The Black Ecstatic: Readings of Loss and Black Queer Possibility
Essays
The Uses of Memory
Ecstasy in the midst of struggle
Roger Reeves
So, ecstasy. In the tertiary section of "Lilliputian Gidding," the last poem of Iv Quartets, T. Due south. Eliot counsels united states of america toward something like ecstasy—or rather, something both similar it and totally distinct, as "attachment," "detachment," and "indifference" are said to exist at one time "alike" and "differ completely" from one another:
There are three atmospheric condition which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the aforementioned hedgerow:
Attachment to cocky and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing
betwixt them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being betwixt two lives—unflowering, between
The live and dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and and then liberation
From the future too every bit the past. Thus, honey of a country
Begins every bit attachment to our own field of activity
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be liberty. Run into, at present they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as information technology could,
loved them,
To be renewed, transfigured, in some other pattern.
What interests me in Eliot'south "use of memory" is the way information technology both subverts and extends Wordsworth'south definition of poetry and retentiveness in the Lyrical Ballads: "poesy is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: information technology takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." Eliot's use of retention ventures, to my mind, beyond the reproduction of kindred feeling or emotion as provender for a poem. Still this is not all it does. In gesturing toward something beyond affect, Eliot also points toward something that might be beyond the future, that does non uncritically carry with information technology the past, as the hereafter tends to exercise. A beyond that transcends want, history, nation. A beyond that establishes a "renewed, transfigured" pattern. What Eliot calls for, I came to sense, is a secular ecstasy that subverts, troubles, disarticulates, and rearticulates the imagination and memory—and with them the old society, the "older design" of politics and intimacy.
Merely I likewise came to sense something else (and this might be provocative): Eliot's pronouncement is ontologically black and queer. Yep, I'm putting Eliot'southward modernist verse form in conversation with scholars, philosophers, and poets similar Fred Moten, Judith Butler, Essex Hemphill, José Muñoz, and Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman. I suggest this neither for shock value nor to reify whatsoever patriarchal notion of lineage that seeks to trace an idea back to its source. On the contrary: I do it as a means of disarticulating the polish sequestering of ideas to culture, race, or historical moment merely, or what Abdur-Rahman calls the "logics of teleological progression." As such, this meditation is aligned ontologically and epistemologically with what Eliot and these queer and black scholars, artists, and philosophers cajole us toward in their wonderings, poems, and essays: a beyond, an inhabitation that allows u.s. to "feel across the quagmire of the present."
Those last words are not from 4 Quartets (though they sound every bit if they could be), simply from the late Latinx queer theorist José Muñoz'due south articulation of a queer ecstatic in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Similar notions haunt the theoretical work of Abdur-Rahman. In "The Black Ecstatic," Abdur-Rahman declares: "As an affective and aesthetic practice, the black ecstatic eschews both the heroism of the black by and the hope of liberated black futures in order to proffer new relational and representational modes in the ongoing catastrophe that constitutes black life in modernity." We hear a similar disinclination to aggrandize the past as heroic in Eliot'south announcement in the stanza after the one quoted to a higher place: "We cannot revive old factions / We cannot restore sometime policies / Or follow an antique drum." The ecstatic, both the blackness ecstatic and Eliot'south, requires disentangling the by (equally nostalgia) from future, and vice versa.
This is, of grade, easier said than washed. As Abdur-Rahman notes, channeling Judith Butler, the hereafter—"the one-time-fashioned hereafter," equally Terrance Hayes has called it—is not a interruption from the by. Oftentimes, this future traffics in the "losses of the by," carrying them forward without subversion of their traumatic ends. Here nosotros can recollect of Faulkner'south famous ko¯an: "The past is never dead. It'due south not fifty-fifty past." According to this logic, the past becomes both the seedbed and grave of the future. The time to come is naught more than the already achieved and archived by, a by apt to be heralded back into existence via nostalgia—as in the Trumpian carrion-call "Brand America Nifty Once more." Both Eliot and Abdur-Rahman push us to consider how the logics of such attachments reinscribe that which we sought to escape, bogging down the present in "sometime," inefficacious "factions" and "policies."
