Magnificent Desolation

"... Manhattan specifically, and it reminded me of everything in the world that I hate - the greed, the insensitivity, the commercialism, bright lights and glam and high-priced shoes and bad attitudes and anger and advertisements and bigotry and facade and cars lined bumper to bumper for endless miles, ruby headlights and horns blaring. >The Times Square lights blinded me as people rushed by through cold air with numb faces and hard shoulders, not looking up down nor around, just staring straight ahead with dead eyes burned out by big bright neon signs. I was going to hang out there and party for a bit after we finished the show, but could not stay another moment, not even to feast my eyes upon Brooklyn Brown Beauties, I could not, I could not wait to get back home to Philadelphia, literally, my heart was heavy until I boarded the train, intermittent sighs of relief as I watched the city fall behind me and look forward to the approach, where the Philly skyline is a thing of beauty, where it is just the right pace for me, no rush. I will remain an infrequent visitor to that place." - written 12/18/06



But as with most things, my feelings are protean, they can shift within a moment, take on a different shape in a different context, situational, so that the very thing that I hate, can, in a breath, in the next vein, be the thing that I love about it. The pace of the city matched my chaotic mood during this particular visit, and so I felt embraced by the hustle, bustle, found beauty in the storm of people, the crowded sea of faces on the subway, as it bulleted through dark tunnels, I felt swept up in the motion. Even the biting, harsh winter cold was inviting, as we roamed the streets last evening with frost nibbliing at our exposed skin, huffing heavily made me feel again, my cloudy white exhale against the black sky was a stark visual reminder that I was here, present, alive, accounted for. Even the streets received me, as we weaved, floated seamlessly in between cars to get across to the other side. I was still daunted by the flashing lights, the gaudy advertisements, dazed by the millions and billions of dollars of electricity spent powering grandiose televisions and assaulting images, subliminal messages being drilled into the heads walking beneath, i actually shrank back, felt panic at moments, a sort of perpetual anxiousness, but simutaneously I was swept up, hypnotized, intrigued by it all. There exists in that place some sort of crazy diversity, the cultures and beings blend, mingle, mixe like a bunch of different vegetables in a warm broth, culminating into a soup. So many different people...from so many different places...attempting to co-exist and find commonality in one space, one broth, sharing a beautiful struggle, surviving, however one defines the act of survival. The millions of accents, dozens of skin tones, hundreds of ethnicities, class and power disparities walking side by side, the same place where thousands of poor live but mere miles away from the wealthiest, in neighboring boroughs, and yet...it works, it is all oddly attractive, and I want to know their stories when I brush against them momentarily, if only we could, in that one instance, exchange and swap stories, experiences without saying a word...



I found this book while I was there, lying openly and nakedly atop and amongst a bin of other books, waiting for me, I believe. It was the only one, and incredibly visible, but at the same time, something that would escape the eye if you hadnt interest to give it more than a fleeting glance in passing on to the next row. Even before I laid my hands upon it to open it, I felt palpable energy emanating, and the pages proceeded to steal my breath from me and absorb it. I'm in love with it and I am almost afraid to look through it, afraid that I wont be able to unglue my eyes and unglue my mind from the many questions about life and existence and the universe and experience and perception and spirituality that it is sure to prompt.

idle love

even i, the infamous loner, require sporadic bouts of human companionship, love or something similar. i do not love love, nor do i live for love, as some do, but i do enjoy and appreciate companionate/relationship love when it is present in my life, and it is enjoyable enough to miss when it is absent. it feels good, it is soft, light, and warm, if it can be physically characterized or put into words. it is a high that saturates your body, a weightless and odorless chemical.Like a fine, obscure, piece of abstract art in an unheard of, underground gallery, a rare piece of jewelry hidden amongst thrift store junk, that priceless gem that you trip over in the sand, cutting your feet, amongst the rocks and pebbles, hidden away, making you bleed openly, forcing you into submission. sometimes i dont know if i believe in it, if it is not but a man-made thing, or just a word put to something that has no real qualities, indescript. we use it to generalize so many things, especially in our culture and in our language. other cultures have it right, i think, as they use different words to describe different types of love. i think we do too, because it seems like things like passion and lust are simply different words for what we generally think of as love. but love, the word love itself is, to me, too general in the first place, to encompass the whole gamut of the human emotion, for emotions are experiential. our cultural notions of love seem so cookie-cutter and rubber-stamped - you attach a particular display of behaviors or internal feelings and processes and thought patterns to an emotion and label it such. i say it is, or should be far more complex than that, and cannot be boiled down to one supposedly all-encompassing word. for anyone who i have ever felt "love" for, the feelings for each person was so different, the "love" so different that it seems almost ludicrous to use the same word to describe my feelings. and because of that, i have often erroneously compared my feelings to figure out if a particular feeling fit the definition of love, and if not, is it something less than love, or if its close but feels slightly different on this day can i call it love or do i have to give it a new name? labels never quite hit the mark for me, for there are always too many variables and considerations and possibilities for any and everything that we purport to attach a label to.

