A Blues Gospel of Anthropocene — Introduction: A Musical History of Black America Suggests Compassion
What follows is not a linear narrative… linear narratives distort nature and time… Narratives that reconnect with the realities of nature and time are not linear… They follow the contours of nature and the cosmos… I write this as I enter my seventies, having followed the contour of a human life almost all of the way around from beginning to beginning.
My circuit passed through its halfway point to begin its way back home when I encountered a cultural transition between written and oral traditions. It wasn’t my culture, but I embraced it as if it was. It didn’t really embrace me back, but it did gently re-direct me towards my own with loving hints of what to look for, for which I remain grateful, beyond words.
The elliptical chanting of that foreign tongue floated me toward the ellipticity of my own path as well, initially into indigenous mythology of Africa and the Americas… then into African American cosmology that was musically expressed… then to African and southeast Asian tonal languages spoken with a drum… then to ragas of India’s classical music… then to pictographic script of African and Asian scholars… Then to daily, seasonal, and regional biospheric circuits of light as well as water…
The biospheric circuit of water in particular cannot just be written linearly… because it is also oral, aural, visual, and most of all kinesthetic… because it is also the generational cycle of human community. So the “beloved community” narrative of my youth approaching 20th century social change has now become for me a river in that biospheric cycle of human community ecology… that biospheric cycle of compassionate black religion… sharing and alleviating suffering within a linear language prison filled with arrogance so great that it’s got the nerve to call itself freedom.
But let’s not resort to calling names. The struggle for compassion from the midst of arrogance seems universal, and perhaps eternal? The difference between being human and being parasitic perhaps? No one can escape it. Is that why so many religious and cultural truths get conveyed parabolically perhaps?
Is that why so many linear minds wield the stories arrogantly like pointed swords that maim and kill, while the underlying message of community compassion gets missed and dismissed, even by the victimized who need the stories most? I don’t know.
Details of my personal journey may perhaps appear in print someday. What follows are some cycles of this path among my people… cycles that finally helped me to extricate and understand my own… a path of people who even though victimized, refused to simply become victims…. It all started to come together for me on encountering C. Eric Lincoln’s 1970’s writings on “Black Religion” as a common religious experience among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas that seemed to cross all boundaries of dogma and doctrine.
For those who don’t remember or who were unaware, Lincoln originated the term “Black Muslim” in referring to the Nation of Islam in such writings of his.
I recognized Lincoln’s Black Religion almost immediately as the home I had sensed in the previous encounter with a cultural transition between oral and written traditions. But this time the culture was mine. The language seemed to be something called Black music, but the “music” was a commodity in the culture that called it music just like the bodies of the Black people who made it.
So I took a step back to calling the musical expression one of the sounds created by the religious experience that Lincoln was describing. Then I traced it through every new cycle of what the larger culture called music from colonial times to the present.
To do so, I wrapped my linear prose around an elliptical storytelling structure that I labeled for the environmental water cycle that seems to contextualize successive generations of human communities within our own sustaining ecologies. Within and across each cycle, compassion seemed to show up as the common religious value that distinguished enslaved African and their descendants from the surrounding arrogant community—not because Black folks were more perfect, but because that was what we needed. So I ended up asking the following question:
Might the religious essence of C. Eric Lincoln’s concept of “Black Religion” be intentional compassionate community—in the root-word sense of compassion as sharing and alleviating suffering?
Martin Luther King, Jr., envisioned and advocated “beloved community” as an intentional choice to bring about non-violent social change. Black Religion, however—when viewed through a history of Black religious experience told in cyclical time by successive generations of Black musical expression from colonial times to the present—seems to describe intentional communities, of necessity sharing and alleviating institutionally imposed suffering.
Upon investigating this question, I found that stages of such a Black religious history seemed to correlate with Biblical narrative stages of Genesis, Exodus, Gospel and Judgement, in which Harriet Tubman is often described as a Moses, and King’s role is envisioned as Christlike. It was also possible to correlate “judgement” with the commodification of nature and climate changes associated with Anthropocene.
Ultimately, I ended up answering my original question with a yes. Lincoln’s description of Black religion—as crossing all boundaries of doctrine and dogma to essentially share and alleviate suffering—definitely suggests compassion as the defining quality that actually makes Black Religion “religious.”
This led to another question that the multiple crises of modern times seem to be answering with a yes also. Might racism and gender bias at the root of such Black suffering be understood more generally as “arrogance” that also threatens global society by refusing to share or even recognize suffering; that may even encourage and inflict suffering; and that may ultimately profit from increased suffering?
Unlike linear histories, the history that follows, told in cyclical time, seems to connect the compassionate response of Black Religion, as King did, with a global need for compassion as the basis of ongoing human survival? Another way of saying this is that modern global culture has created an image for a prosperous and self-propagating human community. Whether or not this actually works is up to us.
Introduction / Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7
Peace Jungle 