Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 1: The Art of Paradigm Dancing

5/1/2021

"The Amazing Sustainable Power of the PEN" artwork by Aberjhani C2021)

INTRODUCTION: I first began looking forward to celebrating PEN International’s and American PEN’s centennial while observing their back-to-back 90th anniversaries 10 years ago. I did so with a series of articles titled Paradigm Dancing. The AXS Entertainment and previous PEN website pages which once hosted those articles are no longer accessible so it is my joyful honor to periodically republish different articles from the series in Visionary Vibes and to also create a complete page in support of PEN’s efforts on behalf of writers around the world.

Claiming Rights to an Honored Tradition

It was almost enough for me to simply join PEN America roughly a decade ago and, on its former site, set up a profile page without doing much else to qualify its existence. Such a page alone could allow me to relax inside the satisfaction of knowing I had remained true enough to my literary calling to place my name beside that of authors whose lives and craftsmanship had so often empowered my own.

That idea, of course, faded very quickly as I further allowed myself to acknowledge something I have long known: you do not claim rights to an honored tradition just because a few books allowed you to bring them into the world or because you managed to cough up the obligatory dues. One claims a right to such traditions very much the way runners on a winning Olympic relay team each earn the distinction of wearing an individual medal––by running his or her segment of the race.

This blog represents one account of one author running his segment of the race. Except that as the title and the quote attributed to Nobel laureate and P.E.N. Club co-founder John Galsworthy indicate, I see it more as a kind of dance than a race. (The anacronym P.E.N. once stood for “Poets, Essayists, Novelists” but now is spelled simply as PEN to indicate dedicated writers of all kinds.)

("Dancing to the Jazz of Life" art by Aberjhani with text by PEN co-founder John Galsworthy.

Galsworthy’s words represented more than a witty aphorism to serve as needless proof for his much-celebrated genius. They could also describe the determination with which he year after year fired off letter after letter, traveled, and campaigned to increase the Club’s membership and secure international support for it. After more than a decade of serving as the organization’s president, he often (according to Harold V. Marrot writing in The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy) expressed his weariness and desire to step down from the position. Yet one thing he did not tire of was promoting PEN’s principles themselves or his belief as spelled out in a May 1924 address to members of the American Center in New York:

“…What we feel today the world will feel tomorrow. In homely phrase: It is up to us to make a better world of it. We are the voices. Our Club exists to convert the wilderness we cry in to a green garden.” (J. Galsworthy)

Faced with such conviction and unwavering dedication, it becomes difficult to do nothing more than skillfully park on one’s semi-magnificent laurels. Therefore, the mission established for republishing this blog is to share in the dance of interactions between language and writers’ visions of literary possibilities, and, readers’ participation in that same relationship.

(“A Sigh Out of the Deeps” art by Aberjhani C2021. Quoted text by C.A. Dawson Scott)

Because this is described as a dance of notions, perspectives, and interpretations moving in out of days gone by and days yet to come, it will spin both forward and sideways at varying tempos. The material will include some articles previously posted elsewhere but most notably will feature entries that focus on principles and observations initially presented by John Galsworthy and Catherine A. Dawson Scott. It will also comprise takes on other authors and progressive thinkers inspired by PEN from the time of the original club’s founding in London in 1921, and that of PEN American Center in 1922, to the present.

As Galsworthy and Dawson Scott saw for themselves, conversion of “the wilderness we cry in to a green garden” takes some serious labor which can absorb entire lifetimes. It’s a good thing they and those who answered their call in the twentieth century have given the rest of us who are tilling fields in the twenty-first century a 100-year head start.

NEXT UP: Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 2 The Pattern of Dynamics

Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

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Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 2: The Pattern of Dynamics

5/1/2021

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(“Falling in Love with Freedom All Over Again” artwork by Aberjhani ©)

INTRO: This installment of Celebrating the PEN Centennial was first published in May 2012. What it addresses in regard to writers’ relationships with language as well as such issues as immigration and genocide are as irrefutably relevant now as then. Possibly even more so. To read part 1 of this series please click here. Part 2 begins now:

Intoxicaing Melodies

Whether language is shyly uttered, fiercely written, or fearfully thought, it creates an inherent rhythm which invites the soul to dance to such intoxicating melodies as truth, anger, inspiration, fear, and love.

Human beings most often accept that invitation to dance in many different ways. Sometimes we do so by following the lead of an initial small or large realization until it whirls voluptuously into an unyielding idea that persuades us to take a certain action or cautions us against another.

Sometimes other pronouncements, spoken or un-, follow the first. But in languages of different kinds. They spring back and forth between diverse grammars and revelations of universal symbols or archetypes, as strangely enthralling formulations and poetic constructions creating what many might recognize as: a song of some kind.

