We also notice no mention is made of the gig’s occasion, the Comeback Inn’s owner’s wife’s birthday, which seems to us infinitely more relevant than the peace accords the Weakly wants the gig to have been. It seems to us that what we had, what can be said to have summoned the balloons, was something of a return to initial premises, premises to which nothing speaks more resonantly than birth. We who make the music remember that the balloons’ inaugural appearance two years ago in Seattle burst with intimations of pregnant air, pregnant wind, pregnant swell, a ballooning remit lodged in alternate ground we term wouldly. What but the airiness of natal occasion’s commemorative occasion gets at wouldliness, the nothing-if-not-that-and-so-nothing event or eventuality the balloons not only announce and inure us to but are, thinly contained pockets of air that they are? Who remembers birth? What could be more wouldly than birthdays? One commemorates an event one can’t remember but at which one was present, the event with which being present began.
The implications of “No-Show Sunday” need not be belabored we thought but the Weakly’s unalloyed jubilation makes us think otherwise. We still don’t mean to belabor them so much as point the main one out: Sunday never comes or, better, was there but not there. The Weakly’s Sunday might’ve been all there but ours both was and wasn’t, a tale of two Sundays, a tale of two sets of balloons. Literal meaning aside, “two” signifies noncontainment, a default on the very containment the Weakly’s read would have. We find the review wishful, painfully unaware of itself, not the arraignment or the ironic fulfillment of wish our passing out the balloons was intended for. We again stress that it was a birthday gig, a meditation on birth, wouldly pregnancy, wouldly wind, an endlessly blown wish to wrap walls around wouldly breath. Unimpatient expectancy, we’ve come to know, is a lesson one has to be long on learning. The Weakly would move into the mansion without a single brick being laid. The Weakly would have it all too quickly.
This is what we must do, this is what we ever so slowly, ever so gradually, ever so painstakingly, all but asymptotically approach: 1) Commit to a fast of not reaching, commit as though fast and feast were the same. No easily presumed arrival will do, no easy applause. 2) See that it has to do with finitude, that “it all has to do with it,” as Trane said of something else, this wanting to have arrived once and for all, a wished-for arrival the band dallies with by way of the balloons but also knows the dangers of. See that dalliance and danger are the balloons’ two bodies, an escaped kingship or queenship whose throne would-be arrival seats us on. See too that wouldly breath keeps both at bay. 3) Come ever more deeply to know that shape is tactility at a distance, balloon curvature a boon at whose behest we bend away from capture, our own as well as theirs, which is both good news and bad. Good and bad apportion, as worth or negative worth, respectively, wouldly weave, wouldly welter.
The balloons are dispossessed lungs, inspiration less objectively drawn than objectified, a fix or a fetish made of something we know to be fleet, fluid—“peace,” were such to be had, beyond any and all patness, which is nothing if not the balloons’ exact proffer. Bicycle and horse rolled into one, the balloons are the gift horse whose mouth we scrutinize, possibly a Trojan horse. We don’t trust them, never have, never will. We will continue to keep our distance, B’Loon’s ingenuous look notwithstanding.
22.III.84
Dear Angel of Dust,
It seems like forever since I last wrote you though it’s been only a few days. I don’t mean to be dramatic but I can’t help saying everything has changed. Watershed, turning point, call it what you will, the Comeback Inn gig, with its array of repercussions (the Santa Monica Weekly review, our “Post-Expectant Press Release,” Dredj’s visit), appears to have prompted the change. To say we’ve turned a corner puts it too mildly. Gone over a cliff is maybe more like it, a precipitous plunge into what only a falling leaf might live to tell about, some stark incumbency upon us now to be that leaf, brake short of shooting star, falling star, burnt-out star. But maybe it’s just me. Maybe I load it with weight only to be bogged down. Maybe weight, a possible anchor, speaks too persuasively now, not so much weight as counterweight, a would-be, wished-for antidote against floataway onset, the across-the-board leavening balloon epiphany apprised us of—backed up or gone back to, for me, by Dredj’s translation of body-and-bone solidity into floataway musk, evanescent nearness, the fleet funk Djamilaa’s nightie dilated his nostrils with. I keep wanting to say, “Just let me get next to you,” some running plea or some lover’s prayer (would-be lover’s prayer) running from King Pleasure to Tower of Power, as though nextness or nearness were the always asymptotic falling short it’s motored by.
