In the Spring of 2013, [the band] Florist was finally given it’s name…For me it has come to represent the multifaceted identity of a flower arranger. Beautifying, preserving, composing, killing, and commercializing a natural and emotional thing [sound/music] which we probably know too little about yet encounter very often.
– Emily Sprague
The Incremental Violence of a Passing Hour
Singing in circles
with no building
and no falling.
The hill doesn’t stay so for long, really.
As the generations pass, pieces crumbling
taken by wind and stream.
Little flourishes of melody
playing out ‘cross the land,
travel to big river and then reach the sea.
Tales of woe and disbelief.
Tales of love and sun snatching.
All are washed away as the waves come to beach.
The salt makes all clear.
And that Spring,
starry voids ring out before my eyes
cause one day my chest rings out for the last time,
ice cracking.
And one days these bones will bleed,
glacial stream.
And the stream starts in the Spring melt.
And the stream starts, watering the hairy meadow which hugs my form.
A spring of being excused by the simple things.
A spring of always return always desire always need
Always wash away always wipe clean.
None attach but everything
little keyrings of the time I been adorning
every step a vacation on unknown beach.
No need to feel diseased.
Can’t stop the tide from coming in.
very important
meet me in slime city
Venus Flytrap Search for the Missing Puzzle
On their state-issued iPhone’s,
counterfeiting the work of God.
As when a treatise on corpses
washes out of a cemetery
and interrupts the section
I’m reading on soils.
The passage read –
I came upon a dark vault
within the depths of the earth,
filled with blowing winds.
The bureaucracy was still there,
you could hear it whisper thin.
They told me that the technique
for restoring a spring which is running dry
is to have a beautiful woman
play music and sing near the spring.
They told me that the drought ended when a farmer
woke up on a moonlit night and started singing,
accompanying himself on the lute.
I tried both, but
still the land stays dry.
They told me that broad beans are capable of curing “agonizing love,”
while ten bucks of ground saffron mixed with wine
will cause anyone who drinks it to laugh until they die.
And so I drink,
chronicling my decay,
like the opposite of height marks on the door frame.
Excerpt:
HENRY DUMAS: Inseparable from Sun Ra’s music is his mythology, a sol-based cosmology that stretches deep into the secrets of the ancient Egyptians. l asked him once about his role of Ra, the Egyptian sun god.
SUN RA: Everybody should try to be what they really are. They should search and find what they really are. That is what I really am. Some people are in the role of a diplomat or a congressman. I am in the role of Ra. To be what I really am, I must be on another plane of existence. On this stage of existence I am nothing. But on another I am in the role of Ra. It’s just like when you go to the theater and you look at a beautiful stage. It doesn’t stay that way. Pretty soon the next act brings you some different scenery.
HD: I asked him about Astro-Infinity music which he plays in the new Arkestra. “Is this a way of relating jazz to the atomic age and the future?”
RA: Astro-Infinity music is just one aspect of my music. It is heavenly, eternal, no beginning and no ending The highest aspiration for many on earth is freedom. Astro-Infinity music is beyond freedom. It is precision, discipline. It is not just freedom. It is coordination and sound interdependence. It is the design of another world. It has nothing to do with the traditions of yesterday, today or the future.
HD: What would you consider some of the possibilities of jazz in the future? I mean, considering the black man as the originator of jazz, considering the social revolution going on today and his attempts to resurrect some image of dignity for himself, where does jazz get into the picture?
RA: Well, you have to go back to some beginnings to talk about that. For one thing, the Creator gave the black man harmony in the beginning. And he tried to discipline the black man to use his gifts, but the black man was too unruly. Even the Creator couldn’t handle him, or at least he decided against it. So, l guess the Creator turned the job over to me. But the black man has been worshipping death instead of trying to understand the ways of his Creator. Yet he won’t make death his king. The equation doesn’t balance. In religion, he believes in the cross, which is an X. When you X something, you eliminate it, you axe it. In the same religion the cross is the symbol of life. Anybody following the cross winds up dead in the cemetery with an X for his crown.
HD: Are you talking about the spiritual death spoken of by Christians or the death of the body?
RA: Both really. The black man is under the name of death. He carries it around with him. The word negro. It is the same as the word necro. The g and the c are interchangeable according to cosmic mathematics. It is an equation. A negro equals a necro. The sound of one is in the other. In the Greek necro means dead body. Necropolis is a city of the dead. Once you accept the name without checking into things, then you are automatically a citizen of the city.
HD: lf the citizens of a necropolis are dead, how does one resurrect them? I mean, in the analogy you just made, how are the souls called forth?
RA: Mostly through music and myth. But it’s not just the black man who is in trouble. You can look in your newspapers and read how the whole planet is in trouble, in need of spiritual awakening. I am painting pictures of another plane of existence, you might say, something so far away that it seems nonexistent or impossible. ln infinite terms anything is possible. Nothing is impossible. People have always been looking for that world where nothing is impossible. A world of happiness, so they claim. But never have they been able to create it. All the great men on this planet have not yet come close to that world. They’ve tried everything and everybody. But people will have to have new mind-cepts. All the old ways will have to pass away. When people reach the stage when they can use their infinite mind power to concentrate and direct the truth in these cosmic equations I am talking about, then they will be ready for the grand experiment. There will be no more death in the next plane of existence. You might say that I am the bridge to the next plane of existence. When they reach that stage, they will be resurrected.
