astringency principle of the looking drum

God is dumb 
until the drum 
Speaks. 

The drum 
is dumb 
until the gong-gong leads  
it. 

—  ”Making of the Drum”, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, Kamau Brathwaite 

“I had to go to work with heavy metal.” 
— ”Colossal”, DS2, Future 

“If” is the conjunction of contingency. Uncertainty is free. I can’t predict its tangent. 
— “Perspectors/Melancholia”, Nilling, Lisa Robertson

[Begin, voice only. At each “—” add a new phrasing of camera sounds to the loop.]

Burning latency. Look. How it hastened to be here: Light permeates the darkened space. Light / fills the space. It traveled to get here. Years / it traveled to get here. Here. In the whole of this room. The womb of this light. Light / welling over. Burning latency. Light enters the whole of my looking drum. 

— 

My listening drum. Metal drum. Thinking drum,
my l____ing drum
whoosh 
my l____ing drum
chunk 
my l____ing drum
whir
my l____ing drum
click
my l____ing drum
thunk
my l____ing drum
think
my l____ing drum
thud
my l____ing drum
thump
my l____ing drum
tin
my metal drum
drones
my l____ing drum
gears 

— 

Dub. The rudiments of this rhythm. Palm pressed against the metal skeem / echoes into the time it gathered. Organic obscura / sound sight. Ride the riddim.   

— 

my metal drum
bones  
my l____ing drum
kick
my l____ing drum
clash
my l____ing drum
toms
my talking drum
looks

—

My sampling drum heard: 
the earth / 
the sun / 
the sea / 
the sound / 
the room / 
the light / 
your voice / 
your voice /

— 

In Obscura. In astringency, little latency oscillates. Impulse of retina ossicles. Groove the ghost note. The ghost note bites, 
& light translates to image. My looking drum sings odd time / off time / paradiddle 
Notation of light. Notation of life. Light translates image.

—

Portrait of silence. Landscape of sound. Landscape of silence. Portrait of noise, noise portrait. & when I am in that visual music mmhm.

— 

No capture, I'm caught up! In the sound of light passing through this hollow body, this holy drum looking out, listening. Throwing mirrors. The life. It hastened /

to be 
here. So then / 
capture confounded  
our speech. In our daily,  
our social. Whole hierarchies  
it ruins / it makes.  
Capture / makes capital. 
I don’t  
want it.

—

Nothing of it. How they weaponized light. Life weaponized. I don’t want it. Empire breeds but Itself. Eats all Light. All Beautiful things. The mechanics of sight replicate the drum. Life hastened to be here. Light hastened to be here. Let the light eat it all light. Lost in that visual music. 

— 

& no drum grates like the piano  
Ain’t no devil like the devil in me. Possessed by that visual music.
& by the end of the night let the drummer off the leash [earn it!! Only once] 

—

DeCarava was dancing! He was dancing in that experimental dark / listening to it. 

—

So look, the sound I saw, I’m seeing! My blur is result of my dancing. 
Blur / result of this sound 
Blur / result of this blurring
Blur / result of this woosh 
Blur / result of this

The primary instrument of experience is the body. Embodiment does not belong to human experience alone. This body of water plays this metal body. Waves unfold to frequency. echolocate here in this body, mine & inseparable. Poetry is equally an act of embodiment as that of language. A natural poetics — language unopposed to itself, expressed with ease, inseparable from the body — to think with Glissant, is “the direct result of activity within the social body.” Which means it is inseparable from you, us, our gathering. Specifically considering African-descended poetics, this practice has historically been communal, rhythmic, and en-drummed. [repeat, delay]

“Forced poetics exist where a need for expression confronts an inability to achieve expression.”, he goes on to say. Let me be in this force of this drum, I need it. The boom of my drum. I need it. Til it’s again natural. Witness of light. [Flash phrase into loop]. The sound of this light. Fills the room. The organic possibility of the medium — light enters a dark space, inviting a reflected image of the outside world, the very mechanics of our eyes — I need it. What is the native tongue of the machine? Linguistics of a proto-photo-always. To reiterate: photography, like poetry, is equal parts language and embodiment. As a tool, the camera encourages a set of choreographies that, in its fluency, remain conscious and unconscious to its user at the time of exposure.

