Diving into the blue hole


DIVING INTO THE BLUE HOLE



What bold, black, wolf-ticket-selling  thought of the day is taking you where?

The answer, of course, is to the agony of cognition.  Or, to quote from the text of the sermon





"You and me…we're like two divers tethered to each other, dropping down into an underwater cave. What they call a blue hole.

….

"You're losing me, Lincoln."

"Oh, you're with me.  You know what's at the bottom of that hole?"

"What?"

"The truth."



Greg Iles, Mississippi Blood, page 29.



                You and I as readers of America's literature  shall never arrive at the truth.  We will come close to a truth, but the truth evades us in the forward and backward motions of critical duration.  At least that is the fib I need to bootleg. Pragmatic evasion.



                So, today in response to an email from a brilliant friend, I dive toward an ekphrastic poem---"Ode to the Happy Negro Hugging the Flag in Robert Colescott's 'George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware' " by Anais Duplan (posted in POEM OF THE DAY, January 23, 2018).  A truth is an onion in want of peeling. And how you shall do the peeling is yet to be discovered.



                What trickster flash of spirit decided to signify and send this chore?  The forms of things unknown are very deep in the blue hole of historical remembering and recovering stuff.  There is something in Duplan's poem which is at once about the erotic and the religious as well as about African American naming practice back in the day when a male child might be marked off as GEORGE WASHINGTON, VICTOR EMMANUEL,  LINCOLN, or JEFFERSON  without benefit of guilt.  What relevance has John Donne's standing in a sonnet from another world, begging his God to batter his heart?  There is something in the flash of Spirit and spirit that is uncertain and entangled.  Do I gaze upon Emmanuel Leutz's "George Washington Crossing  the Delaware" (reproduced on the cover of the 1998 edition of  Ishmael Reed's  Flight to Canada ) or on George Caleb Bingham's "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1871), which is a sign of ideological intentions, to swim toward a tentative understanding of the satire in Robert Colescott's "George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook" (1974-75)? That is but one question. There are dozens of other questions in art history, political history, and literary history waiting for the condemnation of an answer.


Despite lingering doubt about the veracity of Wikipedia, it is there I surf  to discover tidbits of information about Robert Colescott.  To discover that it is not a waste to juxtapose Anais Duplan with Angela  Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell and sketch invisible lines between New Orleans, California, Cuba, and France in an exercise that ought to be done in digital humanities. Duplan and Nin conspire. Not a waste but a poetic opportunity for meditating on our nation's unique histories of unhappy Negroes.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            January 23, 2018

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