Blues For The Muse
Blues for the Muse
She circled back. Inspiration, like a newborn bone, is frail.
But her complaint, her pleas, her charge did not die out
so fast. I, being a poet, had learned how to listen,
and No was the spur. Later that night I walked
around the room, working on my Coltrane poem, still entitled
"Miles Davis Cures The Blues.” Miles had been dead
for three years and all I’d play was Miles.
It was no weird loyalty; I was just stuck;
I learned how to listen from listening to him,
And had grown to nearly hate him for it,
being stuck and having to listen over and over,
and, yet, once I put a record on from any period,
say, the beautiful liltingly sad "It Never Entered My Mind"
(those dwelled-in notes, those indwelling pauses),
or the later darker, bittersweet airiness
of "Blues For Pablo," I was in love again.
The art part of music is hearing it as it is,
not what it sounds like, not what it might become,
not what it once was when you heard it before.
First you have to listen---that is the starting place--and, yet,
Often you get stuck in the listening and never get to hearing.
Pleasant enough, if the music is any good.
But once in awhile it, the hearing, will happen.
And once you hear the music, it begins to emerge
into its own space and you with it. Or you begin
to emerge into the space it makes in your head.
Hearing becomes the transportation from listening,
the transformation to where "you were the music,
while the music lasted". Yet, with Miles, the music lasts
miles and miles past the actual playing of it.
One night a week earlier, on PBS, or Bravo,
I happened to see Coltrane playing on
“American Masters” or “Greats of American Music”
(both supremely accurate titles). The man was playing
up a storm and the notes were flying faster
than the ear could follow or nerves could absorb.
He was lifting the saxophone out of his stomach
and throwing it up in front of his face
determined as a man hurriedly digging up the earth.
Rhythmic, insistent, clear, confident, vigorous,
Inventive---happening all at once. Here was, full-bore, the poetry
of the earth. With Miles one thing happened at a time
but in an open space of his own where anything
was possible yet the inevitable always happened.
With Coltrane it was all at once but in the space
where you happened to find yourself listening
or where the music found you blessedly on your own.
With Miles it was longing, an adagio of it,
lingering in the notes; with Coltrane it was aspiration:
the yin and yang of desire. In the black and white
Coltrane was playing, like a man possessed,
My Favorite Things, and it was pure bliss. Afterwards,
in a long overflowing silence, I thought I knew how he felt:
I had just heard one of my new, and forever, favorite things.
The next day I pulled out an old record
of My Favorite Things and played it
seven or eight times straight through.
I had broken free of my Miles funk---
Relieved and released, from longing to aspiration,
Traveling the tortuous path of the dialectic
without realizing it until after the happy fact.
The antidote for the pangs and slangs
of ordinary longing was not patience,
as I customarily thought, especially while in a longing state;
it was not negative capability,
a kind of simmering enduring passivity.
The antidote, I realized now, was aspiration.
Longing was passive, aspiration active.
Miles was the Emily Dickinson of longing’s spirit,
Coltrane the Whitman of it.
I was being freed into a Whitmanesque aspiration phase.
Transcendentalism reigned supreme!
Enterprise was about to become king of my soul.
That was how the Miles poem became
the Coltrane poem that I was working on the night
the muse had spoken of the need for self-change
through her complaint, her pleas, her charge.
Ghostly white, the page in front of me read:
“Who else but you, maestro of the blues
of blackness and its absence, could touch the timbre texture
deftly and then crash it to percussion new?”
I immediately cut "percussion new”---too much Milton---
and ‘deftly' from ‘touch',’ often too thoughtlessly linked.
I resolved to change the line to something else.
Enough of touch. I thought of what Miles once said
To nervous neophyte Keith Jarrett: “nice touch.”
Another page, mostly white, below that one read:
“touches the timbre texture
to crash deftly to new percussions!”
Coltrane was the player in my poem now
and he was crashing with deftness more to the point.
Then I wrote, after seeing this line
on the back of our phonebill,
“Our favorite things are more than many /and change.”
Our favorites so much more than many things
change like queens to the faces (aces)
of a lifetime. I know now love is part
of listening: either you pray the blues
in thralled aptness and then time runs out on you
or time, slowly and faster, runs out on you.
Then the title got Xed-out for
“Coltrane, Too, Cured The Blues.”
I was truly out of the Miles funk,
now joy in the name of Coltrane was possible.
Much later that night, and through the early morning hours,
I thought of my favorite things and the talk I had
with my wife. I tried to think dialectically:
favorite things and business, Thoreau and enterprise,
change and self-reliance. I was throwing them up in the air
like single notes and hoping they'd come down
in a pattern or make simple sense.
I thought hard of Coltrane heaving
the saxophone like a celebrant toasting
the act of toasting, savoring the swirling, driving notes
and of seeing the evanescent smile of my muse.
We were not going anywhere and, languorously,
affectionately, we were going there slowly,
despite his playing faster than the speed of thought.
The next night I returned to Coltrane,
determined to describe the work of craft
with the TV image of Coltrane rocking back and forth
with the sax in his mouth
like a long and deeply sentient elephant nose.
I remembered that gobs of spit had spilled from its end---
the work, the toil, in those oozings; a mouth sweat.