So, ecstasy—ecstasy as inhabiting a across that liberates from future and past through nonattachment. Ecstasy as that which can disassemble usa from the teleological. Ecstasy "not less of love simply expanding / Of love beyond desire, and so liberation." Memory, for Eliot, allows the love or lover of the past to exist recalled without desire for that love or lover. Conversely, an attachment to the by circumscribes and delimits the potential for a new pattern, a new truth to emerge every bit something beyond the moment, a greater love. Eliot's notion of an expansion of love finds its echo in Abdur-Rahman's extension of ecstasy beyond pleasure. As she writes: "Ecstasy is not mere pleasance or inevitability or fifty-fifty necessarily sexual. Ecstasy exceeds pleasure and sex. More than importantly, it resists the logics of teleological progression by opening an immediate space of relational joy for black and brown people, for whom the hereafter is yet to come and already past." Abdur-Rahman's dislocation of ecstasy allows for a productive defamiliarization. No longer tied to notions of progress, either in the form of satiation and resolution or some purifying cease that volition set by and current wounds, ecstasy tin can be experienced and inhabited in the wound, in the tumult, bearing out the black colloquial adage that states, "In that location'southward a blessing in the storm."
Ecstasy is a pinching, a theft of beyond-pleasure while existence surveilled, prodded, poked, and persecuted. Here we might consider two moments from the literary critic Saidiya Hartman'south Scenes of Subjection, which analyzes the opaque relationship of blackness bodies and their subjectivity to pleasure and the banality of subjection: the coffle (the marching of a caravan of enslaved black people to market, an internal Center Passage) and stepping-it-up-lively for the primary during forced dances on the plantation.
In both situations, enslaved Africans were told to trip the light fantastic toe joyfully, cavort for the chief, or, in the case of the coffle, for the purchasing parties. Mostly, dancing is thought of equally an act of pleasure, or at the very least as an act that has the potential for pleasure. It is quite hard to dance in a lively, expressive, or blithesome manner if i is being compelled past a whip or a master's surveilling eye—when the cease outcome, as in the case of the coffle, is to be sold away from friends, family, and children. In the case of slave dances on the plantation, the master gave no consideration to the fatigue of the enslaved or whether they felt like dancing in the outset place. They danced until the chief tired.
Withal Hartman likewise suggests that nosotros consider whether there might have been fleeting moments of pleasure drawn from these everyday acts of oppression. A subversion and a corroboration occurring simultaneously. Property stealing property. A stealing abroad while existence stolen. Every bit she writes:
Pleasure was fraught with these contending investments in the body. As Toby Jones noted, the Saturday night dances permitted past the principal were refashioned and used for their own ends by the enslaved: "The fun was on Saturday dark when massa 'lowed the states to trip the light fantastic toe. There was a lot of banjo pickin' and tin pan beatin' and dancin' and everybody talk 'bout when they lived in Africa and washed what they wanted." Inside the confines of surveillance and nonautonomy, the resistance to subjugation proceeded by stealth: one acted furtively, secretly, and imperceptibly, and the enslaved seized any and every opportunity to slip off the yoke.
Pleasure was non deferred until some after moment exterior the principal'due south gaze merely was stolen inside it. Memory and artifice (storytelling) also participate in the furtive disruption of subjugation and inhabiting pleasance. To dismiss as mere nostalgia Jones's testimony of black folks discussing their life before enslavement would be a gross misreading. Memory, in the space of the plantation dance, subverts domination. And thus allows for "another pattern" (to bring back Eliot), one that appropriates and contests the design of injustice and oppression that the master seeks to imbue. A subversion appearing equally corroboration. Ecstasy, joy, does non have to be delayed until some amorphous future. Ecstasy now. Ecstasy whenever.
Inhabiting ecstasy in the middle of beggary might be non only an artful act simply a political i. Ecstasy equally protest. Ecstasy every bit a type of protestation artful. Insisting upon itself in the centre of the wound, the break, the ecstatic subverts and opposes the disciplining and oppressive act. Here I am thinking nearly Civil Rights Movement rallies and our current political moment under the Trump authorities. Right now many citizens—those recently inaugurated, those who take still to take their citizenship conferred however are seeking it, and those who have fought for their citizenship over decades and centuries—feel aggrieved and overwhelmed by this regime's attack on civil liberties, civility, and rights. Oft their response takes the course of marches, rallies, dice-ins, and other demonstrations (such as sit-ins on Capitol Colina by disabled activists). I sympathize the impetus for these sorts of protests. And yet it cannot be denied that such protests and their bellboy calls for change are field of study to the grace offered past others. Redress of pain notwithstanding lies outside the agency of the pained—with political entities like Congress, the president, or the judicial co-operative. Pleasance, agency, and liberation are thus once again deferred to some baggy time in the hereafter.
