Dec 2017- Jan 2018

　

If you want to know why dance is important, just imagine a world without it.

Music

Art

Fashion

Literature

In their absence, black holes open up into which all other forms of beauty would eventually fall.

Even poetry.

　

*

　

Christmas eve, my youngest children play, chasing each other around two easy chairs, pretending to be The Goddess Tafiti and the Demi-God Takkar, the Hero of all People, throwing fire balls at each other and shapeshifting into birds and fish. Takkar is trying always to return the heart he stole from the goddess, who rages in madness and grief and who sometimes cannot listen to the voice of reason. My son plays as Taffiti, my daughter as Takkar, and gender identity is never brought up. They learned this story from a Disney movie, which I have watched with them many times, it is a cultural paradox I am comfortable with. Their laughter, loud and clear and free drowns out the TV, drowns out even conversation as we sit in silent awe and I think to myself, I am grateful, for I know there are places in the world where the laughter of children cannot be heard.

Is there anything more valuable than that sound?

Is there?
　
All my troubles fade away.

In this bliss.



***

two wild men, both at bus stops on the same road. The first, a large man, round, with long, well woven dredlocks down past his shoulders. The second, standing, leaning on a crooked cane, with long uncombed hair and a long uncombed beard, and a look upon his face of the kind of contentment only seen on those who have abandoned conventional goals and live by a standard not known or measured by societal standards. And I, with my long uncombed hair and my rough unshaven chin, now sit in the tavern typing about it and trying to find a story to tell you.

The Spartans believed long hair was a sign of a free man. Some native American tribes believe that long hair acts as a psychic antennae.

So here is the story I will tell you, and it is not about wild men, but of ordinary men in extroadianry circumstances....

This event took place sometime during nineteen forty four, on the Eastern Front of the Second World War, as the Russians were pushing the German forces back. This particular battlefield had devolved into trench warfare, as each side reinforced their positions. It so happens that there was a Russian soldier on that battlefield who had an excellent singing voice, and every night he would entertain his friends, boosting morale and spreading good cheer throughout the trenches. His companions so treasured his voice that they were always protecting him from danger, and during lulls in the gunfire, would bring him cups of warm tea to ensure that his throat was also well protected from the cold.

But despite their efforts, the singing Russian soldier contracted a cold, and for some nights was unable to sing. It was on one of these silent nights that the Russian radio operators received an unusual message from the German lines. It was a question about the singing soldier. Was he well, and would he sing for everyone again soon?

The next night, German soldiers crept through the treacherous no-man's land to the Russian lines, and threw down to their enemies a brand new harmonica, so that the singing Russian would have music to accompany him when he sang again.

I don't know what happened to the singing Russian soldier, and I don't want to imagine what happened to the retreating Germans, but their story, this legend of musical history has survived to be passed on. From the heart of the most hideous human conflict ever fought, this tale of humanity, and the power of music has survived.

(As a side note: When I told this story to Lord Stompy, he informed me that during those wartime years, and for a long time after Germany was the only country manufacturing harmonicas of any real quality. The American and English brands being far inferior.)

***

Midnight long gone, by lamplight I sit in bed listening to old classical records from Iran. How strange that new friendships can change old habits, how they open doors in your mind and let you see yourself differently. I am grateful.

I will always be grateful for new friends. For how they challenge old preconceptions. How they aren't willing to put up with bad habits others may have grown used to, and how they look at you like you are an unfinished story. To them, you are new, and your story is unknown, and so in the act of getting to know someone, you get to hear them telling their story for the first time, and as you tell yours, and you get to listen to your story being heard for the first time by someone new.

　

***

Drumming isn't relevant to your life. It won't solve your problems, it will in fact create more problems than you can possibly know. Drumming isn't relevant to your job, to your partner, to your friends, to the taxman or the doctor, it will never mean to them what it means to you, even though it has no concrete relevance in your life either. You cannot use drumming to wash the dishes, or make school lunches, or any other thing. A drum is not useful for anything other than drumming, and so it has no relevance to any other activity in life. So if you think drumming will make you happy, it will not, (for happiness is something innate in you, not something that can be derived from an outside source). What drumming will do to you, is make you a drummer.

What is a drummer?

Drumming may not be relevant to your life, but your life is absolutely relevant to drumming. Your life is the absolute, irreplaceable element without which, drumming can never be. The drum is silent without you. Your life is the only relevance the drum will ever know, for without you, it is only a hollow log. The drum is made purposeful by the purpose we bring to it as drummers. The question central to every drummer's heart is this:

How many I relate to the drum?

