Remembering The Teacher: Charles H. Long (Part 1)

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Hello and welcome to the Matthew and the Doctrine of Discovery podcast.
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The producers of this podcast I would like to acknowledge with respect the onindoganation of the firekeepers of the Huda Shoney, the indigenous peoples on whose ancestral lands at Syracuse University now stands.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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So thank you for all that.
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Now you see who the community is here.
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All of these people carry a part of the mantle of Charles Long going forward.
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And um Professor Ray Carr and I are pleased to be able to present you kind of our Charles Long.
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I first heard of Charles Long from my Chicago Divinity School advisor Frank Reynolds after the first semester at the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1968.
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It's time for you to study with Charles Long, he said.
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He has the method.
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He always begins with a text, a myth, or a story.
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And that's really important to understand about Charles Long.
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So I went and took a class with him.
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And I remember the first lecture.
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The first lecture was on the sky gods, the gods of the sky.
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And I can see him now speaking in Swift Hall.
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I remember he wore this beautiful leather coat that was mellow brown but with a tinge of blood red in it.
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And that stood out to me.
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I remember him gesturing upward about the sacredness of the sky and what is called the Dios Otios.
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That's the God who, after he creates the world, retreats beyond our awareness, not completely, and this God is kind of hidden, comes back now and again, but is the Dios Otios, the hidden God who has created the world.
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And I remember being so excited about this.
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He said, quote, the sky reveals itself, its transcendence, its power, its changelessness simply by being up there.
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So I like this slide of Charles Long and me in Mexico City.
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I took into Mexico City several times, and I like the fact that we're looking up.
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Only in this can, we're not looking up at the sky.
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We're looking up at the top of the cathedral, the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City.
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And the other thing I like about this photograph, just to show you my relationship with him, I like the fact that he's higher on the stairs than me.
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Because he will always be higher on the stairs than me, to me.
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And I think almost all of us who studied with him feel that way.
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That's why we feel such an indebtedness and a responsibility to tell his story, tell about him what he taught, what he read, and who he was to us, you know.
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And one of the things that really impressed me was that when he spoke, he had what I call a rare musicality.
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And this musicality could enchant the hearers.
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And I never stopped listening until the day he died.
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And, you know, I created the Codex Charles Long.
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When I came here to Harvard, I collected eight of his lectures and I put them on DVDs so that my students could hear him and see him, and they could get that musicality.
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I believe I was the first to call him the teacher.
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Not a teacher, but I called him the teacher.
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I never addressed him as Chuck or Charles because his identity for me was in a special category of having mastered a style of seeking, finding, and telling wisdom about the human condition.
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I love this photograph too, because here he is in Princeton when I was there at one of the archive meetings.
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He liked this title, The Teacher.
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And when I called him on the phone, it would always go like this.
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He would answer, hello.
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I would say, Teacher, this is David.
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He'd say, David, how you doing, man?
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I said, Teacher, you sound good.
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How you doing?
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Oh man, I'm doing fine.
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That's good, teacher.
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How's Miss Alice?
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Oh man, Miss Alice is doing just fine.
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The teacher taught us many lessons.
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And my daughter, Leonard, I remember, who knew him almost all her life, and interviewed him once for an essay she was writing.
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And she told me yesterday, Charles Long facilitated my learning.
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And that's what he was.
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He was a facilitator.
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He was like this incredible living dynamic tool of teaching and hermeneutics.
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Here, in short order, are three lessons he taught me.
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Lesson number one the secret is in the creation story.
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Charles Long was an alpha man, and I know we all teach significations, but for me, you don't get Charles Long unless you teach the first book, which is Alpha, Myths of Creation.
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He said that creation myths held the secret of creation and told how a particular society understood the creativity of their ancestors, of their grandmothers, their ecology, and their bodies.
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These stories revealed, he said, how a new form of reality came into the world and required our fuller understanding.
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His argument with theologians, as I understood it, was that we had to give pride of place not to the theologos, but the secret of creation was in the pre-logos.
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The deeper sources of creativity were in the beginning before the word.
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What black people created in the sounds, in the music, in the screams, in the laughter, in the moans, and what my man here calls the monk modes was the poetic wisdom of their world.
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Like the women in Tony Morrison's beloved, she writes, the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words.
