moth’s powder [12.17/20.09]

from: a
to: a
Thursday, December 17, 2009, 1:32 AM
Subject: …

moth’s powder,

it is simply undeniable that there are social worlds that invite others to join in. it’s not an essentialist claim but neither is it an anti-essentialist claim. it’s something i think my friend Arthur describes as the “materialist retentionist” strain or grain that runs in and through and over black folks. he thinks that there are “levels” of culture that are enacted and performed based on material availability. he was over the crib yesterday and pretty much making the argument that when the enslaved were transported to the americas, whatever culture they could carry in their heads – the patterns, musics, dance; the ways of breathing and doing, ways of caring and sharing, ways of conjuring and conceiving – could more easily be passed from generation to generation as well as dispersed amongst people. it’s a pretty sophisticated argument to say something like we remember, or maybe i’ve gotten his theory totally wrong.   

but you know i’ve been talking about pentecostalism as if it’s some sorta monolithic group. but there are all kinds of pentecostals with all sorts of doctrinal beliefs. but what i find most curious and most interesting is how there is a pretty consistent theme of movement, motion, migration, that most pentecostals – even if they do not themselves individually engage – do no balk at the sight of what others find unseemly praise.

of course, there’s something seemingly a bit problematic in the construction of the above paragraph, beginning every statement as if it is some such would be adversarial conjunctive utterance. but the rhythmic feeling i was going for in that paragraph with all the buts is the same sorta quality for which, if anything, New Dawns aspired toward, a sorta pentecostal open-ended-like resistance to resolve. each utterance of the but, not contradicted or stood in contradistinction, but opened up a way, a way of escape, widened the ever widening circle of thought, emotion.

and it is exactly how New Dawns would perform. but Bobby would introduce a rhythm. but you’d follow, with the bare architectaural blueprint, the bare bones, so to speak, of what would eventually become song. what you’d hum or moan or line out was both more and less than melody, it was evacuative structure, withdrawn breath, tendency and tentativity of the voice, hesitance and reticence, giving sound and words while remaining every so wary of them being somehow conclusive. stuttering, scatting, we might say that it was a poetics of pentecostalism: just as one plays at shouting, initiates by that slight and jubilant dance – deliberative – ever so, and a bit, lightly, not glibly but with eyes open, looking around while the feet tap-tap-dip, tap-tap-dip. well. your singing would begin with some kind of chant or repetition. but we’d hear. but Jaylah would come first with that alto, full of vibrato and conviction, sometimes in a minor, plaintive strain against your melody though it was difficult to know. but it was not until Jaylah’s entry that i would begin to figure out a way, a way towards harmonics, following and creating harmonic phrasing, clicking the tremolo then the chorale and back again. but Jalisa would enter, with her soprano register, oft changing the tonal center with her voice. cutting, augmenting what was already there. but Salim would round out the voices, tenor holding some such thread of melody. but then, and only after the entry of all voices; but then, and only after i was chording, would i end phrases with the bass pedal points. but of course there were tambourines, but much, much later.

i remember the first time we sang like that, each one entering the sonic conversation from the pew, wherever we were seated and the congregation seemed dumbfounded. dumbfounded but they could not also help but be moved by our hollers and wails and tonalities. we revised prayer for zelophehad’s children to zelophehad’s daughters, and with the revision of the title was also the introduction of 5/4 rhythmic pacing and spacing, some new inheritable but nonreproductive call and call against response. our voices didn’t so much respond to the other as much as the voices called out in recognition for the other [it’s like the difference between glossolalia and xenolalia … the former is for the other, utterance as commons but incomprehensible; the latter is of a “self,” an assumed possible core stability that we call identity … but more on that some other time]. each voice was allowed to occupy its sonic space, a field or zone of voiced movement, wherein the voices tried not to touch and agree as much as they tried to detect distance and dwell together by buoyant engagement. the rhythm, of course, was Bobby’s fault, but we made do and did something new. and true to form, voices simply fell out when they were exhausted from singing. the congregation would always and undeniably be in it by the time we were done, so the open-endedness worked, they filled in the space where our sound once occupied, we moved them and were so moved.

well.

i get angry when folks tell me, as did a couple of acquaintances said after one of our performances – you were there; you’d remember if you could – it don’t take all that!, that what we did was a shade on the side of excessive, too expressive and unnecessary. pretty much the same sorta critique i heard about growing up at the storefront pentecostal church, where services were too long and we were too tired to do anything once we got home sundays except sleep. it don’t take all that is really a claim about authenticity, saying that, as my friend reminded me of Gertrude Stein’s statement, there is no there there. it’s a claim that approximates the idea thatsince it does not ”take all that” to have an encounter with the divine, that which happens there, the “all that,” that excessive and expressive strain is nothing other than posturing that posits something that is anything but “real.”  i can almost hear someone saying if i can be quiet and composed and have an encounter with the divine, your sweat is merely performance. the weird thing is this, though: i think most pentecostals would agree and say, no, it doesn’t “take all that.”  but whereas the former is critique, the pentecostal claim is to say but we still do it, and most importantly including the idea, and you should join us.