What if ecstasy were skillful publicly, employed every bit a liberating force, reminding both ourselves and those who would strip away agency through legislation and executive order that our joy and our bodies are our own?
All the same what if we adept a type of protest that deploys ecstasy in the center of struggle—even in the middle of the grief of protesting police force brutality. What if ecstasy were expert publicly, employed every bit a liberating force, reminding both ourselves and those who would strip away agency through legislation and executive gild that our joy and our bodies are our ain? Consider the Ceremonious Rights Motion. Hours, sometimes even the night before a speaker like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Joseph Lowery would climb the rostrum, participants in the marches would arrive to sing and dirge in social club to buoy up their bodies and spirits before facing the water cannons, dogs, tear gas, and batons of the police. Contradicting the violence that would exist inflicted on them the next forenoon, their singing also produced a counter-pedagogy, a counter-protest of fourth dimension-independent reveling in the body even as it stood at the precipice of its violation, one that did non crave a future or the achievement of a solidified, calcified liberation. What was being built, instead, were the "new relational and representational modes in the ongoing catastrophe" described by Abdur-Rahman: an ecstatic human relationship to the present, in the song, in the singing.
These defiant possibilities establish in singing are notably similar to those associated with lyric poems, which likewise brandish an ability to contest time and teleology and enact a manner of joy in the midst of ongoing ending. As the literary critic Jonathan Culler notes in Theory of the Lyric, the lyric poem resists mimesis through its ongoing-ness, its sense of "now," which does not end. In a poem, an event that took an 60 minutes, three days, or a year can be invoked in a single line. Or an instant in time tin exist expanded or arrested—for instance through rituality, rhythm, and refrain. As Culler notes in an interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books, "While many lyrics practice have minimal narratives or events in some sort of causal issue, the stanzas of a lyric are oft not bundled in a narrative temporality; they may exist unlike takes on a situation, or utterances that are not temporally situated in relation to one another. (Think of the case of the refrain equally the most obvious.)" Or, as Culler puts it in Theory of the Lyric, "Nothing need happen in the poem because the poem is to be itself the happening." More interested in evocation, in making something happen in the moment of reading rather than merely representing a memory or history, the prototypical lyric thus brings us back to Eliot's entreaty on the uses of memory:
History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. Run into, at present they vanish,
The faces and places, with the cocky which, as it could exist,
loved them,
To get renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Like Eliot's memory, the lyric poem vanishes the faces and places of history "to go renewed, transfigured, in some other design"—not through mere erasure but through the ecstatic. Eliot himself liberates memory from the old factions and patterns for the possibility of a renewed, transfigured design through the imperative and the declaring them vanished in the same sentence.
In this one sentence breaking over three lines, Eliot both erases and renews, enacts a liberation, a beyond in the nowadays (through the apply of the present tense). This pinch of the past, present, and future reminds me of the relational joy of the blackness ecstatic in the space of ongoing catastrophe that Abdur-Rahman articulates. In Eliot, the ongoing catastrophe would be attachment, and, every bit he makes clear, the break is not clean. The renewed, transfigured pattern, though liberatory, will behave residue of the past—memory. The instantiation of the memory toward a transfigured pattern is not a state of purity but one that plays in and with both "freedom" and "servitude." Like the black ecstatic, Eliot'due south notion plays in beggary simply is non constrained by that abjection.
Eliot's utilise of the imperative—an implicit apostrophe or address to an unseen presence—performs an boosted enactment, one that makes united states of america, the readers, complicit in the ecstasy, in the creating of the renewed, transfigured pattern, in the vanishing of history as servitude, history as freedom. In fact, without usa, the readers, the blueprint is not fabricated. The act of making the new pattern and vanishing the old pattern occurs through the operation of reading, through the verse form being made in the reading, which is itself a new design. "They vanish" because we, the readers, inhabit the moment of the sentence, thus enacting the activeness of the sentence.
