happy birthday maru

in 2005 i began listening to 'a love supreme.' i listened to it every morning for about a year. i woke up to it and unwound to it. it took me hundreds of times to get anywhere with it, but i kept listening for the sole reason that i felt it, even if i couldn't describe it, or even hum more than a few parts. it was like a rough, undefined piece of clay in my heart. it is broken up into four parts: "acknowledgement" (which contains the mantra sung by coltrane himself), "resolution", "pursuance", and "psalm." it makes sense if you just let it resonate, stir, stew, swirl inside of you. if it gives you anything, you are lucky. i looked for its reasons and its inner workings, but over time i found that i was ill suited in that pursuit. cortazar wrote: "searching is my sign." i have long related, as i'm sure a lot of people with a fire in their belly have, or underfoot, giving wind. this unclear thing, in german, so says Ms. Girner, is called Sehnsucht. it's a 'longing' or an addiction to longing...while it is nebulous and nameless, it moves you, deeply. it affects those who go out every sunday morning, preying on something, but not sure what. it affects those who know that no one can hold you or keep you or match you, those who are silence and charm, those seeking to present themselves, for validation, or for immortality, or for ego's sake, those who struggle to shape their own truths, those faltering at faith's altar, those searching for that thing that breathes. you want it. you want to take it. you want.

i go out on sunday mornings and i seek it blindly. i go out on sunday mornings and i shake everything i know. i go out on sunday mornings informed solely by fantasies. i go out on sunday mornings and i write it notes thick with pomp and i stick them under clay pots along the farthest reaches of broadway. and i wish the thing well, that it may crest and peak into a beautiful, uproarious, salty swell...every sunday i've been molding it into the precise shape of my hands, so that no one else can ever use it, be it, or have it. this thing will mold me, too. take after take after take after take. and that's it. this is how one year dissolves into the next, with new acknowledgements, resolutions, and psalms...oiste? when i blew my candles out, i saw the face of a champion. may we all find what we deserve.

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