Cobb

The Axis of Magic

There is something which unites magic and applied science [=technology] while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men; the solution is a technique. --C. S. Lewis

This week I happened on a conversation by @swardley, one of my favorite tweeters. He was describing magic in the realm of corporate desire. The thread is here: 

X : Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Me : Magic eats culture for lunch
X : What?
Me : I asked 20 tech executives - “Do you think your workplace is magical compared to others” and 40% said yes. Magic is real.
X : This is bullshit
Me : You started it with culture.

— Simon Wardley #EEA (@swardley) August 27, 2019

And the idea of magic occurs to me in two contexts. The first is the series Magic 2.0 by Scott Meyer. My review of the first book is here.

What a fun book, and what an exceptionally diabolical villain. Scott Meyer's protag is an ordinary bumbling, self-deprecated cornball of a 'Greatest American Hero'. All good intentions and smarmy sentimentality of a Millenial Charlie Brown, Martin Banks can't figure out a purpose for his life and becomes a marvelous fish out of water in the series. And having read the audiobook, one of the greatest voice actors in the business does a pitch perfect mentor in Phillip, the wise and conscientious mentor to Martin the Magnificent. But the true genius of this book is found in the character of Jimmy, social engineer par excellence. I cannot think of a villain who exemplifies so much of what is wrong in this world than this ruthless manipulator. He is the kind of glib evil that permeates so much of American society that recognizing the lengths he goes to is a revelation. 

The book is an excellent meditation on ethics and power, wrapped up in fantasy and fun, a brilliant and entertaining combination. Trekkies will immediately recognize the centrality of the Prime Directive in this work. 

But Lewis' is deeper. I remembered what he said about the expertise of technologists. He said that they cannot explain what it is they do, because they're all wrapped up in technique and their specialization has a necessary measure of opacity and obfuscation. I think I'm feeling this right now in my profession, and mustn't we all eventually? I mean if we really become proficient, we learn the underside of our business. Lewis said however, any child can understand magic. If you want to explain why all rockets don't explode on the launch pad, someone who understands all of the 735 components of the the rocket assembly couldn't explain it in a year. But if you say "it's magic", everybody gets it.

There's another tangent to this which is the explanation of the infinitely contingent nature of human decision making. Jordan Peterson made a remarkable impression on me in describing how humans handle tools. A car, for example, is just a tool to get you from point A to point B. It's only when the damned thing breaks that you bother to look under the hood. You will spend as little effort in using this tool as possible so you can accomplish your goals. When the tool begins to fail you, it becomes a problem and so you get into its innards, yet only up to a point. You then decide that all of its complexities are a waste of your time & money and you discard the entire thing. It is no longer relevant to your purposes. You find an alternative tool.  In that respect, it doesn't matter if your car runs on electricity, squirrel farts or vampire blood. It's technology you're never going to learn unless that is your purpose.

Philosopher Peter Kreeft writes in clarification of Lewis:

Science and religion both aim at conforming the mind to objective truth, objective reality (science conforms our mind to the nature of the universe, and religion conforms our mind to the mind of God and our will to the will of God).

Magic and technology, on the other hand, try to conform objective reality to the human will. That is why they both arose at the same time—not the Middle Ages but the Renaissance, not the Age of God but the Age of Man. Both are Faustian, Promethean. The difference is, of course, that technology works while magic doesn’t (usually). But their end, their goal, the purpose behind them, the human values and desires and state of soul that set them in motion, are the same.

What I need to think about is - oh never mind I just figured it out. Wow!

The abuse of religion always is involved in the establishment of the illusion of supernatural magic. The charlatan seeks the authority granted by inverting the idea of approaching God, the sacred divine by objectifying God as the ultimate authority to which the charlatan naturally appeals. The abuse of science always is involved in the established of the illusion of supernatural technology. The charlatan seeks the authority granted by inverting the idea of practicing the scientific method by objectifying Science as the ultimate authority to which the charlatan naturally appeals. 

