Story

I have a theory that the days I begin with writing are the ones where I speak less. I don’t ramble in conversations, and maybe I make less time for them in the first place. It’s like this part of me that longs to be heard is fed in the morning, and I feel less of a need to open my mouth just to hear my own voice. Like in the same way that stretching in the morning means I’ll crack my knuckles less throughout the day, or having a big breakfast quells the need for constant snacking. I would like to think that inside of me is a wordometer, a subconscious fitbit that tracks how much I talk and tells me to shut up when I’ve spoken too much. What would that data look like? How would it compare to the people that I’m talking to? As a writer, a performer, a guy – I suspect that I jabber more often than I hold my tongue. It’s an unbecoming characteristic that makes me feel like I might be an asshole after I step out of meetings – if not because of what I said then how I said it, and if not because of how I said it because of how long-winded I was in saying it.

There are people in my life who seem automatically wiser to me, because of the amount of pause they’re able to hold before responding to someone in the conversation. For someone like me – reactive, talkative – these seem like eons when they’re really just a beat. But it’s that beat that seems to allow someone to be measured, say something that actually matters, and doesn’t just cut people off. Maybe that’s the heart of what I’m needing to feel generally like a better person – write more, pause longer, speak less, stop cutting people off. Seems as simple a goal as eating slower. What a life this is, where the most epic goals are also the simplest.

Staring into my phone first thing into the morning is my digital version of waking up on the wrong side of the bed. These are the kinds of days where the first sun I see isn’t the one outside my window, but the tiny icon on my weather app. The first thing I touch isn’t my wife’s soft skin, but the cold glass on my screen. The first voice I hear isn’t my own through writing or meditation, but the familiar voice of one of the strangers whose podcasts I subscribe to. When I wake up and immediately reach for my phone, I’m effectively taking the backseat in my ride through the day.

Going first for my phone before anything else isn’t the cause, but rather the symptom (and perpetuator) of a greater issue of waking up to the hum of anxiety. That may have been caused by going to bed with unresolved thoughts or worries, which may have been caused by staying up too late watching or reading something that might be considered the opposite of a lullaby, which may have been fueled by the need to cram extra things into a day that felt unfulfilled, which was probably due to me not feeling like I had agency over that day because I took a backseat. And the cycle continues.

I keep falling off this wagon of daily morning writing, and maybe it’s unrealistic for me, given my personality and this era of distractions and this life of demands, to expect to keep up such a habit. The days when I wake up and take a walk, then half an hour to sit, then another hour to write – when I drink water before coffee, when I talk to a loved one before an acquaintance – might not necessarily be my most “productive” days. But they’re definitely the most fulfilling. The world is moving at such a pace, that I may go months without giving myself even one of these fulfilling days.

This blog has existed in various forms for almost 12 years now, and I keep having to remind myself that it’s not about clicking the “Publish” button, but rather sitting down to write in the first place. I’ve stripped my site of analytics and comments for the very reason that those features could end up informing how and why I come here, which can then drive my entire day. Constantly, I have to remember that maybe the only one who really truly cares about all of these words is me, and that’s more than okay.

The odd theme of the week has been moving walkways. It started off with an email from Christine Sun Kim on a project we’re working on, about the history of elevators, which led me down a rabbit-hole on Elisha Otis, who invented elevators as we know it and demonstrated one at the World’s Fair by putting his son in one and chopping the rope it was suspended from with an ax. Later in the week, I learned the term genericide – and how the Escalator brand fell victim to it by becoming the common term for moving staircases. Meanwhile, despite the government shutdown giving me much more agency over my time, my morning meditations have been more chaotic than ever. It ends up that I’ve gotten used to shaping my days around external requirements. Without them, I’ve been walking through my days without handrails, which is both liberating and strangely uncomfortable. When I know what’s “required of me,” I end up allowing the demands of other people quell my own needs for daily fulfillment. Clearing my inbox takes precedence over clearing the thoughts swimming around in my head. Responding to everyone else’s needs get in the way of my own basic prerequisites for life – sometimes even meals and staying hydrated. In my meditations, this has meant that I’ve found satisfaction of being on a mental moving walkway of sorts. It’s easy to have peace of mind when you know that the day ahead is paved with ticking off assignments. But when face to face with the prospect of making headway toward my life’s purpose, sitting still for 30 minutes feels like a bloodbath.

