STOP TALKING IN CIRCLES Part 2: The Noise is Always with You
Below I speak to myself, to others, and a mirror from another time.
There’s a subtle humming, almost unperceivable sensation that is constant. It could be so many things: something magical, a state of social death, the holy spirit, a cognitive distortion, a curse, an ontological fact, a touch of lunacy, maybe the afterlife of slavery. I don't know. It has something to do with existing in this world or being denied your psychic space in it. However articulated, it is something outside the empiricism of modern science and philosophy. It’s always pressing me and I’ve felt, acknowledged, questioned and attempted to articulate whatever it is.
Because of this since 2016, I've been more consciously stumbling through the discipline of writing. I’ve labored at being consistent and systematic with it. In that labor, Journaling has come and gone as a practice since I was at least eight years old. Journals made it easy to revisit what I’d written to edit, ruminate, gawk, erase, extrapolate, criticize, whatever at my discretion. My inconsistency in discipline became lessons and one particular iteration was on Tumblr starting around 2016. Revisiting that account illuminated some key strategies for managing the noise: 1) publicly sharing work 2) reviewing past works structure and content 3) acknowledging noises these writings still signal 4) documenting points in time.
Time is born out of the contingent, ambiguous, and contradictory relationship that we maintain with things, with the world or with the body and its doubles. As Merleau- Ponty notes, time (and we can easily say as much about remembrance) is born in the gaze directed toward oneself and toward the Other, the gaze that one casts on the world and the invisible. It emerges out of a certain presence of all these realities taken together. 1
Below I talk to myself, to others, and this as a mirror of time.
2016
Black Noise. [Listen] I don’t know what is to be looked at as whole and full. I don’t know what it means to be man. I am not aware, allowed to be aware, of what it means to be [that kind of] free. To be able to experience simple humanity. I am not present in every part of my true existence. I check each aspect of my compartmentalized self, one at a time, day after day- to sew it up, to patch my existence together: firstly for my survival, and secondly for your comfort. I warn you. We are burned. Our skin has peeled, and our scars never healed. But we don’t wear masks. We never hide. We can’t. We still feel. We still see. We still hear. That is how we know we are real, humans.
2023
I’m listening. It was sharp then, now so dull. I wrote that almost eight years ago and today the spoils of an endless pandemic dilapidate my ability to articulate. An enduring pandemic and negligent government disabled the performance of my silver tongue. I wrote this saturated in pain, anger, love and lust. Those were the source, coursing cortisol and adrenaline through my veins. The words seeped through my fingertips seemingly without consent. My mind was running a different operating system back then and I'll always barter with the mechanics of language to taste peace in this world. However operational my mind is now, It still chases words to make peace on behalf of a relationship never peaceful.
2016
We feel death encroaching upon us; we are aware. It tells us in whispers as crisp as a soothing hymn sung to an infant. We mourn for our families and our friends for losses they await receipt. We are selfish and at first we are in denial. Lastly, we are preparatory and restorative for them, not for us. We are calculated in our sentiments and we are in fear and in love with each moment we are given to make our peace with this space. We withhold many facts in order to spare the false delicacy of sorrow. We are preciously, hysterically, painstakingly aware of the world around us. So unearthed by the reality that we are the most transitory beings here, we deny. We are settled in our denial as we should be settled in our truth and we make it our tranquility. It seems as though this reality is only peripherally seen. Until it blinds us by its blatancy, death is in situ. Our acuity is unpolished and because of this our time to come to terms and be wholly is short; we are passive most times. At best. We are such a binary. Truly two beings, one of completeness in our truth and incomplete denied because of our arrogance. These two states battle within us, they toil within us.They, in the end place us among the ashes and dust. We must be at peace with our oneness and our duality. And listen to the whispers. And accept and be accepted when we need to translate them. Hear each cue to free yourself and love your neighbor. Listen and attempt valiantly to be at peace– thoughts on life and death.
2023
I’ve drown in the noise like molasses, tried to wade through it onto the shore. I tried to evade the binary of healed vs. unhealed and reorient toward a glitch, a fissure for me to dive into; I get through the stickiness nowadays because I think this shit is all made up. I don’t need to breathe in here. I’ll simply negate time and accept there’s no choice in life or death here. It’s okay. Grief is the atmosphere.
2016
I am made aware of my dehumanization on every level of my consciousness everywhere my body exists, in all the infrastructure of our world. Every time my heartbeats I am jolted with the blessing you’ve given me to breathe. Yet, My heart is still being called inhuman. Each speckle of reclamation I take back from this “nonexistence,” each thought I claim as mine and not yours. I cherish and I try to expunge. I reclaim the names erased, and I proclaim I will feel their loss when one day you acknowledge it. It’ll still be fresh and new. Because it is always fresh and new. I decide to hold onto their pain. Our existence is not to be desecrated. It is to be understood and to remain and to be reclaimed for you and for us. It is to be loved.
2023
The year 2016 was one of the first adult years I spoke. Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were two of the sensationalized deaths that year.2 I was in a Public health program that spoke with deep bass about their commitment to health equity and addressing systemic racism, I was alone in a new city, St. Louis, MO post killing of Michael Brown. There was so much noise here. It was the loudest place I’d ever been. It was also the most silent. I still hear the land acknowledgements, reclamation of spaces, misappropriations, and calls for love. They’ve become a frequency of noise.
There was so much noise scrambling through me I didn’t know what to do or how to do it but, since I was speaking now I had to try. The incessant hums, chatters, speckles, cracks, pixels and, bufferings making noise. They morph as time boomerangs; moments graze each other creating dialogue. There are opportunities to move toward declarative statements not quiet. Language will labor with you, protect you, relieve you of weight you don’t need to carry. Use it wisely. Language will come back to you just like time, just like noise, it’s always with you.
Through literature, music, religions, and cultural artifacts, Blacks have therefore developed a phenomenology of the colony that in various ways resembles what is referred to in psychoanalysis as “the experience of the mirror.” It is not only the confrontation between the colonized and this mirror image that is acted out on this stage but also the relation of capture that bound his descendants to the terrifying image and demon of the Other- to its totem, reflected in the mirror.3
There’s always a confrontation experiencing the mirror, always potential energy, a presence that teeters above and below our consciousness. I suggest that this noise is similar to a chronic condition. It will persist and is rooted in our environmental factors. I’ll rely on an excerpt from Akwake Emezi’s Dear Senthruan chapter on Mutilation here:
It has been grueling to remake myself each time I learn more about who or what I am– to take steps and bear the costs that such remaking requires. Sometimes the costs are worn on my heart, like when people I love no longer have space in their world view for me. Other times, it's the body that bears them, in markings and modifications. By now, I’ve come to think of mutilation as a shift from wrongness to alignment, and scars as a form of adornment that celebrates this shift. The keloids on my chest and the small lines spilling out of my navel function as reminders— that even when it means stepping out of one reality to be swallowed by another, I continue to move toward myself.4
Emezi is not human and articulates this to others throughout this work. For me, Emezi's writing gleams through the noise, refracts and manifests. The costs of mutilation, execution, propagation and resurrection to the psyche are continual but worthwhile to move toward yourself and sift through noise.