Romantic, if Not Believable

Entry #27
Work: James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues

I don’t know what it is about black writers and their style that draws me to them, but I loved this story, though I again had some moments of discomfort. It flows, rolls, seeps through me as I read. The imagery is perfect. The flashbacks are not abrupt. They’re seamless, something I’ve attempted and failed to accomplish in my own writing.

Maybe I’ll come back to that later. The story itself is what held me after the style grabbed me. Sonny is another one of those tragic, yet not tragic, figures that strike fear in me. Being much like Sonny, I want to cheer him on, though I also want to caution anyone who is predisposed to addiction not the take cues from him. It’s like reading The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test and wanting to feel that way. It’s dangerous. The allure of the artists life has turned many a non-artist into a run of the mill junkie just by the romanticism of it.

I do think that there’s a soul that is missing something, for which art can be the thumb that plugs the dike, a kind of god, if you will, but that’s not everyone. The search for bigger and better and more vital art has sent many down that road when a simple spiritual journey, apart from art but in cooperation with art, is all that it really takes to escape the bottom. No, it wasn’t necessary that Sonny hit bottom (though each is self-defined, I know many who would consider a couple-year hitch in the pokey and a communal living situation to be “the good days”), and if he was a real addict, the ending was realistic. I take his musings on the street preachers’ singing and how it made him feel to be an indication that he’s still partaking of the poppy…and one doesn’t take addiction and turn it into something good. It just doesn’t work that way. Oh, there are rare exceptions (Jerry Garcia comes to mind), but for the most part, it’s a romantic, unrealistic notion.

I’ll need to think on this a little more. Perhaps after class discussion, I’ll have some borrowed thoughts to add.

Till later…