Reading Your Readings

READING  YOUR  READINGS

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?

I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die,

        and I know it.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

2018 ---  forget nothing; work; read; maximize critical thinking; volunteer; vote; demand that elected officials account for their daily actions; remember how unfree freedom is and who died/dies/will die for it; vote; read; ponder; focus as you live with dawnmare, noonmare, and nightmare  ---  2018

Jerry W. Ward, Jr. "Cosmic Orientation," December 31, 2017.

After reading

 (1) PMLA 134.1 (January 2019), a gathering of articles on what's trending in "Cultures of Reading"

and

(2) Wole Soyinka's replies to questions from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in "  'There's One Humanity or There Isn't': A Conversation," New York Review of Books (March 21, 2019): 32-34,

you happen upon Namwali Serpell's "The Banality of Empathy," NYR Daily (March 2, 2019).  This is heady stuff, work for the brain,  a small body of speculations gratefully received by  a small body of uncommon readers.

The PMLA articles remind you that cultural literacy in the USA is disunited and intensely partisan; the Soyinka/Gates conversation reminds you just how disingenuous  recent commentary in the United Nations magazine Africa Renewal has been regarding neo-colonialism and African nations.  The UN is not immune to the sinister virus of raw capitalism.

 Serpell's  assertions and counter-assertions related to Western notions of empathy take you  for a ride . Up and down you go. For as you wrote in "Serious"

as she shakes you

up and down

like a pair of dice

and all the liquids

turn from tepid water into steam

and she, so sure and so serene

[dances]

on the secret dream within your dream

Fractal Song: Poems (2016), page 39

You put the word "dances" in brackets, because you forgot to include it in the published version of the poem.

The three reading exercises  leave you in productive uncertainty.  Just what relationships can you have with texts and the states of being ( transactions) they provoke?  Ultimately, you are left hanging in discomfort and oblivion.  With a morsel of regret, you admit the limits of your mind and count the options of entrapment.  SNAFU.  You emphasize the sound and signifying of "F"/"U."

You were one day away from Lent 2019 when you pondered  the consequences of reading, and you welcomed  the end of Carnival marked by Mardi Gras.  Ash Wednesday is a blessing. Excessive daily celebration of who dat, when dem  and what dis in New Orleans (and elsewhere in the world)  nurtures stupidity or fatal disregard for the gravity of life. Lent promises forty days of respite, contrition,  and renewal for Roman Catholics and other nominal Christians. Forty days of a religious joke.  You would like to give up the simple agony of  reading for Lent.  That is, of course,  impossible.  Fate condemns you to read.  And Serpell's anatomy of what's compromising  about empathy leaves you with an unreliable compass in the territory of Virginia Woolf's The Common Reader (1925) and The Second Common Reader (1932).

 You have to make a choice between the goat path of cognitive empathy and a California highway of emotional empathy. Serpell  enchants  you like a reincarnation of Woolf, tossing out one forking reference after another  to Kant's The Critique of Judgment, to  Karl Ove Knausgaard, Candace Vogler, Flaubert, Cervantes, Hannah Arendt, and  Brecht.

 Where are references to Dao De Jing,  Angela Davis,  Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells,  W. E. B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Tolson, Hayden, Maxine Hong Kingston, Dante, and Baraka?

Had Serpell framed her argument from theoretical perspectives of African ethos and The Epic of Gilgamesh and Chinese philosophy as well as from the exhausted and trite hegemony of Western imaginations, you would be delirious with joy.

 You know too much about Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of moral philosophy in After Virtue (1981), the critique of economic and democratic limitations in DaMaris B. Hill's A Bound Woman Is A Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland (2019), and Tommy J. Curry's critique of conventional assumptions in The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (2017).  You are not delirious.  Who needs joy when unhappiness is so freely available?  Joy is an expensive joke that lives in the outback of fiction ----forms of imagination that evade verification, provisional certification. You are pragmatic because you have a love affair with intelligence as intelligence.  Unfettered empathy would be suicidal.

You do like fiction (prose or verse narratives), drama, and poetry, but you are wary of them.  You place your bets on non-fiction, aware, of course, that reading is always a gamble. Verification and art have limits. The cognitive empathy you obtain from conversations with other uncommon readers is superior to the emotional empathy that occurs in solitary reading.

 Serpell is  accurate in proclaiming that art can't "save us from the violence that still permeates people's lives, shockingly unevenly. " In the long history of humanity, violence is quintessential, religion and theology  notwithstanding.

People are condemned  to the inhumanity of humanity!   Can you get a witness?  Truth be told, people do find relief in the fidelity of genuine friendships, in the illusions of love, in the memorable conversations that many senior citizens in the United States of America have with one another. Should you thank the universe for eternally confusing intelligence?  Yes, it is probable that you should be grateful for bright moments and small favors.  Should you applaud Walt Whitman with absurd howls of execration (borrowed from Albert Camus's The Stranger)  as Whitman broadcasts evergreen leaves of grass  in 2019

What is a man anyhow?  What am I? and what are you?

All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,

Else it were time lost listening to me.

Yes, reading  your readings conjures  icy affective irony,  and the banality of empathy  leaves you  wondering as you wander.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            March 27, 2019