2.21.2004

watched documentary again last night - Let's Get Lost, about Chet Baker. Gifted like Mozart, a natural. wasted his talent; a prodigy who fed (the talent) (off others) like a worm. . . something uncanny about his music. Essence of "lovesickness". Actually, essence of music-sickness. A trumpet-Orpheus, coming up trumps. (Then I found out today my wife had a bunch of her father's old Gerry Mulligan quartet records from early 50s.) In another life I want to play trumpet. From an old poem (In RI):

         This is the voice of nobody, rambling, mumbling.
And it's hard to imagine the God of Descartes,
of the Deists,
a solitary supreme being, remote, Master
Clockmaker, Big Brother in the sky.
But language
is a joint project, a choral endeavor,
and if thinking is thinking with,
and perception
a common inheritance, and under the masks
of skin color and race and tribe flash
subtle unspoken
communications, and if nature displays
asymmetries of inconceivable
intricacy... then
it's not impossible thought might
outrun matter, and mind might be beyond
the visible frame,
and speech might be the mere flower
of reality, like a morning glory
or the trumpet
of an aging poet - the whole body becoming
a trumpet (wavering, fading) - the life
an indelible sign.



also watched vol. I of Russian epic version of "War & Peace". I'm starting to understand the Russian, hey. das vidanya.

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