Notes on the Underground

He had to get away. I could not stop reading until Fred Daniels, the protagonist in Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, was ensconced in darkness in a sewer underneath the city, the water sluicing around his knees, a single beam of daylight falling through the manhole cover onto his face. 

Despite my daughter and her five-year-old friend bouncing about the house, their bodies aimed toward razing the place to the very beams and caulking, I could not turn my attention away from Daniels and the police beating him, coercing him to confess to a murder he did not commit. I could not set the book down and pursue anything like a day until I knew he had escaped from the police, leaping from a hospital window to do so. Herein lies the seduction of Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground: It’s as if I’m watching someone write the recurring nightmare of the last twenty years of my life—that one day I will simply be walking out of a house, counting the money I’ve just earned for a day’s work, and the police will decide I am an answer, their fantasy, an end to a problem. 

I’ve had this nightmare off and on for twenty years. Sometimes just once a year. Sometimes every night for a week. The dreams began in Atlanta, while living in an eight-room, two-story boardinghouse just down the hill from Morehouse College, and continued as I moved to Texas, Brazil, Chicago, then back to Texas. The dream is the same with little variation. I’m accused of a crime that I did not commit. Interrogated. I profess my innocence to two detectives—both with brushy mustaches; one white, one Black, normally wearing blazers or sport coats. Their look: television-cop detective drama fashion of the late 1980s. Somewhere between Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice. Blame my subconscious imagination’s fashion on growing up in the ’80s and watching too many cop dramas—In the Heat of the Night, 21 Jump Street, T. J. Hooker—either as reruns during early-afternoon babysitting or at night with my grandmother dozing off after cleaning folks’ houses all day in Cherry Hill, Medford Lakes, and Moorestown, the television light flickering against the lenses of her glasses, her eyes closed behind them. 

In the dream, the officers, who are nameless, jab their knees into my ribs, grab the back of my neck and shove me toward the metal desk I am sitting at, handcuffed. Often, I feel as if I’m drowning or about to be submerged beneath water. No matter how much I profess my innocence, I wind up walking down a gray, cinder-block corridor. Jail cells line the hallway. Sometimes, the prisons they take me into are the Hollywood set-design cellblocks of the late ’80s—steel bars, the clanging and slamming of cell doors, inmates’ hands hanging out through the bars, the inmates’ bodies, somehow, not there. Other times, the corridor is like the county facility in my hometown of Mount Holly, New Jersey, a facility I visited in high school as part of history class. No, no, it wasn’t history class. It was a Scared Straight type of program, a program that took alleged at-risk and troubled youth into prisons to acquaint them with the soullessness of the place as a means of discouraging them from proceeding down paths of dereliction and crime. No, I was not deemed wanton or headed toward this sort of penitentiary life, but I was a young journalist and saw myself as political and what we now call social-justice oriented. I knew that the young men whom we would see in prison looked like me, came from the same places I came from, and so I wanted to write up something about them, about myself, about how the world refuses to know us, to know what we love, and we are thrown behind these walls to be nothing more than a question the world refuses to answer, to be a fantasy. 

So I hitched a ride on one of those death-trap yellow school buses and rode to several prisons and youth correctional facilities up and down the New Jersey Turnpike. Rahway. Burlington. Mount Holly. Those prisons were not like the Hollywood prisons of my imagination, of the ’80s cop dramas. Their doors slid open from a central command. The buildings —rhombus-shaped, octagonal—the shapes of which I would learn later in college allowed for panoptical observation, allowed for the incarcerated to be observed and feel observed at all points of the day. Punished. Some of the cells had televisions. Below the catwalks, a large, almost lunchroom-looking area complete with tables and benches bolted and anchored to the floor. The young men incarcerated were nothing like the actors incarcerated on television. 

They were young and Black like me. Fathers, some of them. They talked and talked about their families, getting out, going home, their mothers, their children. 

The dream is nothing like this. In the dream, I am alone. Brutalized by officers before they place me in a cell. And there, once in a cell, this bereft feeling takes over. Nothing is coming for me, to take me out or away from there. My vision, the frame of the dream, narrows, and blackness surrounds me in a long tunnel. The dream sounds cartoonish, I know, but for years it returns to me again and again and again. Sometimes, I’m running through the shopping center behind my grandmother’s house, the police chasing me on foot. The plate-glass windows of the bakery and the Chinese restaurant bounce my reflection back to me, my legs churning through the sloshy, concrete air of the dream. 

