Words, Words, Words.

The most obvious note to self is to never do anything for the wrong reasons. Yes, moral relativity is a thing, but I think, intuitively, deep down within us, we all know what is wrong, what is right, what we really want. I don't know if I want to be an artist- do I honestly have the genuine temperament for it?-  but I have words. And I think they're for the right reasons. Here's a few, this time a few raps (not that I haven't already said this before, but I can) instead of the usual written poetry. Oh, and Vince, if you just happen to be reading this: I was the guy wearing the yellow 'Adventure Time' beanie. It was nice to meet you, and thanks for checking this out. What a wonderful talk you did at Harvard. 


Spirit Tree [Working Title]

I.

Listen to the glimmers of the solar system
Simmering murmurings stretching cross the universe, this is my vision
as a poet as a prophet with the lyrics man I copped it
caught a wave, detected it, and to this beat I drop it

this is the knowledge  I want you to acknowledge
the mystery the history delivery don't stop it
the project of this poetry demands your attention
so straighten up your back  as I take to you the 4th dimension

did I mention? did I mention? did I mention?
the marvelous sarcophagus of symphony I'm resurrecting?
bread that I'm baking and breaking; body be aching and shaking
savior's blood split into cups of wine the earth is quaking

fall back for a moment 'fore I go rogue like a ronin
cut you up and dice you up as smoothly as I'm flowing
fall back for moment 'fore I go that rolling stoning
inevitable, impenetrable mass of mass an ocean

a poet be a force that's mysterious
words stretching to the heavens is what constitutes a lyricist

a poet be a force that's mysterious
words stretching to the heavens is what constitutes a lyricist

A poet is a prophet
A rapper more than profit
the paper that I trap for
for's  this canvas boy that's honest

A poet is a prophet
A rapper more than profit
the paper that I trap for
for's  this canvas boy that's honest


II.

Take a wave of light and pass it through a double slit;
What do you get?  A world that we don't comprehend
Forget about it let's just go and cop those bands again
Money chasing 'nother way to stop asking ourselves again

Who are we? What is the space around me?
Pretty selfie on Instagram, we frozen dead we're zombies
Look at me, I'm not the captain, but I'm tired of these captions
What are we hoping to find in a world where we're the only thing we capture

Rap is the start of rapture; turn to the last chapter
Revelatory thoughts on this spacetime and matter
Wanna talk 'bout things that matter, not to ourselves flatter
Wanna make like a butterfly and metamorphosize and shatter

Our fake expectations and statements of the haters
Turn our shamelessness and fecklessness to breathlessness with paper
Talking' about dat poetry I talk it over beats
This is the end of fake news and the start of real philosophy

a poet be a force that's mysterious
words stretching to the heavens is what constitutes a lyricist

a poet be a force that's mysterious
words stretching to the heavens is what constitutes a lyricist

A poet is a prophet
A rapper more than profit
the paper that I trap for
for's  this canvas boy that's honest

A poet is a prophet
A rapper more than profit
the paper that I trap for
for's  this canvas boy that's honest

Image credit to whoever the hell was the fire photographer at Verbal Emancipation, thanks for making my Tinder profile a tad bit more interesting yay.

Verse from 'Lesson in Oppression' 

Young black brother from the motherland
Who plays stereotypes for Ariel Heights
Folk as they touch my hair and treat me like a no man
A nomad, who ventured to America through flights

(Leggo)
I spit all these bars 'hind systematic bars
And I spar with the fates of my stars as they spin
They spun years ago as they span ‘cross the skies
Navigating slaves ships with (        ) no oxygen
The blades cut yesterday, the wound bleeds today
Historical precedence don't simply fly away
When the winds of time sway only one way
To the moment when only through a song we can say

That all the paper stacked by the rappers and all the ballers
Is all blown away by the wind at the end of every autumn
I'm still recalling when the floods of Katrina had strange fruit falling
From the tops of houses to escape the waters
Then broke and drowning in their surroundings
Yet, still can't breathe when there ain't no mountain

High enough that we can't climb
High enough that we can't climb
All year I been on my grind
All year I been on my grind

They be lookin' at me crazy
Like my mind is hazy
'ginning of the year they called me Black Slim Shady
Never in the heads did they ever understand that who I wanna be is a young Jay-Z

But rapping's what's expected of someone as dark as me
Truth be told no respect from y’all 'til Harvard called me
But complaining's what's expected of someone as self aware as me
Truth be told half of y'all have eyes but can't see

That I've got a dream but I struggle to fulfill it
That I've been to the mountaintop and found that they still killing us
That to be judged by the content of my character
Only brings about laughter of a judge holding a gavel
That is clearly labeled 'master' so I been running faster
To kill slavery of thought so that I break apart this vault

(Here's the actual track courtesy of my friend, Audyo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJzfAZPo_NI . Check out the rest of his work here: https://www.soundcloud.com/aodillard ) Also, shout to Audyo  for getting me back to rappin' after nearly two years off it. Shout out to my current work partner Marcelo for getting me back to rappin' for nearly half a year off it. Let's see how long not off it I can make it this time.)

And thus concludes our brief interlude of the Ivy League wannabe rapper who still has overdue essays to complete. 

Drafts.

A quiet and systematic torture

through an assortment of digitized

life vignettes called your Instagram

in which I find your uncondensed 

beauty which reminds me, in every

image, why I hate myself, or if I don't,

why I should

I am foolish and my ancestors are slaves.

I am often not proud of my blackness.

I imagine your boyfriends will speak

French and smoke cigs and will be

worldy. I will be none of those things.

Just me. Unwholesome and dark

and colonized in the mind to think

such things, Achebe didn't quite

reach me at the very end of it all. 

Diapsora children know not what to do with their dark, dark skin.

Unambigous,

it rages

discontentedly with itself: the selves

that correspond to its surroundings: the dreams

they wished to knew. Many first-world citizens

would never dream of their basic pleasures. But

what wonder is it to be lost to the depths of the world's

oceans

without waiting for the waves to buffer before they

hit

you. Modern internet makes it even easier than airlines

to be lost

in places you don't know.

you all know each other 

in ways I cannot
imagine.

my friendship with the
darkness

is brief and
meaningless. maybe

I shall fashion a poem
or two out

of them. But for you
all, you need

not even speak with one
another

and there is an
acknowledgement

of some shadow that
lingers beneath

your very own. I stare
at mine for a 

moment and think about
how 

I cannot jump into it.
You have fallen

many times and often
wonder

if you will ever step
out. These 

are things my eyes
cannot say


but theirs can and will
and must.

this summer 

we experimented on the lsd
of personhood

and were shocked 

when it
led us together 

without a single instance
of touching

My friend Joseph took the pictures yo. In case you're wondering about the font, I save all my draft work in notepad files and they tend to show up in some form of Courier bro. The same friend also borrowed me a typewriter yo. I'm pretentious bro. I also apologize for the spacing issues. I can't quite figure out what's going on without going through the html code of Blogger, and I'm not about to that. I remain too stubborn to switch to the superior Wordpress or Tumblr. 

Maxwell's Equations

This is the first features piece I wrote while trying out, or as students here say, 'comping' for one of the literary magazines at my college. I made it past the first round, but didn't have enough time to start, let alone finish, my next piece for the final round. I'm giving it another shot this semester and I'm hoping to write about ramen, a beautiful Japanese noodle dish, which just happens to be my only true love and joy in this world. To be honest, this is a draft more than anything else and I intend to revise it someday, but, for now, here it is posted as it was first written. I didn't bother to remove the double-spacing. Here we go America. 

Maxwell’s Equations.

The following are a series of false analogies concerning physics which you do not understand.

I. Gauss's Law

The electric flux leaving a volume is proportional to the charge inside.

You were told that your dreams could not fit within the borders of The Continent. This is why the ground beneath your feet has shifted, and why the grass is no longer a parched yellow, but a nourished green. When you were younger than you are now, you dreamt of flying across the Atlantic to come here. The West. You wished to stand under vaulted, collegiate Neo-Gothic structures to breathe the thoughts of long-dead old white men. Now that this has happened, it occurs to you that you might have been trying to age into one of them. This does not equate. What is equal is the following. To the left of the equals sign: in The Continent, the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet are not the same colour as the rest of your skin. To the right of the equals sign: in The West, the rest of your skin is not the same color as the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.

You try to explain.

First, you expand the terms on the left side. In The Continent, the palms of your hands stretched towards the sun when it glowed orange towards the evening and swiped across the sky as it purpled. You had shoes, but for some odd reason memory says otherwise, so the soles of your feet dance with the dust as you tried to awkwardly help your grandfather herd  the cows home. Your grandfather sighed because the rest of your skin screamt ‘city-child.’ Second, you expand the terms on the right. In The West, the rest of your skin is actually your body it its entirety. This body is yours, but for some odd reason memory says otherwise, so your palms pick cotton and your soles dragged across the Atlantic through slave-ships in the the water instead of commercial airplanes in the sky. But you say it took you three flights to get here.  

You try to explain.

You were taught that your thoughts are electric currents that flow through your neurons. From this you decided that the beginning and end of your everything must reside within this electricity. The electric flux leaving a volume is proportional to the charge inside.  Your everything is nothing more and nothing less than the strange happenings between positive and negative charges. This is why you try to explain your home, your body and your skin with physics which you do not understand.

