MYTH-SCIENCE
The Arkestra’s move from Chicago to New York took its music out of the lounge and into deep space. Sun Ra marked the transition with new christenings: the Arkestra became, variously, the Solar Arkestra, the Myth-Science Arkestra, and the Astro-Infinity Arkestra.1 More names would follow depending on the mood of a given project, but these three appear on most of the music released in New York, including material recorded years earlier in Chicago. More time travel: by modifying names, Sun Ra disrupted his ensemble’s relationship to time, further complicating the notoriously difficult business of crediting particular musicians to particular recordings. Although Sun Ra might have intended these terms as generic markers, it’s impossible to tell how. Recordings made in both places come out under sometimes one name and sometimes another. “The Myth-Science Arkestra” first appeared in 1963 on Secrets of the Sun; “The Solar Arkestra,” in 1965 on Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow. “Astro-Infinity Arkestra” is the clear latecomer, first appearing in 1967 on Strange Strings.2 “Solar” indicts the paltry lunar ambitions of NASA, and “astro-infinity” charts the ultimate course of space music. But “myth-science”? What can Sun Ra possibly mean?
Only everything. “Myth-science” describes the form that knowledge takes as space music. Under all its names, but this one explicitly, the Arkestra creates knowledge running counter to normal science and its positivist presumptions. Music as science and science as myth. Myth-Science. A clue to the way it works emerges from the records credited to the Myth-Science Arkestra: their release dates attest no particular attention to the historical time or place of their production. Interstellar Low Ways and Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, recorded three years and half a continent apart, both testify to myth-science, and not because they display continuity in style or personnel.3 The when and the where of their production seem not to have mattered to Sun Ra, since history doesn’t exist, at least not from the perspective of the music or its packaging. In fact, the packaging communicates this point with disarming directness. In a blurb that appears often enough on El Saturn record jackets and catalogs to make it a miniature manifesto, Sun Ra declares a moratorium on history:
The civilizations of the past have been used as the foundation of the civilization of today. Because of this, the world keeps looking toward the past for guidance. Too many people are following the past. In this new space age, this is dangerous. The past is DEAD and those who are following the past are doomed to die and be like the past. It is no accident that those who die are said to have passed since those who have PASSED are PAST.4
The Space Age demands the abolition of history. If today’s civilization arises from those of the past, it will inevitably repeat their failings. History amounts to a cinema playing the same old horror show, interminably. Sun Ra’s myth-science turns away from the past as a foundation for knowledge, away from the zombies of civilization. It resists the call of the dead and aspires to a higher life.
Myth becomes Sun Ra’s vehicle to infinity. But it’s a tricky rocket to ride, not least because it isn’t there. Myth appeals to Sun Ra precisely because, unlike the observable, measurable, substantial constituents of normal science, it doesn’t really exist. Or more precisely, its contents do not. It’s hard to confuse Zeus with Newton’s apple. Zeus is an image, a fiction, a phantasm of the ancient Greeks. Newton’s apple was real, possessing weight and density enough to knock some sense into him and inspire modern physics. The story of the apple hitting Newton, however, might itself be a myth. Sun Ra finds the nonexistence of myth deeply attractive and, for his music (as tone science), profoundly functional. A quick turn to his poetry (remembering his dictum that “words express music and music expresses words”) illustrates the force of myth:5
The kingdom of not. . . . .
A realm of myth. [. . .]
It is not but yet is . . . [. . .]
Thus it is not of the past
And hence is not of the passed
Consider the hidden presence [. . .]
Of the kingdom of not. . . . . . . . .6
The realm of myth—literally—is not. It does not exist and never has. To that extent, it offers a solution to the problem of history, whose pastness scripts a dead present. In a functional sense, however, myth does exist. Its effects influence life, as myths of Zeus influenced the Greeks. The force of myth, efficacious in nonexistence, gives it a “hidden presence”: “it is not, but yet is.” Nothing as negation acquires a positive value as pure potential, or as Sun Ra puts it in another poem (“Music of the Spheres”), “Nothing comes to be in order that / Nothing shall be because nothing / From nothing leaves nothing.”7 Read generously, these lines turn absence into potential presence, or rather the presence of potential as the condition of creation. Out of nothing.
The efficacy of myth became important to Sun Ra because it exactly matches the operation of music: “This music of the spheres / Music of the outer spheres / This music came from nothing, / The void, in response to the / Burning need for nothing else.”8 Like myth, music does not exist. It resembles Zeus more than it resembles Newton’s apple. It possesses no substance. It lacks a medium. It dissipates as it happens, coming to presence in the midst of its passing. And yet the force of this absencing creates the truth of sound, as these lines from “Black Prince Charming” suggest:
The strange truth of Eternal myth
Is the Sound; It is the
Sound truth . . . Music Sound
And there always is music
The music always is
Whatever is.9
The strange truth (the notness) of myth occurs as sound, the sound truth, which “always is / Whatever is.” Nothing becomes everything. The passing force of music potentiates time (“always”), transfiguring it into space (“Whatever is”). Sun Ra puts the point more directly in a series of remarks entitled “The Air Spiritual Man” published in The Immeasurable Equation: “Music envisions and potentializes.”10 It produces effects from no apparent cause, as naturally as the wind: “The sound is of the wind, the wind is not but the not is the note and the note permutated is tone.”11 Out of wind, sound. Out of not, tone. Permutations of equivalence turn nothing into whatever is through sound. Or again: “Nothing is the whole note of music, within that nothing is the divisional-manifestations of the elements of rhythm, and the analyzation quintessence of the melody.”12
The nothing of myth and music served to ground the magic city of potent fictions that built up around Arkestra as it played, its astro-black mythology. Sun Ra has been called the great progenitor of Afrofuturism for his exploration of both tomorrow’s world and the new musical technologies that could take him there.13 But it is useful to examine closely his understanding of the relationship between blackness and myth. His days with Thmei as a street-corner activist in Chicago taught him the urgency of black uplift. Space music and myth-science direct activism toward infinity, amplifying its spiritual sonority. Sun Ra remained a black activist at heart, as lines from his arresting poem “The Visitation” show:
In the early days of my visitation,
Black hands tended me and cared for me;
I can’t forget these things.
For black hearts, minds and souls love me—
And even today the overtones from the fire
Of that love are still burning.14
Loving hands create a history of the heart to counter the horrors of civilization. But in Sun Ra’s efforts to ameliorate suffering through music, blackness slides inevitably into myth. An observation he made during an interview shows how it happens. Discussing the social value of blacks, he says in his verbally frisky way, “They’re priceless. They have no price. They’re worthless. Which makes them priceless. They ain’t worth nothing.”15 Socially considered, blacks are nothing. But that condition associates them with myth and music. From that nothing, perhaps, can come everything (“worthless” turning “priceless”).
