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Hellhounds on His Trail: E L U C I D's REVELATOR

I speak what I see.

—Saul Williams, “Elohim (1972)” (1998)

I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and systematic derangement of all the senses.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Letters of the Seer” (1871)

Every technological change begins with a spiritual revelation.

—Nathaniel Mackey (2016)

1. LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE

The same motherfucker got us living in his hell.

—Chuck D, Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” (1988)

I must forewarn you even now: what I intend to speak about, and in which I shall get myself entangled for reasons more serious than my incompetence, they are, I believe, without solution or exit. Two years ago, ELUCID promised that I Told Bessie could be significantly darker: “Trust me, it could be way more apocalyptic.” REVELATOR fulfills that promise. I Told Bessie introduced ELUCID as an anti-mystic mystic; on REVELATOR, we find him between the forge and the flame. He speaks from filthy tongue of god and griot, offering a <brand> of spiritual healing in the same <vein> as Dälek’s “Spiritual Healing” [for brand read “fire,” “cauterize,” “marked ownership”; for vein read “cold,” “spike,” “artery”]. At turns, his speech sounds of languages diverse, horrible dialects, accents of anger, words of agony, and voices high and hoarse. On ITB, ELUCID had just arrived in Heaven, trespassed its gates, yet stubbornly refused to sit down, to repose. On REVELATOR, he’s at Hell’s wrought-iron threshold, absolutely ruptured.

ELUCID emerges as a transgressive and dark magus speaking the omniversal language of Sun Ra. The first words spoken on REVELATOR, evidently ad-libbed, recall both Fritz Lang’s expressionistic Tower of Babel and Mister X’s psychitecture: “Metropolis…inverse overlord skyscape…” Another filmic nod would be to PTA’s There Will Be Blood (2017), where the climactic and classical rage of Daniel Plainview is unleashed as he screams: I am the Third Revelation! Plainview is, as his name intimates, an unbeliever, and he masterfully coerces preacher Eli Sunday into stating he’s a false prophet and that God is a superstition.

See, the First Revelation was in the Old Testament (Show me your commaaaandments, as ELUCID drones on “Barbarians”); the Second Revelation was Jesus sermonizing that new shit; why mightn’t it be that the Holy Spirit was preparing another? ELUCID delivers the Third Revelation; he is the Seer, the Revelator—entering through a hatch [re: portal] of Houston horrorcore and disharmonic hard bop. REVELATOR is his unexpurgated rendition of K-Rino’s Stories from the Black Book (1993). The mutant blues of ITB have turned to hypnotik hip-noize—serrated, jaggy, shrapKnel-shattered, caltrop-piercéd. We witness, firsthand, the doom gospel he has previously preached about in practice, in praxis, in the demoniac rhythms and the patterns. Ganksta N-I-P’s “Reporter From Hell” (1993) amalgamated with Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873).

2. NOISOME THE EARTH IS

“Here in this hymn-deaf hell,” Rimbaud reports back, but in ELUCID’s hell all we hear are hymns—shrieks, semiwept, semisung. “A black wail is a killer,” Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Jo Stewart, and Yolanda Wisher write in “4 Telling” (2021), a posse-cut poem. Production of “a satanic symphony,” Rimbaud says. Sounding like EPMD in the pulpit, Rimbaud claims “[t]heology is serious business: hell is absolutely down below.” He describes moonlight when the clock strikes twelve, “the hour when the devil waits at the belfry.” Go get a late pass, in other words, as PE presses on “Countdown to Armageddon” (1988) and ELUCID reiterates on “MBTTS” (2016). “Watch me tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned,” Rimbaud writes, appealing to the Devil, “...I will unveil every mystery.”

ELUCID unveils histories of mysteries during his descent. On record, he shares what he sees. He sees Rimbaud in Hell. He sees Kanye and JPEGMafia in hell, Ye with BURZUM in Gothic script emblazoned across his chest. He sees Rubble Kings with SS skulls and sigs sewn onto Flyin’ Cut Sleeves denim. He sees Black Benjie’s assassin in Hell. He sees Richard Hell in hell holding White Noise Supremacists to account for how they treated Ivan Julian (“Mutants can learn to hate each other and have prejudices too,” the latter told Lester Bangs). He says peace to SKECH185 and sees him “playing devil’s advocate with Steve Albini’s Black friend.” Finally, he sees the cerberus in hell—the “monster cruel and uncouth,” according to Dante (c. 1321)—the 3-headed anti-crowd dog. He sees its three gullets, red eyes, and unctuous beard and black and belly large. He sees the wretched reprobates. He sees muzzles filth-begrimed. He sees hellhounds here, there, and everywhere.

3. ROUND US BARK THE MAD AND HUNGRY DOGS

From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept A hellhound that doth hunt us all to death—

—Shakespeare, Richard III, 4.4.49-50 (c. 1592-1594)

“Hands off,” ELUCID commands on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” the opening salvo on REVELATOR [salvo, a discharge of weaponry; yet also salivate: dog’s drool, secretion, spittle, spit the verse]. “It’s just happening,” he shouts—it’s happening to us; we are subjects of history, its malevolent thrum. “I can feel it ’fore you say it,” and I’ve no reason to doubt him. But allow me to litanize anyway.

In Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (2018), Bénédicte Boisseron writes that the dog, the canis familiaris, is “an unwilling participant in the history of social injustice,” a casualty to a depraved Pavlovian conditioning. She cites an “association between canine aggression and black civil disobedience,” reflecting a “prism in which race and dogs insidiously intersect in tales of violence.” She refers to these as cyno-racial (dog-black) representations.

Bloodhounds—aptly-named barking, beastly embodiments of biopower—were “imported from Cuba or Germany” during slavery and “trained to pursue escaping slaves in both the Caribbean and the American South,” Boisseron writes. Dogs were designed to “become ferocious only when in contact with blacks.” The Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (1838) provides insight into this odious operation:

A negro is directed to go into the woods and secure himself upon a tree. When sufficient time has elapsed for doing this, the hound is put upon his track. The blacks are compelled to worry them until they make them their implacable enemies; and it is common to meet with dogs which will take no notice of whites, though entire strangers, but will suffer no blacks.

The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1849), meanwhile, offers a suspenseful, first-person account:

We had been wandering about through the cane brakes, bushes, and briers, for several days, when we heard the yelping of blood hounds, a great way off, but they seemed to come nearer and nearer to us. We thought after awhile that they must be on our track; we listened attentively at the approach. We knew it was no use for us to undertake to escape from them, and as they drew nigh, we heard the voice of a man hissing on the dogs.… The shrill yelling of the savage blood hounds as they drew nigh made the woods echo.

The training, of course, isn’t only about ghoulish intimidation; the hunt would often climax with violence. “When the slave runs away,” Boisseron explains, “the master needs to symbolically reassert his domination through a ritualized act of flesh cutting.” [FANG BITE!] Frederick Douglass spoke of such savagery: “Sometimes in hunting negroes…the slaves are torn to pieces.” Mutilation of runaway slaves, Boisseron claims, enacted “a rhetoric of edibility.” Derrida called it carno-phallogocentrism, linking the slavehunter’s virility and carnivorism, savoring “deeper shades of carnage,” as ELUCID says on “ZIGZAGZIG.” It has never relented. In the wake of Michael Brown’s murder in 2014, the DOJ issued a report that detailed “puncture wounds” left in children by the Ferguson K-9 unit. The victims of these “bite incident[s]” were always Black.

ELUCID also speaks of how victims “force-feed a war machine” on “ZIGZAGZIG”—regions and relics swallowed whole, irrevocably. In their plateau “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…” (1980), Deleuze and Guattari write: “You become animal only molecularly. You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog.” Somewhere on a desolate Yonkers street corner, DMX sleeps with a pack of strays, lying in wait.

Police forces…have used dogs to break up rioting mobs…. The dogs’ snapping teeth, swift movements and indifference to the crowds’ menacing threats have made mob control a routine procedure for the forces which have the dogs.

—“A Progress Report of the Assembly Interim Committee on Governmental Efficiency and Economy on Using Dogs in Police Work, California” (1960)

If a dog is biting a black man, the black man should kill the dog, whether the dog is a police dog or a hound dog or any kind of dog… [T]hat black man should kill that dog or any two-legged dog who sicks the dog on him.

—Malcolm X (1963)

In a contemptible case of cultural exchange, two German shepherds trained by a Nazi stormtrooper were used by police in Jackson, Mississippi to attack crowds in support of the Tougaloo Nine—Black students attempting to access books from a whites-only public library. That was in 1961. [TRUST NONE!] Two years later, Bull Connor utilized dogs to disperse protestors in Birmingham, notoriously documented by Charles Moore and Bill Hudson. Hudson’s photograph of fifteen-year-old Walter Gadsden in the mongrel maw of law enforcement fills textbook pages to this day, while Moore’s photo would be aestheticized and reproduced in Andy Warhol’s Race Riots series in 1964. “Police dogs is one of the accepted practices in police riot work,” a swinish Alabama sheriff said in ’63. Not much has changed. When people demonstrated outside the White House gates after the death of George Floyd, an orange fascist—who ELUCID begrudgingly won two long-standing bets on—threatened them with “vicious dogs.”

“Dogs were once perceived as dangerous due to rabies,” Boisseron writes, “but today the black man is the one responsible for making the big dog look ‘un-kind.’” A.G. rapped about the dogs with the rabies on 1992’s “Runaway Slave,” looking backward to understand his present, but by the ’90s, the ever-evil LAPD was calling Black people “dog biscuits.” An officer in a St. Louis suburb faced suspension after posting to Facebook that Ferguson protestors “should have been put down like a rabid dog the first night.” The aggression of the dogs, Boisseron points out, has “metonymically shifted from zoonotic to a racial context.” In essence, society shouldn’t fear the dogs—society should fear a Black planet populated by Black men. [FEAR ALL!]

The messaging has frequently been mixed—deliberately muddied (mutted, we might say) to defy understanding—racism skewing absurdist. In “A Dark Brown Dog” (1901), Stephen Crane used a “little dark-brown dog…an unimportant dog, with no value” with a “short rope…dragging from his neck” for allegorical purposes. [SHORT LEASH!] A child drags the dog “toward a grim unknown,” the child’s intolerant family. The dog is by its very nature powerless, “too much of a dog to try to look to be a martyr or to plot revenge.” Eventually, the drunk father beats the dog with a coffee pot and tosses him out of a fifth-floor window, falling dead in the alley below. Crane’s well-meaning story speaks to mystery writer Stanley Ellin’s comparison of the “solicitous white intellectual” and the “arrant racist,” the former of which “sentimentalized Black lives” and “patted them on the head as one would a pet spaniel.” To retreat to such romanticizing, Ellin says, fulfills the “function of the stereotype, and it matters very little whether the stereotype is that of vicious hound or pet poodle.”

As a child of the ’80s, ELUCID was exposed to the same surfeit of televised copaganda as the rest of us. McGruff the Crime Dog colonized our commercial breaks, asking us to join the feeding frenzy against drug dealers and burglars (Take a bite out of crime!). Meanwhile, Harlem World’s Herb McGruff provided counterprogramming and warned us of the real “Dangerzone.” “The idea of dogs attacking black people has become a haunting and unresolved image in the collective memory,” Boisseron writes, or, in ELUCID’s words: Eating everyone eventually. THE WORLD IS DOG!

On SEERSHIP! (2020), a project ELUCID labeled a “work of spirit”—a work of glitch-hop and runt pulses and ill-bent illbient—we hear a blare of noise at roughly the one-minute mark. That calamitous blare is sublimated into the soundfury that sets off “THE WORLD IS DOG.” ELUCID’s bogeyman-down production, in collaboration with Jon Nellen’s urgent drumming and Luke Stewart’s grave-groove bass theories, provide for the sonics of a slave escape, equal parts panic and empowerment. “The dissonance is real,” ELUCID raps on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” “—I be feeling woozy,” and that’s the vibration here. In Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1865), Harriet Beecher Stowe describes how the vengeful and unforgiving escaped slave Dred defends a runaway from a hellhound:

…a party of negro-hunters, with dogs and guns, had chased this man, who, on this day, had unfortunately ventured out of his concealment. He succeeded in outrunning all but one dog, which sprang up, and, fastening his fangs in his throat, laid him prostrate within a few paces of his retreat. Dred came up in time to kill the dog…

“THE WORLD IS DOG” is pulsing and gnashing, a sequence of switchbacks and untoggled kill switches, a hyper-aural freak-out, to borrow some phrases from ELUCID’s New York Times blurb for Ornette Coleman’s “Science Fiction.” We should’ve anticipated the arrival of “THE WORLD IS DOG,” should’ve been listening to the panting precursor curses. Be it the gold chain punk asphyxiation of Soul Glo opening for ELUCID at the ITB release show at Mercury Lounge in 2022; the absurd matter we heard from his Shapednoise feature in 2023, wherein he “backhoed the graves”; or his appearance on Kofi Flexxx’s “Show Me” a few months later (I show you what it look like…)—the signs were all there. When word got out that ELUCID was spinning Miles Davis’s “Rated X” (1974), we should’ve known it was over, cataclysmically.

If “Rated X” is the model, then ELUCID has set out to attain “music’s most elusive grail,” as Gary Giddins calls it in Visions of Jazz (1998): “the promise…of an open-ended form that defies harmonic conventions and regulation eight- and twelve-bar phrases in favor of a flexible but contained form.” An anonymous internet blogger called “Rated X” a “demented church service where the organist has become possessed by an evil spirit and worshippers have fallen into a trance.” ELUCID puts the incendiary fuse in fusion—dark energy acceleration | emergent fervor, fire & brimstone | Tony Williams Lifetime-type EMERGENCIES [ecphoneme—bang—ecphoneme—bang…]. This is rap-fusion—uncontrived, channel alive.

“Fire for fire, wade in the water,” ELUCID raps on “YOTTABYTE,” singing the same sorrow song of a century-plus before. “Wade in the Water” (Roud 5439) was a spiritual that reminded the runaway slaves to use streams and rivers to throw the hellhounds off the scent. “If you hear the dogs,” Harriet Tubman said, “keep going.” If “THE WORLD IS DOG” begins in a dreaded delirium, it ends [DEVOLVE!] in radical resistance.

The faded amateur photograph that graces the cover of I Told Bessie shows a man fending off a German shepherd; or, feasibly, the man is elevating the dog—healing it, calming it, exorcizing its engrained demons. Admittedly, it’s a crazy mixed-up world, a doggy dogg [dog-eat-dog] world, and the dog can occupy valences of both killer and companion. Everyone is dehumanized in the slave hunt, in the crowd dispersal. The hunters and the cops are the actual beasts (“That’s the sound of da beast,” KRS howls; “the murderous, cowardly pack,” Claude McKay snaps); the hunted resort to instinct, fearing for their lives, amygdala swelling with signals.

In Martin Delaney’s serialized novel Blake; or, the Huts of America (1859-1862), protagonist Henry Holland, a.k.a. Blacus, a.k.a. Blake, wields a “well-aimed weapon” and “slew each ferocious beast as it approached him, leaving them weltering in their own blood instead of feasting on his.” Delaney doesn’t only draw scenes of retributive slaughter; his characters also speak of how “da black folks charm de dogs.” Threats neutralized. Power harnessed. The Yorkshire Terrier on the cover of Swans’ The Seer (2012) bares Michael Gira’s chompers—he’s merged with the pup. Hip-hop auto-interpellated dog into dawg (s/o to Althusser).

As we learn from “Amager,” ØKSE’s song featuring billy woods, dogs only violate at the behest of men. woods relates a narrative of detainment at Trondheim Airport. The purportedly “colorblind drug dog” exudes innocence (“flopped on the floor, head on his paws”), though its mere presence smacks of discipline and punishment. As the Norwegian customs agent “palm[s] [woods’] clean drawers,” woods sardonically reflects, “I been a nigga too long.” He “know[s] the dance” and “know[s] the damn song,” resentful of this choreography of incurable racism that has been all too common and recurring throughout his life. He understands what’s happening epistemologically (“I know they hoping… I know I’m clean…”), but he also knows “those clammy hands going from the crack of [his] ass to the weight of [his] balls” are suggestive of castration, and when you’re crossing borders, what, what, say what, say what, anything can happen. As they go through the rigamarole of “mak[ing] calls, x-ray[ing] the empty suitcase, / [And] going back through [his] pockets,” woods stews with “impotent rage,” the aforementioned emasculation working its spell. He doesn’t begrudge the animal laboring under the aegis of the Tolletaten, though: I pet the dog as I leave. Scathed but saved. He charmed de dog.

