John Sibley
John Sibley grew up in a Chicago suburb called Robbins, one of the most impoverished areas in Illinois.
The conditions in his childhood neighborhood shaped much of Sibley's world view, and he considers himself 'a product of environmental determinism.' Sibley believes that black Americans - who arose from slavery - bear 'epigenetic scars' from their history.....and from living in environments plagued by poverty and toxic wastes. By this Sibley means that outside factors have affected the expression of black people's genes.
Sibley studied art as a young man, enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1968, served in Korea, and eventually received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 1994. Unfortunately Sibley's life took a downturn in between, when he was wrongly arrested for armed robbery in the late 1970s.
Sibley's alleged crime led to homelessness, drug use, and difficulty finding a job. Thus he worked as a janitor from 1983 to 1986 - a position that left lots of time for philosophical musings.....including ruminations about Americans' misguided views about 'work and self-worth' and 'the meaning of identity and the place of the artist in the world.'
The Chicago buildings where John Sibley worked as a janitor
Sibley notes: "In our culture, your job determines your self-worth.....and my [janitorial] work clothes served as an invisible shield, which hid the ‘real me’ from their class conscious universe. Sibley always considered himself an artist, though he took a hiatus from painting when his situation left him feeling "alienated from the real world."
John Sibley in his janitor uniform
All this led Sibley to pen this book, which was started in 1982, revised over time, and finally finished in 2018.
Sibley is a well-read modern thinker, and his musings about work, religion, art, history, science, environmentalism, philosophy, and other matters are explicated in his thought-provoking essays.
*****
Though Sibley titled his book "Ridin the A-Train With Einstein", he didn't really meet the famous genius. Sibley did, however, share a Chicago train ride with a mild-mannered, elderly, white physics professor. The two men started off discussing Einstein's famous equation E = MC² and its relationship to the atomic bomb. They then talked about the inconstant nature of time....and finally about God - a concept about which the two men didn't see eye to eye.
In the scientist's view “We need to abandon any religious doctrine that teaches us man is made in the image of God, which is a very arrogant and anthropomorphic thing to say.....My God is the cosmic laws that have been discovered by man. God is the mystery inherent in all human and cosmic manifestation.”
The physicist went on to muse: "If God is timeless John -- I hate to say this -- but he doesn’t give a damn about you or me.....Did God save the 100 million African slaves whose bones are rotting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean? Did he save the six million Jews that died in the Zyklon-B gas chambers? What about the 180,000 black Union soldiers who gave their lives for freedom? Will a fictional white Jesus free you from white supremacy?"
Sibley believes differently. He "has faith that God can respond to our needs and prayers" and writes: "From my research, I believe that there is absolutely no chance of our planetary system coming into being without a first cause (God). How do we explain Plank's constant -- the gravitational constant, the speed of light, the speed of sound, the electron charges -- these constants existed billions of years before life, and without those constants, life wouldn't exist. Also, God didn't just create the earth, which is only a small part of our galaxy. I think we are only a small part of a gigantic cosmic evolutionary tree."
Nevertheless, even as a child Sibley wondered: 'If there is a just God, why are black people punished for their black skin? Why is it that my white peers live in a better neighborhood and attend better schools than I?" Of course white people began mistreating others as soon as they arrived on the American continent. Sibley mentions visiting Indian burial mounds on a high school field trip, and the fact that “white settlers felt that there is no good Indian but a dead Indian.”
Indian Burial Grounds
Speaking of God, Sibley also touches on the opposing philosophies of 'creationists' vs. 'evolutionists'.....where he seems to take a sort of middle ground.
Sibley is a perceptive man, and - as a janitor and an artist - noticed everything.....especially people's indifference to the welfare of planet Earth. When Sibley arrived at his custodial job on Monday mornings the parking lot would be covered with water bottles, plastic bags, cigar filters, and syringes. This trash often ends up in the oceans, and 'The Great Pacific Garbage Patches' - each double the size of Texas - is largely comprised of plastic waste. The vast majority of this trash, some 80%, is discarded on land and then makes its way to the sea.
Sibley's janitorial work may well have contributed to this mess. He writes: Sweeping is basically an activity to remove excreta. Because your job as a janitor is to rid the area of the “what was” or the piece of paper, the chicken bone, the bottle cap, the prophylactic, or the pile-of-shit." In fact, every Monday Sibley would LITERALLY have to go up to the sixth floor and sweep up a pile of feces.....first donning protective gear that made him look like an astronaut.
Though custodial garb might label an individual as a 'lower class worker', it could be beneficial on occasion. Sibley tells a funny-tragic story related by his supervisor Ted. Several years before, Ted had been offered twenty-five dollars by an attractive female tenant, to come up to her apartment and install curtain rods. Ted arrived after his shift - in civilian clothes - and while he set up his ladder and began to work, the woman exercised in a skimpy red bikini.
Then a key turned in the lock and in walked "one of the meanest, baddest, ugliest, biggest men Ted had ever seen in his life. Hank (the woman's partner) was about six feet seven inches tall. His head seemed neckless, his arms as large as Ted's waist." Hank beat Ted on the head with a wrench, injuring him severely.....then killed the woman. Ted observed, “The bottom line is never work in an apartment not alert, especially with single women and no uniform on. Why? Because a uniform gives you credibility."