Mike's Manly Man Checklist

Mike's Manly Man Checklist

1. Ride a horse
2. Ride a motorcycle
3. Shoot a gun
4. Rope a steer
5. Tune a car
6. Hang a door
7. Use a chainsaw
8. Quote the Three Stooges
9. Set a broken bone
10. Save a drowning person
11. Surf a wave
12. Ride a helo
13. Win at poker
14. Fly a plane
15. Climb a rock face
16. Retire that debt
17. Play harmonica
18. Garden
19. Wear a tux
20. Stop a thief
21. Run a marathon
22. Swim an ocean mile
23. Defend an innocent
24. Open that jar
25. Weld
26. Bench your weight
27. Stay loyal despite it all
28. Ace a hole in one
29. Gamble a day's wages
30. Break up a fight
31. Paint or photograph a nude
32. Paddle a canoe
33. Welcome a stranger
34. Back up a trailer
35. Take the L
36. Tell a dirty joke
37. Hit a curve ball
38. Get bounced
39. Pour a martini
40. Train a dog
41. Earn a nickname
42. Survive a humiliating job
43. Hustle pool
44. Teach
45. Score a touchdown
46. Perform the Heimlich
47. Calm an infant
48. Score a goal
49. Read Hemingway or Kipling
50. Tell a ghost story
51. Land a fish
52. Dress in drag
53. Finger whistle
54. Move a sofa
55. Drive a stick
56. Eat two steaks
57. No hands bicycle
58. Teabag a spawn camper
59. Nunchuck both hands
60. Wear leather jacket
61. Serve
62. Wear leather pants
63. Wear chaps
64. Explode something
65. Smoke a stogie
66. Survive an interrogation
67. Get a tattoo
68. Chop down a tree
69. Use your real name online
70. Wear the uniform
71. Lay cement
72. Build a fence
73. Grow a beard
74. Shave your head
75. Grill steaks
76. Quote Shakespeare or Bierce
77. Spit
78. Race a car
79. Make a huge fire
80. Approach that girl
81. Put out a huge fire
82. Backpack overnight
83. Face it
84. Play a guitar onstage
85. Wear a fedora
86. Lose a drinking contest
87. Arm wrestle
88. Curse out your (ex)boss
89. Mosh
90. Rescue an animal
91. Stop a bully
92. Paint a room
93. Initiate The Talk
94. Marry that girl
95. Dress an animal
96. Sweat lodge
97. Drive a tractor
98. Hunt for meat
99. Wear body paint
100. Bury treasure

 

American Wag 019 - White Supremacy

 

American Wag now has a bit of momentum. Here we are discussing current events, tribalism, cops busting minorities, identity and racial representation and a couple dozen other things related to the current buzz and fears about America falling off an ideological cliff.

As I begin to describe my efforts to understand the chatting class, liberal arts and humanities what I didn't explain is that my worldview has a very strong statistical bias. That is to say if 1000 people are murdered every year in my state, I'm going to calculate the chances that I'm going to get murdered and that is how I'm going to behave, by a precise risk assessment. Not by what some poet wrote about his dead homies.

The Dutzburger Tribute

This is my family. Dutz is my sister.

A Democratic Chaos Theory

My major take on the entire question of income inequality is that the only thing that's going to break it, income inequality being a bad measure of quality of life, is if everyone suffers. What establishes any meritocracy or any system that can be predictably exploited by the masses is consistency. You have to be able to understand a level playing field so that level playing fields and consequent fair rules can be propagated throughout society. This takes time and discipline.

But what if your desire was to disable the corruptions of the powerful? Given that what establishes much of monopoly is regulatory capture, what if democracy itself was used against level regulatory playing fields. In one sense this is what President Trump is doing to the trade relationship between the US and China. He is being unpredictably arbitrary with his use of tariffs. What nobody really knows is which tariff he might raise or lower in punitive fashion and exactly which domestic businesses it might effect. For those of my associates who couldn't wait to see Trump's brand of chaos upset the Beltway Establishment, this is punk music to their ears.

So while I think power should be distributed to the masses and Federal powers limited primarily because I am against the principle of monolithic scaling, I think it might be possible to establish a level of populist chaos that results in the creative destruction of regulatory capture. But short of this being done experimentally it is interesting to me to capture the marginal changes of policy in various industries and see what exactly the uninformed public is capable of doing. It seems to me that there are limits on the predictive abilities of lobbyists and in the implementations of hindsight as well and that those changes wrought by new regulations propagate in unexpected ways.

I come at this from the perspective of what the reasonable limits of populist, disruptive or revolutionary politics might be. How successful is reform? How timely? How consistently is energy expended? How many reconsiderations are necessary? How many police actions are required, expected, carried out?

The Race Man's Framework 2.0

A couple decades ago, I wrote the Race Man's Home Companion. Today, people are asking questions of the sort that should be answered with a bit more specificity. So I offer the following updated framework. Feel free to use it. 

