I’m on the horns of a dilemma, in these trumpeting times when heads are rolling, walls are falling, and any purse is more profit than a name. While the mighty (those who decree who shall be raised up) and the powerful (those who decree who shall be pelted down in the interest of buoyancy) tremble and dissemble or do the frenzied tail-chasing jab jab dance, I have more urgent matters to attend to.
I was, to borrow a few words from stern Tom, musing on the willful wreckage and casual carnage of our traditional and daily masquerade. It was a moon bright night, the stars and unknown solar systems blinking serenely above the battlefield, oblivious to the wails of the fallen, those piercing cries, which only caustic caimans listen to in anticipation of a tasty aperitif.
Without the gumption of a Galileo I could no more predict which of those lights would remain suspended overhead than Copernicus with an eyeful of cataract; nor could I tell when a meteor might play matador, or a shooting star enter the heavens in a blaze of glory only to drop and fizzle out like an unfinished story.
This earthly paradise nice too bad and sometimes when least expected natural justice reasserts itself and humans and their attendant wear-all wolverines are left wordless, falsehoods frozen on their stroke-stricken lips, transfixed for mortality into the grimaces of their hideous face below the mask.
Below the firefolk of the skies I wrestled with the riddle of all times: baroque or zen; rococo or the void; the florid or the plain; the laughter or the tears and pain. Should we walk the land silently in the sackcloths of our own ashes, heads bowed in the humility of shame, or cavort in all the colours of our collective madness railing against the misfortunes we have so carefully crafted? These are thorny issues, probably not as weighty as those which send migraines through the thickest of skulls now skulking behind high walls, in secret bank vaults or the loneliest corridors of power.
It was at precisely this point I wished I was a trumpeter. Maybe not like Joshua, because there’s no point blowing hard over the fallen citadel. No, I was contemplating something more in a Miles Davis impressionistic mode, or possibly the lugubrious screech of a Guajiro Mirabal. I thought of Shake Keane’s angel horn piercing the clouds of unknowing and uncaring, I heard Joe Herriot’s sax ramping, Luther Francois responding with the smoke of La Soufriere curling from his fingers.
And maybe it’s the horns and brass we’re missing from our music—those breathtaking blasts, sighs and whimpers, which come like extensions not only of our lungs or vocal chords but our beating hearts, the respiration of our swooning souls—not some tawdry tinkling brass, hollow vessel.
There’s a baroque majesty in the metallic shine of a brass section, sound and reflected light, the elaboration and embellishment of melodic theme. But then I think of bare minimalism, some of Satie’s ripples, the waves of Debussy’s eternal sea, Andean bamboo pipes whose echoes percolate from snowy passes to Pacific or Atlantic shores.
The minimal has its place, as Sam Beckett sardonically demonstrated—“Nothing to be done.” Less can be more: less words, less lies. The zen of mamaguy and the silly sheep is here right now in our soca, stripped of human rhythm suffocated by the mass produced riddums of machines, bereft of the breath of brass and wind, while we wine to the horn section and deafen ourselves with the hot winds of folly. Minimal could be fine but let’s not study extinctions in progress like the desertification of Hayti cheri, where now less than two per cent of land surface is forested.
Are we all becoming strippers, of one stripe or another? Strippers of trees, names, dignity, patrimony, even the elusive truth. When the final veil has been danced and we recoil from our own or others’ nakedness, what are we left with: the nada of annihilation, or the plenitude of a sounding void? Is it time to pause, off beat, between the minims, or during those unpredictable gaps where music gestates, and simply listen?
If less can’t work let’s try more; while rococo explodes, zazen implodes. Take it away I say, as our cacophonous band strikes up, each player trying to outdo the other in pure volume, entirely at harmony’s expense. Never mind we can’t hear ourselves think, can we feel ourselves breathing?