RACISM RUNS EVERY WHICH WAY



      malcolm x



Heard somebody say on the radio awhile ago something about racism, Tavis Smiley and maybe it was Cornel West, would be talking on the subject, how race is impacted in our lives. I didn't hear what they had to say. I'd just heard a half hour radio documentary on Forest Carter, who wrote The Education of Little Tree. Turns out Forest Carter is Asa Carter a klansman, this, that and the other. The book is so popular as a really good read that when the word came out that Forest Carter was actually Asa Carter, nobody cared. A good story is a good story. In this case, it's a superb story. It's a particularly American story. The movie is superb too, only it doesn't have the golden glow about it the book has. It's not because it's a book, but because it was written from the heart and a good story told. Evidently, there is an issue of Asa Carter being Forest Carter, but nobody cares. It has never made any difference to me that the writer of the story wrote from an alter-ego. Too much expectation of the rational in human behavior. It's still among the most wonderful stories I've read. George Sand, the English writer, was a woman her readers believed to be a man. Hot dang.


There is too much emphasis on racism projected onto the South, too much blame heaped on the South for something that ended a century and a half ago. Before that, it wasn't just the South. Slavery was sanctioned by the Bible just like war is. The Bible sez: slavery good. The Bible sez: war good. The Bible sez: kill em all. One of the things I love most about the South is the rest of the country looks down on it. Like in school I found the kids that the cool kids stayed away from, rejected, were the most interesting ones. Like most of my life I've wondered if I might run across a wise man along my way. I didn't need to go to a cave in a Himalayan mountain to find one. I found a wise man in Whitehead NC, a farmer, sawmiller, welder, tractor mechanic, bluegrass banjo picker, quit school after 11th grade. He had no more money or assets than I have, which is the minimum it takes to keep an autonomous existence. The wise man I found lived in poverty in a mountain county with no interest in anything happening outside Whitehead and Pine Swamp. Whitehead is where he was born, lived his life and was buried. Pine Swamp is where his mother's relatives lived. I found a wise man in America in the South. I know he is not the only one and I know wisdom is not solely a Southern phenomenon. This just happens to be the one God chose to lead me to, for the opportunity to serve a Master in his frailty and learn from him.


When I heard the sentence earlier about race impacting our lives, not having time to hear the show, it pushed me into looking in myself at how race has impacted my life. For one thing, in America, the Western world, Christendom, whiteness is a privilege to be born with, like wealth. That's the nature of the world I've always lived in. Not many white people get it, but all black people get it. Race has impacted my life by being a white man with compassion for what my race puts people of other races through. I can't change the apartheid system in America. I went to civil rights marches and rallies until I saw it was not my place. I withdrew even interest, it was not my problem any more, and went to college in a white world in the South. There were plenty of black issues, but white people don't care; the black people can demand and carry on all they want. White people switch the channel if it gets too loud. It seems to me one of the great issues black people have is that white people don't see them unless they sing, dance, talk dirty and play sports.


Race impacts my world mostly by denial. Almost everybody I know is a racist, including myself, and black people are racists too, so we always have awkward encounters. When I say we're racists, I don't mean a flaming cross kind of racist. I mean I've looked within and found it to be so that I have had it preached into me since childhood. The quiet message from my parents was niggers are ok, best left alone. This was the 1940s and 50s. There was the attitude that they were the same as gypsies, would rob you in the blink of an eye. Of course, the black people lived in a culture of poverty where survival was a way of life. The black kids I knew in childhood were poor, really poor, beat down by the drunk with serious self-esteem issues that lived with their mama in a shack of a house with half a dozen brothers and sisters. Among white people it was taken for granted that's how niggers lived. I felt the compassion early in childhood, pre school, knowing Dorothy Hopkins and her mother, who lived down the hill behind where I grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, Argentine, close to the football stadium on Lawrence dr. 2312. The house is gone and a newer house is in its place. Black people live there now. I never understood why I wasn't supposed to like black people when the kids I knew were good people. They were afraid of white people and I felt sorry for them having to be afraid of me because I'm white. I didn't want to hurt them in any way. I didn't want to trade places with them either.


