#BlackEdenProject

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BlackEdenProject

“For art to appear, we have to disappear . This may  sound strange, but in fact it is a common experience. The elementary case, for most people, is when our eye or ear is  “caught” by something: a tree, a rock, a cloud, a beautiful person, a baby’s gurgling, scatters of sunlight reflected off wet mud in the forest, the sound of a guitar wafting unexpectedly out of a window. Mind and sense are arrested for a moment, fully in experience. Nothing else exists. When we “disappear” in this way, everything around us becomes just the way we want them. This lively and vigorous state of mind is the most favorable to the germination of original work of any kind. It has its roots in child’s play, and its ultimate flowering in full- blown artistic creativity...”

...It is possible to become what you’re doing; these times come when poof!- out you go, and there is only the work. The intensity of your focused concentration and involvement maintains and augments itself, your physical needs decrease, your gaze narrows, your sense of time stops. You feel alert and alive; effort becomes effortless. You lose yourself in your own voice, in the handling of your tools, in your feeling for the textures and resistances and nuances and limitations of that particular medium, you forget time and place and who you are. The noun of self becomes a verb. This flash-point of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge...”

The Sufis call this state fana, the annihilation of the individual self-hood. In fana, the characteristics of the little self dissolve so that the big self can show through. Because of this transpersonal grounding, artists, though they use the idioms of their own place and time, are able to speak personally to each one of us even across considerable gaps of time, space, and culture. 

The Sufis also speak of a related experience, sama, which means dancing yourself into ecstasy. In this state, body and mind are so intensely occupied with activity, the brain waves are so thoroughly entertained by the compelling and powerful rhythms, that ordinary self is left behind and a form of heightened awareness arises. Rumi, the Persian Poet and Choreographer wrote:

-

Dancing is not getting up painlessly like a speck of 

dust blown around in the wind

Dancing is when you rise above both worlds, tearing 

your heart to pieces, and giving up your soul.

Dance where you can break yourself to pieces and to

abandon your worldly passions. 

Real hero’s dance and whirl on the battlefield; they dance in their own blood.

When they give themselves up, they clap their hands

When they leave behind the imperfections of the self,

they dance.

Their minstrels play music from within; and whole oceans of passion foam on the crest of the waves. 

-

It is curious both meditation and dancing are a way to “disappear”

-Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

[blackedenproject2020]

BlackEdenProject

“What do you like to do most in the world Pooh”

-”Well”, said Pooh, “what I like best-” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.

The Honey doesn’t taste as good once it is being eaten; the goal doesn’t mean so much once it has been given. If we add up all the rewards in our lives, we won’t have very much. But if we add up the spaces in between the rewards and the spaces, then we’ll have everything-every minute of the time that we spent. What if we could enjoy it? 

The Christmas presents once opened are not so much fun as they were while we were in the process of examining, lifting, shaking, thinking about, and opening them. Three hundred sixty five days later, we try again and find that the same thing has happened. Each time the goal is reached, it becomes not so much fun, and we’re off to the next one, then the next. 

That doesn’t mean that the goals we have don’t count. They do, mostly because they cause us to go through the process, and it’s the process that makes us wise, happy, or whatever. If we do things in the wrong sort of way it makes us miserable, angry, confused, and things like that. The goal has to be right for us, and it has to be beneficial, in order to ensure a beneficial process. But aside from that, it’s really the process that’s important. Enjoyment of the process is the secret that erases these myths of the Great Reward and Saving Time. Perhaps this can help explain the everyday significance of the word Tao, The Way. 

What could we call that moment before we begin to eat honey? Some would call it anticipation, but we think it’s more than that. We would call it awareness. It’s when we become happy and realize it, if only for an instant. By enjoying the process, we can stretch that awareness out so that it’s no longer only a moment, but covers the whole thing. Then we can have a lot of fun. Just like Pooh.

“And then he thought that being with Christopher Robin was a very good thing to do, and having Piglet near was a very friendly thing to have; and so, when he had thought it all out, he said, ‘what I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying “what about a little something? and Me saying, “Well, I shouldn’t mind a little something, should you, Piglet,’ and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing.”

When we take the time to enjoy our surroundings and appreciate being alive, we find that we have no time to be “Bisy Backsons” anymore. But that’s all right, because being a “Bisy Backson” is a tremendous waste of time. As the poet Lu Yu wrote: 

The Clouds above us join and separate,

The breeze in the courtyards leaves and returns.

Life is like that, so why not relax?

Who can stop us from celebrating?

- The Tao of Pooh

[blackedenproject2020]

BlackEdenProject

“As the Hour Approaches, I gather my thoughts and escape to a room with the bare necessities. I transform. I enter the zone.  I Focus I stare at blank walls until they become movie screens giving me a front-row seat to the world. I focus Until the earth’s high pitch sound multiplies in my ears only muffled by my thoughts. My mind superseding body I force my life to flash before my eyes again and again. Before I know it. I’m somewhere between conscious and subconscious. My universal awareness heightens.  I focus Seeing vicariously through everyone’s eyes. I can astral project to any place, any time. Past, present, and future. Imagination challenges my reality. Creative juices start to take over. Try to tap into that divine universal source of knowledge until my art speaks as many languages as possible. Try to Broaden my Horizons and in return achieve omnipresence. I focus Then  finally it hits me. The original idea.  I’m focused.”

-Sweat the Technique

BlackEdenProject

[blackedenproject2020]

BlackEdenProject

“Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack...”

