all you people, you know the blues got soul & this is a story, a story never been told … the blues had a baby & they named the baby rock & roll muddy waters
1 twas a day of fortuitious forces & events.
in the heavens, the sun promised ideal affectational exchange, while miz moon fell sick from overwork. fleet mercury proclaimed a hope-to-die-paartay, while the deities of love & war conjoined in fiery coitus never thinking thru’ the consequences. father time balanced his budget, dour pluto gave a fierce libido its head & moody uranus read a letter full of tears. but neptune was to win the day, driving a sleek & shiny oldsmobile, the muscle car of love, into the celestial white only showrooms of popular song.
down here on the ground, on a muggy march & memphis afternoon, sun sam phillips put young ike turner & his rhythm kings on wax (with ike on piano, raymond hill on tenor sax, willie kizart on lead guitar, willis sims on drums & jackie brenston on vocals). the song: ike turner’s rocket 88. rock ‘n roll exploded from the belly of the blues, breached its birth gates with a veil over its eyes; rock ‘n roll was here to stay. oh how horny hound dogs howled & fat lascivious roosters crowed for day & in the acid afterbirth, in the gunshot accents on even beats, in the keening night cries of the electric guitar, the hip, unrepentant glissandi of an infectious boogie woogie keyboard & wry raucous saxophone, a dark alchemy was loosed; an amount of alkali equal to acid fluxed sweet puppy love & transmuted it into a feral, snarling addiction.
2 what kind of love was this that made me manic; made me want to jump & shout; that flaired my big fleshy nostrils wide at eight? was it the fearful floride in the chalky southern california water…or something more sinister in the music? lurking in the lyrics, in the velvety smooth phrasing of ivory joe hunter was the germ of an idea that lovers might be delusional; i was surely feeling things i wasn’t supposed to feel. was i hallucinating?
i asked jackie p. in the fifthgrade to go steady with me. or maybe sheasked me. it was all over in a mere short week & i almost lost my mind. i followed her around for days like a hang dog, my heart going bo-bom-doo-wop, bo-bom-doo-wop & i in my ten year-old tenor sang like frankie ervin of the shields: u cheated, u lied, u said that you loved me – until her big football playing fourteen year old brother threatened to kick my narrow ass if i didn’t stop. a year later i fell in love with pretty brown evelyn t. who called out my name when we were picking spelling partners in class. her voice mouthing my name made my skin ripple & flutter. i felt a sudden forceful flow & swift release of affective force – since i met u baby, my whole life has changed – but alas, evelyn had older sisters who entertained grown men in their home & with her watching. soon she was mimicking them with an older boy from across town. what’s he got that i aint got, i asked howard, my best friend, indignantly the reply wasquick & brutal. a dick, he said.
3 i felt weak in the knees, like little willie john, & loose in the head: my baby had left me i wish i was…dead? no i didn’t want to die. i was almost twelve years old & fighting mad! i wanted the little girls to stop doggin’ me around. that was it! in fact, i didn’t even want a little girl anymore. jackie wilson had it right; helped me sort out what i wanted -- i wanted a woman, a lover & a friend! & i’d wait.
ichanged schools again following my soldier daddy, the third move in eight years. the girls would have to wait, would have to grow up ‘cause i was playing football & basketball & running track & listening to smokey robinson, imagining my jesus loving mama telling me to shop around. i started going to the youth center on the army base on saturday nights & after three months of looking, gathered the courage to ask joanne b. to dance. she agreed & i danced with her every dance thereafter, slow & fast (even though i couldn’t really fast dance) until the place closed. she was medium tall, pretty, black & stacked & she liked me; called me on the phone every day. between phone calls i’d work on my dancing moves with my sisters; even fixed my twist. when we next met at the center on the following saturday night, i did myself, dee dee sharp, chubbie checker & hank ballard proud. i did the twist, the wa-watusi & the mashed potatoes, too. i found that the slow drag & booty grind came naturally to me. ooh it felt so good when our hips & crotches rubbed against each other, made achingly sweet friction as smokey sang who’s lovin’ u. we snuck out back & under a monterey cypress tree, i kissed her. she ruined that first kiss by sticking her tongue in my mouth.
