The First Angel of the Future: Sun Ra's Heliocentric Poetics for After the End of the World

Solar Devotionals/ Heliocentric Speech

Devotion inspires chanting, the intense coiling of identical pieces of sound around an idea or feeling, until the identity of that feeling imprints itself in the sound, speech becoming heat and energy, looping and amplified in the body. Devotion also sparks the need to exhume whatever does not enhance chant and speech as self-realization, whatever trespasses on the perimeter of those enclosed loops, clowning and clinging and testing your faith in the power of your words, is removed by the faith in forms that chant both is and demands. Invaded by song, Sun Ra develops his repertoire of ideas as incantatory poems and musics, chorus, and uses it to dismiss a whole planet’s flimsy hyper-materialist paradigm. By the time we’re done listening to Sunny read us his poems, their myths have replaced the reality of what he names this earthbound babylonian night. Poems on vinyl keep vigil and seem to go on forever, spinning listeners into alignment with their intentions. This is one of Sun Ra’s achievements as a poet—he tempts us to sing ourselves to the edge of the evil dream that the West has been for Black inhabitants, and to sing in speaking, to sing in testimony, to keep chanting, to never let up until this place and its phantoms are undone by their own obsession with what they represent. This intricate unknotting becomes Ra’s Black poem on the end of the world.

Where is your kingdom of the word?

The border enforced between mundane speech and poetic speech occurred in the West as part of the violence the region has inflicted on Black consciousness for what feels like forever when you’re in its trenches, and this place loves borders more than almost anything. This border between forms and uses of language did not exist for Sun Ra and does not exist in Black music, and in fact does not exist at all. The colloquial and the poetic are always working to become one, speech is always moving toward and being song in Black life. We are always singing.

The power of being a constant reminder of the non-existence of someone else’s lie, a lie embedded in everything they express, is that you become more real in that position—stark, starved of your masks. You become the living poem, and the world is this Black poem stripped naked for itself. Sun Ra lived that power and that absurd sense of futility and humor, that honor, that deceit, and revelation, and rebellion. His life story, and the story of his unbeing, undoing, unraveling, unborness, the shadow world that he demands accompany his tenure in the flesh, is a poem. Poets of his caliber are often excluded from the formal literary world because their skill at embodying each utterance would contest the excessively preemptive skill of documenting poetic ideas before embodying them. Sun Ra’s poetics begin with an anti-capitalist, commune-like way of life that demands Black autonomy, and bend toward non-verbal tonal structures that speak. His reverence for language is an extension of his love of life and shadow and intonation. His poetics is propaganda for that Black love that turns toward music at its most intimate, but is always thinking about how to announce that natural turning in microtones that derive meaning from the words encrypted in them.

Down in the subterranean spaces of the city, down in the catacombs and caverns of the mind, down, down in the Earth catastrophe of knowledge, dwell they, The Sub-Dwellers… they should come forward to the sound, and the secret place will no more—be their home, and they will rise to the heavens of natural skies, Sun Ra tells us. There is our kingdom of the word, submerged in a glory we mistake for beneath us, exiled from human perception. He reads this poem, which opens with the screeching of synths made to sound like an ominous storm wind and bondage irons, he reads it as if staging a ritual resurrection.

When you meet a man, you meet a scheme of words 

To mimic Sun Ra’s approach to language, the heme or blood in the (sc)heme of words he projects onto each individual consciousness, a nest of sonnances wrapped in the scars we call bodies, sourcing the body and the person in the sense that to per/son is literally to come through sound and also for sound to arrive in and as and on behalf of and in pursuit of that sound, that blood, that unobstructed spirit hearing—to explore Sun Ra’s blue equational poetics requires bloodletting and an attunement to language as ritual and spell. The only natural way to communicate with entities whose blood is built in grammar and scar drum, is with a mirror that disrupts the scheme of scarification through wrong rhythm simply by reminding us that it exists, an eminence to replace scar/city. Sun Ra, like many Black men and women who possess and are possessed by griot spirits, who we try to label musicians and oversimplify, deemed himself a poet first. He called his poetry the ultimate in things. He obsessed over etymology, and saw the time and ululation and mating in the word ultimate. He was announcing that his poetry was his destination, an energy field beyond time and too sacred for consumption and commodification by out-of-tune humans. Ra’s origins, his scheme of words, is essential to any cohesive understanding of his journey, his legacy, his sense of humor and urgency and listening and muting and mythologizing and singing and composing. He often quoted the line in the Bible, take words my people and return to me. He knew that to both rewrite and become his own Black creation myth he would have to defy the logic of the language he found himself in when he arrived in Birmingham; he would have to find the language of blood, the genetic-code-touch that natural poetry provides; he would have to disavow inherited meanings and define the world around him with reckless autonomy and convince everyone ready that his definitions were law.