This is the lyric par excellence. The lyric poem acts as a way of knowing, as a way of making the invisible visible, as an enactment of possibility. The lyric, in Abdur-Rahman's formulation, resists "the logics of teleological progression past opening an immediate infinite of relational joy." Yet information technology is ofttimes the space of relational joy that is relinquished in the march, the sit-in, the die-in, the occupation, considering in those moments what is prioritized is the teleological, a future-looking, the other side of struggle when the action or event is achieved. Joy must wait for the resolution of the struggle.
But why? Why must our joy be delayed for some amorphous, unguaranteed future? Why non enact it, live it in the moment of the protestation as protest. Later all, our joy is the reason we are there. Here I am thinking of the dancing protests by queer folk when vice presidential candidate Mike Pence visited Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio. Much like enslaved black folks who furtively "skid[ped] off the yoke" of slavery during dances under the chief's eye, the dance parties thrown in forepart of Pence's hotel windows similarly inhabited that space of relational joy. Enacting an ecstatic subjectivity, their queer bodies also performed a critique of Pence'south homophobia through radically making themselves present. In literally dancing before the master, but not for his pleasure (much to his displeasure, in fact), these queer protesters enacted a beyond in the space of abjection, offering themselves a non-sovereign sovereignty and agency that was not beholden to whatever normalizing or mastering discourse, not beholden to the country and its governance for recognition. For the aesthetic act of dancing does not follow the logics of protest or that of the infantile citizen who must beseech the pol for rights and redress. Instead, the dancing creates a din, a discourse that is both legible and illegible: a beyond without a necessity of a hereafter.
This dancing in the midst of struggle continues today, despite the ongoing catastrophe of state violence committed confronting marginalized bodies. During the protests against anti-Blackness in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Newark, Durham, and Washington, D.C., following the recent killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 25, 2020, demonstrator-dancers take juked, krumped, and danced to the Cupid shuffle in the middle of intersections while holding signs that read: "Easily Upwards / DON'T SHOOT" and "LET JUSTICE FLOW LIKE A RIVER." Electrical sliding while chanting "no justice no peace / fuck these racist-ass police," the protesters commit themselves to two simultaneous deportment: civil disobedience and joy. In fact, their bodies in move brand the case that these two phenomena should have never been separated. Although white supremacy and police violence would literally like to have the breath from black people (think of Derek Chauvin, the officer who killed George Floyd, kneeling on Floyd'due south neck for near nine minutes), these protesters, in the luxuriant reveling in their bodies, produce a counter-lyric. This counter-poetic wallows in apotheosis—in breath, in the flexed arm, in the arched back, in the hop and turn, the blackness body dancing subverts its disposability and ironizes the notion that it must be surveilled to death. This dancing is a refusal to exist yoked. Blackness life will not be curtailed. In taking place in the face of the state, in the helmeted faces of the National Guardsmen and police, it fugitively calls dorsum to the coffle, those internal middle passages to auction blocks and slave markets during slavery, reconvening that history while subversively repeating information technology. Whereas before we danced unwillingly and with fear of the lash, at present we dance willingly despite the lash.
History may be servitude,
History may exist freedom. See, at present they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, every bit it could,
loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
I hear something else in those last three lines: a push toward understanding memory as a mode of knowing, an epistemology, perhaps fifty-fifty a theory and metaphor. That the goal of memory is to find something beyond recollection, something that is both an inflow and a disappearance, a beginning and an end, something "renewed, transfigured, in some other blueprint." Might this push to participate in a beyond that is devoid of zipper, this seeking another pattern be helpful in writing in persona, writing in and about a body, linguistic communication, civilization, social position, and class that is non the poet'south? I am referring to the appropriation and misappropriation of blackness, brownish, and disabled bodies, their conflicts, labor, and aesthetics, in text and other media. Over the by several years, social media has erupted into multiple heated debates over the question of who has the right to write and make art about black and dark-brown bodies—from Kenneth Goldsmith's found-verse-performance-slice appropriating the autopsy of Michael Dark-brown to the dustup over Anders Carlson-Wee's persona verse form, spoken in the voice of a homeless person, inThe Nation, to Dana Schutz's painting of a mutilated Emmet Till in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Often there are two sides: the gratis-speechers, who believe we should allow artists to say and brand whatsoever they want and that whatsoever attempt to adjourn this correct is to censor, and those who believe that to deploy the materials of another culture, whether it exist its language, aesthetics, or struggles, is a blazon of colonization, farther proliferating Westerners' extraction of the labor and materials of black, brown, and ethnic bodies. Even so there are also people in the middle, which is the position I would like to think from now. How might we remember virtually deploying discourses, aesthetics, and bodies in our poems and art without reinscribing patterns of colonialism and cultural imperialism? This, we might say, is some other use of memory, another pursuit of the ecstatic.
