The C.L.R. James Institute: "Postscript on C.L.R. James's 'On the Spiritual'" by Ralph Dumain

The C.L.R. James Institute presents:

Postscript on C.L.R. James's
"On the Spiritual"

by Ralph Dumain

Shortly after sending my original commentary to a colleague, I received a response suggesting that I had succumbed to a transcendental temptation myself in writing in such inspirational language. Them's fightin' words. Excerpts from my response follow.

Now, let's analyze the particular Spiritual in question once again. I can't claim my analysis is equivalent to James's, but there are similarities, and there are similarities in the basic approach to the matter. James was not one for fol-de-rol; he was stubbornly empirical. What he found in this Spiritual was strictly empirical, not supernatural, something pertaining to a philosophy of life, to human experience.

One day, one day
I was walking along
When the elements opened
And the Lord came down.

Undoubtedly the slaves believed that things like this happened, as did their African ancestors. James did not nor do I, but he is interested in the experience described. It is this experience he finds more convincing than the Biblical account of Creation, which is a mere narrative assertion of dubious veracity. The elements open, and the Lord comes down. The universe already exists, somehow; who or what made it is not in question. Suddenly, the phenomenal form of the world is torn apart, and something emerges. The Lord coming down is the experience of the person; it reminds me of spirit possession, which we know is a phenomenon experienced in all "primitive" cultures....

I went into the valley
and didn't go to stay,
But my soul got happy
and I stayed all day

James thinks this has something to do with the beauty and harmony of nature. I see it a bit differently. I see the narrator as sticking with his vision or peak experience. Whatever he had planned to do, he got the spirit and stayed all day.

You can talk about me
Just as much as you please.
I will talk about you
When I get on my knees.

For me this is the most brilliant stanza of all, even though it seems the most religious. Obviously, getting on one's knees refers to prayer or talking to God. The way the narrator chooses to get "even" is very funny. But its philosophical significance goes way beyond prayer.

James says that it deals with the relation of society to the individual and recognizes the evil within social life, but this is too general and dry an explication for me. The narrator has experienced something extraordinary, something beyond which the average person gets to see. His perception of the world transcends the dull daily routine, and because he sees things differently, he is different; he is vulnerable to being dismissed as an oddball, an object of bemusement or scorn. He pays the price of social non-acceptance, but he is nonetheless compensated by a deeper contact with reality itself, symbolically personified by God. The social isolation and loneliness are the sacrifices he has made for getting "happy" and being different, but he is willing to make that sacrifice for the greater good of his connection with something deeper. That connection enables him to see through other people and not to be imposed upon by their put-downs. Because of that connection he has the last laugh. Once again:

You can talk about me
Just as much as you please.
I will talk about you
When I get on my knees.

I have never seen a principle expressed more brilliantly. You ask whether this comes out of life experience or out of religion. The question itself is false. Even that aspect which is religious would not come into being if it were not an expression, however mythified, of something relating to human experience. My method of interpretation is nothing unusual. All literary criticism is based upon some kind of decoding of symbolic language. If it were not possible to translate symbolic statements, then it would not be possible for someone with a different religion or none to appreciate poetry, stories, or art infused with a particular religious content. Such appreciation has nothing to do with viewing religion positively, preserving the baby minus the bathwater, succumbing to the transcendental temptation, or embracing New Age sentimental fluff. What I'm doing, and presumably James also, is ... an elementary feature of artistic appreciation....

Obviously James has no truck with religious belief or the supernatural. He expresses himself far more dryly than I do, and it is a known fact how little interested in spirituality he was. To me then it is remarkable that he was so perceptive about something so foreign to his experience and temperament. He makes a very important point at the outset: "Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced." In other words, religion doesn't disappear unless something else comes along that fills up the space it occupies, and the space it occupies is something larger in life than simply a transcendental temptation. Even within the distorted conceptual system of religion, something is being expressed which encompasses some fundamental aspects of self-expression, cultural life, social life, and the drive for self-realization. To understand that is to go beyond the old-fashioned rationalism that merely divides true from false propositions, important as that is historically. It is to see a truth clothed in falsity, an aspect of material reality hidden within philosophical idealism. (This was recognized by Lenin in his commentary on Hegel, the same Lenin who wrote: "the very idea of God is the most unutterable filth.")

In his stubborn empiricism, James finds that some anonymous slave, some tormented creature stripped of his culture and his past, illiterate, whipped, degraded beyond measure, exhausted from unremitting toil, has something positive to teach him about life, something James could not find in any of the books of all the great religions and brilliant philosophers in this wide world. Is this not extraordinary? If this poor, lonely, hopeless, sorry slave had this much in him, with the nothing he had, then what does that say about the greatness you have within yourself?

17 March 1994, edited 13 June 2001

On C.L.R. James's 'On the Spiritual'

Jim Murray, Director (make inquiries here)
Ralph Dumain, Librarian/Archivist & Webmaster

Uploaded 13 June 2001