How may I relate? How may I become relevant to the drum? How can I reveal with my open heart, the voices clamouring for expression in me, through my drum? How can I, through discipline and passion (a combination not easily made), meet the demanding standards of the drum? The drum who can hear my every mistake and read my every disrupting thought, my every indulgence of doubt, for make no mistake, doubt is a luxury, born of the opulence of our age. The drum demands confidence, but will never reward a braggart. The drum demands decisive, clear thinking, but is disgusted by the rigidity of a purely mathematical approach. The drum wants you to understand yourself, the drum wants you to feel comfortable, the drum will lure you out past the edge of your comfort, past thinking, past your confidence, past your own ability and then......then the drum will play you, and all your decisiveness and confidence will be cast off as shackles by the liberty of instinct. If you let it, the drum will play you rhythms you have never heard, never imagined. The drum, when you give your voice to it, will speak your name and take control of your body with a sorcery simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating and in that letting go of control, the un-teachable secrets of drumming are to be learned.

Still, the question lingers, how may I relate to the drum?

I ask, how do I allow my relationship to the drum to transform me? To challenge me? To what extent do I allow the timeless and powerful magic of music to drive my thinking, feeling and behaviour? As I stare off into the middle distance, my fingers tapping upon my knees as others talk to me and around me, while in my mind I swim in the swirling eddies of rhythm, I become the answer to my own question. I become a drummer. Drumming becomes my language, my everyday vernacular is grafted upon the experiences and idioms of rhythm. My conversational patterns are my soloing patterns, the tempo of my walk is the natural tempo of my music.

This writing, is a drum solo.

We are made of patterns, rhythms and music and song and dance and pictures and words and all the other insubstantial elements that we bring into the world through our art. Though our flesh seems real, it is animated by the imagination, made human by the special and unique way that we each relate to the world through our senses, both inward and outward.

So when you see me looking at you in a certain way, when I am looking at your beauty and not your face or arms or any part that you can see, understand that I am looking at the most real part of you. The part that makes art and dances and sings and is in every way unique. When you see me absently staring into the air, my head tilted at just the wrong angle, I am listening to music that cannot yet be heard. When you dance in the silence of your kitchen, when you sketch an invisible landscape upon the air with your finger, muttering that this goes there and that goes up and when you sing without your voice becuse you are too shy to sing out loud...

I take a few slow, deep breaths.

The point is this.

Life is ephemeral. We are insects who break free of our cocoon and lift kaliedoscope wings to the fresh air, to live for only one day. So when I look at you in a certain way, or my head is tilted, or my fingers dancing, know that I am a drummer, know that I am listening to the rhythm of your feet upon the floor, the count of your syllables in conversation and the rising falling pressure of your breath as you speak. I am trying with every fibre of my being to absorb as much information from the world as possible, for the drum demands my devotion to such learning.

So if sometimes I do not remember what you said, it is because I was listening to the symphony of tones and rhythms a single world spoken from you lips can become when I open my mind properly to observe it.

So when I am writing and I start with one idea but end up somewhere else, it's just like drumming you see, and during a solo you can go way out on a limb and the question becomes: how do I resolve this question?

What is a drummer?

You are the drummer.

I am the drummer.

The absolute, irreplaceable element without which, drumming can never be.

The drum is silent without you.



*
At the street fair.

I see a girl in a straw boater hat sitting with friends at a streetside cafe, the exterior walls of which are boarded up to resemble a Jamaican pirate shack.

I see an Aborigial boy, in loin cloth and tribal body paint weaving through the thick urban crowd, stepping as he disappears into the throng, behind a woman wearing a black dress with South American patterns on the hem.

I see two distinguished older gentlemen, a little round at the belly, but broad at the shoulder and chest making a sort of barrel shape, a tree trunk, but with an animal flexibility and strong confident poise. One wears a Trilby, pale in colour and in much better condition than my own, (a little hat envy there), the other is bald, sandpaper stubble around the back and sides, and the same upon his chin. They are tall, moving like elephants among a herd of zebra, gazelle and oryx. Like kings, able to survey the crowd, while others must only dwell within it.

I see an old woman in a loose slung, plain brown hijab, sitting almost asleep in a wheel-chair, around her what must have been her large family, adults and children and those in between. I see the dancers in black take the stage, their silver jewellery glowing with the borrowed colour of carnival lights. I see the old woman wake up, immediately, her eyes are clear and focussed, intently focussed, on the movements of the dancers. I see her pupils dart up and down, following hip and hand, leaping and falling with the peak and trough of skirts spun orbital in the hands of playful wind spirits, the old woman herself begins to float. I glance up at the young woman holding the wheelchair, her hijab is more closely folded to her face than her elder, but her colours are vibrant and exciting, a statment matching her makeup and clothing. She too watches the dancers, the whole family watches, but I am watching the old woman.

