by Jeff Sharlet
West gets down on his hands and knees, crawling along the bottom shelf until he locates a green volume. “This is the Leopardi, brother.” He flips through the pages. “Oh, man! See this one? ‘I refuse even hope.’” He repeats the line, his body suddenly slack, staring at me as if to ask, Do you follow? I do, or, at least, try. West begins to read, rocking forward and backward at his hips like a metronome. “Everything is hidden. Except our pain.” He looks up. “Deep blues, man.” He returns to the green book in his hand. “We come, a forsaken race, / Crying into the world, and the gods / Keep their own counsel . . .’” I bend close, following the rhythm of his handwritten annotations down the margins: “blues,” “jazz,” “blues,” “blues,” “jazz.”
The blues, West says, is the suffering that’s at the heart of the American story, both tragic and comic, darkly grandiose and absurdly mundane. Jazz is democracy, or “deep dem-oc-racy,” as West likes to say, emphasis on the first word and the second syllable, the sound of a system we have yet to achieve. “Y’see, you take a military band, it’s like”—West bangs out a martial beat. But jazz? He drums a complicated rhythm. “Under. Below. On the side of the note. Not just the note itself, y’see. It’s a powerful critique.” Jazz—improvisation—is his answer to things as they are, the negation of the status quo and thus the affirmation of another possibility.
“Now, this, this is the greatest one,” West says, petting a page of Leopardi’s poems and looking at me with giant poem eyes, as if to communicate the gravity of the words in his hand, the necessity of their immediate recitation. He resumes rocking and reading:
That man has a truly noble nature
Who, without flinching, still can face
Our common plight, tell the truth
With an honest tongue,
Admit the evil lot we’ve been given
And the abject, impotent condition we’re in;
Who shows himself great and full of grace
Under pressure. . . .
West closes his book and stands still. His head shakes back and forth with admiration. That’s too polite a word for the emotion flooding over him: It’s relief, gratitude.
“To know the wretchedness of who we are,” he says. “Yet the fact that we know it, is itself a noble thing, because that kind of knowledge means we can know a whole lot of other things.”
I think of a passage in West’s 2004 Democracy Matters. In a chapter that ranges from the Stoic philosopher Zeno to Emmett Till’s mother standing over her murdered son’s coffin, West quotes Ralph Ellison writing on the blues. I’d copied it into my notebook on the train to Princeton. “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness,” I read aloud, “to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”
West nods, a teacher triumphant. “That’s right!” he says. “It’s knowledge the way Adam knew Eve. It’s embracing. Some think it’s just sexual, but it’s not just sexual. To know is to be engaged. The blues knows because the song is an action.” It’s recognition of the death shudder, a naming of the pain. “That’s the way in which a song of despair is not despair.” He points to the craggy features of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, staring out from a book cover eye level with West’s desk chair. Beckett, in West’s reckoning, was like Chekhov: a literary bluesman. “Brother Beckett. He doesn’t allow despair to have the last word. The last word is what?” He paraphrases Waiting for Godot: “ ‘I can’t go on. I will go on. I can’t go on. I will go on.’ Y’see?”
AROUND THE SAME TIME West discovered Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, the particulars of American history converged to reveal the reality of race in its rawest form: the murder of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. That year the Black Panthers came into West’s life when they opened an office close to West’s church. West walked over one Saturday after choir practice. “Young black brother? They said, ‘Come on in!’”
West knew the image: the black leather jackets, the berets, most of all the guns. The year before, Bobby Seale had led a contingent of armed Panthers in a march on Sacramento to protest a bill that would outlaw loaded weapons in public. “Looked like a little army,” remembers West. There were guns in the office next to the church, too, guns West was glad for—as much guarantee as could be had that the people gathered there wouldn’t be killed like Martin. “The problem of violence is that it’s often connected to revenge and hatred,” West says now. “But certain forms of violence are tied to love on a deep level. Self-defense is self-love.” The guns, for West, were on the same plane as James Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” released that year.
But West never took up arms. “I could never join because of my Christian faith,” he says. “You had to be an atheist. My whole life as a person on the Left, I’ve been saying, I’m with you, but I’m a Christian. I’m with you in part because I’m a Christian. But I’m never fully with you because I’m a Christian.”
He believes in Marx’s radical critique of capital and empire, but he also believes in God. West’s first book, Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, was an attempt to reconcile his twin passions, through the lens of blackness. To West, Marxism without what he calls “the love ethic” is inhumane; Christianity without an economic analysis is incomplete. And what does blackness contribute? Death; or, to put it another way, the blues, a sensibility both tragic and comic, free of the Left’s utopianism and Christianity’s messianism. American blackness, he hoped, would draw the church into the front lines for social justice and push genuine radicalism into the main currents of American life.
He published his next major work, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, in 1989. It’s driven by almost lyrical lists of opposites paired, pragmatism described as a philosophy of “profound insights and myopic blindness” that’s equally the product of America’s revolutionary roots and its history of slavery, our “obsession with mobility” and a longing for fixed rules. The same instinct that leads us to discount theory, philosophy, even the idea of ideas—the anti-intellectualism of American life—is that which drives us toward innovation and the invention of new things. Or, to turn this seemingly fair trade upside down: Our talent for technology comes at the cost of the perceptive powers with which we might understand our own creations.
