Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 1 of 3)

12/19/2019

Flannery O'Connor Wonder & Enigma title art graphic for Aberjhani's Postered Chromatic Poetics.

Among the biggest surprises to come my way in 2019 was an invitation to give a talk and sign copies of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah at the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home in Savannah, Georgia. Health issues prevented me from accepting the initial invitation but I am now slated to give a presentation in May 2020. The plan is to also have available for signing a forthcoming book in which I recount adventures and misadventures involving three iconic writers: O'Connor, James Alan McPherson, and John Berendt.

Any literary biographer will tell you writing a book of meaningful depth on an influential author requires a ton of research involving what other writers have already said about the subject. The following are reflections on another scribe's brilliantly-informed perspective, first published by AXS Entertainment as: "Events, Books, Highlight Flannery O’Connor’s Legacy."

Regarding a Gifted Child

One of the words most frequently used to describe Flannery O’Connor is “paradoxical.” Exactly why that word is such an appropriate one is demonstrated with informed passion and masterful skill in Brad Gooch’s finely layered biography: Flannery, A Life of Flannery O’Connor.

The fact that the mystery of O’Connor’s life and work continues to draw increasing attention in the twenty-first century is amazing when considering how steeped it is in the language of her times—the very racially-charged South of the mid-1900s–– and when noting her early death from lupus at the age of thirty-nine.
Gooch begins his story by revisiting a moment which would remain a reference point of both humor and symbolism throughout O’Connor’s remarkable life. He takes us to the author’s childhood home in Savannah, just off Lafayette Square, where in 1930 she was visited by a news cameraman “to record her buff Cochin bantam, the chicken she reputedly taught to walk backward.” While a chicken may have been the first bird to enhance her public profile, in her personal essay about the incident, The King of the Birds, O’Connor noted “My quest, whatever it was actually for, ended with peacocks.”

Her childhood penchant for reversing the accepted order of things might be read as nothing more than weird if attributed to another five-year-old. Because it is O’Connor, it may instead be viewed as one early hint of a creative sensibility which in time would create and coax characters into acting out challenging dilemmas of the human condition as she observed it. Biographer Gooch’s narrative is particularly astute when it comes to his evocation of how that sensibility recognized its own value and instinctively preserved itself within “a regulated and meticulously organized world within a world.”

Flannery O'Connor quotation art graphic by BrainyQuote.

Her tactics included the creation of poems, cartoons, and booklets in which she presented portraits of Edward O’Connor, her adored businessman father, and the resilient Regina Cline O’Connor, her mother. They also included somewhat restrained rebellions against the authority of the nuns, at St. Vincent’s Grammar School for Girls, whose job it was to help shape her character into one reflecting modern Catholic grace and values.

Loss and Suffering

Like nearly all Americans who grew up during the 1930s, Flannery O’Connor’s childhood was marked by the economic ravages of the Great Depression. Her father lost first his real estate business, then a succession of jobs until he was forced to accept a position in Atlanta in 1938 and moved his family to Milledgeville, where in time his daughter would become one of its most famous citizens. Even more notable than the family’s financial up and downs was Edward O’Connor’s death from lupus at the age of forty-five in 1941. His daughter was then fifteen.

Each turn of fate in Flannery O’Connor’s life as recounted by Gooch seems to have reinforced her personality with powerful measures of theological insight, focused creativity, and humor. A couple of years following her father’s death, she noted: “A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief, wonder.” Most people stop at the “grief” part and allow themselves to simply wallow in it until ready to move on. The mystery of the “wonder” continuously pushed O’Connor forward.

Flannery O'Connor: Acts of Redemption from Elizabeth Coffman on Vimeo.

At the age of twenty-five, in December 1950, she was told she was suffering from a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis, but two years later learned her true condition had been hidden from her. Sally Fitzgerald, one of her closest friends, told her she was suffering from the same disease which had killed her father. By the time she learned her actual condition, she had already distinguished herself as an aspiring writer at the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop and as one from whom great things were expected at the renowned Yaddo Artists’ Colony. Her status as a professional author rested mostly on a number of short stories published in prestigious literary journals and on her now classic 1952 novel, Wise Blood, published just a month before learning about her medical fate.

