At a middle school main office in Milwaukee.
“You catchda bus taDay?” asked the school secretary.
“Yeaahp.” He said to her. She was severely tattooed I might cautiosuly add
“I must ha did his enrollment.” She said frowning into the ledger.
“You did.” The boy said.
I understood everything perfectly.
Charles Debose at Cal makes a convincing precis here on the ability not only to switch between Black English..
(Ebonics as it was called in my day and much lampooned, though the relationship to Swahili is undeniable. For example “Why people be so tall?” is a standard grammar in West Africa. The present perfect conjugation of I am to I be. A sense of presence here implied by the perfection.. such as an action that is done all the time or over and over again. As Toni Morrison said this is a sense of time distinct from Standard English. It is, in fact, a perfect sense of being.)
and Standard English (or acting white as they said in my high school) but Debose also makes the argument that it is not just among lower class (ghetto) blacks:
Taylor surveyed black ninth graders from southern and border states from whom he elicited a 70% affirmative response to the question: 'Can you switch dialects easily?' (1975:36). In reporting his findings Taylor comments that:
Dialect switching is a commonly observed phenomenon, especially among older and better educated blacks (1975:37).
But also among highly educated older blacks that can code switch successfully. And so yes I would like to say that I experience this and participate in code switching as well. I would say that one dialect allows me to more fully express joy, and music, male on male touching, yet the other standard dialect allows me the space to contextualize this experience. Which in my experience the context for these forms of speech to arise are as distinct as male to female majorities, southern to northern as they are white to black. My inner confusion and subsequent self-consciousness (My inner aspiring Hick) on when to code switch comes when the rooms are mixed.
“Come on, Motherfucker, Do it!” I have been quoted while watching American football, Tedeschi Trucks, and other kinds of gospel spiritual metaphysical type events such as these.
The one is forward and present and the other detached. Again its why Amy Adams loses her SE when drunk and angry. She is become embodied. The slur is physical.
It is almost as if the ability to hold two separate ideas in one mind is like the many facets of a diamond. Richard Freeman, the jewel of yoga in the Western Hemisphere has made a sincere effort to evolve and become one sincere being that is always still and yet contains gravitas. There is no code switching with Richard. He is too presidential.
Several times I hosted Richard Freeman in Taipei, Taiwan where I was teaching yoga professionally. I commented then how surprising it was that we were both from Illinois, both Hicks from the center of the center of the nation, the middle of the middle, and yet somehow he was born a Prince and I was born this pig.
(My Taiwanese students were infuriated and insulted by this bit of self-deprecating hyperbole, and anyway Richard is no Hick.)
He is the scion of St. Louis doctors and physicians and a good Mennonite (his brother teaches Appalachian musical history by the way.. aspiring Hick suspect) while I am a the child of a steel worker and a nurse. (post state rehabilitation)
Here is Richard describing what he wishes he knew early on.
Mary Taylor and Richard Freeman discussing yoga
This is literally a phenomenal video. That the physical experience of dropping one’s tongue could give you the experiential phenomenon of joy.. and that joy allows for the intellectual capacity for argument and counter argument and also then aesthetic appreciation and therefore the connoisseurship of Life is such an extremely radical notion. One notionally antagonistic to the Socratic method and therefore indulgently tempting.
That to properly experience the faculties of the mind, means one should explore Tantra yoga, and/or other techniques that break free long held traumas and fixed mindsets in the body, and that this Hatha yoga form is a device towards that capacity is extraordinary. Socrates said, in all his physical deformity that all you have to do is ask ,perhaps disquisitively, for further definition of terms. Perhaps not dissimilar an approach to Ramana Maharshi or Neem Karoli Baba. Who are you?
Which begs the question of how hard did they have to work to achieve this drop of the palette and saturation of the self with the seer? That consciousness which observes all things including your own personality. Perhaps it just came to them one day.
What is all this?
This is what makes the pig Hick so implacable to suffering, to the social contract, and cohesion, coherence. Their brains are fucked. The amygdala disposition (the relative size of the amygdala due to experience of trauma) is such that the ability to create empathy for suffering is severely impaired and the PFC is so riddled with plaque that long term planning and strategic thinking is impossible. As Dr. Robert Sapolsky says the sociopathic brain struggles to produce serotonin. Which is say those inured to violence struggle to experience Love.. literally.
It’s this that makes the Republican Trumpist sub-human. It is this that makes Richard Freeman a Prince among men. Change is possible as we know now that the brain is plastic and continuously forms new axonic connections. However, any Kaiser Permanente MFT in Behavior management knows that what makes the borderline personality disorder, the narcissist, the sociopath, and the histrionic such an impossible client is their refusal to accept responsibility. They are never the problem. All other objects (people) are the problem. The objects (humans) in the narcissist’s field of view are the ones in the way.
MDMA and the mystic experience.
I understand that Swami Agehananda Bharati was more of an advocate for LSD as a precursor to the mystic experience, the zero scape beyond the threshold of the door of perception. Bharati is an extremely influential speaker and writer on the yogic experience. His work the Light on the Center was groundbreaking and an influence on Richard Freeman’s thinking and was passed onto me from him with the wide eyed trembling hands of the Deadhead handling the Pizzatapes.
However, as a Gen-Exer I have to say that it is instead MDMA which allows us to experience the aesthetic experience and to know trust and to feel good permanently. Just to say what happens when dropping the drug, an amphetamine complex, is that you after some time, maybe 90 minutes, you look around and feel calm. Perhaps you rub your thumb against your trousers and enjoy its vibration. This is the nucleus accumbans slowing dripping serotonin onto the amygdala which is now stimulating the pituitary gland into introducing oxytocin heavily into the circulatory system.
Your tongue clucks against the roof of your mouth and it feels necessary and good. You look around and see myriad human behavior and smile charitably at this dance of lust like a Nataraj. smirking to yourself at seeing all this before.
Perhaps someone bumps into you or not or breathes on you or not, and you feel finally that the jaw and mouth is free to speak or not whereas before you walked through life with the molars ground together and the brows furrowed so deeply you thought you might eat someone’s face, a loved one even, before you would dare ask them to change their behavior.
Now.. now you simply let them know how you are feeling with kindness, acknowledging the effect this critique might have on their person with empathy.
The feeling of your bottom root grinding in the chair beneath cause your eyes to roll back in your head with pleasure. This feeling never leaves you. No matter how many years later, it is always there. It is what Dr. Eva Henje Blom of UCSF calls Vagal tone. It is what Patanjali refers to as pratyahara Accessing this sensation is as simple as pushing a button. Relax your tongue.
You have become Bill Clinton.
As Barthes said Like the Yogi and “the Politician, a false worker, the writer is a also a false vacationer.”
Not pure immersion in the cosmic ambergris per se, but still the kundalini opening, the afterimage, feeling finally kind satisfaction in all things now accessible to, yes..
we, the scarred.
In Part VII the final chapter in this disquisition on Hick I will discuss violence.
Violence and niceness.