In his roiling spoiling poly-rhythms
the spit must have been hitting the floor in beats
as he drove through the riffs leading us
into the wilderness of creativity
and who would care if he left us there?
I wrote “saliva dripping in beat/to the floor/from the alto”
and scribbled “aspiration imperative” on the margin;
then I took a very steep breath in the music
and the TV images and wrote more: “on the stage of night,
the predominance, Naima, O afro-true, he wants
to talk about you, your impressions of our favorite things.”
Though I knew `impressions' was the wrong word,
I kept writing. The hum was on, the particulars could wait.
“O blow it to flame, then ash, /unlike the confessions of a failed muse---”.
(I was probably thinking of my own current bout
with the invisible inaudible muse) “both failures of the white script.”
The white script was the blank page,
it was the notes of clarity spinning out
into the blackness of the night, it was the white man's history
of oppression, his fearsome black and white morality script,
it was other things that I could not articulate
or want to. What was epoch-full was Coltrane
in the midst of the act of creation, simultaneously art
and rewriting as he played. He could go back
to what he already played, the same sequence,
and rewrite it in the air for all to hear
by simply altering the tempo or boiling the beat.
But he never just altered tempo; he altered the notes,
then their tempo. This was what I was thinking I was thinking
as I wrote, with sharper thought:
“I have heard him, the praise-darer,/blow it to flame,
the salvia/exploding on the floor” Praise-darer? What did I mean?
I didn't know, but I knew he was praising something,
he was in the act of praising also the act of naming
and what was worthy of the praise. In other words,
I heard that he was praying. A man praying while playing
a saxophone should never be disturbed,
and I took special comfort in the knowledge
that Coltrane would be forever praying in white and black.
Most especially humbling was his praying,
by its very nature a private act;
a personal moment had become a communal exchange,
a cultural epiphany not heard across the land,
but must be. He was praying for us all,
praying right into our ears,
and all we could do was to receive it.
I wrote “What guts, your gifts of breath!”
Even if the damn poem was not rounding into shape,
my vision of the moment was.
I was learning what held me to the screen,
what bound me to the music, as I tried to
articulate it blackly on the white page
for my mind to assimilate. The white script
of whiteness needed some black absorption---
it was a cultural and spiritual need.
In my head that night, and in my dreams,
Coltrane was flying past the melody,
Beyond the theme of things, which were mine, too,
And his favorite variations, having played it before.
He was playing beyond their frame,
Past their past fame now in song.
He was firing sounds beyond what even the God
He believed in could not follow. He was swinging,
And swaying, singing out loud, and the planets
Were spinning at his plant-rooted feet like marbles.
Coltrane had time in his mouth and he was shaping
It two or three or all ways he wanted,
Favoring some variations in his own fleet-footed time.
He was, in his own time, out of time.
All over Beacon Hill the snow must have fallen
Unnoticed by me for hours. This evening it was clear
it was going to snow all night and I was going
to work through it instead of sitting still
to watch the street fill up with snow and more snow.
For the twentieth or thirtieth time in the last two days,
Friday to Sunday, I was listening to My Favorite Things.
My wife and daughter were evidently rattled
by the repetition. No matter how sensibly they grew
to enjoyment of the music, by probably the tenth hearing,
they were tired of it. Then I began listening on
my daughter's Sony Walkman (which I gave her
partly for this use). Blasting away in my ears,
I was in a kind of lunatic embrace
neither listening nor hearing but an out-of-body space
caused perhaps by the overwhelming loudness.
Loudness is often meant to enforce concentration
and prevent distraction, though maybe not quite as often
it became an oblivion of thought and the senses.
Out of my immersion, my drenching in sounds,
the new lines for my poem were coming: I believed in the alchemy of music:
Coltrane, Too, Prayed The Blues
Through the unscripted blues of blackness
he wants to talk, O Afro-true Naima, about you
yet to no one but you and the smile
you bring to spiritual flings.
With his alto's higher attitude of kneeling
he croons like a healed doctor,
then squeals it hotly while the OM-pounding bass
prolongs like a brother whatever harmonies
aggravation can squeak from ecstasy.
Welcome your darer of all praise,
as gulp by jolt his solos explode
like concussions; gobs of saliva
oozing from the flame of his cooking.
In the clarity of his sweat, what guts!
Rewinding the smoke-greying video
I hear in the backwards-going spool,
the way Namibia may have, how listening
(unlike confession to a failed muse)
retrieves what we imagine trust will be...
for with the stamina of an epic throat---
to hell, Oh Lord, all scale, all repercussion---
he goes on declaring our fire cure:
we must pray these blues like a favorite thing;
there is only time to be run out of.
Coltrane, too, was probably drunk on his favorite things
when he played the nearly infinite solo
in the middle of the song. His sax was roaring
like a man who knew what a lion felt
when waking his muse. The roaring was an elegy, not Howl-like,
though something had been lost and Coltrane knew it, too;
that was why his sax prayed the blues of it
in apt thralldom despite time running out on him,
and because his roaring was a kind of running on time
and, drunk as he was on fervor, and fluid and fluent with fire,
he made me just as drunk in listening.
He was dwelling high in the blue air, the airy blues,
And I, having been played the blues’ cure of themselves,
Was there with him praying the blues, too.
- Thomas Paladino, Boston, Ma. 2004
(photo, Michael Benabib)