One of the most helpful tips I’ve learned about meditation is that it’s not about being in that state of zen or clarity, but actually about those moments when you realize your mind has wandered, and you make an intentional choice to table that thought and go back to your center. Meditation can appear to be about getting to a state that you can then coast on, but as I enter my third year of regular practice, it’s becoming clear that this is truly an activity. It requires a certain vigilance and attentiveness, much less a moving walkway and more like a series of suspended bricks that like you need to scale like Super Mario. The present moment is not a ride that will whisk you along, but rather a never-ending collection that must each be caught, otherwise missed. This can sound stressful, but like most things in the universe there is a rhythm to be found, a groove to catch. In fact, finding that and staying in it sounds like a much more exciting life than simply finding enlightenment and staying static forever.

The government might have shut down but the politics definitely haven’t. I had to delete the NYTimes and Washington Post apps from my phone just to cut my habit of checking for breaking news every spare moment (of which I’ve had plenty lately). How did I get here? To the place where a forced mandate to stay off work means I obsessively keep tabs on when I’ll be able to return. Haven’t I been longing for a break? A moment to reset so that I can get to a pace of life that’s actually reasonable for a human being? It’s been two weeks, and I feel like I’m still shaking off the momentum I carried over through the holidays from 2018. Like I’m still in the middle of a rolling stop but I can’t get myself to fully step on the brakes. I blame D.C.

A lot of people who love this town say they do because it’s a “thinking city.” Whether they live here or are just visiting, people are here to share their expertise. It’s true that everyone here has an opinion on the state of the nation and the world, and you’d be hard-pressed to get through a day’s worth of conversations with people without someone giving you a piece of their mind about the president, or the mayor, or the way the mayor swears they’re the president of somewhere. The thinking city has been a vice for me, in the same way I was magnetized by New York as a city of the hustle. All these cities are driven by a pillar of Western civilization – D.C. for the politics, New York for the chase for a dollar, LA for the vanity. If you had asked me what the Bay was about when I was still living there, I would’ve said it was the activism. But that was ten years ago. Now, it’s about enterprise – scaling up – someone could argue that whether it’s the activism or the tech, it’s always been about the progress, but I just don’t apply those as the same thing. It’s a shame, how the birthplace of the Third World Liberation Front is now the landing page for America’s captivation of international attention. Maybe it’s still the same gate, just a different direction of traffic.

When I move to LA in the spring, I’m not sure that it’ll be the best move if I’m hoping to grow away from being self-centered and driven by the desire for recognition. Dahlak left town because he said he didn’t like how the city made him look at other people, as individuals to either measure up against or brush off as irrelevant.

But maybe I want to be irrelevant. Wouldn’t it be nice to live somewhere where everyone sees or hopes to see me as such? It sounds like a mutual relationship. Maybe moving to where everyone wants to be recognized is exactly the perfect setting for me to go anonymous. Because as long as I’m in D.C., I can’t not play the game. I can’t not be a thinking person, and thus I can’t not be a part of the herd, equally vulnerable to the trappings that cause us all to wander and react in unison. So yes, I moved to New York to hustle, and I moved to D.C. to politic, but how interesting it will be to move to LA now that I’ve (supposedly?) shed my desire for fame. I can finally exist somewhere not in center stage, but in the nosebleed seats. The view from there must be great.

It’s been a little bit over a week since the Government Shutdown, which has put me out of daily work at the Smithsonian. When the last big shutdown hit in 2014, I had just started my job and was still adjusting to a life of structure as compared to the artist-freelance-vagabonding life I had transitioned out of. Within those three weeks I updated my portfolio, made a bunch of music, edited an iLL-Lit music video, and chilled out all in between. Five years later, I find myself in a completely different place.

From looking at my day-to-day movements, it would seem like I’m still on the clock. Even without the Smithsonian work in the picture, I’ve amassed so many side projects, chores, things in need of maintenance, and other commitments that I’m still ending each day exhausted. It definitely seems like a better alternative than just sitting around. But if a forced break can’t even force me into a break, what can? Have I institutionalized myself into a worker bee, feeling the need to put in labor even if there is no boss or pay staring me down?