“...the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious personhood, to merge this double self into a better and truer self. In this merging they wish neither of the older selves to be lost. They would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. They would not bleach their Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for they know that Negro blood has a message for the world. They simply wish to make it possible for a person to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by their fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in their face... “

-The Souls of Black Folk

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BlackEdenProject

“Hip Hop, like the black musical oxygen that preceded it- blues, gospel, jazz, soul- cannot be looked at in a vacuum because the artists owe their lives to the context of their births. A discussion of the blues,then, without a discussion of slavery and Black southern life would not just be incomplete, but lame, too. A discussion on hip-hop, in the same way, must include what Dr.Jared Ball, hip-hop professor, calls “it’s proper context of political struggle and repression.” Without this context, we are left, as Fred Hampton trumpeted one balmy Chicago afternoon, with “answers that don’t answer, explanations that don’t explain and conclusions that don’t conclude.” 

Putting Hip- Hop in its proper context means understanding the inextricable link between Black music and the politics of Black life. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, reflecting in his autobiography on the role of Black music during the Civil Rights Movement, Called the freedom songs the “soul of the Movement” and even stressed the overriding importance of the lyrics, the message:

“They are more than just incantations of clever phrases designed to invigorate a campaign; they are as old as the history of the Negro in America. They are adaptations of songs the slaves sang- the sorrow songs, the shouts for joy, the battle hymns, and the anthems of our movement. I have heard people talk of their beat and rhythm, but we in the movement are as inspired by their words. “Woke up This morning with my mind stayed on freedom” is a sentence that needs no music to make its point. We sing the freedom songs for the same reason the slaves sang them, because we too are in bondage and the songs add hope to our determination that “we shall overcome, Black and white together, We shall overcome someday.” The songs bound us together, gave us courage together, helped us march together.”

Going beyond the naive idea that Black music is simply entertainment helps us to better understand the current crisis. “It seems to me that if the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music,” is how Poet Amiri Baraka puts it in “Blues People”. So, in that way, to observe contemporary Hip-Hop is to observe ourselves; an observation that, not only blares problems loud enough to drown out seductive samples or head nod- inspiring bass lines- but turns them toward redefinition.”

-It’s Bigger than Hip-Hop 

Black Eden Project

[blackedenproject2020]

George Floyd

Breonna Taylor

Kobe Bryant

John Lewis

Chadwick Boseman

Jacob Blake

Elmer Martinez?

[blackedenproject2020]

BlackEdenProject

“Hip-hop has always been about having fun, but it’s also about taking responsibility. And  now we have a platform to speak our minds. Millions of people are watching us. Let’s hear  something powerful. Tell people what they need to hear. How will we help the community?  What do we stand for? What would happen if we got the hip-hop generation to vote, or to  form organizations to change things? That would be powerful.

Hip-Hop is a family, so everybody has got to pitch in. East, west, north, or south- we come from one coast and that coast was Africa. This culture was born in the ghetto. We were born here to die. We’re surviving now, but we’re not yet rising up. If we’ve got a problem, we’ve got to correct it. We can’t be hypocrites. That’s what I hope the hip-hop generation can do, to take us all to the next level by always reminding us: It ain’t about keeping real, it’s about keeping it right.”

- Can’t Stop Wont Stop: A History Of the Hip Hop Generation 

[blackedenproject2020]

BlackEdenProject

James Harlem still tempers the indignation of buckshots Hollering for mangled niggers And Boston hears the cries  While London rallies in the street Yet I am not free

James

Did survival always mean indulgence where intolerance is concerned

is that why they shot  the ones who spat it back in their faces

I ask myself if to be civilized is enough anymore

Their diplomas can't save me

They cannot understand me

Since they refuse to understand themselves

They cannot forgive 

Since they have yet to acknowledge wrongdoing 

But in its place claim superiority

Over what I cannot fathom

Since I am not a nigger

And they have yet to examine what need there was for a nigger to exist in the first place

In a society where the commerce of superiority is pimped 

I can no longer save face 

Not even through dawning a western mask of education

That once great chrysalis of hope

So I turn to the east for inner peace

in my gaze catch glimpses of what it must be to finally breathe

And revitalize my dignity  

James

We hit them streets again

as you warned

They were waiting for us

we did it anyway

at some point we had to choose to allow the world to deal with us

void of apology

so we took the children

And the dogs

so they shot them as equals

We took the scripture so they burned it and interpreted the flaming bush 

White Jesus casting tea leaves in a Voodoo shack 

The Sacrilege of convenience whizzing past our heads

Smoke too putrid to breathe 

Tears streaming down black faces

Tributaries to rivers our ancestors built Egypt upon 

Tributaries to rivers that floated cotton down for ginning 

Langston spoke of the rivers

the Negro still knows of them

James

The land grows ever weary

Though time has manifested- 

Progress-

Lies destitute  -

Though feigning ignorance

The inalienability  of the truth stands resolute

That the machinery of this country

Operates day in and day out

hour by hour

Until this hour

To keep a nigger in his place

Yet they still do not know what I want

What they do know is that they still  would not like to be black here

that is all the testimony I have ever needed

They still will not kneel with me

Yet my throat remains crushed

James was it hard to breathe 

When they shot all your friends

James they are still shooting

James how did you learn to breathe with bullet holes in your back

Did you write poems in the blood of our brothers

Was the blacktop your easel 

Was the lectern your sword 

James

They still refuse to know my name

Do I have to write it in blood?  

-

-An Open Letter to James Baldwin