Curious
how a three-chord ambient sound
https://alphaphile.files.wordpress.com//03/tryptich-ambience.mp3
repeating over and over
for a half hour or more at a time
can hold me –
Major mode largo
effexed for deep tone and soft transitions
moving like a quiet slow-rolling river
in no hurry to get anywhere
My soul to flow like that
So give me that home
where the mysteries roam
and the violins quietly play
where never is heard
a discouraging word
and my mind is not clouded all day
I see him standing on the sidewalk of the main drag. He has his music on, always. Always.
You can easily tell that he loves his music because he dances. He moves and he dances while waiting for the bus. He dances his walk. He takes six steps, bounces, turns, walks back and bounces some more. He’s grooving.
He smiles almost constantly. And he gestures to the traffic. He’ll pull the rope for a trucker. He’ll hold out his phone toward drivers at the intersection, as if he’s showing everyone, or encouraging them to listen to how cool it is. Occasionally he’ll pump his arms into the air above his head – some kind of victory move, some kind of superpower he feels in his bones.
He waves at anyone, everyone, randomly, as if knowing that doing so is not only just the thing you do, but also how you pass on the love. And as he does so, he dances, moves, constantly. This kid has a motor inside of him.
I have no idea how old he is. He works at Albertson’s as a “courtesy clerk” – the company’s pretty name for a grunt that bags groceries, collects carts, and keeps the entrances cleaned up. You’d think this kid had volunteered for it. He moves with purpose, and knows his job. He is usually smiling while he works, his eyes wide open and active. He has no fear of eye contact. If he happens to catch your eye, he’ll say “Hi,” or “Hello,” and accompany that with a signature wave. He seems to pick people out as they walk through the parking lot. “Hi!” he’ll shout from the next parking aisle, even if you didn’t see him there.
Later, you’ll be driving through the downtown core and see him standing on the corner, doing his thing. He wears a backpack but sometimes takes it off and lets it sit while he jives. Obviously, he has no scruples, no social filters, no apparent shame or shyness, no reservations. He never accosts, never assaults, disrupts, or disturbs. He does not scream at anyone or talk to himself. If you happen to walk by him, you’ll hear him singing. And he’ll address you: “Hey! How you doing? Yeah, man, yeah!” Like, daring you to join him in the dance.
He’s just wide open and all out, all out loud. He is living out loud.
Would you hazard any guesses as to what’s wrong with him? Would you feel compelled to play analyst? Would you, without reflection, jump into that seat?
Not me. I watch him. I’m aware that he’s weird. Odd. Abnormal. Non-conformist. Maybe he’s even got a diagnosis, although I seriously doubt he gives a shit.
Frankly, a part of me wishes I was just like him, but I’m not. So I’ll keep watching. And cheer him on behind the wheel. And be thankful there are folks like him. Grooving to his beat, easing on down the road.
Easing on down the road, and not, like me, carrying some heavy load.
Rub a dub, three men in a recording studio, where the talk is like the music itself, which
is in play and in flux and is a form of communication underscored by a form of communion of which astrophysicists speak after sitting at a black board for months to work the terms of a black hole until it all finally falls into its proper actuation, with
the nominal and phenomenal exception that we don’t know where we’re going while floating in this tonal tub, but we’re working it all the same, as
phraseologies and currents of frequency bounce off three pairs of ears, of oars in the water, processed
through three separate brains in real time and sometimes you struggle to say what you’re thinking next, but
we all hear with more than our physiognomy and it always works one way or the other in real time,
four-quarter time, syncopated and synchronized in that shared space of rolling signal flow, now
then again the air is punctuated by the emotional high of a sequence that comes together, a trio of voiced rejoicing, the sound coalesced into fruition, the kind of which you never saw coming and therefore is all the sweeter for the fruit.
You happy? You good? I’m so good, we’re all so fine with it, we’re all so very fine. This is music, not as determination or even destination, but soley the process of getting somewhere by good intention and faith the size of a semitone. If the whole world knew that kind of magic, why…
it would feel like we could all say adios to war.
It’s an absolutely beautiful day out here in the North American Pacific Northwest.