Then 1954 came and I went into the 7th grade, new and bigger school. It was the first year the black kids that went to Sumner High by bus from small neighborhoods all over the city had to go to school with the white kids at the school nearest their neighborhood. They were scared. Immediately, they clustered into gangs and became a threat because they were threatened. Iran wants nukes, because they know the American military force leaves colored countries alone that have nukes. Pakistan and N Korea are the privileged ones in the "developing world," no apprehension about the paper tiger attacking them. The black boys gathered into gangs for the very same reason, to protect themselves from the white boys. A black kid in a gang was safe. Not in a gang, he risked harassment from white guys, jocks, relentlessly, like Mexicans now in Sparta. I'm hearing on the radio news for the first time that somebody has actually said it out in the open that half the American population lives in poverty. I've often wondered why I saw that and nobody else did. The media never touch it. Government is all about looking good, not pissing on corpses in the Army, and SS not making an international scandal in Columbia over short-changing whores. Makes us look bad. Abu Graib did too, but that was ok. All of it was ok, just don't take pictures of it and put them on the internet. The way I see it, they needed punishment for stupid. Pissing on a corpse for a YouTube moment I can only see as stupid. It's stupid to do without making a video. Totally stupid to advertise it on the internet. Stupid is as stupid does. It's a natural law, like shit happens.


The race issue has always been a difficult one for me. After 1954 the anger that had been boiling in the black people came to the surface. Before, it was easy to talk with black people. They were always nice and agreeable, what I now know they called "shuckin and jivin." Or something like that. Tap dancing. Many white people and many black people attempted integration, but such social changes don't happen as fast as we want them to. I don't make any effort to be extra nice to black people I know. I feel like the best way I can show a black person respect is to treat him and her as I do white people. No special treatment, and no less respect. I believe that's the goal of the civil rights movement. It's not about whether I feel any racism within or if black people feel racism. We Americans grew up in a racist culture, rallying to our own race, and I don't mean this in absolutes. I'm calling 5% racism the same as 100%. A trace is still racism. I like to think I have never used the privilege of race to my own benefit. I want the black people to have exactly the same privileges white people have. We'll have racism as long as we have ego. Ego is not in any hurry to go away and racism is right there with it. I can't solve all the issues, but I can consciously approach racial issues with do no harm, as in other issues. 


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FEAR OF NOTHINGNESS

milton avery, rolling surf, 1958

Yesterday I saw a film with death as its theme and today I saw another with death for its theme, though in an entirely different approach. One Danish, the other Chinese. I think nothing of a film or novel or anything about death, but just about everyone I know can't deal with giving the subject any attention. I live in a world of people whose artistic input has only been television, the bottom when it comes to "low art," and Thomas Kincaid. Everything has to have a happy ending. All stories must be cute and fun without making you think about anything but how sexy so and so is. Television is about not thinking, not giving any consideration to anything not obvious. I've come to think of television as the mystery of the obvious. So many people I know who watch tv and have no other artistic input can only function in a world of the obvious. Response to something not obvious: What? Irony has never really been an American thing, but television has utterly killed irony dead in America. It never works to say something in irony to anybody, ever. This is tv world. Only the obvious is real.


I saw someone I know today who has an appreciation for art, good films, to a point. When I say, "to a point," it's not in blame. My own appreciaton for art is "to a point," too. He had recently seen Lars von Trier's Melancholia. He was glad his wife went to bed early that night, because she would not have liked it and he would not have been able to see it all the way through. He wasn't so sure he's glad he saw it, but had to give it to it as a good film. The problem: not a happy ending. Not at all. He was a bit morose and slightly depressed-seeming while he talked about his reaction to the film. Of my own feelings and thoughts about death I have a hard time articulating, because much of it is self-delusional. I may feel like I'm ready and can go into the light embracing it, but I don't know what I'd do if it came to facing it straight on. I think I could face a gun barrel with less fear than a pack of wolves. I couldn't handle being run down by wolves. Couldn't handle it. I'd lose my cool. Completely. I don't like to think about something such as that, but am not afraid of it. Many people have known that fate down through time. It is a valid human experience. Though awake in bed at night, if something like that creeps into my mind and stays, I'll get up and read a book.


