© Ann Marie Davis 2020 all rights reserved
Synopsis
James is an astrophysics PhD and a member of the National Black Physicists Society. His story is narrated through the lens of several ancestral narrators. They know of James’ lineage intimately. One ancestor, the spiritual and common ancestor of humankind, is a witness to the karmic and evolutionary lineage of all life on earth.
James sees the ghost of a recently dead lover. His attempts at reason break down. Still, he desires a world devoid of any experiences that cannot be quantified.
I wasn’t feeling that good when I wrote this, so it’s a rough cut.
Old Spirit
Some mammal with sharp teeth saw you as supper and you ran. Then you died to this earth and became food. Then you came back from death. You, inside of your body ran as four legged again. You ran as the four-legged animal that you do not remember ever being. And while you were that being, you didn’t think of who you were. And before that, you crawled, and before that you swam, and before that, you pulsated. I know this because I once ran. Once, during a lifetime, I ran and I ran two legged, and at once, I thought of myself, and I knew I was wondering. Somewhere in a garden valley close by the Serengeti as you now call it, I remembered who I was. I looked up at the sun and blinked. Then I looked across at meat sizzling on a fire and I died.
In this thing you call today, or 2019, you, human being, pulsate again and cling to being earth-bound. You lie afraid of turning into nothing as you lie in an intensive care unit of a hospital. Afraid to die. Human, with a plastic tube pushed into a vein in an arm that you call you. I whisper a message into your ear without using words. I use a melody. I use a beat.
It hurts you to think that awareness and your eyes will one day part from you. Someone pulls a rotten tooth out of your mouth and plunks it into a metal bowl, and the sound of that plunk reminds you that one day, all of your discarded teeth will be in the ground, minerals floating through soil. It hurts you to know that your flesh has never been you. You cling, listening to the beep of an electronic monitor, somehow equating that beep with you.
You shrink away from the arm with the plastic tube. You have lived afraid of simple life forms infecting you, floating inside of the blood vessels of your arm, the bacterial or the viral life form, barely biological, closer to molecular, yet a being that is just as infused with living, infused with the pulse of the eons, infused with that same livingness, infused with that same living dreaming thing. You shrink away.
Let me remind you of this. Remember that you are old. There you are. Whether you are a child riddled with the diseases and the side effects of cleverness and modernity, or whether you are grey and sparse-haired, atrophied with the decades behind you, remember that you are older than the arm holding the plastic tube.
An old, evolving soul. I can only call evolution a refusal to go any way but upward. Forward. The path of the soul on this planet comes by way of an unabashed abundance of tiny creatures pushing their way out of the salt-water blood of the earth, and then turning around and forgetting that the earth and the skies and the heaven and the bodies in which it breathes are the dream. When you hear me, you speak to me and think if me as Spirit. Leaves Home, my distant offspring, died many hundred years ago. She speaks now.
Leaves Home
I will call myself Leaves Home. Leaves Home was a women taken from the Mother Land that men call Africa. I, Leaves Home, carried children inside of me to the new place of America, the place where the European people first landed and called a place Plymouth Rock. They looked to practice their spiritual beliefs away from the other people who would not see god as they did. A place with Natives they called Indians. A place where the native people called themselves Human Beings and the called place Turtle Island. A place where Europeans cut down trees and built towns and auction blocks to sell my body and the bodies of my children. I don’t remember the year I left home. I didn’t know the years by their time.
There was a man called James. I call James my child, my progeny. I know to call him this because I know that many of my progeny survived the things white men did. Some of my spirit implanted itself in James. I could see myself in him during the times when my spirit lived alongside him. I could understand the world through his eyes because he was my kin. Back at my old home, men ravaged our villages, but in the 2020’s James still had our eyes. As James lived, I remembered people of my village, my mother, my father, my sibling, but only sketches of it as I looked out at the world as I stood alongside James.
After our people suffered and survived enslavement, they came into a type of freedom, living amidst milder form of hatred amongst people who at times, kept the word n—– far away from their lips, but not out of their minds.
In 2019, James did not know that in the year following, the white culture would out itself as being infested with a meanness, instead of a self-assuming goodness. In the aftermath, many of the individuals pointed to this or that cop, this or that political institution. They failed to see a social virus, a vibratory pattern, had implanted itself into the culture of Americans since the beginning of the republic.
The vibratory pattern permeated and hardened itself into the culture. The founding fathers, all but one, owned other people’s bodies at one time or another. These men declared the independence of the land that they acquired and became wealthy through genocide and slavery, as they wrote their constitution. This is the pattern that settled into the culture and inside of the offspring of the offspring.
It became the custom to do one thing and declared entirely different things, to hold truths to be self-event, that all men are created equal, and to lie. This discontinuity, this cognitive dissidence, this discordant note rang out and permeated new republic and bathe everything they did in it.
The discordant note upset the water in a fish bowl the size of a continent, touching everything. Time alone would not stop its course. It became self-perpetuating as every school child recited the words sweet land of liberty. As the founding fathers were spoken of as benevolent slave holders, it took a special type psychosis to conceive of such a thing as a benevolent owner of other human beings if their deeds, the owning of other people’s bodies, were spoken of at all. Thomas Jefferson, one of their founding heroes, had underground tunnels going to his mansion to hide the presence of his human chattel that waited on his gentle guests. Those able to vote built a nation of replacing the truth with a kind of underground tunnel network. So at the time of James’ life, began again a collapse.
© Ann Marie Davis 2020 all rights reserved