Toumani is absolutely correct that The Mandé Variations represents a new door opened for the kora, though it may not be starkly apparent to every listener in this age of the electric kora. I was particularly struck by the elegy "Ali Farka Toure." I am also enjoying the more classical album Kaira which carries the disclaimer: "This recording was made entirely live and unaccompanied by Toumani Diabate. There is no double-tracking and there is no accompaniment by another kora." Such praise.
Every word I set before me violates the thinking I want to venture, thinking I ask you to take up, knowing all too well that in asking I present you with a dilemma. To talk about loneliness is to disturb loneliness. Loneliness makes itself difficult to talk about, and, concomitantly, difficult to talk to. Its withdrawal is complete. Look. Already I've offended it. Is this reticence the only recourse loneliness has against thought? Is that the problem, that loneliness not only does not want to be spoken to, but that it does not want to be thought, not even in loneliness, not even in being desolate, in being able to say, in full conviction, "I am desolate." Cruel loneliness, because it's also the case that to be lonely is to be alone with one's thoughts.
I am forsaken. Wonder flees from the things of this world. The trees refuse understanding. Has wonder taken refuge in solitude? Solitude. I should hesitate to think that loneliness would be content to die in its own arms. Loneliness does not say "contentment" on its own. Yet neither does the impulse to fly into another's arms arise from loneliness alone. Such an impulse, with respect to loneliness, can only be a response. Loneliness doesn't do responses. Perhaps a philosophy of loneliness could only be like an invitation to a dialogue that couldn't be refused because it couldn't be responded to, an invitation as if from the dead.
Appearance disappears as appearance, disappearance behind disappearance. Loneliness remains as an unknown–I ask that we resist thinking that we know what the unknown represents in order to appreciate the dilemma of loneliness, to contemplate the dilemma of loneliness a moment, just one moment, before discussing it. When I say "I know loneliness" I believe I'm speaking honestly, yet at the moment I can honestly say "I don't know loneliness." It resists being known. Does it merely resist being the object of a thought, destined for speech, perhaps, or does it resist knowledge as such? It has occurred to me that loneliness can only be known as a dilemma. That would mean, however, that loneliness would be open to being philosophically exposed as a dilemma, as an unknown that we can all remember, despite its turning its back on discourse. Could loneliness then only be approachable through philosophy? Not all discourses are equal. It needs to be said. Does loneliness preliminarily refuse every discourse, or just those directed at it? Those directed at exposing it as contradiction? Those may be the least able to speak to loneliness. At the same time, I feel that its contradiction, its stance against saying, means something.
Loneliness has a world, but it is an empty world. I risk contradicting myself. "Loneliness doesn't do responses." Yet its inwardness could be seen as a response to an emptying of the world, or to another movement of discourse away from a soul that has the auxiliary effect–loneliness doesn't do auxiliary, it would isolated from that effect–of emptying the world. I hesitate to note a difference between the manifestation of loneliness and the existence of loneliness if only because, in setting loneliness before consciousness in this way, in treating it as a thing that can be set before us, we risk talking about something else instead of loneliness, risk losing it in our very approach. Nevertheless I feel that loneliness wants to be talked about, that perhaps its suppression holds a secret to centuries of conversation. I see symptoms of a desolation, symptoms of a powerful it, though I may perhaps find that loneliness is first experienced as happening to me, or even as purely me happening to me. (Apparently now I am speaking of events in an inner world, an inner stage, and yet....) How do I feel about being separated from loneliness? Do my feelings about loneliness matter if they appear in an empty world?
Fragile, irrefragable loneliness–I've already said too much.
Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan explains to Geoff Andrew the distance between the characters of Yusuf and Mahmut in his film Distant:
I think it's mostly because the photographer [Mahmut] is leading an intellectual life, along with his friends, and the values of intellectuals are different; their habits change a lot. Most people in Istanbul are not like this; they're more normal, they've come from the country. But intellectuals' habits are more problematic – especially when they earn money, they don't need other people. So you don't want anything from other people, and in return you don't give anything to people. It's as if you've earned the right not to help others, by having become economically strong enough not to need the help of others.
