Jerry Ward's Blogspot

  On the sixth day of Kwanzaa, , we ask ourselves to invent ourselves.     Exploit Kuumba!   The dialogue can start a play, a fiction, a poem -----   Ogundare:           Eraweb   Oshun:                  Erus.   We hope the resulting work of art can be translated music, sculpture, computer algorithms, dance,   painting   or blended forms yet to be named. We are fond of living in special forms.   If the work of art is not married to the conduct of life, we doubt it is sufficiently beautiful and beneficial.   We doubt it is what we truly need, with or without pandemic and other embodiments of chaos. We create what we need on the final day of 2020.     December 31, 2020

  On the fifth day of Kwanzaa , celebrate the invisible uncertainty of mathematics.   After a billion years of earning with tears, sweat, and blood, African peoples make peace with violent affirmations. Without fear, we walk in solenoid maps, admiring fractal flora and fauna, the evergreen difference of such actuality as we know. We do not fear the complications of life.   We do not fear decay.   We do not fear dying.   We have no reason to fear Nature---we are particles thereof --- and every reason to respect it to the same degree we respect ourselves.   Are platitudes beautiful? Is possession of hyper-clarity essential?   Are we past-future surreal?   Use mathematics to provisionally and contextually answer questions.   Stray not from purpose.   The silence of sound empowers us to heed ancestral warning:   Never tell TRUTH "I only have ears for you," because TRUTH can talk you into an unmarked grave. Eat fractals and non-linear equations.   Grow stronger and str

    On the fourth day of Kwanzaa , we think of cooperative economics.   We think of the collective economy that was destroyed in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921.   In many instances such as Tulsa, the African American pursuit of economic sovereignty has been the target of racially-motivated domestic terrorism.   The December 25, 2020 bombing in Nashville was a snapshot of what some black Americans suffered in 1921.   The only renaissance involved in the Tulsa massacre was yet another birth of white barbarism.   In 2020 we can identify a small number of black women and men who have built and maintained   profitable enterprises. Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry are at the top of the list.   Nevertheless, an "objective" report on the state of black American economy in the early years of the 21st century would convince us the USA isn't a promised land.   From the perspective of economics, the USA is a dystopian dream and a pandemic-tinted portrait.   December 29, 2020

  On the third day of Kwanzaa   HARARI ZA ASUBUHI/SALAM ALEIKUM     The old world greets you, reminds you of both cooperative work/responsibility and the worrisome presence of its opposite. Actuality is innately democratic, accidentally generous.   The old world chants   UJIMA   UJIMA     UJIMA   as the bulk of the world's population attends to pandemic.   Fear and the equivalent of volcanic trembling occupy your body as the will to live sounds out survival algorithms in your mind.   You know you know you know you have to discipline yourself with responsibilities; you know you must perform cooperative work, if you want to be whole in 2022.   In every country people know liberty and freedom and   democracy pivot on generosity and/or civility.   People know that being human is a birth to death job. You find no reason, other than severe impairment,   for anyone's being unemployed.   December 28, 2020

  COVID-19 AND AMERICAN NIGHTMARES   On the first day of KWANZAA my true mind said to me "You lie well."   What a discerning compliment.   I lie well.   So too does the world we inhabit.   I do not contradict the world.   For more than seven decades, I have noticed that most of us support the notion that unity or shared   interest in A, Q, and Z is essential.   Even if we can't have unity, we desire its presence in the conduct of human life.   Without unity, little that benefits the commonweal can manifest itself.   Otherwise, people would pursue unfettered whims, their uniquely individual desires.   Each person's penchants would be at war with the penchants of others.   We would live in private domains of self-interest.   How unacceptable would that be?   How abject would that be?   Abject beyond redemption.   A pandemic, for example, demands that the better angels of humanity manifest themselves.   At the same time, demonic angels come forth.   Desir

  KWANZAA VARIATIONS   NIA     Say UMOJA, say we unified in something, say people matter     Determine to voice KUJICHAGULIA, say our voices matters   UJIMA   matters as all matters in the end: the spring of desire.   Capital matters UJAMAA functions greatly in the game of time   Yes, solid NIA collect determination do NIA be one   KUUMBA do say kwansaba   for ever do say   survival   Hang on IMANIA the many demons   condemn lynch them eternal   NIA     Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             December 25, 2020        

  KWANZAA VARIATIONS   NIA     Say UMOJA, say we unified in something, say people matter     Determine to voice KUJICHAGULIA, say our voices matters   UJIMA  matters as all matters in the end: the spring of desire.   Capital matters UJAMAA functions greatly in the game of time   Yes, solid NIA collect determination do NIA be one   KUUMBA do say kwansaba  for ever do say  survival   Hang on IMANIA the many demons  condemn lynch them eternal   NIA     Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            December 25, 2020         KWANZAA VARIATIONS   NIA     Say UMOJA, say we unified in something, say people matter     Determine to voice KUJICHAGULIA, say our voices matters   UJIMA   matters as all matters in the end: the spring of desire.   Capital matters UJAMAA functions greatly in the game of time   Yes, solid NIA collect determination do NIA be one   KUUMBA d

  COVID, the Double Helix of December 25/26, and Winter Solstice Omens for   2021   My first winter solstice (1943) was so perfect that I have no memory of it.   I reckon I do a far better job of recalling imperfection.   Today's sunshine-brightened dawn of solstice is framed by pandemic, the externals which so deeply and effectively give us but one rational choice: prudent mental and physical resistance.   This morning I watched the video of how Ayana Mathis orchestrated the photographing of 32 black male writers on November 30, 2018 at the Brooklyn Historical Society library.   That event was clever advertising for ARCADY GIORGIO ARMARI TOMMY HILFIGER VERSACE PRADA ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA and several other designers of haute couture ,   the excessively priced clothing   that distracts what is ultimately important as we gaze at actuality. At least at such actuality as the naked eye can behold. While the costuming of male bodies was symbolic acknowledgement of  

  RAW OYSTER EPIPHANY     New Orleans ---my only graveyard for ill-regard of COVID ants and ironwork plants   Hot site of those endless parades of lemonades profoundly drunk with absinthe funk   New Orleans --my holy earth home my superdome where saint-sinners ghost beginners   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.   12/12/2020 1:42:03 PM  

  PRAGMATIC PESSIMISM   In a society that is Darwinian, fascist, and systemically vicious, pragmatic pessimism is warranted.     After reading   Frank B. Wilderson III's   Afropessimism   (New York: Liveright, 2020)   the stiff-shirt men and ice-bosom women among us may reject its management of truth, preferring to be charmed   into a prior century by Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864).   Some American readers who possess advanced book learning   and bourgeois yearnings do not want to deal with virtually unfiltered testimony as it growls and laughs in Wilderson's book..   They want perspectives on the human condition to be shaped like Dostoevsky's fiction.   They want the safe, socially distanced thrills of best-selling novels .   The traumatic   mirrors in Afropessimism   reflect what they wish not to see:   their Dorian Gray faces.   For them, denying inconvenient realities is crucial.   One can take or leave fiction without regis

  REPLY TO CHARLIE BRAXTON'S "COVID   POEM"   Yet none of us are innocent. We are Christian, just because we discipline the House (of Representatives) and the Chamber (of Senators) with jawbones of oxen and whales. COVID ordains us.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             December 3, 2020