Once, I did run like this from the police in my hometown, except I was on a bike. Pedaling as fast as I could, I launched myself over the curb into the grass divide that separated the neighborhood from the back bays and parking lot that led out from the shopping center. I refused to turn and look behind me. The police car’s tires were loud in my ears. In my head, I thought of two twelve-year-old friends who were “mistaken” for grown men by the police. This mistake allowed the police to toss them against the car, beat them, and carry them off to an adjoining neighborhood where two Black men had allegedly just robbed a house. When the police pulled the boys from their car and made them stand in front of the woman whose house was robbed, she pointed out that my friends were, in fact, boys—children—and not men. It was men who had robbed her house, she said. The officers left my friends there in this strange neighborhood, lips swollen, crying. 

So I ran when the police car pulled alongside me outside the shopping center. I ran before the officer could roll down his window or summon me over to him or tell me not to ride my bike on the narrow sidewalk in front of the bakery, the Chinese restaurant, the Acme. Not to ride out back behind the shops where the trucks docked and slid their long trailers into the cavernous ports and driveways that descended into darkness. They wanted us nowhere in the parking lot so I ran…

I run in the dream, in the dreams that are not dreams because they were and are too much like the facts of my childhood in southern New Jersey. So what is it that I am experiencing at night over the last twenty years? Reality, of course. Not a dream but the ongoing catastrophe of trauma. What it means to survive your captor, America, while yet having to live in its capture. There’s nothing profound or extraordinary about this insight or my life. It is the banal abjection of being Black in America. Change the region, the clouds and sky, the temperature, the decade, the neighborhood, the legislature, the police car’s color and the color of the officers’ hands, and nothing changes but a few particularities of my dream. The largest question is, Did you survive? 

If the answer is yes, then the question after that is, And now what? What does it mean to survive the dream, survive in America under these murderous conditions, conditions that can and will revisit you the day, week, or year after you survived the last visitation by the police, by terror? Or, maybe, some perverse sense of luck or grace befalls you, and you never experience it again. But there it is now: that worry, that remembrance, the exhaustion, the feeling of your breath in your ear as you run, trying to evade your capture or potential death. 

It’s as if they—the police, the State—have built a prison, a captor, inside you, one that prepares you for your eventual capture. In his poem “An Agony. As Now.” Amiri Baraka writes there’s a man who looks out from behind his eyes and hates him in his flesh. I hear in this admission by Baraka a prison guard, a captor. 

And what is it to hold a potential prison, replete with guards and panopticon, inside you, awaiting you at every thought and dream? It reminds me of state governments and the federal government building prisons on rural tracts of land across this vast country in anticipation of prisoners, crimes yet to be committed, their penitentiary remuneration dreamt of in the large, sleeping head of the Nation. Those empty prisons a type of forecasting, wishing, blood alchemy. They’ve begun building those sorts of prisons inside us, inside me, inside you. And like Fred Daniels in Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, the police are waiting to take you out—out of the world—and put you in the dream of yourself, which is really a fantasy they’ve been cultivating inside you since you were a child. 

To be alive merely as fantasy, as the desired prop of a nation, to be anticipated as that which needs correction, to live this sort of life might devastate someone, plunge them into a lifelong despair, malaise, depression, terror if it were not for our communities—our mothers, brothers, aunts, uncles, fathers, barbers, beauticians, poets, godmothers—teaching us, showing us the opposite, providing us with an underground, another way of holding ourselves, shaking our dungeons, slipping dynamite into the crevices of the fortresses where they would damn up our souls and keep them from the light. This damning of our souls, this shackling of our bodies, is the relationship this nation would want us to have with ourselves—that of the imprisoned. And not just the Black us, but the All of us. 

