This 1936 all-black folk interpretation of the Old Testament draws 'Uncle Tom'-style flak from liberal academia, and maybe they're right (1), but on the other hand, God is portrayed as a black man (Rex Ingram), and He is a God of Wrath and Vengeance. Talk folksy as he may, even within a heaven of clouds, fish-fries, five cent see-gars for a-dults, and cups of firmament-deficient custard, Ingram commands the screen with a profoundly resonant analog gravitas. And I personally love the shit out of this movie, and if part of that love comes from a kind or round-about racism, then stone me not lest ye be first stoned, as I was when I had it on a six-hour tape sandwiched between a host of 30s Betty Boop cartoons and Death Takes a Holiday (1934). The tape was labeled "In case of Emergency" - knowing this blog you might guess what kind of emergency I meant. For nary a month or so went by that my weird self-medication regimen wouldn't fail on me, to the point I'd drunkenly and ill-advisedly take too much acid or too many shrooms in order to pull myself out of a spiritual depression tailspin and, instead of finding solace, wind up spinning even faster, the yawning chasm of Hell below me like a giant laughing Medusa planet maw. In those dark moments, with Death so close I could see its reflection in the toilet bowl mirror, I'd reach for the Boop-Pastures-Holiday trifecta tape, and lo, I would be slowly lifted back up from the pit. The music of the Hal Johnson Choir is the kind of music I hope they play when I die - I'll follow that sound right up the heavenly gates, or--at any rate--out of the devil's grasp. The Hollywood group for such things (they also supply similar notes of grace in Dumbo and Cabin in the Sky), the Hal Johnsons are like the hand that lifts down from the clouds to raise the lowliest of sinners from the mire. Even as they're perfectly in tune you can hear nearly every voice separately at the same time - the cumulative sound is never muddled, and always warm and freeing.
"Nothing dies forever," (perhaps) a (mis)quote I just now heard while in the other room where is playing The Expendables 3. But honey, ain't it apt?
When viewed from the soul-broken LSD bad trip that leads to clear-headed mystical scissor complexity it is a very modernist film, fusing the mythos of the Old Testament to the mythos of the Carl Sandburg/Mark Twain-folksy Old South, with nary a nod to any kind of banal social realism or political correctness along the way. Very of it's time, not just for its free hand with race and co-opted culture but for its ability to tread clearheadedly into avenues of deep overt symbolism thanks to the literati's post-war existentialist crisis. Darker than blue and wrong as acid rain, it goes down sweet as whole bottle of vanilla extract, gulped down as a last resort on a blue law Sunday when the shakes are so bad you can't even get off your knees without dry-heaving.
Like that extract's effect on a shattered alcoholic system, the Green Pastures' sweetness helps you keep it down even as its potency warms you up. The gentle but properly-aligned gravitas of Ingram's lord is like a salve to gash that's bled your soul, mind, and spirit into each other. He's like a draft of Moby Dick's hot blood in a shiny grail fed to a crippled Ahab. He doesn't grow back a new hollow leg, but he just might make it to the kitchen on the one he has, and there are refills thar. The strong response we get from the white community, as in the vicious minstrel satire of it in the "Going to Heaven on a Mule" number in 1934's Al Jolson vehicle Wonder Bar. compared to the earthy resonance and genuine care given to every fibre of Green Pastures should make us all ashamed. Most of these talented actors struggled along playing servants, if anything, or threadbare budgeted blacks-only films and plays. The enduring power of Pastures, Stormy Weather, Hallelujah!, Emperor Jones, and Cabin in the Sky is that these actors cram a whole canon of worthy work into them, a reminder of how much richer our collective cinema might have been in a less segregated history.
And me, during those brutal Sunday hangovers and too-much acid 'suffering side step fails' while miserably alone and bereft and it's winter and work looming like the gallows, man, the thought of an entire keg of liquor waiting on a nice rainy ark, with everything from guys in gorilla suits to freshly painted zebras for company, was like a salve that erased the pain from phantom limbs I didn't know I had.
To a poor space cowboy fallen so far off his horse he'd already passed the ground three times, jerking spastic as he'd plummet, like catching St. Vitus on a yo-yo string, Ingram was the one lord who made sense, the only lord I trusted.
