A Glimpse of What Matters

[Image: Jazz pianist Ellis Larkins. (I haven’t been able to track down the artist who created this drawing/painting/etching/whatever, but this seems based on the cover of Larkins’s album, A Smooth One. For one of his signature recordings, use the little audio-player thing just below this caption.]

From whiskey river:

For us there are always shackles, cages, constrictions. We are not pure beings, not whole selves; not animals, not gods. For all the purity of our aspirations, we live, as Kafka did, in the middle of things, in a room between other rooms, a self among other selves, in what literary types call a “liminal space.” Trapped between two realms, the earthly and the heavenly, we’re unable to fully inhabit, or escape, either one, but can only gesture longingly in both directions, flailing our useless limbs, like an upended beetle trying to get out of bed.

(Robert Cohen)

…and:

Elegy

What to do with this knowledge
that our living is not guaranteed?

Perhaps one day you touch the young branch
of something beautiful. & it grows & grows
despite your birthdays & the death certificate,
& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful
or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out
of your house, then, believing in this.
Nothing else matters.

All above us
is the kingdom of touching
of strangers & parrots,
some of them human,
some of them not human.

Listen to me. I am telling you
a true thing. This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching
the touches of the disappearing, things.

(Aracelis Girmay [source])

…and:

That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armor, and the naked child is flung out into the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells — he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realize you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenges, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

(Ted Hughes)

Not from whiskey river:

The Ferry

I’m jotting down these lines,
having borrowed a pen from a waitress
in this roadside restaurant. Three rusty pines
prop up the sky in the windows.
My soup gets cold, which implies

I’ll eat it cold. Soon I too
will leave a tip on the table, merge
into the beehive of travelers
and board one of the ferries,
where there’s always a line to the loo
and no one knows where the captain is.

Slightly seasick, I keep on writing
of the wind-rose and lobster traps,
seagulls, if any—and there always are.
Check the air and you’ll see them
above straw hats and caps.
The sun at noon glides like a monstrous star-

fish through clouds. Others drink iced tea,
training binoculars on a tugboat.
When I finish this letter, I’ll take a gulp
from the flask you gave me for the road
in days when I was too young to care about
those on the pier who waved goodbye.

I miss them now: cousins in linen dresses,
my mother, you, boys in light summer shirts.
Life is too long. The compass needle dances.
Everything passes by. The ferry passes
by ragged yellow shores.

(Katia Kapovich [source])

…and:

The dead will always outnumber the living.

Dead Americans, however, if all proceeds, will not outnumber living Americans until the year 2030, because the nation is young. Many of us will be among the dead then. Will we know or care, we who once owned the still bones under the quick ones, we who spin inside the planet with our heels in the air? The living might well seem foolishly self-important to us, and overexcited.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

Innocence

There is nothing more innocent
than the still-unformed creature I find beneath soil,
neither of us knowing what it will become
in the abundance of the planet.
It makes a living only by remaining still
in its niche.
One day it may struggle out of its tender
pearl of blind skin
with a wing or with vision
leaving behind the transparent.

I cover it again, keep laboring,
hands in earth, myself a singular body.
Watching things grow,
wondering how
a cut blade of grass knows
how to turn sharp again at the end.

This same growing must be myself,
not aware yet of what I will become
in my own fullness
inside this simple flesh.

(Linda Hogan [source])

…and:

…what really moves us in music is the vital sign of a human hand, in all its unsteady and broken grace. (Too much imperfection and it sounds like a madman playing; too little, and it sounds like a robot.) Ella singing Gershwin matters because Ella knows when to make the words warble, and Ellis Larkins knows when to make the keyboard sigh. The art is the perfected imperfection.

(Adam Gopnik [source])

______________

About the recording: Of this performance of “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” the jazzstandards.com site says:

The always-elegant pianist Larkins had a strong relationship with this song, and here we get to hear him stretch out, which he does with creativity and his usual sense of swing before handing the baton to bassist George DuVivier.

As the title for his album containing this song suggests: a smooth one, indeed.