The Lawlessness that affirms the Law/Subterfuge

And so it was a turf war. As it has always been, really. They wanted to colonize all of Earth—Sun Ra would leap ahead and colonize space and the cosmos first, and he would dig beneath and colonize the mine, Agartha, the sun-terrestrial regions, the subconscious that we all clumsily transmute and engender to function. The power of Sun Ra’s poetics is how dangerously tangent they come to the unknown and unknowable source of associative skipping and slipping and transport. He digs into language and frequency like a surgeon, he does not intend to dress any wounds or remove anything extraneous; however, he is there to turn what’s there into itself, to release false doctrine by re-imaging the present condition as the launch into eternal understanding that it is. God is more than love can ever be, he promises, as part of his effort at rallying and uprooting substitutions. His Space Poetry on the LPs The Sub-Dwellers Volumes I & II, recorded in 1966 and 1982, respectively, are the trance that puts each witness in a trance, these recordings of his poems as recited by him with light instrumental accompaniment, also mostly by him, achieve a perfect balance between his non-verbal music and his griot poetics, and they are beyond category, as much recorded griot poetics is, teaching us that there is a discipline that we fail to acknowledge resting somewhere between improvised Black music and poetry—an oratory of channeling that arrives to rival our accepted modes of delivering poetic language and compel it toward the communal. On The Sub-Dwellers Sun Ra is a poet, a pianist, and an evangelist. He has a message about the way we live and speak that would atrophy if confined to the page but is amplified and eternalized by his tone, his deliberate rambling, his cedar timbre, the real-time momentum he builds with each recitation, and the tangle of pure reasoning that becomes clear in his cadence. He is also a philosopher in that sense, and these albums allow us to think with his thought, to be gathered and propelled with him by its pattern, and on some level re-wired as we listen to the way he speaks.

Since Black people live in a romance language that is always stealing something from us, always in love with and rejecting us/Blackness as its most intense romantic interest—our bodies, our creative power—reciting poems as counter-spells as Sun Ra does throughout The Sub-Dwellers, is our most effective means of accessing the space between tongues, and claiming that open space as our field for thought and self-actualization. To truly think freely, we need a poetics that intends to destroy that language by subjecting it to frequencies it denies and forcing the mundane to enter those frequencies. When we don’t have this—when we submit to the page and received grammars and thought forms, we are estranged from ourselves. The Sub-Dwellers is poetics of reunion, not reconciliation of the colonized self with the ancient intention, but reunion of intention with pre-Western tendencies, to live as if poetry is a nutrient, an essence. This lets us access a place where we don’t hear or accommodate compromise, a rooting and re-making of the possibility of Black identity and human identity. The fact that we don’t call Sun Ra a poet is our lapse in understanding, our ongoing entrapment in category, our need to commodify indiscriminately, and part of why we have lost a whole diasporic form in translation. What would it be like to reconstruct ourselves around our true kingdom of the word? What would it be like to re-learn and unlearn and re-imagine how to speak and listen from Sun Ra and discard previous indoctrination?

