A week ago I was angry with myself. It was two days until the reset on my newsletter subscription. The service permits three emails every 30 days. I had one email left, but nothing prepared to send. My frustration felt purely about maximizing an investment. I’m paying for this and therefore I have to squeeze it dry. I have to write something.
But that’s not how creativity works. My writing should be ready when I say so. The day it reset, once the possibility of rushing out a newsletter was gone, I wrote in a flurry. I had been temporarily consumed by a fear of time, which is an old cosmic joke.
One of the beliefs I hold about art and creativity is that it has a sense of urgency. Art requires time, but within that time there should be stretches of urgency and stretches of ease and meditation. A popular term in basketball is “a game of runs.” The idea is that throughout a game you or your opponent will inevitably find rhythm and momentum that could maximize efficiency and advantage. How you respond to those runs and what you do in the valleys when a run is to your disadvantage demonstrates your composure. Can you weather an opponent’s run and fend off adversity? If you are in the midst of a run can you maintain the focus to your advantage? Can you adapt to the adversity and keep creating?
I cannot stand the idea that the time one needs for art is considered leisure. Anyone who has attempted to write or paint or sew or sculpt something they made purely from an idea in their head knows that it was not an entirely relaxing experience. Art feels bound to urgency. A thing I must do, and I must do it now. But, not in fear, and definitely not because of some doom clock run by the good people at Squarespace.
Sometimes the urgency enters the metaphysical and it feels as though I’m working outside of time. Once again, it reminds me of the game.
Time on the basketball court at its purest moments becomes immaterial, especially in pick-up. Basketball has the power of time suspension. Have you ever had a day at the park, in which the games are so enrapturing that you’re uncertain how long you’ve been playing? Recently, at Murray Park in Long Island City, I played with the Project Backboard team. I thought we’d been running games for over three hours, but it had barely been two. At its most magical, the suspension of time comes when you make a heads up play. We enter the heightened, instinctual realm of response and movement in which you feel as though you’re seeing the play you’re about to attempt, before you make the action. I keep thinking about a recent play I made in which I caught a pass mid-air in my right hand, but my momentum was going out of bounds, so I one-handed a nutmeg on the defender to an open teammate at the three point line. I didn’t (and I never) get air, so the thought that went into the execution had as little time as you can imagine. The preface milli- is demanded. But, in that moment, I felt the idea to send a pass through someone’s legs take form, and my body acknowledged the plan, gave the confirmation that we are a-go!, and then it all happened.
The mind constructs time. If we pay attention to our rhythms, we start to feel that construction of time and the ways in which it toys with the movement of time like fussing with a rubber band. One of my favorite artist quotes that has shaped my approach to writing and to basketball comes from the French painter Matisse: The important thing is to work in a state of mind that approaches prayer. I think we can interchange prayer with meditation. The idea is that we create a trance and within that trance time is immaterial. It feels as though it is a place without fear. And when daily life feels as though danger is imminent, that it’s simply a numbers game of being in the wrong place or that timing chose you, the ability to step into a zone in which time disappears feels like one of the most powerful tools we can possess.
Sometimes I write or play basketball simply to step outside of a dangerous reality.
In the organized game, there are time limits, but even those parameters have instances when they become ephemeral. For instance, I was watching a stream of Oberlin’s first game against Ohio Northern. Oberlin needs a bucket. They are down four with a minute and a half left. They run their high dribble hand off at the top of the key, the point guard leaves it for a cutting wing, who takes two dribbles and fires a contested, off-balance jumper. Completely ill-advised and with no threat of a shot-clock violation. It felt as though he was performing with fear of time. The team needs a bucket, but an in-game minute can last 15 minutes based on a manipulation of time. (Hopefully, you follow.) We’ve all watched buzzer beaters that are executed with .8 seconds on the clock. He had time. It’s not easy to keep your composure and to operate with deferential awareness of time.
The group Black Star (Yasiin Bey & Talib Kweli) released their long-awaited follow-up to their classic debut this year. Twenty-four years later. The album is called No Fear of Time. Produced entirely by Madlib and allegedly completed in 2019, the record strikes a controversial nerve as it is absent from streaming services and physical pressing. The only way to hear it is to buy a subscription to Luminary, a podcast service that hosts Dave Chappelle’s The Midnight Miracle podcast with Bey and Kweli. Bey is vocal about Spotify paying a fraction of a penny in royalties per stream. But, on Kweli’s People’s Party podcast he speaks to their larger vision, which is to simply make art on their terms. Bey is indifferent to the perception and simply requests the reservation of criticisms as he seeks out paths towards an equitable future for his art. “Who looked at a penny and decided it could be broken up into parts,” he wondered. “To be meted out to the people who are essential to the fucking labor?”