Racial Theories:

All racists, and all racialists are attuned to Racial Theories.

A racial theory establishes the conventions around which races are defined. The aim of racial theories is to establish a well-accepted truth about race. These may be scientifically studied and many statistics, stories, myths and traditions may be cited. The point of the acceptance of racial theories is to establish by any means that race has meaning.

A racial theory doesn’t necessarily have to a genetic origin. It may have, according to its arguments, some cultural origins. So racialists will have difficulty accepting that an African could easily speak Mandarin or that a Pacific Islander could easily play European Classical music. This would be true according to the racial theory that each race has a ‘natural’ culture.

A racial theory seeks to be explanatory of behavior and at the very least establishes a baseline core property of any race. All racial theories seek credibility either through science, law, politics, ‘cultural construction’, myth, convention, tradition or any means at hand.

---

Racialism:

The Racial Realist

The belief that there are differences between human beings which are inherited such that they can be ordered into separate races in such a way that each race shares traits and tendencies which are not shared by members of any other race. Each race has an 'essence'.

All forms of racism build from the premise of racialism. Notice that racialism is not saying anything 'good' or 'bad' about races just that mutually exclusive races absolutely exist and divide the species. The racialist would argue that you could trace the bloodlines of blacks throughout history and that you can definitely determine the 'blackness' of any human being according to his racial 'essence'.

If you take a 23 & Me test and you are surprised or you feel that you have learned something more meaningful than what your horoscope says, this is racialism.

A racialist does not necessarily believe that the races, as we understand them in America are complete. He may say that there are, in actuality, 37 races. We just don't know what they are yet. The racialist's point however is that race, whatever it turns out to be, is deterministic of human behavior and that we need to know.

A racialist will discount psychology.

If you ask a racialist what is the essence of a race, they will have some answer or search for some answer, but they will not say that makes a race better or worse. A racialist searches for and finds meaning in racial theories and incorporates them into their worldview. The racial realist will not claim to be a racist, their explanation says "That's just the way it is."

Racism:

Type One: Extrinsic or Soft Racist

The extrinsic racist says that there is a moral component to the 'essence’ of a race which warrants differential treatment. These differences are, to the extrinsic racist, not particularly controversial. The extrinsic racist, while maintaining the belief for example that blacks are stupid, might not feel anything wrong with befriending a black. The extrinsic racist might very well applaud the black who proves himself not stupid and call him a credit to his race.

The extrinsic racist looks for the core meaning of a race as something that race owns, and must be convinced that they don’t know what race means. But they are content to let other people have their own ideas about race, and are always willing to grant exceptions to individuals of any race.

Type Two: Intrinsic or Hard Racist

The intrinsic racist says that the moral 'essence' of a race establishes an incontrovertible status for the race. No matter what an individual member of a race does he should be treated just like the rest of his race. The intrinsic racist would argue that the black is inevitably stupid so he finds clever ways to hide his stupidity (maybe through athletic prowess or spirituality) in order to gain other's confidence or that this intelligent person is simply not actually black, or what he demonstrates is not actually intelligence.

The intrinsic racist is willing to expend considerable amounts of energy in order to take extrinsic racism to the next level, which is to be politically, socially or religiously active and to evangelize for establishing the destiny of various races in the world.

Type Three: Racial Supremacist

The racial supremacist requires for his own peace of mind and the moral righteousness of the world, to be active in the establishment of racial law and racial order. The supremacist recasts the history and future of humanity through the lens of conflict between mutually incompatible pure races with mongrels and others caught in the middle.

The supremacist seeks to establish by any means, peaceful or otherwise, a social and legal hierarchy of superior races over their inferiors. From their point of view failing to do so risks permanent chaos and human dissolution. This hierarchy may be local, national, regional or global, but the supremacist needs the destiny of races to be established with immediacy. The supremacist operating in a non-supremacist society will accept any happenstance that leads to, or appears to lead to their desired outcomes.

Here is a framework that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about racism, racialism and racial theories.

A special note. 
There is a contingent with the political opinion that the absence of explicit and identifiable contemporary racial discrimination is irrelevant to the proper racial balance of any environment. I interpret this to be a fallacy owing more to a 'blank slate' hypothesis which suggests that all cultural and environmental factors can and should be adjusted to produce racially representative outcomes. I would like to call this a soft racism, but I think it is tortured thinking that fails to account for what is known in psychology and what can successfully be engineered in society. If you call it racist, that's ok with me, but I'd err on the side of befuddlement. 

