come on, get it!

22

a war of our own device,

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22.1

a festival of consent.

They practice dispossession in collaboration, as withdrawal, and we’ve been fascinated for many years with the sociality of the music. Can you get that in a poem? Well, if it’s in a poem that’s just poetry in a tight chemise. A band makes music; the making of the band is poetry: anarchitectural, anatopological syntax in correspondence. How can you make the making of the music sound good? The social cultivation of “mere accompaniments” of the utterance. Their practice is their theme. Sometimes this takes the form of commentary, sometimes of inventory. Making ain’t reducible to its conditions but it ain’t detached from ‘em, either. We make cars, the league of black revolutionary workers might say; but really what we’re making is the league of black revolutionary workers—off and under and over the line. What Thom might say is: they thought I was making poems but really we were making poetry. We want to keep seeing what we come to in the making. It’s not that matters of skill or craft have been suspended. They just been socialized, deindividuated, shared. Thom is them. Thom’n’em, Them downstairs, in a tremendous submachine of milk’n’cookies. To say that them is a poet, or a good poet, is to narrow the scope of the shit in which they involved, a threshold poetry hands when its care and study gets so deep. Neither the poet nor the poem can contain such virtue: what it is to be able not so much to ask but to construct a question, to be allowed being also to be required to construct, construct implying some intention—fanned out all over the yard like some weighted canopies or a community sing of open corners or a conversion of the guards—to hit a poem or a poet in the throat or in the stomach. Man, it’s a shame how them fucked up all them damn poets and them damn poems’n’em.

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And Malik’n’em’s problematic of making, in dislocation, withdrawn, a discourse curved in the outskirts of black performance, left as an empty sequence. “The name of this tune is ‘Mississippi Goddamn.’ And I mean every word of it.” The way she says “and” is neither a bending of a note nor a slurring of two. It’s an infinite n, endless, endlessly and unbendingly ribboned and turned’n’em, empathically folded in not in between, unintegered, disintegrated with gratitude. To think Nina Simone as actor, Gunther Kaufman—in Fassbinder’a concern with Brecht’s concern with gesture—as dancer: genre bent, or slurred, and neither. Is blackness a deeply energetic position from which to communicate or a deeply energetic apposition from which to announce communicability? Deep in these ongoing epilogomena to any future meta/physics, she had a wig on cocked to the side. And she hummed every word of it.

To emancipate oneself from oneself is the secret overpopulation of the mono-instrumental imperative. The composers guild throws seed, hill by hill, in minimal dispersion. This is liturgical ru(m)ination, jalalian glossolalia. Jalal al-Din is discourse, well, here you go again. You say you want your freedom, but all you wanna do is share, deforming life in the terraform—“always a collective differentiation” under firm tara. Somewhere I read you long to dispossess yourself of yourself. What’s the relation and/or the difference between emancipation and dispossession? “I’d like there to be space between us and then also a crushing, a pounding.” Eastman, alone, says, “let sonorities ring,” which is what King did when he said “let freedom ring” way past the meaning of what he said, being eastern man alone. Must we mean what we say? Mo. Meant to write no but mo mo’ better in the mo + less than fullness of its articulation. Mo mean no + yes, which is more + less than no, motherfucker. Eastman, unalone, can’t, won’t, yeah. Is hearing a feeling standing over you like Marx asking questions? Cavell gives sharing as an individual affair. Your sharing seems different—either dispossessive of that individuality or held in that all but already given dispossession, the given having given itself away to never was. We got to forgive you, never even gone? Are you ever gon’ go? Give it up, turn it loose.

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group (n.)                 1690s, originally an art criticism term, "assemblage of figures or objects forming a harmonious whole in a painting or design," from French groupe "cluster, group" (17c.), from Italian gruppo "group, knot," which probably is, with Spanish grupo, from a Germanic source, from Proto-Germanic *kruppaz "round mass, lump," part of the general group of Germanic kr- words with the sense “rounded mass" (such as crop (n.). Extended to "any assemblage, a number of individuals related in some way" by 1736. Meaning "pop music combo" is from 1958. Round ass lump or lumpen is from 1976. Lumpen from lumen, or inside lip, a unit of luminous flux in superfluid kisses, from an influenza of switches (such as crew (adv.). A way people be sharply butterflying.