Each day, I encounter my to-do list of about a dozen items, which range from small tasks like mailing off a package, to huge lifts like revamping my website (a can I’ve been kicking down the road for like a year). I look at some of these things and wonder why I even put them on my to-do list, and then wonder why I have a list in the first place. I know why. If I don’t, I’m floating in this abyss of unnamed things that literally need to get done, otherwise I’m letting myself or someone else down. But then there are all these other existential to-do’s that pile on, that are toward making me the person I want to be. Studying a new language routinely, writing daily, calling home. Things that I wish were just second nature, but instead are piled onto a list that stresses me out the more they stack. It looks a lot like the kind of box we see so many people become dependent on, to the point where when they finally get a vacation or even retire, all they can do is long for their inbox.

That’s not the life I want. But in the meantime, the tasks that pop up on my phone are the tricks, and the hit of serotonin I get when I mark it complete is my doggy treat. How do I use this shutdown as an opportunity to start climbing out of this cycle? How do I approach that without turning the process into a task of its own?

Like every elder millennial, I aspire to live in an apartment that looks like it could be on the cover of Kinfolk, only to fuck it all up because I can’t resist purchasing cushions that look like slices of dragonfruit.

When I was living in Beijing, I remember going to Ikea and being floored by how aggressively people would evaluate the merch before deciding to buy it. They’d hop up and down on stools, kick tables at the legs, slam cabinet doors over and over again. Never had I seen somebody be so methodical about buying a $10 Lack table. Maybe it’s the byproduct of growing up in country where virtually all cheap things are made. You come to expect things to break, even if they look like they won’t. You’ve seen too many shiny things turn into heaps of garbage to trust something by how it looks on the showroom floor.

If you want to experience a nice little mindfuck, join me in watching BBC’s Century of Self back to back with that new Marie Kondo show on Netflix. The former is an expose on Edward Bernays, who has been credited with splicing democracy with capitalism (#goals, right?). He transformed America (and then the rest of the world) into a society that procures materials based on want as opposed to need. Because of him, humans no longer bring life to objects – objects bring life to humans. He convinced corporations and governments to communicate how material possessions are methods of self-expression, that the things we use, wear, eat, are seen around, helps us convey who we truly are. By doing so, he jumpstarted the industries of public relations, fashion, and luxury – on the premise that these things once reserved for the elite were now democratized.

The latter is a show about average Americans who need a lady to come over from Japan to teach them how to get rid of their unmanageable amount of junk.

The Kondo show seems to indirectly respond to the conclusions that one would draw upon watching Century of Self. I inevitably end with “I need to get rid of my shit!” and proceed to convince myself that I’m being less of a materialist by obsessing over every single object I own. But the problem isn’t material objects, but rather the dollar value placed on things – whether material or ephemeral. I live amidst a generation of “experiences over objects,” which has left a bunch of industrial-era fields in the dust, while propelling tourism, digital assets, and the monetizing of self and others. “Doing it for the gram” is the new form of a shopping spree, and I’ve been trying to catch myself when I pull out my wallet with the thought of “treat yo self” or “you deserve it” in the back of my head. Yes, I talked about this a year ago, yes, it’s still a struggle.

The problem I’ve found with my own relationship with so-called materialism is that it’s still based on a vision of material objects that’s been marketed to me. It’s not completely unhelpful to go about shopping based on quality and longevity over desire to acquire more and more – but I’m not sure our society has had proper training against our own materialistic impulses to go about this methodically. I end up falling into the trap of sometimes buying more expensive, minimalist-looking things, tossing away useful objects that don’t “spark joy” in the moment, but still not getting to the heart of why the acquisition and spending of money gives me such a high.

Whenever I flip through an issue of Kinfolk or Dwell, or some other publication that romanticizes the idea of living inside a MoMA gallery in the forest, I end up realizing how difficult and expensive it would be for me to live that lifestyle. I also realize that, as someone who works in museums everyday, I really really really don’t want to call one home.

