Harmony Holiday on the Friendship of Henry Dumas and Sun Ra

At Lit Hub, Harmony Holiday considers the mythic friendship of poet and writer Henry Dumas and "poet and pianist and mythscientist Sun Ra," who "were allies and friends, a kind of kin." Holiday knows all: "Dumas and Sun Ra met regularly. Amiri Baraka spoke to Sun Ra almost every day. Bud Powell stepped in between the police and Thelonious Monk during a typical night at The 5 Spot and Bud’s cognition was never the same after the police officer’s baton hit his head as punishment for his intervention between Monk and state violence." More: 

 ...When Sun Ra wanted to communicate with Malcolm X he gave him some books on the nature of the omniverse and the occult.

Exchanges were physical, hand to hand, tactile, visceral, and love and combat flourished on a level that is unfathomable in this age, no matter how well we perform solidarity or longing. Our black Berninis with no stone, no statue to keep them on the ground, take flight in us as such fugitive forgetting of the phantom or fantasized but also actual encounter. This keeps us feeling haunted, where haunt is the lack of evidence of accompaniment for a felt and undeniable presence. We dig up our undead, our living, breathing, archives, to resist these haunts and their limitless invasions of our psyches, which persist until we invite them in through the front door.

Dumas enters through the front door of this Ark and brings Sun Ra with him. He took the initiative to record an interview with Sun Ra during a routine rehearsal at the legendary New York jazz venue Slug’s Saloon, circa 1966. The recording we have, 24 cheerfully eerie minutes playing over some of Ra’s space music, sounds like an interrogation during an abduction made more vivid by Sun Ra’s generous refusal to placate normative ideas in delivering his own interpretations of the human condition, which he feels is in utter disrepair. Henry Dumas questions Ra like an entranced acolyte and Sun Ra responds bluntly, elaborately, with a leaned-in glow in his tonal approach to everyday speech, and a calm cheshire smile, beguiling in his certainty about the sources of our collective lying to ourselves, our fugitive black myths. Rather than editorialize every detail of their conversation, I’ll paraphrase and transcribe from memory the soothing ancient-to-the-future paradigm that emerges from the discussion...

Read all at Lit Hub.