Dispatch 003: THE OFF NOTE

Clear skies illuminate each note in my headphones of John Coltrane’s Psalm, A Love Supreme. Devoid of any misplacement, pure sound. I gaze towards the sun before I enter my home removing the engineered perfection from my ears. I thumb through my vinyl, finding the album. Let the record spin, I set the needle down, ease into the chocolate couch, deep enough to hug my frame. Warmth emanating from the tubes invites a hint more of life.

Settled, taken back years ago down the narrow steps sliding into Smalls Jazz Club a touch past midnight. An intimate crowd sits with the band. The drummer watching. The pianist, hands gliding over the keys, gentle and hard. The bassist, the rhythm in his body, in the pluck of his fingers. The saxophonist, eyes closed, playing a story to hear with all the senses.

Smoke lingers a touch below the ceiling. Our breath of the day, of the night, of the drink that tells of the past. The eternal heat radiating into a sweat that exhibits the life. Life in the soul that lies in quiet. Growth from a movement, from Him who lives within all.

The saxophonist, John felt the divine. His sketchpad on the circle of fifths. Patterns, connections, a network of notes seeking the heavens. Though found in the rest, the silence that speaks, the time when the notes are loudest.

The structure of life can be felt within the rhythm, within the shape of the chords, when an unexpected note arises, supremely balancing the shift in the melody. How life allows detours suited to the now, though they are ignored due to the prescribed notions of what life ought to offer. As if the off note that arrived precisely when demanded was not of the Divine.

We force a symmetrical life, a yin and a yang. Seeking beauty in the equality. The elegance of an equation where truth is held within a single statement. A relationship that expresses everything needed to be understood. Nothing more required. But the mind can stretch and bend and play to see its use elsewhere. Concepts connecting.

Though the world around remains a blur, shifting to a blindness. How the perception of evil lives in a spider who weaves her web in a tree destined for my destruction, but protects me from those within her reach. As if a compression algorithm has been applied to my thoughts.

Perhaps evil lies within that framework. Within the ninth circle of hell as Satan stands still. Nothing happening. For Lord Kelvin had formulated the theological concept of evil without knowing it.

Absolute zero!

Matter frozen in time, the essence of apathy born. No, the essence of any life, gone. If the ultimate good came from a nudge of pure movement, then evil has none. Cause and effect no longer present. The song ceases from existence.

An empty bottle in front of me left on the table without concern. A bottle brings me to the trash-covered streets of Kathmandu. A way of life, when everything has been extracted, when we can simply discard it back to the earth. As if Mother Nature would decompose anything we offered her into a rich, fertile soil.

I walked down those streets in the rain, my thoughts on the highest peaks found within the lowest of valleys. Streets with cars whose horns never let off. Two lanes to four lanes to a single lane. One-way roads that were not. People dispersed amongst the maze. The scent of spices unfamiliar to my senses comes from the stalls. Cows, sacred, walk freely next to me.

I came upon a child, not walking, not crawling, but a movement of his own. His legs had been severed months, perhaps years ago. An arm gone. A joint remains in his other arm. Do I pick him up to carry him where he needs to be? Removing any remaining dignity? Or will he notice my love that never existed in his world?

On the corner ahead, tarps form a wall and a roof to house him and the other children I saw. Their eyes never rise to mine, forever staring at the ground to which they have been discarded. The soul weeps. My eyes wander north.

Om mani padme hum.

The desolation of Lhasa, the monasteries, the myth of the shaolin monk whispering away as the prayer from my lips cannot do anything for the stillness that remains in these streets. I learned of their war, how soldiers would force children to watch as they cut the flesh of their parents a thousand times. Lingchi. Then douse salt on the open wounds. Screams to shatter any innocence free.

I breathe in the desolation that remains in the cold, for my lungs filter the evil that lives in the air. As if the blood that floods these lands grew the rice that nourished our souls at each meal.

