TOWARS A NEW SHORE
CLAUDIA SEGURA
One particularly hot day in May 1914, when the sun seemed to crack the dirt roads of Alabama, Herman Sonny Blount was born. It seemed that the planets had been aligned in a singular fashion to have certain in�luence on what would be the future of this young man. From an early age he manifested an extraordinary musical talent and although self-taught, he learned to write music when he was just ten years old. He was de�initely a little genius at the piano, able to transcribe from memory scores for the different instruments that made up a jazz band. Soon, he started playing in different orchestras. Herman Sonny Blount was devoted to Kabbalistic theories, etymology, the founding myths and futuristic stories. He believed that the sky hid magical theories that for some strange reason came to his ears and inspired him to develop his own philosophy. In some ways it seemed that the stars were determined by his body and height; the limits of the universe reached as far as his arms stretched and thus determined his perceptions. It 1 was a New Universe [1] that Herman could see, quoting Helena Kolody: "He painted the stars on the wall and had the sky at his �ingertips". Given his talent, he earned a scholarship to study musical theory and composition in Chicago. There he had a revelation that would determine his life: the planet Earth was not his birthplace. He claimed to be a native of Saturn and to establish constant communication with beings from these latitudes. And so he created narratives based on visual games; he related registration iconography with contemporary photos and espoused discourses through images. As if it were a game, similar to Memory, Herman would lift the cards and place them as he liked, while making narratives that formed [2] a visual �ile. During his teens he decided to change its name to Sun Ra. This allusion to the Egyptian sun god, linked to drawings by Robert Fludd, the English astrologer and mystic of the sixteenth century, is not surprising. This mystic believed that the human heart functioned like a Sun, and the blood as the planets that orbit around it. In the same American continent but several kilometers away from the Chicago Sun Ra, in the highlands of Colombia, Muiscas called frogs, Ie-Sua [3] which means 2 sun food in the Muysccubun language. This is because when summer arrives and the Sun dries the puddles, and the frogs lie on their backs 1. Poema mínimo, Helena Colody, 1986
2. The Muisca language belonged to the family of Chibcha languages; its extinction was ordered by Charles III, King of Spain, who prohibited its use so as to have better control over the native population. (Its ban continued until the Constitution of Colombia of 1991 was approved, and today it is of�icially an extinct language
until they die. Many Muisca legends and their understanding of the cosmogony of existence refer to the Frog as the food of the universe.
Convinced that he should show mankind his new name and transmit the messages given to him by the gods of his planet through his songs, Sun Ra developed a brilliant career. He founded the Sun Ra Arkestra, an unusual group for the scenarios of the age, not only because of the large number of interpreters who composed it but especially because of the experimental sounds and extravagant costumes they wore at concerts.
Coincidences of life; a fellow national and friend of Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares was born the same year as the musician from Saturn. We do not know for sure if Sun Ra managed to read one of the novels of the Argentine entitled The Celestial Plot, written in 1948. There are many connecting lines between the literary story and the songs of our friend from Saturn. The story in question tells of the journey of Captain Morris, an expert �ighter pilot who travels through several parallel realities. Returning to Buenos Aires after a test �light, he lands in a different city from which he departed; disoriented, he cannot understand that his location is wrong. Divergences between the Buenos Aires he remembers and the one where he has landed are too subtle but present nevertheless. Bioy Casares makes us doubt the certainty of a reality and takes us into a sea of credible �ictions [4]. Allusions to diluted times and parallel realities are recurrent in the poems of Sun Ra. Both he and Adolfo Bioy Casares would have been 21 when Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, "father of cosmonautics" died in the Soviet Union. From a Polish family, Tsiolkovsky was a visionary scientist, and a fervent admirer of Jules Verne. In his youth, he enjoyed From the Earth to the Moon immensely and unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not rule out the idea of traveling to the moon, a feat that seemed like science �iction at the time. On the contrary, he seriously considered the possibility of carrying out such madness, and identi�ied the problem of the idea of the great Frenchman very quickly: the acceleration when leaving the earth would be so excessive that would kill the travelers in the aircraft. Konstantin then began to ruminate on how to reach space realistically. In 1883 he wrote The Free Space that included a sketch of what could be a spaceship, twenty years before the construction of the �irst airplane by the Wright
Brothers. He also designed models of space stations [5] as habitats orbiting an astronomic body. They were essential for space journeys to be made by rockets years later. His studies included rotation for obtaining arti�icial gravity and the use of arti�icial ecosystems. Today orbital stations, as predicted by Tsiolkovski, have an important logistical and strategic value in interplanetary space travel. There are museums, monuments and other terrestrial sites that honor him but perhaps the most special is invisible to human eyes; on the far side of the moon, facing the solar system, is the so-called Tsiolkovsky crater.