A friend of mine who spent several years in prison said something similar to me while driving from the airport. On an overbright autumn morning, construction dust kicked up and coated the windshield of my truck, turning the morning into a golden haze. We slipped into conversation about the reason he came to Austin, a conference at the University of Texas Law School, to explore poetry and its efficacy in advancing prison abolition. We crawled through airport and morning traffic, our conversation moving rapidly until he hesitated and said something like, “I’ve been thinking about the omnipresence of prisons.” Maybe he didn’t use the word omnipresence, but he was talking about prisons being at the very center of culture, of our social world. He said (and I’m paraphrasing and very well could be making this up) that we tend to think of prisons as aberrations, as something far away from us—community, culture, life. In this way, prisons are marginal, something exceptional, an exceptional state of being. But in actuality, prisons are not on the margins. They are the very center of life in America. Prison is the beating heart of America. That last sentence is me, not him. 

I’ll never forget the day, the highway, the swirls of construction dust rising and surrounding us. The sun bright and leaning its heat against my hand. It was one of the most profound things I had heard. That prison is not out there in the dark, in the unterritorialized ether of America, but it’s in the well-lit center of us darkly. I wanted to turn to him, to somehow physicalize for him how profoundly his comment landed, but, of course, I was driving. I could only nod and say something like, “That’s right, that’s absolutely right.” We are all in some relationship with prison. 

While driving through the autumn afternoon with my friend, I hadn’t thought about the years and years of my prison dream and how my dream life corroborated this insight of his. It wasn’t until reading Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground that I thought of the ongoing anthology of my dreams for those many years, waking fitfully in beds from Atlanta to Rio de Janeiro, glad to have passed through the itinerant veil of the dream, glad to be disturbed on this side of it. And not in prison. 

There’s a timelessness to Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground that has little to do with some surreptitious notion of universality or some ephemeral and inexact artistic ideal. Its timelessness lies in its ability to articulate the stone, water, blood, and darkness of what it means to live between and during hostilities, hostilities thrust on a people by a nation. The novel articulates what it means to live one’s life as a dream, as that which must be held on to and simultaneously discarded. Wright vocalizes and reifies terror and its temporary, itinerant assuagements. 

The character of Fred Daniels embodies the utter terror of being a Black American—that at any time your life can be snatched from you. Controlling one’s life belongs to someone or something else. The French philosopher Michel Foucault calls it the biopolitical. The Cameroonian historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe takes this notion a step further and calls it the necropolitical—the State having the ability to kill at will. The State deciding who dies. It is a predicament of utter, omnipresent terror. Terror that is sometimes submerged so deeply that one cannot do something as simple as walk by a police officer at the entrance of a grocery store and not feel as if one’s death is ceremoniously waiting for you there next to the watermelon where the officer stands. Not allowing oneself to drift off into the terror of what if—what if the officer mistakes me pulling my cell phone from my pocket as—I stop there. I try not to lynch myself or others over and over again in my subconscious, giving America the imaginative real estate and tree that it would deny it wants though doesn’t mind idly standing by, and if I put in the effort of imagining myself there going up a tree, why not, why not tug on the rope, raise my body like a dark sun into the sky? 

What becomes scarier is when our white compatriots in America deploy and enact this racist imagining and State terror in our communities. In July 2021, near my hometown of Mount Holly, New Jersey, a white man decided to verbally and physically terrorize his Black neighbors, mocking and goading them, relishing the fact that he could bait and harass them and nothing would be done about it because he was white and they occupied the pitiable position of being Black. And nothing would be done to him because the police are, in fact, on his side. He declares this impunity while being videoed, unfazed, unashamed, and unbothered that he’s being recorded, that he’s providing the sentence and rope for his trial. 

And why should he be bothered? The video of the incident corroborates his assertion—that the police are on his side. When a Mount Laurel police officer shows up to mediate—and I use the word mediate lightly and sarcastically—the dispute, which is not a dispute but an assault, the officer treats the screaming man with deference and respect. The officer doesn’t upbraid the white man or demand he cease his tirade. The officer does not choke him, tase him, or shoot him when he curses and continues to verbally assault his neighbors. Instead, the officer calls the assailant by his name, Edward, and tells the man to get back, allowing the assailant to calm himself at his leisure. Eventually, the white man calms himself, finally taking the admonishment of the officer, but he also points out to his victims that the police are with him. They are his ally, and the police, for that matter, point to this fact—that they are on the assailant’s side—by calling him by his name, by their show of familiarity, by their willingness to allow the assailant to stop his verbal haranguing when he felt good and ready. 