A photographic approach to wind will only reflect its effects, without applying adequate patience. The photograph will simultaneously reflect the subliminal arrangements of its maker. The camera is a listening instrument, percussive as it is. What demands presence will appear, regardless of frame. It is the cacophony & rogue mathematics of rhythm & secret / in this light, through this drum. Can you hear it? Can you dance?

Though emergent of a relatively short history, it has taken no time for this medium to accrue an extremely tensioned history for itself. The camera is a dangerous instrument if not approached with caution and care. Akin to its operator, it must be treated as porous. Writing under imposed language, English being the imperial language happenstance has handed me, we invent anew atop colonized tongues The photographic language produced by a Black photographer can be restricted to the pressures of a forced poetics (1) if isolated and unsupported. New creoles and coded languages allow us to re-privatize our language, in open secret.

[Return to columns — cut it up, cut across. Build in response to the loop. Then peel back the layers slowly, but not into quiet.]

[reflections]

The text of astringency principle of the looking drum began as a poem, but also as an essay and wouldn’t complete itself as either. Rather, I wanted it to complete itself in either one of those directions, or to mold it into a more recognizably critical format. But I had to trust what the text was doing, and that it enabled the work at hand. The text had to become something I could do. The text/script/score developed and enabled my movements, my voice, my questioning. The critical element was in my doing. Making note of impulse made pattern equals habit. Then freak it. Throughout my practice there’s a commitment to the jumping in; an always-already and ongoing conversation continues/crescendos/quiets into another. astringency loaded in from a slow quiet I could look into, a dazzling of mirrors and metal. I’m meditating on a proto-photography, an always-photography, a photography before language, or rather a photography whose language precedes the early 1800s inventions — necessarily plural, and of the traceable histories, I want to consider the untraceables — of photography (by which we mean the ability to still life and make prints/record of the still), but also precedes colonialism, catalogue, capture, surveillance, or any other arm-bending of the medium by the state. Thinking alongside Kamau Brathwaite’s History of the Voice, I am also looking at a creolization of photo-speak, as there must be a way in which that organic language has been maintained and invented despite the violence of imposed languages, and flourishes in its divinatory aims. There’s something holy in the Jamaican patois pronunciation of “flim”. I had to hear it out, listen through to get somewhere. I start with the very camera I use, looking through to listen back.

The performance text serves as a glossary, a set of manifestations, and instructions. It would not let itself be read vertically or horizontally, but instead required an activation and sampling across the wide page. It required some memorization, and some entrancing. I had to lose myself in words. It requires response in real time. Even now, as I think of placing it in print, I wonder if I fix  it prematurely. There is a selectively listening universe that I participate in. My attention, and yours, dare I think of it, is my shame and my obsession.

A performance text shares poetic intention. As they’ve taken shape for me thus far/at this time, they operate as a compilation of language to read across, fragments to sample through when the music calls. A performance text might allow a totalizing — previously written/published/discarded works of prose or poetry found their way into this flow, only making sense when they came together. They seem to live differently to me, the performance text and the poem, and activate a previous and consistent problem of song: when does it begin? When does it end? Can we dwell on the melody, loop on the riff? Rough the riff up, loop the line in. Lean on it. Notation was a memory I can’t always hold. So these hums, clicks, thuds, and rotations. I had to go to work with heavy metal. Harmonics of a pulse that ponders. So the palm was the score. The poem, the score, Cecicly Nicholson: interiority of a determined will (logics fleshed to extend survival/against categories). Extend this surviving drum. Its shape proposes the pacing of breath and punctuation. It instructed the voice and occupation of character. It made way for other ways of knowing, the vibration of circuits summoned spirits. What may be revealed reveals itself.