Devilin' the Years: Prospect

We have other prospects out there (marvinology, versions of "Body and Soul,"close reading of OB4CL, the educations of Ellison) so it really shouldn't be time to start up another thread, but we can't stop and won't stop. Ours is more about beginnings than endings, and accumulations rather than holding s single done thing. It's like that.

So we'll begin where we began before: by observing that our conjuring is in the spirit of the AEC maxim: great black music, ancient to future, an organizing principal that is, as it should be, about the creole -- it's temptations and repulsions, its satisfactions and denials, the power and shortcomings of crossing over, and the Lazarussian dialectic of the unnaground, the street and the will to rise up. We posted a request for more like Allen Lowe's anthologies because the present so much you cannot see from end to end. When it's so high you can't get over it and so low you can't go under that's when you know you are at the crossroad. It's all there, and that's when you know there is not enough of you, and therefore there will always be more. Dig?

More recently it came to this. And as it worked it out, we realized that we could do so much more w/ the tears and prove that each one contained its own host of devils.

What we did then was try to gather, just as a body of work, one stone per year. And now for the foreseeable future we'll start w/ an effort to find the devils in the years. Here's how it goes:

@ the Blue Light, we'll take deep breaths, and always leave a clip of bullets behind.

@ the Red Light, we'll collect the leaves from the library, cause we think our notes should be visible.

@ the blue mirror is where we draw out our selves and look for others; the annex, too, although we admit to not knowing how to work things there. And

@ the repeater pencil, we'll leave a trail of syllables, likely to blow away in the wind before we find our way.

Each gesture is a stone on the roadside. We'll mark each one with the year's number, and in so doing create a new numerology intended to make a new past visible.

It's an autobiographical project. When we conjure the past, we always conjure ourselves. And of course, this is a deception, because the devils take us every time. We aren't ourselves, and then we come back. It's like that.

And everyone of these posts will serve as an invitation. We hope anyone who finds these stones on the roadside feels free enough to pick one up and put down another. You know: one and one is two, and two and two is four.