Mingus In Diaspora

You could say,

I suppose, that he ate his way out, like the prisoner who starts a tunnel with a spoon, or you could say he was one in whom nothing was lost, who took it all in, or that he was big as a bus.

He would say, and he did, in one of those blurred melismatic slaloms his sentences ran—for all the music was in his speech: swift switches of tempo, stop-time, double time (he could talk in 6/8), “I just ruined my body.” And there,

Exhibit A, it stood, that Parthenon of fat, the tenant voice lifted, as we say, since words are a weight, and music.

Silence is lighter than air, for the air we know rises but to the edge of the atmosphere.

You have to pick up The Bass, as Mingus called his, with audible capitals, and think of the slow years the wood spent as a tree, which might well have been enough for wood, and think of the skill the bassmaker carried without great thought of it from home to the shop and back for decades, and know what bassists before you have played, and know how much of this is stored in The Bass like energy in a spring and know how much you must coax out.

How easy it would be, instead, to pull a sword from a stone.

But what’s inside the bass wants out, the way one day you will.

Religious stories are rich in symmetry.

You must release as much of this hoard as you can, little by little, in perfect time, as the work of the body becomes a body of work.