1930--the year Green Pastures was written (first as a play)--was a year of expanded demographical suffering for this great country. A whole lot of once-middle class white folks--many of them decorated war heroes--were suddenly very enlightened in how it felt to be poor as hell, spat on by the cops, forced to sleep in Central Park and to take whatever demeaning job was offered for however insultingly little. They were, as the saying goes, humbled. They knew at last some measure of what it was like on the other side of the class divides. The market had crashed, the Depression was on, there was as yet no such thing as minimum wage or unemployment insurance; you couldn't even drown your sorrows because of Prohibition. FDR was still three years away, but Hitler was rolling slowly but inexorably into view as well, like his dark mirror twin. Each a socialist public works highway-building savior to their nations, both Adolph and Franklin hit their full stride in 1933, ushering in respective sweeping reforms (like on the US side, social security and prohibition's repeal) but that was three years away. In 1930, only the factors that created the need for them existed.What was needed also maybe was some kind of faith that modern hip disillusioned NYC audiences could embrace without feeling overly churchy. In other words, we all could--through the "American Negro Spiritual"--get needed heavenly uplift. Anyone who's been kept from the psych ward by the saving grace of an old Leadbelly record, heard perhaps by chance while passing an open window, knows what I'm talking about. There's an alchemical power to transmute sorrow to joy, hell-lashed helplessness to heavenly power, in those Leadbelly records. You know it when you feel it and you never forget it, because it's an inexhaustible source of solace. And urban audiences both white and black could get behind it.
This same appreciation for black spirituality--real or imagined--took root in a lot of us who grew up in 70s Middle Class America. As a child in Lansdale PA, I was used to black people more as TV characters than actual neighbors: Good Times, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and What's Happening! and of course radio, where you couldn't tell who was male or female ("Hot Child in the City" was my favorite song 'til I learned it was sung by a man) let alone black or white. Our sense that the racist jokes and cartoons we saw and heard were wrong (it was mostly Irish and Polish jokes anyway) and the evil of racist thinking didn't really sink in until Roots came along, and suddenly and abruptly, we--along with the bulk of white America--were all like, holy shit, that really happened??! We ashamedly threw our joke books and inherited Little Black Sambo 78s away, and watered the seeds of our newly planted collective social guilt like it was a rare orchid.
At the same time, I today regard with suspicion the uber-liberal academe for whom ever single word spoken in popular media on this subject is either vile and racist or safely didactic, either flavorless, dour, or scolding. A black actor for these lefty liberals has to 'represent' color, one way or another, elevating or denigrating with his or her every step and word. To quote one of Green Pasture's angels as he looks down from the clouds at Jesus carrying the cross, "that's a terrible burden for one man to carry."
Performing the opposite of that kind of mono-dimensional liberal strait-jacketing, Green Pastures' modality recognizes the universal man as black via accentuation of the black man as Other rather than a bland mouthpiece for the kind of sanitized PC sermonizing that reinforces stereotypes even as it works to transcend them. In the liberal mind, the black character is so not different he can never be universal--often the more entitled (usually upper middle class) liberal mind can't see that basic paradoxical opposition.
So it is that white fans of 30s black Hollywood like myself (and Quentin Tarantino) risk demonization at the hands of the left for the crime of looking at the vibrant soul of the black performer with vampiric envy. We recognize that vitality, that wellspring of submarine missile-to-stratosphere soul, as something we lack. We feel it in our soul's bones, whether it's projecting or not, it's still valid. Like Mick Jagger gaping at the wonder of James Brown on that legendary 1966 TAMI Show, we long to absorb that resonance, that heavy frequency. The performative aspect of a white writer of earthy black characters may seem racist, but race is way too complicated not to mar the vision of the liberal who sees such envy as racist a priori to the experience of that level of depth. The hard left tries to create equality by denying the existence of any actual 'soul' resonance. Spike Lee will tell Tarantino's fans to be ashamed for loving his liberally N-word peppered dialogue, irregardless of their race, but art flowers in the offal of wrongness. It withers and dies when subjected to 'peer-reviewed journal' sterility. Those journals are either part of--or at the mercy of--political dissent-promoters out for tenure who just don't 'feel comfortable' with genuine subversion. They need iron gates installed around the campus just so they can demand they be removed. Like Barton Fink, they feel the common man's plight, but only if they don't have to eat next to him, for truly he doesn't measure up in direct experience to their sanitized ideals, who does?
