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.