Fruit, Kindness, Experience

When Nas sings “Nas is coming” on the 1996 album It Was Written, he is not only incantating his indelible imprint on the American rap scene of the 90s and, by effect, the global rap scene, but also offering a lesson on the search of the messianic. He is not just saying Nas is coming, but Nas is coming, Arabic for the incalculable essence of humankind, the collective. And you know he means it because he’s not worried about painting himself as soiled, as Nasty Nas, the person who “bit the fruit from the serpent,” “who appears in the courtroom drunk,” who, alongside Dr. Dre, defies the shoddy categories of East and West coast, and who ultimately lets “the streets be the court and corners hold the trial.” This Nas is not the artist as mere truthteller or projections of our greatest aspirations for perfection, but rather, the artiste as that syndicated site where the humane encounters the inhumane in thrice practiced attempts at reaching the holy trinity until separation is inevitable. Nas is coming because we are still looking for how to be all that we are, which includes all that kills. FRUIT

I am happy when I wander off on a given path. A mix of aimlessness and direction in time is a creative luxury. This evening, I have an unhurried task to complete a few miles away. Just as I reach the intersection where I would find options for a mode of transport, a ke-ke slides to a slow stop. A woman in a maroon hijab hops off. She’s talking to the driver, and he seems about to drive away, so I wave to him. But the woman slides back in, and then he approaches me. I tell him my directions, and he nods in agreement. I climb next to the woman who seems to pick up where she left off. They were in a fight, the kind that would denote greater intimacy to the mere observer. But as she rattles off her struggles with a phone and some cash stolen the previous day, an incident that left her bare and vulnerable to the world, the driver retorts that why would she say to him he was not someone who had mercy for fellow Muslims. This is an argument over kindness. The driver was doing her a favor, and the woman thought he could do more and take her the extra distance. What if I had helped a thousand people before you, and you did not know, and yet you say I have no mercy for Muslims? His faith through the love for umma was questioned. The woman does not cease talking; her speed is strained as if she is so excited that words cannot help but leap onto each other, or she is very pained, and words must leap into each other for safety. When the ke-ke stops a very few minutes later, she tries to say something profound, land her plea-attack. I listen to her rummage her language for something like a Hadith. She addresses me pointedly as the final arbiter. That Allah says even a kind word is an act of worship. I nod and smile politely like a fool. The driver huffed one big breath, and we rode away. KINDNESS

There’s a saturating core in time, about time. I like this a lot about being alive, that if I care to stay still, something will happen that will inevitably add on to the experience of being me. It can be something large, like a thought, or something minor, like a brush against my skin. It can be something humanizing, like a confession of pain to a dear friend, or something empowering, like a prayer for a stranger. Whatever it is, in time, things become, condense, coagulate, aphorize. I wonder if there’s a name for this, a name for the promise of eventuality, a name for the way aliveness persists and presses upon. If there’s no name for it, which I think there couldn’t be, otherwise no one will go searching through art, then it must be okay if we all just keep trying to name it. If we all just remain alive for another moment to experience it, experience ourselves experiencing it, letting it experience us. EXPERIENCE