We should also remember that the most racist of all biblical films are really those deadly dull ones from the 50s that cast only white actors, sometimes in black, brown, or yellow face, to play Middle Eastern/North African biblical figures. These ponderous roadshow 'scope endurance tests never get called racist even by liberal academes (who've probably never seen them, for in sooth, they are generally godless). Based on the relatively small geographic area where most of the Old Testament transpires, characters should all actually be Arabic, Israelite or North African. Where in popular culture, aside from that Isaac Hayes album Black Moses or the colorblind Jesus Christ Superstar, or on Kwanzaa tapestries, are Old Testament characters ever black? The black man is the original man, true? So no other race should portray Adam and Eve, and that means everyone else in the bible should be played by some mix of African and Middle Eastern heritage, even towards the second half as part of the Israel / Ishmael divide. (2)
 |
| Right |
 |
| Wrong! |
For an illustration: almost at the end of the film, in the midst of a WWI-style battle, comes a son of Adam, named Azrel, who runs into God a few hills back from the front line and--like all the other humans but Noah---never recognizes him (even though he's played by the same actor, both God and Azrel - reflecting God's own inability to recognize His reflection).
"Maybe we was tired of that old God," notes Azrel. He and his people have created a different God for themselves, one way nicer than the God of wrath and vengeance, as He calls Himself. Azrel lays a trip on God that cuts deep: man needs God to be a god of mercy, not vengeance, and so the new God will be perceived that way whether He is actually merciful or not. To thrive, and to understand the concept of mercy, God realizes even He must suffer. Forgiveness can be learned no other way. Azrel won't even acknowledge the wrath of the old God, regardless of the God's wrath. The new God is merciful and kind, and even God Himself doesn't have a say in the matter. It's such a profound yet simple message it took me awhile, wasted as I was through my first dozen or so viewings, to really understand. It was only, really, after my drinking got so bad I went into AA and had a few spiritual pink cloud awakenings that it hit me in the same way. Without the prolonged wretchedness of my last year of drinking, would I be humble enough to accept this true and complete surrender? A soul is like a piece of steel that must be softened in the hell of the forge before it can be crafted into a beautiful functional blade. If we try to avoid the heat, we shatter under the hammer, and it takes rehab or detox or just years of denial and pain to get all the chunks to bond back together in the forge, otherwise the parts shatter again the first hard surface the blade strikes. So it is that, in its bizarre unheimliche mix of historical fact and mythic 'telephone game' translation and editing, Green Pastures gets at a truth too deep to convey with anything like dull DeMille solemnity.
Wait, are you not paying any attention, and just rolling your eyes at my typical educated white boy need to justify co-opting blackness through folksy blah blah?
If all I've said doesn't mean anything to you, o judger of my love for Pastures as 'benevolent racism' then consider just this: The Hal Johnson Choir does some great singing as the Heavenly angel congregation, the kind of music we don't hear nowadays when gospel is either Mahalia Jackson style (which is awesome but every song sounds the same) or classic (which often grows stodgy after one bar). Hal Johnson's choir is more attuned to, say, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, another old trippy favorite of mine. Pastures is not a musical and the songs mostly serve as transitions between scenes and as background, but their heavenly (it's the only remotely appropriate adjective) sound underwrites all the action like firmament underwriting the Earth. While God meddles with, or just visits, the folks on his Earth over the course of the millennia, like a botanist checking on his experimental orchids, deciding whether or not to wipe out this latest breed and start splicing again, the Angels up in the heavenly choir keep everything rooted, sanctified and grand in a way that manages to be humble and cosmic at once,
And if the language seems outdated, note of the original bible text (which I looked up wondering what the hell firmament was):
Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day (GENESIS 1.6-8)Jeezis that's muddily convoluted (and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament;?) I far prefer de Lawd's version:
"Let there be some firmament, and I don't mean no little bit of firmament. I mean a whole mess of firmament, 'cuz I'm sick of running out of it when we need it.".