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Long knew Iliadi was correct that it is only by retelling in words, dance, song, and gesture the creation story that you can create an atmosphere, a ritual atmosphere in which people can experience and thereby know the secrets of creation.
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As he said in one of his first published articles called the Prologomona to a religious hermeneutic, quote, for the bombada, the articulation of the cosmos by the word was accomplished in order that the word would return to its original silence.
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Let me read it again.
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For the bombada, the articulation of the cosmos by the word was accomplished in order that the word would return to its original silence.
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Page 138 and significations.
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Lesson number two, this country is racist to the core.
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I remember Charles Long saying many times, this country has not come to terms yet with its racist history.
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You know, people thought that all during, you know, Obama's all man, you know, post-racist bullshit and so forth.
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And Charles Long was always saying, you know, in spite of all the great things that have happened, all the things the black community, the brown community has done, we still have not come to terms because this country is racist to the core.
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And the key to understanding for me, lesson number two, is in the word core.
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In a course on the philosophy of history, and Gian Battista Vico and Gottfried von Herter.
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So let me tell you, I did take seven courses with Charles Long.
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And one of them was on these two incredible philosophers, Gian Battista Vico and Gottfried von Herder.
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So here's Charles Long, one of two African Americans on the Divinity School faculty.
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And what is he teaching?
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Well, he's not just teaching black history and black religion, he's teaching Gian Battista Vico and Gottfried von Herder.
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And I remember we had these, it was always in the afternoon, and they had these old, you know, heaters in the room that would go bang, bang, bang, and shit when they came on.
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And there's Charles Long teaching us this thing.
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And the phrase that was crucial in that class, in both Vico and Herder, is the phase is the phrase origins cue the structure.
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Origins Q the structure.
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I love that phrase.
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A social structure, an economic structure could evolve and change.
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But its core principles, its cosmovision and potency was set in place at the foundation.
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And even though you may have a renovation and so forth, you got to be careful because those core potencies that attack the lives and lands of African Americans and Native Americans have a profound persistence, he said.
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If they go into hiding for a while, it is only to prepare to reassert the racism, Charles Long said.
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And always in play.
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Therefore, we have to crawl back through history, one of his favorite phrases.
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You have to crawl back through history and unmask the evils of the origins of the country.
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He liked the civil rights movement, he would have liked Black, he liked Black Lives Matter and so forth, and these pragmatic approaches.
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He felt they were valuable in and of themselves.
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But he says, if you failed to critique and understand the damages of the founding fathers and what was thrust into and throughout history, it would never change the conditions, and the cosmic- we could never change the conditions and cosmovision of racism in this country.
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Why did Long take a hard-nosed approach here?
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Because he saw that many movement people had not thought hard enough about the mess that we were in.
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For long, thought and action are not the opposite.
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For long, thought was a crucial and difficult form of action, critical, illuminating action.
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His work reminds me of what Paul Record said about his teacher, Gabriel Marcel.
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I love this phrase.
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Paul Ricord says when he was a student, they used to go to Gabriel Marcel's house with a bunch of other students.
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And they would have these long, long discussions and debates.
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And what Paul Record, the great existentialist philosopher, said, quote, at Marcel's house, one had the impression that thinking was alive.
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That it was doing the arguing.
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A constant dynamic approximation.
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People have to understand about the history of religions.
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The first word in Iliade's book Patterns is approximations.
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And Charles Long took it and he called it the dynamic approximations following Paul Record.
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The dynamic approximation.
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Not only because he's upright and he's strong, but he's got his hand, his fist on those books.
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He's got his hand, his fist on those books, man.
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And he's looking right at you, man.
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He's looking right at you.
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Lesson number three, I'm coming to the end.
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The only hope for a new creation myth lies with the people who underwent the oppression of colonialism.
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Charles Long called those people who underwent the oppression of colonialism colonizer watchers.
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I love that.
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Colonizer Watchers.
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And they're the only ones who know enough to reveal the resources that emerged out of the tragic encounters and use these resources to make a new world for everybody.
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He said the people who did the oppression will not do it and cannot do it.
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Long three messages to me were shared with Mexicans during our several trips to Mexico.
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The Mexicans understood the power of the creation myth, the core of the problem, and where to turn for the making of a new world.
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Here are the words from Mexico's national treasure, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, sent to me when he heard that Charles Long had passed away.
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And it's considered a national treasure.