Leave it to the Government Shutdown to get me to finally trim my toenails. It’s a habit of hygiene that all my life has been perpetually tedious, even though it only requires five minutes every few weeks. The fact that there has always been a mental block insisting that I don’t have time for a five-minute task every few weeks, says less about my laziness than it does about my ability to prioritize myself. I think about the emails to strangers, the articles about topics I don’t really care about, the smalltalk with people who I have nothing in common with aside from the mutual understanding that we both don’t really care to know each other better. What did they do to deserve more attention today than my own toenails? Or my journal? Or my parents? It makes me wonder if the selflessness that I practice is misplaced, or if my attention is hijacked by my propensity for unboxing the new. I appear each unfamiliar encounter is a mirage of endless possibilities, and I never learn, even when most of them end up being a time-sucking thinkpiece or an errand that I have to get to now that I know about it. I feel like I need to be way more intentional about where I direct my generosity of time and energy, and as a default prioritize myself. This may seem obvious to some, but it’s completely against my own nature. I was raised to look for those in need, to always approach people trusting that merely the chance of our encounter meant that they were worth the time. But the result of that means I piecemeal myself faster than I can regenerate. I offer help for things that I’m not great at and don’t have anything to do with me, at the expense of the things that I’m actually meant to contribute to the universe. I spend time with random people while I carry the daily guilt of not calling home enough. I lose sleep over things I see on the internet that don’t have any real consequence to me or even the greater scope of society. But still, I’m always in a hurry. I sprint-walk everywhere I go, get impatient in lines, talk hella fast, eat hella fast, and don’t always get a full-night’s rest. In exchange for what? The chance of serendipity? My fault for reading The Alchemist and probably misinterpreting the role of coincidence. Over the past years, taking time for myself has meant being a better person to radiate out to the rest of the world. Finna get grounded in 2019. Starting with my talon-ass toenails.

You do this every year. You convince yourself that you’re not a tool for the Gregorian New Year, that you’re not the basic kind of bitch who makes resolutions. You take note of the thinkpieces that are written for those who think they’re better than the basic kinds of bitches who make Gregorian New Year resolutions, and instead resolve to construct resolutions that you call by any other name. Last year you told yourself you weren’t going to “do,” you were just going to “be.” You ended up doing a bunch of things you never set out to do, and not really being the kind of person you set out to be. Okay, that’s a lie. You wrote that for the irony of that statement. You were actually pretty great. Sure, you didn’t read the books you listed as books you’d finally read, but who in their mid-30’s really has time to read A People’s History front to back? Instead, midway through the year you got obsessed with the idea that what Kanye is doing is performance art, and you listened to his entire discography front to back. You finally get Yeezus!

You also oscillated a bunch between going with the flow, and treating your life like a garden of sculpted bushes. Where each bush is, like, a routine that, if you followed religiously for the rest of your life, would make your life, like, super optimized. One of those bushes was journaling. The last post you wrote before this one was in June, so that bush is either really nappy or really dry depending on where you want to take that analogy. Remember how you spent your birthday with Lovely in the forest, spent 2 days learning about ayurveda, compiled a list of all the things you should and shouldn’t eat, and then went on to completely not incorporate that into your life whatsoever? That was right before your Kanye obsession. It was a response to the nervous breakdown you had in January leading up to Sundance. It was the moment you spent the next 6 months referring to whenever you reflected on a time in 2018 that seemed like there was less to do and more to be.

This past New Year’s Eve, you did the countdown while Deadpool 2 was on pause. There’s probably something deep to say about ringing in the new year by watching a movie sequel for the second time. You didn’t start 2019 with a bang, nor did you clumsily stumble into it. Actually, upon reading the post you wrote a year ago, you sort of started it off exactly like last time, except with less guilt for waking up late. And despite it sounding like you spent the first two paragraphs bagging on yourself, you’re actually pretty proud of who you became over the course of 2018. You took more time to breathe. You were in nature a bunch. You came across all these moments where you could’ve lost your cool, and you didn’t lose your cool. You spent less money on alcohol. You quit Facebook!!! But all of those things are still things you did. Who you became, who you will continue to be, can’t be checked off like a resolution, because to resolve is to find closure. Here you go with your thinkpiece about how your resolutions aren’t actually resolutions, because they’re openings. Look at you. So deep. SO DEEP.

This reader is composed of works that have guided my listening of Kanye West’s ye. This is not a list of references in the album, nor is this a review or analysis of the album. It’s a shortlist of works and related social artifacts that help articulate life lessons I’m personally working on, and which have been present in my listening of the album. I’m not putting any of these works  necessarily as endorsements, but I do think their thematic ties with ye and to each other are fascinating.

