Image from The Atlantic

Today’s read was I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye by Ta-Nehisi Coates (one of my favorite writers). I love the lyrical way in which he writes in addition to the thoughtful way he cultivates setting. I’m always struck by how well he uses the body to convey story and meaning.

I highly recommend this article because of the thoughtful take on Kanye’s alignment with Trump. However, some of Coates’ statements made me think about concepts beyond the article and examine my own life and thinking. I want to document them here.

“not just God in scope and power, though there was certainly that, but God in his great mystery”

Coates is talking about Michael Jackson when he references God here, but it made me think about the God I worship. I used to worship a God that was God in scope and power, but I never found rest in that God like I’ve found rest in the God of mystery.

It might sound strange to hear I’ve found more certainty in the mysterious God than an all-powerful one, but the deepest truths are paradoxical.

“in fact American unity has always been the unity of conquistadors and colonizers”

“West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom — a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next…

…not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak”

I am often wary of calls for unity and to move “together with one accord”. I trust these calls when they come from the marginalized; when they come from those in power I use Brueggemann’s “hermeneutic of suspicion“.

Are those in power calling for unity in order to maintain the existing structure and silence people? It’s something I’m always seeking to discern.

“And he made music for them, for the young and futuristic, not for the old and conservative like me, and so avoided the tempting rut of nostalgia, of soul samples and visions of what hip-hop had been…To his credit, West seemed to remember rappers having to defend their music as music against the withering fire of their elders.”

This links, to some extent, to my previous point. Coates here describes Kanye’s music and how it spurred the genre (and his listeners) forward as opposed to merely referencing the past as something that needs to be harnessed so that the things could be made great again.

Here there’s a lesson for me about not going backward but taking the wisdom and knowledge and connections I have with the past into future realms. I’ve been listing to both Jaron Lanier and Gary Vaynerchuck lately and they seem to come from two different camps when it comes to social media. Should I delete my social media accounts right now? Or should I do as Vaynerchuck suggestions and be on social media even more?

The answer, as I’ve come to discover with either/or questions, is simply yes. I need to find the truth that straddles both, the deeper truth that can be created if I harness both perspectives.

I think this is what Coates is saying Kanye does. He does not choose; rather, he embodies something more comprehensive, something that bridges both the past and the future. This can only be done by being solidly in the present. At least, that’s what I’ve come to learn.

“…was not solely righteous anger, but was something more spastic and troubling, evidence of an emerging theme — a paucity of wisdom, and more, a paucity of loved ones powerful enough to perform the most essential function of love itself, protecting the beloved from destruction.”

I really like how he discerns between types of anger here. A few years back, I gave up on trying to go underneath by anger. I was starting to become abusive and neglectful towards myself in my dismissal of it. So I stopped. And then I asked God to teach me about anger and for my anger to teach me about the world.

All that to say, I think righteous anger is one in which there is nothing underneath. Righteous anger burns clean. By this, I mean that it’s primary anger. Therapists often talk about how anger is often a secondary emotion that arises out of hurt, fear, sadness, etc. One of my favorite definitions of anger comes from Scientology/L. Ron Hubbard, “Anger is simply the process of trying to hold everything still.”

If that isn’t the truth, I don’t know what is. This kind of anger is the secondary anger, I think. It’s anger born of a desire to control, for example, because a person fears not being in control. This definition is one that humbles me. It makes me shut up and sit in the stillness it grants me.

Secondary anger, is as Coates says, something born from a lack of wisdom, a lack of power. This kind of anger is troubling and it is sudden, temporary, violent.

Righteous anger, God’s anger, is different. I once listened to a podcast in which the interviewee talked about a meditation teacher whose anger burned clean. It burned quick and after that, there was nothing but love. To me, this is God’s anger. It burns clean because there is nothing behind it but love. That kind of anger can be trusted because it’s born of wisdom.

“The work of writing had always been, for me, the work of enduring failure. It had never occurred to me that one would, too, have to work to endure success.”

This makes me feel confident in Coates as a reservoir of wisdom. He gets it. I don’t trust people who feel failure is different somehow from fame.

“I loved my small fame because, though I had brokered a peace with all my Baltimore ordinariness, with how I faded into a crowd, with how unremarkable I really was — and though I decided to till, as Emerson says, my own plot of ground, whole other acres now appeared before me. It almost didn’t matter whether I claimed those acres or not, because who are you if, even as you do good, you feel the desire to do evil?

The terrible thing about that small fame was how it undressed me, stripped me of self-illusion, and showed how easily I could be swept away, how part of me wanted to be swept away, and even if no one ever saw it, even if I never acted on it, I now knew it, knew that I could love that small fame in the same terrible way that I want to live forever, in that way, to paraphrase Walcott, that drowned sailors loved the sea.”

Another comforting response to fame from Coates. This is actually the reason why I struggle so much to do stuff. I already know what tempts me and the evil desires I have (which I know are similar to Coates’).

This passage gave me confidence, however, that I can put myself out there and whatever comes of it will just be an experience, and experiment, through which to discover new parts of myself. That doesn’t sound too intimidating. It actually sounds exciting.

“What I am saying is that this was still a time, as in my childhood, when you mostly had to see things as they happened, and if you had not seen them that way, there still was a gnawing disbelief as to whether they had happened at all.”

I loved this. I mentioned Jaron Lanier earlier, and one of the issues he brings up regarding algorithms is that the online experience, especially in social media, is so tailored to the individual. Our experiences are distinct from each other. Rarely do we have access to the same information at the same time these days.

Coates’ statement on seeing Michael Jackson reminded me that I need to make sure I’m empathetic toward other people’s experience, especially online. I tend to get frustrated with those who say social media (and the internet at large) is a negative place, as it’s never been that for me.

“I like to think I thought of Zora while watching Jackson. But if not, I am thinking of her now:”

This small statement was instructive for me as a writer. I can make these connections in present day and project them into past experiences with language like this. I’m always afraid of lying, but he doesn’t lie here by saying he was astute enough to think of Zora while watching Jackson perform.

“When Jackson sang and danced, when West samples or rhymes, they are tapping into a power formed under all the killing, all the beatings, all the rape and plunder that made America. The gift can never wholly belong to a singular artist, free of expectation and scrutiny, because the gift is no more solely theirs than the suffering that produced it.”

I love this because it gives me confidence in the fact that I will never own what I produce. It’s intimately connected with my individual experiences, everyone who gave rise to those, and even the world-at-large. I can never really create anything myself. I will always fail. And knowing that failure will always be the foundation gives me the freedom to actually create stuff. It’s creation that comes out of rest, grace, and gratitude–as opposed to effort and work. I trust that kind of creation because of the effortless flow and evolution.

    paula baker writes things

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    I write about things I’m interested in. Mostly religion (Mormonism), theology, the social sciences, and what I’m doing with my life (hint: I have no clue).

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