Composition 409 : "Long Hair"
written in the days following first hearing Anthony Braxton's "Composition 409" and Gary Snyder
reading his poem "Long Hair"
after walking alone all morning on trails in the park that meandered deep into the woods and along the river I came upon a crowd on the trail to the beach they talked excitedly and pointed through a thicket of thin-trunked spindly trees where a deer stood its flank towards us its head turned so wide eyed it could consider us maybe ten people stood on the asphalt trail pointing and exclaiming I grew concerned we made the deer nervous and turned to climb the steps up the tall escarpment I grew winded halfway up and flicked my long locks behind my shoulders to keep them out of my face panting my foot finally landed on flat ground just beyond the last step and just as it did the ground shuddered a strange light flashed as the brown-feathered hawks descended
before describing
what happened next
I must say
I felt no pain
the bloody dismemberment
I describe happened
in some strange dimension
within what we call
"reality"
that reveals more
than any sensations
or conceptions
a hawk perched
on my chest
talons digging
through shirt
into skin
it reared back
its head
eyes fierce
and jammed its
beak into my right eye
plucking it out
I felt no pain
so this was no normal
dismemberment
feeling blood flow
down my right cheek
I watched
with my left eye
as the hawk again
reared back
and crashed its open beak
into my left eye
again I felt no pain
the hawk said
"I'm chewing"
and I could not
see
a hawk landed
on my right shoulder
another on my left
I could feel each
poking at my ear canal
with some stick-like
tool finally
they jammed it in
piercing my ear drum
again I felt no pain
but sensed the blood
flowing down to my jaw
beneath my ears
I walked stumbling down the asphalt trail somehow I knew to keep moving some strange sense kept me on the trail going somehow straight I never stepped off the asphalt I had been reduced to pure nerve and my nerve said to keep moving in my blindness in my deafness when another hawk I could feel landed on my chest talons digging in again I sensed a strange swoop and it grabbed my nose in its beak and painlessly wrenched it off in this strange dismemberment beyond all usual bodies
perhaps
I smelled through blood
I saw through blood
I heard through blood
the hawks had eaten
me senseless
while walking on
I touched my hand
to my face
felt the sticky blood
in my beard
wondered if I were
ever to be whole
again
through the blood of my ears I could amazedly hear a creature who identified itself as a hawk say "we have eaten your senses you are in us now and see through us and hear through us and smell through us you are the hawk man though we are not hawks we are microbes gone grown up and all rogue in our roguishness we have bequeathed to you the possibility of new sight new hearing new smelling we have given you the possibility of a whole new world we do it for we do it just as the leaf falls from the tree for no reason and the water etches its way for no reason into granite over the eons"
the soles of my feet
touched asphalt
touched the pebbles there
felt the strange cracks
and crevices
I realized I had
lost my shoes on feet that
never came close
to veering off
the asphalt
guided by a strange sense
was it hawk sense
my long hair
I felt
brushed against
my shoulder blades
I touched my chest hair
realized I wore no
shirt
I felt for my shorts
and touched only skin
I realized
I was naked
bloody naked
eyeless earless and noseless
walking endlessly down
the asphalt
slowly I heard things other than the hawk voice I heard other birds twittering and tweeting I heard their foreign songs through the bloodied ears time suddenly slipped through an unknown knot and uncurled before me into the wormholes of spacetime and became a circle as I became a circle too all around me birds sang I heard them through the blood I heard their sound circling in spacetime I heard through death the death of my ears
walking on
I began to see pink
through the blood
all was tinted
pink
and the pink gave way
to a light green which
grew denser and thicker
and became a dark dark
luxuriant green
and I saw
finally
the leaves on the trees
through my blood eyes
through my hawk eyes
the leaves looked
a succulent green
a green more vivid
than any I had ever
seen before
a branch hung low
over the trail
as I ducked under it
I pulled off a leaf
stuck it in my mouth
and chewed away
I still had no nose
