(Everything is everything)
consent not to be a single being
wiggle

Let’s get down now

I hear voices, I see people
I hear voices of many people
(Oh, yeah)
I hear voices, I see people
I hear voices of many people

Sayin’ everything is everything
Yeah, oh, yeah

Yeah, they’re sayin’
Everything is everything
(Oh yeah, shut up)
Let me do my do my

Everything is everything
Everything is everything
(Yeah)
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
(Yes, it is)

Everything is everything
(Yes, it is)
Everything is everything
(You gotta believe it now)

Everything is everything
(Don’t you know now)
I say everything is everything
Oh, yeah

Everything is everything
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
Everything is everything ¹

Everything is everything is wiggling out of ones’ skin. Wiggling out of expectations. Wiggling out of performativity. Wiggling off script. Wiggling into existence. Wiggling into joy. Wiggling into being. Wiggling through and around schemas, traps, cages. Wiggling into a cocoon. Wiggling away from prying eyes. Waiting room. Holding room. Green room. Leg room. Elbow room. Wiggle room. Who has wiggle room? Who has time to wiggle? How do you carve out time away from basic demands to wiggle your way into your own? To wiggle into multiplicity.

Living Room deploys refusal as a tactic to move from the traps of storytelling ² through a moving image disavowal of the spectacular-bio-explicatory-climactic-narrative-developmentalist-apparatus. Here, waiting is staged as a casting that never finds its own resolution.

Donny Hathaway’s song is about the entanglements of life and reconciling oneself to this multiplicity. Edouard Glissant in a conversation with Manthia Diawara says that “to consent not to be a single being” is to accept multiplicity.³ Kara Keeling in their book The witch’s flight write that:

A cliché can be understood as a common memory-image directed onto a perception prepared according to a common sensory-motor schemata. A cliché is a type of common sense that enables motor movement to occur.
Common sense, in my usage of the term, refers simultaneously to a shared set of motor contrivances that affect subjective perception and to a collective set of memory-images that includes experiences, knowledges, traditions, and so on and that area available to memory during perception.⁴

What uncountable miles and inches of wiggle room constitute a common provision—a commons’ provisions? What images fill it? Evade it? Constitute it? How much scant makes it? How many evasions? How much of its warmth is made from a wiggle that commons, a commoning wiggle?

____
¹ While reading Fred Moten’s Black and Blur’s Chapter 13 titled Remind he mentions Donny Hathaway’s Everything is Everything. I listen to the Voices Inside (Everything is Everything) song which is the title track of the 1970 album. I thought of Lauryn Hill’s Everything is Everything from her Miseducation album so I listened to it after. Donny Hathaways’ song is more apt for this text and these are the lyrics to the song.

² Informed by Parul Seghal’s article The Tyranny of the Tale

³ Diawara, Manthia. “Conversation with Edouard Glissant Aboard the Queen Mary II (August 2009).” Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, 2010: p. 58-63.

⁴ Keeling, Kara. The witch’s flight: The cinematic, the black femme, and the image of common sense. Duke University Press, 2007.

Generously supported by: