. . . thoughts running thru mind stimulated by book keeping me
awake
Improvisation & Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty
I practice hard but I don’t play what I practice. You can’t
think and play at the same time. When I play, I don’t want to play the music; I
want the music to play me. —Sonny
Rollins
Imagine you are in the middle of a solo. In quantum mechanics,
the act of observation disturbs the system [Heisenberg]: if an electron is not
being watched, it will traverse many paths at the same time. In the state of
improvisation . . . there are moments when the player is not “observing” the
notes being played, and like that quantum electron, the notes seem to do a
quantum dance. —Stephon Alexander, The
Jazz of Physics.
Again: you can’t think and play at the same time. Underlying
every poem is the question, Who am I? Every poem is a search.
That search is motivated by an essential, perhaps desperate inquiry, sometimes
disguised as playful, an inquiry that requires a rigorous integrity. There are
many ways to foil this inquiry. Self-awareness distorts it. Even the clever
strategy around this— to observe the observer observing the observer purposely
fragments the illusory I so the poet can be free. Freedom is
the only thing we can believe, which is based on not-knowing, made sensible by
chops. Art is a necessary illusion. So the critical word in the question, Who
am I?, is I. I is the illusion, and the poet or
musician has reached the point where the I sustaining him
won’t work anymore. He has outgrown it. It takes a rare integrity to persevere
in the face of this instability and is why adolescence is so difficult, to say
nothing of old age. In fact old age confronts us with the instability we have
kept at bay all our lives. In old age we we can no longer sleep, as this stream
of desperately abstemious words testifies. The assault of relentless waves
breaks down our defenses like a crumbling seawall.
I am an old man. And yet I’m as excited as young colt eager to
bolt from the pen. This is, as has always been the case, my last chance to
speak from the ecstasy of my being. Unable to sleep, I am forced to face the
dream of being alive. I will soon become what I have always feared, which gives
me a strange thrill. Show me your fangs, sea foam! Amid all the indecision and
doubt, here I am, on the brink of what is. I am almost no longer be here,
which puts me here more than ever. Soon I will be where words will mean
nothing. Yet they are the culmination of chaos, its opposite—what the universe
created me to hear!
All songs start from this undeniable instability. It holds a
promise, if faced and resolved. Who am I when I am so many? The words of the
insane often intrigue us because of this. We understand their instability
because it’s our condition also. That instability faces us with the fact that
we have made ourselves up. We create ourselves, moment to moment, to navigate
the chaos of the world. Normally, we just want an Ithat will work
in a system of other illusory I’s. In short, to enter the
mutual delusion. We prefer to fit into this delusion rather than continually
re-create ourselves. (Now, of course, collective human identity is breaking
down. It has become an organism that is no longer in relation to
the rules of the universe. Consequently the individual is no longer in
relation,either to the group or the earth or himself. By magnifying the
individual Western culture has rendered him rogue. He’s either numbly obedient
to a social death ride or an outlaw. And to think of the artist as a Messiah is
a sad expectation.
We have to give up what we think we are because it won’t work
anymore. Everybody is now facing the fiction of our being and society is on the
precipice of chaos. Society at large is forced to face the instability the
artist, particularly the jazz musician, sings from. The freedom is not only
terrifying, but disastrous if you’re unprepared and have no skills of
artifice.) Also, of course, to get back to what I was saying about people
normally just wanting an identity to fit in, society demands this conformity so
others can depend on the illusion of ourselves we maintain, our roles.
But the artist has to destroy this illusion of identity to be original,
not to fall into conventional expression, in order to fulfill his role
to society, which is to not know what he is. He is always becoming something
else. He is no one. Unknowing is his form of doing. It requires he admit the
terror of being unknown, especially to him or herself. Otherwise he can’t become. He engages this constant identity crisis voluntarily, eyes wide
open, protected only by his skill and his art form, seemingly for himself but
actually for others. Non-being is his gift that keeps society supple enough to
respond to a constantly changing world. He is ignored at that society’s
peril.
If a person falls into this potentially creative freedom
involuntarily, unprepared, he will likely end up insane, like James Joyce’s
schizophrenic daughter. When Joyce, consulting Carl Jung, asked why his
daughter was suffering mental illness when the world she lived in was the same
turmoil of reality he wrote from, Jung replied, “You dove into it. She fell.”
Many of our homeless face this now. Because of society coming apart at the
seams, financially, circumstantially, psychologically, ecologically,
politically—whatever—they fell out of it into chaos. They are forming
collective identities under freeway passes to take refuge from the chaos the
artist enters voluntarily. And because of those identities they cannot go
back. None of us can go back. Wehave to create ourselves anew. The
homeless only make this need visible, as do the massive numbers of refugees
fleeing wars and instability around the world. The popular pull toward
documentaries on tribal people is part of our search for who we are. We know we
can’t live like they live, and even they can only rarely live undisturbed by
the modern world, but they hold examples of what we were when socially coherent
and what we need to become to be in relation with the cosmos
again. But what we need to become is unknown.
