Sun Ra - The Damneded Air (rec. December 1962) (poem)

“We Need New Air”

“There is no place for the past in the realm of the future,” Ray Stubbs darkly intones over a quivering and querulous trumpet and piano in his 1962 performance of Sun Ra’s apocalyptic poem “The Damned Air.” As a vocal performer, Stubbs is emblematic of a rich tradition of male African American narration whose style is marked by an affected gravity and seriousness of purpose. (Think James Earl Jones as Darth Vader or Brock Peters concluding remarks on Miles Davis’s A Tribute to Jack Johnson.) This is significant for it is a vocal presentation entirely at odds with Sun Ra’s own voice, humorous, mocking, and faintly effeminate. When Sun Ra speaks, the sentences rise and fall, jerking backwards and forwards in the hyperbolic, playful yet sinister manner of a psychotic Riddler. When Stubbs takes the microphone, the lines pour out of his throat with the deep strength of ancient rivers, a Paul Robeson or Langston Hughes’ inspired journey to the center of all human existence and the root of immutable truth.

Thus, “The Damned Air” tells us that the Earth has been left only a “damnable inheritance,” and that the root of the problem springs from the very soil that provides each of us with life and assures each of us sorrow, pain, and death. In the classic Western formulation, such sufferings were redeemed and made holy by the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, but that was before Man’s second fall, in the slave ships of the Atlantic, the belching smokestacks of factories, the ashes of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. It was from such events that a new school of philosophy emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, rejecting the eschatological promises of religion and science, and embracing the absurdity and meaninglessness of life. But Sun Ra is neither an existentialist nor is he a postmodernist. He believes in a world where there is meaning beyond Sisyphus pushing his rock and deeper than the linguistic entanglements of Derrida and Barthes. A world where truth and redemption can still be found, not in science, but rather in science fiction, in the embrace of the impossible, the metamorphosis of the human soul through the balm of music and the return to ancient and Afro-centric beliefs that speak not to the ugly, diseased origins of man, but rather to his limitless destiny. Thus, there is no place for the past in the realm of the future because there will be no future until the past is extinguished forever, erased by the holy light of new planets, galaxies, universes, and multiverses. Or as Sun Ra writes in this poem, “another kind of forever.”

There can be no doubt that it is beliefs like this that have caused generations of skeptics to roll their eyes at the mention of Sun Ra, the sight of his band’s silly costumes or the endless aphorisms found in its performances. But at the center of this philosophy lies a truth that is now undeniable: that human history has not been an inevitable march towards a brighter future, that the world as constructed by Christianity, capitalism, and imperialism of all kinds is indeed doomed to self-immolation, and that man’s only hope is to radically reject the present and to dream of new and previously unimagined futures. The Arkestra’s music thus serves precisely the purpose its name commands—as a last hope for humanity to escape the rising flood waters and to claim the very thing that Frantz Fanon demanded in The Wretched of the Earth, written around the same time Sun Ra composed this poem: “For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.”

-Crawford
Other Planes of There

the damneded air

around the earth
circles the infinity of the damneded air
the damneded inheritance of the earth
are the same vibrations it ever was
we need new air
we need the air that vibrates with the
sound of another kind of mind
we need the beam of the future to strike
the earth
like the lightning and the power of a
thunderbolt
in order that the dying embers of the past
should suddenly be extinct
there is no place for the past in the realm
of the future
except temporarily as an exhibit of that
which is taboo
because the past is the past
and the future is the future
the eternity of the limited past
was for those who were taught the limited
darkness
the unlimited reach of the future is
another kind of forever
there is an inner darkness and there is an
outer darkness
those who become subjects of the inner
darkness dwell therein
those who become subjects of the outer
darkness shall dwell there out
out is the way of the outer
and in, the way of the inner
and in of the inner in
is different from the end of the outer in
because the outer in is the outer on
yes
out is the outer and in is the inner
the way out is the way to living, breathing
life
let's blast the damneded air and claim the
right to be a part of the outer heavens and
outer space
that we might live and breathe and be
eternally alive
forever
let's blast the damnded air
the imprisoning circle that bans the earth
with the echoes of the dead truth of the
damneded word
lets the light shine  upon the darkness
that enchains the meaning of the
knowledge that has been used as the law
to destroy

this planet is doomed
the science fiction poetry of Sun Ra
Kicks Books (2011)
The damneded air   pp 64, 65

Many thanks to Crawford of Other Planes of There for his wonderful, insightful contribution to this post.

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