“These scalar experiments and mobile laboratories are speculative projects that envision new modalities of relation and offer blueprints for unanticipated existence.” — Saidiya Hartman, “Crawlspace Manifold” (February 12, 2023), published in “Torkwase Dyson: A Liquid Belonging” (October 3, 2023), pg.14
Two doves come visit my room each day. Rover and Rain, as if to make me up, as if to get me to practice, as if I had to be reminded to return here where the clouds vibrate and blankets of cream coat my body1. And glitter is on the wall. I put glitter on the wall and they come as if to look at it. I’m training for a marathon and this is the work, getting greeted by doves every morning and learning how to talk to them. Rain was the prettier one but Rover knew how to fight, so I preferred them.
We’d welcome eachother’s black beady eyes as if almost to tell time. As if almost to say thank you. Rain had a bird song I noticed they played and experimented with so I taught them how to sing and low and behold the undercommons2 is full of bad bitches.
Foxes and squirrels
Chickenheads and stallions3
Swallows and fur
And I can’t look away. I go to try to lick the screen but this is real. Rain sings like a cazimi4. And I am bounced into beauty like a technology that doesn’t need language5. Rain’s voice even softens Rover and they finally welcome it. We did this for years, if not centuries. Sang back and forth like this6, looked at the color of eachother’s feathers like this,
Iridescent
And sometimes blue
And sometimes black
And sometimes grey
Hula hooping through the “O”, not knowing what the english language is. Rain cleared it everytime. And now they’re back at my window. Back for more time together, sopping up relation7. When I returned to the room after going downstairs to fetch water from the river I noticed they had played their way into the laboratory and things fluttered about8.
The same blue
The same black
The same grey
I fell in love with it at a distance9, now there was none. We were close but this is too close. This is too wild. The unpredictability of your song and claws and wind and feathers, your beak touching my skin, it was too much anarchy and I panicked when I looked in the mirror and caught the glance of utter lack of control.
Utter lack of control.
Utter flight.
I knew it had to end because this is the kind of love that kills you or gets you killed. It’s an important distinction and I usually could tell the difference, but this time I couldn’t so I knew I was in trouble. I noticed the rip in the screen from which they had entered and immediately plotted10, I must get them back through the crack in the universe11 from which they came. We fought and fought but they thought it was part of the dance so Rain and Rover just got wilder. Torquing the climate, singing.
I thought I could take it but if I’m honest, a time limit appeared from in between my left toe, the space your beak loved to kiss and I knew I had to push you out the window. It got violent but Rain left first, knowing they were too bad to be mistreated; but Rover could fight so Rover stayed. You mourn the story when you’re getting to the end. Rover fought for us and I just knew this love would kill me so I slammed the window shut on their ass when they weren’t looking and I swear their eyes broke when our gazes clutched. And I swear they switched their pheromone to the smell of betrayal so they could tell me without talking. And I swear they sang a song more beautiful than Rain whose lyrics only contained five words:
How could you do this?
1
“As I Am” (October 2022), published by Poetry Off the Shelf, inside Ama Codjoe on normal naked bodies, solving problems, and her childfree life.
2
“Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.” —Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, pg. 110
3
“Megan Thee Stallion - BOA [Official Video]” published on YouTube, May 10, 2024.
4
“The Week of May 13th, 2024: Double-cazimi magic and a planetary pileup in Taurus” published on YouTube by Chani Nicholas. “The astrology of the week of May 13th, 2024, is lively, lucky, and largely concentrated in Taurus. On Monday, there is a Uranus cazimi (aka conjunction between the Sun and the planet of disruption) in the sign of the bull, which makes it an excellent moment to take stock of our abundance and channel it into upgrading and dismantling outmoded systems.”
5
“Computer Love” featuring Patrice Quinn, DJ Battlecat, Brandon Coleman. Taken from the album Fearless Movement out now on Young.
6
“This is a way of living, and an analytical frame, that is curious and sustained by wonder (the desire to know). This is a method that demands openness and is unsatisfied with questions that result in descriptive-data-induced answers. Black studies and anticolonial thought offer methodological practices wherein we read, live, hear, groove, create, and write across a range of temporalities, places, texts, and ideas that build on existing liberatory practices and pursue ways of living the world that are uncomfortably generous and provisional and practical and, as well, imprecise and unrealized. The method is rigorous, too. Wonder is study. Curiosity is attentive. Black method is therefore not continuously and absolutely undisciplined (invariably without precision, invariably undone). Black method is precise, detailed, coded, long, and forever. The practice of bringing together multiple texts, stories, songs, and places involves the difficult work of thinking and learning across many sites, and thus coming to know, generously, varying and shifting worlds and ideas.” — Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (2020), pg. 5
7
“Canisia Lubrin: Code Noir” published by Between the Covers: Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry on February 22, 2024. “Award-winning poet Canisia Lubrin talks about her debut fiction, Code Noir. The fifty-nine stories in this collection are each prefaced by one of Louis XIV’s fifty-nine “Black codes,” the rules of conduct in France and its colonies regarding slaves and slavery. And each of these codes, each of these edicts, is also engaged with, manipulated and remade by the abstract artist Torkwase Dyson. Together they unmake history, unmake the edicts, one in language and one with a brush. Canisia tells stories that are as short as a line, or told in footnotes, or that take place one thousand years in the future. Stories that remake other stories, and stories that aren’t stories at all. And ultimately, through storytelling, Canisia asks us how we place ourselves in relation to the stories we’ve inherited, the histories which themselves are fictions, and in the ways she herself does and doesn’t engage with the codes, she enacts a different way of living, sounding a future for Black life.”
8
“We Have to Reimagine Our World | Architect Indy Johar | Louisiana Channel” published on YouTube, May 16th, 2024. “Command and control is no longer efficient.” “What we started to realize was the implied world we see around us. So physically, you could pretty much look at everything around us and see behind it—all the code that constructs it. And to change the world that we need to change, you have to recode all that code. Whether it's ownership, materiality, standards, or how we own materials, all these are codes. Let’s reimagine.”
9
“Some great gap lunged between the print and the child. She glanced between them struggling for the connection, something to close the distance between the silent staring child and the slippery crazy words. Then suddenly, like a rope cast for rescue, the drums spanned the distance, gathering them all up and connected them…” — Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992), pg. 55
10
“Plotting, like learning, is about “invention and re-invention…the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other,” says Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Your plot, too, doesn’t have to mean committing to only one thing. Whether digging deep or sowing seeds far and wide, plotting is about questioning the scripts you’ve been handed and scheming with others to do and be otherwise for the collective good of all.” — Ruha Benjamin, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), pg. 23-24
11
“Colette Pichon Battle — On Knowing What We’re Called To” published by On Being with Krista Tippett on May 16th, 2024. “There is an ecological transformation unfolding in the places we love and come from. On a front edge of this reality, which will affect us all, Colette Pichon Battle is a singular model of brilliance and graciousness of mind and spirit and action. And to be with her is to open to the way the stories we tell have blunted us to the courage we’re called to, and the joy we must nurture, as life force and fuel for the work ahead. As a young woman, she left her home state of Louisiana and land to which her family belonged for generations, to go to college and become a powerful lawyer in Washington, D.C. Then in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina made, as she has said, "a crack in the universe," she returned home to a whole new life and calling. Colette Pichon Battle is a vivid embodiment of the new forms societal shift is taking in our world — led by visionary pragmatists close to the ground, in particular places, persistently and lovingly learning and leading the way for us all.”