Therein lies the rational miracle of West’s vision of a “prophetic pragmatism.” He takes that last paradox—innovation without ideas, invention without the context with which to comprehend—and attempts to redeem it through pragmatism. Whereas academic philosophy tends to seek either ultimate truths or proof that no such truths are possible, pragmatism “evades” the question, instead trying “to deploy thought as a weapon to enable more effective action.” The super-agents of pragmatism are action-oriented philosophers, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Dewey to West’s own mentor, the late Richard Rorty, thinkers who commit themselves to “continuous cultural commentary,” drawing their ideas from the world as they find it and wrapping those ideas around the circumstances of any given moment. A “cultural critic”—the label West has come to prefer to “philosopher” or “theologian”—attempts to “explain America to itself.” That explanation is itself an action, an intervention, a desperate attempt at what West calls “American theodicy.”
Theodicy is a term more common to theology than philosophy. It is also the word for the central question of West’s life, his obsession: “the problem of evil.” Theodicy asks, “If God”—or simply the universe—“is good, why does he permit evil?” It’s the thorny knot at the heart of the self-help conundrum: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” That’s a risky question, one not easily reconciled with the pragmatic tradition. One possible answer is nihilism; another is sanctimony and self-regard. James H. Cone,
a founder of black liberation theology and one of West’s mentors early in his teaching career, cites West’s transformation of the question of theodicy as crucial to the importance of West’s project. West, he says, locates the problem of theodicy not in the abstract of heaven but in the concrete of the world: “How do you really struggle against suffering in a loving way, to leave a legacy in which people would be able to accent their own loving possibility in the midst of so much evil?”
West calls himself a libertarian, but he’s not the kind who mistakes selfishness for wisdom, the fool who knowingly declares, “I got mine and tough luck for you if you don’t.” Libertarianism, in West’s view, is a collective affair. The chains that bind the slave also entrap the master; the prison of poverty requires the affluent to act as wardens. We’re all locked in a box together—and that means that only together can we win our freedom to be individuals. Both slave and slave owner must free each other and themselves from the framework of slavery, the rigid structures of thought—the “matrix,” a term present in West’s work long before the movies—that prevent us from imagining a better way of being.
THE LAST TIME a Democrat took the White House, West almost gave up on America. “I was ready to go,” he says. Ready to leave behind two decades of radical activism and writing during a political “ice age,” ready to leave behind two failed marriages. It was January 1993, Bill Clinton’s inauguration: West watched it from the other side of the world, in his adopted homeland, Ethiopia. He’d moved there with his third wife, Elleni. “Brother Lerner,” he told Rabbi Michael Lerner, with whom he was working on a book of black-Jewish dialogues, “I may not be coming back.”
“I understood the attraction,” says Lerner, who’d considered making aliyah to Israel. “Being in a society where you’re not a minority, where there’s a possibility of being more regular, less bizarre. We discussed it many times, the possibility of him staying there; a life with his wife, a princess, made him feel like he was not going to be an outsider. Cornel is a very lonely person. For a long time I thought I was his best friend. But he had probably about a thousand best friends. He was best friends with everybody. That made him more isolated. It was more like he had a whole lot of one-night stands. Not sexual, of course, but in terms of intimacy. People would fall in love with him, and I believe he genuinely fell in love with them. It was such a series of people and so many, that you couldn’t possibly—there was no depth to those friendships. So much intensity, but no depth.”
Lerner isn’t calling West shallow. He believes that West is one of the most profound thinkers he’s ever encountered. “West has a prophetic consciousness,” he says, language no thoughtful rabbi dispenses lightly. But that’s the trouble. When West speaks of love, he means it in the biblical sense of the prophets. “Hesed,” he tells me one evening in Princeton, the Hebrew word for “lovingkindness.” “Steadfast commitment to the well-being of others, especially the least of these,” West says. That demands a lot of love, but West doesn’t stop there. “Justice is what love looks like in public.” For him justice is not vengeance but fairness; the respect he believes should be accorded every soul. “And democracy,” he continues, “is what justice looks like in practice.” That is, a society in which there is justice—a vast public lovingkindness—for all.
West is steadfastly anti-utopian. He knows that love for all is a hopeless cause, that thus justice is a hopeless cause, too. Democracy? Not a chance. It’s a blues dream of a jazz impossibility.
But still, he can’t help dreaming. I ask West why he came back to America. His marriage was fading—“It’s hard to pursue a vocation and have a high-quality relationship,” he says—but his star was rising, as Race Matters turned into a best seller and he became a different kind of royalty at home in America: “Cornel West became ‘Cornel West’,” as his former student Eddie Glaude puts it.