The music is not always beautiful and the dance it inspires may appear more macabre than graceful. As much as we might prefer to choreograph our lives to hip-hop ballads of genuine democracy, various populations throughout the world community endure their existence instead to the soundtrack of something closer to a nonfiction nightmare dystopia.

Ours is an age in which thousands are driven daily from their homelands by the unforgiving brutalities of war, terrorism, political oppression, starvation, disease, economic piracy, and the relentless suffocation of that singular breath which makes human beings individuals. In the United States, Latinos once secure in their identities as Americans discover they are in fact something referred to as “illegal aliens.” They then have to make their way south across the Mexican border and reestablish their lives to the tune of conditions and customs which previously had been little more than the subject of tales shared by grandparents and other interesting relatives.

Leaving Somalia, refugees struggle to reach neighboring countries like Kenya and Ethiopia or, increasingly, to cross the Atlantic to the United States to escape rape, mutilation, and genocide. People indigenously at home in rain forests and other native locales find themselves driven out by the encroaching demands of commercialism [and climate change].

In each of these scenarios human beings have to adapt to choices made by someone other than themselves and dance frantically, as it were, to a beat not their own. The forced nature of these cultural migrations burden language with a vocabulary of tears steeped in grief and desperation. And they challenge writers to retrieve out of these everyday tragedies any beauty worth singing–– without glamorizing the horrors involved or betraying the lives so despicably at risk.

The Pattern of Dynamics

An author accepting language’s invitation to dance steps onto the floor of his or her sensibility-charged consciousness and begins to move instinctively––even if with much dread––in ways which synchronize images, ideas, emotions, sounds, smells, ignorance, and knowledge. Subtle energies crackle insistently along intersecting horizontal and vertical lines to occupy each other repeatedly and compose a vision which at some point may be called a story, a poem, an essay, or a play.

The pattern of dynamics might alter where different authors are concerned but the nature of this paradigm dancing remains essentially the same. Such is the culture, if you will, of the dance shared between vernacular and writers that others––passionate readers, curious friends, fellow authors, tribes on the run––are always encouraged to join them. Many, in fact, will say the dance is not a true one until they do.

NEXT UP: Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 2: The Pattern of Dynamics

Aberjhani
Author of The River of Winged Dreams
and Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

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Biography Presents Compelling Portrait of Life, Times, and Mind of Jean-Paul Sartre (part 1 of 2)

7/11/2017

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The rich flow of historical details, intellectual insights, and political dynamics that make up the powerful pages of Annie Cohen-Solal’s “Sartre: A Life” are both is primary assets and, for some, its principle liabilities.

In the afterword to the Sartre Centennial 1905-2005 edition of the book, the authors lets us in on her adopted goals and methodology:

“I adopted from the beginning, a different perspective, that of interactionist micro-sociology, which tries to understand society from the subjective side of its actors, proposing to trace the process of intellectual creation and cultural production through an articulation of the individual with the intellectual milieu. Above all, I sought to shed light on the conditions of possibility of a subversive discourse which inversed power relationships by bringing historical and sociological interpretations together… Within this framework, I decided on the following methodological principles: I would adopt a triple approach—phenomenological, generative, and holistic…” (Cohen-Solal, p. 531)

It is a brilliant strategy superbly executed. The outstanding aspect of it for this reader was the propositions to “trace the process of intellectual creation and cultural production through an articulation of the individual with the intellectual milieu.” And: on the dynamics of possibility pertaining to a sociologically- and historically-informed subversive discourse.

That Solal-Cohen was only 32 when she dared tackle the job of writing a biography on Sartre and stuck with it through the completion of some 524 pages half a decade later was worthy of a literary prize in itself. Her chosen framework, however, generates some of the same intimidating challenges as certain of Sartre’s tomes themselves––say, for example, his Critique of Dialectical Reason, or the nuclear astonishment known as The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, which enraptured his soul throughout his later years.

Just as the intellectually-uninitiated––as well as many who have crossed said threshold––are bound to find themselves confused and frustrated attempting to hold on to the thread of Sartre’s reasoning and non-reasoning, so are they likely to experience the same clinging to the hem of Cohen-Solal’s virtuosity as she constructs, deconstructs, analyzes, reconstructs, labels, and defines the mass of public and private components that comprised her subject’s phenomenal life. None of that should discourage readers from enjoying the mind-stimulating ride.