I wanna do bad things to who, Gruppen, writing in a state of abandon. Is a dissertation defense a form of self-defense? Groups. A group of groups. Is there anything other than the group? Or, to be more precise, is there nothing other than a group? Is there a size limit on groups? When is a group too big to be a group? This is the problem of scale. Murray Jackson says Philip Levine’s work is work; is work always, and of necessity, group work? What if it’s not about putting shit together but about how shit falls apart? Communicability against the state. Another history of the group. Another history in this metaphysics. The art of the fugue, evil nigger. Difference got out of jail, and died in the street, saying this is grime. The art of the upper room. The art of the river rouge.

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23

Doubleness of the beguine,

is there any beginning,

the beguine then wandering? Orewoet,

the desire that drives one mad, die minne to bear ghebruken?

Contrafactum, substitution of text

without changing the music, maintenance

of a melody when the text changes,

expands or contracts, requiring sustenance,

or melisma, or double time,

 

is it too far to think the counterfacticity of King Pleasure and Eddie Jefferson?

 

Or some kind of scattish

counterfactotem, the sacred utility man,

a one-man band emblematic of nothingness, scatman carousing, shining in the light that Brent resounds, Hadewijch set to music

hedwig made plain, Edwidge Dantichant,

a maronnage of beguining, running, begging, praying, singing, dancing?

But how’d the beguine begin, and who the hell got there from here, what redirection, what rhum, what rhumba, what ronald, what rose-antoinette, what Martinique, what jubilee?                                Come on, man, certain weird, black-ass white women, evidently, and some Burghardts bogarting for the people.

23.1    Improvisation is how we make no way out of a way. Improvisation is how we make nothing out of something.    23.1.1,

some ways, that thing, is it the same thing to think and to be? To think and to do? To think and to feel? Let’s say that already embedded in this Parmenidean series is the resistance to the very idea, as well as the very regime, of the epistemic even as it’s already scarred by it in being held in it, in its placement of thinking at the center of a relation that soon becomes a relational matrix. (And isn’t this brutalizing interplay of centrality and relationality, in its very surreptitiousness, part of what decoloniality wanted to be about the business of exposing and disavowing?) This idea that thinking, which is to say the thinker, comes first and everything (else in this expulsive grasp that links and constitutes thing and else in severalty) revolves around it, is a problem of settlement, of the settler who brings the center with them, as them, everywhere they go; and today the question is whether the idea→state→activity of “bewilderment” does anything to ameliorate it. The fact that we still here seems to indicate that we hope so. Cole Porter’s jubilee begins again,

one mo’gin. 1. What if the problem isn’t coloniality as an episteme? What if the problem is that coloniality is always already given in the very idea of the episteme? What if coloniality is the age, or the locale, or more precisely, the spacetime, of the episteme? 2. Is bewilderment an expression or a refusal of the epistemic? Is bewilderment in line with other notions—such as techne or doxa—that are said to deviate from the epistemic? Or is it something like the unconscious, or the aesthetic, that might be best characterized as deviant within the epistemic? Is coloniality, or modernity, the episteme of the episteme, where the constrained motion of from and within indicate a common terroir, the general field of scientificity, which is space time itself, produced and then discovered? This Foucauldian question is not meant to advance, against Foucault’s grain, an overarching anti-historicism: it is, rather, a question concerning the perhaps inconceivable, but certainly still unconceived, breadth of the very idea of the geographico-historical as such, unravelled in the beguine,

ne mo’ one mo’gin. 2. At stake is a general problematic of separation. In which case, are we talking, finally, about decoloniality and bewilderment as modalities of partition within a spatio-temporal order, a geographico-historical regime, that is given in and as partition? I don’t know. I’m bewitched. Bothered. I’m Rodgers and Hart and Ella. In this regard, ain’t nothing new. Either need to let all that shit go or just keep going all up in it without worrying about it, or trying to name our way either out of it or innovatively within it. These prolly amount to the same thing. Meanwhile, just since I woke up this morning, how many vicious thoughts have I thought about people with whom I agree on 99% of what they say and with whom I share 99% of their desires? I lost count. That’s bad, and I really want to work on that, but I can’t work it by myself, or in my head, or in the interpersonal diorama,

Diotima, Jadwiga, Hedwig, Edwidge,
Hadewijch, set edge, set to music.

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