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Often when I thus suddenly think of you I am dumbstricken and overpowered with emotion so that not for anything in the world could I utter a word. Oh, I don’t know how it happens, but I get such a queer feeling when I think of you, and I don’t think of you on isolated and special occasions; no, my whole life and being are but one thought of you. Often things occur to me that you have said to me or asked me about, and then I am carried away by indescribably marvellous sensations. […] Oh, my darling, how you looked at me the first time like that and then quickly looked away, and then looked at me again, and I did the same, until at last we looked at each other for quite a long time and very deeply, and could no longer look away.

The [six] hymns about ‘mother,’ in short, exemplify the manner in which the House of God Church affirmed womanhood and the religious freedom of women. No other hymnal of any Protestant denomination, nor of any patriarchal Holiness or Pentecostal denomination, has ever affirmed womanhood in this way.

The reason such sects as the House of God Church became permanent entities in Christianity, rather than remaining passing inspirations, is due…to the interacting roles which suffering and music played in the lives of church members. Less than half a century removed from slavery, those who gravitated to Holiness churches were indeed ‘the least of them,’ people who suffered most severely from social and economic repression, even at the hands of some of the move privileged blacks of the Methodist and Baptist churches.

In the early days of the Africans’ transformation into African Americans, the spiritual was the most widespread, or at least the most widely known, of all African-American musical genres. It was created by American slaves as they participated in the process that Christianized them and as they performed their rituals, striving to retain their African cultural memory.

The nervous system is not contained within the body’s limits. The circuit from sense-perception to motor response begins and ends in the world. The brain is thus not an isolable anatomical body, but part of a system that passes through the person and her or his (culturally specific, historically transient) environment. As the source of stimuli and the arena for motor response, the external world must be included to complete the sensory circuit. (Sensory deprivation causes the system’s internal components to degenerate.) The field of the sensory circuit thus corresponds to that of ‘experience,’ in the classical philosophical sense of a mediation of subject and object, and yet its very composition makes the so-called split between subject and object (which was the constant plague of classical philosophy) simply irrelevant. In order to differentiate our description from the more limited, traditional conception of the human nervous system which artificially isolates human biology from its environment, we will call this aesthetic system of sense-consciousness, decentered from the classical subject, wherein external sense-perceptions come together with the internal images of memory and anticipation, the ‘synaesthetic system.’ This synaesthetic system is ‘open’ in the extreme sense. Not only is it open to the world through the sensory organs, but the nerve cells within the body form a network that is in itself discontinuous. They reach out toward other nerve cells at points called synapses, where electrical charges pass through the space between them. Whereas in blood vessels a leak is lamentable, in the networks between nerve bundles everything ‘leaks.’ Any cross section of the brain levels show this architectonic discontinuity, and the dendrite-like morphology of their extensions.

This misplaced sense of black loyalty to the black president, who doesn’t return it, as far as I can see, is responsible for a host of absurdities, from Al Sharpton’s twisted logic that Obama cannot advocate for black workers’ rights because people will then say ‘See, he’s playing favorites,’ or something like that. In other words, the African American community—and I use this locution as a demographic placeholder—appears to have reassembled around Barack Obama and to have done so as an ontologically efficacious idea of this man in the White House. So the community seems to think that it must have the president’s back, to cast this in allegorical terms, which might be a useful concept, if the president in turn had theirs, as the logic goes here, but it seems that the president is under no obligation to honor an unwritten, and indeed unspoken, as well as, perhaps, even unspeakable, agreement between him and his supporters. Shockingly, his presumptuous attitude toward his black supporters is rationalized as understandable choice. But as alarming to me, and as disappointing to me, as these deliberate misreadings are, they do not reach at their most intense frequency the interracial counterpart of the intraracial discussion.