If you stretched a piece of music – so to speak – as the tone drew away the color would fade.
You think that when there’s somethin that’s got you snakebit you can just walk off and forget it. The truth is it aint even following you. It’s waitin for you. It always will be.
I’d always had the idea that I didnt want to be found. That if you died and nobody knew about it that would be as close as you could get to never having been here in the first place.
So where does music come from?
We might have very different notions about the nature of the oncoming night. But as darkness descends does it matter?
It has no reference to anything other than itself. You can name the notes with the letters of the alphabet if you like but it doesnt change anything. Oddly, they are not abstractions. Is music as we know it complete? In what sense? Are there classes such as major and minor we’ve yet to discover?
You’re a pack of mudheaded bigots who loathe excellence on principle and though one might cordially wish you all in hell still you wont go.
The void has no stake in the world’s continuing existence. It’s home as well to countless millions of meteorites. Some of them enormous. Trundling across the blackness at forty miles a second. I think if there were anything to care it would have cared by now.
The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation. It’s sure to be interesting. When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.
The dream wakes us to tell us to remember. Maybe there’s nothing to be done. Maybe the question is whether the terror is a warning about the world or about ourselves. The night world from which you are brought upright in your bed gasping and sweating. Are you waking from something you have seen or from something that you are?
I suppose the suspicion is that our common past can only warrant a common future if we are willing to rid ourselves of the outliers.
What seems inconsequential to us by reason of usage is in fact the founding notion of civilization. Language, art, mathematics, everything. Ultimately the world itself and all in it.
And what do these categories signify? Where did they come from? What does it mean that they are two shades of blue? In my eyes. If music was here before we were, for whom was it here? Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music.
IN FOUR DAYS’ riding he crossed the Pecos at Iraan Texas and rode up out of the river breaks where the pumpjacks in the Yates Field ranged against the skyline rose and dipped like mechanical birds. Like great primitive birds welded up out of iron by hearsay in a land perhaps where such birds once had been.
Yeah, said the Kid. He dredged up his watch and checked the time. Maybe you’d better go eat. You need to keep your strength up if you aim to wrest the secrets of creation from the gods. They’re a testy lot by all accounts.
John Grady rode through the willows and down the arroyo following the occasional bare footprint in the rain spotted loam until he came upon Blevins crouched under the roots of a dead cottonwood in a caveout where the arroyo turned and fanned out onto the plain. He was naked save for an outsized pair of stained undershorts. What the hell are you doin? said John Grady. Blevins sat gripping his thin white shoulders in either hand. Just settin here, he said.
Everyone is born with the faculty to see the miraculous. You have to choose not to.
A week later I went on R and R and three weeks after that I was back in an AC-130 all strapped in and ready to die all over again.
The highballs are on me. As the giraffe said to the bartender.
Then all rode on and none looked back.