Rain is softly falling. It had snowed the 24 hours before, leaving a soft, wet cover of white on everything. Then the temperature moderated a bit and the rains have been falling since early morning. It is cold, of course, but not quite as cold as it has been the last week or so. The entire continent has been laboring under an apparently unusual series of winter storms.
As the rain falls it warms the snows previously fallen, and turns them to a semi-transparent state somewhere between snow and rain and ice. Somehow the cold air is colder than it must otherwise have been because it is now so blatently wet, cutting through the layers of fabric we wear to the pores of the skin, causing us to feel that going outside at all is a heartless thing to be doing – something akin to Shackleton and his crew shuffling across the antantarctic. Fortunately for us, winter’s outings are limited to short walks from the door to the car, or from the door to the garbage bin just a few feet away. Or from the door to the edge of the deck where we can watch the dog fetch the things we throw, hoping the dog will get it over with sooner rather than later – and get its piss and shit over with as expeditiously as possible to boot.
The sky is as white as the ground, which white is disappearing fast under the gentle influence of the cold, cold rain, inhospitable to man and beast alike. Everywhere now is a slush, a mush. The birds, hunkered, have nothing to say about it.
Come to think of it, though the thermometer says 40 degrees Farenheit, my entire countenance and frame says rather minus 12, or thereabouts, with humidity at 152 percent. Or something.
It’s an absolutely beautiful day.
His name is Nova. It really is.
I have never met anyone named Nova, boy or girl.
He is small compared to the other kids in his class. He is frighteningly articulate for his age. He knows things that I don’t know. Who is this kid? I’m told he reads far above his age level. Clearly, he’s being trained at home by intelligent, proactive parents. Or, he carries more than the usual amount of extra-terrestrial DNA.
When he wants your attention he doesn’t raise his hand, like everyone else. He says, “Um, excuse me? Um, excuse me?” He can be very persistent, but never raises his voice. Yes, he’s being schooled.
And he likes it. It makes him feel strong and very, very powerful. Is this parental compensation strategy? Is this how they help him feel not so little, not so less-than?
“Today, we’re going to do something different,” I start out. “Today you’re not going to use loops for creating a music mix. Other people created that stuff. Today you’re going to start learning how to create your own music from scratch.”
“Um, excuse me? Um, Excuse me?”
“Yes, Nova.”
“Um, I would prefer to use the loops today.”
“We’re not going to use the loops today. We’re going to learn how to start making our own music.”
Nova looks down at his pad, or possibly the table, or possibly nothing, and his face tightens, constricts. He looks pissed. It happens.
Then, the tears start. Ope, he’s not angry. He’s sad, possibly mad-sad because he can’t have his way. But this is, after all, extended learning time. He knows the ropes.
Then he mumbles something.
“What’s that, Nova? I can’t hear you?” says the high school helper sitting next to him. I lean in.
“I don’t think I can do this,” he says. His voice is quivering.
Oh, of course. Sometimes I forget. He’s afraid. He’s scared stiff. I’ve hit that nerve. I’ve seen that before, too, but mostly in teenagers who say, “I’m bored,” or, “I don’t feel so good.”
Nova may be a high-level reader and he may know stuff, but he’s a kid. He’s a little kid, and kids can feel vulnerable at the drop of a hat, especially if they have superpowers. Kryptonite is real shit.
I came right alongside of him and said, “What’s your name?”
He looks up at me as if possibly I just lost my marbles. “Nova,” he says.
“That’s right. Do you know what it means?”
“Yes. It’s the explosion of a star.”
“Well, that’s part of it, yes. They gave the name Nova to that kind of thing. But do you know what Nova means? Nova comes from the Latin,” I say.
I get out my smart dictionary.
“Latin is a dead language,” he proclaims. He knows stuff.
I show it to him: Mid 19th century (originally denoting a newly discovered or newly visible star or nebula): from Latin, feminine of novus ‘new’.
“Your name means New.”
He’s looking at it, then at me. Apparently, no one told him.
“Today you’ll know the real meaning of your name. You’re going to make music that is new because it’s yours, not anyone else’s. It will be something that no one else on the planet has ever done.”
I show him how to get started. I tell him to turn on his metronome (he knew what that was before anyone else in the room).