II. Gauss’s Law for Magnetism

There are no magnetic monopoles; the total magnetic flux through a closed surface is zero.

There are North poles; there are South poles. They pull together if they’re different; they push apart if they’re the same. There is no such thing as a North pole existing without a South pole; there is no such things as South pole existing without a North pole.

You are black.

One night you are at party with faces that look like your and those faces are dancing. You are still. Their legs and arms swish in movements that are not intrinsic to you.  Their breath fills the air and it is thick, heavy and sweaty. The sound of the music is discordant to your ears. This aural landscape is composed of the following image-associations : hoodies, gunshots, fades, kicks, beats. More than a few girls’ asses are placed neatly in front of boys’ crotches and they rotate around one well-oiled joints. This still feels strange to you. Why? Isn’t the music of the diaspora prevalent in The Continent as well?  Back there and then, when the songs of the diaspora rappers and singers spread  through The Continent like wildfire, you figured it might be a way of returning home for them. And they were welcomed even though your body did not let you dance.  Here you are in the West with your brothers and your sisters who were taken away from you- do you not feel welcomed? Are your faces not the same?  Then, are your faces pulled together because you are different, or pulled apart because they are the same?

One afternoon  you are in the freshman dining hall with faces that look like yours and those faces are talking. You all talk about what you want to study. One wishes to study Economics and African Studies to save The Continent. Another wishes to study Medicine  and African-American studies to save The Continent in the West. You say that you want to study Physics and Philosophy because you’re looking for the true nature and structure of reality. They ask you if you’re interested in philosophy from The Continent. You blankly say that, whether we like it or not, the foundation of the modern world was built by philosophers from the West. There is a pause. You are ashamed. You quickly add that the best way of fighting The West is by knowing their ways of thinking directly and hope that this means and proves something.

One day you and a friend walk down stretches of tarred pathway cutting through the grass. Right by the corner between the big old library and your small old dormitory you find that someone has spray-painted something curious on the black tar. Beneath an arrow pointing forward, the words ‘NO N*GAS’ flash in hasty yellow curls. You lie down next to ‘NO N*GAS’ using your backpack as a pillow , relaxedly place your hands at the back of your head and flash your teeth in an aggressive brace-wire smile. You ask your friend to take a picture of this pose for your Instagram. No niggas. No North poles without South poles. No South poles without North poles. There are no magnetic monopoles;  the total magnetic flux through a closed surface is zero. Surely your blackness is the same as theirs.

III. Faraday’s Law

The voltage induced in a closed circuit is proportional to the rate of change of the magnetic flux it encloses.

“Maxwell’s Equations are a set of four differential equations that describe electromagnetism. One might shudder at first at the word ‘electromagnetism’. What  a strange unification. The world of charges and currents; sparks, fizzes and flashes. The world of poles and magnets; compasses, maps and directions. Brought together. In fact, the forces of electricity and magnetism are essentially the same force. Electricity and magnetism are just manifestations of electromagnetism in itself. Furthermore, a changing magnetic field produces an electric field and a changing electric field produces a magnetic field.”

So you think to yourself.

From the first equation, you showed that the electricity is the blackness in your mind which is tied to The Continent. It will travel with your forever, no matter what space you exist within, because the blackness you carry with you is always proportional to the blackness you were born with. From the second equation, you used magnetism to relate your blackness to the blackness of the diaspora, the blackness of The Continent to the blackness of The Continent in The West. You discovered that even though they appear to be different, they are the same blackness, because one does not exist without the other. The third equation tells you that the blackness in your mind and the blackness of your skin are the same blackness.

You cannot think your way out of your skin.

IV. Ampere’s Law

The magnetic field induced around a closed loop is proportional to the electric current plus displacement current (rate of change of electric field) it encloses.

“Maxwell’s fourth equation is symmetrical to the third equation. So they basically look the same. If you fiddle around with them a bit, and if the current density J is zero, then you can make them look exactly the same. There is then no doubt that a changing electric field produces a magnetic field, or that a changing magnetic field produces an electric field, or that electricity and magnetism basically amount to the same thing, electromagnetism. Another interesting thing that happens if you play around with the equations: you get c: the speed of light.”

So you think to yourself.

You are surprised and astonished and awed at this physics that you do not understand. From it appears a fundamental truth of the universe, the speed of light. It is the fastest anything in this space and time can ever go, the limit of everything that has been, is, and ever will be. And it is the product of your skin.

How beautiful, how terrible, how fast, how slow.

***

P.S The images for the equations are sourced from the Wikipedia page for 'Maxwell's equations'. They're rather well made...