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And Charles, I took Charles Long to these conferences in Mexico.
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And man, it got to the point where the Mexicans said, hey man, don't come unless you bring Charles Long.
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We're glad to see you, but we want Charles Long there.
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So we'd have these meetings at the Great Temple, and Charles Long would be there.
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Here's what he wrote Eduardo Matos Moctezuma.
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Charles Long is one of those academics who leave a profound mark on human thought.
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I met him at our Mesoamerican Archive meetings, woo, and was always impressed by his intelligence and the marvelous ways of expressing what he thought.
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We Mexicans waited impatiently for him to speak because we knew that wise words would come out of his mouth.
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I thank my brother David Carrasco for inviting Charles.
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As we learned a lot from him.
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Thank you, Charles Long.
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When my son was born, I pondered over calling him either Mircha or Carlos for Charles or Octavio for the Mexican writer Octavio Paz.
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I decided on Octavio to link him to his Mexican heritage and to a great poet.
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But as I pondered his name, I remember Charles Long's great essay called Silence and Signification, at the front of this great book.
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And it begins, Charles Long quotes this phrase from Pascal's Pinse, quote, the eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.
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Perhaps it was because of, and many people hear, of the infinite space, labor, and love necessary to raise a beloved children.
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I decided to give Octavio the middle name of Pascal as a code word for Charles Long.
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So his name is Octavio Pascal, Charles Long, Carrasco.
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Charles Long gave me many lessons.
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He will always be my teacher and the teacher of my students.
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And I really also like to show you this photograph of someone who's not here, but was also a great student of Charles Long.
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On the right, that's Lindsay Jones.
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The wonderful Lindsay Jones, who died of cancer, I think, in his 50s.
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But Lindsey Jones was one of the great students.
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He was my student, and I sent my student to study with Charles Long.
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And he became the editor-in-chief of that 15-volume encyclopedia of religion, Lindsay Jones.
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So that's my sort of statement about Charles Long.
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And it's a great pleasure to turn the floor over to Ray Ray.
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Ray Ray.
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Do you need help catching up on today's topic?
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Or do you want to learn more about the resources mentioned?
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If so, please check our website at podcast.doctrine of discovery.org for more information.
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And if you like this episode, review it on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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And now, back to the conversation.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Okay.
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So what happened was we used to have these meetings every year at the AAR, as Phil was saying, of this group, part of the presentation, it was really a way for us to get together with Charles Long in AR.
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And we used to have these great things.
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And so I I met I met the Ray Carr there.
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I always knew him because he had these cool hats.
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But I never clearly knew his name.
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So when Charles Long was dying, I mean he was in the last month of his last month or so of his life, I called him up, the teacher.
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And he said to me, he said, uh, David, man, I want to go out and look at the sun and listen to the wind.
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He said, Man, listen, have Ray Ray call me.
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I said, okay, man.
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But I wasn't gonna say I don't know what Ray Ray is.
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So I called up somebody else and I said, hey man, the teacher wants to see Ray Ray.
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Who is Ray Ray?
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He said, no, that's Ray Carr.
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You know the cat with a cool hat.
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So I called him, I called him, I called him against his phone number and I called him up.
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And I said, man, Charles Long is asking for you.
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No, tell them how you said it, really.
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Hey Ray Ray, how you doing, man?
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So then I found out later, he said, yeah, David, somebody told me, yeah, David called me.
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He didn't know who you were.
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Yeah, you take it from there, but yeah.
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One of the things that uh I had I left Pepperdine a few years ago, and I'm back at Pepperdine now, but when I left Pepperdine, um, and I was looking for a place I could go to, and Charles Long said to me, He said, I need to get you up there with David.
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So there's a sense in which in his death he got me up there with David.
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And so we've we've been together since.
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You're all right, I like the hat.
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Anyway, thank you, man.
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How are you doing today?
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We're gonna start off by watching a um uh a video that gives some background on the long papers, which still, even though we've had the papers now since 2021, we're still at the beginning of this.
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I mean, when we talk about long papers, it's which makes sense, and I'll say something of some things about that in my in my talk here, because there's a sense in which long's papers like long resist categorization.
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And you'll see a little bit of this here, and so I want you to watch this together with us.
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Let me turn down the lights.
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All right, brother.
