"I wish we had joined the line for audacity."
"Sorry?" Michael asked, startled out of his train of thought. I looked
up from my glass.
"I wish we had joined the line for audacity."
"Yuh know Carl, repeating what you said when the context was inside your own brain aint helping." He laughs, and looks on expectantly. I scramble to corral my thoughts. We had just spent an hour shouting about Bach as bomb tunes - giggling at the Queen of Sheba chipping a la calypso, and how Handel’s messiah has been seen dancing to Kumina, Garifuna, Bele, and Tuk drum beats all through this archipelago. We even spared a thought for Orpheus in Gluck’s underworld, the furies now blue devils keeping biscuit-pan pace with harpsichord and pan. And still, I find we have this…hesitance to fully step into ourselves and how we present ourselves in these except - and even then sparingly - in our own space.
"Last year this time, I was in a twitter space and heard Ayrid give out a phrase: the colonial chaos of everyday life." I pause. A not-so-patient gesture is made, as my silence elongates.
"Sorry. I was just thinking about that phrase, the feeling of inadequacy that feels as ubiquitous as a steups inside the DNA of a Caribbean person. The way we just -" I gesture expansively, almost hitting the lady perched on the stool to my right " - Sorry milady - the way it takes everything just for us to accept we are good enough. That we are the standard and contribute enormously, or just that those contributions are even valid."
Michael, who has been steadily grinning, now shakes his head.
" I agree, and I have thoughts, but how you reach - I ain't asking that. Why we need audacity? Til I meet you I didn't think Jamaicans could be short of that." I look up from my phone, and wait for him to see it...and begin to accept the epiphany may be a lil farfetched.
"So I mean it's like this. You are passionate about performance practice right? And I am mad about history and also compositional and aesthetic intent. For all purposes, we share a lot of the same thoughts - and definitely read most of the research. So why do we feel the need to write a treatise when we bring things to a natural conclusion?"
"Because we need to come correc' when we open we mout' to say anything."
"Yes, and even when we do all that, do we find anything that says our instinct was ever wrong?"
" no, but that's how it's done."
"And i agree with that perception.”
"And even if they like it, even when it makes sense, they still going to look at you like you're crazy Carl. They still going to want someone with more sense to say it to them. You don't have sense yet. We don’t have sense yet"
He sips his now lukewarm Carib, grimacing. The cogs turn in my head that this should probably be a research paper...or at least a review of something.
There it goes, the need to make all exploration, all thoughts...
‘productive’
...whatever that means. I drain my rum and coke and signal for another. You not solving that equation. While the ten-dollars-a-shot white oak hasn't brought any more clarity 6 refills in...maybe you're on the cusp of something.
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