Free Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House by What Literature Teaches Us About Life [HTML] Page A
revelatory as a flare in the night. This connective vision annihilates privacy and protection, and it reveals a new creatural community linked by hurt and abuse. That revelation, every bit as articulated and interconnected as the "network" reality-picture that emerges from our computer screens, is the work of poetry.
The force of Blake's visionary poem is most fully felt if we contrast this pulsating portrait of a city—with its wounded and victimized up front, their pain and blood writ large, sprayed like graffiti onto the actual surface of the city, onto its proudest institutions—with any other depiction imaginable: your perception as tourist walking the London streets? your experience with a CD-ROM presentation of London? even, let's say, your effort to imagine (on your own, without Blake's aid) the extent of exploitation and abuse that were hardwired in early capitalist England? My view is that none of these renditions can possibly rival the surreal one provided in Blake's poem. Not only does he illuminate what is invisible to our customary sight, but I'd claim that he brings us into the picture, hurls us through Customs (both conceptual and immigration), makes us (by dint of merely reading his poem) fellow travelers, witnesses to the crime, called on to respond. We can hardly go back in time and rescue chimney sweeps. We cannot easily soften the lives of today's urban or industrial victims either. But we respond nonetheless, as Blake takes us into the looking glass, over the threshold, into the inte-
rior. And what we navigate is no less than the great river of pain that unifies the lives of all these casualties. Reading a poem like "London" is indeed a "trip" (as one says today), but a voyage of virtually cardiac dimensions, entailing entry into the bloodstream and flux of a great metropolis, so as to feel—in that ever so dry economic term— the cost of living.
JAMES BALDWIN'S "SONNY'S BLUES": SUFFERING, KINSHIP, AND ART
If Blake begins on a private visionary note, James Baldwin opens his poignant short story "Sonny's Blues" with the public record: the narrator, Sonny's older brother, reads a newspaper account of Sonny being busted for heroin use. Whereas the poem explodes with its strange testimony, the narrative works perspectivally, gradually bringing us —the "straight" readers for whom the "straight" older brother is a perfect surrogate, a man who has escaped Harlem's blight by playing by the rules, marrying, having a family, becoming a schoolteacher—into Sonny's tortured life. And, indeed, is this not how most of us know about Harlem, about heroin, perhaps even about the blues: as dispassionate observers, as newspaper readers, as straight folks going about our lives? Baldwin knows what he is doing when he entrusts his story to the papers and the straight man.
Soon enough, we realize that "Sonny's Blues" is about the casualties produced by Harlem, about the possible escape routes and strategies devised in order not to go under. Not London with its Church and Palace, perhaps, but Harlem is no less an all-powerful toxic container of human lives, a systematic forecloser and contaminator of individual human possibility. Race is, of course, the major key. Hence, when the narrator, who is justifiably proud of his hard-won stability, ponders what he owes his busted brother Sonny, he recalls a good bit of his own early history, including a story he has heard only late in life, from his mother the last time he saw her, when he was home from the army on
leave. The story was about his father, long dead now, who, as a young man, witnessed the obscene murder of his younger (music-playing) brother by a bunch of drunk white youths out on a joyride:
They was all drunk, and when they seen your father's brother they let out a great whoop and holler and they aimed the car straight at him. They was having fun, they just wanted to scare him, the way they do sometimes, you know. But they was drunk. And I guess the boy,
The force of Blake's visionary poem is most fully felt if we contrast this pulsating portrait of a city—with its wounded and victimized up front, their pain and blood writ large, sprayed like graffiti onto the actual surface of the city, onto its proudest institutions—with any other depiction imaginable: your perception as tourist walking the London streets? your experience with a CD-ROM presentation of London? even, let's say, your effort to imagine (on your own, without Blake's aid) the extent of exploitation and abuse that were hardwired in early capitalist England? My view is that none of these renditions can possibly rival the surreal one provided in Blake's poem. Not only does he illuminate what is invisible to our customary sight, but I'd claim that he brings us into the picture, hurls us through Customs (both conceptual and immigration), makes us (by dint of merely reading his poem) fellow travelers, witnesses to the crime, called on to respond. We can hardly go back in time and rescue chimney sweeps. We cannot easily soften the lives of today's urban or industrial victims either. But we respond nonetheless, as Blake takes us into the looking glass, over the threshold, into the inte-
rior. And what we navigate is no less than the great river of pain that unifies the lives of all these casualties. Reading a poem like "London" is indeed a "trip" (as one says today), but a voyage of virtually cardiac dimensions, entailing entry into the bloodstream and flux of a great metropolis, so as to feel—in that ever so dry economic term— the cost of living.
JAMES BALDWIN'S "SONNY'S BLUES": SUFFERING, KINSHIP, AND ART
If Blake begins on a private visionary note, James Baldwin opens his poignant short story "Sonny's Blues" with the public record: the narrator, Sonny's older brother, reads a newspaper account of Sonny being busted for heroin use. Whereas the poem explodes with its strange testimony, the narrative works perspectivally, gradually bringing us —the "straight" readers for whom the "straight" older brother is a perfect surrogate, a man who has escaped Harlem's blight by playing by the rules, marrying, having a family, becoming a schoolteacher—into Sonny's tortured life. And, indeed, is this not how most of us know about Harlem, about heroin, perhaps even about the blues: as dispassionate observers, as newspaper readers, as straight folks going about our lives? Baldwin knows what he is doing when he entrusts his story to the papers and the straight man.
Soon enough, we realize that "Sonny's Blues" is about the casualties produced by Harlem, about the possible escape routes and strategies devised in order not to go under. Not London with its Church and Palace, perhaps, but Harlem is no less an all-powerful toxic container of human lives, a systematic forecloser and contaminator of individual human possibility. Race is, of course, the major key. Hence, when the narrator, who is justifiably proud of his hard-won stability, ponders what he owes his busted brother Sonny, he recalls a good bit of his own early history, including a story he has heard only late in life, from his mother the last time he saw her, when he was home from the army on
leave. The story was about his father, long dead now, who, as a young man, witnessed the obscene murder of his younger (music-playing) brother by a bunch of drunk white youths out on a joyride:
They was all drunk, and when they seen your father's brother they let out a great whoop and holler and they aimed the car straight at him. They was having fun, they just wanted to scare him, the way they do sometimes, you know. But they was drunk. And I guess the boy,