by Rafi Zabor
The Bear listened.
The past, present and possible future shape of his solo was powerfully present to him—as dramatic structure, as pure form expressing itself in the
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air of time, as a shape assumed by his own inmost urging, for which even music was clumsy flesh: perhaps one day, if not tonight, he might play such a solo for real.
Was that still possible?
He felt his harmonic center of gravity shifting gradually, almost imperceptibly upward to the composition's last four bars, the promised land of B-flat major—but Trane had the resources to reach that journey's end, to satisfy the musical demands and live through all the meanings along the way—an eye of a needle too slender to admit a talking bear. But think, if you put everything you have into this music, whatever the terms of your personal farce and the limitations of the given night, who knows what might come into it and join the ride? Tonight could be the night, and if not, so what? The first step is as good as the last, and the end will come sometime. So what the hey, let's try.
Gusts of notes took off from him and whirled into the air, achieving a certain lyricism despite the tempo's unceasing rush. These fluttery, fanning arpeggiations—^when had he played so fast with such articulation? It was like watching a bird extend its wing to stretch it, detailing its feathers along the arc of its embodiment, and he thought in some surprise and perhaps impersonally: how beautiful you are. He sensed fresh air begin to reach him—scent of garden, waft of home—as if there might actually be an opportunity latent in the moment for him to come out of the endless maze of worry that was his solo, his hfe, his place in the world, his shot at love, and all the rest of the wellknown weary round, into free expanse, clear mind, fresh radiance.
Really?
He would find a way up or out if he could.
Raise me up into that music by which all things are changed.
And look there: exactly as if they'd read his mind, Garrett pushed his attack into the front of the beat, Linton stepped up the intensitv^ to match him and Rahim, hearing the moment take form, started laying those powerful two-handed block chords in no matter how much it hurt him.
Almost at once the Bear felt something larger descend to seize the reins. Here we go, he thought, but as he rose through notes as if through worlds, worlds as if through notes, and laid aside successive versions of himself as the air grew finer and the light more uncompromised, he neither saw offered, nor knew how to accomplish on his own, a fundamental annihilation from flesh and time entirely. Even though B-flat major was taking on the transcendent meanings Trane had assigned it, the Bear was still stuck inside the puppet, the cheap fur and glassy eyes, the essential incapacity.
He played a chorus of upward arpeggiating major and minor triads.
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closely bunched, and to his surprise a version of the world appeared almost cinematically before him in the air: a geometric knit of fields, alternately green and dun, set between encirclements of forest beneath a sky of mixed sun and cloud, and it occurred to him that it was a place it was his responsibility to protect, but you know? he'd never really done much in that line, hadn't loved it as he should, or seen it as it was. Looking through it at the people at their nightclub tables, seated as if at their stations of being in the grand scheme of things, points of candleflame marking out each position, he knew he hadn't given them their due either, and the Bear was surprised at the sudden intensity of love he felt for them, and for each mundane thread of which their threadbare mortal coils were spun. He would have liked to play better notes than these, or stand there a more amazing instance of the inexplicable, not for anyone in particular but just, you know, for love.
The Bear found himself playing a classically structured blues chorus and heard the band fall gratefully in behind him: cool. He played another: even cooler. And could have played a third it was such a music of celebration and regret. Come on, Bear, cop to it: whatever the intervening veils and thickness of disguise, whenever we do it real we do it for love, though, true, once you say the word you tend to lose it. Things go bust so easy in these parts.
Say this much: Iris.
Say too: gone.
That was the important thing in your life and you blew it.
He looked back over his shoulder at Hatwell but the pianist wasn't looking back. His face, grey with probable pain and dripping sweat, was bent to the keys, and what issued thence were empty fifths, so bare, so spare, in octaves: he's fading: he's blown it too, so young. Why are we so stupid to ourselves?
The Bear wished he could play an answer, but he was a specialist in error and regret. He was a mote in the world's eye. Nothing could be seen through him. He would just not get out of the way.
He started working his next chorus farther away from the changes, confusing the issue with chord substitutions and the occasional frank anomaly, but ended it with a well-turned resonant shining G: really put it up there as if he meant it: sounded pretty good: tone holding up, the rhythm section behind it like the heroes of perception they were, and there was even some applause, but the Bear knew in himself that the moment wasn't real.
Which made it all the more surprising that this was when things began to change. He couldn't have said whether it was the music's complex joy, his life's simple sorrows, or the tension between them, but his heart finally broke and something greater than he was began pouring through the gap.
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The Bear was unable, as he played, to prevent himself from seeing:
In both the nightclub and the represented patch of pastoral world superimposed upon it, he saw everything in the manifest order, all material things and beings, begin to rise free from imprisonment in condition; saw materiality's prayer outwear its given vehicles, watched notes give out, words give out, vision, ear and paw give out. Saw all he had ever seen or touched or thought or loved or tasted, expiring before him, streaming upward into the music from which their notes had first spun themselves into form, arpeggiating their way back to their hght of origin until lost in the shimmer through which they had entered the theater of being. He saw the tremulous rainbow, the iris tremoureux, whose deUcacy eased their passage between worlds. He tried to play this music of which all things were made and unmade but the notes weren't on the horn.