Like a lot of enduring mythic texts, the Old Testament defies easy interpretation as either truth or fiction, i.e. it is true myth, i.e. tall tales ala Ulysses, Prometheus, Paul Bunyon, and Poor John Henry. It's a text rife with magical staffs and personifications of elemental forces that were probably never meant to be taken as concretized dogma (3) as there are huge gaps in logic that my Sunday school teacher never could answer for me. For example, who did the children of Adam and Eve go off and marry if there were yet no other people? And later, the children of Noah, the same question. Did they mate with some prehuman life form? Or with each other? If with each other--and this goes for the two of each kind of animal Ark system--how, with such a small gene pool are we not all deformed, inbred monsters so many generations later?
My Christian Science Sunday School teacher was worse than ignorant of the answers. She radiated the smell of elderly skin and rotting old lady teeth which, coupled to fellow student Marilyn's infernal and endless sniffling, further abstracted whatever meaning we bored kids might derive from our reading the bible aloud, around and around the table, the abstract and redundantly worded language of the text devolving further and further into meaninglessness. We would either rush through the text in a bland monotone (Marilyn), stutter and mispronounce every word (Terry), or make fun of it by emphasizing random words in a hammy voice (me). Green Pastures at least has the gumption to discern the common threads in the text and summarize its events into a relevant and moving preface to the New Testament.
The moral being, even God sometimes needs to suffer to grow, and the only way God can understand mercy is through His own suffering, the kind that comes from seeing your son die on a cross. Through acceptance of the unmitigated feeling of hangover depression comes its deliverance-isn't that what the blues is all about? For the hungover wretch like me, the pain was abated as long as the old country blues played on the speakers, like a hot bath for sore muscles. Silence or some other music was like suddenly getting out into the cold shivering air.
For First World middle class white kids like myself, with no diseases or ailments or crippling accidents or arrests of any kind, we can really only know true suffering via mental illness, such as bi-polar depression, or our own self-inflicted variety (via perhaps self-medication to allay the first kind) so we suffer from anorexia, drug withdrawal or bad trip overdoses on psychedelics that turn out to be laced with strychnine or formaldehyde, or are just way stronger than we were prepared for, amplifying our sense of loneliness and isolation to the point of existential agony. Failing that, it's my opinion suicide attempts are a last ditch effort to achieve the same grace. If you survive, suddenly your once stifling woes are dialed back into focus and maybe your mom finally lets you get the help you need. Suffering is the fire of God the blacksmith, melting down your frying pan brain. Best learn to love the sound of the hammer ringing, because He's never satisfied, not 'til your shiny and pure and sharp as a Hattori Hanzo Bill-killing special. Here's a little song I wrote about it, ready?
The dentist is not punched for his painful probe;
instead you pay him for the end result.
The infant is forgiven his filthy diaper, and
the old man his soiled bedsheets;
but not the young junky vagrant with no bowel control!?
Not the drunk, convulsing, stumbling reminder
that no purloined ecstasy escapes its full opposite?
What hypocrites we are to not see each new load of shit the same,
each endured pain the price of future joy,
the clean fang the dentist's pain full paid;
heart unafraid to face the same fate
as that dead old boy,
poopin' his way back to you, babe.
--
If your crying is not from worry or the dread of dying
Allow it. Aummmmmm
If your crying is not from fear the manna shall soon cease its flow,
Aummmmmm, allow.
If your crying is not from dreading some fatherly punishment yet to pronounce
over missed finals, Aummm
--
If your crying is not from worry or the dread of dying
Allow it. Aummmmmm
If your crying is not from fear the manna shall soon cease its flow,
Aummmmmm, allow.
If your crying is not from dreading some fatherly punishment yet to pronounce
over missed finals, Aummm
nor from tedium feared before it's even started
aum...
This suffering is sanctified.
Where the twig meets the leaf is where the first frames of meshed mom morph.
Then it vibrates outward like the unspooling spiral of the seashell snail shape Aummmmmmm
shuffled downward onto plankton carpets,
shamanic rattles caked in baby spittle,
white and shiny salivas glistening like the freshly hatched serpent.
Aummmm, shapes cut from glowing red lantern spin orbit patterns as your crib surrounds you.
