Dear Nearby Constellations,
[TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL #4, 9-4-18 21:14, TRAUMAGRAMS: A Book of Starter Abstractions by Joselia Hughes. ALT TEXT: Black india ink on white paper. Several geometric figures assemble. Straight lines meet curves, circles intersect with triangles. Scenes and spaces of depth are indicated by black. Perhaps there is a window. Perhaps there is door. Perhaps there is a portal. Perhaps there is a spinning person. TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL is made up of 55 “tests” based upon ink blots.]
BABY SONG #6 (LIBERATION IS WRITING TODAY TOGETHER)
sleep peels
peels to leap
come on darlin’
we ain’t jumpin’ neat.
so strap up
n strap in
be sure to pack
ample we-pens.
Sometimes I don’t notice where sleep goes until I ask myself a question and remember to answer aloud. Been feeling sleep as peels. Remembering sleep is both a solidifying and fragmenting experience. Been waking up from continuous explosions and bright lights pouring into my bedroom window. Been driven mad by a lack of sleep, a coordinated effort of fireworks detonating the possibility of rest. Been feeling sleep like it’s a bag to get in. Been near sleeping, also known as windowing out, desiring “see/sea”. I’ve been frazzled in se(my)lf.
Been recalling only a few dreams and that inconsistency provides fertile ground to continue the practice of non-attachment. I used to fight my body’s own functions (non-attachment) believing them to enemy. I fought by keeping big thoughts and acquiring Knowledge and positioning statuesque permanence as essential being like all that hoarding, all that holding, could make me more than subjected object.
“I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.”-Frantz Fanon, Black Skins White Masks
I believed the cascade of deceptions white suprematist, ableist, cisheteronormative capital Society implemented to secure the set seats of doubt underneath the be-hind (legs) of Bblackness. I believed my Self/Fels* as enemy.
*Fels means rock/cliff in German.
Sometimes I don’t notice where the days go until I am again pinched by diss/comfort and remember comfort, without the diss, in this current World short on everlasting days, has never been a choice, has always been something we’ve had to afford.
***
AM AGAIN/AGAIN AM
re/am— re (prefix: again and again, back or backwards) am (ante meridiem or amplitude modulatiton; verb: first person singular indicative of be)
ream—transitive verb: to widen the opening (of a hole)
ream— 500 sheets of paper
***
Diss/comfort is as certain as M.A.D (mutually assured destruction or insanity or anger or the extreme “She mad gully for this”). Diss/comfort is “dis” (prefix: apart, asunder, away) exploding, traveling to “diss” (transitive verb: to treat with disrespect or contempt). Why they dissing our sleep? Put some respect on our sheets.
Can’t remember when I said this but I described the avant-garde, the neoteric, as a group of fliers who spread their lives out and leap off cliffs. They hurl themselves off ledges because they believe and trust in the possibility of a landing beneath them. I don’t know what art is; I feel creation. Maybe we’re not making up. Maybe we’re making down. Maybe we’re not looking for the most high. Maybe high is for drugs and good food and giggly sex. Maybe neoteric behavior brings all of us closer to the ground. Maybe neoteric behavior challenges us with what Mr.C asks in the Cha Cha Slide.
“How low can you go?
Can you go down low?
All the way to floor?
How low can you go?”
[HUMIDITY’S FORMATION. first conceived in 2019 and reworked for 2020. ALT TEXT READING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: 3 black circles and one red gradient circle overlap on black space. Two thin lined red “rings” indicate spin, orbit and the relationship between these circles. In the black circle, placed furthest to the left, reads HUMIDITY in white text. Next to HUMIDITY is a small black circle, blended in, that reads, in white text: can’t breathe oppressive low air quality absolute relative specific climate temperature subject ed/ion/ing non-being % or quantification. In-between the two previous circles is a read circle that reads ANTI/BLACKNESS in black text. In the three corners, or posts, reads TEXT anagrammed to spell interpretations of Exit.]
Liberation sense tells me hope is a vegetative force, a rhizome. Liberation sense also tells me vegetative forces ask into what Jay Electronica rapped, “You either build of destroy. Where you come from?”
I come from the land called and/both. In the land and/both, what’s articulated below happens.
I have a friend I don’t talk about. We chat in somewhere and they tell me jarring—truths for jars— things. They tell me how visible people be, they tell me about transparencies saved for exclusive projectors. They tell me with hot anger I don’t always understand. I believe them. Truthfully, I believe them until believing is tiered into tired. When that happens, I rely upon not knowing or some other evasively empty container. And then I have to check myself and ask, “Ay yo, you really gonna take on empty when you can give full?” And then I have to check myself again and say, “Jarring Knowledge ain’t the same as attuning and attending to the real. Free up what you think you know for what is happening.” I have a friend I don’t talk about whose anger pierces illusion and holds me accountable. My friend doesn’t owe me this, truth-telling, truth told. My friend owes me nothing. It is exactly because we are in no debt to each other that we practice freedom without overthinking, by feeling it. I don’t want to call this a lessen.
Maybe you don’t keep up with these things but Mercury’s stationed Gatorade, as the funny Twitter people say. It’s also Cancer season, the season of lateral movement, the season of carry-your-home-with-you. My Venus is in Cancer. Each year, around this time, when summer sweats sticky and temperatures skyrocket and city humidity ravages my Sickle Cell to its boiling hiss/diss/dis, I move a little different— extra dense, extra fastslow. Sometimes I get depressed and disappear a little. I be interior and tacit and tangential—inter ta ta tee BALL SWING— and feel through all of the spaces I displace the rest of the year.
[TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL #5, 9-4-18, 22:15, TRAUMAGRAMS: A Book of Starter Abstractions by Joselia Hughes. ALT TEXT: Black india ink on white paper. A figure made out of circles, half circles, triangles, and other geometric figures faces east. The figure’s head, not fully filled with black, perhaps resembles a wave. There may be a spaceship within the drawing. There may be a hatch. There may be transcendence. There may be an icon of profound change. TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL is made up of 55 “tests” based upon ink blots.]
There’s something to be said about interiority, be/coming to purpose literal life. Now we’re feeling longtime be/coming, circling, perhaps passing the baton to our next be/yond. We were born feeling longtime but were contained away. We were contained to clock time, clockwork. Our containment attempts to remove trust in longtime but we have to foment trust for our interiors, our lives depend on it. We must trust longtime is a round, not right, matter. That said, I hope this text salves some joints, insists on skips, ties strategy to child’s play, helps you get lost. Further unlocking our freedom means giving time to be/ing lost, be/ing found, learn/ing by process not product. I hope this letter feels like the kind of meeting that only happens on still summer nights, when the fireflies are aplenty and citronella perfumes the dark and we’re careful not to knock over the lit kerosene lamp at our ankles. I hope this letter feels like us tasting Earth’s sweet offerings of possibility on our lips. I hope this is an opportunity for you to tell you how you feel, ask what time is it?, weigh the present, consider how you’re inhabiting movement in cresting, surging, mass waking.*
AND/BOTH AND/BOTH (A LESSON)
in somewhere
visible projectors tiered not knowing.
check, ask:
take on empty? give full?
jarring knowledge ain’t real; free up what you think you know.
friend, truth told, we practice freedom without overthinking it, by feeling it.
call this a lessen.
I listen to this song when my confidence is shaken and I need to remember the power of mantras:
(W)rapping from the other side of the moon,
joselia hughes aka la’quemini who?
*https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-wake