The Uncle Bunny Scenario

I have white ancestors. I met them when I was a child. They were my Uncle Bunny and Aunt Mae. They lived in Connecticut in a small pristine house. I loved them immediately. Uncle Bunny had a head so bald that that it shone in the sunlight. Aunt Mae said he had a special formula that consisted of eggs that he used to polish his dome. Aunt Mae was just sweet, and you could tell that they loved each other. It was said that Uncle Bunny bought stocks in Ford when the company first went public. I am thinking about that today.

Someone I've known online casually mentioned in an interesting way that she inherited a bundle. And for some reason, I actually felt opportunistic. It's something I never felt before - not in the way I did for a few hours. I happen to know that the way she particularly came into this money was the cause of some embarrassment and discomfiture. You see she had lived her life without it purposefully not wanting the power it would give her over her material circumstances, but through some complications of the law she was forced to take possession of it or lose her wish to donate it all to charity upon her death. Seven figures is no joke, it might even be eight. Now it must be parked, for the moment, in a liquid state. She's going to buy an SUV.

We all have that wish for the genie to grant our wishes. I know that I have made a number of choices in my life that made me flirt with various probabilities of riches. I originally called it 'Fuck You Money' as did many people in my generation, especially those of us who worked in Silicon Valley. Although many of my wishes remained the same, I renamed it the 'Dosh Point'. And so I considered what I would do if I ever reached my Dosh Point. I must say that for a good majority of my professional life, the Dosh Point has never seemed that far away from me, and I have felt relatively confident that I would attain it. So I adopted such an attitude that I assumed it and so my tastes were never too far away. For me, it would be relatively easy to achieve the few material possessions I wanted and afterward settle into a kind of shabby gentility that always seemed appropriate to me. 

After some time, it became apparent to me that people much younger than I were cashing out of the casino capitalism having studied the game and counted the cards. Whatever it is they have done, I have recently considered that like Shaft, they must have planned for and achieved a Big Score. By my calculations of the thermodynamics of life, this effort must have had some opportunity costs. I've certainly known men who have sacrificed family for the glory of being the top dog. And while I often am thankful for what I have, I sometimes wonder in my solitude if I might have been happier with more money and less sagacity and more assholiness. I wrote about that earlier this year: 

A couple years ago I gave myself a bad haircut and went to see a long awaited popular military hero movie. In the men's room after the show, I met an irascible old man who grumbled that the actors in the movie didn't do shit compared to what he did in 'Nam. I took him out and bought him some drinks at the PF Chang's next door. He had come down the hill from Palos Verdes to condescend to the public. He informed me that when he was young he was a statewide track champion. He went to the war and became a helicopter door gunner. His bullets would spray but he didn't pray. "At least 100 kills" he said with a kind of practiced, gruff sangfroid. One day his chopper crashed and it broke his spine. He was told he'd never walk again. He walked like an old man for the rest of his life. He built a chemical company and lives in a multi-million dollar home with his wife. She let him out of the house, where he rarely goes. He still runs the company from home. He has beat everyone.

As I recall the story it reminds me of how Jordan Peterson says that disagreeable people make for good apex predators in the game of life. This man was certainly a case in point. He reminds me slightly of another man who was the one who loaned the computer that changed my life to the highschool I attended in the 70s. I called him to thank him one day, and he still grumbled about how OSHA set him up. He too ran a chemical company. The most successful men I know, with few exceptions, don't want to be happy. They want to win. They are only happy that they're not losers.  Life's a pile of shit that you must climb and stay rooted on top. These old climbers are kings of the hill and they'll tell you about it. They're not bragging to you, they're warning you.

I have some measure of this assholiness, but owing to the shape of my personality and life experience I have consciously bent myself into the service of others. Sometimes, though I am often disagreeable, I wish that I was more disagreeable in the way I was as a callow youth. But I have grown a social skin and it has become me. The engines of my single-mindedness have a lower redline than they used to. I could fearlessly go out and have that experiment with myself given double my Dosh Point, but I'm truly not motivated to do so. It gives me a sense of pleasure to know that I can and that I would, but I moderate my want for things I know I don't need, like that new Porsche and that house in Pasadena. 