My eye and ear for art  is all-inclusive. I believe the entire spectrum of human experience -- human because it's the only experience we understand, or have the capacity to understand -- is available for weaving into an art experience. Not every individual's life ends happily. Not everybody is happy all the time. How's that for obvious? Then there is the more obvious: nobody is happy. The tv viewer wants a distraction to make him happy for a split-second of self-delusion, called not thinking about it. The death issue in Melancholia is as absolute as a vision of death can be. When the planet earth penetrates a planet the size of Jupiter, a baseball hitting a catcher's mit, all the world's history went with it, everything that has ever been important to anyone, everyone, not just self, but the whole of earthly existence, the Bible, Adam and Eve, Popol Vu, Bhagvad Gita, good works, bad works, right, wrong, everything suddenly as if it had never been. Some extra-terrestrials will have seen it happen, a few witnesses from outside, like seeing somebody's shoe thrown into the ocean. Instead of making a sci-fi special-effects extravaganza of it, von Trier focused on four people taken from their everyday lives with time to think about it. Of the three adults, one could handle it, two could not.


Melancholia examines not only the death of the body, the ego, but the end of everything ever having to do with the earth, the earth, itself, ceasing to exist at the same time as all its life forms. At least we feel that when we die, some will go on remembering us, we'll have a grave stone, birth and death certificates, records of existence. When everything goes at once, it's the same as it never was. It's a fairly profound way of looking at death when everything we held important is over as if it never had been. It's a bit of a leap into the unknown to imagine the cessation of our own individual existence in the body, our individual "earth," let alone when all we've ever known of is gone too, no more than a grain of sand dropped into a pot of molten lead. Less than that. Nothing unto nothing. I forget that a lot of people are uncomfortable about death. I can't say I like it, but have come to learn over time that death is the parenthetical end to a lifetime with a parenthetical beginning. The lifetime dances between the parentheses. I've come to see that there is no death. I think of it more as dropping the body than dying. While I was entertaining thoughts of the end of everything we've ever known and thought is the same as nothing, the same as never was, I felt like I had an insight to why grave stones are so special to us. Name carved in "permanent" marble, a record of existence.


Leaving existence is something difficult to ruminate on. Like I said about lying in bed with thoughts of dying some horrendous way, I'll get up and read a book. I feel like I have an understanding of the soul shedding the body. I think about what if somebody got a wish to live forever. Beyond 100 they would need a wheelchair, would have to be kept in a nursing home for centuries and centuries unable to die. After a few thousand years, seems like the body would be something like beef jerky. Who wants to be like that? Better to be dead. The question of does the spirit go on after the body dies, or is this life it, rattles my curiosity like light tests positive in waves and positive in particles, meaning light must be particles traveling in waves.


The death of an individual life is absolute as it gets. But the death of an over-populated planet inside one minute brings in a much bigger perspective. A much bigger, more vast blackness, so vast it's the same as never was. As the soul never dies, all the lives on the earth will continue their individual evolutions on other planets, earth one of many playgrounds in the universe for souls to use for a playing field. I tend to see it also like the instant demise of the earth is about the same as a bowling alley, a playing field, burning down. Seeing the earth as the place where souls have learning experiences, the place where all the scriptures that have come to us in various times in our collective spiritual evolution telling us we live best without attachment, it seems a shame. Unattached to earth and objects, all of which are perishable, is the key to living without suffering, with peace of mind. When the birdfeeder at one house runs out of birdseed, the birds go to another feeder.


