8

IMMEASURABLE EQUATION

New sounds blew through Sun Ra’s head, sounds that exceeded the size and shape of more conventional jazz forms: swing, with its ensemble harmonies; bebop, with its jagged melodies and rhythmic tricks. It would take a lifetime to turn them all into compositions. Sun Ra now had a band of his own to express them freely and to share them with the world. But the sounds were not the whole of it. They chimed with ideas, longings, and visions that had visited him for years. Music was more than music. It stirred a philosophy in his bones, a deep wisdom he would orchestrate—eventually.

Sun Ra had been writing text, too, for quite some time. Words provided another way of expressing his beliefs and visions. While enrolled in teacher’s training at Alabama A&M, in Huntsville, he had kept a journal in which he recorded his private thoughts and experiences, including the details of his alien abduction. One afternoon his roommates found it and read it to one another aloud, laughing and jeering mercilessly.1 He threw his journal into a smoldering ashcan. He would never again be played for a fool. But he continued to write when the mood descended, mostly poetry, sometimes vatic prose. He considered himself enough of a writer to list poetry among his serviceable skills as a conscientious objector. Although music alone made life livable, his poems helped him survive. They opened a space for spiritual reflection. Over the years, they would pile up to become a kind of user’s manual for his compositions, instructions for better listening—and living—in a spiritual key.

It makes sense, then, to approach Sun Ra’s poetry as a prelude to his music. The relation between the two bodies of work is as intimate as that between two common registers of the word “composition”: a work of words or of sounds. Sun Ra worked in both. His lifelong activity as a writer provides a verbal commentary on a corpus of musical creation that remains utterly unique in jazz history, which typically relies on a tissue of reminiscence, research, and invention to convey a sense of the music’s significance. While it would be naïve to read his poems as straightforward explanations of his music, they nevertheless offer slanted insight into its urgent, often strange sounds. His poetry crosses the music at oblique angles, or better, inflects it from within. “My music is words,” he writes, “and my words are music.”2

Sun Ra’s words do not script his music. Rather, they recapitulate it in another idiom. Words equate with music, and vice versa, in a manner that communicates an abstract, ultimately spiritual wisdom: “My words are the music and my music are the words because it/is of equation is synonym of the Living Being.”³ The reversible phrase “my words are the music” provides an instance of the equation “it/is,” which resolves distinctions into identity, a point Sun Ra makes semantically by equating the plural and singular form of the verb “to be.” For him such an equation becomes possible only because Living Being underwrites it. Words = music = Being. To examine Sun Ra’s poetry, then, is simultaneously to explore music and Being as well: words equating to music equating to spirit. A logic of equation guides the movement of Sun Ra’s whole creative corpus. Poems accumulate in a verbal space (also a musical space) that expands to receive them. Over the course of a long career, with the exception of a few early experiments in a confessional mode, Sun Ra displays almost no development as a poet. His poems appear as if written in some deep past or distant future, on stone tablets, perhaps, or a Plutonian polymer. They arrive as if perpetually complete, and even when revised, they read like holograms of a higher world glimpsed completely in its scattered shards.

And they are scattered, those poems. Sun Ra’s poetry has yet to receive treatment equal to the seriousness with which he wrote it. That seriousness was not lost on its few early proponents. The great progenitor of the Black Arts movement and theorist of black music Amiri Baraka (earlier known as LeRoi Jones) included several examples in the incendiary anthology he edited with Larry Neal, Black Fire (1968), and also printed an instance of Sun Ra’s prose in his underground newsletter The Cricket (1968). A few poems also appeared in the important Black Umbra anthology (1967–1968) and even in a commercial collection of black verse entitled The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20th Century (1973).4 Sun Ra’s reputation as a poet seems since to have sunk in proportion to his recognition as a musician. Its haphazard “publication” scattered the poetry across a hodgepodge of different media: record jackets, concert brochures, promotional flyers, business cards, and a variety of self-published booklets. Several recent collections from small presses offer gatherings of a corpus that can probably never be completely determined, so cavalier was Sun Ra’s approach to publication. Editorially improvisational, these volumes nevertheless make a selection of the poems available to intrepid readers.⁵

The lack of a scholarly alternative leaves a collection whose subtitle gestures toward totality—The Collected Poetry and Prose—to serve as the standard edition of Sun Ra’s written work. Compiled and edited by James L. Wolf and Hartmut Geerken, The Immeasurable Equation includes several essays, some by prominent scholars, that help dispel the confusion this poetry can arouse.⁶ But even this edition amounts to little more than the work of earnest amateurs, the bibliographic equivalent of a fan-boy record collection. Sun Ra’s poetry awaits serious editing. The near-universal neglect plaguing this singular musician and visionary’s writings, which languish in slap-dash editions, attests to the skewed priorities of commercial and academic publishing alike. Although Sun Ra sought to place his work with mainstream publishers, none would hazard such strange material. Undeterred, Sun Ra self-published his poetry in multiple editions of booklets bearing the cryptic titles The Immeasurable Equation and Extensions Out: The Immeasurable Equation, Vol. II. A title he used for a related, never-published volume from 1966, “The Magic Lie: Outer Universe Equations,” shows how consistently he applied the term “equation” to his poems.7 He printed the booklets privately and sold them at performances or through the mail.

Sun Ra later defended his decision to publish his poetry himself:

I had to pay for it myself, ’cause in America, the main publishers said it might as well be written in a foreign language as far as they were concerned. It seemed to be poetry, in a sense. But it’s not, it’s equations, put in nice forms, just like putting some chocolate on top of it. It was just so strange to them, because of their fixed opinions.⁸

Sun Ra’s disdain for a commercial idiom becomes clear to anyone who reads his poems. But note his unexpected assent to the opinion of America’s “main publishers.” They reject it for sounding as if written in a foreign language.

