Dark Matter

by Sheree R. Thomas

  The last hurdle is science fiction. The power of science fiction is that it can tear down the walls and windows, the artifice and laws by changing the logic, empowering the disenfranchised, or simply by asking, What if? This bold logic is not easy to attain. The destroyer-creator must first be able to imagine a world beyond his mental prison. The hardest thing to do is to break the chains of reality and go beyond into a world of your own creation.

  So where are the black science fiction writers? Everywhere I go I meet young black poets and novelists who are working on science fiction manuscripts. Within the next five years I predict there will be an explosion of science fiction from the black community. When I tell black audiences that I’ve written a novel in this genre, they applaud. And following this explosion will be the beginning of a new autonomy created out of the desire to scrap 500 years of intellectual imperialism. This literary movement itself would make a good story. The tale could unfold in a world where power is based upon uses of the imagination, where the strongest voices rise to control the destiny of the nation and the world. Maybe, in this make-believe world, a group is being held back by limits placed on their ability to imagine; their dreams have been infiltrated by the dominant group making even the idea of dissent impossible. The metaphor of this speculative and revolutionary tale could be language as power—the hero, a disembodied choir that disrupts the status quo. “Jazz in the Machine” could be the title. Black letters on a white page would suffice for the jacket design.

  YET DO I WONDER

  Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid

  (1994)

  Intro to “Yet Do I Wonder” (2000)

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  cd:dir>moment/goto: It’s all very simple. First the “on” button, and then the results: a screen and some images. No more, no less. Before beginnings and beyond ends, there’s a process of resolution—it takes time and patience and many seconds pass in the reverie, but as the image rises into focus a thought refracts through my mind: Everything eventually gets remixed. But then again, that’s what this is about. A series of recent polls about the American populace’s beliefs in 1999 state some interesting facts:

  93% of the populace believe in angels, 49% believe the government is concealing information about UFOs and a figure of something over 25% believe in reincarnation and the possibility of communicating with the dead. It’s most definitely some strange times we live in, and the line between myths of the current moment and fact has been blurring at an accelerating rate. I bet that if you walked down a street and asked most people about the principles that drive everything from the light bulbs they use to the physics of turbulence that makes their toilets work, you would more than likely draw a blank response from the bulk of the people you encounter. I think you can get the drift of the kind of picture I’m trying to convey: modern belief and the technology that undergirds it are intertwined in ways very few of us have explored. I try as much as possible to convey that sense of incidental belief—life by osmosis in the age of unreason, or something like that. “Yet Do I Wonder” was a kind of prose poem remix of Countee Cullen’s poem of the same name written many years ago. I always think of dj culture as a place where text’s migration into a digital realm occurred among the people who were least likely to “formalize” its implications. As above, so below. Origination, derivation—it all blurs, but then again that’s kind of the point. In a world held together by displaced signals and invisible codes, it’s about the only thing that makes sense of our quotidian environment that is rapidly moving into a fully technological context.

  the only black history and black mythology

  the hiphop generation is going to identify with

  is the history they invent for themselves.

  Everything they know about being black,

  they’re gonna get from a sample or a rapper.

  Looked at another way, if it weren’t for the microchip, they

  wouldn’t have no black culture

  (as we ancient ones understand black culture) at all.

  —Greg Tate, “Remember My Name,” 1993

  The current message has been deleted. Any sound can be you.… You lean forward and press play. The tape’s wheels begin a slow but steady movement. With a slight hissing and popping in the background, a song as beautiful as it is strange makes itself known. Polytemporal pastiches—fleeting sonic images carried by shards of time—expand out into the audioscape that is you, feel the alphanumeric caress of the sounds as they wash over your mindscreen.…

  Picture, if you will, my room when I was a small child. Sunlight streams through the air, illuminating dust particles as they slowly drift through empty space, their passage disturbed by your gaze. The room has several blends of African fabrics lining its walls. They, too, reflect the sunlight. There are no other furnishings. Consider this scene to be a developing chamber. The room now has me as I am today, age twenty-three, standing at its center. I point to the northern wall, where a lithograph, as abstract as it is minimal, hangs near the door. This poster is a gift from my father and mother. Inscribed in a calligraphic style, wheat stalks whose seeds are being dispersed by an unknown wind are overlaid with an adage from an unknown Bantu sage. This is what he said: “I have begotten a son. I shall live on in him. Go my son, mix with the crowd.” Those words, enhanced by the artificial distance of digital delay and reverse-gate reverb, still ring in my head to this day. They fall distinctly, yet with an odd cadence disfigured by time, to arrive with the impact of all songs of myself in the form of this black print on a white page.

  Here, I, Paul D. Miller, DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, a/k/a the Ontological Assassin, sing the body electric. I know it might sound a little weird, a little jumbled to your ear, but it’s my mix. I am a member of what I like to call the children of the digital night, a part of the Combine Generation who by eminent domain will inherit this electromagnetic circus we call life.