Limpid pools of light, her eyes are the eyes of a young woman. Keenly she studies the dancers, keenly and with knowledge and deep stirring memory.

I imagine she is remembering the old coutry.

Can you remember the old country? I cannot. My German ancestors fled here from the old coutry six generations ago, or so family legend tells it. If I have a memory of that place, it must be very faint by now.

I am watching the old woman, as she is watching the dancers in black, and all around the crowd are watching us. We, the troupe of dancers and drummers who wear the culture of a foreign land as if it were our own, making of ourselves devotees, students of the world and of peace.

I see the faces of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Malasian, Indonesian, Italian, Greek, Iraqi, Iranian, Afghani, Egyptian, African (I'm not great at identifying African nationalities)Polish, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, German, Scandanavian and French and I think I see an actual Viking. He is a head taller than the rest of the crowd, has long straight gray hair, a long gray beard and tatoos visible on his neck, so I'm going to say he is a Viking. I think I'm getting my point across though, when I list the nationalities I can with reasonable certainty, claim to see in the crowd tonight.

I think that something very special is happening, in this time, in this place.

And I think that you are all a part of that.

Indivisble from Magic

November - December 2017

　

*

in the room of mirrors.

i encounter the first demon, the blackness, despair.

he tells me : everything is its opposite, all energy moves contrary to its intention, nothing can be known, nothing can be assumed, nothing can be done, you are dead, floating meat in a meaningless and effortless universe.

you've been in control all day haven't you? i ask

well, not all day, he replies

his voice, hateful, whining like an overworked engine, a frantic, destructive stress, a mess, a strangled dog, full of fear and contempt. a voice so loud it blocks out all other considerations.

i take a warrior stance and i spear him through the teeth and i drive him back into the mirror, but at midnight i wake with him on my chest, bloody mouthed and howling. i sit up, gasping for breath as his slippery fingers creep vinelike around me.

i rise from bed and put salt on my tongue, walking in the dim green glow of a midnight hallway. breathing deep, breathing slow, unclenching the fear that clutches, who, limping on crutches, terrifies me with nightmares of my own decay.

why is everything unfamilar? everything always strange? i ask the demon.

you make it that way, you prefer it to the alternative, replies a soft, calm voice. it is not the demon, but the monk robed in gray and black, sitting cross legged on the floor.

i return to bed, breathing deep, i take up the spear again and drive despair into his mirror, but it is my own reflection in the glass.

i turn to the monk in gray and black, crosslegged on the floor, and i say to him :


you've always given me good advice, what should i do about the first demon, the blackness, despair, that hateful lunatic who sees nothing good in the world and believes that all evergy moves contrary to my will, and that whatever I try to do, the opposite will always happen, and the more I try, the more I will fail. what do i do? to engage him is to become enraged at the absolute breadth of his glib sarcasm and flat assertion that all else is pathetic fantasy. tying to ignore him only allows his poison to subversively infect the way i see the world, and define the way i live and breathe, without my knowledge or consent.

what do i do?


i cannot prove him wrong

what do i do?

　
the man in gray and black, crosslegged on the floor says to me :


understand him.

　

*

　

I want to tell you a story, I want to spin you a fiction taken from amidst the facts of my life, but I cannot bring myself to lie to you. So, though it sounds fantastical, though perhaps my imagery strikes you as imaginitive, I tell you this. All this is true. Make of my words what you will, but know that I write them with sincerity and purpose.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about the woman with the keys, the invisible woman in the market. I ask myself, what does she dream of? Searching in the night for the lock to which her key will fit, searching for the thing she threw away, or perhaps the thing she locked away, but which now she cannot find. Though it sounds a cliche, I ask myself, who has the key to her heart, or to her mind? Is she known by anyone? Or is she truly invisible?

　

*

　

Wooden floorboards, low ceiling, fluorescent lights, coloured fabric on the walls, three of us are talking.

Life feels so unreal, so free of consequence. The fiction of history tells me that events are sequential, connected, that action provokes reaction and from these steps dynasties are built and torn down. History tells the story of consequence, yet I do not feel this in my day to day existence. I do not feel the inexorable accretion of my actions gradually building my destiny. I do not see the interlocking experiences that manifest as my beliefs, and which in turn, manifest as my actions, which in turn, grant me consequences. Life feels unreal, like there are no connections, no sequences, just random events piling up like hailstones in the street.

