Jerry Ward's Blogspot

  Pandemic Truth-Telling Seminar (Prelude for April 2021)   It is foolish to chase after cause & effect, because the effect is itself a lost cause.   We (Eye and I) pardon your nicked name but not the radical hope you claim.   We are defensive/offensive weapons, stopping enemies where they stand.   We teach an accidental genius once named K. Marx the plain art of thinking. The report cards suggest he is making good progress. Eye and I do not disown the virtue of a sinner in order to laminate a saint.   I/ beautiful in battle/dies. Eye dies?   A shame/ ashamed to question grammar.   Actuality reads   reality's poker face.   Correctness is a homeless entity.   In a ordinary moment of sexism, we say "Mama, your thing is up tight and too tight. Why do you consent to attempt to do the jobs assigned to Horus and myth in a dead book?"   Shame, shame, shame as you navigate the coffle- chain of fools.   Conversations cancel conversations.   We (Eye and I) know ho

  STATIONS OF OUR CROSSES (Holy Week   critique of peace)   1.   Condemnation   Pilate's   washed hands dry the Autumn of guilt in Spring// pure finality   2.   Assuming the cross   Shoulder pain gladly\\ dare to season salvation, carry holiness   3 .   The first fall   In hours of doubt immortal bones kiss the earth: time yields no blessing.   4.   Ave Mater   Mother, your womb's proof is socially distanced   hope// sinners hibernate   5.   Simon of   Cyrene   Truly brotherhood prevails   beyond cheapened race in consummate grace   6. Veronica's Cloth   An image transferred// a visage saved forever: silent sorrow song     7.   The second fall   Mea culpa, sage must appease the angry sky that summer condemns     8.   Ladies of Jerusalem   No fine feathers hear their bodies in agony// the winter's sorrow   9.   The third fall   Amens of the end: 'Tis spring

  Pandemic Illumination   Pandemic is an example of Shakespeare's   Caliban, a Renaissance stereotype,   learning language from Prospero.   The flesh and blood Calibans of our time learn language from Thomas Jefferson,   Karl Marx, Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, and an array of white fog theorists. . Cursing in anger is an obvious feature of the 21st century, and we are hard put to minimize the cursing and to pursue the acquisition of knowledge.   Bacon helps.   Outside state-controlled   academic spaces, in multi-layered domains of common sense, it is possible to learn life-critique   from Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and his remote kinsman Francis Bacon (1909-1992). The elder Bacon taught valuable lessons about science and the idols (cave, tribe, marketplace, and theatre) that are in possession of human understanding. The younger Bacon taught us how judiciously art can visualize the horrors of the human condition.   Let us resolve to learn from the Bacons.   Jerry W. Ward,

  THE GUANT ÁNAMO TWENTY   These   names are this poem, this poem only old   gods   should stoop to read ---   Mr. Ali Mr. Abassi Mr. Amin Mr. Yazidi Mr. Bahlul Mr. Ghamen Mr. Mujahid Mr. Moqhel Mr. Malik Mr. Rahizi Mr. Shalabi mr. Nori Mr. Wasiq Mr. Mazioom Mr. Idris Mr. Ruhani Mr. Zakik M. Hicks Mr.Mohammed Mr. Zayly   Let the names that are this poem sing alien arias that lock you in an opera of   common   sense.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             3/27/2021 9:38:33 PM  

  Jerry W. Ward, Jr. 1928 Gentilly Blvd. New Orleans, LA 70119     March 26, 2021     President Joseph R. Biden , Jr. The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, D C 20500   Dear President Biden:   I implore you to pardon Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was given a death sentence in 1982 and who has spent almost four decades appealing what is considered in international circles to be a gross miscarriage of the rule of law.   Mumia (Inmate ID AM8335) is suffering from   heart issues, COVID-19, the lingering effects of Hepatitis -C and skin eruptions that cause exposed wounds.   After 39 years of incarceration, he deserves a chance to live his final days in dignity.   A pardon is a matter of great urgency.     I predicate my request on the belief that you are a compassionate person, that a briefing from White House staff about his case would persuade you to issue a pardon as an act of Catholic mercy.   Your doing so would transform beautiful words from

