Managed to Capture Motion

 

A great friend was also a roommate of mine for a year down in the foreskin of Manhattan.  We lived in a Lower East Side tenement with a rough, wonderful view immediately out on to the Williamsburg Bridge.  He always wrote policy papers on factual matters that concerned social justice.  He still does.  But one day he showed me a page or two he penned wherein he traced the motion of the sun, across his room as dusk expanded.  It was arresting.  He had managed to capture motion itself.  I admired him and I was jealous.  I had no idea how to do such a thing.  And I remember the two of us sitting there, whenever I sit down and consider the slow steady change of the morning light or the evening onset and try to write about it.

 

I made my way hesitatingly into Countee Cullen’s “One Way to Heaven” today.  Fasting, drinking lots of black coffee and water, I read when I visited the bathroom, a few pages at a time.   The introduction in this particular anthology would have been better to avoid, I suspect.  The editor suggests "One Way to Heaven" wasn’t well received in its day and was deemed implausible.  This informs my hesitating progression.  Anticipating perhaps James Baldwin’s Gabriel Grimes in “Go Tell it On the Mountain”, the author of which apparently credited Cullen with teaching him French (but nothing more), Sam is a convincing performer, an ironic preacher and, like us all, a hypocrite who appears to be using the power of the pulpit to woo the recent convert Mattie. 

 

I used to have a friend named Mattie who lived on Empire Boulevard in the Crown Heights section of, Brooklyn.  Dignity personified; she was a teacher’s aid the years I worked at High School Redirection in the Brownsville and thirty-five years my senior, she taught me, while I taught class and quietly legitimized my role so that I could slowly claim respect.  I remember one day I wanted to play the students some Muddy Waters, and they weren’t particularly interested.  But Ms. Carter, Ms. Mattie Carter simply said: “When we were young, they used to line up outside the club just for the chance to see the man.”  And with that, I had their attention.  I hope she is very well.

 

Anyway, I’m enjoying Cullen’s prose, thus far.  He allows Sam the dignity of architecting his own indignity.  He is, for now, at peace with his sinful inconsistencies using the power of his profession to manipulate a young lady’s questions of faith towards his own advantage. Coaches, and bosses, and teachers can all use the power of their position in ways untoward, though there is a unique quality to the vile when a man of the cloth, invokes all that is holy to satisfy base desire.  A fan of Keats, a fan of Shelly, it’s interesting to watch Cullen the poet paint out a tapestry, beyond the pith of verse.  But it’s Monday and the list I have is long.   Sam and Mattie will remain as yet unsullied and there in the bathroom bookstand, for now.

 

 

 

Monday, 02/10/20