photo credit: Intermedia Arts

Geneva and John Henry played songs like they learned them, by rote, for as long as they could but knots of unrequited living or unrequited love didn’t unraveling to satisfy their needs. Something more was required; a hook, a head or a melody wouldn’t carry them away anymore. They longed for passage to spaces beyond what they knew into somewhere other than here. Even “jazz” wasn’t out enough for them. What is “jazz” but “somebody else’s idea of somebody’s else's world?”

Geneva decided, "I'm 11:59," as she sat half done half undone spitting improvised prevarications at anybody who walked through the doors of the Something To Say Cafe'. "I'm 11:59 about to be midnight, just about to turn into another day, just about to be somebody else. I'm not running toward daylight I want to remain the last minute of the day. If someone ask what’s my last name tell them PM." I heard what she said and was inspired by what I think she meant. She was determined to be free, not merely loose, or outside her aesthetic but 11:59 all the time, on the verge of midnight. Or as Miles said, ‘round bout midnight.’

Freedom isn’t determined by an infinite amount of choices but by making one’s own mind up. Monk’s classic composition Round Midnight has been brought new life through several renditions by an array of brillent musicians; the chart is only one way to play it. Whatever it means for you is what it means, but when Trane played it with Monk he played it differently than when he played it with Miles.    

One looks forward for what’s unseen, unheard already. One tries to go in a strange way, tries to go down a different path and still we find ourselves in a place commonly known as the blues. The calendar fills up the calendar is empty and neither reality makes us happy. We say when the calendar is full ‘if I only had more time,’ we say when the calendar is empty, ‘I have nothing to do.’ What do we mean? How serious are we about cultivating solitude when we fill every minute of our day with something else to do. We say we love ourselves and ourselves become the least company we keep. We say we are thinking and meditating and we’re actually remembering and chanting somebody else's ideas. Where is authenticity of living in our own minds, listening to our own thoughts and practicing original behavior?

Geneva wasn't talking to anybody in particular but everybody in general because she was talking loud enough to be heard halfway down the block. We were sitting on Main Street; where all the people pass, all the ideas, all the pain, all the suffering, all the memory loss and the lingering intimidation from a world that works us twelve hours a day twelve days a week. John Henry said, "We worked so much overtime we didn’t know our name." He no longer responds to his name because somebody may be calling him back to work. People who know him know how to get his attention.

Others were talking too, overlapping John Henry's and Geneva’s words, some in conversation with them and others playing in trios, quartets and duets of their own. People stood outside the Something To Say Café afraid of the sound of freedom spilling out, not knowing how to intermingle or weather to take a solo.

Life is religion. We're objects and believers or we hide behind fear and loathing trying not to be exposed as hypocrites. How can we be true in a world filled with temptations and debates for every illogical argument we propose, every irrational act we commit? Nothing makes sense in a world where love is dysfunctional and nothing is often what we’re left with, after trying everything and nothing is the only thing that works. Only nothing works because everything else has been exhausted and releasing nothing back to from whence it came is our only hope to reboot a virus corrupted heart.     

It’s hard to find love when you’re down and out, hard to believe you deserve it. When you hit the lowest ebb is when the mournful sounds start rumbling deep within your soul, a sound that won’t subside until the weather gage changes. “Make you wanna holla, throw up both your hands.” Everybody’s talking about it; the rigmarole, the jumping through hoops to get what should be yours by permission, that’s where the music comes from. That’s when your metabolism and your molecular structure realigns. What might have been a ballad becomes a moaning cry instead that rises from the bottom of your feet and passes through you like electricity.    

Organic quotes from composted gardens often yield beautiful flowers and vegetables, however weeds growing there spread their worth as well. Some gardeners harvest weeds and mix them in with other plants as equals. Other farmers change the names of plants and the types of places they grow them. It’s also constructive to begin again and follow wherever that leads.

Sun Ra and his Arkestra, “The” Coltrane Quartet, The Celestriail Communication Orchestra, Ornette’s Double Quartet, David Murray, Branford Marsalis, artists working with the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) and the list goes on… All showing us how it’s done, climbing and peeking and leaping beyond to new territory in space.

I don't recall reading the word requited without "un" as a prefix, I don't remember hearing it either. What does it mean to be requited and how do we recognize it? I go on ruminating about this because of my personal history, or so I thought, of unrequited living, unrequited love. Today I find myself living in abundance, requitedness and generosity. I have to trace back to when my life segued from the perception of one to the other, from un to requited and perhaps back again. To quote Henry Miller, “either you take in believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird.” I move forward with purpose and self-determination. 

That’s how I recognize freedom. To change my name, to follow who I choose, to sing new songs nobody else composed for me and to start over when it seems necessary. Like Geneva and John Henry I keep searching for new ways to interpret myself. Sometimes it doesn’t work out the way I planned; the bills don’t get paid on time, the power gets shut off, the phone stops working and my stomach growls.

This is from John Edgar Wideman, from Writing to Save A Life: “The innocent, imploring look of determination and helplessness in the eyes of a man (person) who's fallen hopelessly in love and understands he (they) are not loved in return and that nothing the loved or unloved can do, good or evil to the other, will ever unknot unrequited love.” We press forward hoping somehow to untangle the knots that hold us hostage from joy and clarity of our souls worth and our life’s work.