Surely he imagined a moon such as the heavenly body described in science �iction novels; many scienti�ic advances are based on imaginations created by literature and �ilms. How else can we make sense of the present if it does not resemble the �ictitious image that we have of it? If we were to pulverize 100 science �iction novels, the image that would result would be the same lunar crater: a whitish landscape in which ashes move to create fantasies. We might think that there had been a miscalculation [6] and that the words by themselves are not enough to make sense; that it is necessary to have an active reader or spectator to �ill in the hermetic value of the text and to begin to act. One of these pulverized novels could be Dune, written by Frank Herbert in 1965 and which years later Alejandro Jodorowsky wanted to adapt to make a movie under the same title. The �ilmmaker could not ful�ill his dream because it was �inally directed by David Lynch, but the original script, by Jodorwosky, would revolutionize the world of �iction. He projected extravagant characters played by artists and actors like Orson Welles and Salvador Dali. They were heroes, shamanic beings that channeled information and energy from other levels and planes. Somehow they gathered information from the stars [7] and condensed magic, subtle, micro and macro effects. It seemed that the writer was picturing what life would be like in remote places of our galaxy. Driven by the same curiosity but in exactly the opposite direction, in the 70s the scientist Carl Sagan launched a project that propelled the Voyager and Pioneer space crafts into space carrying a series of data that would provide an idea of our civilization and our planet. Pioneer space probes X and XI were two of the �irst attempts of the space exploration program at NASA. Some plates were installed on these probes, with a symbolic message regarding human beings
and the Earth, addressed to a possible alien civilization that might intercept them. The Voyager probe traveled with the so-called "golden disc of Humanity". It would take 40,000 years to reach the vicinity of the star closest to our solar system. Carl Sagan stated that the spacecraft and the information would only be found if there were other civilizations capable of traveling through interstellar space. The scientist tried to capture time under a symbolic action but did not realize that messages have been sent into space for thousands of years. They are Voices from Vanishing Worlds [8] embedded in a gold plate that we could redo today, including events related to the history of scienti�ic knowledge, ecological changes, discoveries that in�luenced the discernment of our evolution or even technological transformations. 3 In 1986 and to the surprise of many, Sun Ra, the legendary, free jazz driver and John Cage, the experimental intellectual composer, staged a concert together in a Coney Island park in New York. John Cage meets Sun Ra was the name of the famous event. Both musicians agreed on the limitation of language on human perception and how the repetition of a sound [9] opened new �ields to other dimensions. Delving into spaces where perception is lost and the horizon escapes, increases the ability of our eyes to better see the light in space. James Turrell [10] says that "we feed on light, we drink it through our skin and with a little more exposure to light, we become part of things”. As Sun Ra, on several occasions, he said: “I am not an artist of the Earth; I am totally involved in the heavens.” Partly for this reason the American artist Turrell decided to embark during more than three decades on the construction of Roden Crater; the transformation of a volcanic crater located in the Arizona desert, into an observatory for the naked eye, designed for sighting celestial phenomena.
The questions are always the same: what do we seek in the universe? How is it made and what composes it? Let us place ourselves for a second in a lecture by a scientist who explains the formation of our galaxy and at the time of the questions, a shy lady raises her hand. She says that the Earth is held up by the back of a turtle, to which the wide-eyed scientist asks: “And what is it that supports the turtle?’” 3. Szwed, John. 1997. Space Is the Place. The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. Nueva York: Pantheon
With a smile, she explains: “Turtles all the way down� [11]. Actually the projection of space is as much objective as it is subjective. There are many enigmas still to be discovered that neither specialists on the universe know how to decipher. The projection of space is as much objective as it is subjective. The astronomers that tirelessly observe the blue dome struggle against time investigating formations that most probably have long disappeared. They are archaeologists looking at a defunct future. What they discover is part of a historic event that comes to them inactivated in time. Imagine, then, that our cities and their landmarks can also compose constellations [12] in the same urban scheme. As Alice in Wonderland said: "If I were to make my world, everything would be nonsense. Because everything that would be, is not. And on the contrary, what would be, would not be and what would not be, would be. She believed in a place that was Nowhere [13], which could not be deciphered and was lost in the black holes and the most distant galaxies. Through futuristic novels, ancient legends, space movies, urban appropriations and sidereal music, Sun Ra created the magical music of the spheres for future times. He said: Here is that something [14] when he referred to meteorites, their speed and the possibility of crashing against a planet; he believed that the end of the world should not be feared; instead, the secret beauty of the incandescence of those rocks should be admired.
His songs in�luenced a generation of visionaries and everyone mourned when, on a cold night in 1993, the sky opened to absorb a breathless Sun Ra and many say that the celestial dome took him to a planet; Jimi Hendrix has always believed that it was to Venus, and many others to Saturn. No doubt he left for a New Shore, traveling at the speed of light.
[1] Marlon de Azambuja / New Universe (2016) [2] Pedro Torres / Again (2015) [3] Juan Zamora / Ie-Sua (2016) [4] Alberto Lezaca / 304 no es 309 (2016) [5] Tania Candiani / Geometría de estaciones espaciales (2014 – 2016) [6] Julieta Aranda / There Has Been a Miscalculation (Flattened ammunition) [Ha habido un error de cálculo (municiones aplastadas)] (2008) [7] César González / Astros (2016) [8] Regina de Miguel / Voices of Vanishing Worlds [Voces de mundos que se desvanecen] (2013) [9] Pedro Torres / O (2016) [10] James Turrell / Stuck Red - Stuck Blue (1970) [11] Basim Magdy / Turtles All the Way Down [Tortugas hasta abajo] (2009) [12] Mayana Redin / Establecimiento Cosmos (2016) [13] Adriana Ciudad / Nowhere (2016) [14] Víctor Garcés / Here is that something (2016)
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[5] [11] [3]
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[13] [8]
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Second �loor
[7] [12]
[13]
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[6]
[1]
First �loor
Towards a new shore Many light years away in space There I will wait for you Where human feet have never trodden Where human eyes have never gazed I will build a world of abstract dreams And I'll wait In the realm of tomorrow We will take the helm Of a new ship As the crack of a whip We will suddenly be on the road And traveling at the speed of light Towards a new shore Sun Ra
The Spanish version of this little book was printed in Bogota in a not particulary hot day, 102 years after Herman Sonny Blount was born.