i’m pretty cool with the idea that pentecostals don’t get everything right. what i love about the tradition, though, is that it is fundamentally invitational, it constantly says to come in, eat, have fun, dance even if you don’t know how to, tarry, sweat with us. the music of New Dawns was seeking that notion of joining and togetherness. we never “finished” our songs but left them undone on purpose. it’s like this: pentecostalism is about transfer, the in-between. things don’t end, energy just modulates from moment to moment. we did not aspire towards perfection but towards pursuit, towards journey, towards carrying. sure. we could’ve sung normal songs and sung with staid composure. the performances toward the divine we created did not necessitate the excess. but the excess was the coolest part of the performances, i think.

of course, there was too much excess, not in terms of New Dawns, but you did charge me with that in terms of our relationship. i was, what was it? too intense? i believe that is what you said. but it’s funny how time changed things because, initially, it was i who was being pursued and thought you a bit too…much. there was the nadir when we sorta matched each other in intensity and fucking and all that … and things were cool for a while, when you thought it was a passing phase, that eventually you’d take up the intensity again and i’d repress myself. let you lead the way or some shit. but you changed me, so it was a new way of life, a fact i did not want to change. that it was not only intense for you but for me, quite quotidian to be and do in such excessive a manner? well. i suppose it was just…just too much. eloquence is not necessary here. it was just too much. and thus, the end. of New Dawns. of us. i wish we learned to expect more out of life, such that the quotidian is not excessive and the too much is a way of life. i still hold out for that possibility. at least between us.

love,

a. 

moth’s powder [02.27.10]

— — — 

— — — 

from: dtim
to: a
Sunday, February 27, 2010, 8:29 AM
subject: Re: omg…

just waking up, so I’m just getting your message! Of course you can email me whenever you want…that’s why I sent you a message yesterday. We should have a phone convo too soon…I miss your voice.

moth’s powder [02.25.10]

from: a
to: a
Thursday, February 25, 2010, 11:39 PM
subject: Re: mp 

moth’s powder,

it’s like this:

to carry a service. to be underneath, underground, underwater sounding out and through. Background and surplus. the gift. this is nothing. not the absence but the overwhelming presence of that something. it wanders and precedes and follows, presences and flows. it sets atmosphere and mood and agrees and dissents. descends and ascends. at the same time. the very same time. arpeggiated creativity and sustained discovery. S P A C I N G and T I M I N G. triggers the mind, reflection. recollective holy. it’s there, it’s here. how to put it together? this is that nothing.

what are you playing

they’d ask before we’d sing…before the service would begin.

oh…nothing

i’d say, a bit with a smile. knowing that i’d moved them with this putting together of something that is called nothing. i’d say it with joy. undulated joy. both erstwhile and post. with each enunciative declaration of nothing is its underside, its truth, its improvisational meaning. improvisational and provisional. somewhere between those two words, those two concepts is where that nothing is. nothing as fullness, as birth, as L I F E. more abundantlylylyly. this service, it’s acoustemology comes from nothing but to know this nothing, you must come from and eternally return to that there. 

hold the foot pedal sustained…

play with the chords on top. make them sound different. vibrate variously in bodies, through pews and carpeting and wooden floors. because of sustained bottom, playful top. dramatic changes from loud to soft, the interplay of dynamics, intensely. and all this before anyone gets on the mic and says praise the lord anticipatory.

funny. funny how anticipatory and participatory are harmonic, the former waits and desires the latter as some such fulfillment. all this because nothing was and is being played, figured out, invented. something full is being emptied in order to be refilled. the organ, the hammond, the b-3 breathes. it exhales and inhales. fill again.

but. also. laying pretty-beautifully apparent: nothing is not ever true, it is always the index of the lack of some propriety or given structure or epistemology or center. even while being rehearsed from within a normative claim or mood. 

or something. 

i’ve been writing nothing all this time. like the music. not a song. a series of sounds attempting a feeling, a mood through astonishment, tension and release. it’s about how chords are put together, what occurs between two to make folks gasp for breath, clap, nod their heads, quicken, throw up hands and say ooooh, jesus! it’s nothing. but so full. full of content. some call it chord progression but that’s the ruse, one immediately, enthusiastically realizes that digression is foundational to this form of nothing. that word, curious, indexes faith, sonic substance of things hoped for, immaterial acoustic evidence of things unseen. faith is forward, futureward but so often is talked about through some sorta observed empiricism. not faith in the least.

faith is the uncapturable, though in standard testimony and theological reflection, it is put forth as a happenstance past event, always working through a tense situation. 

it’s like when mother smith would say

and if he NEVER does anything else, he’s already done what he’s said he would do!

or deacon jones would say

i know God is real because he saved me!

or we’d sing the song

look what god has done / mastermind is he!

what often is glossed over is the past-tense of such reflection, hindsight reflections about a past; they are empiricist judgments, they tend towards the ago, the gone. faith, however, is the antithesis of such claims to knowledge and is not an empiricist possibility. the enslaved had faith in a freedom they had not tasted but knew was both available and possible, and not based upon a past deliverance but a futureward contemplation and injunction of justice as necessary. faith is the soon of heidegger, how he argued that time is nothing but a succession of nows, always being approached by the soon, always receding into the ago. heidegger, i’m sure, wasn’t talking about anything i’d play in church, he wasn’t thinking about the pentecostal nothing music that would animating pretty much everything that happens in a service. but he picked up something, some nothing that the musician was already engaging. the musician in search of the soon.

