Glacial Errata, No. 4

Five Things for the Week of February 3, 2025.

Author

Colin Dickey
February 03, 2025

One: Inferno

Two: Purgatorio

From The Harlem Book of the Dead, the photo that inspired Toni Morrison’s Jazz (the second in her trilogy, including Beloved & Paradise):

“She was the one I think was shot by her sweetheart at a party with a noiseless gun. She complained of being sick at the party and friends said, ‘Well, why don’t you lay down?’ and they taken her in the room and laid her down. After they undressed her and loosened her clothes, they saw the blood on her dress. They asked her about it and she said, ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow, yes, I’ll tell you tomorrow.’ She was just trying to give him a chance to get away. For the picture, I placed flowers on her chest.” -James Van Der Zee

Three: Purgatorio, Cont.

The Harlem Book of the Dead, a truly stunning book unlike any other, that remains criminally out of print, was edited by Camille Billops. The photographs are by James Van Der Zee, who was born in 1886, in Lenox, Massachusetts. In New York, he took a job as a studio assistant for photography Charles Gertz in 1911; within a year he had opened his own studio. Among regular portraiture and other work, Van Der Zee photographed funerals. These photographs were primarily a way of letting distant family members, many separated by the Great Migration, know what happened, and to allow them to participate, even if only vicariously, in funerals. Van Der Zee spoke about the family’s need to know what had happened and to be reassured that the body had been properly cared for—“to know about the way he was put away,” as the saying went.

The camera a form of remote viewing, of distant witness.

Four: Paradiso

“The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower’s failed architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would have been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as post-life.”

(From Morrison’s Nobel Lecture)

Five: Le Stelle

The final lines from, respectively, Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, & Paradiso (translations by Jean and Robert Hollander):

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

(Then we came forth, to see again the stars.)

…puro e disposto a salire a le stelle.

(…pure and prepared to rise up to the stars.)

…l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

(…the Love that moves the sun all the other stars.)