Ghost of a Flea Read Online Free

great divide began developing between high and low art, and Fearing carried that divide within him, on the one hand consciously adopting a kind of writing that limited him, on the other finding within those limits a release of creative powers that otherwise might never have been available to him. Populists like James Agee, and in his own way Fearing, rejected belief that the old high art held some possibility of salvation. Now art, all art, had been democratized, leveled, marked down for quick sale. Now it could only be packaged and repackaged and packaged again to fill the unending need for consumer goods and the media’s relentless demand for product: distilled into streams of sweet-tasting poison.
    Little doubt that Agee, Fearing and the rest overstated the case. But in their mixture of populist pride and sadness at the decline of a higher culture lay something vivid and luminous, the apprehension of one of those rare moments when society visibly, utterly changes, and the sense of loss that sweeps over us then. That stream of poison, too, is a thing we all recognize.
    Blacks more than most.
    The poison goes down from generation to generation like the dissimulation and mimicry our forebears learned in order to survive, never saying what they really thought, putting their distress signals in code, till now, at this late hour in America’s history and our own, we no longer know, maybe can’t know, who we are or what we think.
    Year by year by year the poison drips in. We’re told it will heal us.

Chapter Five
    I’D GOT UP that morning (off the bench, so to speak), taken a long look at the reef of bottles, and climbed upstairs to bed. During the day I awoke several times and lay there listening to the old house’s creaks and groans, remembering Whitman’s I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen/And accrue what I hear unto myself , before falling back asleep. I got up for good when I heard Deborah down in the kitchen. It was dark.
    “And here we thought you’d become just another brave explorer claimed by the desert,” she said when I stumbled in.
    “Bad news, I’m afraid. We had to kill the camels for food. And the bwana, of course.”
    “Bwana first, I hope.”
    “Damned right. Not much meat on Ol’ Massuh, though. Tell me there’s coffee.”
    “I was thinking about making some. You can chew the beans, if you’re really desperate.”
    “Desperate, yes—but chewing beans would only remind me of the camels. I loved those camels.”
    “You do need coffee.”
    That was the first pot, as we sat idly talking, both of us too tired to give much thought to food or other routines of the day. We pulled various corners, edges and butt ends of cheese out of the fridge and ate them with the remains of a loaf of French bread. Deborah had stopped off at her set designer’s apartment after leaving the flower shop, and it was now past nine. I’d slept, in bed as opposed to on bench, fourteen hours.
    “I just didn’t have the heart to wake you this morning when I came down. You were, by the way, doing a fine imitation of Bat, half on the bench and half off, no bones anywhere.”
    I squeezed both eyes shut and opened them again: Bat, wincing.
     “You didn’t get caught in the storm, then?” she asked.
    “Only the beginnings of it. Which is just as well, from what I saw this morning. I’m surprised the streets were clear.”
    “They weren’t. Passable, though. Everything bleached-out and blasted-looking, but with this brilliant sun and bright blue sky overhead. There had to have been all kinds of trash in the streets, tree limbs, trash cans, African drums, a bloated politician’s body or two, but I guess the rain washed most of it away.”
    So, veering from prattle about Aristophanes and the play to news of her day at the shop, the latest on Pakistan’s earthquake and the saga of my purposeless sit-in at Joe’s, we went on talking till almost midnight, when Deborah cashed in the chip or two she had