After dealing with so many strays I had learned one thing: be patient.

—E.A.R.L.: The Autobiography of DMX (2003)

Perhaps no figure better illustrates the subjugation and subversion of the hellhound than DMX. In the lead up to the millennium, Dark Man X embodied the dog of vengeance; he exemplified the undoing of the dog’s quasi-innate hatred of Blackness. In ELUCID’s words, he emerged as a “whole new nigga” with “skin [untorn], eyes [ungouged], hair [unshorn].” DMX’s arrival in 1998 felt like centuries in the making. He waged a vendetta in the name of every runaway slave and Civil Rights demonstrator. He’d slept on the streets and shared the concrete with his dogs, strays like himself:

Stray dogs are normally scared of people; they’re scarred by whatever neglect or abuse put them out on the street. Or if they’re lost, they’re depressed because they can’t find their way home. But that morning I decided that no matter how long it took, I was going to get that dog to come over to me. I was going to convince him to trust me and make him mine…. I started looking all over for strays that I could catch and train for myself…

DMX charmed de dogs and the rest of us in the process. He stayed shitty, cruddy, trading the cartoonish bow-wows we’d become accustomed to (via Snoop) for fierce grrrs and arfs, elevating rap’s onomatopoeics. With “Get At Me Dog,” he turned a familiar B.T. Express funk sample feral. In the video, the most achromatic Hype Williams ever managed, X holds possession of the Tunnel crowd, on a stage but of the people. His only bling: a stainless steel choke chain that collars his neck. The black-and-white video disorients with strobe effect and negative exposure—pitch blacks suddenly transform into flashing whites. Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen look on from the periphery of the crowd like, well, out-of-place bitches. The video captures the raw power of DMX, his stygian intensity, reminiscent of Tadayuki Naitoh’s 1971 photograph of Miles Davis. Like X, Davis harnesses his rancor and exhibits his self-possession.

The success of DMX’s subversion of the dog trope likely apexed with his Woodstock ’99 performance. Before a majority white crowd of hyperthermic slavehunter descendants, DMX rocked what Thomas Hobbs calls “blood-red dungarees.” X “growls viscerally” and “convulses” across the stage in a manner “akin to a Bad Brains gig in a sweaty punk basement.” DMX—like Dred and Blacus before him, like ELUCID to come—subdues the monstrous, cowardly pack, and has them eating Milkbones out of his hand by the end of the 45-minute set.

The first thing we feel on REVELATOR is a snarling, ravenous “fang bite” and the exhale of “dog breath.” We search for alternatives: the RZArector’s fangs on 6 Feet Deep (1994) maybe, a presence that Kodwo Eshun argues is akin to a head “filled with revelations that impeach the daylight.” We might think of the parallel universe of “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” (1928) where “dogs all have rubber teeth,” but REVELATOR doesn’t offer up that heavenscape—only a hellscape where teeth tear rabidly, rapidly. The “dog fangs [which dig] into black flesh,” Boisseron writes, are “deeply ingrained in popular culture.” We’d prefer the hip-hop context for “biting,” like when Rakim invokes “biting and borrowing” on “Follow the Leader,” where “brothers tried and others died to get the formula.” We’re on a “short leash” here, but Chuck D speaks of how he “cut the leash” on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” and how prison bars “got [him] thinking like an animal,” and so I think we should act accordingly, tactfully, and lick our wounds.

ELUCID strafes us with 2-syllable units, iambs or IEDs, right from the start:

Fang bite Dog breath Short leash Pit fight

We’ve not felt shelling like this since the opening words of DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot (1998):

One-two One-two Come through Run through Gun who? Oh, you don’t know what the gun do?

We’re propelled and pummeled by a Dark Enlightenment acceleration; unquestionably, we’re on our heels. ELUCID activates a sequence of 3-syllable units—anapests—as we descend into Hell:

From this height At this speed Downhill Careening

Later, the 2- and 3-syllable units alternate: “Shit that binds, / Spit out, / Ribs came spared.” Such blunt syllabics occur elsewhere on the album as well. “YOTTABYTE,” for instance, introduces a more dactylic, grounded pattern: “Hard science, / Scum gutter.” These are billboard throw-ups in Mister X’s Radiant City. They’re terse skull snaps like when Michael Gira sings, “Space cunt, / Brainwash” on “The Apostate.”

“I’m not psychic, but I’m reading,” ELUCID clamor-raps. The rapper has repeatedly denied the spiritual and supernatural in favor of tangible work, learning, reading. He much rather attend a demo or browse a bookstore than show his face at a séance or a church service. “The more I thought, the less I prayed,” he raps on “BAD POLLEN.” In this regard, he’s a dialectical materialist, much to the dismay of so many nimrod New Age seekers. ELUCID is not your self-help savior. Appropriating occult symbology in song is not inscribing sigils on the navel of a newborn. More likely he’s standing in solidarity with the child laborers pulling opal from the ochre mines of Madagascar. “Black Jesus hated bill collectors—I do the same,” he raps on “IN THE SHADOW OF IF.”

In The Conjure-Man Dies (1932), Rudolph Fisher’s Harlem murder mystery, the titular conjure-man, one N’Gana Frimbo, is the closest forebear to ELUCID, a practitioner of the aesthetics of alchemy but one who knifes through the nonsense:

There are those that claim the power to read men’s lives in crystal spheres. That is utter nonsense. I claim the power to read men’s lives in their faces…. Every experience, every thought, leaves its mark. Past and present are written there clearly…. My crystal sphere, therefore, is your face.

“I receive it, then I weigh it,” ELUCID explains. He’s no Knownot but he also knows that he knows nothing, in a Socratic sense (one day it’ll all make sense, trust me [TRUST NONE, FEAR ALL]). He’s a member of a tribe on a quest, receptive of vibes and stuff, asking questions like: What? Can I kick it? Does it live or die? Who gon’ tell me why? Who goes there? Who dare disturb the hive? He remains unflappable, constant, “still inside,” channeling his “honey child” while killa bees are on the swarm angling for the fatal sting.

Our “small world” is razed; it “devolve[s]” as hell is raised—it’s not that tricky. The dog’s got “jaws that grind” and “teeth that tear”; Dante tells us Cerberus “displayed his tusks” and “rends the spirits, flays, and quarters” his enemies. “Where’s a pit, there’s a plague,” ELUCID says, demonstrating syntactically that life is parallelism to Hell but we must maintain. Boisseron discusses the “hysteria around pit bulls” rooted in an “overblown fear of rabies,” and we watched a “plague” of reckless media representation caricature Michael Vick as the very animals he electrocuted. “Pit bulls have been historically used in America as a weapon of stigmatization against blacks,” Boisseron explains, and so every Black man takes up residence in the Bad Newz Kennel when the public deems it convenient, whether they would ever dare to hold the jumper cables or not. If the stigma doesn’t catch up to you, the sickness will. ELUCID’s “pit” evokes morgue trucks reversing up to the trenches in the potter’s field. Careful where you step, or else risk experiencing “a quick trip to glory if you slip.” Pitfalls on every corner, beneath the buildings of every block. Like DMX said on “Get At Me Dog,” If you don’t know by now, then you slippin’.

“Be not afraid,” ELUCID advises, bending Biblical. It is I. It is I. It is I. If we can keep up, he’ll usher us out of the ravaged world. If not, “don’t know, don’t care—get out my way!” ELUCID’s “in the garden,” his own private Gethsemane, agonizing and “pouring for everyone whole came before [him]” and didn’t survive the onslaught. He pours out a little liquor, and like Pac who had his “back against the brick wall, trapped in a circle, / Boxing with them suckers till [his] knuckles turn[ed] purple,” ELUCID is intoxicated by his own dogged determination. Pac was simply rewriting McKay, who likewise found himself “pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Glorious as it sounds, ELUCID’s exhausted—as we all are—by song’s end: voided. All he can put together are fragmented, clipped, incomplete idiomatic and figurative expressions: “razor walking”; “bridge to nowhere fast.” Still, he bites back. Like DMX, he’s “eating everyone eventually,” indiscriminately, re-establishing the order of “the world [that] is dog.” He, too, is dog. Sic ’em, and get sick wid’ it.

10. TEKNOHELL

Today the plagues of Revelation are…the disastrous results of…the irrational use of technology.

—Pablo Richard, Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on The Book of Revelation (1995)

“Police dogs were often framed as technology,” writes Tyler Wall, a scholar of racialized state violence. He cites a Baltimore K-9 officer who claimed “[t]he dog is the most potent, versatile weapon ever invented…. You can’t shoot around corners, but dogs can go anywhere you direct them—like guided missiles.” These comments anticipated the NYPD’s rollout of actual automated, data-gathering robot dogs, of course. But “CCTV” and “YOTTABYTE” escort us into an arena of Ballardian extreme metaphors and emergent technologies—a teknohell—where “Spot bots” prowl every city block.

“CCTV,” co-produced by ELUCID and August Fanon, screeches like a dial-up modem gone diabolical—a discordant din of panic chords. They’ve programmed drum patterns around the sound of the CCTV shorting out—the dread comes in sine waves: megahertz hurts | multiplexing and motion-detecting | low-frame rate. The cameras are everywhere we look, but ELUCID splits the veil and the surveillance. The mandala is a panopticon, a C-band satellite dish for bodies to rot upon. Impaled by feedhorns. Parabolically resting in peace. In “a moment of clarity,” ELUCID fucks the noise and begs, “Don’t be mad at me.” I ain’t mad at cha. Who could begrudge the corner boy who cracks the lens of a varifocal security camera with a rock in the courtyard of the low-rises (they call it “the Pit” on The Wire)?

The ill communications that ELUCID was channeling on Armand Hammer’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips continue to nauseate him. A year prior to that release, ELUCID told Gary Suarez that he was working to “dismantle what isn’t serving and then download and update with what does now.” For the man who “feel[s] a way about proving [his] identity to robots,” he can also acknowledge damage has already been done, which is evident in his diction. On SEERSHIP!, he despaired: “Every device I own knows my latitude.” On “NY Blanks,” he warned: “computers are listening.” In Jacques Derrida’s “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy” (1983), he describes a Tetsuo-like man/machine [MAchiNe] who loses clarity between the sender and the receiver of electronic messaging:

And there is no certainty that man is the exchange [le central] of these telephone lines or the terminal of this endless computer. No longer is one very sure who loans his voice and his tone to the other in the Apocalypse; no longer is one very sure who addresses what to whom. But by a catastrophic overturning here more necessary than ever, one can just as well think this: as soon as one no longer knows who speaks or who writes, the text becomes apocalyptic.

In this sense, REVELATOR is, at turns, an apocalyptic text. Much of ELUCID’s work has been. The cover of SEERSHIP! features a P1 phosphor font choice, as if it’s destined for a monochrome monitor. One might come to believe ELUCID writes in matrices of terminal green.

11.

In Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies, N’Gana Frimbo is questioned by Dr. Archer:

“You actually are something of a seer, aren’t you?” “Not at all…. I filled in the gaps, that is all. I have done more with less. It is my livelihood.” “But—how? The accuracy of detail—”

“Even if it were as curious as you suggest, it should occasion no great wonder. It would be a simple matter of transforming energy, nothing more. So-called mental telepathy, even, is no mystery, so considered. Surely the human organism cannot create anything more than itself; but it has created the radio-broadcasting set and receiving set. Must there not be within the organism, then, some counterpart of these? I assure you, doctor, that this complex mechanism which we call the living body contains its broadcasting set and its receiving set, and signals sent out in the form of invisible, inaudible, radiant energy may be picked up and converted into sight and sound by a human receiving set properly tuned in.”

ELUCID showcases his broadcasting set and his receiving set, but his carries the outlaw spirit of an illegal cable box or the pirate radio signal from the short-lived Dread Broadcasting Corporation out of West London in the 1980s. ELUCID as DJ Lepke in limbo.

12.

The title “VOICE 2 SKULL” evokes a note to self, a Nextel push-to-talk, or a voice-to-text: ELUCID as fully automated, as a cybernetic MC. But the human essence—the flesh, blood, and bone—is still there: “I get up before everyone and lose my mind first— / For even just an hour, I work in sound and feeling—sometimes fury, / Asking the whys and hows when lies turn to vows.” That is, he grinds; his work ethic, the grating of gears. He starts his day, travels where he will, but always “free roaming” and “pinging stupid” as a “transcontinental satellite receiver freaking forth.” On “XOLO,” as tek, he “reach[es] inside—only to [his] elbow, / [And] pull[s] it back out like [he] was rewound.” Like a VHS tape, or Betamax. Functioning as some new plastic idea. We’re all wired and wasting away with “mirror[s] in pockets” as we busy ourselves “looking hard in the camera.” Not squinting to make sense, merely modeling a manufactured exterior.

13.

Digital overlords don’t need free promo…

—ELUCID, ØKSE’s “Skopje”

The teknohell is ever-present on REVELATOR—you can’t escape its server rack bracket clutches. “Defrag the files,” ELUCID raps on “BAD POLLEN,” attempting to counter what Nathaniel Mackey calls a technology of decay. RFIDs, modems, CCTVs, pagers—all this tech isn’t anachronistic; it’s timeless—e-waste salvaged or scavenged—but ELUCID evolves, keeps it moving [...like a moving target], even if that means “bloody fingers on the keypad,” which we heard of on Valley of Grace. His own magnetic fields fuck up electronics; he lives in the “chaos hour shadow play” mentioned on “THE WORLD IS DOG.” “The situation’s unreal,” as Chuck D says on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal,” Harold Pinter responds. Ultimately, ELUCID is “wholly unimpressed by your social media metrics,” at least according to “MBTTS.” He offers up “brick and mortar rhyme for distorted time” and “offline [is where] [his] core thrives.” He knows what’s what: these gadgets and gizmos are “soon to be rendered useless: and then what?,” as he inquired on Small Bills’ “Even Without You.” Merchandise is Brand New Second Hand as you sit in an ergonomic swivel chair before Roots Manuva’s radiation-emitting dusty microwave. ELUCID searches for a truth beyond the motherboard.

14.

I tell you this in truth; this is not only the end of this here but also and first of that there…the end of history…the death of God, the end of religions…the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West…the end of the end, the end of ends, that the end has always already begun, that we must still distinguish between closure and end…. it is also the end of metalanguage on the subject of eschatological language…

—Derrida

…so let me shut the fuck up.

—Editor’s note [me]

Tell me a lie, tell me a truth becomes ELUCID’s Max Headroom mantra for “CCTV,” minus the sputtering, the glitching. We like to think that the “truth [will] find you where you at—it’s fine, it’s fair,” he raps on “RFID,” but, more often than not, revealing the truth requires trying. Your responsibility, Toni Cade Bambara insists, is to “try to tell the truth,” and “[t]hat ain’t easy.” It’s tough to summon the strength when we “have rarely been encouraged and equipped to appreciate the fact that the truth works.” The machinery of lies and disinformation come fine-tuned with a gleaming chrome finish. As for truth, we’re numb to its virtue; neutered by negative thoughts and clouded past experiences. But if we can pursue truth, prove it, and impress it upon our enemies, according to Bambara, “it releases the Spirit.”

The “cattle prod [will] shock you back some reality,” ELUCID raps. But truth can seem a hackneyed notion in the wrong hands. In Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” (1965), Jesse, an abusive cop who takes sadistic pleasure in cattle prodding Civil Rights protestors, is charged with bringing the singing of jailed demonstrators to an end. He targets the “ringleader” of the group: “I put the prod to him and he jerked some more and he kind of screamed—but he didn’t have much voice left.” The protestor refuses to call for the others to stop singing, either out of defiance or debilitation from the beating he’s suffered, so Jesse’s frustration grows: “...the prod hit his testicles, but the scream did not come, only a kind of rattle and a moan.” Revisionist history can’t absolve the truth of that barbarity.

