Dancing to the beat of your own drum…

Un enfant terrible…

Oscar in The Tin Drum, perfected the art of breaking glass with his screaming.

I don’t know what I’ve been trying to break, or if I’ve been trying to break something, but I have certainly been striving to hit some invisible spot… sometimes mistaking loudness for intensity or getting other parameters mixed up.

Maybe the whole of this human’s endeavour consists in trying to explain why, or trying to give the coordinates of the target, or just perfecting the aim (“I may be off mark, but my aim is true” as Lone Kent sings in Point of View).

A friend sent me a Miles Davis track which reminded me of how distinctive a sound he created. A trademark. Like Keith Jarret, it is almost immediately recognisable. I then picked Miles Davis on a “make your own radio station” website, and it played me a track by Chick Corea which was very nice.

As I was listening, I was surprised to be finding it interesting, because I do not normally like instrumental jazz. Apart from the two musicians just mentioned and Eric Satie I need a singing voice to create the right kind of edge. The excruciating instrument solos of all those bands with no singer, no voice and therefore no real message… As if all music was accompaniment for a singer, a voice, a person … as if instruments were merely the equivalent of machines - something you switch on – you can programme - as if the voice was the only real expression of the soul and of creativity – A drum solo is like a kind of torture you put up with to be stroked in the direction of your fur (dans le sens du poil) by the singer’s voice. And not just any singer’s voice, it goes without saying. But that’s another kettle of fish.

Marciac jazz festival. The frustration of hearing English songs sung by people who stress all the wrong syllables and whose emotions are not in sync with the mood of the lyrics... the drunken Irishman who thinks he can make the words up because he’s in France and nobody will understand anyway (wrong)… then Françoise Guerlin, who understands the lyrics and knows what she is singing, and does it for me by sending the last note of In a sentimental mooooooooooooood gliding through the air like a love letter to Mars. Did anyone get it? Did she get any replies? The b******s can’t write, if you want my opinion.

So many misconceptions – or this one vast misconception, that all music is simply there to allow voices to sing – fell apart as I listened to Chick Corea and enjoyed the sophistication of the rhythm. And my mind (heart) silently admitted that it was pleased with that kind of creativity and it was not a problem that Mr Corea was not making the music with his mouth and body only but had added an instrument – so the instrument could actually be something more than the body and not necessarily always something less, a shield to hide behind, a disguise, a cop-out…

The female vocalist’s solo in The Dark Side of the Moon… Now you're talking. Incidentally, at the recording session, when she stopped singing, she apologised for having screwed up… that’s how difficult it is to know how you are doing in the middle, if you can’t read the audience and even if you…

Now I’m listening to instrumental music and it is not distracting me – it is a background – a beat, a tempo – for too long I was only and exclusively able to dance to the beat of my own drum… which was not always in the tempo… which often mischievously led me astray.

Instrumental music is non-intrusive – like email – you don’t have to listen to it if you don’t want to – it is not asking a direct question, it has no linguistic message – it can be as relaxing as a holiday in a foreign country whose language you do not understand, because you don’t have to make an effort to try to understand, you don’t have to strain to eavesdrop on your neighbours at the street café, on the beach, because you have no entry point, if you can’t visualise the words you can't divide it up into units to understand it piece by piece and if, perchance, the message does speak straight to your heart – as in Samba Pa Ti, for example, by Santana – then yes, it will arrest you and you will stop and listen to it and take it in with every cell in your body and “know” what it means – infinite sadness, love, emotion , nostalgia, human striving – beauty – and yet not "know" and it will become a part of you for ever.

The flowers of passion

I lived in Paris for fifteen years. One day I was going home from work on the metro, and a lady with a bunch of lilac sat opposite me for a few stations. I was shocked. I think I had forgotten there was a life outside the concrete jungle and that it involved seasons with ephemeral blooms.

When I moved to the south-west of France in 1998 there was a creeper growing on my balcony. One day it flowered and I couldn’t believe how strange the flower was. It looked to me as if it must have fallen to earth from another planet. It has a decidedly extra-terrestrial look.

The fruit of this passiflora plant looks a bit like apricots.

Hungry, lonely and afraid

I could see a pale glimmer of light in the distance. My life of darkness was coming to an end, it seemed. Soon, things started moving and I was painfully and inexorably expulsed from my hiding place. They let my mother see me. I don’t think she was very impressed. I cried a lot. Eventually, the nurse took me away, and locked me in the linen cupboard so that my mother could rest.

I cried and cried. I screamed till I was blue in the face. I was tied up tightly in a shawl and couldn’t wriggle and kick. I writhed, ranted and raved. I never gave up hope. I fell asleep, still expecting to be saved. When they let me out it was too late, my relationship to the world had been laid down once and for all. I would go through life thus, a strident, unanswered demand for my needs to be met by someone outside myself. Anger at the lack of response. Determination to elicit a response by screaming louder, longer, to reach ears ever further away. I was persuaded that the fact that nobody answered my cries meant that nobody had heard them and that if nobody had heard them it was because everybody was too far away and I wasn’t screaming loud enough. Thus my future behaviour was programmed as a quest to hit a further spot, to be heard and elicit an answer from someone or something that was out of my reach, out of earshot, off limits. It was only a question of time, I would break through the silence barrier and touch the other, be heard, be perceived, and it or them would come running to fulfil my every whim.

The fact that nobody ever answered the demand did not allow me to call into question the legitimacy of my attitude. Obviously the world was at fault in this, it couldn’t have been brand-new, pristine, unspoilt, undegraded, perfect me. How can the behaviour of a new-born baby be considered in any sense wrong? I was my song, and my song was me, and it was loud and painful. It was full of longing, a lament, a cry from the soul that nothing could soften, since it hadn’t been answered at the right time and now never could be.

So much for the baby in me. It is still unconsoled. But it is no longer alone and no longer free to scream as much as it likes. Its future states came into contact with the reality principle in a variety of different ways. Each time, I suppose, the thwarted élans regressed to the cradle rat whose cries went unheard and therefore unmodulated. All in all, it was a felicitous event, for the being that grew never doubted for a moment that the point was to get a message across, and, never having succeeded, the will remained undiminished.

Reaching puberty, it wrote poetry that it likened to “a pathetic cryptic message for the Martians” – as indeed, in a way, it was. They never responded, either.