Alice Walker: In Search of Zora Neale Hurston

Alice Walker’s essay “Looking for Zora” is a story about Walker searching for the grave of Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston clearly had a huge impact on Walker’s life, because she flies to central Florida and hunts down Hurston’s grave. Throughout the essay, Walker incorporates pieces of information she had learned about Hurston from reading her novels and listening to other people who had studied her work and life. “Eatonville has lived for such a long time in my imagination that I can hardly believe it will be found existing in its own right” (Walker 94). Walker is clearly deeply connected to the city Hurston wrote so much about, though she had never been there before herself.

Walker first finds an elderly woman who was familiar with Hurston and her family, Mrs. Moseley. Walker and her companion, Charlotte, had first gone to the City Hall and found out about Mrs. Moseley from the woman working there. Mrs. Moseley tells them about growing up with Zora and going to school with her. Walker refers to Joe Clarke, the first mayor of Eatonville, and his store which had since been transformed into “Club Eaton.” “It is, perhaps, the modern equivalent of the store porch, where all the men of Zora’s childhood came to tell ‘lies,’ that is, black folk tales, that were ‘made and used on the spot,’ to take a line from Zora” (Walker 98). One thing that Mrs. Moseley explained to Walker that deepened her understanding of Hurston was why Hurston was against integration. Mrs. Moseley had similar ideas about integration to Hurston: “I have lived in Eatonville all my life, and I’ve been in the governing of this town. I’ve been everything but mayor and I’ve assistant mayor. Eatonville was and is an all-black town. We have our own police department, post office, and town hall. Our own school and good teachers. Do I need integration?” (Walker 99). This encapsulates what Hurston also thought about integration and somewhat changes Walker’s view of the fairly mysterious woman.



Walker and her companion eventually found their way to the funeral home which orchestrated Hurston’s funeral, and from there went to the graveyard where Hurston was buried. Walker finds a hole that is similar to a grave, and then goes to get a headstone to mark where Hurston is buried. Walker chooses a “plain gray marker” because it is all she can afford. “It is pale and ordinary, not at all like Zora, and makes me momentarily angry that I am not rich” (Walker 107).
Soon Walker finds a doctor who was close with Hurston in her older years, buying her groceries when she ran out and inviting her over for meals at his house. During this conversation, Walker learns a lot about Hurston that surprised her, one fact being that Hurston was rather large in her later years. “‘Zora loved to eat,’ Dr. Benton says complacently, ‘She could sit down with a mound of ice cream and just eat and talk till it was all gone.’” (Walker 111).

At the end of the essay, Walker talks about how sometimes grief and sadness and other emotions are so intense and strong that the only action possible is to let “laughter [gush] up to retrieve sanity” (Walker 115). I think Hurston had a huge impact on Walker. Though the two women never knew each other, Hurston’s bravery, intelligence, and life’s story seems to have helped Walker appreciate her life and her writing abilities that much more.

Works Cited:

Walker, Alice. “Looking for Zora.” Downloaded from Blackboard.
Images:
Zora Neale Hurston: [http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/Zora-Neale-Hurston_s.jpg]

Substituting a Noun for the Actual Thing

“In Tender Buttons and then on and on I struggled with the ridding myself of nouns, I knew nouns must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything was to go on meaning something.  And so I went on with this exceeding struggle of knowing really knowing what a thing was really knowing it knowing anything I was seeing anything I was feeling so that its name could be something, by its name coming to be a thing in itself as it was but would not be anything just and only as a name” --Gertrude Stein

Tender Buttons is a weird poem or prose piece or writing or whatever it actually is. Gertrude Stein titles each piece “Objects” “Food” and “Rooms” and then goes on to compile a list of seeming random attributes and stream of consciousness thoughts loosely grouped in these broad categories.

But, does she do that really? Perhaps, as she states in the above quote, she is instead trying to peel off our many-layered associations with various nouns until she can uncover something of their essence.

I’m only going to look at “Objects” because there is enough in there to write many blogs.

“A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS. 

