TSK Ex. 18 and 19, you will become more aware of how references to the past and future locate your present experience… will help to develop an increased awareness of the structure of ordinary time. With sufficient practice, this awareness will emerge as more than simply an attentiveness on the part of your ‘self’. Instead, it can be a ‘knowing’ which is brought by ‘time’ and keeps abreast of ‘time’ even where the ‘self’ cannot do so. This ‘knowing’ can see how the ‘self’ is set up, moment by moment, and how its consolidating tendency narrows down the vastness of ‘time’.
Sitting calmly, but not quietly, listening to piano jazz trio, Les McCann, who sounds a little like Ramsey Lewis: funky riffs, killer rhythms, echoing under-base.
Search YouTube for: Les McCann – “Love For Sale”
In mental space with eyes closed, ‘minds-eye’ hears sound, timing, and is acutely aware of space. Space allows melodic relationships that are simply sensual as they pervade my being, and tingle the spine. The piece proceeds toward it’s intended future in a general way, but the journey is immediate, insistent, urgently counterpointed. I drift into thoughts of how I would play this part, how my fingers would tickle the keys into this funky dip, touch this dissonant note, and transition into full syncopated melodic counterpoint. I love my version existing in the listening space alongside of my imagined place. My foot can’t keep still, my head bobs in sync with the beat, I AM the beat in space, returning on point, insistent, willful. I am vital and alive, blissful and at home in my element.
…but then I remember I haven’t played the piano in thirty years. I realize the only place I can is in minds-eye listening to another’s genius. My experience of this funky jazz masterpiece of rhythm and blues where the bliss of what is, and the joy of what might be move in time, and I see I am that movement…I am time, and its knowing space.
Ha ha! Michael! What is my telling without drama!? :-) You compare me with Salieri! And here I was thinking of Mozart!! Loved your reference! You have me moving with legends. How am I to remain grounded?
D
Hi David,
I loved your sudden turn to a recognition that you have not played the piano in thirty years, put so dramatically at the end of your musical piece of writing about music.
I’m reminded of the film Amadeus where the lesser composer, Antonio Salieri, is riddled with envy for what he cannot do himself. Yet earlier in the film, Salieri’s appreciation for Mozart’s score, expressed in such beautiful language as to be of a piece with Mozart’s music, revealed an openness to beauty that could have been its own reward. If he had had your ability to appreciate being a movement in time and a knowing in space, he wouldn’t have ended his days a bitter old man in a nut house.
So keep raising your horn to the evening sky . . .
Michael