Chaun Webster

Some say that we are our names, that something cellular and beyond the cellular is bound up with them. On the 22nd of May in the year 1914 in Birmingham Alabama a child arrived, those we understand to be his parents named him Herman Poole Blount. Poooooole, sounding like a long sip of water, Herman after a magician, something of the fantastic in the birth and the after birth. But this isn’t about birth, this is concerning other transformations, this is a consideration of our Saturn son, and the circling rings of his many other futures. Some say Sun Ra was a lying fool. Renaming himself, calling his people myths and his home Saturn, a planet not suitable for life as we know it. But in the tradition of lying up a nation, I’d like to map other countries for the supposed end of Jazz’s brightest sun.

One. 79 years after his earth arrival, something like the end of a life, Sun Ra had his Arkestra lay his body in a powder-blue metal coffin. A suitable vessel for return, and as it rests in the Alabama clay each year through the metal and decomposed mixture of what we call a body, climbing asters have grown and lifted that coffin further and further into the dark and starry beyond. It has been just under 30 years, but the asters have nearly carried him home.

Two. In refusal of the body as something singular and self-contained, Sony’r spent his earth years slowly learning how to reorganize his flesh, and blood, and bone. Disordering them into what he called sun music, because it is all sound, it is all light anyway. He learned how to travel as quickly as them both. And when not much of his so-called body was left he gathered a number of intimates at the mouth of the Mississippi instructing them to say space and place, space and place until in the chorus of that recitation his remaining flesh burst into innumerable grainy particulates. He rode the sound into the sunset.

Three. Sun Ra understood the piano to BE a spaceship, and though ridiculed for saying he was from a planet that could not support life as we know it, he maintained that life as we know it is structured around black death and dying, that it is better to become the myth. So he played a few notes and took as many as he could with him.

Four. Sun Ra became nothing, no one. Knowing that the position of the unthought and unthinkable is as close to fugitivity as one could get at his present. That future presents might offer more but in order to get there one need travel through the void. He is still moving through that abyssal space, not knowing what, if anything is on the other side.

Five. Dying of thirst, some say Le Sony’r Ra went to the nearest dive asking for water in a shot glass. After throwing back that cool drink he made an incision in his belly, peeling back the flesh to reveal ANANSI and their eight legs striking the keys to Springtime Again.

Six. He didn’t die, he left.

Seven. His death was the only portal that so-called bodies would allow.

Eight. The Arkestra, after estranged years, and doubts, returned to Sony’r and constructed a piano that he would play as they built, its errant sound echoing into a future Saturn where it still swings.

Nine. Le Sony’r Ra learned how to dive into the poooool of himself, named and renamed, some void within he could fashion into time, spiraling, being both in and outside of it. Not magic, sound, but here we will also refuse certain distinctions. And if sound is echoing, beyond a border, stuttering on and beyond material, he is there insisting on more than his own absence.