Some Kind of Soul

Hello all,

I've mentioned to some -- perhaps most -- of you that I wanted to begin a blog in order to foster a political and cultural community. Some, I suspect, thought that I was full of shit. I don't blame you. My plan for a blog has been delayed for so long, I've forgotten it for so long, that I don't doubt you remember it with the same urgency and conviction as you remember that pile of shit you stepped into on the street.

But perhaps it can rise above such a status. As an opening, I've invited Nabeel Ebeid, a good friend and an excellent poet, to contribute a couple of his poems. Speaking to Nabeel, I've compared his poetry to Langston Hughes's. It is, like Hughes's, full of a vitality that goes beyond the question of race, of oppression, and that enters upon the question of living, of how we may fight injustice, and of how we may create society in a form beyond that in which we've seen it, experienced, it.

This question -- of living -- is the purpose of this blog. If the poems promote a vision of the world that some will criticize as being too close to the realm usurped (poorly, I agree) by critical race theorists, I will respond that they -- the poems -- have an exuberance that points beyond race, and to social struggle. For cynicism stretches beyond issues of race or of sexuality or of social justice. It prevents the expression of life. No truth attaches itself to Nietzsche's claim that "there could not be any greater and more doomful misunderstanding than when the happy, the well-formed, the powerful of body and soul begin to doubt their right to happiness." Nietzsche did not live in the twentieth century, with the horrors of the Shoah and of the Cold War (which was not so cold for the leftists of Chile or for the people of Vietnam!) How can we live in a society whose foundation roots itself in cynical responses to inequality, to exploitation, to violence? Our response must pull together the strength to meet it -- more than that -- our response must be to effect its direction.

I shan't say more than this. I hope that, with this, we might begin a discussion. I look forward to your thoughts and your comments. I look forward to a continuing exchange about what we need to begin a movement that goes beyond the present to imagine a future. Any comments are welcome. Let's begin a discussion that will end in an alternative to the world. With that, I leave Nabeel the stage....

Best,

Clayton Simmons