Whenever I Listen To Messiaen

Whenever I listen to Messiaen I’m never quite sure whether the music is crawling, gliding, or flying. Sometimes it moves quietly like a broad river at twilight, the surface dimpled occasionally by fish or insects, & sometimes it glides like a desert wind moving over sandstone, sculpting arches & angels. Sometimes is slithers like a snake with a colorfully patterned body. And sometimes it flies with the grace of an albatross, the oscillations of an organ braiding the air into ribbons of black & red & brown. And all of it mingled, like the minerals in Dead Sea mud. Takashi Kokubo, on the other hand, is nature singing itself into the fullness of being that is its true music. Music always wants fulfillment. It’s always ascending and descending, expanding and contracting. Its oscillations are the oscillations of oceanic consciousness, dilations of trance. Enchantment. Dispersion. Satori. The mingling of purity and mud. The thing itself, raw or cooked. Perhaps stored in a sunflower lapping at the sun’s bounty. What is Such-ness? Is it such a big deal? Is it good for old people? I’m green at this. Never made it to India. But old age engenders its own India. The topography varies from day to day. Some days it’s a Great Awakening, some days it’s arthritis and retail, and some days my knapsack is full of unsalted peanuts and Oreo cookies. If stirred up sediment is left alone the sediment will settle to the bottom and a clear pool of water will appear. When feelings settle at the bottom of the paragraph the rest of the words fall asleep. Dream arise. And this is a cause of igloos. Subaru windows fogged up on a street in Seattle. Where all kinds of things occur. And don’t occur. Occurrence is a strange phenomenon. It often occurs before you know it’s occurring. And then you realize something. You can put a plume in your hat and quack. Or run around naked as a jaybird shouting lagniappe! lagoon! lassiez-faire! Because it’s there. And because you can. There are things I will not do. I will not put lipstick on a lion. I will not wear the uniform of death, which is camouflaged in propaganda. But I will get a hammer and build something, a birdhouse or a rapid vibration of words that lead to satori. And what then? I’ll enjoy two mugs of coffee and get in a long wide sentence leading nowhere. Imagination gives you everything. The bizarre. The ineffable. Hostess Cupcakes, horses, and introversion. The rest of my day is a postmark predicated on Ava Gardner chopping the shit out of a lobster in a Mexican kitchen. I mean, we all like to talk, don’t we? I wonder what a conversation with the Covid virus would look like. I think it would go something like this: where are you from? Covid: silence. Are you here to make human beings disappear so the planet can heal itself? Covid: silence. Are you surprised that decimating the human population would be this easy? Covid: silence. Are you ... cough, cough ... excuse me ... cough, cough ... I'm sorry, I'm not feeling well, can we do this another time? Covid: silence. Covid speaks in code. In DNA. Figure. How odd that these little squiggles, these marks on paper or a computer screen, these little loops and sticks, a bit bigger, maybe, than the legs of a small insect, can carry the weight of so much history, so much conflict and pain, so much love, so much tender perception, so much provocation for another pair of eyes, another being attentive and appreciative of these marks. There is, at present, a gross insensitivity to it which is consistent with the fall of empires. But there are a few who still bring themselves to make them walk, fly, crawl, struggle like a dying moth beating at a window to make a light in someone’s head.