You Can Only Touch Traces of its Awkward Glory

Bayo Akomolafe, Why I Sang in the Dungeons: A Prophecy to End the Year 2023:

In small pollination songs, in stifled dungeon music, in stirring strains flowing across desolate places, in smaller revolutions, in molecular experiments within arachnean networks, at the shorelines of "no return", something else sings. Something crosses. You'll never capture it, not fully. You can only touch traces of its awkward glory. You might find pieces of it as we notice that conferences aren't doing as much as we want them to do, and that we need para-pedagogical, postactivist experiments in the carnivalesque perhaps just as much as we need instruction; you might notice traces of "it" as we feel the grief that dances across partisan lines; you might sense the tingling sensation of it as a politician admits that contemporary politics is stuck on itself, and can't seem to rise to the occasion. You might smile then because you'd know what I know and feel what I feel – that when one comes to one's death, when one arrives at the door of no return, when one touches the agnostos theos, the tribute to the unknown god, it is not a rising that is needed.