Hell-bent Notes


Hell-bent Notes on WTF in the USA

PARADISE IS HELL; HELL, PARADISE.



When you ask should writers do more to encourage rejection  of talking about American culture and political affairs within the exclusive limits of what is black and what is white, you are asking a question that is at once accusatory and presumptive.  You presume that people who call themselves writers ought to have significant opinions about how Americans talk among  themselves and about others in 2018.  You presume that writing has impact on literacy and literature, that writers have more investment than have non-writers in the benefits and dangers of speech acts.  Your presumption is anchored more than a little in your research and writing on the life and works of Richard Wright, but it is dreadfully and fatally located in your belief that many contemporary writers pander to their egos and do not give a tinker's damn about much other than broadcasting their personal suffering.  Please note that belief is not identical with knowledge or knowing.  What is accusatory about your question lives in quicksand, in the combat zone where what is red, gray, yellow, pink or brown about the actuality of being human is rarely accounted for. Ego is a selfish god.



I am the yam and the lamb; you shall have not yams and lambs before or after I am.



Open Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (New York: Atria, 2018) by Alice Walker, turn to pages 9 and 10,  read "The New Dark Ages (for Martin), "and meditate on these lines-------



Still,

We miss you.  Dreadfully.

As we miss

so many others

who left us with this one

desire:

that no matter how deep the fall

into obscurity and obscenity this new age

portends

Life might permit us

to remain standing

if only on the inside;



You are of a certain age and can remember that fifty years ago Muriel Rukeyser urged you to read Walker's first collection of poems Once (1968) and can remember those poems and the poems in Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart transmit sanctity, the balm for the spirit so absent in the works of writers who care not to be lessoned by how well Alice Walker tended her garden.  In the dark age of the truly colorblind, you may assume they fear to be lessened.



The water became fire; the light, a rainbow ----my sign.  Thirst as your greed and pride burns your heart into ashes.  But, first, return to the binary limits which cheat you and cheapen you, the real subject.



Many citizens of the USA have been socialized to believe (1) that they are the only Americans and (2) that the land they occupy (stolen by their multi-ethnic ancestors from the indigenous peoples, the originals, with help from the Great God Capitalism) is the greatest republic on the face of the planet.  They insert earplugs when Americans from Canada, Cuba, and Chile tell them they are liars, that there are many "Americans" between the North Pole and the tip end of South America.  They are colorblind, incapable of seeing the nuanced hues of their debatable democracy; their understanding of history, of national narratives, is myopic.  All that matters in the unending narrative is the permanent tension between the white and the black, the tension of genocidal domestic warfare, the tension perpetuated by writing, publishing, reading, decoding of (mis-/dis-)information and raw data, the sprawl of mass and social media and technologies.  The tension is endemic. It is a terror-driven dream of cosmic evil.



 There is cold comfort in the news that



"Neuroscience research at least muddies the distinction between bodily injury and mental harm, and, in the future, it might negate it entirely.  One tool that neuroscience can deploy is brain imaging, which allow a window into the altered functioning of the brain under different conditions." [Lobel, Jules and Huda Akil. "Law & Neuroscience: The Case of Solitary Confinement." Daedalus 147 .4 (Fall 2018):63]



Neuroscience does not explain, however,  to anyone's satisfaction why unhinged passions cause targeted bodies to bleed into oblivion on unhallowed grounds, why Americans murder Americans with maximum alacrity  Human beings, you may safely presume, are a billion years away from omniscience. They are incarcerated in self-manufactured baby cribs of the black and the white. They acquiesce to the whims of literature and writers, speech acts and people  much in need of scrutiny and severe criticism. You do have the integrity to admit you are one of those writers.



When you think of how the social construction of the collective American mind so poorly functions, you curse and freeze, or you laugh and melt.  To be sure, you exaggerate with a purpose, presuming that  American writers who create many genres and influence thinking  ought to push back against mass insanity and produce responsible opinions.  Presumption fails, and ego prevails.



PARADISE IS HELL; HELL, PARADISE.




Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            November 14-15, 2018

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