STOP TALKING IN CIRCLES Part 4: Man
Here I discuss and opine the construction of man.
For the black man to be seen and for him to be identified as such, a veil must have already been placed over his face, making it a face "bereft of all humanity." without this veil there is no Black man. The Black man is a shadow at the heart of a commerce of the gaze. Such commerce has gloomy dimension, almost funeral, for in order to function it demands elision and blindness. 1
He said to me “I am a man,” and I heard destruction. I saw the walls tremble and the ground quiver. My own heart palpitated. The tone was triumphant and declarative. It was in awe of itself, convinced of its own indestructibility. The man was unstoppable and I sat and swallowed myself watching and listening. The room was already full of anticipation and the climax burst its seams. I contoured into, and through, and around it; nevertheless metaphysically impacted by the explosion.
I am afraid but fear not stop me. A deep breath and I peer into the eyes of man. I gaze into a creation of man. A peak of the soul catches my eye and I am empathetic but not too much– it knows who it is, who it wants to be seen as, how it wants to behave and I am no fool to feed a hungry beast by holding out my bare hand.
Man is a consumptive, extractive, compartmentalizing construction. Man excludes many. Man includes those who are identifiable and categorizable as able to perform: physical, intellectual, psychic functions of manhood, racial supremacy, and able bodiedness. Each of these force out, devour, exclude any other expansions. “He,” exists because he kills, he takes, he assaults, he possesses, he deceives. It’s as if he is the devil and preaches against himself. Woe is him and he created this woe. Please don’t get stuck to the pronoun and what you associate with it physically, he could be she, her, they, or them. He works with them and her and they work to keep the construction stable, well maintained, adapted to the times. There’s plenty of work to do for the man: chucking, jiving, dying, shooting shit, shit shooting, fucking, fighting, taking up space, making room for him, shuting up, scooting down, making a fuss, holding your questions till the end, bcc’ing, cc’ing, bitching, complaining, mansplaining, being a pick me, getting chose, killing, manipulating, ignoring, invalidating, gaslighting, It’s always something to do for man-ness.
I don’t trust man or his agents. I don’t believe you or what you say you want to do, how you want to help all of us. You’re so convinced of the great prosperity you’ll bring. Convinced any other is only a hater, an opp praying for your downfall but, you dead them. You’ve been born and bred “to know,” and you believe in your truth. Your “knowing,” can’t see me. It doesn’t love me how I desire to be loved. It desires the possession of the depths of me. It doesn’t not acknowledge my desire. It conceives my desire, only to operationalize new methods to engulf me further.
He lusts for me. It slithers through my spirit seeking a crevice to nestle itself into; to fester between— among my corollaries and expand and siphon and expand and siphon until my dried crusted over circulatory system mourns for the past present it lived without you. Then you’ll yearn for me, despise my corpse, cremate me. Leave my ashes to the dirt and wait for another me to rise again to suckle me. The man who only feeds the ashes of desire. You even got me to pray to your man God. Praying to the man that made you to disintegrate you as he did with the people he deceived into your calls to action.
People is population. It is a group, the group, the conglomerate of beings. People evokes “we.” We evokes the collective. So, people may be akin or analogous to collectivity. I think so. I avoid species as a way to clarify this because of its association to the biological but necessary to mention. People is kind of analogous to the collective and that brings me to familial. There are transcendental and material bonds amongst us including memory. Memory stored through our bodies and our constructions. It is stored through our constructions of man, race, architecture, geography. People is a concept that I illustrate or imagine as a feedback loop containing and driven by our decisions, including the building of man.
Oppenheimer (2023), award winning and generally critically acclaimed, poetically recalls Albert Einstein being asked to review calculations used in the process of making the first utilized atomic bombs in WWII. In this scene, Oppenhiemer recalls his own reluctance and/or questioning of the entire Manhattan project and specifically, ominously and rhetorically warning that the bombs themselves could be the start of a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world. He believes they (the Manhattan project team) began this process by successfully making and later using atomic bombs.
Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
This scene and the film itself pressed criticism of the man’s world we are living in (Oppenheimer as an agent of this world). A place in time, this current state of the world is a whole lotta systems of man bringing death to people. So much ego and pride embedded by colonist ancestors and humanist theory that garnered men material birthright to conceive of world ending methods for mass death. And they were here before the atomic bomb, infamously imperialism and colonialism are real things. More deprecating still, most of us are excluded from the spectacle of debating these methods at all. We’ve conceded our voice to a representative of our democracy that has not on behalf of the most popular opinions of anyone but man’s for centuries. Lay on top of that a disgusting performance of manhood on every stage of public debate we, the people, are privileged to see; in political debate, in news commentary, in company and organizational press releases, in podcasts, in tweets, in our homes, in our beds. The bombs dropped by man in the 1940’s were so literally an example of the world man wants. We are in Oppenheimer’s world, a performance of criticism.
Death is punctuation for our psychic state. Death ends it. Death separates. Death is a momentous metaphysical altering. Death is a structural conclusion. Death reminds me of the demolition of a building. Wherein the form is completely disfigured, flattened. Its introductory basis ceases. Death is energy reforming. One form of death releases another holds.
Much of this made up man is a journey led by desire. Desire nurtured through the seduction of the world, of capital gain, and possession propagated. Man and his indestructibility has been vindicated time and time again, playing with the concrete and conceptual manifestations of death throughout time. We must acknowledge men and men’s agents, us. We have all allowed it to absorb us into its bloodstream– deconstructed and metabolized into its circulatory system there’s so much wonder about how to escape what has now become yourself. Wonder in itself may be helpful, wonder in imagining may be helpful, wonder in criticality may be helpful.
Authors Note: This entire essay is written upon reflection of the world through interaction with the work of Sylvia Wynter, humanist philosophy, modernity, and my birthplace the United States of America.