In this syllabus, I reference four works whose passages serve as bookends for each “lesson,” accompanied by the work’s social context via public commentary and author reflection. I think each of these works recall themes that encircle ye as a piece of art and social spectacle, and the complementing artifacts remind us that the byproducts of our content consumption tell us more about ourselves than the content could ever hope to implicate. While it’s the role of the artist to prove art’s influence on the world, it’s the public’s responsibility to determine how the energy of that influence manifests.

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Lesson 1: Prison of the Mind

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, 2005

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The most beautiful thoughts are always inside the darkest

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from Chapter 1

Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily means thought forms. If evil has any reality – and it has a relative, not an absolute reality – this is also its definition: complete identification with form – physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms. This results in a total unawareness of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic oneness with every “other” as well as with the Source. This forgetfulness is original sin, suffering, delusion. When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create? To find the answer to this, observe how humans relate to each other, read a history book, or watch the news on television tonight.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

–

I’ve been trying to make you love me
But everything I try just takes you further from me

–

Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond, Netflix, 2017

(Jim Carrey:) There’s the avatar you create, and the cadence you come up with that is pleasing to people and takes them away from their issues, and it makes you popular – and at some point you have to peel it away. It’s not who you are. At some point you have to live your true man. Truman Show really became a prophecy for me. It is constantly reaffirming itself as a teaching, almost. As a real representation of what I’ve gone through in my career, what everyone goes through when they create themselves to be popular or to be successful. It’s not just show business, it’s Wall Street, it’s anywhere. You go to the office and you put a monkey suit on, and you act a certain way, and you say a certain thing, and you lie through your teeth at times, and you do whatever you need to do to look like a winner. And at some point in your life you have to go, “I don’t care what it looks like. I found a hole in the psych and I’m going through. And I’m going to face the abyss of not knowing whether that’s going to be okay with everybody or not.”

–

I got the mind state to take us past the stratosphere
I use the same attitude that done got us here
I live for now, I don’t know what happens after here

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“Why Eckhart Tolle’s Evolutionary Activism Won’t Save Us”, Tikkun Magazine, 2012

This is almost incomprehensible. How does he know what the evolutionary stages of consciousness are? What is the relationship between evolved consciousness and capitalism? When we no longer identify with form will all injustices be eradicated? If not, and if it is possible for us as a species to be “awake” while simultaneously living in an and being complicit with an oppressive industrial society then we should seriously question the social and political dimensions of spiritual transformation.

Why can’t this divine evolutionary impulse awaken us to the reality of things that actually matter like deforestation, pollution, racism, homophobia or imperialism? Why couldn’t experiencing Being and connecting to our divine source actually provide us with tangible knowledge and concern about the ravages of industrial capitalism instead of disembodied, abstract and politically neutral states of presence? Tolle and others like Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen believe that God evolves through everyone — Tea Partiers and KKK members, white liberals, black feminists, Chinese Taoists and queer activists to merely discover their deepest and truest self. Unfortunately this divine act does extremely little to actually move us towards global and planetary change. 

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Plotting, scheming, finding
Reason to defend all of your violent nights

–

from Chapter 3

In certain cases, you may need to protect yourself or someone else from being harmed by another, but beware of making it your mission to “eradicate evil,” as you are likely to turn into the very thing you are fighting against. Fighting unconsciousness will draw you into unconsciousness yourself. Unconsciousness, dysfunctional egoic behavior, can never be defeated by attacking it. Even if you defeat your opponent, the unconsciousness will simply have moved into you, or the opponent reappears in a new disguise. Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists. 

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Lesson 2: Negotiating Ideology in Public

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, 1952

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I’ma lose my mind in it, crazy, that medulla oblongata

–

from Chapter 11:

I listened with growing uneasiness to the conversation fuzzing away to a whisper. Their simplest words seemed to refer to something else, as did many of the notions that unfurled through my head. I wasn’t sure whether they were talking about me or someone else. Some of it sounded like a discussion of history . . .

“The machine will produce the results of a prefrontal lobotomy without the negative effects of the knife,” the voice said. “You see, instead of severing the prefrontal lobe, a single lobe, that is, we apply pressure in the proper degrees to the major centers of nerve control – our concept is Gestalt – and the result is as complete a change of personality as you’ll find in your famous fairy-tale cases of criminals transformed into amiable fellows after all that bloody business of a brain operation. And what’s more,” the voice went on triumphantly, “the patient is both physically and neurally whole.”

