SETUP

       'I put away childish things.
It was for this I came to Riverside
And lived here for three years
Now coming to a not uncertain
Ending or flowering as some would call it'.
('Absolute Clearance', John Ashbery)

What happens in a poem? One view is that the poem is self-sufficient, free-standing. Yet it and the words in it are dependent on time. Maybe it is fair to say that a poem explores an inner world? Riverspell works, and I should also say plays, within this understanding. ‘River’ is the practical part, adhering to the world of convention. ‘Spell’ introduces an element of imagination: light moves like a tide over the rocky surface of the moon, as do words over their own adopted surfaces. In terms of structure, there are the usual ties (then now soon) and the fact that description is necessarily always of something in particular. But this is not all. I want to produce poems that, if not autonomous, nevertheless are not reducible to what is said.

PASSAGE1

Before the noisy outboards, smoother than escaping birds, kayakers glide the salty measure with paddles held high a moment before falling. Call the backdrop mist or fog, call it and the water motionless, within an ebbing tide. Above the fog loom boatsheds; and between them masts; otherwise gloam. At the low-tide mark, a portion of the striding oystercatcher's beak is forever caked in mud; while pied stilts parade daintily. Everything wants to nail to something solid, near the playhouse. This is a poem about non-attachment.

Up early, I see the moon unzip the sky from left to right. I gaze across the Basin to the Pukunui hills, still in silhouette. Things move away, no river, no syntax, no request. Nothing to recover.

Two years it takes for the tide to come in. A duck turns over pebbles one by one on the grassy bank. Near the pedestrian bridge, gulls and oystercatchers meander, then disperse. Two terns fuss atop poles that contain their nests. ‘A scene of bird life’ is a phenomenon each day in Whangārei. Jagging swallows; a still-life heron; pūkekos dragging their legs in flight over reclaimed Pohe island. Existence extends in increments. One catamaran bears the name ‘Mango’. Another, ‘Moon’, moors outside Brian’s Marina—if moor is the appropriate word? Alongside the wooden esplanade I examine the schooner Neorion, splendidly refurbished. Marina boats, like flowers or scattered birds, bear exotic names. Their flags drape bright colours at half-mast. Did I say ‘drape’ or ‘suspend’—to prevent something from falling?

Scattered gulls are a tangle of misspellings. Swallows, sparrows, singly or in small groups, commit minor errors—a blackbird?—an unlettered worm wriggling in the thrush's mouth, aghast. Entire meaning is jeopardised. A remote heron, paradise ducks their heads tucked onto their backs... another pair huddle together on the field. A semi-colon, where the sculpture fair is hosted. Tongues, our special tongues, active, voider.

Moon strolls over water. I wander over Te Matau a Pohe. Circles radiate where the tern falls suddenly to complete a kill. Sunlight sieves through the branches and leaves of the suspended pōhutukawa, more vibrant in space than matter. A dredge lumbers slowly upriver. The river and sky mimic each other, a world at its end. Dreading loss, a thrush sounds the alarm on top of the walkway lamppost—such song!

PASSAGE2

Eyelid or a cusp of ear, above me, seeing hearing, the moon—above the puzzled river. Meeting never ends in satiety. Ou-yang Hsiu is seen reading the poems of a friend now gone. The eyelid of the moon narrows on the water, while nearby a shag summersaults on landing.

The gulls seen on the surface are not seen in the sky. Ribbon shapes today and tomorrow an arrow forms. On the pole above the water, a proud gull bares a white chest. Shaken off, movement occurs like that of a hand or a torn piece of paper. Clouds are blown like ribbons and ribbons like clouds, settling eventually over spread water or wound round or over the hills. The unevenness of the hills surrounding the river remains uneven; ripples gradually flatten following the black shag’s departure: the day it takes for the moon to blink.

I daren’t prick a pin on the water. Is reflection enough to reprise a geisha girl or collapse an entire marquee at the sculpture fair? Who mentioned conjunction? Mister tern presses on, chin tucked. Say spoonbill. Say forevermore.



Words ripple over the larynx while a distinct ink marks paper—neither depth nor meaning stays unattended, for fear of being missed. Still, something has to give. Having obtained what we want from them, words let go, like leaves torn from trees, freed from thought. The tree doesn't exist to have leaves. And Kant confounds phrases like ‘an end in itself’.

