For instance, I cannot perceive an angel unless it manifests in a way that my senses can detect.
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Although, I should also say, creation can be said to consist of more than just the phenomenological, for there are things in creation that are beyond the reach of our senses.
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In earlier entries, where I have used the word “creation,” I have been referring to reality in its phenomenological sense.
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Picture that ‘stepping forward’ as the opening of one’s senses to phenomena. We see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Some might say we also intuit, though the accuracy of such a sense might be more difficult to measure than that of the others. All the information that comes to us through these senses, as well as the phenomena from which the information originates, is part of reality.
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First we must define it. And yet, even before we define it, one might ask, “How can we be sure it can even be known, so as to be defined?” That question can be answered by beginning with the premise, Cogito, ergo sum, and stepping forward.
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Let me return to that term I brought up, by way of Baldwin — “reality.”
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Sometimes I detest being a writer, the very notion of it.
But I know there is nothing detestable about it, not in and of itself.
What I would detest in it is some vision, real or imagined, that I might have of myself as one. Which is neither here nor there.
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And yet overthinking is a privilege, is it not? I have the opportunity to dwell on things because I can sit in a room at a computer, and no one is putting me on the spot, no one is demanding that I answer them — now, now, now. I am not out in the world, struggling in a more immediate way. I have no reason to fear that my mere appearance could be perceived as a threat.
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One fears that one will get lost, or that one’s perspective will be too broad, or too narrow, or will be wanting in some other way. Which itself might be only a symptom of overthinking.
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Or maybe there is only one way, or a handful of ways, and then a bunch of other ways that one could take, but that are less advisable.
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Of course, there are many ways to begin, which is why it’s difficult to know how to do so.
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I feel it would be irresponsible of me, or disingenuous, to not attempt to talk here about how this quotation relates to Baldwin’s larger concerns, which involve the oppression of Black Americans, and other peoples of color, by a framework or mindset that, since the nation’s inception, has always privileged Whites. But I’m not sure how to begin.
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The implication of which is, I think, that facing reality is important; that it is something we need to do, for our own sake as well as the sake of others.
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Another thing that Baldwin said, not in writing but in a televised interview from, I think, the 1980s, was this: “The American sense of reality is dictated by what Americans are trying to avoid. And if you’re trying to avoid reality, how can you face it?”
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Baldwin himself put it this way: “What this does to the subjugated is to destroy his sense of reality.”
Notice that he does not say that reality itself is destroyed, but only the “sense” of reality. You cannot take from a person their dignity, though you can treat them so cruelly, and so unjustly, that you can make them believe that their dignity is gone, or that it was never there to begin with.
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Baldwin, the writer, understood what it means to suffer, to be oppressed, and to be persecuted, though he also understood how the experience of those things cannot diminish one’s dignity, though one might feel so hopeless, from the experience, that one believes it can. He understood too, I think, that it is through the exercise of oppression, through the causing of suffering, through the perpetuating of it, that one does diminish one’s dignity. And his gift was for articulating this fact with such clarity and beauty that readers can feel the truth of it in their soul.
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That story is about a jazz musician named Sonny, and is told by his older brother, who witnesses the struggles that Sonny endures, and who comes to realize that the playing of music, particularly the blues, is a means by which Sonny can give expression to suffering, thereby memorializing it.
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I thought of him because of a story he wrote called Sonny’s Blues, the last line of which mentions that “very cup of trembling.”
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Someone who did have integrity was the American writer James Baldwin, who I also thought of a handful of entries back, when I mentioned the ‘cup’ that Jesus was preparing to drink, as he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.
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Which is something people tend to find objectionable or tiresome, when it appears in a Christian. Because, I think, people have seen too much hypocrisy, too much falseness, not enough integrity. Who can blame them, really?