It Might Get Messy

It Might Get Messy 

Dr. H, my surgeon, is a born teacher. Plus, he works hard at it. He almost always has one or two trainees at some level with him when he does exams, procedures, or surgery. A couple appointments ago, he had a visiting student from Mexico. While they are peering at the scope (via the little camera inserted via my nasal passages and sinuses), Dr. H says “see that hair? That’s because we used a chunk of his arm and chest to separate his airway from his esophagus.” And I’m thinkin’, “eeewww, no wonder my frickin’ throat feels funny”. Mind you, not funny Ha-Ha, funny like “really uncomfortable, as if there was a big patch of hair in my throat.” 

But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to talk about John Coltrane. By the early 60s, Coltrane had played in R&B and rock and roll bands, mastered the intricacies of bebop, and revolutionized music by modal improvisation vs. playing over chords as in bebop. Through the mid-60s, Coltrane started to see a completely different way to play music. Possibly it came to him via his studies of Asian and African musics, but I suspect he was heading in this direction anyway. Rather than building a musical piece from its parts—notes, rests, measures, sections—Coltrane saw music as a problem of holism. 

Western music by its very nature is a reductionist enterprise. The whole is constructed by pasting together individual components into a single piece. Coltrane eventually studied a book of “scales” by a guy named Slonimsky. The scales are in quotes because Slonimsky didn’t restrict himself to known or accepted scales—major, minor, and associated modes. Rather, he broke the musical staff into as many variations as mathematically possible—scales that were all thirds, all fourths, etc., scales defined by moving intervals, etc. Slonimsky showed Coltrane that you could get a whole by an infinite displacement of parts. At that point, Coltrane’s brain clicked. If he started from the whole and worked back to the parts, he would transform the quintessential reductionist enterprise into an innovative exercise in holism. So he hired Rashid Ali, a drummer who played all rhythms at once on his trap set. Then Coltrane essentially played all notes at once, or as close to superposed as possible (including true simultaneous notes via a technique called “polyphony”), and started to dissect away the chunks of sound he didn’t need to sculpt music that brings me personally closer to believing in an anthropomorphic god than anything else. 

The problem was having a band that could understand and play the completely new music methodology. Coltrane ended up a man in transition for a number of years as he eased out of his “classic quartet” (Elvin Jones on drums, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass) and into the future. He basically ended up with Ali, and often with other like-minded saxophonists. His anguish in shifting bands was a problem—Coltrane was loyal and genuinely loved his band. But his art conquered it all. He turned music on its head, changing an inherently reductionist process into a holistic enterprise. In addition to “Transitions”, he recorded and issued one album—Meditations—twice, once with the classic quartet, once in his new style. Coltrane changed music completely several times in the course of his short life. And he lived in transition.

And THAT’S why we’re here. Cancer—and its treatments and outcomes—are inherently transitional. I’m going on my fourth year of war with cancer, and things change for me in big ways or small ways every single day.

Presently, the transitions seem to be in my favor. After being sick with a virus and exhausted (but happy) from a trip to the beach, I’m feeling a lot better. Almost feeling good. Today I managed to walk and get some cool photos. If my transition keeps moving forward toward health, I’ll be a very happy transitional camper. 

We’ll see. I take a lot of meds, so I need to separate short-term medical outcomes from long-term changes in the status of my tumors and treatment-damaged tissues. But today I feel good. Very good. Almost, and if I believed in mysticism I wouldn’t say it out loud, recovering. 

My friends, a lot of my good feelings come directly from you. Your support keeps me going, makes it worth my while to fight while I can fight and however I need to fight. I remind you I love you all. I leave you with a few summer photos. And I remind you starting Sunday evening to check the whole weblog empire: http://docviper.livejournal.com/ ,  http://aehsfoundation.org/ (go to lower left and click through to weblog) http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ , and http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/. And don’t forget Dr. Crossley’s wild west weblog at daccrossley.typepad.com/. 

More photos to come for sure, now that you all have got me feeling this good!