Listening to Sun Ra, Birds Convene Outside My Window

A friend of mine likes to chide me

for what he calls my bourgeois proclivity

to listen only to music played in time.

So each time this afternoon I’ve put on

volume one of The Heliocentric Worlds

by Sun Ra, I’ve thought of that friend,

and wondered whether he would let this

qualify as sufficiently experimental,

though it isn’t the full recorded chaos

he often argues is the only moral

kind of music left. A silly pretense

of his, but one I can’t help sometimes

measuring myself against. And, I admit,

though there are stretches of incoherence

on this record that try my patience,

I can usually find a definite plotting,

particularly the sections where the bass

begins a walking line the other instruments

organize themselves around; making what

Sun Ra, in his own way chiding one critic’s

attempt to classify his compositions

as free jazz, more accurately dubbed

“phre” jazz: the ph signifying the definite

article, and though I don’t know how

in English to make that claim cohere,

it’s an assertion I’ll grant Sun Ra

not just because he may have meant

the definite article of some form of speech

not yet part of human understanding,

but also because it imbues everything

in his songs with purpose. There in the word,

Ra said, indicates the sun, so that his music

is the music of the sun. And really,

though I don’t hear on this record

the enveloping whiteout of sound

I think of when I try to imagine the music

of the sun, I appreciate his gesture

at something so large. And, in the most

chaotic moments, where I hear him

fumbling with the meter, when Sun Ra

lets out a too-quick flurry of notes and the band

behind him lets the song dissolve into

something like the noise of two dozen

pinched balloons deflating as they streak

across a room, I hear in it their collective

enthusiasm, all of them overeager to enjoy

at once all the notes in the song, which

validates the notion of this music as

a perpetual celebration of motion and being.

Perhaps that’s the thing that’s got

these two mottle-headed blackbirds

returning to my windowsill each time

I put the record on. Now, because I’ve made

my friend’s voice into one of the many critics

always running through my head, and so

clearly hear his claim to distrust something

as cogent as the pleasure one might take

from listening to arranged sound, I think how,

seeing this scene, my friend would say

that these two birds can’t be lingering here

to enjoy the songs with me; he’d claim how

they sometimes caw and flap around is proof

of agitation, their dancing a defense,

a sign they fear the source of such adamant,

inscrutable music, and he’d say that if there’s

a lesson to take from the nature these two birds

exemplify, it’s in the way they distrust art

like it’s some classic predatory foe. Granted,

I’ve stacked my lines against him; granted,

I’ve heard him sing “Daisy, Daisy, give me

your answer, do” to his daughter in perfect

tender pitch, and though when singing it

he did disrupt the tune’s rhythm, it wasn’t

to deconstruct the body of the song,

but so he and his girl could exchange

a bit of laughter. But I’d like to think

he would agree with how I’ve drawn him,

that this is an accurate description of how

he prefers to think about music, diminishing

the notion that art can provide joy,

calling me either wrong or naive

when I disagree. I can see him citing the way

I’ve made a prop of him here as proof

that coherence is all a false elaboration.

So what can I say to such a claim, other than

to admit I know no more than he does

how birds experience joy, and that

my pleasure in this scene comes as much

from listening to Sun Ra dismantling a melody

as it does from the wonder of these birds

returning to hop and sputter along my sill,

whether they gather here by chance, delight,

or to try to call the song to order.