by Eric Tyler Benick

Anna and I cram our way into The P.I.T. (short for Property is Theft) around six p.m. on a Sunday evening. The small bookstore / venue / community space is already filled, every plastic folding chair occupied, bodies pushed up against the shelves of used books and records all the way to the egress. We squeeze off to the side against a shelf of red paperbacks. Fred Moten is seated in front of his laptop and microphone while the bassist, Brandon Lopez, fusses with the levels on the soundboard. The two men carry on a casual conversation, barely audible, which seems to prelude the evening’s performance. Moten mentions a motif from the Lightnin’ Hopkins song, “Ain’t It Crazy,” which he attempts to explain at first and then opts to play the song through the pill-shaped bluetooth speaker next to his laptop. What strikes me about this moment is how private it feels, a communion between two close friends, but our witnessing turns it into performance, the private enters the public, and the work (and words) of Lightnin’ Hopkins become enfolded into the improvisation. Lopez plays along to a few parts before pulling away, an affectionate look of stupefaction on his face. When the song ends, Moten gives a knowing smile and repeats a line from the song, audibly enough for the audience to hear, “now here’s what cooked the goose,” which signals a direct commencement of Lopez’s double bass.  
I am driven to write about this event perhaps as a result of cathexis. For over a week now I have been listening to Coltrane’s Ascension on repeat. I am looking for something inside of it, a (likely inappropriate) dialectical enlightenment. I am not a spiritual person, so my access is limited, but I am drawn to its freedom, its din, its heightened moments of perceivable ululation. I am drawn to polarizing reputation and its interpersonal ruptures, it being the last Coltrane album for Elvin Jones to play on. Jones is a monumental figure in my historical imagination, a drummer with no perceivable limits, the rhythm (along with Jimmy Garrison) that carried A Love Supreme to its apex with Sisyphian diligence. What could be so wild, so rigorous, so exhaustive as to break this man’s spirit, or, at the very least, discourage his belief in Coltrane’s vision? I am interested in that possibility because it portends even greater possibilities, greater beyonds. My listening to Ascension is also informed by another essay I am writing that delineates an undercurrent from Wenders’ Wings of Desire, to Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, to the praxis of poetic address (or parrhesia). In other words, I am interested in breaking through. I am interested in an answer to disillusionment. I am interested in a salve for the political symptoms of nihilism. I am interested in getting out of the circle. 
I arrive at the Moten/Lopez performance with these thoughts half-formed, looking for another piece to instruct my pedestrian modes of what I’ll call “comparative literature.” I arrive because I’m often looking at the politics of cultural exchange through Fred’s guidance. Certainly to witness Fred’s brilliance alongside Brandon’s brilliance within the implicit solidarity of The P.I.T. 's community space will result in a kind of intellectual osmosis, my little world of engagement suddenly delimited, a cosmic alignment that will abet my academic conspiracies. I am, after all, a Romantic first and foremost. The context of what I am seeking becomes inseparable from the context of what I am witnessing. 
The question of when the performance begins is inscrutable. Moten plays another track from the pill speaker, an excerpt from a political rant which could just as easily be a pentecostal sermon. Lopez plays high up on the neck of the bass, a series of taps, pulls, and hammers in a propulsive ostinato,  his thumb providing a barre across the neck. There is another sound I can’t place, something voiced, just below the register of Moten’s speaker and Lopez’s bass. I look around for it until I realize the shape of Lopez’s mouth. He is humming along to his playing, matching the ostinato with his breath, not precisely, not note-for-note, but as an undertone, as if he is composing live within the margins of the music. My attention is so drawn to Lopez’s duet with himself that I miss the precise moment when Moten enters, forming a third. 
Fred Moten is perhaps most notable (along with his colleague, Stefano Harney) for his theories of the undercommons, a space of fugitive study that examines the correlations (both insidious and benign) in the institutions we take for granted––namely, academia. As someone who has navigated academic spaces with distrust and hesitation, from the sheer cost of my participation, to the infuriating circular bureaucracy it maintains, Moten’s work around the undercommons has been a cogent perspective for my circumstances. I am employed by a college as an adjunct. I still work in hospitality to compensate for the abysmal pay from the college. My relationship to academia is inseparable from my relationship to labor. One has always supported the other, my menial job for my intellectual pursuits, and now continues even as the latter turns to another form of labor. I do not tell my students this, but I should. I worry, perhaps irrationally, it will affect my credibility with them. 
By the time I am watching Moten and Lopez, I have been trying to form an undercommons with my students for months. Across my courses, conversations have ranged from Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose and the current genocide in Gaza, to Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? and the racist history of the American carceral system, to the deft art of narrative in Outkast’s “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” as guided by the poet Roger Reeves. I am trying to encourage digression and parallax. I am trying to encourage poetic leaps out of the paths of certain destruction. Some of them join me from time to time. Most of them cling to the material comforts of the circle, its veiled promises of upward mobility, its grand narratives of individual freedom. I do not want to sound conspiratorial to them. I do not want to indoctrinate them. I nudge lightly into the discourse. The more we digress, the closer we get to seeing alternatives. 
Lopez, visibly frustrated, stops playing for a few beats. He mutters under his breath, ostensibly to himself, “I keep playing the same fucking thing.” And then returns to a variation of the ostinato that began the performance. His frustration breaks a certain boundary. It is unclear whether it is in earnest or in presentation. Moten responds, assuringly, ironically, “It’s okay. The goose is cooked.” The two are riffing off one another. Lopez’s pause forms a caesura in Moten’s poem. Moten’s response forms a strophe inside Lopez’s rhythm. They are both embracing the circle rather than trying to break free from it, or at least, they are making a point of expressing the nature of the circle. Lopez cannot free himself from the ostinato even though he exhibits all of the experimental range. Moten returns to Lightnin’ Hopkins, invoking a history, a tradition that is inescapable. 
“Sometimes, when in a circle, if I wish to exit, I must leap,” Layli Long Soldier says in her poem “38.” I teach this poem to my students with caution of the circle. Long Soldier’s voice is authoritative and instructive. She recalls the systematic murder of the Dakota 38 with acuity. For many of my students, it is the first time they've ever considered the colonial violence of their country, but it doesn’t take much to get them there. A poem. A nudge. The problem is that it is easy to accept the past, but more difficult to accept its rhizomatic expanse into the structures of the present. In a moment of pedagogical weakness, I lean too hard on the Faulkner quote about the past not being past. This just confuses them. The problem with the Faulkner quote is that it too is a circle, and one I’ve used too many times before. Like Lopez, I keep playing the same fucking thing. The pedagogy I am interested in must remain ready for improvisation. The questions sometimes fall flat, miss their intended goal, or need swift restructuring in the moment. The students themselves come from an array of personal and cultural experiences, different incomes, different literacies, so much that their collective engagement is marked by these differences. If they are to ever be unanimous it is in their indifference to my class, which, for me, is just another obstacle that requires improvisation. If I repeat the same question twice (in its exact syntax), my discouragement fills the room. If I have a motif, I have to know how to expand upon it, around it, to explode its potential. Sometimes, like Long Soldier, I too must leap. 
In his essay, “Reading Ascension: Intertextuality, Improvisation, and Meaning in Performance,” musicologist Jeremy Strachan suggests that Coltrane’s album “is compositionally intertextual” for the way it opens in direct reference to A Love Supreme, the saxophones of Pharoah Sanders, Archie Schepp, Marion Brown, John Tchicai, and Coltrane himself playing a variant of Jimmy Garrison’s bass ostinato on “Acknowledgement.”  Coltrane deliberately orients his listener in the familiar before rushing towards the fringes. The musicians repeat these three notes in successive overlap, slowly drowning the other out when joined by the trumpets of Freddie Hubbard and Dewey Johnson. From there the album explodes into its polarizing dimensions of free jazz (or the “New Thing”), with the eleven-piece ensemble all individuating their own paths to improvisation. There is no question that Coltrane’s ensemble is playing outside of the circle. There is no question about whether or not they have leapt. The divisive question about this era of Coltrane, and about this album in particular, is do they land? 
“The black radical tradition,” Moten says in Stolen Life, “improvises terror, through the philosophy of terror, in ways that don’t limit terror’s discursive or cultural trace to an exclusively descriptive approach toward some either immediately present or heretofore concealed truth.” This quote feels instructive for thinking through the arduous heights and extents of Ascension. I can hear the terror in Coltrane’s squealing horn. I read “immediately present or heretofore concealed truth” and I think of the gravity of Coltrane’s bearing witness. I think of how every account of bearing witness to God incites the question of the witness’s sanity. “Every angel is terrifying” wrote Rilke. Perhaps God and terror are inseparable. Moten’s quote is not an address of the phenomenon of God-in-itself, but the paraontological position of blackness through a retroactive investigation of Enlightenment thinkers like Immanuel Kant. It is my admittedly atheist literacy that has me seeing God and Enlightenment as interchangeable. “What’s the relation,” Moten later asks, “in the knowledge of God (so deeply bound to heaven, the faint idea of a future state) and the knowledge of freedom (another, and one would hope more material future state)? The Enlightenment (“freedom”) as an answer for God. God as an answer in and of itself, and while neither of these are satisfying places to end, they instruct both my listening to Coltrane and my reading of Moten, because, through their conflation, I can see Coltrane’s digressions contextualized by Moten’s position of the black radical tradition expressed towards its beyond. 
Lopez breaks from his ostinato with discordant pulls at the open lower strings of the bass, the force of his pull distorting through the amplifier. He plays the entire body of his instrument, rubbing his hand against the wood, beating his flat palm against its upper and lower bout, plucking the strings beyond the bridge where they are most taut and sound like a haunted piano. There is a sense of terror in his performance when he breaks away from the consternation of the circle. His improvisations are explosive and reactionary. Moten’s language has become pure sound by this point, clicks and coos, glottal and velar plosives. Eventually, Moten accompanies Lopez’s oscillation between ostinato and improvisation by scratching the windscreen of his microphone, which intones the fear of someone scratching at the door. Lopez returns again to the ostinato and to his previous frustration. “I keep playing the same fucking thing,” he says. “It’s okay,” Moten responds, “the goose is already cooked.” 
It feels clear to me that Lopez and Moten are exploiting the circle, playing with its absurdity, its return. Lopez’s frustration is performed. Moten’s consolation is a riff, a refrain, a return. This is difficult for my anxiety, but useful. During the composition of this essay, I revisit the performance with Anna in her kitchen. Anna is also thinking about circularity, having just finished the first volume of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume and recently sat for an hour of Christian Marclay’s The Clock at MoMA. In addition to these mediums, Anna is also slogging her days through jury duty, which is a more sinister and conscripted modality of circularity which seems to be taking its toll on her own personal constitution of ethics. I’ve not read Balle or yet visited The Clock or ever served a jury, so I cannot speak on them, but I am compelled by our discourse to include my own approximations of Anna’s voice as a mirror to the Lopez/Moten dialectic. The ways in which I am trying to flee circularity, Anna is trying to (or is forced to) inure and see deeper into. I return to Debord’s Spectacle, the rupture and inevitable failure(s) of détournement, Coltrane’s spectral Ascension, Lopez’s ostinato and Moten/Hopkin’s goose, and I wonder if each mode of engagement first seeks to reify the circle in order to resolve it. I can only arrive here thanks to Anna’s ability to contextualize the function of circularity as an amorally stable constant, which is not a philosophy of complicity (something I fear) but a way of giving dimensionality to an abstract. It’s her way of telling me that the goose is already cooked, that my return back to the beginning is an inevitability that is (in so many ways) futile to resist. She does not know that she does this. I don’t even realize it until I revisit our discussion. 
To close, Moten nonverbally instructs a couple in the crowd to place the other’s hand against their own ear. This becomes a painstakingly public event as the couple errs to complete Moten’s instruction. Moten remains patient with the couple and continues to instruct, the source of their error becoming a source of folly. The two finally manage it, each with their cupped palm against the other’s ear. Moten then gestures to the remaining crown and we follow in suit. I take Anna’s right hand against my left ear and she takes my left against her right, the act of which presses our heads together, our free ears connecting, and forms a closed loop of sound, a circle. I do not feel constricted by this closed loop, but liberated––in communion not only with Anna but with the public witness of Moten/Lopez and their generous dialectic. I think then of my students, of my pedagogical practice, how the freedom of digression is only edified by its return to the subject, how the improvisation must resolve back into its motif, how maybe the power is not in how to break the circle, but it’s resolve, or, not how we leap, but how we land.

Works Cited 

Long Soldier, Layli. “38”. Whereas. Greywolf. 2017.

Lopez, Brandon and Fred Moten. Concert. 6 April, 2025. Property Is Theft. Brooklyn, NY.

Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Duke University Press. 2018. 

Strachan, Jeremy. “Reading Ascension: Intertextuality, Improvisation, and Meaning in Performance”. Critical Studies in Improvisation. 2013.