Nathaniel Mackey's Bedouin Hornbook defies easy summary, though its parts are easy to enumerate. 1. It is written as a series of letters. 2. The letters are written by a musician named N. 3. These letters cover a three year period and ostensibly document the various developments of N's band, the Mystic Horn Society. 4. The reader is only privy to N's side of the correspondence. And 5. His recipient, called the Angel of Dust, takes on a sort of spectral presence throughout the text. These are the basic parts of what any reader will encounter.
And, yet, to merely list these parts is to leave out the force through which Bedouin Hornbook proceeds: the role of structure/tradition, as both a necessary and limiting force, within African American music. In lieu of attempting to parse the difficult logics of Bedouin Hornbook, I offer a riff of my own, writing as if I were the Angel of Dust.*
Dear
N,
I was happy to hear from you after so
long a silence, but there is no need to apologize. These gaps, like gasps for
air in between a complicated set of notes, give me time to consider the myriad
implications that unfurl from both song and letter. Think of them—these gaps,
that is—as our command of time and not the inverse. And now that I have taken
time, I will respond thusly.
In
reading through our correspondence I find myself most interested, at least as a
place of beginning, in your dream. The disassembled clarinet is a powerful
image, one that offers a complex and nuanced metaphor for how one should
understand music as a whole. And for that, I praise your decision to relay it. I
am, however, unconvinced that you are being honest when you say that you have
abandoned the idea that the image suggests a desire to reconstruct “a way.” But
for now let me abandon my five-dollar Freud and pretend that we both agree that
the instrument refuses permanent reassembly. Most obvious, of course, is that the
clarinet acts as a metonym for music. In this
sense, any analysis must abandon the idea of individuality and, instead, focus
on the implications it has within free jazz.
With
that out of the way, may I suggest that the deconstructed clarinet takes its
central analogy with that of collage?
It is not so much a puzzle, with each note locking into a
specific rounded groove, but, rather, a collection of disparate and jagged images
that when placed in a specific order only seem to be a fixed and unmovable
whole. Thus, deconstruction—the very act of scattering these parts—becomes the
way in which all assemblages are revealed to be unnatural. I do
not mean to say that order is unnatural; our want of it belies how natural it
may be; rather, the assumption that organization—as we see in more traditional
musical compositions—is never more than a cobbled form, sewn together by
composers whose ideological location affords them specific connections.
What is important, then, is not so much
whether or not a work sounds complete, but whether or not the composition
allows for one to see the possibility of possibilities. I am reminded here of Hans
Hoffman’s insistence that “the ability to simplify means to eliminate the
unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” In both cases, the purpose is to abandon traditional technique
so to foreground the myriad possibilities caught underneath, to pry lose the
manhole cover. But does this reduce the form? Does such
an understanding imply a stumbling onto meaning, an accident by which only the
absence of playing signals the whole that exists in between the silences? More clearly, are your songs only songs
because they begin and end? Have we, like that sentence written on the San Francisco
wall, been given too little and too much credit? And could any collection of atonal, dissonant noises expose
the issues at hand?
I’m not sure. But what I do know is that our pasts fold into the present like flour, leaving us with nothing to grasp, no material to which we
can return. And so evidence of a time before our time, before now, does not exist.
And, yet, I know—have faith even—that there is no present free from what has
come before. We each exist in a series of moments organized and justified by
unavailable dates, but their disappearance into the batter, so to speak, does
not negate their existence. And so we search because we must. Resurrection is,
as you say, a phantom limb. From dust to dust and then dust again, it would
seem. It is not so much a past known in the way a photograph taken in childhood
and seen when older has the power to catalyze memory, but, rather, it is a
revelation, such as the first moment the child realizes a parent was once as
young as he. It is a past not known but felt.
And so what the uninitiated may first
hear as a collection of strangled notes, with no more ability behind them than
that which a child could produce, I know—we know—that free jazz attempts to
organize itself around disc(h)ord rather than disorder. It pries apart notes
and chords, even modes, and what appears to be the scattered detritus of hacks
reveals itself to be the crumble of a cake, which cannot return us to the
initial ingredients by which it was made but which allows us to see that all
wholes are made up of disparate elements awaiting construction.
This much I know: Deconstruction in all
art always assumes a previous assembly. One cannot take apart that which was
not once assembled. And, thus, the tradition upon which those notes were born still
exists—whether in phrases that have survived the dismantling or even in the
theoretical space that attempts to justify the discord—and this is what makes
all the difference, what separates the child’s scribble from the artist’s
stroke, or the honk from the howl.
Nowhere,
of course, is this argument more compelling than in your use of the palimpsest. I must say that I am quite moved by the
implications therein. If I must be
completely honest, I was forced to look up the term, and I have learned that a
palimpsest, in its most general sense, is a sheet of paper upon which texts are
continuously erased so to make room for new words. The idea, of course, harkens
to that ever-long debate concerning the domination of one voice over another.
But where the palimpsest becomes most interesting is in the fact that the act
of erasure is never fully complete; former texts linger, as if awaiting a
spontaneous recovery. They are, I suppose, those phantom limbs about which you
write so eloquently.
