Response to Between the World and Me

Some days without reading in the afternoons, and then yesterday with the afternoon off reading practically all of Between the World and Me in one sitting. It would be good to talk it over with Anthony and Joe, to imitate it or respond to it on the part of the Dreamers laid so low throughout, to look up the context of Toni Morrison’s high praise, the voting proceedings of the National Book Award critic-judges, and certainly to compare it to Gilead’s fictional letter to a son from a father.

Maybe the most interesting aspect of the whole thing is its insistence on the body being all there is, and the struggle for it the only certain meaning. Such has been the author’s experience, bereft of God and peace or trust outside a narrow Mecca, and the materialist worldview underlies the unstinting refining of the question of the purpose of the struggle whose answer consistently comes back in those same terms. Call and response. In turn, as a positive tenet, the beautiful vulnerability of the body fuels Coates’ unquiet critique of nonviolent heroes and scorn for the idolized Dream.

Perhaps the only thing subjected to harsher treatment still is the apparatus of the state itself, the aims of the police and the schools, the pitiful resistance of the street, in all of which the body is already forfeit, and with it, of course, any personal responsibility, subsumed under the unstoppable historic process of plunder.

The book ends with a brief interview with the mother of a friend killed by police and prophetic warnings that even her strength and forgiveness, the whole tradition of black personhood she represents, is fast dying out, and that it would be powerless, anyhow, in the face of the self-destructive arc towards chaotic possessiveness that is the truth at the core of the Dream she and her heroes kept believing in, even if it was only enjoyed elsewhere, through the impermeable media of screens, by ignorant actors with white skins. The final image is the forceful embodiment of wasted potential, South Side projects rising through the rain, but also a possible ark in the swelling flood of environmental catastrophe brought on by a lifestyle in pursuit of an impossible Dream.

How this incontestably gloomy vision is supposed to coexist with the joy shining out in the depths of that ark, leaping up in moments of study in the Howard library, or on the green, or with the trips to Paris, full of unforeseen new vistas on life--all this is evidently reducible to the body, too. It does look suspiciously like the intimations of some vaster and more mysterious spirit; it comes close to collapsing the mental walls around the Dream as tinted by the television box, if we just take that further logical step of conceding that those conjugations in French class did have some purpose outside the confines of the present struggle, and that it wasn’t simply to constrain young curiosity. It would require supposing that the joy Coates felt in France, free from the crushing oppression of history and fear for his life, is just the same as the uninhibited joys of people anywhere who can forget for awhile to feel that weight and that danger--including the worshipers in any church, or the sleepwalkers or Skywalkers in any suburb. It would demand the acknowledgement of the West as being full of Tolstoys of all backgrounds, languages, and outlooks; insofar as the West means anything at all, it means that Tolstoy is as manifold as his readers; and there may be something to struggle for to preserve that freedom and security to read from attacks from outside the West as well as from within its precinct houses and illiterate classrooms, and the two threats might well be quite different in kind, so that to conflate them under the catchall Terrorism is quite mendacious, or at least shortsighted.

That there is something other than a body and greater than anybody because more enduring and life-giving than a body, namely the word, but that it means something precisely because it is embodied. Otherwise we’re just neglecting the water for the vessel, solipsists and egoists, in prison-houses of our own making, waiting empty on a shelf. But long may this vessel be full! Long may this book be taken down and read!

In a related vein, there was the training in the morning, dealing with restorative dialogue with students and coherence of instruction around critical reading skills--a roomful of white teachers, paid by the state to teach the whole range of children living in some of the poorest zip codes in it. So is it true, as Coates maintains, that the intention of the teacher means nothing, and all that counts is the difference of bodies and perceptions, or does some spark pass through the words spoken and the unspoken spirit of love, trust, and desire for freedom, through learning, from one person to another, perhaps outside of the control of either, but manifest in both results and intentions? It seems like an open question, but answering it one way permits us to keep on working, while the other is a form of the dilemma that accounts for so many suicides, senseless rampages, and other nihilistic acts among precisely the privileged, or the ignorant majority, at least.

It is too easy to suppose that only the disadvantaged or minority has access to deep thinking about some state of affairs that affects everyone, thanks to their conscious, pervasive experience of the struggle giving their embattled lives meaning. To me it has always seemed obvious that there would be something so desirable about that kind of life as to make up for any amount of hardship, to have access to those truths firsthand, and not only ever reading about them, not unlike wishing to fall in love though knowing in a sense that it would bring some pains with it. So rather than Aragorns I would say we are Raskolnikovs, this generation of hipsters and readers, seeking something that we know and don’t know, and that that pain of dissonance and seeking for meaning is real, and that it does also provide some meaning of its own, insofar as any struggle in itself does.

I don’t think this is hairsplitting too much, but that in going to work in Boston I was doing something analogous to what Coates does in travelling to Paris: seeing things from the other side. And it is what reading and learning helps to transmit, this desire for authentic experience of whatever kind. That this is embodied, for us, yet transcends the body. That we know it as a kind of experience and relationship, but what it is in itself, who’s to say? And who is to circumscribe the limits of the kinds of bodies who have access to it? That is simply dogma via ressentiment, cutting against Coates’ own professed and seemingly sincere devotion to open inquiry.

Now these workshops on restorative dialogue open up one other chasm that needs crossing, which is what the kids for whom it does not work fall into. What is going on with them, with our relationship to them? Isn’t force still the thinly veiled recourse then, if respect is not possible to piece together--the old promise, the old authority, still in effect at bottom, for all our efforts to cobble together some new contract, some more aspirational promise? And is it doing these kids, the ones who have not learned to trust words and refuse to, any favors to lead them by degrees to their shock of encounter with the force majeure?

There is something insidious about the authority pretending, agreeing to pretend, that it is not, that there is some parity, until it no longer suits it to dissemble, at which point the truncheon comes out. And yet how could we deal with these kids, these people, in the hard-and-fast rules’ absence, so as to preserve the modicum of kindness and security necessary to have the time and quiet to read, to study, to learn to be human, unless by exiling them to the side of things where consequences are enforced rather than negotiated?

Unless it is only when that whole apparatus is dismantled that the true conditions for trust are re-established; what force and exile could not accomplish, forgiveness does?