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BRAIN TUBA: The Moment
by Jesse Jarnow - jesse.jarnow@oberlin.edu

There are certain things that I will always remember, individual moments where something previously beyond my grasp either became absolutely clear to me or, at the very least, came one step closer to making sense. These realizations have ranged from infinitely small to unfathomably big. For now, they need not be described. I'm fairly certain that everybody, at some point, has these moments of sheer personal clarity. And, as far as I know, there is no formula anywhere that can predict in any definite terms when one of these moments will come. For some, there are certain things that can act as catalysts. For me - and I'm sure a lot of people - one of those is music.

Virginia Woolf called these occurrences "moments of being". In an essay entitled "A Sketch Of The Past" she wrote that "many of these exceptional moments brought with them a peculiar horror and a physical collapse; they seemed dominant; myself passive" (1). This seems an apt description of the purest of those flashes. I have most certainly had experiences at shows - most recently during the second set of Phish's New Year's run at Madison Square Garden - where the music and the moment have taken control and everything seems to break down around me and all that is left standing is the awareness of something new. I receive a jolt and realize that some shit needs figurin' out.

In a lot of ways, it's an absolutely indescribable feeling. Yet - after it happens, after the show - many, myself included, inevitably try to describe it. It's something so profound and meaningful that there's just no other option but to share it. "It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together" (2). For Woolf - and myself, to an extent - writing was (and is) a way to express these realizations. There are a lot of times, though, when I have trouble trying to explain these things in words. Thankfully, there are other options. (Though, for what it's worth, I usually choose to push stubbornly at the words until I think they work.)

Moments of rapture are not uncommon at shows. For many, I think, traveling to see live music is a quest for moments of being, a "searching for the sound" (3). Obviously, not everybody who goes to shows writes about it. If a moment of being can be preserved in a totally abstract state somewhere in the body, then writing about it might be considered a rational way of releasing it. But there are also extraordinarily abstract ways to liberate this stuff. By far the most popular, I think, is to dance... to spin... to twirl... to gesticulate wildly. An image I often come away with after watching noodle-dancers at shows is that of someone trying to extract something from his or her body in the most graceful way imaginable. Imagine getting a large, obtusely shaped piece of sculpture through a doorway. In the process, one might have to turn the object in dozens of different directions in order to accommodate all of the different lumps and twists in it. If this object is the moment, then the body is the doorway -- the object is stationary while the doorway spins. During the show, it's ongoing. Moments flow into and through the body as the body shakes and worms them out. It's exhausting.

Another way to do it is through music itself. Mike Gordon has spoken about actualizing himself through music (4) -- this seems to be very similar to Woolf's idea of doing it through writing. Musicians often speak of revelatory moments on stage, moments of being. Through his music a musician might be trying to figure out what the moment means to him while, in turn, triggering flashes in audience members. An audience member, then, might need a way to release the moment from himself through music. Drum circles have long been a staple of the scene after a show. A reason for this could very well be that it is a collective effort of expression for experiences inside of a show.

Of course, go ask any spinner or parking lot percussionist why they do what they do and you'll likely get an answer that strongly resembles absolutely *nothing* written above. Dancing and drumming are completely natural and instinctual things to do. Neal Cassady, Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On The Road and the Merry Pranksters were perhaps extraordinary prototypes for much of the lifestyle now associated with tour culture. In 1981, Jerry Garcia spoke of Cassady. "Neal represented a model to me of how far you could take it in the individual way. In the sense that you weren't going to have a work, you were going to *be* the work. Work in real time which is a lot like a musician's work" [emphasis mine] (5). The idea of a being as an ongoing piece of art is an appealing one. I think that twirling and participating in drum circles are two of an infinite amount of ways for individuals to do this.

Woolf herself gets at a similar conclusion: "From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool [of daily life] is hidden a pattern; that we - I mean all human beings - are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. 'Hamlet' or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock" (6). Damn, talk about a meta-moment: the shock that realizing your shock is actually part of a huge conceptual work capable of producing more shocks... whoa, dude. Heavy.

(1) Virginia Woolf; A Sketch Of The Past; Moments Of Being; Sussex University Press, 1976; p. 72. The whole portion related to the idea of moments of being is pretty interesting. I retyped the section of the essay related to this idea.
(2) ibid.
(3) Robert Peterson; Unbroken Chain; Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics
(4) Richard Gehr and Phish; The Phish Book; Villard, 1998; p. 143
(5) Jerry Garcia; Behind The Wheel With Neal; Spit In The Ocean; Number 6 ("The Cassady Issue"); Intrepid Trips Info Service, 1981; p. 120.
(6) Woolf 72

Trippers and askers surround Jesse Jarnow, / People he meets... the effect upon him of his early life... of the ward and city he lives in... of the nation... / They come to him days and nights and go from him again, / But they are not the Him himself.