Rasan Rolenkirk

I’ve been thinking about a concert I heard on the radio a couple years back. Rasan Rolenkirk in Germany, 1972, blowing mad notes out of a brass instrument. It’s 36 years since the recording, two years since I heard it for the first time, but the memory of one note has remained with me ever since. The song came to me from the tin space of public radio on a hot summer evening, the kind of hot when leather becomes magnetic. I was sitting in my car somewhere in the heartland, festooned with a misery of some trivial sort. His song shuffled between three distinct themes until he broke the cycle with a lone, mangled note that dripped from his trumpet like a string of spit, thin at places, thick at others, wavering like a nervous mother up at night. He held the note like a foot on mankind's neck until I could nearly envision the legs of convention thrust and shake before falling limp. Strip the biology of life to a single prehistoric sludge and squeeze it through your fingers. You’ll find the same note there, shrieking like a child blowing on a blade of grass. We who can hear this note are mad. It follows us around every corner, it intrudes upon the rhythm of our lives, it stalks and distracts us. It can be heard hissing along with the whip of our often recalcitrant tongues. It is a general’s call to arms. It is why painters paint, writers write, singers sing...

I can see myself grown old, sitting at the end of a table, white beard, red cheeks, bellowing with mirth while recounting the sordid tales of youth, laughing at children prancing around the table, stuffing myself with bread and game, whiskey and wine, grabbing at the soft rears of women with flaxen hair and aquiline features… The scene is set so vividly that I can smell the cork on the table, the musty breath of well-fed friends, I can hear the pots being set into the sink, I can feel the warmth of a loved-ones lips upon my neck like a warm, softened tamarind. This image wilts if the story changes only slightly. I do not see myself sitting there a banker, a merchant, a line cook, or yoga instructor. If I seem distant, or avoiding, it is because of this image, and my need for it to be real. Sorry babe, but I have to write something tonight.