There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as “black diamonds.” Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into one’s waistcoat pocket–but it can’t! At the same time, there is a fascination in coal, the supreme commodity of the age in which we are camped like bewildered travelers in a garish, unrestful hotel. And I suppose those two considerations, the practical and the mystical, prevented Heyst – Axel Heyst – from going away.
I’m trying to write a new post about depression and doubt. One does not do this without referencing Leonard Cohen and Ernest Hemingway. I looked up some old posts for reference, only to find that I’d written this almost a year ago to the day:
I can’t say that my medical situation is exactly the same as it was then, but I feel a year better, at least, about almost everything.
Below is what I started with this morning before going back.
For me, doubt is never about the veracity of some narrative. I suppose that’s because the living Christ is the only thing I really believe in. I suppose it’s because I feel connected to the prophetic witness and movement of the Holy Spirit. Or perhaps I am drawn to these realities specifically because I can’t fathom the idea that the salvation of the world depends on getting this or that narrative right. I want to experience what Jesus experienced of God, and what his followers experienced of him. I want to do what he did. I don’t have time for anything else.
For me, doubt isn’t waking up and fearing that the stories we were raised on aren’t true. I don’t care about that. Doubt, for me, is far more insidious. It has to do with waking up and worrying that everything I fought for yesterday doesn’t matter, or, worse, would embarrass Ernest Hemingway. I’m talking about a specific, latent, and under-discussed anxiety that often turns young Christian or Muslim or just plain earnest men into misogynists: the fear of spiritual conviction as masculine failure. In the West at least, men are inevitably trained to worry about this. We are trained not only to believe that our worth as men or as people has everything to do with supposedly gender-bound responsibilities of provision to our families and sexual gratification to ourselves, but that the bald pursuit of both at any cost is somehow noble, right, and good. Spirituality (like nurturing) is better left to women. When we do pursue spiritual matters, God (God!) forbid we allow ourselves to cede equal ground to women or their equal standing before God. God forbid we affirm the radical hunches of Paul or the radical directives of Jesus. If we’re already concerned that spirituality (or anything not manifesting as apathy) makes us cruiser-weight chumps in the war of each against all, we’re not likely to admit women (or gay men, for that matter) can do that shit as well as us, period.
If you’ve ever felt this way, please know that hyper-masculine Neo-Calvinism won’t help. This isn’t about embracing a beefed-up vision of Jesus but about reclaiming an honest one. He fought the law and the law won. And then he won. On the dark mornings of my soul, waking up means having to remember that the radical potency of insubordination and insurrection isn’t just the point of Jesus’ witness, but of this “work in progress called life.” The point of life, as best as I can see it, isn’t found in the catechisms of J.M. Barrie, Martin Luther, or Ulrich Zwingli. It’s found in the life and work of someone like Jesus, killed for daring to free the world from the scarcity model.
That’s no small thing. It’s nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed of. It won’t net you a sports car or pension or the kind of disposable relationships we sometimes crave. It may, however, net you some life and in that sense, abundance.
In the context of the class I’m teaching, it’s important to present the modern formal structures of essay clearly, and for students to be able to execute these schema even as they learn to hear, develop, and deliver their unique, respective voices. It’s also important that they (and that all of us) read widely and across foreign and familiar cultural and linguistic settings.
Braithwaite, of course, is not saying that iambic pentameter is a more formal, academic, or polished form of expression than are the cadences of his experience. The old English forms, unlike the basic structures of essay taught at the undergraduate level, are not conventions to be mastered and then moved on from. They are simply different from other expressions, and just as valid. But the insight he gives about the ways in which experience, geography, and culture influence our voices and our framing devices is brilliantly stated: the hurricane does not roar in pentameters.
In writing, the old sports adage also holds true: you have to get good before you can get fancy. Braithwaite or Ferlinghetti aren’t “fancy” in this sense, nor are the old English conventions necessarily “good.” But we do, all of us, carry points of reference, and for better or for worse, the discipline, practice, and art of writing in English or in the West in general requires a certain level of engagement with things like pentameter and people like Shakespeare, Chaucer, and, later, Whitman, Emerson, Twain, Conrad, Hemingway, etc. In writing and in physics, we’re dealing with relative values and definitions: neither our experience nor our execution manifest in vacuo, neither are they hatched like Athena, fully formed, fully armed, out of Zeus’s head. Motion is always relative, and so too is the spectrum from “good” to “fancy.”
