Saul Williams:
I just saw you at WCU. A fellow leap yearer; I was struck. I had not heard of you. I did not know of you. All that came flowing from your mouth had a familiar sound. That sound of the unspoken you were talking of. The Dharma, The Tao, The Way, The Faith.
My father talked with you at Mad Batter. He did not know you either, till he shouted at a friend “are you going to see the Hip Hop guy?” You talked of Paris and the 10th arrondissement. Paris is the city that holds all hearts, those forged through hip hop and french philosophy.
My brother would sing to me John Henry and Paul Robeson. My brother is one outside of time. History is his present. Communists, dreamers of Utopia, dead but still living like Joe Hill, talking to him through dreams. Dreams so thick we could not reach him, had to pull him out from fingers strumming their tunes. Jonny, Jonny, Jonny, come back; stop playing mandolin. Those strings needed to be reverberated through friction and voice.
Thank you, for sharing my day of birth and telling me what you have learned. All days of birth must be shrouded with uncertainty. The existence of a birth, half believed through evidence, and a lack of knowledge of what came before first memory. But you know it. Aloof, floating in the mists of Brigadoon, February 29th.
When I was in Paris I studied Language, through the medium of undergrad anthropology, through the medium of BYU, through the medium of text, language, and internet. I remembered reading that everything we know and are taught is prior text. Culmination of generations, thoughts formed, truths learned, opinions gleaned. Giving us commonality to share commonalities through. So there is enough commonality to bridge the gap of “race.” A black man can speak to a white girl. She struggles to express voice, organize scattered thoughts. She writes the voices that whispered to her while you talked. The tangents taken and thoughts bubble through. Then a shift. I needed to listen to you. But I couldn’t listen without the other. The realizations. Ortega was right. All utterances exuberant and deficient. I didn’t even hear everything. And that missing will lead me to buy your work. So everything is forever changed.
Goodbye for now. It’s time to look up Nina Simone, and your books.