Aummmmmmmmm, the holy gleaming halo of your last first faint sunset Aummmm.
Each death, night, goodbye, adieu just an outward breath Aummmmmmm.
Mom, that titan, encircles us no more tonight,
just the slow spinning stars of nontoxic plastic, above us casting shadows,
out of reach, above the bars of our baby crypt.
The rattle dries into whiskey and drum sets, growing tall brings girls of equal height,
their breasts no longer big as beanbag chairs,
only the forgotten homework now stirs a guilty shiver
only that is the infant's giant mom's
harrowing equal
in absence.
Inward..
Buzzing, the razor stops suddenly, the chair
either dentist of barber, you forgot which,
lurches downward.
The bib comes off.
We're unleashed,
but to where, with such an obscenely naked neck?
And so we sense that the hangups that befoul our spiritual questing are all beaten and cleared away by the enormous suffering of the Jewish slaves and the black slaves of the Old Testament, and the grotesque words, faces, jewelry and actions of their oppressors speaking to a great evolutionary comeuppance, as the grotesque exaggerations of blackness, the dice game, the koochie dancers, the grim inhumanity and shallow interest in 'tricks' gives way to hard-won dignity as humanity collectively moves from a pagan pantheon of animal gods and graven images (requiring human sacrifices) to the idea of a single, yet jealous god who demands fidelity, and finally to the one god himself changing from a god of wrath and vengeance to a god of love and forgiveness not through his own choice but because his creation, man, wills it, via the strength over him he's given them through suffering - the indirect 'balance sheet swivel'. It's all there in Ingram's face as de Lawd, and also as Adam, and also as Hezrel, a name that appears here and nowhere else.
During my 'here comes the big 12/21/12!' big rapture moment (4) I understood at last with diamond clarity that all the suffering in the world had only this one purpose, the shaking of the gold prospector's pan - to sift away the dross and mud so God might see what's left to shine, and all the baubles and wealth in the world won't buy you one step onto that golden stair, so don't be sure all that glitters in the Robert Plant's hair has two meanings.
But in losing all that, in tossing possessions away, in enduring centuries of slavery with one's every pain-wracked step (5), one earns the gift even God can't take away. No expensive wine ever tasted half as sweet as plain water to a man dying in the desert. So Jesus made men desert wanderers, that they might know this awesome sangre vintage. Why did God invent war? Because there's no atheist in a foxhole.
And because I'm too pampered to want to wander and die in the desert just for a taste of this golden water nectar, too lazy and grandiose to want a walk-on part in the war, I became a psychedelic surgeon lead role in a cage, cutting myself apart in endless operative bars. But when I accidentally sew my ego into my soul via incorrect sutures and stay awake in the dark night of the soul despair, then I got Leadbelly, and Lightnin' Hopkins, and the Pastures, to raise me clear above it via a transcendental alchemical process of absorption, for I can feel the beauty and triumph to be found through 'feeling' their own acceptance of their pain. This is a true alchemical miracle. It comforts me and reminds me the desert's always waiting, somewhere wrapped in foil in a forgotten college freezer, the 'good work' always ready to be picked up right where I left it. Aummm. And don't let the lord convince you that one keg of liquor on the ark is enough. Better take two kegs, lord. Or the Big Book of Alcoholic's Anonymous. On disc. As read by Tim Leary. Or at least Dennis Leary.
A final word:
Perhaps in order to balance things out, Rex Ingram also played the devil, or at least his son-in-law in Cabin in the Sky, another all-black film that posits negro culture as being more extreme in its polarity than whites (i.e. a black man is either a sober God-fearing Christian family man or a debauched craps-shooting, razor-wielding pimp --there's nothing in between, aside from Little Joe, of course) gets far less critical dross, but I think is far more racist (7). In Cabin we never see the lord, Ingram only plays the devil; in Pastures we never see the devil, Ingram is only the lord. And he played the genie in Thief of Baghdad! In other words, he's very good at playing larger than life mythic archetypes that far transcend the generic role of the 'bearer of the burden of blackness' though he seems to be able to do only one per film. For example, in his opening words in Pastures, he genuinely seems to be asking, in that beautifully gentle but forceful purr of a voice, "Have you been baptized?" ("Certainly, Lord" the choir responds) Have you been redeemed? ("Certainly, lord"), etc. He's a complex god because though he judges his creation, his main requests are simple that man honors him on Sunday, obeys the commandments, and doesn't go "squirmin' and fightin' and bearin' false witness." He brings in the three Hebrew angels in long white beards, and declares "It so happens I love your family, and I delights to honor them." The angels mention their people are in bondage down in Egypt. "I know they is. Who do you think put them there?" The Angels look dismayed "Oh, that's okay, I'm gonna take 'em out again." The Angels smile - but again there's the nagging suspicion that God is a bit of an insecure egotist. A good parent understands his children are bound to disobey on occasion, that it's essential to good growth of independent thought. This seems especially true with a God who seems to do things for no reason and then undo them, looking for any kind of dissent at his contradictory impulses.
