This is a piece I wrote about my experience visiting the Brooklyn Book Festival in 2009. I am reposting it now because the Brooklyn Book Festival 2023 is quickly approaching, and this piece gives a fascinating look back at the literary world fourteen years ago. Some of the people mentioned in the piece have gone on to become superstars, some have had dramatic reputation re-evaluations, some have since passed away, and some are still writing away, doing the work. Some of the cultural and media insights mentioned here are also of interest with the benefit of hindsight. I hope you enjoy!

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Downtown Brooklyn’s Court Square feels like a college campus on a sunny summer day. That’s where they hold the annual Brooklyn Book Festival, and yesterday I attended the fourth. Here’s how it works: there are nine stages, four of them are indoors, and require tickets. These can be picked up at one of the two outdoor ticket tents starting an hour before the event begins. The other stages are outdoors, and don’t require tickets. All of the events are free. They begin at 10 AM and go through 5 PM, each lasting about an hour. This limits the amount of events you can see, but it also makes it so everyone can be occupied most of the day, if they want to be.

My day began at 10 AM with a panel on the legacies of writers John Updike and David Foster Wallace. (a ticketed event in the courthouse.) The panel included Lev Grossman, Laura Miller and David Lipsky, moderated by David Ulin. It’s a lopsided panel, so it was a somewhat lopsided discussion: Laura Miller admitted she’s never actually read an Updike novel, she could never get through one; Lipsky is writing a book on David Foster Wallace, and so is probably more an authority on Wallace than Updike, and Grossman admitted that he had a leaning towards Wallace because they were of the same generation. All of which is fine and good, but since I also know Wallace better than Updike, it would have been refreshing to see someone who really knew their Updike and sympathized with him as a writer up there too. Don’t tell me they couldn’t find one. The glut of material about Updike that’s appeared since his death has been overwhelming. Library of America officially canonized him for Christ’s sake; there have to be writers or scholars or enthusiasts out there they could have found.

All the same, it was an interesting discussion. The discussion centered around whether DFW and Updike’s legacies lie in their non-fiction more than their fiction, if DFW attacking Updike, Roth and Mailer as the great white male narcissists was simply an example of takes-one-to-know-one, whether DFW’s oversized books (his unfinished work is supposed to clock in at 500,000 words) was just a fad of the 90’s and how well their work dates. Opinions on these issues were all over the map with the panelists; one thing I did like was Lev Grossman’s assertion that DFW was the first writer to write in the headvoice of his generation, in the way Salinger or Hemingway wrote in the headvoice of their generations. I felt the same thing reading him, but I read him right after college – and since my education was strictly classical, ending with the late 19th century, I take my opinion with a grain of salt on this matter. Later on, when I read McInerney or even Henry Miller, I think I recognized my headvoice in their work too; maybe not. DFW was hyper-intellectual in a way those writers aren’t; before DFW I probably would have said Proust came closest to my headvoice, so maybe I can think of DFW like a Proust meets Henry Miller. Ha!

As for Updike, like I said, I wish he got more representation. I took away from the discussion that Updike’s best novels were the Rabbit novels (heard that before already anyway) – that he’s a virtuosic writer (heard that too) – and that he talked about things in his books that no one talked about in American popular culture. I’ll have to take their word for that, as I wasn’t around when he first started writing. What I did find interesting was Lipsky’s argument that books don’t date in the way that film or television dates. A book from the 19th century about the 19th century can still feel vital; movies from the 30’s and 40’s feel dated already. That’s true and not true, and too general a statement to stand as an argument. Too many people still think Gone With the Wind is a masterpiece (I think it’s garbage, personally – talk about dated!) – and certain writers, like Thackeray, are just not interesting to your contemporary reader unless they’re in Academia.

During the Q & A period, a 20-something Asian lady with a thick Italian accent stood up. She turned out to be the Italian translator of DFW’s works. She talked about how important he was to young Italian readers; did the Kurt Cobain compare and everything.  That was really fascinating. Her question for the panelists was why they thought he got such a reaction from foreign readers, but I think she was more making a point than asking a question.

I ducked outside and grabbed tickets for the next event in the courthouse right at the end of the discussion. This was Paula Fox, Steven Millhauser, Bradford Morrow and Roxana Robinson giving readings from their work, moderated by Harold Augenbraum. The topic was “The Limits of Fiction” – how far can a writer tests a reader’s patience with suspension of disbelief. I attended this one mostly for Millhauser, whose work I’ve admired for a while. He just gets better over the years, taking seemingly normal stories and stretching them into surrealist fiction. Paula Fox started first, but she didn’t read anything. She simply related an anecdote about her youth, going to Columbia. I’d like to say more about it, but I kinda lunched out for a while. (it happens) Steven Millhauser read next. He read a passage from his novel Martin Dressler. It was well written – very rhythmic and descriptive writing about going from Manhattan to Brooklyn in the late 19th century, before the bridges were built. It felt very Saul Bellows, the prose style, but I’m not sure how it related to the theme, except that he was writing about someone much different than himself. After that he read a (non)poem called “He Takes, She Takes” – a rhythmic piece about the division of material in a breakup. It was light and funny, and almost “music” as the next reader, Bradfard Morrow called it. Morrow read from the opening of his newest book (I think) – which began, “All wars begin with music” – and went into a story from the perspective of a young Asian girl who loses her father in a war, and her relationship with music, war and death. Very Proustian stuff. Up until this point most of the writing had been really writerly: you know that feeling you get, when someone switches from talking about stuff to “reading” – no one would talk like this, you think, but everyone (tries) to write like it. I don’t know how I feel about this kind of writing. I do enough of it, Lord knows, but I feel like writerly writing comes off as inauthentic when it’s read aloud. Even compared to stagey slam stuff. Unless there’s a music to the language that can take the place of the material, I’d rather just hear a voice if you’re a writer trying to inhabit a character; not a writer. Roxana Robinson managed to avoid that. She read from her novel, “Cost,” and she read from the perspective of a 22 year old junkie. I was skeptical; what could this late-middle-aged lady know about the desperation of a 22 year old heroin addict? Well, turns out she nailed it. It was by far the most gripping reading of the panel. The language was fresh, sharp, and felt real, the way the Wire feels real. I’ve never heard of Robinson before, but she managed to interest me in her work with her reading.