Could this exist precisely the problem—the inability to imagine the other in ecstasy? In the examples I've given above, all three artists sought to meet black subjectivity or the racial, economically disenfranchised other solely through woundedness, annihilation, and the elegiac—quite simply, through eradication, equally if pain is and was the just way to make the other legible. What if the pursuit of writing about the other means understanding the other as a body in the possession or position of ecstasy, rather than sorrow? I am not arguing that racialized others' sorrows or struggles should be off-limits to a writer or creative person from a dissimilar bailiwick position; rather, what I am petitioning for is a rendering of the other that allows for ecstasy, pleasure, and joy to be within moments of struggle and sorrow. In other words, to think of the black, brown, or disabled body non simply equally a trunk but in hurting but also every bit one complicating and contesting pain and subjection. Think again of the testimony of Jones, the enslaved man who describes the cursory moments of pleasure and agency stolen while nether the surveillance of the slave main at Sabbatum dances. Even there, in the most brutal of situations, we observe a complicating of the bifurcation between pain and pleasure.
In pursuing this line of thinking, I would similar to put Eliot's passage in chat with Christopher Gilbert'southward "Listening to Monk's Mysterioso / I Retrieve Braiding My Sister'south Pilus." Christopher Gilbert is a poet who died of polycystic kidney affliction in 2007, and whose work is woefully understudied and underdiscussed. Built-in in 1949 in Birmingham, Alabama, he grew up in Lansing, Michigan. A psychologist by trade, in 1977 he participated in the Costless People'southward Artist Workshop, which was established past Etheridge Knight. In 1983 he won the Walt Whitman Laurels for his starting time book of poems, Across the Mutual Landscape, which was published by Graywolf Press the post-obit year. I came upon Gilbert'south work when Terrance Hayes emailed me several sections of the poem "Across the Mutual Landscape" in 2010 and asked if I had heard of him. I hadn't. Every bit shortly every bit I could, nevertheless, I plant a copy (used) of his book and immediately was entranced past the thinking, the music, the ability to move in and out of several linguistic registers. (In 2015, Graywolf reissued Beyond the Mutual Mural together with a previously unpublished manuscript Gilbert wrote before his death, Turning into Abode.)
Gilbert'southward piece of work is suffused past his sense of wonder—wonder at how to be part of something that is not 1's own, how that wonder can pull someone into a place of joy. It is that wonder we find in a poem similar "Listening to Monk's Mysterioso / I Recollect Braiding My Sis'due south Hair." The poem offers us a lesson on how to become to "it," the lyrical space of the beyond, the not-yet-seen just opaquely known. Merely Gilbert and Thelonius Monk'due south "it" is also the "it" of the other, the other'due south pleasure, the other'south ecstasy.
The poem begins with, and in, the illegible, the unknowable.
What'south information technology all well-nigh is being
only beyond a man's grasp,
which is a kind of consciousness
you can own, to get to
be at a moment'southward center
and let it proceed on happening
knowing you lot don't ain it—
which is moving yourself close to, beingness
particular to that place.
The enjambment of the get-go two lines emphasizes the first one-half of the declarative statement—"existence" every bit opposed to annihilation else. In that location is no want to traverse—to subject—this unknowable territory. In other words, what "it" is all about is beingness, not knowing. This "being" that Gilbert is describing reminds me of Eliot's nonattachment to memory and history, in that Gilbert does not call for an "owning" of the unknown, the ungraspable, merely rather allows for its mystery, its unfamiliarity. And information technology is this which so allows for one to become "detail to that place," which I read as a type of renewed or transfigured design because information technology creates a human relationship that did not exist before. The term "item to" is important hither considering information technology nods to a blazon of nonhierarchical simultaneity that Gilbert volition after call a "mutuality" existing betwixt the foreign and native, betwixt two disparate entities, in his poem "Kodac and Chris Walking the Mutual Landscape." This mutuality transfigures and critiques the American notion of tolerance, that "I tolerate you and your means, and you tolerate me and mine" which e'er seems to carry with it the connotation of disgust and disapproval, our tolerance erecting a debate between u.s.a..