So I think I understand (Sheila's) desire to resist the temptations at all costs. If you've made peace with the life you actually have, with person you have become, then why do that experiment? Perhaps it was in a moment of insight that you promised never to be that experimental asshole. Something like that commitment must be close to the heart of the reluctant heir. Isn't it the reformed alcoholic who knows better than anyone the power of the addition? Isn't it the beaten child who knows the terror of abuse? It's it the truly loved who know the horror of abandonment? I'm guessing there is something decidedly extra in my friend's experience that has made her swear off the fortune, or knowing her, she's just hardheaded enough to will that wall into existence, except for the SUV. Gotta have a good SUV.

I know in my heart that when I first read Fortune magazine and saw the profile of three rich families, I identified with the restaurant owners of Marina Del Rey. They pulled about 300,000 per year (in the 70s) from their businesses. They could have franchised and made way more money, but for them, they knew that would just translate to more expensive Christmas gifts to buy their friends.  That dovetails with the warning I had from a close friend of means who said if I made much more money I would only succeed in spoiling my children - a wreck of a sort I would never forgive myself. So yes, I am pretty much accommodated to my distance from the Dosh Point and consequently my bucket list is very very short. I am comfortable and I don't need much more comfort. It would be nice to have that Porsche and that house and that stereo system before I spend the rest of my life maintaining my health. It would be nice to have a month to waste in Paris with the Spousal Unit. There's not much more debauchery I'm interested in, not that I can think of any at the moment, but I do want to be exhaustive here.

All I can think of, seriously, is funding that business that builds that system that I think the world needs and only I have thought of, and time to write my books. It was that first opportunity that made me feel opportunistic when I heard the news. So it is in this I must face my lazy indifference and the possible disorder of my priorities. It is in this I deal with my own faults, a motivation I would lose if I suddenly had Uncle Bunny's money. 

I think I understand the point. That's why I no longer call it Fuck You Money. I'm not trying to be more of an asshole than I already am. I'm trying to reduce my asshole footprint. Personal riches are not going to help with that, they will get directly in the way. 

Red Metal

Once upon a time I remember believing that Robert Ludlum was on the government payroll and that his fiction was partly paid for by our intelligence services just to scare the enemy into thinking about how we might be thinking. Then I started reading Tom Clancy, so I thought no it's not Ludlum, it's Clancy. Then, if you can believe it, for a short time I thought it might be Dick Marcinko. Now who knows? I mean there are writers like Littel and LeCarre and my new favorites Jason Matthews and Ben Macintyre all who know quite enough history to have their work reviewed for approval. 

None of that approaches the verisimilitude of Greaney's new book with Rip Rawlings. These two in combination have done to the genre what Speilberg did to the war movie with Saving Private Ryan. Suddenly everything prior seems fake, staged and artificial and 'tacticool'. 

This collaboration is stellar. It puts together a complex timeline, memorable characters, geographic settings, strategic consideration, battle details in a compelling narrative. It works on multiple levels with remarkable precision that doesn't sound stilted and it doesn't force you to suspend disbelief while delivering just the right amount of drama. It is not romantic, nor pessimistic and it is far from far-fetched. The duo have set a new high water mark for the military thriller. 

The way this turns out I even wonder if there is much of a market for this kind of fiction written in Russia. I feel sorry for Russian authors. 

This one gets tanks, militias, choppers, close air, infantry, submarines and artillery operations down with stunning precision (as far as I could possibly tell) and by doing so takes a great combined joint strike at the genre of the special forces that do it all. What a refreshing take. The story itself is certainly plausible and it gives the reader a new take on how quickly things can go from bad to worse. No book I have read has ever done a better job of dealing with the fog of war in the manner this one does. 

A stellar effort. 

Toni Morrison

I was 28 years old and at a summer pool party. It had been a year since I moved out to the beach and had been driving my BMW. I was coming to the end of my patience with yuppie indulgences, but I was still trying to find a consistent highbrow aesthetic in black culture. I had joined a couple memberships in theatre companies, I toured all the black bookstores in the city. I went to all the coolest clubs and bars. People knew me and I knew people. It's funny I was just talking about some of that period in my life when my friend Charles and I ran GDZ and were part of the Babeless Crew. Nothing like being affluent, single and somewhat attractive in Southern California during the Cosby Era. It struck me that I was about as connected as I could get when I had been invited to hang out with Robert Townsend's Partners in Crime. I watched Bobby Brown practice at the Wadsworth Theatre for his comeback. 'My Prerogative' was the song. I knew it would be a hit.