4 three times we tried to get it right, the last, memorably, with both our eyes wide open. she saw my uneasy disgust & confusion & dismissed me as a lame. she never called me or saw me again & i took comfort in ray charles’ declarative: born to lose i 've lived my life in vain; every dream has only brought me pain, all my life i've always been so blue, born to lose & now i’m losing u. to add injury to insult, i broke my leg trying to deliver newspapers on roller skates. i was laid up in the hospital mending for 3 months until it was time to move once again – this time to a black city & a black high school.
i grew four incheswhile in the hospital. i went in 5’11” & cameout 6’3”. i thought i was now big enough to find me a real woman. my good friend, melvin,17 & the baddest sucka in town (who beatup his older brother who used to be the baddest sucka in town) had hooked up withour high school spanish teacher. she was a real grown woman, white & too fine. she would come & get him. take him away. i thought i might do something like that until sam cooke was shot to death in an l.a. motel by a real bad woman.
he had had it made; had29 top 40 hits, but his version of a fool’s paradise rang truest: i often think of the lifei've led & oh, it's a wonder, i ain't dead…but he was dead – just like that, wacked by a woman.like "cleanhead" vinson said, who never loved& said he never will, i knew then that a lovingproposition could most definitely get u killed.
i had to back up, hold up & regroup. i had to think this through. if i learned to really talk to a woman, maybe steal a lyric or two, from smokey perhaps, or the temptations, like: it would be easier to take the wet from water, or the dry from sand… or… one day u will begin to realize by the look that’s in my eyes how much i love u… yeah, that’s it, like that. & learn to kiss, learn to suck on a tongue & explore the soft inside of a woman’s cheek -- maybe, if i’m good enough & if the planets ruling the day favor me, i just might get the right woman & … i just might get laid!
for trudy wells & the six teens lyrics from “a casual look” by ed wells (1956)
in an age of innocence where happily ever after began with an idyllic wedding walk down the aisle just days before a conscripted groom shipped out overseas, i raptly listened, my eyes bulging with pulsing heart-shaped pupils, to trudy wells, barely a teen herself, as she fronted five other teens to sing:
a casual look, a little ring,can reveal just what u think…
trudy’s girlish voice fleshed out my simple love; painted the self-coherent, internally consistent setting along with all those do-do-do-do-do-do-do-dos, for my acting out hormones to play at love. i could be her unshy soldier guy with the frozen face; i could practice what would become a lifetime of begging:
darling can’t u see that i’m going overseas for two, three, four years, don’t know how long its gonna be …
my romantic fantasy lay hidden in that voice; leaked out into my real world through that simple lyric, opened up the timeless for me to step into & stay there. but my real affairs & numerous nuptials, which began sweet & innocent enough, more often than not ended in trouble, heartaches & pain.
& just to think all it took was a casual look…
there were no songs to tell me that openings were temp- orary, that fantasy could neither balance love & need nor even hint of the impossible selfwork involved in making a relationship last. like a man trying to relive his first coital release, i’ve spent the goodly part of my life trying to reprise the thousand delights cloaked in a casual look.
for dee clark, ray charles, smokey robinson & james cotton
delectus clark in ‘61 characterized a particular strain of mangrief, gave silky voice, swooping falsetto & sundry other truth- effects to a particular kind
of mentalizing, a mediated affect, & episodic memory retrieval; the engrammatic imagery of heartache & pain coaxed into a blue metaphor, into raindrops falling from my eyes.
betraying an upward flow of air in the head; air containing water vapor cooling below the dew point into a mighty cloud condensing into raindrops falling from my eyes.
ray charles robinson sang of it in ’56, thru’ phlegmy & fey vocal chords, thru multivalent performative effects & oracular wilderness crying to warn of raindrops falling from my eyes.
falling so copiously, so prodigiously that they threatened eminent inundation, even drowning for those swept up in the violent, unceasing torrent of raindrops falling from my eyes.
“smokey” bill robinson, past master tunesmith, bade us look in ‘65 behind the phoney smiles & laughter, pierce masquerading gaiety to see the tracks of raindrops falling from my eyes.
see the flood damage, the aching hollows that pockmark the heart’s bereft landscapes, feel the rending agony of the fear of being replaced scored on the soul by raindrops falling from my eyes.
james “superharp” cotton in ’96 dug up murderous sentiment interred in billie’s long gone blues; bluntly pointed to abandonment, where it surely leads with raindrops falling from my eyes.
made me think of how closely i held u, away from gawking eyes; how I bought yr time & attention, even possessed u; how I plotted yr demise when u left me with raindrops falling from my eyes.
but there is no cloud in my head, nor is my heart a rock that gushes forth water when tapped twice by a miracle staff. i am just another lonely guy making up stories about raindrops falling from my eyes.