Briefly he saw Trane's well-remembered face: my friend.
Well of course: who else would be here with me?
Though truth was, it was hard to play in these conditions, since what he saw happening to the world was also happening to him. The things you had to put up with, when all you wanted was to play some jazz on the familiar cunx of light in E-flat thank you. It wasn't fair. Look: all the world's conceivable notes trying to burst in upon him and be played: all keys, all rhythms, all sounds clamoring for impossible simultaneity and the death of all condition. Look, he had to tell them, I'm in the middle of a chorus in front of a New York audience, backed by a handful of kids I have to keep an eye on all the time: they think I'm taking it too far already, and look what you're asking me to do. Wliat do you want me to say? Yes yes yes yes, Holy holy holy? It's not very New York. It's such bad form.
It was the Bear's last attempt at irony, and the music blew it away, its tempo gathering and the rush of his own ideas blasting him into regions unforeseen. He saw the treasured geometry of his lights and vitals, the wellscanned signature of his timeless self erased by waves of greater light, the vessel bursting. As the Bear sped to the limits of his own transcendent outline, he could discern details—gardens, geometries, geometric gardens, fine dust and starry singularities, all the declensions of Life into lives— rushing toward annihilation and embrace, their mayfly constructions swept away, since under these circumstances even metaphysical flesh was grass.
He felt the the wellknown fluttering veil at the entrance of his heart give way as a greater paw lifted it like a piece of pop-up tissue paper.
I don't believe this is ha—
The who
le world vanished. In fact all worlds vanished.
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The Bear was plucked out of existence like a cheap suit. He had once thought the cloth so finely woven.
Not just outside time and space, but blown clean out of individuation too.
Complete break.
Despite all his stoopid efforts to the contrary, he was gone.
Am I dying? Have I died? Did someone shoot me? Just look at this.
That sun. Those seas of Hght—ocean upon ocean of unconditioned being, seen as fire. These receding scrims of sky—at the center, a single, inconceivable sun. Life without limit. Sheer being, set free from all constriction. If you stand where you stand you will see what I am. Little One.
The light and warmth feel so good. What a relief.
That sim. The Bear had never seen, nor even nearly conceived, anything approaching such generosity. You could not say that the sun was the source of this vista, since everything was so beyond duality there was no possibiUty of particularized attribution, or that a distribution of that sun's Hght had placed these seas rank upon rank like a series of theatrical scrims in the sky; but that v/as how it seemed to be. Just as worlds by the miUion were perpetually bom and annihilated in those seas, rising and falling away like foam, so did these serial unscalable shores of light seem implicit in that central sun. Good grief, he realized, this was a conventionaHzation, a display. He was being given a show.
This was what he had been looking for all those years, room after room in the wide house of himself while hoping for a window or an exit, and had sought through the intervening veil of every passing form. But he had never himself existed and there had never been anything but this. Where was that cartoon bear? Vanished in the neverwas, drowned in what hand has not touched nor eye seen, ear heard, tongue spoken, mind conceived, heart encompassed nor love nor hope framed its image: the Bear had come home.
Who could have imagined how large joy is once you're cut loose from the farce of having to be someone? or dreamed life freed from the stricture of things and all conceptual limit? Rolling upon rolling sea of light without end, space not even the memory of being cramped, time less than a fidget. If it had been possible to laugh, he would have laughed—he laughed—and the laugh went generous into the oceans, those fugues of recirculation and embrace.
Notes were nothing. Each note was infinite. It made perfect sense.
Had the Bear still existed he would have laughed beyond being drunk on beauty and drowned in light. Had the Bear ever existed he would have plunged into these seas and tried out his stroke in them. Were he not himself these seas, and these seas him. It was so simple it was inconceivable not to have seen it all those blinkered bearshaped years. It was the basic fact of life
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and he'd walked right past it. How? How had he got his paw so painfully caught in so illusory a trap?
A press-roll broke behind him and a crash cymbal seared the sky.
What?
When the world reappeared and he found himself onstage in a New York nightclub, finishing up a four-bar phrase over pedal-point that he remembered starting an eternity, that is to say an eyeblink ago, he was unable to feel that things were substantially different from what they had been in that unbehevable serried sky. It's all here. Was and will be. What a hoot.
Since it was not his business to laugh, he continued to play: a series of choruses that didn't have a lot to do with the changes but weren't willfully outside them either: they pursued their proper business according to laws they brought into being as they went along, for the pure pleasure of invention—and wasn't it interesting to hear how the guys in the rhythm section responded, how they adapted each according to his character and the moment's possibility of sight? Ain't that just like life?
How much more should I play? he wondered.
As much as I like, was the answer.
