Week 107: &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

THE DAILY SUN 2

One of the things I love about music is the way it shapes time and makes me feel like I can actually move back and forth in time, slow it down or speed it up, turn it around and go backwards, or any of a number of other time maneuvers and summersaults that make me feel like I actually have some semblance of control over it, which is more than I can say for my daily life.

One of the things that I enjoy the most, and that I call a free time maneuver sometimes happens when I play in a band. Let me see if I can describe it. Let’s say we are playing a gig or a rehearsal, and we are playing a certain chord progression or song. This could be a very loose arrangement, improvising over a vamp, or it could be a fairly strict composition with little room for chance. Either way one of the things I love about music is that even in the strictest compositions music is always flexible.

So we are playing along and I realize we are coming to a certain part in the music, say a turnaround in the melody or a change in rhythm, or maybe even a simple chord change. Right before this moment comes up I get an idea of something that I can do at that point, at that very moment of the change. Something unexpected, surprising, something that I would want to hear happen at that point, something that would enhance that specific moment, an accent, a harmonic variation, an adjustment to the tempo, a rhythmic inversion. It might work or it might not, either way it’s a chance that I like to take, sometimes more daringly, sometimes less so. Often times I know I’ll get a glare from the rest of the group, wondering what I’m doing, but not always. Sometimes it’s magic, sometimes it’s the way things should be. So I have to chance it, because it’s those moments that keep me sane.

I described it as very deliberate, but it all happens intuitively, in the blink of an eye. I get the idea, with some luck a measure before, but most often much closer to the moment when I need to execute it. Most times, the moment is upon me as I’m getting the idea so I just respond and do my variation. Most of the time, the rest of the band looks up at me, and everything continues on smoothly. If there is an audience, they might not even notice anything different going on.

But sometimes, just once in a while, right before the moment arrives, and after I’ve had the idea, in that micro-instant of a moment, someone else in the band does something that prefaces my idea in a way that seems as if she knew exactly what I was planning to do, and decided to insert her own idea as a lead-in to mine. It’s like she read my mind, and it gives me the feeling of moving backwards in time for a moment. Like when someone answers your question before you ask it. Or an even more accurate comparison would be, not when someone else finishes a sentence that you started, but the opposite, when someone else starts the sentence you were about to finish.

And sometimes, in those rarest of occasions, I realize that my idea was just a preface to something someone else was going to do, and that in that smallest of moments there is room for more. And it feels like the moment just continues to expand to allow more and more music. And if you can string together enough of these moments, you end up in another time, a time where you are one with time, you and the rest of the group moving through the time of the music in the way that you intended, even as you don’t know what that is.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen often. Not in music, even less in the rest of my life. The more general feeling is that other people in the world are intending a time that keeps rejecting me. Everyone else is starting and finishing sentences that I can’t begin nor end, that I don’t want to begin or end.

This doesn’t mean that there is nothing out there in the world that appeals to me. On the contrary, I find great enjoyment in much of what my fellow humans create. A good Brooklyn-Bronx game, almost anything Dizzy recorded, Garcia Marquez’s Amor en los Tiempos del Colera, Borges’ Aleph… And there are a few others. But most of the time the attraction is the attraction of interacting with someone else. They show me their music or their books or their sentences and I show them mine. And we nod appreciatively and I go to another time, and they are glad I’m gone. And I’m glad they are gone. I am me and you are you, and we are not together.

But there are those occasional magical moments. They happen often enough in my immediate personal life, mostly with Monica, but they hardly ever happen in the larger world. I never identify like that with someone I see on TV or in a movie or a recording or a book. Not when I see them talking on TV not when I read what they’ve written or heard what they’ve recorded.

Only once in a while does this happen. Only once in a while do I find someone out there in the world that is starting or finishing my sentences without knowing me. It’s very rare, but it happens. And it happened yesterday. Alfredo recommended that I might like this book, so even though I generally don’t take recommendations from Alfredo, today he is so old and tired that I don’t have the heart to say no and I take the book with me as I leave his dingy Staten Island apartment stacked wall to wall with newspapers and books. I was surprised to find myself in the ferry with the book still in my hand, so I opened it and started to read it.

After reading two pages I already felt like I had written this book or more accurately like I had written a version of it. Like this author had either read something I had not yet written and written her response to it or maybe like she knew who I was and had written a story about someone just like me. It’s a novel, but as I read it I felt like I was making the words as I read them. Like she wrote the story that I have been writing in my mind my whole life. I’m no stranger to déjà vu, but reading this book was a very strange version of it. If I was more superstitious I would worry that reading this book was going to cause some little girl to come crawling out of the well where she’s been rotting, and she’s going to come out through the pages of the book to kill me. But this book is a sweet romantic book about love, not a horror story. Yet, I can’t say that it is not a little scary to be reading the words of a stranger as if they were my own.

I couldn’t finish the book. I stayed on the docks reading it, but it was already late and I’d been up for a few days, and I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t stay up long enough to finish it. So I fell asleep on a bench and now the book is gone, along with that time. And there’s that prick Frank banging on the door waking me up to go deliver newspapers. Maybe today is the day that I quit this house.

But for now I’m going to lay in bed a little longer. You know, I want to tell you about this book; I want you to read this book. But I can’t bring myself to tell you what book it is because I sound like a crazy person, and I’m afraid it will get back to her who wrote the book. And if it does, I don’t know what would happen. I’m sure she would be terrified of me. I mean, I sound like one of those people like the Son of Sam that gets secret messages from some neighbor’s dog. But I’m not like that.

Ok, I’ll try being nice to Frank today. Have I tried that before?