blocked heart

James Blake - I Never Learnt To Share from Michal Zielinski on Vimeo.

this knowledge, this mind, this smartness, this intellect...it protects me from breaking down, from feeling, it jumps up and says "i know this...i know all about this" so it stays in the head and doesn't move into the gut and heart. i've felt it in the gut and the heart, been there, visceral reactions (reading Langston Hughes Alice Walker and books like Invisible Man, Savage Inequalities in high school then college bell hooks and Urban Studies-chicago 1999 and community organizing uptown Chicago with kids of color criminalized and harassed by cops and Aaron Patterson and all the black men tortured into confession released by Gov. Ryan, Bomb the Suburbs and ethnic studies courses and KRS-One and Black Star the Marcus Garvey line, the shock of my own ignorance and the overwhelm of all that is wrong that i benefit from) and there was an openness and softness that seems to have closed and hardened as i've felt less and less hopeful and more and more helpless at making change. this inner conflict of despair at not knowing what to do to transform these huge systemic problems and not wanting to experience the constant pain and havoc oppression wreaks in every instant. i mean i have the choice to escape, avoid, close my eyes. sometimes i look. i have looked closely fiercely and gotten outraged and self-righteous and was just as ineffectual. so what is to be done? to feel it, feel it fully the pain and empathy and to do what i can. power is local. yes those large scale systems of power over exist. and yet there are cracks, there is leeway, rules broken and dominant structure defied in our personal interactions. it's why i work at the cybrary. it's so not enough, so minimal but i do have an intention of loving and attending to each person, serving from the heart. patience for my path to unfold in the best path of service to others, self-denial is certainly not the way. living out my best, in integrity and awareness and compassion. allowing my heart to break at all the devastating reality. not pity. no victims. to have dignity. respect for those living out their freedom within constraints...it's always been this way. inspired by remembrance, all the history i've studied shows how people have exercised their will, their SPIRIT, their independence in the most impossible conditions. our own denial of reality, this maintenance of a fiction has caused material corporeal injustice for oppressed and cause such lack of self-awareness and lifelessness and disconnect from reality among oppresses. to the winners the SPOILS go. so we are all suffering. of course, there are material inequities, unequal choice, opportunity, and access and these do matter. i have used political ideology and spiritual ideology to find a way to be RIGHT about it rather than break down and truly feel the horror of it. something that transmits that, gets me in the gut is James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. i have read it four, five times...perhaps time for a re-reading.


i want to feel my failure from the vulnerable heart, not from the mind, the intellect that went through anti-racism trainings, studied the history of racism, and "knows" the white supremacy of our culture, of my own conditioned mind, very well. i want to feel the grief of being part of this legacy and the joy, as well, at the paradoxical inextricable links and interdependence we share with everyone that makes this nation. i also feel glad when i see how faces have changed...that there are, in fact, more multicultural-anti-oppression driven organizations out there and beautiful people (many college friends) do amazing, powerful work from a place of Love and Justice. i want to melt my mind from the block of "already know" into the despair that lives there, in the heart and gut.


i also want to acknowledge and say thank you to my friend who is in the RAWNESS right now, in it, feeling it with courage and facing all the scary confusion with honest openness that i really admire and reminds me of just how blocked my heart is with THOUGHT and IDEA and SOCIAL CRITIQUE and POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORY i can foucault all fear away. 


p.s. timely news. 


Troy Davis