At noon I walked down the block to St. Francis College, where Tao-Lin, Yona Zeldis McDonough, Ben Marcus and Nicholson Baker were giving readings about the Surreal Real. I got there halfway into Tao-Lin’s reading. He was very shy and awkward as a reader; completely monotone, almost like his prose bored him, a young guy. I can’t say much about the work itself, because I missed the first half of it – seemed to be a story about two student writers chatting on GMail. I’m not really sure. But he published his stories on a blog, a publisher (Meliville House) came across it, asked him for more, and published a book of the kid’s stories. So one wonders about literature: what’s the difference between writing to be read aloud, and writing to be read on the page; can the two be separated, is language aspires in some sense to music? I don’t know. Tao-Lin was just a bad performer all around. He even answered his questions in monotone, and I don’t know if that was his normal way, nervousness or an affectation.

McDonough read about an ATM machine that kept giving money, another writer I kinda lunched out on. It was refreshing to hear her read like a professional, though, after Tao-Lin’s performance. She was followed by Nicholson Baker, who easily gave the best reading of the panel. He prefaced his reading describing how he wrote this (his latest) book. The book is about a poet who sits around the house ruminating on poetry, and Baker (who has a Santa Claus beard already) said he grew his beard out larger than usual, sat around the house, at the bottom of the stairs, in the study, wherever, recording himself becoming Paul Chowder (the narrator of his novel). His reading reflected how comfortable in the character. His first reading was about meeting Edgar Allen Poe in a laundromat, the second about how he slept with his books. Nothing happened in any of them. It doesn’t matter. I probably could have listened to him read the whole damn novel, it was that interesting and entertaining.

Ben Marcus read last. I expected something a little more experimental from him, but I was disappointed by what felt like just another commonplace opening to a domestic novel. I probably missed something, but I expected a lot from Marcus- (I wanted to study under him at Columbia for a while) but I don’t know if it was reading style, me being a space cadet or what, I wasn’t impressed with it.  This may be just me, too, but it seemed like all the panelists looked nonplussed by all the other readers here. Marcus is especially funny looking, with big black frame glasses, a bald head, and something like an overall Devo-esque thing going on. Heh.

At one o’clock I wandered around a bit, enjoying some time outside, until I ended up listening to the second half of a half-hour panel about Washington Irving’s Diedrich Knickerbocker, fictional historian of New York. This was given by Philip Lopate and Elizabeth Bradley, but I wasn’t there long enough to take anything in. I realized that I was missing Colson Whitehead reading in the courtroom, so I left just before it ended, hurried across campus – er, the plaza, grabbed a ticket for the courtroom and walked in halfway through a panel of readings by Matthew Aaron Goodman, H.M. Naqvi, Achy Obejas and of course, Colson Whitehead. They were reading works that emphasized how cultural enclaves define and challenge writers. I walked in in the middle of Naqvi’s reading – a young, serious middle eastern man whose prose sounded fantastic. Too bad I missed too much of it to say anything more about it. I missed Goodman’s reading altogether. Achy Obejas read about children in Cuba during a crucial historical moment for the country and characters, and Whitehead read from Sag Harbor, his new novel about going to Sag Harbor as a kid. Whitehead was the most dynamic of the readers. He actually got up, walked up to the podium and put a little (not much) performance into his reading – just hand gestures, asides, etc… It really made the reading come alive, but I felt it was unfair to the other, lesser known writers. Or maybe they should have thought of doing that themselves. I don’t know. Most disappointing was there was no discussion and no moderator, as far as I could tell. After having just gone through an exhaustive research project into the Harlem Renaissance, and its aftermath, I was hoping for some of the writers to give their thoughts on how ethnic writers felt about the disputes that had raged on all through the last century: what is it to be an (ethnic) writer – can you be a writer first, and your ethnicity second, can the two be separated? How do you reconcile these problems in your fiction? Alas, nothing of the sort.

Around 2 PM I thought to head over to the youth center and hear Ned Vizzini read. I used to email with him a bit, and met him once at a reading at KGB where I called out New York oddball Christopher X Brodeur – another story for another time – so I figured I’d show some love and say what up. On the way I got sidetracked by the writers on the International Stage in the middle of the plaza. They were fascinating: David Lida, Meera Nair, Hirsha Sawhney and Cheryl Harris Sharman were discussing “Urban Realism and the Global City.” I came in as David Lida was telling a story about how he was “cabnapped” in New York in the 80’s. That’s when someone carjacks you and the cabbie and drives you around making you take money out of ATMs. Doesn’t happen much anymore, but apparently there were a rash of them back then. The International Stage was outdoors, and being in the center of the plaza was highly trafficked. There was nowhere left to sit, so I stood and listened to the panelists have a free-form conversation about the differences between writing fiction & non-fiction, writing for newspapers and publishing with indie-publishers, and general pop-culture topics. Hirsha Sawhney talked about a piece he wrote for a paper which remained unnamed (but was obviously the New York Times) concerning a film he had  a lot of problems with (don’t remember what the film was – something I’d never heard of). He was paid $1.50 a word for it, got a great report back on it from the publisher, only to find weeks later the legal department had a lot of problems with it, and spent $10,000 in legal fees cutting the piece. The piece bounced back and forth between the legal department and the editor for the better part of a year before being killed altogether. Then Cheryl Harris Sharman asked him about a piece he wrote on Slumdog Millionaire. “Well okay,” he asked the crowd. “Who here’s seen it?” A group of folks raised their hands. (not me – I still haven’t seen it) Then he asked, “who liked it?” Almost everyone who’d seen it raised their hands again. “Well, okay,” he said again, “I thought it was an enjoyable piece of commercial entertainment too, but I have serious problems with the subtext,” which he described as such: why, in 2008/2009 would the West take so highly to a film about an Indian kid who works for a call center (from the West), goes on a gameshow (an import from the West), and goes on to live this great life because of it? Because Indians live awful lives, and isn’t the West great for offering them these opportunities for a better life. It’s a movie, he argued, that superficially makes us feel good about ourselves without really grappling with any of the real issues facing India today. It was an interesting perspective on a film I haven’t heard much negative criticism about.

