First, I have a poem out in the latest issue of SPORAZINE, a journal of experimental trans writing. It’s pay what you want, with proceeds split between contributors (or a cause of their choice). Check it out. I still like my poem, which is rare for something I wrote months ago, and the first issue was excellent, so I’m looking forward to digging into it myself.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this interview with Afrofuturist jazz legend, Sun Ra, from 1971.
If someone lands on planet earth from outer space, what kind of treatment would they get? Because what country do you have that would give them any kind of respect. Protect them. We don’t have any country that has thought about that. But since we in the space age, it should be thought of. Because he’s running into a lot of things that he’s never had to face before [...] On this planet according to a lot of ancient scriptures and philosophers [...] not only do we have humans on the planet, we have angels on the planet. You don’t have a government in the world that would give angels any rights. Although they’re teaching in churches and other places that there are angels, I don’t know of any country that has rights for angels.
I have briefly referenced my long standing interest in angels elsewhere, mostly stemming from a severely closeted fascination with the gospels’ promise that in the age to come we would be “as the angels”, without gender. In contrast with my late adolescent search for identity, heavenly or otherwise, Sun Ra is more concerned with the question of relation. It is perhaps unsurprising that the space age, characterised by increasing aggression both on the cold war stage and again Black struggles within/against the west, may turn Sun Ra closer to earthly (if spectral, unrecognised) presences, rather than promises of the future.
Perhaps distantly related, I have returned recently, at a friend’s prompting, to an old favourite poem, by Constantin Cavafy.
The Afternoon Sun
This room, how well I know it.
Now they’re renting it and the one next door
as commercial space. The whole house is now
offices for brokers, salesmen, entire firms.Ah, this room, how familiar it is!
Here, near the door, stood the sofa,
a Turkish carpet just before it;
nearby was a shelf with two yellow vases;
on the right - no, facing it - was an armoire with a mirror.
The desk where he wrote stood in the middle,
along with three large, wicker chairs.
Besides the window lay the bed
where we made love so many times.All of these poor furnishings must still exist
somewhere.Besides the window lay the bed;
the afternoon sunlight reached only halfway across it…That afternoon, at four o’clock, we parted,
just for a week… alas,
that week became forever.
The combination of pleasure and melancholy, forged together in that sense of memory and attention to detail so distinct to Cavafy, is what makes this poem so classic and, well, memorable. Cavafy was a favourite poet for me early on in my life “as a queer person”, with his specifically Greek-Christian articulation of degeneracy - which that form of memory is part of - appealing to me as a young Orthodox convert. But the account of the room’s transformation from a site of contact to “commercial space” reads differently to me now, especially alongside my current nightstand book, Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. For all of Delany’s denial of nostalgia for a ‘golden age’ of pre-AIDS gay sex, forms of memory such as Cavafy’s may attune one more to the kinds of pleasure, desire, or contact that the former sees as formative (and deformative) for class struggle in urban centres. In turn, reading Cavafy through Delany may be more useful for contemporary purposes than returning again to the question of how to place Constantin in debates around early modern/ist Greek identity, where Hellenistic and Christian conservatisms compete across the lines of imperialism and homoerotic desire.
This review of Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony that I finally got round to last week perhaps puts Delany’s emphasis on “interclass contact” in slightly differently light.. I may have more to say about this another time.
If the connections I’ve drawn here seem odd, it is perhaps a result of the pressures of the past year, in which contact and relation of any kind seem hard to come by. This piece by Hannah Black, from the end of last year, on the George Floyd Uprisings, the pandemic, and public space, helps reminds me of what alternatives are at stake.
All the best,
Ignatz x