End of 2018 Letter

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 of not trusting sympathy, because it is often a kneejerk response in times of extreme crisis, tragedy, or catastrophe. Shakespeare's  Portia lied beautifully in saying the quality of mercy is not strained.  In daily life as we know it, mercy is mutable.  One second after the reason for sympathy has abated, we may retreat into a neutrality that is remote from sympathy.

As a writer, I think of  sympathy is a choice made by a billion cells regarding how to effectively respond to another set of a billion cells.  Cells are clever.  They differentiate weakness from strength, prudence from foolishness.  They affirm a well-known Machiavellian hypothesis:  a person who tries to be good all the time amongst so many who are bad is bound to come to ruin.

If, out of Christian sympathy, one habitually forgives those who use power and privilege to torment and/or murder one's people, is one an idiot or a saint?  How we answer that question tells us which we decided to be  in 2018.

I've not totally abandoned hope, but I assign it a low priority in my life.

 It is more important to live against time, because as I wrote in my blog of March 31 ----

On Wednesday, April 4, 2018, I shall remember an assassination on April 4, 1968.  As I fly from New Orleans to Chicago, the finality of death will monopolize my thinking.  The end is promised, and it never fails to deliver.  I shall remember and protect myself against the cultural amnesia that the Tribe of Trump bids our nation to embrace.  I shall not forget.  And I have yet to arrive at a point from which I can forgive our nation for its dedicated barbarity.  Although my mother's name was Mary, my conception was not immaculate.  My name is Jerry not Jesus. I am not obligated to perform salvation on a cross.

To the extent that I embrace a fluid, Roman Catholic understanding of how sin is constructed and why it flourishes within the operations of capitalism, I am aware that I belong to a sin-saturated Church , that I have citizenship in a nation wherein sin is a palpable virtue.  There is small profit in being orthodox by any measure. Or, as I informed an audience at the 2018 Tennessee Williams Festival, no one is entitled to claim that she or he is innocent. All Americans are complicit in the production of a United States "history"  (a speculative narrative at best) that rewards sin (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) with delusions of goodness.  Blessed is the American who is ignorant in the name of patriotism and who is capable of sinning without a twinge of conscience.  She or he will be justly rewarded with Biblical blindness until death brings the shock of vision.

I survive what is casually called "the times" by living against them, choosing my terms of engagement with calculated discretion, and trusting no one without first spending decades in reading the person's character.  I survive by assuming that human beings are fundamentally evil  and that they have the potential  to be just and decent and to do good things for the benefit of humanity.  Unlike a few of my friends who still hold fast to dreams of a better future, I gave up the will to dream on April 4, 1968 when I heard Duke Ellington announce, at a Tougaloo College concert in New York, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead.  His death enlightened me about the hype of American hope.  After fifty years, I refuse to be bamboozled by it.  I live against the times in a spiritual location of actuality rather than in a secular address of reality. A death is a death is a death.

The cost of maintaining sanity is high, and I do not recommend my strategies for doing so to other people.

As 2018 neared  its end, I summarized my feelings in a poem that mocks George Frederick Handel's oratorio "The Messiah":

Discomfort ye, discomfort ye

My people saith the godly ghost;

saith the consecrated host;

cause ye discord eternal;

and grunt unto it,

that genocide is accomplished,

that holocaust is rejected,

and cry unto it warfare is anointed,

that its iniquity is unctuous,

is death-light pardoned.

The brazen trumpet sweeps

in wilderness: concludes chaos

with flowers of evil so damned, so medieval.

Confirm chaos: make crooked canticle

in space; in time, warp for the godly ghost.

Discord shall cheapen in the people's minds.

And petrify the daughters and sons

of Gogmagog in middle gassings

of virgin witches in sugar ditches,

in middle passing of windbag wigs of wheat,

of  brain burned in paradise.

Discomfort ye, discomfort ye

My people saith the godly ghost;

saith the consecrated host.

