The Marrow of Tradition

Crying this morning. 

Against my academic training. Against my alleged distance from materials which I subject to critical scrutiny. Against my supposed temporal distance from matters which happened a "long time" ago...

Words: I love the connection of long to time - of a distance measurement to a sensation which we observe only peripherally. I mean, truly, time is that which we see out the corner of our eye, but which, upon turning seems to have disappeared. Like a ghost. Like an illusion. Like a floater in our eye that was not there when we were ten, but now drifts through at will, across the mundanity of our day to remind us that there is a world within us to complement the one without, and it too is decaying.

I love that 'Long' is so very indeterminate. That it means different things for everyone and lies as a space between, a mediating revolving phantasm that spooks each of us differently. Long the day, long the hour, long the minute. Long the pool, long the miles.... we accept language so whole heartedly for so skeptical a species!!! Why we accept that Long and Time belong together is a mystery to me, although we are also lazy.

 

But I have become esoteric.

This novel, this text, has made me cry. I have not cried like this since I fully merged with the words while reading Octavia Butler's Kindred, and realized to the depths of my own marrow, that were I born a few centuries earlier, my life would have been one of indescribable horror, pain, degredation, violation, oppression, and sadness only balanced by the inescapable knowledge that life is, at least, brief. 

Brief and perhaps balanced by something better on the other side....

The Other Side. Something Better. Not an Opiate of the masses. But a belief and an inextricable part of what allows us to continue rising each morning and breathing when there seems no reason to. Better - than here, than now. 

There must be! 

Because we all know, can feel in the flow of our blood from veins to arteries that the Planet's guiding principle is Balance. Our bodies continually seek balance, our environment (through all we try to eradicate that balanced functioning, Nature tries), heck, even the most simple laws of nature - of hot flowing into cold flowing into warm flowing into hot into cold... filling spaces and seeking equilibrium. 

All that We Know seeks Balance. 

Except, it seems, us.

Therefore, if Now is an indescribable Horror of Pain, there must be an Other Side of, if not pleasure, than Equilibrium and comfort... right? Please? There must be because the seeking of balance is what the very planet we walk on seeks. So how can there not be a Balance for the Human Spirit?? Even if it lies beyond what we can know in these tortured bodies. There must be. And so religion is not false, but fundamental. Not misleading, but a guide to avert annihilation. A beyond that is possible... right?

But the pain of the Now is profound. And marrow deep.

So, I cry. 

The book - yes the Marrow of Tradition is a book - is about a North Carolina town where the only successful coup of a legally elected government on U.S.A. mainland territory has taken place. The story of a massacre of Black citizens by White in the wake of the changing face of the city - a city that was quickly balancing out as Mama Nature of course, would have it.  These White citizens disrupted that fast approaching balance through their hate and fear, and by violence, by slaughter. Eventually destroying all Black businesses and driving over 2,100 Black citizens to flee in fear.

My love/hate relationship with academia revealed: If not for so many scholars pushing through the quagmire of these stories, this history alongside me, I would throw the book away.