FADO

For the Lamenting Prophets

What do we do with a fate we lament?

There is but a scornful glance at the God you believe in, but immediately abandons you. You distrust a personal will that does not exist, for your strength is summoned by attributing all to Destiny.

Faco, Fatum, Fado. All refer, first of all, to a fate that irrupts time, thrusting the fated into the midst of presence. The mouthpiece for Divine decree trumpets an irreversible condition. What is and what will be require no symbolic intermediary. Thus our human language is excessive as it deplores an inexorable death. Fado is more than a melancholic feeling, it is a disposition, a consciousness which recognizes its finitude. Fado is sensible existential weariness and its incumbent aimless flitter.

To read red is to realize the body is a terminal. Again, prophets are also a place. Like the singer uses the whole body as their instrument, the oracle is barefoot with their aria. Both require a delivery of voice. So we are a singing oracle. So it is a somatic prophecy. Bodies reading bodies as God is a gentle whisper. This melancholy is discreet, for only those who allow themselves to frequent such prophetic places accustom its expression. 

It is a metaphysical comprehension, a consonant spiritual maturity achieved at the end of empire, at the moment of economic and political decline, as with Portugal. Its overseas empire collapses but its language remains, pluralized, drifting over five continents. FADO is an interlude. It is the episode of interval between Brazilian, North African and Portuguese riding the rhythm of the seas evoking the longing of irreparable loss:

"Com que voz chorarei meu triste fado / With what voice should I lament my sad fate/sing my sad fado."

We become prophet poets. We are Orpheus, beheaded, and bobbing up and downriver. The lyre becomes our body and every song we sing mourns the fate that kills us softly. We practice divination as Fado, strumming our pain knowing that we won't survive the end of empire. We are frail and we falter. Our strong souls are weary. Our Gods are distant. 

FADO will continue to develop the red pedagogy I put forth as we gaze into the sky and measure prophecy by parallax. This class series will be like pearls on a necklace, disparate, but connected as well, baroque in psychic insight luminously hidden in our fleshy darkness. A read red aims to realize a divinatory embodiment. It is to raise one hand, prick it, and revel in the realization that beneath the racialization that differently locates and classifies our specific bodies in time and place, red is the blood we will all spill. And the suffering we share means when we call out with our cards in sorrow, the response of divinity will affirm a shared humanity. The blood is on all of our hands. Its haptic. You will feel red. Red reading produces, attunes a synesthestic perceptual phenomenon of psycho-active yearning. Yearning for an answer, a direction amidst our existential drift, we vocally render our query. Images answer. Vision is engaged, colors are heard, shapes have a scent. The augur is a river with many cognitive tributaries. 

It is said to be soothsaying because the lyrical sedative we administer keeps dreams euphoric. Our prophecies arouse auroras of an alternate galaxy. It's a meditative head rush on organic hallucinogens of foreseeing. Songs of lamentation are supposed to keep us from cardiac arrest, but even as we blame the sun don't we keep clutching our breasts, gasping for breath. In the nights overwhelmed by God's test have we been left for dead?

So to caress death we contemplate, what will manifest in the meantime, what might we write in the margins to make the dead divinity's verb? The FADO marginalia will be a conversation through conjuring, a fringe consciousness in the shadow reflex of doubt.

To wake us from our petrified thoughts the climate conspires. Revolution is replete with zones of woe, spheres of marvel. Lighting inspires intuition, then thunderclaps of astonishment resound in the cavities of our bodies so there is an echo of intimacy amidst strangers.

In FADO, the God's return, legitimate and listening. 

FADO FORM

FADO classes are an ongoing melodic ripple. Thus far, 12 distinct, disparate classes {pearls} are in development to be taught live at about a month’s interval. 

Each class will be offered independently to the public for a 2 week playback, while students who enroll in the full FADO course will maintain live and recorded access to each class for the year as it deepens and unfolds. Further, students who enroll for the full program will have 20% discount on each class than the stand-alone class rate.

For students in the full form enrollment, all the classes, as they are created will find all the information, accompanying materials and zoom links populated continuously under the course content page here / above. For those who wish to enroll in a single or several select classes from FADO, each will be announced here via my substack, with individual registration information therein.

Stay tuned for the first class topic to be announced very soon!

x,

Christopher