Regularly cleaning up feces on the job stimulated Sibley to research 'waste' and he learned that excreta (feces and urine) was quite useful historically. Pliny the Elder, who was a naturalist, philosopher, and army commander in the early Roman Empire, wrote: "The urine of children not yet arrived at puberty is widely used to counteract the bite of the Ptyas (insect) that spits venom into men’s eyes. Adding the white egg of an ostrich makes it more potent…adding old urine and the ash of burnt-oyster shells to treat rashes on the bodies of babies. And for all burns, scorpion stings are treated by urine. In ancient Egypt female hysteria was treated by making women inhale the fumes of charred crocodile dung.”
Pliny the Elder
In addition, feces in agricultural production - used as fertilizer - had been commonplace in ancient Rome, as well as in China and Greece.
Ancient Chinese farmer working in the field
Sibley also read "that the Tibetan Buddhists believed that the Dalai Lamas are so holy their poop and pee are the best things they can give to the believers or students to bless them. For example, in 1954, when the Dalai Lama made his trip to China, after using the toilet his poop and pee were collected in a gold pot and made into medicine pills."
The Dalai Lama
For Sibley, America's socio-economic philosophy- and the interplay between the political and economics in art - made him feel that an artist like himself had "to ostracize himself from everyday people in order to paint….. then wait patiently for the art-circle-elite to sanction its approval." This feeling was probably enhanced by Sibley's 'disastrous' one-man exhibition at Independence Bank on Chicago's South Side"....which closed early. These experiences caused the painter to question the validity of an art philosophy "that allowed mediocre artists to survive and yet snatched the life-support system from those with vision."
Sibley observes that: "What appears sometimes to be a perfectly natural phenomenon can be quite contradictory: for instance, my poverty, my anxiety, my black skin, in relationship to mass culture, have an overwhelming and profound impact on being an artist in America." Sibley writes: "I can paint an abstract or expressionist piece, but because of my class and the racial universe in this society, I am forced to view painting from a different frame of reference. Well, now maybe you understand that I have no option but to view my plight as an artist as being an outsider -- an interloper -- because of my skin color and class position, which is non-privileged." Sibley feels paintings should reflect reality and be ennobling.....and that artistic creations "are too sacred" to be generated purely for monetary gain.
Iverson by John Sibley
(Note: More examples of Sibley's artwork can be seen below.)
The death of Sibley's supervisor, Mr. Wheen, led him to meditate about death and how - after the Middle Ages - death in Western culture became a "personal ritual." An amusing example of this occurred in Chicago when a famous drug kingpin called “Flukey” buried his son “Willie the Wimp” in a casket built like a Cadillac - because that’s what his son drove when he was alive. Sibley includes a funny poem about this, called "Willie the Wimp", written by R. Ellworth & B. Carter Stevie Ray Vaughan. (There's a great video of this on YouTube.)
Willie the Wimp's Cadillac-shaped coffin
Thinking about the world of drug bigwigs - and their mink coats, diamonds, gold and pearls, fancy cars and gorgeous women - induced Sibley to think about 'routine consumerism.' He asks: "Even as a consumer, how many times have you gazed at the freshly carved refrigerated meat at the local store? Steaks, beef, chicken? Or gleaming tomatoes, bananas and grapes? Never thinking about their source?" Sibley's point is that people labored (and maybe suffered) to provide these goods, and "we cannot see the number of exploited lives that were used for our consumption...…just like Willie the Wimp’s Cadillac coffin cost the lives of untold victims from his drug empire."
Sibley also muses on other living things, like trees - which use volatile compounds to communicate - and on the consciousness of animals. In this vein, Sibley describes his family's trip to Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, where they visited the primate house. There Sibley locked eye-to-eye with the great silverback gorilla “Otto”.....one of our "so-called distant cousins."
Gorilla in a zoo
Sibley then muses about what separates humans from gorillas, who share 99% of our DNA. He concludes that the difference is a “psychic leap....something we can't touch, weigh or see. It's something elusive. It's metaphysical. Fleeting. We can't find this “something” in a pile of ancient bones." Sibley goes on to say: "My feelings are that the same life-force that generates life for humans also exists for other creatures."
The animals Sibley dealt with most often were cats, which - as a janitor - he found in garbage cans, garbage chutes, compactors, on stairwells, in garbage bags, and so on. He found that "cats, more than any other domestic animal, seem conscious of their being - more so than a dog." He's noticed that "a cat seems to possess an almost telepathic reaction to a thought. If you think negative, they will feel it."
Finally, Sibley wonders if we will ever discover our true meaning for being on planet earth and ruminates that "though science is based on observation.....since man’s perceptions are finite, there could exist uncharted realities or dimensions that are not discernible to the scientists."
Just for fun, Sibley speculates about where life originated and suggests "a totally new and novel theory -- a theory that some of you might find repugnant. To some of you, it will be absurd." In short, Sibley (jokingly) suggests that life comes from 'alien shit' that was spit out of a passing spacecraft.
In a sort of postscript, actually an interview with a journalist, Sibley posits that: With the election of Donald Trump as President and the rising xenophobic right-wing groups in the US, Europe, and across the globe, the homeless, the disenfranchised, immigrants, and minorities will increasingly be portrayed by the media and the world governments as parasites."
Sibley includes much more in his narrative, which is - in turn - provocative, philosophical, challenging, and profoundly personal. As a scientist myself I don't agree with all of Sibley's beliefs, but I found the book engaging and thought-provoking, and I think many serious readers would enjoy these essays.
Thank you to the author for a copy of the book.
African Dream #2 by John Sibley
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Rating: 4 stars
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