In dissimilarity, Gilbert's way of "existence / item to a identify" as a grade of non-knowing implies a broader openness. I does not have to be of that place, ane does not take to be native to be detail to it; i can be "of" it via one's consciousness, even if the consciousness is in doubt. In other words, uncertainty as a way of being at dwelling.
Gilbert finds a way around this ethically fraught territory of
possession and noesis.
I read this moment as an intensification of Keats's negative capability, the ability to sit in doubt and allow that doubt to be part of the creative procedure. Gilbert would have us think of doubt and confusion not only as a manner of knowing (epistemological) just as a way of being (ontological). A mode of knowing and being that allows the unknown its opacity and illegibility without recasting that illegibility every bit unsafe or reprobate. Gilbert starts his poem in argument, a statement that contests the notion that knowing something requires being able to agree it, possess information technology completely. As such, he addresses the byproduct of knowledge production and accumulation. Often, in the pursuit of knowing nosotros gear up or arrest the event's—"its"—motility. This pursuit foregrounds the desire of the pursuer and reifies what is being pursued. The objectifying so leads to a type of fungibility that moves knowing into the territory of commodity and control, thus bringing u.s. back to subjection.
Gilbert finds a manner around this ethically fraught territory of possession and knowledge. Rather than focusing on the confounding, "ungraspable" effect, he would have u.s. remember near our consciousness, about the inability to grasp as a blazon of consciousness, a blazon of place to be, something to own as in merits rather than possess or administrate over. The move toward claiming a dislocated consciousness rather than the upshot is a shift of burden and an offer of grace. Often the confounding outcome is blamed for its perplexity, its opacity. Gilbert wants us to sympathize that such a transference is misplaced, non because the event (in this case the braiding of hair) is inherently ungraspable simply considering "you" (the narrating poet) lacks sufficient skill and experience in braiding pilus. The hair slipping the grasp is not a failure of the moment but the moment as it should be.
It might seem as if I'1000 arguing that the Gilbert poem is offer ii competing models of ecstasy, i that involves sitting in the position of the outsider and assuasive the ungraspable aspects of the moment to be the way into ecstasy, into knowing and being, and the other i that suggests that ecstasy resides in non corralling or absorbing the unknown but allowing its illegibility. What I am pushing the reader toward is embracing both. Ecstasy in the ungraspable, in rendering the unknown, is recognizing i's outsider-ism while simultaneously understanding or embracing the ineffable of the deed itself—the hair resisting the braid, for case—which skilled practitioners of the human activity would know. And information technology is thus that Gilbert offers that defoliation, that disability to grasp as a identify to dwell. In the unreachable, the unattainable: grace rather than anxiety.
What Gilbert also acknowledges in that long start sentence is that existence a stranger does not necessarily hateful beingness estranged or alienated, conditions often accompanied by discourses and technologies of violence and containment. In letting the event "proceed on happening," assuasive ourselves to exist nonnative to the event and nevertheless at its center, Gilbert offers a distinct kind of inflow. This is an arrival that critiques the expansion of Europe into the erroneously named New World, critiques Europe's imperialist movement into Africa. Gilbert's inflow is an inflow that does non require mastery, mastering, or extraction. His sense of arriving at the center of a moment has to do with a mutuality of differences, but the differences exercise non require a reconciliation. They happen alongside each other without contestation. They co-perform. They exist without seeing the other equally impinging or threatening. In arriving without the need to bailiwick or control, we arrive at the center of the event because the consequence is large enough to invite in the uninitiated. There is no exterior or outsider.
Merely exactly where are we, what is the impetus for this claim about consciousness and knowledge at the commencement of Gilbert's poem? Gilbert's opening is similar to Auden'due south in "Musée des Beaux Arts": "Well-nigh suffering they were never wrong." Who is this "they?" But as Auden clarifies who "they" are in the side by side line ("the Old Masters"), through a shift in diction, Gilbert grounds his philosophical assertion in a narrative scene.
Like my two sisters
taking turns braiding each other's pilus—
hair growing against their weaving, they formed
a flow their hurt and grace could mean
as each took turns pulling the comb through
the other'due south knots and their little Vaseline.