In one final [ex]plosive shout before “CCTV” transitions, ELUCID says, “Steal me your blues.” A call for reappropriation of what has already been plundered on a mass scale. The blues are never blameless. ELUCID collects blues and deranges ’em—traditional | twelve-bar | crowbarred | prison blues—deep cobalt with sapphiric crazing. REVELATOR most obviously invokes Blind Willie Johnson’s version of “John the Revelator” (1930), what with his scum gutter growl of Who’s that writin’? Jeff Place called Johnson a “guitar evangelist,” a man who was blinded by lye in his eyes at seven [the means of his marring and age should not go unnoticed], a reenactment, perhaps, of John the Revelator’s being dunked into the boiling oil cauldron—not nearly the “musky oils” ELUCID spoke of on “Obama Incense.” The teknohell is home to a Victor Talking Machine, no doubt, and the 78 RPM shellac record of Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” (1937) spins centripetal. RJ’s bottleneck slide screams phoenix as he sings, I got to keep movin’. For protection from the dogs—zig, zag, zig.

August Fanon and ELUCID sacrifice the frenetic for a straightforward refrain to conclude “CCTV,” something to mesmerize with layered vocals, subliminal messages not so sub- that they’re unmanageable. Take freedom: ELUCID wants you to hear the message, the charge. “All power to oppressed people” isn’t just a slogan for him; for others, as we know, it undeniably is. He asks for a “red light on the virtue signal for the come-latelys”; or, as PremRock says on ShrapKnel’s “Human Form”: “Closeted moderates post black squares then act scared of actual progress.” On “NY Blanks,” ELUCID “refuse[d] to kneel and pray for hashtag another slain name, / On the dashcam frame of sight.” Technology pervades every moment of life and language—from sonogram to dashcam and the SMS notifications of each and all else in-between.

15.

Child Actor’s production on “YOTTABYTE” traps us inside the machine with hex bolts knocked loose and rattling around. Again, technology works its way into everything. “Stints and priors, / Sweat labor, / August sun,” ELUCID raps, seemingly on a chain gang—the teknohell is a maximum security prison: biometrics | video analytics | signal-jamming | duress alarms. Data storage facilities bursting at the seams.

“Terabyte, gigabyte, niggas bite,” ELUCID spit on “Bitter Cassava,” adding with a whiff of cybersexuality, “I heard ass taste better in the summertime.” Do androids dream of having a romp with the provocatively named Deckard? Do Nexus-6 replicants have rape fantasies? “Came out the pussy and wrote a classic,” ELUCID says on “YOTTABYTE,” and I’m left wondering what Jodorowsky’s love machine from Holy Mountain (1973) might have to do with this. Cold and sterile tech-infused corporeality | conjugal visits with slinky cyborgs | proto-pornbots.

“SKP” presents as more sound poem than song—its patterns erratic, and therefore erotic—unpredictable with vocals pitched down and up arbitrarily. Andrew Broder provides a mellowed pulse backdrop, tunneling toward something visceral, and not the gear boxes and springs, the sensors and metal tubes, that make up a robot’s innards. ELUCID has previously proclaimed he was “a dyke in a past life,” a Sister Outsider standing alongside Audre Lorde: “Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos.” “SKP”—Some Kind of Power—draws inspiration from Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1984), which reframes eroticism, removes it from the teknohell.

I know you know the codes, ELUCID says. His lover has the key—they each possess a copy. And the key is crucial, at the crux of the relation; listen to what woods says on “INSTANT TRANSFER”: “It’s all skeleton keys on the keyring I keep, / Keys I never seen before for places I never even been, / Luxury cars—I key ’em and go to sleep.” Keys, keys, keys, as Angela Carter writes in “The Bloody Chamber” (1979)—to china cabinets and safes and every other secret place. The narrator’s husband, though, forbids his young wife from using one key in particular. Not the key to his heart, as she presumes (“skeleton key to ya heart,” ELUCID echoes on “CCTV”), but “the key to [his] enfer.” He teases and tantalizes her and throws all the keys into her lap as “the cold metal chill[s] [her] thighs through [her] thin muslin frock.” Something’s not quite right; “we was down singing off-key: how?” ELUCID says on “XOLO.” The key might crack the code | stroking and fondling | heavy petting | as artificial intelligence records the taps and timbre of your keystrokes, stealing sensitive passwords—a sensate focus therapy for anonymous internet users. Probably best to keep the key under the mat.

“The erotic is a considered source of power and information within our lives,” Lorde writes. ELUCID answers: “Knowing is enough—deepest core informing all.” The erotic, Lorde notes, “offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation.” “From here forth,” ELUCID says, “you spit, you scream, you burn my tongue too raw—be soft.” Erotic, Lorde explains, is from the Greek eros, “born of Chaos, and personifying power and harmony.” Harm may precede harmony; pain prior to reaching “beyond the posture and the program.”

“Call me out my name,” ELUCID commands, “I’ll be the one you cum for.” Even if he brushes against the sophomoric at times (“Baby, please pop that pussy for breakfast” would be one such example from the archives), ELUCID’s sex raps swerve sophisticated. Lorde says the erotic is often “confused with its opposite, the pornographic,” which would demonstrate sensation without feeling. When ELUCID says “call me out my name” to his lover, he’s exploring “how acutely and fully [they] can feel in the doing.” Lorde explains, “[A]s we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up…being satisfied with suffering and self-negation…with the numbness.”

The technological bent to “SKP” climaxes with connectivity (¿Tu Tienes WiFi?)—a mutual dependance—“power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person.” In 2020, ELUCID told Tim Fish about how a trip to South Africa inspired Valley of Grace (2017): “...my wife was there, she was still my girlfriend then, and she was working at a law center, working towards protecting sex workers…. So being there, she’s at work for at least 8 hours a day, and I’m in the flat just hanging out….” At the end of “SKP,” ELUCID declares “in a union made now, tomorrow anything…,” and we feel the phantom phrase “…is possible” in the absence that follows.

“There are many kinds of power,” Audre Lorde tells us, “used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise.” 2Pac, for instance, never achieved ELUCID’s level of erotic power in song. On “How Do U Want It?” (1996), Pac was forward with his proposal, seeking consent (“Tell me is it cool to fuck? / Did you think I come to talk? / Am I fool or what?”), but copped to his preference for pornographic perversions, the “positions on the floor” he invokes: “Ironic, ’cause I’m somewhat psychotic.” Lick before you bite, ELUCID raps on “BAD POLLEN,” his own nod to the erotic/psychotic dichotomy. But it’s more tempered than Pac’s imprudence. He seems to taunt Pac’s shortcomings on “YOTTABYTE”:

Wiggle with the lights on, Ripple off thrust, Ooh, it’s just us, Yes, I need it how I want it, Feel like Southern California with my belly full…

Not to say ELUCID’s erotic power is purely PG-13; it’s not. On “BAD POLLEN,” he “wake[s] up and thrust[s] inside [his] missus, / Two fistfuls of hair, [his] face buried.” Flashes of a possessive desire, an “I Wanna Be Your Dog” energy: So messed up—I want you here…in my room…I want you here. But even when ELUCID goes raunchy, it’s organic matter, raw materials—mud and bone and verdant muck—not nuts and bolts and a nexus of cables. His trysts always involve talking out the mud, crashing through the walls…, scorch, [and] stimuli response.

16.

I might work with the wires wet if we talking ’bout power…

—“INSTANT TRANSFER”

With SKECH185’s analog(ue) tape dispenser on loan (also note the Basinskian “disintegration tapes” mentioned on “IKEBANA”), ELUCID patches and splices the first bars of “INSTANT TRANSFER” in a terse trimeter:

Five side, keep the tape warm, Wrapped rays weighing way more, Racks raid how we wage war, Slack walk to a main course.

The alliterative and consonantal groupings (“wrapped rays”; “racks raid”; “weighing way”; “we wage war”; “slack walk”; “keep the tape”) and slant rhymes present an inconsistency that models a human touch—the warmth of the analog tape undermining digital media and the instantaneous [gratification and otherwise] operations of an ATM withdrawal, just as we see the plastic bank card repeatedly guided into the multi-function maw by a human hand in the “INSTANT TRANSFER” video.

Nostalgia is no retreat from the teknohell. Even on a memory song like “HUSHPUPPIES,” the hum of Integrated Tech Solutions interferes when ELUCID recalls the “static sizzle with the grease in stereo”—frying fish and the kitchen TV set in concert with one another. “HUSHPUPPIES” feels like a loose adaptation of Henry Thomas’s “Fishing Blues” (1928), a fond recollection of fish as sustenance. Both ELUCID and Thomas begin with an urgency; Thomas “went up on the hill about twelve o’clock,” and ELUCID speaks in a tongue-twisted, nursery rhyme: “Must find fried fish—it’s Friday.”

REVELATOR has us fearing for the worst: fish fried in sulfuric waters, gilled vertebrates pulled from the River Styx—but it’s not that. “HUSHPUPPIES” feels down-home, a brief view of before, of Bessie-time, of salve and saviors and stove-top safe haven. “Put on your skillet,” Henry Thomas sings, “Mama gonna cook ’em with the shortenin’ bread.” “HUSHPUPPIES” works as a child-vision folk song, much like the “choking on a church mint” episode of “Guy R. Brewer.” ELUCID is an artist composing twenty-first century folk ditties, intent on inclusion in the Roud Index. I’m wary of the “sugar water, lemon sugar, water lemon” lyric sequence, though—the words transmit, mutate, like a gain-of-function in the kitchen sink. I feel he’s trapped speaking with “the language of the on-again/off-again future, and it is digital,” as Laurie Anderson once said.

17. PEOPLE TEND TO THINK THAT A PAGER’S FOUL

In 1991, Q-Tip asked us if we knew the importance of a skypager. The responsibility fell to Phife Dawg to explain it in full:

The “S” in skypage really stands for sex, ………………………………………………….. At times I miss the pager so you don’t get vex, Having bad days like a voodoo hex, Conceptually, a pager is so complex that I be standing on the verge, ready to flex.

ELUCID portals us to that very ’90s dimension to pick up on Phife’s “-ex” rhyme scheme.

Skypage text, alphanumeric, Blind days—rain taste metallic, Dark roads lined with tall pine, Fire tongue in the annex.

Where Phife’s explication was elementary with its backronyming and monosyllabic rhymes, its simile and succinct storytelling, ELUCID’s post-millennial penchant for broken language and Holocene imagery elevates the archaic device of the skypager to the status of fetish item. One can see the huddled assemblage of survivors circled around the faint LCD glow on the annex floor, the acid rain falling through the collapsed roof.

18.

“14.4” drags us through the mass hysterics of Y2K mania with Saint Abdullah and The Lasso layering assorted ambient jazz touches to the Tron grid. ELUCID and SKECH185 fuck with the trellis modulation, raising a “Napster ’99” download speed from the titular 14.4kbps. They float over dial tones: “I dial in; you dial it down,” ELUCID says as he receives the signal from Armand Hammer’s “Landlines.” He’s charged with a “couple hundred-thousand watts,” so “do hold the line.” ELUCID and SKECH rap with “revolutionary millennial movements,” in the words of Eugene D. Genovese, “born in social catastrophe or in the fear of impending catastrophe.” Still, though, in the West African tradition, “time is cyclical and eternal; the religious tradition cannot then therefore readily provide for an apocalypse.” Fear all? Maybe it’s more fear none than we first thought.

I sometimes configure ELUCID as Aaron Dilloway (of Wolf Eyes, and—for our purposes here at present—their 2006 limited-release Dog Jaw) with a contact mic—full-contact stage presence | kilowatts killing | bringing the pain in a really real way. He wades in distortion, awash in both antiquated and active teknology (“*69—hit redial,” he remarks on “XOLO”). Hell is populated with tek—yottabytes of it like motes in sunlight, refracting his digipoetics. He announces proudly, “Afrika Islam loop in the key of my Lord,” which is a permanent—nearly park jamming—register for him to operate within. He dials in to Zulu Beats on WHBI 105.9 in New Jeruzalem and cracks codes for the afterfuture.

19. THE HAINTS OF HAM RADIO

Never polemical, ELUCID makes aslant references to oppressive histories, dating back antediluvian. One second he’s “in ya sundown town holding [his] dick dolo,” and the next he’s bouncing to bear witness to an “illegal chokehold.” He time travels from crabgrass frontiers to a sidewalk slab on Staten Island. He may be “too old to comfortably rock logos,” but he’s in-the-ever-know [and the ever-now] of former lives—he embodies Gift of Gab running from Feds in his red Pro-Keds, and he hits the racks of Saks Fifth Avenue with the Lo Lifes. Nowadays, though, he’s Naomi Klein’s No Logo incarnate. In another nanosec, he’s a po-mo narcocorrido singer reading “the note like Chalino, except it’s off the SIM card.” He’s hopping through traversable wormholes of genealogical blues “from Ham to Cush to Nimrod.” Settle our assassin’s eyes on Ham, hm?

In A Season in Hell, Rimbaud “set out in search of the true kingdom of the children of Ham.” Wyatt Mason argues that part of Rimbaud’s legend can be attributed to the rumors of him as “the scoundrel who sold slaves in Africa.” Though it’s accurate that Rimbaud was free roaming, sub-Saharan, his vagabondage through the Horn of Africa might not have included slave-trading—that point is disputed by his biographers. In The Rebel (1951), Camus called Rimbaud a “bourgeois trader” of percussion rifles and Ethiopian coffee, but made no mention of slaves. In 1994, China Achebe stated that “[w]hen Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry” because poetry and slave trading “cannot be bedfellows.” When he wasn’t tagging up the Luxor Temple on a lark in Egypt or running guns across the border into Shewa land, Rimbaud’s travelogue was interlarded with diagnoses of typhoid, synovitis, and osteosarcoma—his right leg eventually lopped off. Perhaps we can ascribe his disease-ridden body to A Season in Hell’s most profane moments, such as when he writes, “I’m an animal, a nxggxr. But I can be saved. You’re all fake nxggxrs…”

The so-called “curse of Ham,” a blasphemy on Black people courtesy of Christian whites, has long contaminated the discourse—a shibboleth adorning the flowstones and helictites of the teknohell. “According to the scriptural defense of slavery,” Eugene D. Genovese writes in Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), “...the enslavement of the blacks by the whites fulfilled the biblical curse of Ham.” But Genovese’s research indicates “the slaves did not view their predicament as punishment for the collective sin of black people. No amount of white propaganda could bring them to accept such an idea.” When ELUCID talks of “hammers hang[ing] on loop” on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” or “hammers out the Hummer” on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” I construe this cargo pants weaponry, this pakinamac in the back of the Ac’ (or Hummer), as a means of countering white propaganda, comparable to Treach’s chainsaw or Havoc’s scythe. Throughout REVELATOR, we find ELUCID going ham—hard as a motherfucker—but ELUCID’s too humble for any Tisci gilded throne. Instead, think of him as John Henry driving steel through the carpal tunnels of sinners and thieves. He sings a Scaramangan screed as he works, something gleaned from Seven Eyes, Seven Horns (1998): “Alphabetic hammer, magnetic grammar.”

ELUCID advances with “apocalyptic movement,” which Derrida defines as “the gesture of denuding or of affording sight,” a gesture which is sometimes “more guilty or more dangerous,” such as when Noah gets krunk in his tent and “Ham sees his father’s genitals.” ELUCID sees through the myths, the slander; instead, he exposes us to a soundtrack of staticky swells as he ascends out of the teknohell. I imagine the noise is a replication of what Joyce’s radio in Finnegans Wake (1939) sounds like. Here’s that signal recounted superlatively:

tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modem as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute…equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for distance getting and connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini-Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker, capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emittences, key clickings, vaticum cleaners, due to woman formed mobile or man made static and bawling the whowle shack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegotumy marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes.

In Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun (1998) | [“MBTTS,” ahem], he writes that “Long-distance telecom systems intensifies sensations of imminent Revelation.” Oh, indeed.

20. POST-INDUSTRIAL DOOM GOSPEL FOR THE GODLESS

On “Old Magic,” ELUCID announced himself as the “revelator, armed and dangerous,” so nothing he does on this album should come as a surprise. This lot of doom gospel spells shatters expectations, though. “I’ve been revelatin’” is what he told us on “Smile Lines,” and he’s yet to cease or even slow. The Book of the Seven Seals bulges, busting its binding and bending back its raised bands. REVELATOR, lyrics transcribed and beats notated in neumes, passes as ELUCID’s Book of Revelation.

