"Community and Ethnographic Esoterics"

Benevolence
merlin, May, 2000

 Where the river
Meets the sea
Unseen maelstroms whirl,
And I inhaled the majesty,
That makes receptive soul
Of vessels shaped in innocence
That see with eyes of old,

By the river
Of my play
Rolling foam and hovering mist
Lift themselves in gentle haze
To blue above and tumbling veil,
With joyous children’s dance below,
So earth and star would kiss;

On the water
Where I dream,
Laughing winds they taste of rain,
And lenient morning river crawls
From musky mangrove rich and raw
To rushing sea and widening sky;
That anchor hearts to home

In the river
By the sea
Secrets whispered to the wind
And sealed within vined fruit
Are sailed away on perfumed waves
In ebb tide ripple and hand-made trays
In consecration of this place

Where the river meets the sea.

==============================================

me:
"it is so sad there is amazing history in this so very small place. I learn something new here, but also think of the Rada people, which is a vine of my family tree.

We really need an Indigenous and African History of Trinidad and Tobago, but i dont know nary enough to validate creating it

i am aware of their work although i have never held an Elder book in my hand, I have a few Warner=Lewis, but somehow those books as you remind me are still too distant seeming. But as you have reminded, I will try to build a collection to move with in the coming months. that would be rich and good. thanks"








"yeah. i now get clarity on my point. Being mindful that I never read an Elder book, I find Warner Lewis' treatments to be generic, general, regional. Not stories of Moruga, Arima, Tortuga. Belmont, St. Joseph that is what I meant when I said there is an amazing history in this place, at the ground, at the people level that is largely unknown and lost.

I realize that my Venezuelan grandmother and her sisters in st. joseph were some serious power women. who writes about that, enough for their living nieces to recall and tell stuff, but they are modern enough to not know and that is the thing, in my parents generation it is like they were willful fools for the purposes of silence, subjugation, keeping the secrets lest they be known, etc, etc. they never asked who and what of people.

my great aunt also from st. joseph but her parents from up the islands, have come to me in dreams. who were they up in that community?

pa neezer in moruga,

seadly's people in belmont.

That ground personal lineage level and their community.
THAT. that is gone~"

Merlin Hernandez : "Maven, I know what you mean when you speak of the distance in these works. I have not read Maureen Warner's work, though she was my A level Literature teacher...but I found the work if JD Elder, though seminal, to be grounded in a broad narrative devoid of the esoteric that we both desire. In that sense the work does not satisfy the need to rediscover and explore the deeper connections to our past."

me: " ahhhh Merlin. you just gave me something:

Ethnographic and Community Esoterics

BOOM wink emoticon"

Merlin Hernandez: " The convergence of mind...Looking forward to reading it in a couple of years..."

Merlin Hernandez: " Maven, I have been reflecting , perhaps ruminating, on the idea of community esoterics quite a bit since your post...And an image/experience haunts those thoughts. And it has to do with what is called "live ground" i.e. places in the community that are sacred, sometimes naturally so like the mouth of a river where I played as a child where the energies were so powerful that you entered with trepidation but knew you were in the arms of something profoundly divine...And sometimes these spaces were invested with such energies by the communal yearning that reaches into the very earth to infuse it with perfection. The Spiritual Baptist church in my neighbourhood had that energy..you did not enter frivolously because those esoteric forces arose in an arcane place less mundane...Many Shango shrines host those energies that give meaning to your idea of Ethnographic and Community Esoterics for me...Just a thought...I have a poem somewhere about that river...I'll hunt it up"