The Arts Today Ezine vol 6.1

CONFRONTING COVID-19: meditations for blues people

THE PROBLEM OF THE 21ST CENTURY IS THE PROBLEM OF COGNITION. PERIOD.

January 10, 2021

Prelude to a Conversation

Dear _________,

My calling you was an act of desperation. Lately, I am only at peace when I talk with someone whose friendship is extremely special. Strangely, that peace doesn’t occur in speaking with my first cousins once removed.

You are one of the very few people with whom I share uncensored ideas, share my intimidations of mortality. Note that I allude to Wordsworth’s final lines in “My Heart Leaps Up”----

The Child is father to the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

and their use in the epigraph for “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” I am no Romantic. I am stuck with how mortality intimidates and have a lot of commerce with being mortal. I do not delude myself about transcending the terms of engagement with reality and actuality that I set for myself. As horrible as life is, I am content to live in dread. Richard Wright taught and continues to teach me well. Without waiting for an answer, I pose the question- ----If the child is father to the man, which daughter is mother to the woman? Thus we entertain the whiteness of whiteness.

The spectacle of this whiteness unhinged me on January 6; listening to such conservative thinkers as John McWhorter, Jason Riley, and Ralph Richard Banks on C-SPAN 2 ( December 16, 2020 program ) unhinged me even more. They were unfair, I think, in their condemnations of CRITIAL RACE THEORY. CRT is not unified; it has many warts to be sure; nevertheless, it does ask questions that only the stupid contend are not appropriate for the 21st century. All that I got from the program is that makers of extremely academic discourses about theory do not know or care duck-crap about the sufferings of the men who collect my garbage each week. Garbage collectors and people who dispose of what we manufacture in sewerage systems possess a natural equality with ourselves. Our academic preoccupations trick us into assigning them to different class and caste coordinates in the scheme of reality. I find little reason to be proud of this posture. I find every reason to be ashamed of it. Is the guilt I feel nonsensical, absurdly irrational? I never asked myself that question during the four decades of my teaching career. I simply followed my mother’s injunction to help those who were less fortunate than I was and sought to help them in accord with my notions of tough-love. One ought not blame the victim unfairly; one ought to help the victim escape from the prison of being a victim.

I applaud you for continuing to teach inside and outside classrooms with intelligence, a secure sense of histories, and clarity that is essential for the 21st century. I commend you for being radical beyond any disabling box that liberal , centrist and conservative thinkers blissfully cooperate in constructing to enslave our minds.

With gratitude,Jerry

January 25, 2021

Vicious divisions among American citizens multiply from one day to the next. If we know some basic facts about the evolving narratives of what we glibly call American and world histories, we do not beg ignorance in bad faith. We do not delude ourselves into thinking the narratives speak for all the Constitution-protected American citizens. Actuality delivers a mean punch. We erupt in despair, even if we think despair is an apt name for what Maximus Wright calls “soul damage.” The time-walking wretchedness so eloquently voiced by David Walker and Frantz Fanon is a legacy to be argued with.

Emerging technologies and the suspect whims of journalists who manufacture the “news” from many angles do an excellent job making awareness of division inevitable. “News” consumes us more than we consume it. In a special philosophical sense, the news is a covert agent of enslavement. Ultimately, we become enslaved to the existential imperative of endless resistance. Do not take my words as sufficient. Believe nothing other than the intimate conversations you reluctantly have with your psyche.

Fine words ancient and modern do little to relieve the anguish some of us feel. All the current talk about reconciliation, reunification, transforming palpable injustice into viable justice, robust hope, transcendent faith, and selfless charity or compassion ----all this talk amounts to a debilitating pandemic of noise. Never in all my 77 years has the notion of a unified American population been exactly real for me. Since the early months of 2020, the idea of unification as become a most surreal fiction. I think political language and the uncertain ideology for which it stands are cognitive death-traps.

The reason upon which one could depend, with ample qualifications, in time past has been either minimized or abandoned by large numbers of Americans. The American democratic experiment is not dead, but it is rapidly falling in love with the colors of fascism. Culturally different versions of this phenomenon are global.

Google.com

It is rare to have any cross-ideological conversations for which the common ground is reason. The prospect that reason might vanish in some ill-lit digital space is repulsive, because the prospect is a forecast for the loss of humanity as we once knew it. We are shrouded in dread. Yes, we will continue to be human in some sense and to yearn for the abstract ideals of freedom, but 21st century humanity will have all the properties of a bitch monster. Humanity will become more profane, more willing to express its diverse frustrations in acts of terrorism and a surplus of unfettered profanity. Obama’s audacity of hope has become Hughes’ raisin in the sun. I do not think the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Defense is equipped to manage fruitcake American citizens, to restore the fictive rules of law and order which have evaded our nation for almost 300 years.

I am always too aware of the potholes, fault lines, and cognitive walls in American history/herstory, and of how the gendered descriptions his/her + story highlight divisions. It might be argued that WWII was a period of approximate unification, but even then the fact of segregation in the American military gave the lie to the myth of unification. The lies constituted by systemic whatever are exceptionally powerful. During the current pandemic, the telling of lies is stronger than efforts to speak truth. We are severely limited by the rhetorical motions we make.

My reading and writing and thinking have become double-edged activities, obvious instances of paradox. They cut me twice. They give me some relief from total anxiety. They provide information that confirms discomfort. It is a now in situation. My recent blogs and poems are so akin to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, although my motives contrast strongly with those of Dostoevsky’s unnamed narrator.

We have seen the world’s cruelty, its face devoid of cosmetics. Let us try to be safe and sane as we cultivate our gardens which can’t ever be Eden, cultivate them with a pragmatic economy of ancestral wisdom.

IN BURNT MINUTES OF PROPHECY

you crapshot a neighborhood, the dice and black bones numbering one fate or another in the forever afternoons. You knew an apocalypse in a garden. You burrowed under new and selected soil where cursing the night was common. So rashly they sold you tickets to exile your history and your hatred, for mercy had nothing to do with it, whatever it proved to be. In the final hours of rhetorical spectacles, you proclaimed the sky is a page of ink clouds. Why did you fall so hard to rise? But then again, perhaps the best an odyssey can be is a calendar of accidental myth.

February 1, 2021

THE EMPTY PARKING LOT

(for C. Liegh McInnis)

Yesterday ---it might have been already tomorrow-- pandemic authorizes no certainty--- we saw what you saw in inept parking lots of indifference--- all those invisible spirit cameras witnessing the thunder of our peoples’ tears, all their piss stains of grief eternal.

And thank that universe for the eternal blackness of you telling our weary ears to listen to the sacred silence of the cameras in the empty parking lots, to hear the sole/soul message of how we did, do, shall live.

I am the parking lot, empty and asking you what is the best deal to make with Death and God. But I know the answer --do I not--written in the stone of your gendered grammar?

Thank the universe for the blues.

~ Jerry W. Ward, Jr. 2/6/2021 1:22:32 PM