James Baldwin: Epistemology and Poetical Economy
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If you’re lucky, there will be a handful of times in life when you’ll come across a writer who absolutely wrecks you. There hasn't been a lot of opportunity for this throughout history. The written word has only been around for several thousand years, with seemingly independent origins in China, West Asia, and Mesoamerica. The earliest writings were symbols carved into clay tablets. People’s inner thoughts were also exalted on bones and shells and silk and wood. We’d write on anything that could handle it, as we’ve always been hungry to externalize, mobilize, and immortalize our inner lives. China invented paper sometime around the 1st century CE, but we’d still have to wait patiently a millennium and a half for Gutenberg to invent the movable type and usher in the modern book.
All this dramatic epeolatry has occurred within a fleeting fraction of humanity’s tenure. Written language, perhaps the most powerful invention in the history of Earth, has been around for less than a few percent of the existence of Homo sapiens. Our ancestors spent tens of thousands of decades exploring this planet without feeling the feathery pages of a book in their hands, never once breathing in the vanilla and chocolate notes of a beloved novel. And, even to this day, far too many are left without the privilege and resources to read. To have decrypted the inky squiggles on a page, to have had the thoughts of another silently carried into your mind—a type of scientific telepathy—means you are luckier than most everyone to have ever taken a breath. But, if you happen to be one of these lucky few and you’ve come across a piece of writing that’s devastated you, that’s transported you from your physical surroundings into a state of emotional transcendence, then you, my friend, have breathed in truly rarefied air.
I am one of the lucky ones. I have come across a handful of authors and works that have shook the foundations of my being. There have been a select few treasured moments where my eyes scanned a page, I listened as words were soundlessly spoken, and then I changed forever. James Baldwin is one of the authors to have done this to me. I have long been a fan of writers mentioned alongside Baldwin—particularly Toni Morrison—but for whatever reason it had taken me an unfortunate amount of time to dive into his work. And now there’s no going back. I have tried to take notice of how he constructs sentences and makes an idea flow throughout a paragraph. In one of my favorite excerpts from the nonfiction essay The Fire Next Time, he manages to sing about the psychological and social malignancies resulting from our fear and denial of death, the moral and existential responsibility conferred on us because of our mortality, and then connects it all to the destructive force of racism and white America’s hostility toward people of color and the generalized Other. On our fear and denial of death, he writes:
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
Here Baldwin shows that a host of harmful tendencies sprout from our desire to be immortal, to live in denial of mortality. We have a deep-rooted fear of death, to be sure. And we go to great lengths to avoid admitting to ourselves that things will come to an end. But, as Baldwin argues, this denial results in a vain clamoring for immortality, manifest in some of humanity’s most corrupt inclinations. We clamor and cry for something bigger than us to validate our existence, only to turn a blind eye to our true responsibility: each other.
Baldwin goes on to speak on this responsibility. On the duty to live morally and meaningfully as a consequence of death, he writes:
It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.
We have, all along, been misunderstanding the implications of our own mortality. In our baying disavowals of death, we have missed the fact that life is meaningful precisely because it comes to an end. Despite persistent anxieties driving us to feel otherwise, death does not render life meaningless. It underscores how precious life truly is. It’s all we got. Baldwin is extending a long philosophical tradition of reframing death as a means to stress the importance of life. He follows Socrates who said that true philosophers make dying their profession. ‘He who would teach men to die,’ wrote Montaigne two millennia later, ‘would teach them to live.’ And Wittgenstein said that ‘Only death gives life its meaning.’ These thinkers are not just passively reminding us of oblivion. They are providing moral guideposts. These are admonitions for how to live while we're still here. This is what an unflinching and stable mindfulness of our mortality can help us realize: that existence, through its rarity and fleeting impermanence, is both a source of gratitude and profound responsibility.
Baldwin then brings it full circle, speaking of how privileged groups (white Americans in this case) fear and hate Others because of the dissonance caused by confrontation with change and difference and, ultimately, death. Thus, this is one of the many ways in which racism is a turning away from reality, a turning that is destructive for everyone:
But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And this is also why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears. And by destruction I mean precisely the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free.
