Comments on: Jujitsu for Christ: Leon and the Blackhawks.

By: PrettyFakes » Blog Archive » Thoughts on the Forthcoming Howard Chaykin Blackhawk Collection

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 23:49:09 +0000

[...] Don’t forget: Gorjus wrote about PF contributor Jack Butler’s use of Blackhawk in his amazing novel Jujitsu … [...]

By: Jack Butler

Jack Butler — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 14:36:00 +0000

You guys amaze me. I didn’t realize anyone even read the book any more. Every one of you is right on the money. Hell, you’re teaching me things about my book. Salvation is what the book is about, all right. And knowing salvation, how can one abide a twisted and corrupted society, a society that discriminates?

So happy someone is picking up on the comics references.

Speechless. Thanks.

By: Regulator

Regulator — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 13:28:13 +0000

I would agree wholeheartedly except with the ‘oneself’ and the ‘spiritual self’. Personal quests, tied up so often in physical struggles, are limited if not doomed; that’s why Marcus, heroically, fights in the field of commonality/community: the ideological. Christ wasn’t just trying to save alot of individual souls, but to change peoples’ ways of thinking about themselves and more importantly of others. But the idea of working physical vs. spiritual realms, biblically, makes perfect sense.

By: gorjus

gorjus — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:16:25 +0000

Wow. Excellent point. Might it also be further shown that Leon’s physical struggle fails outright? That perhaps the only “real” or actual way to power is to transform oneself?

That spiritual v. physical contrast then brings in interesting paralells to the Bible—i.e., the Old Testament conception of a messiah as a Mosaic freer of the physical self/slaves, as opposed to the New Testament savior who works to free the spiritual self.

By: Regulator

Regulator — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 18:14:26 +0000

I guess this sort of relates to this question of ‘realness’: I keep feeling this novel is in some way a ‘novel of ideas’—a label that nearly carries a perjorative connotation—but one that works well anyway. Part of what it plays with is the way that ideas manifest themselves in material conditions (race is not real, segregation is). Part of what Marcus learns is that his hero, tho’ master of the material, fails to triumph over the ideological. All that he accomplishes personally in overcoming the material threats of violence, the material conditions that result from racism, make very little dent in the ideological conditions which dictate the material. So where Roger failed thru Karate, thru crossing the race lines, thru trying to stop the terrible climax, Marcus’ battlefield is the ideological, giving up on his great physical abilities to write a novel about ideas.

By: brd

brd — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 11:07:32 +0000

Bravo. This is very eloquent. As was the article that Butler wrote defining or musing on Southern writing.

From yesterday, Prof Fury – “Mr. Blake understands heaven, but he can’t find a way to talk about that new understanding in a way that will mean anything to anyone (32-35).”

What is authentic faith? Butler captures in “Roger Finds Jesus as His Personal Savior” a vignette of repentence/redemption as Roger turns from being “left out” to relationship. This conversion – that does seem to parallel his conversion to Karate earlier – would generally be seen, evangelically speaking, as the premier salvific moment. (I, too could give my testimony.) And I’m not minimizing the authenticity of these turnings or the moumental nature. These signal moments when we are at Canaan’s edge and have taken up stones from the middle of our Jordan and have set them as a memorial in Gilgal.

But enter Mr. Blake and his salvific moment, a rather Tillich-ian experience of the eternal now, and though a different formulation of the picture of conversion, I see it as authentic and essential philosophically and spiritually.

I wonder now (as I have wondered before), what the heck is the soul? How is it brought into being within us and nurtured. My experience would avow the importance of the initial redemptive assertion, but not apart from the potentiality of making every existential moment a soulish one in which we may convert and add, if not a stone, then a pebble to a monument of authentic faith. Or, to honor Butler’s call for knowledgable reference, if Moses said, Ha’azinu, “listen, God is the Rock” before the crossing of the Jordan, he also said, Shema “hear, the Lord is one.” And that more personal call was for all your heart, all your soulishness, all your days, all your doorposts. That is the itch that the Blake thing is trying to scratch. And, frankly, for me, that is also the “rub.”

By: Professor Fury

Professor Fury — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 19:58:37 +0000

Aw, this is just brilliant. I’ve never been sure what exactly to make of Leon’s Blackhawk battle-cry, and this just nails it. I never knew that the cry was meant to “summon” the B-hawks “to action”; knowing it now just makes Leon seem that much more lonely and pathetic. And your reading of Roger’s reactions as arising from his belief that he’s failed Leon somehow, has betrayed him, is really interesting. I’m persuaded.

Your discussion of these flawed models of resistance brings to mind an interesting passage: in the newspaper column praising Roger’s bravery in stopping the robbery, the racist pundit write, “I salute you, my captain. Mississippi has need of your like.” captain. Mississippi. Captain Mississippi. What I’m saying is, even a superhero identity that started out as a way of resisting the horror of “Mississippi” gets appropriated into it, becomes just another part of it.

This is great!