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SEEING LARS VON TRIER'S MELANCHOLIA

     kirstin dunst as justine


Again, I sit here breathing in stunned awe after a film by Lars von Trier. This one, Melancholia, took hold of me by the throat like an earlier one, Anti-Christ, that went way deep into the individual psyche, sparing nothing. Melancholia goes all the way deep, too. It goes all the way to the soul. I can't say it is disturbing, because it is not. It is provoking. It provoked me to face it that I am the same as watching a planet of death (my own) approach the earth, living day to day. Certain death is a moment in the future. The story was written by von Trier, and very, very well written. I found myself thinking of Harold Pinter quite often, not in the long silences and pauses so much, but the brief, significant moments between characters that tell stories in themselves. Director von Trier is a deep-psyche diver; he swims in the depths of the human psyche. In Melancholia, we pay close attention to the four people, 2 of them sisters, the blond, Kirstin Dunst, speaks English with an American accent and the brunette sister, Charlotte Gainsbourg, speaks with an English accent. This was a surely dramatic expression of the differences between them in the development of their characters interacting as sisters.


The story begins with a big cast of characters at a high dollar wedding, presumably somewhere in Denmark, possibly on the eastern coast north or south of Copenhagen, a golf course, a mansion-sized house on the edge of the course looking to the sea. Horse stables. The place gives me the impression that it is a country club used in the film for a private residence, a portion of it, and it being so huge it stays active as a lodging, an expensive hotel, grand rooms of times past. Wedding ceremony, big catering, bride and groom 2 hours late for the wedding party. Drinking. Shit happens. Family dysfunctions erupt. Turns out Justine, the blond, has a bad case of depression, of melancholia that carries her away as the story progresses. The name of the planet approaching earth is Melancholia. It's moving at 60,000 mph toward a direct hit. This planet rapidly approaching appears the size of a star, then the size of the moon over the course of a few days, then bigger than the moon and bigger every day. It rose and set like the moon, bigger each time. The planet Melancholia looked to be about the size of Jupiter in relation to earth.The cosmic ball of earth penetrated the planet like a baseball into a catcher's mit. That's it cat shit.


At the same time that Justine, Kirstin Dunst, falls into her deep depression, she is feeling energies from the earth she can't explain; the horses feel the energies. Brief hail storm. Brief snow storm. Electrical charges rising from power poles, eerie feeling of a large brooding presence looming bigger every day in the sky. The family living their lives that we're watching are under a dark brooding cloud like what I feel in Chinese novels, the dark cloud of Mao's whims covering the whole country like a slate gray cloud. That cloud is especially palpable in Gao Xingjian's novel, One Man's Bible, a tension running through everybody. As the planet approaches in a matter of days, like over the period of a week, the people become hysterical in helpless, inner ways, keeping their lives going on hoping it would be a "fly-by." When it became apparent it was not a fly-by, but headed this way and will gobble us up in a matter of hours, no longer in days, growing bigger and bigger in the sky, things change.


Clare, Charlotte Gainsbrough, who is the sister with the stable mind, stable life, breaks down under the strain of knowing the planets will indeed collide. In one minute all human concerns over time through civilization and all the millennia of animal life and ocean life are over as if none of it had ever been. Not even a grave marker in the universe. The immensity of the certainty near at hand took the characters into inner places they didn't know they had. Justine, the depressed, unstable one with some psychic sense, became calm, in control as the crash approached. Kiefer Sutherland, husband of Clare the stable sister, the one who kept up with what the scientists were saying, the one who held it together while the others were falling apart, couldn't handle it. He took a handful of pills when collision became a certainty. It was in that time when it passed into certainty the characters reversed their roles; the unstable became stable and the stable ones in control went out of control. Justine went with bliss running through her whole body and Clare tied in knots of agony, the reverse of how they'd been before.


Like every film I've seen by von Trier, this one takes the viewer to the extremity of what the human psyche can handle. He is a brave man. A kind of spelunker of the mind. He can swim through underground rivers. I think of the adventure writer John Long in that regard. Where Long can go on the crust of the earth, von Trier can go in the mind, those deep, dangerous places not many can handle. The film was not made for boxoffice, but like Bergman films, they do so well it doesn't matter. Brilliant films simply as films. I've watched Melancholia twice and will keep it over another day to see it tomorrow, too. I saw so much in the second viewing that I'd missed the first time, it was like I'd missed half the movie. The third viewing will reveal even more. It is nothing but exquisitely beautiful in every shot from start to finish, a characteristic of a von Trier film. This film seems to me it must have touched an apex of some kind in film making. When the planets touched, end of movie. This is even worse than the burning of the library in Alexandria, Egypt, that wiped out a huge number of the classical texts from Greece. This snuffed all of human history, all of earth history. The same as catching a bullet in the heart. No more future. Unforgettable film. Unforgettable like Woman In The Dunes. It makes me want to give myself a von Trier film festival over the next weeks.


