Walidah Imarisha contributed a short story titled “Black Angel” to the Sci-Fi collection Octavia’s Brood that she edited with adrienne maree brown in 2015. Explaining why Sci-Fi and speculative fiction are necessary now, she writes, “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction” (2015a, 3). Even more precisely, she dubs the work of the anthology “visionary fiction,” which is a category of creativity that “encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice” (4). “Black Angel” shows this work in action through the figure of A., an angel that has been evicted from Heaven because of her choice to intervene in the lives of humans. What would make A. endure God’s wrath, the scorching heat of eviction, and the loss of a wing that was wrenched off in her descent down to Earth? The answer is pain. Human pain. 

Well, human pain + human love, which is to say the response of humans to the inhumanity of their own kind. “There will always be those humans so twisted, so hungry for power, they will devour all in their way, even the weak, the sick. The children” (2015b, 50). Yet another thought follows quickly: “But not all. There will always be those who fight against that, who push the forces of destruction back” (Ibid.). The scene unfolding in front of A.’s eyes while she thinks these thoughts is that which plays out in our streets today. ICE. Agents abducting people from a Harlem tenement. It was not the eviction, however, that goaded A. into action. Rather, it was the sight of adults holding back ICE agents so that the children of the abductees could escape from the federal agents. Still aching from her own expulsion, A. could nevertheless no longer stand impassively in the face of such wrong-doing. “She had been ashamed of herself since the first time she let her feast of pain, of having something else taken away from her, stop her doing what she knew was right” (Ibid.). And so, despite having served as an Angel of mercy, not of vengeance, A. sprung into movement. “She threw off her trench coat like a dark storm cloud and unleashed her remaining black wing. It unfurled until it blotted out the glow of the streetlights. Her face twisted almost beyond recognition with rage, and she was more terrible than anyone could ever imagine” (51).

While she was able to slice through the bodies of some agents with her wing of steel, the rounds of bullets shot into her were enough to slow her crusade and stop her from achieving her primary goal of eliminating the entire threat. ICE regrouped, threw as many bodies into their trucks as possible, and sped off, but not before A. scooped a child up and fled into the alleyways. No longer immortal, A. was both capable of recovery and horribly wounded. After carrying the child to safety, she passed out. 

She awoke to the face of the child. Then the real pain hit. The girl’s face expressed profound disbelief, not because of the presence of the angel, which she easily understood as a messenger sent from God, but because her mother was gone. A. read the pain on the child’s face and desired in that moment to utilize her sole remaining angelic power, The Voice capable of changing hearts, of singing humans clean. A. would have willingly accepted the child’s pain as her own through the act of Singing, but she was unable to proceed. Looking at the child, she realized The Voice wouldn’t work because there was no evil to remove. The pain inside the child was not corrupt or a sign of wrong. The child’s pain was necessary, a mode expressing the Love that motivated A.’s merciful vengeance that navigated both she and the little girl into this present moment. And so, with both the girl’s pain and her own remaining, the angel stood, took the child’s hand in hers, and walked off to plan the next step of resistance. 

What spirituality does Imarisha offer us? It is recognizable at first as an image of profane divinity, of heaven existing on Earth. Opposed to the utopian vision of immortal imperviousness rectifying the errant ways of sinning carnal beings, we see an immigrant evicted from Heaven, ailing because of the journey, and struggling to understand a new mode of being, one neither mortal nor immortal. A. occupies numerous in-between states: heavenly and earthly, merciful and afire with vengeance, fully ambivalent about acting in plain sight and remaining within the shadows. Similarly, the humanity Imarisha shows us lives within a forcefield (Kraftweld) created by the dialectical tensions of fear and courage, humanity and inhumanity, hope and despair, justice and injustice. By encountering these tensions in the text, we watch as spiritual movement arises from a searing No. A. acts as an embodiment of the particular pain manifested through the dialectic of love and loss, and through her action we see No in motion. Goaded by the affirmation of grief, A. helps readers glimpse one method through which spirituality might lead to social change. The story is fiction only in the sense that A.’s particular form has not yet shown itself on Earth. The spiritual action, however, that No with a power to affirm the unity of love and pain, is abundant. In this way, Imarisha helps us look anew at what is already here. Hers is a spirituality known through its divinely profane ability to render the impossible already accomplished. 