What is the meaning of flax or tūī, or the first word ever—a sensible question to ask? It’s as if an impulse or urge arises from someplace else, someplace wordless. And what's this hankering to rest? Or let it simply tumble—into that salty ditch? Language hangs like a kite or a random piece of wind, a branch blown that does not know what blew it, or why it bears leaves, or why sitting on it is that particular tūī, bibbed, grateful and open-hearted. 

A dozen ducks inscribe radiating circles
 on the Hatea River. Two seabirds fly high and have nothing
to write on.

The bridge operator expresses concern at the low tide. Through the struts, he indicates a makeshift landing, where the maroon-coloured schooner is temporarily moored. A replacement motor will be delivered tomorrow and strapped to the side of the yacht’s hull, he explains. It will allow the boat to dawdle upriver for repair at the marina. A pencil line skims the river that the shag simultaneously draws and erases, fixing nothing to nothing to nothing.

 

Rosemary Waldrop’s Gap Gardening is real
 & Anne Lauterbach lauds
 whatever ‘neither fully informs nor fully entertains’.
 A glass
has one end open and another closed,
like an eye.
Kant speaks of sublimity that
 surpasses reason, fulfilling its 'own end’. One's theatre
 is one's place of abandonment.

PASSAGE3

The new sky is trimmed with yellow pink green—up to the moon and nearby Venus. Likewise, a calf, like the one we observed during our stay in Bodh Gaya at Ram Krishna’s guesthouse, its mother nearby, bound by the unseen. No rim, no tether, vaguely pink.

The blackbird is more weighty than the pōhutukawa branch
on which it is perched. The branch’s girth
 equals that of a human torso. All three
 so-named: blackbird, branch, torso.

In half-light, between the shimmering swimming pool and the flowing river, the flax stem (M. kōrari) leans over noiseless water and sports lifeless, crusty, brown, supercilious seedheads. Another head turns, intent, clumped, a torsoey, proud kōtare. Later in the day, rubbery clouds descend over an equally proud Hikurangi mountain, a different stillness, where we visit the rockman, seeking a sentry-pair of rocks to adorn the corners of our entranceway garden. Faraway Kōshō’s Antaiji! Faraway orientalism. Faraway, hojo doorstep.

Free as rocks. No 
final hardness, 
nothing to penetrate. In fact 
no respite. Drowning, as Shakespeare 
remarks, in water.

As with others, there are many things I have named the dangling orb other than ‘moon’: a vagrant, a piece of cheese, a rock, a triple goddess. Early morning it hovers imperious to peer down on me and the small still-lit town and hills of Whangārei, with distinct unconcern.    Supposed Watcher, itself a receptacle of light: nor am I the thing lit up; indifferent to naming, it strikes and illumines only the skin.



Above Parihaka’s silhouette or dawn or gods or goodwill wafts yellow or green or pink air, lessening as the eye lifts to the uppermost black obscurity of the sky. You gaze at the water hosting the mangroves beneath the wooden walkway and something else gazes back. On the surrounding water there is a passing of distinct whites and reds, reflecting early morning traffic descending Mair Park down the Hatea Drive. Are any two twosomes?

At my feet a thrush dances, indistinguishable from the dancing leaves. Irrespective of the choice given at the fork of Vale and Dundonald, one’s none the wiser and the destination’s unaltered. I draw two columns: one contains words and the other demarcates the sublime. Beneath them flickers a city of lights in fog. What decision is there to be made? The leafless oak is not required to be bare of leaves for birdsong to be heard. Even the birds hardly listen to themselves. Over there, a pair of shame-free thrushes sing in an imbroglio of time and leafless branches. Who is it that dances?

A single crane flaunts   A   T   L   A   S   in red neon above the Hundertwasser building site. Perception fades. Sitting above nothing (pl. lekta) we cast the spoken word.

The eyes wonder what to settle on. A number of ants move in a column over what remains of the apple core in the old breakfast bowl I use to collect food compost. I look out toward the Pukenui hills. Whether seeing can separate the bush and the clouds that settle on the bush is an open question. Given the idea of inclusion, realities of realities—oh, forget it! Singularity is an abstract noun, bound to dissipate. One stops clinging to clouds.