Rather than contest that opinion, Sun Ra corrects it. What those publishers took to be poetry is actually something else: “equations.” The result is not poetry written in a foreign language but language written in a foreign idiom. “Equations put in nice forms”—in this disarmingly simple phrase Sun Ra announces a theory for composing poetry like little else in English, and maybe any other living language, too. The “fixed opinions” of commercial publishers blocked their capacity to perceive or value his poetry in its own terms. In a move deeply characteristic of much that he would create, Sun Ra decided to produce his poems himself, beyond the control of a culture industry blinkered by narrow opinion and guided by invoices. This is DIY meets avant-garde in a poetics of transposition that turns poetry away from traditional forms and toward new ones, “nice ones,” forms for transporting people elsewhere.

“There is no place for you to go / But the in or the out. / Try the out”: these words would ring out during musical performance in the attempt to provoke that transportation.9 They provide a helpful motto for his poetry, too. “Try the out”; that little phrase goes a long way toward defining (or rather redefining) a poetics that works at purposes contrary to those of traditional verse. Out as in exteriority, a movement not inside but outside the self. Sun Ra turns lyric poetry away from personal identity as the ground of literary expression. But out as in improvisation, too, a movement not within but beyond chords. Sun Ra moves music past harmonic intervals as the foundation of sonic expression. This conflation of literary and musical connotation proves key to his artistic activity, which reaches beyond traditional forms to explore aesthetic possibilities that exceed them: playing out and beyond, playing with the beyond. Many of his admirers come to his music through this outside, his most out improvisations opening a door to new sonic possibilities—including his poetry. But out names a relationship as much as a movement, a space beyond that relates to forms that precede and propel its opening. It’s important therefore not to take exteriority for the sole reference of either Sun Ra’s music or his poetry. The relation of both to traditional forms, even where attenuated or transposed, helps situate their movement out.

It’s difficult to describe this relation, however, which is one reason literary and cultural critics have neglected Sun Ra’s poetry. It seems to fall from the heavens (or more likely Saturn) without much reference to terrestrial forms. Sun Ra eschews them; no sonnets, odes, couplets, blank verse, pastorals, or satires for him—though the formal eccentricity of his verse might align him with experimentalists. But he does have forerunners, however distant or indirect. Szwed allies his musical program generally with the tradition of European romanticism, and something similar can be said for his poetry.¹⁰ Its true precursors (not progenitors; that would be overstating their influence) are poets of the British romantic tradition, in particular those prone to cosmological reference and mythic sweep.

William Blake provides an obvious example, one whose importance only increases with Sun Ra’s turn to myth as a medium of expression. Blake’s unshakeable devotion to creative autonomy in his own historical moment of revolutionary fervor (“I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Mans / I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create”) aligns Sun Ra’s poetry with a potent tradition of cultural insurgence.11 Like Blake, Sun Ra constructed an ideological architecture for his poems that enhances their claims. A myth sustains their meanings. And like Blake, he worked as an artist outside the industry that would claim his labor. Blake, too, self-published his poetry—engraving, printing, and illuminating his books by hand; selling them to friends and fans directly; and living in obscurity for his reward. Sun Ra took up a similar if not so completely uncompromising position vis-à-vis the music industry, preferring to produce his most adventuresome music independent of commercial standards. Finally, like most traditional poets, Blake situated his poems in direct relationship to music (as the word “lyric” still implies). Sun Ra similarly explored the affinities of poetry and music. Two of Blake’s earliest collections (Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience) ally lyric poetry less with individual speakers than with the songs they sing when speaking, a relation developed even further by later artists who set those songs explicitly to music (Allen Ginsberg, for instance, or Greg Brown). The claim here is not that William Blake’s poetry and myth provided direct inspiration for Sun Ra’s; rather, they unfurl a literary backdrop against which the black musician’s work acquires heightened visibility.

The British romantic poet whose work most closely resemblances Blake’s, Percy Bysshe Shelley, also offers an instructive corollary. Shelley shares with Sun Ra a less systematic approach to myth than Blake’s, manifest in a tendency to reverse inherited narratives rather than create new ones out of whole cloth. Shelley’s most revered poem, Prometheus Unbound (1819), mounts a revisionist retelling of the Greek myth of Prometheus, who filched fire to assist a suffering humanity and was rewarded with perpetual punishment (chained to a rock with a raven pecking at his liver). In Shelley’s hands, this old myth of imperial indignation and curse becomes a new cosmo-drama of cultural insurgence and transformation. With unspeakable ease, Prometheus unbinds his tormentor’s chains (as much his own), ushering in new worlds of interplanetary music where stars and comets sing songs of celestial blessing. Shelley also proves a revealing precursor to Sun Ra at the level of poetic language. Compared to other poets writing in English, Shelley crafted poetry of unprecedented abstraction, not merely avoiding the concrete language typical of traditional poetry but willfully exhausting it in an effort to communicate something higher, more mystical, abstract. An instructive instance occurs in his poem “To a Skylark,” where Shelley compares the song of a skylark (“bird thou never wert”) to a series of sensory splendors until, all metaphors failing to convey its beauty, the song becomes a vehicle for the beyond (“Better than all measures / Of delightful sound”).12 Such an instance of poetic language as functional abstraction renders Sun Ra’s poetry a little less weird, for the measure of Shelley’s established achievement shows not only that poetry can serve a spiritual as much as an aesthetic or a political purpose but also that those aims might ultimately coincide. In the most spiritually ambitious poets of the romantic tradition, Sun Ra found, if not ancestors exactly, companions on the road to eternity.

