Jerry Ward's Blogspot

    FICTION AND FRICTION, 2019 Yet, in that Gestalt of grace wherein the City finds its enabling principle, there is a further element to be remarked, for if "life together" is an affair of Substitution and Exchange, then it must be conceived to involve most essentially a kind of sacrificial discipline.   For when we act for others   ---   as when a "father acts for the children, working for them, caring for them, interceding, fighting and suffering for them" and thus undertaking to be "their deputy"    ---    something is being given up; life is releasing itself as an offering to other life: that which is of one's own is being handed over to another, for the sake of human communion    ----    and this leitourgia has the character of a sacrificial service. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. The Poetry of Civic Virtue (1976), pp. 46-47 And if I could ask one small thing of you, Dear One, it would be that you oc...

UJIMA for 2019 "Great writing is a dogged confrontation with the human hell without and the human hell within oneself;   great writing is the courage to draw prophetic conclusions from the existence of hell. ….. To face hell means not to collapse because of man's present reality but to face up to man's ability to conquer himself, to face up to man's infinite potentialities for health and goodness, for godliness, for creativity, for beauty, for the construction of boundaryless human harmony." Lance Jeffers, "The Death of the Defensive Posture: Toward Grandeur in Afro-American Letters" (1970) The definition Lance Jeffers created for great writing is daunting, but it provides descriptive boundaries   for work during 2019 and beyond.   Wikipedia estimates that slightly more than two million books are published annually throughout the world.   China publishes 440,000; the United States, 304,912. If 1% of that number is significan...

Mentoring at Tougaloo College, 1970-2002 In antiquity, liberal arts ( artes liberals ) were essential for citizenship. A Greek citizen was obligated to master rhetoric, the art of persuasion and public speaking; to have skill in forensic science or the art of defense in court and in making juridical decisions; to render service military and otherwise. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the trivium ) were valued. These were amplified in medieval Europe to include the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy/astrology). In later iterations, logic was subordinated to accommodate history and moral philosophy (ethics), and studia humanitatis ascended, becoming the foundation for what in America was deemed a liberal arts education when Tougaloo College was founded in 1869. For one hundred and fifty years, our alma mater has been the site where the future meets history, the unending narrative of social, cultural, and political events.   During that time, good teachi...

INDULGENCES/INDULGENCE: the preface Needing to elucidate a "truth," Martin Luther posted 95 theses ---- Disputatio pro declaratone virtutis indulgentiarum ----on October 31, 1517 in Wittenberg.   Nailed them it is alleged on a church door.   Were our nation's senators and representatives equally as brave and inclined to be statespersons rather than ego-masturbating politicians , they would post 95 theses ---propositions on universal principles of human rights and dignity and justifications of debatable democratic experimentation in governing ---   on January 21, 2019, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday.   These would be painted in bipartisan ink on the walls of the Oval Office and on the exterior of the White House.   Our Congress would perform an unprecedented historical act . The theatricality of the act would alter the world order of the 21st century. Our Congress ( the Republicans and Democrats and Independents of 2018),     however...

A NATION OF ANGER When a writer uses   the findings of   the social sciences regarding anger   to produce an explanatory narrative, the writer's good intentions may provoke anger and a vision of despair.   How many readers find comfort when the reflection of their faces in a Mirror of Truth stares at them with contempt?   Charles Duhigg, an accomplished writer of a certain kind, succeeds in producing neoliberal anger in "Why Are We So Angry? : The Untold Story of How We All Got So Mad at One Another" in The Atlantic (January/February 2019): 64-75.   The voices of indigenous peoples and Asian Americans are silent in the telling of the untold.   For them, Martin Luther King Jr.'s saying to an audience at Carnegie Hall in February 1968 that "the supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force" is water on Teflon.   So too is the fact that in April 1968, Duke Ellington announced at Carnegie Hall th...

Reawakening the Cold Mind Fukuyama, Francis.   Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment .   New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.                 In contrast   to Allan Bloom's effort in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) to excoriate his fellow citizens for complicity in allowing higher education to fail democracy and impoverish the souls of students, Fukuyama makes an effort to warn his fellow citizens that aspects of the soul --- thymos (craving recognition of dignity), isothymia (demanding   "to be respected on an equal basis with other people") and megalothymia ("the desire to be recognized as superior) ---propagate the multiple issues that torment contemporary forms of democracy (xiii). There is more than a little profit in reading Bloom and Fukuyama against one another in order to grasp how what is now touted as intersectionality is naug...

  Paradox of the Obvious As I work on Richard Wright: An Unending Hunger for Life , the growth of Wright's mind and creativity becomes increasingly fascinating and resistant to "definitive" explanation.   How does one explain, for example, that certain ideas born out of his vernacular existentialism retain exceptional relevance in 2018?   It does not seem sufficient to say the ideas are transcendent, or to ignore abuses and uses of Wright's thought in contemporary discussions of intellectual histories and world affairs.   Why does "Early Days in Chicago," published in the anthology Cross Section 1945 and later published as "The Man Who Went to Chicago" in Eight Men , address the most unsettling issues of 2018? As I wrote in 1978, we must struggle to "understand something of Wright's ultimate despair and something about Wright's frantic distrust of all except the 'self.' "   Wright's truth-telling is fu...

On a book by Dr. Tommy J. Curry When errors thrive dangerously in the wilderness of discourses, it is judicious to issue a writ of coram nobis .    In his timely book The Man-Not: Race, Class,   Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood ( Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), Dr. Tommy J. Curry, Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at Texas A & M University, issues such a writ and makes a sterling contribution to intellectual history.   One can't praise the excellence of his anatomy of dilemmas, however, without noting the bane of academic writing.   For a writer to be deemed serious, worthy of attention, in academic territory, she or he must use jargon, the very language of the tribe that itself nurtures error. Curry is not culpable, and is, to be sure, not complicit.   He   is quite aware of what might be called the rhetorical traps of the Academy and of publishing.   A small number of scholars have published scath...

Notes for a 2019 Poem Be afraid.   Tricentennial masquerade is over. 2019 is the year, surely you can recall, 1919 will interrogate, by dint of academic obscurity, the rites, the riots, the reasons in domestic terror, treachery, and treasons. Render unto its gold-plated idol/icon of a god her properties and lynch her with prayers of love. Close readings of close reading of closest readings. History is a deck of twelve aces. It is everybody's business   and nobody's fault. Literate tongues drool, explicate and exorcise. Let there be light, pain-filled recovery of intelligence. There is no sanctuary for a Red Summer, a Red Scare, a Red reading of a near truth. Waves of molasses wash Boston when telephones emit no sound. The Jass Age begins with renaissance of bathroom gin and bedroom sin and the signing of Amendment 18. When tiny rain taps a tin roof anarchy, espionage, and   ethnic washing of whitenes...

END OF 2018 LETTER December 6, 2018 Dear Friends, I began this year with a single purpose: setting my terms of engagement with a world that seems to become increasingly unpleasant.   All that has transpired since   January 1 convinces me that I made a good   decision. 2018 is an opportune moment to scrutinize and readjust terms of engagement. Do not assume, on the basis of insufficient proof (either anecdotal or empirical) that sympathy is a given ,an innate property,  a psychobiological reflex possessed by all human beings. Think critically. Sympathy or compassion is ambiguous; it is at once necessary and disabling. Some portion of it may be encoded in our DNA, and the remainder is probably  a result of how we are socially and culturally educated or conditioned. Centuries of narrative direct us to such a conclusion.  Those same narratives inform us that sympathy is not constant.  It is variable.  We have the option o...