HD: What is the next stage and how will music be used?
RA: For the black man the first step will be toward discipline. Music is a force of nature. I am a force of nature. I am in the role of Ra because the Creator has left it up to me to give some order and harmony to this planet. Not everyone is in need of it. Many people are well developed spiritually and are growing. But most are not. So a force of nature gets them all. It’s just like when it rains, it rains on everything and everybody. You might say that I represent all the forces of nature. People don’t all know about this mind-cept, but in the Yoruba culture it is understood. In many parts of Africa this cosmic law is true among the people. If a man or a people reach a certain stage in their growth and development and then they just can’t go any further, a force of nature incubates among them. And this force, be it the wind, the sun, rain, lightning, or thunder, whichever is really needed for that particular kind of development, achieves what could not be done A force of nature gets under you and drives you to do what you thought you couldn’t. If I am in the role of Ra and I put some heat up under you, then you will move or burn up.
————————————————————————
The final question Dumas asks Sun Ra before the recording cuts out is what is the name of the supreme being? The tape ends abruptly like it’s fallen off a jagged cliff. About two years after this recording was made, Dumas is killed by the NYPD in a case of “mistaken identity.” On the night he is killed, Sun Ra convinces him to give up his gun, he disarms him. Dumas goes to the subway station in Harlem and he’s shot and killed by police. The secrets he wanted Ra to divulge by proxy he now knows as another stolen black life sent to the other side for vigilance, deliverance. The thief who stole Henry Dumas’s days, turned him into a saint who now guards our hidden legacies and this recording is evidence of where he was sent. In West African tradition, the griot or town crier, because he cannibalizes his people’s history in order to tell it, must assimilate it, eat it alive, is not buried with other members of the community when he dies but instead put in a tree to be consumed by maggots.
…
Sun Ra wanted us to acknowledge that there is no death, that life is endless. At concerts he would beseech enthralled spectators, asking will you give up your death for me? When, in this recording of his fireside chat with Henry Dumas, he assures we’re already complete in the realm of the dead he is saying, in a way, that eternity awaits, this plane is remedial in comparison to that knowledge, there’s nothing we lack but understanding of that.
He is explaining that death is a western concept we must outgrow if we really expect to be among those who see and hear and know how to listen to Sun Ra. He knows that the Egyptian Book of the Dead, as it’s mistranslated in the west, is really called the book of coming forth by day, of the boat that carries the sun, in its natal tongue. It is a book of endless revivification, it does not acknowledge the life/death binary the west obsesses over, but instead establishes that there is either sun or a limpid accursed sunlessness, enlightenment to the life-giving force or a forest of terrors, and we must seek the sun, Ra, Re, that ravening arrow on the way to never, the saturnine realm Sun Ra governs.
If body, mind, soul, and spirit were aligned on the same plane, language would reflect the eternal truths that belong to music and poetry and we would all be coming forth by day in harmonic unison. Beneath his matter-of-fact responses to Dumas’s naive but sincere questions, is the subterfuge of that mythos, its impatience with misinterpretation and its inability to be grasped without being experienced.
…
Even as the maggots eat the flesh of the griot, we keep talking, giving of ourselves defiantly, coming together furtively and unapologetically saying yes to yesterday, to accompaniment, to the disavowal of false curses, to being devoured by our own songs, transcending our haunts with our horrors until we become the heroes we seek in effigy. We, out here in the diaspora waiting to be cannibalized and lied on, are making conversations, new languages, and converting them to tone then song then eating the flesh of our music as this record.
-Harmony Holiday
There It Is by Jayne Cortez
My friend
they don’t care
if you’re an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a shithead or a snake
They will try to exploit you
absorb you confine you
disconnect you isolate you
or kill you
And you will disappear into your own rage
into your own insanity
into your own poverty
into a word a phrase a slogan a cartoon
and then ashes
The ruling class will tell you that
there is no ruling class
as they organize their liberal supporters into
white supremacist lynch mobs
organize their children into
ku klux klan gangs
organize their police into
killer cops
organize their propaganda into
a device to ossify us with angel dust
preoccupy us with western symbols in
african hair styles
inoculate us with hate
institutionalize us with ignorance
hypnotize us with a monotonous sound designed
to make us evade reality and stomp our lives away
And we are programmed to self-destruct
to fragment
to get buried under covert intelligence operations of
unintelligent committees impulsed toward death
And there it is
The enemies polishing their penises between
oil wells at the pentagon
the bulldozers leaping into demolition dances
the old folks dying of starvation
the informers wearing out shoes looking for crumbs
the life blood of the earth almost dead in
the greedy mouth of imperialism
And my friend
they don’t care
if you’re an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a shithead or a snake
They will spray you with
a virus of legionnaire’s disease
fill your nostrils with
the swine flu of their arrogance
stuff your body into a tampon of
toxic shock syndrome
try to pump all the resources of the world
into their own veins
and fly off into the wild blue yonder to
pollute another planet
And if we don’t fight
if we don’t resist
if we don’t organize and unify and
get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity
the stylized look of submission
the bizarre look of suicide
the dehumanized look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
forever and ever and ever
And there it is
TAKE THIS RIVER by Henry Dumas
We move up a spine of earth
That bridges the river and the canal.
