I am otherfar more ecclesiastically REclined than I am Ecclesiastically inclined -- which is to say, I am no Christian; nor do I subscribe to any other religion. And so, Ive no scripture as people customarily conceive of religious texts to which I may turn for surcease in times of doubt and despair. But I do have recourse to poesy, from which I oft find substantive scintillas of solace. Particularly, I am oft retrieved, mayhap so much as redeemed, by my favorite poem, Meditation At Lagunitas by Robert Hass. poetryfoundation.org/poem/177014 The initial third of Hasss poem goes: All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. Ive read and reread and reread aloud -- like a mantra -- Hasss poem in the last several hours, after hearing the finding of the Ferguson, MO Grand Jury in the case of White police officer, Darren Wilson who with a fusillade of bullets wantonly shot dead unarmed and fleeing Black teenager, Michael Brown. St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch, and the Grand Jurys refusal to charge Darren Wilson is but the latest mongst myriad many relegations of the worth of Black peoples lives . . . and deaths . . . in the context of Americas polity. For centuries, in the context of this polity, Black people have wrestled trembles to rages, and manned the braces, railing gainst injustice, yearning and wailing, and working and marching and oft dying for fits and starts of intermittent justice. And so oft, just when we imagine we have it finally, securely in hand, just when weve succumbed to the hope to fancy it tenable, sustainable, we find Justice repossessed. All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. Contemporary, common-lettered, Lacanian notions of justice; or an ancient, capital-lettered, Platonist paradigm of Justice -- at such times as now, they both feel too much, if not all, about loss, that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea, that justice is as if by [its] presence, / some tragic falling off from a first world / of undivided light. Moreover, the other notion that, /because there is in this world no one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, / a word -- blackberry, or justice -- is elegy to what it signifies. In fact, it seems, as go other of Hasss lines, that / talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, / pine, hair, woman, you and I. People oft perfunctorily parrot Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. What few know is that Dr. King was actually paraphrasing Unitarian minister, prominent American Transcendentalist, and Abolitionist, Theodore Parkers third sermon, Of Justice and the Conscience from his 1857 collection, Ten Sermons of Religion: Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of [ . . . ] right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble. I am a riot of sentiments, though, saliently, I think-feel -- indeed, I *believe*, like A Man For All Seasons playwright Robert Oxton Bolt defined belief -- that the disparities of expectation, judgment, accountability, and legitimacy endemic to Americas historical and extant Context of Race, Pretext of Racialism, and Subtext of Racism -- particularly vis a vis the conspicuously misnomered justice system by which Black people are especially, veritably bludgeoned, sometimes to death -- are a collective vestige of White Americas enslavement, mass-rape and mass-murder of Black People. And America did, as Parker said, tremble, eventually bloodily wrestling its trembles to rages enough to abolish Slavery. But the history of Black people in America is not merely one of a singular, iconic and defining conflict of conscience gainst conscience, a Civil War, but rather, a series of still on-going trembles wrestled to rages. White America at large well might be trembling tonight and afterward at the sight its chronic and acute iniquities. And Black people, certainly are trembling with longing, desire for justice. But what Fire will come, Next Time, when we wrestle our respective and collective trembles rages? I recall with the emotional dissonance, the ambivalence, that prompts poesy, other lines from Meditation At Lagunitas : Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 08:07:37 +0000
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