James Baldwin asks, in the Fire Next Time, what will happen to all that beauty?1
he writes: “When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful.”2
Walking through the street, riding the train, moving through the city, buying coffee, I look at all the faces and I hear this question too. What will happen to all that beauty?
the refusal, denial of each other’s beauty wreaks so much havoc, as Baldwin feels and names. what we refuse to know destroys us and allows us to destroy each other.
The question stays acute, 61 years after the book was published, a lifetime later. It is a question about Black people now. It is a question about people whose lives we endanger now. It is also a question that looms large for me in the face of genocide, “war”, climate catastrophe, the housing crises all over this country, ongoing pandemics, all of the ways we threaten and destroy life. It is a question about the earth. What will happen?
i wonder what would be possible were we accountable to each others’ beauty, which is to say preciousness; were we mindful of it at all. it might require relinquishing other allegiances, it might be more gentle. it might draw us closer together.
earlier this month i read, “Interconnectedness is a big clunky word, but we also call it beauty. In that moment when you experience something beautiful what happened to the ‘you’? You are not even around anymore. Whatever you see is still there, but something happens to transcend that object or phenomenon and you, and beauty just exists. So that’s the interconnectedness, that’s when that sense of us as separate, our embodiment which is how we navigate the world, somehow is held in abeyance. And something else emerges.”3
my teacher/friend/mentor/elder doug recommended the piece this definition comes from to me. this way of thinking about beauty reminds me that there is a wisdom in awe, an ethic in wonder. in the face of immense destruction i veer towards dread, nihilism becomes convincing and intelligent. and then, oh, right: beauty—people, art, the creatures, the music, the earth—rescues me from myself by taking me out of myself.
doug’s email signature includes the Toni Morrison quote: “at some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough.” !!
i return to this point in life, sometimes willingly sometimes begrudgingly. i know it by the quiet i feel in beauty’s wake, the sense of satisfaction and delight that rises in my chest at the moon glowing, the person walking by, the light on the water, those chords at the beginning of the song, your words.
maybe we are the ones who decide what will happen to all of that beauty, as we learn to trust it, as we remember that we are it.
pg. 111; I was returned to this part of The Fire Next Time encountering Fred Moten’s book All That Beauty two summers ago. ↩
He also writes, “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.” (99) Which is to say we often trade mystery for rule, for the illusion of control. Instead of being in relationship with the inevitable, allowing it to power our appreciation of the fleeting, awe-inspiring, preciousness of it all, we lean on doctrine, citizenship, myth. ↩
Peter Senge in “Relational Systems Thinking: That’s How Change Is Going to Come, from Our Earth Mother” Melanie Goodchild with Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Roronhiakewen (He Clears the Sky) Dan Longboat, Kahontakwas Diane Longboat, Rick Hill and Ka’nahsohon (A Feather Dipped in Paint) Kevin Deer ↩