Alpha 60: It is our misfortune that the world is reality. And as for me, my misfortune is that I am myself.
—Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville (1965)
In a recent interview for a notable art magazine I was asked, what keeps you up at night?
My immediate response, at the time not considering what a silly question it was: This (brutal) societal rupture. And how it is not even a (necessary) interregnum, but the confusing and certain end of something(s).
The answer was not published with the rest of the interview’s questions and answers. Too many parentheticals, I suppose. Or perhaps too apocalyptic (for an art magazine). But I hadn’t meant to be apocalyptic, not at all.
Before the age of 16 I had already felt in my young body, had optically and viscerally experienced (if somewhat abstractly without any coherent outrage) the national murders of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, President John F. Kennedy, the four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama—14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and 11-year-old Cynthia Wesley—and then James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr (with the ensuing Holy Week Uprisings riots), and Bobby Kennedy…
There was also the heavy psychic weather of the Vietnam war, with the draft lottery ending my final year of high school. My number was near the bottom and I got to stay home. Where I was growing up with a father who had been stationed in South Korea as an artillery lieutenant (a junior officer leading soldiers in delivering cannon, rocket, and missile fire to destroy or suppress the enemy). A good father who never said a single word to me about his time in Korea. This relentless national violence (delirium) was normal, even in the high white liberal paradox of Minneapolis in the 60s and 70s. An enduring paradox that has meanwhile become a beacon to about half the nation in 2026. Back then it was part of the identity of where and how my family (safely) lived, it seemed. So, no, to me this fraught American moment is not worse, not a worse time. As the institution remains inherently unstable, perhaps entropic, still.
Different monsters
A different doom
A different moral apathy
Different ruins, collapsing time, history, and lessons. Perhaps representing a different metaphor in answer to the same contemporized question: why this persistent primal human trait, lineament; why the ongoing cruelty, seemingly unavoidable violence, absurd fear of the other…? Something that we are all capable of, given the right circumstances, to misquote James Baldwin. And to misquote Baldwin again: what is the source of this stagnant (and at the moment, savage and chaotic) cultural pain in relationship to how we also deeply love as human beings? An infinite question no doubt. One seemingly impossible to make art about. A good thing. To love fully is not enough. So then what? We keep trying.
A different repetition
A different (universal) doubt
A different nostalgia
There are times when one’s Blackness (as a way of being—the morphing and expansive thing it is, or might be for everybody else), comes together as a collection of culturally sonic facts. And becomes a temporary threshold. Proposing a different generative dichotomy about our slippery human nature. A different kind of (unreliable) hopefulness. And gravity.
In 2017 I was flying from LA to NYC and out the window the sky was doing that strange moistful color migration in and out of hues of white and blue, and time, west to east…
I had brought along Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me to re-read, but stopped after a few chapters. Not from the writing or the reiteration of Coates’ thinking, but because my eyes and brain were tired.
I turned on the video screen in front of me and scrolled through the selection, stopping at the movie Moonlight, which I had not seen. I watched it, pausing at points, re-watching certain scenes for dialogue because airplanes are so noisy and airplane earphones are so shitty.
I got you. I promise. I loved that moment, around 17 minutes into the film, twice, three times… and found the whole exceptionally intimate swimming scene (with “The Middle of the World” soundtrack) very beautiful. The Black boy-child’s body (Alex Hibbert as child Chiron), unable to swim, being vulnerably held (safe but not safe) above water, briefly, in a vast unsolvable ocean.
A few nights before this flight I’d had a dream, another water riddle (koan), also fugitive. One I felt all over my skin, shimmering. Another version of a love story.
It was a brief dance, an improvisation, with Barack Obama. Kind of funny, I know. We were at an indoor swimming pool, but in fact it was not so clear that it was a pool, not at first. The dimensions of the space were confined, pool-like. It was large, Olympic-scale and humid, that was clear. It was some kind of rehearsal, or maybe it was an actual show, a performance. However, there was no discernable audience, not that I could see.
I was sitting on a bench facing away from this pool-like place and Obama was standing a few feet in front of me, undressing. He might have been wearing a white shirt and gray striped tie, dark suit, blue, I think, shiny black shoes—but I’m not sure. I was wearing gray sweatpants, but no top. Bare-chested.
Now undressed, only in his white underwear, boxers, Obama began to move. A soft, lyrical, spiral-like motion, starting from the top of his head through the rest of his body, to the floor, prone now, lying on his back. And then another motion, a whole-body lateral roll towards and then beyond where I was sitting. I got up from the bench, moved to a spot in front of where Obama was rolling and flattened out onto the floor, faced down, prostrate, as he continued rolling onto my back. Once on the full of my back, he too faced down, his bony sternum pressing on the back of my head, he paused. My body was right along the edge of what was now clearly a royal blue tiled swimming pool. I stayed prone and still, feeling more of his body, his height and weight, and then my body slowly torqued to the left. (This took some effort because of his height and weight.) Obama’s body tilted toward the very edge of the pool and then he dropped down the few inches, seconds towards the water. As he was falling, now in slow motion, completely vulnerable, he said, “You’re waiting for me to say something...”