rejoice with those who rejoice & weep with those who weep… st paul
the apostle who verily wrote of spiritual gifts, who claimed sweet love to be the best of these was no more an authority than johnny lee williams when he sang in ’59 his only lead for the drifters before being finessed aside by ben e. king:
if u cry i know my heart would break that would be much more than i can take…
could that holy, humble apostle, who repudiated women – said they sinned first, were created second, & should by all means keep quiet – even measure up to the doo-wop balladeer whose slick androgenic stylings honey-dripped with such unerring empathy.
if you cry i don't know what i'll do, baby cause i'm so in love with you. & if i knew that i had caused you pain, my tears would fall like the rain.
u’d have to be deaf, dumb & blind not to know that johnny lee truly loved his baby. & in that same way i hoped to love mine, whoever she might be. her joyeous joy would be my joy; her precious pain would be my own, her life my cherished life.
how pristine pure the framework, how striking quaint the lens an eleven year-old looks thru’ to interpret, to interact in his world. most of my ideas & beliefs about love came from someone else, somewhere else; were uninformed by
my own dormant perversity. sieved thru layers of st paul – a year before paul anka’s anthem on transient, adolescent love – my amorous notions crystallized. but i could only see thru’ them darkly – & only what I wanted to see.
i could not see the markers for tragic long-term abuse, & there was no one to explain to my youthful heart that love & obsession were identical twins that sometime had the same euphoric feel; & happy ever after depended on telling one from the other.
so i opened up a vein & mainlined the music; introjected doo-wop voices to tell me what my mama couldn’t or my daddy wouldn’t. about my baby, my sweet baby, like tommy bullock of the fiestas sang, she’d most definitely be:
… so doggone fine …loves me, come rain, come shine…
fine. my simplistic motivation for attachment. that’s all she had to be. big lipped, heavy hipped & built up from the ground; could come in any shade. no confusing eroticism for love. the two were, of course, the same, like intensity & intimacy.
my baby, captured by my powerful induction, would ooh-wee bring the drama, change my mood, provoke me to make her over & endure my jealous rages as proof of my devotion. she would supply my every need.
i couldn’t see it then but i can see so clearly now, looking back over the wreckage & withdrawals of four different matrimonies, a bevy of broken romances; over all the what-went-wrongs – there is no true love in a doo-wop song; no true love at all.
the steps came easily,naturally. how easy thisdance, how eloquent thedrums, how comfortingthe rhythm –
gege of the seven strokes –
a cool & undulantrippling of rhythmic waves,so like the sea, so deceptivelypleasant ‘round the place whereu wade or bathe, but treacherous‘neath the surface, draggingu down down down.
yemọja gives with one hand but takes with the other
one with those rhythmsthe woman sinks down intotheir blue-green mystery.into successive, changingsymmetries of fish swirling inmulticolored schools, intovertiginous bits of coral &sea shells & kelp, planckton& ocean stones surrounding her,protecting her, loving her.
the goddess comes revealing herself –
half woman, half fish, taking her hand, drawing her down into the deepest of depths into a timeless realm where all human acts play themselves again & again without ceasing
yemọja gives with one hand but takes with the other
attached is she to memories;pleasant & painful, always inher mind. she forever reminisces,looks back into the past &remembers distant things:distant things still close toher.the goddess takes her headmakes her dance; makes her facea deep dark shame, an everywoman’s fear & shame, repletewith conflict rising from herseparateness, from desires &strivings for separate love.
random rape, real & imagined; indifferent battering; physical & emotional; incest in word & deed; neurotic self-undoing, purging & self-mutilation, concealed larceny & autistic detachment – acting with convincing politeness; abrading a young girl’s soul..
makes her lookat her secrets, her loss ofinnocence again & yet again,until she can bear to look no more,
yemọja gives with one hand but takes with the other
until the dead space in herspirit begins to stir. giving wayto a murderous rage, whichsubsides into caustic anger.the goddess does not relent,but takes her back to that placeagain & yet again until angergives way to resentment; givesway to boredom & she grows tiredof seeing the same old scenes.
“look until u see something new & interesting,” yemọja demands,
taking her back to look again.the steps come easily,now. how easy thisdance, how eloquent thesedrums, how comfortingthis rhythm –
this gege of the seven strokes –
the epiphanic laughter announcing –like green trees bending announce thestorm – the abrupt, invisible/electricmediating force of yemọja, a healinghilarity reducing the prurient dischargeof spirit decanted from a woman’sopen psychic sores to pure élan vital,transmuted by the power of forgiveness.
