by Cornel West
The lady smiled and said yes.
It was August. That was the summer Sylvia had her “Pillow Talk,” Marvin was telling us, “Let’s Get It On,” and Gladys and her Pips were saying, “Neither One of Us Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye.” It was a romantic time, a sexy time. I had found love and love was going to last.
“This is it,” I said to Cliff over the long-distance line. “I asked and she accepted.”
“Congratulations, my brother,” said Cliff. “Sure you ain’t moving too fast?”
“Wanna move even faster,” I said, thinking of graduate school coming up and wondering how many courses I could take. Reading over the list, I wanted to take’em all.
WE OPERATE ON DIFFERENT TRACKS at the same time. New experiences energize us. New possibilities excite us. Fresh romance warms our hearts, thrills our imagination, animates our dreams. These are the positive blessings of a life fueled by love. Yet our essential duality can never be denied. Christians consider Jesus Christ the most divine creation to ever walk the earth. Yet his full divinity coexisted with his full humanity. At times he doubted, at times he cried, at times he felt abandoned, alone, even traumatized.
I entered graduate school a blessed man. Arriving at Harvard with less than a superior high school education, I caught up, caught on, studied hard, and graduated in three years. I got into Princeton, where I was fortunate enough to have Londoner David Lumsden, an extraordinary philosopher, as my roommate. My dear brother Eugene Rivers was a frequent visitor. My fiancée back in Cambridge was everything I had ever wished for in a woman. I was so crazy for Mary Johnson that I did not spend a single weekend in Princeton. (If truth be known, even today, as I long to enjoy the beauty and idyllic pleasures of my New Jersey community, I’m a bluesman and have yet to spend one single weekend at home.)
Every Thursday morning, I’d catch the bus for New York City and at the Port Authority Terminal would change buses for Boston. I was teaching a course at an adult education school that was stimulating. I was taking courses that were stimulating. I was running around in my usual manner, up half the night reading books, making notes, writing papers. You’d look at me back then and say, “This brother’s on the go. This brother’s got energy to spare. He’s moving fast, he gives out positive vibes.” You’d be right, but you’d also be unable to explain why, in this very same period, I experienced a series of blackouts that seemed to indicate that, beneath the surface, darkness loomed.
Several of these blackouts came at or around the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan. One time I found myself flat on my face on Forty-second Street. I had no idea what happened. Afterward, I thought of the wonderful line spoken by Blanche DuBois, the American Hamlet, in A Streetcar Named Desire, that masterpiece by the white literary bluesman Tennessee Williams: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Were it not for strangers who picked me up and helped me to the first-aid station, I could have easily been robbed, beaten, or left for garbage. This was, after all, a time when the crime rate was out of control and the city was swimming in squalor.
Another time I blacked out on the bus itself. When I came to, I found myself being attended to by an older white woman who, with the help of two men, had picked me up off the floor of the aisle where I had collapsed, gathered up all my books and placed a wet towel on my brow.
“You must be quite an accomplished young man to be reading books of this caliber,” she said, pointing to those thick philosophical tomes I carried with me. “But you best see a doctor and have a thorough checkup.”
Doctors and checkups have never been high on my priority list. In fact, since high school I haven’t engaged in a single athletic activity. I haven’t once set foot in a gym. I say that not out of arrogance. Obviously, exercise is vital. As with everyone, exercise would do me good. But my absorption into the life of the mind, together with a commitment to political action, has been so complete that I’ve eschewed such training.
During graduate school, I got my workouts on the dance floor. You’d find me at the discos. This was the grand period of Parliament, who had transmogrified from Funkadelic and was tearing it up with “Up for the Downstroke” and “Chocolate City.” Later, of course, the funk got thicker with “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker),” and “Flash Light,” not to mention the ethereal Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop).” I hadn’t lost my love of dancing first triggered by Mrs. Reed, our Sacramento neighbor whose devotion to early Motown got me spinning like a top.
