Bloods

Where Ganja & Hess meets Kendrick Lamar meets my father: It's the blood for me.

We were alone and he was singing. 

The primary scene in my macabre imaginary of the events surrounding my father’s death features him coughing up blood on the way to the hospital. I was a kid when he died and hazy details surrounding the event, all of which I pieced together like rumors while I was in the throws of learning for the first time that men are mortal, turn my memory of that time into a benign horror flick populated by scenes my imagination devises to situate me in spaces I was forbidden to enter in reality. I didn’t attend his funeral but my blood was there.

I don’t think the detail of his coughing was relayed to me directly but it was my job to eavesdrop on the adults around me as they traded opinions about my father’s blood. A vulgar way to picture the person who had always been in charge of making others bleed or shed tears, suddenly wilting under his own struggle for air and reprieve. I pictured him as if at the end of a long breathless race, imagining that he could see the finish line through the bloodlines and that in his mind, once he was done singing he was already dying, becoming less like himself. By the time his very speaking was covered in blood it was in blood he would write his final song for us. Dad in a fast car coughing up blood whenever he attempts to sing, alchemizing blood into music and music into silence— a score kept at the moment when terror and exhilaration meet and diverge. 

The presence of spilled blood makes us squeamish and pitiful, we’re embarrassed for it to show as if it tells all of our secrets just by appearing. That same crimson intervention draws in so much intimacy that once it comes up, it’s hard to put it away, the wound does not want to close, we have to will it shut and we keep a stash as scar tissue. What is it about the blood, or about the bloods as we call ourselves to mean blacks at our coolest and most black. What is it about the blacks? What is it about the black blood? The blues blood. The blood addicts. The black blood addicts. Blood violently ejected from the body when it goes to scream thus became my final image of my father the black cowboy singer who towered over the world in voice and stature in my estimation, who evoked enough fear to ensure I fear no one and enough love to make sure I fear a certain kind of love that cannot differentiate itself from suffering. The image of him coughing up blood replaced the image of him at the threshold of our front door in Iowa, under arrest, begging us to stay so he would survive. In between there were phone calls, my mom sneaking away from my grandparents’ house where we were living then, to a phone booth to call him in jail. I don’t remember if I ever said hello on those calls. I remember feeling like a guard who had to look out for detractors while mom committed the crime of calling her so-called abuser who she had escaped with her daughter. I remember her pregnant belly and the morose beauty of the pale San Diego sun, and the tinny leaping color of the phone booth, its patchwork of blue, a modern sphinx. I remember feeling like three fugitives and a bunch of bloods. What is it about the blood?

The blood of thing is the truth of the thing 

In 1973, Sam Waymon, younger brother of Nina Simone, born Eunice Waymon, composed the score of the film Ganja & Hess. Bill Gunn was the director of the film, and had been commissioned to make some kind of Blacula style Blaxsploitation vampire flick with a lot of sex and blood but not too much for general audiences. Instead Gunn bucked the studio’s insistence on pulp and pomp and delivered a one-of-a-kind mythic parable that deconstructs the way we violently cannibalize ourselves and each other looking for the very intimacy we reject in sweeter forms, having to achieve it by watching one another bleed. We grow so desperate for the evidence of connection in an alienated world, that we force that evidence upon ourselves as danger. 

The refrain of Sam Waymon’s score is a gospel hymn that tells the story of a tribe condemned to live forever feasting on one another’s blood, hungering for it pathologically. The piercing, hollowed, hook enters in a bare acapella the blood of the thing is the truth of the thing, they had come to be addicted to blood, they had come to be addicted to truth. And then a break and a lament, oh my-my-my-my-my-my, which travels like proud shame, proud because it’s acknowledging itself, ashamed of the abjection of the addiction the song admits. Lone claps that ripple in a sharp coil, as if recorded in a small chapel where the acoustics are folding in on themselves like judgment, hold the phrases together as they gasp their revelation again and again. One of the characters in the Ganja & Hess decides to be saved from the fate the hymn promises, and one decides to remain addicted to truth— to carry all that blood and all that beauty, forever, and trust that the cruelty of immortality will come with rewards and power and retribution. Both choices, though they appear to be antonyms as simply as life is antonymic to death, confess the same addiction. And the veil between worlds becomes as thin as a bloodline claiming or denying its patterns and forcing them to masquerade as oppositional when they have a common source. That source, that soul, that blood, that double possession, that love of being a blood even in the face of terror, what is it about the blood? 

