Wednesday, July 27, 2005
1.~~~~~~~~
In medias res, in the middle of things, I jump into this journal-book already bothered with a question of its beginning. Each project, like each new day, has some irreducible continuity with past projects, from which we receive the basic assurance that we know what we are doing. We are continuous beings; nothing emanates from us completely differentiated from all else we have done. We are always in the middle of our life, and need to feel this connectedness with ourselves, all the more so in a world that continually tempts us into dispersal and multiplicity. But some projects, again like some days, are defined by some finite moment when we choose to risk the continuity of life activity and venture out of the safety of our haven. We have some sense that we can continue what we are doing only by projecting it into a new form.
There is a certain energy we get only from approaching something as fresh at that particular starting point, a sense that we are free of the rules we had earlier felt necessary. We have dumped the clutter on the table and pieces fall broken on the floor; we are free to construct anew. This is our necessary myth; we can know it is only a story yet still feel its power. After a time we might see how we are doing much the same as before, and the power of the story can‘t hold us up. We risk becoming self-conscious, false, and therefore stymied. We experience what is fresh turning quickly stale as we face it alone on the page, the canvas, or in the recording. We are not convinced of what we do.
Most of us have a memory of the futility of beginning things with an energy that then somehow dissipates, it seems inevitably. In writing, it’s as if words were little toy soldiers we trot out, easily overwhelmed when they are few in number, preferring not to stick out their necks but to be swallowed in the mass. We would like to hide our beginnings in the web of continuity and understanding, support from outside the project. But to begin something with a truly fresh spirit we must admit that we don’t know what is to follow, we don’t know what will happen, even that we will continue. We have a plan in mind, but plans are subject to change the very next moment, and so even with the full ardor of innocence we must accept a surrender to change from the very outset.
We are dealing with our personal nature here, giving ourselves a chance to create that nature--observe it, know it and in some measure change it. Yes, in retrospect we are always in the middle of things, but there is the vulnerability of each point of starting, of opening new lines of flight and trusting them--and of trusting failure as well.
In improvising freely, which is my intention in music, there is this beginning moment when I often wish I could bludgeon my way into the music, just close my eyes and force it into being, in hopes to reach the point where I become lost in its midst and simply follow what is going on. I would like to have something external to the running mechanism, as a car has a starter, to get myself moving out of inertia, from the ordinary world where I am dealing realistically with things created by others to the extra-ordinary world where I am nothing but my activity of creating. For improvisers at the moment of initial playing nothing can, or should be able to convince us that we truly know we can play music--that is a specific thrill of this kind of music. We can find reasons to trust our ability to improvise well, if that’s what it is, but we must distrust these reasons in order not to be false in our playing. In fact there is no easy mechanism for starting; there is only a gap, a lack of connection, a risk of leaping. We enter into the middle of things not with a battering of the door or any external aid but with a kind of homage to the threshold that exists between being outside the music and inside--each foot on a different side, caught in mid-stride. An apology…for pretending to be strong enough to resist the temptations of inertia, or the temptation to lie about our situation--and a peculiar kind of energy that comes from such humility.
One often finds as a tendency of the avant-garde the wish to disturb or at least create an effect, to appear original, discontinuous with one’s past or with others, and this wish precedes and frames the content. The avant-garde likes to announce itself; after all it is at the forefront of the battle, the entering wedge, the disrupter of the cultural peace. It is a stance of self-assuredness, confidence in one‘s rightness and ability to communicate, to create war as to create art. Its vision of art is that it needs an opponent (a paper tiger will do as well). On the contrary, my intention is to slip into the water without creating a ripple, as if to improvise-- to start each moment afresh, time after time--were fully in harmony with what came before. In fact there is a violence to beginnings, and a fear of many things--most profoundly, self-betrayal. Beginning requires strength rather than power in order to handle this. It is the strength of full, conscious vulnerability, at each point almost failing; only then is it something that might be called mastery.