A denial of death, then, can be particularly potent for groups blinded by privilege and power. The potency of this denial is, in turn, especially toxic to those with less privilege and power. White people, consciously and unconsciously, cling to our unmerited power and privilege—and lash out with hostility and fear when this is threatened. Even if the acknowledgment of privilege and the relinquishing of power would be beneficial for everyone, such radical change is, for many, simply too much to stomach. Our unwillingness to be open to change and to recognize our biases only serves to restrict everyone’s freedom. True freedom must, after all, come from a recognition of genuine circumstances. Only then can one live authentically. Otherwise, what appears to be authenticity is a mere ‘clinging to chimeras.’ The above excerpts are taken from within just a couple pages (pp. 90-91). Baldwin presents here a masterclass in poetical economy, packing each sentence with eloquence and sagacity.
Though nothing I’ve read of Baldwin’s has impacted me quite as much as Fire, I’ve still been continually impressed and humbled by Baldwin’s fiction pieces. Each of his novels, much like Morrison’s, are experiences more than stories. They are phenomenological submersions more than they are traditional narratives. This is especially true for me as a white male, sitting at the intersection of so many privileged identities. These novels jolt and disturb my calcified, provincial exterior. I think part of Baldwin’s enduring relevance comes in his ability to so vividly capture both broad and specific human experiences. The rawness and realness of his characters makes it impossible not to resonate with the reader, no matter how far from one’s world the specifics might be. It’s true that throughout his life Baldwin was largely motivated by love and wrote extensively about the unjust burdens put on those taking the so-called higher road. But this struggle was very real. And Baldwin shifted his stance on the usefulness of nonviolent protest in his later years. He wrote of these burdens—burdens conspicuously absent for people in power—with melancholic heart and resolve. So, no, these stories were not written for the benefit of white people. Nevertheless, his stories absolutely and positively should benefit white people. They should shake us to our core. They should act as a slap in our face, a wake-up call for the realities and brutalities of oppression. As much as I wish I could say that I didn’t need these epistemic and empathic jolts, I very much did. Privilege is insulation. Privilege is inertial. And fiction can be a powerful countervailing force. Baldwin was exceptionally deft in his ability to confront the reader with reality, even in fictional worlds.
Baldwin’s fiction thrusts the reader into the emotional whirlwind and psychological realities of its characters. These works show the complexity, the messiness, the muck, the power, and the potential of humanity. Baldwin’s portraits are sympathetic without being romantic. Everyone suffers. He doesn’t shy away from the brutality of individuals (he’s at his most disturbing in the short story ‘Going to Meet the Man’) or the brutality of systems and how they function independent of people’s expressed intentions (perhaps best communicated in his play ‘Blues for Mister Charlie’). Baldwin will—providing you’re paying attention—fuck your shit up. He is devastating and wonderful, a slap on the face and a kiss on the lips. He demands of his reader to open their eyes and minds, to see and to feel the world. I am grateful to have been exposed to his works. I’m better because of it. Baldwin guides and edifies, deconstructs and destroys—and I can’t wait to read more.
Books are a powerful epistemic and empathic tool. Baldwin said as much when he wrote, ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.’ The written word bonds us to our neighbors. It is easy to forget we are animals, hairless apes sculpted by the vicissitudes of natural selection. This process has equipped us with the stunning ability to feel the feelings of those around us. But it has also built into us a capacity for malevolence and callous indifference. We are most likely to reach out and help those with whom we feel connected. We cannot trust our natural instincts with this, as we are prone to chauvinism and hostility to those we deem as Others. We need to expand our circle of compassion. There is no easy fix for this, so it’s important to utilize any and all tools at our disposal. Books are one of these tools. The written word can grab us by the collar and force us to look people in the eyes, force us to see each other in all our vulnerability and messiness and complex humanity. The written word can humble us. It hasn’t been around for long. And, like any tool, it can be used for both good and evil. But, if we follow in the footsteps of Baldwin, we can use words to shatter obstructions and help us see anew.