EXTENSIONS OUT
Sun Ra lies in a bed at Baptist Medical Center in Birmingham, Alabama, with a few friends in attendance. In lieu of speaking, he clutches their hands.1
I’m an angel, you see. I belong to another race, the angel race. Angels don’t die. Humans die. To err is human, and I don’t err. I got to be like the sun and the stars. Always in their places, where they should be. Where I am, everything happening, all the time. I’m a free spirit. I see myself as P-H-R-E not F-R-E-E. That’s the name of the sun in ancient Egypt. I’m not really a person at all . . . immortal spirit. They talk about freedom in America. First creative artists have got to have the freedom to play for people. It’s ridiculous for America to even talk about freedom when all the artists are in chains. Life on this particular sphere is nothing but imprisonment. A lot of people begin to see it. I wouldn’t be caught dead on a planet like this. My real self is somewhere else. There have been times when people have seen my real self. If I feel ill like I do now in this hospital bed, my other self will stand right there in the room watching me, like it is now. Over there. My other self is darker, but absolutely the same. So I do have what the Egyptians call a double. I’m connected with ancient Egypt. I’m connected with the pharaoh. I could feel it when we played there, Egypt. The vibrations were different there. Not like Chicago or New York or Philadelphia. They got the pyramids. Giza. The Sphinx. They didn’t want to let me in because of my name. On my passport. But Sun Ra is not a person, it’s a business name. I made it official. And on the certificate (it’s a business certificate which was gotten in New York City), they didn’t notice that I didn’t have down there what my business was. They stamped it, notarized it, and they filed it. So therefore, it’s a business name, and my business is changing the planet. I can talk all the ancient Egypt anybody knows. Hieroglyphics. So they let me in, the Egyptians, and the next day we played at a friend’s house in Heliopolis. Then the Balloon Theater. You might say jazz came from the priests of Egypt. The whole world revolves around Egypt, really. And there we were. I wanted to play my compositions in the pyramids. I’m going to play my music. So then we went to see the Great Pyramid, just three of us, and I brought a tape recorder and some tapes we made of our performances. Our guide was an old man in a white robe. He led us upstairs and down corridors until we got to the King’s Chamber. I could feel the ancientness, five thousand years of precise government, education. So right there, me and Bugs start chanting “Sun Ra, Sun Ra,” and when we hit the ninth “Sun Ra”—all the lights went out. Pitch black. A sea of darkness. Antique blackness. So you see. Now they have to deal with phonetics. “Sun.” That is the sound of God and not the son. This is the sound. Because it’s the voice, you see. The sound and the voice and it comes right back to one word. Namely Ra. Because that represented the mouth or the voice that named Ra, you see. Now, they got to get back to Egypt. Because they had the truth too. And they talking about immortality and infinity. The world is talking about something else. I’m dealing in equations, uh, I’m a cosmo-scientist. Equational scientist. Now, I’m an equational equationist scientist. If people want a better world, then they have to get the formula to have a better world. If they want eternal life, they must get a formula. You can’t get it without equations. It’s nothing but equations. That’s all they need now. Another tomorrow they never told me of came with the abruptness of a fiery dawn and spoke of Cosmic Equations: the equations of sight-similarity, the equations of sound-similarity, subtle Living Equations, clear only to those who wish to be attuned to the vibrations of the Outer Cosmic Worlds, subtle living equations of the outer realms dear only to those who fervently wish the greater life. The equation Ignorance equals bliss deserves due consideration. In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth and the Earth was waste. In the undertaking God created the haven and the oath and the oath was waste. All equations together are two immeasurable equations because of the immeasurable presence of the nonbeing in the duality of the balanced openness of the two. You may be sure that my conclusions about the whole thing will be balanced justice . . . precision sincerity. Hold my hand. There. I have to deal with the people. They’re not manmade, you know. They’re instruments in a sense. And so they got to be tuned up. They got to be tightened up like they do a piano. If you tune them up to the Creator they’ll be in communication. If you tune them up to Saturn, they’ll be in communication there. Wherever you tune them, that’s where they gonna be. But right now they in the department of death. The realm of death. All in the realm of death is nothing but peace. Its inhabitants have all received equal rights because they received equal rites. But if death is the absence of life, then death’s death is life. But when it comes to music, man is god up there in the octave. The music comes from the void, the nothing, the void, in response to the burning need for something else. And if music is in your heart, you can’t do anything wrong. Friendship is what I’m talking about. Friends are not friends for any reason whatsoever but it’s very beautiful, friendship. Like one of my songs is Friendly Galaxy. I’m talking ’bout friendship. I don’t think about nothing but reaching people with impressions of happiness. I’m actually painting pictures of infinity with my music. It has something else in it, something from another world. Hold my hand. I opened up the Space Age. See, nothing happens on this planet unless somebody from somewhere else allow and give permission to man to do it. So I’ve chosen intergalactic music or it has chosen me. Intergalactic music concerns music of the galaxies. It concerns intergalactic thought and intergalactic travel. The intergalactic music is in hieroglyphic-sound: an abstract analysis and synthesis of man’s relationship to the universe, visible and invisible. This music is of the realm of the alter-destiny. It touches upon the realm of myth of the outer-alter potential. The eternal endless mythology spectrum hieroglyphic parallel/duology presence. HOLD MY HAND. All that I am is a visitation, and that is the meaning of the natural alter-self. . . . The alternative to limitation is INFINITY.
Sun Ra departed planet Earth on May 30, 1993.
He travels the spaceways from planet to planet.