Late Arcade

by Nathaniel Mackey

  Stingy-brim strut had come a long way, a diffuse, omni-voice dilation or solution absorption knew no way to constrain. No more than a mere hint of oratorio, no more than a mere hint of chorale, it furthered an aqueous consort of carolings coincident with the medium itself—coincident but not by that to be contained or ingested, an attenuation beyond (while residing within) liquidity’s confines. Liquid’s exhalation of gas was what it was like if not outright amounted to, an exhalation that oddly wafted within even as it wafted while standing in wait beyond. Such wafture, multiple, immanent, extrapolative, was nothing if not the quantum stride (not only soulful in addition to quantum but quantum only insofar as it numbered soulfulness among its attributes) called for by stingy-brim strut and begun by it to be put into play.

  Nonetheless, neither “aylelolay” nor “Mensaje de Alto” had been left behind, each a standing rope song’s promise of ascent made a signpost of sorts I repeatedly made note of and, in so doing, made listeners make note of as well. A firemen’s pole if not a laminated snake, it could hardly not also expostulate descent, bearing senses of emergency, alarm and even frantic dispatch, its croonfulness and reassurance at the strictly musical level notwithstanding.

  It all went to insist again that Hotel Didjeridoo would in no way countenance easy elevation, that it would have no truck with facile rebirth or rebuilding. Hotel Didjeridoo would have none of it, as its three alternate names (Jíbaro, Moro, Mita) and its unstated but implied potential for even more names had meant to make clear, “lay low’s” and/or Lole’s blown smoke’s amity with “lo alto” not to be taken as other than the qualm or qualification it assuredly was.

  Ambient accompaniment, water maintained pedal-point armature, fluviality, surge and subsidence, light oratorical wax and recess. Stingy-brim strut’s Osirian posture stood on friendly terms, it all but went without saying, with standing itself, obfuscating Osiris’s coexistent rapport with recumbency, recline, supination. It was this blown smoke’s ascendancy made clear.

  So I bent my knees and squatted, continuing to play, not missing a note. I leaned back a bit, letting my ass rest on the seafloor, horn still in hand, continuing to play. I lay back farther, the back of my head coming to rest on the seafloor, my back flat against the seafloor, still not missing a note, continuing to play. I extended my legs until they too lay flat on the seafloor, horn still in hand, horn pointed upward.

  Aside from the fact that I was breathing and not lying perfectly still, moving my arms and fingers to play the horn and keeping time with my right foot, I lay like a mummy, not only not missing a note but playing my heart out, serenading and seducing (would-be seducing) the boat overhead.

  Sincerely,

  Dredj

  30.IX.83

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  I’m writing about yesterday’s letter. It was written, as you no doubt saw right away, during a cowrie shell attack. The attack seems to’ve been brought on by a chain of associations or a train of thought that began with me reminiscing about my early childhood in Florida. I was particularly nostalgic about conch fritters, which I vividly remember though I haven’t eaten any since we left Miami when I was four. Was that enough to ignite the conch component of the cowrie shell attacks, the new, scalpel-edge wrinkle that seems to’ve motored recent attacks even more than the cowries themselves? Or was it my recollection of a family fishing trip when I was three, the incident everyone still laughs about, my uncle reeling in a fish, whipping the line back in a high arc, and me, standing farther up the bank in back of him, getting hit squarely on the head by the fish on the end of his line?

  Whichever, if not something else and if not both, it got me going. Whether conch-implied incision or fish-upside-the-head wallop, something seemed intent on underscoring depth, subaqueousness, river if not sea. It seemed to merge with a watery, “oceanic” sense I’d felt while playing “Sekhet Aaru Struff ” the day before (albeit not so much felt as felt surrounded by perhaps), a sense I couldn’t quite shake of being underwater, cosmic or not if not earthly and cosmic both. Was yesterday’s letter Dredj’s attempt to convey that sense? Garbled attempt I’m inclined to say, so brimming with matters not particularly germane to “Sekhet Aaru Struff ” the letter seems to me to be. Or are these departures from point the very “point,” the diffusion of point I touched on in the letter that accompanied the tape? So maybe it’s not so much a garbled as a “struffy” attempt?