The Propaganda of History

I dont celebrate this month. I refuse. I will participate in the handout to some limited extent because it is an aspect of my community and social involvment and I know that many others are *satisfied* with 28 days. I'm not. Take what you can get, right? I cant. Its sickening to me that we can even still say Black History Month with a straight face. It may as well still be Negro History Week, for all the difference it makes to anyone. Martin, sometimes Malcolm if your school is a little more liberal, Benjamin, Harriet. Slavery up until Civil Rights, and thats the beginning and end of our history. People feign some interest in the cause for a week or two. Attend a talk or a lecture to fulfill their Black History Month event requirement. "I marched with Dr. King in the 60's!" Disgusts me. White and Black "Progressives" alike, spew bile-like rhetoric. As we concern ourselves with integrating and neutralizing our culture by selling it to the Gods of Corporation, our fight is dying along with our heroes. Even those of us who are so-called conscious and educated are using our knowledge to further our selfishness, to attain the American Dream. 2.5 kids. White picket fence. I don't hate on the paper chase - if you have been denied opportunities all of your life, if you have been confined by poverty and social stigma all of your life, I wouldn't expect otherwise. But is it worth the death of us, the death of our legacy? Is your comfort worth the death of hundreds of thousands?

Our history no longer belongs to us. It is a tale spun in the back rooms of Academia, constructed by unconscious and unmindful, hateful beings and set forth in textbooks, shipped out in masses to the unmolded minds of school-aged boys and girls. Black History has been considerably tainted by the tool of institutional racism, taking on a different meaning as a set of ideas, facts, and “lies agreed upon,” as DuBois once said. Black history, as it is established today, assumes that Africans and their descendants were naturally born into slavery and therein lies our beginning and end. To speak of Black History is most often to frame it in terms of its historical context and relevancy within the American socio-historical background. This is limiting in the sense that the history of people of color begins and ends here in America, as though there is no significance or relevance of our history before we were forced from our native lands and shifted to the foreign and hostile soil of America. In the classroom environment, where our history is already abridged and presented in a limited context (only as it sheds light on the development and growth of white America), it would seem as though Blacks came in to existence when slavery began, and that it was our birthright to become slaves until the white man's conscious and kindness allowed for our emancipation (which is why I use the term enslaved and enslavement as opposed to slavery, as to denote that we were placed into slavery, we were not naturally slaves or born as slaves).

This view of African/Black history is backed by historiographers and philosophers such as Hagle, taking it upon themselves to rewrite African history, subsequently blotting it out of the timeline of world history. These supposed historians manipulate, or even create evidence that sever African ties from the Black Egyptians, citing their intellectual accomplishments as a reason to espouse the assertion that ancient Egyptians are not of Africa, or that Egypt is not even in Africa. However, when noted scholars such as Chiekh Ante Diop provided evidence to refute claims of a disconnected Egypt and defend its origins, his research was denied due to a “lack of balanced evidence” – which meant that the white scholars did not have enough evidence to disprove or rebut Diop’s evidence.
The above are perfect examples of what Dubois calls “the propaganda of history”. This propaganda, or propagation of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating it, allowed for an interpretation of Africana history that has favored white supremacy and defended the actions of the white race. It provides that the annals of African history be built upon lies and falsehoods as to complete a number of goals: (1) diminish the culpability of whites in the destruction of African civilizations, (2) diminish the intellectual capabilities and achievements of Africans and diasporic Africans, (3) elevate the white race on the ladder of racial hierarchy, and justify their place on this rung, while simultaneously validating the placement of Africans and diasporic Africans last in the pecking order, and finally (4) using these reasons to substantiate continued oppression of the colored races. These goals are accomplished in a number of ways, misinformation and its dissemination being one of them. ..