Tales of the Out & the Gone (15 page)

Now, you can dig what all this sounded like to me, knowing some portion of what all this is and where it really comes from. You dig? But when strange happens, it be strange to you too!

“But you see, I don’t know how much you understand about bullshit.”

“I know what I understand.” Where he had taken this story was out anyway. The form—and you know in the store, like that—an anonymous fullness.

“People like you, Baraka, said all that garbage about brainwash. I could dismiss all that when it gave me pleasure. I could aspire to be in my world, where I was what I wanted anyway.”

“People like me?” He was looking at the television set of my expression and the narrative of my random acknowledgments. Grunts and blowing short breaths.

“But you see, the dumb shit is completely inside it, unexpressed by anything outside it.”

“Yeh.” What the fuck?

“Yeh.” He paid the cashier. “You see, if you really understood America, you would disappear into it and be calm and holy.”

“I know.” He was television’s future.

“But its lie is all the way always in all ways. A lie. I love lies and it lied to me. The truth is what hurts.”

When you find people talking to you like this, it makes you want to help them in a way that would’ve made the discussion never happen. Like bullshit about heart-wrenching or being heart-wrenching about bullshit. I know. But then, I knew he was already something alien. That he lived in a space between what he thought and the actual. I couldn’t understand him totally at first—it was a definition that scrambled his speech. Drifted his face into clichés.

“You see, even now I’m not rejecting the experience.”

“Experience?” It was like therapy. Even racism was useful as a measure for these guys.
These guys
?

“The lie was that they did not hate me. The lie was that they were ignorant. Bullshit. I saw them behind closed doors, dressed in white sheets, feeding on skinned children. Negro children.”

“What?” What can you say … I caught a hacked snicker in my throat that would’ve sounded like a laugh. He had flowed out of his own skin calmly, a yellow and brown puddle, smoking. The skin kept talking without eyes, empty as a pocketbook.

“I knew then that we were excluded. That they felt we couldn’t hang. Couldn’t understand their huffy ritual.”

“Is this shit for real?” Came half-thrown away.

“That’s why they attacked us in the press, because we saw the lie.”

“Yeh.” This was actually a “guy.”

“And you see, some of them knew we could fit. That we could eat the nasty nigger anytime, anyplace, anywhere.”

The eyeless skin bent and picked up the yellow- spotted bleeding mess of his insides and slapped it on the scale there at the checkout counter.

The mgr had come out and checked the scale, then gestured to a gray bow & arrow Negro w/white jacket, who sliced it neatly so the flesh and guts would fold, then dumped it in a plastic sack and carried it away.

“I’m going to sue!” He was getting a stack of dollars pushed through his empty eyeholes.

“Yeh,” was all I said, turning to leave.

April 1992

A LITLE INF

Evolution is the going to the going, where the speed of light is the measure, whereby faster than that which “disappears” from this eye. The five senses are the truncated perception of the animal. The seven senses, the nine senses, are stages of that speed, and wherein we cannot get up to speed, we must start up wherever. In the nine-card molly we have dealt. That is the sun’s house. The sun to Saturn and back again.

Hell is the waste, burnt up and “disappearing.” That is what that “is” as “self” completely disrealized, i.e., without will, accounting for the future but without one, except as time. The engine, the generator, that engulfing fire.

Time is literally speed, and space is time, as going from wherever. To wherever.

We leave here because we cannot stay. We go where we are taken by what we are. What exists is what is viable to get us wherever. And that accretion of self, information, expansion, revelation is the measure—the placement of where we are and will be.

So that we aspire to humanity in the animal place and mind we are held. The slowness is a measure of how far we have to go, to disappear from this circle-cycle, this Milky Way of keep-on-coming.

That’s why Sun Ra wanted to “skip” Mars &c. and proceed directly to Jupiter. That’s what he wanted to know and see. He felt perhaps that by dealing directly with the Jupiter-self, he could use Saturn as a springboard beyond the Milky Way to the literal “beyond” and not come back around into the nine circle.

If this is hard to understand, I can understand. Computers cd explain a great deal of it. But monkeys have difficulty digging the real deal.

November 1995

DIG THIS! OUT?

Remember when the Blood met us on his doorstep, unlocking the door? He explains that he is not who we think, but he will explain. & when he went in, he started right away. Saying he was a replacement for himself, but from a different planet. Maybe he said “place.”

We asked him which planet. He looked at us like we was corny. “Earth,” he said. Dig that. “Earth!”

And then he begins to put everybody down, or a lotta people we know, cause we can be in the zoo, calm and employed. As the Animals!

Man …

Now he says that this is not Earth, but Dirt. And Humans cannot yet inhabit it! Like it was the jungle and we was all Animals. Or even if we knew about Humanity and dug it, we couldn’t go all the way because Animals ruled the zoo and forbid Humanity to develop.

“This is a big cave in the sky. I can see it even where I come from. But we so hip, we can imagine the smell!”

So who is you, was what we was asking.

“I am why niggers never die.” Yeh, he said that. And dig this …

“I am the Charlie

     Parker

     Bird

The Soul

     of

Blackness

A Tale

of

Fire

Exploding

thru Space

Black

&

Flying

tale

on fire.

Out

is

my

Castle

Gone

is my

Name

Who leaves

burnt lies

beyond the moon

I am from

where you are

going

& who you

will be

to get there

if you don’t die.