At the pool party I was reading Toni Morrison's new book "Beloved". It was rather the last straw. I had pretty much had my fill of what was explained to me as the best of black fiction. I found it shocking that 'The Women of Brewster Place' was considered the best. It left me rather flat and unimpressed. I knew that as a student of Computer Science that my background in the Liberal Arts needed work and I tried to ignore the conceit that we in what would eventually be called 'STEM' worked a bit harder and were a bit smarter. Yet I kept singing myself to sleep with that song from the film After Hours "Is this all there is?" Jeopardy and Thelonius Monk didn't quite cut it. What was an intelligent young man to do, just make money? And then about 20 pages into the novel, I realized that here was the writing skill and imagery I had been craving. Suddenly the world around me began to pale and the sounds got tinny and muted and I was in Toni's world. She owned me.

That summer marked a major change in my life. Eventually all of the dance clubs, in fact all of Los Angeles fell into the background. I had found, at long last, the powerful black literature that I wanted to experience. For all of the extraordinary complexities of Beloved, I found an even better lesson in Jazz and started to understand through her narrative grace and insight something that boiled down to a Michael Jackson lyric "You're just another part of me." It's often hard to communicate what differences I expected and experienced between race and culture as flattened as they have become in the popular imagination. But the very last lessons of race I learned from Jazz and the works of John Langston Gwaltney and Adrian Piper. From Jazz came the subtle yet profound consequences of the emotional rejection of family and what comes of the rejection of genuine love between individuals who owe loyalties to their racial identities. It doesn't have to be hate that brings one to ruin. Exclusion from family is sufficient because it is the ultimate betrayal.

Beloved's Sixo was for me, Morrison's best character. Of all the characters in all of the black literature I ever read there were ever four that marked me as something close to the self. They were Jean Toomer's Kabnis, Paul Beatty's protagonist in the 'White Boy Shuffle', as well as Darryl Pinckney's in 'High Cotton', and Sixo. That was for then. I don't often think of Sixo now - I found my Thirty Mile Woman and she bore my progeny. My time out of time is best described in the time and place I wrote that some 20 years ago if I did. Morrison, more than any other black literary figure I can recall stood in a unique place. There was something ineffably affecting in her writing, not only in its evocation but in its syntax. Morrison's sentences went on and on folding and unfolding like tesseracts of consciousness capable of delivering you into parallel universes. You live in the world, but your mind is captivated elsewhere. That's what I recall floating through the NYC undergrounds. It was an alien diet that made your aura transmit in the ultraviolet spectrum where Earthlings still see only black and white.

Like all great writers, Morrison had a psychological wisdom that allowed her to occupy the consciences of her characters. I can't tell if she was going inside herself or not as the book following Jazz took me into a gory corner I could not stomach. Was that Paradise? I don't recall - I only remember choking on blood. The last bit of Morrision I took was from Playing in the Dark, as she metastasized into America's black woman author. In that, she talked theory, perhaps it was critical theory of a sort. I think she overplayed the 'masters tools' hand while making an excellent point of the matter of the rescued.

'The problem of internalizing the master's tongue is the problem of the rescued. Unlike the problems of survivors who may be lucky, fated, etc. the rescued have the problem of debt. If the rescuer gives you back your life, he shares in that life. But if as in Friday's case, if the rescuer saves your life by taking you away from the dangers, the complications, the confusion of home, he may very well expect the debt to be paid in full.' -- Toni Morrision, 1992

Morrison brings up an interesting tangent. If America paid the Negro his Reparations, what do you think it would ask for in return? It doesn't matter the actual price, it's a psychic bargain, a deal with the Devil if you will, another form of shackles. Perhaps we ought to note and confess that the Negro is always with us.

This thinking remains with me, as does the echo of Sixo's self-liberation. I wonder if literature today, American literature, ever bothers to reach as deeply into the human psyche as Morrison's once did for me. I marveled at the empty profundity of so many somebody's daughter books, as if only the trials of women's souls were worth examining in literature. Unlike academics, I am not part of the industrial process of constant dealings with the intellectual and social maturity of our youth - these examinations of the dimensions of the soul are for me processed at the level of history and philosophy. Dostoevsky most recently. It is difficult to bear witness and learn at once. I am not growing tired or bitter, but I do sometimes wonder why so much is politics and so little is life. We are shocked at murder and want to blame somebody. We don't recognize the dimensions of our own souls, that is, I reckon an eternal human problem. We should wonder why we want to think we can program an AI to figure it out, or somebody else to tell the tales that Morrison has already told. Humanity lies in plain view in front of us, and maybe it is her death that can remind us of the transformative power of actual art. Can we bear our own imagination? Here lies Toni Morrison.