Equinox
More rain. Trane reeling up on a tape deck. Fluorescent lamplight stealing in through the hospital window. A sleepy soprano. Serene/unguent.
A spitter gargles beside the scaly black feet of Martha Collier as she sits in a wheelchair by the window. Off in the numinal. Staring outside at Ka the earth. Nut the sky. Ra creeping towards the womb of cosmic matter.
Night.
"Spit." Josaih puts the tip of the spitter between the cracked lips of the woman who'd once been his professor. Now sucking up phlegm which has been lodged in her chest since afternoon. "Drink." Putting a straw to her mouth. Waiting as a vanilla drink silts an itchy throat. "Priests would perform rites to the stars."
"What was that professor?"
"Priests. In Ancient Egypt. Scribes interpreting. Propitiations made in sacrifice for the safe return of Ra from the realm of the dead ... ...Ahhh, this doesn't interest you."
"Don't say that. It does. I'm just worried about the infection in your chest."
"What interests young people these days Josaih? The educational system is failing you. Churning you out like burgers at Drive thru. Leaves me ... curious."
"You should rest Professor."
"C'mon Josiah. Tell me ... honestly. What do you think of this music?"
"It's jazz. It's great. Miles n' those cats. But ... hip hops more my thing ... This sounds like ... too heady. Thoughts. You know ... I struggle to feel it."
"Take a deep breath."
"You're the one whose supposed to be doing the exercises."
"Just breathe ... o.k. there. Now get in touch with ... before the explosion which became the civil rights movement. Martin. Malcolm. Trane's prophetic unravelling of that consciousness."
There's a trigger pull of tippling notes as Josaih reaches up for a cloth. Then wipes spittle from a bottom lip.
"It was recorded after brothers had returned from fighting in the Second War. Returning with hopes for an integrated society. Only to find Charlie still ran the store. Which is where Trane is coming from here. If you've listened to earlier stuff. Like his playing on Kind of Blue. You can feel his expanding vocabulary after the years with Miles. After the tutelage with Monk. On his own. Stretching out the length of his solos at the clubs. "Explaining." 25 and 50- different ways. Leading to ... this track. Equinox. Night and day of equal length as the sun crosses the celestial equator."
They stare out the window. Josaih noting malaligned bone jutting up at Martha's shoulder. Il pleut and books with broken bindings lie in heaps beside their feet. Martha's crooked fingers reaching up to trace on the window ... a box on the inside of a circle.
"I wasn't born in a hospital you know. But in a village. Just some midwives there. My father waiting at the place of a friend for the news. Now ... I die in the company of machines. Respirators. Things with names I'm hard pressed to pronounce. Which is what saddens me now. Not dying. Just knowing the last think I'll be staring at is an I.V. drip in my hand."
"You're not dying."
"Homo sapiens have been making ... tools since the beginning. I'm not knocking the value of technical wizardry. But ... this whole thing ... the splitting of the atom to ... clone sheep. You end up with ..."
She begins to cough. But tired stomach muscles fail her. "Spitter." Josaih lifting the suctioning tube to her lips. "Clean it first."
"Clean?"
"Turn it up then stick the end in some water."
He does so to the sound of McCoy Tyner flipping the track wide open. His solo a loungy stroll through the high end of a piano. Right into a backache Josaih stretches out before tipping the hissing mouthpiece towards her lips.
"Are you ready for bed?"
"That word used to mean something else."
"Bed?"
"No. Technology. Like when Plato used the expression techne tou biou to describe the craft of life. Techne wasn't just mechanical skill and instruments but artful managing and careful shaping."
"You didn't say whether you're ready for bed."
"Not yet. I'm not ready yet. Not for bed. Not ... for death ... to be doomed to die in a sarcophagus filled with the treasure of our age. Machines to prolong life. To end life. To make it more efficient. Dying alone in among symbols of an Icarun flight too close to the sun."
"All right. You're dying. But you're not dying tonight. So why don't you climb into bed. Save this conversation for a time when your chest is clearer."
"Do you know much about alchemy?"
"Professor!"
"Alchemists in the Medieval Period understood their work as the numinal relating through the phenomenal. Their creation being a physical representation of an inner propensity towards individuation. Metal transmutating through forms of poison before reddening. Robedo. To gold."
Phlegm moves in lungs and ... an effort. Clearing. Clearing again. Before Josaih dips a sponge into a bowl of water which is dabbed onto lips.
"That moment of completion was Logos hermaphrodictally merging with its female counterpart - Eros. Like the circle which encloses the box I drew up on the window. Like Jung's opposite sexed soul image in the unconscious - this projection from within. Anima and Animus. Ones inner functions confronting and awakening sympathy with erotic feeling. Their unity a Hieros Gamos- a Sacred marriage between God and man."
"I'm going to try rubbing your feet a little," he interrupts. "Try to get some circulation happening."
"Eyebrow."Josaih scratches her eyebrow first before reaching down for toes. "It's our lack of connection to that cosmology that I'm dying in. Trinkets and gadgets and gizmos. Triumph of an Apollonian order over against the Dionysian. Disconnecting the natural and material from the mental and the spiritual. A connection I feel expressed in the music." She shrugs. Furrows retreating at her brow. Skin sagging onto bone.
He reaches for a remote control. Hits the button which will play the track over again.
NOTES:
The sound of falling rain/Equinox. Text projected onto a window/ rain streaks. Traffic. Etc. in the background.
Equinox PRIVATE - David Nandi Odhiambo -
NOTES
The sound of falling rain/Equinox.
Text projected onto a window/ rain streaks. Traffic. Etc. in the background.