Is solitude enjoyable? Is it numbing? Does it make you feel lonely to contemplate the conditions of possibility of your solitude, or is this feeling too just an aspect of the intellectual habitus, another condition to be examined dispassionately? Is solitude about the desire to have a deeper core than the way you live, a kind of forgetting?
We often seek out what's visited upon us, as if nothing could stop us from seeking. Should we cherish this unstoppable yearning, or estrange ourseleves from it? Can we live paradoxically?
Some while ago Dylan Trigg asked whether it is possible to think of musical intervals independently of spatial extensions. The short answer is yes. The long answer is very long indeed, but perhaps not much of an answer. I've been giving a lot of thought to harmonic thinking, how not to do a phenomenology of listening (*cough* Don Ihde *cough*), but I simply cannot fathom what an originary way of listening would be. Morning. An ornithologist hears a robin doing something robins do while a musician hears a bb, or the 13th harmonic of a D, which is not quite equivalent, and cognitively quite a different sort of operation. A bad example perhaps because in my experience robins don't dig anything past the 12th harmonic, whereas many musicians, Giya Kancheli, for instance, evidently do. Digging beyond the 12th harmonic is going outside the received harmonic world of the twelve-tone equal temperament tuning system--Okay, so is the 11th, but we can always fudge it and, a la George Russell perhaps, play as if our tonal system were consistent with natural harmonics. Fudging it: that's the name of the game in harmonic systems. The blue sixth (13th harmonic) is well established in several musical traditions, but I don't know of any working musical system that fully comports with the harmonic series. You always have to bend a little somewhere. The fundamental question here for me is whether the kind of musical training that enables one to identify the 13th harmonic brings one closer to the original sonic phenomenon or whether the cultural mediation involved in producing trained musicians shapes the perception of sound to such a degree that the way musicians hear things ought not be understood as primary by any stretch. This is partially moot because I believe most musicians would recognize the ratio represented by the thirteenth harmonic as a blue sixth or blue thirteenth (i.e., thirteenth tone from the tonic) before they would recognize it as a harmonic. And yet....
Enough for now. In addition to robins, I've been listening to a lot of music, going through a new batch of cd's. In the Heart of the Moon by Touré and Diabaté is as good as it gets. I have listened to a bit of kora music, live and recorded. This recording is the best I've ever heard that instrument sound, as if your head were right there in the calabash. Both musicians use harmonics to great effect, and the recording seemingly captures it all. Wow.
The first time I really listened to pianist Hank Jones was on the album Sarala which featured a kora player by the name of Djely-Moussa Condé. There's some really fine music on that album, and the whole session is exemplary of what afrojazz fusion ought to be about. A couple of years of ago I bought a Hank Jones cd and was disappointed by the shabbiness of the recording and, frankly, the listlessness of Jones' playing. It was definitely not a date worth putting on record. But one bad session was not enough to sour me on Jones. I recently picked up Joyous Encounter from Joe Lovano featuring Hank Jones on the piano. I've long been a fan of Lovano's beefy tenor sound, so the only risk I saw here was that they would be playing standards and maybe not giving it their all. As it turns out, it's solid. There's plenty of energy on these cuts, and loveliness too.
I've been in awe of Gonzalo Rubalcaba since hearing him live, oh, about ten years ago. Now this is a cat that dwells in the upper harmonic realms. I've bought quite a few of his recordings, but I haven't appreciated them all equally. The ones I like most are like Diz, because Rubalcaba can be very moody, but he also really does have exquisite time, so I prefer to hear him being moody at a furious pace. Paseo finds him with Ignacio Berroa on drums. Man, this is good stuff.
Unless you're a hardcore monkophile or jazz historian you may not have heard of Elmo Hope. A long time ago I picked up Harold Land's The Fox because it featured Hope on piano, and they played several of his compositions. It was a little disappointing. (I've never quite dug that whole Westcoast scene.) However, recently I snagged a Bluenote reissue (limited edition connoisseur cd series) called Elmo Hope: Trio and Quintet. Oh, this is it. If you dig Herbie Nichols, Bud Powell and Monk, you have to listen to this.