I’d picked up tickets for the St. Francis Auditorium at 3 PM. Paul Auster, Francine Prose and Russell Banks were all reading in a panel with the cringe-inducing name “Literary Masters.” Still, it featured three strong writers I looked forward to hear read, Banks being the only one I wasn’t that familiar with already. Paul Auster read first, and he read the first several pages from his new novel “Invisible.” It’s to be released in six weeks. Paul Auster reads in a very measured, paced way, like a grandfather reading to a child before bed. The story was about a young poet who meets a couple hipster existentialists traveling Europe. It was interesting, but by the end I wondered where he was going with his novel. His reading voice nearly soothed me to sleep, too. All the same, I look forward to picking up his new book when it comes out. Francine Prose read next. She said she wanted to read from her unreleased book on Anne Frank, but her publisher told her not to read from something currently unavailable, which got a little chuckle from Paul Auster, who’d done just that. Instead Prose read from her novel “Goldengrove”. The prose was really gorgeous, poetic even, and since I’ve only read Prose’s essays, made me think I should check out her fiction. Still, I needed a jolt of caffeine with a reading after sitting through Auster’s austere reading voice, and Prose’s lush prose. Russell Banks came through with that. He was the only reader of the day to read a self-contained short story. Banks is an older man, with a thick Boston brogue, and the story starts with him and some buddies leaving the theater. The narrator still has some black grease on his face from doing a play on the Mason, playing an Arab character, and within the first few minutes, Banks drops an n-bomb: “My friends were joking with me about what a great nigger I made.” – which made Paul Auster, who’d been leaning forward in his seat, shoot bolt upright immediately. Banks certainly had the attention of the auditorium at that point. The story was about meeting an old love at a bar – the narrator now in his fifties, the old love in her eighties. It was a strange, strangely beautiful story, completely honest to the voice of its narrator, and read like a man telling you a tale in a bar. It was surprising: the reader I cared the least about gave the most interesting reading of the panel.

At 4 PM I checked out a discussion in the Courthouse Community Room about “Independent Media Voices.” The panel included Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!, Pamela Newkirk, Dennis Loy Johnson, Melville House publisher and Richard Nash, Soft Skull publisher. They were discussing the place of independent and amateur media in our technologically changing world. Newkirk worried that the glut of bloggers that had popped up weren’t doing much real journalism, simply spouting opinions. She was also concerned that media was being balkanized – the new bloggers simply write to the converted instead of focusing on getting under-reported information out there to the general public. Goodman talked about holding the mainstream media accountable for their growing laziness, sloppiness, and catering to the status quo. Johnson and Nash discussed the future of book-reading in the future, and Nash expressed his sincere enthusiasm about where we’re headed. He said we’re on the cusp of a publishing revolution that will be like nothing we’ve seen before it, and he couldn’t hide his enthusiasm for the future.

The last panel I attended, at 5 PM, was an open conversation between Mary Gaitskill and Jonathan Lethem. The moderator, Greg Cowles, launched the conversation with a discussion about an article by Ben Michaels (I think, Gaitskill kept changing his name when she referred to him) in BookForum. Michaels attacked literary fiction for not paying attention to economic realities in contemporary life, and since this was something both Gaitskill and Lethem did do, Cowles wondered what they thought of that article. Both dismissed the article for telling authors what they should write about, (as did Cowles) but Lethem said he sympathized somewhat with Michaels’ concerns that there were some things literary fiction didn’t talk about – and things that should be talked about, because literature should be a medium where there’s nothing that can’t be talked about. Gaitskill bristled at the article completely. She didn’t have any sympathy for Michaels’ position whatsoever.  Their conversation went on to cover narrative conventions in fiction, switching between time/place (apparently Gaitskill does this nearly paragraph to paragraph in her book Veronica, which I haven’t read), literary influences, media’s influence on fiction, footnotes in fiction and generational differences between authors. Gaitskill said she’s been reading Haruki Murakami and Orham Pamuk, while Lethem said he finds it harder to find new authors that inhabit his headspace like he used to, the same way it gets harder to make new friends as you get older. He did mention Bolano, though, as demonstrating that you can do anything you want with fiction; Bolano’s been liberating for him. More often than not, though, he reads things he missed in his youth: Balzac, for example. He also said one of his main influences as a young writer was Graham Greene, in some ways the inventor of the modern novel, because Greene structured his books with the influence of cinema. Concerning footnotes, Gaitskill made the astute observation that mostly humorous authors use footnotes; there’s a sort of dry humor to them that gives the writer license to take the reader out of the story. An interesting way to end an even that began with a discussion of David Foster Wallace, a footnote fanatic, who, while funny, is to some extent problematic for Gaitskill’s argument, since DFW’s lodestar was Dostoevsky.

And that was the day. Coming out of the last panel, I heard a young lady say that Gaitskill was “the woman she wanted to be” – a touching, understandable remark, considering Gaitskill’s wonderful stage presence on the panel. As for me, I don’t know how to sum up the whole thing. Cheryl Harris Sharman from the International Stage earlier that day complained that when you write a non-fiction piece, the editor generally wants some kind of takeaway at the end; a function fiction doesn’t have to fill. In fiction you let the reader make up her own mind — and the takeaway definitely serves its function: generally it gives the reader a punch at the end of the piece, something to think about going forward — Well, I’m with Cheryl Harris Sharman here. I’m not going to provide that.

– September 14, 2009

“Modern life begins with slavery.” – Toni Morrison

What my father underwent, and now gone so long, and now come back, and now pallid brown, eyes wide, suddenly a shadow on the door. We had mourned him and buried him in the earth and now buried him in our minds, and his spirit had sank into ala-mmuo, and yet here he was again reincarnated in his expiring body, standing in the doorway, eyes agog. I had been learning the dibia magic. But it is terrifying to see the dead alive, so when I saw the pallid hordes of zombie aboard the ship, I recited the words. I stood aboard their Jesus and watched my home recede, although I was below with all the others, only I was standing on the deck and the spell was only broken when one of the dead struck me, and the fresh blood on my tongue woke me into the hold where men lay grunting like pigs.

Come morning there was no sign of land. Through the portholes only the blue green sea and the blue gray sky. Hordes of men already huddled together in the hold where the air was so putrid and still I could still smell supplication.

Sometime in the morning, the zombie came down into the hold and gathered us in groups to come on deck. I stood in that breaking blue morning and watched the sea roll and wander. The boat lurched and trundled the waves. The air invigorated the spirit, but the air and spirit sank again. My father’s face as he turned to look at me in that doorway. His eyes grotesque unblinking. The door swung shut and startled open again. A group of men behind my father, among them the rival Dibia. We were taken back to the hold. The sailors took off my chains and spoke in indecipherable grunts like my father lurching through incoherence. I began to wander the hold. The dark labyrinth of bodies and low ceilings wheezed and heaved and seized cacophonous. So many languages, most of them close enough to my own where we could still understand each other.

