NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR / PRELUDE : VON BL3SSING

“Good theatre got Soul.”

— Dr. Cristal Chanelle Truscott, SoulWork, (in Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches)

“In an essay entitled “Conscious Purpose vs. Nature,” published in 1969, Bateson proposed that in the same way as the “physiology” and “neurology” of the human individual function in order to conserve the body and all the body’s physical characteristics... so a correlated process can be seen to be at work at the level of the psyche or the soul.... determinant of the overall range of acquired know-how that is produced by the interactions of the wider society in which each individual finds itself...”

— Sylvia Wynter, Unsettling The Coloniality of Being/Truth/Power/Freedom

“You can count your karma

if Nirvana is your goal

you can shake and you can rattle

you can rock and roll

you can be a Clark Kent

or a Lois

or an Alice down a hole,

you can be a vampire on a mountain

with a heart of stone black coal.

you can be a leather angel

on a sleek black Harley bike

or a redhead screaming f*ggot

or a dazzling d*ke

you can lock yourself in a closet

in a fine mink stole

but it really doesn’t matter

if you ain’t got soul.”

— Marsha P Johnson, Soul 

During the course of 2020 and 2021, amidst the stress of a pandemic, uprisings, housing insecurity, gender violence, and inclement weather Bl3ssing Oshun Ra took trips to the Bronx River, looking for some place to cope. 

Weaving together Blues based stories and songs, they would talk about dreams, science, radical struggle, and ancestral beliefs while on these trips. This was part of a workshop series, Flows n Figurations, the latest expression of the Green Afrofuturist Project, which Bl3ssing started in 2017 as a way to use speculative art in dissecting the effects of environmental racism on ecological, mental, and bodily health. 

The following is a handful of poems themed around a speculative language called “the Undulatrix.” This speculative language provides a backdrop to many of the stories and songs Bl3ssing shared at the Bronx River. 

As you read these pieces, go into this work as though you were at a Blues performance, hearing the sweet strum of a guitar, banjo, harmonica, or the light rumbling of a drum; the stomping of feet into wood floors, or the crackling of handclaps, raspy voices heaving and whooping, relaxed and melisma'd tones speaking their truth. Try to call forth a feeling of rest, reprieve, and repose, and visualize yourself gliding over water in a rowboat, or sitting on a park bench, watching the tides go up and down the shore. Afterward take a look at the endnotes of each piece. These are there to provide more context on the grammar of “the Undulatrix,” and its role in Bl3ssing's life.

#GreenAfrofuturistProject  #AnthropogenicQuestion  #ThroughSociogenyWeFindEcogeny 

#TellStoriesFilledWithFact  #HouseTalkUnderground  #RadicalBlackEcology  

Von Bl3ssing

is a Black, disabled, nonbinary artist, organizer, and self-described 'underground ecologist.' Since 2017, Bl3ssing has used their love for African-American folk spirituals, theatre, and speculative art to facilitate workshops about environmental issues that combine scientific scholarship with digital media and ritual performance. Bronx-born and raised, Bl3ssing is devoted to building communities of resistance among marginalized populations disproportionately impacted by environmental injustices.