I was privileged to see Louis Armstrong in concert in 1961, when I was seventeen years old. He kept a stack of white cloths in the grand piano on stage, and periodically pulled one out and wiped his face with it. The woman who sang with him was magnificently, radiantly black, as wide as she was tall, and her gown glittered when she moved. She danced, she sang that night as though the lightning of all that was sacred inhabited her. Mr. Armstrong’s playing was closer to revelation than anything I’d experienced in my young life until that one incredible evening. It wasn’t an experience one ever forgets, and I haven’t. People who like to think that the world can be reduced to their bloodless, misanthropic calculations really have no idea….
“People who like to think that the world can be reduced to their bloodless, misanthropic calculations really have no idea….”
It’s probably a blessing that they are clueless about how impoverished their life experience truly is, though I suspect some of the vitriol that seems to bubble up so effortlessly among them is due to the fact that at least some of them suspect.
Honestly, I don’t know. Much of what’s wrong with them once seemed obvious, and Lord knows I’ve held forth often enough with what may now prove to be ill-conceived theories about their motivations. The more I think about the whole mess these days though, the more it seems undeniable that this puzzling derangement, being both world-wide and cross-cultural in the broadest sense, is pointing to some progressive malfunction as inexorable, and as imperfectly understood, as the famously suicidal marches of our distant mammalian relatives the lemmings. Either that, or everything we’ve been so sure we knew about who we are and how we got here, has hitherto unplumbed lacunae in it somewhere that, despite all our rigorously due diligence, we’ve yet to discover. Given my age, the thought that we may never understand what the hell is going on feels uncomfortably like being packed off unshriven to my grave. Ugh!