I'm reading Imani Perry writing about James Baldwin and what he could see about today from his perspective in mid-20th century USA.
I think what Perry's saying extends to now even, bc at each crisis we as a culture remain in an "unrepentant childlike state" that is "too eager to think we can just turn a page or turn a blind eye" to our problems.
"We want to escape the ugliest of moments and are therefore bound to repeat them."
Toxic positivity keeps us in the loop.
Baldwin: "coercion indistinguishable from despair"
A whole career could be spent exploring that one phrase. 🔥
Baldwin: "To be locked in the past means, in effect, that one has no past, since one can never assess it, or use it: and if one cannot use the past, one cannot function in the present, and so one can never be free. I take this to be, as I say, the American situation in relief, the root of our unadmitted sorrow, and the very key to our crisis."
This reminds me of the way trauma can work in the brain, keeping us out of our present.
Baldwin: "[...] condemned to eternal youth, which is a synonym for corruption."
I had to sit with that one for a minute, and I'll need to think on it much more.
Earlier he talked about our lives as the product of the extremes of marketing and its impact on our humanity.
When we are unrecognizable as us, both as individuals and as a national identity informed by mythology, have we bought our own corruption?
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