Just as the intellectually-uninitiated––as well as many who have crossed said threshold––are bound to find themselves confused and frustrated attempting to hold on to the thread of Sartre’s reasoning and non-reasoning, so are they likely to experience the same clinging to the hem of Cohen-Solal’s virtuosity as she constructs, deconstructs, analyzes, reconstructs, labels, and defines the mass of public and private components that comprised her subject’s phenomenal life. None of that should discourage readers from enjoying the mind-stimulating ride.

The Litterateur Par Excellence

What makes this book so mesmerizingly extraordinary is the succession of dual portraits of Sartre as a flawed and at times wounded soul in contrast to him as the emerging-and-then-dominant French intellectual of his time. He was the litterateur par excellence who could simultaneously advance is working theses in multiple formats: as journalism, plays, lectures, philosophy, novels, and movie scripts. Yet he was also the doting son who saw to his mother’s well-being, as well as, the pied-piper mentor to aspiring writers, hopeful actresses, and political activists who would follow in his footsteps.

In addition–– whereas he may have been properly lauded as a prominent member of the French resistance and unexpected author of Being and Nothingness, he was also an unlikely kind of Casanova and a borderline drug addict. Capable of deep loyalty to either an individual (as he was for a time to fellow Nobel Laureate Albert Camus) or a cause (per the Cuban Revolution) he could quickly and brutally eject them from his public and private embrace. In short, his was a unique personality unleashed during one of the most volatile periods of modern history and how the prolific author interacted with it on multiple levels is fascinating almost beyond belief. Were it not for Cohen-Solal’s insistence on balancing the great man’s achievements with his human shortcomings one would be tempted to say he was nearly larger-than-life.

NEXT: For the concluding part 2 Please Click Here

Author-Artist

Aberjhani is an American poet, historian, essayist, editor, journalist, social critic, and cautious artist. His many honors include the Choice Academic Title of the Year Award, the Notable Book of the Year Award, Outstanding Journalist Award, and Poet of the Year Award. He is currently completing final edits on a work of creative nonfiction about the cultural arts, race relations, immigration, and human trafficking in his hometown of Savannah, Georgia (USA).

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3 Poems about 1 Phenomenal President

1/6/2017

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“Poetry empowers the simplest of lives to confront the most extreme sorrows with courage, and motivates the mightiest of offices to humbly heed lessons in compassion.” Postered Poetics by Aberjhani.

In the debate over the potential repeal of the American Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, mainstream media commentators commonly refer to the law as President Barack Obama’s “signature achievement.” Whether you describe that tendency as guerrilla decontextualization or simple disrespect, it mostly adds up to a miscalculation of the assessment of President Obama’s impact on American and world history.

Said assessment is one which historians will be determining for decades, but for now, by way of introducing the 3 poems that will soon follow, it is enough to note that the American Care Act is only one of many key achievements spearheaded by Mr. Obama on behalf of his American constituents and his fellow leaders in the global community. How is it commentators so easily overlook the fact that under his leadership a downward spiraling recession which nearly brought the country to its red, white and blue knees was effectively strategically reversed, dropping unemployment figures from double digits to when he took office to the current figure below 5 percent? How can they so casually forget that his accomplishments earned him the Nobel Prize for Peace?

Historic 2009 Black History Month American Legacy Magazine cover by artist Allan Burch featuring President Barack H. Obama (center), and pictured in the background starting from the left going clockwise: Malcolm X, Mary McLeod Bethune, Frederick Douglass, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Original source: http://allanburch.blogspot.com/2009/02/barack-obama-for-american-legacy.html

That he became the United States’ first African-American president at the age of 47 is possibly less remarkable than the full two terms during which one generation was born, and another grew into maturity living without the assumption that a black American president––this one accompanied by First Lady Michelle Obama and their two daughters–– was by default an anomaly. The observation is more than just the most commanding fact to cite for Black History Month every year from this point onward. It is one of the most compelling arguments for ramping up improved lessons worldwide in diversity, cultural literacy, and peaceful coexistence.

Add to the above the skillful application of leadership principles employed by Mr. Obama to repair diplomatic abroad and whether storms of race-fueled violence at home. Look closely at the risks he took in effort to achieve a diverse workforce with appointments of women, gays, Latinos, Asians, and African Americans to influential offices. And although he obviously boasted a bit when it came to his role as Commander-in-Chief, he was amazingly effective in his position as Chief Comforter following some of the most horrendous natural and man-inflicted disasters in history.

Of the poems below, the first was written to commemorate Barack Obama’s historic 2008 election to the presidency. The second and third were written as it became apparent that his presidency was going to meet with serious oppositions of every kind: political, racial, personal, military, betrays, and more. Each of the poems are available in the pages of The River of Winged Dreams.