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And this is a distillation of a talk we did at Harvard a year uh 2023, that video.
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What did they find?
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They found distinction.
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Yeah.
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How we got it broken.
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Look at black scars.
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Objectivity.
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Oh, what is that saying?
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You've got W and B the boys, man.
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Shut up.
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Somebody wrote it.
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Somebody wrote this stuff in here, but this is him.
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Yeah, this is him.
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So you want to keep the whole page, man, yeah, right there.
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So I just thought we crank it, crack it, you can shake it, crank it, crack it, shake it, crank it, crack it, and shake it, crank it, crank it, shake it.
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She doesn't boot the money more.
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Shigin Bamoka.
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Wow, go walk.
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Oh, there's so many little note papers like that everywhere.
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He would sit too.
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Yeah, he would come out here and smoke, yeah.
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He would just sit out.
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Yeah, right here.
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I'm gonna bring ring ring.
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You see that stretch over there?
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Yes yeah, it is actually it's an opening to another world.
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It is only a good year.
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When you come out, it could be the year 2006.
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Maybe you're only in there an hour, but when you come out it's 2006.
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Yeah, okay.
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Those are those foul tables for our folks, yeah.
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Beautiful, okay.
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That's what I'm talking about.
00:22:44.160 --> 00:22:44.880
Yeah, no doubt.
00:22:45.039 --> 00:22:45.680
Listen to this.
00:22:45.839 --> 00:22:47.200
Here's what he underline.
00:22:47.839 --> 00:22:51.359
God's love for the world is taken seriously.
00:22:51.680 --> 00:22:59.200
How's to suggest that there are things which are generally not himself, whose activities are not completely determined by his agency.
00:22:59.359 --> 00:22:59.759
Oh, wow.
00:23:02.000 --> 00:23:02.640
See, that's it.
00:23:02.720 --> 00:23:03.440
That's what he liked.
00:23:03.599 --> 00:23:04.000
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:07.039
He liked that determined by his agency.
00:23:07.119 --> 00:23:08.240
That is God's agency.
00:23:09.440 --> 00:23:10.160
Who wrote this man?
00:23:12.079 --> 00:23:13.039
William Christian.
00:23:13.920 --> 00:23:14.240
Yeah, yeah.
00:23:15.279 --> 00:23:18.720
William Rick and Lick and Michigan Little Lick.
00:23:38.880 --> 00:23:39.759
Look over there, man.
00:23:40.079 --> 00:23:40.400
Huh?
00:23:42.319 --> 00:23:43.359
What is what is it?
00:23:44.000 --> 00:23:48.400
Well, this is a 1948 journal of religious before he did his piece.
00:23:48.640 --> 00:23:49.200
Right, right.
00:23:49.279 --> 00:23:51.759
And it's all these articles, but he's got all these underlines.
00:23:53.039 --> 00:23:53.519
How we read.
00:23:58.000 --> 00:24:13.519
So we're just talking about the process of how we might deal with the papers and establishing something uh our archive with all daddy's papers.
00:24:14.079 --> 00:24:23.759
So now we're just kind of thinking about uh A what would go uh you know and that's really up to you.
00:24:29.519 --> 00:24:32.319
Everything would be on the table to go.
00:24:32.799 --> 00:24:33.039
Okay.
00:25:32.960 --> 00:25:42.960
And I have to give thanks to my wife Joy Carr, who actually filmed a lot of that and did this this work that you see and setting everything up and catching David in rare form, also.
00:25:43.359 --> 00:25:45.680
And then uh I also want to acknowledge uh Mrs.
00:25:45.839 --> 00:25:46.240
Long.
00:25:46.400 --> 00:25:50.079
She died this year, and she wanted to live to be a 100.
00:25:50.480 --> 00:25:52.640
She didn't quite make it, but that was her wish.
00:25:52.720 --> 00:25:56.400
And she said she didn't know how Charles lived so long because he did all the wrong stuff.
00:25:56.720 --> 00:25:59.279
And when she was she was in her 90s, she had a trainer.
00:25:59.519 --> 00:26:06.319
Her grandson was her trainer, so she was working really hard to be healthy, and uh she ended up having dementia and she passed away.
00:26:06.480 --> 00:26:10.240
Uh but they were it was it was wonderful to watch them interact.
00:26:10.480 --> 00:26:13.200
He called her Freeman, because that was her family's name.