I see it all, Michael Gira throat-sings. I see it all I see it all I see it all I see it all I see it all… over the sunn oh godspeed charnelhouse chanting and gunmetal grind of SWANS’ “The Seer” (2012). ELUCID is all-seeing as well—omniscient shit. It wasn’t always this way. On “Blame the Devil” from Save Yourself, ELUCID admitted that “revelation had [him] spooked.” In his preface to The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), George Bernard Shaw describes the Book as “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict which was absurdly admitted to the canon under the title of Revelation,” which only adds to the terror for an ’80s child who grew up with crushed crack vials underfoot.

On “Blame the Devil,” ELUCID saw the “seven eyes, seven crows” and “was lost.” “Now I’m found,” he would continue, “End of days—amazing time, / Everybody’s got a word—mine just happens to rhyme.” No longer cowering in church corners, surrounded by the congregants of what he has called a “death cult,” ELUCID’s Revelation remix has a liberation theology reverb. Pablo Richard’s Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on The Book of Revelation (1995) places the curious record in the context of revolutionary power:

Revelation arises in a time of persecution—and particularly amid situations of chaos, exclusion, and ongoing oppression…. Revelation transmits a spirituality of resistance and offers guidance for organizing an alternative world…. Revelation is wrath and punishment for the oppressors, but good news (gospel) for those excluded and oppressed by the empire of the beast…. Revelation teaches us to imagine the present and final eschatology with a sense of joy and hope…. The book of Revelation is helping to create a new historical and liberating language.

21.

In The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire (1990), scriptural scholar Leonard L. Thompson points to the difficulties of understanding the “symbolic, metaphoric, even bizarre language of the seer.” John the Revelator confessed to being “in the spirit” when he composed the book, what Eugene D. Genovese might call “religious frenzy” in another context. Thompson receives the Book of Revelation as a nesting language, one in which “highly symbolic language” nests into “ever-larger contexts—ultimately into a cosmic vision that includes the whole social order, the totality of nature, and suprahuman divinities that invade but transcend both society and nature.” I think it wise to receive ELUCID’s lyrics in a similar manner. Lucien Goldmann might call it Towards a Sociology of the Rap Album. “The seer tends to develop his material concentrically into ever-widening rings,” Thompson contends. ELUCID reps such a structure in his verses, in his songs, even lending his own phraseology to the process, be it those “shimmer rims spinning loopy” on “VOICE 2 SKULL” or the “orbitings” we hear about on “IKEBANA.” ELUCID will “leave the meter running” only to “trigger doomsday.” He sips “Ethiopian coffee” and seconds later “space junk” floats by. We’re hipped to the particular and the panoramic. Scaramanga was similarly skilled. Samuel Diamond writes of how “Seven Eyes, Seven Horns” is “as much a meditation on symbology, semiotics, and brand identity as it is an erudite MC’s spin on a passage from the Book of Revelation.” Or, as Scaramanga Shallah himself says on the song, “What a script…” [as in, whew].

22. MYSTIC STYLEZ

All a mystery…

—“THE WORLD IS DOG”

…nothing could have been more impressive than this cool, deliberate deep voice, stating a mystic paradox in terms of level reason.

—Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-Man Dies (1932)

To bring it back to that damnéd Derrida essay once again [back is the incredible], MC Deconstruction redefines “apocalypse” as revelation: “Apokaluptō, I disclose, I uncover, I unveil, I reveal the thing that can be a part of the body, the head or the eyes, a secret part, the sex or whatever might be hidden, a secret thing, the thing to be dissembled, a thing that is neither shown nor said…” This revelation “not only affords seeing but also affords hearing/understanding.”

We’ve prior seen ELUCID as mystagogue—a mystik journeyman, a Walkman invader—he whose function is to initiate us into the mystery. As Guru was above the clouds, the mystagogue positions himself, according to Derrida, “above the crowd [which] he manipulates through…a crypted language,” but, despite what some dum-dums [to borrow a term from diggity Das EFX] may argue, ELUCID is not beyond understanding. We must strive to understand misunderstanding; we must endeavor forevermore to miss understanding. Those who throw fits and fail to accept these norms—I have to presume—have not been listening to hip-hop very long or well. “Words mean things but don’t have to,” ELUCID declared with Derridean flair on “Split Tongue.” “[I]f anything has outlived its usefulness it is ‘coherent’ metaphor, one with explicit contours,” writes E. M. Cioran in The Trouble with Being Born (1973). “It is against such metaphor that poetry has unceasingly rebelled, to the point where a dead poetry is a poetry afflicted with coherence.” “I’m okay with not understanding,” ELUCID said on Small Bills’ “Here Be Dragons,” “—I’m okay in the dark.” Dark Man X knows all directions.

Listening to ELUCID’s music, you enter a delirium, which Derrida refers to as a Verstimmung—“a social disorder and a derangement, an out-of-tune-ness…. The tone leaps and rises when the voice of the oracle takes you aside, speaks to you in private code, and whispers secrets to you.” On “IKEBANA,” ELUCID cops to “talking out [his] head, a fever set in.” Like Rimbaud in Obock, shivering, with his knee gauzed over, not a poetic thought to be found.

23. SOUND & CEREMENT

Sound has a grammar to it—believe me—that will cause that thing that you call bending to open up in a way you won’t believe it.

—Ornette Coleman (2005)

…I just bend the rhyme…

—“Sir Benni Miles” (2021)

ELUCID, more than any other active MC, embodies a compositional approach that conflates poetics and musicality in a manner that doesn’t favor or diminish either—symbiotically rendered, synchronistically flexed: the orphic bend. In an epistolary novel by Nathaniel Mackey, Orphic Bend denotes a fictional album title of a fictional band. ELUCID asks on “RFID”: “Why play if I can’t bend the rules?” To forbid ELUCID these ludic junctures would be ludacris, a loss of not only file data but of finely wired rap filigree. ELUCID stays bent in both senses—his sentence inclinations, his word inebriations—bent like Miles Davis’s mouthpiece; dead bent like DOOM’s swilling death-drive to fund these experiments. These are “games I win at—mark me,” ELUCID gloats, but he also invites us to “share this reality.” If we’re willing, he’ll leave none of us behind; he won’t orphan us.

“We’re all eventually orphans,” Mackey has said. Elsewhere (namely, “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol [1987]), he kindles, he forges, the meaning of orphan and Orphic, “an orphan being anyone denied kinship, social sustenance, anyone who suffers, to use Orlando Patterson’s phrase, ‘social death.’” Mackey continues:

Song is both a complaint and a consolation dialectically tied to that ordeal, where in back of “orphan” one hears echoes of “orphic,” a music which turns on abandonment, absence, loss. Think of the black spiritual “Motherless Child.” Music is wounded kinship’s last resort…. Music is prod and precedent for a recognition that the linguistic realm is also the realm of the orphan…. This recognition troubles, complicates and contends with the unequivocal referentiality taken for granted in ordinary language…. Poetic language is language owning up to being an orphan.

ELUCID has previously instructed us on “the difference between loneliness and being lonely,” referencing like a hand reaching out—to Gwendolyn Brooks, who feels the “under buzz” of loneliness. But ELUCID’s bent is in the direction of populating his cathedral with the motherless children of his bastard style.

24. INSIDE REPEATING NUMBERS

To stave off the dogs, the teknohell, and the unknown opps, ELUCID makes endless calculations but with an imprecise science. One can imagine the setting for such calculations resembling N’Gana Frimbo’s consultation room, what with “obliquely downcast light” and “lateral walls…adorned with innumerable strange and awful shapes.” Those strange and awful shapes—like glyphs carved onto dusty clay tablets—included “gruesome black masks with hollow orbits, some smooth and bald, some horned and bearded; small misshapen statuettes of near-human creatures, resembling embryos dried and blackened in the sun…forbidding designs.” The conjure-man’s mantelpiece showcases a “murderous-looking club, resting diagonally.” The club is actually “the lower half of a human femur, [with] one extremity bulging into wicked-looking condyles, the other…covered with a silver knob representing a human skull.” ELUCID holds the club like a stylus, dealing in tally marks and totalities until the skull smudges out an answer.

Numbers are concrete, seemingly. “Numbers don’t lie, but they damn sure don’t tell stories either,” ELUCID rapped on “NY Blanks,” skeptical of statistics. On “IKEBANA,” he starts with “3800 out the credits.” I ain’t count it, he admits, “but it’s sweat labor.” He narrows the narrative with estimates: “ten or something”; “on time, but off-key”; “almost, almost over…so close…almost over….” These are “complicated chemicals” that only work to deepen what Rimbaud called “numerical visions.” Do the math. On “YOTTABYTE,” it’s “dead money [and] thirteen guineas for a pickaninny piano.” On “BAD POLLEN,” he “brought a trunkful of tiny violins to the bloodletting.” ELUCID can “play one on each finger for every seven bodies.” These aren’t exact measurements or accurate costs. As he says on “INSTANT TRANSFER,” he’s “counting up in the dark” (in Frimbo’s consultation room, right?). Persevering and perseverating on “14.4”: “System error, / Less than zero, / Humanity pending.” Sounding like he needs to get his affairs in order.

The numbers game inevitably leads to money—nasty business like toxic assets and credit derivatives—and money is time; time, money. “Can’t clock the kills,” ELUCID says on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” echoing Master Ace in ’90 (“Can’t Stop the Bumrush”) and Jay-Z in ’96 (“Can’t Knock the Hustle”)—earning miles while on the clock as a touring musician, tallying transatlantic and domestic flights. But is there ever a time when he’s not “waiting on money, thinking of murder,” as he raps on “BAD POLLEN”? Does the hustle, the bumrush, the killing ever cease? Or is it an interminable loop of episodes mimicking bell hooks’ oft-quoted (by all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons) opening sentence from “Killing Rage: Militant Resistance” (1995)? “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder,” hooks wrote. “I’m at the age they start to count my nights out,” ELUCID raps on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” because death or revolution seems “a black power nap away” (“IKEBANA”). “Time wore us out,” according to ELUCID, speaking in the past tense as if the deal has already gone down, the jig is up, the end is here. The “24-hour drones” he mentions on “14.4” survey the damage. Too easy to get greedy and selfish at the end (“Give me a minute…give me five…”), shuffling off this mortal coil as “we wait—who knows the hours?”

25.

“IKEBANA,” despite the time-and-numbers crunch, sketches a scene of restorative habits, a survival guide for the godless. It falls short of He-is-risen optimism (Orpheus is the figurehead here, not Jesus), but we’re headed from hell to the heliosphere. ELUCID wishes the world “good morning” with “oatmeal” and “Ethiopian coffee.” He’s calculating to find peace. He feels that “everybody knew” but him—crying it out; they must know the secret to peace. Miscalculations leave him envious. Everyone laughing at his ignorance, at “all [his] comings and goings”—the state-of-the-art GPS tracking of the teknohell. RFIDs on the heels of his feet triggering field detectors.

The solution is a sometimes-turn inward: Being alive, I must look up. If the Ethiopian coffee doesn’t cut it, he’ll order an “everything bagel with the tofu scallion” or “vacuum the whip” (as he does on “VOICE 2 SKULL”). We’ve heard of his domestic resolve before. On woods’ “As the Crow Flies,” ELUCID was “cleaning up [his] kitchen, / Emptying the fridge, bleaching counters, [and] sweeping corners.” By placing his “silverware in order,” he rebuilds the rubbled world. Peace is plucked from panic elsewhere, as on “YOTTABYTE” where he’s “squatting in a Barcelona hotel room playing Wu-Tang Forever,” observing the world rather than his phone, nourishing himself through sights rather than storing up the cache and cookies of his frequently visited sites.

After many calculations, the epiphany points toward what he details on “BAD POLLEN”: “I squeeze my children’s hand and walk harder against the wind,” the same wind that rustles the dead roadside bracken, as Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road (2006). ELUCID turns to his children, his family. woods, it should be stated, does the same, as noted on “Niggardly (Blocked Call)”: “I walk ’em to school, then the park, / Hold they little hands when we cross the street.” A small step to cross the street is far simpler than crossing the Rubicon.

“IKEBANA” is another ELUCID and Jon Nellen production, and Gabriel’s muted horn is buried in the mix of the song’s bridge, a distant and dour reveille as ELUCID sings softly. As he bemoans everybody knowing what he doesn’t, Nellen’s percussion pulls us to where ELUCID wants to be: looking up. Being alive, he’s looking up out of hell. We hear his will to struggle, to survive, and to exist, but we also hear our will to “look up,” or research meaning, reflected—manufacturing it if we have to—as in, “You must learn” (life being nothing more than a boogie down production). Improve ourselves through awareness of others, of our loved ones especially, of our situation within all the scattered “scorching space junk, x’s and orbitings.” You must change your life, in Rilke’s words.

26. MAN THREATENS LANDLORD

Kill your landlord, no doubt…

—“Roaches Don’t Fly” (2021)

“SLUM OF A DISREGARD” celebrates thirty years of skullduggery since The Coup’s “Kill My Landlord” (1993), but underhanded housing policies—what ELUCID calls “comforts of material conditions core-rotted”—are nothing new. Look at Langston Hughes’ “Ballad of the Landlord” (1940):

Landlord, landlord, My roof has sprung a leak. Don’t you ’member I told you about it Way last week?

Last week is “way last week” because any leak sooner than soon, quicker than quick, becomes an inundation, a deluge, and the subsequent damage, mold spores, and stench overwhelms. Hughes’ subject alludes to withholding rental payment until the landlord “fix[es] the house up new,” but the landlord threatens back with “eviction orders.” The threat is communicated through the tenant’s account, through a series of questions—a dialogue masquerading as a monologue for the first five stanzas of the poem. The landlord is absent, a ghostly presence only there to extract profit. When the tenant turns to intimidation (“If I land my fist on you…”), we suddenly hear the landlord’s voice summoning police and precipitating an ugly and familiar scene:

Copper’s whistle! Patrol bell! Arrest. Precinct Station. Iron cell. Headlines in press…

For his threat of violence (which the landlord exaggerates as an attempt to “overturn the land”), the tenant receives a sentence of “90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL.” But for his neglect and threat of dispossession, the slumlord suffers nothing.

“The house is built on deceit,” Boots Riley raps on “Kill My Landlord,” acquired through primitive accumulation and the successive decades of sniping and stealing, compressing a courseload of Proudhon property is theft readings into a solitary verse. ELUCID’s landlord—nay, slumlord—is on a “Tel Aviv holiday” when the crisis hits. While the landlord uses ELUCID’s monthly rental payments to feed IDF soldiers [...my taxes pay police brutality settlements, billy woods shouts back], ELUCID struggles to get him on the phone. When he does, he finds the slumlord’s “sincerity was threadbare” and “urgency been missing.” ELUCID “smile[s] like watermelon slice,” a simile which upends the slumlord’s own race-based neglect through subversion. ELUCID will grin and bear it (for the time being), but he won’t let it go without signaling to the slumlord—or himself at least—that he’s privy to the power dynamics which undergird the exchange. In doing so, ELUCID enacts a stratagem used by poets before him. “We sliced the watermelon into smiles,” Terrance Hayes writes for fourteen consecutive lines in one of his sonnets from American Sonnets from My Past and Future Assassins (2018). In Langston Hughes’ “125th Street,” the poet doesn’t allow racist stereotypes to overshadow Black joy:

Face like a slice of melon grin that wide.

Hayes, Hughes, and ELUCID invoke historical [mis]representations by combining the smiling, subservient Tom caricature with the conniving, watermelon-thieving Coon to deliver a knowing wink to the reader/listener. In a promo video for REVELATOR, images of James H. White’s Watermelon Contest (1896) flash across the screen—an Edison film under Brakhage-like production techniques.

The longer ELUCID stays on the line with his slumlord, the sharper the sting. Mahmoud Darwish once asked, “Why did you lean on a dagger to look at me?”—and ELUCID listens long-distance to the slumlord “turn the dagger slow” with every second that passes. This is an abrasive exchange—ELUCID’s complaints and his characterization of the slumlord’s speech effectively evoked through consonance: “Too late to make it right, / Tongue-tied talk, / Make noose quick.” The slumlord stumbles over his words, speaks offensively, and we’re reminded to “believe what people say they are and do.”