A copacetic plummet I’d call it except I wonder what rubs off and what sticks to have put it so. This chasm I feel to have opened up between then and now, before and after, the cliff we went over and the chasm we fell into, stretches time to where I’m not sure when I last wrote you though I know I wrote you only days ago. Is it that all nextness or nearness got spirited away by some quantum turn we took, not only Ellison’s bit about seeing around corners but cornering a certain claim, a charismatic “no-show” claim the balloons admonished us with but would, even so, package and contain and commoditize? I feel my head bent sideways even as I ask. It’s not so much a chasm or a canyon I see as a gray morning, misty coastal fog on a downhill street going toward the ocean, a foggy morning prospect in as ordinary a place as Long Beach or San Pedro, if not ennui a diffuse being-at-loose-ends in a small harbor town. Such would be the tone poem I’d write, copacetic plummet downing the ante on Dredj’s “Copacetic Syncope.” The bumpy logic it would move by evades me at the moment but that’s neither here nor there, much less the point of this letter.
More than one person has told me I have an old soul. Maybe that’s what this is, the jostling around of what the Rastas call “anciency,” but also more. I’d repeat prospect only to say peril, repeat peril only to say pearl, repeat pearl to imply an irritant ploy whereby time doubles back to audit itself. Some dislodgement intervenes between pebble and ointment, a secreted sheen whose girth and gap we come in time to summon. To have gotten one’s head around that, as the saying goes, may well be what time’s work is, all it is, all so near nothing nearness can’t but be the wall we fall arrested by. A qualitative audit I’d call it, head turned, head gone to or gotten to and so on, arrivance’s matte perfume.
Maybe all I mean is that it all feels thicker, portentous, packed with variability so immense it’s not at all evident where to begin. I don’t remember feeling this way ever except maybe the moment I turned to music as what I’d do with my life. Is this a new beginning, a new life, la vita nuova? Thick time, heavy time, the weight shadows carry could shadows carry weight, is what this is, I think, a ponderous vamp-till-ready perhaps. Of the Comeback Inn gig and what it opened up I’d say cloak only to repeat it, repeat cloak only to say cloth, repeat cloth only to say knotted, meaning by that a dense traffic of shade let loose, all accent, bend and inflection, a quickened and quickening membrane it fell to it to flow thru. Whatever corner we came to would turn to take us in, whatever edge we came toward come to meet us. This was the Comeback Inn gig’s bequest, a fund of confidence if nothing else, no matter whatever outer misgiving.
So we hold tight, sit tight in our perch, a risen prospect nothing if not misgiving affords. Call it vigilance. Call it a sensed imminence. We sit bumped up in some way we can’t yet specify, an effect of the bumpy logic we’d make music of and will. No, it’s not just me. Something real is afoot.
Please forgive this. It may strike you, I know, as more a mood than a letter, a mood piece or a pep talk to myself, the working out of a mood, the working thru it.
Yours,
N.
2.IV.84
Dear Angel of Dust,
I woke up with a pounding headache this morning. A repetitive, riverine figure had at my head from inside my head, a sawtooth guitar lick of nine notes, each eve
r so often let linger with a postulant twang. Such twang sought both entry and release it seemed, a complicated order of induction it cried out for. The river it rode ran dappled by sunlight, a slow promenade so white with sun it forced one to shut one’s eyes. I looked on with an inner eye more ear than eye, the procession of pocked whiteness an auditive report blind witness made sing. A benign headache I hasten to call it, benign and low-key. It bordered on but pulled up short of a shattered cowrie shell attack.
