The C.L.R. James Institute: Jim's Letters to Ralph

The C.L.R. James Institute

Jim's Letters to Ralph

Jim Murray
April 10, 1949 - July 21, 2003

Jim would have been 55 years old today. His loss hangs heavily on me, as do others. One of Jim's intentions for this site was to revive his old newsletter Jim's Letter, a publication from the pre-Internet era, for this web site. He only got around to producing two of them. The best substitute I can think of is to publish excerpts of his countless communications to me, illustrating the highlights of his perspective and the uniqueness of our intellectual relationship. I will add more of Jim's letters as I come across them, as they strike me, in no particular chronological order. Let this new feature of the web site serve as another memorial to Jim, and as a counterweight to the selfishness, malice, and ignorance of those who disgraced his memory at the November memorial. Reality is not subjective, and truth will out in the end.

— Ralph Dumain, 10 April 2004

Fri, 8 Sep 2000
Ralph,

even tho I wasn't there and don't know the people, I think I have a strong enough sense of your take on them and indeed on some of them, to follow you every step of the way. Until the very end. So that is why you are at war. Just on the logic of your account, during which you fighting your way through a lot of human, subjective complicated data, . . . shows a lot of dedication to the pursuit of the rational, the knowable, objective content of the scene. So why end the account with this anguished, outraged, emotional, personal lament of your own "objective" loneliness there? Ralph, it is not our fault that brains were given out one at a time. Just because you know something, from a lifetime of struggling alone to figure things out, using the most conscious methods of intellectual self training, does not mean that you have to be at war or have to be a winner or loser in that war. Granted, it is the very depth of your insight, how you yourself, you your lonelyass self, have had to learn from class society itself how much more class analysis has to offer than racial posturing, that makes it human and true. In your struggle to make rationality and intelligence transcend social division, you are the one believing in the impossible or I should say the ideal. You feel at war, indeed you are at war, because you have that bedrock unshakeable faith in the power and authority and ability of MIND. Your revealing that, to me, indeed your articulating it just to yourself, I regard as a tremendous gift, a beautiful gift, a historically transcendent gift. Maybe instead of thinking of it as warfare, or acting on it as if it were warfare, it would be more constructive to just call it politics. What are the chances of you creating the conditions in which you could engage C— one to one? You engage by listening in conversation, you aren't, normally, comfortable expressing your own ideas in the moment. I only suggest this because you insist that he does understand something of the class nature of oppression also. Anyway, I love your analysis, it goes somewhere which of course the racial doesn't, and the aspect of it all I also love is the public, the performance element. People spend years and years, lifetimes, looking for experience and material of this sort, and don't get it cuz they only settle for the family, the institution, the patriarchy, the church. But it is in public that we become human, that we create a self and say hello to the species such as it is at any given time and place. Compared to what you describe, all of new york society is phony ambition, just fashion. Yesterday I ventured forth, inspired by Staples the day before. To midtown, the bank, Gotham book Mart. Just to see William with his fellow workers at Gotham was a novella of information, and I was only there 40 minutes. I walked past the crowds of lunch eaters on the sidewalk, rockefeller center, feeling alert to every face, every outfit, every eating and drinking choice, just like I used to do as a poet in public. What really got me: walking along with the crowds (interesting how many people take their lunch alone, to get away from the people at work) I myself was checked out along with every one. Me, the man without mirrors in his apt. . . . .

love
Jim

Ralph Dumain, Librarian/Archivist & Webmaster

Uploaded 10 April 2004