Like “Ballad of the Landlord,” the conversational lines within “SLUM OF A DISREGARD” are one-sided. We hear ELUCID, in father-mode, pressing: “If this happens all the time, what’s the plan?” The slumlord’s excuses are elided, for his words are meaningless drivel. “Both my boys have my eyes,” ELUCID coldly explains, “—don’t force my hand.” His hand, like the tenant’s fist in Hughes’ poem, communicates to us that stakes is high. “Don’t force my hand,” he pleads, but Darwish writes that “we are forced to return to the inhospitable myths / where we have no place.” On “Between the Lines” (2001), Slug rapped: “If I see you as a threat to my seedling or my sibling, / I’ll die to pull the plug on your machine.” This kind of escalation really isn’t escalation at all—it is meeting the violence of the slumlord, a violence aimed directly at the face of children. “Black mold, / Black lung, / Black child,” ELUCID chants, delineating the equation. He receives “no callback” and his fury rises. An international call culminating in a rat’s nest of cords and wires—a switchboard in a landfill.

“Abuse of power comes as no surprise” isn’t just a Jenny Holzer holdover, it’s ELUCID seeing and stating that which has become so tiresomely obvious. We would have to delude ourselves to see something other than what stands before us. “I am not a prophet claiming revelation, or that my abyss reaches heaven,” Darwish writes in “Mural” (2003), “By the full power of my language I am the stranger.” We’re no stranger to oppressive language, language that oppresses. On October 9, 2023, Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” A year later, nearly to the day, ELUCID tells a truth to counter that lie: My landlord is a Zionist.

27. FRESH AS FUCK ON STOLEN LAND

With his home in disrepair, ELUCID looks elsewhere to ease the tension of his rent-strife. “IN THE SHADOW OF IF” documents a search for refuge. He seeks to construct alternate realities and “alt timelines” where he’s making “[his] own breaking news” and “Lucy shit[s] diamonds” instead of habitating the sky with them, her kaleidoscope eyes gouged out. But you would need kaleidoscopic vision, of sorts, to manifest such a place. Though ELUCID has copped to “nam[ing] a thing or two into reality” on “SKP,” “IN THE SHADOW OF IF” postulates an added if—if he wasn’t “born in the year of this country’s last recorded lynching,” maybe he’d be better off. But as he says on “Microdose,” the question—and the reality—is “who stopped recording?”

Fleeing the city, ELUCID heads upstate and beyond—somewhere coastal that he can walk “barefoot in the sand.” We discover him “stepping over dead fish in a bucket hat.” This is the downbeat of deep ecology. “Salt and sulfur,” he raps, and he “can’t tell where the wind blows.” Gusts die down and Hell reemerges (as if it ever left) | guts tighten. “I’m on that Black leisure for the increase,” he says, calling in a reservation at The Black Dog while reclined on his beachchair on Martha’s Vineyard’s Inkwell. ELUCID uses his ink well. But this all seems a reverie, an abstraction, as he challenges us to “pick a coordinate / [And] show [him] where localized perceived violence didn’t come with receipts, / White sheets.” Klan presence pervades any and all vacay getaways. You might not see the hoods and horses up north, but you will see “too many flags—one too many flags.” He’s not gonna front, “seeing all those flags outside the city make[s] [him] nervous.” These are ELUCID’s dead flag blues. They represent “physically violent reminders.” Natasha Tretheway writes that flags “inscribe both a figurative and literal white supremacy onto the physical landscape and the psyche landscape of the American imagination.” Go back to “The Blackout” (1998) where Jadakiss warned that those “rednecks up in the mountains’ll try to slay you.” ELUCID ends up feeling like he’s “been cursed to concrete,” cordoned off by external forces, told to stay in the city, which makes him wonder how he’ll keep from going under.

“The devil is a lie,” he exclaims, realizing “we are the ecology.” The mob made the devilry, manufactured it out of gurgling hate, and unfortunately “a moment to pause never goes on sale,” so peace can’t be purchased. ELUCID told us he was a “green book reader” on Armand Hammer’s “Stole,” navigating the netherworld of where no Black man, woman, or child is welcome. Time is warped; he angles through a simultaneity of oppressive timelines—“twenty years behind and ahead.” The “Black futures” he sought to build on “Stole” start to feel unattainable. Instead, he finds himself gripping “black steel in the hour of submission in search of a place to land… / …in search of a place where our blood don’t precede us.” Fact is, they built it on Indian graves. The land is composed of blood-soaked soil—runaway slaves torn to shreds, lynchings, and extrajudicial killings. On the original “Black Steel,” Chuck says, “Here is a land that never gave a damn.” ELUCID wants “purple rain” and “wild greens,” a lush and fertile vista where’ing the flowers grow and the price of avocados is free. “Search[ing] for a place to land”—forty acres won’t do. Can a reparations calculator really tell the cost of dispossession and plunder?

28. WHO’S THE SUN SEEKING?

Xoloitzcuintli guides ELUCID into Hell, but ELUCID guides us out of Hell, penning a travelogue in miniature—traffic patterns and images of languid BK denizens. Virgil-level guidework, as Mos Def once said, “from the tree-lined blocks to the tenements,” so you don’t get vicked. On “No Grand Agenda,” ELUCID spoke of his “daydream on city buses, / Brooklyn pushing [his] button,” and on “XOLO,” we appear to receive the full panorama once the sound of sulfuric screeches and barking dogs in the distance fades:

Staring at the sun— a corner florist fell asleep with his mouth open on St Felix, downhill on Dekalb, Green light succession, Stop-and-go, rubbernecking, Swerve, change directions, Head in a smoke cloud…

He squints through the sunlight so that “he won’t burn” his retinas. Not to worry—he comes protected. REVELATOR’s cover image (photograph’d courtesy of A. Richter) shows ELUCID in shades. We can map the antecedents—be it Miles Davis’s shield sunglasses, Porsche 5620s with the frame screws (precursor to Kool Moe Dee’s steez); be it Sun Ra’s Courrèges Eskimo slit glasses that he rocked on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1969; be it Afrika Bambaataa’s future-geometry set of shades. ELUCID’s might as well be a Makrolon face-shield, as he’s protected from the welder’s flash of Hell’s ultraviolet flames. On “CCTV,” he fends off the “sunshine and teargas,” the “flash bang” of dispersal orders, the anti-crowd dog’s growl and howl, the Brooklyn confetti of uprising. He does so just as the Irish travailed through the Troubles, as depicted with punkish punctuation in Ciaran Carson’s “Belfast Confetti” (1989)—with shrapnel (the titular “confetti”) in motion like movable type. ELUCID’s text goes explosive in the same ways as Carson’s: “Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, / Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type.” ELUCID’s sunglasses allow him to “see now”—all the “details” with “color-cut clarity.”

Elevating out of Hell requires him to forge his own way, an avenue that becomes familiar: “I’m acclimated, black upon a path, / I made it outta clay.” Rakim crafted in the same Creator-cum-MC way on “Follow the Leader”: “Planets as small as balls of clay.” Get the fuck back, ELUCID orders, Stay the fuck down. Run for your life; duck down—his alarum’s a Rude Awakening. When ELUCID summons N.O.R.E.’s “theoretical niggas on the run eating,” the tempo starts to increase, steadily. Fire kindles and ELUCID says what we already feel: “The house is burning here…yeaaaah.”

In William Melvin Kelly’s A Different Drummer (1962), Tucker Caliban is a slave descendant who, after serving the Willson family for generations, has had enough. He shoots dead his livestock, salts his land, and sets his house aflame in an act of defiance. The Lasso’s tempo-shift tracks with Kelly’s description of the inferno:

Orange flame climbed the white curtains in the center section of the house, moved on slowly to the other windows like someone inspecting the house to buy it, burst through the roof with the sound of paper tearing, and lit the faces of the men, the sides of the wagons, and the faces of the Negroes…. Sparks curled up and then died, dissolving against dark blue sky…. [T]he rubble of the destroyed home looked like a huge city seen at night from a great distance.

Tucker’s family leaves the town of Sutton and the other Black residents soon follow, baffling the white residents who watch the procession of “suitcases or empty-hand[s]” headed for the state border. As a crowd watches Tucker blast bullets into his horse and cow, witnessing the “sticky blood r[u]n down” their fur,” as they watch him ax “the twisted tree” on the Willson Plantation, “on which his great-grandfather and grandfather had been slaves and then workers,” they think he’s gone mad. Enlightened Harry Leland refutes this, though. “It’s his land. He can do anything he wants to it,” he tells his young son.

29. P.L.O. STYLE

You may burn my poems and books You may feed your dog on my flesh…

—Samih al-Qasim, “Enemy of the Sun” (1968)

ELUCID dropped a zim zala bim on Armand Hammer’s “Solarium,” but—in recognition that magic can’t be the only survival method—he now promotes a zigzagzig. DJ Haram provides the sound design—a metallic gnashing, a chittering of rebar stakes, and a bass that throbs, muted and distorted, like eustachian tubes swollen from proximity explosions. On “Old Magic,” ELUCID offered a “double portion of protection,” but even charms and conjurings aren’t always enough. Under “war clouds” and a “cruel sky,” his “niggas survive like a moving target.” Zig. Zag. Zig. With the Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding of the last letter in the Supreme Alphabet—the zed, the end. Another bend of the body—an Orphic bend toward protest. The thousands upon thousands of Gazan orphans crying out to be heard.

For years, dead prez’s M-1 has argued that the struggle for Black liberation and the struggle for Palestinian liberation were “the same struggle.” “We have always been an international cadre,” he has said, “We have to see ourselves as a movement without borders.” Teknology allows deaths far and wide to be televised, rewound, reproduced on a “watch again” | replay | “share” exploitation loop. “I didn’t watch the video,” ELUCID says—and who can say which video? We wade through yottabytes of video footage like tonnes of debris. The video could be of grieving mothers in Khan Younis carrying the corpses of children, or it could be of Philando Castile bleeding out in the passenger seat of his Oldsmobile 88. ELUCID willed himself to not watch the video—to not tune into the Black death | Palestinian death broadcast—because he already “remembered in [his] body,” in his bones in which the trauma sings, in the code genetically imprinted.

The specter of Palestine pervades REVELATOR. Listeners are more likely to scan ELUCID as “abstract rap” than “conscious rap” or “political rap,” but that’s only because ELUCID’s art is so innately revolutionary and activist, lacking the sharp edges and defined features of more contrived artists. The abstraction is that the unacclimated will perceive ELUCID as a mystic on the mic rather than a rebel. He can be both; he can defy categorization; he can perform more powerfully than any single genre tag or pigeonhole could signal.

The history of solidarity reaches back to the 1970s with communiqués shared between the Black Panther Party and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (Method Man’s P.L.O. Style would never…). Kwame Ture (née Stokely Carmichael) dreamt of “having coffee with [his] wife in South Africa” and “having mint tea in Palestine.” Liberatory lucid dreaming. We collectively hope—and work—for better futures, for the dogs of Abu Ghraib and the hounds of the Great Dismal Swamp pace the same Hell. “I shall not compromise,” Samih al-Qasim writes, “And to the last pulse in my veins / I shall resist.” al-Qasim’s poems were discovered in George Jackson’s San Quentin cell after his death. “Enemy of the Sun” would even be misattributed to Jackson because he had transcribed the poem by hand.

ELUCID finds the energy, the caloric boost, in “locust and wild honey”—embracing this ascetic appetite of John the Baptist. He changes out his alpenflage cargo pants for a camel’s hair robe and leather belt about his waist (getting down with the animal pelts). He shelters in a “deeper shade of carnage,” turned from a whiter shade of pale, and “stare[s] into the fire,” scrying, divining answers from the glowing embers. On “14.4,” he said he “live[s] between two mirrors,” spitting catoptromancy raps wearing the “bulletproof Girbaud” from “YOTTABYTE,” backpocket containing a bulletproof wallet. Layers of protection. It’s the only way to “fix up sharp,” as he says on “IKEBANA” with dizzee rascality. Dressed to impress, he’s a “stiff-lip maroon.” In Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (1973), we learn that “in Surinam, as in Haiti, Jamaica, and elsewhere, warriors underwent complex rites and wore amulets intended to make them bulletproof…. [I]t was their gods and obeahs that spelled the ultimate difference between victory and defeat.” You already know ELUCID’s been spellling. And because the world always has been and continues to be dog, Cujo, Stephen King’s rabid St. Bernard, can be traced to Cudjoe, the Jamaican maroon leader. “A fearless rebel [who] boasted numerous bloody victories against the British,” Boisseron writes.

When ELUCID sees the “heads of state laughing” on “ZIGZAGZIG,” he knows they’re “liars” and that “hate has a logic.” They laugh “an idiot’s unbearable laughter,” to quote Rimbaud, still sweating through his Hell szn. But so are we all, grappling with the fact that “there’s no conscience, no authority.” ELUCID “live[s] to tell the story, / …to sing the song”—witness to atrocities, articulator of awfulness. When he can, he hammers out a warning. But he’s always on alert for imminent attacks which strike “without a warning.” Despite our teknological advances, we’re still a primitive society—our world still reduces to rubble, routinely. MPR500 precision-guided missiles fall from the sky and a Palestinian child stashes snacks in an abandoned IDF ammunition box. We search for survivors by hand—“Stony ground, metal poke out rubble, / Body twist angles akimbo, / Covered heads huddled”—hoping and praying for signs of life—head aching like rebar through skull, an inglorious Phineas Gage.

On “Revelation Narrative” from Horse Latitude (2017), we hear the voice of a young child calling out: I want mama. How prescient. But the past tells the present, the future. 1948 | 1967 | 1987 | 2000 | 2008 | 2023 | & every increment in-between. ELUCID calls “from river to sea in lieu of peace, absence of truth.” He finds the gutless heads of state “guilty as charged.” They’re “monster[s] out the darkest abyss,” and—like dogs, like hellhounds—they exhibit a “gnashing of teeth.”

The death toll tolls for thee. John Donne felt the weight of every dun: “Each man’s death diminishes me, / For I am involved in mankind.” ELUCID makes the same pitch, even to those deaf to reason. His mathematics don’t need to be supreme; the most basic arithmetic tells a truth:

Who can still ignore the score? One more—to what end? Man-made horror beyond comprehension.

30. I WOULDN’T TRUST IT IF THE POET DOUBT

After Revelation come a Genesis…

—Small Bills, “Falling Up” (2020)

No variety of literary originality is still possible unless we torture, unless we pulverize langage.

—E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (1973)

ELUCID pulverizes language. The lyrics on REVELATOR read like Bible page cut-ups, like Gysin and Burroughs put the scissors to ’em, like garbled Ghostface transcriptions. Narrative gets negated—not to confound, but to complicate communication. In doing so, ELUCID mirrors our shattered contemporary speech patterns, only it's art not the garbage glibness that the Geto Boys apprised us of in ’89—talkin’ loud but ain’t saying nothing. His Orphic bend and cadence flexing leave us levitating, lost in what Rimbaud calls a “hallucination of words.” More from Rimbaud:

I regulated the shape and movement of every consonant, and, based on an inner scansion, flattered myself with the belief I had invented a poetic language, that, one day or another, would be understood by everyone, and that I alone would translate…. Worn-out poetical fashions played a healthy part in my alchemy of the word.

On “VOICE 2 SKULL,” ELUCID cops to “complicating noun combinations over drumbreaks.” He felt the existing “language insufficient—chess pieces to the checkerboard.” His new language includes words for the living and “words for the departed” (“ZIGZAGZIG”), as if a seraph touched a burning coal to his lips. His diction ushers in cosmic agonies. His voice is “the strange instrument of death,” loaned from the conjure-man Frimbo. Listening to REVELATOR, I see the colors, geometry, and nonlinear wanderings of Wadada Leo Smith’s scoring of improvisation, his Ankhrasmation language articulated into words.

31.