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.” (p. 180, 1-4)
Here Stein brings to mind a carafe, defined as:
carafe |kəˈraf; -ˈräf|
noun--an open-topped glass flask typically used for serving wine or water.

Her choice of word may have been made by simply observing a carafe on a table. And then how does one go about stripping from that thing all the associations that have accumulated over years of seeing and using and perhaps washing carafes?

What does it mean to “know, really know” what a carafe is? Stein goes first to typology – kind, kind in glass and a spectacle …something to be seen, and seen through. Glass, but not a glass, a drinking glass, or looking glass, but glass to some other purpose, and how is this glass arranged such that it – this substance glass – becomes something different and unique?

Stein allows her prose to wander and to wonder, to skim around the edges and come to an ordinariness, while also wondering at order, that does not resemble other things that are ordinary.

“The difference is spreading.” Here she leads us on, the difference (in understanding? In not understanding?) is spreading to other objects.

Stein: “A PIECE OF COFFEE. 


More of double. 


A place in no new table.

A single image is not splendor. Dirty is yellow. A sign of more in not mentioned. A piece of coffee is not a detainer. The resemblance to yellow is dirtier and distincter. The clean mixture is whiter and not coal color, never more coal color than altogether.

The sight of a reason, the same sight slighter, the sight of a simpler negative answer, the same sore sounder, the intention to wishing, the same splendor, the same furniture.

The time to show a message is when too late and later there is no hanging in a blight.

A not torn rose-wood color. If it is not dangerous then a pleasure and more than any other if it is cheap is not cheaper. The amusing side is that the sooner there are no fewer the more certain is the necessity dwindled. Supposing that the case contained rose-wood and a color. Supposing that there was no reason for a distress and more likely for a number, supposing that there was no astonishment, is it not necessary to mingle astonishment.

The settling of stationing cleaning is one way not to shatter scatter and scattering. The one way to use custom is to use soap and silk for cleaning. The one way to see cotton is to have a design concentrating the illusion and the illustration. The perfect way is to accustom the thing to have a lining and the shape of a ribbon and to be solid, quite solid in standing and to use heaviness in morning. It is light enough in that. It has that shape nicely. Very nicely may not be exaggerating. Very strongly may be sincerely fainting. May be strangely flattering. May not be strange in everything. May not be strange to.” (p. 180, 1-27)

This object is strangely dense and disconcerting. A piece of coffee – a bean? a grind? a cup? What exactly IS coffee?

Perhaps she is writing of the whole ceremony of coffee. What amazing and complicated things a simple word, this noun coffee, can hold. To know it, really know it, one can perhaps know only a piece of it.

Mixed in with the physical is the sound of the words themselves, and Stein uses them to mix it up … “the same sight slighter, the sight of a simpler negative answer, the same sore sounder” here she almost sounds like James Joyce in “Finnegan’s Wake” where the words and the sounds tumbled over one another confusing the reader and at the same time bringing to mind the confusion language brings to life all the while it masquerades as the way we think we understand things.

I think the beauty of Stein’s writing in “Tender Buttons” is that one has to slow down, slough off one’s idea (and idealization) of reading and understanding and allow the words themselves to emerge as uniquely as possible.

It may be that Stein is articulating the current (via Eckhart Tolle) notion of “be here now” and rather than reading in a complicated, yet comfortable, way of bringing to mind an accumulated set of images instead one can stop and ponder the essence of the thing itself, which is a kind of poetry.

Stein, Gertrude. "Tender Buttons." The Norton Anthology of Contemporary and Modern Poetry. New York: Norton, 2003. 180-185. Print.

Claude McKay and the Caribbean Influence

Claude McKay is a modern American poet who was born in Jamaica in the late 1800s. He was given the opportunity as a young child to receive the best education possible, and he eventually left Jamaica to live in America because he won a prize for his writing. Much of McKay’s work grapples with the challenges he faced as a Caribbean black man in America.

