Radical Transparency

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December 02, 2008

Secret Flowers

I just read the first chapter of East of Eden again.  Because I couldn't resist.  Too good not to want back in, even if just for a moment.

And, of course, as not so secretly expected, I found something new.

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers.

I don't have those kinds of memories.  I have snapshots and impressions and a handful of incomplete, skeletal stories, but I don't remember my imagination.  Not as far back as childhood names for grasses anyway.

I can tap imagination memory a little bit in relation to sports and music.  I remember counting down, commentating, and launching three pointers to take playoff games to OT.  I remember walking out on a spotlit stage, long hair swinging, and hearing the crowd explode as I picked up my guitar.

But I think that's where it stops.  Or that's where my access stops.  At the moment anyway.  I do hear faint echoes of crawling around pretending to be animals.  I know stories of my days dressed up as Robin Hood and carrying a quarterstaff.  I can't imagine my mind wasn't racing all day every day.  And I hope I'll someday dig deeper into those memories.

But not today.  No secret flowers for me.
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November 21, 2008

Blues, Poetry, Temperature, and Guilt

Every Friday, Ta-Nehisi Coates posts a poem and asks his readers for their thoughts.

Today's is Middle Passage by Robert Hayden.  A white man writing about slave ships.  From white perspectives.  Sympathetic, it seems, to everyone involved.

"10 April 1800--
Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says
their moaning is a prayer for death,
ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.
Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter
to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under."

It made me think of Benito Cereno, of course.  But it also made me think of Taj Mahal's blues version of Langston Hughes's Crossing.

Strange the contrast between the fever in the Hayden poem and the chill in Hughes.

It yanks me back into Melville:

Whether this haggardness had aught to do with criminality could not be determined; since, as intense heat and cold, though unlike, produce like sensations, so innocence and guilt, when, through causal association with mental pain, stamping any visible impress, use one seal - a hacked one.

Crossing is track 6 on An Evening of Acoustic Music.

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