In 1965, Amiri Baraka ended his liner notes to The New Wave in Jazz on this hushed note: “New Black Music is this: find the self and kill it.” Nathaniel Mackey has interpreted Baraka’s statement in the following way:

...in the course of improvising and getting to the point where you can play free music, you have to find yourself. You have to find out what your sound is. It may be something innate, but you have to practice and find what it is, where it is, and how to get it out, and how to translate it through a horn or a piano or a bass—whatever—which you likely call “technology.” How do you technologize yourself? How do you utilize that technology to render something that may be unspeakable, or there before not spoken—and maybe unrenderable? How do you get out a version that at least approximates that self and, at the same time, registers your refusal to be satisfied that you have properly and authoritatively, or with some finality, articulated that self?... In some ways, you have to be prepared to lose that self, or even to be an instrument of losing it, which is to say, to be killing it.

By this measure, ELUCID has found out what his sound is. On REVELATOR, he’s getting it out, violently. He’s translating it through his trauma mic—that is his chosen teknology. He has killed the self, and—to speak in the terminology of today—he keeps killing it.

“This ELUCID for whoever’s asking,” he once said on Armand Hammer’s “Resin,” and he’s forever been “staring at the sun” (“XOLO”). Often overlooked is the irony (or anti-irony, depending) of the MC’s name. Elucidate—to “throw light upon,” to “render intelligible,” perspicuity for the patron saints of post-rap. These ideas are at odds: How can he complicate and clarify? Make the equation make sense [ELUCID = light = “sun”]. “[W]e know that every apocalyptic eschatology is promised in the name of light, of seeing and vision,” Derrida writes, “and of a light of light, of a light brighter than all the lights it makes possible.” John the Revelator’s apocalypse is “lit by the light of El, of Elohim,” he adds. [T]he glory of Elohim illuminates it [21:23]. It’s as if ELUCID is “applauded by sunrays,” as Saul Williams says on “Elohim (1972).” Gnaw on this while you head-nod:

...what imposes itself as the enigmatic desire for vigilance, for the lucid vigil, for elucidation, for critique and truth, but for a truth that at the same time keeps within itself some apocalyptic desire, this time as desire for clarity and revelation, in order to demystify or, if you prefer, to deconstruct apocalyptic discourse itself…

ELUCID takes on the apocalyptic tone, and whoever takes on the apocalyptic tone comes to signify to, if not tell, you something. What? The truth, of course, and to signify to you that it reveals the truth to you.

Images:

A close-up of “the Envious,” Anonymous, The Last Judgment, (ca. 12th century), Gold and glass mosaic, Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello | A hand-colored woodcut of a 19th-century illustration shows an escaped slave trying to elude slave hunters and their dog. (North Wind Picture Archives/AP) | Gilbert Shelton, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Unknown issue (detail) | Bill Hudson, “Parker High School student Walter Gadsden being attacked by dogs in Birmingham, Alabama,” The New York Times (May 4, 1963) | McGruff the Crime Dog PSA, “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” 1984 (screenshot) | Robert Cohen, “Ferguson police officers during a protest in August 2014” (Associated Press) | DMX, “Get At Me Dog” music video, dir. Hype Williams, 1998 (screenshot) | Tadayuki Naitoh, “Miles Davis” (1971) | Jacob Riis, “The Trench in Potter’s Field on Hart Island, New York,” (ca. 1890) | Barry Williams / Getty Images, “Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD officers look at a robotic device from Boston Dynamics” (2023) | The Wire theme song, dir. David Simon, 2002 (screenshot) | Dread Broadcasting Corporation flyer (ca. 1981-83) | Unknown photograph of computer desk (c. 1999) | Stephen King, Cujo, first edition cover, 1981 (detail) | Joan E. Biren, “Portrait of writer Audre Lorde at work at her desk, surrounded by papers, books, and posters” (1981) | Image of ham radio (Lehigh Special Collections) | Self-portrait of Arthur Rimbaud in Harar, Ethiopia (1883) | Scaramanga, Seven Eyes, Seven Horns, interior cover art, Sun Large Music (1998) | Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-man Dies, first edition, Covici-Friede Publishers (1932) | Illustration in Abel C. Thomas’s Gospel of Slavery, 1864 (detail) | Gordon Nye, “New York City Rent Strike” in the Yiddish newspaper Di Varhayt (1907) | Afrika Bambaataa (unknown) | Sun Ra, photograph for Rolling Stone (1969) | REVELATOR album cover, Alexander Richter (2024) | Richard Ansdell, “The Hunted Slaves” (1862) | “Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton outside an unnamed Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon,” Unknown photographer (1980) | Wadada Leo Smith, “Kosmic Music” (2008) | A close-up of “the Envious,” Anonymous, The Last Judgment, (ca. 12th century), Gold and glass mosaic, Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello

#underground hip hop #backwoodz studioz #billy woods #armand hammer #elucid #revelator #fatpossum

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yall-batman-fanfic · 2 days ago

Text

Dreams and Reality | Bruce Wayne/Batman x Reader!Magician ft Justice League Dark [Part 2/3]

Synopsis: Secrets are out about Vivian's biological father and about her mother, and with these secrets an old and vengeful enemy of Madeline comes from Hell to kill Vivian, and the only way to stop all of this to answer the summons of the Endless.

~ Many Days Ago ~

It was rare to have all of the Endless come together. The last they all spoke was after the disappearance of the Prodigal, and with his absence his realm was closed off. Appearing in the venue, Dream found many of his siblings already in attendance: Destiny wearing his cloak, sat in silence at his seat; Despair with her hook carving her face as she fidgeted beside her twin, Desire who looked at Dream with a mocking glint in their eyes.

“Dream, you're late,” said Desire.

“You're early, sibling,” Dream greeted Desire, surprised by their punctuality. “Despair,” he greeted his sister, Desire's twin. Then he turned to Destiny who he nodded at as a greeting. “Where are the others?”

“Late, same as you,” said Desire.

As soon as they spoke, another of the Endless appeared. This time it was a stout woman, colorful in dress and the pain on her face.

“Delirium,” Dream greeted.

“Hi, Dream!” Delirium greeted and skipped to her seat. The former representation of Delight swung her legs to and fro as they all waited for the last one to appear. That is if Destruction was to return.

Minutes passed, silence remained in the room of Endless, and finally the last of their siblings appeared.

“Sorry, I'm late. A lot of souls today,” said Death as she took her seat beside Dream, leaving the empty seat at her other side where Destruction would be seated.

“What is this call for, brother?” Dream asked Destiny.

Destiny turned to him. “I believe you would know by now, Dream.”

Dream's brows furrowed in confusion.

Destiny opened his book and read aloud a passage. Rather, an event that has occured. The return of the Phoenix after Vivian Pryor was used as a means to summon Mammon. The woman died in the process of the summoning and was brought back to life by John Constantine by unbinding the Phoenix and using its power to revive Pryor, then established a door which she can access the Phoenix's power with her control.

“Old news,” said Desire. “Everyone has felt the return of the Phoenix. And I have warned our dear brother of it.”

But that was not what Destiny was concerned of. “The Phoenix's return was destined. But unlike the other the others whose destinies are told. The Phoenix and its host Vivian Pryor has rarely been mentioned in here.”

“And this is concerning because…” Delirium began.

“Because that is the Book of Destiny, the omniverse. All is written there. Past, present, future,” stated Desire.

“Our sibling is correct. All is recorded in the Book but for Vivian Pryor but for a handful of times whenever she interacts with someone around her. But Vivian Pryor alone is not. Just like her mother, Madeline.”

“The matter of the Pryors has been addressed long ago,” Dream mentioned. “Much like the Vortex becomes the center of the Dreaming, the Pryors are unknown who simply walk amongst the mortals —”

“To cause chaos,” Despair added.

Dream glared at his sibling. “ — to bring free will. Not all can be written in the Book of Destiny.”

“But that is the point, Dream,” Desire mused. “The Book of Destiny knows all, and it seems this Pryor has been causing some trouble for our dear brother. You do not seem concerned about this matter, brother,” a knowing smirk came to Desire's lips.

“Because the Pryor woman does not show any form of threat.”

“Yet she holds the Phoenix.”

This time it was Destiny who spoke. “Before we brushed the matter of the Pryors, but with the Phoenix finding its host with Vivian Pryor, we cannot ignore the threat she possessed.”

Dream stood from his seat. “Vivian Pryor has done nothing to disrupt the balance –”

“Yet,” said Desire. “Vivian Pryor has done nothing yet. But shall we recall the night of Mammon's return? She destroyed the demon – wiping it from existence. If she has that kind of power, who knows what else she may do.”

“Dream,” Death warned him as she saw her brother glaring at Desire.

“Tell us, Dream, why do you defend Vivian Pryor so? I expected you to be the first to act upon the next counter measure.”

“She is an innocent, a mortal-innocent.”

“Her mother was immortal, I believe.”

“By artificial means, Madeline Pryor surrendered her immortality long ago and has passed.”

“She is far from innocent, brother,” Desire rolled their eyes. “Her works with Constantine proves it so, and we all know Constantine's reputation – a man to never enter Hell nor Heaven upon Death – tell me, sister, what happens to a soul when they are unable to enter any plain?” Desire turned to Death.

“Vivian Pryor is not John Constantine.”

“You seem adamant in protecting this child, brother,” Despair added.

“Yes, he has been,” Desire grinned mischievously.

“Enough,” Destiny spoke. “That is enough. We shall deal with the matter of the Pryor woman as does Dream with the Vortex.” When he saw Dream about to protest, he added, “I admire your love for every individual human, brother, but the Phoenix is too powerful to be left in the hands of an anomaly. It is for the best.”

“Dream,” Death whispered, urging him to speak.

“You cannot!” Dream spoke up. “If you do so… you will be spilling the blood of family,” he revealed, making Desire’s grin grow and Destiny and Delirium look at him in shock. “And you will loose the protection as an Endless, brother.”

Weakening him.

Destiny glowered at Dream, “What have you done, brother?”

“He has acted on his impulses,” Desire teased.

“And Madeline Pryor has suffered the consequences of it. By my actions and the actions of one of my creations.”

The Corrinthian.

“How long have you all known?” Destiny turned to his other siblings.

Delirium shrugged but Despair, Desire, and Death remained silent.

“As we cannot dispose of the host,” Destiny sat back. “The only way is to contain her.”

“Contain her?” Death said. “You do not mean…”

“The only option.”

“I shall find her myself,” said Dream.

“You mean you don’t know where she is?” asked Delirium. “How? Can't you just find her in her sleep?”

“He can't,” Desire laughed. “Because his lover placed a spell that he can never find her and their child. Oh, what a mess you have made, Dream. I can find her, brother. Leave it to me.”

Destiny looked at Dream and then at Desire and said, “I want Vivian Pryor brought to us all so we may decide our next course of action.”

With that the meeting has ended and Destiny has returned to his realm.

“What will you do, sibling?” Dream questioned Desire.

“My duty, Dream,” Desire shrugged. “But I’m a little giving today, so I'll let you have a headstart in finding your daughter.”

The word daughter made the others present flinch. It was one of their sacred and only laws. To not involve themselves with mortals else that mortal will meet a cruel end.

“Thirty-six hours would suffice, I believe. Then I shall make my move.” Desire then left, bringing with them Despair, leaving Dream with Death and Delirium.

“What are you going to do, Dream?” Delirium asked him.

“I need your help, sister.”

Death nodded once and left for her realm.

~ Now ~

Vivian looked at the man – no, at the Endless for a moment taking in the sight of him. This wasn’t the image she had of the father who was never there. In fact, the image she had of her biological father was a mortal bum who one day went to the convenience store to buy cigarettes and never came back. An asshole who broke her mother’s heart. Not an anthropomorphic being that represents the fundamental aspects of existence – the personifications of universal concepts that all creatures in the universe experience!

No. This was wrong —

He can’t be—

"Huh," Jason spoke. "Ma's Daddy Issues now make a lot of sense." When the other Robins, Alfred, and Bruce turned to him with a look of disbelief and a glare he said, "What?"

Vivian finally found her voice but it was fleeting, "I-I need to -- Bruce, I need to-"

Bruce was fast on his feet but despite being beside her it was Dream who caught Vivian and carried her protectively. His actions had her sons and Cassandra ready to attack but then they saw how the Endless held their mother in such care as if she were a fragile flower.

"She'll be awake in a moment. For now, her quarters?" Said Dream.

"I'll take her," said Bruce, but then he saw Dream's hold tighten on Vivian. This must be the first time he held her. Bruce glared at him and was forced to say, "Come with me."

~*~

Batman watched as Dream placed a still-unconscious Vivian on their bed. The Endless, took his time as he tucked in the woman with the comforter, and brushed away strands of her auburn hair. It was a scene of a father saying goodnight to a daughter.

“I was there when she was born,” said Dream as he caressed Vivian’s red hair. “I held her in my arms, the tiny thing crying so loudly, she would have woken the gods, and when she slept she dreamt of the sanctuary of her mother’s womb and the song Madeline would sing to her while carrying her. That was the only time I held her before Madeline Pryor made it her mission to keep me from finding her.”

“Why?” Bruce stood close to them. He wasn’t comfortable that a stranger was so close to his wife when she was this vulnerable.

“Because she holds the Phoenix. It was safer for her to be at my side. Her place was by my side in the Dreaming. “

Dream got up from the bed, but before he left, he looked at the troubled face of his child and wished her sweet dreams before leaving. “It saddened me to not be there for her as I was with my previous children. Madeline Pryor was a talented witch, she was able to hide herself from me and kept herself and Vivian from the Dreaming. For forty years, my daughter never knew what it is to dream — all she had are memories to fill her nights or nightmares to haunt her.”

Bruce kept silent as the Endless spoke, that is until they entered the empty sitting room where a mantle of family portraits were placed. Photos from their early years of dating, to having Dick in their lives, then Jason, Tim, Damian, Steph, Cass, Barbara, Duke. Then one stood out the most from the mantle of photos.

The photo that caught the Endless’ eye was of Bruce and Vivian's wedding. It was taken right after they were told to kiss, both smiling from ear to ear, faces still close, and their arms wrapped around to hold each other. Bruce wore a blue tux then, which Alfred mentioned made him look like a spitting image of his father; and Vivian wore a beautiful, lace-sleeve wedding dress with a flowing skirt. Her auburn hair was placed in a coiffure that was held together by flower and pearl pins. A stunning sight she was. Bruce kept a copy of that photo with him in his office, and whenever he saw it he would be reminded of the happiest moment of his life.

But for the Endless, seeing the photo brought conflict between happiness and sadness in him.

“I was not there on her wedding day, how can I? Madeline made sure I could not find her. But one of my siblings was. My sister told me so I may dream how she looked like and be the one to give her away.”

“Adam is her step-father,” Bruce pointed out, quite harshly. “He more than deserves to walk her down the aisle that day.”

Dream turned to him and met the man's glare. “Still, even an Endless has such… desires. I am sure you are wondering why I need Vivian's help.”

“The sooner we deal with this, the sooner we can decide what the whole arrangement will be.”

“What arrangements?”

Bruce called for everyone in the comms to come to the sitting room. He has ordered them to suit up and prepare, and to bring Constantine with them.

“I was lucky enough to get along with my in-laws, but I guess you'll be the one that's going to drive me insane.”

~*~

Vivian woke to the call of her name. The voice sounded familiar, ominous and sinister at the same time. Getting up, the first thing she saw was Ace and Echo jumping in the bed. The former nudged his nose at her cheek, while Echo meowed and licked her chin.

“Ace, Echo,” She petted the large dog and cat. “Thanks, I needed to wake up.”

“Vivian, you're awake,” Duke entered the room, all dressed in his Signal uniform but for his helmet.

“Hi, buddy,” she croaked.

“Here, some water and scotch – Alfred was the one who told me to get you this when you wake up,” he handed her the glass and glass of scotch.

“Ha! Just what I need to wake me out of this nightmare,” Vivian drank the scotch. “Where is everyone?”

“In the sitting room.”

“Constantine?”

“Alive.”

“The…”

“The scary man in black who is not your husband? He's there too.”

Vivian smiled and had him help her up. Waving her hand, her clothing changed from the holiday jumper she and Dick wore earlier for shopping to the clothes she wore on a regular basis when she started consulting for the Justice League under Justice League Dark more often than before. It was a simple attire with a white button blouse, black trousers, a pair of boots, and to top it all off was her signature maroon coat which fans every time she moves, giving a glimpse of the black lining inside which is printed with elaborate runes that creates multiple spells for her arsenal – a protection spell, summoning spell for familiars, and so much more.

