Blog2.11.2021

 

BLOG2.11.2021

 

I TALK WITH DEATH EACH DAY.

I SMILE AT IT; IT GRINS AT ME.

WHEN WE PART COMPANY ALONG THE WAY,

I AM STUNNED TO SEE WHAT I CAN SEE.

 

 

COVID -19 and the necessity of social distancing have intriguing side-effects.  You become more intimate with yourself. More reflective and more terrorized by the possibility that the world is not a stage but a cinema, film noir constantly dancing on the screen. Your terror becomes almost impossible to bear, because you realize you are a character in a movie the mass media is most reluctant to discuss.  If you do not belong to the Tribe of Trump, the pain is excruciating. COVID-19 incarcerates you in the  surreal.

 

You are haunted by an assertion James Baldwin made in The Devil Finds Work ---

"The distance between oneself -- the audience -- and a screen performer is an absolute: a paradoxical absolute, masquerading as intimacy."

The more you refuse to say the absolute has credibility, the more abstractly absolute your human condition grows. Whether we are the children of an unseen God or  the children of a highly visible Satan, we are tormented  ---no matter how much hope we force-feed our minds.

 

In  Moonrise (1948), you find a mirror for your face.  Dane Clark as the guilt-haunted young white male, Danny Hawkins, exists in a Huck/Jim relationship with Rex Ingram as the paragon of black wisdom, Mose Johnson. The mirror says to you that white men and women in the USA  are in need of black parenting.  The New York Times review of Moonrise  (March 7, 1949) nailed it.  Ingram who gave a stellar performance in the film is the "philosophical confidant" for Clark who gave an equally stellar performance. The mirror is a trickster. The next frame is the Sidney Poitier/Glenn Ford relationship in Blackboard Jungle (1955) , a flipped black/white iteration of confidential parenting.  In the USA, there is no exit from the systemic cage, screen, or page.  You are stunned to see what COVID-19 forces  you to see.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            Thursday, February 11, 2021

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