It seems that to Bey, however long it takes to find solutions to these problems, it will be essential time spent. The Black Star album might only exist as a podcast episode if a better alternative never materializes. It’s frustrating. For all involved parties. But, as much as I want to hear the album outside of its podcast form, I admire their resolve that time will not determine the existence of their art. It exists on their terms. For me, it’s a reminder that the Squarespace subscription doesn’t control me. Just like I’m not required to post to Instagram. And there’s nothing wrong with the fact that it’s been three years since Vol.I of Sacred was published.
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I want to write a newsletter regularly. I want to challenge myself to produce a regimented thing. Which has the potential to restrict me. And yet, I view this as my practice space to create freely. The topics I explore, the frequency in which I do so, is all my decision. Still, there is fear to make it happen. Sometimes, I’m at the computer willing words out of my fingers. Or I’m rambling into a notebook, trying to free associate a discovery. Not out of joy for the process or the curiosity to see what’s going on in my head, but out of fear that the subscription will reset and I’ll have sent nothing. Fear of time. Fear of squandered investment.
Thinking about the Black Star album gets me thinking about my own delayed follow-up.
November 22, was the third anniversary of Sacred Vol.I. Three years! When I released Vol.I, I indicated that I’d written a triptych, and that Vol.II and Vol.III would soon follow. None of that has happened. The delay of Vol.II is entangled in a fear of time.
As a music journalist I’ve interviewed local-level rappers who parrot that thing big-name rappers do: amp up the anticipation of their next record, make it seem as though the people are begging for the follow-up. At times it feels imaginary, like they are still that kid who’s pretending to beat Michael Jordan because no one else was at the park to hoop that day. Maybe, I’m the asshole for doubting that the streets been asking. Maybe the feeling is sourced from a barrage of questions from fans, or maybe it’s just one comment on a Facebook post. There could be a very good reason behind the claim that goes beyond promotion. Maybe that’s their fuel, even if it was only one comment, that was fuel. It gave them urgency to make more art. There have been times in the last three years in which people have said, “I’m excited for Vol.II” and I took that very personally. Damn, the streets are asking.
We should live with urgency. Create with urgency. Explore with urgency. Be with urgency. It cannot consume us, but it has to remain with us. None of us know how much time we get. It’s silly to get caught up on platitudes like “live everyday like it’s your last” or “no regrets.” Part of living with no fear of time should be to do nothing for a whole day. Maybe a whole week or longer. It reminds me of a recent experience listening to Cities Aviv’s “Slave Play” on the train and how I felt the words “all work no play… actually that’s called slavery” echo in my head even though the song kept moving.
I was angry about the subscription reset, much like I get angry about not having completed Vol.II. The truth is that I’ve written Vol.II over and over. It keeps changing and that’s because this whole project keeps changing. I don’t write the same as when Sacred began. I realized that this week when I opened Vol.I for the first time in over a year.
There’s this idea in Sufism that the person who tries to dig shallow wells in various locations will die of thirst, but the person who digs deep in one spot will find water and it will provide for others. When I looked at Sacred Vol.I it occurred to me that my well is much deeper than when I began. I have much more to say in this space that I’ve created and it’s because of the passing years. As Vol.II remains elusive, I keep thinking about that Black Star album title. I want that same power of my process and the presence of my work in the world. It happens on my terms. I don’t care if the streets been asking. So I wrote this sprawling newsletter about time. As I wrote, I was making a big pot of white bean and kale soup. I hadn’t eaten all day. I wrote hungry. Mostly, I wrote hungry because the soup requires time. The point at which I started writing is when the soup needed to be left to stew. The ingredients were all in and they just needed to be with one another for an hour. If I left it longer the soup would continue to improve. I started writing around 4pm. Two hours later, I ate a bowl of soup. It was worth the wait. Tomorrow, the soup will be even better. No fear of time.
Epitaph:
Then, I waited another week. I didn’t look at these words for seven days. But most importantly, I didn’t consciously think about them or worry that I needed to return to this document and make edits. I waited until I felt like returning. I wasn’t waiting for leisure. I was seeking the urgency that is not consumed in fear. It’s just a feeling that today I’m ready to finish something I’ve started. And as I wrote, I forgot about time.
release. rotation. splash.