Sinners, Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, & the return of ritual theater part i
(i have been trying to avoid the longform essay because it feels banal and dead but here we are anyways)
INTRODUCTION
Something massive in me shifted the day I heard Joshua Schrei of The Emerald Podcast talk about the origins of theater; how, before it was a performance to an audience, it was a religious ritual to the gods1. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS
Every time I’ve started to write about this, I’ve stopped myself at the awareness of the deep absence of quality historical and cultural education—from learning the same tired version of “American history” just about every year of high school despite my liberal teachers’ veiled attempts in our cornfield school to invite us into a more thorough historical consciousness, to almost getting fired for introducing the novel Ender's Game to my seventh graders at the Catholic school almost two decades later, despite the fact that it was the single work of literature from the curriculum that year that managed to be both accessible and catalytic to my students – I feel underqualified at best to try to get at what I’m trying to get at without even more immersion into the historical, cultural, and political discourse in a psuedo-academic setting, and despite the fact that the very institutions I’m ravenous for access to are the same ones caving like cowards to the very systems they claim to combat with their so-called progressivism. (Hi, I’m Julia Wicker. I will be using run-on sentences and I hate it.)
The conscious narratives our culture adopts are collective efforts, are orchestrated efforts, and finding the underlying chord roots is also a collective effort and one reason today’s collective consciousness is where it is: we’ve been conditioned that going off script of the narratives we’ve adopted have serious ramifications. (they do.) Decorum is prized, not truth-finding, and that is entirely a function of self-preservation of the Powers That Have Us in Their Spell, and our own individual desperation to survive (although that’s part of the spell). These powers function as the abusive adoptive parents that we turn a blind eye to, because we want parents at all. We are cultural and spiritual orphans2.
(I also feel uncomfortable just dangling prepositions at you, but here we are. This is not going to be an academically soundproof essay, it's going to have cracks and I put them there on purpose. And because I literally don’t have time to be a proper academic right now. Surviving and creating come first.)
Another limitation to our entry into this work is that we we can’t see the wider energies at play, 1)we are trained to focus on our own ability to assimilate, exist survive and numb, but then when we do get our heads above the water of that intentional, orchestrated collective paralysis, 2)we don’t have the tools (language) to explain what is happening to ourselves. We don’t have qualified systems of meaning-makers.
Oops, all of our performance art is a celebrity game. Oops, all of our tv shows are built for consumption loops. Oops, our taste is formed by our collectively adolescent emotional intelligence. Language itself is weaponized (or conditioned as the wrong tool – merely decorative, then suddenly savage – the ceremonial knife becomes a murder weapon or merely a decoration, hello have you seen that blade? It was built for a precise precision), but we’re gaslit that it’s a fixed entity with fixed meanings.
My Christian upbringing’s insistence that there is an “objective” truth and that the Bible “clearly states it” (language that wouldn’t get by even rudimentary states in language or philosophy discourse, if we weren’t indoctrinated to swallow it). Then that rhetoric got translated into our political sphere, recycling the same terms to justify fascist tendencies and widely accepted in part because it’s such familiar rhetoric to so many of us who grew up just trying to be a good Christian. We don’t know any better, but we don’t know how to know any better.
God, I haven’t even gotten to Sinners yet. There’s a part of the movie (SPOILERS) that presents what I’m trying to say but as a story: Rennick (the, yes, Irish vampire) is trying to kill Sammy, the Black blues genius who can call up the ancestors of past and future with his blues voice and his blues guitar: Sammy as he was taught by his preacher father (oh, i recognize that preacher father!) begins to recite the Lord’s Prayer as a ward, as a final rite.
But Rennick joins in, two voices invoking a god, and Rennick explains to him, yes I know this prayer too – my oppressors made me learn it, and yet it still brings me comfort. (The translation we know of the Lord’s prayer versus its aramaic roots is another part of the story we need to know, as I will now argue:)
ABSTRACT
In high school English class we were taught poetry as: a bunch of lines on a page that usually rimed, that were flat not just on paper but usually also with Romantic or Victorian-era pastoral platitudes and plushness, or if they were (post)modern, usually made no sense, which were clunky and uninteresting or saccharin and disgustingly sanguine. In one form or another, inaccessible3.
We are taught that poetry is the form, not the energy that is pushed through the form. But what we don’t understand: poetry as we know it is talismanic. And it's true, poetry on paper (“ “) is a flattened shadowy attempt to translate through time and space what a poem really is: the felt, sung, danced, collective trance state wherein humans exacted their humanness in the world: doing what we came here to do as custodial species4 of the universe and of the earth:
A poem as we know it is a talisman of the religious rite, the ritual theater before it became a stage.
A poem is the religious rite itself.
Poetry and religion go together. Poetry is the zombie, religion is the ghost.
LITERATURE REVIEW
We have to go back further even than the term religion because the word religion has been co-opted by being institutionalized (captured to control). Institutionalization is domestication. It’s the dark side of being civilized.