“Twang” may be the wrong word. A cross between fishing line and piano wire, a point or a ping somewhere between the two, might be a better way to put it. Whatever it was, it wanted to light out at some damped oblique angle, ringing but all the while reined in, no toll if not exacted of itself, dues and destination rolled into one. In that way it was like everything else, a universality it modestly proferred, a sense of itself as not exempt it advanced with exact restraint. Light’s late arcade I was tempted to call it, a deferred arrival portended or carried by the cave or cathedral voice it was the accompaniment for—crystalline, echoic, slightly husky at points, rounded by an encounter with collapse.
It was Milton Nascimento’s “Cais” come to haunt me, a friendly ghost, the ghost or the trace of what was already a ghost or a trace, the benign guitar lick in league with a benign organ surge. I put it on last night, not having listened to it for what felt like ages, and found that, having listened to it once, I put it on again and, having listened to it twice, put it on again and, having listened to it a third time, put it on again—on and on like that, listening to it over and over, until I’d listened to it I don’t know how many times. Something about it got to me, spoke to me all over again as though for the first time, as though when I heard it ages ago I heard it without really hearing it. It did this again and again.
It wasn’t that when I listened to it ages ago I wasn’t really listening. It was more a matter of time having been taken out of alignment, a jutting shelf I stood on listening anew, not merely more but entirely such a matter of time staggering or having staggered. Time waits was the last thing I’d have thought I’d ever say but I did. “Time waits,” I whispered, all but under my breath. “Bud was right.”
Or was it that “Cais” itself waited, lay in wait, held back or held some of itself back, only to have at me all the more later, years later that would seem like ages later? Was the shelf or the shift in alignment the song’s eponymous pier, nothing if not Milton’s invention (“Invento o cais,” he sings—“I invent the pier”), the pier one would let go and go forth from? Was it, to go maybe a little further, anything but a shelving of itself time, in the song’s guise, tabled itself on? “Cais” lay in wait or “Cais” crept up on me all these years that have come to feel like ages—crept and continues to creep on conga beats, benign conga beats I hear as padded feet. It launches an invented love (“Invento o amor,” he sings—“I invent love”), an invented sea (“Invento o mar,” he sings—“I invent the sea”), an invented path (“Tenho o caminho do que sempre quis,” he sings—“I hold to the path I’ve always wanted”), an invented boat (“E um saveiro pronto pra partir,” he sings—“And a boat ready to leave”), all of which, separately and as a whole, I’m tempted to call love’s late ark, love’s late arcade, love’s last arcade perhaps.
Come legless to the sea I’m tempted to say. I’m tempted to say love’s last arcade might be its first, come to such extremity one’s back at some beginning, again the beginner one is when it comes to love. Such, at least, I’m led to say by the pounding, the piano ostinato that breaks in toward the end of “Cais” and on which it fades, Milton singing wordlessly alongside. It takes me back to Djamilaa’s beginner’s tack on “Some Sunday” at the Comeback Inn, back to my very conception of the piece, its mock-awkward loss of time and its folk song-sounding recovery of time, the verge upon a children’s song or a child practicing it treads. “Cais” goes even further, the piano ostinato recalling “Chopsticks.”
Where that leaves me I’m figuring out. The pounding, I insist, is benign. Is it a prompt to revisit “Some Sunday” or the advent of a new composition? Is it perhaps a combination of the two, a sequel to “Some Sunday” I might call “Another Sunday” or “Some Other Sunday,” in the tradition, titular at least, of James Baldwin’s Another Country, Gary Bartz’s Another Earth, Jimmy Lyons’s Other Afternoons, Grachan Moncur III’s Some Other Stuff and so on, not to mention Arthur Herzog and Irene Kitchings’s “Some Other Spring”?
The “Chopsticks”-like pounding driving my headache took me back to another Nascimento piece, “Pablo,” whose piano ostinato is even more like “Chopsticks” than the one on “Cais.” I got out the two versions I have, the Portuguese version on Milagre dos Peixes and the English version on Journey to Dawn, and I’ve been listening to them, both of them confirming the sense of lost time, lost and recovered time, I took to be at issue in “Cais.” “Pablo” takes it even further, making a more explicit reference to childhood in both versions: on Milagre dos Peixes, the song is sung by a young boy; on Journey to Dawn, Milton sings it with a boyish falsetto and is joined by a children’s chorus halfway thru.