This was also the glorious period of the Maestro, Barry White, whose soaring orchestral flights of fancy were anchored by deepbottom grooves that had us half-crazy. “Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up,” the Maestro declared. “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe,” he swore. “Let the Music Play.” As the music played, as I danced my existential blues away, as I lost thoughts of entangled philosophical systems, I found myself at one with pure motion. Barry elevated the funk—gave sheen to the funk—without abandoning the funk. That was his artistic mission. He understood on the deepest level that the funk can be a springboard for beauty. Funk faces brutal reality and reflects its raw consequences. But in doing so, funk is transformational, even redemptive. Funk is liberating. In the funky dance, we express outrage at our human (and political and economic and social) condition, even as we transcend it, even as we get high-up on something low-down, even as we celebrate the catastrophic human condition—which is to say, the certain death of the flesh—by following the mantra first set down by Funkadelic: “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”
And yet after a long evening of such freedom, after a super-stimulating night at a New York City disco where Archie Bell and the Drells’ “I Can’t Stop Dancing” and “Tighten Up” had me whirling and The Main Ingredient’s “Spinning Around (I Must Be Falling in Love)” and “Everybody Plays the Fool” had me grinding, I left the disco feeling fine.
Then why, right there on the streets of midtown Manhattan at three o’clock in the morning, did I black out?
I hadn’t been feeling faint. Hadn’t been drinking. I don’t drug. I’d eaten sufficiently. And yet I was gone. When I came to, I saw that a group of late-night revelers were caring for me. Once again, good Samaritans were seeing me through.
After a number of these dark episodes I went to the doctor. The man said, “I don’t see anything wrong with you. You’re just going too fast.”
I’d told him about the number of courses I was taking and my nonstop weekend trips out to see Mary Johnson in Massachusetts.
“I’ve always moved this fast,” I said.
“Well, it’s time to slow down.”
“I can’t.”
“You must.”
I didn’t.
I still haven’t.
I WENT THROUGH GRADUATE SCHOOL at Princeton in philosophy, still grappling with the questions, still racing through books and sociopolitical platforms, still searching and questioning, still unable to pinpoint the source of my blackouts. There was so much new light in my life coming from the knowledge of my professors. And yet the darkness did not abate.
Mary and I drifted apart. She was accepted into the London School of Economics where she would earn a master’s degree. Ironically, even before I had written my Ph.D. thesis, I had won a Du Bois Fellowship to study philosophy back at Harvard. Mary and I were two ships passing in the night.
We would write. Occasionally we would speak by phone, but the distance did us in. By 1975, we were no longer a couple. Samuel Beckett said it best. His insight into the human effort to get things straight would follow me throughout life.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better—that’s how Beckett saw it.
It’s a deep thought, and one that’s helped shed light on what happens when a relationship falls apart. Then there’s that Saint Augustine statement that keeps haunting me, the one that says that he’s a mystery to himself. I ain’t no saint, and my life sure hasn’t moved toward celibacy, but I relate to August
ine’s humility. I fell for Mary. I saw myself living the rest of my life with Mary. I was overwhelmed with the warm feelings that come with romance. I thought I had surrendered to those feelings, but maybe not. Maybe the circumstances of my life proved greater than my devotion.
At the time, Eddie Kendricks, former high tenor for the Temptations, sang a song that said it all for me: “Tell Her Love Has Felt the Need.” I remember playing it for Mary. In soaring falsetto, Eddie sang, “Tell her love has the felt to the need to leave her … I could never be what she wants of me.”
The song is heartbreakingly beautiful. Images abound: a woman is awoken at dawn, sunshine warms her face, the morning breeze blows her tears away. She dreams of a wedding, she dreams of children, she dreams of a home filled with love and a husband who never leaves her side. That’s the life she wants, the life she desires and deserves. In the words of the song, however, “But my life is like a ship that sails.”
