Jerry Ward's Blogspot

  Lines for Monday Morning   Instant opinions zoom down West begging peace to be still   Unhappy with the fire they flap up East leaving   peace to be still   Instant opinions life fluids in grains of sand apologize for nothing   Discontent with the water they pivot North to find the South abandoning peace to be still   Devout makers of misery they follow the science, the sad snafu of broken minds birthing   peace to be still.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             August 23, 2021    

THE WORDS OF ST. RUFUS   I have fractal faceprints. All saints have fractal faceprints and footprints.   My father carried crosses; I carry words.   You can read my thin biographies   in the Catholic Encyclopedia .   It disappoints me that after more than a thousand years only a fistful of people have read my epistles, letters that the Roman Catholic Church have ostracized from the liturgy. I advise folks who are incarcerated by the black/white binary to read my letters.   The letters may save them from the oblivion of damnation.   If the letters do not, it ain't my fault.   I have walked in the valley of despair,   and my feet are intact and clean.   When, dear Lord, is this business about washing in the blood of a lamb?   As far as I know, people ought to wash in water not blood. It is all future-hype to me.   I have climbed   the mountains of equity and found cosmic discord   that is as vicious as a hungry Siberian tiger, but I defeated the tiger with

  SITUATION REPORT   The summer heat in New Orleans prompts me to sweat ideas.   As might be the case with many Americans and citizens around the world, I am weary of pandemic,   journalism that makes a travesty of what news ought to be, a growing moral depravity among millions of people, and the international   disorder that might provide firm grounds for WWIII. It seems "natural" to be annoyed by uninvited robot calls, by terrorism, by road rage, by the grief that must be carried when friends die, by sundry assaults which preclude harmony and peace. I DO NOT LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY.   Not liking the days of my life is not exactly a free choice. Yes,   I do have an option to tell myself beautiful lies.   I could tell myself that the enslavement of my ancestors in the State of Mississippi does not matter now. But the summer heat reminds me that enslavement before and after 1865 matters greatly. I cringe when I am reminded that historical sorrows   contribute to regretta

 v Lines for August 18, 2021   Ultimately,   as if ultimatum is a flddle-footed   notion, people by habit account for obnoxious stuff----   the mysteries of a   planet, the sublime   debris   of essentials----   those   mini-testimonials   cancel aged beliefs in values, confidence in the what matters .   People by nature cannibalize patience the way Columbo   and trench coat ate tolerance,   the way the daily news cancers a human heart or a human thought.   People by custom insist that they are entitled to obliterate Creation.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

IN   APPRECIATION:   John Oliver Killens (1916-1987)   The Minister Primarily . New York: Amistad, 2021.   464 pp.   $27.99   As Ishmael Reed, a razor-sharp satirist, attests in his foreword for   The Minister Primarily , Killens   "proved that his satirical pen could cut individuals and institutions to ribbons" (xvi).   The twin targets in this novel are struggles against the deadly corruption that plagues many African nations and the deadlier political corruption in the deeply troubled   United States of America.   Good satire afflicts readers with discomfort, and only readers who are stalwart long-distance runners will appreciate what Killens achieves in prose that is exceptionally baroque or rococo   or a tantalizing mixture of extremes. It is easy to believe that Killens might have had Rabelais somewhere in his imagination as he wrote the novel, because his masterful and cognition-troubling satire is Menippean.   His satire signifies endlessly as it cuts its read

  TREES AND BRILLIANT FLOWERS ( in memory of Adella Gautier, 1948-2021)   "For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but here leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit." Jeremiah 17:8   The inevitable --- grief battering our hearts; hope preaching to our minds.   Time allows listening again to your stories, fetched from antiquity and burnished to be keys for another day.   Willing to know, we attended then and attend now your performances in the aroma of brilliant flowers.   You are even more now a tree dispensing lore. You are even more now those trees you planted on stage, on page, in films.   We behold those tall dimensions of being special, grateful for the fruits you even now yield.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             August 13, 2021          

 v RANDOM SENSE AND NONSENSE   Pandemic compromises the fun of drinking either 1945 Chateau Mouton Rothschild 750 Ml or Macallan 60 Year Old whiskey in a plastic cup.   Snail-mail lives.   Some militant women have expressed concern that Black's Law Dictionary has not defined WOMANSLAUGHTER .   "Fragile Spreadnecks" is a stereotype of recent vintage.   Today the necessity of necessity is getting the best of   the worst of us.   The news is saturated with Northern penthouse trash. Good Southern trailer trash is off the radar.   Wright Thompson's "The Barn" ( The Atlantic , September 2021, pp. 68-79) provokes anxiety about the current status of August 28, 1955.   The NEH 'Dialogues on the Experience of War program supports the study and discussion of important humanities sources about war, in the belief these sources can help veterans and civilians think more deeply about the issues raised by war and military service."

  ITEMS FOR THIS DAY   Conversations with fellow writers are productive and painful.  Productive for the ideas that get born. Painful for the silence you put in your mouth so as not to offend.    August 29, 2005.  I hope New Orleans is not hit by a hurricane of any category this month.  The sixteen years of misery after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is enough punishment. I speak from the vantage of having survived the 1947 hurricane in the Crescent City.   I have recently heard curses that cause the King James Bible to blush.  I must listen to Roberta Flack's "Reverend Lee" this afternoon.   There is nothing innately wrong with CSPAN's broadcasting  a conversation between Eddie S. Glaude, jr. and Robin DiAngelo about the difficulty of a civil exchange of ideas among Black Americans and White Americans .  Nothing.  There is something systemically not right in CSPAN's failure to broadcast similar conversations between Joy Harjo and Viet Thanh Ngyen , o

    CONSUMING FICTIONS   The fiction that old people are aged to perfection inspires belief in the inevitable cruelty, stress, and depression people endure day to day or year to year or in short or long spans in claims of humanity. 2020 cast a universal shroud. 2021 makes uninvited progress.   It maximizes raw fear, terrorism in many guises, decline of happiness. We respond by becoming shadow figures of what once we thought we were, the special creations of the Trinity.   It is possible to have lucid memory of the way we were, but the effort throws us into absurdity.   It is not possible to possess abundant bliss.   If we make super-human efforts ( enormous leaps of faith )   to enjoy bliss, we fail. We are left to feel we are raisins in the sun and rain. We are weather's collateral damage.   Aged to perfection, we suffer as we follow "the science."   And we eventually know "the science" is metafiction.   So much death.   So much grief to car