Disavowal/ Unnaming/ Homegoing / Reconstruction

A specter equal parts disgrace and glory haunts Birmingham, Alabama, allowing the beleaguered town to invent and sustain a vector from Sun Ra to Angela Davis to MLK’s self-documented bondage there. Abject segregation inspired rogue Birmingham Blacks to concentrate on their own myths and exodus. Sun Ra’s focus was so intent he was abducted by supernatural forces real or imagined during his childhood in Birmingham. It doesn’t really matter if the abduction was literal or conjured by the needs of his spirit, as it endured the snares of the America he arrived in, in 1914, one of its most shameful eras of racism and class warfare—the aim of Ra’s account of abduction—departure, another world, and a keen awareness of alternatives to American society, was achieved either way. And once Ra was exposed to another mode of existence, another order of being as he called it, Birmingham became portal instead of jail. He would spend his time on Earth using tone and language to invent a Black, living myth that matched that abduction and visit to Saturn, in scope. Language was Sun Ra’s first obsession—he knew that without deconstructing the colonizer’s mode of speaking we would forever be subject to their thought patterns. His poems are channeled resonances that propel listeners into another dimension or what he called an alter-destiny of language and communication itself. If a poem successfully invents its own system of logic, it can operate like a black hole, nullifying anything that defies that system. Jazz musicians and composers and poets share this desire to ruin and undermine received modes and to reach for the ineffable and incorruptible sense of the impossible happening, the not-yet and never-before eternal becoming of tonal communication and terraformation. Tone and vibration reshape the Earth and to be deliberate with them, to deliver them, is to be a God force here. Sun Ra believed that only poetry could accommodate that innate call to duty that he possessed, verbally. He also knew that that poetry had to be alive and constant, woven into every word and gesture, not annexed to books or records. He used words like shields to banish limits and his compositions are proof of what waits on the other side of those shields, that intoxicating limitlessness that becomes toxic and obsessively modern, without a grammar of the impossible. Within Sun Ra’s grammar of relation, nothing is stationary—meaning travels inside of and through even inanimate words as they are spoken and what we say aloud becomes what we are and what we are is our land or territory, and governs our interactions on Earth and beyond. Poetry for Sun Ra was cosmic and natural law, the higher law that allows the breaking of petty limiting regulations.

Rambling/Reasoning

To access that place of freedom through deliberate (almost messianic) creative discipline, Ra’s poetry often begins in modest ceremonies of intentional revving, building momentum through pauses, stammers, and blocks cool unsentimental logic, and then veering into the fluid and strange, reclaiming the strange and different for Black people who quietly disavowed it to assimilate and/or be militant, and build a middle class and revolutionary consciousness simultaneously during and after Reconstruction. Ra is a Surrealist in that sense, collapsing coterminal realities into his one omniverse and riding the fluctuations like a magician so that he does not contradict his own laws when making assertions like the light is like the darkness to God. Like those dubbed Surrealists, he makes things strange. Sun Ra does this in order to compel us to construct a Black myth throughout the diaspora and to make it clear how unreliable Western thought is, especially for Black consciousness. His recitations of his poems include long pauses: I speak of ….   But        I   do not speak of anything because I speak of everything. He begins his poem “I Speak of Everything,” which moves into spontaneous worldview building and shifting between pronouns me and I as if they are enemies in a detached alliance that is the self or the human identity, as if they force the would-be myth to wobble on its axis. This poem moves from a close examination of where to locate identity to a call to move beyond the curse, beyond the blessing, beyond the gravity of the earth-bound Babylonian night. The defiance Ra calls for and examines is first a deference to universal and universally deranged and unreal self that can only be accessed in renunciation. Behind the syllogistic logic of Ra’s projected talking to himself, is this vulnerable and sacred search for a breakthrough that only vivid and liberated associations can accomplish. The ability to make speaking and communication strange again, which makes us listen again, is part of poetry’s deep power to transform. Aware of this, Sun Ra pretends to be having a mundane conversation with himself about everything and lures us into his unique understanding of being and nothingness, with an exhortation that we call things by their destinies, that all names are destinies, and that no destiny is outside of the jurisdiction of one willing to use poetry to speak of everything.

The poem as foreclosed fetish object is the dying poem. The living poem, like the living myth, is transient and seeking and suspicious of industry; it addresses anything and everything; it turns memories into premonitions and neutralizes omens by calling them friends or misplacing them, forgetting them. Forgetting is like killing. Memorization for Black orators and poets has been a part of the form, and improvising in jazz and jazz poetics has been a way of accessing lost or stolen memories beyond the fictive constraints of time and written record.

The concept of knowing something by heart is at the center of this neglected form that Ra exemplifies, and is centralized in Sun Ra’s space poetry on The Sub-Dwellers. Written work in this form is transcribed memory, private, secretive, and laying down the burden of that hiding. Spoken and recorded as, and with music, this same poetry is that memory’s demolition of what had previously silenced it. In Ra’s case no word was spoken without intention, and the kingdom that level of focus created is so dazzling we lost track of its bones, his poems, their language.

