BERNEVAL

John Edgar Wideman. Hiding Place.

The character misses the trolley. Forced to walk he turns the event into an aesthetic moment.

Nothing for it now but to walk. He had to walk that night and in the darkness over his head the cable swayed and sang long after the trolley had disappeared. He had to walk cause that’s all there was to it. And still no ride of his own so he’s still walking. Nothing to it. Either right or left, either up Homewood or down Homewood, walking his hip walk, making something out of the way he is walking since there is nothing else to do, no place to go so he makes something of the going, lets them see him moving in his own down way, his stylized walk which nobody could walk better if they had some place to go.

The prose has its own gait. Its own down way.

And so for day 1922
18.03.2012

In a conversation with a colleague interested in the institutions of liberal democracy, I urged her to consider scribling a top ten tips for engaging in civil society. It led me to meditations of my own on the topic of relationship management and working across cultural and social differences. Here’s my take on the basics.

Listen: stay tuned to repetitions and mantras. Detect patterns.

Ask questions: elicit narratives: where have you been? where are you going? (of course, actual questions have to be more specific and tailored to the circumstances [remember the point about listening]).

Adopt and adapt vocabulary. Take on the words that resonate with your interlocutors. Be prepared to explain how your organisation works and what it aims to achieve. Either way, check the translations you make in either adopting the other’s vocabulary or adapting your own (remember to validate with questions).

Be open for future contact — relationship building is not instantaneous, be prepared to invest.

Seems so simple and recursive now that its laid out here. Seems a wise course for communications internal to an organisation too.

And so for day 1919
15.03.2012

Sounds of congregation from Damballah by John Edgar Wideman …

I wanted to dwell on Sybela’s first free morning but the chant of the Gospel Chorus wouldn’t let me sit still. Lord, reach down and touch me. The chorus wailing and then Reba Love Jackson soloing. I heard May singing and heard Mother Bess telling what she remembers and what she had heard about Sybela Owens. I was thinking the way Aunt May talks. I heard her laughter, her amens, and can I get a witness, her digressions within digressions, the webs she spins and brushes away with her hands. Her stories exist because of their parts and each part is a story worth telling, worth examining to find the stories it contains. What seems to ramble begins to cohere when the listener understands the process, understands that the voice seeks to recover everything, that the voice proclaims nothing is lost, that the listener is not passive but lives like everything else within the story. Somebody shouts Tell the truth. You shout too. May is preaching and dances out between the shiny, butt-rubbed, wooden pews doing what she’s been doing since the first morning somebody said Freedom. Freedom.

Improvisation within convention is what the alert listener is on the lookout for whether or not they have sat in butt-rubbed pews.

And so for day 1913
09.03.2012