During my last big awakening I became a ball of light unmoored from my body and 3D space time. I realized I was always either revolving closer to the godhead or farther away - but there was no such thing as true motionlessness, like a balloon constantly being lifted between ceiling and floor - and to merge into the godhead obliterates all separateness, and can be dangerous unless you're ready to die -- like moths aren't meant to survive hitting the bulb they orbit. A part of them lives on, dried on the bulb, so to speak, but the shell falls away. In this case it was I realized, a rebirth moment- reliving the ground zero of infancy --the sun being mother's breast, her uncritical love, her all-protective presence.
When you're a baby, your mother is a gigantic icon, more then five times your size. You worship her and need look no farther for true sustenance and comfort and if you hold a good orbit around her you're okay, but drift too far from her amniotic light and it's total darkness (she has to go to sleep sometime). She becomes just another star as you drift (as seen in Enter the Void). And if you're not working back towards that holy light, the devil's got you in his long reach gravity, convincing you to curse, get drunk, and get more stuff for your shelves because God doesn't exist anyway. True or not makes no difference: I remember, I feel the comforting gravity of the lord when watching Green Pastures -and that is enough. If there is a God, the miseries he creates here on Earth are to aid us in finding a streak of true faith and true mercy, true humility, the nonjudgmental love that unites all dualities back into a healthy radiant whole. There's really nothing else important -- life is just for this. Crying about injustice doesn't move him. It's there for a reason, to get you to cry your way past the trap of ego, to uncover the you that remains when your ego is finally willing to leave and let your Full Self emerge. It's all that lasts. Do I bend mighty low? I do. And showers of warm grateful tears are my reward.
Until the drugs wear off.
------
NOTES:
For New Testament Action, see Acidemic's 2011 Great Acid Cinema JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977)
1. See G.S. Morris's great, even-handed analysis: Thank God for Uncle Tom. Race and Religion Collide in The Green Pastures (Bright Lights, Jan. 2008)
2. I don't know what I'm talking about here, shhhh!
3. Imagine if Aesop's Fables were taken as truth, with vintners making sure their vines are always low enough for foxes to reach, lest the grapes turn sour, etc.) Naturally, were the ancient alien theorists right, all these miracles would be the result of their advanced technology
4. fall 2012 if you're keeping score, check the posts.
5. Giving away all your possessions and $$ gives you a rush of total freedom, if it didn't then cults wouldn't exist. Add to that the idea that a vegan diet is both very holy and right and yet makes you highly suggestible and passive, and drudgery and ceaseless toil give you clarity (i.e. when standing for 24 hours straight, lying down is a sublime ecstasy) then cults have a great rationale for all their exploitive behavior.
6. STP - or DOM - is a Berkeley chemist masterpiece, it's a sports car that comes with no brakes, and no way to de-accelerate, the gas tank just has to run itself out. I didn't know til Erowid that what I'd taken (DOM) was the same as what my doppelganger avatar Dave in Psych-Out (Dean Stockwell) . See: Great Acid Cinema: PSYCH-OUT (1968)
7. see one of my very first posts on this site: CABIN IN THE SKY: Co-Dependence and the Lord. (7/07)
aum...
This suffering is sanctified.
Where the twig meets the leaf is where the first frames of meshed mom morph.