00:26:13.440 --> 00:26:18.960
And so um uh I I got to spend time, I got to spend time with them also in hospice.
00:26:19.039 --> 00:26:21.359
So I got to share some really special moments with them.
00:26:21.519 --> 00:26:24.240
For me, Charles Long is not an intellectual object.
00:26:24.960 --> 00:26:37.680
He's uh, for me, a radical human being that I've had to think with, come to terms with, and um I'm deeply grateful for uh what he meant he's meant to me and my work, what he means for me and my wife's work.
00:26:37.839 --> 00:26:41.920
And so I'm gonna share a few things with you uh tied to that.
00:26:42.880 --> 00:26:49.599
And I call this piece uh residuum, or some people would say residuum.
00:26:50.480 --> 00:26:54.400
The shed and the office and Charles Long at 100.
00:26:54.480 --> 00:26:56.720
You'll be at 100 this coming year.
00:26:57.039 --> 00:27:11.279
As I wrestle with what to say to you today, in light of taking religious phenomenology seriously, especially as articulated by Charles Long, I was reminded that in order to wrestle with long, one has to go back into the mess.
00:27:11.440 --> 00:27:14.240
And as you all know, he uses different language for that.
00:27:14.400 --> 00:27:17.759
That is, that is how he got into the heart of the matter.
00:27:17.920 --> 00:27:26.079
That is, by entering the messiness of life, the messiness of thinking, or what one he might call the stuff, that stuff.
00:27:26.240 --> 00:27:40.559
And other terms he used phrases like going back into the water or crawling back into the past, where the water itself becomes a mnemonic structure, addressing water with its structure and capacity and its relationship to this stuff.
00:27:40.720 --> 00:27:53.440
Of course, all this reminds me of Long's penchant for periodic periodized periodizing, I'm sorry, maybe I need to get the gum from under my tongue, for periodizing the world in various ways.
00:27:53.680 --> 00:27:57.599
For example, he sometimes periodized using bodies of water.
00:27:57.839 --> 00:28:01.440
He used the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific.
00:28:02.960 --> 00:28:07.680
And by the way, I remember once I was parked beside the Pacific in Malibu, and I called up Dr.
00:28:07.759 --> 00:28:08.079
Long.
00:28:08.160 --> 00:28:08.720
I said, Dr.
00:28:08.799 --> 00:28:20.079
Long, now look, I've I've heard you talk about the uh the um the Mediterranean, and I've heard you talk about the Atlantic with rationality and notions of freedom and slavery.
00:28:20.160 --> 00:28:22.559
I said, but I've never heard you talk about the Pacific.
00:28:22.799 --> 00:28:25.759
You have to excuse the language, a little rebaldry in this.
00:28:25.839 --> 00:28:27.680
He said, Oh shit.
00:28:27.839 --> 00:28:30.960
He said, the Pacific, it's a booger bear.
00:28:31.200 --> 00:28:34.240
He said it's twice as deep as the Atlantic, twice as big.
00:28:34.400 --> 00:28:40.000
He said, you he said there they're volcanoes, the Mariana Trench, there's a ring of fire.
00:28:40.079 --> 00:28:42.240
He said, you mess around, an island might pop up.
00:28:42.400 --> 00:28:44.720
He said, now they mastered the Mediterranean.
00:28:44.880 --> 00:28:49.440
They mastered the Atlantic, but the Pacific, it'll whip their ass.
00:28:49.920 --> 00:28:53.039
Anyway, so I thought that was uh quite intriguing here.
00:28:53.279 --> 00:28:55.839
So he would use these bodies of water in that way.
00:28:56.000 --> 00:28:59.359
Then there's a periodization which occurs in significations.
00:28:59.599 --> 00:29:15.440
In his book, um uh his book, which will also be the 40th anniversary this coming year, he periodized the war according to what he called mythic cycles, framed as sites of fecundity or important revelatory junctures in the American experience.
00:29:15.680 --> 00:29:26.079
He stated that from 1776 to 1860 is almost 100 years, and from the Civil War to the 1960s and 1970s is another 100-year cycle.
00:29:26.319 --> 00:29:30.720
So it struck me to question what would it mean to think of Charles Long at 100?
00:29:30.960 --> 00:29:40.799
Next year, on August 23rd, 2026, will be his 100th birthday, and so what it would mean to come to terms with Long's thinking at 100?
