Written by Littleton Odom
The Black Belt of Alabama is visible from space. Alabama itself is something like a meteor magnet. When stars fell on Alabama in 1833, it was then called “the night of raining fire.” With an estimated 100,000 meteors visible per hour, the dark and clear skies of the Southeastern United States provided excellent and terrifying observation opportunities for this unexplainable event where hundreds of thousands of small particles of matter in the solar system became directly observable by their incandescence from frictional heating on entry into our atmosphere. Triggering something of a collective psych out, many witnesses of the event believed it to be an omen signaling the end of the world. Some confessed sins to neighbors, some panicked and screamed. Others observed silently, some prayed. Some viewers responded artistically, with drawings, etchings, paintings, and diary entries. The cosmic event, which lasted two days, left a deep impression in the region's cultural memory.
About a century and a half later, modern astronomers linked “the night the stars fell” in 1833 to the periodic “Leonid shower,” caused by debris from Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, now known to be the parent body of the Leonid meteor shower. Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle is a retrograde periodic comet with an orbital period of 33 years, with subsequent meteor storms occurring during these 33-year intervals. It travels in loops as it orbits the Sun. Between 2021 & 2030, Earth will pass several times through a meteoroid stream left behind from the orbit of 1733.
The comet was first observed in 1699 by the son of a German shoemaker, Gottfried Kirch, who in 1700, became the Director of the Berlin Observatory and the first astronomer of the Royal Society of Sciences ("Kurfürstlich-Brandenburgische Societät der Wissenschaften") in Berlin. Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle is named for the two astronomers who, 167 years later, independently observed and calculated the orbit of the Comet, the German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel, working in Marseilles in December of 1865, and the American astronomer Horace Parnell Tuttle, working in Maine in January of 1866.
In all of recorded history, there is only one verified account of a person being hit by a meteorite. Reported in November of 1954, Ann Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama was struck by a meteorite that crashed into her home. After it bounced off the wooden console-style radio it arced six feet in the air and landed on her hip as she napped beneath two quilts.
“Stars Fell on Alabama” was written a hundred years after the meteor storm in 1934 by Frank Perkins, with lyrics written by Mitchell Parish, born Michael Hyman Pashelinsky, in July of 1900 in Lithuania, then a territory of the Russian Empire. The song has been performed and recorded for almost another 100 years by many famous artists with new versions being released as recently as 2023. One such artist who released a version of the song in 1990 was yet another star that fell on Alabama. Sun Ra, the avant-garde jazz pioneer, born in Birmingham in May of 1914. He claimed his spirit originated from Saturn and that his music came from outer space, transmissions from another planet. Compositions which he offered as gifts to “the Creator.”
The dates of tonight’s presented material span 1934 to 2026, totaling 92 years of creative invention. The second oldest contributor of this assembled sonic material, born after the aforementioned oldest, the lyricist Mitchell Parish born in 1900, is American poet of the Jazz Age, Langston Hughes, born 1901. Vera Hall, whose Black Belt voice was preserved by Alan Lomax in 1958, was born in 1902 in Livingston, Alabama. Sun Ra born in 1914. Kathryn Tucker Windham born in 1918, in Selma. The youngest contributor to tonight’s program is Black Belt artist and poet, Casey Roberts, born 1997 in Marengo county, one year after his cousin (on the Tucker side) Kathryn Tucker Windham published a seminal work of her psychobiographical oeuvre, entitled “Twice Blessed,” a book recounting her days working in the then “undiscovered” community of Gee’s bend, her early days as a journalist and later, as a nationally-known story teller, her photography practice, and her fascination (or obsession) with graveyards. The book ends with her wishes for her own burial rites and funeral, obsequies that were ultimately performed by her close friend and collaborator, Charlie Lucas, whose studio we inhabit tonight.
Like his cousin, in the epilogue of his psychedelic creation myth, “Malus Pumila,” Casey Roberts writes of another end of days that reads like an Old English fever dream:
“Now my ashes follow their swift retreat, to join infinity…
So set the stars alight for the endless night that melts into day. To you I am flying away.”