Such “devastating knowledge” might have reduced another sensitive soul to a simmering puddle of depression from which they might never have recovered. As Gooch points out:

“She did not know whether she would be allotted the same three years of borrowed time as her father, following his diagnosis, or if indeed ‘the Scientist’ possessed a miracle cure. She had her doubts.

She also had her faith and intellectual passion, both of which helped her to confront the enemy known as lupus. (Gooch’s report on how doctors treated individuals with the disease in the 1950s is particularly interesting in light of the Food and Drug Administration’s 2011 approval of a drug called Benlysta as a treatment option; the authorization marked the first time in fifty-four years a new drug received such an endorsement.)

NEXT: The N-Word Factor: Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 2)

Author

Aberjhani is the author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savanna and co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. He is also an accomplished artist & photographer.

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Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections & renewed hopes (part 2 of 2): illumination

5/4/2018

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That Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love, would prove a challenge to get published had always been known. Potential traditional publishers had no problems admiring its bold creativity and uninhibited spiritual intensity. What most could not accept was something traditionally troublesome when it comes to artists and the marketplace: the financial risks involved.

With all respect to healthy doubts and sensible reservations, so far as Luther and I were concerned the years of energy, labor, and determination already invested in Elemental by the time 2006 rolled around equated to something more than a calculated transactional value. From the perspectives of our deepest meditations and intentions, the completion of Elemental meant contributing to the cultural legacies established by creative artists like those who made possible such movements as Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and the Harlem Renaissance. This last, especially, was one which had already stamped our destinies as Luther had studied with artists of the Harlem Renaissance and I had already co-authored Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance.

The center image for this art graphic features the first two stanzas of a poem by Aberjhani from ELEMENTAL (p. 22) titled "Past, Present & Future Are One" based on a Luther E. Vann painting of the same title. The third-eye illustration seen above was drawn by Jason Maurer when the poem was published in the former SCAD newspaper The Georgia Guardian in 1993, 15 years prior to the publication of ELEMENTAL. The combined creative synergy demonstrates how ELEMENTAL has helped to inspire and empower others from the beginning.

But once creative passion and committed partners empowered us to finally produce a physical book, we reached two important conclusions. First: we recognized the need to articulate, both for potential buyers and booksellers, as definitively as we could, the goals and values inherent in Elemental. Secondly: it seemed obvious the work could be adapted for different mediums. These considerations resulted in the following statements:

ILLUMINATED LOVE

1) The vision behind ILLUMINATED LOVE is that human beings and the environments we inhabit are inherently multidimensional in ways that are typically ignored but which can make our lives richer and more fulfilling than generally recognized or consciously experienced.

2) The mission of ILLUMINATED LOVE is to express through visual art, poetry, and music the creative and spiritual harmony that connects shared public spaces with individual need and existence; and, to demonstrate the multidimensional nature of the same.

3) The objective and/or goal of ILLUMINATED LOVE is to provide a product that functions as a source of entertainment, as inspiration, and as an enhanced tool for the study of employing complementary creative genres within an appealing multi-media format.

When envisioning Elemental as a staged musical or as a video production, I described it thus:

...An exploration and documentation of the way human beings occupy public spaces in interpretative contrast to how they experience inner spaces... It illustrates the way collective intention makes communal interaction possible while individual need and impulse maintain the integrity of a person's separate being.

For example, the Luther E. Vann painting "Christ Listening to Stereo" (p. 27) is of a youth on a bus in New York City (please see image below). The image reveals how the youth is at once physically part of a larger setting while remaining, via his personal stereo, completely apart from it. Immersed in his music, he claims a connection to the artist who made the music and who allows him to not only share in the expressed creative passion, but to utilize the same as a kind of soundtrack for his own anticipations, memories, desires, needs, or fears of the moment. Very similar and yet very different scenes are enacted in such public spaces as parks, malls, back yards, office buildings, clubs, and street corners. They all make the individual part of a larger whole even while many individuals continue to exist primarily as isolated fragments of that whole.