These everyday practices of annihilation are not unfamiliar to Black folks or our fellow Americans. A list of names that are testament to this violence could be inserted here. Or a list of infamous moments. The killing of Medgar Evers in Mississippi by Byron De La Beckwith for championing voting and civil rights in 1963. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Ahmaud Arbery chased and killed by white vigilantes because he was taking a jog in his community in 2020. These incidents are pornographically and absurdly known. Timeless. This tradition, unfortunately, has become a pastime and preface to several American summers, which leads to the fashioning of the same book, the same story to follow. After the killing, protestors overwhelm the streets to express their discontent and anger; then, hand-wringing by politicians who hang their heads or kneel in contrition beneath gold-domed statehouses; then, sloganeering by businesses that have underemployed and underserved Black communities and benefited from this negligence; then, nothing. No, not nothing but a backsliding into the tumult of gilded and empty American morality. A cooling-off period. A muting of pain. The graffiti—Fuck the Police! Black Lives Matter! once vigorously scrawled on the highway, on sidewalks, on police station walls, on statues of Confederate generals—melts into the edifice it once gleamed against, its shouting, spray-painted colors of red and blue and white a little less bright after a few weeks of rain and sun and summer heat. And when the protests dissipate to nostalgia and memory and the mealymouthed correction made by liberal politicians is lost to the newest scandal on the news, the newest American tragedy, out of that diminished flame rises another incident—some “good” white folks harassing and harming “good” Black folks (if you let the liquor and conservative politician tell it). And the police showing up and nothing being done until there is some absurd, over-the-top video evidence of the killing of another Black person who was casually going about their day—reading, jogging, bird watching, selling loose cigarettes. 

I wonder what type of social world am I being invited into? What type of ensemble, band, country are we making here? It is nothing short of an apocalypse—a war. There’s only so long before folks come down out of the lynching trees and refuse to go back up again. And I’m not saying that those captured and lynched willingly and passively capitulated to their captors. We know they did not. What I’m thinking about here is what would happen if we collectively refused, collectively went underground like Fred Daniels. Or what if the underground began to be our prevailing political and social position to America? What if we brought the underground above? It is violence without violence. It would be nothing short of a revolution. Freedom.  

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin cajoles his nephew not to be driven from his home, his home being America. “Great men have done great things here,” writes Baldwin, “and will again, and we can make America what America must become.” When I arrive at this moment in the letter, I always feel let down, as if my uncle who said he was going to come by and pick me up to toss a ball around never showed, and I’m waiting at the door, the descending night just beyond the screen mocking me. Baldwin’s turn to “make America what America must become” feels as if Baldwin himself doesn’t realize that he is trapped in history, trapped in a rhetoric of liberalism, of exceptionality, trapped in American optimism, which is a blind arrogance based upon the superiority of our alleged wit and muscle. A superiority that eschews reality, history, and experience. It is this superiority, this willful blindness, that has led to our people being billed as monstrous in the American movie playing in the streets and schools of our local communities. 

Baldwin’s turn at the end of the letter to love—loving our white brothers who have sought to subdue us at every turn—refuses to acknowledge America’s outright, multigenerational project of homogeneity through various genocides—Native, Black, queer, women, poor folks—and how difficult it might be to trust, let alone love, my brother. Baldwin doubles down and writes that “great men have done great things here.” Baldwin’s turn toward unnamed “great men” feels a bit suspicious to me because it reminds me of the pedagogy of fourth-grade social studies—the sycophancy and making hagiography of the founding fathers, explorers, and “pioneers” who literally rampaged and ravaged the people and land to extract and cultivate this “great” nation. This turn to greatness reminds me of our present mythologizing of not only American excellence (former President Trump and the far right’s cry to “Make America Great Again”) but also Black excellence as a counternarrative and counterargument to the historical preoccupation with Black folks’ alleged inferiority and underachievement. #BlackExcellence has become a sort of superficial tag, a gimmick, that is supposed to interrupt and differently narrate the living history of Black folks enduring and succeeding within the chaos and destruction of white supremacy, but it always does so on the terms of our captors—merit, wealth production, winning, individualism. What is mostly celebrated with #BlackExcellence is how we got or are getting “the bag.” But what isn’t always acknowledged is who is being exploited while we’re “getting the bag”—that exploitation occurring in other countries, in foreign wars, on sweatshop floors, in kitchens and bedrooms whose curtains we cannot imagine. 

