Acting Like an Amplifier

Paul Bowles set me out on a journey, as is appropriate.  I hadn’t realized that the author of “The Sheltering Sky” had a broad range of music he’d composed.  Diving in there was there on Spotify, an attestation to his more familiar work as an ethnomusicologist.  He’d recorded hours of Moroccan folk music which I settled on later in my morning.  The howls and ecstatic shrieking all reminded me then, of the music of Randy Weston the jazz pianist to who studied under Monk and lived among other places in north and west Africa, in Morocco for many years and, on albums like Blue Moses, afford ample evidence of Berber music.  That night, making dinner, I reached for that album and confirmed.

It was raining all morning.  I took that to mean there’d be no point in watering the sad little aspen stems I’d, seemingly unsuccessfully, transplanted.  The brittle bamboo that hasn’t decided whether or not it wants to live yet, could also get through the day without any help from my pink watering can.  Later, the hourly forecast proved accurate and the sun parted leaving some remarkable afternoon clouds and I head out, up north towards Rosendale where I stopped and spotted a Bitternut Hickory tree who was just making his way up into tree-dom.  The shortest-lived of the hickory, they “only” last to be two hundred years old. 

Tira Hunter has written a book which had been recommended to me called: “Bound in Wedlock.”  A history of marriage during slavery and while I thought I knew what this might mean before I dove it I swiftly realized marriage proved a vexing matter to settle into Christian morals and legal frameworks when, both people were property or when one was a freedman or freedwoman and the other person was not.  The many hundred’s years gestation of life as chattel where a master could break up a family on a whim or any time he or she was faced with economic hardship.  “Let no man put asunder” unless he or she was white and then, it didn’t much matter what you’d vowed. 

Now the sky has cleared and there is a phenomenal sunset.  The sun is down beyond the Shawangunks but there is a cloud that is acting like an amplifier, gathering up and radiating out a remarkable megaphone o final reds and pinks and tawny browns as the sun continues on across the Pacific to greet the dawn in Asia. 

Thursday, 06/11/20