August 11, 2013

Relapse or set-back, feeling worse today than I did yesterday. Maybe the antibiotic isn’t strong enough. Violent plumbing-related illness during the night. A friendly invitation to Sunday brunch presents, now, whole field of dilemmas. Cooked mightily yesterday (trying to use up the bounty of tomatoes), and now everything I cooked is sickening to me. But I did have a magnificent day at the studio, painting better–without the element of luck–than I have generally in the past.

Reading  E’s new book reminded me why I hate jazz. The his work possesses is the talent of improv, of riffing. It gives itself a theme or a character and goes to town on it, weaving poems out of streams of association. We all did this as eager undergraduates, but most of us let somebody beat it out of us. The streams of association almost never have a point or a revelation or a fresh understanding attached to them. They sound erudite but lack understanding of what to do with that erudition. He has the autodidact’s misunderstanding of what information is for. The work reminds me of those snakes that thrash their tails about in dry leaves so that they might be taken for rattlesnakes. This is also my feeling about jazz improv, which I never found the means to express before. It is a knot of associations, each knot like the other and leading not to a new thing but to a whole line of knots, the more repellent as they are the more showy or secret, almost always less interesting (because more ego-driven) than the original theme. This is also the difference between Baroque improvisation and jazz improvisation: one ornaments a thing or an idea, the other aggrandizes the improvisor. I hate jazz so much that perhaps I have misinterpreted it, but this explains my hatred even if it doesn’t justify it. E (deliberately, now that I think of it) lost his opportunity to learn what poetry is in order that he might start the sooner being taken for a poet. It is hard to condemn that very much, as it is the wasteful  camouflage of this whole age.

I’d gone to the café to write (thinking I might be inspired by that book, and be able to tell the author so), and was thwarted on all sides. Taking up all the terrace but my little corner was a boiling, stentorian, unfettered family, everyone screaming (literally) to be heard before her sister could be, shrilling out such a chorus of “Me! Mine! Mommy!” as I’ve never heard before Tiny feet were stamped, minds changed the tenth time at the ordering counter, plates grabbed and spilled, bodies hurled onto the ground in ecstasies of thwarted self-will.. There were three aggressive, selfish little girls and two boys apparently beaten into sullen submission on the periphery. Under the din, Mommy could be heard sometimes explaining the importance of making good decisions. The worst of the little girls would be sent to sit by herself in the car, but daddy would go immediately to comfort her and bring her back into the fold, where she would lose not one second in restarting the turmoil she had just been exiled for. No adult ever said “No” or “stop that.” Except once when the brattiest of them crashed against my table, demonstrating how far she wanted to get from her siblings. Mother said, “Don’t bother the nice man!”  The littler boy had gone to the toilet by himself, came back crying and wiping his eyes with his sleeve. His father said, “Did you go potty? Did you go potty? Did you go potty?” I swear to God he repeated it fourteen times in that public eating space AFTER I began counting. I butted in once and ventured that the little sparrow opening and closing her beak on the chair frame was remembering the time when she would do that and mother would be there to stuff a bug into it. She was being weaned, as it were. If I thought this would distract them, I was wrong. The wail went up immediately, the shrilling chorus of longing to take care of the little bird (which had long since flown away), and not as a family project either.. “I want to take care of it!. . . NO! I saw it first, I want to take care of it. . .” and so on until they packed into their station wagon and shuddered on. By then the Muse too had fled away.

I think now the extra bad feeling this morning is the fever breaking. I feel sweaty and ebullient. I have learned to recognize this as good.