00:29:41.039 --> 00:29:44.640
What would it mean to wrestle with this moment as a mythical cycle?
00:29:44.880 --> 00:29:45.680
In fact, as Dr.
00:29:45.759 --> 00:29:51.839
Carrasco noted in the video, you go into Long's shed, you may come out about 50 years later.
00:29:52.079 --> 00:29:56.960
A fact which puts us right into one of those 100-year mythic cycles, in a sense.
00:29:57.200 --> 00:30:05.200
The first thing that came to mind, however, is that when we wrestle with Long, one of the things we have to think about is this following quote tied to the mythic cycles.
00:30:05.359 --> 00:30:07.039
I want you to hear this quote from Long.
00:30:07.279 --> 00:30:17.920
He said at each one of these mythic cycles, the opportunity is present for a change in the ritual, for a break in the repetition of this kind of eternal return.
00:30:18.160 --> 00:30:26.799
It was present in 1776, and then again in the bloody civil war, and then again in the 1960s with the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr.
00:30:26.960 --> 00:30:27.759
and Malcolm X.
00:30:28.160 --> 00:30:46.160
But at each one of these junctures, the American Revolution is aborted, and clever priests of our national language and apparatus, skillful in the ways of ritual purity and manipulation, come upon the scene to ensure the repetition of the American ritual.
00:30:46.559 --> 00:30:51.759
It's a sharp critique of that repetition that we are enduring today.
00:30:52.000 --> 00:30:58.240
It may be wondered what would Long say to the burgeoning phenomenologist who has to deal with these clever priests?
00:30:58.480 --> 00:31:06.960
What would Long say to those of us wrestling with the religious datum, those of us who are still coming to terms with religious orientation and its power to convey meaning?
00:31:07.200 --> 00:31:16.240
In other words, what might the shed, the office, and Charles Long say to us as we deal with America as a hermeneutical situation?
00:31:16.960 --> 00:31:23.039
First, what stood out to me was how long truly worked as a brickolore.
00:31:23.519 --> 00:31:27.599
A fact that gave meaning to my own thinking in wrestling with Carl Bart and James Cohn.
00:31:28.079 --> 00:31:33.359
Long once asked me in Memphis, he said, How did you come up with that Bart and Monk thing?
00:31:34.000 --> 00:31:47.519
He then stated that he had considered writing a book on Carl Bart and Claude Levy Strauss, who popularized the term brickolore, which is one who improvises with the tools at their disposal, who creates in this kind of way.
00:31:47.680 --> 00:31:51.680
And I thought of this improvisational aspect as I surveyed his office.
00:31:52.000 --> 00:31:54.480
There were only two items on the wall.
00:31:54.559 --> 00:31:57.039
I can't say pictures, because they weren't just pictures.
00:31:57.279 --> 00:32:01.119
One was a picture of his teacher, Joachim Bach, his doctor father.
00:32:01.359 --> 00:32:03.759
The other was an African mask.
00:32:04.799 --> 00:32:09.200
Long at the end of his life was still signifying.
00:32:09.440 --> 00:32:12.400
He did it to Carl Bart when he visited in 1962.
00:32:12.559 --> 00:32:15.200
He said, What do you think about this strange place called the United States?
00:32:15.359 --> 00:32:18.319
He did it with James Cohn when James Cohn had just finished his first book.
00:32:18.480 --> 00:32:19.440
Came by his house.
00:32:19.599 --> 00:32:22.400
Cohn said he looked at him with a sly smile.
00:32:22.640 --> 00:32:25.920
Or gave him a sly look, actually, is the term they use here.
00:32:26.400 --> 00:32:27.599
Signifying.
00:32:28.319 --> 00:32:29.200
As Charles E.
00:32:29.359 --> 00:32:36.880
Winchrist notes in his preface to signification, he said that, quote, Long is not simply imposing a hermeneutical problem on epistemology.
00:32:37.119 --> 00:32:43.839
He deepens an epistemological sensibility that is implicated in the realities of contact and exchange.
00:32:44.079 --> 00:32:52.480
Quote, he is a thinker of the coarse and fine-grained complexity of religious and cultural meaning, close quote.
00:32:53.119 --> 00:32:59.200
Implicit among other books, on the top of the books in the house, was an order underneath.