But Sun Ra is a far cry from Shelley or Blake, most obviously in being black. The true tradition for his poetry is that of African American writing. It’s disappointing, then, to note the dearth of critical response to his verse. The larger contours of his myth receive occasional notice, but not the poems that communicate them. Aside from prompting a few general comparisons between their content and more familiar African American images (swing low, sweet chariot), they have inspired little enthusiasm, dismissed as the left-handed work of a gifted piano player with two right hands.¹³ If not tradition, then perhaps experimentation—maybe Sun Ra’s poetry sounds best in the company of a literary avant-garde. But no, the critical study in which one would expect such treatment, Aldon Nielson’s Black Chant, honors Sun Ra’s poetry mostly by omission, preferring to poach a few phrases and titles instead of directly engaging its irremediable strangeness.¹⁴ Sun Ra’s most perceptive commentator remains a man who knew and worked with him personally, Amiri Baraka, whose collection of music reviews and essays called Black Music still offers the best place to begin a close encounter with the poet from Saturn.

In other words, not literature but music provides African American writing its most living legacy. The poet, essayist, and novelist Nathaniel Mackey, explicating Baraka, puts it this way: black music “serves many black writers as both a model and a highwater mark of black authority, a testament to black powers of self-styling as well as to the ability of such powers to influence others.”15 The higher authority to which Sun Ra’s poetry appeals is not that of earlier British poetry or even African American literature but that of black music—the very music that Sun Ra himself composed and promoted. It circulates the dual effects of styling your own life and influencing the lives of others. Mackey offers a third source of that music’s usefulness to black writers, its “longstanding status as a symbol of dissent, of divergence from conventional attitudes and behavior.” As a “prod and precedent for non-conformist tendencies,” black music unleashes a countertradition on the docile demeanors of majority culture, one irreducible to its romantic correlative because its insurgence originates with the most open, vile, egregious, and yet familiar form of human bondage, chattel slavery.¹⁶ Black music inspires black writing by beating manacles into song.

But it is important to notice exactly how Baraka vindicates this music’s creative insurgence. In Black Music he measures artistic accomplishment with an unapologetically spiritual standard. And what does he mean by spirit? What is its relationship to human life? “We are animate because we breathe. And the spirit which breathes in us, which animates us, which drives us, makes the paths by which we go along our way and is the final characterization of our lives. Essence/Spirit. The final sum of what we call being, and the most elemental. There is no life without spirit.”¹⁷ No life without spirit. Baraka’s vindication of black music begins with breath, the breath that fills the lungs with air, the body with movement, the whole of human life with spirit. It is the element of true habitation, the medium of highest living. Whatever politics black music might advance, it aspires to realize this spiritual life. Physical life doubled by spirit, a double being: “What your spirit is is what you are, what you breathe upon your fellows.”¹⁸ It is in this sense of spiritual being—of spiritual breathing—that Baraka describes Sun Ra’s vocation as artist: he “is spiritually oriented. He understands the ‘future’ as an ever widening comprehension of what space is. [. . .] So the future revealed is man explained to himself.”19 Black music explains man to himself, woman to herself, human beings to themselves, but in a spiritual idiom. Any politics that takes music in this sense for its medium will open a space of widening comprehension. So when Baraka writes that Sun Ra’s music “seems to take up all available soundspace. All Nature,” he celebrates its transformational force.²⁰ It fills the world with “total sound.” It re-creates the world as abstract image: life as Nature, breath as Spirit. Black music spiritualizes reality. Poetry that it inspires will, too.

Here’s why this is so. Consider first the strangeness of sound as a medium for artistic expression. Unlike paint, say, or marble, or even printed words, sound is intangible. It lacks substance, which is not to say that it doesn’t physically exist, for clearly it does: stick strikes drumhead to propagate waves through air to strike a tinier drumhead in the human ear, translating them into nerve impulses that produce the sensory effect known as sound. Remove any part of this material circuit, including a medium for the waves—as could happen in the vacuum of space—and sound can’t occur, which is why a small philosophical irony accompanies the common description of Sun Ra’s music as “space music.” Strictly speaking, space music remains a physical impossibility. Sound waves don’t propagate in a vacuum. But Sun Ra would of course delight in the implication that his work achieves the impossible. “Everything that’s possible’s been done by man,” he liked to say, “I have to deal with the impossible.”²¹ The very impossibility of space music enhances his achievement in having composed it.

More to the point, however, is the fugitive quality of sound. It disperses as it occurs. As sound happens, it passes away. To a large extent, sound lasts only as long as its source persists in making it. Unlike portraits or statues or books, it cannot outlive the moment of its occurrence. Even if recorded—on wax, vinyl, tape, or digital media—sound evanesces when reproduced. Recording achieves only an afterimage of its passing. This fugitive quality is nicely summed up in the word “decay,” whose double signification (material rot/sonic fade) allies sound with dissolution. Perhaps better than more substantial media, sound reenacts the tendency for all living things to pass away.22 Decay. As an artistic medium, then, sound introduces a hint of dissolution into the heart of creative activity, an undertone of annihilation that tugs toward silence. At its most extreme, this quality of sound gestures toward the priority of nothing as the basis of everything that occurs: music as the herald of nothing, the medium of nothing, the art of nothing at all. Sun Ra deeply appreciated the fugitive quality of sound and would make it basic to his understanding of both music and myth. Witness his poem entitled “The Sound I Hear”: “The sounds I hear are nothing / They seem to be but are not.” Such sounds dissolve reality, as the next lines attest: “These walls around me are nothing / They seem to be but are nothing.”²³ The nothing of heard sounds erodes the walls of the real world.

