You are always on my mind
Some evil heroes I think about all the time, some things I've been thinking about in recent days
This past Friday I spoke on a panel about the work of black, classical composer Julius Eastman. I was joined by members of the collective Wild Up, who are releasing new interpretations of Eastman’s work in an ongoing series. The New York Times recently published a review of a debut performance of the volume 3 in this series, If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich, yet left out any account of the performance of his composition “Evil Nigger,” and effectively white washed and liberal washed the music and erased Eastman’s deliberate imprint from it. My feeling going into the discussion that followed a live listening session to the album wherein attendees took to floor mats in an extended collective meditation, was that you cannot bring up Eastman without interrogating the demographics of the audiences at live performances of his music— mostly white liberals who sometimes seem viscerally startled to see other black people in the room, as if we are voyeurs on a private pleasure of theirs. The strange charade this makes of Eastman’s personal edict, I want to be as black as I possibly can, becomes part of the acoustic experience— confrontational and full of neptunian delirium.
Eastman and Amiri Baraka enter into conversation on the wilting axis of that earnest black wish. I just found a letter from when Baraka was still LeRoi Jones; it had been tucked into the sleeve of a signed copy of his self-produced album Black and Beautiful, Soul and Madness. He was exhorting people to support a Newark mayoral candidate as a matter of self-determination. He signed the terse solicitation, blackly, the superior sincerely. With the glimmering madness in the album’s title, he volleys back to Julius Eastman’s blatant declaration of evil. That self-incrimination as a shield gets us into the uses of evil in black greatness. Miles Davis’s Live Evil, Sun Ra’s flirtation with the Luciferian principal as a greater good, Nina Simone’s if I’d had my way I’d have been a killer, and even more taboo representations that come about whenever any mainstream black artist is accused of being a part of the occult, and complicit in the grand ritual of mesmerism closer to evil than salvation. John Coltrane’s “The Damned Don’t Cry,” every hip hop anthem glorifying crime, and every anthem glorifying bad bitches, baddies, the ecstatic terribleness of certain blacks, who happen to be among the best. Michael Jackson’s bad, James Brown’s “Super Bad.” It’s as if, through projection, good has been so adulterated and misapplied that evil and criminality became sanctified mandates, desultory black gospels. They stir the blood and make the sound more urgent and diabolical and real. And if you accuse yourself, you revoke the enemy’s power, and thus disarmed, they are confused into agreement with you, they begin to support you the moment you declare that you’re bad and intend to be that.
So to deny Eastman his posthumous and spectacular evil is to castrate him, and make him a relic for your well-curated tastes in revived black genius. It helps if during their lives, the virtuosos in question were cast aside and denigrated. That makes the black dead troubadour returning all the more glorious and redemptive. We whisper ecstatic benedictions over their corpse psalms. The question came up in our discussion, whether or not Eastman might have ‘intentionally fragmented is archive,’ and in the stark swoop between intention and seeming inevitability, I quickly and silently realized that this archive of his, or so-called archive, and the archive as black practice, practiced blackly, (sincerely) might be false and entirely commodified without fragmentation. The fragmentation is code for no, for the subject’s inherent resistance to the subjugation that is posthumous acclaim.
The effort to collect and transcribe in linear order is corrosive; it rots the history and destroys the collective ability to improvise on it. It’s not that Eastman intentionally fragmented anything for the sake of empty mischief, it’s that he distributed himself among those he loved through encoding himself in his notes, the blackest most hysterically romantic notes that he could gather—the, in his words “Evil Nigger” notes, that can only be accessed by those for whom they are intended. What others think is access is actually a spell of exile from that frequency cast on them through it, a trap built into their fetish that neutralizes them with it. The archive should never be linear and clean and extracted in a line-up for witnesses who will distill it into phantoms of their own eagerness to discover black America over and over again in a loop. The pristine archive, with all of its virtue signaling, is set up that way in the cold cold library to make the case for the invocation of the subject’s evil as capital. The ordering of their chaos is pitched as saviorism and not as the invasion it is.
A couple of weeks ago, I visited Octavia Butler’s archive at Los Angeles’s Huntington Library. The pristine grounds feel a little like a luxury rehab for celebrities. Octavia’s belongings are kept in boxes and you can request them and they will give you the boxes and you can scour them for evidence of her baddest most supernatural insights. We were searching for a map she made, and requested several boxes. When we finally got to the one that was said to contain the map, it was missing, not in its place, maybe stolen, maybe intentionally fragmented by god or her ghost, maybe gone. The story an archive seeks to divulge is lodged in its every incident of disarray and fabrication. What if it meant to be improvised, to be scattered and return from that marronage declaring your right to be evil and superbad and untraceable. Profane and profound for the same desire to do wrong and remain maladjusted to the asylum you’ve entered and been told is the highest level civilization can attain. The real heroic deed, then, is to say, well in that case I’d rather be evil, I’d rather be that menace that makes you feel uncomfortable repeating my songs aloud than the lamb who mumbles “Amazing Grace” into the rudiments of his own coffin.
It has always been so easy for me to empathize with the so-called villains, in my life, and in fiction, and I think it’s because they trouble and fragment the Black Ark in ways I find as exhilarating as anything good. Is anything good? Is anyone? The divine villain smiles at the silence after an evil question like that.
As always, brilliant essay. Reminded me that Miles was “The Prince of Darkness.” And also of this haiku by Etheridge Knight:
To write a blues song
is to regiment riots
and pluck gems from graves.
Beautiful essay. I would love to go to Octavia Butler's archive. Harming, this is an interesting piece on morality, while questioning and embracing your reality. Thanks for sharing it