Waking Craft for Gut's Sake

Sounding Down

I wrote a full on banger in my sleep. Everything was there. Each line. It was either a hook or a verse. Not all the lyrics rhymed, but they were tight. Like entirely locked in. I heard the phrasing, the exact performance I’d go for and the kind of layering that makes even the weird songs I make relatable.

Completely in surrender to my world of total and absolute creation, I see myself in a music video performing the song. A 70s skating rink half carnival, I remember the view of a psychic who stuck their finger out toward me attempting to pull me in energetically, finger extending up and curling in near a downward gaze rimmed by thick black liner. It wasn’t my time to see her. I sauntered off singing, knowing this song like it had been imprinted.

Thrilled by the bop, I began to peel myself toward the waking world but once I crossed the threshold, I was left on the other side with just two fragments, one of which I have now forgotten, the other floating away between dreams, making, living a day. When I tell you I was so disappointed. How is it that I’m writing from God’s supple choir completely knocked out, but the second I am conscious that I am conscious, that magic slips away?

I lay there horizontal grasping for the lyrics and their accompanying melody, and the harder I clenched, the more they evaporated. You would think holding something would keep it near. But no. States beget states and the whole framework is that nothing belongs to anything. Think of what your hand does when it grips. It folds inward. The thing inside is unable to get out. It is under a suffocation spell. But once the hand is wide, open, it becomes a landing pad for something great. It gets to use you as a host for its tangibility.

So how do you get the banger into the reality field?

Sounding It Down

In Black sound work there are many ways, none of them new. I keep saying this because this era wants everything to be fresh, wants a fast-track method. But the throat does not work like that. The throat bends for relaxation.

Joseph Shabalala would dream of choirs singing in harmonies even though his group could not make them in the waking world yet. Not even in practice. For six months, the same dream would come to greet him asleep. Ladysmith Black Mambazo planted itself in him. He was the one chosen to transcribe it. Here is the part that undid me when I learned it. The same way I couldn’t, he couldn’t hold the songs between the two states. So instead, he woke in the middle of the night, mumbled to his children, keep this song I’m dreaming until morning, when the sun comes. Entrusting innocent witnesses with the work, somewhere it could survive his crossroads between states.

Alice Coltrane knew music as spiritship. Harnessing this space when she sat at the piano, Coltrane practiced induction method. She didn’t wait for sleep to be hypnotized by sound. Going inward while awake, trance like, on purpose, as drone repetition. Sustained tanpura until its one note turned into a walkable room.

Trances are a vulnerable, receiving place. An ear somewhere. Maybe, in fact, this is the whole ask of creation. What I found myself chasing across the threshold that morning, I now have a lineage of ways to access. A banger during waking craft, for my gut’s sake.

Black diaspora, holy ghost, zikr, community ritual, all teach to reach the channel by letting go, through repetition. Palms available for sounding down from everywhere, the older waters our ancient practices swim in.

A grip can’t do nothing for you but push, enclose. Tug and war.

Gripping the Eye

Picture creation as an eye that makes, not watches. Grasping is like drawing a three hundred and sixty degree fixture around a thing. A nine, which in my work is sky level, where works go to meet the world, sealed. Cooked. At the end of their cycle.

Open the orifice, the hand becomes dimensional, moving through an arc where it can roam. Same eye. Same gesture, reversed. The difference between a trapped creation and a free one, posture of choice.

Here I am at gut work with receiving ears, a signaling mouth, the input leaning on the crux of the churning method. Both meet to either cook or clench. Grasping felt like constipation whereas sounding is more like being regular. The lyrics I lost vanished because reaching before rooting, speaking before gut checking, is like trying to fly without wings.

The gut does not work by force. Nothing that matters does.

Below the paywall is a 22-second fragment I caught on Voice Memo using a Shabalala Coltrane method mashup, in addition to the second Root Mouthing living prompt, Mouth Diet.