Blackness becomes space, becomes music. Between them, the two versions of a poem entitled “The Outer Darkness” chart Sun Ra’s heading: “Black is space: THE OUTER DARKNESS,” reads the opening line of the first version. “The music of the outer darkness is / the music of the void. / The opening is the void: but the / opening is synonym to the / beginning.”16 The nothing of black space—the void—opens to a (new) beginning. That Sun Ra means these terms racially becomes clear in the revision: “Natural Black music projects the myth of Blackness / And he who is not Black in spirit will never know / That these words are true and valid forever.”17 Black in spirit: Sun Ra changes the race game from skin tone to sound tone. Music projects myth, and both are black, as black as space. This is blackness of a deeper shade:
I speak of different kind of Blackness, the kind
That the world does not know, the kind that the world
Will never understand
It is rhythm against rhythm in kind dispersion
It is harmony against harmony in endless coordination
It is melody against melody in vital enlightenment
A living spirit gives a quickening thought.18
Note that the qualities of this “different kind of blackness” mimic the multiplicity characteristic of space music. By assimilating blackness to space to music, Sun Ra potentiates “nothing,” remaking it into “living spirit.” This is activism (to quote Stevie Wonder) “in the key of life,” no longer agitating in the confined space of segregation on the South Side but orchestrating spiritual flight into the space Sun Ra calls “Black Infinity.”19
Sun Ra formally announces this spiritualized political agenda in a poem frequently chanted at later Arkestra performances, the stirring invocation entitled “Astro Black”:
Astro-Black Mythology
Astro-Timeless Immortality
Astro-Thought in Mystic Sound
Astro-Black of Outer Space
Astro Natural of Darkest Stars
Astro Reach Beyond the Stars
Out to Endless Endlessness
Astro-Black American
The Universe is in My Voice
The Universe Speaks through the Dawn
To Those of Earth and Other Worlds
Listen While You Have the Chance
Find Your Place among the Stars
Listen to the Outer World
Rhythm Multiplicity
Harmony, Equational
Melody Horizon
Astro Black and Cosmo Dark
Astro Black and Cosmo Dark
Astro Black and Cosmo Dark.
Astro Black Mythology
Astro Thought in Mystic Sound
Astro Black Mythology.20
From nothing to infinity: astro-black mythology answers segregation and racism and bigotry and hate with sounds (in the most exhilarating and exuberant sense) for the Space Age.
Lest Sun Ra’s astro-black myth, with its mystic sound and timeless immortality, seem too abstract to address worldly concerns, consider the poem in which he speaks directly to the coming generation, “Message to Black Youth.” It begins surprisingly: “Never say you are unloved / I love you.”21 Rarely one for open declarations of affection, Sun Ra offers young blacks a blessing. He is also quick to explain what might appear to them as neglect: “If I deny you / It is only love / Seeking a way to make you hear / The thought essence of being.”22 Love moves through its apparent absence to make essence audible—yet another instance of what is not becoming what is. “Your beauty to me is your discipline,” Sun Ra writes to challenge stereotype. “No one could ever care more / Than I.”23 Through “discipline-precision” he promises them “an abstract tomorrowness myth / A triumph of otherness love.” Astro-black mythology conveys and bestows love as a constituent of tomorrow in a way that opens toward otherness, as the poem’s final line suggests: “Other youths if real in the myth shall partake.”24
As Sun Ra pushes reality into myth, he takes blackness far beyond the more mundane registers of his Chicago activism. One of his favorite puns—almost a homonym, really—shows the height of his hopes for blacks:
See how the black rays of the black race
Have touched the immeasurable wisdom
And therefore the unknown quantity
See how they are not understood
And as what they know is what they are
See the unlimited freedom of the black rays.25
“Race” becomes “rays” when heard in a different way. A limiting social distinction unfurls to unlimited freedom. The desideratum of so much traditional activism arises to hand as black rays touch immeasurable wisdom. “The alternative to limitation,” Sun Ra wrote in a concert program, “is INFINITY.”26 As blacks realize what they already know, they become a power source, beaming a wisdom that exceeds social confinement.
So decisive is this transformation that Sun Ra postulated a new race to distinguish its new being, the “angel race,” which he describes in detail in an essay called “My Music is Words,” published by Amiri Baraka in his newsletter The Cricket in 1968:
My measurement of race is rate of vibration-beam . . . rays. . . . Hence the black rays is a simple definition of itself/phonetic revelation. [. . .] [B]ecause in the scheme of things even the least of the brothers has his day, and when you realize the meaning of that day, you will feel the presence of an angel in disguise.27
Out of the least, then, the most: from South Side black to space angel. Sun Ra holds this conviction so dearly that he repeats it, intensifying its meaning: “If you do not understand anything else, understand this . . . that the least of the brothers in his humbleness and understanding of the weakness and the strength of everything is the initiator and the interpreter of the dimensions of the infinity . . . and that is why there is a black angel race of beings or soul-mates.”28 The black rays of angels interpret infinity to a dead planet. When, later in the essay, Sun Ra describes himself as “the least of the brothers [. . .] as far as popular jazz is concerned,” he affirms both his membership in the angel race and the infinite prospects of space music.