When McKay first moved to America, he enrolled in the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It was at this college that McKay first encountered the realities of racism in America (Giles). His Caribbean heritage made him a target for racist behavior in the Alabama college, and the experiences he had there heavily influenced his writing. At the time McKay was writing in New York City, racist tensions were extremely high. He was there for the Red Summer of 1919, and because of that experience he wrote the poem “If We Must Die,” an influential poem that Winston Churchill later quoted during World War II (Giles).

The Red Summer of 1919 was a period of time in the United States where a reported 76 blacks were lynched and 26 race riots took place. One of the worst race riots took place in Washington, DC, where six blacks were killed and around 100 blacks were wounded (Callum). This period of American history is a time of severe racial discrimination and tensions between different sects of the country. This intense display of anti-black violence was the unstable and hostile environment in which McKay was writing his poetry.

Clearly McKay’s Caribbean heritage played an obvious and vital role in his writing. Though he wasn’t a pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance in terms of his writing style--his preferred style was that of the Shakespearean sonnet--he was hugely influential in his ability to speak of racial issues in his poetry (Giles). McKay was able to masterfully juxtapose the romantic, serene Shakespearean sonnet with violent, uncomfortable topics such as racial discrimination and lynching. He also used the Caribbean dialect, or the Creole dialect, in many of his poems. McKay was a poet who was able to write in a way that forced his readers to pause and contemplate the issues he so directly addressed in his work.

McKay’s poem “The Harlem Dancer” illustrates the isolation he felt from the American community, not only because he was black but also because he was a Caribbean man in America. He was therefore fairly marginalized by the society as a whole. This isolation is expressed in one of his most famous poems, “But looking at her falsely-smiling face,/I knew her self was not in that strange place” (501). This excerpt mirrors what McKay felt as a dissociation from the “strange place” he lived in, an inhospitable and racist America. The dancer in the poem, though she is physically present, has mentally escaped from her harsh surroundings. Perhaps this detachment from the harsh environment she is in is similar to McKay’s attempt at accepting the harsh, bigoted world he lived in.

Works Cited:
Callum, Agnes Kane. "A Killing Season: 'Red Summer' of 1919. [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/a_killing_season.htm]

Glies, Freda Scott. "Claude McKay's Life." [http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/mckay/life.htm]

Images:
Dancers-- [http://www1.assumption.edu/users/mcclymer/His130/P-H/Harlem2/jeunesse.jpg]
McKay Cover-- [http://farm1.static.flickr.com/158/416037600_aecede4543.jpg?v=0]

Moore and Eliot

When I read Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” I am put in mind of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” I don’t know exactly why. I think it has more to do with the way the language and articulation makes me feel, sort of the essence of it, rather than the substance.

Moore is speaking specifically of ‘the thing’ – the poem, poetry itself. Trying to articulate something ineffable. She brings attention to that ephemeral thing that is poetry. Eliot does something similar. Particularly in the opening of “Burnt Norton” the first of The Four Quartets:

“Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.” (1-8)

I find these some of the most beautiful lines in the world of poetry. They are a continuous door into the unknown, the ephemeral, into something I may just be aware of beyond my consciousness. Sometimes I have thought of these lines as relates to spiritual matters. Sometimes as relates to relationships. Sometimes just in terms of abstract notions of literature and art.

“I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important

beyond all this fiddle.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,

one discovers that there is in

it after all, a place for the genuine.

Hands that can grasp, eyes

that can dilate, hair that can rise
 
if it must, these things are important not be-
 
cause a


high sounding interpretation can be put upon them

but because they are
 
useful; when they become so derivative as to
    
become unintelligible, the
 
same thing may be said for all of us – that we
  
do not admire what
       
we cannot understand.” (1-10)

Here Moore is doing the same thing, opening a door into the world of impermanence with words, language and style that is temporal and tangible – hands grasping, pupils dilating, hair rising. Yet what is the focus or cause of these tangible enlightenments is something as abstract and “unintelligible” as a poem.

“Into our first world.