PASSAGE4

The reflection of the moving lights on the water is surprising and fascinates me. On a single surface, streaming both ways, they mimic the traffic—though each vehicle must arrive somewhere at some time, whereas these images vanish into thin air! The medium is its own cause, yet behind these glittering lights nobody sits or steers. Higher up, Parihaka beams a red aerial light, as if to announce something without something being there. It is a sign purporting  another sign, like the lights beneath my feet. Like the song of the thrush, whose notes continually surpass one another, unundoable in their displacement. No wonder John Keats sat at his table wonderstruck. It was a magical moment, hearing the nightingale’s notes deliver the secret of its performance. It was this that transfixed him.

Out of the dark mangrove swamp a sudden thrashing of wings is heard. Large plane leaves detach and flutter to the ground and new fruits duly appear. We call it fruits, adorning a single tree. One isn’t sure if this is correct because the very notion of efficient cause is disputed. Think of the young Gödel. We have no idea what we want out of the great pit. Words woo one another, as do leaves and fruit adorning the tree about which they otherwise remain ignorant. Early in the morning I pass Annette, dwelling in her house at Dundonald, longtime married to Ian, a policeman-boatie, now no more. In what context does that statement matter? As if proximity is the material fact. Now she sweeps the leaves that have fallen onto the roadside and path and trailing Zen steps that I descend to Vale, saying she is pleased enough to play her part. On the powerline above my head, a blackbird shuffles their tail feathers, remonstrating existence. Words, as much as we draw close to them, betray us. They are like leaves that randomly release from trees, never an essential part of anything. One doesn’t lose one’s memory but rather the route the memory had taken (P). It’s routes that matters.

I walk to Pac'nSave,
passing Jay’s Destination Dairy enroute,
and crossing the canopy bridge,
not quite knowing where I’ll end up.
Here at the corner.

She’d say ‘Whangārei’
and I'd connect with something
'in the air'. 
This evening swallows seem to short-circuit 
the air they occupy
and a delinquent fantail panics in response.

The two boys throw a red ball back and forth to each other on the driveway outside our house. In the west, tumbling into the Pukenui hills, is a ball of orange plasma. It is our conflated memory of the origin of the sun. Someone adjusts a lens and suddenly I blurt out, ‘I can see’.

The maximum amount of information in a region of space is proportional to the area of the region (Susskind). Redgreenblue provides us with a complete palette of colour, a primal multiplicity! I opt for black and white. I stand tall. Masque man.
(see Papañca!4, Riverspell2)

The active backdrop to the hills is white, the same colour as the moon that continues to ‘float’ in the sky. Something causes the river surface to ripple in irregular patterns as the water presses down from the Otuihau falls towards the bridge, whereupon it meets stranger water from the sea pushing back, as if uphill. Two waters merge into one. Even the collapse of streetlight and moonlight through the air onto the same pavement and roadway favours calescence. When I utter my phrases, each one puts out its hand to take another, a resounding chain loop. Each word pools in the ear, I see that. Perhaps that’s the reason why part of the sky falls straight through the moon? Some call it a map of the world, with its countries and cities and suburbs that claim space and assume distinct names? This morning the surrounding birdsong is irresistible and has me wanting to compose a book: Early Morning Birdsong on Whangārei Walks! I realise that the moon drifts above every house and moving object, including me and my steps. Strange surveillance I am subject to! When I greet Annette under a half-lit sky, we share an appreciation of ascending bird notes and the utter quiet they impart. Each of us rises at five. By seven, she is sweeping the roadside and I pass by her there. Among other things, I conflate her with: motion of the moon, motion of the water, scattered birdsong, the aura of surveillance.

PASSAGE5

Ruth enters the room with a handful of jonquils. Their scent fills the air. When we sit together, thoughts arise and retrace like fingers quickly lifting and returning to the palm. It is as if the mind echoes internally. The word ‘palm’ is exotic and may not to apply to the hand, which is adorned with four fingers and a thumb, a front and a back. Hence we say ‘hand of necessity’ rather than ‘palm of thought’. Neither saying clearly establishes what the other implies. I crisscross fingers and my thoughts. I crisscross the named streets of Whangārei, similarly waylaid. I find I traverse all streets, all avenues of mind, discovering what’s common and uncommon. It’s like a river that has anywhere to go yet settles on a particular riverbed, resting and held there. Water welcome anywhere has somewhere special to head, typically downhill. A boat wants a keel. This is a means of retaining buoyancy, of honouring the movement of time and the sea. Things turn one way then the other: a tide, a boat, a sail, an unwieldy rudder, sprays of water, a medley of thought. Ruth holds them in the palm of her hand and thus things arrive at the same place together.

