Miles is playing 'Round Midnight, I am looking at the words I wrote next to Rothko, "One thing leads to another". Rothko said: "Silence is so accurate".
Something happens to you when you listen to a lot of Miles and Coltrane. You hear what couldn't be beaten out of these men. You hear the truth that holds up against the ugly they had to deal with.
When the house is silent and I move like a ghost from room to room, snowed in, cut off, I forget the warmth that can come from music.
Each of us writes our own story in our minds. We say the words, we make it so. In the end, will we be liars or wiser?
Honesty is humiliating, but dying a liar is dying in vain.
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So much of what we admire comes from oppression. The great existential journal hidden under the planks, not to be read, but written to be read. Who is it that sits on the other side complacently expecting flawless prose, a proper address, canto.
Can we move our memos to the top of the pile by being clever, profound, omniscient, eternal?
What god is it really, that has the rules? That expects sacrifice? What god is it really, that is vengeful, that collects foreskins and alms? Whose law hangs the murderer? Whose judgement makes it so? What voice can not be stopped when there are: sPelling erRors - uh-oh, comma, uh-oh, comma,.....
Whose voice interrupts yours and makes you doubt your own instincts?
Whose voice is so loud that nothing else gets in?
But this god has swallowed sand, already sick with Miles, Thelonius, Burroughs and Ginsberg, Dolphy, and Freda, and Socrates, and Pierce, and Nietszche, and Dostoevsky, this god can not stop the derelict sacheing about in his girlfriends pink running outfit, can not masse' the MFA onto what it is like for a kid to take a shit in the woods.
This god, no matter how brazen it is, can not choke the experience out of life with grammar and style.
For all of the fine attractions: the neutrino exhibit, the Louvre, the three body problem and two-phase commit and tensors and commuting diagrams and buzz of PDEs and latest Vegas act with one man synchronizing a re-enactment of the entire Civil War using life sized puppets; this is not a miracle. These are the possibilities, these are the props. Only one god can make the miracle of perception reach for the right brush.
To move these gods to action, away from the current, away from the easy fiction that is always believed - away from platitudes and cliches -
This god is predictable, it is the mind of the rancher, breeding stock.
Winter makes for judgement, for ranking, for reassuring lies.
Must every wrong have a villain, must the mobs judgment be so low?
What is at the heart of revenge, of anger, of malice?
Imagine motive and you'll find blame.
Knowing motive tells you nature.
Knowing nature, makes the crime
fit the punishment.
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In 500 years, we would tire of it all, the scripts, the unavoidable betrayals, the pretense of it. In 500 years, we would see the physical world as a broom.
But like all con artists, it does not stay long enough for you to catch it in a lie.
It can only hide the words: "If we don't have em read it now, they never will. But they won't understand it, they're too young. Make them understand it. "
"There now children, you have read Moby Dick."
In 500 years we would see it as moronic.
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There is only one miracle, and that is in the imagination.
It is only the imagination that makes the choice between so many truths.
Out of all of the things the world could be, it will be this one.
Out of all the reasons not to choose, I am choosing this.
Knowing it is a choice is the heart of freedom.
Knowing what to choose, takes art.
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If you want to know what is possible, try something impossible - "petition the Lord with prayer".
"To know you are not alone...." - that is the echo, that is the refrain.
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When will we tire of the flawless performance?
We sit like Kings and Queens in the concert halls watching one they found for us with talent.
When will we all be artists?
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