From Red Clay
An Introduction
This is going to be a place where I write things as long as they have to be. It’s named From Red Clay because I’m from the Deep South where dirt like that is a thing. It’s also my place for projects not writing and other likes. Almost everything is everywhere now. So who knows? My music isn’t here. But maybe I’ll integrate my creative spaces. I certainly like to dabble.
Expect a Southerner. I have scalawag and integrationist affections. I’m interested in historical contingency, historical arbitrariness, fashion, education, and violence. I am an avid collector of nonsense of common and idiosyncratic varieties. Expect things I’ve written years ago and things I’ll write in response to life that may have only just arrived. Expect me to try to write how I talk. I’ll aim to scribble all the ways I know how. Expect a great deal of trying with the goal of achieving much, grounded in an exercise meant always to communicate and/or record ideas. I pride myself in crafting language that is communicable and understood. However, I am also concerned with creations that may be more purely expressive. So clarity is a concern that will ebb and flow depending on the piece, and I’ll try to make that clear from the titles and writing. This is basically the end of the introduction the rest is more for the interested, the academes, and the readers.
*****Positionality – Where I’m coming from
Positionally, I haven’t lived in the South for a long time. But my ways and concern for wisdom are still deeply down there. Since I did philosophy while fallibly staying awake in church pews, I considered a God that imagined being loved through respects for human life more than legalisms. A God that seemed to damn kind people who never knew Them made no sense, so I didn’t praise them. I did that young because it seemed remarkably petty for God to be fickle AND unforgiving. These days, I’m a bit of a Heschel head because of a crazy story. I mostly agree with that coal of a man (He’d hate my stances on substances though). Now my belief didn’t fit in the church that raise me so much as extend from there. And I say that from here if only to give an idea of origins, though that distracts from all the interminglings and in betweens I’ve syncretized since. I am capable of giving an absolute banger of a sermon. And I think something about starting there makes me have skills in wielding severity in my language. Certainly, that is why topics like grace and communion are important to me, though their beginning for me at home is not their home with me today.
That first home is something like I’m a Black Franchise Missionary Baptist Liberationist Christian originated with deep syncretic embraces that draw me through varieties of Buddhists, Animists, and other Syncretic peoples across time and place. I’m okie doke being a minor cultist of varying association based on a Monty Python-esque deep faith that gives God and the other Gods a break on Sundays. Because I think letting God rest Sundays means I get to be an atheist at least once a week. I’m also really NOT into Babylonian astrology. I’m a wooden dog and then a Virgo in phase with…..After all this I consider myself first as a spiritual being.
Perhaps weirdly, that consideration led me from an early age to imagine ideal lives without having a body. As a child a read The Bartimaeus Trilogy. It’s a story about a demon and a magician in a sort of British Parliament-ass world. The part that matters here is that in the third book, Ptolemy’s Gate the wizard goes through the aforementioned gate and enters the spirit world to find Bartimaeus. There, they realize they’re slurry mixing amongst slurry in a void. They feel what they are tumult in the flux of this void as their very self has no place to stay. The magician sees this as a problem, and consolidates what they feel is their essence into a sphere. The sphere is then picked and ground by what rest of a colorful slurry appears, and their sense of self washing away is replace with the agony of being ripped apart as all manner of whatever form there is washing around sheers pieces from the sphere. Eventually Bartimaues is found and instructs the magician to let go—chiding, the magician was bringing form into a formless world. The indigenous spirit population sought to unmake this form as it unbalanced their world. Accepting the flux, the magician’s agony ends. To me, gender is the sphere and its performance the sheering. I accept the flux but am only capable of it in dance. Beyond this I am simply aware that gender is an aspect of identity made simultaneously from inside and outside myself, all the time. My politics desire healthcare that would allow me to explore my self in steady work of health in a private relationship with professionals.
Instead I currently have the options to finangle care that relies on my employer or at times in my life I have been perhaps near to going on Medicaid (at least once I was in New York); however, I soon wasn’t poor enough to do that. Now I’m stuck in work in which I would very much not like to have my transition staked to my current position. Beyond this, although a studier of bureaucracy, I am not a great leverage of its systems and labyrinths. I would like to simply pursue my care in in the hustle bustle of my life have yet to be able to claim therapies that I would explore otherwise. This makes my gender very strange and shitty to experience because my body is at once gross, a frontier, and an unclaimed confederate. My least favorite people would have me accept its branding and my most favored people would have me accept its branding or embroil myself in a tumult of performance that would still be out of my control and would still in largely conform in much hierarchy based on a few themes of expression. I’m a lonely mix, most happy when dancing. My person is a self arisen in matronly and witchy excess—Theyby for now but Them all the same. And this while a long time ago I imagined uniting to win healthcare before arguing for particular civilly relevant healthcare. I remain in awe of some and quite jealous of others. I have grace for myself and others and intend to embrace it judiciously. Finally had a full workday in a skirt recently and it was lush as fuck. Didn’t stop some petty exclusionary shit later that night—I’m no natural it-girl. Though I’m an extraordinarily bad bitch.
Anyways, I want bodily autonomy so badly I imagined a narrative of Uglies that was predicated on the protagonists not being a traitor but mostly just enjoying her “ugliness”, camping, and then ending up one of many in a new world of extra’s-esque look as you’d like (except for the hierarchy-- I rarely make hierarchies and thus have few absolute favorites). I give this vulnerability to express I believed in a world of expression a long time, and that world did not mature to consider embodiment less. It just was raised with a cosmology of self and spirited--if not before myself, then simultaneous with my being and inherited in significant part1[1].