But I sit. Nothing can be done. I fight for the passion to not run dry. For if it does, evil takes hold, time slows to a standstill and beauty and love vanish. I wait at a stop.

I board a small bus. A few are seated. We make stops to pick up fellow travelers on the way out of the city. Seats are full, but never full enough. A spot on the floor. A rack to hold onto on the roof. Always room for one more.

The dirt road out of the city, wide enough for a single vehicle, winds along the mountains. The driver and the horn are in sync around every curve. It sounds as if there is never a straight passage.

We stop when another approaches. Backing up, while the rear passenger taps the side to alert the driver when the edge of the cliff is near.

Hours pass. At one point, we disembark to push the bus through a dry riverbed. The weight of a never-full bus bottomed out along the rocks.

Eventually, my stop arrives. A small village with a few buildings. Nothing I can see in any direction. A two-hour hike awaits over the mountains that embrace these people. I sit for lunch. Grilled chicken, while the chickens who have yet to meet their fate are stacked next to my table.

Dusk under a cool sky approaches as I come upon the village. Clay homes sprinkled along the hills as the density ceases. I was welcomed into the home where I would stay. Two young boys who called me uncle. Their mother not much older than me. Her mother-in-law and her father-in-law, a witch doctor. The boy's father, long gone to Qatar, off seeking a better life for himself, never remembers his family.

We sat for dinner. Killed and broke down a chicken as a treat alongside the dal baht. Afterward, the witch doctor pulls an ember from the oven and places the red wood on top of his pipe. No. It is not a pipe nor a hookah but none of that matters.

He inhales, then passes to me. Smoke fills the room as I contemplate the essence of the moment. I fill my lungs, coughing, as the wood burns my throat, pulling another to ensure continued connection. A smile appears across his face. No words are needed, though no word could, as my tongue is as foreign as his.

Through the smoke of our lungs lies the thurible of the evening, to remind us of the Holy Ghost, even if he prays to Buddha, we recognize His ways are not our ways.

I sit in the home of a man who we would pass if elsewhere. I look down to remind myself of the child. He lives where the roads cannot reach, but where the unknown can be found. I sit watching him pray only for himself as the smoke settles in his hair, seeing an inner peace in a man ravaged by life.

I awake outside on the wooden frame under the terrace as the gongs across the valley rang as light rose above the peaks. Prayers for the day. I walked alongside the witch doctor through the village as he made his daily rounds. Each home offering rice wine. We sit and drink while he listens to everyone. A sacred connection with his people. He feels their bodies with eyes closed, ensuring the Buddha is within so they might continue on for another day.

Children, wondering who I am, watch. A young girl, snot forming at her nose, lips chapped, belly as if she had eaten too much, though I knew otherwise. Her hand reaches out, touching my ribs, feeling the skull with angel wings inked under the skin. Memento mori, she stares.

Days pass. Life remains. I sat on the floor in the corner, working the bamboo into a basket, when a shirtless man walks in. The witch doctor greeted him. They speak for a few minutes, then the witch doctor briefly goes into the other room, returning with a curved knife. A knife one would use to skin a larger animal, not found in these parts.

The man lay on the ground, the witch doctor over him, blade in hand. Prayers, drawls, the edge of the blade never leaving the man's skin. Grazing his forehead, chest, abdomen, thighs, and legs. Moving in an unfamiliar rhythm, as if their gods danced differently. I sit and watch, never a part of the ritual, but immersed in a holiness of that which I had no understanding of.

Each prayer, each rotation of the blade across the flesh, each beat of the heart left me in a trance. Then it ended. The man got up. Appearing healed, he left. The witch doctor pulls out his pipe. Smoke returns. The Holy Ghost.

My memory fades into the haze of the club. The saxophonist stands in silence. His eyes now open, while the brushes against the drum hold the rhythm. The bassist walks the line as the piano lies in. A note blown from the saxophonist. The climax, the ending. Sweat falling from the chin to the floor.

Splash.

My mind opens to the needle sliding off the record. Static noise.