An artist is dead in the water once he believes he knows who he
is. We trust him to follow his inquiry because he promises to not know
who he is. How do we know he does this? By the silence he achieves in our soul
when the music ends, which we call art:
I do not know which to prefer
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes
The blackbird whistling
Or just after
—Wallace
Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
We feel something essential resolved. Peace—from the torment of
anxiety our changeable circumstances, inner and outer, cause us. It is a
momentary stillness that quells our desperate craving for stability. Once
again, How does he do this?
He does this by falling. He falls before what he is saying, or,
musically, what he’s playing. If he knows what he’s saying that knowing is
observing, and what he says will be predictable. Then he’s just human, which is
the illusion he needs to escape. He’s just another guy talking about himself,
and why should we care? He’s not us. But when he falls before what he’s saying
he’s an unknown being at the edge of the unknown, as is everybody. He’s us. An
artist has to fall before what he’s saying just as a surfer riding a wave must
fall in front of the wave to catch it. If he balks he will miss it. He has to
ride in front of his fear, feeling the power behind him, uplifted and poised to
fall, and stay there. Then he rides it, quivering, one with the dangerous wave.
Similarly, an artist has to go through that mental barrier that tells him he’s
going to fall, and let it his song sing him. He is no one but his
song.
Fear destroys momentum. And rhythm depends on expecting. This is
why Orpheus can’t turn to see if Eurydice is following him out of Hades. As
soon as he turns to see her, because he doubts she’s there, his need for
reassurance answered by observation, he loses her forever. To improvise one
must be free, just as the beginning universe had to be free to evolve into all
paths at once. Orpheus is the archetypal Singer. When he sings, Eurydice will
follow— and Hades must release her. When he doubts she’s there and turns to
look, she disappears. The moment of all possibilities is lost.
We really live in front of ourselves. When we seek the
reassurance we crave, to know what we’re doing, we desert our
intuition, our genius, which is merely our sharing of the glittering on the
waters, and we lose the freedom of all possibilities. When I’m in the
middle of a solo, whenever I am most certain of the next note I have to play,
the more possibilities open up for the notes that follow—Mark turner.
We only know what we are doing when we don’t know what we are
doing. But we are not then just doing anything. I practice hard, Rollins
reminds us. And we have memorized many licks from the masters we like. We have
our chops down. We are ready to play. But we don’t know what we’re going to
play, because it has never been played before. Again: Mark Turner says: When
I’m in the middle of a solo, whenever I am most certain of the next note I have
to play, the more possibilities open up for that notes to follow. As
soon as we see a star appear in the evening sky we realize the entire sky is
full of possibilities for others to appear.
Hemingway would never leave off writing for the day until he
knew where he would start the next morning. As Mark Turner points out, in
improvisation, we know the next note we haveto play, and
we know the end note, but don’t know how we’re going to get there, all possible
paths open up just as they opened up for the universe in its beginning. Does
that mean the universe knows where it’s going? Listen to Stephon Alexander
talking of Sonny Rollins:
. . . the key idea of knowing only the beginning and ending
notes, with nothing in between except time. The ending or “target” note is
central to how the improviser traverses the path. In “Playing in the Yard,”
Sonny Rollins solo starts with D and ends with the target note G: the two notes
are harmonically related by a perfect fifth. The other notes in the scale trace
out a path through time, connecting the originating and ending notes.—Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics.
These paths of phenomena are as unpredictable as the path of
spring across a hillside, although they have relative probability. The flower,
called footprints of spring, a yellow-green plant that grows
flat to the ground, is the first to appear in spring. It is called footprints
of spring because it appears to mark the trail Spring left as her feet
lit the brown hillside with gold-glowing green footprints. Musical notes, words
in a poem, leave a similar trail. What inspired them becomes sensible only
after they are played or written. The wind that blew them across the page or
into the air is gone. They are the remains of something miraculous that has
passed through us, that we can never know but only, periodically, embody.
Perhaps the most honest art form to catch this repetitive,
never-to-be-exactly repeated rhythm, is dance. No gesture can ever be perfectly
re-created again. This fact culminates in Yeats’ famous question: Who
can tell the dancer from the dance?
The same indivisible mystery confronts us when we think about
the relationship between the individual and society, between the life and the
work, and, perhaps, in physics, between the particle and the wave. Because of
the flow of life-energy each has aspects of the other. It is a mystery we defy
at the risk of disastrous fragmentation.
The question, Who am I? resolves in, I
am both. This irreducible paradox resolves the binary dilemma: am I a
spirit or a body, a man or a woman, an individual or a group. To all these
contradictions I say, I am both. I am I and I am you and yet I
am I. I am not you. I am both. I am the voice and the page,
the leaf and the tree, the ground and the sky, the boat and the sea. Cleave
this union and you leave the particle yearning for its other half—the wave!
When I die, I hope to be waving like a motherfucker!