Taking the sharp hair stick from the pocket to put up her hair, she called for Duke so they could see all of them downstairs. Arriving at the sitting room, the first to see her was Cassandra who ran from her seat beside Stephanie and tackled her to an embrace, following her was Damian who asked her if she was alright.

“I'm fine,” she reassured them.

“Vee,” John greeted her with a nod. “Good to see you're dressed for work. I guess all said earlier was forgiven.”

“Fuck you, John,” Vivian snapped at him.

“I guess not – in my defense, I needed you to pop off without me giving a lengthy lecture. And it worked,” he shrugged.

“Vivian,” Bruce approached her. Damian and Cassandra released her from the embrace and Bruce took their place as he reached to touch her cheek. “How are you, my love?”

Vivian leaned into his touch and sighed. “I just wanted a peaceful holiday, is that too much to ask?”

“I know. We'll find out what he wants then hopefully we can still set things back on track.”

“Yes, because we can go back to how things were after meeting my father who I thought was just a bum who went to buy cigarettes at the store and never came back…” she looked over at Dream who sat there watching her. “I have no idea how to feel about this.”

“Neither do I,” he leaned down and placed a kiss on her cheek. “But we'll deal with it together.”

“I don't think smoke bombs work on the Endless,” she teased him as she left his hold and went to face the Endless who stood from the seat of his little throne. It was Bruce's favorite seat in the room. “Okay,” she took a breath. “What is this about?”

“Oh, straight to the point?” John spoke. “You don't want to get to know each other first?”

Before Dream could answer Vivian said, “If it took him forty years to ask someone for help to look for me, it means Lord Morpheus needs something. The gods tend to only reach out to their children if they need something.”

“Do not think I did not try to look for you. Rebuilding the Dreaming would have been easier if you were within my reach,” Dream got up from his seat. “If I could, I would have gone through worlds to look for you and offer aid, but I had responsibilities and duties to my realm, my people, and to humanity.”

“It doesn't matter,” Vivian muttered. “Well, what's the ask?”

“Right,” John moved a step from the possible crossfire between the two Endless. “You're being summoned, Viv, to appear before the Endless.”

“What do you mean?”

“There has been an anomaly with the Book of Destiny with Pryor women,” spoke Dream. “The Book of Destiny is a tool of my brother which records all events – past, present, and future. But for one line. The Pryor women.”

“Why?”

Dream shrugged. “We can never understand, it is an anomaly that we have decided to accept as part of the mysteries of the cosmos. For centuries we have until now. You are the host of the Phoenix, Vivian. An anomaly such as yourself is too dangerous to have a force that can destroy all existence.”

“If that's the case, why wait this long? Why not summon for me when I was a kid?”

“Because of your rebirth. The return of the Phoenix and your war against Mammon has shaken all words. For eons, the Phoenix has not used its power in such a matter until that night, and the many times before you have used its power. The Endless do not trust you with its power. That is why you are being summoned.”

“Is this some sort of magical hearing?”

“I don't buy that they just want to have a chat,” Bruce spoke up, glaring at Dream. “If I knew about something like this, I would contain it until I find answers. So, tell us, what is this summoning about?”

“Well?” Vivian questioned Dream.

With a guilty look Dream tried to dodge the question with, “I can make a case – speak with my siblings to show that you are not a threat.”

Jason scoffed and came between Dream and Vivian, hiding his brother from the Endless. “Yeah, that's what everyone else says. You and your siblings are not getting her.”

“Jason,” Vivian told him to stand down.

“They're not taking you, Ma,” Jason held her wrist.

“I agree with Todd,” Damian said.

“Mom stays with us,” Cassandra took Vivian's hand.

“Resist this summoning and it will only end worse for you,” said Dream. “It is best you come with me now before they come.”

“Whose coming?” Vivian questioned.

“Oi, you never mentioned anything about another party heading over,” said John.

“I do not know, but one of my siblings will have done something to hunt you down,” said Dream.

The lights of the manor started to flicker and chill ran through Vivian and John's spines. The sudden eerie feeling had everyone rising from their seats and into their fighting stance. Alfred took the shotgun that was on display and cocked the thing, and to add for his protection, he took out the cross that was blessed from the Vatican. While Vivian appreciated the Robins’ attempt to protect her, she got out of their protective circle and kept them all behind her with Bruce standing at her side. This was something they cannot simply punch.

This was something beyond their capabilities at this time, and as much as they hated to admit it, only she can protect them now. Her and John.

“Sulfur,” John said.

Vivian took a whiff and agreed, “Someone's coming out of the pits.”

“We need to leave now,” said Dream.

“I'm not leaving my family with this haunting our home,” Vivian told him off.

Pryor… voices whispered in the wind.

“Uh, Viv, you might wanna see this,” Barbara called as she looked out the window.

Coming to Batgirl's side, Vivian ushered Barbara from there and checked. Nine figures stood not far from the Manor, all donning black robes that covered them from head to toe.

“How come the alarm system didn't sound?” said Duke.

“Because they're not there,” said Batman as watched the nine figures standing there and slowly taking their first step towards them. “They're ghosts.”

“Wraith-Witches,” said Vivian and pushed her husband from the window before starting a spell to keep the unwanted out of their home.

“They're Sinner's Nine,” Dream told her.

“You're joking, right?” Vivian said to Dream.

“Who?” asked John.

“In 17th century Gotham, there was a witch named Gisella Sinner. She had nine daughters and was married to a man. She hid her identity as a witch until a jealous woman spread lies that she was a witch. Gisella and her daughters were killed in the streets, bodies torn limb from limb and burned. There's a legend that the daughters of Gisella Sinner would come back to take revenge on the woman who spread the slander.”

“A lie,” said Dream.

“What?”

“It is true that Gisella Sinner and her daughters were killed because they were accused of being witches, but only because it was Sinner who first told everyone that Madeline was a witch.”

“Madeline?” Batman asked.

But Vivian knew what Dream meant. “No,” she whispered.

“She never told you… I am sorry, Vivian,” Dream tried to reach out to her but Vivian moved away and started to create the enchantment to protect their home.

“It's too late, love,” said John. “Vengeful spirits will not be stopped by protection spells. The only way they will stop is if they get you and those who have traces of you.”

Her family.

“The only way is to get out of here. Lead them far from the Manor, from brats, and have them follow us.”

“How can I be sure they won't go after them when I leave?”

“We don't.”

“I can't leave them to chance, John,” she told him and Dream.

“We take them to Midnite. He can protect them. But first we need to get them away from this manor —”

Mist entered the manor through the fireplace. A window crashed as an arm broke through the seals and the glass. Damian was quick to act and swung his sword to take down the arm that thrashed around in search fo Vivian, but he forgot. This was a Wraith. It cannot be harmed by normal weapons.

Another hand broke the glass and this time it got Robin.

“Damian!” Vivian reached out her palm and pulled Damian from the wraith's hold and flying to her arms, almost sending them stumbling back if it weren't for Bruce catching them both. “We need to leave now!”

“We all can't fit in the Batmobile, some of us needs to take the bikes,” said Batman.

“Take Alfred and the others in the Batmobile, I'll try to shake them off. John, go with them and make sure Midnite lets them in!”

“I'm not letting you face all of them alone,” said Bruce.

“I'm sorry, but this time, you can't help me in this, Bruce,” Vivian placed a kiss on his lips before commanding the clock to open so all of them would go to the cave. Alfred beckoned the Robins to enter before he went in with Echo and Alfred the cat in his arms, and only when Ace and Titus crossed did he follow them.

“She won't be alone,” said Dream, reassuring Batman.

“I'll get them away from here. Go!” Vivian pushed him into the cave with John, using her magic to pin them back to the wall, and before Bruce could get out, she shut its doors and disabled the keypass to open.

“You need to come with me, now,” Dream told her.

“I told you, I'm not leaving them until they're safe,” Vivian sneered and with a wave of a hand she sent a wraith away but she can only do so much as they do not have physical forms. She needed to find a way to give them corporeal forms so she could do damage to them, but for now, she will not let the Sinner's Nine destroy her home.

“Expelho malum. Expelho malum. Expelho malum,” Vivian chanted and around the entire estate a seal burned brightly and made its mark on the grounds. The wraiths screeched in pain as the sacred flames started to burn them. Seals may not keep them from getting their revenge but it does not keep them from getting hurt.

When she heard the beeping of her phone, Bruce giving her a signal that everyone was on the move, Vivian made her escape. Crashing through the window, Vivian flew out of the manor, using her magic to get her to fly in the night sky. Behind her she saw the wraiths leaving the manor and following her, taking flight as well, and ahead she saw the lights of the Batmobile and the motorcycles of the others driving down the path heading to the city.

The screeching of the wraiths pulled her gaze from the fleeing vehicles and she saw one of Sinner's Nine above her about to shred her to pieces with their sharp claws. Vivian quickly dodged the wraith's attack only to be attacked from behind by another, scratching her across her back making Vivian grunt in pain, but she quickly grabbed the wraith, surprising the entity, and placed her hand on their face to blast her gold flames.

The wraith screamed in pain until it disappeared.

Vivian caught herself before she could crash to the ground and flew back in the night. She kept the wraith on her back, having them in an endless chase until she gets a signal that her family was safe.

More of the wraiths appeared and attacked Vivian – scratching her, blasting their magic, screeching at her ear until it bled. One of them was able to summon locusts which they used to blind Vivian, worked, and one of the wraiths summoned their familiar of snakes and had them strangle Vivian.

Falling, Vivian struggled to get the snakes off of her, to get the oxygen she needed to fuel her fire. Reaching to her hair, she pulled the bone-hairpin, with her free hand she grabbed the hissing snake and stabbed the creature with the hairstick at the head. Gasping for air, she burned the snake and all that came with it before using her flames to rocket her back to the sky.

The wraiths surrounded her in the sky.

“Listen,” Vivian panted. “I just found out my Mom was an immortal witch from the 17th century. How about a parley?”

“Sins of the mother,” sneered one of the wraiths.

Vivian sighed. “Figures.”

Before any of the wraiths could attack, Dream appeared before Vivian, hiding her from them. “I am Dream of the Endless, and I command you to cease this at once. Vivian Pryor is under my protection.”

“We do not serve you, Dream Lord,” said one of the wraiths.

“Good try,” Vivian mocked Dream and summoned a circle, trapping the wraiths inside.

“Suicide,” said the wraith, grinning.

Her phone rang. Good. They were in Midnite's club. Pulling up her sleeves, Vivian smeared her blood on her arms and chanted a summoning spell. Grabbing Lord Dream, she pulled him out of the way and from her coat a colony of bats burst out and attacked the wraiths. The wraiths were confused. How can these bats attack them? The circle! It gave them flesh and now they can feel the bites and scratches of these bats.

And when the last of the bats summoned from the cave came, Vivian opened a portal and dropped from the sky, then landing on the pavement harshly before a bookshop. Dream fell by her side and closed the portal before any of the wraiths could follow them.

“Vivian,” he helped her to her feet.

Getting up, Vivian limped towards the door of the shop and pushed it open.

“Ma!” Jason was the first to see her and ran to her aid. He was about to grab one of her arms when he saw the dripping blood. “She's injured.”

“We can see that, Hood,” said Tim. He and Midnite freed the table for Vivian to sit.

Batman came to Vivian's side and carried her, taking the woman from Dream's hold and placing her on the table where she insisted on sitting rather than lying down. It brought memories of the slab when Gabriel carved out Mammon from her body.

“You're not healing,” Bruce said.

“Get scratched by wraiths, even magic can't heal that easily. They're cursed,” said John.

“You know what to do, love. You gotta burn the curse.”

“Use that magic and you will be a beacon for them to come here and find you,” Dream spoke. “I thought you knew, that's why you didn't call forth the Phoenix.”

“I didn't call for it because I needed them to follow my scent. My magic, not the Phoenix's magic,” Vivian explained. “But I guess that would have helped me earlier and not be their scratching post. Ouch,” she hissed as Jason helped out of the coat.

“You're bleeding too much,” Batman observed as he checked every scratch on her body. “Midnite!”

“I'm here,” said the witch-doctor. “Make room – will you tell your Robins to wait in the other room? I cannot work in this little space! And Constantine, close the shop.”

“I don't work for you, mate,” said John.

“Do it,” Batman sneered.

“Fine.”

“Nightwing, take the others to the other room. Alfred, I need you here.”

The others were reluctant to leave, Damian tried to put up a fight but one look from Alfred and he was marching back.

Removing her shirt, Midnite saw the deep scars on her body and began brewing his potions. Alfred offered his help stitching the scratches which the witch-doctor accepted while he focused on removing the curse.

“What did you do to get them off your back?” Constantine asked.

“I sent the bats after them. But first I gave them flesh.”

“You bound them to the mortal plains, this means they are much stronger now,” said Midnite.

“I can deal with it.”

“Can you?”

“I thought you will keep her safe?” Batman questioned Dream.

Dream remained silent and watched as John, and Midnite removed the curses on her body while Alfred stitched her wounds. “I had no power against them.”

“Then what is your use?”

Dream glared at him. “The wraiths are of the Morningstar's realm, I do not command them.”

“Midnite,” Vivian began, forcing herself to focus on anything else than the pain. “My Mother.”

“What of her?” Midnite muttered as he had the potion drip over her open wound.

“How long have you known her?”

“A long time?”

“How long?”

Midnite turned to her and saw her glaring gaze. “Personally? We met seventy years ago. By reputation? Nearly four centuries. Your mother was a witch born during the early years of Gotham's settlement. she knew how to hide but she also had many enemies.”

“Like Sinner's Nine?” Vivian hissed in pain as Alfred began to stitch on the part where the wound was bigger.

“Apologies, Ms. Vivian,” Alfred muttered and continued on.

“Sinner was a witch who was jealous of your mother,” Midnite told her. “Gisella was an insecure woman who married because she fell pregnant with a man out of wedlock. They had many children but there was no satisfaction. She saw her husband speaking to Madeline frequently. Obviously he would, she was the village's Healer. Jealous, she caused illnesses in the village, which killed children, and blamed it on witchcraft and on Madeline's medicine.”

“How did she become immortal?”

“Some say she drank a demon's blood. Some say she slept with the devil,” Midnite’s gaze went to Dream where she spoke with Batman. Both arguing in hushed voices. “I guess it is not a devil she slept with.”

“Who knows, right now I feel like I don’t know my mother at all,” Vivian scoffed.

“She did what she thought was right to protect you, Vivian,” Midnite finished the last of her wounds and took a needle and thread to start stitching. “Madeline sought for a child for so long. She had many miscarriages, and then you came. She did everything she could to protect you, even if it meant giving away her magic and her immortality — have you ever wondered why Madeline stopped using her magic?”

“She said she didn't want to,” Vivian whispered as she remembered those nights when she would ask her mother why she never uses her magic any more, or see her looking into the mirror as she found a white strand of hair.

“A trade to protect her only daughter. The one she had with the Dream Lord,” Midnite finished with one of her open wounds and moved to the next.

“You knew and you didn't tell me.”

“A promise I made with Madeline. She wanted you to have a normal life. What does the Dream Lord want?”

It was John who answered. “She's being called by the Endless. They want to talk to her. Any suggestions, Midnite?”

The witch-doctor took a breath. “If you can destroy the Devil, the Endless should not be a problem.”

“Problem is, if one of them disappears, the whole world turns to shite,” said John. “Remember the Sleepy Sickness, mate? And that was just Dream. Imagine killing Death.”

“No one dies,” replied Midnite.

“Relieving to many.”

“But without death,” Alfred spoke. “There will be a state of decay that will never end. Overpopulation will come, viruses and bacteria will continue on living. Chaos will come.”

Vivian agreed.

“Kill Delirium and… what? The Joker ceases to exist?” John snorted.

“Sanity will also disappear, along with insanity. There will be nothing,” Vivian explained.

“Desire?”

“Then what will humanity live for?”

“Despair?”

“Balance to Desire.”

“Right, so no one can die,” John sighed.

“Yes.”