If it is not a dream

If it is not a dream/where is it now? Sunny begins his poem “The Past is a Dream.” He wants us to transcend the shadow of any fantasies that depend on our assessment of past fulfillment—he wants us to stop resenting past events and to direct that creative attention toward building an eternally regenerative now. This poem reels the past into a trap of swollen repetitions intensified by synthesizers and amps spewing erasure of the dreamed-up undone doing. Proverbs ground Sun Ra’s poetics. His delivery of them is matter-of-fact and unflinching, seeking to convince and inculcate listeners in the idea that their thinking is too narrow, or willfully trapped in the limitations of a universe whose laws we must learn to defy and defeat. Ra repeats in a frenzied loop, the past is a dream, if it is not a dream where is it now? He hypnotizes us out of the clutches of our own memory of ourselves and induces the kind of presence in the moment that brings the relief of forgetting. Deceptively simple, Sunny’s proverbs are the foundation for his veers into his insular logic. If he can successfully exhort us to give up our sentimental dreams, we can join him on the journey through his reinvented grammar maps without being liabilities. We can go beyond ourselves while the pillars of those proverbial ideas protect our subconscious minds from doubting the power of our dreams, if we decide to alter them, to alter our very beings. If the past is a dream, we can change the past by dreaming it differently, and Ra’s poems on The Sub-Dwellers discreetly enact those loving substitutions, building a mirror-laden world of them.

Pure music is what you must face. If you limit. If you reject. If you do not consider. If you are selfish, earthly-bound, pure music is your nemesis… the sound-mirror. There is a tide in time, of sound.

Alter Counterpoint Blueprint Sound/ A Mirror that You Must Hear

The parallels are fields, fields of parables which are instruments, and the people are instruments. The music is the living mirror of the universe. Because the meaning of the balanced word on the pivoting planes cannot be written as revealingly, as it can be thought of and felt.

Intent on inventing and building and then solving immeasurable equations, for Ra, sounds and tones and words become quantities in a system of rigorous and defiant logic. Words belong to how they sound in his world, and how they sound to you is your truest mirror, and that reflection is self-actualization. You cannot be yourself here without this sound mirror, Sun Ra promises, you cannot be sincere if your sound is not. He is echoing a private philosophy of Black improvised music, poetry, speech, and listening, wherein the imprinting of a person’s sound precedes everything about them—their appearance, their behavior, their terribleness of grandeur. This is what allows Miles Davis to be revered beyond his ruthlessness, it allows us to forget all of Charlie Parker’s pathological theft and addiction and just remember his bursting garnet-hued sound, and we forget that Billie Holiday died handcuffed to a hospital bed in need of treatment for a heroin addiction and wishing for candy—all we want to do is look her in the voice and in the cadence and nestle the gardenias held up by her ears. In this way Black music teaches us to know by heart and beyond the skill of memorizing and writing everything down, but also makes us complicit in Black suffering as we sometimes act as if it is abjection and tragedy that make our music come out so beautiful. Sun Ra’s parable poem on this topic, on this most honest mirror, is cerebral and kind of masochistic in the sense that it upends even his own disguise, which means it also affirms his sincerity. I do not desire what they thought I desired. He warns, insinuating that he, like every true and authentic Black artist, is motivated by the sound mirror first, and vanity and fanfare is tertiary to craft and the synchronization of shadows. He uses the recordings on The Sub-Dwellers like sonic weapons, encouraging us to play the atonal music of the shadows, before we find ourselves trapped in obsolete myths with obsolete music because we refuse to listen to the benthos, the unspeakable reflection of our displaced utterances. Ra gives his poems over to that reflection. He sacrifices frivolous play to offer parables like salves, like antidotes to post-traumatic slave syndrome. He limits the pleasure principle in himself, disciplines himself, not in the sense of policing but in the sense of following, in order to convince us to live up to our own Blackest potential,  to be our own disciples of self, to follow our own self-invented paths. And he is adamant. We Must Not Say No To Ourselves. We must not say can’t when it is imperative that we should.

Myth Demands Another Type of Music  

The idea that words and music, that verbal language and music, are not of one grammar is what Ra and all great practitioners of Black Classical music contest and intentionally ruin. The music of the resurrected Black myth begins as poems that arrive like spells and bind like spells and unwind as song. How beautiful my world, the world they do not know. How beautiful my world, the world I left behind. Ra affirms in a halting adagio knowing, his voice at the center of a cluster of chimes fluttering like newborns and retreating like secrets. We can no longer honestly differentiate words from music, both take the subterranean chambers of thought and feeling and make them tangible and impossible to ignore. The other kind of music is poetry and poetics, that which is made from the root as its etymological definition hints, that which can undo inertia and stagnancy by rerouting thought away from traditional codified meaning and toward its lawless infinite sense of the meaninglessness of everything but feeling, soul, a certain kind of impossible inflection of otherwise neglected inevitabilities clear only to those who are meant to live beyond the law of words, Ra tells us in another poem. Myth demands another kind of being, another way of being in the world. Ra taunts us with the knowledge that we occupy a “Planet of Death,” as he titles one of his poems on The Sub-Dwellers, that this new way of being might save such a miserable place from itself, make it less narcissistic and more infinite. The new way is to become a planet of poets honoring a living myth instead of a dead Memorex one. Ra’s poems are the myths he knows by heart, the rhythms that beat in him and become some of the most complex and beautiful compositions for piano the world has known, or what he deems the unknown acoustic, the alter planes of isness and not ness.

