The Whispered Speech of Instructions

     Many years ago, in 1974, I remember, as I sat next to a much older woman, whom I did not know, in a pew at church in a small suburb on the outskirts of Indianapolis, the reverend spoke.  And as he spoke to the congregation, his words slipped out of his mouth with a weight and wisdom said to be laced with a strange kind of divine intervention.  Hearing the reverend's voice as I did, I glanced up at the older woman, her eyes marked with the wrinkles of age and hard work.  The sequins on her dress sparkled bright green like a traffic light under the lights inside the church.  At the moment when the reverend spoke about some sort of "sanctity of life", the old woman raised her naked finger on her left hand and picked the gaping nostril at the base of her long thin nose.  Disgusted and surprised by this act, I tugged on my mother's dress to alert her to this repulsive phenomenon during the sermon.  My mother, deeply annoyed by my perceived childish-ness, slapped the top of my hand and, through a whisper into my young ear, instructed me to listen closely to the sermon.  After the sermon was delivered, the congregation was invited to sip on grape juice and eat a small square of bread.  Blood and body, the reverend said.  Some weeks later, I recall, I would read an article by a sports journalist who wrote about, among other things, a "ritual" involved in a big-time boxer's preparation for a fight.

     As discussion continues in many galleries and museums across this nation from the controversial knee-jerk removal of the video, "Fire in My Belly", by David Wojnarowicz, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C, some younger critics and writers, like, for example, Art Fag City, are calling to "dedicate venues for the display" of "transformative", "moving" and "transfixing" works of art such as the one featured in this video.
     And while right-wing politicians remain ridiculously unflexible, staunch, as though stuck in time, with their own positions on contemporary American social issues which are expressed and presented in our longstanding American cultural institutions, disregarding and trashing along the way "free speech" rights in our shared democratic process, the writers at Art Fag City should be commended for making reference to the second video mentioned above.  Forward, readers.  Forward.