00:32:59.359 --> 00:33:03.119
So it says improvisation, but then there was this order underneath things.
00:33:03.279 --> 00:33:11.119
Not a categorization, but a system that ordered the books in terms of the subject matter and location rather than strict taxonomy.
00:33:11.200 --> 00:33:11.920
He once told me that.
00:33:12.000 --> 00:33:14.559
He said, you know, I uh my books are not arranged in that way.
00:33:14.640 --> 00:33:17.920
I go to one book, I'm looking for one, then I'll see the other and I'll use it.
00:33:18.960 --> 00:33:22.400
Provide improvising on the categories, in a sense.
00:33:22.559 --> 00:33:30.799
This included file cabinets, as you saw in the video, and other boxes that contained floppy discs and other intellectual artifacts of the past.
00:33:31.119 --> 00:33:33.839
The desk itself was makeshift.
00:33:34.000 --> 00:33:37.440
It was a piece of flat wood that sat on top of cabinets.
00:33:37.599 --> 00:33:45.039
And then I'm deeply reminded of the yellowish nicotine-stained residue on top of the books.
00:33:45.279 --> 00:33:47.519
Indeed, I remember telling a joke in front of Dr.
00:33:47.599 --> 00:33:49.519
Long, and this is how that applies in some ways.
00:33:49.599 --> 00:33:51.359
It gets you at who Long was.
00:33:51.519 --> 00:33:55.599
I remember someone said that they had an old copy of significations, the red copy.
00:33:55.680 --> 00:33:58.319
Some people remember that red cover on significations.
00:33:58.480 --> 00:34:00.079
And so they said they had a copy of that.
00:34:00.160 --> 00:34:03.279
And I stated, now you haven't gotten a real copy yet.
00:34:03.440 --> 00:34:04.799
They said, Well, what's a real copy?
00:34:04.960 --> 00:34:05.440
And Dr.
00:34:05.519 --> 00:34:06.640
Long was sitting there listening.
00:34:06.720 --> 00:34:15.199
I said, a real copy is when you get the one from him, and you get the book, and you open it up, and a plume of smoke comes up out of the book.
00:34:15.440 --> 00:34:18.239
Something akin to the smoke of the temple of the Old Testament.
00:34:18.400 --> 00:34:20.480
Oh, he got a good laugh out of that.
00:34:21.280 --> 00:34:22.320
But there were other things.
00:34:22.400 --> 00:34:26.559
There were multiple computers, CDs, floppy discs, even eight tracks.
00:34:26.719 --> 00:34:28.320
Oh, and some romance novels.
00:34:28.400 --> 00:34:30.320
I still couldn't figure those how they fit.
00:34:30.480 --> 00:34:31.679
But they were all there.
00:34:32.079 --> 00:34:39.760
In fact, when we moved Long's papers and books, there were over 200 boxes of papers and books that we have, still wrestling with that material.
00:34:40.000 --> 00:34:44.159
And then as you go outside at his house, you walked into the shed.
00:34:45.039 --> 00:34:48.239
A space that the family rarely entered.
00:34:48.480 --> 00:34:52.320
As you journeyed into the shed, you entered another world.
00:34:52.559 --> 00:34:59.280
It was like where Long talks about Africa as a historical reality and religious image, where the shed was something similar.
00:34:59.440 --> 00:35:02.800
It was almost eschatological when you went into the shed.
00:35:02.880 --> 00:35:08.639
There were cobwebs and there were old Mayflower boxes that folded under their own weight.
00:35:08.960 --> 00:35:17.360
The often uh the um and it often contains these not just file cabinets with these kind of brown files on them.
00:35:18.000 --> 00:35:22.960
These kind of brown files like this, old school files, where he had written on the cop on the.
00:35:24.079 --> 00:35:26.880
But there were also these yellow notepads.
00:35:27.119 --> 00:35:30.400
And the yellow notepads were rarely completed.
00:35:30.800 --> 00:35:39.360
And I noticed that when you follow some of his talks, you'll follow his lecture, and then the lecture will break off on paper, and Long is improvising the rest.
00:35:39.599 --> 00:35:46.559
One of the things I learned is that Long had a uh with two family members who had this really powerful memory.
00:35:46.800 --> 00:35:50.400
And so when you see his books, rarely are there citations.