Yesterday happens in this manner. Out walking, the softness of the sound of that word is hardly self-aware and reduces physical impact, if you consider them as complements. Similarly, the sound of the word ‘boardwalk’ suggests wood and board are synonymous and that walking shares something in common with the surfaces it happens to happen upon. Does walking require sequential footfall? Above the canopy of mangroves—above Parihaka with the resolute red and white lights like the crosses of Christ—the city below with teeming lights—a wash of light upward, as if (in the old language) being raises into being all the things that I observe: the trees, the sounds, the birds, Annette’s sweeping, the empty paths, the empty streets, the lights lining the street and others still shining in the windows of the town. The colour of things does not inhere in things. There is nothing to hold on to or resist, light and dark face off in a perversity of views. Among images, represented by the five fingers on each of my hands, we encounter holonomics: half plasma half hollowscape. I have heard thought and feelings are indistinguishable. That’s it! An image is a fist with bunched fingers, one and the next straightened and returned to the palm. The palm is thought’s possibility (so to speak) and each finger represents a single thought, a feeling, or a bodily sensation, arising and subsiding. It’s hard to know why we need abstract and concrete words, are they not of a kind? The mind and the palm are occupied with what occurs. We make of it another abstraction, citing khôra, as once I did, admiring as I still do William Carlos Williams, and Monsieur Derrida, another smart phantom. Yet even an abstraction is an assumption of something concrete that in the end is a mere finger tapping away.

A bright sunny day. What colour is sunny? Lining riverbank protrusions the kingfishers freshly knotted in blue, sport thick bodies. On the uppermost branch of the tree, a thrush swells to an immensity. When Karen and I return on the ‘paper-road’ from Jagger’s Camp (and the luminous surf), we observe a cloud of red-breasted swallows lift from the fence wire, circle the car, and return to the fenceline at a point further along. I think, this is my venturing consciousness along a notation of wire, ticking a limit.

A ribbon of fog wraps Parihaka, as if to render it a gift—honouring which gods? At the entranceway to the property are two gaunt lichen draped rocks, our male sentries. Unlike Susan’s at Matapouri, as she tells it, which wears sculpted on it the face of Maui, our two remain faceless facing each other. How quickly anything between a this and a that, as between our two carefully positioned rocks, or those strewn haphazardly on the riverbank, outside the Aquatic Centre, claims a centre.

PASSAGE6

Two black shadows representing birds emerge from under mangrove cover near the boardwalk. Something has frightened them. I am struck by the fact of the water’s quiet surrounding their rupture. Experience happens in the words, scrambling like the ducks to reestablish order. Frightened, tails wagging furiously, they skedaddle.

 

Basho sees a frog splash into a pond.
 Someone else has cut
 three large palm fronds above the fenceline
 & laid them
 down on the path, where
I step over them, bow, & pass,
on my way to visit Annette.

Verbosity provides a base. Helen Keller discovers language through examining water games: ‘Everything has a name’. ‘Percept’ and ‘concept’ derive from the same word ‘capture’. And concepts have a ground plan: ‘Name’s tremendous, powerful effect’, someone notable said. ‘Just as your liver works your conceptions work’, says another. Things often please and displease in equal measure.

The cloud threads might signal the starling murmuration that Garth and De introduced to us on Somerset Levels, near their home in Wells. Like a moving of spirit, three towers atop Parihaka mimic three Christian crosses, intimating suffering and redemption. Yet another thrush sits bawling on a jagged totara high above Dundonald, where I walk, oblivious to all except my own thoughts. Something else happens. From the startled pōhutukawa I pass hang sweetly scented jasmine in profusion, flooding the air that carries the bird’s equally besotted song. In summer it will be the turn of the brilliant blood-red flowers to immerse the eye. Curnow’s prospect of a devil-may-care slaughterhouse, with a young dancer, is nowhere yet to be seen or smelled.

The kererū occupies a position on the leafless oak. Neither it nor the oak utters words like ‘cathedral’ or ‘catapult’ (see etymological note above). Each stays put according to custom, singular enough. Simulate falls apart just beyond a word like stimulate, which beckons. Just wait. A slight convergence. Thus oak and kererū share a language. Enantiodromia (Gk)—rare portrayal?

