Off List: Riff to You Rift

I’ve reached the point where I cannot read another voyeuristic page of de Sade’s Justine, poor virtuous wretch who I’ve left in the clutches of diabolical Benedictine monks. I need a break and picked up two off list books at the library yesterday. I know one is a centuries old murder mystery suggested by Hammagrael; the other, once again dear blogger reader, fell into my consciousness from who know where.

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje is a short novel about Charles “Buddy” Bolden, a cornet player in New Orleans at the turn of the 20^th century who legend has it was the originator of jazz. And that is the challenge for Ondaatje: how to write a book about music, about what occurs in the mind of a mad genius, compounded by the fact that there are no recordings or authoritative sources of Bolden’s life.

Ondaatje is brilliant. The reader hears the story. The words ring of poetry as the fade from one speaker to another, like members in the band, each picking up the riff and taking it to new directions and circling back to pick up the original chords.
Within the first few pages, the author nails Bolden’s talents and demons: “… Unconcerned with the crack of the lip he threw out and held immense notes, could reach a force on the first note, that attacked the ear. He was obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth would drag a net of air in and dress it in notes and make it last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like air transformed into cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the color.’

Bolden is transported by performing, yet in fear of his listeners. He outshone other band members by breaking with beat and score. He often played in street parades where he recalls “… people would hear just the fragment I happened to be playing and it would fade as I went further down Canal. They would not be there to hear the end of the phrase … I wanted them to be able to come in where they pleased and leave when they pleased and somehow hear the germs of the start and all the possible endings at whatever point in the music that I reached them.” Bolden seems to me the equivalent of French Impressionists and as close to the edge of sanity as Van Gogh.

Ondaatje weaves Bolden’s New Orleans with Bellocq’s to reinforce innovative, pushing the envelop artists flirt with dementia (taking some liberties with Bellocq’s live as he goes along with the plot). Bolden sees himself prostituting his talents, being lamed and displaced like the lowest of Storyville whores.

Bolden’s friends want him to live for his musical talent and pursue him relentlessly whenever he retreats into the depressive cycle of his bipolar disorder. His mental diary of what it is like to be at Webb’s house, not capable of playing, disconnected with all his physical surroundings is eerie, Flaubert’s internal dialogues to their possessed nth degree.

When he returns to the city at their urgings and joins yet one more parade, he reaches ecstasy, finding a woman in the crowd who catches his music: “…For something’s fallen in my body and I can’t hear the music as I play it. The notes more often now. She hitting each note with her body before it is even out so I know what I do through her. God this is what I wanted to play for, if no one else I always guessed there would be this, this mirror somewhere … the music gets caught in her hair, this is what I wanted, always …” Shortly thereafter, a blood vessel bursts in Bolden’s neck.

I think of Reservation Blues and Robert Johnson, another mythical figure of Southern blues, and how Sherman Alexie, far removed from the culture makes the myth real and relevant. Ondaatje was born in Ceylon and migrated to Canada, an unlikely candidate to extol American lost history. He also wrote a book called The Complete Works of Billy the Kid, which unfortunately is not in my library system’s collection. I want to hear Ondaatje’s change of voice for a new story. I want it to sing like a cowboy on the range, explode like gunfire.