Lost and Found:

The universal mind
That thinking left behind
When self became an ego
And inner eyes went blind.

The universal soul
That spirit can't control
When being became having
The part could not be whole.

by QMS, June 2015

Tomorrow is Still the Question!

Viva Ornette!  

March 9, 1930 – June 11, 2015

(Ornette Coleman on alto and soprano saxophone, Don Cherry on trumpet, Percy Heath and Red Mitchell on bass, and Shelly Manne, Recorded between January 16th and March 10th, 1959)

It is so immediately obvious that this music and these musicians lost nothing and gained so much by abandoning certain conventions and standards. You can hear the exuberance in everyone’s playing: the exuberance known only to those who collectively go where no collective has gone before. Here is a living, ongoing fusion of cutting-edge and tradition, common sense and avant garde, both essences at once, in sound and the silences in between.

 














We can reenact their almost subversive rhythm, melody and harmony, we can feel its promise of another music (and another world) in our heads and hearts. But if we try to copy them we can never have the same exuberance in our playing as in this album. For us the question is yesterday, while for them it was tomorrow. Until our life questions and musical questions together are of tomorrow (as theirs were), we will never be able to sound like this. Tomorrow is still the question. Ornette Coleman, Presente!

 

Before the Time is Over

Before the time is over

Clasp the chaos in the order;

Stretch the moment to its limit!

Become immortal within it!

Hear the birdsong go on forever!

Hear how the melody perishes never!

Build a kingdom, topple a kingdom!

Lose, regain, and practice freedom!

The time is almost over

But the moment has no border:

Now and then and forever,

Here and there and wherever,

You and me and whoever,

No one and everyone together.

by QMS, June 9, 2015 

Notes towards an Anarchist International

by Jax Cafark

Left Boredom, May 30, 2015, New York City.

What do we awaken to? 
100,000 people are gone from New Orleans.
We're losing land. There will be no 400th anniversary.
What is the real?
The real is the shock of something we didn't pay attention to,
when it takes away our families.

Protest is so masculine.
We need an ecofeminist movement within anarchism,
So we can actually give birth to something;
Regeneration of the human and natural community.

   
Learn something from people who have communal lives.
Can we learn?
Can we join together?
Can we begin to really practice solidarity?
The First International was a metaphysical breakthrough.

Uniting institutions, ideologies, imaginaries and ethos:
Positive envy for a charismatic movement:
It has to be so good that people feel bad to be left out.
Not short-term gratification, but the real joy of the long haul.
Like the Zapatistas, movements of the imagination:
Grassroots poetry and stories!

Our main focus: what are we creating?
It's simple.
People are born, they live, they need to eat and drink, they die,
They need to be taken care of.
Our system is callous and cruel to people.
If they like what you're doing, something's wrong.
We can do better. People will flock to it.

P.S. I continue to be amazed when you show me what “I” have said.  “I” is such a strange equivocation. This is another useful example of how “I” can “have” no ideas.  The parallax of perspective brings out much that “I” could never have imagined!