I'm going to change a little bit and read some prose.
This from a broken bottle.
From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfumes still
Emanate, which, as Charles noted, is a series of fictions
that I've been writing for a while.
And they take the form of letters--
epistolary novels, I guess you'd call them.
And Bass Cathedral, the one I'm going to read from,
is the fourth in the series so far.
In this work, I write as a musician trying
to turn fantasy into fiction.
I write as a musician named "N."--
n, period.
And based in LA, late 70s, early 80s--
founder of a band called The Deconstructive Woodwind Chorus,
whose name changed to the Mystic Horn Society
and then changed again.
And the letters have to do with the music compositions.
They're often accompanied by a tape.
The letters are addressed to an angel.
They all begin, "dear angel of dust".
Dreams have a lot to do with them.
They're dream books, of sorts.
The very first letter begins with the dream in which--
N. Dreams that he is playing John Coltrane's tune
Naima on a bass clarinet.
No doubt, the bass clarinet that was
owned by Eric Dolphy that was given to John Coltrane
after Dolphy died by Dolphy's mother.
So there's a lot of that, and this is one
of those that dips into dream.
Or what might have been real as N. says,
he's not sure whether he dreamed it or not.
It's a long letter.
Some of the letters get to be very long,
and this one is too long to read in its entirety.
But I wanted to read the opening of it.
And then I wanted to read the last few pages, in which,
in the course of Bass Cathedral, N. is
playing more and more trumpet--
and having started off as mainly a reed player.
And they do a number that he takes a solo
on, and then the other members of the band solo.
And then he decides to take a second solo.
And I want to get to that second solo which ends the letter.
But let me begin as he does with telling
a bit about this incident that might have been a dream
and might not have been a dream.
"Dear angel of dust, my mother and everyone else in my family
insist it never happened.
So maybe it was a dream.
Or maybe it's something I hallucinated at that time
I had a serious fever when I was four.
Whether it was a stage, or a gymnasium floor, it was on,
I can't say.
People sat in seats, the rows of which
receded at a steep angle--
higher up as they went farther back.
They sat looking down at us.
I stood on the stage, or the gymnasium floor, a small boy--
three, perhaps four years old.
A tall man wearing a tuxedo stood on my left.
A woman in a one piece bathing suit stood on my right.
She was wearing high heels.
He wore a top hat.
He repeatedly called her his assistant,
his lovely assistant.
No action of her's is not introduced by him announcing,
his lovely assistant would now do this or that.
I stood on a stool I had been helped on to
by the two of them, each of them taking hold of one of my arms
just above the elbow.
The man in the tuxedo held a funnel and a glass of water--
the woman in the one piece bathing suit, a porcelain bowl.
My lovely assistant will now hold the bowl up
to the boy's ear, he announced.
And she did.
He asked me to tilt my head to the right, which I did.
Whereupon he put the tip of the funnel into my left ear
and proceeded to pour the water into it.
The water went through my head.
It went into my left ear and came out of my right,
slowing somewhat as it did so, but flowing through
nonetheless.
Trickling out of my right ear into the bowl the woman held.
The man in the tuxedo completely emptied the glass of water
into my ear.
Once all the water was in the bowl,
he said I could bring my head back up,
hold it straight again--
which I did.
I must have looked perplexed, alarmed,
at a loss as to how the water had gone through my head.
The audience applauded, and laughed as they applauded.
The joke, if there was a joke, I couldn't
help sensing was on me.
When the applause and laughter subsided,
I heard the sound of water, trickling water,
deep inside my ear--
the sound of a babbling brook almost.
An nsansic, mbiric, thumb pianistic sense
of ongoingness and flow, ictic insistence
to the n-th unremitting degree.
So it began, as far as I can remember.
So began the trickle I've heard ever since.
The sound of water that's never not there, and that came
into play, overt play, during the gig we played last night.
Yes, we at last got a gig after all these months.
The fellow who runs the Blue Light Lounge
called on Thursday.
And said, the band from Portland that
was scheduled to play Friday, Saturday, and Sunday,
couldn't make it, and asked if we could fill in.
Needless to say, we said yes.
We were about to burst with the new pieces we'd written,
and the call came out a minute too soon.
It was a gig which had its moments,
more than a few moments.
Many of these provided by the new pieces we played publicly
for the first time.
Book of Elysian Escort and Sekhet Aaru Strut.
The former, for example, offering among others,
what we've come to call an X-ray moment--
see-through amenities afforded by extreme self-inflection."