Do we call this song heartfelt? Among a crisscross of quavers it faces the sun near the compass’s eastern point, where the thrush sits high above the half-salted water, heaving its breast, extended in gracious stupor. Such language!

PASSAGE7

A pair of snowdrops: from palm tree to totara spin two trailing similarly-lit bulbs—swift tūī alight tahi rua [more blanks] bodies resettling like cloth.

Snowdrops and an onionweed—I distinguish their smells and shapes, even though ontologically-speaking they are indistinguishable: white curios, they are joint prestidigitators of our grassy banks.

The Mimiwhangata puriri lowers to the angle of the prevailing wind, in a muted surrender. Likewise, shrubs and t-tree on the hill rump overlook washy Kupe Beach. In Whananaki—where Keats sat pondering pōhutukawas—their knees and elbows crouch near the sand, reaching after dispensing waves, in weirdest mimicry. Here, the water pushes and the pebbles broadcast the sound that ensues, rummagers playing on repeat. I forget to mention another auspicious thing I noted on arrival: a kingfisher with a belly as compact as its shoulders, baring a ‘heart of gold’ and a bright prognosis for the future.

Parihaka forgoes its base. A pūkeko stands on a single leg. A thrush tucks its wings in flight, squeezing through the vertical struts of the Aquatic Centre fence. Kowhais spin jujubes. A dove propels towards the power line, extending the arms of the paraclete. One does not see spring: one sees nasturtium and onion weed dominating the grassy bank.

Blackbirds at three points range over the lawn, adjusting the angles that separate and distinguish them, though the sum of the three is unchanging. As a fourth I approach, loosely, hardly a square.

Language embraces the moon and an emotional moon reciprocates, two e's: temperal orbis.

How notice water when you’re in it over your eyeballs? Mouth releases bubbles. One object attracts another and why doesn’t the moon fall? Standing on the viewing platform at Otuihau Falls, I contemplate water as it suddenly trips and flattens out below, like an upturned stage, where two young men practice twirling their taiaha. In this city, in life, things are pendicular and form an axis.

PASSAGE8                         

A signal requires a wave. When you greet me at the door, I am surprised, imagining Descartes doubled over. Everything—say, nature—is limitless. Necessity shapes a river tipping over a falls, as it falls—unravelling, moving right along. Such combines insatiability and excess, tenderest human handholders. Who regulates? Who tinkers at ‘things you have to ponder’, grasped by a taut fist and inevitably slipping through the fingers? Like atoms, like big emptiness. Like nexus, Whitehead’s own trusted tinkerer. Even a correct appearance is not enough to say one weathers well, including clouds over the river, despite what is gestured or bound in common. O my word, directions quickly give rise to derogation. Into the river channel, and out as far as Whangārei Heads. Out into the ocean. 

                                                                                           Flummoxed. 

Loopdeloop.   The whole cannot be grasped.   Parts of me are plainly erroneous, others erogenous—oops!— . 

Without explanation of the facts received. That is, we believe that seeing requires something seen and someone doing the seeing. As if the observed requires our you.   Deloopde.

‘Whangārei?’ I ask.
‘Me?’ the answer. ‘I stand between here and there’. How to place an exuberant thrush on a green upright post at the Baha’i Centre in Kensington when everything is so disjointed?

Where you clip (think of ock’s missing ‘r’)
 determines the function
and determination (of a statement).
   Arguably, the harm logic does
is unreckonable.  Nowhere else to go?

Individual points of view
 across divisions.
 Who wants dialogue (between us
 humans)?
 Dialogos (Gk). Really2?

PASSAGE9

Rain dissolves the instant it touches seawater at Mitimiti. Eased against the topology of Ralph Hotere’s gravesite, grey pebbles are arranged in an orb with white transect in the shape of a crucifix; plus a number plate. Others sites are contained within picket fences. Whose is art, dear dissolved Ralph? Whether lost in the round, or caught in a cross-hair, sorrowing occurs for every-thing that passes. Pax nations.

Daylight and the wind trusts various grasses to keep swaying, chanting. Through prickly purple bushes, Karen and I clamber up the steep incline, to where the famous MillHill chapel once stared unseeing beyond the obelisk that commemorates those killed under siege at Te Aupouri—sea-ward driven to escape. A clap for each girl and boy who fled the pa under cover of smoke. Ralph, how stage this ruckus?

