The Sound of Playing With Pleasure As a Need Not a Luxury
Ordinary notes of a world beyond survival
Imagine a picture frame that is really a window, weathered white, wide open. In the background, dark arms flex to collar a note—blow it strum it beat it to the cut. All you see is the bell of a horn, or a valve shiny as a silver dollar. His cornet comes toward you, pushing through the window, leaving the frame. You look straight into the deep black mouth— it is talking, loud. Come on, it calls. You're almost here.
— Natasha Trethewey, “Calling His Children Home,”1 1996
“Just like your body knows how to breathe, your body knows how to write” is a mantra I chant to begin today. As I write this love letter from the bathtub, it occurs to me…this is the first year, in my entire life, I have prioritized myself with intention and integrity. A relational life skill that always seemed just beyond my reach. I’m touching her now.
Prioritization with intention and integrity, feels like this2. Not like, “you’ve worn me to rib cage and resentment so now I’m on guard”. Not like, “I said yes too many times, now I’m shaping self-disappointment into critiques of you so poetic I escape responsibility”. Not like, “my inability to express my needs melting into silence as I pull away while you whisper “let me help, let me help, let me help…” until there’s so much distance our relationship is inaudible”. No, prioritization with intention and integrity, sounds like this...
The chant of me treating my creative practice as if it is my breath. The hum of tending to my needs first, out of pleasure not survival. The song of Seeda School’s revenue exceeding the salary of the 9-5 I left to write a story I had no clue would turn into a school. I’m strumming the instrument of my body and now I can’t unhear it. It’s easier to believe this is a series of unrelated chords. The sheet music I was handed taught me to believe the only way to increase my income was to suppress my desire and the only way to get my needs met was to work harder. I tried playing this tune for years, resulting in a frustration with myself, I would project onto others when I couldn’t manage to sing on key to a song that was never mine. Turns out my perfect pitch was a more ordinary note — where my needs, breath, desire and survival were chords braided into a melody that disentanglement would destroy.
There are all kinds of ordinary notes: there are unreservedly antiblack notes; there are notes that attempt, but fail, to undo antiblack logics; then there are notes that refuse altogether to accede to those logics that simultaneously de/re/ and unhuman Black people. These Black notes may land in silence or a tone, a sound, a pitch, a record, or an observation made with care; these notes might just reach you across distance, time, and space and with them you may be “held, and held.”
— Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (2023), “Note 1”, pg. 3
What do we do when our song seems to be incoherent inside of capitalism’s logic of survival? When our needs don’t register and our chants get drowned out by machines, and bombs, and time, and law, and order. How do we hold on to our ordinary notes? Our ordinary breath. Our ordinary song. I almost said “writing practice” instead of “creative practice” back there but it is no longer sustainable for me to pretend I can or should separate my writing practice from the business of Seeda School. It is no longer sustainable for me to pretend these seemingly disparate notes don’t make up a song that is all mine to sing, and by mine I mean yours3. I was born into the impossibility of separating my politics from my practice, but my pleasure? Separating my pleasure from my practice was a song I learned to clap to a long time ago.
The history of worldbuilding stretches to the origin of language. But we don’t have to go that far, we are still inside the world they called new. “The New World” is what colonizers called the Americas starting in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. It included the Caribbean islands, North, Central, and South America, and other landmasses in the Western Hemisphere. It is known as “Europe’s Age of Discovery”. The sound of Europe’s boats landing on shores is a reverb that kills everything in its wake. A sound that repackages indigenous knowledge to sell it on top of graves they call a market. A sound that contorts the word “stealing” into “building”. A sound that justifies bombs with business. A sound that colors the right to consent. This is the scale of worldbuilding. A sound that transforms my last name into Cotton. A sound that perverts interspecies collaboration into colonial violence. The sound of picking cotton and weaving cotton. The sound of coding on the weaving loom and being encoded. This is not a poem.
Everyday I wonder what’s on the other side of us believing the worlds we need, are the worlds we have. What comes after us remembering the resources we’re waiting on, are waiting for us to pluck them from the sky of collaboration and creative practice? If we are to dream at the scale of bridges, and boats, and buildings, and bodies wrapped in care not colonization, then we can no longer afford to fear money will compromise our values or our pleasure. Creativity is all we have and creativity is all we need. The sound of ordinary notes from the bed to the streets, from elderly homes to daycares, from the keyboard to the forest, we came here knowing how to sing4. We came here knowing how to play. What’s on the other side of us remembering, all at once, ecstasy is also our job and breathing has always been our business. Drowning out the sound of this “New World” we sing of a world where pleasure and survival are no longer at odds, but quite possibly the only pathway to harmony.
A couple paragraphs ago I decided I would write until the end of the song. And the chant continues and the breath continues and I continue to continue5 until the record stops.
📰 Seeda School News
🧘🏾 There’s a brand new black feminist breathwork meditation for Treehouse members waiting in the Worldbuilder’s Way library. In this meditation we acknowledge that we carry the memory of our ancestors and ecosystems with, around and inside us. In this guided meditation on memory we visualize a vessel, floating above our heads, full of light, pouring into our bodies filling our toes, feet, legs, belly, back, chest, arms, fingers, shoulders, throat, mouth and head. We do this to breathe into what it might feel like to shine in honor and awe of their memory. From the inside, out.
🔗 Seeda School is on Are.na! Check out the Treehouse Summer 2024 Channel for links to dispatches, resources and tools linked inside our Zoom chats and Discord channels. Think of it as our emerging creative altar and offering to you. 🤲🏾
🌐 Treehouse members can now tune into episodes of “The Worldbuilder’s Way”, our private podcast for worldbuilding on the go! Listen to recordings of all the Treehouse programs and guided meditations to join us in asynchronous creative practice, when and wherever you are.
🎙️The public podcast “For the Worldbuilders” is taking a break. In the meantime, please enjoy the archive of 55 episodes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. We hit 10,000 plays around episode 50 and I can’t thank y’all enough for rocking with your girl. To have our collective breath affirmed in this way is a dream and a song come true.
Found in How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity by La Marr Jurelle Bruce, “Chapter 2 — He Blew His Brains Out Through the Trumpet: Buddy Bolden and the Impossible Sound of Madness”, pg. 36
“The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free.” — Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” (1985), the inspiration behind the title of this love letter
“and when I tell you you mine, I also mean I’m yours.” — Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987), pg. 203. As seen in Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
Thank you for everything Dr. Bernice Reagon. Singing, shining, loving, longing, breathing in your honor forever and always.
“i am not done yet” by Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (1987)
“What do we do when our song seems to be incoherent inside of capitalism’s logic of survival?” I’m only accepting and ~ embracing ~ this reality for myself right now. Thank you for your words!
Congrats on 10,000 downloads! So happy to connect on Arena too :)