words and crisis
WORDS AND CRISIS
The opening stanza of the
Lithuanian poet Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtè’s poem “Jazz” reminds me of why I created the word “blacktrocute” to name an effect certain
poems might have on readers ----
I’m in a hurry, I’m already late
for the jazz concert, and I have no/ idea what could happen in that jam-packed
hall, face to face with/ the executioner who tediously consults his assistant
and reads the / sentence from the notes that only he can see, maybe taking
pity, or/ maybe opening an artery, chopping off a head, compelling everyone/ to
howl with horror and fascination ---that executioner whose name/ is Music!
Terribly in Love: Selected Poems (Sandpoint, Idaho: Lost Horse
Press, 2020), page 62
The stanza suggests that Music
has the power to punish while it gives dreadful pleasure, the power to attract
and repel simultaneously. Marcinkevičiūtè’ is but one of many European writers who
grapple with vexed emotions when they hear jazz, classical Black American
music.
2
Writing about Marie Cardinal’s The Words to Say, Toni Morrison directs
attention to how a Louis Armstrong concert provided an opportunity for a young
European woman to come face to face insanity:
“My heart began to accelerate,”
Cardinal wrote, “becoming more important than the music, shaking the bars of my
rib cage, compressing my lungs so the
air could no longer enter them. Gripped
by panic at the idea of dying there in the middle of spasms, stomping feet, and
the crowd howling, I ran into the street like someone possessed.”
Preface, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992),
page vii
3
Comparing the two quotations helps us
to distinguish how Music activates the heart of European darkness in a fashion
antithetical to its activation of the heart of American blackness. Later this summer I shall ponder what words
and/or music reveal about the ever changing ontology of crisis.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. May 10, 2020
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