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HOSPICE PARTY FOR VOLUNTEERS

      louise nevelson, 1967

This evening a free dinner for hospice volunteers at the Silver Dollar in Glade Valley. A strange energy place, but probably I'm the only one that feels it, if I indeed feel it and am not projecting it. Whatever the case, it was an enjoyable evening. I took up right away at a table of 4 women I knew through the hospice. It was a trip sitting with women in their 70s and us having a grand time talking. We did. I realized these are my peers; they're not just a bunch of old women. I had white hair too. They were fun. We did have a good time talking. The Junior Appalachian Musicians of Sparta school entertained us on the stage with half a dozen old-time tunes like Sail Away Ladies, In The Willow Garden, aka Rose Connolly, among them. They played slow and tentative, but they had music. It was foot-tapping music. I said to the women at the table, They are the future of mountain music. They truly are. Not all will go on playing, but some of them will and some will stay in the region and be the respected musicians of their generation. One or more may turn up in bluegrass bands in the future. And none of the above may happen. It was an enjoyable entertainment. A few of the kids were already musicians.


Changes happening in the hospice offices in Sparta. Vickie, the director of the Sparta office, is leaving for a teaching job. Mary Lee, grief counselor, is moving into the director's role and Amy Douglas is taking the grief counseling role. Just seeing the names means nothing to you, but knowing these two women I see a perfect shift into the new style. Mary will be just right for her role and Amy just right for hers. I heard Amy at one of the talks given at hospice for volunteers on various issues concerning elder care. She's good. Got her ducks in a row. Pays attention. It's an excellent bunch of people there at the hospice office. They're all caring people. It seems like with all the bad news we're told every day on all varieties of media, caring people are rare and hard to find. That's not necessarily so. I find a lot of caring people, fewer that care enough to commit, but plenty that care.


Like I've said before, in this time of my life I want to only be around the people I care about who care about me. I find I have so many I don't need more. I don't need to go about like a flashing neon light that says Like Me. No need to advertise myself to strangers with a smile that says, I'm Nice. I'm not always nice, so it wouldn't be truth in advertising to let on like I'm nice. Therefore, I advertise myself somebody you don't want to know. That's the only thing I can truly advertise about myself. I'm as boring as Andy Warhol's 24hour film of the Empire State building. I don't play kick volleyball, and I'm not a team player, only meaning I prefer to work and play alone. I like George Thoroughgood's song, I Drink Alone. I like his sassy manner with it. I drink with others, but I also drink alone. I have no problem governing myself where liquor is concerned. I can go with it or without it. Thus, I do both; go with it awhile and without awhile. I tend to think of it as candy and don't overdo it. When I want a candy bar, I eat a candy bar. When I want some liquor, I drink some liquor. I like the buzz and I like to get shit-faced, but I don't like the next morning so well. It's the next morning that taught me moderation. Moderation for the sake of virtue means nothing to me.


I've just talked myself into putting some good liquor in a wine glass to have a sip or two. Or three or four. Or seven or eight. I poured the last of a jug of good liquor my friend Jr Maxwell gave me about 4 years ago into the orange juice glass he drank his liquor from. The glass he drank his liquor from was the only souvenir I asked for from Jr's objects. It was the only thing I wanted. About an inch and a half in the bottom of the glass. Just like when I drank with Jr in the evenings. Good memories. The kind of memories that are warm in the heart. Like the New Years Eve we decided we'd stay up til midnight. By 12, both our faces were on the table, neither of us could move. When the big hand and the little hand were both straight up, the party was over and we went our different ways to slumber. It was fun for both of us. We usually stopped drinking after 2 hours. This night we went on for 5 hours. We laughed like silly penguins giggling and flapping their flippers.


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