingly surreal in American discourses.  The human condition in the twenty-first century is such , particularly in our nation, that prudence in personal behavior demands a high level of consciousness regarding what assaults our minds endlessly: a surplus of information, misinformation, artfully designed disinformation.  Ah, the brave new world of intense frustration.  We have to sort through the surplus to behave well, to protect ourselves from misapplications of powerful technologies,  to deal with those bodies of knowledge (or knowing) we call disciplines.  People who have a more than casual investment in education and  the life of the mind may be slightly more aware of the rubbing of feeling against reason, but even those who are silent notice the friction.   Skepticism, disgruntlement,  cynical attitudes, and mean-spiritedness seem to undermine the better habits of the heart ---compassion, altruism, selflessness --- in contemporary life.  Is it not unfortunate that evidence of genuine humanity is most obvious  in moments of  crisis and catastrophe?

                What is happening to us is not unique and original; what is happening is ancient and quite commonplace; it is indivisible from the terms we use to engage what we think reality is.  The sooner we make efforts to manage  terms and our destinies, the better.

 

                 A term  of endearment is a word or phrase used to address or describe a person, animal, or inanimate object for which one has love or affection.  Such a term must be used with caution nowadays. Touching a person' s ear with the word  "sweetheart"  can get you entangled in nasty  exposure and litigation

                 A term of engagement is a rule that people follow in dealing with each other or situations as in negotiations between the United Nations and the World Bank or between Great Britain and the European Union,  in civic debates or in exercises of First Amendment rights which can quickly become  barbaric and deadly.  It is necessary, almost in a Machiavellian sense, to analyze our terms of engagement;  in many instances we must revise traditional terms of engagement, so as not to be beaten down and constantly  enslaved by the language of the Others.  Vigilance is a matter of using common sense in our choice of action. We can't depend  on  deceptive "liberal" or "conservative"  social theory to guarantee our relative freedoms.  I am pragmatic and have anxiety regarding our terms of engagement.

                As Cleophus Thomas, Jr., a brilliant and highly regarded attorney in Anniston, Alabama noted in an email he sent to me on October 2, 2017: "No one has to convince a listener that James Brown is Johannes Brahms in order to conclude Brown is great.  But this need for deemed equivalence in visual arts turns criticism into a cultural currency converter.  Fungibility.  What can I trade this for?  Perhaps that is what all criticism is."  Understanding of greatness and significance  is in the ear of the listener,  in the eye of the beholder, in the mind of the critical thinker. Have we too soon abandoned the crucial lessons of the not so distant Black Arts/Black Aesthetic enterprise?  For good measure, Thomas reminded me "For James Brown no special pleading is needed, the art not only speaks for itself but was claimed rapturously by the community."  I think he wanted me to remember that in 2017 Papa, Mama, and their children have or should have  brand new bags.  Such abstractions as identity,  gender, race, and ethnicity slam new bags on old tables. The rhetorical motions of Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi  help us to sew the new bags.

                In his book Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry ( Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), Jed Rusula has a passage that hits the target dead center.  He wrote with reference to the treatise  Philosophy of Liberation ( Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985) that

Liberation theologist Enrique Dussel elucidates the cost of canonical ambitions: " modern European philosophy, even before the ego cogito but certainly from then on, situated all men and all cultures --and with them their women and children ---within its own boundaries as manipulable tools, instruments.  Ontology understood them as interpretable beings, as known ideas, as mediations of internal possibilities within the horizon of the comprehension of Being" (3).  In Dussel's account, Eurocentric history is itself a canonical mode of production that hierarchically disposes humans from top to bottom and center to periphery, distinguishing those empowered to speak from those bereft of speech.  Ironically, canonical figures are certifiably mute by virtue of having "spoken for us all. They can no longer speak for (or defend) themselves, as the force of their signification is redirected toward a central chronicle, a supreme fiction. (168-169)

For the sake of clarity, I would "translate" this  word-thick passage into plainer language.  The so-called dominant version of what is real in the world, the version operative in the United States of America,  is a historical narrative that is an unreliable fiction.  It is not supreme. 

