William McCauley (1917-1999)
Concerto Grosso
The Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra
conducted by Boris Brott
CBC Recording
Concerto Grosso
Largo / Allegro moderato
Interlude 1 / Passacaglia
Interlude 2 / Theme & variations
Three More Things We Mean By Black Lives Matter——This is a music blog and I like to keep to just that, but music also sets the ideal setting for meditating on things outside the realm of music.
‘La Petite Mort’ by Kyle Dargan
goal for today / the rest of my life: weaponize happiness. —Fatimah Asghar
Many of us are here today because it is difficult
to maneuver when experiencing an orgasm.
Over the past couple weeks, on here, I’ve been meditating on what else we mean by ‘black lives matter’. Aside from the incontestable demands for basic justice and fairness in law, what else do we mean by that now ubiquitous slogan, the depths of which are no longer plunged? During Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the question of black dignity, how much it matters to the public consciousness, came to mind. Then in Dvorak’s American Quartet, the difficulty of black individuality, at risk of jeopardizing solidarity against the perennial devaluation of black bodies, shifted into focus. Queued by the bustle of the brass section of this McCauley concerto, I want to wrap up this meditation here with the third consideration on what must also matter if black lives are to matter: black joy. To be sure, that is the same as the simple quotidian joy of any other demographic—except for the fact that we so rarely celebrate black joy and success. That has been especially so with the onslaught of incredibly traumatic and widely disseminated imagery of black misery over the last year. It’s easy to forget that whatever we mean by ‘the black experience’, is also a thing that runs as much on joy as on anything else.
My friend, responding to his girlfriend’s laments
about their second infant, shouted “well, I told you
to get off of me.” It was a futile warning.
The boy is, god knows, how many years old now.
Life goes on. That is the point—after the little death,
Life goes on. We live in a world of Tasers,
Of tranquilizer darts and anesthesia. By accident,
These kill us on occasion. That big death—
The one from which none have returned, wherein
Your flesh seizes, clams, but never reanimates.
Then there are the guns which … well, I cannot explain
Guns beyond the intent to call forth the big death.
It goes without saying that what we generally mean by BLM—that is, stop shooting us—is a woefully low bar. Albeit a bar that a ravenous minority of law-enforcement persistently trips over. Yet it must be said that the perfunctory gestures in support of that slogan is, among many good things, ultimately an exercise of the white-saviour muscle. Despite what we’ve been seeing lately, it shouldn’t be shocking to discover that, no, most black folks don’t interact with police on a daily basis. Instead, the threat we face on a daily basis is a result of those who fail to comprehend the other ways that BLM. At the workplace, on sidewalks, in the mute and daily exchanges of social life and social expectations—that is where you are presented with the overwhelming majority of opportunities to show that yes, Black Lives Matter.
But if all we need is a means to slow or subdue
people, why not give the police orgasm guns?
Whose legs churn fluidly while the brain is taken
by a stampede of endorphins? Who is threat
with spastic genitals? I am reimagining the past
four years. Rather than queues of choppy footage
in which men and women are deaded
point-blank by the police, I see bodies
buckling and dropping to pavement,
mouths gushing expletives though none in pain.
What else shouldn’t come as a shock? That black joy is a threat to the narrative of the neccessity of white attention (the white gaze etc). Inasmuch as joy interrupts the usual transactions and expectations between the majority and the minority population. So in that sense it seems that the self-realization inherent in joy-making is as much a threat as black anger is a threat, albeit the latter is (too often) met with decisive force.
The cops could even shoot the Caucasian killers
who they infrequently shoot. They would still live
to be later gassed or injected to death—
Which we call a penalty, a process much slower
than what skips over judgement to execution,
bursts premature through the thoraxes of brown
people. I cannot afford to believe that someday
the State, these states, will stop shooting my cousins,
so let there be another weapon—one that induces
only the small death. Yes, my cousins would come
against their wills, but they would come back,
unlike the big leaving—this spasm without release.
There is indeed a new generation of trauma in seeing so many black bodies writhing pain over the last year. As Kyle Dargan puts it in his seemingly prophetic Anagnorisis: if only these guns discharged bliss rather than bullets. Then we’d be reminded that black life, like everyone else’s, is a thing primarily made for joy rather ceaseless struggle.
Song of the Week: ‘Joy’ — Sophie Alour
Throwback to: YR3, WEEK38 — YR2, WEEK38 — YR1, WEEK38
Click here for the full 2020/2021 roster of selected recordings