In 2031 Christmas

was replaced

by Halloween

as America’s Holiday

The Jack O’ Lantern

and Skeleton

replaced

the Star

&

Christmas tree

The Devil became

Santa Claus

& Death was celebrated

instead of Birth.

Finally, the world

had become A Great Poison

Cave, with skulls

& bone crosses

piled up to the

edge of the polluted

endless twilight

H O R I Z O N

of

Corpses

which were money.

Afro America

slid we Blue Razor

out we Black Belt

Sharp

like street light flash

in the cities’ collective

I’s

Swift & Rising

in us hand

like night

Black &

Invisible

in a swinging

arc

of

everything

over yr head

Swinging Hard

Comin

Down

& where it strike

A Red Star

of

Blood.”

And having said that, he sits down at the piano and begins to speak. “Parables. You hip to parables, right?”

Then he starts to recite very rhythmically, and then sings. We tried to remember it. (A copy of the transcript follows.)

“ … out is

gone.

JA   ZZ
Yes

the signs

ZZ=Lightning

The & from the

Sky

The N + J upright + connect

A (1st/AM)

eye

A

looking

down.”

Since then, we get messages on the box. He saying we can meet whenever we got a question. Or an answer. So we discussin it first … you know …

1995

HEATHEN TECHNOLOGY AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

When they discovered how to remove and imprison the mind (to make the brain unmetaphorical), dis/image it, there was a shrill whoop in the small laboratory. This whoop is repeated each time the process is repeated.

I saw the yellow circle on Jay’s forehead and instinctively pushed him away, thinking to misdirect the “Yankee” beam. It worked partially. He developed a love for Robert Bly and Michael Harper and could no longer dance.

He recovered after Red came up with the antidote: Trane and Aaron Douglas eight times a day. And the Babs Gonzales
Be-Bop Dictionary
eye chart to check every hour, with verbal repetition halfway emphasizing the rhythm.

A few years before, if you “remember,” before History was 1st defined as nonsense and then outlawed, little Willie came up with the bound metaphor as energy source. If the metaphors of a heavy group were rendered collective and focused on whatever, energy and power could be produced.

Con Edison cops 1st detected the profit drop and unlisted disd/structs still lit and heated. That was wild and they swooped in, got a criminal blunt jingle to penetrate. They came up with a simulated BM, like rock and roll to the truth, and began to market it once they got a meter for individual heads.

Then they ruled the original an illicit drug and anybody with lights &c. unlisted in the disd was an abuser.

They had copped the fiveness and hummed for scat, limped for real unhip and copped a group of tan Ivy Leaguers to go for real folks, just after Rectum’s brother became president. The colored riff nigged the still lit and lit. Clarence was a greenish statue with fecal-perfumed Bibles splashing us on the way to the Under-Mart. His shadow, remember, was permitted to function and they had a silver bullet on his chair which sang slave songs when they killed somebody.

The brain switch began with naked murderer unisex supermodels arriving at certain peoples’ houses like Jehovah’s Witnesses. The victims were so stunned at the 1st digging that they could be quickly disabled and dismetaphored.

This worked very well till it was discovered that if no TV set was on or no newspapers open, then the supermodels looked like Dahmer carrying a newspaper with his picture on the front page.

That’s when the TVs would come on automatically at daybreak, quiet so you didn’t know it. And
Dead Peepas Daily
would be slid under your door without a sound.

So then California (the name of the U.S. since 2019. Capital: Dallas) began to sweep metaphor out of citizens’ minds large-scale. It was a major project. Every day the mounting aggregate of stolen metaphor metabolism was released with the stock market reports.

The problem began when the collected metaphorical power collectively imagined nothing existed but what it could not imagine.

So like gigantic nuclear-force wheels, the present sped into the future and the past carried garbage across the horizon. No one could be anywhere unless they didn’t yet exist. What existed changed and changed. The buildings rotted and the people disappeared. Re-appeared. And the people whose metaphor had been stolen could not imagine what was going on. And they disappeared anyway.

So swift had change and transformation become that everything was a blur. A blue wailing blur, like speeded-up flicks. Things, places, persons, nature itself rushed, grew, vanished, was replaced, and everything shook like Saturday-night-nigger- party Bloods spinning on the one.

Red hipped me to all this and we walked around digging like you dug Sun Ra coming out with his hop and chant. It was like Mao said: the world, what is so fantastic, it could freeze you in your digging.

So nothing could exist except everything that rushed and changed. We, with Red’s invention, monitored the hip and hung out inside the blue song.

But like a child with a nasty thing inside it which it finally rejects and ejects, the rush spun into another angle of motion and movement. And it seemed places. And with that, soon faces, some wide-eyed “humans,” appeared.

We are approaching some of them now. And it seems nakedness is obsolete. They are their own clothes. And they are laughing!

July 8, 1995

RHYTHM TRAVEL

Your boy always do that. You knock, somebody say come in. You open the door, look around, call out, nobody there. You think!

But then at once, music comes on. If you watching, there’s a bluish shaking that flickers—maybe “Misterioso” will surround you. The music is wavering like light. The room seems to shift, to step.

Then you recognize what you hear, man. “Aw, brother, you at it again. You in here, ain’t you?”

A laugh. This dude.

“Yeh, I’m in here. You hear me. You feel me. Here I am.” He appears, laughing and pointing at you. “Hey, man. I’m still developing this.”