                Consider how judicious is a tentative conclusion Jeremy Campbell reached about electronic/digital environments  in his thoughtful book Grammatical Man:  Information, Entropy, Language and Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982):

No final, wrapped-up, all-inclusive theory of reality will ever be perfected.  The nature of language, the forms of logic, the duality of matter beneath the surface we observe, the power of rules to generate new structures, the limits of knowledge, the special character of complex as opposed to simple systems, all point to this conclusion.  In this respect, science and art, philosophy and politics, history and psychology, meet on common ground, so that the barriers between the cultures break down under the recognition that all are incomplete and always will be; that no single discipline or school of thought has a monopoly on the truth.  The truth itself has become more difficult to define as a result of the last half-century  of discoveries in what used to be known as the exact sciences, making them richer, but not necessarily more exact, and disturbing them to their foundations. (111)

                Study of Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1962) might convince us that Campbell has put his finger on a truth. Our terms of engagement  in 2018 must disturb and negate traditional foundations and prepare us to make concrete differences in the global arena. Black Fire provides ample models for the work we ought to do, just as The Double Helix urges us to ask revealing questions about what is gained and what is threatened by scientific advancement.

                Our best terms of engagement  resist the enthrallment of fiction. They replace it with  non-fiction derived from experience.  They make empirical  counter-narratives possible.  Such efforts have long been the work of  African American thinkers who refuse to be taken in by academic double-talk.  Nevertheless, we ought not be surprised  if our commitment to non-fiction emerges from works of imagination. Wisdom is brewed in poems and other literary works  that amoral capitalists tell us are anti-aesthetic ,  incendiary and dangerous.  A sterling example would be Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001). Was it not a blowing-up of African American memories that angered those who wrote essays for William Styron's Nat Turner:  Ten Black Writers Respond?

                What might our terms of engagement become  by juxtaposing  Baraka's poem with Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach"?  Would we begin to liberate our Selves and our minds for a viable future?  Yes,  our futures would acquire more  transparency and diversity.

                Often it is a poem that calls attention to the "eternal note of sadness" that disturbs human affairs and our everyday practices of life.  An especially relevant example for 2018 is Matthew Arnold's fine lyric  "Dover Beach" (1867), which is significant for its handling of  tensions between science and religion or science and humanism.  This poem is memorable as a speech act about critical feeling regarding  the consequences of late  nineteenth-century world affairs ----duplicity, violence,  colonization, capitalist enterprises that minimized ethics, the forms of  modernism that produced the chaos of World War I.  While Arnold's  poem does not address the ur-fascism that culminated in World War II, it does not allow us to be complacent about ideological combat and  the contemporary climate of terrorism international and domestic.   It jolts the least political among  us with existential alarm about the United States of America as a  fragmented nation.  Arnold's poem is at once personal and political, because like our most astute poets he recognized that reason and emotion are not divorced from affairs of state and the body politic.  "Dover Beach" raises historical consciousness by way of meditation on the human condition.  I have a wake-up call each time I read the final stanza of "Dover Beach."

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Arnold's yoking a term of endearment with terms of engagement is  on time. And I must return to Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History as a way of choosing language to use in talking about imperialism, terrorism, genocide, military exercises and investments.

                Jeffrey T. Schnapp's  article "On Disciplinary Finitude" ( See PMLA 132.3 (2017): 505-512 ) points  eloquently to terms of engagement, action, and education ---

Irrespective of which side of the fence I'm standing on, for me the answer remains the same: disciplinary homelessness is like a meal without textures, smells, or flavors,.  Innovators need to come from somewhere to go somewhere beyond.  But to thrive, disciplinarity requires a counterforce, and such counterforces are fed, in turn, by discipline-based modes of inquiry.  The paradox is irresolvable because it's productive: whether in the classroom, the laboratory, or the workplace, depth plus reach equals greater mental agility than either pursued in isolation can hope to provide.  Disciplines may come and go, they may rejuvenate from within or without, but the great mosaics of twenty-first-century knowledge will be built from the tesserae of domain expertise, not from a scattering of skills (511).

                A similar idea was  operative in my writing of

CHINA KWANSABA

Should alien light with furious love smash

against the ancient Great Wall and time

become pixels to float in frantic design

down upon the face of worded Earth,

could vision make wiser speech of physics

or parse better, for you, for us

a bolder meaning of tragic magic beauty?

                In defiance of cosmic evil, the ugliness of resurgent race-marked  hatreds, and the endangered concept of truth, I must enter The House Made of Dawn  with new terms of engagement in my mouth.  After 50 years,  N. Scott Momaday's novel  tells me that unless I embrace my complicity in  the histories and destinies of indigenous peoples in the United States of America , I shall forever be one of the wretched of the earth. 

BIO

Jerry W. Ward, Jr., author of THE KATRINA PAPERS: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery (2008), The China Lectures: African American Literary and Critical Issues (2014), and FRACTAL SONG: Poems (2016), lives in New Orleans, LA.