You children are free to move about the ship. We will need you to deliver messages. The white men don’t understand our languages.

I pondered this appellation for the zombie a while, white men, for they weren’t quite white, rather red. The heat of the region reddened them further and they drank copious amounts of liquor that smelled stronger and more toxic than palm wine, and then they turned rough red in the low rough sun, and meaner too, so that the redder they were the more you knew to avoid them.

One morning in the red sun, I saw a group of red zombie drinking in the sun, and turning back into the hold to avoid them, I bumped into a girl coming up the steps. She tripped over the steps and slipped back on the floor, cursing. I put one finger to my lips and pointed to the door above, and started to say white men, but then said, red instead, and made the motion of a man drinking, and then her eyes smiled, and then she smiled and the boat lurched and trundled the waves and the voices of the zombie came carousing through the paralyzed air of their still.

Nkiru, she said.

Azubuike.

We were inseparable and often separated. She made life on the ship as bearable as life on the ship could bear, and it was unbearable. I taught her the obeah arts my father taught me. She taught me the language of the zombie; she had been with them for years. We taught each other those things only two curious young people can teach each other.

One morning in the red sun, I saw a group of red zombie drinking in the sun, and turning back into the hold to avoid them, I heard the shrill cry of Nkiru, and turning back I saw that among the men, Nkiru sat nude shuddering. I lurched forward, then swung back. The men looked up at me, their faces turned dark heavy red in the heavy sun. Before a word could be exchanged between us, I had the knife of one, and the knife found the throat of another, and then the sun turned dark and rough and began to sweat red acid as the day dimmed mid-day. The dark sea burned the blood. Nkiru screamed. Excruciating daylight.

I was born a slave, but I would die free. From my earliest days I would play out in the fields while my mother worked, never dreaming of my degraded position in the world. My father, I never knew, though my mother said he was an African hero, a dibia, or magic man, who died on the ship. She told me there were enchantments in songs.

No one was dearer to me than my mother, lovely Nkiru, who looked longingly sometimes off in the sky as if the sky were the sea and she could still sail away somewhere through her thoughts. The innocence of those early days.

Shattered one morning when my mother, too sick to work in the fields refused to get out of bed. A cruel overseer, an overzealously evil man, with wild red hair, and dopey drunken eyes whipped her until she shrieked and crawled from the bed. I never looked at my situation the same. My people were taken from Heaven into Hell, and I was going to deliver them from Hell back into Heaven!

I learned to read from my mother, who had learned the Master’s language in Africa. We would spend early mornings going through a hidden Bible. The words were strange, but beautiful, and I marveled at the way the language soared in the voices of these prophets, especially in comparison to the degraded English of the slaveholders.  In the afternoons, I would walk out among the Georgia fields and recite the words to myself, incantations, and note the incongruity between the love preached in those words, and the hatred practiced by the slavers. It was as if slavery had degraded their very souls.

I was sold when I was 14 years old. I was never to see my Nkiru again. I was placed on a block, and sold to a dour looking man named Charles Montage, who couldn’t even meet my eye. The Georgia sun hung low and hot in the sky, tears sizzled my cheeks. I swore I would run away the first chance I got, that I would see my mother again, that I would be avenged, that I would kill white men.

I would have died that very summer had I not met Carolina. Carolina was one of the girls already owned by Montage. She had wonderful dimples that lit up the day, and would smile a very sad smile that should break the heart of the most heartless slaver. She had lost her mother when she was little, and we were two withdrawn orphans.

Soon we were inseparable, although we were often separated. Our new master was unusually cruel, a so-called nigger breaker, and he was only happy when we were not. He would whip us without provocation, terrorize us. He raped our women. He would ride out into the field and curse us in his degraded English.

Meanwhile, I taught Carolina to read the most beautiful English, and I taught her the dibia chants my mother taught me. She taught me to channel the courage that I needed to resolve myself to my early promise. I had sworn I would free myself from my chains, and I was determined to bring as many of my brothers and sisters with me as I could!

In the evenings we slaves would gather together, and I would deliver brimstone speeches about Freedom, the underground railroad, spoke of a future in which our children would be born free, where we would stand proud, even up to the very highest offices. America debases us and our culture, refuses to call us men. This now ends!

We launched our revolt the night after their Independence Day, while they all lay stupefied in vapors. We gathered together field tools, stormed the house, killed Montage and took his guns. With the moon looming gold and white in a spellbound sky, we rode out into the fields with his horses free men. We went from plantation to plantation, killing the sleeping and gathering weapons. By the time the sun rose red over the red fields of Georgia, we were tired, and an alert had gone out. I clambered off my horse and told Carolina she should go on alone, on foot. There was no chance for us, and I knew it.

She wouldn’t go.

In the afternoon, she dozed off and I left her where she slept.

I was heartbroken, but had as reassurance the certainty of my own death. Come twilight, the white men had found us. We rode hard into the woods, and they followed. Ahead of us in the expiring day we saw the lanterns flash, and then the flash of firearms. I had seen the way they tortured and killed insurgent slaves. I loaded my pistol, and called to the men. We will all die freemen.

We will all die freemen.

The woods grew dark around us, and the shadows began to crawl. I fired at a flash, and saw a white man fall. I rode into the dark, and turned back and hopped off my horse, ducked low and kept firing. A searing pain roared through my shoulder, and I turned, still shooting. Another lurched through my back, and I fell forward in the mud, gasping blood. I saw boots approaching, and with the last of my strength, I rolled around and raised my pistol and then there was a retort and then it was all very easy, the night turned light and then dark and then the day dimmed into a din where sound became sight.

Swing low, sweet chariot

Coming for to carry me home.

Oh swing low, sweet chariot

Coming for to carry me home.

 

I looked over Jordan and what did I see

Coming for to carry me home?

A band of angels coming after me,

Coming for to carry me home!

The Negro has been everywhere oppressed, and has everywhere risen above his oppression. I am myself of humble origins, born by a shining river where the egrets sang response to the spirituals of my mother, Carolina, a copper-ebony woman, deep in aspect and regaled in beauty.  My father was ever absent, but my mother would tell me stories of his heroics, how he had led a revolution against the slaveowners, and gave his life that she might escape, and that I might be born a freeman.

But for mine own part, it was Greek to me. The Emancipation Proclamation was passed mere years after my birth, and I grew up thinking all men equal in the eyes of the Lord, and thus in the eyes of the law. Oh, dark was the day indeed when I was to learn that a thick veil hung between me and my fellow man, one which the white man could never see through, and which estranged me forever from my country and made me see life through a troubling doubled aspect.

