Grateful for so much as my history unfolds in reverse. Summer’s first journey to my birth mother’s home, with a family whom I’m so proud of with me. Upon our return my paternal side manifested. A grandfather in the Jim Crow South. Voice on the line who shared this family’s history of migration to the north, who invited me to holiday gatherings and told me, “You’re not alone in this.” Music and accomplishment has flowed through both sides. My genetically aspirational test results confirming Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica as ancestral places. And out of the sky, my long-failed career as a recording artist is suddenly not quite so failed (recall: history in reverse).
Category: Journal
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Up on Garrison Creek
July 2001, early morning. I pass through an intersection in a quiet neighbourhood and walk along a street that appears impossibly green, even for Toronto. As I look in all four directions I see no one else. The light is golden, the air still cool and I have a rare unobstructed view into the distances. I am about to begin a new chapter. There’s a lot of fear but this moment is breaking it up. This corner of stolen land or what is built upon it seems briefly mine.
November 2011, mid morning. I reach that same intersection in a busy neighbourhood, to view the apartment home that my wife, children and I will live in. The corner is bustling. Much has changed here in a decade, in my own life to an almost unfathomable degree. Spiritually it feels like coming home; mentally the years are a discarded anchor; physically this is only a brief resting place.
July 2013, late evening. I stand on our balcony, staring out at the intersection. Always that. The year is barely half over, and already it has seen almost as much change as the dozen just passed. Change that flows out of the natural course of things, and sudden, surprising change. It’s not all good, it just is. Love is more difficult, but deeper. Ideals are more firmly grounded, less rosy. But dreams don’t die.
Halfway mark, insha’Allah.
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Dream Scream
I am sitting at the top of a climbing apparatus like the ones in junior school gymnasiums, except it is “adult” size, putting me two stories above the floor without a crash mat. Beside me are two school crushes whom I haven’t seen in real or dream life or thought about since early adolescence. We are talking and they are making it seem as though I have been neglecting them all these decades or something like that. They are wearing flowing clothing, carefree and seemingly oblivious to our location . . .
I am on a campus, it is the present but the atmosphere in the college I’m in is decidedly 70s. People are engaged in reckless partying and wildly indulgent artistic endeavours with generous overlap between the two. I have combed out my afro to larger than life dimensions. It feels silky . . .
I am in a corporate meeting of entertainment executives and they are listening to my responses to mass sci-fi culture, as if I were an expert. Somehow this develops into me being chosen for a low orbit space mission. The feeling of being chosen for something apparently important is exhilarating . . .
I go for a long walk at night through the forests surrounding the campus and encounter shadowy beings who seem friendly and are trying to speak or sing to me through the trees. They are ethereal, and engaging in some kind of ritual dance, a quiet celebration . . .
I am sitting in a chair in my home with my back to the floor (like an astronaut in launch position), interacting with online friends about creative items we are posting. One of us – we don’t know – has presented some audio or graphic art that analysis has revealed to be of extraterrestrial origin or design (of course) . . .
I am so engrossed in this that I don’t notice two intruders have entered the room and are going through my equipment, taking technology. I want to confront them but it’s not clear whether I’m still on my back but I cannot move . . .
I begin to shout at them. They continue taking things and appear to be moving to subdue me. I shout “Help!” with a rasp in my voice. The shout wakes me, my wife, and our baby daughter (real life here). Luckily it is 6:30 a.m. The night is over and it’s exactly when we predicted the baby would wake anyway. Still.
Yeah, stuff is a little intense right now. Great and less so, overall intense. This dream seems a little run of the mill for me, except for the ending. Afterward, I had the desire to be held. Thing is, I’m not a hungry baby just waking up. Journalling seemed in order.
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Cage Centenary
August 12, 1992
(Journal entry. Transcription by Nehal El-Hadi, September 4, 2012)
John Cage died today at 79. I have somehow been expecting this news, as if it were confirmation that a certain era of progressiveness or revolution was truly now over. Cage, more than any other single figure in the arts, was one to bring about change in Western culture. And I wonder what effect his passing will have on art and music, if there is one to be felt.
He was a person who was mysterious to me, and I knew only some of his music and writings, but what I felt for him was something approaching worship. His ideas on music and life were some of the most profound I have yet encountered. I am sure that it will be many more years before I can really appreciate or understand the person or at least his ideas.
The music, however, has always communicated to me almost instantaneously. I am affected not merely on a cerebral or spiritual level, but on a highly instinctualized one. His prepared piano pieces give a feeling which is new and alien and perfectly “logical” at the same time. His reaffirmation of rhythm was so much more thorough and fundamental than either Stravinsky’s or Bartók’s. Through the innovation of prepared piano (even if it wasn’t his) and his writing for unique grouping of percussion, he reasserted the primitive in our music. This was long before rock ‘n’ roll or minimalism or new age; these genres owe a lot to him even if it has never been acknowledged.
His willingness to accept the total sound spectrum, including noise, as full of musical potential – not just tempered pitches and orchestral timbres – put Cage (along with Varése and Ives) at the forefront of musical innovation in this century. This was his gift to us: the whole world of sound.
The man who gave us “Music of Changes” realized there was inner music in outer silence, and inspired a whole community of performers to explore it. He legitimized his non-conformity.
I find it interesting that he eschewed conventional temporal and harmonic structures early on, and spent the rest of his life rediscovering the role of time in music, and later, the context of non-music.
I can think of no better goal than searching for the same answers that he was through his music – to learn about this world through art (not to exploit art for shallow ends). When we are confronted with silence in the not-too-distant future, after the media maelstrom, we will find Cage waiting, listening.
EL MAHBOOB 