“But what of his psychology?”

“Absolutely of no importance!” the voice said. “The patient will live as he has to live, and with absolute integrity. Who could ask more? He’ll experience no major conflict of motives, and what is even better, society will suffer no traumata on his account.”

–

Shit could get menacing, frightening, find help
Sometimes I scare myself

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Ralph Ellison’s National Book Award Acceptance Speech, 1953

If I were asked in all seriousness just what I considered to be the chief significance of Invisible Man as a fiction, I would reply: Its experimental attitude and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction.

When I examined the rather rigid concepts of reality which informed a number of the works which impressed me and to which I owed a great deal, I was forced to conclude that for me and for so many hundreds of thousands of Americans, reality was simply far more mysterious and uncertain, and at the same time more exciting, and still, despite its raw violence and capriciousness, more promising.

To see America with an awareness of its rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom I was forced to conceive of a novel unburdened by the narrow naturalism which has led after so many triumphs to the final and unrelieved despair which marks so much of our current fiction. I was to dream of a prose which was flexible, and swift as American change is swift, confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthrightly, but yet thrusting forth its images of hope, human fraternity, and individual self-realization. A prose which would make use of the richness of our speech, the idiomatic expression, and the rhetorical flourishes from past periods which are still alive among us. Despite my personal failures there must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.

–

You want me working on my messaging
When I’m thinking like George Jetson
But sounding like George Jefferson
Then they questioning my methods then

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“The Long Shadow of Invisible Man“, Humanities, 2002

In the 1960s and 1970s, [Ellison’s] vision of “black and white fraternity” put him increasingly at odds with the black nationalist and black arts movements. During this time, Ellison was teaching, first at Bard College, then at Rutgers, and later Yale. Kirkland describes Ellison’s growing isolation from the emotions of the time…“He wasn’t acting as they thought he should. He was seen as formal and disengaged. What the poet Amiri Baraka and others at that time wanted was some acknowledgment from blacks in prominent positions or highly thought of across the country. But Ellison was very critical of them. He never got down and talked with them. He was aloof.” A crisis came in 1967 at what should have been a celebratory party in Iowa. A young black man denounced him as an Uncle Tom. Ellison, always cool and assured in public, broke down and cried.

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Years ahead but way behind
I’m on one, two, three, four, five
No half-truths, just naked minds

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Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)

from Epilogue:

Let me be honest with you – a feat which, by the way, I find of the utmost difficulty. When one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other, depending upon who happens to be looking through him at the time. Well, now I’ve been trying to look through myself, and there’s a risk in it. I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied – not even I. On the other hand, I’ve never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to “justify” and affirm someone’s mistaken beliefs; or when I’ve tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear. In my presence they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security. But here was the rub: Too often, in order to justify them, I had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house in a high wind. Oh, yes, it made them happy and it made me sick. So I became ill of affirmation, of saying “yes” against the nay-saying of my stomach – not to mention my brain.

There is, by the way, an area in which a man’s feelings are more rational than his mind, and it is precisely in that area that his will is pulled in several directions at the same time. You might sneer at this, but I know now. I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man. Thus I have come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from the point in society toward which I originally aspired.

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Lesson 3: Call-out Culture / Cancel Culture

To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar, 2015

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But how you the devil rebuking the sin?

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from “Blacker the Berry”

I’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015
When I finish this if you listenin’ then sure you will agree
This plot is bigger than me, it’s generational hatred
It’s genocism, it’s grimy, little justification
I’m African-American, I’m African
I’m black as the heart of a fuckin’ Aryan
I’m black as the name of Tyrone and Darius
Excuse my French but fuck you — no, fuck y’all
That’s as blunt as it gets, I know you hate me, don’t you?
You hate my people, I can tell cause it’s threats when I see you
I can tell cause your ways deceitful
Know I can tell because you’re in love with that Desert Eagle
Thinkin’ maliciously, he get a chain then you gone bleed him
It’s funny how Zulu and Xhosa might go to war
Two tribal armies that want to build and destroy
Remind me of these Compton Crip gangs that live next door
Beefin’ with Pirus, only death settle the score
So don’t matter how much I say I like to preach with the Panthers
Or tell Georgia State “Marcus Garvey got all the answers”
Or try to celebrate February like it’s my B-Day
Or eat watermelon, chicken, and Kool-Aid on weekdays
Or jump high enough to get Michael Jordan endorsements
Or watch BET cause urban support is important
So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street
When gang banging make me kill a n*** blacker than me?
Hypocrite!