Reconstruction inspired me. I was elected to the Georgia senate. Around this time I also began publishing the pamphlet Freedom! This pamphlet was a call to action to my Negro brothers and sisters who found themselves free only to be enslaved again by the newly instigated “Black codes.” These laws made it illegal for us to be out of work, which was as good as saying it was illegal for us to be free. It’s no coincidence that the Thirteenth Amendment makes slaves of criminals. It takes no great leap of the imagination to see that the “Black codes” were implemented to make of the Negro a permanent criminal, and thus a de facto slave.

I published and preached throughout the great state of Georgia, where the sweet Maplewood air breathes life into fields harvested in death, and I ignored the threats as they came as best as one can ignore such propositions against one’s person.

I would not bow to fear. Every morning I walked the lovely walk through the marigold path leading from my home, down the small green glazed hill and down farther into the bustling town.

One morning as I walked the path, I met a sweet brown woman there, and the marigolds winked scents back as accents to talk. After that, Nella and I would meet every day in the same marigold path, and after we were married, we would walk through town together, and wave and stop to talk to folks we knew.

In the afternoon, after my session in congress, I would walk back, often taking lunch in Louie’s Kitchen, a Negro deli not far from the courthouse, usually with Nella, where we would plan our plans for family and future.

One afternoon as I was coming out of the courthouse, I heard a scuffle behind me on the steps, and I turned to see three men in Ku Klux Klan outfits had emerged at the top of the steps.

Montage, you black bastard, we sentence you to death!

I blinked, turned on my heel, and fled. I heard their footsteps above me, and then turning again, I reached for my blade. I had little time to realize what was happening. A couple men had crept up behind me from the other side, and then I felt the sharp slide of their blades. I turned to them, but the Klansmen from the top of the stairs were now upon me, and I thrust my blade forward, blindly, surely catching flesh, but this would be the last thing I felt, as the painless razor shine of death caught the side of my throat and then the angels swung down from their chariots and carried me up into the glorious day.

Them nightmares kept me up. They say we came back from the war, but I ain’t really came back, them battles stayed with me, the way people died like living didn’t matter a lick, killing factory style, corpses on an assembly line. I heard the term bandied about a bit, shellshocked, and that sounded about right, the sound of shells shocking the system like the rhythms of the jazz I would listen to late at night, wandering the streets of Harlem, down into the speak, speaking into my drinking, hoping the racket from the band would drown out the sound of the shells shocking me back. So I ain’t really came back from that war, and I walked around and just about died every day a thousand times over again, just like those buddies of mine where you would turn your head and the smoke would sear your eyes, and then they weren’t there anymore, and then where did they go?

That where did they go was what it was, it would ring in my ears in the music and would stay with me through the sleepless lavender mornings. I would look up at the purpling day, and think I could see there in the skies souls sometimes in the wisps of clouds, but then there would just be this tremendous absence like an unresolved melody looking. Whenever I could sleep, it was in the speaks, slumped over a drink, and where did I go? I would follow the music past the breaks into nightmares, and wake up again with the drums and trumpets trumpeting death and chariots and bombs and guns. Bleary I would walk through digressions of sounds with the musicians, and then would remember in a smooth passage a passage through to childhood, before the war where my mother Nella was telling me stories about my father, the first black congressman in Georgia, and how when I was little I would hear stories about him in Louie’s Kitchen where we would eat and folks would tell tall tales about my father going through town lickin’ Klansmen left and right to where they couldn’t stand it anymore, and so I guess my father he also died in a war right here at home.

I met Kali in the speak, I barely remember how, only one night we started talking, and she was telling me about her childhood here in Harlem, and I was telling her about mine in Georgia, and she laughed and said she liked the way I talked, what with my southern drawl and all, and I laughed and said I liked the way she talked what with her Northern clip and wit, and what about it? She worked as a waitress at the speak and we would sometimes dance, and that would keep me dreaming dreams different from the nightmares caught up in my drinks, and sometimes we would slip back into the back and dance private to the music ecstatically, and emerge back into the smoky dark speak weak with laughter and love and winks and kisses.

The raid happened on one of the nights Kali had off, and I was dreaming in my gin. I was back there again, back in the trenches, and the drums and trumpets were war reports, and the smoke of the speak was the smoke on the field, and people sort of floating on by me like spirits, and I fell deep into slumber, like Rip Van Winkle, almost like the gin and the jazz put some kind of hoodoo over me where I couldn’t wake up, the banging on the door, and the shouting voices and scurrying customers were all part of the nightmare, contained within the past. I saw a couple of my buddies go down and the smoke settled in hard, and then hands had my shoulders which they must have been pulling me out of the way of the shells. I reached down where I still had my legs, but couldn’t move them and then there were two loud retorts like shots, and they had me on the back of the truck where I couldn’t move to move, but where the smoke was slowly clearing, and the sky lightening, and soon I’d be back at the base. Somewhere in the future I murmured Kali, Kali, but I couldn’t find the words, my tongue wouldn’t move, or maybe I was wounded and didn’t have the ability.

When they tossed me down, I thought I’d hit my cot, but I fell and kept falling, and then the earth came falling faster after, where I woke up in the breaking dawn, not in Germany like I thought, but in an old plot in Harlem, in a hole, half buried. I struggled up against the mud, and then I heard a voice loud and clear, I don’t think the nigger’s actually dead, and then silence and then the earth fell even faster and Well, if he ain’t yet, he will be soon enough, and when I opened my mouth to scream the earth choked my voice, and I coughed mud and vomit against the falling day and then my ears and nose clogged and soon the nightmares came back and where would I go?

When after all a sister been born into it. More or less born in the speak where my mother worked as a waitress and been boppin my head to them beats ever since, had my head way back hoodooed to bebop before the first bop came to be, and been boppin ever since. And ain’t got the faintest whisper of a clue who my papa may be, mama didn’t much talk to that, and who knows if she even knows she didn’t know too much about parenting and that and I been just as soon raised by musicians as by her but that’s how it do. These fellas didn’t have much problem trying to raise me as it were anyway, and they were the ones what taught me to play, and then I would blow sax and flute like any of them jarheads. They learned to get threatened by me, and they learned right.