And where a dying white log, finger-like,
Floating off the bank, claws at the slope,
We stumble, and we laugh.
We slow beneath the moon’s eye;
Near the shine of the river’s blood face,
The canal’s veil of underbrush sweats frost,
And this ancient watery scar retains
The motionless tears of men with troubled spirits.
For like the whole earth,
This land of mine is soaked….
Shadows together,
We fall on the grass without a word.
We had run this far from the town.
We had taken the bony course, rocky and narrow,
He leading, I following.
Our breath streams into October
As the wind sucks our sweat and a leaf…
“We have come a long long way, mahn.”
He points over the river
Where it bends west, then east,
And leaves our sight.
“I guess we have,” I pant. “I can hear
My angry muscles talking to my bones.”
And we laugh.
The hood of night is coming.
Up the river, down the river
The sky and night kiss between the wind.
“You know,” Ben says, “this is where
I brought Evelyn….
Look. We sat on that log
And watched a river egret
Till it flew away with the evening.
“But mahn, she is a funny girl, Aiee!
But she looks like me Jamaica woman….
But she asks me all the questions, mahn.
I’m going to miss her mahn, Aiee!
“But I will . . . Ewie. Ewie I love you,
But I do Ewie . . . Ewie . . . ,” he says
And blows a kiss into the wind.
Broken shadows upon the canal
Form and blur, as leaves shudder again…again
“Tell me this, Ben,” I say.
“Do you love American girls?
You know, do most Jamaicans
Understand this country?”
We almost laugh. Our sweat is gone.
He whispers “Aiee” on a long low breath
And we turn full circle to the river,
Our backs to the blind canal.
“But I’m not most Jamaicans….
I’m only Ben, and tomorrow I’ll be gone,
And … Ewie, I love you….
Aiee! My woman, how can I love you?”
Blurred images upon the river
Flow together and we are there….
“What did she ask you?” I say.
“Everything and nothing, maybe.
But I couldn’t tell her all.”
We almost laugh. “‘Cause I
Don’t know it all, mahn.
“Look, see over there….
We walked down from there
Where the park ends
And the canal begins
Where that red shale rock
Down the slope there . . . see?
Sits itself up like a figure,
We first touch our hands . . .
And up floats this log,
Not in the river
But in the canal there
And it’s slimy and old
And I kick it back . . .
And mahn, she does too.
Then she asks me:
‘Bennie, if I cry
When you leave would you
Remember me more?’
Aiee! She’s a natural goddess!
And she asks me:
‘Bennie, when you think of Jamaica
Can you picture me there?’
And while she’s saying this,
She’s reaching for the river
Current like she’s feeling its pulse.
She asks me:
‘Bennie, America means something to you?
Maybe our meeting, our love? has
Something to do with America,
Like the river? Do you know Bennie?’
Aiee, Aiee, mahn I tell you
She might make me marry . . .
Aiee! Ewie, Jamaica . . . moon!
And how can I say anything?
I tell her:
‘Africa, somewhere is Africa.
Do you understand,’ I say to her,
And she look at me with the moon,
And I hear the wind and the leaves
And we do not laugh . . .
We are so close now no wind between us . . .
I say to her:
‘Ewie, I do not know America
Except maybe in my tears….
Maybe when I look out from Jamaica
Sometimes, at the ocean water….
Maybe then I know this country….
But I know that we, we Ewie….
I know that this river goes and goes.
She takes me to the ocean,
The mother of water
And then I am home.’
And she tells me she knows
By the silence in her eyes.
I reach our hands again down
And bathe them in the night current
And I say: ‘Take this river, Ewie….’
Aiee, wind around us, Aiee my God!
Only the night knows how we kiss.”
He stands up.
A raincloud sailing upon a leak, whirs
In the momentary embrace of our memories….
“Let’s run,” I say, “and warm these bones.”
But he trots a bit, then stops,
Looking at his Jamaica sky.
“Let’s run the long road west
Down the river road,” I say,
“And I’ll tell you of my woman….Aiee.”
We laugh, but we stop.
And then, up the spiny ridge
We race through the trees
Like spirited fingers of frosty air.
We move toward some blurred
Mechanical light edged like an egret
And swallowed by the night.
Into this land of mine.
And the wind is cold, a prodding
Finger at our backs.
The still earth. Except for us.
And from behind that ebon cloak,
The moon observes….
And we do not laugh
And we do not cry, And where the land slopes,
We take the river….
But we do not stumble,
We do not laugh,
We do not cry,
And we do not stop….