Whew. Academes eat your hearts out. I hate how you’ve grown to include the world to talk and write. I think this says things about academia….
Speaking of, I’m trained as a lotta’ things but my favorite is the master’s in Anthropology and Education—focused on education and violence through an ecological lens and such—thus some of the embodiment. Besides that, I got a Master’s in Education:7-12 social studies; I been studying Muay Thai since I was 23 and am just a mixy martial artist by now. My amateur record in Muay Thai is 1-1 and I wonder what it would have looked like if covid didn’t disrupt tries that started this year2[2]. I wrote my IP get-out project on comparing pedagogy at where I gym’d and where I worked. That more memoir and less paper (but yes, the paper). Is a thing for here. I did a thing about records and bugs and music. I actually feel I learned how to teach at 11 by copying teachers my mom mostly picked out and people in general. In a lot of ways I notice the job hasn’t really changed since my Uncle didn’t show up once and I wanted to take this break promised in the church schedule that we never made it to. I also wanted me and anyone I’d play with to be prepared in case some church person tested us randomly (which they would have been allowed to do, would have gotten me in trouble, but also NEVER happened). We got that break. Apparently they thought I was good at this (the adult class wanted me to teach to the point I would visit home and be a guest adult teacher and got my first speaking fees from a sudden youth day thing; just riffed it; I visited the church of the guy who made sure I knew long division had to joke I was getting everyone too hype from my youth day speech—I came out and was like, “Actually, I’m here on the adults. It says don’t provoke your child to anger…It also says knowledge is beautiful…; and one time I just put myself on my preacher’s schedule about some feedback on a sermon and I clapped back day of3. To me, I just read the lesson before everyone and walked us through it, some mild interpretations from myself and experience. My highlight is I’d teach men’s class a lot by the time I graduated. Lead prayer, and I’d pray for responsibly carrying the legacies of peoples dead over the land who where all human kin to me. No land acknowledgements were made so much as reminding a room that remembered us to remember them too. I thought it was weird to not remember loudly for everyone because I didn’t hear about that, but we would talk about world injustice and things. I didn’t think anyone was malicious, but I did think they just hadn’t emerged to opportunity. And even then I felt I was only reminding. These days I think prayer is a place for establishing the sacred. I always considered it felt out but I liked the way Heschel gets to that.
I guess other important educations besides are Bardara Fields’s history class, obv Cornel West on Heschel, Ms. Screws, Ms. Hammond, Ms. Gladice, my dad, Professor Tawasil4, Professor Gundaker, Professor Erickson5, but also all my kinfolk6.
So Imma’ write about education and violence, a memoir, an oral history project/podcast experiment, a collection of essays riffed from a weird friend’s input and topicals. Because I can do faddy shit too, but I generally don’t like to because it reinforces a systemically dominant focus on being reactive versus thinking long-term. But this is moreso the place I want to examine things like:
· Ways of looking at long term thought, theory, and education
· How education systems outpace the potentials of “wisdom systems”
· Education ethnography ranging from pedagogy, rituals, fads, theory and memoir
· Culture stuff a la broad arts writing and perhaps experimental artistic work
· A serialized novel The Revolutions of Mun and Etoile
· Whatever else seems right
· Maybe a comic memoir? I’ll draw bits…certainly can draw enough of my own art
· And footnotes. Imo it goes down in the footnotes in history7
I expect someone will say something like, “But you’re not a done-you-anyhow type. I/they/we did it. That doing it perhaps creates the situation and concerns experienced. Youre’ an embodiment person – you should get this. You’re not real, and how could you experience. For the longest time I’d have little to say back. Now I’d say follow the implications into the body that seriously wrote the words and can never prove the thoughts and can see the limits in the self-proclaimed imagineers. I very much knew I wanted experimental treatment, and fundamentally know that because I looked up the medical ramifications of my dreams…and I wanted to do that in a private empowered way with my doctor. And I can’t and I’m pissed. Please forward any other complaints to my ass crack – that’s not an attack. That’s a challenge. Always believed I had a self I may not realize –surprise is in the world as much as I am a being surrounded by other impossible miraculous dreams, a thermodynamic miracle if a soul is too weird for you. I understand myself as one that may change and even like the experience. Perhaps that’s even literally happened before….
Wouldn’t you wonder? Perhaps not.
He just explained the political context and intent of that part of the sermon. Basically described he was reacting to the fact that he doesn’t see truly Black churches building Africa up on missions; it’s like our White sister church. Which…understandable. These days I’m off his conservative family prescriptions but I think his biscuit sermon on doing what you can and being graceful is legendary. We had 2 sister churches. That’s def’ not all our church kin tho’.
Who I hope won that award and challenges me to consider everyone I beat for the seat. And I clapback and say I’m a but for the grace of God go I type who always feels like they survived clusterfuck to here. I feel full of duty to give back a gift. That’s a thing that makes writing feel hard—she is SO SWEET compared to how that legacy sounds. She capable of great severity is all. She held me to skills and talents. I’m glad I ended up taking essentially the same class with her twice. I wish I had learned how to apply to IRB successfully when I did—again, bad at bureaucratic shit
Damn, that lady can TEACH! The clarity and moderation abilities so high!
I intend to mean what I did here.
Absolute Pettiness. When you stop paraphrasing the archive to…