Yearning, Disaster and the Blues Metaphysic by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#3, JUNE-AUGUST/2018

Yearning confronts the implicated temporality of human ‘being’ with lived potentialities as renunciation of conformity with the Real. Whereas desire voices satisfaction through consciousness experiencing attainment of tangible aims, Yearning enunciates a perpetually unattainable desire and intangible movement of consciousness towards the Divine. Yearning thus overcomes situated limitations of base desire towards the Real, unveiling pure intentionality of consciousness seeking realization as the tragedy of socio-ontological movement without possible fulfillment, the Blues metaphysic of unrelenting crisis and struggle mediated through geohistorical transitions of ascent and descent anchored in disaster. “The disaster of the man of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved. The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has murdered Man.” [1]

The Blues metaphysic, as lived continuity of human suffering giving rise to an aesthetics sustaining Revolt against the disaster of coloniality in the Raw, unchains Yearning from demeaning itself as a restorative desire for absolute certitude mined from the concrete mythological totality of a past that is irrevocably shattered, and from any literal prophetic expectancy for a future that will inevitably be decisively incomplete. Shattering certitude in a fully constituted past, and dispelling hope for a comprehensively totalized future, releases lived potentialities for a poetic intentionality of human subjectivity from bondage to desiring acquiescence with the Real, thus introducing conditions for the possibility of a dialectic rhythm of lyrical consciousness and socio-ontological dissonance which resists the harmony of the normative gaze, transcends the legitimacy of established power and disrupts the equilibrium of a western imperialist continuum.

[1] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (Grove Press, 1952, 1967) p.231. modified translation and capitalization my own.