Then it vibrates outward like the unspooling spiral of the seashell snail shape Aummmmmmm
shuffled downward onto plankton carpets,
shamanic rattles caked in baby spittle,
white and shiny salivas glistening like the freshly hatched serpent.
Aummmm, shapes cut from glowing red lantern spin orbit patterns as your crib surrounds you.
Aummmmmmmmm, the holy gleaming halo of your last first faint sunset Aummmm.
Each death, night, goodbye, adieu just an outward breath Aummmmmmm.
Mom, that titan, encircles us no more tonight,
just the slow spinning stars of nontoxic plastic, above us casting shadows,
out of reach, above the bars of our baby crypt.
The rattle dries into whiskey and drum sets, growing tall brings girls of equal height,their breasts no longer big as beanbag chairs,
only the forgotten homework now stirs a guilty shiver
only that is the infant's giant mom's
harrowing equal
in absence.
Inward..
Buzzing, the razor stops suddenly, the chair
either dentist of barber, you forgot which,
lurches downward.
The bib comes off.
We're unleashed,
but to where, with such an obscenely naked neck?
And so we sense that the hangups that befoul our spiritual questing are all beaten and cleared away by the enormous suffering of the Jewish slaves and the black slaves of the Old Testament, and the grotesque words, faces, jewelry and actions of their oppressors speaking to a great evolutionary comeuppance, as the grotesque exaggerations of blackness, the dice game, the koochie dancers, the grim inhumanity and shallow interest in 'tricks' gives way to hard-won dignity as humanity collectively moves from a pagan pantheon of animal gods and graven images (requiring human sacrifices) to the idea of a single, yet jealous god who demands fidelity, and finally to the one god himself changing from a god of wrath and vengeance to a god of love and forgiveness not through his own choice but because his creation, man, wills it, via the strength over him he's given them through suffering - the indirect 'balance sheet swivel'. It's all there in Ingram's face as de Lawd, and also as Adam, and also as Hezrel, a name that appears here and nowhere else.
During my 'here comes the big 12/21/12!' big rapture moment (4) I understood at last with diamond clarity that all the suffering in the world had only this one purpose, the shaking of the gold prospector's pan - to sift away the dross and mud so God might see what's left to shine, and all the baubles and wealth in the world won't buy you one step onto that golden stair, so don't be sure all that glitters in the Robert Plant's hair has two meanings.
But in losing all that, in tossing possessions away, in enduring centuries of slavery with one's every pain-wracked step (5), one earns the gift even God can't take away. No expensive wine ever tasted half as sweet as plain water to a man dying in the desert. So Jesus made men desert wanderers, that they might know this awesome sangre vintage. Why did God invent war? Because there's no atheist in a foxhole.
And because I'm too pampered to want to wander and die in the desert just for a taste of this golden water nectar, too lazy and grandiose to want a walk-on part in the war, I became a psychedelic surgeon lead role in a cage, cutting myself apart in endless operative bars. But when I accidentally sew my ego into my soul via incorrect sutures and stay awake in the dark night of the soul despair, then I got Leadbelly, and Lightnin' Hopkins, and the Pastures, to raise me clear above it via a transcendental alchemical process of absorption, for I can feel the beauty and triumph to be found through 'feeling' their own acceptance of their pain. This is a true alchemical miracle. It comforts me and reminds me the desert's always waiting, somewhere wrapped in foil in a forgotten college freezer, the 'good work' always ready to be picked up right where I left it. Aummm. And don't let the lord convince you that one keg of liquor on the ark is enough. Better take two kegs, lord. Or the Big Book of Alcoholic's Anonymous. On disc. As read by Tim Leary. Or at least Dennis Leary.
