Instead of a poem I am posting a short essay today, found here, in Vanity Fair of all places, a publication that has soared lately with progressive editorial decisions. My choice is not coincidental. Kiese Laymon‘s books, Heavy – An American Memoir, and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, an amazing collection of essays, are already wrapped on my desk, waiting to be delivered come Hannukah and Christmas. (Note the website link offers alternatives to Amazon: Black-owned bookstores.)
Laymon’s descriptions bring us to places located within our own country yet utterly foreign to the privileged existence. They educate and enchant with a brilliant mind, and a gift for story-telling that matches the greats in the literary history of this country. Crystal vision originally referred to hippies or a free spirit doing their thing with the crystals; I like to think of his writing as a gaze penetrating through the opaqueness of the glass, willing a view into clarity.
I also was captured by the video mentioned in the essay below, when it first appeared on my feed, soon to burst into variations across the globe. I knew the Fleetwood Mac song by heart all those decades ago…) That explains today’s musical choice. Photography covers street performers and musicians in Louisiana since I never made it to Mississippi.
Here is the essay:
Now here we go again, we see the crystal visions.
Early this morning, my mailman read me a story. Two stories actually. I met my mailman, Shawn, in July. While sitting on my porch, Shawn had walked up and asked if Biggie Smalls was my favorite MC. Before I could answer, Shawn said he noticed the portrait of Biggie in my sunroom. Shawn placed my delivery on the steps and asked why I had so many books delivered. I told Shawn I was a teacher and writer. Shawn told me he’d never taught but that he was a writer too. I sat out on that porch listening to Shawn rap one and a half songs about his “old life” in Kansas City and recite the synopses of two projects he needed to finish.
“I’m not sure if they’re screenplays or novels or short stories,” he told me.
This morning, I listened over speakerphone as Shawn read the first five handwritten pages of the two stories he started on my porch. I lay on my bed, the back of my head buried deep into a down pillow that 10 minutes earlier I held like a soft someone I hoped would not leave. I never dreamed that my mailman asking me about the most effective use of third-person point of view would be what pleasure on a summer Sunday morning felt like.
Like so many of my friends, my past eight months have been spent dodging death, mourning the dead, creating art, and loving Black people. I’ve lingered in socially distant conversations with strangers. I’ve cried and laughed at what made me cry and laugh. I’ve made recipeless meals that were so nasty, all I could do was giggle in the middle of every bite. I’ve tenderly touched parts of my body I’d forgotten. I’ve found that pulling the hairs out of my corona beard is actually soothing. I’ve reread, rewritten, revised. I’ve done all of this not simply in the hopes of feeling good, but because I long to feel less like we are going to die tomorrow.
I am a Black southern writer from Mississippi. That is my superpower. Aloneness is our fuel. Loneliness our fire. But this, whatever this is, hurts in a new way. Folks across the political spectrum have talked a lot about normalcy this year, prognosticating when and how we’ll get back to it. In response, there have been heaps of brilliant essays, speeches, and webinars about how the obliteration of an inequitable normal is the first step in creating a place where abusers of power are held accountable and the vulnerable actually have equitable access to healthy choices and first, second, and third chances.
When this new normal is created or accepted, I wonder what will happen to sentimentality—that gorgeous monster James Baldwin called the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, the mark of dishonesty—in art, artists, and the audiences who give us life. How will we distinguish what feels good from what is supposed to feel good when all of our skies are orange and every stranger’s touch is a violation?
After not having touched another human for over three months, the night before I talked with Shawn, I drove to one of the only restaurants in town that still only offers curbside service. I touched the finger of a masked woman who brought Thai fried rice with tofu level 4 to my truck. I tipped her as much as the meal costs and thanked her for committing to curbside. She put the tip in her pocket and thanked me for committing to her restaurant. There’s a sentimental version of this story where, exploitation be damned, we both wait until we are out of each other’s sight to clean our hands, take off our masks and nod our heads slowly up and down at the grit, grind, and grandeur of Americans.
I did not live that version of the story. The kind woman who accepted my money went directly from my truck to the car next to me. I cried alone in my truck.
Later that night, I saw that someone sent me a clip of a brother who goes by the name of doggface208 gliding on a skateboard from the highway on-ramp with a half-drunk 64-ounce bottle of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice in one hand and a phone recording himself in the other. Sixteen seconds into the video, doggface208 bends at the waist and sings into the air. I watched the clip a second time with sound, and everything changed. I notice doggface208’s familiar nod to us, and really him, is so in the pocket of the song.
