One of the very first writers who ever thrilled me with that epiphanic frisson of “well, this is something new, isn’t it?” was Ambrose Bierce. My college lit classes were akin to swimming in seas of sameness, with an emphasis on that which was safe; that is, work that had been taught for seeming eons. Ambrose Bierce was not safe. Nor, alas, was he taught much.
I was not perspicacious enough to realize at the time the irony that Bierce was, indeed, not taught much, despite his work doing something hardly anyone’s work does now: veering off into direction upon direction, as though Bierce were a literary changeling. He was a newspaperman who could salt away nonfiction scenes such that they gained forever-life in your mind, his vignettes as indelible as personal memories stamped upon your brain, only they weren’t your memories, they just felt that way.
What may have gone unnoticed was his capacity to delight in the simplest things, in an un-filmed moment, especially given how much of the world he had seen and tasted.
Gay’s poem theorizes an ethics that is inescapably political, and its ebullient gratitude, fore and aft, reads not just as an overflow of thankfulness but as a concrete practice of the ethics Gay suggests. It is the kind of practice that eschews literary competition and anxieties of influence; it is the kind of practice that, in contrast to a death-dealing drive to possess, gives and receives gifts—books, saplings, time, poetic lines—with open hands. This holding-each-other, this mode of beholding, is a regenerative alternative to the slave ship’s hold.
Through Tiller’s sweet vulnerability and his steadfast grasp on hope, Lee tells a story of what it means to be plucked from darkness into the light of recognition, and in doing so, explores the fundamental human desires to be seen and to love.
There’s undoubtedly more to know about Lee and the creation of one of the major forces in American pop culture. This is an excellent dig below the geniality that shows casual fans who he really was. Famously, he wrote, or paraphrased something he heard as: “With great power there must also come great responsibility.” Well, maybe not. As another comics writer says here: “He’s a good guy. He’s just not a great guy.”
I am in need of a manicure.
A manticore. A man to cure.