The image used for the cover of the novel Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player is from a section of Vann's painting "Christ Listening to Stereo."

From One President and Generation to the Next

Some might consider the timelessness of the project a good thing in regard to aesthetics but then questionable for the way Elemental's implied commentaries on social and political conditions of a decade ago remain relevant today. In this sense, it continues to illuminate how our least and most desirable practices impact humanity's quest for mutually-advantageous coexistence.

Another example: the ebb and flow of dismay and inspiration from the time of publication until now might be seen in criticisms of former President George Bush's administration as the book was heading to the printer in early 2008. Likewise: less that a year later, after its publication, came Barack H. Obama's unprecedented election to the White House followed by eight years of spectacular innovations and shifts in public consensus regarding everything from race relations and gender equality to environmentalism and economic reforms. And now: current POTUS Donald Trump continues to implement policies resulting in a tug of war between the Oval Office and American citizens committed to resistance.

From one president to the next and one generation the next, Elemental has always proposed for leaders and followers alike a path of informed awareness built on common ground:

The states of interaction with one another and estrangement from each other represent states of being, or levels of reality, that the artist seeks to capture and identify in order to understand their possible implications and consequences in the modern world. Social conditions and activities indicate different outcomes. Some appear to thrive in powerful socially rewarding ways—such as economic advancement or political prestige––while others seem to quietly wither away, turning into the infamous "damned souls" of the world existing in states of perpetual despair leading to the destruction of self and others.

In its essence, Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love, maintains we are all on a quest to experience qualities of compassion and acceptance capable of helping to sustain both the individual and the larger society. Because such a journey tends to take place even more within than without, the visual imagery, words, and music of ILLUMINATED LOVE incorporates both levels of that reality.

Admittedly, those words might sound a bit more grandiloquent than intended. That does not mean they are any less sincere or applicable.

Powerful and Cherished Allie

This celebration of the 10th anniversary of a book of art and poetry is not to suggest that such a volume holds the key to solving all the world's very serious problems. It is, however, to suggest that humanity for too long has remained too comfortable investing faith in fear and violence. Student walk-outs in protest against gun violence in their schools, calls for police policy and training reform, the #MeToo movement, and resistance to government policies which threaten to widen even further the gap between "haves and have-nots" prove the need and desire for something more healing and beneficial than relentlessly suffocating trauma.

We celebrate Elemental because it identifies not just a potential but a capability already within our reach. It helps take the edge off the impulse to destroy what we fear to understand and allows sufficient time to remind ourselves of this: Love, Knowledge, and Beauty are not our enemies. Whether dressed up as art, poetry, or a simple smile, they have always been among our most powerful life-sustaining allies.

Aberjhani
© May 2018

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Chaos of 2017 Sets Stage for Growth and Greater Unity in 2018 (part 1 of 2)

12/28/2017

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(Chaos of 2017 sets stage for 2018 Postered Poetics art by Aberjhani)

“Men and women who dedicate their lives to the realization of their gifts tend the office of that communion by which we are joined to one another, to our times, to our generation, and to the [human] race.”
––Lewis Hyde (The Gift)

I am ending the year 2017 the same way I started it: by recommitting myself to life-affirming values and productive best-practices. The hope is such commitment will help me and others continue to steer our way past the debris of political chaos and social nihilism which characterized too much of 2017 and thereby make 2018 a time of much greater unity and productivity.

In 2017 this translated into doing anything and everything necessary to complete a nonfiction book project on which I had been working for nearly a decade. It also meant increasing efforts to encourage the use of compassion as a primary tool for nonviolent conflict resolution.

