Re: further reflections

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

I am answering this post not in hope of getting through to Simple Simon,
who knows not but thinks he knows, but perhaps of getting through to
someone else in addition to April, who I'm sure understands completely what
I am about to say.  I have plenty of venues in which to express myself, so
I needn't trouble you folks any further if I'm not getting anywhere.  I've
given you a lot; you've got to make an effort yourself.

At 10:02 PM 6/1/99 +0100, simon smith wrote:
>Ralph Dumain writes
>>But what about his self-mortifying tendencies, the "guilt of
>>art", "no poetry after Auschwitz", etc.?
>
>You can't understand that expression of feeling? Is that because
>you are an American?

I categorically reject that expression of feeling, and I'll tell you why in
a minute.

But first: I understand why Benjamin says every document of civilization is
also a document of barbarism.  The only guilt of art I recognize, however,
is the guilt of ruling class ideology and all-around barbarism incorporated
into art, the glorification of courageous battles, wars, kings, etc.  I
hated having to read Homer and Beowulf and just about every piece of
literature shoved down my throat in public school, not out of any conscious
political awareness whatsoever, but because of the elitist and forcible
submission which served as the subtext for all instruction in "culture",
which I considered, as a naive child, to be beneath me, because of my lower
middle class plebeian orientation and my fortunate brainwashing into the
ideals of American democracy and the liberal humanism I learned from THE
TWILIGHT ZONE.  (BTW, unlike the precious Frankfurt culture vultures, for
me science and technology were democratic, "culture" was undemocratic.)  To
me, the classics were alien because they were against democracy, as the
forcible study of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome,
and the Holy Roman Empire and all the rest of that rot taught in history by
alcoholic, McCarthyite old biddies utterly repelled me, because it was not
democratic.  (I was yet to learn for many years that William Blake agreed
with me here, but he was not taught in school, except for his two most
famous poems, which were given no context or explanation, hence remained
non-threatening and so didn't register.)  Under the circumstances, I could
only stomach science fiction, because at least it was about the future, not
about the past, not glorifying the empirical world of so-called human
relationships, a bloody, reactionary bore.  This was my naive, instinctive
way (in a vacuum of critical discourse, I assure you!) of negating both the
imposition of "culture" and the actual empirical social world.  This did
not allow me to see through the illusions of American exceptionalism, but
it instilled me with a sound system of values, however abstract.  (You'll
never see me low-rating Enlightenment values, and please kiss my ass if
this is a problem for you.)

There was something lacking here of an affirmative nature (ha-ha), but I'll
get to that in a minute.

Now as to guilt and poetry, I could split my sides with laughter at the
very notion.  Can you imagine Frederick Douglass on a podium shouting at
the top of his lungs: "No poetry after the Middle Passage!"  Can you
imagine guitar pickers in the Mississippi Delta discoursing about the guilt
of art?  It's all horseshit, because it's against life.

Returning to the gloomier moments of my adolescence, I had the
existentialist attitude to the world, not knowing it was a symptom of
social status, a historically produced attitude.  Mythology always negates
history, and the empty, barren, meaningless universe of existentialism is
as mythic as the minotaur, an ideological symptom of life that has lost
momentum and come to a standstill.  How people could devote their entire
lives to such a dead thing is beyond me.  Thank goodness I grew out of it
after a few years.

As to how and why I learned that life is too precious to waste, that there
is nothing more vain and in vain than reducing  existence to vanity, this
story I shall spare you, but the influence of black culture played a large
role in the rebirth of the spirit.  And that's because of the unstinting,
unyielding affirmative character embedded in the whole history of its
cultural expression, always striving upward, washing off the not-human,
resisting dehumanization, affirming life in the face of despair, never
surrendering to hopelessness, never losing its faith, a faith rooted more
deeply in the materiality of its humanity and in its striving than in the
horrendous, mind-deadening superstition of its alienated conscious
expression in religious belief.

When one has learned to experience the unbearable ecstasy of being alive,
one has no more time for the culture of death, the wallowing in decay and
nothingness.  And so I categorically rejected the culture of TS Eliot, the
culture of Samuel Beckett, the culture of nothing and no-place-to-go.  "No
poetry after Auschwitz": what drivel!--I feel to spit.

One more point: when I learned the value of "culture", it was not as an
object of academic study nor a separate, compartmentalized world cut off
from life.  There is no philosophical activity I ever engaged in which was
not a vital part of my everyday existence and the confrontation with my
immediate environment.  I never accepted the division of knolwedge
accroding to class and the division of labor, and hence the immediate
problems around me have motivated my studies much more than following the
needs an trajetories of a "discipline", not to mention the joke called
"interdisciplinarity" (compound bureaucracy).

>>If I had more time this morning, I'd go on to explain how black
>>America was >just coming to self-consciousness of its own
>>historical destiny in the 1940s,
>
>What 'historical destiny' would that be?

Who could ever guess?  The historical destiny of overthrowing Jim Crow.
The average person thinks of the Civil Rights Movement as starting in 1955.
 Aside from the tangible pre-history of those epoch-making events, there is
a question of long-term historical motion, occluded by the McCarthy era.
But the signs of open rebellion are already there in the 1940s, culturally
as well as politically.  There is much more to be said, but only to those
who care.

>>.... shown the slightest comprehension of or interest in anything
>>I've had to say.
>
>In my case that's because I'm a vapid little shit, among other
>things.

So it seems, but who can know for sure?

"Grown old in love from seven till seven times seven,
I oft have wished for hell for ease from heaven."
    -- William Blake

"The Negro will impart new values to Western civilization."
    -- Martin Luther King, Jr.