that’s the nothing, the counterclaim of predestination, the interest in building as we climb or play or listen. that nothing is faithful, full of conviction of the not-yet, the irreducible agnosticism or something. sorry. i diverged. what i mean is this: it’s sorta like when paul would say that it wasn’t as though he’d already attained something but that he would press anyway, that he would strive and lift and move and ascend or descend or something. he pushed things behind while reaching before. iiiiiiiii’ll press! [really, though, it’s one of my favorite things preachers say…lol.]

anyway. or it’s like bishop seymour and bishop mason itinerating all over the country, not even primarily to preach…but primarily to seek, to find that greater, more in-depth experience. speaking in tongues. they kept moving all over the country because they wanted experience meaningful. this? this is that nothing. that search. that movement. their walking and sitting on trains and talking and eating with others? that’s what it sounds like. 

maybe something. or nothing at all.
a.-

moth’s powder [02.21.10]

from: a
to: a
Sunday, February 21, 2010, 8:47 PM
subject: Re: mp 
 

so i know there’ve been times i’ve thought to myself that is when i fell in love with him and each time, each and every time, it’d be some different time … nothing consistent or whatever. but i guess it just means that there were several, various moments when i knew i had to love you. but that one time you called me all the way the fuck out? i guess now it’s hilarious but then? then, it was just hurtful because i couldn’t figure it out. sitting at a diner – as we always did – and me expressing to you
 

but i didn’t know you were really into me … i didn’t think i was attractive enough for you

you called out the bullshit i didn’t even know was there.

you must think everyone else in the world is shallow as hell … and you must think that you’re the only one who could possibly “like” [yeah…the finger thing you did there] someone for reasons both physical and otherwise. you must think you the smartest dude in the world and that’s the reason nobody likes you. that? that’s that bullshit. i’m sitting across the table from you right now telling you that i “like” you and you still won’t hear me?

and i sorta just sat there stunned. stunned because it made so much sense but i didn’t even know i was thinking it or something. like, with each enunciation of why are you into me was both a doubt and desire. so i guess doubt and desire sorta reside right next to each other, along the same sorta harmonic scale, though distance separates the two concepts. doubt and don’t … where don’t is what indexes doubt. i did not want to give in to the possibility of you. that i was – finally, though i’d been wanting it for a long time – i was falling for something that was real and i was vulnerable and who has the time for that shit?

of course, i didn’t argue with you then. you had that effect on me. but i’d argue, or resist a bit at least, now. it’s not that i thought i was smarter than everyone else. it’s just that i didn’t know what to think of myself. that’s all. unsure. doubtful. letting the don’t verb itself as a the constitutive force of my life, my love. so, sure, there may have been some narcissism or some egotistical baggage weighing down my misreading of you, making it appear that nobody could ever want me because i conceived myself as so unique and different – and though i think we’re all unique and different or whatever – i used that to buttress my resistance to connecting with you. not so much shallow as just ignorant. can i get off with a my bad? lol.

but i dunno. maybe there’s a hint of narcissism and shallowness whenever anyone declares that their difference is an impediment to connection. reminds me of one of my students last week. we were talking about the nature of all this gospel music i keep having them listen to. so after we’d listened to Emily Bramm Bibbey and Loretta Oliver, and after the subsequent conversation about their voices sounding “wet,” this dude – who NEVER talks in class – speaks up and says [i allow my students to cuss because, well…i cuss a lot in class…lol], he said

their voices do sound wet! and it seems like those voices are just dying. Professor A! i never listened to gospel music before this class but hearing all these voices, and how they’re on the verge of death, just makes me think about the slave stories you had us read and i was reading this guy named Orlando Patterson and how slaves are socially dead and i totally get it now!

it’s like…i wish i wore glasses just so i could take the glasses off my face, close my eyes, throw my head back, and give a looooong, pulsating sigh. it’s like…an affront to everything i’d been trying to teach in the class. those voices? those voices bespeak life…and to sound all like a bible, life abundantly. even on the very literal sense, a voice enunciating itself is made possible by breath…by animus…by spirit. and to think of a voice as enunciating death is to have made a declaration from a very particular, peculiar position that life was never possible for those voices in the first place. anyway. there was narcissism and not just more than a little bit of shallowness in his set of concerns. the sort that declares without reservation that some things for some individuals is not possible because of some unavoidable, inescapable condition. what’s so weird is that it took his emphatic, excited opening up that allowed me to see that i was totally against “social death” categorically but allowed the idea to animate the way i behaved with you. and that shit’s corny. 

i only wish i had your eloquence to call him out in the ways you called me out. i said something hopefully, at least partially, helpful.

the idea of natal alienation and estrangement along with the idea of inhibited honor, i can do without. i’m not really into social death because, well, seems that it depends upon a continual misreading and misrecognition of the conditions of life, the fact of the irrepressible nature of life. it grows. those voices aren’t on the verge of death any more than any one of us is on the verge of death: death is a fact of life and not the other way around. the capacity for Bibbey and for Oliver to dig down more deeply and take another breath IS LIFE. the ability for the slaves gathered in brush harbors in secret, performing theological conviction with the ring shout for HOURS until, at the point of exhaustion, they’d fall out and laugh – using more breath after breath had been thought to be nothing other than evacuated – IS LIFE! Harriet Jacobs in her grandmother’s crawspace, unable to see almost anything but listening to the voices of her children, and her children hearing coughs from the crawlspace so much so that her son “knew” she was alive, there, caring and watching – literally – over them, and pushed other children away from the area so as to make sure no one else would hear her, him acting in a reciprocal moment of care and protection? that’s LIFE, dude.