MY LIFE HAD SAILED. I had received a calling so powerful it required obedience. I knew I had to keep reading, keep thinking, keep teaching in as many ways and in as many places as possible.
A formulation was taking shape in my mind and heart: that the centrality of vocation is predicated on finding one’s voice and putting forth a vision. All three are intertwined: vocation, voice, and vision.
I view vocation in stark contrast to mere profession. Vocation cuts deeper. I also contrast a voice with an echo. True voice doesn’t imitate or emulate prevailing paradigms. The notion, for example, of staying within restricted categories would never work for me. My voice, by its funky blues character, cuts across the disciplines.
The radical uniqueness and sheer singularity of voice are connected to the depths of our soul and the love that abides therein. In the greatest scene in the greatest play in English about love, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Romeo approaches Juliet in the dark and gives voice to his soul, despite his despised name. Juliet replies, “My ears have not yet drunk a hundred words/Of thy tongue’s uttering, yet I know the sound.” Or as Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, those rhythm-and-blues love poets, would say, “I’d know you anywhere.”
As I reflect on the eternal art and sudden death of the incomparable Michael Jackson, it is clear that there are profound joys and unbearable sorrows that accompany being true to one’s calling. The comfort is in the knowing that by giving one’s heart and soul to uplift others through one’s art, one’s vocation, voice and vision are fulfilled. As a blues philosopher, Michael Jackson is my true soul brother.
Contrary to that unforgettable moment in line 607B of Book Ten in Plato’s Republic where philosophy quarrels with poetry, I believe philosophy must go to school with poetry and music. In short, like Nietzsche, we need dancing philosophers, Socrates with gaiety—poetic thinkers philosophizing under a funky groove.
I come from a blues people whose anthem is, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” The connection between unique vocality and empowering visionary practice is profound.
A vision is not a stare. A stare is flat. A vision is vital and vibrant. A vision is biblical: without a vision, people perish. Our job is to keep people from perishing.
My vision was surely based on my black Baptist foundation. It had everything to do with Jesus Christ’s mandate to love extravagantly and radically, but it also went in a dozen different directions. I didn’t see a precedent for this calling. I wanted the maximum degree Princeton had to offer, but I knew I wasn’t born to be a conventional professor. I believe in on-the-ground education. For years, I taught adult ed. And yet I knew those venues weren’t enough. I also taught in the prisons and churches and neighborhood schools.
I have found prisons to be both liberating and depressing institutions, where my soul is elevated and challenged. Be it at Sing Sing in New York, the city jail in Boston, the correctional facilities in Bordentown, NJ, or the juvenile detention center in Jamesburg, NJ, I am inspired when I speak and teach at those places where my brothers are incarcerated.
One of the most moving moments, I experienced during my teaching was when a prisoner simply asked me, “What was the source of hope for someone with a life sentence in prison?” I replied, “We all have a death sentence in space and time and there are many outside the prison walls whose hearts, minds, and souls are in profound and permanent bondage. So there is a sense in which a wise and courageous person can be free with a life sentence in prison, just as others can be unfree walking the streets of New York City. My fundamental aim is to touch the souls and unsettle the minds of people be they in prison, classroom, church, or on the block.”
During this time I began writing, but not in any traditionally academic way. And when I needed to find an expression of the complex romantic anguish I was facing, I turned not only to Brother Shakespeare, but also to Brother Eddie Kendricks who said, “Tell her love has felt the need to leave her.”
I knew what that meant, and I didn’t know what that meant. I knew that in leaving Mary Johnson I had not stopped loving her. I love her to this day. Love of her led me to leave her. But some other kind of love, whose dimensions were beyond both description and comprehension, was fueling my feelings and moving me in directions that I hadn’t anticipated. I had found love. I had lost love. Love of my calling was pushing me on.