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I hear y’all bringing my name up a lot

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“People Are Angry About Kendrick Lamar’s Ferguson Comments”, Complex, January 2015

“When we don’t respect ourselves how can we expect them to respect us” dumbest shit I’ve ever heard a black man say.
— AZEALIA BANKS (@AZEALIABANKS) January 9, 2015

Give Kendrick an oscar, made everybody think he’s a future pro black leader but he’s really the black misinformed version of ned flanders
— Ahmed/Red Cafe Fan (@big_business_) January 9, 2015

Wanna know what Young Thug and Kendrick Lamar have in common? Neither is the spokesperson for the movement.
— Art Vandelay (@YCtheCynic) January 9, 2015

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If I wasn’t shining so hard, wouldn’t be no shade

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“Has Kendrick Lamar Recorded the New Black National Anthem?”, Slate, August 2015

The chorus is simple yet extraordinarily intoxicating, easy to chant, offering a kind of comfort that people of color and other oppressed communities desperately need all too often: the hope—the feeling—that despite tensions in this country growing worse and worse, in the long run, we’re all gon’ be all right…what more timely, relevant chant could there be?…But I also listen to it because it’s been a long and difficult year since Ferguson, and the world sometimes seems like a terrible place, and I need Lamar’s reminder that we’ve been down before. Another black person shot by police? Turn on “Alright.” 

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Thank you for all of the glory, you will be remembered

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To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar

from “Mortal Man”

Do you believe in me? Are you deceiving me?
Could I let you down easily, is your heart where it need to be?
Is your smile on permanent? Is your vow on lifetime?
Would you know where the sermon is if I died in this next line?
If I’m tried in a court of law, if the industry cut me off
If the government want me dead, plant cocaine in my car
Would you judge me a drug-head or see me as K. Lamar
Or question my character and degrade me on every blog
Want you to love me like Nelson, want you to hug me like Nelson
I freed you from being a slave in your mind, you’re very welcome
You tell me my song is more than a song, it’s surely a blessing
But a prophet ain’t a prophet til they ask you this question:
When shit hit the fan, is you still a fan?

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Lesson 4: Collective Liberation Through Difficult Love

Radical Dharma by angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, Jasmine Syedullah, 2016

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Today, I thought about killing you, premeditated murder
You’d only care enough to kill somebody you love

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from Introduction

We live in a culture in which our first reaction and response to something we don’t like or are uncomfortable with is to want to change it. We want it to go away…so we want to change it. What we have not learned to do is to give ourselves the space and time to simply observe it as it is, to make friends with it. As powerfully painful as that may be–with all due respect to Gandhi–we can no longer afford to just be the change. We actually have to be the transformation, which is to say we have to transcend the form, the construct that we find ourselves in…We can’t see that if we won’t observe what is, because we’re trying so hard to get away from it. We’re trying to evade the grief and trauma of our own racism and our internalized racism and our continuous perpetuation of racism and classism and other forms of oppression on ourselves and others every single day…If we don’t respond to each opportunity that opens up, we need greater falls from higher heights before we look at ourselves in the mirror and say, “Oh! I’ve actually called this moment to me to recognize that I need to make some kind of fundamental shift.” 

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Time is extremely valuable and I prefer to waste it

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“Radical Buddhism and the Paradox of Acceptance”, Huffington Post, 2010

Of course, for people who don’t practice, meditation can and does come across like a pitch-perfect cliché of passivity before the status quo. When you look at someone sitting there, you might think: “Seriously what does that do for them? What does it really change about their situation? How does it better the world?” We ask these skeptical questions because what we rightfully want is not just the ability to pay attention, but the ability to transform our circumstances. We want change we can believe in, both internally and externally. That’s the payoff we are looking for. Without the reward of transformation coming at some point on the path, meditation is useless…Practical transformation is what Buddhist practice is all about. It’s also about changing the world. To practice meditation consistently is to push back hard against the tidal wave of materialism that is quite literally killing the planet.