For unto them a Beast is born,

unto them a vengeful thing is given,

and the government shall be eroded

in its mouth; and its name

shall calcify -----wunderbar,

ice-creamy emperor,

wunderbar demonic lord,

wunderbar the everlasting father,

wunderbar the emblem of no peace.

After 75 years of living on Earth, I find that cynicism is  useful and powerful for recognizing the limits of being human as one discovers a few bright moments in work and in rewards that arrive by fortunate accident.

 For me, the latter was receiving the 2018 Daryl Cumber Dance Award for Lifetime Achievement  from College Language Association and a contract from Polity Press to write a book on Richard Wright for its "Black Lives" series with the blessings of Wright's oldest daughter Julia.  The other things I consider to be good and meaningful are 1) my serving on the Community Advisory Group for the New Orleans Public Safety and Justice Initiative and as an Election Commissioner for Orleans Parish,  2) my direct efforts to help adult male inmates believe in their intelligence and humanity, 3) my correspondence with  former  students who now have something to teach me and my conversations with the very small number of people who share my values , 4) having conducted three courses -----"Richard Wright: Selected Works," "African American Impact on Classic American Literature," and "Five African American Writers" for senior citizens in the People Program, and 5) works published

Print Publications

"Imperatives 2017." Xavier Review 38.1 (2018): 59.

"Growth."Bayou, Issue 69 (2018): 77.

"Sarah Webster Fabio: (Re) Covering the Rainbow." Valley Voices 18.1 (Spring 2018): 144-149.

Review of Lawrence P. Jackson's Chester B. Himes.  JEAL 8 (2018): 122-125.

"Erasing." The Griot: the Journal of African American Studies 37.1(Spring 2018): 101.

Blogs and Other Writing.  Lawrence, KS: PHBW/Jayhawk INC, 2018.

"The Septuagenarians' Sankofa Dialogue."  Kalfou 5.1 (Spring 2018): 112-141. [dialogue with Kalamu ya Salaam]

Reprint of "Uncle Tom's Children Revisited ." Papers on Language and Literature 44.4 (Fall 2008): 6-9

in  Short Story Criticism, Vol. 253 (San Francisco: Gale, 2018): 237-239.

Online Publications

"Tending the Mind," ARTS-TODAY 4.10 (January 28, 2018): 164-166

"Terms of Engagement," ARTS-TODAY 4.11 (February 22, 2018): 34-37.

"Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and a Jug of Ancestors." Neworld Review 11.76 (2018).

"1968-Terms of Engagement," BKNation. 30 March 2018. bit.ly/2GpHgbr

http://bknation.org/2018/04/1968-50-years-later

"Epistle to the Humanists." ARTS-TODAY 4.12 (March 29, 2018): 160.

"Learning from Undergraduates." Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies 11.6 (April 2018):259.1

"To Live Against the Times." ARTS-TODAY 5.1 (April 28, 2018): 183

"African American Impact on Classic American Literature." ARTS-TODAY 5.3 (June 24, 2018): 42-44.

"Sound Poems in Early Modern Urixiza." AllPoetry, July 26, 2018

http://allpoetry.com/page=1

"On Presentism." ARTS-TODAY 5.4 (July 27, 2018): 44-45.

"Implacable Violence, Part One."  PHBW website.  August 27, 2018.

"Twain's Macroaggressions." Neworld Review 11.79 (2018)

http://www.neworldreview.com/Vol.-11.No-79/criticism/php

"A Moral Crisis in New Orleans." Konch  (Fall 2018), n.p.

https://ishmael-reed.squarespace.com

"Three American Poets." ARTS-TODAY 5.5 (August 26, 2018):112-114.

"Viewing Cane River."  PHBW website.  October 29, 2018.

Review."The Life and Work of Etheridge Knight by Terrance Hayes." Neworld Review 11.81 (2018)

In the final weeks of December,  I am trying to fulfill some promises as I devise terms of engagement for 2019, the arming of Self with the power of language to decimate imps of uncertainty.

With best holiday wishes for you and your families,

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.