Being able to say I met with significant measures of success on both fronts is a good feeling. These individual accomplishments, however, become much less satisfactory when considering how little an impact the call for compassion had on those who throughout the year 2017 convinced themselves that mass murder, as uselessly insane as it is, was a viable approach to achieving some kind of victory. Or some form of favor with divine authority.

Historic Tipping Point

While striving to reach certain goals (about which more will be said a little later) that component of history known as current events frequently interrupted my plans with its own agenda. Like authors, journalists, and artists all over the world watching the clashes between political uprisings and humanitarian urgencies, I responded in the best ways I could.

Some, like the massacre of 305 people at the al Rawda Mosque in Egypt on November 24 and the killing of 58 people (along with the loss of millionaire gunman Stephen Craig Paddock’s life) on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada (USA) on October 1 (just to give two examples) left me speechless for days; I was astounded at our collective inability to evolve beyond an apparent addiction to the cruelest kinds of pandemonium.

In addition: extreme alt right politics (often equated with white supremacy), scary fluctuations in the climate, and the ongoing disclosure of unacceptable sexual aggressiveness within business environments have created what many consider a historic tipping point for humanity. The question is whether we’re going to tip forward toward healing progression or tumble screaming backwards into even more aggravating mayhem. A certain president’s—that would be U.S. POTUS Donald Trump’s––decision to re-tweet inflammatory anti-Muslim videos and repeatedly bate unstable dictators has not been particularly comforting.

Various transgressions stirring furious indignation are not new. Does this mean they must remain unceasing? The level of expanded public outrage prompting corrective responses to perceived, and often confirmed, injustices represents a powerful shift in humankind’s shared awareness of its potential plight. And that in itself is reason to keep hope alive and kicking.

A Bridge of Silver Wings Reconsidered

Of all the issues worth pausing my writing and art projects long enough to join fellow citizens in public protests and advocacy, the one which actually prompted me to do so was the historic Renaming the Talmadge Bridge Symposium sponsored by the social justice advocacy group Span the Gap and the Beach Institute of Savannah, Georgia. Originally, I was slated to join participating panelists on stage at the Savannah Theatre along with the moderator, former Mayor Otis S. Johnson. Health issues, however, forced me to limit my participation to taking a front-row seat in the audience and accepting Span the Gap’s gracious acknowledgment of my contributions to the ongoing campaign.

The panelist who did go on stage included: civil rights attorney, pastor, and educator Francys Johnson, president of Georgia state NAACP; community organizer Bernetta B. Lanier; Connect Savannah’s community editor Jessica Leigh Lebos; former Chatham County commissioner John McMasters; Savannah Morning News columnist Dr. Mark Murphy; community activist Pamela Oglesby; and chairman of SCAD’s Architectural History Department Robin Williams.

My participation in discussing the need to change the name of the bridge from that of someone who openly championed white supremacy to one less racially antagonistic was less robust than I had preferred but I took some consolation in knowing I had helped create this momentous event through the publication of various essays and articles prior to it taking place. Among them:

Struggle Continues to Correct Racial Transgressions of America’s Past
The Bridge and the Monument: A Tale of Two Legacies (from The American Poet Who Went Home Again)
2016 and 2017 Statements on Renaming the Eugene Talmadge Bridge(circulated offline)
Review of The Wild Man From Sugar Creek
Re-Envisioning the Confederate Monument as a Portrait of Diversity
Commitment and Conscience in Debates over Removal of Confederate Monuments in America

The Renaming the Talmadge Bridge symposium did not end with any kind of firm commitment to immediately change the name of the causeway. The event did help raise public awareness of what’s at stake if it remains unchanged. It also inspired me to begin work on a play about the dynamics of inter-generational legacies and embracing the battle to correct social injustices.

Vigorous Applications of Compassion

The practice of compassion sat either at or near the top of the list of most crucial life-affirming values to which I re-committed myself in 2017. Working with partners at Charter for Compassion, I strove to drive home the point that a vigorous application of compassion in daily personal or professional encounters, the composition of government policies, and religious considerations could go a long way toward solving many of our most egregious dilemmas.

