In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books…
I am reading:
Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing by Charles Johnson- A rather intoxicating mélange that serves as an introduction to Buddhism and as the insights of a Black writer on Black intellectual discourse.
Best chapter I’ve read so far is the chapter showing the influences of Buddhism on Jean Toomer’s late works. I am still trying to understand why he simply didn’t break this off into two seperate books, though.
While he may have been a disciple of Gurdjieff, and even eagerly taught at his institute, Toomer’s creative work in the 1930’s in two forms— the aphorism and poetry like “Blue Meridian”— reveals a first-rate elegant mind attempting to transcend false concepts of of Western dualism and to ontologically restore restore to our sense of life its original wholeness, as well as the universe’s enduring mystery, which human arrogance always denies.
But what put the peculiar in the “Peculiar Institution” was the superimposition of white-supremacist ideology onto the enslavement of blacks by WASPs who employed all the Manichaean symbolism of difference between “white” (good) and “black” (evil) found in the Judeo-Christian tradition (dating back at least to Plotinus) to portray people of color as inherently inferior and to justify their total subjugation.