The neighbour’s roofline catches
 the sun,
brightening the buttery beak of the blackbird,
and renders it
 a notch above the second.
 A balance between the eyes,
 braced for enterprise.

Wake. At Busby’s Point a fantail settles on my shoulder. Another, a container ship, settles on the shoulder of the sea, approaching the Hen and Chickens, splotchy islands. Smugglers Bay denotes treasure. I’m yours you’re mine, two kayaks, a launch afloat, another fluttering fantail occurs. The hebe's whitewashed, three bees in yellow rags scurry over the bright manuka flowers, the piety of clematis. Serene Emily Dickinson arrayed in white, an angel at a table. Two letters and a lone syllable. Terms and conditions apply: ‘And wore my last year’s gown—'

No questions today. The full moon shines. Leopardi’s Italian sentences are awash. Today I gaze across Takapuna Beach at Rangitoto. Each movement of the water is a small violence. What does it he intend? Messy punctuation? Eyelashes lacking faces? Faces lacking eyelashes? We hover at the sea shore. Hardly wavelets, little occurrences at the edge of the tide are featureless. To what do they call out? I ask the man beside me about his golden retriever that loves the sea as much as the land under their feet. He gazes steadfastly at me and the dog he follows.
[ditto]

The river's a drain, and still the shag owns it. You don’t get blacker than that blackbird on the grass. The smell of the mangroves congeals and overflows like water, self-bolstering. Like that, two dozen pairs of white-eyes loiter afar on the red bottlebrush awaiting the end of time.

Spoonbill stalks the drainpipe.   Swish—pause—swish—swish—.   Who suspends the world in a single observatory?

JAZZPASSAGE10

Ribald thrush. The two sections of its beak move energetically. The entire body throbs, jostling upon the pole. Ornette admonishes: ‘Music ain’t the alphabet’.

What is it with these guys? Shorter’s ‘potential not rehearsed’. Now he speaks of a lotus, boy’s a girl, two-in-one, surrounded in a pool of clear glassy water. We collapse onto our knees, swamped, ghosted, bent on the genuine. One with ‘NightDreamer’! Joseph Jarman goes zip. Music crashes. Stage’s zip gone! A box tips—birds spill—confounds th’air. Dizzy’s gargantuan cheeks, absolute floppers. Upraised. We are upraised.

My favourite Ornette. Compassing the past (say a Gower or a Langland) or anyplace else that exists to be remembered. 
He sits α and Ω at the piano with his plastic saxophone, white as ice, placed on the counter: ’I only think of the quality of what I’m doing’. No king, no queen. ‘What is exciting is the memory you bring’. 

To Jacques Derrida: ‘What’s got hold of you, you want somebody to pay you (for your soul)?’
Jacques: ‘It is an enigma [engine?] for me’. 
‘Do you ever ask yourself if the language you speak interferes with your Algerian self?’
‘Thinking and knowing doesn’t depend on a place of origin’.

Ornette: ‘I had wanted to call one of my pieces She was sleeping, dead, and wearing glasses in her coffin. I called it “Blind Date”’. 
‘So the choice of a title was not a choice of words but a reference to an experience?’ 
‘For reasons that I’m not sure of, I am convinced [... before becoming music] music was only a word’.

Cecil Taylor. C-sil. Dissolving inside the keys he smacks. Swiveling on the carpet in loose golf pants and a cap as big as Sara Vaughan’s throaty serenades, another billow. ‘The symbol equates to the sound’, says (Cecil) da codger.

My favourite blackbird
 is back.
 It lands on the railing
 of our wooden deck, beyond
 which blue sky
 spans the known world. It pares and cocks
 its tail.
 Pendicular. Chants forever departing
 on the swing.
1—2—3—4—

'No notes' Ayler, jazz history’s ‘coarse anomalous’ one. Ken Vandermark Peter Brötzmann, the late David S. Ware, under the kingsman’s touch: ‘We are the music we play’. ‘The word had came back’, chuckles Don Cherry.

‘To me music 
is everything one does’.

Figure this 
among the jazz greats?

‘Trane was the father. Pharaoh was the son. I was the Holy Ghost’: Ayler. ‘Is logic the lowest form of magic?’ (Singer Tailor Master Spy).

Refrain:                       Who  tells  a  human  how  to  exist?

Whotellsahumanhowtoexist?

α                                                                                                   Ω