Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Many nights, I let music take me away; “away” here meaning both transport and submission. I listen mostly in my home office. Bona fide audiophiles, like my friend Garrett, would probably look on with pity at my ragtag system: a pair of Bose speakers, an aging Sony receiver, and a retro JVC turntable. His vacuum tube amps, Italian-made tower speakers, and carefully curated music collection is the epitome of sophisticated listening. In his extraordinary memoir, The Perfect Sound, he speaks of “soundstaging, air, and bloom.”

My audio system might not bloom, but it does emit a crisp sound, big enough that if I close my eyes, I’m suddenly in the recording studio, staring straight-faced into the seductive phrasing of a tenor saxophonist.

The phrase “take me away” sounds passive. But music requires work, requires paying attention to changes, knowing a passage is an improvisational homage to some legendary artist. I love keeping up with the fast thinking behind the notes like little sunbursts. The nuances, say, of a Thelonious Monk off-chord is an intentional discordant act which announces presence.

Today’s poem knows music is light that travels places. If we are lucky, we know not where we’re going, but are sure to arrive, by way of intricate progressions of sound, to ourselves.

Listening to Monk’s Misterioso I Remember Braiding My Sisters’ Hair
by Christopher Gilbert

What it’s all about is being
just beyond a man’s grasp,
which is a kind of consciousness
you can own, to get to 
be at a moment’s center
and let it keep on happening
knowing you don’t own it—

which is moving yourself close to, being
particular to that place. Like my two sisters
taking turns braiding each others’ hair—
hair growing against their weaving, they formed
a flow their hurt and grace could mean
as each took turns pulling the comb through
the other’s knots and their little Vaseline.

A knowing which makes the world
a continuity. As in your core
something calls to you 
at a distance which does not matter.
As in the world you will see yourself
listening to follow like water
following its wave to shore.

To arrive in your life you must
embrace this letting, letting
which is a match for the stream
through flowering field and the tall trees
wandered into and the river wearing beads
just ahead which you go into
further on because you can.

This going so is something else—the way
it flows into always something deeper and
over your head, a kid with “why” questions.
Your answer is a moment struggling to be 
more than itself, your straining for air
to have the chance to breathe it free.
It’s alive you’ve come to,

this coming into newness, this dis-
continuous mind in you looking up, finding
an otherness which trusts what you’ll become—
for me, my sisters once offering, 
“You want to learn to braid my hair.”
If we are blessed in this world
it is in feeling this—

i.e., there are circumstances
and you are asked to be
their member. Not owning but owning in—
a participation, like Monk’s implied words
reaching for their sentence: “If you can 
get to it. . . .”

“Listening to Monk's Mysterioso I Remember Braiding My Sisters' Hair” by Christopher Gilbert from TURNING INTO DWELLING © 2024 Christopher Gilbert. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press.