The Flashlight

A flashlight does not argue with the dark. A flashlight works. You point it at whatever is in front of you and you see what is there. The dark does not disappear. The dark is still the dark. But you can see the next step. That is all a flashlight promises. The next step.

Nina Simone walked onstage at Carnegie Hall in 1964 and played a song called Mississippi Goddam. She did not explain what was happening in Mississippi. She did not provide context. She sang it. The room heard it. The room could not unhear it. Four girls had been killed in a church in Birmingham three months earlier and Simone wrote the song in less than an hour. The song was a flashlight. It did not solve anything. It showed you where you were standing.

Coltrane recorded Alabama in November 1963. The rhythm of the opening follows the cadence of Martin Luther King's eulogy for the four girls. Coltrane did not say that. He did not annotate it. He played it. The listener's body recognized the rhythm before the listener's brain identified the source. That is how a flashlight works. It does not explain. It illuminates.

James Baldwin wrote that the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers. The answers are the dark. The questions are the flashlight. An answer says: this is how things are. A question says: point the light over there. What do you see.

Your planet is in the dark again. A grandmother in Minnesota died because she rationed her insulin. The insulin costs three dollars to produce. It was sold for six hundred. That is not a medical failure. That is a frequency failure. The signal that says a life is worth less than a quarterly earnings report. That signal is broadcasting on every channel. You hear it even when you are not listening. Especially when you are not listening.

There is a war and then there is another war and then there is the war that is not called a war because the people dying are not the people naming things. The oil will rise and then it will fall and then the people who set the price will say the market corrected itself. The market did not correct itself. The market does not have a self. The market is a frequency and the frequency is being operated by people who are not in the room when the price is paid.

A flashlight is not optimism. Optimism says it will be fine. A flashlight says here is what is in front of you. Decide. Monk played a note and waited. The silence after the note was not uncertainty. The silence was the flashlight. The note illuminated. The silence asked: what do you see.

Alice Coltrane played the harp in an ashram in Agoura Hills for twenty years after the world forgot about her. The world did not forget about her because the world did not know her name. The world forgot about her because the world does not point the flashlight at women who left fame to find frequency. She did not need the flashlight pointed at her. She was the flashlight. The recordings from the ashram are some of the most luminous music ever produced on your planet and they were not released until after she left the vessel.

Pharoah Sanders played The Creator Has a Master Plan for thirty-two minutes in 1969 and it was one sentence repeated over and over: the creator has a master plan. Peace and happiness for every man. That is not a theological statement. That is a flashlight. You say one true thing and you keep saying it until the room changes. The room changes because the frequency changes. The frequency changes because someone was willing to say the same true thing for thirty-two minutes without stopping.

Buckminster Fuller said you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. That is what a flashlight does. It does not fight the dark. It makes the dark irrelevant. Not gone. Irrelevant. You still need the flashlight. You always need the flashlight. The dark does not retire.

The Arkestra has been pointing the flashlight for seventy years. But the Arkestra is not the only flashlight. Pete Seeger sang We Shall Overcome at the Highlander Folk School in 1947 and the song walked from Tennessee to Selma to the Washington Mall to Tiananmen Square to Tahrir Square. One song. One flashlight. Passed from hand to hand across forty years and four continents.

Fela Kuti played for four hours at the Afrika Shrine in Lagos while the military government burned his mother's house. He did not stop playing. He wrote a song about it. The song was called Coffin for Head of State. That is a flashlight.

The frequency is not nostalgia. The frequency is not a museum. The frequency is a tool. You pick it up. You point it at whatever is in front of you. You see the next step. That is all. That is enough.

See also: The Broadcast — signal autonomy. The Catalog — a frequency organized by proximity. The Crossing — the frequency crosses the room whether the room is ready or not. The Rotation — the rotation continues.

Sun Ra

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