D.O.U.B.T. - A Density

I wrote this text right before the election runoff between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, in November 2020. It marked a departure from addressing white patriarchy directly in my own work, both in my own ancestry, and generally within known power structures. Relinquishing a need to manage accountability of white guilt in the wake of the 2020 uprisings, I no longer felt responsible to respond directly to the suffering or anxiety of inheritors of power and privilege in my work in such a way that reaffirmed my own “victimhood” (absurd) and kept me in a strange loop of acting as a sort of translator. I released myself from the supposed responsibility, to help non-black people understand the dimensions of the black experience that I could claim or have access to (what a relief) — no longer a bridge, I then deeply indulged in the pleasures and densities of language, thinking about a continuous present, a woven curtain of words and references, an ocean to hold or move me — I charged up, like I ate a mushroom in Super Mario Bros. I thought a lot about Adrienne Kennedy’s plays, about the presence of multiple timelines in one scene, where one might find Jesus, Patrice Lumumba, and the Duchess of Hapsburg suddenly in proximity, and how theater can hold so many worlds in ways that feel less possible in daily life. When I was a kid, I had a recurring dream of hitting an intergalactic home run, the baseball bat smashing to smithereens in slow motion, and multiple fragments of ball, cascading through the stadium into a night sky, refracting into constellations — mnemonics, maps, a resemblance to the Big Bang. I also fantasized about a possibility of communication through time travel, a portal where a transmission to the past intervened, perhaps in some historical wrong-doing, as an attempt to distort the render, to muck up the known account, as a manner of shifting future outcomes — like in the film Back to The Future. A ruining of history as an evasion of capture, to make room for what stories, what people, what objects may emerge, having been here all along anyway, for as long as blackness has reverberated, with and beyond known forms, stories, people. The baseball field, the plantation field, the field of stars, the art field, the fieldwork, the fielding of eyes or feelings.  

The balls on a body, the balls in a body, the balls of stars or planets, the balls to hit hard. 

“This is the Last Time I’ll Be speaking to you in this form.”

I have no idea if this text should be performed live, or if it could — if anyone has the balls, let me know.