THE BIG BLOCK
THEY CALL IT ABD. All But Dissertation. If it sounds like a disease or psychological disorder, well, dear brother or sister, that ain’t far from the truth. I suffered with ABD for years. I raced through my graduate work at Princeton with enthusiastic dedication. Philosophy was my meat and potatoes, and I was blessed a little later in this period to study with the greatest philosopher of the latter part of the twentieth century, Hans-Georg Gadamer. This brother was so heavy it was ridiculous. Lived through the hell of the Third Reich without supporting Nazism. Survived to write, among other major works, Truth and Method, one of the most profound books written in any language on any subject. The man lived to be 102. When he lectured, he never used a single note. Like a master jazz musician, he spun the words out of his spirit. He improvised magnificently. He was the Count Basie of philosophy. He was the architect of twentieth-century hermeneutics, a fancy word that refers to the ways we use to interpret texts, especially religious texts. His follow-up to Truth and Method was an examination of Paul Celan, the finest post–World War II poet in Europe, a Jew from what was then Romania. The follow-up blew the minds of Gadamer’s fellow philosophers. Philosophers just don’t knock out a complex work of theory and then devote a volume to understanding some poet. For traditional scholars, one doesn’t just follow the other. But Gadamer saw it was a continuum. To others, Gadamer’s leap seemed crazy. To me, it seemed right. I was doing some leaping of my own.
I was also leaping from philosophy to poetry. Truth was in metaphor, uncertainty, ambiguity, the beauty of the blues, words and thought mixed in the muddy waters of raging literary seas. I got back to Harvard as a philosophy graduate student, but I could never be a straight-up philosopher. I had been granted membership in the first class of Fellows of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute not for any distinguished academic work I had written, but because my former Harvard mentors, Martin Kilson and Preston Williams, used their power to get me in. They just liked me and figured I’d thrive in that environment. They were right, even if I found myself heading in a different direction.
The direction was toward literature. All I wanted to do was read novels, and Russian novels to boot. I started jonesing for every nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Russian novel ever written. Those were the bad boys who really understood the blues. They broke down the blues better than anyone. Talkin’ ’bout Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy—the heavy hitters who, from their strong moral base, wrote sagas about our tragic condition as people, the complexities of personality, the exploitations of society, and the scandalous intersection where indifferent history collides with human passions.
I didn’t want to write my Ph.D. dissertation. I wanted to write
literature. I had a notion of realizing an intellectual performance that would sing like Sarah Vaughan and swing like Duke Ellington. In fact, it was during this time that I wrote a short story. I got the title from Earth, Wind & Fire. “Sing a Song” is a jazz-fused piece of fiction fixated on Duke’s death. (Ellington had died only a year earlier in 1974.)
It’s a barbershop-based story peopled with hustlers and pastors. It’s got the new music of the day—Teddy Pendergrass singin’ ’bout “Wake up ev’ybody, no more sleepin’ in bed…no more backward thinkin’…time for thinkin’ ahead”—and P-Funk screaming “We gonna turn this motha out!” It reflected my love of musical geniuses like Isaac Hayes, David Porter, Kenneth Gamble, and Leon Huff. It’s got the narrator going to a club where he paints a picture that had been burning in my mind for years: “People of all sizes and shades of the Negroid spectrum filled the misty, sweltering room. Flashing fluorescent multicolored lights shone just bright enough to see who was wearing what and who was with whom. The floor was filled with banana-skin females dancing with jet black men and chocolatecolored women dancing with paperbag-brown males.” This was a scene that Ernie Barnes would paint for the cover of Marvin Gaye’s I Want You. This was a story about the clash of generations, the young losing its connection with the best of the old, the old losing its connection with the fire of the young. The narrator, who was once a musician, was losing his hearing and had to make a vocational decision. Should he become a jazz intellectual in the world of ideas? He says, “Watching the vivacious dancers, I could see my former Self. There I was, fingerpopping and ass-twitching. But I also could see me now through my former Self. There I was, wall-flowering and analyzing.” The narrator is caught between the world of observing and the world of acting. Doing. Dancing. Singing a song.