The Association of Black Librarian, Vegan, Yoga Teachers
It’s a play on words. There is no “Association of Black Librarian, Vegan, Yoga Teachers” because I am making the association—in my head. It is a head 🧠🐌 that is not electrocuted by Van-Gogh-like seizures—I am not not eating the vermilion. The vision is quite matter of fact.
The Black librarian part is not that hard—even here in Los Angeles. There is at least one do-right sister in Culver City and more than an honorable few at A C Bilbrew. But, when I tack on the Vegan-Yoga part, it gets balmy.
But lets be clear: there is an International Association of Black Yoga Teachers led by Krisha Kaur but Black yoga does not imply veganism and it certainly is not yoked to library science—Black library science.
And when I say, ‘Black library science,’ I am saying that there are Black women of the 21st century who prioritize preserving Black memories as a profession. So imagine a sister like Ona Hawk getting together with a sister like [Shanee’ Yvette Murrain](Shanee’ Yvette Murrain), making a third sister that melds with that kid from Just Alkaline Vegan. Balmy.
This is a crazy dream of a person that went beyond mere work-life balance (which is something I am far from mastering): they explore death-culture-life-culture “balance.” Going too far into the yoga threatens the prioritizing of a non-alkaline diet (and misleads one into thinking that the Buddha was not reactionary to imperialism while African high-civilization predates imperialism entirely). Going too far into the “Black” often prevents progressive interest in technology (made famous by Erykah Bahdu) and ultimately leads to a Mark Essex impasse (made famous recently by Officer Dorner). Going too far into the white-institutional academics (offering the library science) leads to a Dubois-talking-shit-about-Garvey, eugenical repetition of negro history. So what I am talking about (crazily) is that this imaginary sister in my head really, really took the time to think about identity, like an internationally renowned conceptual artist that somehow made a career without courting Eurocentric institutions.
So, there is a negative side to being attractive. Being attractive also means that, like the 14th Dalai Lama, you have to deal with people traffic which will start to compete with solitude time for meditation. The first thing every do-right brother should want to know about an attractive sister is how they handle the people traffic. In this world of social media, she can easily send signals (along with the selfies) that she is deeply involved with at least one person, starting with herself.
The destructive stupidity of men (which could be happening here in this writing), is rooted in his unawareness of the people-traffic problem most attractive women with a smartphone have. This dumb guy actually thinks he and her are (or can be) alone, instead of seeing what she most often sees: a group-think electron cloud of entertaining indirection. She sees no ‘problem.’ The toxic violence of men (abstract and physical) is rooted from trying to force her be alone with him. There is no waiting for her to want to be alone with him. This, by the way, is truly likely to never happen.
Both of them—the male and the female, fail to frame these incompatibilities as a Buddhist problem of desire. She wants adoration crowds of socialite belonging (like a celebrity from the 20th century) and he wants to be alone with her body (seriously, similar to a psychopathic killer from the 20th century). And these are the unflattering, non-optimistic reasons why I think “everyone” is an “artist.”
Each of us has a “practice” as an “artist”—one gruesome but popular practice in North America is the consumption of the Standard American Diet to cause inflammation, eventually making living fibroid tumor sculptures in the womb. I am not saying I am free from American gruesome styles (as you can see in this writing here) I am just saying that Theaster Gates’ use of the words Black Archive might represent a beginning that some great sister is already working on…