Which was funny, because when you dropped back into the world and into yourself with it, full of indiscriminate love and good vibrations, everything was exactly as it had been and utterly transformed. It was to laugh. He was so blown out by radiance that all he could find to play was one high repeating torn and happy cry not quite at the top of the horn: as if to say YOU! YOU! YOU! or HA! HA! HA! or perhaps indicate that compared to infinite Being one note was about as good as a million of 'em so let's play one good one and call it fair enough. Musician: always an imperfect profession.
After two recapitulatory choruses of pretty swinging B-flat-minor blues he played a third that glossed the melody, then stepped back from the microphone and lowered his horn.
Whew, that was a long one. I feel good. Is everybody happy?
Nice big ovation there, a few kind folks leaping to their feet, a bunch of people yelling and carrying on. Wonder what they heard. I have no idea, but maybe it was good.
He pivoted and turned his bright, refreshed regard upon the band: each of the three bent to his instrument. Bostic was just coming off the drum-and-cymbal flourish that had capped the Bear's solo, the cymbals still loud enough so you couldn't hear anything else. It looked like Bobby Hatwell had begun a solo but it was hard to tell. Everyone was dripping sweat, and Garrett was bent in so intent an embrace with his instrument that the Bear couldn't see
45^ Rafi Zabor
whatever expression might be on his face. In any case Bostic finally consented to subside, the drummer peeping at the Bear as he went back into time over the top of his Istanbuls—he was using larger cymbals, darker in timbre than the high bright things he'd played on the tour, and they gave the Bear more of that dusk-bronze tone he wanted. How sharp-eared Linton was, to have known it: must remember to thank him. He seems to be working pretty hard and he looks kind of tired but he's still quite watchful and alert. Tight around the mouth, though, and dripping sweat.
What's Bobby Hatwell up to now that I can hear him?
The Bear listened to the beginnings of his solo, heard the pull of rhythm against rhythm within the phrasing—the music sleeking down into something leaner, more efficient and economical than it had been during the Bear's outing, and for a moment he felt an odd, hallucinatory shame for the disorder he'd unloosed upon an after all wiser world during his solo—Garrett's flex and bend of the beat running alongside the piano line from idea to idea beneath the fleetness of Linton's cymbal-time and, the Bear's odd flash of shame to one side, the music moved him. That is to say, he moved. A little Monkish cross-accented stumble to his left, an apparent flail of his arm into an interesting little gap between the beats, a pivot of his body on the floorboards for pleasure and, you know, things in general . . .
It took him longer than the audience to recognize what he was doing, took a long minute for him to reahze, as one of Harwell's choruses rose to a hint of chmax in its middle but then fell back into its long smooth stride, that he was doing something he would have sworn he would never do in front of an audience again on this side of the sky or any other: a shuttle of hips, a dip of shoulder, the feel of boards beneath his feet, the happiness of the wood. It was hard to believe it but he liked the way it went down. He was compelled to admit how pleasant and inevitable and unconflicted it seemed. There were an odd few hundred reasons for him to object, but he submitted his essential substance to none of them. The rules were blown.
The Bear did what he felt like doing.
He danced.
In the greenroom afterward the Bear encountered a small social problem: he couldn't stop laughing, and his tongue kept lolling uncouth out the side of his mouth as the laughter seized him but aw what the hell how can I help it? My manners were never much anyway. Always stood out in a crowd. Maybe what I need is another beer. Amazing how dehydrated I am, and all it was was a B-flat-minor blues.
Laughing, even though I know if I'd gone all the way through there
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wouldn't have been any sky imagery only light beyond form. Laughing, even though if I'd entered that world completely I wouldn't see
even this vestigial distinction between that world and this one here. Laughing, because it had to coimt as a good night anyway, all things tallied. There comes a time when even a Bear has to quit grumbling and give up the funk.
He rummaged among bottles and icewater in the galvanized tin tub beside the sofa he was overstressing with his weight. The Bridge seemed to specialize in the world's most obscure microbreweries: he paddled his paw through the jetsam until he came upon a bottle of Buzzard Breath, and he popped it open for a taste. And you know? It was good.
The Bear had a certain tendency, at the moment, to confuse himself with other people walking by, this world still so suffused with the nondifferentia-tion of the other that sometimes he couldn't make routine distinctions. Didn't we have a good time though? Hey guys—he either thought or said as Bostic, or himself, walked past to stir the contents of the beertub in a sort of cosmic ruminative gesture that for the moment he felt too lazy to decode in detail—didn't we? He squinied up his eyes for a clearer look around.
Rahim Bobby Hatw^ell sat in a straightbacked wooden chair, hands perched atop his walkingstick, face grey and glaring as he purged in large clear drops of perspiration his evident physical and perhaps after all moral pain. Garrett Church, plunged in the depths of a winged green armchair, held a bottle of beer between his knees w^hile he taped up the tips and sides of the fingers of his right hand with strips of surgical white adhesive: you could see fi-esh blood red on the windings. Linton had transferred his bottle of Brooklyn Brown Ale from his right hand to his left, and bent to show the Bear the tremor convulsing his cymbal hand, the fingers twitching inward toward the palm as his thumb spasmed in less regular rhythm side to side. "You played that solo for twenty motherfucking minutes," he told the Bear.