But developing our voice as writers or as people requires the mastery of certain modes of expression. We might even say that without the narrative frames afforded to us by the convention of language, we’d be a very different species arranged in very different communities. Even if we can’t read or write, language has given us the ability to think of ourselves as objects with stories moving through time. Self-reflection is in most cases a function of narrative, ours or someone else’s. Mastering the elements of basic structure (getting “good” with the basic tools of the written trade) brings deeper possibilities of expression closer to our reach. I may understand, conceptually, a great many things about black holes, but I’ll likely make no significant contribution to the study of them if I’m not conversant in the language of higher mathematics, even if I say, with Einstein, that all motion and velocity are relative (save the velocity of C). “Good” and “fancy” may be relative terms, but they occur within a written and spoken frame of reference alongside our experiences and efforts toward understanding and expressing them.
The Physician’s Palette, Pablo Picasso.
It’s been said by Malcolm Gladwell (and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis) that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master any given discipline. I like for students to keep this general idea in mind: you have to get good (proficient, comfortable, familiar, conversant) before you can get fancy. Visually, I’ve used the work of Picasso to drive this point home. Before he did his groundbreaking work, he become very proficient at using the language of the art world around him. Before he was a cubist or surreaist, he plied his craft in the artistic realm of realism. He became conversant at this formal aspect of the craft and, of course, transcended it. But without The Physician’s Palette, we wouldn’t have The Old Guitarist or Guernica.
We’ve been talking about all of these ideas over the first few weeks of class. While preparing for our most recent session, I decided I wanted to revisit the Brathwaite quote in particular and did a google search for “the hurricane does not roar in pentameters.” The second result was for a tumblr blog called Poets of Color using the quote as a tag line. The most recent post on that blog?
Even my hat mocks me laughing on the inside of my grief –
My twisted mouth and gnashing teeth, my fingers fat and clumsy as if they were still wearing those gloves – the bloodstained ones you keep.
What has happened to the pupils of my eyes, Picasso?
Why do I deserve such deformity?
What am I now if not a cross between a clown and a broken piece of crockery?
3
But I am famous. People recognise me despite my fractures.
I’m no Mona Lisa (how I’d like to wipe the smugness from her face that still captivates.)
Doesn’t she know that art, great art, needn’t be an oil-painting?
I am a magnet not devoid of beauty.
I am an icon of twentieth-century grief.
A symbol of compositional possibilities
My tears are tears of happiness – big rolling diamonds.
14
Picasso, I want my face back the unbroken photography of it
Once I lived to be stroked by the fingers of your brushes
Now I see I was more an accomplice to my own unrooting
Watching the pundits gaze open-mouthed at your masterpieces
While I hovered like a battered muse my private grief made public.
15
Dora, Theodora, be reasonable, if it weren’t for Picasso you’d hardly be remembered at all. He’s given you an unbelievable shelf-life. Yes, but who will remember the fruits of my own life?
I am no moth flitting around his wick. He might be a genius but he’s also a prick – Medusa, Cleopatra, help me find my inner bitch, wasn’t I christened Henriette Theodora Markovitch?
Picasso, I want my face back the unbroken geography of it.
– Grace Nichols
Dora Maar (nee Markovitch) was Picasso’s long-time partner and the muse/model for much of his best-known work. She was also an up-and-coming artist in her own right in the 30s and 40s and photographed the creative process of Guernica. The diamond tears Nichols speaks of refer to Maar’s role as the face of The Weeping Woman, a sort of Guernica writ large. She also wrote poetry, and so we’re able to move from seeing Maar through Picasso’s lens to hearing Maar in Nichols’ voice to finally arriving at a place all writers want to be: seen as we see ourselves, heard in our very own voice:
Pure as a lake boredom I hear its harmony In the vast cold room The nuance of light seems eternal All is simple I admire the full totality of objects.
The soul that still yesterday wept is quiet — it’s exile suspended a country without art only nature Memory magnolia pure so far off I am blind and made from a bit of earth But your gaze never leaves me And your angel keeps me.