There they were, dignified, invisible,

Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,

In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,

And the bird called, in response to

The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,

And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,

Along the empty alley, into the box circle,

To look down into the drained pool.” (23-35)

Exquisite formal language, evoking a formal garden, Eliot could also be talking about a poem, or about poetry in general. Dignified and invisible the words and symbols of a poem are like “unheard music hidden in the shrubbery” and roses that have “the look of flowers that are looked at” can be a very poetic way of describing the very process of analyzing poetry. Then the idea that we are the guests, invited into the poem, moving in a formal pattern. I don’t believe that is what Eliot was talking about, but when reading Moore’s poem I think of these words.

“One must make a distinction
    
however: when dragged into prominence by half
poets,
                
the result is not poetry,
    
nor till the autocrats among us can be
        
"literalists of
        
the imagination" – above
            
insolence and triviality and can present


for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads
                
in them, shall we have
    
it.” (17-24)

I like how Moore cautions against over abstracting poetry until it no longer has “real toads” but the process of creating such poetry is hard. Not everyone can do it. I like to think that her language of “literalists of the imagination” is applicable to Eliot. His language is beautiful, but also shimmers with reality.

“Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.” (37-43)

Here it is birds, rather than toads, but as one reads the first part of “Burnt Norton” I think it is easy to see that Moore’s paean for “real toads” is answered.

Works Cited:
Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1962, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York. 1963

Moore, Marianne. “Poetry.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, Robert O'Clair. New York: Norton, 2003. 438-439. Print

The Downfall of the American Dream in The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is a novel that stands throughout time as one of the great modernist works. In this novel, Fitzgerald uses the character of Gatsby to struggle with the illusory concept of the American Dream as Gatsby struggles to make his own wealth and then fails to get the girl he wanted. The Great Gatsby also deals with the opposing concepts of wealth in America and spirituality.

Throughout the novel, Gatsby’s main drive is to win Daisy for his own. They had been together at a younger age, and then Gatsby went away to war. When he returned, Daisy was gone. Now, during the time of the novel, Gatsby has made himself plenty of money, though his money is old money, and he lives outside of the city, yearning for Daisy. “He stretched out his arms towards the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward - and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock” (Fitzgerald 16). This green light, we find out later on, is on Daisy’s dock in the city, and this is a perfect depiction of Gatsby reaching for what he wants yet will never attain. This constant struggle to grasp the impossible is the darkness of the American Dream that Fitzgerald is capturing.

By the end of the novel, Gatsby has come to realize that he is never going to be with Daisy—she has chosen to stay with Tom. Perhaps she stays with Tom for material security, perhaps because she truly loves him. Either way she does not choose Gatsby in the end, the one man who, in the whole novel, seems to encompass most fully the American Dream. Gatsby “has humble beginnings and works in order to raise his station. He has a dream, a desire, to find the girl he loves; and that is what motivates Gatsby” (Dawson). However, he also is representative of the corrupted American Dream because even though he works diligently to achieve his goal, he never does get it, which seems to crush his spirit, his hopes and dreams for an ideal future, at the end of the novel.

In The Great Gatsby, the American Dream is corrupted by excessive wealth and materiality. Many of the characters in the novel are only interested in their money and power, as well as finding ways to attain more money and power. Though Gatsby’s dream seems to be more pure than those of the other characters, the American Dream still fails him. Fitzgerald leaves the reader with the understanding that “the problem with The American Dream is that it never fulfills, it never satiates, it never satisfies, and it leaves a trail of heartache in its wake” (Dawson). No matter how much of anything these characters acquire throughout their lives, they are always reaching, always earnestly grabbing for more.

Works Cited:

Dawson, Charlene. “The American dream and the Great Gatsby.”{http://www.helium.com/items/804056-the-american-dream-and-the-great-gatsby?page=3}

Fitzgerald, F Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.

Images:

Green light-- {https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio5rx_vTPX8RQHnN8OopIbfLDrB4V1w4N0ViNBF4KQIXTg2x-RiHFBcvBnnk0yR8QL4aT4bk30SCiTWVnRiBtsAHnopzeJdARw5_jtFvqWUenIs-2PcAEqWwnKo6nOA1ZsllA1WMzAQg/s400/stoplight-green-light_~AA022292.jpg}

Great Gatsby Cover-- {http://bibliojunkie.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/great-gatsby1.jpg}