”[Language, myth, art, and religion] are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines and strengthens this net. [….] Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.”
–Ernst Cassirer, I think
A conversation with yourself, then. Looking at your past to look toward your future. Hey now, I’m no charlatan, but Derrida said, everything exists in relation to itself, or other things, or whatever. I think.
And today, the third of August, ’59,
Stretches on the grass a deliberate
Shadow, but already the fact of naming it
And conjecturing its circumstances
Makes it a figment of art and no creature
Living among those that walk the earth.
– Borges, I’m pretty sure. Oh Jorge, how I feel that. That other tiger, that which is not in verse. What happens to the rest of everything, what gets left out when we construct all this ‘representation’? Where does it all go? The ghosts of before and after?
“this album is everything that i am and everything that i am not. i wanted to embrace all of the facets of my identity but not let those paradigms build chains around my artistic vision. this album is a queer’d journey of interrogation in order to discover the seed of my fire.”
–Abdu Ali, I’m sure of it. What is home, youth? Where do we lie to rest the gaps, the empty spaces of memory? The ennui of nothing-moments, staring into your mind? Do you remember youth? Do you let yourself feel the moments you have forgotten? Do they creep up when you’re getting a haircut, diamonds falling from your hair? We all need haircuts, even kids. And we’ve all been between two mirrors facing one another, in the middle of an endless tunnel of refracted light. And we can’t see that unless we’re stuck in the middle.
Abdu Ali—baltimore, a musician, a performer, a human, “a creature of consumption” (see track: “Interlude: To Be Human?”). But also “multifaceted, layered, ever evolving.” All of us are like that, no? But are we one person (x1) at one point (t1), then carried wholly intact (x2) to a later point in time (t2)? In other words, answer me this: if t1 —> t2, then x1 = x2? Or do we need an arrow? A two way arrow, like <—>? What changes? What stays? What grows? What falls away?
Free jazz, soul, punk, rap. Call it whatever. FIYAH!!!! is a journey within and without. Abdu Ali’s work is ever-evolving, a shapeless wet clay, a reflection of their past. Dive in below.
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