An acknowledgement of the type of psychic training and slavery

inflicted upon people today, an indication of their fear of a policed

state, occurs at the beginning of a piece called "APRIL IN PARIS,"

subtitled "The Creaking of the Word:  After-the-Fact Lecture/Libretto

(Aunt Nancy Version)" in _Djbot Baghostus's Run_By Nathaniel Mackey.

Jarred Bottle, sitting at a stoplight in Los Angeles at three in the morning,

thinks of a quip he'd heard before, "Revolution would never occur in a

country whose people stop for traffic lights late at night when 

there's no one else around." Subsequently, sitting at the intersection,

defiantly "deferring to nonexistent traffic," Bottle constructs an exquisite

ten-plus page journey of romantic ("...so tenuous a thread could be so

binding made for a mystery only moans could address") and musical

intrigue (he swears he hears the horns of imaginary cars playing the

three chord melody line from Frank Wright's "China"). In the midst of

his trance he reconstructs part of the meeting with Aunt Nancy (a

member of the Mystic Horn Society), from which he was coming. His

work, he explained to her, "would revolve around locale and

dislocation, two terms of a continuing obsession he felt not so much

prompted as dictated by." Jarred Bottled comes out of his spell,

finally, when a policeman approaches him. The section concludes:

 

         The cops would ask him had he been drinking, ask what was the idea

        of just sitting there. He'd tell them he was a Rastafarian, that he

        was waiting for the red, yellow, and green lights to come on at the

        same time. "All this time," he'd explain, "I've been thinking about

        Paris and China, but it was Ethiopia I was actually headed for."

        The cops would have no idea what he meant.