Sun Ra often distinguishes himself from humans altogether. In a Detroit television interview, he makes his position clear: “You got the angel race and you got the human race. That’s where I make a distinction. I’m not human because to err is human. I don’t. [. . .] I’m talking about precision and discipline, human beings are talking about freedom and other things. It don’t concern me.”29 Angels don’t err, and neither does Sun Ra—that’s the point of discipline and precision. By holding himself and the Arkestra to a higher than human standard, he opens its music to other worlds. Nor is he alone in his aspirations. Others share it, as did, for instance, the blacks weeping openly at the funeral of Albert Ayler, the dazzling saxophonist. An African in attendance reported to a mutual friend an unusual sight: “some black people, black Americans, they were crying. The angels were crying and he saw.” Sun Ra recognizes them as kindred spirits: “I’ve been saying that I’m an angel, like all along and I’ve been saying a lot of black people are angels and there are some white angels too. But this man from Africa say he saw some angels crying. So it fits right in.”30 Sun Ra recognized these mourning blacks as kindred spirits. The angel race exists in the midst of the human, and their example can inspire a deeper reach into infinity.
Astro-black mythology lifts history out of time and opens space for new creation. It assimilates ancient Egypt as readily as modern America, solar boats as effortlessly as Cold War rockets. Thmei’s esoteric wisdom meets Space Age aspiration in a recombinant mixological myth that crosses antiquity with futurology. Sun Ra’s Egypt, paying little homage to either history or its scholarly interpretation, enters astro-black mythology as a stockpile of material useful to the task of creating better worlds for blacks—and angels. Responding to the Arketstra’s initial performances in France, critics noticed the homemade quality of its Africana. One wrote, “It was interesting precisely for this invention of Africa by blacks from Harlem and elsewhere. But it was a mythic Africa, a bricolage.” To which another replied, “A drugstore-styled Africa.”31 The names of tunes like “Ancient Aetheopia” or “Pyramids” or even the name of Sun Ra himself (double solar deity) bespeak an Africa built to order, one whose force is not a function of its truth, historical or otherwise. Myth, as Sun Ra saw it, is “something that’s greater than the truth. . . . Myth was here before history. That’s what everybody was dealing with before history”—and then he adds, “I’m talking about space.”32 Myth antedates history but includes space; it is space—namely, the space where ancient Africa and contemporary America intersect. Astro-black mythology thus reinvents Africa and African Americans for the Space Age. In this view, as Brent Hayes Edwards says in arguing against taking Sun Ra for a black nationalist, “black people are mythic, ancient, or cosmic. They are the race for space.”33 Blacks are the true astronauts (afronauts?), astro-blacks inhabiting a myth irreducible to the linear time of history or the confined space of segregation. Astro-black mythology, Sun Ra believed, could inspire a reinvention of politics along impossible lines: “I really prefer mythocracy to democracy. Before history. Anything before history is myth. . . . That’s where black people are. Reality equals death, because everything which is real has a beginning and an end. Myth speaks of the impossible, of immortality. And since everything that’s possible has been tried, we need to try the impossible.”34
What better way to perform the impossible than to incorporate infinity as a business? In 1967, as if to make astro-black mythology a material and economic reality, Sun Ra, Alton Abraham, and Almeter Hayden, an old Thmei crony, filed papers of incorporation in Cook County, which includes Chicago, for “Saturn ‘II’ Research,” whose purpose appears most clearly in a draft application Abraham typed in his beloved caps:
