Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Saltimbanque: A Work-in-Progress

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.1996.0158

1080-6512

Patricia S. Jones,

Latin American Literature Studies

Saltimbanque A Work-in-Progress Patricia Spears Jones (bio) . . . the place of art in the city and society, the space allowed to art. . . . its very different publics, its perversions in the courts and its suppression in the streets. T. J. Clarke 1. Suppose Daumier had behaved differently? His walks across Paris uneventful. News banal—barricades, congresses, the secret societies ineffectual. What would his cartoons reveal? The fat bellied bourgeois slimmer? The masses stepping into well made shoes? Or would he have, as he did in private, made more paintings of the saltimbanques, suppressed street performers, their children and trained beasts starving by order of the State? Were their songs too political, pornographic? Had their children not received instruction from the priests? Were their dancing dogs and wily monkeys better off, burned? Have we not enough water? Is there not enough air? 2. Flags dirty and torn. Fragmented song singes air. Why are the revolutions of 1848 so present? Weapons in the hands of peasants, slave rebellions in the American South, royalty in crisis, plutocrats measure their new found power in gilt, silk, velocity. [End Page 836] Pamphleteers for the right hand and the left. Militarists, Marx, and monopoly capitalists, the modern world embryonic. 3. What a blaze was to be made in about one hundred years. Sorting through shadows, air borne war machines disrupt, destroy with electrical ease. An eleven year old’s voice is suddenly burdened with dust, human dust as ovens roar a clinical heat. (Attendants weep as a passage from Wagner rises from a well-tended Victrola.) Displaced, disloved, dissolved almost, a patch of khaki becomes a small child’s dress, old shoelaces ribbons for her hair. A population of zombies beg for cigarettes and curse. 4. On a Saigon street, in the midday heat or so it seemed in the black and white photograph, a Buddhist monk in a moment of amazing rage and pure tenderness doused his saffron robes. We do not see this yellow. We taste dust. Human dust. Sous les paves, la plage Under the pavement, the beach. 5. Sous les paves, la plage songs of freedom scorch parched throats. Workers and students defy enforced alienation. Rise together, spray police with pamphlets, curses, the very paving stones that once were danced upon by the saltimbanques, their children and trained beasts. While an ocean away, under an image of the ever defiant Che, intellectuals, idealists, the disaffected rallied across a hemisphere. In the mountains of Central America, poets purged themselves in clear cold streams, debated desire, and learned to shoot. Sous les paves, la plage Under the pavement, the beach. [End Page 837] 6. On a road to Biafra, in the slums of Manila, on the back- streets of Kingston, inside the chain-linked lawns of South Los Angeles, people make a new song, riot song as a stockpile of promises collapses the shantytowns, miners’ camps, the migrant workers’ busses traveling north from Florida seats sticky with overripe oranges. Under the pavement, the beach. Under a stockpile of rotting promises, human stench. Bodies gunned down in daylight in Manila, Mexico City, Memphis. Cameras chasing children grabbing a solid taste of fire. And earlier that year, Soviet tanks pressed against the Prague Spring, a winter storm drowning flowers. 7. Martin King sat bleeding in a Birmingham jail. He worked his mind along the stations of the cross where he found, if not solace, then the tattered cloth called dignity, as he prayed for the souls of jailers. Tracing Alabama dust, his cross just heavy enough to bear, word could have been miracle, joy, power It was likely to have been song, people, or alone. He made in private, a face, mimicking his fat jowled jailers. Clown face turned towards dust. His tears roll away holy laughter. Saltimbanque in a moment of amazing tenderness and pure rage. Under the pavement, the beach. Patricia Spears Jones Patricia Spears Jones is author of a play, Mother, and two volumes of poems, Mythologizing Always and The Weather That Kills. Her work has also been published in such periodicals as The American Voice, The Kenyon Review, The Black Scholar, Hanging Loose, and Journal of Southern Culture. She teaches a poetry...