I remember one of my college professors critiquing Dostoevsky’s use of children in his work (Polya in Crime and Punishment, Ilyusha in The Brothers Karamazov, Matryosha in Demons, etc.), calling it barefaced, blatant, unabashed. He’d probably say the same about Milton but I find myself wanting to be exactly that, wanting to find a place for a child singer or a children’s chorus in “Another Sunday” or “Some Other Sunday” (whichever it turns out to be called).
Sometimes you have to go for the jugular. Sometimes you have to show circumspection the heel of your hand. Sometimes, put upon by dilatory compliance, you have to shove more than suggest. Especially under threat of No-Show Sunday, you have to shout.
As ever,
N.
17.IV.84
Dear Angel of Dust,
It seemed if I could only 1) angle at the exact amount of incline, 2) lard lead-in with absence in the most parsed and plotted manner possible, lace or load it in such fashion as to make tread trepidatious, the ground trepidatious, trepidation the ground itself, 3) titrate touch in such a way as to build while disbursing twinge, verge on twinkle perhaps, 4) coax or connive, eke sound out, so situate twitch or its adumbration as to extenuate love’s least integer, so reside within extenuation as to mitigate timbral collapse, 5) wring the notes as much as play them, wring fully in league with an implied play on toll, twist each note as though it were cloth and the drop squeezed out of it both, 6) placate momentum’s demand while recruiting an abiding pocket, a cyst or an insistence indigenous to suasion or swell, 7) confess to a certain dismay or admit my impatience, pound against time until the beat wore ragged, 8) ply layers of waywardness, an annunciative ken peppered with and paced by hesitancy throughout, an arrhythmic hitch cognate or conjugal with nothing if not rhythm, 9) be at large in a twilit fallback, relaxed albeit beset by combinatory chagrin, fallen shade’s fluency and fount, all would be right with the world.
All would be right, at the very least, I thought, with the solo I was at the beginning of. By combinatory chagrin I meant a sense I’ve gotten in dreams, the sense of returning to a place I’ve been to before, dreamt of before, dreamt I’ve been to outside of dreams before, as though to dream was not to make up scenery but to traverse and revisit stable terrain, actual ground and what’s built on it, this or that house, this or that room inside. These houses give off the feel of a combination of houses, places I’ve lived or visited given an odd yet familiar aspect, teasingly familiar but not to be precisely placed. Something about the approach to one of these houses might suggest the promontory to a friend’s house in Pasadena while, once inside, the stairway to the second floor would recall, ever so faintly, that of the flat I lived in in Oakland and so on. One of these rooms might seem compounded of the living room of our apartment in Miami when I was a child, the library cubby I studied in when I was
in college and more. It’s as if all the aspects, facets and features of these places were bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, subject to changing arrangement and permutation while maintaining a sense of real premises, real provenance, more than simply concocted, more than merely dreamt-up.
Chagrin, though, in that, coming upon or coming into these places, I always feel I’ve forgotten something I meant to remember. These rooms, halls and houses appear to be part of some mnemonic practice, a memory theater of the sort Frances Yates writes about perhaps. I despair each time that I’ve lost the key that would unlock the familiarity I sense but can’t entirely call forth, the legend that would mete out place and punctuality, dispel the tease or taunt of what appears partly “on,” partly “off.” In some of these dreams I feel like a ghost in the Winchester House, combinatory largesse only so many stairways and doors that lead nowhere. I feel toyed with, the Bible’s “In my Father’s house are many mansions” brought to mind, a trickster’s pitch.
So it was with the notes and sonic tactics at my disposal at my solo’s outset. Even so, I wanted to step onto such oneiric ground and into such oneiric housing, have my solo be the means of doing so or even be such ground and housing, my own such instructed tenancy and tread. I wanted to be like the man spoken of in my antithetical opera, “both hands tied, trying to build a house with his voice while sitting on a cot in his jail cell.” I wanted my solo, by the time I was done, to say what Rick Holmes used to say on KBCA, “We have built!” I was bent on a masonic outcome for my chagrin.
Late Arcade Page 15
