Meditation 87

9 August 2020

An inner life of sadness meets its non-corresponding breeze through ferns and a tight corridor of light that runs across stairs and through horse tails. I turned to The Nickel Boys after months of procrastination. The handsome man in dreadlocks on the back cover is not the driver who picks us up when we’re lost and deposits us back where we’re abused and beaten. And so here I go again, headed down that road in my manual shifter car, angling for the shadows, listening for the screams. They called it “going for ice cream,” which lives one or two notches past irony on the Richter scale. The other book begins in gossip and ends with a stalled love affair, a real one, the kind that sheds gossip for racial and spiritual allegory. In one book, the survivor starts a moving company (read that as emotional transfer); in the other, the survivor’s a gym rat, a lake runner. Trauma’s the crow bar that pries them open. A murder of crows makes offerings of gifts, rows of broken jewelry and awkward twigs sorted on a blanket by a human intelligence. To ferret out starts from animal but proceeds more like Columbo. We know whose crime it was, but we're more into the process of figuring out. Like re-watching a baseball game we saw before, so that suspense is in the art of the tag and not in the tag itself. George Floyd’s image came up on the Brewers’ scoreboard at the start of the truncated season. Silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, and then we went in to the ballgame, watching the empty stadium’s blank regard. Kids set a Black Lives Matter table up the hill; the real estate agent from several courts down set hers across from them. All Lives Matter, her sign demanded. Behind her, a neighbor held a sign: “I bully fourth graders.” There’s a thin line between performance and violence; both can be funny, but only performance gives you space to think. 

A meditation-review of Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys and Linda Norton's Wite Out.