then it hit me. sure. we were sinning, according to some. we went to diners and smiled. we went to the movies and laughed – loudly – together. we held each other and fucked a lot. we sang and played and made music. we held hands. we argued…too much. we loved. we breathed each other. every.damn.day. we could not be separated, not even when folks said all kinds of shit about us, youtube comments or just in passing. didn’t matter. because we had something in us, between us, that exceeded any of those desires to regulate and repress that which we had: life. couldn’t be contained. and a love like that is possible, not when one (me? lol) continues to believe their own hype about how great – and thus, unlovable – they are. the love to which we arrived was possible because breath exists, life exists and was waiting for us to realize it. or waiting for me to accept it.

i hate that you’re gone but all i do is think about your nearness to me. i have yet to have a night that does not remember you. and  i am sad. maybe more some other time. for now, i just want to breathe in the body of this bourbon [a poor attempt at punning, i know]. 

this is my prayer,
a.-

moth’s powder [02.18.10]

from: a
to: a
Thursday, February 18, 2010, 11:12 PM
subject: mp

i’ve been watching all these youtube videos of older black women singing in churches and their voices have moved me because they sound, for lack of a better word quite honestly, “wet.” you should know what i mean…remember the cassette tape [yes, a throwback i know] that i’d play in the car on our long trips up and down 95 or 85 or back and forth on 40 or 10, the tapes from convocations in memphis and specifically the way Emily Bramm Bibbey [her name just sounds sanctified, holy and full…like she just ate a goodass meal she cooked] would walk up to the mic and without pleasantries – the only sound you’d hear being the movement of the microphone towards her mouth – would belt out

one day at a tiIiIiIiIiIiIiIme, sweet jesus!

…that kind of voice, her kinda voice. or even Loretta Oliver from Fellowship in chicago [just in case you think i have a pentecostal bias, though Loretta grew up pentecostal, Fellowship is baptist] singing

wonderful savior is he! 

wherein her voice sounds of its climbing out of the depths from the wonderful, reaching the apex by he! or her singing   

it’s a hiIiIiIighway up to heaven…ooOOooOOooOOh!

though sung with a much more rapid velocity than Bibbey’s, Oliver’s voice likewise uses melismatic rupture as hallucinatory of a bubbling vitality, a bubbling life. like i said, their voices sound “wet” but i’m not too sure how to translate this to “paper” [though, i suppose, if you think of the screen as “paper,” then you can think of the lowercaseUPPERCASE alternation as attempting to visually represent the shaking of the voice, its refusal of being stilled, its fugitivity, its wayward nature, its lack of decisiveness, indexed by the repetition of interplay]. 

well.

the point i’m getting at is that there are voices that, for me, sound as if they were submerged in some deep, mysterious, watery grave and those voices struggle for their own resurrectional capacities to be heard in and through such wet substance. to be underwater is to be, we know, beneath the surface and this below and beneath makes anyone standing above – on a ship’s deck, for example – inaudible. it’s not as if the sounds do not exist below the surface of a body of water; indeed, there are sciences dedicated to listening to the sounds underwater. the vibrations that produce sound, audibility, the soundscape, move more quickly and further and further still underwater. so it’s not as if life is not occurring in any underneath or underwater inhabitation; it is that one must position oneself securely within the folds and underneaths that are generally discounted as listless, lifeless.      

so, like i said, i’ve listened a lot to Emily Bramm Bibbey and Loretta Oliver and couldn’t shake the feeling they kept giving me. i put a status on facebook saying, simply, that their voices sounded “wet” to me, and other than a few “likes,” there was no conversation that ensued, which was cool. i figured saying it out in public would make the “feeling” their voices gave me go away. but, of course, this week was also the week that i had my students read about the Zong massacre, particularly the poetry that Philips produced by using the court case … amazon has a better description of it than i do: 

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

it’s like youtube knew that i’d be having my students read about this particular massacre and this poetry that emanates from such underwater mausoleum and found a sonic, spiritual, ecstatic parallel to such praise and lamentation. so though i was initially against it because i did not want my students to confuse the pleasure of singing in a church with the pain Philips tries to echo [and it is indeed an echo, a hollowed out, previous to situation, recitation of sound that produces proximity by way of nearness to a source without ever laying claim to the conditions of such emantional force; echo because it is the reflection of sound waves, waves as in ocean and water? perhaps], i played clips of Bibbey and Oliver singing while we discussed the book. i looped several of their songs and sermons [i had no idea until this week because of youtube that Bibbey was assistant pastor of a church in new york for a while] and while we talked about Philips’s poetry, their songs and sounds of watery upheaval were playing in the background [i initially wrote and deleted blackground, but i’m not so sure it’s wrong]. if Philips’s poetry dives into the water to receive a word from the submerged, Bibbey and Oliver’s voices attempt to extend outward from the same sorta condition of submergence. 

it’s not simply that their voices struggle from some sorta underwater dwelling. their voices sound of gurgling, the flow of sonic resource that from within them – in a broken, irregular current – come rushing out. gurgles make me think of bubbles and bubbles are from underwater, making me consider the air necessary for such encapsulated plea to be released to swim to the surface. the gurgle is nothing other than the sign of life of the submerged, the sound of water current attempting to eclipse such breath and breathing. the bubble is formed because some air from a body or organism was taken with them either as a thrown away, discardable material substance – such as the captives aboard the Zong ship – or taken with them as a decision to throw oneself overboard because, as the testimony service song says, they’ve got a hiding place, even in the overboarded underwater world. what i’m not saying simply enough is that one takes air, which is to say life, with them and the gurgle and bubble is the fact of the capacity to take things with you, in you, even in the face of conditions that would attempt to take away even your capacity to hold shit in… 

anyway.