ọya a princess tears a cloth in twain that falls to earth a potent spell. the mighty niger floods the plain; ọya springs from its lusty swell. ọya is the hurricane, witch wind & summer breeze. brings trouble & abundant pain brings healing rains & love’s reprise her power sweeps away deceit; she is corruption’s mighty foe. her justice swift, severe, complete; for truth she strikes her surest blow. mother of nine, owner of winds she nurtures sans distraction the egungun, four sets of twins & every marketplace transaction. ọya gifts the breath of life & takes it back when life is done; şango’s bloody bearded wife, more terrible than anyone. ọya, thus, is absolute change her winds explode, uproot & spew destuction. how passing strange this force that brings the new. ọya is the electric storm, clears the way for the lightning bolt. unwavering champion of reform, provocative spirit of revolt
a nose opened wide recalls the scent of musk melons & clotted cream, the delightful penetrating odor of ripening, is nothing more or less than pheromonic sorcery.
a salivating tongue remembers sweet sugary cakes, baked in a shallow tray & filled with jelly or butter cream, is nothing more or less than sweet sortilege.
the flavors & aromas of my aroused woman compel my nose & tongue like gravity, to blaze salacious, salivary trails to the source; to that tangy, slippery salt lick to irrigate a delicious opening,
to pause, like a blues lover, at the door of a favorite joint, to soak up, savor the sounds; show sensual sapience before hardening up & sliding in, giving in to luxuriant lubricity,
giving in to the tao of love like a fervent farmer breaking ground to sow his seeds, like an intrepid warrior breaking thru’ enemy lines, like a stallion bucking wildly in a stream or
a huge stone sinking into the sea, into the welcoming wetness, into the swelling tumidity of wonder, into the shimmering not-self of release, is nothing more or less than tantric play.
yr loving arms hold me like lanceolate leaves, broad & pinnately veined; yr yellowbrown flesh, delicately scented & easily bruised, its soft colorless hair perfectly plates the visual euphony that u are; yr sweet, solitary purplepink flower, whose fragrant, contractile petals close at my tongue’s raspy touch, sings to me a sultry siren song, drawing me stiffly into yr warm, wet stoneless center, yr delicious friction, again & again until i’m passionspent.
jamesetta hawkins, who for me is to the lovesong what gwen brooksis to the sonnet, transposed her birth name to etta james & in early1960 supercharged the colored clouds of fine auric substance in mydesire; molded & shaped my juvenescent feeling coresinging the lines:
i heard church bells ring, i heard a choir singing...
in the echoing halls of my desire, those plaintive words mademetaphoric moisture & vapor rise, made sensate particles collide,rub together, raising the charge to hyperelevated levels. made myblues electric, bright & clear;made heartbreak a necessary nemesis;taught me that tears may be all one has when powerless:
all i could do was cry; all i could do was cry…
her voice cried for me. made me love/hate the heartbreak feeling,hooked me on the drama, the memories & fantasies that madethe feeling worse. but this was what love was about,wasn’t it?later that year she put to wax the magical words i needed mybeloved to say to me:
all i need is someone like u my dearest darling, please love me too...
in the matrix of my desire, specialized structures were built, set &embedded; loss & need, two polar pillars stood in mutual opposition,connected numbness, disbelief, separation, despair, sadness &loneliness with clay-footed, flavor of the day love objects, theembodied narcissistic essentials of well-being…
i don't want nobody if i can't have you oh i can't love nobody unless i'm loving you...
& then came “at last”, that 1942 mack gordon/harry warren tune that etta breathed life into. this song was the promise & the prize & her voice sealed the deal. i ached with 13 year old anticipation, visualizing what my true love would look like, what it might feel like to have a thrill to press my cheek to …
at last, my love has come along, my lonely days are over, & life is like a song...
in the magic theater of my desire, love donned its wizard robes, called for its transmuting wand, touched loss to make numbness feel, make disbelief believe & separation whole again. gave despair hope, made sadness glad & brought to loneliness an exquisite, lingering humantouch. love transformed need into self-efficacy & self-respect:
ohhh you smile, you smile & then the spell was cast & here we are in heaven, for you are mine, at last!