West’s answer, though, is both more personal and more abstract. “Two reasons,” he says. “My mother”—West’s father died in 1994—“and the music.” The Whispers, the Stylistics, the Dramatics; Curtis, Marvin, and Aretha; Sinatra, Sassy, Coltrane. “In the end, as a bluesman, as a jazzman, it’s about the life that you live that is artistically and musically shaped. And you can do that in the academy, you can do it on the street, you can do it in the library, you can do that on the basketball court, you can do it in the nightclub.”
You can even do it in America. “I’m for the revitalization of democratic possibility within the empire,” he says. “I’m still part of the American grain.”
West is sometimes criticized from the Left as a reformer rather than a revolutionary. There is a sense in which that is a radical understatement. West is a conservative in the truest, oldest sense. He’s inspired by Giambattista Vico, an eighteenth-century Italian philosopher who in his New Science—an attempt to construct a theory of almost everything—pointed to the common roots of “human” and the Latin humando, which means “burying.” To be a scholar of the humanities—to be human—is to begin with the dead, to see that our futures are linked to our pasts, to acknowledge, deep in our bones, the truth of our own dying selves, “from womb to tomb,” West says.
Several years ago West was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer, given just months to live. Instead he has thrived. But the cancer isn’t gone, merely “contained.” Then again, that’s the way it’s always been for him. One day, in the midst of a riff on some of his heroes, Richard Pryor and Toni Morrison, Malcolm and Martin, he comes to an abrupt halt. It’s the death shudder. Imperceptible if he didn’t tell me—just a pause, a consideration of what unites them all. “It’s always there,” he says, and he’s grateful for it; the death shudder makes him glad to be alive. “Wrestling with death,” he writes, “not simply as some event that’s going to happen to you at the end of your life, but calling into question certain assumptions and presuppositions that you had before you arrived—that’s learning how to die.” That, for West, is the beginning of freedom. “To learn how to die in this way is to learn how to live.”
There’s something almost funny about that paradox. Not funny ha-ha but funny like the blues, the absurdity of a situation—from slavery to segregation to a simple broken heart—so painful that the bitter laugh of the blue note becomes resistance to suffering. “Subversive joy,” West says. It’s an American tradition, John Coltrane’s jazz and Bessie Smith’s growl, the deepest rhymes of hip-hop and even the wisdom of dead white men. “The impassioned odes to democratic possibility in Walt Whitman,” West writes in Democracy Matters, “the dark warnings of imminent self-destruction in Herman Melville.”
Consider Moby-Dick, he says one evening at the bar across the street from his office. It’s the quintessential American novel, and look how it ends: The whaling ship dashed to smithereens, crazy Ahab gone beneath the sea, and only the narrator, Ishmael, left alive, clinging to a coffin in the whirlpool that has swallowed them all. “Most critical,” says West, hunching forward and giving me a great, gap-toothed grin, waiting for me to catch up. “The raft,” he says, running his fingers along the edge of the table, nudging me toward his favorite kind of ending, tragic and comic at the same time. “The coffin constitutes a raft. He’s spared to tell the tale.”
4You Must Draw a Long Bead to Shoot a Fish
I’VE A LETTER demanding an answer. It’s from my friend Ann, who has gone home to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to watch her father die. He is (or maybe now was) a self-made millionaire, a maverick Mennonite, a builder of hard, bony houses, and a shooter of animals on land and in water, which is saying something, since you must draw a long bead to shoot a fish. Her father is or maybe now was, writes Ann, “guns and sweat and beer.”
When the ten-years’ dying of his cancer began to accelerate last spring, he called Ann and her sister to tell them that when the time came, they would find his body in the hollow in which he lived, his head gone on to heaven by way of his shotgun. He is, writes Ann (or n
ow was), a man to be feared, not for violence toward others—none of that—but for competence plus disdain plus the dumb-beast arrogance of any pretty man who can make women swoon. These virtues made him a twice-abandoned husband and an ignorer of daughters. The daughters have nonetheless returned to the house he built to ease his dying.
Ann, his oldest, is a scratch over five feet tall, her body taut and muscled and disciplined in youth to the easy use of a hammer and a gun and alcohol. I imagine she could handle all three at the same time. She cooks, too, and gardens and sews, and if she thinks a man’s brilliant she writes him a check from her meager salary—she’s a college bureaucrat—and asks for nothing in return. She learned early on that men take, and take, and take, until they die.
When she was a kid she got out of Lancaster pretty fast and married I don’t know how many times, taking from each husband a name she added to her own like a pearl on a necklace she never wears: I knew her months before I learned how many names she currently owns (five). She is shy of forty, a woman with a past and now yet another husband, plus another lover for good measure. She goes by only her latest surname, borrowed from a neurasthenic German architect, a pale, lovely guy who lives separately from her and stops by from time to time for conversation or for food. This is fair, she says, because he was a finalist in a very important architectural competition; he needs his space.
Ann’s space, meanwhile, is in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where she is the white girl on a street of poor Puerto Ricans. She lives in a tired old flop of a building, the back wall of which bows outward like the hips of a cello. The German told me that soon it will curl, like a wave falling, and bring the back of the building crashing down.