Bibbey and Oliver’s voices come to us, in all of their force and magnitude, as evidence of having been submerged but having, also and most importantly, survived any attempt at drowning. i guess the question that keeps coming to me is this: are their voices, with the “wet” sound, rehearsing an ontic condition of the submerged that keep coming to us again and again? why would such a “wet” sound be so pleasurable, why does it move the congregation in such endurational ways? what is the capacity of the “wet” voice to show signs of life even if gurgling, bubbling, from horrific conditions of drowning? maybe Philips’s poetry, attempting to sing something of the breath and vitality of the more than 150 drowned captives, and the “wet” voices of Bibbey and Oliver are a part of the same aesthetic production…or something. a different kinda baptism.

i’ve been thinking about breath a lot lately, and not simply because of my foray into bikram practice. i’ve also been having lots of trouble sleeping lately, yet and still, all over again. you keep coming to my mind from way below me, in my stomach, in my heart and i feel night sweats on my brow, i awakening with labored and belabored breath. i attempt to sleep and i feel faint, as if i were about to be carried away by currents too forceful for me to fight but i still struggle within the currents…and against them. it’s as if i would black out each time i lay head to pillow but this blackening would be too weighty to bear and i’d never wake up. so i’m exhausted a lot, tired a lot and only fall asleep after i can literally no longer stand or sit or lay. it just comes to me and i awaken hours later. but each time i wake up, hard of breath, out of breath, tired from breath, i only have just enough breath left to squeeze out your name, moth’s powder, as if the name itself were agitational torque working in and through my body.

corny way to say i miss you, right? lol…but i do. and at least i’m laughing a bit more about it, about us, these days. though, as i said, sleep is difficult. dtim still thinks i should contact your mother, say hi or some shit…and shit, valentine’s day just passed and i didn’t even say i love you. but that, you already know. and still, i do.

anyway.
a.-

moth’s powder [12.15.09]

from: a
to: dtim
Tuesday, December 15, 2009, 7:33 AM
Subject: Re: until i get *this* outta me

just a bit more, i guess …

i should have known something of myself based on the ways i used to love to play the tambourine. i never liked the aggressive pop as much as the flamboyant jingle, though i popped it a lot and was not shy about the percussiveness of the pigskin [and no, the newer plastic tambourines, i think, are horrible; they don’t have the same sound. don’t tell PETA, though…lol]. anyway. i would shake and shake and shake the tambourine, just so i could hear the jingles. of course, the pop-doo-loo-loo-loo-pop-doo-loo-loo-loo-pop were cool, percussive or whatever. but the shack-a-lack-shack-a-lack almost bordering on some bells that jingle for the holidays? well. the jingles are slightly noisier and a bit more incoherent, which is why i like them so much. not so much angular in their address, they’re more suffuse and diffuse. sorta just sounds like a shakeshakeshakeshakeshake or a shhshhshhshhshhshhshh and i can’t ever hear it without thinking of the ways bodies moved and bounced when they were played. breasts jiggled. asses quaked. the entire body’s gotta gyrate even if a little bit. and to be serious with playing such a sound, one would have to concentrate, pull their lips into the mouth so all you see is its crease and line, one would have to hold one’s breath while beating whenever trying to create polypercussive rhythm of the bop-bah-doo-doop-bap-bah-doo-doop really, really, really fast.

and of course, this sorta rhythmic sound could only be matched by a pair of new “church shoes” on a wooden floor. you know exactly what i mean too!  you’re probably, what, smiling a bit as you read this because you know whenever you bought a new pair of shoes, you’d say, let me find a good wooden floor because the sound of the new heel on wooden floor is so…churchy. pentecostal shouting ain’t only about the move of the spirit, it’s also about the move of sounds over the varied locations, making the building resonate with some such holiness and life. and nothing sounds better than a bunch of shoes clanking and clonking on some such wooden floor along with other hands clapping and the organ’s bass runs and the yelps and hollers and the shhshhshhshhshhshhshh of some tambourines. nothing.

pretty much, my affinity for the tambourine should have let me know, early, that i would be a bit difficult to pin down, nice to hear, but difficult to gather once sounded out. i’d need constant movement and motion for sustenance, couldn’t pop me once and think that i’d reverb. no. i needed to be jostled and handled and moved. and it was you that was able to do that. words are failing me a bit today. but i suppose i am simply trying to ask: what is it to be handled and moved? you’d gotta know something about the environment, about the social world, in order to get what was going on. and you were able to see me but once, at your daddy’s church, that one sunday and knew – and knew – after but one conversation that something about me needed something about and within you. and of course, the vice versa.