As Stevie Nicks sings, “Now here we go again, you say you want your freedom,” I notice trucks, factories, and two tattooed feathers behind doggface208’s ear. I see yellow and white lines marking the margins of the highway. I see how baggy and plush his gray sweatshirt is. I notice the familiar way he smacks his lips, relishing the punchy sweetness.
I feel, with every ounce of joy in my body, doggface208’s acceptance of fear and joy when he bends and lip-synchs the lyrics, “It’s only right that you should play the way you feel it.…” I’d heard, and loved, Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” thousands of times, but I’d never felt the freedom in loneliness I felt when watching doggface208’s TikTok.
The video didn’t make me forget that many of us are dying, dead, or mourning. The clip gave me another portal of entry into pleasure and movement. Doggface208 bended, and really blended, my gendered, raced, classed, and placed expectations of revolutionary desire, and art.
“But listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness,” is the next line of the song we do not hear.
Three mornings later, I am sitting in front of a smudged computer screen. Sixty-eight mostly Black high school students from Baltimore’s City Neighbors High School have invited me into what in 2020 we call a classroom. I am expected to read a chapter from my new book and teach the young people about the multiple uses of point of view in narrative art. I do not want to do what is expected of me because what is expected of me will not feel good to anyone.
I ask the students if they’d rather talk about fear and joy and concrete language. The only rule of the exercise is there are no abstractions allowed.
Two hours later, my computer, our classroom, is closed.
I am on my knees wondering why I am energized, satisfied, but not sobbing. Sixty-eight young people from Baltimore did what our geriatric presidential candidates and moderator could not do the night before. They used word patterns they’d never used. They talked freshly about fear of isolation. They collectively unraveled how capitalism encourages a speed that makes love, pleasure, and actual contemplation nearly impossible. They wondered why school didn’t teach them how to gracefully lose and graciously win. They made critiques of the nation and critiques of themselves. They listened to each other toe the thinnest of lines between yearning for pleasure and aching for escape. They accepted that they are worthy of the most exquisite joy. They argued vigorously about the ethics of seeking pleasure at the expense of essential workers, like many of their parents, who put their lives on the line for a tomorrow filled with remedies to overdue rent, grocery bills, bludgeoning debt. They wondered how to make essential labor into pleasurable labor for essential laborers when the nation insists on treating them as expendable at best, and big-hearted collateral damage at worst.
Those 68 12th graders made themselves feel good. Then they thanked each other for making themselves feel good, all the while pulverizing my understanding of sentimentality.
Later that night, I am sent an essay I read the first time one day after September 11, 2001, called “Blood, Bread, and Poetry.”
“Nothing need be lost,” the exquisite Adrienne Rich wrote. “No beauty sacrificed. The heart does not turn to stone.”
I love Adrienne Rich. I have believed Adrienne Rich my entire reading life. I am not sure I believe this Adrienne Rich passage anymore. Beauty is absolutely sacrificed. Our hearts often do turn to stone. This arduous acceptance is a radical pleasure, a sad but sensuous reminder that we are worthy of looking forward to responsibly feeling good in a world of ruin, where presidents shed their COVID-filled masks, wash their nasty hands of death, and the blood drips from the sky.
When the rain washes us clean, we will know. We will feel so good. I believe that. If we find, however, that the rain has actually left more bruises, soaked us in more sour than we ever imagined, and if that bruised sour feels so good, it is then that the pleasurable work actually begins. Many of our hearts are stone. Much of the beauty here has been sacrificed, and most of it stolen. There is no commercial, doctor, or wellness regimen to smudge that truth. Home is gone, but there is responsible pleasure to be found in the wreckage, in the pathways of the wrecked, and in all the goodness beyond where we’ve been allowed to discover.
Everything, finally, is lost.
Music today from the album Rumors.
Here is the original TikTok clip mentioned in the essay, featuring Nathan Apodaca, who is half Mexican, half Northern-Arapaho.
And here is a report on what dissemination of content on the Internet at times accomplishes. It is actually scary, because it feeds into the “everyone can get rich” myth of the American Dream. It is also encouraging because individual creativity echoes across the globe when it previously would have been restricted to the hard conditions of life on an Idaho potato farm.