Please don't cut me off in the middle of this prayer.

On a prayer shared between Sun Ra and June Tyson circa 1976

How many of us who sing know what singing is? — Amiri Baraka 

June Tyson has at last attained the raspy near-screamed pitch of exasperation— freedom. Her former giddiness in song expands to meet this rage. She’s center stage in the middle of her escape scene, singing a lullaby to the unseen. I hope you understand, I hope you understand, when the black man ruled this land, pharaoh was sitting on his throne. 

There are children all over the world who know they are the reincarnations of icons and can recount details of their past lives in the spotlight with jarring precision. They break open the slow burning myth of finitude and chase boundaries past their rigidity. They possess the blunt dignity of angels and are patient as so-called adults in their lives wake up to their dual reality or don’t. They hope you understand. These children, usually between the ages of four and eight, when the whole will is at the mercy of the subconscious, bend time, and define the sheer music of life in the omniverse. Some of them long to reunite with their prior selves by visiting living relatives from those lifetimes, some of them just tell the stories calmly like jurors delivering divine justice, while seeming content to remain who they’ve become in their new birth. Perhaps the soul does not crave redundancy when it retains its memories from life to life, perhaps all longing to go backwards is a symptom of chronic collective amnesia and the desire to stimulate obsolete nerves. Nothing is arbitrary in this territory where many lives are lived simultaneously and filed down to the one most tangible. We hope you understand. 

Sun Ra was one of these children for his whole life. He knew he came from another planet, he knew that planet was Saturn, and he took a few leaps forward in the knowing, as was his manner, and lived as a man of earth, an angel, and an exile simultaneously, carrying each dimension with him in sound and demeanor. He then rehearsed all his life, himself and his band, so that when the moments were right, he had access to every dimension within him all at once as tonal resonance, and could demonstrate that conflation of godly and human frequencies in sound and sight with or without the added spectacle of performance.

When June locates her own pent up tantrum from a previous existence and can’t stop hoping we understand, Ra gets up and saunters toward her from the piano in her periphery; he almost slides there with a brass sun disc in hand, twirling it intermitently. He puts down the solar mode and embraces her, she’s still singing. For a few bars of the refrain they sway cheek-to-cheek like ancient lovers in a platonic reconditioning of what it means to be romanced. Ra’s eyes are closed and at ease in the spinning of a dream he probably had in another universe that is finally gathering itself to be introduced here as a new beginning. He loosens his grip, still embracing her, and steps back gallantly to get a closer look at her beauty, before going back to their duet. 

The moment passes and he lets go completely and returns to the piano to close the portal they opened together. He’s done a lap around the black sun. The energy trails off into ominously scattered low notes that give the feel of a broken carnival medly, before dissipating completely. I hope you understand. How silly erotics become in the presence of this subtle and insistent union, how silly the fantasies we’ve upheld our whole lives become when traced back a yearning for this exact style of embrace and reenactment of being in the right place at the right time for an eternity. 

—

Please don’t cut me off in the middle of this prayer. I’m obsessed with chance gestures that heal the whole human condition and evaporate into the phantasmagoric. I’m addicted to the archives that hold and withhold them like unasked and unanswerable questions, whims, impossible to assimilate until a part of ourselves breaks open to allow them in as this hope to comprehend what we are witnessing that is gone and reemerging in the same moment all the time. The audience of voyeurs and thieves may never understand, may incarcerate chance with expectation, but I understand too well, the need to perpetuate a gorgeous misunderstanding as scream and chant, and the way June knows that without the disaster and loss she is tending to with music, her song may have been lost. And that would be worse, more devastating, and so much more arduous to recover. The facility with which Ra both rescues and abandons June here, like weather itself retracing its path through seasons, is a version of the loss and glory June reinvents as a pitch submerged in the pit of her own experience. It’s that cruel and doting ease that makes their friendship and collaboration so neat it’s messy, so misunderstood it’s arkestral/spectral, outcast unity of saturn longing to turn venutian and being refused and compelled. A nickel in the juke for Pharaoh, who is so trapped in our interpretation of this magic he cannot return to prominence and has no ease but blues.