A Perfect Resonance

Coincidence isn’t a mystery to her.
The margin is always wide enough.
– Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives

A choice fantasy of mine is encountering, unbidden, in the wild, a being who is as into Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives as I am. I imagine there are a handful, like me, who were struck by the piece and listen to it, dozens of times, hundreds of times. The work is profoundly alive to my ears, to my heart. Lines from the work come to me, unbidden, in the wild, on a daily basis. It’s part of my personal corpus of scripture.

The briefest introduction: Perfect Lives is an Opera written for television in the early 80s. Each of the seven movements is a 30 minute episode, with commercial breaks, and deals with a particular set of themes. All of the themes interconnect. It is mostly spoken word, with looping percussion, vocals, and piano improvisation by the amazing “Blue” Gene Tyranny. Robert Ashley himself is the primary performer, a dreamy combination of Laurie Anderson and a Homeric Bard, weaving a nonlinear story about a robbery that stole nothing in a Midwestern town, studded with references from Joyce’s Ulysses, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and others. It’s a challenging work to enter. Engage at your own peril.

For her piano playing is the only mystery.
It’s so beautiful, and how they do it no one knows.
 – Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives

There is a concept in Zen of a “live word,” a saying that just cuts through and touches you. It’s like getting hit by lightning – a single hearing of a single phrase can crack you open, into something new.

For me, this quote is one – found in the seventh and final movement, “The Backyard (T’ Be Continued),” a dreamy reverie. When I first heard this, as a teenager, long before I knew what a live word was, it hit me. I was struck dead by this line, for it had revealed my deepest mystery.

For me, this _is_ the mystery: I do not know how I play the piano. It’s so beautiful, and how I do it, I know not.

I have never known. And since then, as I have been playing, I’ve been thinking about this lyric. And it has, like any good seed, taken root and grown in me.

What do you do in the presence of mastery that you cannot understand, but can experience?

My main artistic practice is an answer, and it is one of pure improvisation.

This is the score:

Listen. Breathe. Play.

No tempo, style, mood, timing, nothing. The only constraints are the instruments themselves – the body and the piano.

Every time I do this, music comes out, music that surprises me. It is never the same. Its source is unknown. It was not chosen. A structure emerges, themes, lines, entire worlds, like a plant growing from a seed. The grasping mind is incapable of holding the entirety of what is going on – when it tries, there is a collapse, like a surfer falling off a wave.

A constant flow, right on the edge of falling off. The only way to get through it is to enact the score – Listen. Breathe. Play.

This, for me, is pure embodied play. I do not need to understand this to surrender to it. The doing is the proof. My practice is to step into this place, as deeply as possible, and hold on until the wave subsides.

The deep teaching is this – the only way to truly hold on is not to ever hold on in the first place.

Sometimes I fall off – that’s part of the game. Take it lightly.

Dancing on the edge of expectation is a funny place, and when things almost come crashing down (or do!) – there arises a smile, an authentic laugh. If you can’t play with play, what can you play with?

She makes a double life.
She makes two from one and one.
She makes a perfect system every day.
She makes it work”
– Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives

In the spirit of integration, I have made it my practice to bring this excellent spirit of improvisation to every aspect of my life. It’s an impossible goal, for sure, and often the result is “I cannot bring the spirit of improvisation to this context right now.” Wipe out.

I have been practicing this for many years, now. More and more, I find myself in this stance, however imperfectly. And when I do – when the wave catches and holds – the entirety of the universe changes. It’s as if there’s an entirely new game being played. A more expansive, more resonant game, in exactly the way that surfing on a wave is more favorable than getting hit by a wave.

It’s just that way.