Originally published February 3rd, 2017.
This is what my writing looks like when I’m not focused on enjoying date night.
My wife, after reading this, convinced me that this needed to be the last post for my previous blog until life got less busy for me; I had used a date night as gristle for my paranoia. I felt I was being data driven with the mentioning of historical dates in the historical piece. Upon further reading, I can clearly see I was becoming undone. This would of done better being a shorter, 400 word piece.
Stress will make a liar of you. It will force you to take on more than you can, and you will do all subsequent tasks at reduced quality. I hope to get pushback from readers if my writing quality starts to slip.
“Of course you chose that one,” my wife teased as we settled into our seats at Little Rock’s Pinot’s Palette, a business that lets you paint and booze.
We were there for her friend’s birthday. I opted to draw a Van Gogh-ish painting of the New York Skyline. I looked at the instructions and my historian mind activated. Some buildings in the fore and backgrounds, with the Empire State Building pulling the details together; clearly, this was designed after 9/11—no Twin Towers, no Freedom Tower, the Empire State Building once again the crown of the city skyline. It was a true representation of my hometown. I settled into my seat with a ginger ale and got to work.
I painted the outlines and mostly fell into the work. But between mixing my blacks and blues to create an authentic night sky, I scrolled through my Twitter and Facebook feeds. My wife clearly was annoyed, but also understood—she shot me a glace, saw the barely contained anxiety, and continued to use her blues and whites and blacks to create a primeval lake landscape.
The con man from New York is all I feared. I expected he would do everything he promised to do, and I hate that all the days since January 20th were a confirmation of the truths I have accepted about my nation. I hold no mythical notions about the state, but the impulse toward mythology does pull me to several points and places in time.
1955. 1965. 2008. 2012. Appomattox. Kansas. Selma, Chicago. Washington D.C. These times and places are halcyon calls to freedom and advancement to me, and I often weight them against all the other horror times black folk endued in this nation. These years and locations are also rooted in truth. I think of my grandparents who fled the South, and my wife’s grandparents who stayed and survived the hate of their homeland. Their truths should have been self-evident as I gravitated toward the myth of better days that was the result of their labors.
My anxiety comes from this conflict between myth and truth, of having a mystic’s heart and a scientist’s soul. I started “For the Dead and the Dying” after watching Alton Sterling and Philando Castile die due to police misaction. I wanted people to understand their deaths were unneeded. I believe that, in my small way, the false belief that rigorous truth would change attitudes and thus policy. Now I am faced with a struggle to understand the world before my eyes. Confusing myths and truths, I learned, is something all humans do. But it is also a pattern in American history that our white mythmakers are allowed to make public policy, and our black truthtellers are told their lives don’t matter when they protest and agitate for the rights enumerated in our Constitution.
Already my government has made everything murkier. What to say of the millions of Americans who voted for a xenophobic, racist, kleptocratic urinal of a leader who then turn their heads and tell me black folk deserve every bad thing that happens to them? I think of recent minor trifle—a banker reneging on a proposed interest rate for a loan my wife and I are trying to secure to buy a house by .10%. Some of my peers tell me this is the myth of playing hardball. But I know the banker’s action lives in the shadow of redlining and banking discrimination black folk have suffered in this nation. And I am frustrated that the plain truth of it all does not matter. I am constantly haunted of everything— the myths and the truth—immolated by nuclear fire. We all now stand inside the risk of a nihilistic apocalypse, of the mythmakers flensing everything they don’t believe in.
Two hours pass and I put the final touches on my painting. The instructions tell me to take the wooden end of my round brush and to dip it into the white paint. I do so, and follow the last direction—peck the wooden end it across the night sky to create the appearance of stars. It’s only when I accelerated to highway speed on I-430 South that I reflected on the New York sky through the only way I can now—through memory. One sticks out. My brother and I hung out on the roof on a cold December evening at my mom’s house in East Elmhurst, trying to put up Christmas lights. It was after 9/11. We could see the city skyline from our house. I remember looking up and cursing the light pollution of my city. There were no stars over New York.
I put the painting in my office that will soon hang in my house, another testament of myth versus truth. There are no stars over New York.