“Listen to it,” I say. “Listen real close. Now punch this chord.” He does. “Now this one.” He does.
Within a minute he’s punching chords to the beat, which he understands. Which we’ve clapped a hundred times. I hit the record button. After eight bars I press stop.
“Okay, go to your track window.” He knows how to do that.
“Play it,” I say. He does.
“Listen to what you did.”
“That sounds good, Nova!” says the high school helper. She’s not blowing smoke. It really does.
“Okay, now, now choose a beat loop that fits your piano part.” Reward time, but with a kick.
I walk away. He knows how to do loops. When I return after checking on other students, I see that Nova has six other tracks added. He looks up at me.
“Okay, I’m done,” he says. In that way that kids do when they are ready to show you what they’ve accomplished. He hits play. There it is.
“That’s your music, Nova. That’s new music and it’s yours. Way to go.”
I tell him he should save it. He knows how to do that. This is the title he gives it: Supernova.
Dragon slayed.
What does it mean to share a history that never became a relationship?
How many different kinds of relationship do I have? Can I have? Will I accept?
What does it mean to share a history that once may have been a relationship that then came to an end? Does it live on somewhere in the universe, without sight or touch or sound? Does it dissipate like a dying star?
There really is no common core, as it were, to the experience of growing into adulthood (functional, cellular) with those other people, beyond the shared experience of circumstance and incidence in our bewildered youth. As to ask, whose am I? Who loves me? And how?
There is no common core beyond the absolute certainty of materialism in the vacuum of anything else of soul, the perceived artifice of greeting cards that said to our eyes what was never said to our ears. We never heard that song. Not once.
She gave me a crafter’s photo gram consisting more of décor than of photo, of a history that belongs to her but not to me. They just aren’t my people, cellular pathways notwithstanding. Her way of seeing it and mine do not harmonize.
Function, function. Must all be reduced to function? What is enacted and spoken and accomplished? A clear-running brook may be a pretty thing to a dying man in the desert, but a pretty thing will not save him.
Function is not enough for me checking out groceries at the market. There is a human being there, deeper wider higher and unknown who plays a function for me, whom I must look in the eye and acknowledge. Function, function. Must all be reduced to function?
If the children sense I don’t like them, each one – heed them, each one – then all my knowledge and skill is for naught.
I ask again: am I a brother if no one found me as a brother? One whom they saw, and claimed, and knew? Is a chair a chair if no one is sitting there?
No, we never found each other, did not know how, now do not care to. This is how it is: sometimes, if you never did, you never will.
I am not a brother except to those to whom I am one, who choose me as one. I would, if I could, make a brother and sister out of everyone I see.
Because no one in my youth made one of me.
And sing them all to sleep in tears of heartbroken gratitude.
I’m high from getting all the stuff done that I had wanted to get done, so I roll down the window to take in the tempered breeze seeming to herald spring’s approach and me all randy, so I stroll down Isaacs like a high school idiot cruising up Division on a Friday or Saturday night back in the day, turned up my ingratio-tunes, old school classic chassy romantic fantastical sing-alongs, and roll in at a con-store to pick up an iced frap in a bottle and chug that like it’s a beer, not caring about the caffeine against personal policy at 6:30 pm because I still have a few hours and miles to go. Living it up – me, as close as I get these days. On the edge Me. Needing to bust out like I’m all full of piss and hope and youthful energy. This is me on President’s Day, which I in no way observe, but it’s a Monday, a free one, and I’m on my way to choral society rehearsal where an old woman my mom’s age (but more alive and gregarious as hell and really needing to get out of the house where she’s been dutifully caring for her husband with cancer) talks me up non-stop for 15 or 20 because she recognized me from before and neither of us had been singing in the group for 7 or 8 years now, and are now delightfully met, along with the 4 or 5 others I had known in other contexts; then one of the old choir veteran tenors, head full of snow white hair and snow white beard to match, comes up to my seat, bends over with his hands on his knees, and conspiratorily says, “Now, back in the old days…” and he emphasizes “old” and I, like the silly smartass I can be for fun in social situations says, “You mean the Jurassic? the Paleolithic?” and he smiles and says he’d sung next to met at the high school gym when the choir was known by a different name and I says, “I don’t remember singing there, when was this?” and he says, “In the early 80’s” and I says, “Couldn’t have been me, I was just out of high school and into college,” and he looks at me, and there’s that delicious pause, you know what I mean, where the penny drops, then grinning in his teeth because he’s mistook me for someone older (I’m 60, he’s 85 and apparently neither of us likes acting our age much) he goes, “Well, hell, thanks a lot,” and turns to walk away and I laugh because of course this is a punch line, me laughing like a hyena or gleeful witch like I do in these social moments when I can entertain myself with a raucous cackle for the sheer fun and joy of that particular human activity – secretely figuring that a lot of folks forgot somewhere that laughing is a better music for the soul and world both than whining and bitching, them that dropped their selfless joy somewhere along the way of getting caught up in who the next prez is going to be and never bothering to go looking for it.
my head’s full of noise.
what do you think is the difference between noise and sound, I asked. Between sound and music, I asked.
what’s the point of music, he asked. Out of the blue like that. a question that always goes without asking for me because music is everything. The key to all life. The learning that facilitates learning. The most sublime thing. Better than politics or religion or social engineering or economic systems any day of the week for something to be into.
like that kid who isn’t into music, doesn’t listen to it in his car because I JUST LIKE THE SOUND OF THE CAR. What the?
what do you mean, you little shit, what’s the point of music? You don’t like music?
Not really. I mean, I listen to it sometimes, like BTS. They’re cool.
(Yeah, I bet they are. they’re Korean and some kind of YouTube sensation and they’re a bunch of young kids and that’s always cool, right?)
what’s the point of asking, then, what the difference is between noise and sound or sound and music? To some people it’s just noise, and how dare they. (Except sometimes I turn the volume down and sometimes I shut it off because for some reason it feels overwhelming, even or especially if it’s stuff I listen to all the time.)
all the time.
fancy 4-star chefs serve you tiny entrees on fancy plates like it’s a work of art instead of something to eat and it forces you to savor every bite lest you feel you got cheated for the price of the thing.
and sometimes with a student I’ll say “tasty bits, tasty bits” because “less is more” and all that – and I have the temerity to ask how anyone could not think music is the bomb?
I’m a one horse pony. ?
I’m a self-contained one-meal deal.
And those people who paint their houses pink or purple? Are they like me or like the kid who never listens to music? Because I’m still stunned at the question: what’s the point of music?
I should have taken it as academic and striven to give an answer. but he’s a fourth grader and isn’t interested. he’s saying it because he doesn’t think there’s a point to music.
Kids these days.
Me these days.
Sky is mostly blue and the air is moving. Ah, Spring – She’s a-coming. Taking her time, but a-coming just the same.
For a time we knew, as the days of light grew shorter, She hung back, a sleepy child napping.
Winter, that moody crank who comes forth when Summer – Spring’s older sis – recedes to let the earth rest in its soils and from its toils for fruit and prosperity, for the urgency of lustful singing.
Winter: He has his own mysterious beauty. We know He does. We concede it. Unhurried himself, He is wise beneath his dark brow and recyling ways, custodian of decay performing balancing acts amid stubborn shadows.
(Autumn is his fickle niece, ambivalent entre-act.)
But now Spring has awakened, and is coming. Walking toward this face of the wild planet, her hair in waves, a song breathing from her lips, and in her hand a crocus bulb. Get ready to hail her: She will never grow old.
She has already begun tossing sprays of sunlit cyan from where, if you peer through your scope, you will see her walking toward you on a carpet of warm ethereal shimmer her Sister has laid out for her.
Oh, sweet, sweet Spring of endfless hope and boundless lust for life: eke out our fervency for songs of salvation and rebirth while they labor on the other side to pull the young from the earth’s angry bitter cold raw quaking maw.
||: everything takes time :||
||: what’s really important? :||
||: everything will be okay :||
||: you are exactly where you need to be :||
||: this is not “hard”; this is your process of growth. that is all and that is everything :||
||: relax :||
||: everything takes time :||
So, these are the things I practice telling myself
( ||: is the music symbol for “repeat”)
Word Pictures 