All sonic documentation presented in tonight’s singular happening will never be layered or delivered in the same way again. (At least not in this reality.) In this blip in existence, thanks to the discovery of quantum mechanics & quantum theory, it is incredible to witness the unveiling of how bendable time is and how the present, past and future all seemingly exist at once. Many physicists theorize that time is not a fundamental dimension of the universe, but rather an illusion that emerges from the complex entanglement and interactions of matter. For only a century, Quantum mechanics has opened strange ways of thinking about simultaneity, probability, and the instability of what we call the real. Modern Quantum Mechanics, as far as the formal, cohesive mathematics of the field, was developed between 1925 and 1926 by German theoretical physicists Werner Heisenberg and Max Born who introduced "matrix mechanics,” and Austrian theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who formulated wave mechanics based on his famous Schrödinger equation in 1926.
In this strange moment in infinity that we find ourselves in, perhaps we could together consider some of the poetic absurdities that we currently exist with and in. Synchronicity, premonition, spontaneity. Does luck speak for itself or is it unable to? Is that why we call it dumb luck? What exactly are these glitches, these little runs, in the fabric of time?
The title of one of the books that will be read from tonight is “I Must Be Living Twice,” written by Eileen Myles. The poem we will hear tonight, “What Tree Am I Waiting?”, is printed in the book twice, once at the beginning and again at the end, and becomes a vehicle for an essay entitled “Twice,” written by Myles in Ireland during a writer’s retreat. A portion of the essay will be read now.
Some of the themes that will be repeatedly encountered tonight are a fixation on mortality and lingering connections to people’s spirits after their deaths. In an interview in 1968, Sun Ra is quoted saying, “Some people are of this world, others are not. My natural self is not of this world, because this world is not of my not and nothingness, alas and happily, at last I can say this world is this unfortunate planet. The destiny of this planet is at stake, one fatal further mistake can cause its long delayed destruction. One fatal mistake can be its last mistake. The future is obvious, but the potential impossible is calling softly and knocking gently…”
In the final poem of the “Mount Monadnock Transmissions,” which will be read tonight, CAConrad asks for a kiss from the ghost of a dead lover. In “Death, have Mercy,” Vera Hall sings to death directly, asking for mercy and more time. An achy awareness of life’s precious beauty, which blooms even in the midst of and in the aftermath of the worst, most destructive events our reality can produce, sometimes leads certain highly sensitive beings to new creative discovery. A moment like September 15th, 1963, 63 years ago, when four young Black girls, all younger than 15, were killed by 19 sticks of dynamite at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, an act of racist, domestic terror committed by four members of the KKK. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then deeply engaged in Alabama in the struggle for Black civil rights in the United States, delivered a powerful eulogy for three of the victims, turning attention from the men who had murdered them to the racist social infrastructure of America and the moral rot that sustained it.
“And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death… They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream. And so my friends, they did not die in vain. God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city.“ [18 September 1963. Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama, USA]
Prompted by Martin Luther King’s eulogy, one month after the tragedy in Birmingham, John Coltrane composed, performed and recorded his composition, “Alabama,” live at Birdland jazz club in New York City, a composition we will hear tonight, as a memorial to the girls. It is said that the cadence and phrasing Coltrane used in his saxophone lines were based on the inflections of Dr. King’s eulogy.
Artistic creation is something like magic, some invisible force activates a creativity impulse inside a sentient human being to the point of stimulating psychic-into-physical creation. Strange, separate visions of beauty emerge, a balm for the spirit, an outlet, a channel, a pillar. Ideas and phrases emerging like reverse meteors, earthen stars rising out of a spiritual ground, into and out of the atmosphere, with tails of sparkling, flaming light, exiting our gravity and sight, to whirl out and away into the void of potential.
In this act of creation, a new link to the past, the present, and the future is created, though the impact site in time, of a document, a song, an object, a digital file, all of which will be eventually lost to time, cannot be foreseen. The zeitgeist [which, directly translated is “time ghost”] is finicky. Some things strangely endure by small miracles of reverberation, and there are those transmissions that are sent out decades before their meaning can be fully conceived of or known, finding the right ears in the future.