Today is in early June. It’s been a couple weeks since I returned to Wisconsin, and months and months since I moved into my new body, my body that doesn’t have a living father. It seems like the same body. But it sees itself in more dimensions. Its mind is not separate, physically, from its matter. Its imagination is wider, its ambitions clarified. This mind-body (only adding the mind terminology because of tradition) sees itself as a vessel for life, as an observer of life, a rambling living thing. To be of life, to be inside life, and to be as life is a consciousness variety that seems difficult to access if one is not a tree or a whale. The trees know who they are and are god damned well pleased with themselves. Whales know who they are and find each other, touch each other, and sing to each other. To be such a way requires a faithful adherence to one’s identity and a complete release of one’s personhood; trees and whales have no ambitions to become people. And they’re smart. To become unpeople is a truly human objective. Not to remove one’s humanity, but to become above, below, and within human. It’s a lot less complicated when one loses something that one can never get back. In a lot of ways, maybe in every way, this book is a really long letter to my dad. It bounces around the way our conversations did. It meanders through assertions that it couldn’t possibly support with footnotes or logic, in the same way we both do and did. It believes in itself, it believes it is what it is. That’s something I learned from my pater, from the mustachioed dude who spent a lot of time on planes, from the guy who watched our house burn down and didn’t more than a beat and a half, changing the tune to match the situation. He didn’t know how to play an instrument (as far as I know) but he was the best jazz musician I’ve seen. I’d like to think the jazzy flavors that I like in life are epigenetically learned from this man who went away too soon.
Mutual comprehension is one of those goals that is necessary to mutually hold onto, while never expecting its achievement. I didn’t understand this until very recently. I’ve wanted to be understand, valued, respected as the full, complex, human thing I think I might be. But that’s unreasonable. For someone to want to understand is the thing. For that wanting to be mutual. And for the mechanisms for understanding to evolve to bring this unachievable goal closer and closer, while still infinitely far off.
Every genre is jazz, from poetry to history.
Roman Ryan 