  In any case, call it Dredj Alley, for it was an alley Dredj ducked into before it became a body of water whose floor he was on, an alleyway just off the beachfront in Venice, I’d go so far as to say, up from which one looked out from a flat filling up with sharp Shostakovian light. From House of Dredj to Dredj Annex to Dredj Alley, the attacks appear to be on an anti-architectural course, a course of architectural undoing, Hotel Didjeridoo refusing resurrection, insisting solidity and solubility hold hands. “Sekhet Aaru Struff ” or not, Dredj descried hand holding hand, hand on hand, held hands holding his writing hand.

  A light attack, it lasted only a day.

  As ever,

  N.

  4.X.83

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  I wouldn’t say I’m taking a page out of the balloons’ book, that I’m trying to beat them at their own game. Aunt Nancy suggested as much but I don’t think that’s it. No, this new thing I’m trying goes back to a story Yusef Lateef tells about the days when he was in Mingus’s band, a story I was deeply struck by when I first heard it, a story I think about from time to time. Yusef says there was a composition on which he was to solo and that Mingus, rather than writing out chord symbols for him to improvise against, drew a picture of a coffin, that it was this that he was to base his improvisation on. A friend of mine once joked that Mingus simply meant that if Yusef messed up the solo he’d kill him, but I’ve long been intrigued by and attracted to the idea of getting musical information from a picture and it’s this that led me to a certain experiment with my latest composition. Braxton’s diagrammatic, pictogrammic titles and the solo concert of his I caught a couple of years ago, the scores for which looked like pen and ink drawings, nonfigurative but drawings even so, had a role as well.

  The new composition is called “Fossil Flow.” I wrote it thinking about oil spills, the increasing number of them and the damage they do. Just this year there’ve been two massive ones: in February, the Nowruz Field platform in Iran spilled 80 million gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf; in August, a Spanish tanker, the Castillo de Bellver, caught fire and spilled 78 million gallons off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. I was thinking about the distant past (prehistoric apocalypse, collapse or catastrophe) achieving fluidity, the oxymoronic play between fossil and flow of such dimension as to put the present at risk. It’s as though it were the dinosaurs and the mastodons’ revenge, prehistory’s grudge against what came after, a brief against preservation or containment, fossil solidity, an entropic brief against past and present keeping their places. It’s as though, Dredj-like, I saw solidity’s hand and solubility’s hand, gripped though they were by one another, holding history’s hand, leading the way as it broke. Or was it, oil and water notoriously not mixing, solidity’s hand and insolubility’s hand? I’m not sure it matters. Recalling the rationing and the long lines at gas stations a few years ago, I saw dependency’s hand and depletion’s hand take solidity’s hand and (in)solubility’s hand’s places, presided over by an entropic sun.

  Much of the piece is written out but I’m trying something new, something of a built-in improvisation approach, by leaving gaps at various points in everyone’s parts, gaps of a certain number of measures (which varies) marked by the words “Wild Card.” The latter refer to a drawing and text with which each musician is provided, an 8" x 12" posterboard “card” on which he or she is to base what he or she plays at that point. I’m enclosing one. As you can see, the “card” consists of a drawing, captioned “Molimo m’Atet’s Figurehead Consoled on the Reviv
al Bench,” beneath which is a brief paragraph. I struggled over whether or not to include the latter, fearing it might be spelling things out too much, taking away from the suggestiveness of the drawing. I decided in favor of keeping it, realizing that it adds a suggestiveness of its own, that words, regardless of how much they point or specify, can’t altogether escape indefiniteness or inference, that, indeed, specification has a way of being shadowed by implication. What, for example, is to be musically made of the fact that the figurehead’s ribs show, simply enough, in the drawing but also show, in an augmented, not so simple way, in the words “visible, as were the planks of the ship’s busted hull”?

  I’m also enclosing a tape. Let me know what you think.

  Yours,

  N.

  .