So the nothing of sound is no simple absence but an active force that transforms the present. Sound offers Sun Ra not the truth of nothingness but an occasion for invention. In a positive sense, if that is possible, it annihilates the present world, as his poem proceeds to insist: “These seeming emotions, so real, so enlightening / That gently speak to me / Are nothing.”²⁴ This untuning touch of sound opens the present to new possibilities. That is its effective force, as the poem’s last lines indicate, wherein the present (“yesterday’s now”) becomes other to itself: “How unlike the days I would to be / How unlike the days I would to horizon-be the future. / But this is the alter-future I speak of. / The alternative is the key.”²⁵ Punning on that little word “key”—a sign of what is necessary for change, the signature for a new musical mode or tonal center—Sun Ra inserts the conditional (“days I would to be”) to transform reality through first negation (“how unlike”) and then invention (“I would to horizon-be the future”). A new horizon opens a new world and, with it, a new “alter-future,” a tomorrow discontinuous with the present and its constitutive past. Sound’s nothing makes possible the impossibility of an alternative future.

Just where you might expect negation, Sun Ra swings the fugitive quality of sound toward invention of a better world. That’s the gist of the following lines from his poem entitled “The Pure Sound”:

Listen deeply to this and cogitate:

It is sound. . . . sound . . . sound

That makes the body sound. . . . .

It is sound. . . . sound. . . . sound

That makes the sound mind sound

It is sound. . . . sound . . . sound . . . sound

That makes the spirit besound..

A sound foundation is the key

To locked-door fate’s eternity . . .

It is sound and sound again

That makes the voice of silence heard.26

Poetry like this might be hard to read in the spirit of British, American, or even African American literature, but its abstract simplicity conveys with surprising clarity Sun Ra’s commitment to the progressive effect of sound. The ritual repetition of the word “sound” lands, so to speak, first on a familiar register signifying health (“the body sound”), then on a double register signifying healthful sonority (“the sound mind sound”), and finally on an abstract register signifying an all-expressive spirituality (“the spirit besound”). The phrase “a sound foundation” assimilates health and strength to the nothing that is sound, which in turn is said to unlock an eternity hitherto sealed by fate. In the idiom of this poem, such is the force of “the voice of silence”: an absent sound emerging in response to the imperatives “listen” and “cogitate.”

This spiritual register of sound becomes central to Sun Ra’s poetry, music, and myth. It’s crucial to acknowledge this aspect of sound—all the more so in a world deeply skeptical of spirit. That it should thrive at the heart of Sun Ra’s music, radiating outward toward other possibilities, is at least partly an effect of music’s capacity to communicate at such a high level of abstraction. What, after all, does music communicate? Not, as with language, a set of meanings that, however potentially ambiguous, serve nevertheless to situate listeners in a socially coherent world. Music can certainly serve this linguistic function, as practices as diverse as listening to pop radio, downloading iTunes, and singing hymns or national anthems indicate. But some of its most interesting commentators claim that music can also invoke something higher. The early Friedrich Nietzsche, building on the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, identifies music with Dionysian instincts that celebrate the deformation (in pain, suffering, and even death) of life’s beautiful forms. Musical decay here turns functional as the aesthetic correlative to suffering, transposing existential pain into joy born of sound. Baraka calls the saxophone, as wielded by Sun Ra’s hard-playing peers such as Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, a “howling spirit summoner.”27 They play not just to change the social world but to exceed it: “Oh, when the Saints go marching in.” Blues and the abstract truth. Other planes of there. Sounds of transcendence. Sketches of infinity. Music communicates what philosophy only dreams.

Nathaniel Mackey helps explain how. “The world,” he writes, “inhabits while extending beyond what meets the eye, resides in but rises above what is apprehensible to the senses.”²⁸ In Mackey’s description, the world exceeds our sensory apprehension of it. Sensation limits human understanding to a congeries of impressions. But what about everything that exceeds them, that “rises above the apprehensible”? Immanuel Kant quarantines such excesses, relegating them to the nouminal, the province not of understanding but of the speculative capacity of reason.²⁹ But Mackey, channeling Nietzsche, might whisper, “Immanuel, study music.” His view contradicts Kant’s: although apprehended via the sense of hearing, music captures and communicates the truth that lies beyond the world of sensation. It can do so because it operates at a level of abstraction commensurable with Mackey’s “beyond” and “above.”

Mackey draws upon the work of Viktor Zuckerkandl to describe how music can communicate what exceeds sensation. It all comes down to tone. Music

helps the thing “tone” to transcend its own physical constituent, to break through into a nonphysical mode of being, and there to develop in a life of unexpected fullness. Nothing but tones! As if tone were not the point where the world that our senses encounter becomes transparent to the action of nonphysical forces, where we as perceivers find ourselves eye to eye, as it were, with a purely dynamic reality—the point where the external world gives up its secret and manifests itself, immediately, as symbol.30

The intangibility of music (“nothing but tones”) takes tone beyond matter and mere sensation to “a nonphysical mode of being” that exceeds both, “a life of unexpected fullness.” Strangely, however, tone both is and is not “the point” where sensation becomes the means of apprehending the “purely dynamic reality” that exceeds it. Tone is that abstraction, but as if it were not a means of communicating it. That task seems reserved for the symbol as an immediate manifestation of that dynamic reality.