but it never lasted, etta. it was always so ephemeral &… temporary. u never sang of the outside fix that love could be. u didn’t prepare me for the time when love stopped working, stopped making me high;when i couldn’t stop my mindless stumble thru a long life of ugly relationships, no matter how hard i tried…
alone from night to night you'll find me too weak to break the chains that bind me. i need no shackles to remind me, i'm just a prisoner of love.
but u couldn’t could u? warn me, that is. yr life wasn’t that much different than mine. could it be that the reason yr voice sings softly but unmistakeably in the background of all my memories is that we are bound by the same addictions, the same obsessions. is that why i hear yr voice so loud & clear.
i want a sunday kind of love a love to last past saturday night i’d like to know it’s more than love at first sight i want a sunday kind of love
well, we have grown old together, peaches, & since i’ve known every type of love, been ground down thru the mill of love, reviewed the wreckage, revisited the scenes, i need u, etta, the one who has been with me longest, to sing to me once more, tell me that its not my fault, that i’ve beat myself up enough, & that i’ve finally paid the cost.
tell me, baby please, that self-forgiveness really is the greatest love.
the mysterious power of the feminine repelled the assembled powers of heaven…
(woman is the gateway tween ọrun & àiyé)
the same that is taboo to the uninitiated; those magical potencies of patience, those efficacies of control & reverence –
(the mothers art mightier than the òrìşà)
the mothers who overshadow all women; who are bound to them by menstrual flood
(blessed are the mysteries; the vaginal rites)
who dwell in a village of women, the àjé, the gẹlẹdẹ , the mothers who place the crown;
(even heaven cannot prevail against the mothers)
beat back no less than şango & his thunderstones, ògún & his knives & swords, omolu & his plethora of pandemics,
(great is the collective power of the feminine)
beat back the almighty host of warrior ancestors, the ibora egun, for in truth they were only men.
(the mothers know the secret of life & cannot be defeated)
when yemọja & her mountainous tides & ọya of the electric storm joined the fray, they, too, tasted bitter defeat. Even the awon iyami were rebuked & could not prevail.
(the mothers art mightier than the òrìşà & the ancestors)
òrìşà & egungun to heaven returned defeated & filled with despair. never again would they engage the mothers
(ọşun sits at the vertex of creation & procreation)
ọşun, the primal erotic feminine, secret ally of the mothers, placed on her head a calabash, danced & sang from ọrun to àiyé, from heaven to earth,
(ìbà ọşun kayodẹ, i respect the spirit of the river; owner of the dance!)
beating the calabash as a drum she danced to the center of the village of women, into the reservoir of feminine energy,
(yẹye komaya, mother, bring the power of the mothers)
compelled the mothers to join in her dance, rousing the cellular force felt in every vulvate contraction, secretion & climax; in the stretching & tearing of childbirth…
o distant sky, wide earth, vast seas, do not crush & don't destroy the wicked. let them destroy themselves! itshak katzenelson
1941: gunnar myrdal surveys southern whites on miscegenation:
what do u think the negro mostly wants from integration?
“cain’t u see?” they said.
“nigras want nothing more, nothing less than to marry & fornicate with white women!”
what he didn’t ask:
“why do u feel this way?”
that terrifyingly tumescent query would tear, rend & rupture:
the membranous tissue of lies that partly or completely occludes the rabbit hole to certain sexual disintegration & mental sadism; the plausible reasons given to explain away purely phobic behavior driven by the prurient delusions of mass psychosis.false sensate perceptions elicited by what drug, what wish or dark phantasmaldesire?
the brutish african with his abnormally large penis lasciviously leering at the fleshy contours of whiteness; breaching, eroticizing racial borders – mothers, sisters, daughters – no matter; seeking to desecrate what was proclaimed unsullied – the whited receptacle for small but sacred fetishes.
see him, that mortal black behemoth, mount the helpless rapunzel, climb her hair, take her roughly, rending, tearing & stretching, his sloshing pleasure drowning out her screams –
while a diminutive white boy, humiliated by his small endowment looks on thinking ruinous thoughts; complicated, conflicted thoughts that make him want to kill the beast & rid the world of its kind; to string him up on a poplar tree, boil him in oil, strip off his flesh & castrate the offending member. or failing to do so becomes himself degraded, a human toilet, a cleaner of ejaculate, a cuckold & a slave;
while a little white girl, bewildered by unwanted sanctimony, ambivalently totters on her pedestal, looks on not knowing what to do or think. conflicted, she like shamhat of old with the sweetnessof temple harlotry. but religion succors nother lust, only her guilt. she yearns for, is repulsed by what she sees & aroused, makes the vision obligatory for sexual functioning.
she plans furtive liaisons she can disavow if caught; pawns beast & sexual intimacy for virtue.
1941: emmett louis till is born. no avatar of man-the- whole is he; just a little black boy, raised without a father, who in untimely death gave conscious shape to a people’s dream.
a people’s unconscious, massed for action, becomes aware of a light in its collective darkness; a luminous phosphorescence flitting, hovering over swampy ground caused by spontaneous combustion of hopes unrealized & dreams deferred…
1955 emmett louis till, a pawn in a cosmic chess match, a piece of the lowest value blunders onto life’s eighth rank & is promoted to a symbol of power.
went down to mississippi, ridin’ the southbound train went down to mississippi, ridin the southbound train; & there found death awaiting to take me home again.
three days in money was all it took. money, mississippi. three days for the whimsical innocent, traipsing along the crags of phobic southern life, without regard for hidden peril, to trespass racial borders, to stir the dragon of sexual psychosis.
perhaps he got caught up in the glamour of southern serendipity. thought he was in a humphrey bogart movie. thought like a fourteen year old. thought pretty carolyn bryant was lauren bacall & that her conflicted look meant:
u know how to whistle, don't u, emmett? u just put yr lips together - & blow."
emmett louis till, or maybe some other faceless black phantasm, escaped missus bryant’s psychotic subterranean chamber of horrors & whistled. she gave him up to redeem her virtue; to save husband roy & in-law j.w. from the whirlpools that tear the fabric of white southern mind & body.
three days later they came for him. before day on a sunday, retributive white wrongness snatched the boy out of mose wright’s house & taught him a lethal lesson.
two redneck paladins of white womanhood; killed a young buck because they could.
the mississippi delta, pristine symbol of soul merging with the absolute, of spiritual nourishment, tasted corruption; tasted the desecration of adolescent whimsy
the good old boys had a good laugh when they dragged the mutilated body out of the tallahatchie. said:
“aint it just like a nigger to try to swim the river wit a cotton gin fan chained to his back.”
a bloatedfourteen-year-old corpse not worth agoddamned whistle.
his mama cried:
"look what they’ve done to my son!"
put his reliquiae & american insanity on immediate display for the world to see...
if a thousand, it was fifty thousand black chicagoans on that grim september day who looked upon that body; those remains:
a people’s unconscious, massed for action, gravitates toward a gory image, becomes identified with yet another cruciate symbol; an emblem of suffering & shame…
they marched around that coffin in robert’s temple of god, some passing out from the sight, their footfalls raising prescient echoes of marches yet to come, some shouting as their inner walls of fear & trepidation broke & came a’tumbling down.
meanwhile, back in mississippi:
nine white farmers, two white carpenters & one white insurance agent deigned not to disturb their ancestors nor turn them in their graves...
took minutes to acquit the accused in spite of the sudden emanation of radiant courage from moses wright who fingered them in open court, or the damning testimony of willis reed who forfeited his sanity when reaching asylum in chicago.
a people’s unconscious, massed for action, moves; releases power.
bends the mind of an alabama seamstress who got sick & tired of being sick & tired until she becomes spirit in act;
floods the ego of a young georgia preacher who identifies with a glory image of freedom until he becomes spirit in act;
opposes the unctuous whore & witch whose spirit endures in america’s psychic vineyards; the susceptible ahabs, the roy bryants & j.w. milams who don hats or hoods, suits or sheets, literally & figuratively to fend off morbid flaccidity,
becomes fuel for an endless journey of collective growth…
we give thanks, emmett, for yr immolation, much like the faithful who, venerate agony, transubstantiate flesh to bread & blood to wine. we offer up yr body that our celebrant collective memory may take, eat & remember!
we give thanks, emmett, for the gift u have given us, first to move us up out of our apathy & resignation into anger, then to help us release that anger into self-affirming action.
we need to remember!
in remembering, we can revisit yr bloated visage again & again, not to wallow in inertia & recrimination, but to test our emotional wounds to see if they are healing; to see if we have outgrown our need to build collective identity around past atrocity.
in remembering, we can, if we choose, give up our grudges, resentments, hatreds & self-pity, knowing that we do not need them to punish those who have hurt us; knowing that we were never truly victims.
in remembering, emmett, we can do honor to yr sacrifice, drawing on its fullness & power to rediscover strengths we’ve always had; relocate our limitless capacity to understand & accept others & ourselves.