  Molimo m’Atet’s Figurehead Consoled on the Revival Bench

  An oil tanker had run aground farther up the coast and broken apart. Brothers in black before they knew it, B’Loon and Djbouche washed ashore with the news of the spill. People gathered on the beach to help clean up and help rescue seabirds, oil and tar stuck to their feathers from alighting on the water or, standing or prancing on the shore, being caught by the tide. Bright sun and blue sky notwithstanding, the spill cast a pall over everything and everyone, not least of all Djband, who, likening themselves to a ship, the sun boat of Egyptian belief, felt as though they too had run aground. Epitomizing the “boat-bodied lightness, light-bodied bigness” one of them had once extolled, the female figure gracing the prow of the ship they took themselves to be (the goddess Maat, some said) stepped away, walked ashore and sat down on a bench facing the sea, head down, dejected, ribs visible, as were the planks of the ship’s busted hull. Impromptu patron saint of shipwreck, ad hoc angel, Dredj immediately sat down beside her and put his arm around her, offering comfort, consolation, recondite sun, as if to look to and be lit by eclipse were the only amenity.

  8.X.83

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  Many thanks for your letter. I appreciate your comments on “Fossil Flow,” your reaction to which, I have to admit, I was nervous about. Yes, you heard it right. “Stratified extinction,” as you say, does pervade the piece, a tributary distinction between extinction and exhaustion woven in. I’m impressed by your picking up on the “Wild Card” sections of each band member’s playing and what about the drawing and/or text informs how he or she plays. Drennette says you’re right that the abstract bench Dredj and the figurehead sit on (and, by implication, the abstract revival available to them) particularly caught her eye and especially spoke to her, giving rise to the stroked, retreating figure she has recourse to with brushes that you note a couple of minutes into the piece (not unlike, she agrees, sand pulled away from the shore by a receding wave). You’re also right that the “welter of double-reed hustle” Penguin and Lambert get into on oboe and English horn, respectively, the outbreak of metaphysical sweat with its needling or drilling insistence as if to answer a spiritual-materialist clot begging to be cut thru, is one of the places where two players’ “Wild Card” sections coincide. And your surmise that Penguin’s choppy, shenai-like drone has to do with a focus on the apparently oil-toed and oil-fingered extremities on the drawing’s right side agrees with his account; a meditation, he calls it, upon those extremities’ “tarpit premises.” Likewise, Lambert’s barking, dilated, alto-sounding complaints derived, Lambert says, from an impulse born of both pictorial and textual cues, an impulse to “occupy ribcage arena,” as he puts it, those cues being exactly the depiction of and the reference to the figurehead’s ribs that you suggest animated his playing at that point.

  Nothing much else to report. Just a quick thanks for your letter.

  As ever,

  N.

  10.X.83

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  Penguin seems to have been heartened by the subtle blush the balloons brought to Drennette’s face at the Century City Playhouse. It came up as he and I were talking today. “Lambert got it right,” he said. “Or should I say the balloons got it right? They blew the whistle on Drennette’s fake reticence, ripped away the blasé front she puts up. With all that stuff about the balloons following her home, all but about being stalked or maybe outright about being stalked, she got it right as well, auguring a muse of pursuit and pursuit’s engine or draw, reluctance, a ruse of rebuff, a prude poetics.” He paused a moment, savoring the thought. “There was more to that blush than met the eye,” he resumed. “Her heart’s blood flew to her head.” It seemed it flew to his as well, for he paused again, subtly blushing at the conceit before going on. “The balloons not only blew the whistle,” he then went on. “They let the air, so to speak, out of an inflated self-regard. They all but burst with Drennette’s recondite desire to be found out, contested, caught by lordly science alone.” He subtly blushed again, inwardly balked, twin to the balking inwardness that was more than met the eye, the prude interiority he took to heart and took heart from, the soul whose mating twin he’d be if he could.