For transformation to take place, we have to actually make friends with our mind. We have to learn to like ourselves. This is the opposite of a “get rich quick” scheme. There is no product we can purchase to aid this work. It only comes from the willingness to be with yourself, nakedly, openly, and lovingly, again and again over a long period of time. Which means we have to spend time with ourselves. A lot of time. And the time we spend with ourselves on the cushion is the opposite of passive. It’s often tough, it’s usually intense, and it leads to a hard-fought, slow-won, and revolutionary victory over self-hatred. We can actually come to like ourselves. Liking yourself is the result of acceptance. To call acceptance “radical” — as Tara Brach does — is actually a severe understatement.

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Ain’t no love lost, but the gloves off

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“Rev. angel Kyodo williams: Why Your Liberation is Bound Up with Mine”, Meditation in the City! Podcast, May 2018

You don’t get to walk a path of liberation, and not be accountable. First and foremost, liberation is about choosing to be 100-percent accountable – 100-percent accountable for who and how you are. And if that sounds like a really long job that you’re going to be working at for the rest of your life, it is. And there are other things you could be doing with your time, you just don’t get to say you’re walking a path of liberation.

I have no dominion over what anyone does, and maybe my insight is really, really tiny. But I know this to be true: Liberation never wants anything else other than liberation for all. And the only way that I could be sitting here, and not be absolutely furious, livid with every man, every white body, every straight body, is for my path – even when I want to be mad, even when I want to be hating on folks because they represent dominant paradigms – I cannot. Because liberation wants nothing else but liberation for all. That’s the only reason I can speak from here. Because one day I woke up, and much to my chagrin, I loved the very same people that would rather see my body laying in the street. I loved the very same people that would ignore me in my dharma center. I loved the very same people that would make me invisible. I didn’t say I liked them. But I do love them.

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I don’t do shit halfway, I’ma clear the cache

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“Why Meditation Is Not Enough: Rev angel Kyodo williams”, CTZN, April 2018

The very fundamental underlying glue of our humanity is redemption. And that people are aware that redemption is possible is, I think, the difference between being able to be a human and potentially becoming a monster. And we have structured society in a way in which we are too often too quick to try to make people irredeemable monsters…This idea that we have that we can decide a clear-cut right and wrong, good and bad, belonging not belonging – is exactly the mental construct that allows patriarchy to continue under-challenged. It allows the colonialist mindset that founded this country to continue to wind its way through all of the systems and structures that we have. And we can produce things in a human being – the society, the culture, the norms – what is expressed in the culture through an individual can be blamed and burdened upon solely the individual. But the culture remains unscathed. It releases the culture from any kind of responsibility or accountability for what it is that we produce in our society, what it is that our culture produces, what it is that are our norms, what it is that are the unspoken things, not just the things that are said – we have a set of behavior codes….we absolve the culture that allowed that behavior to manifest in this society. 

Edit: An earlier version of this syllabus featured williams’ On Being interview, but the above passage speaks to the point of this lesson more succinctly. 

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They gotta repaint the colors, the lie is wearing off
Reality is upon us, colors dripping off 

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from Introduction

Movements for Black liberation cast their bodies into resisting the systems and instruments of oppression. Our bodies take the shape of, and thus illuminate, the contours of the most insidious force of systematic dehumanization and destruction ever imagined, one which has led the global community into a downward spiral of self-annihilation. Our insistent march exemplifies a grace and forbearance that humbles and inspires direct confrontation with the truth, widening the path of justice toward liberation for all people. We are propelled by the essential human compulsion for freedom, but we can also be driven by centuries of pain and carrying a burden greater than people should have ever known. Our healing cannot wait until the structures acquiesce, are dismantled, or come undone. We must take a seat.

Each community possesses, as Gandhi offered, a piece of the truth, of Dharma. When we seek the embodiment of these truths, giving ourselves permission to be more honest, more healed, more whole, more complete–when we become radical–neither the path of solely inward-looking liberation nor the pursuit of an externalized social liberation prevails; rather a third space, as-yet-unknown, emerges. It is a radical dharma. And it is ours. 

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I let it all go, of everything that I know,
And nothing hurts anymore, I feel kinda free,
We’re still the kids we used to be

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