Arts
The Negro Artist and the Sacred Mountain (1) Begin With Denouement and You End Up In Synch This is about lifting the thumb from the bow. A talent for devotion goes black blooded to the over-soul and convinces us the aim is love which when we pierce it, enters us. That force of nature that always aims the hero’s heart toward trances and it’s nobody’s fault but his own. Here come Malik and them. Amos and Andy are somewhere in here too like a laugh track or a surveillance device or the clean black man in the numb cadillac driving down the rent. The succulents grow like so fiercely and you wear acacia crowns around the dream of empire high yellow pirates are circling, and we get high, we about to go get lifted now like sunrise how we open the blues up and let the blues blood come out to show them. You chose the first flower for how it sounds and another for how it looks in the red dark of township or worship or fast car, sweet double hipness— and more for how they feel under water or to the boss’ favorite son in trade, our lady of the sun trade. This pace is for her. It might as well be spring for her every hour of every day and all decoration is superfluous and invasive and makes us sluggish with safety. To escape we climb into the night like space suits, but the fugitive did not recognize this fast taste of night, stompin and stompin and…Am I brave enough for this? Can I understand devotion without idol worship or piety or the punctuated protestant quietness of some white men? What is it then? What is the sacred without a mainstream guideline or religion and how and where do we apply it in our lives then? Does lack of a devotion to one particular god make art more necessary, does it make art our devotional practice and us the arbiters or gods that we love and fear through it? Are we brave enough to be this devoted to ourselves, our beautiful back and gold selves, are we brave enough for this? (2) Synchrony and Her Cronies 1n 1926 Langston Hughes wrote The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, an essay that urges black artists to revel in so-called blackness and to be beginning to see the light; to not fall into the traps of legitimation that tempt so many of us awkward/ backwards and into chasing after a culture that runs from us. Maybe if we’re lucky we turn that chase around or erotic and our work admits something of our truth that way but often all we do is dilute ourselves looking to dispel the color. Almost 80 years after Langston’s tender admonition and the more things change, the more they stay the same. What I explore here is a caveat in the equation Langston arranged to balance the social with the political, the clandestine and blatant space where the sacred resides for the black artist with what that space delivers. It occurs to me that praise rituals practically govern the black spirit and that the varying systems of faith brought to us by the white power structure’s spiritual-industrial complex and/or god-complex, prey upon this innate hunger we have to enter our own gifts and celebrate the hoodrich way, the main way, the ghettofabulous way and the monastic way chanting in each May there be peace, love, and perfection throughout all creation Am I brave enough for this? So I am as ashamed of the black artist who rejects the sacred as Langston is of the one who tries to lift the black off his alphabet like an inverse thief or broke down robinhood complex; I fear both stances are slumps that hinder the ancientfuture and create a kind of hipness that rips creativity to shreds. The racial mountain’s tendency to transmute into a sacred mountain for black artists, the tendency we share to use faith in higher forces to give us the strength to face the quotidian glories or our so-called race or as Fred Moten so brilliantly notes, I ran from and was still in it; it was so big I ran from it and was still in it, that is the quality whose scatological potency we face today,