Tone remains allied to the fugitive quality of music. Here is Zuckerkandl again: “To be sure, tones say, signify, point to—what? Not to something lying ‘beyond tones.’ Nor would it suffice to say that tones point to other tones—as if we had first tones, and then pointing as their attribute. No—in musical tones, being, existence, is indistinguishable from, is, pointing-beyond-itself, meaning, saying.”³¹ As sonority beyond itself, tone signifies nothing beyond itself. Not merely its intangibility but more effectively this excess allows tone to communicate abstraction. And without sounding too mystical here, tone is what it communicates, which in Sun Ra’s sense is nothing. Tone reaches and registers a level of abstraction that exceeds material reality and opens to “the final sum of what we call being,” namely, spirit. And it does so as excess. As abstraction. As nothing. As tone science, which is an especially apt phrase Sun Ra uses to describe his music. Born of constraint, black music arises to resist confinement in material reality via an abstract spirituality forever beyond human understanding. As Mackey puts it, “immanence and transcendence meet” in such excessive sounds, “making the music social as well as cosmic, political and metaphysical.”³² Sun Ra’s music operates on both registers, but it does so in such a way that the cosmic animates the political. Musical abstraction becomes mundane critique, cosmic tones for mental therapy.

Transfer this aesthetic to Sun Ra’s poetry, and some of its weirdness begins to seem strategic, effectively so. Its abstraction turns functional, the verbal equivalent of tone science. Sun Ra gestures in that direction when he calls his poems “equations.” In mathematics and elsewhere, an equation is a statement establishing an equivalence of two expressions. The particularity of each resolves into a higher unity. By entitling his main book of poems The Immeasurable Equation, Sun Ra suggests that his poetry aspires to similar if more spiritual ends: equation beyond reckoning, abstraction as vast as the cosmos. Whereas conventional Western poetry celebrates particulars and eschews generalizations, his does just the opposite, dissolving differences into abstract equivalence. His poetry of tone presses beyond perceived distinctions to reveal spiritual prospects that exceed them. Equations, not ideological convictions, set the terms for the social agenda Sun Ra pursues through creativity. The purpose of his tone poetry is to rediscover and resuscitate a life of spirit that exceeds everyday sensation and its workaday words.

Not literature, then, but mathematics provides a model for this kind of poetry. In an interview with Graham Lock, Sun Ra identified its appeal:

Mathematics is balanced; it proves itself. That’s what that means: when you deal with equilibrium, balance, when a person loses their equilibrium, he can’t even stand up. So if this planet lost equilibrium, it would do a flip. You’ve got to have equilibrium; that’s why you got a right leg and a left leg, so you can stand up, you know. Really, a person’s not really single, he’s built in duality, got two arms, you see, he got to balance himself, and that’s the way it should be with doctrines and religions and philosophy. It should balance itself. If it can’t balance itself, you shouldn’t believe it, shouldn’t follow it, because then you’d be unbalanced. “Unbalanced” also means mentally ill, so then it comes down to balance, and that’s equation. It proves itself, you see. All you have to do is use intuition and reason, and you can see yourself what is needed: they need equilibrium, balance. They need sound truths that deal with sound. [. . .] That’s why you can hear it. If you hear sound that’s not balanced or something, it not only hurts the ear; it hurts the body.33

These remarks contain the substance of Sun Ra’s poetics. Mathematics in his gnomic summation is self-authenticating; it proves itself. He writes poetry that does the same, dissolving apparent differences through equivalence. Balance—equivalence asserted by the copula—becomes the ideal such poetry strives to produce and communicate. Moreover, balance possesses the abstract capacity to affirm life simultaneously in a variety of ways: physically, politically, psychologically, and spiritually. Its synonym “equilibrium” links people to the planet, and its antonym “unbalanced” confirms its value through inversion. Sun Ra’s extended meditation on the proposition “mathematics is balanced” tracks associational nuance in so many directions that what begins as a quality becomes a universal value. Balance. In his closing move, Sun Ra turns equation toward music, just as balance promotes “sound truths [. . .] that deal with sound.” Mathematical equivalence enhances bodily health as music communicates balance by force of sound. Sun Ra’s poetry seeks to vindicate such purportedly self-authenticating claims, resolving difference through equation.

One of the challenges Sun Ra faces as a poet arises from the disequilibrium of his medium: language. Words serve as much to obscure as to illuminate existing equations. Sun Ra applies tone science to language itself, attempting to recover the balance it currently conceals. He explains its confused state with a familiar story from the Bible, a holy book of codes that in his view most readers fail to crack. In a lyric worthy of Blake, and rare for its use of rhyme, Sun Ra recalls the biblical account of the confusion of words at the Tower of Babel:

’Twas at Babylon they say. . . .

Ah, dread and drastic day. . . . . . . . .

That God did something hitherto unheard

He confused the meaning of the word

He made the meanings thrice and double-twin

And helter-skelter-mayhem ruled since then.

Though you may roam yon here and there

You’ll find confusion every where.34

Multiple meanings unhinge the world of words, scattering confusion to the winds. It’s the familiar story of an unfortunate fall into polysemy, but without the usual assignment of blame to a prideful humanity. Instead, Sun Ra assigns responsibility for the babble of tongues to the biblical creator, who willfully alienates himself from sound (“did something hitherto unheard”) and confuses meaning in the double sense of multiplying but also obfuscating it.

In an even more surprising twist, Sun Ra responds with a prescription for better speaking:

This is not to say

There’ll never be a better day. . . . ..

Watch what you write, watch what you say!

Some words lead to gloried shame

Making innocence to blame

Secret-sacred hidden lore

Oftimes lead to deadly woe.

Words substitute.. permutate

Subtle tools of enwrit fate.

