Sun Ra: The Sempiternal Plane

By Will Alexander

The Greek summation grounded its motives in stricken insurrectional dice. Someone the stature of Sun Ra threw them, and could not be stricken or dissolved by such institutional lessening, by such case-by-case squaring. When I think of Sun Ra, an image comes to mind of a diamond which stores piranhas in its heart. These piranhas being symbolic of Sun Ra as a fabulous unbidden maxim. He remains a curious appearance from the upper life, a presence which was suddenly eminent from the flotation of Saturn. In contrast, his movement through New York, Philadelphia, and Montreal, was, in a sense, of ancillary import. So when we sense that his mysterious convivial psychic equations exist as primordial alternatives to protracted biography, it is RA harking back to the aboriginal seething where beings conducted themselves as forces, where energy was balanced through Uranian etiquette, where being was understood as the perfect utterance of itself. Not body as scarred by dates and institutions, but as a blinding solar ray compressed into human form. It’s as if one consulted a shaman on the precise chronological age of wind when it appears to the senses, arriving from the differing gulfs and animations of the cosmos. The only utterance the shaman could emit would amount to sigils, and koans, and seemingly improbable narratives. Such utterance being comparable to the inscrutable poise of Sun Ra.

He could never be entirely aligned by earthly location, as if Chicago represented the essence of Ra’s interior equations. When I listen to the Arkestra play The Sun Myth, I remain suffused with the unexplainable, by sudden trance calendrics fused as vapor. A vapor with the power of Imperial direction, not condoned by some pointless empirical policy capable of nothing more than stasis and bereavement.

I remember being a soul at a Sun Ra concert at Myron’s Ballroom in Los Angeles, where floating above a pitch dark room was a seemingly weightless being circling above an eclipsed audience, parallel to a strangely sequined ceiling. I’ve always remembered this aerial roaming as being symbolic of the powers of Ra, which always evinced transparency and soaring. Sun Ra the Sun, with his organic satellites represented in part by John Gilmore, Pat Patrick, Marshall Allen, and Ronnie Boykins.

Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, aphorist, philosopher, and visual artist. Former Whiting Fellow, California Arts Council Fellow, and 2007 Pen Oakland National Book Award recipient, he is a 2013 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award winner, with new books due out from Solar Luxuriance, Oyster Moon, New Directions, and Litmus Press.