I’m done learning for now, but mostly, unlearning, as that seems to be more pressing in my life. The art of letting go requires far more unlearning than learning. The art of letting go also requires you to put down the books with adjacent titles to “The Art of Letting Go.” My eyes have followed the scribblings of Alan Watts, I felt safe in the long pauses between Ram Dass’ words, I feared the inapplicability of the jarring Zen Teachings of Huang Po, and alongside warrior Arjuna, I journeyed through the Hindu-holy Krishna-partisan that is the Bhagavad Gita. Through it all, I chilled, surely surrendered, at least a smidge. Nah, you know what, I’ll give myself more credit, considering the depth of my neurosis—“heaps” is a more suitable quantitative measure. All in all, knee deep in Eastern thought, I chilled the fuck out. My mind didn’t go bizzerk, as it once did with the Westerner callous-criticals: The Hegels, The Foucaults, Freudians, Lockes, Humes, Heideggers, The Kants. The words of their world really spun me up, wound me tight, and all their questions and answers only left me with more questions that needed answers. It was a hamster wheel thing, and I’m glad I extricated myself before I became a full-blown spunion.

The day I finished The Gita is the day I picked up fiction, and I have yet to return to Western philosophy, teachings alike, medical journals, studies that promote longevity, and all other systematic academic-type beats. I felt bright that day, walking down a lonesome street. The sun was out, which deluded myself into feeling such brightness. How extraordinary to be deluded into happiness! My gait was prideful, because The Gita sat on the shelf for half a year before I decided to give it a real shot, a real finish. I realize now that The Gita then would’ve been no match in meaning to having read it now. I wasn’t ready for The Gita then. I now understand the trust one must have in Krishna, especially in terms of timing. So, on this day, the day I finished The Gita, my journey to fate led me to one of those “free libraries” parked on a sidewalk in front of a suburban home—a birdhouse-type exposé, wooden, with a framed plastic door and a brass hook-and-eye latch. There it was: James, black, hard-covered, beautiful, and written by a literary mastermind of our time, Percival Everett.

My discovery of Everett’s mastery started a while back, with his novel Erasure, which was renditioned into a film dubbed American Fiction, to which you could pinpoint better than the novel, I’m sure, considering people don’t read much anymore. I once wrote a paper on Erasure—an angsty delve into the concept of the reader’s authority over an author’s selfhood. Had I the relationship I have with Everett’s work now, reading Erasure would’ve been a far different experience, one of more laughs and not being a white savior. This paper being a perfect representation of the academic craze I wish to walk away from at times. Here’s a quote from it: “Confession is the light, and readers, the fly.” That probably adds little context, so here’s a lengthier, more non-colloquial one: “I had managed to take myself, the writer, reconfigure myself, then disintegrate myself… (Everett 257).” Such insights imply that the sense of “ownership of the Earth,” as W.E.B. Du Bois identifies with whiteness in the twentieth century, is rooted in the regime of racial capitalism that turns Black persons into commodities. In Erasure, by popular demand, Black authorship is being asked to limit and fragment itself into only producing stereotypical “Black” narratives that masquerade as “Black” “representation” and therefore, “activism”—i.e., TV shows like Love and Hip Hop and Flavor of Love. “Black abolitionary” writing is not something protagonist Monk wishes to feign and deliver though; he is more focused on the ins and outs of post-structuralism and even carpentry. But a writer needs cake, so Monk stakes selfhood in order to qualify his self, who had value without qualification, whether pedagogical or intuitional, whether Black, purple, writer, or just mere liver of life. Shit, who am I to continue this word vomit? I admit it! I’m hypocritically performing but another autopsy on a Black individuals’s writing, but the point of it is to prove my previous point of the reader being a fly, and the writer, the light: the reader, especially the white reader not only has authority over the author’s selfhood, but is smugly entitled to it.

It’s interesting: before stumbling across Everett’s newest Pulitzer Prize winner James in the free library, I saw it at Barnes and Noble and came very close to buying it. I didn’t though, because my thrifty self decided twenty bucks was just too steep. After reading James, for free, by fate, I never gave a second thought to the dollar amount of Everett’s books. I rushed to buy The Trees, I’m Not Sidney Poitier, and Dr. No the day I knew I’d finish James, which took me about three days—record time for me. While The Gita, Watts, Baba, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali did all that they were set out in the world to do to and for me, I missed the belly laughs, eye-rolls, and sustained smirk fiction like this gave me. While learning and unlearning is good, sure, needed, yes, and sometimes unfathomably and elitistically hailed, laughter is a lesson unmatchable, a Deity in its own right. I say all this because tomorrow, a Saturday, my only plan is to check-out Everett’s Telephone from the local library, curl up into a comfortable corner on my couch, turn some pages, and cackle about.