The end of the world is the desire of the world

Fear of the end of the world is really fear of the end of the defunct ideologies that sustain Western civilization, I suspect, and Ra corroborates by promising in his poems the end of the world is the desire of the world. Everyone who is poised to overthrow the West’s dead ideas and the habits they demand is ready for the end of the world, and the most ready among us occupy a territory that visionaries like Ra guide us toward after the end of the world where our sense of sound becomes invincible and whole and grammar is world building and elemental. Here, in this afterworld, we use sound to keep the biosphere alive and vivid, to align with the geometry of the universe, and we cannot use received forms to mimic or fake this alignment anymore in this limitlessness after the end of the world. As we enter and become the desire of the world, we are responsible for its integrity, its capacity to endure itself. Can we withstand a world made of our own sounds? If not, if we’ve learned to use the sound mirror in a punishing, self-abnegating manner, Ra comes in with his poems throughout The Sub-Dwellers to call out that Black suicide and lure us back to a sustaining source. The road to that source and renewal is through what some might perceive as nonsense or excessive simplicity or maddening complexity, and Ra walks this jagged path because he hopes to break and lose a few of us, the insincere and unwilling to learn by heart cannot follow his jolts and veers of sound and sense. He is the Legba archetype this way, our trickster god-poet in the flesh. All too often a more aggressive less talented person has taken the place of the natural musician artist, Sunny reminds, while outrunning those types by constructing a world a little too strange and visceral for their structured but vacuous power grabs.

In this new world comprised of the ruins of Western thought re-animated as Black rhythm, where the romance languages of the West have been appropriated and inflected with naturalness and Aromanticism, poems vivify and spin on vinyl, in the low purple coating of vibrating Black throats and hearts, in the mahogany of palms and heels, and all speech is held to the standard of poetics, all grammar bends to the will of song.

Ra walked the earth like a fugitive sphinx, always with a slight squinting smile that indicated his knowing that the joke is on anyone who takes the most serious thing, the poem, to be anything but the intensely playful music of world building. Throughout his life he wrote an epic poem this way, which began with his abduction in Birmingham and visit to Saturn, and entered infinity through the gasps and chants of his poems, whole volumes of poetry he kept quiet the way many Black mystic musicians do their private poetics, because he didn’t want to give away the entire blueprint for some meagre fame or fortune in trade, he wanted us to get to a void with him and dig up these remains. Sun Ra the poet is Sun Ra the musician’s musician—we must look at him next to Pessoa and Aime Césaire as much as adjacent Stockhausen and Duke Ellington, as someone who was an architect of a next many steps in both music and literature. Both disciplines have to transcend the realm of commodity and arrive at a place where live performance and how they function in the world is as important as how they document, mass reproduce, and sell. For that we all have to admit that it’s after the end of the world, that we’re underneath some massive unspoken archive which we will either turn into music or be crushed by. When the music stops, earth will stop, and everything upon it will die. Ra reminds, smiling like a Cheshire Cat because he is stealing back the joy that was stolen from him by understanding that Black music is as immutable as carbon here, that he is always inventing and ruining the sound mirror at will, that through words and tone-poems he is teaching even the most stubborn grammars to honor the Black spirit.

The privilege of being called a poet is that your strange equations are the law to which your legacy must defer, you’re not forced to be estranged from yourself in the archive. Sun Ra does not only deserve this endless deference, he demands it as our truest poet-healer of the apocalypse, fearlessly pointing us toward a level of Black oral tradition situated between disciplines that question our precious notion of who gets to be called a poet, who gets to make the other worlds and alter-destinies. Sun Ra excavates, goes beneath words and letters to vibrations and unsayable meanings that only transmit through tone. As his poems surface, so do pieces of a Black poetic sensibility that was nearly beaten out of us, that we are relearning through listening and selective forgetting, and that reminds us that we do want our own forms and that inventing them requires our exploration of the afterlife of Western civilization. How will things sound when these societies have fallen? Ra’s poems let us think, and kin and kindle, and move in that direction.