ceremonies in absent time

 

CEREMONIES IN ABSENT TIME

 

Pandemic  is not good for public health, but it is excellent for the construction of public intelligence.

 

Many conversations in 2021 make use of the "passed future tense," one of several grammatical/aesthetic categories invented by the poet Asili Ya Nadhiri.  Informed by Nadhiri's  considerable knowledge of music, global affairs, and quantum physics, this innovative tense enables us to talk on time in time outside of time.  It allows us to first hear and then see ourselves as legitimate participants in chaos.  Present tense is constantly negotiating in the absence of full cognition with the arrived future and the destined to return past.  In this way, Nadhiri's excavation of hidden grammar is a necessary motion for breaking out of the nothing of stone (or being "stoned" ) into the infinity of light, into the obligations of morality.

 

We are who we are as a result of our fear or our failure to deal with quintessential morality.  Fear and failure embalm us with insecurity.  Insecure people  become overly willing to destroy anything that challenges the will for power, even if the "anything" is their ego-sick selves .  If DJT is the sole glue and common ground  for millions of American citizens, the American Dream and fraught American democracy should hasten to kiss there you=know-what goodbye!

 

In a note (July 10, 2019) on "a quantum phenomenon," Nadhiri posed a thought-fat question:

 

"Since entanglement has been finally (2015) experimentally confirmed, why are we still clinging to religiously onto the belief that the speed of light is the speed limit for the transmission of information?"

 

The question is less rhetorical than it might seem.  It is a genuine invitation to think our way out of the "stone," the enslaving tyranny of amoral technologies.  If we refuse to think and act and settle passively for death-bound thrown on our plates like hush-puppies, we deserve to be destroyed by the unholy trinity of pandemic, climate change, and global and/or local chaos.  We deserve to use Constitutional entitlements to fashion idols and worship insane gods.  We deserve the wages of refusal to speak in the "passed future tense."  Cancel the humanity of pretending  sorrow.

 

Asili Ya Nadhiri's substantial body of tonal drawings in poetic form may yet help us to save ourselves from the jaws of death that wear the masks of social and mass media.  In the tonal drawing "Most Gracious "(2019), Nadhiri wrote

 

always ever only beginning to be

    solacious approximating

in the infinite entangling

     entangling all of us in

this most gracious

   superpositioning of ourselves

 

Yes, tomorrow is yesterday; you have already been your future

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            March 3, 2021

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