A scream is a fact and revelation is the precursor to a scream. What we all know about this world, by now, truly, is that some humans believe they can control life. These people insist that they are the only humans, and therefore singularly moral, correct, deserving of life, adulation (love), and profit. The refutation of this is a scream that connects people’s movements from Occupy to Indigenous water and life movements to Black Lives Matter, Women Life Freedom, the Indian Farmer’s Movement, and the decades-long anti-colonial resistance by Palestinians. There are no revelations left, in this regard, and to obscure the sound of screaming is to ignore the fact.
I don’t want to quiet it. I’m just trying to know what’s inside. I’ve been listening to screaming at the gym and on walks. A controlled agitation — choking, the unsettling of skin and teeth — emerges within my body, conditioned by yoga to experience this as rajas, the tendency of substances toward motion, action, and heat-building. It is uncomfortable but it doesn’t frighten me. Right before Tuesday’s total eclipse, I felt as though my brain was being pressed between my ears. The pressure was palpable and dulled most of the noise, despite hordes of people happily gathered there by the lake. All I heard was a friend’s voice and the thick flapping of a swan’s wings against the air as it flew low over the water. Gulls turned circles and hollered above, revealing, for anyone trying to hear, what we all knew was coming.
Recently, I began listening to DJ Haram’s “Bushnell Meditation.” I say that I began because meditation necessitates repetition. I listened over and over, loudly, as she reccomended, to Aaron Bushnell screaming “Free Palestine,” through layers of rumbling and static, until I could situate the sound within me. Haram made a portal with this track. What I hadn’t been able to look at, I could hear. Bushnell lit his body on fire not as critique, but to interrupt the deranged western liberal fetish for more process, more and more revelation, more proof, more evidence and bodies, as though no one can hear the screams which don’t stop.
From DJ Haram’s statement: “I thought about all the Nazi noise types back in the early 2010s, using references to fascism and its violent tactics of rape, murder, torture, destitution to make a edgy and discomforting impact and I was like NVM LOL. I thought about all the disrespect and violence I and most of my peers have survived in these scenes, undeniably due to peoples unchecked white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal pursuits of power.. I thought about all the moments I wasn’t harsh, when I didn’t make noise. Aaron Bushnell’s dying wish was to spread this message. Why is the point of being a creative in audio and digital media and not engaging?”
Still alive in the shadow of revelation, we’re invited by DJ Haram to use our bodies as transmitters. There’s a thrill of resolve and a possibility of beauty — of all things! — offered in this brutal supplication. It’s a musician’s gesture, so I want to love it in the easy way that I love music that pleases me, but this doesn’t do that and so I can’t. Instead I think about how beauty can’t be determined by the eyes alone. Beauty is a relation, something that is bestowed, which means that we are always implicated in its replication: How do we withhold beauty? How does it reflect a power that’s too shallow to hold everything that is?
Isolating a final scream as something to behold is a lucid refusal of the epochal lies about human beings as ugly and inert, incapable of loving anything but themselves, and spiritually unfree. What does it mean to deny your body’s need to process terror? Thwarting its autonomy, and letting your mind run interference instead? I think “Bushnell Meditation” fulfills its purpose as meditation, crumbling around the human voice, and clarifying what’s real and unreal.
I’ve prayed before many fires. Ritual fire and the comforting smell of smoke and ghee, and always the mantra that my aajabapa, my mother’s father, taught me: asato ma sadgamaya, tamaso ma jyotirgamaya, mrityo ma amritmamgamaya. It’s an appeal to god to be led from falsehood to truth, from dark to light, from death to immortality. I remember now that the spiritual philosophies of my ancestors do not rely on revelation and prophets but the removal of obstacles to an absolute truth. This transforms the mantra and the symbol of ritual fire, as I understand it, from an esoteric prescription to a call to witness the flames. Fire isn’t to be feared, I’m reminded.
"I remember now that the spiritual philosophies of my ancestors do not rely on revelation and prophets but the removal of obstacles to an absolute truth." This whole post speaks to me so deeply, THANK YOU