I’ve been pacing the house trying to pinpoint the note you struck in me as I read your ‘improvisation.’
It’s the concept of ‘dynamic.’
Evolving community, jazz improvisation, life…as I see it, is a ‘dynamic.’ To put an ‘is’ to life is to objectify it, but necessarily so. For without the ‘is,’ there is no life.
‘Is’ gives us a reference. It is the objective part of reality: this ‘is’ a pen. We can label ‘is.’ We can’t label that instantaneous urge to play D at the very instant D is played; the ‘dynamic’ has no ‘is.’
‘Is,’ in effect, stops time. A thing that is, is that thing always, ‘across’ time, until it is not. A bit like being in or out of your ideal community. The community evolves. The membership evolves. The ‘notes’ the community play evolves. The ‘community’ is always the same community, until it’s not, as I’m the same ‘me’ until I’m not!
There is another element I’d like to add. The concept of experience.
In our millennias-long quest to objectify reality, parsing it to pieces, labeling it to death, I think we miss a great truth: ‘is’ itself is a dynamic. The ‘two’—the thing a thing ‘is,’ and the dynamic that urged ‘it’ to be the thing it is at the moment that it is (awkward to read!)—go hand in hand.
The ‘dynamic is…’
Is experience.
When we objectify our world we miss the existential truth that without the dynamic there is no world. Understanding that, we can say that interacting objects are not the basis of life. Experience is the basis. Experience is life.
And understanding that, we can say that experience (life) is communication.
Your mother’s last pen communicates ‘its’ existence to you, not via ‘itself,’ but via the entire improvisational context of ‘you’ at that moment (and every moment) that ‘it’ ‘exists’ for you.
The urge to play your D is the urge, via the entire improvisational context of ‘you’ at that moment, to communicate that D.
And that D (with the help of modern technology) we can ‘save’ via vinyl or digital, just as we can ‘save’ a pen via metal or plastic, or reed. That D now ‘is,’ just as the pen ‘is.’ To experience one we open eyes; to experience the other we open ears. Is there an existential difference?
Both pen and D exist for us as what they are to us, in relation to us, at that moment of experience, and the same for all who might experience them. Communication always exists as a moment-to-moment relationship. Same as life!
The D and the pen are expressions of life. They are life playing itself as we might play our record. And as the record is a communication of sound so life is a communication of…
That which experiences ‘it’!
Thanks for the read. Your thoughts like sparkling water are refreshing, and refreshed, send my thoughts off on travels of their own…
(I hope some of those thoughts, anyway, made sense. Our current ‘objective reality rules’ language conventions don’t mold well to some of the concepts.)
Take care!
