Arts Mediocrity in a World of Change

Muse on Pegasus by Odilon Redon

"Rejoice in this: Seeds of futurity require the darkness within soil to dream."

Source: Nation of Change

_______

She attends a Sikh dance ceremony. Ladies in elaborate jewelry and glorious headdresses dance to an electro-pop Banghra. Three ladies stick out, as they wear differentiating clothing. One is fully covered, from head to toe in black, another appears only through the eyes, and yet another wears a colorful headscarf. This is unusual, as the Sikh women would not be known to wear Islamic hijab or burka coverings. To her, they seem as transformer figures.  

I am in a field that at once changes into a warehouse meant for music rehearsals. Standing across from a legendary local musician, a classical percussionist and kit drummer, he asks me to play drums. “Every American kid must have banged on a drumset, eh?” he asks. To which I respond, “Actually, my brother used to play all day long, I’d only listen. Now he’s graduated from Berklee!” “How do you think he did there” again, he interrogates softly. My mother appears as from nowhere, “He was kind of depressed, so he didn’t do as well as he wished.” My shape-shifting surroundings turn from warehouse to field, as I sit to a small drumset of snare, high-hat and ride, only when I sit down, the snare inches away, and the two cymbals spread far apart. I look down, and all I have for sticks are pieces of asparagus and cilantro, and thin pieces of balsa wood. I try to use this delicate craft wood and these flimsy vegetables, and the musician and teacher begins walking away. He looks at me, trying to navigate this moving drumset in an open field and simply tells me a story of decadence in New York, about a lesbian soiree that he once hosted at his house after a celebrity gig of some kind. 

________

with a most subtle whisper

behind a fantastic passion

eager to express unity

with perfect awe in a world that dreams

Up, a new way to be

for the moment

and its own living mystery,

questioning

“what is before?”

- excerpt from "all rivers have one source"

Skeletal Percussion under an Insurmountable Cliff in a Cairo-Western

Moses Striking Water from the Rock by Francesco Bacchiacca

I fail in my attempts to scale a sheer cliff face. The convex shaft of rock rises with crumbling shale and patches of vegetation. About 12 stories high, there a small plateau can be seen, whereupon a sparse array of pines and a wild horse appear at the glinting corner of my eye against the vertical immensity.

With extreme patience, I wait so long at the bottom, contemplating my journey up to the top of this rocky upshot plateau that my surroundings turn to nightfall. I am somewhere, it seems on a street corner of an old Western town mixed with a particular street corner in Zamalek, Cairo, Egypt where an old-fashioned, abandoned colonial bar still exists as the sole edifice of its kind across from the Iraqi embassy. It is nightfall and the dirt road is damp. Eyeing a nearby cat atop small, ramshackle homes and halfheartedly constructed projects, I shoe away stray dogs. I am playing an odd percussion instrument. With vertebrae, it seems of dog, horse and cat, in different sizes strung up, and hanging down off a piece of wood, I knock against them with the skull of a dog. The bone-knocking sound is then accompanied with a metallic cymbal-like object that I also strike against the differently-sized vertebrae hanging down in various lengths, to produce specific tones upon striking them. The sounds are enlightening, yet as the dog nearly kills a cat, attempting to chase it into certain death around my roofless quarters, I still yearn to rise with break of day and scale the rocky outcrop.