The following is a list of blog essays in which I attempted to present my case for advantages of applying a philosophy of universal compassion to everything from global warming and violent conflicts (domestic as well as international) to creative maladjustment, poem-making, and the agony of historic cultural shifts.

So: why all these diverse explorations of the application of the golden rule? Because there’s a lot more wisdom in doing unto others as we would have them do unto us than most people take time to consider.

NEXT: Chaos of 2017 sets stage for growth and greater unity in 2018 (part 2 of 2)
By Aberjhani

About Aberjhani

On any given day of the week, the creator of Postered Chromatic Poetics and co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Aberjhani, may be found wearing any number of hats: historian, visual artist, poet, advocate for compassion, novelist, journalist, photographer, and editor. Having recently completed a book of creative nonfiction on his hometown of Savannah, Georgia (USA) he is currently writing a full-length play about the implications of generational legacies as symbolized by efforts to rename the Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge.

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‘Songs from Black Skylark’ Novel No Longer Accessible on Freed Reads, Previous ‘Christmas’ Edition Still Available

10/31/2017

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Not quite 2 years ago (February 12, 2016) I wrote the following regarding the publication of a new edition of my novel, Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World, now titled Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Player, on the publication streaming site known as #FreedReads:

‘Freed Reads hopes to help combat those problems [associated with illiteracy] by doing for reading what #YouTube and #Netflix have done for viewing. But is such a thing possible? Can books be streamed in a manner that proves satisfactory to #stakeholders at every level? Freed Reads’ founders decided that the idea is worth investing sufficient time, labor, and pioneering technology to find out…” (from Christmas Gets a Valentine’s Day Weekend Reboot)

I also felt the innovation was worth taking time to investigate its possibilities. For me, that meant taking a leap of faith and placing Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player in the Australia-based publisher’s hands.

Bad News, Good News, and More Good News

With the stiff competition that seasoned organizations like Amazon and various retail chain giants always present to newcomers, the venture at first gained some respectable ground. Recently, however, owners decided the operation in its current form would not be able to survive and the website hosting it is now offline.

The good news is that although Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player is no longer available as a “Freed Read,” the original Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World underground classic edition can still be purchased in both copy and digital formats at the following links:

The other upside to recent developments is that the Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Player edition is now available for a traditional publisher to consider its publication and distribution.

About Aberjhani

On any given day of the week, the creator of Postered Chromatic Poetics and co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Aberjhani, may be found wearing any number of hats: historian, visual artist, poet, advocate for compassion, novelist, journalist, photographer, and editor. Having recently completed a book of creative nonfiction on his hometown of Savannah, Georgia (USA) he is currently working on a play about the implications of generational legacies as symbolized by efforts to rename the Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge.

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Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 1 of 3)

Regarding a Gifted Child

Loss and Suffering

Author

Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections & renewed hopes (part 2 of 2): illumination

From One President and Generation to the Next

Powerful and Cherished Allie

Chaos of 2017 Sets Stage for Growth and Greater Unity in 2018 (part 1 of 2)

Historic Tipping Point

A Bridge of Silver Wings Reconsidered

Vigorous Applications of Compassion

About Aberjhani

‘Songs from Black Skylark’ Novel No Longer Accessible on Freed Reads, Previous ‘Christmas’ Edition Still Available

Bad News, Good News, and More Good News

About Aberjhani

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 1 of 3)

Regarding a Gifted Child

Loss and Suffering

Author

Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections & renewed hopes (part 2 of 2): illumination

​From One President and Generation to the Next

Powerful and Cherished Allie

Chaos of 2017 Sets Stage for Growth and Greater Unity in 2018 (part 1 of 2)

Historic Tipping Point

A Bridge of Silver Wings Reconsidered

Vigorous Applications of Compassion

About Aberjhani

‘Songs from Black Skylark’ Novel No Longer Accessible on Freed Reads, Previous ‘Christmas’ Edition Still Available

Bad News, Good News, and More Good News

About Aberjhani

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

From One President and Generation to the Next