And it is in this spirit—that of the
endless heteroglossiac possibilities within any utterance—that I arrive at your
concept of duende. Before I add my
own meaning to the term, it is helpful to remember how Lorca defined it. “The
duende,” he writes, “ . . . is a power not a work. It is a struggle, not a
thought. It’s not a question of ability, but of true living style, of blood of
the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation . . . Everything that has
black sounds in it has duende.”
How convenient for us that Lorca chooses to use black as one of his
primary descriptors. It is as if he knew that this moment would arrive, that
our use would play with both the intended connotation of “emotional darkness”
and a bit of old fashioned signification that allows us to lean in on the phrase,
to push heavy with our shoulders until the meaning has shifted so to include
something of race. I suppose that it’s your turn to scoff; and I can already
see your smirk. After all, neither you nor I have ever seen each other, so how
could I know your race. How could you know mine? And more broadly, what does race have to do with
deconstruction? Is not the point to dismantle these ideological and historical
snares that bind us? I suppose the
answer lies in my hope that the purpose of deconstruction is to reveal the
possibility each of us has to become builders.
And so I ask you: have I pushed Lorca’s
phrase too far? Bullied an elegant definition across the Atlantic? Have I, to
be indelicate, enslaved it for my own purposes? Before you say yes, remember duende’s most popular iteration is tener duende, which loosely translates to
having soul. Can we not hear Bobby Byrd’s “I Know You Got Soul” each time the
phrase is uttered? Have we not happened upon a parallel desire for a positively
constructed subjectivity? Isn’t my act just a matter of reconstruction? And can
we not see that looking at how race informs jazz is about giving voice rather
than excluding it? Knowing that
one man has soul does not mean that another cannot. Duende, thus, is not so much racially determined, as it is aware of
the implications that exist within each note. It is about tradition. At stake
is how one documents the moment. To have duende and to have soul find their parallel not merely in their
semantic pairing, but in how the practice of both disrupts dominant culture.
But if we are to accept this, and I hope
we are both in accord, I am most troubled by your use of fallow in one of the more
recent letters. At first glance, the metaphor appears to be incongruent with
all that we have said before. As indicated by the phrase “accretional yes,” which
you use in the same letter, you clearly continue to believe in the present
moment as a space built upon the varied layers of history. But how is one to
understand the two concepts together?
Is fallow to be understood as a critique of the collective unwillingness
to, if you’ll allow me to push the metaphor, plant meaning within the
rhetorical soil? Are we just too
lazy to confront the invisible past? Or is what you call the “unavailable
heaven” the site of the unconscious, a space unavailable to the waking mind but
no less an influence? And if it is
the latter, how am I to understand what you call its annexation? Annexation is, of course, a loaded
term; both my agency and yours rest upon our ability to not merely apprehend
this space—which I cannot tell if I am even capable—but to plant within it the
concepts upon which our notes will signal. And so the image of a fallow,
unavailable field leaves me troubled.
Before I continue, let me say that I fear
the frustration these questions will raise in you, and I apologize in advance
for it. Know that they—and all my points—are not meant to manipulate your intent.
Neither are they meant to correct. Despite your accusations to the contrary, I have never told you so. Think of my responses as feeble
attempts to apprehend not a fallow space but, rather, the fecund space, rich
with both intention and meaning.
But if you still find yourself angered by
my questions, understand this: your frustration betrays the purpose of
deconstruction. For if we are to understand the potential of free jazz to be
that which ungirds the moment, then even it must be turned to dust at some
point. This may sound strange to a man trained in archeology, but the sort of sonic
sites mined in free jazz differ a great deal from those of archeological digs.
On their surface, they seem similar. The archeologist digs up the earth because
he or she hopes to uncover artifacts from an earlier period. In this sense, the
soil acts as a metaphor for all structures; it is both that with which we steady
ourselves and the substance that obscures what lies beneath. But unlike artifacts
dug up by archeologists, the disruption sought within free jazz is necessarily
ambiguous. It requires a rhetorical looseness that leaves all ideological
constructions vulnerable to future disassembly. Your concept of “graspability” seems
to admit as much. But I fear your
hesitation is not quite reflexive enough. The sort of deconstruction you claim to
support is not merely subversive, it is asymptotic. To look singularly backwards---to fix your construction—is not
to investigate the past but, rather, to become of it. It represents a death,
with the fixed structure acting as a tomb. One need only look at my initials
for evidence. When inverted, A.O.D. foretells the fate of those who attempt to
laminate any particular ideology or moment. And thus every strategy is only
liberating insomuch as it offers others the tools by which they can reassemble
the elements needed to include their voice. Risky as this is, even our own work
must be flung into dust—because, after all, it is not merely from dust to dust
in free jazz, but dust to dust and then dust again.
Yours sincerely,
A.O.D.
*For a more complete--and infinitely helpful--reading of Bedouin Hornbook, see Herman Beaver's "A Space We're All Immigrants From" Othering and Communitas in Nathaniel Mackey's Bedouin Hornbook." in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies
-Lokee
