So much depends upon a red wheel barrow. So sayeth the Bard.
The blonde boy learned very young that he depended on drum sticks, guitars, typewriters, books, dictionaries, tape recorders, transistor radios, tv, vinyl records, microfiche—red wheel barrows he needed to clear a path into history where valuable artifacts had been left on the banks of the river—music, poetry, narratives, reports of experience, captured thoughts from a collective consciousness far greater than his paltry share.
Though he faced stiff cultural headwinds in his habitus, where behaviors mimicking those who think their shit don’t stink were surveilled and disciplined, he also found reflective adults, primarily women, in the community who gave generously of their time, attention, and resources, especially at school and in the library, tireless spirits committed to children he could not imagine life without. They made the rhythm and harmony for his melody.
He came to cherish rhythms first, loops of time made of predictable intervals and pacing shaped by human behavior. With drum sectionals in third grade, with regular practice required to participate, he discovered that time moves not just from day to day, but from week to week, month to month, in a rhythm. Mr. Stanley held sectionals, drummers practiced, Mr. Stanley held full rehearsals, drummers practiced, Mr. Stanley conducted the band in a performance, drummers went home high as a kite on adrenaline and got ready to do it all again.
As the river flowed, the rhythm kept on like Sonny and Cher’s beat, drums kept pounding a rhythm to his brain, ladeedadeedee, with Mr. Kinnison conducting the magic in junior high, Mr. Makeever reigning over a musical wonderland curriculum in high school with concerts, competitions, parades, football band, pep band, pom poms forever. Even as an adolescent, the boy knew that these music teachers were heroes in a universe that inclined toward beneficence.
The rhythm of time, once discerned, led the boy to understand tempo as the mumbo of the gumbo, slow and thick or quick and light. ‘Peggy Sue, Peggy Sue, oh, how my heart yearns for you,’ Buddy Holly yodels in the heat of young love. ‘I bless the day I found you,’ croon Phil and Don Everly in the sober syrup of a lifetime commitment. ‘This is a mean old world,’ wails Walter, the little, not the big, to a slow slow beat, one foot, then the other, don’t fall, the harmonica a sustained and bent wail. ‘You got to live it by yourself.’ The song works for high voice or low; the key isn’t key. But Mean Old World can never be Maple Leaf Rag (Scott Joplin). Musicians tweak the original groove and feel of a song, but it’s rare to slip into a completely new groove. Only under unusual circumstances can the girl from Impanema become the Honky Tonk woman.
Keeping time, making time, calling time, taking time, carving out time, killing time—so it was in the beginning and will be until the song ends. As the metronome measures out a song in gyroscopic clicks, as the second hand sweeps like a swimmer (so sayeth the Bard) in an open sea, as Prufrock measures his out in coffee spoons, musicians must master a sub-dimension of time, a specialty of time, weaving not yarn, not wicker, not leather, not rope, but sound in notes and words that make you cry or hope or laugh or just sing.
Rhythm is time bound by human hands to fulfill a purpose. 1-2-3 push! Counting down to blastoff! Rhythm governs human behavior: They who set the tempo rule. In Book XIII of the Leviathan Thomas Hobbes commented on the significance of the loss of the rule of rhythm ‘during the time men live’: “Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called War; and such a war as is of every man against every man. […] In such condition there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual Fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
There it is in a nutshell, which I could be bound in and count myself lucky if I had music, a childish old man’s take on rhythm in a mean old world where red wheel barrows can be hard to come by.
