FLOODESIGN

SOMETIMES, A PRAYER REMINDS ME OF A BROOK FLOWING DOWNSTREAM: IT CONTAINS ITS OWN RHYTHM AND PURPOSE. THIS, TO ME, IS A KIND OF THEOLOGY. Julius Eastman knew how to pray. You know, the way old folks will exclaim "that's a praying somebody!" A declaration of profundity. You know, the way they would tell you to go sit with somebody's big mama if you really wanted to be healed. An intercession. I am thinking about this black-and-white photograph of Eastman that I love, taken during a 1974 rehearsal of the S.E.M. Ensemble in Buffalo, New York. His eyes are closed and his head is tilted back ever so, his mouth slightly open as his right hand touches the right side of his face, gently. The sweater he is wearing hugs his neck. The collar of another shirt peeks through. By this time, Buffalo had been his home for several years, the city he embraced after studying at The Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. The photograph depicts Eastman before New York City. Before John Cage failed to understand his brilliance. Before "Evil Nigger," "Crazy Nigger," and "Gay Guerilla." Before his death. It is difficult to think about this image and not imagine Eastman in a moment of prayer. Maybe he was praying to keep his rhythm—a Black, gay man in the lily-white world of classical music who understood his soundness in spite of a world that refused it. Cage was infamously enraged after witnessing Eastman's performance of "Song Books"; he declared it too "closed in on homosexuality." As if the sin was Eastman's assertion, insistence, proclamation that one can be Black and gay and whole. An incongruence amongst his avant-garde peers who preferred silence. Perhaps, in that moment of pause, Eastman was praying to be steadied. Or maybe, he was praying for an unbridled-ness to engulf his work. For a troubling of the waters. For an urgency that would outlast his body. WHAT IF HE WAS PRAYING FOR US? I have always understood this as the power of the intercessor: theirs are the invocations that wrestle with the tensions of this human realm. From them, we learn new vocabularies. We peer at the fragility of our flesh. We see our theologies anew. A prayer, then, is an offering. If you listen to "Gay Guerilla," for example, you'll hear a sonic dissonance as the intervals between the notes shrink and the composition progresses. Dissonance, a discomfort. A type of illegibility that stretches itself. An unbridled-ness. A troubling of the waters. A grappling. Dissonance, then, can be a prayer. Are not guerilla tactics shrouded in a pleasurable ingenuity? A sweet transgression: Black and gay and alive and whole. When Eastman died of cardiac arrest in 1990, he was 49 years old. It would be another nine months before any formal obituary was published, and we are still reckoning with all that he was, all that remains. We know that our spirits never die. (What was his final earthly prayer I wonder.) Last winter, I watched as a dear friend gave Eastman back to us, in her own way, with "That Which Is Fundamental," an exhibition about him that pulled back the veil. This is, in fact, how I came to Eastman. And so I am forever indebted to this friend: I have begun to understand better all of the ways in which Black people love and continue to love as we transcend realms. This, too, is a theology. It might not do us any good to wonder "what if?" As in, how could someone so talented, so bright, fade away so unceremoniously? The (White) world rarely knows how to love Black people until it is time to mourn our passings, and even then, it isn't sufficient to account for the harm we encounter while living on this side. You know, the way the old folks will tell you that though this life is hard, joy is coming in the morning. I know, though, that prayer is also communion. Who can define its boundaries? I ask many questions about faith, not because I am losing mine, but because I am trying to see underneath it and around it and through it. I would like to find it in all of the places in which I have found myself. I listen to Eastman's music and it is almost as if he answers me: it can be found here and here and here and here. So I come to Eastman — a Black, Gay man with an offering — in the best way I know how — as a Black, Queer woman, learning how to pray again. My intercession. I am thinking about that black-and-white photograph of him and I wonder if the better question might be: what if Eastman is praying with us? Across time and space and place? With those of us, like him, who are trying to grasp onto our truths at the root. 19 | PEAKPERFS.ORG

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