Cool
In African Art in Motion, African art scholar and Yale professor Robert Farris Thompson turns his attention to cool in both the African and African-American contexts:
The mind of an elder within the body of the young is suggested by the striking African custom of dancing "hot" with a "cool" unsmiling face. This quality seems to have haunted Ten Rhyne at the Cape in 1673 and it struck the imagination of an early observer of strongly African-influenced dancing in Louisiana in the early nineteenth century, who noted "thumping ecstasy" and "intense solemnity of mien." The mask of the cool, or facial serenity, has been noted at many points in Afro-American history:
It is interesting that what remains a spiritual principle in some parts of Africa and the rare African-influenced portions of the modern U.S.A., such as tidewater Georgia, becomes in the mainline Afro-American urban culture an element of contemporary street behavior:
Negro boys…have a 'cool' way of walking in which the upper trunk and pelvis rock fore and aft while the head remains stable with the eyes looking straight ahead. The…walk is quite slow, and the Negroes take it as a way of 'strutting' or 'showing off'....
The…cool style of male walking in the United States is called bopping…. Mystical coolness in Africa has changed in urban African-American assertions of independent power. But the functions, to heal and gather strength, partially remain. And the name cool, remains. And the body is still played in two patterns, one stable, the other active, part energy and part mind.Read more about this topic: African Aesthetic
Famous quotes containing the word cool:
“A favorite of outdoor alcoholics, connoisseurs and Fundamentalists, these pills turn water into wine. In 10 minutes the most fetid swamp scum in the forest can become modest red, elusive and light on first taste, yet playful—one might say a trifle impudent—on the afterbite. Saves pack space by eliminating need for bulky corkscrew, decanter and bottles. Store pills on their sides in a cool dark place.”
—Alfred Gingold, U.S. humorist. Items From Our Catalogue, “Wine Pills,” Avon Books (1982)
“Up from the meadows rich with corn,
Clear in the cool September morn,”
—John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
“I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to
me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined
toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I
was happy.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)