Hope and Audacity Revisited

The poem titled “There Upon a Bough of Hope and Audacity” was first published in The Savannah Herald after Barack Obama’s first election to the U.S. presidency. Ironically enough, the poem proposed that Mr. Obama was not to be compared to the great Abraham Lincoln, and yet one of the more noted responses to his re-election in 2012 was a challenge much like one Mr. Lincoln faced a century and a half ago. It was the challenge, whether symbolic or literal, of a growing call for different states to secede from the U.S. President Obama’s re-election was by no means a given. The battle to win was as epic a political struggle as America has ever seen, but U.S. citizens in the end made their choice clear:

There Upon a Bough of Hope and Audacity by Aberjhani originally published in the Savannah Herald to commemorate Barack Hussein Obama's first presidential inauguration.

Songbird of speckled feathers and new millennium eyes,
you trill notes of democratic vistas heavy with light.
Chords of miraculous notions enrich your blessed voice
with power to sing dreams into deeds well done.

Above your head Sallie Hemings’ children laugh rainbows.

You are neither Christ nor King nor Lincoln.
But what you are is willing, capable, and sincere,
there upon a bough of hope and audacity
as branded by history as any have ever been.

Knights of global tables toast the lyrics of your vision.

A grand son of two continents, your heart marches
to the glorious world beat of universal drummers,
and your American dream dutifully follows: one step
for peace, another for justice, two more for strength.

Harriet Tubman’s tears splash prayers for your success.

From where you perch, the trade winds of destiny
lift your songs like leaves of silken prophecies,
scattering the soft true gold of their melodies and joy:
to their rhythm a world sways, hums, and dares to believe.

(from The River of Winged Dreams)

Angel of Hope’s Persistent Flight

“To continue one’s journey in the darkness with one’s footsteps guided by the illumination of remembered radiance is to know courage of a peculiar kind––the courage to demand that light continue to be light even in the surrounding darkness.”
--Howard Thurman

I.
Wreaths of nuclear ash
decorate civilian hearts
with unresolved blood.

Greed, crowned emperor,
rules the earth with cold disdain
for harmony’s path.

War poisons the land
like diseased minds downloaded
into bowls of tears.

Chaos, loving none
so much as itself, slurps and
spits dead souls like bones.

What is belief now?
What is faith that will not die?
What news from heaven?

II.
In midnight’s orchard
rose’s blossom the secrets
that heal daylight’s wounds.

Beats of broken hearts
flow waves of revelation––
open gates to strength.

Cradled in scorched arms,
a soldier’s moon keeps its vows––
shines persistent hope.

This love that God is
curves in figure eights greater
than both time and space.

Death wins nothing here,
gnawing wings that amputate––
then spread, lift up, fly.
(from The River of Winged Dreams)

(Postered Poetics title art graphic for Midnight Flight of the Poetry Angels by Aberjhani.)

“It was a savage scene, and we stayed there for a long time, watching life feed on itself, the silence interrupted only by the crack of bone or the rush of wind, or the hard thump of a vulture’s wings as it strained to lift itself into the current, until it finally found the higher air and those long and graceful wings became motionless and still like the rest.”
––Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father

What once was blood streaks
your face with indigo tears
and lush midnight tunes.

Holding silver hands,
you compose a Tao of art
that heals broken wings.

Lips glow violet,
open to reveal tongues bright
with pearl metaphors.

A speckled halo
handcuffs the world’s best liars
to soft dark passions.

Music’s sweet labors
give birth to a springtime rush
of sighs rippling dreams.

Out of your mouth rhymes
blossom like warm paradigms
already in flight.

Golden, your songs,
and noble; spinning stars on
their axis of love.

On faith’s battered back
calm eyes etch prayers that cool
a nation’s hot rage.

Inside these scarred hearts
genius flows incandescent
waves of truth made real.

Hope drowned in shadows
emerges fiercely splendid––
boldly angelic.
(The River of Winged Dreams)

From the History Channel: “The 44th President: In His Own Words”

Author-Poet Aberjhani is currently completing a collection of nonfiction narratives on the cultural arts, history, race relations, literature, and social and political conditions in Savannah, Georgia (USA).

Bright Skylark Literary Productions
© 9 January, 2017

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Something More Dynamic than Tear-flooded Woe

5/10/2016

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"History & Erasure: Chronicling Legacies of Black Artists in Savannah (part 1 of 3)" 2016 essay series by Aberjhani. (Postered Poetics image of artist Luther E. Vann by Aberjhani)

It took a while for me to think about writing anything in reference to the death of my friend Luther E. Vann last month because when it occurred I was already working on a different kind of essay about his life and art. Slamming the breaks on that project, going into a tailspin of grief, and then finally regaining focus took some work.

