Restorative Community Project Session 9:

voices to voices, lip to lip

i swear (to noone everyone) constitutes

undying; or whatever this and that petal confutes . . .

to exist being a peculiar form of sleep

It’s a spatial elision, a signature move of our poet Estlin Cummings: “noone.” I suppose you can read it as if a cow uttered the remark, but I think it is proper to say “no one.” We are a part of this category so I should perhaps be less blithe about it all, but somehow this seems better than to be overly governmental about such matters. What is worth getting paternal about is that any of this (us, “noone”, voices or lip(s), even petals and all) that anything from this panoply be “undying.” Can you figure a more offensive thought? I have read ahead and you are welcome to as well, but what you find is that these voices and lip(s) are a “you and i”; again another typical formulation for our author. Love being his supreme object of study, of course it would then be raised up as the one thing that can defy our bodily destinies: dying.

What do you know of dying Basir, when you say your great grandmother is now better off? Cruelties dodged in and through an eternal sleep. No longer “peculiar” indeed. Perhaps it is dying that is of wonder and death where our investigations end. So I ask: are you still looking too?

what’s beyond logic happens beneath will;

nor can these moments be translated: i say

that even after April

by God there is no excuse for May

You once asked is all art logical and I, in only so many words, said kiss me. But what lies over the edge of such wantings. “beyond logic” if you will. The founding myth of the great African city and Roman advisory, Carthage, began with a woman and her beguile. The story goes, in settling her nation's arrival into the northern coast of the ancient continent, she negotiated with the natives who agreed to grant her as much land as could be covered in a single hide of cows skin. Wit and merit being the stuff of legends, and Dido indeed legendary henceforth, ordered that the skin be trimmed into thin ribbons which when reassembled could circumscribe an entire hill. So we have it, our city and a myth too. This limit is easy to peer over. This “logic” indeed has a “beyond.” I can see it: the unlegendary. What I’ll add is that to be outside of a national myth making is to be black in this country. What's more, despite all cummings efforts to tuck the sublime underneath agency, the unlegendary is defined precisely by her subordination under some biopolitical programme: “beneath will”. Sahfeeah, you are a dream or an unconscious when you say no to science. I am not willing enough to say yes or no to you however. I just don't want you to die, that's all. Please don't die. Please do not die.

“Always historicize!” 

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

“Only a rebuke that ‘has something in it’ will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.”

 Sigmund Frued, The Interpretation of Dreams 

-bring forth your flowers and machinery: sculpture and prose

flowers guess and miss

machinery is the more accurate, yes

it delivers the goods, Heaven knows

It is in moments like these where I realize just how much Dickinson has touched me. Let me explain: the poetic ratio provisional to even my arrival is a beautiful one: flowers are to sculpture as machinery is to prose. It is messy and bordering on the incoherent as all wise and truthful things ought to be. What Dickinsonian about this balance is the value statement intrinsic to its construction. I see the great scale tip, I feel the tide of the poem build, I exhale into the space opened up into the poetic reversal “yet.” More ought to be said of its propositional signification however, Sculpture is biological while prose is synthetic. Was cummings a naturalist? Why sculpture? Elisa once shared with me a piece by Cy Twombly suggesting that the sculptural was poetic in the highest normative sense. This seems about right. Not sculpture but poetry. And not just this, but poetry as (as the Dickinsonian anticipates) supreme to prose. Fiction is a dead genre I explain.

To perceive the inertia of the poetic imagination in this moment is what it feels like to hear Evans pull back in order to let Davis enter. That space of anticipation is a precious one, precisely for its poverty. But what she lacks in bounty, is made up for by the riches of potentiality. A condition of possibility. Mohammed, you said humans are more beautiful than any angel because unlike our heavenly counterparts, humans have a choice to be good or evil. Angels do not. This possibility of our virtue is the source of our aesthetic. So be it then. I choose to be cruel if for nothing else, it can make me less divine. And more human.

