PERMEANCE

Sometimes an idea comes to you—or maybe you come to it—and you jot it down on paper so thin that some of the ink soaks right through and makes a derived yet different image on the other side. For improvising musicians, that paper is the thinnest (infra-mince?), the most gossamer veil that separates and links (as Duchamp knew) the always of creating (which is, of course, what we do) from the right now of presence.

In other words, contemplating an improvisation is being in that right now when the inky images of constant creating gradually seep through and become visible in the fleeting present, when the always makes its mark on the almost never, the only once of right now.

There is, of course, a certain periodicity in the creative flow of ongoingness, but grasping the similarities that indicate cyclicality draws us into the realm of memory, and therefore, away from right now. One remembers that this or that resembles something previously heard, seen, felt. Some of what seeps through that thinnest of barriers recalls earlier perceptions. That, at least, is how it is usually expressed, but in fact, it is not the perceptions that are called back; we, ourselves, are called back to them, to the moment when they happened before, even when those very percepts are all that remain of that earlier time. And thus, memory pulls us away from right now, from the present moment, and back to some previous moment when something happened that we now experience as similarity.

Perceiving similarity underlies, in the case of music, a sensing (or assignment) of form through repetition, however inexact it may be. A sense of familiarity. And if we choose to call this memory-based comparison understanding, we will have to accept that, by pulling us away from our open awareness of right now, understanding interrupts our full and ongoing experience of the work as it unfolds. Not so, experience, which involves fully living the moment rather than drawing back in medias res to somehow grasp its supposed significance on any other time scale.

If we return, here, to our opening metaphor of the gossamer veil, we might begin by asking ourselves why so much seeps through on some occasions, and so little on others. Why, from this side of the tissue, do we sometimes have the feeling that our ideas are flowing almost uninterruptedly? Why does it sometimes feel so effortless when, at others, we struggle to maintain even a modicum of perspicuity?

If our side of the veil is the moment, the right now of improvisation, and the other side is its always, its ongoing flow in the unconscious, perhaps time is different on one side and the other. And maybe, just maybe, the relation between those two times is not what it might seem. When everything flows in and through the moment, when creating seems effortless, might it not be because things are moving more slowly on the other side? And when almost nothing seems to be seeping through, when extracting even a tiny part of what's needed to make the music flow requires an incommensurable effort, couldn't it be that things are moving more rapidly on the other side? Consider the pen, hurrying across the page, passing so quickly that it leaves only enough ink to hint at recognizable figures, lines or marks. So little ink, in fact, that almost none will soak through the veil. Now imagine a slow, gentle or deliberate—perhaps both—delineation, where the pen deposits all the fluid of expressed reflection. There, the pure volume of the medium will insure that much more penetrates the veil.


Or, perhaps it is not a question of time at all. Perhaps the veil is thicker, less permeable, more obdurate some days than others. Perhaps the same flow of ideation, the same volume of metaphorically inky discourse, is sometimes blocked by the need to protect oneself from the seepage of one's own utterances, the manifestation of what we neither want to share nor even to face, ourselves. Perhaps the anxiety some call "stage fright" is not fear of the stage, not the fear of being exposed and vulnerable before an audience. Perhaps it's a deeper alarm at the prospect of an ineluctable encounter with oneself, the feeling produced by recognition that what seeps through the veil cannot ever be rationally reconciled with the protean and indispensable construct of falsehood and metaphors we consider everyday reality.

Whatever the case may be, things were certainly flowing for Abdul Moimême and me as we made music together in Lisbon on the 13th of March, 2022.

And here it is.


Wade Matthews
Madrid, 5 October 2022