A final word:
Perhaps in order to balance things out, Rex Ingram also played the devil, or at least his son-in-law in Cabin in the Sky, another all-black film that posits negro culture as being more extreme in its polarity than whites (i.e. a black man is either a sober God-fearing Christian family man or a debauched craps-shooting, razor-wielding pimp --there's nothing in between, aside from Little Joe, of course) gets far less critical dross, but I think is far more racist (7). In Cabin we never see the lord, Ingram only plays the devil; in Pastures we never see the devil, Ingram is only the lord. And he played the genie in Thief of Baghdad! In other words, he's very good at playing larger than life mythic archetypes that far transcend the generic role of the 'bearer of the burden of blackness' though he seems to be able to do only one per film. For example, in his opening words in Pastures, he genuinely seems to be asking, in that beautifully gentle but forceful purr of a voice, "Have you been baptized?" ("Certainly, Lord" the choir responds) Have you been redeemed? ("Certainly, lord"), etc. He's a complex god because though he judges his creation, his main requests are simple that man honors him on Sunday, obeys the commandments, and doesn't go "squirmin' and fightin' and bearin' false witness." He brings in the three Hebrew angels in long white beards, and declares "It so happens I love your family, and I delights to honor them." The angels mention their people are in bondage down in Egypt. "I know they is. Who do you think put them there?" The Angels look dismayed "Oh, that's okay, I'm gonna take 'em out again." The Angels smile - but again there's the nagging suspicion that God is a bit of an insecure egotist. A good parent understands his children are bound to disobey on occasion, that it's essential to good growth of independent thought. This seems especially true with a God who seems to do things for no reason and then undo them, looking for any kind of dissent at his contradictory impulses.
During my last big awakening I became a ball of light unmoored from my body and 3D space time. I realized I was always either revolving closer to the godhead or farther away - but there was no such thing as true motionlessness, like a balloon constantly being lifted between ceiling and floor - and to merge into the godhead obliterates all separateness, and can be dangerous unless you're ready to die -- like moths aren't meant to survive hitting the bulb they orbit. A part of them lives on, dried on the bulb, so to speak, but the shell falls away. In this case it was I realized, a rebirth moment- reliving the ground zero of infancy --the sun being mother's breast, her uncritical love, her all-protective presence.
When you're a baby, your mother is a gigantic icon, more then five times your size. You worship her and need look no farther for true sustenance and comfort and if you hold a good orbit around her you're okay, but drift too far from her amniotic light and it's total darkness (she has to go to sleep sometime). She becomes just another star as you drift (as seen in Enter the Void). And if you're not working back towards that holy light, the devil's got you in his long reach gravity, convincing you to curse, get drunk, and get more stuff for your shelves because God doesn't exist anyway. True or not makes no difference: I remember, I feel the comforting gravity of the lord when watching Green Pastures -and that is enough. If there is a God, the miseries he creates here on Earth are to aid us in finding a streak of true faith and true mercy, true humility, the nonjudgmental love that unites all dualities back into a healthy radiant whole. There's really nothing else important -- life is just for this. Crying about injustice doesn't move him. It's there for a reason, to get you to cry your way past the trap of ego, to uncover the you that remains when your ego is finally willing to leave and let your Full Self emerge. It's all that lasts. Do I bend mighty low? I do. And showers of warm grateful tears are my reward.
Until the drugs wear off.
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NOTES:
For New Testament Action, see Acidemic's 2011 Great Acid Cinema JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977)
1. See G.S. Morris's great, even-handed analysis: Thank God for Uncle Tom. Race and Religion Collide in The Green Pastures (Bright Lights, Jan. 2008)
2. I don't know what I'm talking about here, shhhh!
3. Imagine if Aesop's Fables were taken as truth, with vintners making sure their vines are always low enough for foxes to reach, lest the grapes turn sour, etc.) Naturally, were the ancient alien theorists right, all these miracles would be the result of their advanced technology
4. fall 2012 if you're keeping score, check the posts.
5. Giving away all your possessions and $$ gives you a rush of total freedom, if it didn't then cults wouldn't exist. Add to that the idea that a vegan diet is both very holy and right and yet makes you highly suggestible and passive, and drudgery and ceaseless toil give you clarity (i.e. when standing for 24 hours straight, lying down is a sublime ecstasy) then cults have a great rationale for all their exploitive behavior.
6. STP - or DOM - is a Berkeley chemist masterpiece, it's a sports car that comes with no brakes, and no way to de-accelerate, the gas tank just has to run itself out. I didn't know til Erowid that what I'd taken (DOM) was the same as what my doppelganger avatar Dave in Psych-Out (Dean Stockwell) . See: Great Acid Cinema: PSYCH-OUT (1968)
7. see one of my very first posts on this site: CABIN IN THE SKY: Co-Dependence and the Lord. (7/07)
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