They all knew me up in Harlem, so when I started to play, I played mostly downtown, brown cap down over black hair, blowing back blues all night, boppin those twelve bar basics flat into fifths, flattering the faults of the fellas I followed, and feeling just lovely. Drinking whiskies with them like it wasn’t nothing in the world, and laughing and bawdying just the way they would, and well if that wasn’t the time of my life, cuz after them days, when my breasts turned into upside down timpani and my voice and age ain’t match in range, then folks started to let on I was a frail, and soon enough the phone stopped ringing, and when the fellas talked to me in the speak it wasn’t to speak up about gigging but guess.

Ever seen a musician can’t blow?

I mean I could still blow, but couldn’t perform, to put it one way.  I played up in my room old jazz records alchemizing Basie into Bop. And just about lost my mind in the process, bopping alone in my bedroom blues to bluey twilights. Evenings in the speaks, but no way up to the stage, stuck in the seats, seated between a gin and a grin that means heartbreak. So when Kyle approached me one night after the set with his set back eyes and voice like Don Giovanni, talking about maybe I join his band, we ended up in bed in no time, but I never ended up in his band. Ended up in his bed one night, he made promises to me he didn’t keep, disappeared a couple months after that, and then down at the speak listening to Monk crawl the keys while the owner told me he heard Kyle moved to Chicago, and was playing them funky styles they got out there, which made me laugh, but then I cried the rest of the night, and in those tears I think was the last of my small supply of dreams-not-yet-dried-up, because after that I saw things through a melancholy bop like Chopin meets Prez.

Like how after that the days got longer and the weather got warmer and my belly got bigger. I couldn’t stand the speaks anymore with the smoke and liquor and then I had no ways of getting gigs and couldn’t gig had I did, and so I stayed in my room and watched my belly get bigger and the weather get warmer and the days grow warmer, and my mind warmed in the sun must have melted away somewhere did they go? The cozy mornings where days swam into swelling bellies, dancing days, blowing days late into the daze of jazz, lazy days of love illusions and music. Lots of music. And the weather waiting, warming for the arrival. She is after all an extension of me, and where do I begin and she? The afternoons with Ornette and the evenings with Dizzy. Sitting in bed, listening, with a book, or a flute, and the mute nights of music, and the morning again, and the belly growing like a budding grove, and then one day comes and goes the doctor was there in my room, and saying something to me in a foreign language and the morning was asking me peculiar questions like where does the time go? and the afternoon reclined with tea and talked about Wilbur Harden and the evening was pure ornithology whereabouts my soul stole off swift with the swifts.

It/s, of course, of vital importance to remember that the Black man is born into conditions that make even the possibility of complacency unpalatable. It/s not so much that I was a Negro, as that I came to realize the white man needed to invent the Negro & the question was why? My mother dead in childbirth, my father dead in life & me left w/no choice but to adopt a ruthlessness that/s never left me; I am, after all, as much the product of my environment as we all are, trapped inextricably entwined w/in our own violent history. I grew up in violence & violence follows the Black man in America. The streets of Harlem are not a happy place for a boy w/no mother & no father. They are, in fact, often not a happy place for anyone; they are mired in poverty.

This is not to say there is no joy there. I was raised by my grandmother, Kali, a woman I loved dearly. She was a wonderful, inspiring woman, but vanished in a deep sense of loss from her lost daughter & from her lost husband, my lost grandfather & from living a life surrounded by loss & licentiousness. She/d worked in speakeasies all her life, of which she couldn/t speak easily & she/d spend the most heartbreaking smiles, b/c they locked away a lifetime of regrets.

Growing up under these conditions, I learned to be wary. I nor trusted nor believed; I was quick to interrogate the integrity of any person, statement or idea.

It was the perfect apprenticeship for a writer.

I published my first novel when I was still a young man. I/d prepared myself for a stunning reception & still I wasn/t prepared for the reception of the novel, which turned me into a public figure, as they say, overnight. It/s a somewhat apt cliché, in that one morning the public figure wakes up & no longer lives in the same world he lived in the day before. His thoughts are no longer private thoughts among private individuals, rather, after this moment, even when alone, he/s always performing. For a Black man this is an even stranger phenomenon, as I was now somehow a spokesman for my people & among my peers, I/d/ve been the last person to be considered a spokesman for Black people. The very concept of a spokesperson for Black folks is a strange chimera created by white America, because I/ve never believed myself to be speaking for anyone other than myself & certainly no white writer believes himself to be speaking for the entire white race when he puts pen to paper.

This is what initially conduced me to move to Berlin. In Berlin, I was able to be simply me, Montage, the writer. The writing from my earlier days, w/its explosive, revolutionary tone was being co/opted by the civil rights era & m/w, in Berlin, I found myself discussing ideas about performativity & modernity in bawdy burlesques. I met Mina, a burlesque dancer who reminded me in some ways of my grandmother w/her restless sad look of always already having lost the world.

Black America never really forgave me for Mina & white America never will. Both of them began to tire of me, I could feel it in the tepid reviews my essays were collecting. The fact is, the revolutionary has never left my work, but in the later work I/m more interested in how we act as revolutionaries as international globalized peoples, as a diaspora & I/m interested in these ideas of performativity & race, as well as performativity & modernity & how the 2 intersect, especially on a linguistic level. But this work has not done so well in the United States & before long there were signs enough that the world in general/d had enough of me, because phone calls would come in w/no answer & my front door would be open when I returned home, although I was certain I locked it on my way out. Cars would whisper past me, slowly idling as they cruised my block & then speed up again, vanishing around corners. Clicks on the telephone. Shadows that vanished into sunlight whenever I turned around. 1 morning I got out of bed & the light dipped & I plummeted to the dizzy floor.

That floor opened the vortex, wherein my health plunged w/the diminishing days. Heart infection. I could imagine my heart suppurating viscous black blood, poisoned by years of bitterness & the more I imagined it, the more I became entrenched in its sluggish ideology. I couldn/t eat. The mornings were unclear & dark & the days only got darker, sweating in bed w/Mina over me, eyes dark w/tears, darkwater in the dim light, like the blood dimming my heart, the weakening spirit, shadows vanishing in the sunlight, a motion towards resistance.

EXT. SAN FRANCISCO – NIGHT.

SUPER: San Francisco. 1974.

