Flash of the Spirit by Robert Farris Thompson

Author:Robert Farris Thompson [Thompson, Robert Farris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-87433-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

His travels through Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi took him through bottle-tree territory, past cemeteries gleaming with the traditional deposits, past black houses with automobile tire sculptures in their yards, past other fleeting images of artistic motion redistilled in the folk propensity to sing of bluesy strains of love and yearning. Such was the grief and joy of being black in the U.S. South in the 1920’s. And then one day, just before the Great Depression, Dorsey came back home. He had trained in Brownsboro as a stonemason and, despite the Depression, “was lucky enough to have as much work as he could do.”101 Dorsey married Laura Johnson, a black woman, and lived in the house that his father had inherited from the Dorsey clan. Henry and Laura had four sons and two daughters. By 1956, approaching sixty and feeling his infirmities, he showed his brave and generous nature by countering his physical ailments with images suggesting important cheerful matters. These deliberately entertaining figurated constellations, in iron and plastic and other media from the industrial West, were to occupy him for the rest of his life. He died November 8, 1973. His wife, Laura, died soon thereafter. And the decorated house they lived in remained enigmatic to their neighbors. Few had walked around the house, seen it whole, put Dorsey’s labors in cultural perspective.

It was out of an interaction of house and cemetery, clan and person, that the art of Henry Dorsey emerged. The key to his intent was a sign by his door that said, “You are welcome as the flowers of May” (a tag line Joyce himself used in Ulysses: “Alo! Bonjour, welcome as the flowers of May”102).

Dorsey taught us to master things rather than to complain about them, to subdue them with artistic weapons of humor and generosity. This is instanced by the care with which he traced the dates of the birth of his own children on a concrete tablet discreetly recessed into a wall on the chimney behind his house. (Plate 99). The tablet shows, for example (Plate 100), that his late son, Zack, was born on 29 May 1930, with the citations of the other children’s initials and dates of birth. The D in the Dorsey of Zack’s name is decorated with a tiny commemorative white piece of shell; the D in the name of a surviving daughter, Costella A., is similarly embellished. The tablet attests to his historical consciousness. In the beginning he felt these things privately, behind his house, but then, c. 1956, he felt the need to counter his existential void with celebrations of names in a far more assertive and public manner. He began to decorate the front of his house for the entertainment of the world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.