‘Blue(s) on its way to black’

In response to Thornton Dial’s ‘Royal Flag’

by Keno Evol

While, looking at the frame, or the structure, this work takes place in, prepared for us by Thornton Dial, it’s the blue(s) that reaches out. In the world of the blues, which is to say the world of the American south, cultural theorist Fred Moten tells us ‘blue is a fugitive color, it’s on its way to black’ and this scene made by Thornton Dial is a sad one that skips straight to the heart.We register within the structure, the blues of bodily harm. Diana. An unmaking of a body. Sentences, it seems, are kinds of structures. Noise we could say, has a fugitive relation to the sentence. It breaks it all up. Refuses to be cooperative. Noise brings in the blues. A noise or noises, may be a more appropriate response to a body being unmade. Or perhaps, a blues song. As to what I can provide, I only have a few sentences, which is to say a few, structures of sound. Language can be limiting in that respect. Which is to say it can only cooperate within certain limits.

While, looking at the square, prepared for us with a kind of care by Thornton Dial, one is called to wonder. What are the conditions under which Thornton Dial prepared this for us? The conditions of the American South? What are the associations that went into making such a scene as this? One that skips straight to the heart. One that is on its way to black. Who perhaps advised such a gathering of blues? Whose voice entered? Or perhaps, the only interlock was noise. A noise that refuses to cooperate. What noise of Alabama made contact with Thornton? A screech or perhaps a yell?

As a poet running a small arts organization, the Black Table Arts Co-op in Minneapolis, I work in a kind of world of the blues – of color and of sound. Our structure is a space for blackness – of color and of sound. As you arrive at the cooperative, you’re on your way to black. The black brick exterior of the building reaches out. Both come with their own structures. Our cooperative in a way, is a blues cooperative. It’s structured on a blue note. If you look closely the floors aren’t quite right. The floors, if you look closely, are crooked. The walls slant, as if sulking. However, these crooked floors make our relations possible. Perhaps the blues that inform Thornton Dial’s work is also situated on crooked floors. A kind of crooked ground rooted in Alabama soil and debt.

Thornton tells us, “I was born on Luther Elliot’s plantation. My great-granddaddy Rich Dial lived there…They were sharecropping, picking cotton. They kept on farming and didn’t ever come out of debt..the Man always say, ‘You just about come out of debt this time but didn’t quite make it.’”

Perhaps this also is a kind of blues – to never quite make it. However perhaps within what we might call blues conditions or conditions on their way to black, we find relations to get us through ‘never quite making it’. And perhaps those relations take on cooperative structures. Even if those floors are situated on debt. Perhaps we seek to be indebted to each other.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney remind us ‘They say we have too much debt. We need better credit, more credit, less spending. They offer us credit repair credit counseling, micro credit, personal financial planning. They promise to match credit and debt again, debt and credit. But our debts stay bad. We keep buying another song, another round. It is not credit we seek nor even debt but bad debt which is to say real debt, the debt that can not be repaid, the debt at a distance…the black debt…the queer debt…’

And perhaps the black debt, the queer debt is the only kind of debt that constitutes relationality. The debt that is blue. A blue(s) on its way to black, situated, as it were, on crooked floors.