Do you think with your cranium or your gut? Or both?

One of my favorite quotes is by the trumpeter Lee Morgan, who said and I paraphrase: ‘you learn the technical devices of your instrument, live your life and then play yourself on the horn.’

That quote signifies an integration of mind, emotion, spirit in ones process of creating. Of being.

We live in a country that not only doesn’t allow that integration, it nurtures the development of fractured, crippled, half-people. This society/system of racism/white supremacy states,

“You are nothing until WE pour the approved knowledge into your empty vessel. What we give you is ‘accredited,’ according to US, ‘rubber stamped’ by an institution that has OUR mangy seal of approval. This information will NOT threaten in the least OUR status as God-incarnate, bien sur.

Signed,

DA LORD

What’s a muthafucka to do?

I was conversing with AskWhy about this; what came up for me was that I made a decision (not long ago) to ignore most of what I absorbed ‘out there’ and began to tentatively rely on my own finely tuned senses. In my twenties, I would buy the Washington Post everyday and read the front page like the Bible: I wasn’t a man unless I read the paper of record. I couldn’t help but strongly identify with the suppositions and assumptions of the authors/editors. They call that, ‘playing the music on the page.’

One of the reasons I rarely engage in factual or theoretical debate with people is precisely because they are arguing the theories of dead white folks and sometimes live ones (never, ever do the philosophies and opinions of black academics make the cut). Still, I’m more interested in the folks who can quote themselves, as opposed to making someone else’s learning their foundation.

When I got to the place where I began to sense that everything I read was bogus, colored by class and racial privilege, corporate suggestion and racism, I knew I had to look within. Improvise.

Lee Morgan is right: in order to play yourself on the horn for realz, you have to forget what you’ve been conditioned to think and feel and believe. You have to recognize that you have to Un-Think, particularly if you are white. (How difficult this is for white people) Then you have to float in that in-between space of ‘I don’t know what the fuck is my thinking/feeling and what is the implanted chip’. But float you must. Its like we have to allow ourselves to become unhinged from THEIR tether, their definitions, their words, the meaning of their words and find a homing signal/instinct/impulse within.

So many muthafuckas are bound and gagged by their brainstem, hollowed out and refilled with toxic waste; their attachment to the “knowledge” they’ve received at the white man’s trough - The Academy - is fundamentalist. These ‘academic jihadists’ are so prideful. Its like that saying, ‘you can tell a white person, but you can’t tell ‘em much! You can glean the ‘one-two-three-two-two-three’ mechanized, second-hand output in their speech, in their writing, in their behavior. They’re dead, living zombies. They have been ‘bodysnatched’, replaced by a numb, intellectual accountant, whose facts add up and has zero disc space for their brain’s other hemisphere.

If you are exclusively using that pasteurized domepiece they plugged into you…..no wonder you can’t get with this.

I ain’t tryin’ to be mean, but sometimes you need to holla when children run into traffic.