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...

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

AFFIRMATION OF LOVE...


 
 
I knew he was the one mostly… no specifically because I wanted to just lay with him, forgetting about time…  I had been there before, many times before… each time with a different man. 






 It seemed it was so easy to reach the summit of love but more difficult to bring its power to the next mountain ahead… between these two promontories of romance lay an entire depression of random banalities that seemed to suck the very nectar from the fruit of understanding…  To me it was clear that one had to ignore much of what happened between summits and transform the mundane task of passage into a pilgrimage toward love itself!   It was the hardest thing, come Sunday, to finally break the ice that formed a bridge between the moments we had spent together and a world that threatened to break us apart… I knew that once the ice had been broken the bridge would fall into a thousand pieces representing an eternal happiness that might have otherwise gone unbroken… 



The world we loved, within which we lived, that had bought our lives together now threatened pile all of its cares and distractions between us as a folly or as a testament to fate… challenging us to reconfigure the magic and the willpower to reaffirm the gilded promise we both made during those brief hours… 



 At the end of the day all we really had was our love and compassion for one another to inspire us to risk climbing the sheer mountainside again…  It seemed that the key was understanding our ascent was not alone… it was a mutual effort only possible if we helped one another at every impasse…  



I knew love was possible, and so did he… but was our will strong enough to convince fate?  Once the bridge had been broken, once the soft and gentle bed of isolation had been spilled over, once we were thrust into the lion’s den of other peoples wants, needs, passions and desires all focused on separating us, then we would learn the truth within the blithe innuendos exchanged during the passions of the past 48 hours…

 
 
FIN
 

Written by D. Vollin
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