The hurricane does not roar in pentameters. Dora Maar does not speak in the voice of Picasso or Nichols but is still, for them, an indelible symbol, a cypher for their own struggles (theirs and their peoples’). Behind that is a person with a point of view and a voice, a photographer-poet wrestling with the ecstatic anxieties of having both and of using them. That’s what we’re talking about here.
I can’t speak to the meat of this piece, and the piece it opposes, as it relates to post-blackness.
On the other hand, ethnographically, I do know something about the immigrant experiences of my own kin, and people like them, in the history of 20th century Americanization. Clearly, I cannot (and have no reason to try to) equate the struggles of my brownish Italian ancestors, who came here in the figurative chains of the most extreme forms of European poverty, with the experience of black slaves and their (and their descendants’) struggle for community and freedom. At the same time, it seems to me that the expatriate experiences of slave and immigrant narratives have in common what the writer at Liberator identifies as the longing of the expatriate community to retain ancient values that stand in sharp contrast to the political and economic machinery of the America they were sold on or sold to. In these ways, post-blackness might be something like what classically poor and marginally white ethnic communities have long mourned in their third, fourth, and fifth generations. I know something about that. These experiences are far from identical. But for the vowels in my last name, which are changeable, and the radical values, which are not, I could blend into the WASP elite largely unnoticed. Color, and, I take it, blackness, is something different and has been something different since the beginning.
As a white man with an ethnic memory and as a follower of the radical called Jesus, I’ve thought a lot about what’s being said in the Liberator piece about the possibility and necessity of maintaining cultures and communities that stand in opposition to the neo-liberal or libertarian modes of capitalism destroying our poor (increasingly more of us) and our planet. The instinctive drive of expat communities to retain their cultures and values is not unlike a religious witness: we can and do oppose you forces of injustice that seek to rend our families, exhaust our world, and feed us, all of us, like so much fodder to the socioeconomicpolitical array.
There’s a saying, which I think goes back to James Cone, that “all theology is black theology.” These are reasons why. In the American context, black people are and always have been the most marginalized of expatriated groups. If Jesus is for the margin, and if, by God, Jesus is what the early first-century hymn says:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
and if those who follow are to use this model as a basis for treating each other with this same mindset (Philippians 2:5), then we must follow Jesus into quintessential Otherness vis a vie the power structures of our day. In a figurative way, Jesus followers of every background must be made cruciform. Is it too much to say we must all retain a kind of blackness?
In my own ethnic context, Robert Orsi notes that “Vecoli has portrayed Italians as fierce anti-clericals, angry at the church and looking for leadership to the radical political thinkers who emigrated with them and took up residence in the Italian colonies [in American cities].”
The important part of this quote, for me, is the alignment of Italian American immigrants with the radical political thinkers expatriating with them, and their penchant for living their spiritualities in the home and in street. In The Madonna of 115th Street, Orsi shows the political/spiritual unit of the the domus (the family, the home life), standing in contrast to the demands of a newly industrialized West and in American urban settings. Our cities were and are rife with abject urban poverty, an experience made even harder to bear by the grim contrast it bore against the comparatively wistful graces of abject rural poverty in Southern Italy: generational connections to domus, piazza, culture. This is not to say that pre-Columbian or pre-industrial cultures were uniformly just and good (far from it) or that it was better to die of hunger in Campania than of a broken heart in Brooklyn. It is to say, however, that in the rush to Americanize, my people have lost something vital, something ancient, and something that might serve as an alternative to the money-loving monoculture we’re relearning to resist.
All Christians must be expatriates. All Christians must, like Christ, be immigrants. This is what Paul means when he talks about being in but not of the worldy power structures. This is no raptured absence from the realities of the the mess we’re in. Instead, it’s a stubborn, radical insistence that there are other ways of doing things: black ways, Italian ways, Latino ways, Polish ways, Middle Eastern ways, Asian ways, and diverse seas within them. There are Old World ways worth reexamining, the teachings of our ancestors — and the teachings of Our Lord — among them.
Bummed about the Spurs? There’s still baseball. Read my new essay, freshly published at Hobart, about how I learned everything I know about postmodernism from the Phillies. If you’re feeling dejected about last night’s Big Game, you’ll find some succor in this piece, I think.
Bummed about the Spurs? There’s still baseball. Read 
Chris Cocca 