The Temperature of Death
You want your obituary to communicate the best ideas you
have about yourself. You are pleased, of
course, that the New York Times took
notice of your departure. Only the best
people have death notices in the Times.
You have a small measure of gratitude to National Public Radio. The use of expensive air time to make a
verbal portrait of the artist is not something at which you sneeze. It was the luck of the draw to have death
words splashed in the Washington Post
before the paper becomes digital funk. You do wish that person who did a
credible profile of you in the New Yorker
some years ago had done a more decent eulogy for The Root. What he wrote says
more about literary commerce than it does about the elegant respect that ought
to be accorded to a national treasure.
You know in your heart you are better than that.
In this new century, taste and decorum are in low cotton,
and the temperature of death is so easily miscalculated. Something told you, you should have written
your obituary last year. You did not
listen to something.
Yes, you did riff in the American mindscape as did Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Ralph Ellison, Jean Toomer, Samuel Clemens, William Faulkner,
Walt Whitman and other gentlemen who embraced what is genuinely Omni-American. Yes,
you did excoriate the betrayal of patriotism and the poverty of class
aspiration among proponents of the Black Arts Movement. You do not deny that these features are
appropriate in the social science fiction of the photograph. You are superior
to all that. You are more sublime than that. You are more elegant and profoundly
iconoclastic than that. You and Mr. Ellison and Mr. Ellington have style that
men of obscene wealth are too impoverished to purchase. To be frank, style cannot be bought.
But an obituary is
not a photograph. It is, if it is
properly done, a full-length portrait of the artist in the birthpain splendor
of the blues and the glory of jazz, 1916-2013.
Unlike the photograph, the portrait tells a better story about the
movement of the storyteller from Magazine Point, Alabama to Magazine Print, New
York. You are the consummate teller of tales.
You wish the obituaries gave more attention to the fine brushwork of
your mind.
To get back to the
matter of the representative anecdote.
My primary vernacular, regional, or indigenous, or yes, down-home source
is the fully orchestrated blues statement, which I regard and have attempted to
define and promote as a highly pragmatic and indeed a fundamental device for
confrontation, improvisation, and existential affirmation: a strategy for
acknowledging the fact that life is a lowdown dirty shame and for improvising
or riffing on the exigencies of the predicament. (The Blue Devils of Nada)
In truth, it is literature,
in the primordial sense, which establishes the context for social and political
action in the first place. (The Hero
and the Blues)
You did not listen to something. Something told you, you should have written
your obituary last year.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. BLOG August 21, 2013
