In the darkness he strokes my quivering brain till it spurts its neurotransmitters across my synaptic gaps in a cascade of embarrassed emotions. Left limp with the aftereffect of my cerebral climax I sit back and reflect on the poem I have just read, examining the mixed emotions, excitement, and embarrassment, anger. How can this man, long dead, reach out across time and have his way with me, then so callously toss me aside?

 

He is so Buddhist in his desire for the turning of the great wheel. His poems are the thousand sorrowful songs of life. Beneath many of them is an undertone of love long pent, and if we listen carefully we can hear him whispering, whispering, whispering from the past. It is I that am sorrowful now. For with his passing, with his embrace of sweet death, who will guide me now?

It is the experience of life that is the essence of great poetry. One must be there, to see it, feel it, taste it; there is no other way. Walt Whitman knew this and he feasted on all aspects of life. He drank deep from the well of knowledge and put it into words so that we too could partake of it. We are forever blessed for his sharing.

It is one of those strange and amazing facts of history, almost unbelievable, that the greatest technological achievement in human existence, that of time travel, was cracked by a twentieth century musician, not the technology of course, that didn’t come for another four hundred years, but the concept that rhythm is time, a concept so simple it lay unnoticed for a hundred years after Micky Hart first wrote about it. Historians still argue weather he had any conception of the great truth that was on the tip of his mind, his understanding that the manipulation of rhythm induced an altered time line awareness in the individual indicates that he may have, he understood that the universe was composed of the material manifestations of rhythms and that we are all embedded within this matrix, and that the universe as a consequence is time, he even knew that, and I quote him here, “The key to duplicating a rhythm apparently lies in our ability to measure the spaces between beats.” There it is, the very heart of time travel, the duplication of the exact rhythm of a point in time, a duplication that became possible with our ability to “. . .register the micro rhythms of our universe,” the theoretical kernel that powers the Hart Drive of today. So far the major difficulty encountered in time travel centers on the Law of Entrainment, as we have found, all too often the rhythm of different points in time are nearly the same, and when our current time is exposed to the induced rhythm within the Hart Drive, all too often an undesirable entrainment occurs, melding characteristics of both points in time together. Ah, I shall continue this in a moment, my quill point is getting dull and I need to sharpen another.

 

 

 

 

 

From the valleys and mountains that surround the great altiplano known as the Quad at UNCA, they came and gathered to accept the great gift of music from Alejandro Camara and Javier Mendoza. It was a gathering of many tribes. Two great tribes were there in large numbers, the tribe of the blankets, and the tribe of the aluminum lawn chairs, and in lesser numbers were the tribe of roller-blades and a single member of the tribe of the juggling pins. Coming together in peace and friendship to listen to the magic sounds from the Andean mountains.

As dogs bark at kids on roller-blades, and an old man juggles pins with a circle of children, a lone figure stands under a bright, yellow and white striped canopy. Alejandro Camara, one of the few charango masters in the world is playing a sad Spanish sounding song. My wife and I meander through the crowd and find a place to sit under a tree. As we settle in, a boy and girl about four years old go hopscotching by on the paving stone path that arcs through the grass.

Alejandro is having a Spanish “speak along” with the audience, as Javier Mendoza joins him on the stage. Together as the group Sayubu they bring the music of Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Argentina to this gathering. They begin to play a polka rhythm, and a man with shoulder length, bright iridescent red hair nods his head and taps a foot. Surprisingly the turquoise shirt compliments his hair color.

Between songs Alejandro tells stories of traveling and the humorous events surrounding his attempts to communicate with words only half remembered. Javier Mendoza sets his guitar aside and hangs a variety of flutes around his neck as Alejandro tells us their names. There is the Zampona, a flute of seven to seventeen pipes, and smaller flutes, the Quena, Tarka, and Pututu. These are often made from cow horns or hollow canes. There is a very large drum called a Bombo, and small percussion rattles made from goat hooves called chajchas. With these traditional instruments Sayubu brings the acoustic sounds of the Andean mountains to this place.

Getting the audience clapping in a particular rhythm he sings in Spanish. His whole body moves as he plays the twelve-string charango in a happy Bolivian rhythm, the Zampona’s haunting sound giving a sense of sadness to it all.

A father and his children play hide and seek in the crowd, a cell phone goes off, in the distance kids are sitting in trees, a flute warbles other worldly, a strangely pleasant juxtaposition. Playing in a flamenco style Alejandro dances, taking me back to sixteenth century Bolivia when the Spanish introduced guitars into the land. Accompanied by the haunting melodies of drum and flute, I am taken back to pre-colonial days by the playing of Javier Mendoza. I would almost swear that his quena flute is one made of human bone, it sounds so eerie.

A woman from India walks by, and as I listen to Chilean cuecas, Venezuelan joropos, Ecuadorian sanjuanitos, and Bolivian and Peruvian waynos I realize what a small world it is. Far from my birthplace in the Austrian Alps, I relax in the ancient mountains of Appalachia immersed in the music of the Andean peaks.

You whimpered as I approached,

squirming joyfully through the pain,

and licked your tears from my hand.

 

I stroked your head one last time,

put the gun to the back of your skull,

and pulled the trigger once.

 

Your pain filled eyes looked

confused, as the bullet rattled

around your brainpan.

 

Then you sighed one last time,

eyes brief with love,

finally at peace.

 

© Albert De Lorenzo 2002