  “Just like Lambert likes to say about the griot,” Penguin said when he took up speaking again, gazing into the distance as if what he was going to say came from afar, “the balloons, bless their hearts, have a big mouth.” He no longer subtly blushed but again he paused. “Drennette’s a little bit off,” he said when he spoke again. I took him to mean more than he said. I took him to mean the balloons call interiority out, their mouths, insofar as they can be said to have them, open in awe at Drennette’s abscondity, her becoming all the more an object of pursuit by not being all there. He sought leverage it struck me. He’d have made B’Loon’s wan smile a satchel mouth. He’d have pried B’Loon’s wan smile open, ransacked it, anything to get next to Drennette. Confirmation came at once. Penguin repeated, “Drennette’s a little bit off,” adding, “but the balloons would have none of her not-nearness. They would abide by nothing short of not-nearness beginning to see its end, not-nearness beginning to be sashay.”

  I could not have seen Penguin more clearly. I saw him in nothing if not namesake light, hallowed by eponymous aura: ripped, wingless bird, wind-afflicted, flightless, devout. “The balloons would know Drennette otherwise,” he said, “knowing her by her being a little bit off no longer enough. They would have her no more than two bows’ lengths away, no more than an atom’s breadth away. The balloons would be her throne and her footstool.” He was quietly raving, caught in a low-key agitation, a game of hide and seek (hers with him, the balloons’ with the band), gnostic stranger, grounded bird.

  Still, he would aver what was yet to be seen, given heart by the balloons’ intimations. He now spoke explicitly of himself, changing the course it had seemed he was on, contrasting himself with the balloons. “I, however, would know her by her distant footfall, footsteps down a dark hallway, a rustle outside my door.” I’d all along taken the balloons to be a stand-in for himself and I continued to see them that way though he now employed them as foil. He fell silent and I remained silent.

  I had said nothing all the while Penguin spoke and it seemed he expected as much. It was a run of pure devotion, a poem, a paean, an oath.

  Yours,

  N.

  26.X.83

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  Day before yesterday we drove up to Santa Cruz to play the Kuumbwa Jazz Center again. It was three years ago we first played there. It was good to venture north again and again we took 101 and then 1 where it branches off from 101 at San Luis Obispo. The coast was a feast of blue sky and blue water again, radiant sun and reflected sun’s radiant sparkle on water. It was a feast we could hardly take our eyes off. Sunlight and sea lay hypnotically to our left all the while we put Morro Bay, San Simeon, Carmel and Monterey behind us.

  We got going early in the morning, early enough to get to Santa Cruz by late afternoon. It was still dark, in fact, when we left L.A., so we pulled into Santa Cruz well in time for the sound check, the longer route we took notwithstan
ding. It turned out we got there with time to spare, which time we decided to burn by visiting the lighthouse. We walked around on the pathways and the sidewalk and the grassy field surrounding the lighthouse, watching the surfers, the bicycle riders, the skateboard riders, the Frisbee throwers. Waves crashed on the rocks. Wind wafted salt.

  The smell of salt addressed us again as we stood outside Kuumbwa later that night between sets. The air smelled heavily of the sea, prompting Aunt Nancy to note “a coastal piquancy” she said demanded we play “Fossil Flow” during the second set. She couldn’t help, she said, catching a recondite whiff—imaginary, she admitted, but all the more insinuative being so—an oblique hint of oil threaded thru the marine bouquet the night air wafted. “I can’t get those rigs off my mind,” she said, referring to the oil platforms off the Santa Barbara coast we’d driven past in the morning, the site of a huge oil spill in 1969.

  It was hard not to see the sense it made. The specter of the derricks had followed us up the coast, shadowing the sea and the sun’s gleam and shimmer, dark prospect under an otherwise bright façade. “Fossil Flow” couldn’t have been offered an apter setting, salt itself auguring future affliction, imaginary though the smell of oil might’ve been. The piece is one that wants to put pressure on flow, indemnify furtherance, bestow auspice and omen upon the undulacy it works. Ominous undulance had already, to an extent, come into play, a suppositious wave and waft Aunt Nancy picked up on mixing oil and salt. Bass player to the bone, she sensed a deep throb, eventual ache, dark unction, a waxing of promise and foreboding that was doubly on the tip of her tongue—oil she could almost taste, calamity she all but announced. It seemed all the more fitting that “Fossil Flow” begins with her playing a three-note ostinato.