oh, the leaf tasted bitter but it was a good bitter it was the bitter of green the green I knew somehow somewhere I needed to have I chewed and chewed its bitterness and broke it to pieces in my mouth some of it spindly after swallowing some bits I realized I was a microbe gone grown up and gone all rogue in my roguishness I smelled manure from somewhere unknown and I knew I smelled it hawkish through the blood of some stylized dismemberment swallowing more bits of leaf
suddenly finding myself
naked and knee deep
in a roiling rapids
a fully dressed man
in waders and gloves
and big hat
fly fished
with his back
toward me
I called to him
he slowly turned
his head
under his hat
was a face
of white white
skull
I waded away
from him
and walked
down a beach
naked and bloody
and noseless
hearing rapids
crashing into rocks
wading back into the edge of the rapids I dunked my head of long hair into the cool water I heard underwater the gurgling of the rapids I wiped the caked blood from my jaws and cheeks and face after noticing my nose had returned and I was whole once again I lifted my wet hair out of the water and snapped my head back to make the hair slap against my shoulder blades I saw above me the mirage of blue that is the sky and realized it was my friend and that the trees too were my friends and they awaited patiently my words which came with no effort
"deathlife is
long hair yesterday
long hair today
long hair forevermore"
with that declaration
I realized the strange lesson
the brown-feathered hawks
had so brutally bequeathed me
that I am the living dead
that I see partly with dead cells
hear partly with dead cells
that I touch through layers
of dead skin cells
I know only through death
there is no life
there is no death
there is only lifedeath
inextricably one
like spacetime
sometimes
the only way to know
is to be shocked
into it
sometimes by brutality
itself
my words echoed back repeatedly between the mirage of sky and the rapids I waded in the words curled up and shot away in strange trajectories action at a distance and through knowledge denied to conventional cognition but open to the paradoxical ecstatic embrace that is total somatic response to the eternal flux of things and processes blending and dissolving bleeding and abling and disabling I sensed my words had arrived action at a distance through wormholes to odd nooks and crannies weird eddies both churning and turning gently to resound or peep as the case may be even unto parallel universes
in all these offbeat
faraway hidden places
these words resounded
LOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNGGGGGGGG
HAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
____________________
Freelancin’
after james “blood” ulmer’s album “freelancin’”
“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” —Chuang Tzu, (369 BC-286 BC)
the ghost of chuang tzu
came to me last night
to say the universe
is infinitely wise
wise beyond all
human conception of wisdom
the distance of alpha centauri
from earth
to respond to this wisdom
he said we must go local
attune ourselves to the polyrhythms there
hear the big beats and little beats
the shuffling and sharp ones
the brushed and sticked ones
and shake it on down
until the dirt feels the rub of the butt
chuang tzu told me that, yeah,
he’s a jazzer
he’s always been a jazzer
even in 300 BC China
because the blood reaches
back that far
reaches back and forward
in its electric shock
its electric shout
its shumble and stumble
chuang tzu said he came back
as charlie christian
who dazzled that benny goodman band
with electric Taoism
all the way to the coal-burning electric plants
of the 30s
and now chuang tzu is blood
and blood never ceases
the moon is blood
and the sun is blood
and every blade of grass stretches toward the sun
because of blood
the age of blood
knows no bounds
like
a photon traveling at the speed of light
knows no time
according to einstein
it travels space in no elapsed time
so to it there is no spacetime
all is absolutely here absolutely now
what is more real
light years based in human perception
or the perception of a photon
there is no reason
to put human perception
at any center
so time is not what we think
and photons scurry through blood
and the blood reaches forward
reaches backward
through time and culture
and this is how chuang tzu
is a ghost and not a ghost
is blood and not blood
is freelancin’ his way through
the collision of centuries
from the perspective of gluons
amid electric guitar buzz
skittering runs down the fretboard
we are always/
never
home
____________________________
Gary Snyder can be seen reading "Long Hair" at Wang Ping's YouTube Page.
Anthony Braxton's "Composition 409" is on this boxed set.
JeffersonHansen.com