  AUBADE   Not sunshine but wet hues of grey sing mourning praise song,   tragic noise for pandemic pain ---and worse --- no robins twitter despair in Colorado when Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa used the color of the First Amendment to publish his anger, his abysmally "normal" anger in the red letters of ten once were true blue lives ---and worse -- recorded himself a pure American.   We hear his too loud anger, the discordant noise of his song as we take the communion of   a passionate breakfast---and worse-- ignore the holy spirits who weep for a black man---- who weep for Mumia Abu-Jamal who weep for   the forty stations of his cross.   In New Orleans we are old catholic masters of deception---and worse--- we indict Alissa, we trial Alissa, we condemn Alissa with charity ---and worse --- deny Mumia the same compassion, when in faith we should implore Our Lady of Prompt Succor to bring comfort to Mumia, bring freedom f

  personne mauvaisses Ils n'existent pas simplement qu'ils procréent

  CYBER TERRORISM   It began as an excellent video-conference on the life and work of Anne Moody, a 1964 graduate of Tougaloo College.   Leigh Ann Wheeler was sharing her research on Moody with special emphasis on how the author of Erwachen in Mississippi: Eine Autobiographie was received in Europe, particularly in Germany.   Wheeler was displaying some very rare footage of German interviews with Moody in the 1970s. Some of the listeners had been Moody's classmates.   Without warning, the conference was zoom-bombed.   Extreme radicals, lovers of anarchy, attacked with vulgar, racist, neo-Nazi, homophobic, and barbaric screaming and very loud, distractive music (pure noise really).   We were hearing January 6, 2021 in video-time.   We were no longer remote from chaos; we were the targets of chaos and hate.   In the future,   zoom-conference organizers will have to take extreme measures to minimize cyber terrorism.   Only the host and the presenter (s)   should appear on the

  1968 is a Moebius magnet, attracting pandemic-weary minds of a certain age to live again among the ruins.   Marvin Gaye heard it on the grapevine. The Tet Offensive was quite dramatic, forecasting a love affair with war   the USA faithfully maintains. Anne Moody published Coming of Age in Mississippi . LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal edited the landmark classic Black Fire . Richard A. Long published the essay "Crisis of Consciousness" in Black World , May 1968. James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy. Cointelpro murders were in vogue, forecasting that political violence would be the norm for the twenty-first century, a century of moral myopia. Czechoslovakia celebrated Prague Spring, a disconnected prelude for the Spring the Arabs dreamed of having. Massacre was common in Vietnam; liberation struggles on the African continent baptized the soil with blood; Latin Americans manufactured and exported drug

    BENEFITS   AND HARMS OF PANDEMIC   Pandemic delivers   benefits and disadvantages..       The disadvantages are psychologically expensive and   strange, taking form as semi-permanent grief; excessive indulgence in hatred;   calculated   violence; hasty and   uncritical decisions ; ennui ( luxury of boredom);   excuse to overdose on designer drugs; discovering   opportunities to shame, torment, and virtually   kill; and other items of negativity which defy counting.    In ordinary, pre-COVID-19 time, none of these things would   be deemed normal.   In the clouds   of pandemic,   they are ultra-normal.   Unadulterated insanity is remarkably "normal."   Pandemic   also gives   birth to positive awakening, the sense that one can name and defeat one's demons. The   positive benefits   belong to the category of wisdom.   They struggle to articulate themselves.   The interest paid by wisdom is worth less than a postage stamp.   The benefits and harms of pandemi

  SUFFERING PANDEMIC   We occupy the common ground of misery.   Pandemic days assault us with banality----stupid mornings and insipid nights. The days assume the habits of a coy mistress who has world enough and time to torment and undo a weak man.   I am not weak, but I am weary.   Hope annoys me like gnat who thought my eye was a helipad.   Hand me eye-wash.   I have immoral longings.   I discover moments of joy in writing, but writing is emotionally expensive.   The dividends of the effort   invested in writing seem to be disappointingly small, especially if one refuses to auction oneself in a slave market of pure capitalism. Ultimately, refusal is liberating suicide. But death and I are enemies not friends.   I suppose my friend Maximus Wright will lecture me on soul damage. And the lesson may yet save me from the imperfections of my Self.   The damage sharpens my mind, but I will not permit it to destroy my body.i am a half-way good Roman Catholic.   Today I happen

  THE UNDERADDRESSED   We have made some "progress" over the past two or three decades in creating stronger, detailed inquiries   about American cultures in general and African American cultures in particular.   Given the Siamese-twin relationship between the categories African American and American, nothing happens and is voiced in one category that doesn't influence the conduct of inquiry in the other.   Unfortunately, the dominant mode of inquiry is casually binary ---all black and white; the inclusions that would continue to lend voracity, authenticity,   and credibility to our constructions of knowledge are most often absent.   Just plain not to be found or exceedingly difficult to find.   Listening to Harriet A. Washington discuss her most recent book Carte Blanche; The Erosion of Medical Consent (2021) is a sobering exposure of our global Catch-22 in the midst of fear-inspiring pandemic.   I will not play the post-funky, tired as an overworked harlot   gam