(yet are we mindful, though not as yet awake,

of ourselves which shout and cling, being

for a little while and which easily break

in spite of the best overseeing)

Fragility is only taken as a cause for care when the object has secured its excess value in the beholder. This is why what makes china delicate is no different from what make my heart, yours and broken. A cruel thing it is to be the architect of our undoing like a dog who chases her tail, like a fire that cannot stop his burning. If what makes humans beautiful is our virtue of choice, how undemocratic it is that I have no pickings with whom it is that makes me suffer. This time last year, amidst all this suffering, I still believed that love could nonetheless offer some reprieve. For me yes, but also Coolie men indentured and destructive. I choose not to say more because I believe in the capacity of language to commit injury and the evil of recapitulating the brutality of the everyday. So Jazaret, this is what I have to say to you: “but this, this otherness is beyond the capture of my words, this cannot be useful, this is a dream"

i mean that the blond absence of any program

except last and always and first to live

makes unimportant what i and you believe;

not for philosophy does this rose give a damn . . .

Indeed metaphysics cares not for the erotic. Jean-Luc Marion wrote, “Philosophy today no longer says anything about love, or at best very little. And this silence is for the better because when philosophy does venture to speak of love it mistreats it or betrays it.” In this way the feelings are mutual. The rose too does not care, or so says cummings. A jewish man one night, after an evening of breaking rules meant to be broken, and likely high, oh how you used to always be high, he came to me with wild flowers picked not for me but the idea of me. It was too romantic in the way young lovers make a show of their rehearsals in courtship, but I was too deep into it to perceive him or the gesture as anything less. It has now become a tradition that I preserve the petals I receive. What used to be entombed in my phone case, now takes up a residency wherever life seems to organize itself at the time of its reception. The most recent installment lies in my copy of sister outsider.

William Carlos Williams was famous for doing away with the english romantic fascination with the rose in pursuit of a new American Modernism. Oh how exciting it must have been to pronounce, “how dare you bring me a dead symbol.” Scott has heard my rejoinder on this subject many time over. As I crawled through that window, I caught a glimpse of your wilted roses, I didn’t give a second thought to it till you exclaimed, “ a dead symbol!” The words attached themselves to the signifier like dough on a kitchen surface. Blunt and unfair; the disgrace felt fraught with misgivings. The semiotic rose might indeed be dead, but its phenomenological referent is very much alive and kicking. Such is what I learned on my brief and $41 dollar sojourn to Baltimore. Looking out his western facing exposure, I marveled at the sight of an urban design that made me wonder, is there any part of a city whose witness is outside is outside of its said design. Is there any part of you I am not supposed to see. You will have to tell me for yourself Micah. The chance will be yours again with time, he ays with no insurance to his guarantees. But you must be used to that by now. Being a man of faith and all.

bring on your fireworks, which are a mixed

splendor of piston and of pistil; very well

provided an instant may be fixed

so that it will not rub, like any other pastel

Dear Professor Bay,

Congratulations are in order! Your forthcoming book, “Traveling Black” is indeed an achievement to say the least. If you will indulge me: for a text about mobility I found myself curiously slowing down. What is it about the terrors of our travel economy that made it a site of intense resistance in the long march to freedom? “American identity has long been defined by mobility and the freedom of the open road, but African Americans have never fully shared in that freedom.” is what I imagine you would offer in response. The sophisticated and vectored logics of humiliation that press against the experience of black mobility is far from a thing of the past as you so prudently argue.

Naeem has never left the city. Destiny just bought a car. Both seem to be children of this history you chart. The fantasy of escape and fugitivity is nothing short of a freedom dream. Emancipation as flight, Nothing could be more American it seems. Who else would look at the moon and say, freedom is over there. So what is it that sparks the engine of empire; and are we its pistons?

(While you and i have lips and voices

which are for kissing and to sing with

who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch

invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

Let me paraphrase: so long as you and I are undying, who cares about the scientists and his findings? Perhaps anti-darwinism is the thesis of cummings poetic world. My caution of all things coherent, empirical, and scientific is indeed why I take just issue with journalism. What is it more than history written in a hurry. A sort of co-morbidity as even historiography too is not without her vices. If it offers any explanatory power to the reader, this is why my reports have made use of opacity and fragment: doing so I hope protects the subjects with the mist and obscurity of an order that scientists and journalisms always seem to undermine. Further, this too is an archive.

Brandon, when you say your journalism class forced yourself to approach yourself and peer in for long enough that the reflection began to become more and more strange, strange enough to finally know it as different and intern, observable, I thought to myself; maybe I am wrong.

each dream nascitur, is not made . . . )

why then to Hell with that: the other; this,

since the thing perhaps is to eat flower s and not to be afraid

have i told you lately

this mark

i rub lavender on your hands)

and open themoon

inside is just what you expect

skid marks and batteries

[fear and the afraid