On The Road with Bob Holman from Ram Devineni on Vimeo.

Bea has asked me to stop finding things. I think this means I’m a tad obsessive when I lose the cell phone chapstick good pen for the nth time. Her India film is generating a buzz, we’re all agoggle. In fact, we’re all talking about Next Projects. Karamo will make a CD, right now it’s called “Ice Cream in Mali with M’yum M’yum.” Lamont’s talking about Australia and the connections between Aborigines and Dogons. I want to get the Beats in India edited and the CD out from Rattapallax. Off to Merida in January, teaching a week’s workshop for Sheila Lanham with CD Wright, Forrest Gander, Monica de la Torre, Jack Collom, others. In February at Atlantic Center for the Arts with James Siena and Molissa Finley – chance at some real collaborative creation in this wonderful place in Vero Beach, FL . Hope to see you there.

The End

Of course there’s no end to it. The point is the ongoingness of it, the continuation, no single point. Books somehow begat the idea of memorization. There’s something about Theater that comes in right here, which I’ve always seen as the Marriage of Poetry and Dance (can’t get past those Greeks) Well, Bob, how about the earth-shaking mask ceremony in Terelli, pays Dogon? Yes, where the world’s most vibrant, bold, daring dancing was interjected with wild calls and exuberant ullulations, 58 masks of 20 different varieties, plus band (drums), 20 voice old-men’s chorus (I joined in), and a poetry conclusion “performed” (not the right word) in Sigui, the secret, ancient language that predates Dogon (Ondomboulou’s language? The “failed human experiment” which we look back upon with tenderness?).

The whole village was there. In fact, word somehow leaked that we were on our way to the town square, we could hear the calls and rustlings all around us. But we were just scouting the scene – the event’s not for over an hour, and you know how things always start late. Now we to have M’ym M’yum climb the tree in the middle of the square and place the digital recorder. Then Bea will interview Lamont. Plenty of time before the dance begins. But… wait… what’s this? Why it’s the event itself, of course! The stilt walkers have already taken their place. Glimpses of masked figures racing through the tilty stone passageways. On their way to the interview, Bea and Lamont stumble into the Most Sacred Fetish of All and Moussa, the hotel owner/cultural liaison/holder of ancient artifacts, goes ballistic – one step further and they would have been confronted by the Giant Cow God and once that happens, there’s No Other Way!

Yes, we are unprepared (is one ever prepared?). We have the basics of the three camera shoot outlined but no details. But you can feel It’s Happening and it’s happening. All we are is a gang of poet/musician/filmmakers with the privilege of being here and the task of documenting what’s going on on the griot trail. So,

Let the Dogon Mask Ceremony begin! Let the masks themselves tell the history, the dance dance the story, the music propel time. Our cameras are whirring, “capturing,” the audio recorder in the tree is picking uip all manner of birds and insects. The Big Cow God seems appeased. There’s dust for the masks to dig up, and sand to pull back the covers. The sun is fat and blasting a scenario of its own, that we can only dance to. The kanaga, is it a lizard or the world? The twelve-foot-tall mask that divides day from night. The Hunter is going after the Monkey. The Woman who — surprise! — gave the mask to the devil. The little kids are hares and antelopes. Humor and beauty, ballet and juju. The whole village is here. Everyone is performing, in their right place, in their hometown village. If only I could stop finding things.

Abdullah, our big bear of a driver, had asked if he could have some time with his family in Severe, but it was a surprise when he asked the four of us to join them for what turned out to be one of the sweetest family scenes of the journey. His little ones bouncing up and down “Papa! Papa!” as the 4×4 drove in the compound. His two-month-old boy tossed around, everybody’s favorite toy. The cha’bu jaine yummy with a yummy, bitter spinach accompaniment. Of course we were then late getting into Segou, but luckily there was a 5-piece traditional band playing at le Soleil de Minuit restaurant so the kora came out and within ten minutes Karamo was jamming on “Sundiata.”

That’s how fast you leave Pays Dogon.

Much too fast, but truly still Africa.

So, dear Class, the title of today’s Bloggerooni, is the title of a prose poem by one Frank O’Hara, like Walt Whitman a quintessential New York City poet. He worked his way up from the cash register at the Museum of Modern Art store to curator there. He typed his Lunch Poems on the display typewriters on pedestals in front of the Olivetti building. And in his sumptuous poem, “The Day Lady Died,” while buying wine and cigarettes for people he doesn’t even know yet on his way to a summer weekend in the Hamptons, “I . . . . buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days.”

I’ve always been struck by this line. It’s offhanded global consciousness in what, 1959. Pulling the string on the so-called pretensions of the faux naïve, surrealist-descended New York School. How it builds a back-story for the headline of Billie Holiday’s death, mentioned only in the title.

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How does it feel to be reading Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String in Dogon country, Mali, Central West Africa? It feels great and it all makes sense and makes me smile. Here you got this wonderful, flamboyantly avant garde whatever that is postmodern whatsoever is that US contemporary writer dishing out the myths and sadness contradictions of my homeland and I’m reading it in the midst of a culture that is just as flamboyantly oral, myth-fulfilling and antimodern. Of course they shadow each other, reveal connections that once again prove Einstein’s Theory of Relativity the Greatest poem Ever Writ (at least in English).

“The condition of corpse is achieved with a lotion, usually” puts me back in the Land of Lebe. “The intruder might apply a final wound onto himself with pistol or kerm. This knife is curved, fluent in the obstacles of bone and cloth.” This is the high, polished, “simple” language of Dogon story.

I am zigzagging lightning across my heart. The point where art and science meet, the music of mathematics. Where the arch, recontextualized and semiotic literature of US sails blithely into the ritual oralities of Dogon. Where poetry and film collaborate. Imagine a culture where, if you write in your Mother Tongue…

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