MONTAGE – VARIOUS

• HIP CLUB IN WEST BERLIN – NIGHT – Parents dancing to James Brown.
• BEDROOM – NIGHT – Sick father dying in bed.
• BEDROOM – DAY – Baby in crib, squirming to Marvin Gaye.
• BEDROOM – DAY – SUPER: 1984 – Kid about 10-years-old, dancing to Michael Jackson.
• DUNKIN DONUTS PARKING LOT – DAY – SUPER: 1992 – High School punk rock kids listening to Bad Brains out of a car with all the doors open.
• COLLEGE DORM ROOM – DAY – SUPER: 1996 – College dorm room, young men sitting on beds, discussing Foucault, drinking wine, smoking cigarettes, 2pac on the stereo.
• NYU FILM SCHOOL STUDIO – SUPER: 2000 – Three students standing at a storyboard. Eminem on the sound system.

FADE OUT

END OF MONTAGE

MUSIC CUE: “Monster” by Kanye West.

EXT. HOLLYWOOD – DAY

INT. HOLLYWOOD PRODUCER’S OFFICE. – DAY

FILMMAKER

Listen, here’s my pitch, it’s my own story, but it’s also epic.

PRODUCER

Epic? I don’t like epic.

FILMMAKER

Epic like slavery days epic. Oscar bait epic.

PRODUCER

Okay, word. I’m listening.

FILMMAKER

Cut to Africa, don’t know where. Doesn’t matter. Slaves getting on the boat. This is how the movie starts. We follow one character, an insurgent slave, through three hundred years. He gets on that boat. Gets himself killed defending a woman’s honor. Heroic shit. But get this: he comes back again. This time as a slave and he leads a slave rebellion. He gets himself killed again, of course. Next time he comes back as a Reconstruction congressman. In Georgia, of all places. Real flashy kind of brother.

PRODUCER

He gets himself killed of course.

FILMMAKER

Of course. (Beat.) So he comes back as a World War One “Negro” soldier. He survives the war, but gets himself buried alive somehow. KKK. Doesn’t matter. Comes back as a jazz musician who goes crazy. Those dudes. Happened to them all the time. All of which leads to his death, of course. Next time he comes back as a Negro novelist or something in the sixties. Sort of like my own father.

PRODUCER

Assassinated?

FILMMAKER

No doubt. Poisoned or something. Doesn’t matter. Something devastating. Anyway. Then comes my story. He comes back as a half-German, half-black filmmaker. Born and raised in California, attends film school in New York, works on postmodern picture about the very story we’re talking about now. So the audience learns at the end that the film the filmmaker is going to make is the film they’ve just seen. And then we pepper the historical stories with contemporary references to police shootings, Black Lives Matter, Trump. That sort of thing.

PRODUCER

Not bad. (Beat.) You got a hook?

FILMMAKER

A hook?

PRODUCER

A name we can drop, something like that. (Beat.) Anything?

FILMMAKER

My father’s name’s not enough?

PRODUCER

Rather go bigger. No offense, but he got a little weird in the end.

FILMMAKER

Yeah, well. Don’t we all?

PRODUCER

So no hook?

FILMMAKER

What about James Baldwin? Based on an idea by James Baldwin? Is that a hook?

PRODUCER

This is based on an idea by James Baldwin?

FILMMAKER

From some essay on Ingmar Bergman.

PRODUCER

He must’ve been drinking. (Beat.) But Bergman and Baldwin? We can use that. (Beat.) And how does it end?

FILMMAKER

With a yes. I would suggest it ends with a yes.

PRODUCER

A yes?

FILMMAKER

The filmmaker would be pitching the script to Hollywood. And they say yes. They greenlight the film. The you character greenlights the film. There’s a sense of redemption.

PRODUCER (Snaps.)

And just like that. 300 years of suffering. Justified.

FILMMAKER

Through Hollywood?

PRODUCER

That’s Hollywood.

(Beat.)

FILMMAKER

So whaddya say?

PRODUCER

I say this is something we can sell people.

FILMMAKER

Yes.

Everyday the table moves a little closer to the television. Sooner or later one of them will have to go. Behind the television the window threatens the same. Isn’t it better to be sucked into the world instead of phantasmagoria? Possibly both, and neither; there’s been evidence they are the same.

The cell phone never jumps. It lies lifeless on the table, next to the monitor, lifeless also, though bent towards two flashing screens, never disclosed, but hastened to again, foretold to other eyes on some other screen; or so they say.

Best, then, to put the television out the window; to put the table out the window, the cell phone leaping at last, laptop and all. It’s not the luddite’s leap of faith. It’s more extraordinary than that, and less. After all we would board up the windows.

But my head is still two monitors. One of them says I must listen to the loop, and the other one says you must listen to voices. What do I say? There is no I, when I am other, a teenage boy, a grown man, a phantom limb, a visionary’s bitch.

It’s been a long ride, brother, and I wonder as I wander. Hope to see you at the crossroads. Well, don’t count on it. I already been down and back. But that was a long time ago, and besides, what kind of fool expects Scratch to hold up his end of the bargain?

Me, that’s who. You.

On Mondays it’s Coltrane. It gets the week going. A little love supreme in the morning, on the 1st Ave bus uptown to 42nd Street. Office cubicles turn into soundtracks. I turn a corner on the third level of floor fifteen and these are a few of my favorite things. The coffee percolates and hums with the memory of morning on the bus, Coltrane wheezing through the exhaust.

On Tuesday I take the bus to Method. Give it to me give give it to me raw. The angles on buildings in midtown sharpen, and the sun gets suddenly brighter. Slanting against taxis and the sound of the subway the agression of crowds becomes manageable, here I am, here I am, the method man. A logic of images and myth turns cities into gateways to [g]od like ancient Babylon.

Wednesday melancholy with the Cure. Seventeen Seconds or Faith, reverberating voices like ghosts in windtunnels of buildings labyrinths of city landscapes. Ghosts of memories of my youth, halfway through the week – halfway through my life? Halfway home, change your mind, you’re always wrong.

Thursday I get silly and listen to Thriller. Then I change my mind on my last minute out the door and transform the day with Under the Cherry Moon. New York is Paris in black and white! Girls and boys walking hand in hand anticipating the weekend. You don’t have to beautiful to be my girl; I just want your extra time and New York, locked in a french kiss, turning the mundane into sheer bliss.

Friday I choose Prokofiev, because I like to begin and end the week without other voices. Its my Friday theme song: Peter’s theme propels me through the day like a wolf. I find myself laughing at disasters, and smiling at strangers. The sun goes down and the moon comes up, and the week dissolves in music.