Different disciplines have different terms for what’s really going on with the energies which is why I often come back to language as a sort of linchpin. Language itself is talismanic — it carries narrative form and narrative is an energetic field of humanness in symbolic form (collapsed into potent traversable forms, down the hierarchical scale of complexity, but no less potent or self-aware as such). It stays close to the body of matter but it is itself not matter. It’s hard to describe, which, of course it is because you can’t define something using itself. It simply is itself. But it is distinctly human—that is, our language is the technology of understanding within ourselves and its technology is specific to humans5.
Growing up my Christian and even inching progressive Christian sensibilities were always finding writers digging around at this idea. (I came from anabaptist roots but they were co-opted by evangelical calvinists, who are more refined than the southern baptist sort but keep going down and there are still the same turtles. Doctrinal competence was prized and I watched it start digressing into blind worship of people who had all the opposite qualities I taught were Christian, then it collapsed into raw indoctrination and propaganda, which I noticed early because I grew up reading World War II history, thank you dad.)
Christians who also like to read and think (because that’s the kind of Christian I was) were always writing down how “stories matter” and it was a matter of circle-jerk-level feverishness—there’s a reason C.S. Lewis is still a rage cult classic following within Christianity, because he told good stories that were extremely subversive, but secretly so6. Good art does that7: it’s accessible to all but the potency only can be felt, understood, and integrated in that order, at the level of each person’s energetic resonance, so at what level are you tuned to hear it. It’s exactly what Jesus meant when he said “he who has ears to hear, let him hear. It’s why Sinners is both a vampire movie and a fucking invokation spell8.
It’s what happens when you know how to wield a story.
METHODOLOGY
You wield a story as an energy field that goes beyond the logic of language, the adverbial properties of itself: you wield a story well when you know how stories mean, and the potency of what we create can haunt or change those who hear it, whichever we decide to let it.
Since my devout evangelical childhood I’ve always secretly thought good writers were the best Christians, because I thought Christian meant “love god and people in a way that changes your life” (partly because the Bible told me that) and the characters in only the best stories were always finding this invisible thread to an Invisible Center and letting that knowing and being change them in a way that changed the force and directionality of the powers around them — as if they were a center of power themselves, as if aligning that center of power to radical truth and connectedness and care and deeper worldlessness was why they were in the world to begin with9.
It’s why the English and history departments of even the most conservative colleges are more progressive than the others, even if in secret.
It’s why so many theater kids are gay.
The thing is. There are so many other metaphors10 I could use to drive this point home11 and I’m fixated on this one. Ritual theater. Why?
I don’t know how to say it12. That’s why this essay is currently 4,500 words and counting13, and I started writing it at seven thirty this morning – the metaphor speaks to me, it means something to me, and I’ve struggled to write about it because, like I said, our collective virus, spell, whatever you wanna call it that we’re under is layered. Like a solar system. Like a chakra system. The metaphors abound because all maps lead to the same place14. An artist is doing some of the weaving but the people gotta have a foundation to weave with too.
Just like in our bodies there are several sets of systems which influence each other and show up in a body with illness, like, when I got Lyme disease, it wasn’t just because I got a tick bite. In fact, I wasn’t even sure it’s a tick bite because Lyme is carried by mosquitoes now and that’s not known to mainstream allopathic literature because no on is funding those studies and family doctors are more behind on the literature than they admit, because it’s hard to practice medicine and learn medicine at the same time, do you see where I’m going here? There are several sets of underlying factors that each must need to be addressed to start to wake us up from this howling delirium. Basically we have a lot of work to do.
PART II FORTHCOMING
The Revolution Will not be Psychologized by Joshua Schrei on The Emerald podcast
note: This series of essays by
that I discovered when searching for Stephen Jenkinson’s talk on whiteness was the most accessible catalyst for my current understanding of whiteness: https://healingfromwhiteness.blogspot.comArt’s inaccessibility is frustrating: I also didn’t like having to read an artist’s statement at art museums, do you understand the dilemma? I am writing this essay in essay form for accessibility purposes but it loses a lot of talismanic potency this way. Go watch Sinners.
Tyson Yukaporta said that humans are a custodial species.
Other beings use other technology, it doesn’t make it less complex or specific to the beings who utilize it.
Yes there are layers of that irony.
Like, I hate that phrase so much. I’m so tired of circle jerking “why art exists” already, but here we are. We keep talking about it because we haven’t figured out how to embody it yet, but we need to. We NEED to. Go write a poem or howl at the moon.
And there is a reason that the movie itself does the same exact thing as Sammy’s performance in the movie: it is the play within a play, a fractal power.
There’s something in another discipline, physics or something, that I have not been able to cognitively draw in, but C.S. Lewis (surprise!) also talked about it in his science fiction trilogy.
The reality and potency and function of metaphors themselves deserves more time, consider this a dropped pin.
Several ridiculous things I noticed: one, I resisted using this idiom and almost stopped writing entirely until I could come up with a better turn of phrase; second, I had to google to even remember what part of speech it was.
that’s half the point.
A la Blaise Pascal, “if i would have had more time I would have written you a shorter letter”
Literally these idioms are making me cringe. I am being cringe to myself. I am making myself write them anyways, I am my own snootiest bully.
I thought being Christian meant that too. — the apostle Paul
Girl go