Finished with the stitches, Midnite offered Vivian new clothes which she accepted. She told him and Alfred that she'll just change behind those shelves and that they should break up whatever argument her husband was having with her biological father.

“Batma,” Alfred called the man.

Immediately, Bruce turned to Alfred then to where he last saw his wife, “Where's Vivian?”

“Changing,” said Midnite.

“How is she?” Dream asked.

“Pissed but back to normal,” John answered. “So, how's the in-law bonding going on?”

Batman wasn't amused, nor was Dream. “For this to end, Vivian must come with me to face my siblings and prove her case.”

“And if she is captured? We have no assurance that she will return, and we have no idea how to get to her if she were to face the other Endless.”

“Midnite, don't you have anything that has pants?” Vivian came out wearing a black dress with a hood lined with gold runes. “And I do not want to repeat myself, so I'll say this the last time, I am not leaving my family while those things are out there.”

“We do not have time,” Dream told her. “The more you resist these calls the worse it could end for you.”

“If it was an innocent call then why send those dead witches after me?”

“The works of one does not define us all. There are those who will support you in this summoning, Vivian.”

“Fine. But I want to meet them on neutral ground.”

“That can be arranged.”

“Uh, Batman,” Dick came out, holding his phone. “You gotta see this.”

It was the news, and reporting live was Vickie Vale in the square where chaos was happening. Multiple criminal organizations were suddenly running rampant in Gotham, robbing banks, turf wars happening left and right, and in the sky the Bat signal shone. “Batgirl will head to the clocktower to give us eyes and ears around Gotham. I'll lead the attack to get Gotham in order,” said Dick.

“I'll lead the attack. I have a feeling this has a supernatural element in it,” Batman muttered.

“There is. One of my siblings, Desire, is able to make mortals act on their wants. All are running rampant in their impulses,” said Dream. “Which is why we must leave for the summons.”

Vivian nodded.

The Robins started to leave the room and exited the shop, but as they did, they all greeted Vivian, asking how she was before they stepped out. Damian and Cass were about to tackle her to an embrace when Alfred told them Vivian had stitches, so they were careful when they brought her to an embrace. Tim promised her that they'll take care of everything and be back for the holiday dinner, and then there was Jason who gave his jacket to her as the dress was sleeveless and showed her bandages.

“Thank you, my sweet boy,” Vivian smiled and accepted the jacket, even if it was too big for her. “Look out for each other, alright?”

Jason nodded. He leaned down and placed a kiss on her cheek before following after the others. Dick was the last to step out, he gave Vivian a salute then used a grappling to go soaring. Batman was all that was left of the group of heroes, standing there before Vivian. He folded the sleeves of Jason's jacket so her hands wouldn't be devoured by it, and her and then he reached to hold her hands.

“Come back when it's done,” Bruce said.

“I will,” Vivian promised.

“Is this how you always felt when we leave for patrol or when I leave for the Justice League?”

“Pretty much.” Getting on her toes, she pressed a kiss on his lips. “Be careful out there.”

“I will.”

“If it would ease your worries,” Dream spoke, breaking their kiss. “I will lend you my raven. Matthew can be our bridge to the going ons in the summoning.”

“How will I know which raven is yours?” Batman asked.

“He's nosy and talkative.”

“Oh, so he's like Dick but a raven,” Vivian chuckled and kissed Batman again, just one last time before letting him go. Batman gave her hands one last kiss and went to the door, but before he left he asked Midnite to let Alfred stay until they are sure that it is safe for him to return home.

“Of course, anything for Vivian Pryor,” Midnite turned to the butler. “Whiskey?”

“Oh, don't mind if I do,” said Alfred.

With that, Batman left to join the Robins in the fight.

“And what of you three?” Midnite asked them.

“I shall take them to the place where we will meet my siblings. But first the Sinners.”

“I thought the meeting was urgent?” Vivian questioned him.

“Yes, but your family is vulnerable. The Sinners will be out here and they will attack them.”

“Thank you, Lord Morpheus,” Vivian bowed slightly. “You said I am a beacon when I call for the Phoenix. Then I'll call for them.”

Vivian was forced to remove Jason's jacket not wanting to burn it, and handed it to Alfred. Stepping out of the shop, Vivian and John stood in the middle of the road and prepared for their battle. Both summoning their magic, both preparing to face another foe, just as they always do.

“Into the Light, I command thee,” Vivian summoned the Phoenix, and the magic manifested itself around her, but no longer did the robes appear, this time it merged with the robes she wore now. The one that Midnite gave her. Her stitches then disappeared, leaving healed scars.

“I think you're not bright enough, Vee,” John said as he saw the wraiths flying towards their direction.

“You think so?” Vivian clenched her hands to a fist and summoned the flames. Similar to what she did earlier, the flames burned bright and swirled around her and up to the heavens, creating some sort of beacon – as Dream mentioned – and died slowly as Vivian was sure she has provoked not just the wraiths but those beyond as well. Angels, demons, Endless, and Lucifer.

The wraiths dove down towards them, and before they got close, Vivian blasted a wave at their direction, burning them from existence. John captured one of the wraiths before Vivian could incinerate them to cosmic dust and sent them back to hell. A little message from Vivian as a warning.

More and more of the wraiths appeared and Vivian burned them to dust, leaving no trace. No soul to return to anywhere.

When the last of the wraiths were killed off, Vivian did not have the Phoenix return to the darkness. Instead, with this power, she called for the great powers of all things. She didn't care who would answer the call, she wanted them there. On her terms. Right now. In a place where she could speak to them where all of them are in equal ground.

~*~

One moment Constantine was in the middle of the road at Gotham, under the dark skies, the next he found himself standing in a garden. A beautiful garden with blue skies above, lushful flowers and grass around them. This garden reminded him of a place. Rather, a part of a place. It was just a small space there, a small garden with a stone engraved with the name Helena.

Helena's garden.

They were standing in a garden, an endless garden, with an apple tree giving them shade, and a picnic table with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, juice, strawberries, and so on. Just food coming from the basket that reminded him of the cornucopia.

“What is this?” John turned to find her, and there she stood by the stone where Helena's name was carved wearing the black dress. “What is this, Vee?”

“A personal study,” Vivian returned to his side. “You don't think I only study when you're around, right?”

“Helena's garden,” said John.

“Not exactly, but the one who owns this place let me plant the seeds of the garden.”

“Who owns this realm, Vivian?”

“This is the realm of my brother. How did you open it?” asked Dream as he walked through the meadow, his eyes wide in shock as he looked around.

“I let her,” a man appeared, wearing a flannel, jeans, and boots. His red hair tied to a ponytail. In his hand was a sword which he used to hold his sack of belongings. “Hello, Dream.”

“Destruction, brother.”

Vivian turned to the man. “I've been planting here for a while now and you never once told me we were related,” Vivian sad to the man.

“I didn't think it was my secret to tell,” said Destruction.

“All this time, you knew and you never told me,” said Dream.

“I was never here, in fact, I only came back before she asked me to — no. Commanded me to.” Destruction took his place at the picnic table and began to open his sack where he pulled out a vase made of clay. He placed it in the middle of the table. Looking closely, John could see the name Helena engraved onto it.

Vivian came to the table with a handful of flowers and placed it in the vase. “Thank you,” she said to him, and sat down beside Destruction. “Well, don’t just stand there. Sit and eat, while we wait for the others.”

John took his place beside Vivian before Dream could. He didn't want to be beside anyone he didn't know right now, especially when these strangers were Endless. Which left Dream to seat across from his daughter and wonder.

“Helena,” Dream acknowledged. “I have heard of the tragedy.”

“My daughter,” Vivian said, her smile was a sad one. “She died while still in my womb. We were shot. I never got to hear her cry… Bruce buried her in the garden. We would have picnics there with the family.”

“And sometimes she would leave them here for me to pick up,” said Destruction as he ate a piece of chicken. “The others have arrived.”

“What is this, Dream?” Desire demanded as they walked through the meadow, wearing their white suit. With them was Despair, who was also confused for the forced summons.

“A picnic,” Vivian called out.

“The Phoenix,” Despair whispered in horror. “She called for us?!”

“Yes, she did,” Destruction answered as he continued to eat.

“The Prodigal,” Desire said.

“Destruction!” Delirium ran past the twins and went to hug the Prodigal. “I missed you! Food! And there's so many!” Delirium sat beside Destruction and began eating as well, stealing from Destruction's plate.

“Dream, Delirium! Death appeared, strolling through the meadow. “This is a nice place… Vivian Pryor.”

It was Dream who stood and made the introduction, “Vivian, my sister: Death.”

Vivian got up from her seat and faced the beautiful woman before her. There was something she needed to say but as she faced Death she found herself unable to. Seeing the struggle, Death smiled softly and took her hands.

“She looked so much like you,” Death said.

“I never got to see her. If I did, I can't remember because I was in and out,” Vivian led Death to the table. “Can you tell me what she looks like?”

“She was so small, small that I could carry her in one hand. She had no hair yet, but I could see that she was going to have red hair, like her mother. Her eyes were blue, like her father. And she cried for her Mum.”

Vivian sniffled and wiped her tears. “Thank you… I always wondered what she looked like.”

“Vivian Pryor,” Destiny has arrived. He strolled through the meadow and stood before them all. His book in his arms. Though blind, Destiny saw Destruction’s presence at the table. “Brother, you have returned.

Destruction shrugged. “For now. Can't miss a family picnic, now can I?”

“You missed many family dinners,” Desire pointed out.

“Well, I can't ignore the request of my niece. I rarely get a chance to meet any of my nieces and nephews.”

“There are not many of them,” Despair said.

“And the one who seems to have many is our dear brother, Dream,” Desire added.

Opening a bottle of wine, Vivian poured them all a glass and used her magic to distribute them all. “Considering we're all family,” she began. “We should at least speak as a family and none of that summoning bullshit. Well, shall we begin?”

Destiny took his seat at the other side of Death. While his siblings started to eat, but for Desire, Destiny only waited to know why and how Vivian had summoned them there.

“Maybe I should step out,” Constantine was about to leave but Vivian grabbed him by the collar of his coat and forced him to stay. “Or not.”

“You wanted me dead,” Vivian began, addressing the Endless.

“And we start right there, aye, love?”

“We only wish to speak,” said Destiny.

“Then why the Sinner's Nine?” Vivian continued. “Why send vengeful wraiths after me?”

“We did not…” Destiny glanced at Desire's direction. “A summoning was called upon. She is family.”

Desire brushed off the sermon and drank their wine.

“And not only that, Gotham is chaos. My family is fighting there, trying to get things back in order all just to fish me out? I would have answered the call if it wasn't by force or a threat to lock me up in some prison,” Vivian slammed her hand on the table, which she apologized for. “Or a father suddenly barging into my life as if I can easily accept that without consequences,” she said the last part to Dream.

Dream kept silent.

“Lord Morpheus claims that you all feel my existence brings danger,” Vivian continued. “Why?”

“Because we cannot see your existence in the Book. We do not know what goes on with you, Vivian Pryor,” said Destiny. “We do not know what is to come.”

“Isn't that how life is supposed to be? Not knowing what's going to happen, figuring things out along the way, whether it would get you in trouble, bring your happiness, sadness, grief?”

“It is not you that we fear,” Death spoke (Desire muttered that they were not afraid). “It is the force within you. You hold a being that has existed beyond Mother Night and Father Time. This has never happened before.”

“In three years you have used the Phoenix's power to erase the Prince of Hell from existence, traveled in time, opened Destruction's realm and summoned us all here for a picnic,” Destiny counted.

“I have an explanation for that,” Destruction wiped his hands clean. “I'm the personification of destruction and creation. I was here when human life appeared. While Vivian is the daughter of Dream, the Phoenix's powers are linked to my existence. The Phoenix is the force of all creation, of life, of death and destruction and rebirth. We exist as long as there are humans living and breathing, but the Phoenix. It exists before the creation of man, before the inception of Heaven and Hell or Lucifer, before the Endless, and before Mother and Father.

“The Phoenix is present and will always be present even if Vivian Pryor dies. It will just move to a new host or return to the cosmos.”

“Why did it find a host in her?” Desire asked.

Destruction shrugged. “One of the many mysteries of the cosmos.

“But the Pryor line,” Destiny spoke. “Why can't the Book of Destiny find the Pryors in its records.”

“Another mystery that we cannot understand, just as the Vortex exists. It is simply a mystery,” Destruction laughed. “Isn't it amazing, though? Despite our beings and purpose, there are still things we do not understand? There are still mysteries for us to uncover.”

“It does not change the fact that a mortal — an untrained mortal, and one that can hide from us — holds the Phoenix,” said Desire.

“I've been studying,” Vivian told them.

“Studying. With Constantine as your teacher?”

“Constantine knows a lot of things.”

“Reckless and selfish.”

“Oi!” John called out. “I'm right here.”

“The point is, I'm learning. What do you want me to do to show to you that I am not some cosmos destruction button?” Vivian asked the Endless.

“No more hiding,” Dream spoke.

“I didn't even know I was… but I won't. Not anymore.”

“Understand your responsibilities as the Phoenix's host,” said Destiny. “There are those who wish to rip its power out of you and use it for their own.”

Darkseid. Vivian remembered what Bruce told her. Darkseid has been looking for a power to rewrite the universe.

“I will be careful,” Vivian promised.

“Study,” Destruction shrugged. “Instead of burning everything with your fire, why don't you create something with it? Bring life.”

Vivian nodded.

“Attend family dinners,” Death added, her smile never falling. “We hope to see more of you, and to learn more of humanity. Or maybe we can have dinner with the entire family? That would be nice! We'd need a longer table though, because from what I recall you have,” Death counted with her fingers. “Five adopted children, one ward. Then there's your husband, and Alfred, then there's also your stepfather and your brother and sister. It would be fun!”

“A family dinner with only us will do for now,” Dream told Death. “But I do look forward to those with you.”

“Family dinners. I'll make time for it. Can you promise me no more schemes?” She glanced at Desire's direction.

The Endless only shrugged and drank their wine.

“If that is all —”

“There is another,” Destruction spoke. “The Phoenix’s power crosses in both our realms: reality, life, destruction and creation. When the time comes when you must unleash the Phoenix's power to start again, you must put forth duty first before love. You are not just a mortal. You hold the power of existence, you hold responsibilities now. One that is greater than the Justice League's. Swear to it.”

Reluctant, Vivian nodded. “I swear to it. Is there more?”

“None,” said Destiny. “If it would ease your worries, Vivian Pryor. Your family is safe and Gotham has found order. You may return if you must. But what of you, brother?” He asked Destruction.

“I'll be around,” Destruction got up. He wiped his hands with the table napkin and gathered his things. “Till next time, my siblings. And my niece, call and I shall answer.”

“Destruction, don't go!” Delirium begged. “I miss my brother.”

“Humanity has no need of me. Alone, mortals destroy and are able to create without me. But don't worry, I’ll be around. See you, Delirium.” Destruction walked away and disappeared from his realm.

Rising from the table, Destiny said his goodbye to his siblings, Vivian and Constantine, and left for his realm as well. Delirium followed and left as well, going off her way to wherever she wishes to be. When Despair and Desire were to leave, Dream called for the twins.

“You are spared today, my siblings,” said Dream. “Do such schemes again and I shall take action and place my case to revoke your protection as an Endless.”

Desire smirked and only looked at Dream and left with Despair.

When it was Death's turn, she got up and said, “I must leave as well. I have appointments to go to. I shall see you brother, and Vivian, I shall see you when it is time.”

She disappeared with the dark shadow of Death's wings. Rising, from the table, Vivian and Constantine walked to the center of the garden where Dream followed.

“I want to speak to you again soon,” said Vivian to Dream.

Dream smiled. “And you shall. Now that Madeline's spell is removed, you can now enter the Dreaming and I shall find you. There, we can speak more about your mother and your loss. Goodbye, daughter.”

Dream disappeared, but it was not the Dreaming he returned to. He went to Gotham and brought all of the people to sleep. Not a deep slumber, such as Sleepy Sickness, but one that would give the Bat Family a break as the criminals in Gotham are dreaming in their beds, dreaming of their escapes and their successful crimes, until the Batman comes to thwart their plans.

#batman #batman x reader #fanfic #batman fanfiction #dc fanfic #the sandman #john constantine

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