A Collection

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

your thorns are the best part of you.

But the cop would be Clifton's historian, his judge, his witness, and his executioner, and I was the only brother in the watching crowd. And I, the only witness for the defense, knew neither the extent of his guilt nor the nature of his crime. Where were the historians today? And how would they put it down? I stood there with the trains plunging in and out, throwing blue sparks. What did they ever think of us transitory ones? Ones such as I had been before I found Brotherhood - birds of passage who were too obscure for learned classification, too silent for the most sensitive recorders of sound; of natures  too ambiguous for the most ambiguous words, and too distant from the centers of historical decision to sign or even to applaud the signers of historical documents? We who write no novels, histories or other books. What about us, I thought, seeing Clifton again in my mind and going to sit upon a bench as a cool gust of air rolled up the tunnel.

What I want to examine is how the processes of imperialism occurred beyond the level of economic laws and political decisions, and - by predisposition, by the authority of recognizable cultural formations, by continuing consolidation within education, literature, and the visual and musical arts - were manifested at another very significant level, that of the national culture, which we have tended to sanitize as a realm of unchanging intellectual monuments, free from worldly afflictions. William Blake is unrestrained on this point: 'The Foundation of Empire,' he says in his annotations to Reynold's Discourses, 'is Art and Science. Remove them or Degrade them and the Empire is No more. Empire follows Art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.

'I can't marry you, you know that,' he said. 'Now what do you want me to do?' 'No,' she said, 'and I reckon you wouldn't marry me even if you was free. I reckon you wouldn't want no whore like Esther for your wife. Esther's just for the night, for the dark, where won't nobody see you getting your holy self dirtied up with Esther. Esther's just good enough to go out and have your bastard somewhere in the goddamn woods. Ain't that so, Reverend?'