Tree of knowledge . . . Paradise

Led to needless sacrifice.³⁵

Not the Holy Spirit but careful writing and speaking will undo the confusion of tongues. The poem traces a movement from sight to sound. The imperative to watch what you write and say shifts language from a verbal to a visual register, cultivating awareness of its fallen effects (“some words lead to gloried shame”). But it also opens a space for unperceived equivalence, as in the slant rhyme “lore” and “woe.” Orthography dictates that these words do not rhyme. But a consideration of regional pronunciation raises the possibility that they do rhyme, especially for a speaker or reader from the southern United States. Substituting auditory equivalence (full rhyme) for visual difference (slant rhyme) restores the abstract force of tone to a language untuned at Babel. A harmony of sounds supersedes a difference of meanings, equating what sight divides and redressing the confusion of words. Sun Ra’s prescription for better writing and speaking involves close attention to the tonal possibilities of language: “Words substitute. . . . words permutate.” Making substitutions and changing sequences become “tools” for fixing a fate “enwrit,” written into words. Sun Ra’s poetry both identifies and undoes the confusion that language inflicts.

As the short but instructive poem “To the Peoples of Earth” puts it,

Proper evaluation of words and letters

In their phonetic and associated sense

Can bring the peoples of earth

Into the clear light of pure Cosmic Wisdom.36

This little lecture telling us how to read also describes how to write poetry. Both involve judging words and letters with great care, particularly in regard to sound and association. This emphasis on sound, the phonetic aspect of words, allies Sun Ra’s poetry with music and the intangible excess of tone. Sun Ra emphasizes and exploits the sonority of words independent of their apparent meanings. He writes a poetry of assonance, in which one sound leads to another and another and another, to identify equations concealed by the appearance of different meanings. Hence his emphasis on the “phonetic and associated sense[s]” of words, the sounds they make and relations among them that conventional attention to meaning deems insignificant. Word substitution becomes a strategy for reviving the force of sound, a tool useful for disrupting the limited fate enwrit by words. Assonance accumulates equivalence, whereas meaning distributes distinctions. As word substitutes for word, sonority displaces meaning, resolving differences by the measure of “Cosmic Wisdom,” an abstract, intangible, fugitive excess. Assonance as additive sound: in poetry as much as in music, Sun Ra makes sound a vehicle for spirit.

Here is an example of the way Sun Ra works as a tone scientist of words. Follow him as he pursues the flight of sounds:

This birth thing is very bad for people. The word should be abolished. Supreme beings have trapped humans with words and one of the words is birth. You see, birth is also spelled berth, which means a bed, and when they bury a person that’s their berth because they’re placed in a berth. So the day they’re dead becomes their berthday. Birthday also has the phonetic word for earth in it—erth—so you could also say be-earthday.37

Birth/berth: two meanings, one sound. Their assonance provides the occasion for an equation that resolves difference—in this case, between life and death—into a unity that exceeds and subsumes them in a self-authenticating proof. Birth is berth, a premature burial. A birthday is a death day. Life is death. It’s the kind of equation Sun Ra esteems, the terminal outcome of a mathematics of sound. In the interview just quoted, he continues to ponder the implications of the sound “erth,” but does so visually, performing a permutation at the level of the letter: “erth” rearranged is “thre,” which is “three,” as in the third planet from the sun, or as he puts it in the revised version of a poem entitled “The Glory of Shame,” “Ereth is eerth is earth is erth is thre is three.”³⁸ Add to this equivalence several others (“tree” is “three” is “GIMEL . . . GAMMA . . . GE”) and the conclusion becomes (for Sun Ra) clear that “earth” is “three”: a “third heaven” (as the Arkestra chants on the recording Soul Vibrations of Man) confined to a limited orbit and destined for inevitable death.³⁹

Sun Ra sums it all up in the compressed little poem “Be-earthed”:

Those who are be earthed

Are be erthed

Burthed or berthed

They are placed

In their place

Now Ge is the earth

And Gesus is earthsus

And Ge’s is earth’s

Ge’s us is earth’s us

Consider Gheez and Gheezus40

Buried in common slang (the exclamation Gheez/jeez!) lurks an equation that identifies the Christian Son of God with death. Birth on Earth is a living death for all of us, redoubled by our devotion to Jesus, Earth’s dying god. Equations born of sound substitution and semantic equivalence (Je = Ge, Ge-earth, Jesus = Gesus = earthsus = earth’s us) create the possibility of an auditory alternative to the living burial of life on Earth. Such is the force of sound in Sun Ra’s poetry.

Sight can work similar effects. The visual register of Sun Ra’s poetry can reach a density characteristic of more recent L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, as in his untitled poem called “[Point Equal Aim],” in which equal signs after seven descending periods link them to the words “aim,” “end,” “period,” “time,” “era,” “age,” and “cycle.”⁴¹ Any measure of time, apparently, achieves equivalence with a point. Even more visually arresting, however, is the poem entitled “Tomorrow Never Comes,” a serially permuting “word anagram”:

Tomorrow Never Comes,

Comes Tomorrow Never

Never Comes Tomorrow

Tomorrow Comes Never

Never Tomorrow Comes

Comes Never Tomorrow.⁴²

The poem unites two visual registers (a block of type with a series of repeated words) that allow it to be read in any direction: across, up, down, or diagonally. Sun Ra provides a rare written commentary: “It is said that tomorrow never comes. Here is an equation with the word never. The equation should read Tomorrow comes never or Never comes tomorrow. Tomorrow here is associated with never.”⁴³ Substituting “comes” for “is” replaces the copula with a dynamism, turning this apparently static arrangement of type into a kaleidoscope of words. But nothing ever comes of all that movement. Like sound, like tone, like the sonic register of language, tomorrow is nothing. Tomorrow is not today. It never comes. Yet its equivalence with never bespeaks other prospects, an association that ever beckons, a permutation that never ends.