No, not really, I wasn’t. And then I woke up.
I met Obama near the end of his two-term presidency, in 2015 (the National Medal of Arts ceremony), in the White House, the old East Wing, before it was destroyed. The first thing I recall was how extraordinarily shiny his shoes were. Like two black mirrors. I could almost see my reflection, twice, as I looked down in a requisite bow. A metaphor for the aura of the room, the space, with an imperial and truly magnificent Obama standing in the center, surrounded by a few famous people and more than a few very handsome young military men and women in white dress uniforms. I waited in line and when it was my turn, I shook his hand, looked up into his eyes, and softly (ridiculously) uttered, “Four more years!” Because that’s all I could think to say.
“Nope, I’m outta here,” he quickly and curtly replied.
But not yet. His very present eyes looked really old, or maybe just exhausted, weary. And I thought to myself: oh, you’ve seen too much. There have been too many consequences. (Especially those remarkable and deadly drones.) And then I wondered how younger generations of POC Americans would think of him as an elder. How amidst all the deeply thoughtful, kind and caring stuff he accomplished, tried to accomplish, he really had no choice but to lead soldiers in delivering cannon, rocket, missile, and drone fire to destroy or suppress the enemy. Or was there a choice? A choice, or no choice to kill a lot of people, many people of color, some of them innocent, without voices, or any resistance. Like all presidents are required to do. Because maybe we are always at some uncontrollable war.
Obama of course had no real idea who I was (what kind of art I made), who he was shaking hands with, with his sincere and wildly captivating smile.
A different cipher
A different (mankind) machine
A different coming undone
Let’s imagine for a moment that this current societal rupture is in fact an actual breakage, a dismantling. How wondrous. This might give us hope, an escape from the daily unsustainable delirium, perhaps. And then there is the possibility that this system’s (seemingly) coming undone would have little to do with what we think is right. Not due to any mindful strategies, how empathetic and diverse we want or need to become, nor due to any caring and explicit corrective action on our part. Little to do with courageous politicians or the present crowds of young, middle-aged and old people who really care, who are legitimately at all-out war with the institution, the perfect obstacle. Rather this coming undone might simply be a primary quality of existence. The ebb and flow of what we think we know, what we desire and ache for. Getting it right sometimes but mostly getting it wrong, regardless of how powerful and certain we feel about our individual efficacy.
Ok, and before we say, fuck this, this fairy dust meditation…
Amidst the righteous and convincing wailing rage over the collateral damage, the heartbreaking expense of the (requisite) many lives that go along with the inevitable breakage and a more wondrous sympathetically subversive conjuring about what’s next, what could be next, there are unarguable truths to do with the corporeal body; its ineffable equipoise with safety and danger, safe but not safe. Life and death.
A different (unsolvable) ocean
It is human nature to be certain (in our ephemeral uncertainty). We put our (inchoate) trust in the tribe, institution, government (democracy) as we try to manipulate it, with our sincere and meaningful truths and falsehoods. The machine, its power, consumes all of it: the falsehoods, the truths, the trust (love), the manipulations, the protests… and it expands, refining how it consumes, accelerates, always prevailing, always breaking apart, always coming back together again, differently. It’s quite breathtaking.
Still, there is beautiful indeterminism in right action. (To act without harm, a Buddhist concept, also ephemeral and fictive). This is primarily an action of imagination, I would like to believe. Imagination as a basic tool for survival, and/or a weapon of self defense. Actively imagining a planet, countries, cities, citizens, art that can speak generously to all of us without regard for any fixed and dangerous mythology, patriarchy, supremacy, hatred, fear… places and existences not governed by any dominant hegemonic matrix as we know it, or don’t know it (and either way, live it). Instead, imagining an existence circulating in some other (organized) chromaticity, a color migration in and out of hues and values. A resolute engagement with a different faith and breaking of faith, a different notion of love, with its own complex system. A love not captive to fear or confusion, one more expansive, capacious, anti-spectacle. And then to live and work with the impossible resonance (the active labor) and freedom of that imagining. Showing up for all of it. A compassionate activism and its unforced embodied experiments, resistance, courage, grieving... (And while we’re at it, let’s add, as a soundtrack, the remarkable sonic propaganda of Albert Ayler’s “Spiritual Reunion.” Imagine that.)That might be enough and it will certainly not be enough.
It is important to stay vulnerable. And to be kind. I am certain of that. While also, each one of us, sharing a committed intimacy and reconciliation with our very fragile planet.
Alpha 60: Do you know what illuminates the night?
Secret agent 003: Poetry.
In Godard’s sci-fi dystopian Alphaville, Alpha 60—the sentient fascist dominating system, machine, nation, culture, invisible space and voice that uses mind control over the residents of Alphaville—ultimately self-destructs, breaks apart. It is also destroyed by a love story.
In 1999 FCA inaugurated a series of commissioned writings to for its annual grant publication.The preceding essay continues this tradition.
Ralph Lemon is a choreographer, writer, and visual artist and the recipient of an early project grant in 1986 and a Grants to Artists award in 2012.