  48 MILLION BLACK VOICES Four years before Richard Wright published 12 Million Black Voices , he proposed that the "relationship between reality and the artistic image is not always direct and simple," primarily because our idea about historical periods is not "a  carbon copy of reality. Image and emotion possess a logic of their own." ("Blueprint for Negro Writing", Section 9 ). In the introduction for the 2002 Thunder's Mouth Press reprint, David Bradley suggested Wright's fluid response to photographic images and his passionate prose endow the book  with "a lyrical power, an impressionistic rather than logical structure a power of a type different than that achieved in any of the work he was able to publish in the forties" (xviii).  Nevertheless, one can discern a logical structure in Wright's folk history, a logic imposed by Wright's historical consciousness regarding  American cultures.  As Wright informed readers in his

  PANDEMIC TALK IN HOUSE AND SENATE   Loose screws talk endlessly through unseen shaming walls, fragile barriers as democracy is dying. In sacred  violated chambers they have at it with toxic gusto. They sound like COVID-19 in heat, in throes of temper, in the ugly beauty of pristine dread --- noise beating noise out of noise. In the post-truth of elected patriotism, all one hears is the enslaved dying of democracy. Fit allegory though fatal, one concludes, for the nativity of barbaric harrowing.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            March 10, 2021  

    Dark deep stars cluster forming beautiful berries// Spring renews my eye.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             March 9, 2031  

  Lines for March 9, 2021   You said with poignant excess "My almost dying was the best thing in my life."   We shall be glad when you are dead, you rascal, you.   Almost dying is a sorry d We shall be glad when you are dead, you rascal, you.   We shall be glad when you are dead, you rascal, you. Almost dying is a  sorry copy of the real thing.   We shall be glad when you are dead, you rascal, you.   The earliest and the final recordings of Louis Armstrong  confirm the fools that mortals be.   To the not-selves which so vainly pretend to be who we are not, we say   We shall be glad when you are dead, you rascal, you.   Accept the finality of death and give us permission to say   We shall be glad when you are dead, you rascal, you.     Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                      Lines for March 9, 2021   You said with poignant excess "My almost dying was the best thing in my life.&

  FRAGMENTS RESCUED FROM THE COVID FURNACE     "……face left its humble apartment and walked   down the littered street and through the open door of a house without windows.   Wind slammed the door.   The house shuddered and vanished.   Face had no clue about…..and then…. (page 3) ……..   Face had no ears and could not hear the celestial music that guided people through pitch-black moonlight.   It stepped on invisible toes that tapped to   unearthly sound; it did not understand why it was slapped with extraordinary frequency.   After some months, face assumed pain was normal in this strange world. (page 47)   ……..   the privileged space excluded….(page 49)   ….in its 11th year of exile, face acquired ears   and then began the ultimate trial……(page 64)   The Justice Sisters ---Snow Red, Snow Green, and Snow Purple ----arrived , dressed to the 81s for the grand ceremony, the indictment of face for lack of decorum…..(page 75)   The sentence was ---FIRE.  

  CEREMONIES IN ABSENT TIME   Pandemic   is not good for public health, but it is excellent for the construction of public intelligence.   Many conversations in 2021 make use of the "passed future tense," one of several grammatical/aesthetic categories invented by the poet Asili Ya Nadhiri.   Informed by Nadhiri's   considerable knowledge of music, global affairs, and quantum physics, this innovative tense enables us to talk on time in time outside of time.   It allows us to first hear and then see ourselves as legitimate participants in chaos.   Present tense is constantly negotiating in the absence of full cognition with the arrived future and the destined to return past.   In this way, Nadhiri's excavation of hidden grammar is a necessary motion for breaking out of the nothing of stone (or being "stoned" ) into the infinity of light, into the obligations of morality.   We are who we are as a result of our fear or our failure to deal with qu

  THE WHITE HOLES OF AMERICA "Cruelty has been refined to tragic pity, so that it is denied the name of cruelty.   In the same way sexual love has been refined to amour-passion ; the slavish disposition to Christian obedience; wretchedness to humility; a pathological condition to the nervus gympathicus , e.g., to pessimism, Pascalism, or Carlylism, etc." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power ,   312 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888) Using Nietzsche's eyeglasses   to   "read" the 21st-century "text" of the United States of America   yields amazing results.   One gains insights about the nation, its citizens and institutions, its fetid ideologies of disunion and divisiveness.   For us, Nietzsche's use of the word "refine" is a cloaked reference to "re-define," the   endless spin to which we subject language and make things mean what they never meant. We have a penchant for uncertainty and a lust for confusion.   In