Tales of the Out & the Gone Read online

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

  JA (Yes!

  The Creating The is

  (Jazz = The is

  “God” is

  be

  Yahweh

  Jehova is

  the signs

  ZZ=Lightning

  The & from the

  Sky

  The N + J upright + connect

  Up not m

  ZZ = Lightning

  Thunder

  Shango

  Electric Sky Jism

  I = J M move

  more

  Eye RAR Are

  JA = Yes

  JAH

  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 did
n’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.”

  “What you call it?”

  “Anyscape. The 1st one. Molecular Anyscape. The Resoulocator— that was the improvement. T-Dis-Appear. Nicknames. Perfect Nigger. American Citizen. Ellisonic. Migration. I got a name for each step.”

  “And now?” I rolled my eyes as he got completely out next to me, dissing the Dis report on Appearance.

  “This is the next to last. I can disappear. Dis visibility, be unseen. But now I can be around anyway, perceived, felt, heard. I can be the music! Yeh. But now I got something even heavier.”

  This dude is out—it ain’t no jive. He had actually done those things. And he never swore me to secrecy either. He just fixed it so I couldn’t remember nothing, except when I came back.

  “Further out? The cloth refiner?” He said he needed to make the cloth fade more so he could get in and out of the bank w/o any hysteria. It took a few hundred thousand to get where he was technically.

  “How come they don’t detect the money splitting?”

  “Well, I ain’t been able to stabilize the cloth thing. Sometimes people see the money floating off. But I still get away.”

  “How come they don’t say nothin’?”

  “Well, it’s hard to explain, I guess. Floating money. They studying it.”

  “Oh?”

  “A few weeks more, I’ll rob all the mammy-jammas clean!”

  “Wow!” I thought of a stream of exclamations, but I could only analyze it while hearing it. I needed to reflect, but your boy wouldn’t allow it.

  “But now, B., dig this! I pushed the Anyscape into Rhythm Spectroscopic Transformation. And then I got it tuned to combine the Anywhereness and the Reappearance as music!”

  “What? Brother, you know this is some deep technical stuff.”

  “Aw, no it ain’t. It’s science. I can teach people how to make and use these.”

  “What?”

  “Now I added Rhythm Travel! You can disappear & reappear wherever and whenever that music played.”

  “What?”

  “So if you become “Black, Brown & Beige,” you can reappear anywhere and anytime that plays.”

  “Go anywhere?”

  “Yeh, like if I go into “Take this Hammer,” I can appear wherever that is, was, and will be sung.”

  “Yeh, but be that song and you be on a plantation.”

  “I know.” He was grinning. “I went to one.” He was staring me down, winking without his eye. “I seen some brothers and sisters digging a well. They were singing this and I begin to echo. A big hollow echo, a sorta blue shattering echo. The Bloods got to smilin because it made them feel good, and that’s the way they heard it anyway. But the overseers and plantation masters winced at that. They’d turn their heads sharply back and forth, looking behind them and at the slaves. Man, the stuff I seen!”

  “You mean you been Rhythm Traveling already?”

  “Yeh, I turned into some Sun Ra and hung out inside gravity. You probably heard of the Scatting Comet. Babs was into that.”

  “Really? Man, so—”

  “I know. Why? What I’m gonna do with it? Yeh, but I’m just explaining now. I got a lotta tests.”

  “I guess so.”

  “But I want you to try it.”

  “Hey …”

  “Hey, brother. Ain’t no danger. Just don’t pick a corny tune.”

  1995

  (Originally published in Dark Matter, 2000)

  SCIENCE & LIBERALISM

  (A SHORT TALE)

  “Like the time my man built this record player which took yr voice & played it back as music. But if you was lying, it would kill you.

  “So we made him leave it at home when we went out.

  “But then he pulled it out at the party.

  “And everyone got outta there, one way or another.

  “Naw, we wasn’t there. Now they looking for him on TV!”

  “Yeh,” the other man said, “And you under arrest!”

  1996

  WHAT IS UNDUG WILL BE

  The pretenders arrived after we’d found out they were pretenders, and the people killed them. Don’t blame me with Sarah Vaughan, when we used to walk up the hill pointing at her house. It’s the pretenders who make-believe her house ain’t there no more, just a Boys & Girls Club the off pretend is for the on. I see that funny-looking sun and can’t pretend it’s the real one. The real one is locked up. You see, God is the guardian of Good, so it don’t escape and get rid of bookkeeping. The missing front wheel—you can’t have infinity without two good wheels. That’s why the 1st Crazy Eddie was lame. See, the woman-headed lying nigger, so hip he could hang out in the desert forever waiting for a new horn, told the sister upstairs that the dude was really a human being. You know the riddle, hey diddle-diddle, niggers play second fiddle. Four legs, two legs, and three legs. But three legs is a lame. A FM who goes north becomes a MF. Frowny, he called himself, opening the supermarket of Dis. It was Hell, which was the future not coming. A two-legged man who never arrives. Then it was Hades. The past tense of wealth, which is insanity. Then dig, you knew where light went. You didn’t understand that when you said “out” and the lame said “out,” they was different outs. You wanted Bird to climb black fire wings wailing the blue raise of gone went. The square—I told him that was curtains—some snow juju greedy inside garbage that stunk with charm.

  “To eat, you beat.” Remember the slogan? What about, “Don’t make me happy if you respect my intelligence.” Remember that? The limping crazy motherfucker told us he discovered yodeling in a labyrinth—
who else ate doo-doo while rich, squeezed Africa’s titties for milk, stored in the refrigerator, waiting for Alan Ladd to kill him? And the withered bastard had a pen that shot poison swords. Remember Colonus? That’s literary for frozen nigger pops, chocolate blood sweet. And the baseball mind—oh diamond crystal salt—which is white, ain’t that right? He meant out as the city’s enemy. We is in on all the time, except when we go out, like on out, which is where the good go and come to and from—is you with us, jitterbug? But out mean darkness which is hip, but lame mean that as if nothing could exist, it could. But wouldn’t that be something? So now they come frowning and eating everything like the low cuss they call God. I told you a dog shit the church out of his backwardness. God is a broke short passing for in, but it’s only out as in the opposite of off. And darkness, for a lame, has nothing to commend it but his cannibal breath and lying tongue. If you eat doo-doo your breath stink, or so the Pope do sing. And if feces ain’t the past and turns into money, the cow jumps over the moon and never comes down, but frozen in the north, growing balls in the sky. And what is really ain’t and what ain’t is just a coat of paint and the devil own everything, and you see him on television, lame motherfucker.

  That’s why when the rest of on got hip to off and offed him, dug dis/stance was the graveyard, an illusion of skulls being on a flag—with you they background anonymous and still, except for the wind. And you know the Negro played God and the skull made-believe it had Malcolm behind them in white, a frame for the cross, which ain’t even fishy—it’s dead. What I say? And the skull tells the rest of the niggers to lay flat and passive like they worked in the museum, a tombstone for ideas which was a couple of weeks ago.

  That’s how long you been down, and I don’t mean hip. Except at the top of your lying body is your woman, the only sane person in the desert, and you holding her back, being an animal and refusing to leave the ground, so it’s a playground, now a desert, and it’s the whole meal. Don’t make me say it. You ain’t got no more juice, except north, where they too hip to lie completely. Like half a lie is better than a full deck. Gravity. They in an airplane ruling. Or in a laboratory. They ain’t Tarzan, and if they was, you warned them not to fall in the trap they set for you. So you joined Local 666 and they got you a gig in his movies as uncivilized. Dig that.