Association and permutation, assonance and rearrangement: these become Sun Ra’s preferred strategies for creating poetic equations that resolve apparent differences in abstract equivalence. They can be auditory or visual: “The equations of sight-similarity / The equations of sound-similarity,” as he puts it in his poem “Cosmic Equation.”44 Operating on different sensory registers, such “Subtle Living Equations” establish the conclusion that an abstract life of spirit exceeds appearances and, more radically, that music and poetry can convey it.⁴⁵ Sun Ra contests millennia of Western skepticism by practicing a counter-wisdom accessible to sound and identifiable by sight. His aim is not to flaunt the spirit, however, but to mobilize it toward the end of exploring new tomorrows, building a better world beyond this one. A poem entitled “The Outer Bridge” compresses these otherworldly aspirations into seven brief lines:

In the half-between world

Dwell they the tone-scientists

Sound

Mathematically precise

They speak of many things

The sound-scientists

Architects of planes of discipline.⁴⁶

Artists of abstraction, tone scientists dwell “half-between” living/dying matter and impossible spirit. Sound is their medium, precision is their means, and what they speak of they build: abstract planes of sound/knowledge accessible through skill, persistence, and discipline. On a foundation of fugitive sound they construct nothing more than tone can sustain, command nothing less than the life of spirit.

Sun Ra frequently displays ambivalence toward language as a medium for this kind of creation. Only where it partakes of the fugitive quality of sound does it open to other worlds. More typically it prescribes confinement. Sun Ra shares with William S. Burroughs (be-erthed the same year) a keen awareness that language can function as a means of control.47 How then to write in a way that evades—or disrupts—this effect? In a poem entitled “The Enwrit,” Sun Ra advances a critique of language—or more precisely, of writing that forces limits on life—but he offers an alternative, too. Writing by ear, as it were, with attention directed through the appearance of written words to their sound, he asserts an equation that will guide the meditation on language and control that follows:

To beright is at times to bewrite:

So that there is an equation

Which through phonetic mathematics

Makes right be write.⁴⁸

Two words composed of the verb “to be” fused with a further single sound rendered in visually different ways (right/write) establish an equation that both reveals and disrupts the prescriptive force of words. Sun Ra works a small but willful violence on conventional language by resolving a difference in meaning into a similarity of sound. Right equals write—but why stop there?

Through this summation or sum

The idea of another three R’s

Assumes form

Projecting the words right, write, and rite.⁴⁹

Reading, writing, and arithmetic give way to a new kind of knowledge that assimilates verbal difference to abstract sound, in this case “rīt,” identifying the social correlatives of law, language, and ritual and aligning their operation.

Writing prescribes rights by rite. Sun Ra immediately deploys this equation against language’s tendency to assert control, but he does so in a way that might come as a surprise to easy advocates of social equality:

Those who in ignorance seek rights

From the hand of man

Receive rites.

So that equal rights

Are equal rites

And equal writes.50

The pursuit of equal rights betrays a nostalgia for subjugation to less congenial rites enforced by writing. Sun Ra’s equation quietly invokes the whole tortured history of African enslavement and its deployment of writing (slave laws and black codes) to enforce ritual control over a people deemed inferior. An apparent commitment to social justice (which Sun Ra elsewhere permutes to “just is / the status quo”)⁵¹ conceals a longing for control enforced by language: “equal writes.”

Sound abstracted from sense both identifies the problem and promotes a solution through the simple sonic force of negation.

Equal writes can be

Equal written words.

The right word can be considered

As the write word; the written word.

The negative abstract

Is the unright, the unwrite

And the unrite.⁵²

Sun Ra assaults the written word, with its built-in ritual control, through a simple act of negation, inserting yet another new sound (“un”) as a prefix to words that usually work without one: “unright,” “unwrite,” and “unrite.” That these are not canonical words—even when written—is part of his purpose. The sound of negation swallows conventional language, loosening constraints, unwriting rites and rights. Control cedes to sound that untunes its prescriptions. Nothing occurs instead, the nothing that opens rights, rituals, and writings to abstraction. And in this openness new worlds become possible.

Poems explicitly about music constitute a libretto, so to speak, that guides creation. By now, Sun Ra’s basic strategy for composing should be clear: test what is against what is not, deploy abstraction to open new worlds, create sounds that can lead there. That is the simple program that his poetry outlines and his music performs. The poetry itself may be opaque to the point of obscurity or diffuse to the point of confusion. But for all its strangeness, it announces a coherent if abstruse theory of composition that brings a strong sense of purpose to music too often valued simply for being weird or fractious or unconscionably hip. Composition begins, then, with nothing: the negation of what is and the invocation of what is not, as the poem “The Music of the Spheres” instructs: “This music is of the outer spheres / Of the Kingdom of Not . . . the void / For it is of the unsaid words / Concerning the things that always are to be.”53 Music comes from an outside whose entrance is negation: words unsaid, sounds unheard—but not beyond reach. They reside not here and now but somewhere in the future, with words unsaid because yet to be said. The Kingdom of Not awaits its saying, its sounds.

Consider in this regard the wind, which is not and yet produces observable effects. In “Of Coordinate Vibrations,” Sun Ra indicates how music sounds the unsaid, speaks (for) the future: “The wind is not / But the not is the note / And note permutated is tone. / Music is of the epi-cosmic ray point.”⁵⁴ With the addition of a silent letter (signifying nothing?), what is not becomes something else, “note,” the written sign of pitch and duration, which in turn—when turned—becomes “tone,” the intangible excess that opens music to abstraction. What is not produces tonal prospects whose possibility boggles words (“ray-point”) and leads beyond them to new worlds. As the poem puts it, “Music envisions and potentializes,” and it does so out of nothing, since “The nothing is the whole note of music.” Nothing, the full measure. The fugitive quality of sound becomes the vehicle of vision and creation, which becomes audible in music as “a grammar and a language / As well as a synthesizer.”55

For Sun Ra, the new worlds that music synthesizes are better than what is, a conviction he conveys in the opening lines of the poem called “New Horizons” (which is also the title of an early musical composition by him): “Music Pulsing like a living heartbeat, / Pleasant intuition of better things to come. . . .”⁵⁶ This pleasant intuition provides the impetus for a political agenda as radical as anything either the civil rights or Black Power movements would have to offer. But Sun Ra’s medium for transforming the world is neither moral conviction nor political indignation but, more boldly if surreptitiously, music, abstract sounds heralding new worlds:

Music spontaneous rapture,

Feet rushing with the wind on a new world

Of sounds:

Invisible worlds. . . . vibrations . . . tone pictures . . .