This ballyhooing our alleged American greatness belies its woundedness—even, arguably, its absence. The turn to greatness by Baldwin is a romanticization, a move toward sentimentality, that I’m surprised to see him gesture toward especially after his trouncing of the sentimental tradition and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” I’m not here to slay fathers, monsters, dragons, or uncles. Baldwin’s written and oral work is crucial in the thinking about where, what, and who Black people are in America, to America. In fact, there would be no Roger Reeves as a poet, essayist, playwright, or fiction writer without James Baldwin. But as a native son and a great-grandnephew of Baldwin, Wright, Malcolm X, and Georgia Gilmore, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Queen Mother Moore, I have to ask: What is this preoccupation, this capitulation to this dream deferred, to this magic America that constantly eludes the grasp of Black folks? The end of Baldwin’s letter feels as if he is dangling this future liberation in front of us—his nephews, his sons and daughters—and as we grasp for it, strive for it, beseech, march, and protest for it, it drifts further and further from our grasp. It’s as if Baldwin, unwittingly, is trapping us inside a history of striving, of progress borne upon what looks like faith but is in actuality what the late scholar Lauren Berlant would call a “cruel optimism.” 

And why, why would we want to continue to partake in this cruel, American optimism? America has refused us our making, cajoling, beseeching. America has refused us our very lives. Why wouldn’t we go underground? Why not seek refuge in nowhere? Because the truth of the matter is that our freedom resides in this nowhere, in this invisibility. Our freedom is invisible—not because it doesn’t exist but because it has yet to be achieved. We must go underground not merely to escape our deaths (or at least delay them) but to figure out who we are, what we want, and what we mean to each other. Therein is our freedom, our liberation. 

And who do I mean by we? “We who believe in freedom,” says Ella Baker. We who have been blackened, raced, othered, and extracted from in order to make the American empire rise out of the swamps and hollows and plantations and graves. I’m not here to elide the particularities of historical struggles. The struggle of Native Americans inside, outside, and against the American empire is not the struggle of Arab Americans inside, outside, and against the American empire. The struggle of Arab Americans inside, outside, and against the American empire is not the struggle of Black Americans inside, outside, and against the American empire. However, we are kin and comrades in our struggles against our annihilation, against our respective colonizations, racisms, and exploitations, in our struggles for self-determination here in America. As scholar Ussama Makdisi suggests, the question is “how to imagine, articulate, and enact—and to commemorate—this solidarity without privileging one discourse and experience of oppression over the other.” 

I’d humbly offer that the space to imagine this solidarity is underground, away from the swarming of American optimism and the fetishizing of freedom. Where we can talk among ourselves. Where we can be with each other. This is what I mean when I say we must know what we mean to each other. We must also be honest about what we have meant to each other, how we have harmed each other, used each other, at times, in our acquiescence to American optimism and American notions of success. 

In the underground, value—what America values—submits to the distortion of darkness and darkness’s defamiliarization. Careerism, wealth, nationalism, patriotism lose their hold on our imaginations because they can no longer supply the fiction of stability or safety. We must grope in the dark for what truly makes us, keeps us us. In the underground, our American vision is useless because it cannot rely on a veneer, a history of fraudulent illumination, a corrupt and lied-about hagiography. I’m not quite sure I’m making sense. What I might be calling toward, summoning, might feel like the ephemeral matter of a poem, of feeling. And it might be that, too. But I assure you that even in its ephemerality it is real. It was what Fred Daniels realizes when he’s underground. Money and riches become literal ornamentation—useless, nothing—because what is at stake for Daniels is his life, rescuing it from his captors, the police. When Daniels swipes a bunch of cash during one of his adventures into the belowground rooms that connect to the sewer, rather than come aboveground to use it, he lines the walls of his underground lair with it. Money no longer carries for him the allure, the seduction it once did aboveground. In the underground, where his life is at stake, money becomes mere paper. It loses its coin because it is outside of circulation; thus, it must bear the obscenity, violence, and waifishness of its fiction. 

The underground also allows for Daniels to hear the multidirectional, often contradictory nature of desire. I might say that he actually hears below desire—he hears desire’s desire. Desire unmanicured. Desire unadorned. Desire that is truly vulnerable to itself. Which might be one of the most useful aspects of being underground—your desire, my desire only ambiguously tethered (maybe even slightly untethered) to the past, to expectation, to the nation. In order for you to understand what I mean there’s this moment that I have to describe to you from the book. Stay with me. I know we prefer our hot takes and thinkpieces without literary allusion or criticism, but I’ll try to make this move against decorum and the zeitgeist worth it. So check it. 

Daniels is in the sewer, enshrouded in darkness. The floor he’s been walking on falls off precipitously. With a pole that he’s been using to test the depth of the water sluicing about him, he slides down into the little room below him. He hears a voice. It’s singing, a singing that’s both “strange” and “familiar.” A singing suffused with longing that causes Daniels to run toward it, causes him to listen closely, to listen beyond the words, beyond the notes to where urge and striving and want reside. The singing is coming from a Black church, and when Daniels slides his eye into a crevice, he sees Black men and women holding raggedy hymnals, their mouths upturned, singing about wanting Jesus to take them to heaven and wrap them in the love of his bosom. No longer in the world of the aboveground, of the Black church, he hears their singing differently. “His life had somehow snapped in two,” writes Wright: 

When he had sung and prayed with his brothers and sisters in church, he had always felt what they felt; but here in the underground, distantly sundered from them, he saw a defenseless nakedness in their lives that made him disown them. A physical distance had come between them and had conferred upon him a terrifying knowledge. He felt that these people should stand silent, unrepentant, with simple manly pride, and yield no quarter in whimpering. He wanted them to assume a heroic attitude even though he himself had run away from his tormentors, even though he had begged his accusers to believe in his innocence. 

In this moment, Daniels resides in bewilderment—a very useful bewilderment. It is the unclean, impure, raggedy bewilderment of escape and fugitivity, which is both the front and back door to freedom. In the singing in the Black church, Daniels recognizes the need for and the enactment of a type of escape—Black folks trying to get outside of their subjection through the will of the voice, the will of the body. However, this lyric form of fugitivity bears irony and contradiction because of the singers’ supplication, because of their “physical distance” from actual escape and freedom. Daniels, who has enacted a different commitment to his freedom by escaping from his captors and going underground, feels terrorized by the inadequacy of their singing, by their beseeching of an unseen God to rescue those he has seemed to ignore. Daniels would have them assume a “heroic attitude” and “stand silent, unrepentant, with simple manly pride,” though “he himself had run away from his tormentors,” the same tormentors “he had begged…to believe in his innocence.” 

Daniels himself is also sitting in the seat of irony—he himself a contradiction. This sort of contradiction is nothing but the blues, the epistemological scaffolding of Black American aesthetics. Some folks might even call it a Black surrealism, and if I were trying to write an aesthetic treatise I might go there. But that’s not where we are. We are underground and must stay there for a while—in darkness, the water sluicing about our knees. But we are not alone; we are with each other in this blackness that is also blue. 

We must reside in this ironic sensibility, this swank swerving into the broken because this breaking is what it’s all about. In the essay “Memories of My Grandmother,” which Wright wrote as a sort of account of the personal, aesthetic, and historical ideas that influenced and conducted the writing of The Man Who Lived Underground, he describes this sort of breaking but in terms of characters. “This breaking, in my opinion, represents a point in life where the past falls away and the character must, in order to go on living, fling himself upon the face of the formless night and create a world, a new world, in which to live.” Fred Daniels has flung himself into the darkness, resides in the void, in the nowhere that is the underground. The past falls away, and he must confront the contradiction that is the beginning of the freedom—the contradiction of the past as well as the contradiction of the present—that in order to create the world he desires to live in he must embrace nowhere. Nowhere is the somewhere he wants to be—where he must be. Like Daniels, we must embrace the formlessness of nowhere if we mean to come to who we want to be. We might not stay there long, but we must run away from the somewhere of our prisons. 

INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE UNDERGROUND 

: SLEEP.  

: SLEEP SOME MORE.  

: IF YOU’VE MADE IT HERE, WHEREVER HERE IS, YOU ARE PROBABLY TIRED AND IN NEED OF REST, SO REST.  

: IN THE UNDERGROUND, WE STEAL FROM THOSE NOT IN THE UNDERGROUND.  