00:35:50.639 --> 00:35:55.039
There's these little yellow notes that reminded him of what he was interested in.
00:35:55.199 --> 00:35:57.199
I found that deeply intriguing.
00:35:58.079 --> 00:36:14.480
What I want to suggest with this, which brings me to the second point in relation to this kind of improvisation, this brick-lore type idea, is that what stood out to me in all of this is that I was working with a person as a site who resists categorization.
00:36:15.039 --> 00:36:20.960
Long's thinking, even Long's workspace, embodies a materiality, a stuff that resists.
00:36:21.519 --> 00:36:34.719
Even as I think about how to come to terms with a process to deal with the residue, I stand face to face with the caveat that bids me never to distill Long's contributions to such a degree that I make it too neat.
00:36:34.960 --> 00:36:37.119
That's his critique of Joseph Washington.
00:36:37.280 --> 00:36:40.559
It's too neat in his critique of African Americans.
00:36:40.880 --> 00:36:45.599
Still, that was part of the experience of reading, knowing and coming to terms with Long.
00:36:46.239 --> 00:36:58.480
With this experience, one is left with a kind of, now I didn't say degree, but a kind of residue, which reminds me of his advice when I was writing theology in the mode of monk, which is these three volumes that I released.
00:36:58.639 --> 00:37:01.440
He said, now I want you to read Science and Signification.
00:37:01.599 --> 00:37:05.360
He said, now when you read it, don't analyze it.
00:37:05.599 --> 00:37:08.559
He said, let it perfume what you're doing.
00:37:08.800 --> 00:37:13.440
And anyone that knows Long knows who uses that label, that phraseology of perfuming.
00:37:13.599 --> 00:37:15.920
I love this idea of let it perfuming.
00:37:16.000 --> 00:37:31.840
The perfuming was a kind of, again, a reminder and a way of wrestling with the remainder, which gets at the topic I've chosen, why it's important to talk about this residuum and the way we can be creative in relationship to the past.
00:37:32.320 --> 00:37:43.440
In other words, there's an extent to which long gives way to a kind of not just a resistance to the past, but also a wonderful kind of creativity.
00:37:43.920 --> 00:37:46.320
I remember him sharing with me in his colorful style.
00:37:46.480 --> 00:37:53.039
He once said to me, he said, he rattled off this question, who came up with this East and West stuff?
00:37:53.679 --> 00:37:56.159
Who gets to decide what's East and West?
00:37:56.639 --> 00:38:03.920
And then as I was this past semester teaching the ancient Near East in the text, I could hear Long saying, Who decided on the East and the West?
00:38:04.400 --> 00:38:09.119
You know that's decided by its relationship to the West or to the European.
00:38:09.280 --> 00:38:16.719
And so it led me to wrestle with that question in very creative ways as I taught students about the Hebrew Bible.
00:38:16.880 --> 00:38:27.679
And part of what that led to me in terms of its creativity, it helped me to see the Bible and its relationship as a literary project itself, as being too over-determining.
00:38:28.000 --> 00:38:29.599
Where is the oral?
00:38:29.840 --> 00:38:31.440
How do we get in touch with this?
00:38:31.599 --> 00:38:36.239
These are part of the reasons I, in my work, deal with theology in the mode of monk.
00:38:36.400 --> 00:38:43.679
I want to wrestle with not just the visual, but I want to see how sound itself impacts the way we think about theology.
00:38:43.840 --> 00:38:51.840
So Lon, in my life, is giving away to a wonderful kind of theopoetics that honors the richness of the oral tradition we see in the African-American tradition.
00:38:52.000 --> 00:39:03.679
And it's here that I think that we, as we think about his way of being a bricolore and improvising, his way of wrestling with categories and how that gives way to a new kind of creativity and how that could bless us in this space.
00:39:03.840 --> 00:39:13.440
So I hope that the young phenomenologists in the room who are using and trying to think along with Long will keep these things in mind as you too wrestle and wade into the residual.
00:39:13.519 --> 00:39:13.760
Alright?
00:39:13.840 --> 00:39:14.239
Thank you.
00:39:31.760 --> 00:39:40.320
This podcast is funded in collaboration with the Henry Luce Foundation at Syracuse University at Hendrix Chapel and the Indigenous Values Initiative.
00:39:41.280 --> 00:39:45.280
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