The Devil’s Work

As you can imagine I have been trying to wrap my mind around the chaos, dare I say absurdity, of our current moment. Trying to find language to describe what I feel in my gut. Toggling between rage and despair. Not knowing what to say or how to say it. Finding it easy to condemn the ugliness of the world and difficult not to view with contempt the people responsible for it all.

Bitterness and hatred shadow my days. But one thing I have learned from reading James Baldwin all these years and remembering the wisdom of my great grandmother, Ruby Wilson, (who we called Mymy) is that you cannot allow bitterness and hatred to fester. As she once said to me, “you can’t dwell on all of that; it’ll eat you up.” Focus on your loves close to the ground.

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It was hard-earned wisdom from a life lived on the coast of Mississippi and from what she saw working in white folks’ kitchens all those years. Amid storms and the fever dreams of a nation prone to madness, one must tend to one’s soul. Whatever they do and no matter what they say, you must not let it determine what kind of human being you will be.

The pounding of the skull and the irritable belly in response to the evils of the world seem inevitable, but we must work diligently to keep it all at bay. Contained. Capped. So that the ugliness does not burst open and pollute our spirits.

I found something unexpected in a recent return to Baldwin’s words that helps deepen this insight. There is a moment in The Devil Finds Works when he discusses The Exorcist. It is a devastating reading of the film, but he turns inward near the end. The film, in a way, had him reliving his “adolescent holy-roller terrors.” It led him to think about what moved him deep down in the dark and dank cellars of his being and how that realization – that vulnerability – connected him to others who also trembled in their bones. He wrote,

To encounter oneself is to encounter the other: and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does too: and, if I can respect this, both of us can live. Neither of us, truly, can live without the other: a statement which would not sound so banal if one were not endlessly compelled to repeat it, and, further, believe it, and act on that belief…. [W]e must be careful – lest we lose our faith – and become possessed.

That last line haunts. We must be careful not to lose our faith or we can become exactly what we despise – what we fear. The monster in us can be set free.

I suppose this is what my great grandmother meant when she said that dwelling on the hatred can eat you up. It can consume you. It can possess you. Baldwin put it this way,

For, I have seen the devil, and by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy,…in the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens…and in the eyes of my father, and in my mirror…. This devil has no need of any dogma—though he can use them all—nor does he need any historical justification, history being so largely his invention. He does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: we do.

Baldwin offers, especially for those of us who are certain that we are right in our moral position, a reminder of what we are capable of: that the darkness resides in us, too. And my great grandmother reminds me that we must tend to our souls and weed our gardens so that ugliness does not eat us up.

So much of the world’s troubles rest in the arrogance of certainty – that illusion of comfort found in dogma that settles all questions, all the mysteries in the dark. Fertile soil for the devil’s work.

Bitterness and despair be damned. Let’s focus on our loves close to the ground. Keeping in view who we aspire to be and what we can easily become.