Monday, February 24, 2014

On liberation by hearing (a treatment for an impossible book)

This is a book about dead immortals who don't know their own role in the eternal triangle. Love trio with self. Three or Four black men, or one who is all of them. Dialog with the Feel Trio, Dialog with Yesterdays New, Real New, Trio of Five-spotted dreams. Triage sometimes got in the way of true love. Children are more urgent than lipstick. Loud thug music chugs through their hearts guzzling bitterness or bigtimeness, like the train they travel home in, on a bright dark night. Sex is a form of measurement, that's all, and each man has used it like a labor as thick and settleback as his music, some kindred pattern to turn to in a ruthlessly random universe. Some Sweet Sweetback mannerisms. Not quite swept away but not quite not, yet. What are we waiting for, everyone wonders. So each man spends the book describing his life, so beautifully, so into it, not knowing that what he's actually describing is an afterlife, an underworld curled toward him like a woman he can't feel, for fear. Maybe the men are Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, My Father, and you. You know who you are. One by one they slip into a memory of the same song and start to sort of play it with their stories like a blues parallel or call and response, it plays itself back for them and they begin to realize it's all happening like a blindfold test, there are other men's sounds emanating from their own music. They discover one another this way. I thought you were dead, each man says to the other, and then the others, one by one, until everyone is revealed to everyone else. Can you stumble into an epiphany casually or does it have to be this huge distracting rupture like a chariot in a sea of motors? The significance of it all is that maybe so. I mean maybe we are all both dead and alive, like good and evil going beyond themselves yet again, and what does that mean for the revolution? It seems perfectly natural to assume that I have always existed, is one of the refrains running through the text. And if we are all in that middle space together for some kind of always then maybe the extreme way in which we repudiate it is the stray bullet aimed at our victory and sorrow, all our good ass Blues codes under threat by our own jacked up unlistening. The men maybe discover that fear of another world had plagued them so much that they were afraid to acknowledge that they were experiencing that world and the fear of it simultaneously. Only in their music would they admit this to themselves. But now, at this great and advanced reunion wherein they cannot tell the difference between before and after, a divine sense of responsibility attracts them back to one another, where they play out alternatives to spacetime, a less degrading sense of justice. The discovery is not so much consolation as incentive to relax like real slaves, the kind we've all been, to our all-time spirits. Nothing is really resolved here, or no, maybe one by one the men disappear, spiral into subjecthood like priests and repeat the whole thing on the kind of camera that this tiny world has become. Wild/calm.