Sometimes I see people sitting in a quietly cynical silence on the subway, and wonder how they let the city sabotage the solace of the solitary courts of their mind. It’s a harsh, violent, unfriendly, unstrange music, the music of the street. It threatens to snatch your sanity. Music maintains and defamiliarizes in beautiful dissonances all that’s become mundane.

Really, a eulogy for a musician ought to be a piece of music. I received the news of Billi’s passing when I woke up on the morning of October 11^th. Although he’d been sick for some time, the news was unexpected, as he had already made it through some rough patches, and appeared to be possibly on the verge of a recovery. For this reason, the news came as a visceral shock. Like every morning, I walked my daughter Emma to kindergarten, and on the way back I searched for his presence in the vastness of the sky, which seemed to only respond with absence. This walk home that morning has stayed with me, though, every time I walk my daughter to school, and in this way, I think my brother has made his presence known. This was always his way – his spirituality slyly manifested itself in relationships with others; we come to be close to each other through those rituals that make up our relationships.

Family was always important for Billi. From the time I was born, he was always concerned with “taking care of his baby.” Growing up, I always knew I could depend on him for help, advice and insight. As a younger brother, I always wanted to emulate him, and I envied his wit, his intelligence, grace, charm and genius. This he expressed beautifully in his music, whether he was interpreting the work of classical and jazz musicians or playing original compositions. In fact, many of my brightest memories of my brother involve music, as he loved music in all its manifestations – from hearing him practice weekend afternoons in our apartment, where I would often complain, more because he was turning his attention away from me than because of the music he was playing, to his teaching me about classical musicians, and our going through the voluminous box sets of records of classical composers in the living room, to hearing him play the latest trends in pop music, and discovering cutting edge trends through him to learning how to listen to jazz and blues through his instruction and listening to him play and interpret the music. Friends of mine from college still remember going to see him play at the 18^th Street Lounge right here in DC, with a band that updated bebop and connected it musically with rock and hip hop, and I remember a jazz brunch he played at a café across the street from University of Maryland, where the band broke out into a sudden, unexpected interpretation of the Charlie Brown Peanuts theme, which made the entire crowd break out in delighted laughter.

As a musician, he was also a lyricist, and as a lyricist, he was also a poet. In his poem, “Family,” he expresses his complex thoughts on family and spirituality.

The tensions found in balancing

more than just the opposites:

I can do to you

what I can do to noone else

But I cannot tell you

what I can tell to all the world

Nor can I heal the sick or raise

the dead or even cast out spirits

(… when I’m with you…)

 

I am not me –

Nor what you expected me to be

But we can dance

that awkward dance of grace

that only intimates of time

and love and hate,

disclosure and deception

From diapers, bibs and cribs to

Tights and tuxes

Tits and teeth

And even when there are no longer teeth

again we twirl upon the needle’s

head and only you can bring me

through the eye –

 

I cannot tell you, but I do not have

to say because you know…

you know it wrongly, so do I:

 

Of course – we ARE a single thread

 

Like a musical theme, the family is all part of a single unit, although each member of it must play their own solo, and even though the closeness of the family unit makes a full expression of the self impossible within the confines of the enclosed musical universe of the family. This is why, I think, family was so important to my brother – because he realized that in all its contradictions, there was something very fundamental about the way one relates to family and the way one relates to oneself, with all the contradictions, difficulties, uncertainties and trials that life may bring.

One of the ways Billi maintained such grace was through his spirituality. Spirituality was central to Billi’s life, and his life was a constant spiritual and intellectual journey. He was always interested in understanding where we as people came from, why we’re here, and what our purpose in this universe is. Like all the most profound spiritual philosophies, Billi’s spiritual philosophy helped him navigate the torrid seas of emotions, desires and disappointments which all people undergo, and navigate them in a way to make him a positive and inspiring example to those of us who were lucky enough to know him. He was secure enough in his spiritual beliefs, and open minded and curious enough about others’, that he was open to long, intense discussions about these ideas, and I’ll always be influenced by his penetrating insight, his humor and the aura of spirituality that he emanated in his best moments.

Intellectually, he was always at work on projects that would daunt most of us. A remarkable self-taught linguist, one of his life-long projects was the development of a new language. This is a project that dates back to our childhood, where the two of us would engage in the project of developing alternate societies while trying to make sense of our own. While I abandoned any such hope of developing my own language (my efforts were mostly pale imitations of what he was already doing), Billi persevered, and continued to develop his Dragat language throughout his life. This is no idle exercise. Between having just finished studying linguistics at University for the last two years and watching my two young daughters grow up bi-lingual, I’d argue that understanding the way humans acquire language is one of the most profound ways to understanding the way that we as people think, and this is an insight that Billi was aware of from a very young age.

Language of course, fails us, when we need it most. All language expresses only inadequately what we want it to express when we’re trying to express our deepest feelings, and there are really no words that I have to express the sadness at our loss of such a remarkable young individual. Billi has always been my greatest source of inspiration and awe, and so when I say that only a eulogy for a musician should be music, it isn’t just rhetoric – it’s an attempt to say what my brother said when he wrote those lines: “I cannot tell you, but I do not have to say because you know… You know it wrongly, so do I: Of course – we ARE a single thread.” As usual, my brother has already, in his poem, better expressed what I’m attempting to express in this eulogy. Because we are a single thread, and the loss of a family member, – for me, the loss of my brother – is a loss of part of the thread that holds me – that holds us – together, and the unravelling that follows is only mitigated by the realization that death is only another aspect of life, and his spirit, as he constantly reminds me, every morning, walking my daughter to kindergarten, is always there with me, in these complex and confounding relationships that build up family, memory and love.

I remember one winter afternoon when I spent the afternoon at my brother’s apartment. He lived right in the neighborhood of Frederick Douglass’ house, and we walked over to the house on that cold snowy afternoon to take a look at this often overlooked piece of history. I hadn’t even been aware of the fact that it was there. We walked to the top of the hill; the house was closed but from up there on the hill you can Washington spread out below, and you have this magnificent sense of history and place blending, where the past isn’t the past, and the dead are still with you, and distance is, like time, relative. In the last few years, living abroad, I’ve been distanced from my family here in the States, and time seems to distance me, as the days pass, from my brother; but then I think back to that moment on that hill where time and place dissolved, and where the past, to paraphrase Faulkner, was not even the past, and I realize that Billi is still teaching me new things, that his spirit remains with me in the musical notations of memory, and that “of course – we ARE a single thread,” and that thread never unravels, because it is the thread of time and space, which connects us all.

May his spirit continue to inspire and elevate all of us.