I’ve failed more ways than I can count. Every day I fail it seems. I’m failed as an academic with grades so bad from an epic shattering mental breakdown in a masters program that a doctorate is beyond me practically speaking. I fail in other ways all the time. Let me count the ways. I’m sure you fail too because if there’s any comfort it’s that we all do. I feel a weight on me too for the ways I fail the victims of US empire to be honest. Being woven in systemic webs that harm all but the few at the top is not the life we were created for I prefer to think.
A long time I’ve been listening to the song “Luchini AKA This Is It” by the 90s hip hop group Camp Lo. It’s particularly tied to nostalgic nights in a club that was located beneath the ground in a converted parking garage in Atlanta when it would come on and unite people in various stages of inebriation by the substances of their choice in the dream that we too would see the day when money poured from the sky for us. A lot of hip hop implores us to get rich, but for me it’s the generosity of luchini as cash is called raining down on us all in this song, as though we can stick our palms out for it. It’s a song of yearning and hope and assuredness that days of plenty are comng not only for us both for those dear to us. The horns threaded through from the early 80s club song it samples are leisurely luxurious and assured. The flow of the MCs, impeccable. Perhaps these days they speak of will come for us. If not we dream through songs like this that they already have and build organic pathways of memory for things that never arrived to us in waking life.
I’m weaving myself together into someone who can pass for functioning in times when catastrophe abounds through not only old songs I love but still through books. I told you all I would be reading a novel by an African writer and I still am, now it’s the brilliant Teju Cole’s second novel TREMORS. This book has been long awaited. In a literary world of immediacy it’s nice for a writer to remind us art isn’t always rushed. I reviewed his first novel OPEN CITY in Paste Magazine when it was out. I won’t go into TREMORS here at that kind of formal length I did back then. But I will attest that TREMORS like that book is a rich read so far because of all that is being accomplished with each paragraph as each sentence does work far beyond conveying plot and character. For failed philosophers like me to read a book like this where philosophy and more is executed through the vehicle of fiction is inspiring. All of us is waiting to be poured into all we do. That’s something to keep with us, going forward using the voices we’ve been given.
yes! those of us boxed in through "failing" within an empire which made failure inevitable are having a rebirth. revolution/resurrection/rebirth looks so different than i was expecting. but a new world, i've realized, will look & operate in the opposite way of the old one. and thank heavens! when you're building your, "own foundation,"* it's a lot of unseen, painful work that mostly looks like nothing of note is happening. and it can be discouraging. and then i think of my haitian ancestors. they had no privilege to feel or invest in imposter syndrome or i would not exist. how does one have so much hope and foresight in the face of well-earned despair, material suffering, confusion and terror with no precedent of victory? that is why i can't give up hope. because i have to finish out their promise. this is for them, too. and it does look like failure within dark systems that define success through temporal & ultimately self-destructive metrics. it's a messy, terrifying & extremely human journey, but the success is that i'm still on it & the victory is sure. thank you for this. sending care. please keep writing ❤️
* "break my soul," by bgkc
Thank you for this - firstly for reminding me there were so many good days in the 90s - something hard for me to focus on with the current goings-on that involve hip hop moguls that leaves a bad feeling in my stomach connected to that era. Also, for helping me park the word "fail" somewhere useful. It's not a word I use myself, as I would like to see everything as practice, but this version has a great spin to it. Love to you.