Take me to the Water
Corsica, October, 1956. Some jittering brandy. Billie Holiday is on
the phonograph serenading a small gathering of lovers and friends.
Baldwin and his current lover, Arnold, have become taciturn and cold
with one another and Arnold has announced that he plans to leave for
Paris, where he wants to study music and escape the specter of an
eternity with Jimmy—he feels possessed or dispossessed or both by their
languid love affair. This kind of hyper-domestic intimacy followed by
dysfunction and unravelling has marked Baldwin’s love life and seems to
prey upon him, turning his tenderness into a haunt, a liability. Baldwin
makes his way upstairs while Arnold and the others continue in the
living room, and he absconds the house by way of the rooftop, leaps
down, and stumbles through a briar patch to the sea, finishes his brandy
and tosses the glass into the water before he himself walks toward a
final resting place, ready to let it take him under, having amassed
enough heartache to crave an alternate consciousness, a blank, black
slate. But at the last minute, hip-deep in the sea, as if he has been
hallucinating and a spark of differentiation has separated the real from
the illusion at the height of his stupor, Baldwin changes his mind, his
mandate becomes more vivid to him. He has to keep witnessing these very
agonies and ruptures, to keep coming unhinged and living to tell it. He
is bound to this earth, where he must finish inventing Another Country.
The suicidal impulse, a sign he is at an impasse, would fade and
intensify in a haunting pattern throughout Jimmy’s life. A few months
before this attempt at sea, while still in Paris, he had swallowed an
overdose of sleeping pills and then called his friend and confident Mary
Painter, who helped him regurgitate them before the pills took their
fatal toll. That attempt too, came after a fight with Arnold. This
episode in Corsica is just another in a revolving trapdoor of nights,
where a sense that the human struggle is meaningless is usurped by a
reckless commitment to purpose, just in time to revive James Baldwin’s
spirit. Was his uncanny intellect futile if it precluded intimacy, was
his boundless capacity for eros trivial in the face of his filial love
for Black people and for justice for all of humanity? If love affairs
evoked the fearful, unjust malaise lurking within Jimmy’s soul, was it
better to die of a lonely heart or a broken heart, or could he reconcile
the false dichotomy between being alone and being lonely, realize the
pleasure and intentionality in his solitude, and derive joy and
confidence from that reconciliation. Or was it too far gone—had
self-loathing metamorphosed into self-obsession, a kind of inverse
vanity that makes it hard to live and impossible not to.
One Day When We Were Lost
James Baldwin
is allegedly one of our most well-loved writers, revered, and called
upon any time the United States is in crisis, to serve as a resounding
voice of honest critique and premonition, both on and off the page, and
on either side of the race drama. Yet James Baldwin attempted suicide
several times throughout his life and it doesn’t seem like our
infatuation with him allows him to be fallible in that way. Maybe that
restrictive covenant with the public’s love and admiration is part of
why he found this place as unbearable as it was worth saving. His best
friend committed suicide in 1946. His novels and plays and essays
explore the topic in detail and in act, stopping short of divulging his
own suicidal tendencies. As explicit as depressive episodes and fixation
on suicide are in Baldwin’s biography, as emotionally fragile as he was
in private life, it’s almost sinister that he is used by the literary
and cultural machine as a symbol of the uncomplicated and elegant great
Black hope, the well-adjusted unwavering public intellectual and writer
to whom we can all look for an example of how to master the discipline
and the image of artistic genius. The toll Baldwin’s outward mastery
took on his spirit is overlooked or hushed by the fanfare, so that
writers who emulate him like disciples are practicing sorrow and
precarity as much as excellence and intelligence. By tidying up the
legacies of great talents, or just being oblivious to their
shadow-sides, we undermine them completely and doom ourselves to
repeating the struggles as much as the triumphs. On some perverse level
we even come to fetishize the trouble, as if it’s part of the rubric of
having a story to tell. Or worse, we aestheticize the trauma of an
artist’s or any citizen’s translation into a public figure; we make them
abstractions in our minds and leave them with no place left to be real,
to become. What story does Jimmy Baldwin’s very real recurring attempts
at suicide, even at the height of his fame and creative power, tell?
How does his lust for death complicate his effectiveness at life, his
legacy? For every James Baldwin, there are a whole lot of corpses, a lot of people who went under,
he once lamented during an interview toward the end of his glorious
tenure on earth. The versions of him who almost went under, and not just
the stellar easy-to-admire iterations, are the ones in need of our love
and recognition. As in James Baldwin, so in ourselves. This revisionist
history becomes an ongoing act of love and reparation, of rescuing us
from the edge by letting us admit when we reach it and almost leap
forth, almost wanna be ready. Suffering that precipice in silence is not
a sign of courage, not romantic, not poetic, not going to make you see
what James Baldwin saw, not going to impede the truth from its clamoring
march forward into and through and beyond you. So vent, own it, live to
tell it, what made you want to die? What let you live? What does
survival mean to you? What did it mean to James Baldwin? What does Jimmy
mean to us when he is suffering and opaque, that he doesn’t as a purely
oracular cultural hero whose subjectivity is masked by his capacity to
reveal us to ourselves? What does our Western-minded half-consumption of
Baldwin’s identity, our effortless editing of the sad parts in search
of the fire that we vampirize and abide, force him to hide, harbor, and
lament privately without the allies and sycophants who are around when
he seems carefree. If James Baldwin was lost, we all are. Searching is
our mode of survival. ... [mehr] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2018/08/preface-to-james-baldwins-unwritten-suicide-note
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen