From the Magpie (lightsoftsheer neutralbetween)

Magpie, definition, Cambridge Dictionary: 1) a bird with black and white feathers and a long tail, 2) someone who likes to collect many different objects, or use many different styles

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Lil Buck floats on his toes. In fact, he seems to float right off his toes; he seems always to be just landing with a flutter of wings. Lil Buck is a master of the dance form called jookin. If you don’t know what this is, or even if you do, you can go to YouTube and see videos of Lil Buck jookin in Tokyo, at Lincoln Center, in the London Underground, in Venice (the California one), at Vail, and, recently, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, rippleflowing past Picassos and Matisses. Jookin looks like a hybrid of ballet, breakdancing, tightrope walking, moonwalking, and taffy. It looks like what would happen if you could cross a bird and a fish and a butterfly. It looks like a ribbon twisting in water. It looks like a dream you had that you could fly, not because it looks like flying, not exactly, but because it looks like the dancer is weightless. It is radically fluid. It is lightness incarnate. See him in these, for instance.

Now that you’ve watched, tell me: Why are these performances so sad? Why do they pierce the heart? In the dream you had that you could fly, were you sad? Generally, no. And yet, this young man en pointe in sneakers touching down here and there around the globe, pirouetting as traffic and people pass him by, or alone in a desert near mountains, has a ghostly melancholy. He is a turning question mark. He is like that other dream you had, the one where you were going from room to room, and the rooms kept changing. You were looking for something, but what was it?

And Lil Buck appears somewhere else in the world, in an instant, on the tips of his toes. He goes everywhere, without weight, without friction, without borders. He moves with complete freedom, unbound by location or the way bones are usually locked in place.

It seems possible that my nearly weeping when I watch Lil Buck dance is because I’m not sure this is allowed anymore. Recently, lightness, softness, indeterminacy, blur, unlocatability, and in-betweenness have become dangerous practices. Where is your passport and what does it say? Who would dare show a soft bit of skin, an intimate curve, in this cold, and getting colder, season? Who would venture out without a firm sense of allegiance to this tribe or that one? Who would risk getting caught in between? When we duck and cover in the nearest VPN, it’s self-protection, not release into flux or radical openness. It’s armor—possibly necessary armor, to be sure—not play.

In his recent essay “Toward a Politics of Mere Being,” the poet Carl Phillips considers the problem of being seen, and unseen, as a gay male poet of color when he sees, as he says, “my agenda, to the extent that it can even be called that, has always been to speak as honestly as possible to my own experience of negotiating and navigating a life as myself, as a self—multifarious, restless, necessarily ever-changing as the many factors of merely being also change—in a world of selves.” However, to his own surprise, he “became a poet who, according to reviews, spoke unabashedly—daringly, even—of what many wouldn’t, in terms of sex. As for race, I’d unknowingly thrown a gauntlet down to a long tradition of assumptions as to what blackness meant and, especially, as to how a poet of color should speak, and about what.” He recalls being eased out of the famed Dark Room Collective for not “writing the kind of poems that were correctly ‘black.’” He asks, “How is it not political, to be simply living one’s life meaningfully, thoughtfully, which means variously in keeping with, in counterpoint to, and in resistance to life’s many parts?” Phillips published this essay last March, and it already seems like a message in a bottle from another century, or a scandalous invitation.

Let’s get unlocated, baby.

Can we? Dare we? Must we?

Better hurry.

In Roland Barthes’s strange and seductive book The Neutral—it isn’t even a book as such, although it exists between covers; it’s a series of lecture notes—he toys with being unconstrained by all categories of thought and language and civilization generally. On April 1, 1978, he mused about the possibility of being a self “like a score (large surface of staves); each part (each wave) is independent, clear, vivid, sung and heard vividly; but in me, underneath me, there is no me to read the whole . . . there is no orchestra conductor in me who could read the score.” It’s absurd, of course, it’s a paradox, he knows that, but that was his aspiration on that April Fools Day (called Poisson d’Avril in France, also a day of tricksters) so long ago: to be like a score of music that he himself could not read.

The point isn’t that Barthes could attain it, or even expected that he could. The point is that he could wish it, that he could contemplate turning that trick or being that trick. I want to cry when I watch Lil Buck, because the joy of which Barthes dreamt, the extraordinary vulnerability and loss of control, seems less and less acceptable even as a fantasy, much less a reality. Lightness is the first luxury we can’t afford, here in life during wartime. A politics of mere being seems like willingly going boneless—too soft, impossible, freaky. Selves? Who are you kidding? These days, you’re lucky not to get beaten, or worse, for the one self people think they can name on sight.

That man on his toes, a citizen of the whole world at once, is he landing or flying away?

I miss him already. I keep looking up, hoping for a glimpse of shoelace descending.