maybe it was in my reticence and astonishment at the very suggestion that we should “exchange numbers” and “hang out” in such a public space, with everyone seemingly looking on. you know there were all those rumors that you might be a bit “funny,” that you were a “tambourine beater” for a very long time – or so you said after we’d hung out – so your presumption and gumption in front of all those people was telling. and that is to say nothing of the ways you knew that i would comply, that something in me leapt out toward you and needed you when we spoke. your astonishment and surprise and that surprised gesture of the brows going up, rapidly, quickly, and the way your mouth formed that o shape? i could not take my eyes off your mouth when i looked at you so, of course, i looked around and up and down and past you as we spoke. i did not want people to think i was flirting with you but i was so confused by what was happening. but you, of course, knew something of the church and the rumor and the gossip in that location to which i did not yet have access. so i just sorta inhabited it as best i could. and you said don’t go anywhere. let me put this tambourine back and you winked so faintly that even i almost did not notice it.

well.

of course it was when New Dawns added the tambourines that things really took off for us. we had that sound of spiritual quest and Bobby, of course, gave the down beat with the bass drum, hi-hat, snare and cymbal. but there was still some such lacking quality, in our fast songs at least, that needed some other diffusion, some sound that would have us sound more “churchy” given our, how can we say, extrabiblical commitments and ideations.

it’s sorta like Abbey Lincoln. in the beginning of her career, it seems she was much more focused on being and becoming another sorta Marilyn Monroe figure for black folks, focused a lot on outward beauty, but also the notion of reproducing and re-performing Monroe’s visual look. i mean, Ebony Magazine did this entire spread in 1957 pretty much saying that Abbey was nothing other than the black [and of course, more beautiful] version of Monroe. the problem, of course, is that she had to comport and composer her self in the Monroe-esque, her more beatifulness depended upon aspiring to mirror as closely as possible that which came before her. of course, all of this was before the tambourine. by the time Abbey performed with Max Roach in triptych: prayer, protest, peace, well, she was changed. some might even say converted to a particular black consciousness. after we saw her live performance – Jaylah was all into black radicalism and making us listen to it, to use it in our own music; i’m not complaining! – in one such live performance of driva man in Europe, Abbey looks almost like we should be calling her Sister Lincoln.the long, mute dress, the plain hair in a afropuff bun, the two-inch heels the lack of makeup and the tambourine; the picture of pentecostal holiness and modesty.

what was in the transition to the tambourine for her? what social life did the tambourine index? Max, of course, played the saxophone while Oscar Brown, Jr. played the drums. her voice and her tambourine were her instruments of choice and as she sung driva man, punctuating each phrase with a hit of the pigskin? well. if we wanted to get saved? it was that sorta salvation.

so New Dawns singing songs with lyrics about Zelophehad’s daughterswas one thing; singing the words of Baby Suggs, holy? well. that was another complication altogether. but knowing that the tambourine could be some kinda sound that worked against the common assumptions of New Dawns as “unsaved?”  [we weren’t, not in some conventional sense, at least.]  folks just chalked us up to some sorta it’s not about their lyrics, it’s about their quality and tone.  and as true as that was, it was also false. we could not give the same tone without lyrics that would allow us to break free from all sorts of normative theologies and ideologies. our unexpected lyrics gave a way to explore sound differently. we contested and agreed in all new modes and forms. maybe it was something about the insistent jingle of the tambourine? or maybe some such conversion to blackness. who knows.

i’ve been trying to say something but i think i’m failing. i know i have.

shhshhshh,
a.-

— — —  

from: dtim
to: a
Tuesday, December 15, 2009, 12:40 PM
Subject: Re: until i get *this* outta me

this was so beautiful. but like, what do you want this to be? what are you DOING with this? what are you trying to write? i get this … but what are you trying to make with this? do you even know? i mean, i’m asking because i keep doing all this painting with no goal in mind, so it’s a bit confusing but i keep discovering all this cool shit in the middle of playing with your goddaughter’s interrupting me. her interruptions are helping me create different kinds of art. and, well, your writing is doing the same. it’s forcing me to deal with my on-again, off-again boo a bit better. so what IS THIS?! lol…

— — — 

from: a
to: dtim
Tuesday, December 15, 2009, 12:51 PM
Subject: Re: until i get *this* outta me

i dunno what it is…i’m just, afraid or some shit. what i had with mp, i’m afraid i won’t ever find again. i mean, i read this shit from Baldwin last night  in Just Above My Head right before i went to bed and it’s been bothering the hell outta me

Thirty.  And I was alone, had been for a while, and might be for a while, but it no longer frightened me the way it had.  I was discovering something terrifyingly simple: there is absolutely nothing I could do about it.  I was discovering this in the way, I suppose, that everybody does, but having tried, endlessly, to do something about it.  You attach yourself to someone, or you allow someone to attach themselves to you.  This person is not for you, and you, really, are not for that person - and that’s it, son.  But you try, you both try.  The only result of all your trying is to make absolutely real the unconquerable distance between you: to dramatize, in a million ways, the absolutely unalterable truth of this distance.  Side by side, and hand in hand, your sunsets, nevertheless, are not occurring in the same universe.  It is not merely that the rain falls differently on each of you, for that can be a wonder and a joy: it is that what is rain for the one is not rain for the other.

i mean, it annoyed the hell outta me. here i am, a dude who has found love, that good shit, the shit where the fucking was transcendent and the conversation was cool and the hand-holding was butterfly-inducing and the staring at each other in public was so fucking ridiculously lovely and i lost it…i lost him. and i’m afraid and annoyed that i’ll never find shit like that again. EVER again! and like, Baldwin just made that shit so very real and hurtful and apparent for me. because if he could write that shit out of his experience and i could feel something so very similar while radically different, do i have hope of finding love again? like, seriously…i just think i’m looney to keep looking for something like i had with mp … lost cause or some shit … i mean, i’m all about letting go of shit, of giving up anxiety as to be liberated.  but hell…reading that yesterday made me want to call a shit load of dudes in my phone just to see if something was there. anything. scared? very possibly. vulnerable? hell yeah. i just don’t know … i just don’t.

