The Great Saturnalian

My mind is off with the Specials' song “Blank Expression” wherein’ the first deliberate line is “snow is falling no the ground.”  I’m being driven around lower Manhattan and wet snow is falling, dissolving on the asphalt.  It is not accumulating.  I remember when they built the Jacob Javitz center there, over on the west side.  I never had any reason to go to a convention center in those days.  I probably wondered why they bothered to build such things.  I entered for the first time today.  An enormous, artificial environment, whose occupants rotate weekly.  When we emerged from the hall, and confronted the planes of glass, looking out onto street, it slowly dawned on me that the thickness outside in the air wasn’t rain.  It was snow. 

Traffic is finally reminding me of Beijing.  Not the horns and the aggressive cutting in, and cutting out.  Rather it’s the inability to move.  We are stuck, coming down Seventh Avenue.  Dead stop while the light turns red and yellow and green, over and over again.  “Was there an accident?” I ask, almost on cue, the way one would in Beijing.  “Nope.  It’s the Holland Tunnel.”  Eventually we cave and jump out outside to walk the remaining three blocks. 

Saw Sun Ra and the Arkestra last night, under the direction of Marshall Allen.  The gentleman who introduced the great orchestra struggled beneath his hair to be clear at first with the laundry list of obligatory items he needed to speak to.  Finally though, he spoke from the heart about what we were about to hear and managed an appropriately inspiring invocation.  And the Ark began to sway.  A younger woman, heavy set, heavier fro, began to sing some of the classic June Tyson parts.  The moog synthesizer cut above swinging band, channeling the great Saturnalian.  So uplifting and positive, I just closed my eyes and let it bathe me.  As a man whom I met the night before said when I bumped into him after the show: “Who knows when we’ll see this again, if we ever do. “

I’d never been inside Judson Memorial Church, there on the downtown side of Washington Square Park.  A hundred times I’ve gazed up at the tall Tuscan campanile beside the church with no reason to ever enter.  Now inside, I rose from the basement I confronted the crowd of a hundreds, there before the stage and moved over to the left to get further forward.  Turning, I spied some steps up top and before long we had a celestial perch looking down on the crowd. 

Looking out I marvelled at this Baptist Church and considered the purpose for which it was built and the purpose for which I was there.  The eighty-two year old Marshall Allen honked and shred his span of life that traced the work songs and spirituals of the Deep South and the pathway through big band to doo wop and bee bop and the avant garde all the way out to an arc around Saturn’s rings.  And I closed my eyes and I tried to heal myself.