It is magic to have your brain organized by hearing someone smarter than you speak.
It happened to me last night when listening to Angela Davis and Hilton Als speak at City Arts and Lectures. I enjoy relaxing into and with complex ideas that are being shared, not performed. There is something galvanizing about Angela Davis that isn't rooted in a hoo-rah, emotion-laden speech. It is in the pondering, the analysis, and the presentation of the personal that is centered in the collective, universal. As I listened to her speak, I took furious notes in my notebook in the dark. Last night and this morning, I made a list of all the questions that she asked or that I was thinking about. I'll be sorting through these for a long time...
- Where does the subversive voice come from? Is it cultivated? Natural? Does it pick up on incomplete, unethical, and just bad thoughts?
- How does the voice of resistance display itself?
- Is the body as necessary as the voice?
- How does sexuality bear the burden of freedom?
- How can writing serve as an act to center myself–thinking, reading, writing?
- How effective is enforced concentration?
- Does a limitation of the body free the mind?
- When we hide people, do we do it because we want to hide the problem that their presence confronts us with?
- What is our capacity for building bridges when individualism is militant against individuality?
- What can we do to make people more centered on community?
- Who is profiting off of our alienation?
- To what extent does sorting help or hinder the ways we see the world and the people in it?
- To what extent can we be critical without being hateful?
- How do we educate with love and persistence?
- What topics and events are the litmus test of my morals? What topics and events are the litmus test of our collective ethics?
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