  You might think you know me. I am a living televisual presence—the shape of things to come. Every day on every street and TV channel, throughout all coordinate points of the megalopolis, like phantoms slipping across the electronic palimpsests of your naked eyes, you see me. I am the end of your world. To you—parent, professor, preacher, consumer of popular culture—I am the wasted burned-up desires of all the pasts unremembered, all the fears of your unknown futures gone slip through your hands—consumed like so many famished silhouettes the annihilating light of exposure in the only time that means anything anymore. My politics of meaning are derived from strange loops, every word is a lie, every image a soft oblivion. Emerging from commercials, glossy magazines, video games, and music videos straight out of your worst nightmares, what you see before you is the sum of a life lived under sensory overload and absolute media immersion.

  Does my voice sound familiar? In order to understand me, you have to teach your eyes to hear and your ears to see. Then you will understand what I call reality. I kick out flava in PrimeTime where I am seen and scene, and flow in a calculus of finite TV channels available for viewing. I, the Ghostface, I, the Ripple in the Flux, am a kid who has gotten the picture but lost the frame, and life for me is one big video. Pick a point in a general curved space; think SUN RA. Define a vector at that point. Cut and fold the vector in on itself. Make it scream, imagery (the cassette as an electromagnetic canvas) presents to you, its emulsion blood red crystalline under the safety light of this darkroom.

  Liquid drips from the images—visua
l and audio representation merge until there is no distinction between the two; just like alchemy, a transmutation of base materials into something exquisite is achieved. When I look around me, everything is colored with blood. It seems that all human interaction requires some sacrifice. Today, the sound of blank verse making chamber music, the unrelenting chatter of binary conversion, is the musical accompaniment to the choreography of violence that we young black males call our lives. Presence and absence, my brothers cut down in a coded dance of death, scroll 0’s and 1’s down my face like tears in the rain.

  My mother, gentle to the core, gave me life. My father, by his absence, informed it. He died when I was three. I have only known him through the books and records that he kept, and my mother’s descriptions of him. It’s strange; during the most formative years of my life, I had a small group of friends but for the most part remained a loner. Books were my most consistent companions. We have a bright green house that my parents added to as time passed. One of my favorite “new” rooms was the library. My father had made this room almost entirely of glass. Here, where the sun was brightest, I would spend my afternoons reading and daydreaming, and watch the movement of the refracted sunlight play over the pages of whatever I was reading. I would look at the wall where my parents had organized their books and start thinking about building my own library. By the age of twelve, my mother’s words were keeping company in my head with the Marquis de Sade, Huey Newton, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chester Himes, Sylvia Plath, Bessie Head, John Rechy, Angela Davis, Buchi Emecheta, and Malcolm X, while I sat listening to Lee Morgan or the S.O.S. Band and watching Fat Albert reruns on TV at the same time. In my mind, what a dialogue we had.

  Every other male in my family is dead. Father, uncles, grandfathers—they all died from natural causes like hypertension or just plain and simple bad luck. None of them died by the violence that saturates African American culture in a sensurround scenario of psychotic erosion—but just the same, they are all dead. With the women, I mourn their passing, and live on.

  When I think of the idea of family and history, my mind draws a blank etched with question marks, blood, and music. Every patriarchal “family value” that I have ever thought of begins to crack and fall to dust when I think about the stuff of which my everyday life is made: Dj’ing, living under almost squatlike conditions, writing. The “values” dissolve and float away into the opaque murk of the past. This I learned from Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany’s science fiction: any and all truth is a tale I am telling myself.

  Repeatedly upon a time, I silently slip into a region of myself made up of nebulous points of reference that I call my memory. Gently, I begin to link these coordinates into an intricate web of thin lines dense as all the omniverse (such a sky as you have never seen… ). Images of my family (a product of an economy of identity rooted in a postindustrial structure based on two, maybe three things—time, sexuality, and memory) move quietly toward me. Arms open the silence to embrace me. They gesture and move away in graceful dance of recognition. I follow their patterns. Sacred geometries emerge from the fluid landscape that they have wrought with their movement. I watch their fugue, build a transmutable architecture of myself in their midst, and join them. No sign emerges unnoticed from this dance, no signal goes unanswered.

  When I think about how much of African American identity is linked to our music and, in turn, our music to our literature, my mind is boggled. Music is the original code; bloodword + bloodrhythm = bloodsong = bloodcode. It’s as if music is a product of the datacloud that tells me who I am, more so than any family tree. At this, the threshold of the synthetic theater of all possibilities, the cassette plays on.… Where do the songs go when you’re not singing them? To a recording device no doubt, or if one is not available, back into your mind?

  Sound and signification play out a theme… check the permutation of the nation… check the function, cognitive disjunction. Freedom and frequencies, forms and functions. Beyond double consciousness into the realm of techne and logos… fact and fiction become dialectic friction.… This is what science fiction is for me.