A new world for every self

Seeking a better self and a better world.⁵⁷

A passage like this one renders Sun Ra’s whole practice as tautology: a new world of sounds opens a new world for every self that seeks a better world. Repetition breeds abstraction and conjures intangible possibilities: invisible worlds, vibrations, tone pictures, what Sun Ra calls “the alter reality” in his poem entitled “The Skilled Way.” Politics takes an otherworldly turn as he extends his reach to include art in its totality as “the skilled way . . . the skilled weigh,” a practiced path to and adjudication of all that exceeds what is: “The Cosmos is the ever Eternal or the never / Ending immeasureable [sic]. That immeasureable / Beingness of the Cosmos is abstract art / Beyond compare.”⁵⁸ The line-ending “never” is also “never Ending.” New worlds alter reality by measure of the immeasurable. Music opens to abstraction. Abstract art is the Beingness of the Cosmos. Deep? Perhaps. But as Sun Ra writes elsewhere, “The unauthorized reality is celestial Being,” a spiritual reality neither authored nor authorized by this world.59 His practice as poet and musician breathes spirit into a world of death.

Sun Ra offers a summation of the tone science that guides composition in a poem he would reprint frequently over the course of his career, “The Neglected Plane of Wisdom.” It’s much more (or maybe less) than a poem in the traditional sense, comprising a series of declarative equations that read like aphorisms carved on the sarcophagus of a forgotten king. Their flat, serial presentation gives “The Neglected Plane of Wisdom” the weight and gravity of a manifesto, making it central to any understanding of Sun Ra’s art. It gathers into a single sustained utterance many of the notions examined above and therefore deserves complete quotation:

Music is a plane of wisdom, because music is a universal language, it is a language of honor, it is a noble precept, a gift of the Airy Kingdom, music is air, a universal existence . . . common to all the living.

Music is existence, the key to the universal language.

Because it is the universal language.

Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Music.

Music is not material, Music is spiritual.

Music is a living force.

That which is of the soul is the greater light

The light of greater instruction . . .

The light of culture and beauty

The light of intensity and living power.

The name of Music is Art.

The name of Music is played by infinite instruments.

The name can lift dreams from nothing to reality . . .

And keep them ever before the eyes . . .

Like once silent voices burst into song, the name strikes the ear

And the sound of it rushes like a wild thing and takes its place as the core of even the minutest part of being.

Music has wings, it moves upon the wings of intuition and thought.

Music is the Ambassador of the Airy Kingdom.

Sound . . . Cosmic Vibration . . . Life

Pure life like pure blood is negative.

It is time to consider the negative plane of existence. It is time to consider Music as a plane of wisdom and a weapon of defense against the past and the condemnations of the past.

Blood when negative is pure.

The negative is the symbol of the pure.

The Music of the past is positive Music in the same way the past is symbolized by the positive.60

Characteristically, Sun Ra celebrates music as a negative wisdom, or more precisely, a plane of wisdom discontinuous with a positive past, cutting across it to disrupt its judgments and eradicate its evils (among them slavery and racism). Hence the disarming simplicity of Sun Ra’s equations: music is not material; music is spiritual, a living force. Moving from negation to the life of spirit, music is abstract art. It comes from another kingdom, an airy, unapparent one where sound moves in vitalizing waves and breath communicates being. Most important among the equations this manifesto contains is the claim that music is a universal language. Sun Ra would repeat it frequently. Unlike written and spoken language, music is intelligible to everybody. It redresses the confusion wrought at the Tower of Babel by welcoming all who have ears to hear new worlds of sound. Universality offers Sun Ra a social correlative for abstraction. Music must be heard to be actualized, must sound to be-sound. It completes its work in people by transforming their perceptions in order, as he puts it in another poem, “That man might rise above the stage of man.”⁶¹

In a press release published in Detroit in 1969 by the White Panther Party, Sun Ra explains the operation of music as a language:

How many times has it been said that music is a language? I want to say it agin [sic] in another way. cosmic music is a cosmic language. Cosmic music is a plane of tomorrow, it is the dimension and the balanced perspective of tomorrow. It is the view of the living future of the living tomorrow. The music is rhythm, melody, harmony and precision. It speaks to the worlds of the greater potentials awaiting the peoples of the worlds at every future point on every future plane.62

As a universal—cosmic—language, music interrupts the present to introduce the prospect of a “living tomorrow.” It speaks of “greater potentials” to transform reality through what is not: tomorrow, which never comes. It nevertheless transports its listeners to future points and planes where they become the people of those worlds. The universal language of Sun Ra’s music enacts the absent future it communicates. And people change, making this a politics of sound.

To advance the musical agenda his poetry announces, Sun Ra would rely on the Arkestra, a living instrument for creating a living tomorrow. “I’m using the fellows who are playing the instruments as the instrument,” he said once in an interview. “It’s just a matter of transforming certain ideas over into a language which the world can understand.”⁶³ Poetry is a personal expression, while Sun Ra’s music has a public agenda. The Arkestra would conjure into existence his new sounds and the living futures they communicate. It played music to change the world.