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Edited on Tue Jun-22-04 09:58 PM by ChavezSpeakstheTruth
Well, instead of drinking this evening (Tuesdays are always a temptation - cause I usually go without on Monday then on Tuesday I feel like I "earned it") I thought I'd write. Since, when I don't drink I get a bit of insomnia, I think I'll go to the local coffee shop after and draw - start building my chops back up.
But, yes I though I'd write first, sort of like journaling, I suppose. They say its good for you.
A Love Supreme - Alice Coltrane said of the opening of Ascension "It's like a beautiful city, but we don't enter, because we have to go through the portals, the corridor, and then we reach the entranceway. When that chord hits, that E major, the doors start to open. That's what its like for me - the very first invitation to this place that's here, that's in our heart and spirit." - hmm, yeah, I like that. Seems to me like alot of what needs to happen with me. An opening, an exploring.
Coltrane means alot to me. The man drank very heavily and then became such a junky that Miles Davis kicked him out of the greatest jazz grouping of all time. If you look back at Trane's life, he always was driven by his art. He suffered the loss of a number of family members (including his Father) when he was at a formative age. But he always had his horn.
By comparison, I always had my pad and a pen in hand. I suffered the loss of my father through divorce (or abandonment, depending on your preference) and then my mother through addiction. She has come back, lately, though not fully.
Trane was known to be obsessive in practicing, dedicated totally. Even during his drinking days and later his junky days - he prefered his music to trying to pick up women and such. Inevitably the problem took over and he began to lose control.
I, now on day 2 of recovery am at a state where I have become separated from my art - from myself. I need to rediscover what lays in that inner city. I feel that through my last hidden pangs of self love and survival instinct, the gate has cracked open. Man there's sure a maze of corridors in there! Some are dark and strange sounds come from them. Others seem to hold light, somewhere deep in there.
If you listen to A Love Supreme you find a man encompassed by his art, flowing, flying, grinding, wailing. Wailing about love, passion, God, whatever you want to call it. A man who had recovered himself (not after enough damage had been done for him to die young - though sober). Just dive into Resolution and let it sweep you up into the stratosphere like a milkweed seed hitting all the frenetic updrafts and zephyrs and cool rythmic breezes until he gently lets you come to rest on the ground of Elvin Jones's quick flit of an ending break. That's the art of a man joyous to be free, at last.
Coltrane sweated withdrawals out locked up in a room in his mother's house. Cold Turkey. He never looked back. He became a man completely for his art and his love of God.
Now I'm not going to speak of my own religious/spiritual feelings here (I always get flamed) but I'll say that Coltrane's spirituality makes my own vibrate in resonance. I wish I could speak to the man. In some ways I feel like I can, like he's there, somewhere encouraging me saying: "Come on man, throw that bottle out and pick up that brush and paint. Even if you don't like it. It's time to do some woodshedding, my man!"
Well, with encouragement like that I have a place to start out from.
I think I'll step inside this first corridor. It's dark. If I take my pad and a pencil and go sit and do some street portraits of the kids that hang out in front of the coffee shop, lit up warm, streetlight orange in the haze of this humid night, then each line can be a step inward. Each observation can cast a little more light into that city. Each quickly grasped gesture is a new, shaky step, as I relearn to walk, relearn to draw. Relearn myself.
Thanks John, I love you, man!
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