At BOMB: Harmony Holiday on Sun Ra, Our Peril, More

At BOMB, a new essay from Harmony Holiday, part of the magazine's "Spectacular Herbs" series, advises us to listen to more Sun Ra as we encounter our apocalypse: "It’s as if we’re taking comfort in corruption and outrage, not all that concerned with survival, deriving a sense of hyper-fertility from the idea of a doomsday clock ticking ever closer to midnight, exploiting our every frenzy, in love with our time bomb, our scapegoat, our angry goat memes, our race rants, our stammering guffaws, enamored with the greater catastrophe of American life because maybe it fulfills our sublimated desire to be rescued, by god or some monarch or MGM or Netflix, Freud, Jung, poets, negritude, Sun Ra." Need she say more? Yes:

As a master griot, Sun Ra puts our peril in perspective for us, as hearsay, rumor, gossip, something petty, an irritant you move to swipe away like a fly indoors but one drawn toward you by your own idleness in the face of the machine.  We idle in the glow of machines in part to refashion the intimacy we sacrifice to go into hiding behind them in the first place, and affectionately name our idling, productivity, or domestic life. We are being blown apart by our myriad electronic devices on a personal level, forced to live in etheric compartments, to fold into avatars and unfold into presence on the shoulders of those ghosting self-inventions standing in for us inside the machines, and so it’s no wonder that the idea of achieving unity by being ripped apart or atomized or bombed out, holds subconscious allure for men who don’t seem to realize that their outward inhumanity is fueling a need for intimacy so cruel and wild it would incinerate the world just to feel like part of it again. 

The death drive Freud describes is actually a desire to feel alive in a way that the sickest among us only arrive at through violence and extinguishing, through forcing other bodies and bloodlines to join them in their downfall dreamscapes, not out of hate, but because the desperate need to come together will find a way... 

Harmony also made a Sun Ra playlist for the summer solstice. Find it, and the full essay, at BOMB.