UNDER Construction From Beneath the Underdog, His World as Composed by Mingus by Charles Mingus: "Not long before I worked with a poet named Patchen . He was wearing his scarlet jacket and sitting on a stool on a little stage in a theatre you walk upstairs to down on fourteenth street. We improvised behind him while he read his poems, which I read ahead of time 'It's dark out, Jack-' this was one of his poems-'It's dark out, Jack, the stations out there don't identify themselves, we're in it raw-blind like burned rats, it's running out all around us, the footprints of the beast, one nobody has any notion of. The white and vacant eyes of something above there, something that doesn't know we exist. I smell heartbreak up there, Jack, a heartbreak at the center of things, and in which we don't figure at all.' Patchen's a real artist, you'd dig him, doctor. 'I believe in truth' he said, 'I believe that every good thought I have, all men shall have. I believe that the perfect shape of everything has been prepared.'" [p.330] - Charles Mingus Let Us Have Madness Let us have madness openly. | |
|
