FOR THE BROTHAS: AN INTRODUCTION

It must have been about 20 years ago when I first began thinking about creating a "Cultural Salon" as a reaction to the mundane social circles In Washington D.C. The richness of intellectual and artistic interchange had died, college friends had moved, the internet had not yet become the phenomenon it now is... I romanticised about the Salons of the mid to late 1800's in Paris, London and Berlin and the cultural dynamo of the Harlem Rennaisance. I was fortunate enough to meet a gentleman, an artist who lived and traveled with James Baldwin... Jimmy he affectionately called him, and he spoke often of their small cottage in southern France and of the many Artists, Poets and Luminaries that dropped in to chat and relax. Well, the impressionists, cubists, modernists, etc. all hung out together famously in those days and shared their ideas with one another creating a creative greenhouse in a world that was rapidly changing. I longed to have lived in those times, to have met Cassat, Rodin, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Baker, Balwin, well I did finally meet Baldwin and others purely for the joy of intellection upon the arts. This was in the late 1980's and by the mid 2000's I happened to run into a friend of mine from Hampton University who had been living in New York since he graduated in the early 90s. Well, I was surprised to hear him comment that in all of the wonder that is New York he never met anyone who ever really had anything interesting to say about art, literature, architecture, science, fashion or anything... I was so surprised to hear this since it had also been my experience. Well here I am in 2011 attempting the Virtual Salon...

Saturday, December 24, 2011

LIFE AS A SUPERNOVA



When did we precipitate the first fateful explosion of life? The explosion of us that instantaneously began  to impact the world directly around us?  When did our heat begin to rise and surge and affect others beyond the local scope of us? When... did the intense light from our lives supernova and first begin to truly shine and cast the very tincturement of ourselves upon the world? 

 

The phenomenon of our life began to expand and to illume but slowly... at first we had no inkling of the amazing potential shone within... nor could we imagine that this gifted light could actually affect profoundly the conditions of others around us and far from us and those at unawares... of us... but it did...



Those of us who built families, who ourselves climbed away from the protective cocoon of our nuclear family to fend for ourselves amidst the world learned not only how our life was instrumental to affect others but also how the lives and light of others affected us in return... It was a nearly balanced model in theory as Newton had prescribed... "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction".  But this model in real time hardly delivered the same degree of symmetry... it was after all the very stuff of scholarly debate, scientific treatise... but not the very mirror of life as it is daily lived and experienced by men... Nevertheless we watched as our life began to affect those around us... those who most depended upon us... our wives husbands, lovers, children colleagues and clients... all caught within the radiation flux of our life as a supernova...



Those of us who did not build nuclear families saw our model differently within the cosmos... Planets were not so fixed to our orbit but stray and random asteroids, comets and other transient astral phenomenon, when they drifted within our aura of influence, became enamored of our radiance and for that instant, they wore the brilliant shower of illumination that refelcted our soul and intellect.  likewise the fixed points within our cosmos of influence... family, friends, lovers, colleagues and clients all... they wore the electromotive signature of our solar flux... marked by our sun... they told the story of our lives as a reflection...



By the time we became mature adults the legends were astounding... those who had been affected by our aura of influence came back to give testimony to our lives... These Off-Scene satellites, cosmic dust, warped space anomalies, Etc... Etc... Etc... They were the great and magnificent link between what we measured as our influence and impact and what mark on the cosmos our supernova had actually been carved into the linear concept of time and space...
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