Hell-bent Notes
Hell-bent Notes on
WTF in the USA
PARADISE IS HELL; HELL,
PARADISE.
When you ask should writers do more to encourage
rejection of talking about American
culture and political affairs within the exclusive limits of what is black and
what is white, you are asking a question that is at once accusatory and
presumptive. You presume that people who
call themselves writers ought to have significant opinions about how Americans
talk among themselves and about others
in 2018. You presume that writing has
impact on literacy and literature, that writers have more investment than have
non-writers in the benefits and dangers of speech acts. Your presumption is anchored more than a
little in your research and writing on the life and works of Richard Wright,
but it is dreadfully and fatally located in your belief that many contemporary
writers pander to their egos and do not give a tinker's damn about much other
than broadcasting their personal suffering.
Please note that belief is not identical with knowledge or knowing. What is accusatory about your question lives
in quicksand, in the combat zone where what is red, gray, yellow, pink or brown
about the actuality of being human is rarely accounted for. Ego is a selfish
god.
I am the yam and the lamb;
you shall have not yams and lambs before or after I am.
Open Taking the
Arrow Out of the Heart (New York: Atria, 2018) by Alice Walker, turn to
pages 9 and 10, read "The New Dark
Ages (for Martin), "and meditate
on these lines-------
Still,
We miss you.
Dreadfully.
As we miss
so many others
who left us with this one
desire:
that no matter how deep the fall
into obscurity and obscenity this new age
portends
Life might permit us
to remain standing
if only on the inside;
You are of a certain age and can remember that fifty
years ago Muriel Rukeyser urged you to read Walker's first collection of poems Once (1968) and can remember those poems
and the poems in Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart transmit
sanctity, the balm for the spirit so absent in the works of writers who care
not to be lessoned by how well Alice Walker tended her garden. In the dark age of the truly colorblind, you
may assume they fear to be lessened.
The water became fire; the
light, a rainbow ----my sign. Thirst as
your greed and pride burns your heart into ashes. But, first, return to the binary limits which
cheat you and cheapen you, the real subject.
Many citizens of the USA have been socialized to believe
(1) that they are the only Americans and (2) that the land they occupy (stolen
by their multi-ethnic ancestors from the indigenous peoples, the originals,
with help from the Great God Capitalism) is the greatest republic on the face
of the planet. They insert earplugs when
Americans from Canada, Cuba, and Chile tell them they are liars, that there are
many "Americans" between the North Pole and the tip end of South America. They are colorblind, incapable of seeing the
nuanced hues of their debatable democracy; their understanding of history, of
national narratives, is myopic. All that
matters in the unending narrative is the permanent tension between the white
and the black, the tension of genocidal domestic warfare, the tension
perpetuated by writing, publishing, reading, decoding of (mis-/dis-)information
and raw data, the sprawl of mass and social media and technologies. The tension is endemic. It is a terror-driven
dream of cosmic evil.
There is cold
comfort in the news that
"Neuroscience research at least muddies the
distinction between bodily injury and mental harm, and, in the future, it might
negate it entirely. One tool that
neuroscience can deploy is brain imaging, which allow a window into the altered
functioning of the brain under different conditions." [Lobel, Jules and
Huda Akil. "Law & Neuroscience: The Case of Solitary
Confinement." Daedalus 147 .4
(Fall 2018):63]
Neuroscience does not explain, however, to anyone's satisfaction why unhinged passions
cause targeted bodies to bleed into oblivion on unhallowed grounds, why
Americans murder Americans with maximum alacrity Human beings, you may safely presume, are a
billion years away from omniscience. They are incarcerated in self-manufactured
baby cribs of the black and the white. They acquiesce to the whims of
literature and writers, speech acts and people much in need of scrutiny and severe criticism.
You do have the integrity to admit you are one of those writers.
When you think of how the social construction of the
collective American mind so poorly functions, you curse and freeze, or you
laugh and melt. To be sure, you
exaggerate with a purpose, presuming that American writers who create many genres and
influence thinking ought to push back
against mass insanity and produce responsible opinions. Presumption fails, and ego prevails.
PARADISE IS HELL; HELL,
PARADISE.
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