Key Signature:

Healing does not occur in the abstract, sterile space of medical terminology or diagnostic coding; it happens in the concrete, everyday performance of living.

I have recently been working through numerous cases that share the following attributes: 

• Extensive diagnostic history from multiple institutions that frustrate the client and make clinical imagination-conceptualization work quite hard.
• For example: over 20 years, a person has accrued the diagnoses of Bipolar, Borderline Personality Disorder, PTSD, OCD, and ADHD. Is this picture accurate? If it’s accurate, what does that mean in terms of this person’s moment-to-moment lived experience?
• Existing on “the spectrum” has been a core phenomenological experience for the clients, but much of the medication prescribed to the clients aim for acute symptom management and abandon the neurodiverse dimension. 
• These clients have routinely felt dismissed, disempowered, and ignored by providers. They are hesitant to raise their voice within the Doctor-Patient power dynamic, and yet not raising their voice has led to protracted but unhelpful medication regimens and long stretches of emotional and psychological distress 

In reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein, I call diagnostic pictures like this one “a fly-bottle inside a fly-bottle.” Famously, Wittgenstein wrote that the aim of philosophy is to show the fly out of the fly-bottle. By this, I believe he meant that philosophers and non-philosophers alike have become trapped within language-based prisons that end up defining the boundaries of the thinkable. Translating the thought into the therapeutic register, I believe that when people become patients who acquire diagnostic labels, they find themselves caught within a fly-bottle insofar as, from the time of diagnosis on, they can only function within the terms applied to them by psychiatric discourse and “evidence-based” therapeutic practices intended to treat illnesses outlined in that discourse. Even in cases when patients learn to perform well within such confines, they will eventually leave that fly-bottle and re-enter the other one, the fly-bottle of society where language and spectacle and validated behavioral scripts compel a second performance. 

Working with people who share this kind of experience has motivated me to clarify my theory of therapy, which I now identify as performance philosophy therapy. That title presents the basic picture: I believe psychoanalysis, performance in everyday life, historiography (a la Foucault), and philosophy (e.g., Wittgenstein) can come together to produce an experiential and relationally focused therapy that forwards the client as the producer of change. 

Recently, I’ve returned to the work of Fluxus artists because their experimentation also blends the same elements as my performance philosophy therapy. I am working on a “non-workbook” called Therapeutic Event Scores that offers “event scores” to clients along with analysis of the Fluxus works that served as motivation. A walk through a city street, an unscripted conversation, a deliberate pause, or an intentional relational gesture are not mere background noise to clinical intervention; they are the primary sites of therapeutic potential. When we approach these mundane moments through an experiential, score-like framework—drawing on the minimalist tactics of Fluxus Event scores—we begin to treat daily existence not as a static diagnosis to be managed, but as an ongoing, immersive performance.

I use the phrase “micro-practices of presence” to name the mode of attentiveness required to shift from “stuff I do” to “event.” I can talk to myself and just let that be that. But I could also invite people to my home for a 20-minute window while I perform the mundane task of talking to myself. The shift from occurrence to event requires an artistic and philosophical shift in perspective, and once this shifted perspective supports a daily practice of attentiveness, “event scores” can function as non-pharmacological therapeutic interventions. The aim is not to elide the difference between being and performing; rather, the aim is to make visible the sparks of tension between being and performing so as to describe them and see what they illuminate. Furthermore, these scores do not attempt to fixate on abnormality or fix reality into a universal index, but instead invite therapy seekers to experiment directly with new ways of inhabiting space, time, and relationship. By framing pedestrian actions as minimalist performances, these score-like experiments re-sensitize us to the richness of the present moment. In doing so, they actively counteract the emotional flattening, somatic alienation, and system-wide dampening that so often accompany chronic medication use and manualized psychiatric protocols.

By turning the mundane into an Event, the problem does not simply receive a new label; rather, in the true Wittgensteinian sense, the problem vanishes as we act otherwise.