: WE TRY TO APPEAR AS IF WE’RE NOT IN THE UNDERGROUND. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO AND ENTITIES THAT DO NOT WANT YOU TO BE HERE AND WILL DO ANYTHING THEY CAN TO TAKE YOU OUT OF HERE AND AWAY FROM US.  

: IN THE UNDERGROUND, EAT WELL.  

: LAUGH.  

: DANCE.  

: PLAY SPADES.  

: READ BOOKS.  

: BAKE CAKES.  

: FUSS, FIGHT, FUCK, AND CARRY ON.  

: MAKE MISTAKES.  

: FORGIVE.  

: OPEN THE UNDERGROUND TO OTHERS.  

: CLOSE THE UNDERGROUND TO OTHERS.  

: BE HERE UNCOMFORTABLE AND BE COMFORTABLE IN IT.  

: IN THE UNDERGROUND, WE AFFLICT AND COMFORT.  

: AFFLICT AND COMFORT.  

: DO NOT REQUIRE THE ABOVEGROUND TO BE THE UNDERGROUND.  

: DO NOT REQUIRE THE UNDERGROUND TO BE ANYTHING LIKE THE ABOVEGROUND.  

: GRACE—HAVE IT, BE WITH IT.  

: DON’T DIE—THEN, SOMETIMES, DO.  

: BE QUIET WHEN YOU WANT TO.  

: YOUR MONEY IS NO GOOD. IF WE DECIDE TO MAKE MONEY GOOD, THEN WE WILL NEED AN UNDERGROUND BENEATH, ABOVE, OR TO THE SIDE OF THIS UNDERGROUND.  

: WHAT WILL WE MAKE FOR EACH OTHER IN THE DARK, IN THE HEAT, IN THE COLD, IN THE SILENCE?  

: WILL WE BRING WITH US THE SONGS FROM BEFORE?  

: WHAT WILL WE DO WITH THE OLD GODS?  

: THE OLD GODS ARE NOT REQUIRED TO LOVE US HERE.  

: NO GOD IS REQUIRED FOR ENTRY.  

: BE CAREFUL, THE UNDERGROUND MAY NOT, IN FACT, BE UNDER.  

: NEVER MISTAKE WHAT IT IS FOR WHAT IT AIN’T.  

: YOU CAN HUM HERE IF YOU WANT.  

: COME ON, COME ON, COME ON NOW, DON’T YOU WANT TO GO?  

: YOU CAN LEAVE WHEN YOU WANT, BUT YOU MAY NOT BE ABLE TO GET BACK IN.  

: EVERYTHING HERE IS ON THE ONE.  

: THE UNDERGROUND MOVES AT WILL—SOMETIMES AGAINST ITS WILL, SOMETIMES AT OUR WILL.  

: THERE IS NO SAFETY HERE.  

: REMEMBER TO SLEEP.  

: SLEEP SOME MORE.  

: EAT WELL.  

: REMEMBER WHAT YOU COULDN’T OUT THERE.  

: THERE’S SO MUCH NOT TO KNOW DOWN HERE.  

: DO NOTHING.  

: LISTEN FOR WHAT YOU COULD NOT HEAR BEFORE.  

: YOU MAY ALREADY BE IN IT—THE UNDERGROUND.  

: SOME OF US MAY NEVER GET THERE.  

: ALLOW THE CHILDREN.  

: TEACH THE CHILDREN TO FORAGE AND HUNT.  

: TRAVEL ONLY AT NIGHT.  

: BE AS DEFINITIONLESS AS POSSIBLE.  

: BE.  

: WILDERNESS.  

: REENCHANT FAILURE.  

: LOVE WHAT YOU COULDN’T LOVE OUT THERE.  

: COME ON, COME ON, COME ON NOW, DON’T YOU WANT TO GO?  

: BUILD NEW GRANARIES, NEW STOREHOUSES, NEW PATHS.  

: MAP NONE OF THIS.  

: BE AS ANCIENT AS YOU WANT TO BE.  

: BEING HERE DOES NOT EXONERATE YOU FROM SUFFERING.  

: BE FORMLESS.  

: BE READY TO MOVE.  

: MOVE.  

: OPEN THE UNDERGROUND TO OTHERS.  

: DO NONE OF THIS.  

: DO NONE OF THIS.