STOP TALKING IN CIRCLES Part 5: Being Yourself
I tell myself about being yourself as praxis in the antiblack world with guidance from Toni Morrison, Christina Sharpe, Derrick Woods Morrow, Autumn Womack, and Sylvia Wynter.
You’ve been lost many times in the theory of yourself instead of practicing who you are, burrowing through clusters of identifications, gasping for breath being guided by a speckle of light toward a zenith. Carbon and capital; elements of the world crystalize your corporeal form–you’re almost there. You claw for particles of air and sediment; access is restricted to essential elements by your environment. Every motion is distinctly laborious and still you do. This is the world–moving through it is what we do.
And that can be the paralysis of critical thought. To be lost excavating some shit from some man's wretched imagination. Every so often, when you’re close to that speckle of light the theoretical what if may petrify your fiction in situ. Drenched in aforementioned light, overexposed building your fictive story, you’ll encounter a graze from the veil across your forehead and flare your eyebrows, maybe sniffle and that twinge from a phantasmagoric fabric is an innocuous cerebral signaling. The veil glimmers. The silence is broken, now you can speak. A singular moment, nothing identical will reoccur. It was just that—an encounter with some real shit, some dirt, the dust with which we’re all composed. And among the dust you’ve caught a glimpse, There you are refracting.
When I first imagined, It was with baby dolls and action figures. Now, I recollect those scenes as meticulously nebulous; the figures flew, threw energy blasts, spoke, raced cars, steered spaceships, kissed, all that. There were men and others. There was admission of fantasy and acknowledgment of material bounds. I was submerged in the tension of making stories. Everything a young mind could conjure was there. Now, My older form remembers and regales me with the mysticism that was inherent.
Fiction, by definition, is distinct from fact. Presumably it’s the product of imagination—invention—and it claims the freedom to dispense with “what really happened,” or where it really happened, or when it really happened, and nothing in it needs to be publicly verifiable, although much in it can be verified.1
It was all imagined by me and verifiable by the conditions that made me, an iteration of a loop.
By contrast, the scholarship of the biographer and the literary critic seems to us only trustworthy when the events of fiction can be traced to some publicly verifiable fact. It’s the research of the “Oh, yes, this is where he or she got it from” school, which gets its own credibility from excavating the credibility of the sources of the imagination, not the nature of the imagination.2
Toiling in mens discipline daily, lies the noise we avoid like death. Oh great death, Since we coalesce with you in symbiosis perpetually, we forfeit. We’re here in the wake, working.3 We’re speaking through gravity not time; we break the formality of language and mangle it into another. Instead of avoiding particles of the now, we have the ability to synthesize our experience, our memories, our proximal stimuli and operationalize them into discernable action. There we are fussing speech, noise, critical thought and imagination. There's no settlement with death in theory when practice spills the blood. This is the way of the world. Yield a weapon with your symbiote– dance. We are Black. Our body is the hybrid that meshes into this unreasonable plane. It’s the theory. We are its praxis.