TO PERFORM WORKS OF A HUMANITARIAN NATURE AMONG ALL PEOPLE OF EARTH, TO HELP STAMP OUT IGNORANCE DESTROYING ITS MAJOR PURPOSE, TO OWN AND OPERATE ALL KINDS OF RESEARCH LABORATORIES, STUDIOS, ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT, AND ELECTROMECHANICAL EQUIPMENT, ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT RELATED TO AUDIO AND VIDEO DEVICES AND AUDIO AND VIDEO DEVICES THEMSELVES INCLUDING SOUND RECORDINGS AND TAPES AS WELL AS VIDEO RECORDINGS, TELEPORTATION, ASTRAL PROJECTION DEVICES, MIND CLEANSING SOUND DEVICES, MAGNETIC COMPUTERS, ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONIC DEVICES RELATED TO ALL PHASES OF ENTERPLANETARY SPACE TRAVEL, INCLUDING SPACE SHIPS WITH SPEEDS BEYOND THE SPEED OF LIGHT, INCLUDING ENTERPLANETARY COSMONETIC DEVICES OF AN ASTRO INFINITY NATURE, TO OWN REAL ESTATE AND ALL OTHER FACTORS RELATED TO REAL ESTATE INCLUDING, LAND, BUILDINGS, WATER, INCLUDING AIR SPACE ABOVE SAME, TO USE THESE VALUES FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF ALL PEOPLE OF EARTH. . . . .35
Although Abraham toned down the language on the actual application, Saturn “II” Research originally included the impossible in its articles of incorporation. Astro-black mythology served an economic as well as a conceptual purpose. It sustained the Arkestra’s explorations of space.
Explore they did. As NASA sent Mercury, then Gemini, and then Apollo rockets into space, the Arkestra released album after album, shooting higher and journeying further on an explosive mix of myth and sound. On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 touched down on the powdery surface of the moon, with Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap” meeting JFK’s challenge to land a man there by the end of the decade. At the time it seemed an incredible achievement, and in some ways it still does. But how does it compare to the Arkestra’s achievement as tone scientists exploring space with musical instruments? Soon after the lunar landing, the Arkestra recorded a chant that urged an awakening: “Them folks been walkin’, a-walkin’, they’re walkin’ on the moon, / If you wake up now, it won’t be too soon.”36 Perhaps the world has indeed awakened. The moon circles Earth now like an abandoned dream. Apollo touched it, as did the Soviet Union’s Luna and, most recently, China’s Chang’e. But it no longer fires the desire of millions or the rage of nations. It’s a silver dollar lost in the night sky. NASA, which once hurled mighty Saturns into the heavens, later focused closer to home, driving a fleet of low-orbital space trucks until July 21, 2011, when the last shuttle returned to Earth for good. And yet the Arkestra continues its explorations every time it performs or someone dusts off an old El Saturn LP or slots its CD reissue into a playback system. The Space Age lives on in music created to meet its challenge: Sun Ra’s sounds of outer blackness, the Arkestra’s “images and forecasts of tomorrow.”
“The beauty of music,” said Sun Ra in a statement worth a thousand moons, “is that it can reach across the border of reality into myth. Impressions never known before can be conveyed immediately.”37 New worlds open as music reaches into myth. If, as Sun Ra once insisted, “the synonym for myth is happiness,” then music ultimately aims to convey it.38 As Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins flew toward the moon during the summer of 1969, Esquire magazine asked Sun Ra (among others, including Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut, Truman Capote, and Vladimir Nabokov) to compose a few lines suitable for touchdown. The poem he wrote for the occasion views the event as a promissory note for impossibility:
Reality has touched against myth
Humanity can move to achieve the impossible
Because when you’ve achieved one impossible the others
Come together to be with their brother, the first impossible
Borrowed from the rim of the myth
Happy Space Age to You . . .39
As other impossibilities now beckon, happiness does, too. That might be the greatest gift of Sun Ra’s myth-science and astro-black mythology, the prospect of a happy tomorrow.