A Thank You Note

Dear John,

I've been reading "Ten Things I Do Every Day" every day. "Now I don't know anything anymore." What does sacred, ordinary protocol have to do with knowing anything or with knowing nothing? Anymore? When? What common irregularity? What regular surprise? Is there an ante-epistemology of the open field or the open road behind the open door? See that mirror in the open window? Painting is required when it seems like seeing comes first. You say Bearden's seams in my burning ears and I'm still learning, not knowing anything anymore. I can't see around the corner but here come sound and all as you see through painting. I wanna be where you are, as nothing's ever left your mind. It's not that the erotic and the elegiac haven't always gone together; it's that the ways they get together stay more thick, more desperate, more abandoned. New world and world's end are breathtaking in your eyes. The truth of the kiss ain't true if it can't bear drowning; if it can, then it ain't true. Insofar as you see all that, you see how to say, "blue solitude."

You do ten things seventeen ways, and fifteen ways in one of those. Actually, I can't count the ways you go through actuality, but by way of your beautiful ways of bending, of all your leaving and parting in valid beginning, the way your method of truth against method is a way, I wanted to take this chance and learn the ways of love all wrong in the generous margin of your spine. Can I say that I'm your shadow? Don't take back all this withholding. In the failure to redeem, and to redress, something forgetive is born. Borne by the unbearable, something comes of the unforgiveable. Out of all this divining, out of all this diving out of rule, out of all this lining out of worried line, remember.

To remember is to investigate demonstrations of presence. Such demonstrations often show in hiding. Your punctuation undiscovers. Colons don't explain but they describe. They don't describe but lie between description and recounting. They count off rough and realign, all nonaligned in three or in three/four, all bent, all slid, all indicating stumble, all over the edge having been slid inside, cecilian and prepared, strung lubricant and stroll and stroll, top lifted, entered instrument, top lifted, double strum and Catalan, caressive anacrusis, open-mouthed, turn took and fall in stammer, in unknown names, in drift and angle. Anymore I know of the open body? I don't know what passed for lack or wasn't needed. The fluid secret of the scar, ex voto in the sound itself, dissolved, enfolded in the vivid whole, in the vanishing point in the sound of love, in the square, in the plaza'd arms, in the resonant garage, in the penetrant refrain of the beautiful horizon.

You write nonlocal histories of the neighborhood. The whole and the hole feel like portals for one another. The playhouse is a funnyhouse in a rocket ship in a tea room in a monastery. No one left intact in the alternate bar in the other woman's club on hamilton terrace. Andean alternate harlem, low and east, and the various piedmont. Everybody talking, everybody gone, about the way you do. In the variant march, like something like work, or like something off minor, playing all this love as if son might then pursue no overriding, all overthrowing. They played that tomorrow, as your thing is old school, no such thing as the new school, really no such thing. If you remember, stop: erodes, and no ligature, just bone on bone and blow in breaks and leaps and these broken sweets and endless, plotless, just off right on time. After the election, in the wake of the elect, the exit of the darkest man is a particular thing we feel if these songs for the betrayed, through this proximity's exhausted prelude, can ever echo their fragrant explosion.

The return of the question of remembering in remember, and of binding something, but I'm not sure, becomes clear in blocking and uncountable thrum. I want you and I want all. Murmur on the edge of murder, ardor, churn. As we feel and fade or phase, no phrase, no concept, no mirage, just murder, murmur, John, I hear you asking, "ain't you heard?" You say, "beauty is especially dangerous under pressure" and I hear you, but I also hope so. I, too, am committed to the carnage of song, all that branching and tearing in all that crush. Hood looms, huh, in the human instamatic, in the dark angles of the angels of light, in the diggers coming back, in the postcards, in the rough care of uncurated energies and scenes, in travel questioned in the precinct and the territory, in the coincidence of the block all up under the official island, in Bearden's open secret Martin Wong, and all up on that open bridge. In open subramage you show the shed is open, too. I believe in your delicate violence, but I also hope so, John, John, I just want to sing your name.

Yours,

Fred

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Fred Moten is Professor in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature, where he teaches courses in black study, poetics and critical theory. He works with lots of social and aesthetic study groups including Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, the Black Arts Movement School Modality, Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, Moved by the Motion, the Institute of Physical Sociality and the Harris/Moten Quartet.

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