There are moments though, when I see the world as it is. When I see the world through every other persons eyes and suddenly it all makes sense, and I can see the sand piling up around us, the grains of our words and thoughts and deeds stretching as a desert in every direction, and atop the dunes and across the great red expanse entire, stand kith, and kin. Our shadows reach long to entangle with each other, and in the simultaneous sunset of an age, and the dawn of a new epoch of discovery, we stand upon the vast evidence, upon the sedimentary landscape our lives have given testimony to, we stand upon the sand.

While Ozymandias' stone head lays buried far below.

I blink and there I am again, in the room with the wooden floor and the low ceiling where I am, talking with you, suddenly aware of the consequence and density of my actions, which have over these years culminated in one word from you tonight which meant more to me than I could ever have expected.

Trust.

Perhaps now, in this time we live in, it is the rarest of all the virtues.

The most precious of bridges

built over the troubled waters of our

tumultuous

generation.

That the word should even have meaning any more is astounding, since our lives seem shaded forever in gradations of terror, and every day a new reason to fear each other gains traction in the cultural gestalt. Once sacred bonds of this and that now seem like relics from a bygone age (Greg Taylor). Swept along in the tide of human affairs, in gasping moments we pull ourselves to the surface and glance around, hoping for perspective. Perspicacious we seek a landmark amidst the tumbling waves, believing that we will know land when we see it, hoping that we will know land when we see it.

We do not see land, but we do see each other, all of us, caught in the same storm.

Perhaps now, in this time we live in, Trust is the rarest of all the virtues. The most precarious, precious bridge we can build over the troubled waters of our tumultuous generation.

　

*

　

When all around you keep their heads, while you loose yours, its possible that you are mad. The incessant babble of my thoughts and the incessant chittering of my fears perpetually throws me on my back foot, I retreat from myself, uncertain of my own motivations, all confidence in my own point of view is gone. I assume that any confidence is arrogance, hubris in the face of an impossibly complex world. I reject confidence, I worship doubt. I approach with my softest voice, yet somehow always end up on the end of my own sword. I have no measurement by which to interperet behaiour, no consistent story by which to understand moods. All the old ways are broken in the vast useless pit of history, there are no prophets, none can say what tomorrow will bring. Yet we hope against all evidence that tomorrow will be like today.

Please let tomorrow be anything, but what it was today.

　

*

　

This old man

he played one

he played knick knack on his drum

A schoolyard in the afternoon...

There is sunshine on everyone's faces, mothers, fathers, children, grandmothers, grandfathers, babies and even the birds are sunlit today and I blink and remember nineteen seventeen and the mud coloured world of starvation and war, the hollow eyed stares of mothers whose sons are all dead, the inexpressible pride and shame of old men who sent their sons to war. A generation lost to madness and today, here I stand in the sunshine with everything restored, the Somme re-forested, and even our sadness is now a glorious joy that knows nothing of deprivation and loss and war...


This old man

he played two

he played knick knack on his shoe
A restaraunt at sunset...Marrakech

The orange glow of Moroccan lamps inside, shadows are split by sunset beams and somehow this crowded room feels secret, private, hidden from the street and shaded from the vulgar day. The restaraunt is almost full as we enter bedecked for celebration, champagne on our breath and the excitement of eventide and good company in our voices. As our banquet begins, so too does The Dancer in black and gold, and in the narrow alleys between tables and chairs, she moves as if she had all the room in the world, dancing as freely as a girl on a beach, turning hand in hand with two men who know some steps, dancing back to back with a leopard queen in a gold turban, and the women from our table rise and dance with her too and the phantasy feels like real life...


This old man

he played three

he played knick knack on his knee

A world restored to the pursuits of peace and the enjoyment of the fruits of peace and the wearing of silk slippers and the sipping of fine wine and the enjoying of the easiest joys in the world to understand: children who are healthy, young, beautiful, free and who will live to enjoy the fruits of our peace, children who will live on to have children of their own, and who will struggle and suffer, but who will remember this time in golden rays of nostalgia and know the taste of fresh air, and the sweat and sand on their skin and the dreamy smile of an eight year old girl as she waves goodbye to my son after school has finished for the day and together we sing a nursery rhyme as we walk to the car.


This old man

he played four

he played knick knack on his door

Yet it is real life, a real life with dancing and drumming and I look up into their faces and I kneel in service to them, my hands upon the drum trying speak the secrets their feet know, or their ankles, or their hips or swaying hair, or languid smiles, my hands giving voice to the silent communion of movement as together they complete the story that the open door of the restaraunt implicitly invites...