  A long time ago J. G. Ballard wrote a simple statement that seems to drift over me like some sort of overlit neon expanse drifting across my mind’s eye, a Times Square icon hanging on my screen as I write:

  above all, science fiction is likely to be the only form of literature which will cross the gap between the dying narrative fictions of the present day, and the cassette and video tape fictions of the near future.

  As if… simply was… perhaps will be.… Hypothetical. Dialectical. The future is here now—but realize it was never gone. It, too, was just another screensaver banished with the push of a button.

  Someone somewhere once said that assembly is the invisible language of our time. Someone else once said that time had an essence or “spirit” that moved in or animated it. I thought about these things when I decided to call myself DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid. Put simply, I play music that haunts you, music that gets on your nerves. In this postsymbolic electroculture that I inhabit, music is the free-floating signifier for the world’s soundtrack: the records become my notes, and I become their instrument. The images, the rhythms I invoke became my television, my network, my interactive soul, my PrimeTime. The here and now disappeared into the nowhere of a song of tempered bloodmusic—recombinant soul for your third earhole.

  My names drift with the ebb and flow of the rhythms of the datacloud: DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, DJ Spooky that Tactical Apparition, DJ Spooky that Ontological Anarchist, DJ Spooky that Coded Waveform, DJ Spooky that Alphanumeric Bandit, DJ Spooky that Dream Cyclone, DJ Spooky that Renegade Chronomancer, DJ Spooky that Semiological Terrorist, DJ Spooky an Artist of the Floating World. The list goes on. It is many names and perhaps all names.

  “Where has he gone? To a song?”

  Slowly, ever so slowly, I collect my thoughts and drift out into synthetic space, my only reference to my identity a flood of transient sonic images. To my fellow children of the digital night I have these parting thoughts, rite words and rite times: Seize the modes of perception. Slip silently. Fade in the algorithm of life in the liquid parade of the modern mindstream and be subtle to the point of formlessness. Remember that those who have flava sell it to those who do not, and that those who control the spice control life. When you remember your name, you will remember mine. When I think of you, I will do the same.

  The tape’s playing ceases… see the object fade out.

  THE MONOPHOBIC RESPONSE

  Octavia E. Butler

  (1995)

  For all but the first 10 years of my life, writing has been my way of journeying from incomprehension, confusion, and emotional upheaval to some sort of order, or at least to an orderly list of questions and considerations. For instance…

  At the moment there are no true aliens in our lives—no Martians, Tau Cetians to swoop down in advanced spaceships, their attentions firmly fixed on the all-important Us, no gods or devils, no spirits, angels, or gnomes.

  Some of us know this. Deep within ourselves we know it. We’re on our own, the focus of no interest except our consuming interest in ourselves.

  Is this too much reality? It is, yes. No one is watching, caring, extending a hand or taking a little demonic blame. If we are adults and past the age of having our parents come running when we cry, our only help is ourselves and one another.

  Yes, this is far too much reality.

  No wonder we need aliens.

  No wonder we’re so good at creating aliens.

  No wonder we so often project alienness onto one another.

  This last of course has been the worst of our problems—the human alien from another culture, country, gender, race, ethnicity. This is the tangible alien who can be hurt or killed.

  There is a vast and terrible sibling rivalry going within the human family as we satisfy our desires for territory, dominance, and exclusivity. How strange: In our ongoing eagerness to create alie
ns, we express our need for them, and we express our deep fear of being alone in a universe that cares no more for us than it does for stones or suns or any other fragments of itself. And yet we are unable to get along with those aliens who are closest to us, those aliens who are of course ourselves.

  All the more need then to create more cooperative aliens, supernatural beings or intelligences from the stars. Sometimes we just need someone to talk to, someone we can trust to listen and care, someone who knows us as we really are and as we rarely get to know one another, someone whose whole agenda is us. Like children, we do still need great and powerful parent figures and we need invisible friends. What is adult behavior after all but modified, disguised, excused childhood behavior? The more educated, the more sophisticated, the more thoughtful we are, the more able we are to conceal the child within us. No matter. The child persists and it’s lonely.

  Perhaps someday we will have truly alien company. Perhaps we will eventually communicate with other life elsewhere in the universe or at least become aware of other life, distant but real, existing with or without our belief, with or without our permission.

  How will we be able to endure such a slight? The universe has other children. There they are. Distant siblings that we’ve longed for. What will we feel? Hostility? Terror? Suspicion? Relief?

  No doubt.

  New siblings to rival. Perhaps for a moment, only a moment, this affront will being us together, all human, all much more alike than different, all much more alike than is good for our prickly pride. Humanity, E pluribus unum at last, a oneness focused on and fertilized by certain knowledge of alien others. What will be born of that brief, strange, and ironic union?

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