yesterday morning there was a sign I almost missed, about Joost, tucked behind the iron fence surrounding Greenwood Cemetery, on 5th ave close to 38th street. i paused my run to read it: “Legend has it that, near this spot during our Colonial period an African American named Joost dueled the Devil in a fiddling contest. When Joost triumphed, the Devil, in defeat, stomped his foot on a rock, leaving an impression of a hoof print. By the time of the American Revolution the rock with the Devil’s Hoof Print had become a local tourist attraction. This rock, recently dug out of Sunset Park’s ground, reminds us of the folktale of the Devil’s Hoof Print.”
i had run that way once before and missed it, and this time it caught my eye. my dad always reads the signs when we go places, is sincerely interested. my sister and i would groan sometimes when we had to double back, or linger. and the signs matter, the paying attention matters, the noticing matters. i try to read the signs now. both taking a page out of my dad’s book and countering what i now understand as my deeply embedded cultural inheritance of who the fuck cares who was here before?
Daniel Alexander Jones describes this colonial impulse that characterizes so many of our interactions: “…what I see is a…colonial impulse you arrive and you not paying attention to the fact that people wer1e there before you got there. And that is so deeply the inheritance of our country that’s exacerbated by this kind of hyper individuated consumer culture and that our interactions are now tailored to our desire through our devices that I can curate what I engage with”
the insisted upon cultural oblivion and amnesia would have me miss the Joosts. i don’t want to miss the Joosts.
Joost is lingering with me, in my worry, in my judgment, in my habitual doubt. to defeat the devil with your song, with your gusto. you heard me, back up. with my song, my vibration, you can’t touch me. the legend2 endures.
i don’t know if i believe in the devil, or evil, but i heard Suzanne Stabile define sin as distraction, and hearing Tara Brach talk about the Buddha’s encounters with Mara also resonates.
paying attention to who, what has come before. who, what is around me now. can i, too, play the song so good that the devil gives up.
Who Yo People Is with Sharon Bridgforth “everywhere I’m walking around, and I see it in interpersonal space…people move through the world totally subsumed by their own energies and not aware of other people in space, watching people and you know I could say is we could get into it’s white people or young people or who ever and increasing it’s almost everywhere that I see it where people walk and the only contact they have with you is you are suddenly in their way, so their way their trajectory their agenda is guiding them through the world and everything that is in the world before they got there five minutes ago doesn’t exist except as subject to their will right? …what I see is a…colonial impulse you arrive and you not paying attention to the fact that people were there before you got there. And that is so deeply the inheritance of our country that’s exacerbated by this kind of hyper individuated consumer culture and that our interactions are now tailored to our desire through our devices that I can curate what I engage with that you know something I talk about with my students who are anywhere from 17 to twenties, early twenties that they get to choose pretty much when they have to talk to another human.” ↩
legend comes from legere meaning to pluck or select. pluck that tune, select what you pay attention to: the song, the instrument and not the devil. ↩