See here how everything lead up to this day
And it's just like any other day that's ever been
Sun goin' up and then
The sun it goin' down...

- Robert Hunter.

Foreword: "Ferber's Quandry," much like a certain Vermont quartet, is now on indefinite hiatus. Out to pasture. To any rabid fans who might be out there (chirp...chirp...), I'm truly sorry. But inspiration has left the building. When and if fiction chooses to return to this space, you'll be the first to know.

And there it is, really...my year in microcosm. Bold ideas and fearless first steps followed by faltering and frustration. And the occasional victory, of course. But then the sun shines on every dog's ass sooner or later.

Like an experiment in formless serial fiction, this solar go-round was probably doomed from the start to disappoint. Yeah, I'd wisely discounted the Y2K mania as the big night approached, but by the time the sun came up over the Everglades for the first time in "the new millenium," I'd bought into the hype lock, stock and barrel. Ambling silently and reverently over Seminole ground, I became convinced that we had just pierced the veil; tossed the rulebook out the window; stumbled on the end of the rainbow. And that nothing would ever be the same again. Looking back, things were more the same in the year 2000 than they'd ever been been before.

But the temptation to mine some kind of overarching meaning from the events of the year 2000 is almost irresistible, especially in light of the extraordinarily absurd Presidential election. It seems like we're groping for some kind of common thread that we can weave into a monochrome tapestry and say, "this year was most decidedly taupe!" Most Americans, being Americans, are all too willing to let the machine tell them what color it was in the language of electoral mandates, intifadas, Elian, consumer confidence indexes, and so on. But ask those same Americans how any of those media-ordained measures touched their lives, and they'd be hard pressed to tell you in anything but the most vague terms. Those things matter because...because they just do. Right?

My own consumer confidence has reached an all-time low. I'm not buying what they're selling. I just don't have a use for it anymore. Not only am I tired of the conventional "wisdom" that pretends to define our existence as a string of things that happen to us; I'm tired of looking outside altogether. Life's too damn short.

- Tom Marshall.

Happily, I read a few great books this past year. Gary Zukav's The Seat of the Soul was excellent and truly enlightening, though maybe a little too certain of its own New Age convictions. My favorite was Robert Pirsig's fictional philosophy, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I'd picked up and quickly put down years ago. Not this time.

Zen tells of two journeys; a cross-country motorcycle trek shared by a father and son, and the father's attempt to ascend a metaphysical precipice that broke his spirit and sent him plummeting into insanity years earlier. It's a thinly veiled treatise on the spastic failure of western thought -- our addiction to externalizing the source of our problems, and all the sickness that the fallacies of dualism and separateness breed -- and it's also an attempt to locate a singular concept that offers real meaning. That concept is Quality.

In one of the book's true grace notes, Pirsig fails to define Quality in words, at least in any concise or comprehensive sense. His journey circumnavigates Quality, offering not so much what it is than what it means to him, and then leaves the rest up to you. Which seems to me to be the whole point -- and at the same time the source of our great disconnect. It's a question most of us refuse to ask ourselves, let alone try to answer. What do I value, and what will I do with it?

It's really not our fault. We're walking cushions for the pins of consumerism, and even the most airtight among us will spring a leak sooner or later. We're assaulted unendingly with the notion that we need Gatorade to provide our bodies what Mother Nature has so cruelly deprived us of, and that without the new Palm Pilot our very sanity will crumble. Everywhere we turn, ambition is championed above principle and ends valued above means. Get that promotion and you'll have respect. Get that second car and the world is your oyster. It's the Big Lie of our age and our greatest obstacle to overcome.

In Pirsig's words:

- John Bell Ken Burns' "Jazz" series debuted last night on PBS, and by the time this column appears in print there will still be several installments left. See them. If you've missed the first three quarters of the documentary, you can get it on VHS or DVD, or better yet buy the book of the same title that Burns co-authored with Geoffrey Ward. I got it for Christmas and it's a treasure.

Jam band fans won't see familiar faces like Medeski or Scofield or Krasno or Fleck or Skerik in this piece; in fact, you won't see much of anything from the last thirty years of jazz. Burns, by his own admission, takes a historical perspective, and undeniably gives short shrift to vanguards like Sun Ra and William Parker (who's still out there carrying the torch in a vibrant free-jazz scene), and even some giants like Charles Mingus. Watch it anyway. There seems to be less and less of which Americans can truly be proud, but I couldn't help but marvel at how jazz and American history interweave and enmesh.

But the most moving stories in "Jazz" don't speak to patriotism or nationalism. They speak to hardship, more torturous than most of us will ever know, overcome by the stubborn joy of creation. Maybe most notably, the life of Louis Armstrong stands as one of the most inspiring stories I've ever read. As a child, Armstrong was surrounded in human indignity, violence, racism, and fear, but managed to never veer from a path to becoming one of the most (if not the most) influential musicians in American history. This would be a massive accomplishment had his work been burdened with the darkness that his life might suggest, but the truth is even more astounding. Not only was his musical canon honest, encapsulating both the light and the darkness with equal grace, but his spirit was so indomitable and grateful that many of those who knew him believed that he was nothing less than an angel.

There's subtle disagreement as to the angel's message, it seems; some say he was sent to tell us that everything's going to be all right. Maybe he was sent to show us that everything just is, and that we are free to do with that whatever we choose.

I can barely fathom the kind of peace of mind Louis Armstrong possessed; I still get pissed in traffic. But I believe that his caliber of inner peace requires an acceptance of our circumstance -- a realization that suffering and joy and pain and pleasure require each other. I also believe it requires an understanding that only by acknowledging that we're in pain can we dance it away. Louis Armstrong believed those things, and he poured them into his songs and out his horn. He didn't play campaign functions -- he didn't even have much to say about the world outside his own sphere -- and still, he shaped billions of lives. If you need evidence that one person can change the world with a little attention to Quality, forget our wilted and pathetic excuse for democracy; take a stroll to your CD collection and let your mind boggle at the art that grew from Louis Armstrong's seed.

The next night I participated in an Indian sweatlodge ritual called a temescal that takes place inside a tent of animal skins. A native shaman and a fire keeper explained to us that the temescal was a rite of physical and spiritual purification, and asked menstruating women not to participate; menstruation is a potent downward flow of energy, and we were to direct our energy upward. No one left.

We filed into the cramped tent, all twenty of us, and as the shaman ignited herbs and poured water over hot lava rocks we began to offer prayers and songs in the pitch darkness. For the next two and a half hours, as the temperature rose almost unbearably and the energy spiraled inside the confines of the sweatlodge, I could hear whimpers and pleas for strength. I managed to keep mine to myself, but said them nevertheless. A woman beside me said she felt sick and numb; she begged to leave and was refused. We prayed with her and in time her sickness withdrew.

At the end of the ceremony, before he opened the door, the shaman wished us all "a deep inner quiet," and in doing so named the source of my initial anxiety in this place: quiet. Without ever realizing it, I'd been so deprived of true silence that it had become foreign and disconcerting. The shaman opened the door, and my anxiety drifted off with the steam and smoke. We exited with a short prayer: "For all my relations." Then I stood, and curled my toes in the cool sand.

Later that night as I lay in bed with my ear against the pillow, I heard a drum in the distance, punctuating the deep quiet. It was a familiar and primal rhythm; a steady triplet that I remembered from a long time ago. I opened my eyes and wondered, what's someone doing beating a drum at four in the morning? This isn't Big Cypress! Then I realized it wasn't a drum at all. It was my heart beating in my ears, steady and strong. I smiled at my wife asleep beside me, closed my eyes, and waited for dreams to come. I was alive. It was a very good year.