I know it was the blood 

The body will pull calcium from the bones if alkalizing minerals are lacking in the blood. In order to keep the blood alkaline, at a pH of between 7.3 and 7.4, the body will steal from itself to align itself with a fixed destiny. Acidic conditions are taken on by the lymphatic system, the body’s other fluid system, and ideally acids are carried out of the body all the time, in sweat, etcetera. If we are sedentary or have sluggish lymph this is not the case and those acids build up until they form cysts, blocked sinuses, and other unwanted symptoms of stagnancy that shows up in the lymph on the skin or as restlessness, but begin with the blood’s dominance. A subconscious fear of becoming ourselves can compromise the blood,  and not just the psychic life but physical life as well.  That resistance leads to habits so submerged our body activates them without notifying our conscious minds though everything we do contributes to them, from how we breathe to how we walk to how we think. This habit of betraying the self, the auto-erotic double cross muted by the ego’s chatter that tells you every act you commit is in your favor, is the root of most tragedy.

My dad’s moment between song and flood has been a submerged habit of mine, born of my need to see him again even if it was an imagining, even if that imagined view features him under duress—at least there was something I could call a scene between him being in his body and him being somewhere else. There was blood between the states of being that bound us as if he had suffered for me. I would tend to the blood he coughed up looking and looking for truth there, forever. I would come to be addicted to truth, to finding out what really happened, to avenging some of it, to revisiting it whenever I need a dose of private drama to remind me why too much attention to drama distorts and displaces real love. 

The vampirism of “concern” 

We’re not drinking one another’s blood now but we are watching each other’s blood like poorly trained assassins. Mutual surveillance is bloodlust. The impulse to inspect or in some cases discover a stranger’s blood is an aspect of contemporary vampirism. Why would you study my blood if you didn’t plan to consume it or strip it for parts? And so all of us get into a hard drive together as data, as if boarding a slave ship, as the avatar attempts to override the flesh. The blood protests and howls by failing and flailing and descending into filth and muck and trouble so you notice it and tend to it before it’s overwritten by interference on that drive and merges with your personalized false idol. The spellbound cocktail of genetic and external instructions blended in the blood, and the array of dysfunctions those instructions might encounter throughout life, is on the verge of inspiring irreversible collective madness. We keep replaying the same scene looking for clues out of the loop. And like in any great cult of a dying culture, that specific version of aversion madness will be deemed decency until it is defeated. What is it about the blood? Why is so much blood in distress? And the bloods are in distress. And the blood is dressed or decorated in lace, as veiled as it is hunted and traced and available, coughing itself up, turning itself in to become itself—filthy, too clean, not alkaline, too black, to habit forming, what is it?

My whole life I’ve revisited that private moving image of my father coughing up blood for some kind of guidance, an image I never witnessed firsthand but invented and held onto greedily to get a glimpse at the blood of him, the truth of him, and better understand my own through that remote surveillance fantasy. Ganja & Hess is so visually and intellectually stunning because the characters fall in love in the face of undeniable horror. Through looking the horrific in the eye as corpses and blood addictions and predilections to ruthless hyperconsumption of anything that bleeds beneath the sharp edge of longing, they conjure eros. Their mutual terribleness becomes romantic. They call on one another to cough up blood the way a robber commands a night cashier during a novice stick-up, stealthily but with an edge of rehearsed pleasure. Every scene feels like deja vu but it’s all full of suspense at the same time. How is that dualism possible? What is it about the love that turns the blood into a mere accessory? It’s the same effect watching my father cough up his blood over and over has in my mind, each time I replay it is a subconscious effort to scan for an escape that would change the outcome, save him, and then a renewed commitment to the outcome and a settled feeling when I decide that this suffering was also his salvation and manner of showing what it took to be him in the flesh before he left it. When the body begins obstructing the spirit instead of animating it, is the blood of the thing still the truth of the thing? Can the body survive without its incessant lust for decay and regeneration, tricking itself into repair moment by moment, coaxing itself into the Christ consciousness against the will of industry, to which enlightenment is a threat. 

My heart is rich, my heart is famous

On his 2017 album DAMN!Kendrick Lamar defines himself in terms of his DNA and his soul throughout. The first track “Blood,” champions that moment of choice between eternity and finitude. He speaks instead of rapping and his tone is flummoxed. He recounts his own assassination, which comes upon him when he approaches a trickster type and tries to offer her salvation. She shoots him, as if he approached her asking for exactly that. To listen is to imagine him bleeding so that the rest of the album becomes posthumous, the story of him in the endless afterlife explicating our sins and potential paths to redemption. He had to get the bloody part out of the way so he could get to the story. That’s sort of where I finally am in my understanding of my dad coughing up his blood. The world exploits the emphasis we place on blood to distract us from what it animates. To let one moment of suffering stand in for a whole life, that’s the madness of obsessing over blood and it is time I stop casting this man, my own dad, as wounded, and give him back to joy. Damn. Pathos is easier than letting go. 

But if we vulgarize blood and dying the same way forever, we’ll end up trapped here with zombies who know how to hijack our empathy for eternal attention and treat every wound like an opportunity to do just that. Like tribal scarification, the suffering of some black singers marks them for song, but none of their best songs will be about the meaning of those deliberate marks and rites of passage, those marks and the blood spilled to leave them is none of your business. May a deliriously bloodless consciousness reign next season, may we release our masochistic need to problematize our own blood, our own bloods.