— — —  

from: dtim
to: a
Tuesday, December 15, 2009, 2:35 PM
Subject: Re: until i get *this* outta me

::::::::biiiiighugs::::::::

boo! i hope you know that i feel you sooooooooooooooo much right now! but you’ve gotta open your hand. i realized a few days ago that i keep clenching my fists when in my pocket, sorta just holding them hella tense or whatever. stressed out about the boo. and finances. and your godchild. and just everything. but when i realize that my fist is clenched, i just open up my hand. you need to do the same. i know my metaphor ain’t deep but open yourself up to finding something. i think the beauty of you and mp was the fact that after all that searching, you found him and he found you. it means that possibility IS out there. keep looking, babes…but be honest with yourself too. are you even open to someone else right now?

— — — 

from: a
to: dtim
Tuesday, December 15, 2009, 2:51 PM
Subject: Re: until i get *this* outta me

i know i know i know … i’m not and i think all this writing is proof of that … i’m trying though … really

moth’s powder [12.15.09]

from: a
to: dtim
Monday, December 15, 2009, 10:49 PM
Subject: until i get *this* outta me

i gotta keep writing, i suppose. i’ve been listenin to all these youtube videos the group did so i’ve been thinking and writing and thinking and writing a lot about it. this sorta just popped outta me earlier today. shit. feels like i’m just supposed to write this … so i’m doing it or whatever…anyway.

part of me just thinks this is hella heavy-handed. but then the other part of me doesn’t care because ain’t nobody gonna see this shit anyway…so yeah

miss you…xoxo!

mp,

it’s like i’m embarrassed by having the desire to keep writing you. but what’s the use in trying to act like i don’t still feel shit? i can’t afford therapy – or, well, you know, i never liked going to it anyway…that shit was definitely your idea…lol – so anyway, i write.

and i guess we could say that i’ve only partially been honest or, at the very least, i haven’t been entirely forthcoming. i have been rather obsessed with New Dawns music lately, listening to recordings of us, though we only performed for a little over two years. and i have of course been listening to it lately because our anniversary is quickly approaching – not of our coming together but of our breaking apart. and so i’ve been watching these recordings, listening to them with the volume on up as high as possible because i’ve been trying to rediscover you, so to speak. like, i wanted to know if there was something in your gestures, in your face, in your smile that i could know and seize, on which i could think and meditate. so i’ve been looking and listening to instances and inflections.

to say i miss you would be the most vulgar of misstatements and half-truths ever. it is not merely that i miss you, it is that i am no longer me, that i no longer play the same musics, that i do not inhabit the social-sonic space that made me, we. you know i don’t necessarily believe in soul mates but something certainly happened that first day we went to the diner. the shy eyes, the reticent gestures, the bashful but ongoing pleasure of jumping headlong from one conversation to the next. who knew that that sorta calm conversation and knowing comfort were possible between strangers? who knew that that sorta wordplay and game, inflection and voice were attainable for two people not even yet acquaintances? i had butterflies.

and of course, and thus, i knew. and of course, you told me you trusted me. and of course, that made no sense if we were bound and restricted to some sorta linear time progression.

our meeting, i think, at least for me, was the disruption of such linearity. it’s as if i’d known you many moons ago, some half-life agone, that our communion and conversation could be traced back to some such agora. [and i’ve been quietly working on this speculative fiction about a character named Xenith who finds life and love after he comes to earth as a created human being…the life and love he finds is with the king’s son but they’d “known” each other before their birth or whatever. it’s like, rather than meeting for the first time, they “found” each other on their earth planet. but the whole fucked up part was because they were both dudes and people couldn’t understand it and so they had to make all sorts of cosmic conclusions about the nature of love and sex and connectedness that precedes time and exists long after time ceases. anyway. our love was the inspiration.]

what was most weird and cool and most interesting was that that non-date – whatever it was – was the first time you asked me, right before you left, if we could pray together and it made me quite afraid. i was not one prone to pray. [and still am not, truth be told; because if prayer will fix it every time, and i’ve prayed ceaselessly for you, for you to come back to me, for me to be able to smell and taste and touch you just one more time? just one more time? well? well prayer must not work. prayer, in this case and if anything, makes me long more for that which i do not have; prayer becomes the perpetual, ongoing index of loss and lack.]  of course, i grew up saying grace and going to prayer and bible band on tuesday nights and wednesday night prayer meetings [Mingus was entirely too correct], so i knew and know how to pray. i just didn’t then. and don’t. i did not then because i felt it inefficacious, a joke, folly that tried to escape this life. prayer was infelicitous at best, a performative utterance that did not do what it purported.

then i met you and our communion, at the very least, introduced me to the notion of focus. of course, other traditions privilege meditation as a means to focus thought and breath but i had never conceived of those loud prayers from my mother and father along this wise.

