Refugees from Utopia

Two wrongs don't make a right, but christians aren't perfect, they're just forgiven. Negroes don't even know that they live on the biggest continent on the earth, don't even know there are Negroes across the ocean. Chinese negroes, Japanese negroes, french negroes, english negroes, african negroes, brazilian negroes, mexican negroes, dutch negroes, negroes everywhere! Given the whole bloody world, it's been given to the negroes. Give them your mind! Give them your soul! Give them a piece.

Establish Slavery!
Abolish Slavery!
GIve them jobs or 40 acres of land and a mule!
Give them Jobs!
Give them lynch mobs, give them drugs!
Give them our daughters!
Give them our DNA!
Give them the white house!
Give them my job!
Give them my guilt!

I'm a negro now too I've learned, and it's interesting. Not all the way quite, but we're working on it. Me and my negro me. Me and my negro mind. The negro mind sees things differently my. 'x' saw it, she called it out, caught it before I did. Caught it sneaking in and shot it sexier looks than she shot me. My negro mind sees things differently and fills me in on them.

There's a moment, I realize now, when familiar things and places cease being a source of comfort. Through the lens of the other mind, the negro mind, they appear threatening and off limits or ambivalent and spitefully gay like something you know you'll never be able to own even if you've made enough to buy it 10 times over. The Other mind can SEE evil manifested in the common world of the everyday. Normally you can only see it's shadow, cool, distant.

I like Robert Motherwell. I'm black like that. Not like Langston, not like Dizzy, or Goldy, or Spike Lee. I'm black like dried paint, like a robert Motherwell, like a Spanish National anthem, like a fallen matador, like a 1975 Dodge Camero, like a friend in gallery, like spots on a cow. Like a shadow in a Kafka short story during broad daylight cast by a little girl who just wants to be a shadow, not the residue of something more tangible and threatening. Just free to come and go as it pleases, to blend in with darkness and be in harmony with light. I am black like that and I will make great art from that which I am.

I am black like Robert Ryman is white and projected onto a field of textured wall.

I am black like Robert Rauschenberg is white spilled all over a secret language of discarded objects that emerge like manhattan's lower east side when you descend upon it from a blanket of clouds.

I am black like Japser Johns is gray mottled on stenciled letters, and woodblocks.

I am black, not like Robert Motherwell is white, but like a Robert Motherwell is black.

I am not black like the Invisible Man is black, but I am invisible like the invisible man is unseen. I am invisible not like a ghost is dead, but like a ghost can see other dancing shadows and living spirits around him that pass unseen, cool, distant, and ignorable. I'm not dead. I'm alive, like a white man is alive, like a white man is alive, and like black man has a living body, and so I am gray. And I enjoy being gray in my mind, black in my body and invisible to the rest of the world like white light waves pass through water- the way black smothers white, and light casts away shadow. I exist as both world's, as a negation in a nether world.

Neither black and white, nor black, nor white, nor other, except for sometimes when I play and think now as Other. With no outward representation in society or mass media, there is no context into which we can be placed and standardized against. We're guilty by nature, both oppressed and oppressor, the perfect American formula. Criminal and Victim. We exist as illusions, reminders of a white multi-cultural dream still walking the earth like phantoms in places like the midwest. Our cultural dialogue was summarized at Jonestown. A brief impossible utopia suddenly and senselessly destroyed. So many of our would be mentors and friends perished there, torn from their mothers white and black and injected with red cyanide watching their rainbow colored playmates fall before them in blue shorts and red shirts vomiting and screaming as white men with long shaggy hair and sky blue shorts watched them twist and squirm in the dust like stranded earthworms. And so we live as refugees from Utopia, but we will never disappear altogether. Simply continue to fade in and out. To reappear and disappear like a song carried on a cool breeze, passing. Staying momentarily in our own private worlds. No population can claim us, we are an aborted race, a remnant of a lingering nightmare that was too real to be forgotten, as hard as they try. A perpetual reminder, bourn like a scarlet letter that redemption is possible, even if it is no longer coveted. In the mean time, for us, transcendence from earthly identification, suffering and desire is the only option. But I digress. As I was saying before...