Whereas the poem begins in the public realm of the rhetorical and philosophical, the simile moves the reader into the visual and the domestic. This switch vernacularizes the opening judgement and stanza, locating the philosophical in the realm of the everyday. And every bit such it indicates the intellectual rigor and possibility in an act such as braiding hair, an act many would characterize equally without intellectual substance or difficulty.
The "ii sisters / taking turns braiding each other's hair" teach us how to sit in the unknowable and exist. In the sisters' braiding, in the patterning, they materialize the ineffable of "hurt" and "grace." And for a moment they brand a motility, a "flow," that allows the "injure and grace" to be known. It is an improvisational moment, a moment of pinched ecstasy. In grasping each other's hair, they create a new consciousness, a transfigured pattern, even as the hair resists the legibility of the braid: "a knowing which makes the world / a continuity."
Just like the speaker of the poem, nosotros are constantly embarking upon a process that is amorphous, vanishing, renewing, and transfiguring itself into another pattern, even as nosotros seek to brand 1. Gilbert's wave metaphor at the lesser of the tertiary stanza addresses this procedure of constant alter.
Equally in your cadre
Something calls to you
at a distance which does not matter.
As in the world you volition see yourself
listening to follow similar water
following its wave to shore.
The water post-obit the moving ridge back to shore must accept on the shape of its varying formations, rushing toward what calls it even every bit it is moving toward its own dissolution. In the fourth stanza, Gilbert declares that this following of one's calling is a type of "letting," which we are to understand as a blazon of being. In following this procedure of being, we move into "something else," into condign an "other." I would argue that this is the position and disposition of the author. This becoming other is neither shine nor easy. In fact, Gilbert describes information technology as a type of drowning: "it flows into ever something deeper and / over your caput." Though he lightens the moment a fleck—likening the one in this state to "a child with 'why' questions"—Gilbert swiftly submerges us again, transforming the "'why' questions" into something that can drown u.s.. Yet the drowning is the but manner we come into life:
Your answer is a moment struggling to be
more itself, your straining for air
to have the chance to breathe information technology free.
It's alive y'all've come up to,
this coming into newness…
In what might seem like a contradictory moment—coming into life while drowning—we run into another echo of Eliot's notion of the transfigured pattern that results through nonattachment. We also witness a moment of ecstasy. This ecstasy is one of relational joy, in which struggle is non banished or eschewed, an ecstasy that accepts contradiction, the oxymoronic. For Gilbert, this oxymoronic moment—the struggling for air, the struggle for answer—is the quintessential moment of being alive. While before in the poem Gilbert suggested that this process is illustrative of the continuity of the globe, he at present presents information technology as simultaneously discontinuous: a way one comes into newness, into a mind that can perceive an otherness. Quite simply, one becomes fractured, transfigured—though into what?
Here again, at the poem's moment of greatest abstraction and uncertainty, Gilbert moves u.s.a. dorsum into the world of the existent, of his sister's offer: "You desire to learn to complect my hair." The asking moves him into the eye of the event, and recognizes his want to be part of information technology, a mutuality signaled by Gilbert's use of a menstruum rather than a question mark. The sister'south offering is both a request and an acknowledgment, a moment of ecstasy. It is at this point that Gilbert presents, for my money, the poem's nearly sublime and humble insight: "at that place are circumstances / and you are asked to exist / their member. Not owning simply owning in." Here again I hear an echo of Eliot's notion of nonattachment, transformed into a manner of beingness part of an result without colonizing it. Equally such, it is liberation. Ecstasy as "not owning simply owning in," a getting to "it." Learning "to / be at a moment's eye / and let it go along on happening."
For those interested in writing near people and lives other than theirs, this moment is instructive. Primarily, nosotros must be asked or called to the job the manner Gilbert's sisters requested and acknowledged his call: "Y'all want to larn to braid my pilus." The writing of the other and so, is the learning of what is beyond desire: "non less of beloved but expanding / Of dear," learning to braid, walk, talk, love, cry, run, and hurt like the other without usurping the moment. So liberation. So ecstasy. Ecstasy, so, becomes non a possession of the other but a mutuality, a recognition of a simultaneity such that "The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal elapsing," equally Eliot writes. "If you tin, get to information technology," writes Gilbert. Another pattern, another love. Ecstasy.
Roger Reeves is author of the poetry collection King Me. He has received the Whiting Laurels and other honors.
The Black Ecstatic: Readings of Loss and Black Queer Possibility
Source: https://yalereview.org/article/uses-memory
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