you showed me and whispered to me and spoke in tongues to me and demonstrated for me how wrong i was. just because we’re loud doesn’t mean we’re not focused or not contemplative is what you said to me. focused thought and breath is not only found in the quietude of buddhist meditational practice, in the soft hum or brush of yoga chaturanga poses and the like. it is found when my mother would be in the microphone and i’d be on the organ backing her up, her saying something like  

satan!  the lord rebuke you! 

wherein she’d punctuate words with the letter t and the sound tuh! along with the intentional singularity of such words that were plural [think of rebuke rather than rebukes]for dramatic purpose and pause. so it’d sound like she was saying

satan’tuh!  the lord rebuke’tayuh! 

as some sorta melismatic break of word and augment with new sound. what do you think prayers are? you’d ask me, then making me listen to my mother a bit differently because, well, she did not say satan’tuh when she was speaking, only when she was praying or preaching or, generally, when she was convicted. so, and of course, you forced me to think about the intentionality of such breath and vocablic rupture and suspension.

well.

we stood outside the diner, and you asked can we pray right quick? i mean, before we leave? and there was no way i could say no to you. you were insistent while asking but once. you were energetic by some sorta withdrawal. it was in your face. you became gravely serious as we stood out there, not knowing how to say goodbye, whether we should shake hands or hug or kiss, right there, in the lot, outside, for all to see. i wanted to do all those things but i did not yet really even know you, i just knew that i felt things that were either dormant or dead or demonic, all concurrently, all for you. so much boldness displayed by your query. so much strength. and conviction, i suppose. i just sorta stood there and you just continued by standing right in front of me, looking me clear into my eyes – i almost began to have tears forming right there, in the bottom of my heart – grabbing my hands with your hands, you lowered your voice a bit and said, ever so gently, we should…we should pray. i know this may a bit strange but i’d like to pray with you. for me? please?

i did not say a thing. i sorta stood there stunned by what was happening. loss of control. then a tear, before you even uttered a word, a tear formed and it dropped and, i suppose because you did not want me to feel embarrassed, you bowed your head and closed your eyes. the dropped tear, you felt and were correct to know, was assent and ascent. i bowed, closed eyes. then we stood there. and the wind blew a bit. and the street lamp overhead in the parking light buzzed a bit, almost backgrounded to the edge of nothingness. faint, ever so faint. you began to moan a bit, really quickly. then father, i’m thankful for the two of us having met today. keep him and me as we leave here. i would certainly like to see him again. in jesus’s name. amen.

but all i heard was i would certainly like to see him again. and you hugged me. then: i hate to sound all James Baldwin-y but, bye-bye baby, so long, and flashed a smile, and got in your car. i never told you but i stood in that parking lot for nearly ten minutes after you drove off. i could not figure out what had just occurred with me, with you, with us. i just knew that i’d see you again. and so, i was very, very happy. so happy that i cried.

these thoughts of that first experience and prayer came to me today as i listened to the first song our group sang at that first concert some years ago, the one i’d written prayer for zelophehad’s children. to say that mount zion church of god in christ knew not what to make of this motley crew of singers, musicians and songs is no misstatement. i don’t think most of them had heard of zelophehad so they were confused about who we were singing to or for. this mattered less when i descended the scales on the b-3 but, still, most of the congregation remained wary of us throughout the two songs we rendered. [render, of course, is the best word for what we did because we had decided – you, i, Salim, Jaylah, Jalisa and Bobby – that we would literally improvise our way through the entire song; we made it up on the fly, though we practiced the structure of the song and knew the keys, we would allow you to lead us from tonal center to tonal center, and the harmonic progressions were up to us to provide as you gave the melody [we might call it the new way to line a hymn]; and, of course, i refused to sing and only sang that one time because i always hated singing in front of people; but i did what i could do on the b-3 in order to cut and augment the sounds you all made. Zelophehad, and his daughters i suspect, would have been proud.]

breathing into our microphones and using the atonal sound of our breath as much as the harmonies, Bobby’s percussive operations and the sonic architectonics provided by your melody and my response? well. we gave the meaning to Zelophehad’s daughters going to Moses, telling him that he should be open to the spirit, to giving them what rightfully belonged to them, even if the laws and customs of their age dictated that women were not able to inherit land. our song was all about contesting conventional notions of the sacred, of the gospel, of the love of christ and the power of community. so we breathed a bit on and off, before and after the beat. we sang harmonies that clashed. and we hummed and buzzed. the congregation wasn’t ready but neither was Moses, so we were alright. the video is funny. you can see the congregation sorta just sitting there and you can see us not paying them any attention. just kept singing, kept insisting, kept pushing through with improvisation and caprice. threw in a couple of Jesus’s for good measure. i suppose it worked. i miss that sorta blending and disagreement, that kinda sound and sociality, that prayer, that praise.

still,

a.- 

from: dtim
to: a
Tuesday, December 15, 2009, 1:22 AM
Subject: Re: until i get *this* outta me

boo! i hope you KNOW that you can send me stuff whenever you want! i sooooo love this and i sooooooo feel you on all of this! and i’m sad you’re not making music anymore, and i know you’re so sad about the way things went down but you’ve gotta know that he loved you…loves you. you’ve GOTTA know that!

don’t feel bad about writing this stuff, this much or whatever. you’re not obsessing. i just know that when i write out my feelings sometimes i understand them better…which is why i’ve been loving the emails you’ve been sending to me. i might not have much to say in response but i’ve been thinking about it a LOT!

write soon…!