These days a lot of people––maybe too many people––know that feeling of sanity-shattering loss. Surely, even as I type these words, the tens of thousands fleeing the inferno in Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, can feel the pain of it.

So can others around the globe who find their attention directed toward the news of a toddler killed while fleeing a war zone with siblings not yet in their teens, a mother or father lost to yet another mass shooting, or a pestilential outbreak that suddenly changed with no warning whatsoever the spiraling course of human history.

Psychic Interiors, Cityscapes, and Multiverses

It is because of examples parallel to the ones just given that I could not write a simple mournful remembrance of Luther. Like the psychic interiors, cityscapes, and multiverses painted in his work, he would have preferred words that reached beyond sorrow centered on him to communicate something beneficial to others.

Consequently, I had to wait. But soon enough it became apparent that, more than anything else, he would have wanted an article (or two or three or more) that extended our conversations on the pitfalls and triumphs of living lives immersed in pursuits of inspired creative visions.

Chronicling Legacies of Black Artists in Savannah-Georgia

Considered a classic of feminist literature, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing significantly influenced aesthetic theories employed by artist Luther E. Vann.

The thought of extending previous conversations in the form of an essay was enough to stimulate the beginning of a paragraph. It soon developed into an outline for a new three-part series based on highly-accomplished creatives who, owing to one reason or another, are often excluded from official forms of recognition. The three installments currently scheduled, barring any technological issues forcing title edits, are as follows:

The scope is expansive and inclusive because Luther’s work was the same. In my attempt to communicate something more dynamic than tear-flooded woe, the essay presents a view of the artist’s life and work through multiple lenses. They place in context issues like the erasure of history (a.k.a. erasures of history), and the cultivation of different creative influences.

Counted among the latter are the late novelist and Nobel Prize for Literature winner Doris Lessing, especially where the impact of her novel The Golden Notebook is concerned.

The essay also examines the role that the music of iconic masters of jazz like piano virtuoso Thelonious Monk played in Luther’s creative processes.

Background Color Schemes

Finally: I did feel it important to at least try to incorporate within the three-part series a visual component other than the videos posted with each installment. Toward that end, I created a set of original images to employ as art graphic title panels. The series is called Savannah Silhouettes and the taller human figure within each panel is Luther E. Vann.

The different background color schemes of yellow-gold (seen in the art graphic for this blog post), purple (presented with the second installment), and black (the third) are not arbitrary. In addition to being important to his uniquely-applied craftsmanship, they were also important to what he called his “particular language of painting,” the one that made it possible for him to say what he needed to say about humanity, about the mysteries of the cosmos, and, about himself.

Aberjhani
© Bright Skylark Literary Productions
May 2016

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Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 1: The Art of Paradigm Dancing

Claiming Rights to an Honored Tradition

Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 2: The Pattern of Dynamics

Intoxicaing Melodies

The Pattern of Dynamics

Aberjhani
Author of The River of Winged Dreams
and Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Biography Presents Compelling Portrait of Life, Times, and Mind of Jean-Paul Sartre (part 1 of 2)

The Litterateur Par Excellence

Author-Artist

3 Poems about 1 Phenomenal President

Hope and Audacity Revisited

Angel of Hope’s Persistent Flight

From the History Channel: “The 44th President: In His Own Words”

Something More Dynamic than Tear-flooded Woe

Psychic Interiors, Cityscapes, and Multiverses

Chronicling Legacies of Black Artists in Savannah-Georgia

Background Color Schemes

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 1: The Art of Paradigm Dancing

​Claiming Rights to an Honored Tradition

AberjhaniCo-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem RenaissanceAuthor of Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind​

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 2: The Pattern of Dynamics

Intoxicaing Melodies

The Pattern of Dynamics

AberjhaniAuthor of The River of Winged Dreamsand Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Biography Presents Compelling Portrait of Life, Times, and Mind of Jean-Paul Sartre (part 1 of 2)

The Litterateur Par Excellence

Author-Artist

3 Poems about 1 Phenomenal President

Hope and Audacity Revisited

Angel of Hope’s Persistent Flight

From the History Channel: “The 44th President: In His Own Words”

Something More Dynamic than Tear-flooded Woe

Psychic Interiors, Cityscapes, and Multiverses

Chronicling Legacies of Black Artists in Savannah-Georgia​

Background Color Schemes

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Claiming Rights to an Honored Tradition

Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Aberjhani
Author of The River of Winged Dreams
and Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Chronicling Legacies of Black Artists in Savannah-Georgia