This old man

he played five

he plaved knick knack on his hive

I blink and I see that old world, charcoal shaded beneath the skin of the present, the mud coloured suffering of nineteen seventeen, I see those mothers without sons and fathers without sons and a broken hearted generation who lived on and on and who in their turn and in their time, created those who created us. We who play with our children in the sunshine and who enjoy the historically unparalleled abundance of education and nutrition available to them and who live in hope that their future will be even brighter than our present, we who dine in restaraunts and dance between the tables...


This old man

he played six

he played knick knack on his sticks

An open door. The restaraunt is a public house, the host in his white coat becomes our friend, smiling and talking and making sure we are always at ease and want for nothing. He is there, beaming at the spectacle played out in his dining room, with his guests all there to share in the wonderful, subversive beauty of people holding hands, strangers dancing, and old friends dancing, and I, a drummer, am graced with the opportunity to follow and witness this contract of public trust. The restaraunt is a ritual, it is rebellion against tyranny, it is an open door, a room where strangers may meet and and where any topic may be shared as the food is shared and where we the common folk may be served and made to feel important. Where, bouyed up by the sweet and satisfying intoxication of our senses, we resort to poetry where once only common speech felt natural, we resort to song where once poetry had seemed enough. Every moment in a restaraunt is an opportunity to be grand, to feel welcomed and strong and content amidst the glowing faces of friends and the overpowering love of food that unites all humans in all times.


this old man

he played seven

he played knick knack up to heaven

The guns of Aras are silent, the ghosts of Paschendale keep their distance. Even long after the day has passed into the palm of night, the haunting blank faces of the long forgotten cannot break the glow of Moroccan lamps, the dead cannot whisper louder than our conversation. The burden of the past cannot drag with undertow certainty back, the tide of time which lays one day upon the next forever until today.

Today.

Though the walls of our buildings are made with the clay of our ancestors, though their suffering is forgotten, rendered meaningless by passing ages, though nineteen seventeen and four hundred BCE have more in common with each other than anyone might know, today is a new day, and new leaves have grown upon the apple tree of our discord, and new fruits, and our knowledge is not born as a sin, but as a savior. Our knowledge, and the sharing thereof, might yet save us from the ignorant consequences of the past.

So I say to you

Feast

Share in your greateness that we might be made greater still

Today.

For the future is unwritten

 with a knick knack paddy whack

give a dog a bone

this old man came rolling home

　
*

I go blind for two days, voluntarilly you understand, and through that dark telescope I see a great world open up and I imagine my home, the hallways and rooms and furniture, sketched out in my mind's eye, first gray, then colour washed wave like wave like waves across my inner view. In that bright darkness, lit not by the worldly sun, but by my own inner sun, I walk in peace and listen to the creak of my footsteps and the sonar of my breath and voice and the sway and brush of my fingertips along the walls and chairs and floor. In the darnkness I hear the quiver of wings, and the misty sound of falling dust.

I hear the dragging of feet and the trailing of chains and the clashing of picks upon stones, and low, deep beneath the earth upon which bare feet do step and stamp, I hear someone singin' the blues. The one bar blues, the call and no-response blues, the locked door at a dead end blues, the take a look at your black life, never goin' home no more blues. The Grandma's name is forgotten blues, the home town gone forever blues, the Grandfather fed to the dogs blues. The train don't come this way no more blue, the hailstone broke your widow blues, the howling dog forever blues, The one note, one line, one way down, no way out blues.

Do not mistake my reverie for despair, for what I hear is not the song of death, but rather it is the music rising up from the bottom of the cave. It is the song of the condemned, the great happiness that can not ever be suppressed, even in slavery, forced migration and the erasure of history. Coming up from below I hear the song of the human race, the reason, I think, that we will always survive despite our best and most ignorant efforts to destroy ourselves. The song at the end of the universe, calling back to us.

Blindfolded, my imagination becomes a dark, warm, fertile soil, and from it, growing through the skin of my conscious mind, the flowers of Persephone bloom in colours unseen by the opened eye, and the songs I hear are songs never heard by the lob'ed ear. Songs only heard in the cave, where the voices of our ancestors still echo and all we think forgotten, is known. I see great and impossible architecture, amidst the ruins of civilisations long gone, new civilisations stand and fall and new civilisations stand and fall upon them. Like wheat in the field, grown and harvested and sewn again. The sun golden upon the seeds and upon the pollen clouds, and upon the earth, and upon those who sow the grain and those who harvest.
　

Remember, inside you, even when your eyes are open, there is a world, watching you, listening, learning, growing.