Encomium for No One

Notebook from my week in writing and listening

If I thought too hard or too often about my love for Bill T. Jones and for dance as the most fulfilling art form, I would abdicate the primacy of words on blank screens or pages, and move my body more frequently, more impulsively, while cataloging state secrets aloud, until I mastered Jones’s style of choreography as testimony, poems written in and as the flesh.

The body isn’t meant to be treated like a corrupt file on a computer—you try to open it and it makes a machine-grey sad face; you have to take it somewhere to be opened. Let’s hope you realize this before that place is a casket in cemetery. A digger of graves got on tiktok a few weeks ago, acting as a whistleblower. He said all graves are empty and body parts sold on the black market. Then he said he was being persecuted for revealing this. Then my algorithm shifted from the missing dead to the walking dead and the show trial began.

Intimacy is what’s at stake, besides love and the soul. People use gossip to bond and believe they are close in a tender way; instead they are close like addicts who use the same drug. An ability to develop intimacy without negating others for sport or acting as an unpaid vigilante, is creative freedom.

The heartbeat is not an errand. You cannot outsmart your rhythm.

The deep breathing of fugitives and babies resumes in unison at 3AM and I become both and neither. Awake in defiance of and unnamed menace, mostly email. I reexamine conversations with my friends.

Fred recounts the arthritis in his hips, and playing college football at Harvard. We discover that the bourgeois see pain as an errand you handle by running or hiring help. We see it as a spell they put on us to run us like machines.

Kahlil and I discuss a painting, auction prices, capital gains taxes, atrocity, the limits of improvisation in films about atrocity, a one actor movie in three acts we’ll be making.

For the film, and inspired by Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, I look up Japanese weeping rituals. Participants cry on command to purge trapped energy and repeat this as many times as possible, in response to the same circumstance, the same performance of it. It’s maddening, psychotic. It’s not unlike making another film about slavery when the audience for the last one still remembers that plot vividly. Come again, weep again. That blood-drenched loop is our economy.

I yearn to have fewer friends in that economy, only the ones who break the loop of sorrow-seeking and sensationalized platitudes habitually, approaching each topic like hunters and departing from it with game, a league all theirs.

Have you ever been in love?

Why are they laughing, we are on the verge of last war in the world, he asks, before a live audience, between arabesque and collapse. A refusal of the burlesque, finally. He wears orange, a transgression, look at him in orange and black like a prisoner.

Have you been?

He splits the difference between improvisation and compulsion, bondage and affinity. He knows when to stop talking over himself and fall to his knees in surrender.

Laughing

Live audiences in the US, especially when confronted with a performance with no punch lines, laugh at inappropriate moments, often, or most noticeably, on the occasion of black torment or into an interval of suspense during which a black person’s emotions are unintelligible or hostile. Even the tenderest giggle into such voids reveals a desire to be entertained that the performer thwarted and the spectator violently reclaimed by making the wrong unsolicited sound at the wrong time. Inappropriate enjoyment as dominance, schadenfreude.

You’re too quiet up there, too comfortable taking up space with silence or ambivalence; I’m gonna laugh now. You’re too focused and near breakthrough, I must become hysterical, heretical, bypass your will with my lazy comfort in light hearts. The spectacle of awkwardness can be funny. When you don’t empathize with the subject, especially. This laughter is sadistic and languishes when you catch on like a criminal who realizes he removed his gloves and got fingerprints all over everything.

He must switch from rapture to neurotic self-forensics.

What’s funny?

Acquittal

That Girl

I can finally listen to Yesterday’s New Quintet again. I used to joke with Madlib, that it wasn’t him I wanted, it was Malik Favors, the transliteration of the name of Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Malachi Favors that he made up to populate his mythic jazz trio YNQ, wherein he is every member and disappears. My favorite YNQ album is dedicated to Stevie Wonder. Being efficient, one of the first things I ever asked him about his music, was where he got the sample he uses on the introduction to his jazz trio of one’s interpretation of Stevie’s “That Girl.” He told me it was Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Then I found the sample, hidden deep in the groove of a secret vinyl I should never have been able to trace; it arrived when I had stopped searching. And then I vowed to stop listening to O’s music, because it felt strange, like it precluded intimacy in our knowing of one another if I knew his work that well. You’re so cool, damn, he wrote after reading my first book of poems. We were even for a while if I could just put down his albums and make my own songs.

Recently, maybe because his house burned down and some other internal wall it was helping prop up collapsed with it, or maybe because I’ve become more sure of my own tones, I can listen to this YNQ Stevie album again, tease him about Malik, the myth, with I’m that girl, and request a sequel, his version of “Ribbon in the Sky.”

The Tears of Eros

Stevie Wonder’s birthday was a couple of days ago. He’s a fellow bull, a taurus, propelled by dangerous sweetness, sweetness that could turn your blood cold or stampede and crush you if disrespected. There’s a photo of Stevie with Diddy circulating now that testimony has begun in this hideous trial, so far with Combs’s ex-girlfriend and star of many “Freak Offs” Cassie, delivering excruciatingly detailed testimony of the abuse she incurred during their ten year relationship. She’s testifying while pregnant. Diddy’s children are in the room while Cassie describes their father beating her and holding her hostage with emotional and circumstantial blackmail.

Violence’s proximity to the sacred is what Georges Bataille explores doggedly in his Tears of Eros, insinuating that shared experiences of the gruesome can become a cult-like shared addiction, a manner of ritualized bonding and perhaps a sickness that mistakes its symptoms for its cures.

Anything I’m trying to make sense of about the entertainment industry, I’m trying to reconcile about my own life. My investment is personal. I watched the Sly Stone documentary and thought of my dad’s days hanging out with him and Bobby Womack. It’s like they left Sly in 1975 reprising his innovations until they became gimmicks. His story could have been anyone’s, too famous, too young, too nervous, too high. At first they probably thought him lucky, then he was what to avoid becoming if you could help it, now he’s a sage who made it back to dignity. The lore about him making and deleting whole albums at Electric Lady Studios feels almost desperate when you watch archives of his rise and fall.

I’m reading the Diddy trial transcripts and trying to figure out how anyone who rubbed shoulders with him backstage could be innocent or oblivious to his criminal mindedness. Recent headlines mockingly decree “Stevie Wonder defends Diddy: I didn’t see anything illegal.”

Because everyone glamorized Diddy’s lifestyle, and joined when invited, we have another even messier trauma plot home movie during which misguided audiences and accomplices are gonna laugh as the former A++ list rapper drags a woman by the hair through a hotel hallway while Monk plays “Don’t Blame Me” alone in the elevator, like a reaper, savior.

So many girls ago, I hadn’t realize that refusal to listen to music I love made by someone I love was a refusal to speak, a self-silencing. I thought I was being noble and brave, exercising restraint. I was afraid to be that girl. Out of no where so many women are recovering from conditions we didn’t know we’d suffered.

I wrote the last poems for my collection on child stars with this in mind, this week. An excerpt: