Sitting quiet at first light and outside, splatter and
splatter echoes. Distant drops hitting
leaves, draining, running, meeting in grates and pipes, singing as they
disappear. Falling rain. Zeus heard my invocation. No lightening bolts twisting out miles across
the night sky in the flash of an eye. No
accompanying acoustics. But blue is in
ascendency this morning, moving the gritty yellow accretions off and down from
everything.
Preparations for the morning run. I welcome a run in the rain. Just how rainy is it? There’s a lot of welcome noise, but its only
really drizzle. Avoiding puddles, the
rain has me wet before any sweat can form.
Snails and worms and amphibians and things that rely on mucous for
motion all seem pleased. A fine, rainy
day National Day. Perhaps it wasn’t
Zeus at all but rather the lords of Zhongnanhai who ordered the clouds seeded
last night.
Turn, splash, splatter, soak. That puddle was deeper than it looked. The cowbell calls out to my ears, one two
three, one two three. That cowbell, is
the sacred leader and the other instruments follow, as explained by Abraham
Adzenyah, my Wesleyan professor, many years ago. The congas fall in and then the full
complement of horns, and the rhythm section.
Who is this? There are 2000 songs
on this play list. I can’t name the
performer but I know that it is either from Nigeria or Ghana. It’s one minute and twenty three seconds in
though before the backing vocals make it clear to me. Those harmonies can only
be Ghanaian.
Dozens of things distinguish the two mighty traditions
during the axial period of bloom when the sixties became the seventies. I should reread John Chernoff’s “African
Rhythm and African Sensibility” for a re-illumination. http://www.amazon.com/African-Rhythm-Sensibility-Aesthetics-Musical/dp/0226103455 But no research is required to distinguish
Ghanaian harmonies. They are celestial
like clouds artfully parted to allow for three octaves of sun to beam,
precisely when each song needs them. And
I pull out my iPod to see who it is and . . . I’m off. It’s Ebo Taylor and that groovy album cover,
that name . . . my running mind is
flashing “Ebo” with “Ibo” (aka Igbo) This is Nigerian? Wow. The Bight of Biafra, petroleum, Okonkwo . .
. “Aba Yaa” is a fifteen minute song so
I’ll be stewing on how Kumasi harmonies got pinched to Port Harcourt for the
duration.
In another era I’d have put up with ignorance for a while. Perhaps it would have just wallowed in
perpetuity. A few key strokes in when
I’m home and I can confirm that Ebo Taylor and harmonies are from Ghana. Phew.
What sounds Ghanaian is. Verification
for most things becomes ever so easy.
This, multiplied by everyone. Cold, naked
facts sweeping away ambiguity from every corner of our world. Will we come to miss the ubiquity of dark
corners? Or 看破紅塵,[1] in
all this antiseptic clean?
We had a party last month and we invited many friends. One friend never wrote back. I thought nothing of it. People are busy. His wife wrote me from his account late last
night. After a long illness last summer,
he had passed away in his native Serbia.
His wife and children have returned to L.A. where she was from. He was here laughing in this house not so
long ago. He was thrilled to see an old
Sun Ra disc on my shelf and I gladly obliged him by turning up the Arkestra. Truly a ‘thief in the night.’ Gone.
The pivot of life has been passed. It’s the second half of my duration, unless I
am fortunate enough to make it past 94 with body and mind functioning. From now on death will call about me with
greater regularity, until it calls for me personally. Rad Lukic you had a
beautiful, disarming smile and I never really got to know you. Thank you for the ride home that night. I hope the Arkestra is sounding out now in
the place where you are resting, peacefully.
The clouds must have been seeded. The rain has stopped. The sun is shining. It is now a glorious, made-to-order National
Day. A Mediterranean National Day for
yellow Beijing, reading the way it does, in the children’s textbook account,
where red flags flutter about Tiananmen proudly. Can
you imagine the contention if one or another party tried to manipulate the
weather to secure a beautiful day, for an inauguration ceremony in the U.S.? Do you remember the rain that fell and fell
on the day George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001, after that most contentious
of contests? One Party here. One bright, shiny day.
Early afternoon aglow.
Apollo’s chariot is at its full height. Red dust, yellow dust now begins
to settle slowly once again on to the leaves and on the ground. Silting out the
puddles. Gristle that slows the snail’s
viscous path. Grit rising once again.
Red dust filling the space, within the particles of air, obscuring what we
see.
[1] Kān
pò hóng chén: To see, to break through
the red dust. To see through the world
of mortals (idiom, of Buddhist monk) / disillusioned with human society / to
reject the world for a monastic life
No comments:
Post a Comment