I’m craving to define morning, mourning, moaning, and mo’nin’ as if they can't be understood without one another’s compliment, or echo.
Morning (the start of a new day, light, reprieve, sight, sense, clarity, justice) is met by Mourning (the ongoing, timeless, illogic, irreversible, opaque) and is undone by it. Mourning renders Morning powerless to replenish. Or, put differently, Mourning haunts Morning—dapples its light with the kind of suffering that does not heed the calendar or the clock.
And Moaning further dismantles Mourning by rendering it wordless. Moaning (the unbearable, unspecific, abundant, violent in its repetition) is testimony of phonic meaning without the baubles of language. Moaning transgresses language, is in excess of language, and illuminates language’s lack. Moaning opens a wound that Mo’nin’ marks with an indelible double time. Mo’nin’ creates music from Moaning, creates rhythm, marks time, marks the coming of the Morning.
All four are linked in a cycle of destruction and production. It is “the ongoing destruction of the ongoing production of (a) (black) performance, which is what I am, which is what you are or could be if you can listen while you look” (Moten 200).
Do all four, tethered to one another in anticipation and loss and regeneration, create the fundaments of black performance?
morning : mourning : moaning : mo’nin’
ReplyDeleteI’m craving to define morning, mourning, moaning, and mo’nin’ as if they can't be understood without one another’s compliment, or echo.
Morning (the start of a new day, light, reprieve, sight, sense, clarity, justice) is met by Mourning (the ongoing, timeless, illogic, irreversible, opaque) and is undone by it. Mourning renders Morning powerless to replenish. Or, put differently, Mourning haunts Morning—dapples its light with the kind of suffering that does not heed the calendar or the clock.
And Moaning further dismantles Mourning by rendering it wordless. Moaning (the unbearable, unspecific, abundant, violent in its repetition) is testimony of phonic meaning without the baubles of language. Moaning transgresses language, is in excess of language, and illuminates language’s lack. Moaning opens a wound that Mo’nin’ marks with an indelible double time. Mo’nin’ creates music from Moaning, creates rhythm, marks time, marks the coming of the Morning.
All four are linked in a cycle of destruction and production. It is “the ongoing destruction of the ongoing production of (a) (black) performance, which is what I am, which is what you are or could be if you can listen while you look” (Moten 200).
Do all four, tethered to one another in anticipation and loss and regeneration, create the fundaments of black performance?