"So What" Worship and The Atheist-Agnostic Monarch Conundrum

So What Worship and The Atheist-Agnostic Monarch Conundrum

So What

Miles Davis’ solo in ‘Round Midnight, piercing and quiet against sophisticated fills by Red Garland (p), Philly Jo Jones (d), Paul Chambers (b). The trumpet rings out… do I hear spit skitter across the horn’s bell? John Coltrane (ts) and Julian “Cannonball” Adderly (as) trade solos; the faint echoes following their lines rise and retreat depending on the direction the saxes swung towards in that corner of Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in 1959 NYC.

Next, on to So What, with Bill Evans: piano and James Cobb: drums from Kind of Blue, recorded a few years earlier. One of humanity’s greatest achievements. I cannot describe the creativity, teamwork, concentration and completeness that make up these blues and ballads and other iterations of America’s classical music - jazz.

According to the Kind of Blue album notes by Bill Evans, “Miles conceived these settings only hours before … you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The players had never played these pieces… the first complete performance of each was a “take.”

This is on a Columbia compilation CD I purchased on Rue Monge  in Paris in 2001.

Just for kicks, I pulled out the 1959 LP (a stereo version.) So What (lp) vs. So What (cd); an almost head-to-head, A:B comparison. Must switch input and volume at preamp, so, just almost.

The sound stage is slightly different - the bass is a bit more centered on the LP, the separation of instruments perhaps a bit extended on this version. Everything is there with great clarity, lovely soundstage (spatial placement of instruments) in the CD version. All is there on the LP too plus, of course, a bit of scut sound between tracks and maybe in the background. Yet, yet, yet… while the sax and trumpet solos are full, full, full on CD, from the LP, the sounds fill the room, seeming that they might soar forever.

The changing tonalities of each band member play across the stage, as if their only limit was not technological but the challenge to become one of those people who, as Mr. Evans wrote: “…see well enough to find something that excuses explanation.”

 

The Atheist-Agnostic Monarch Conundrum - So What Excuses Explanation?

In the Oaxaca airport, in a pilot’s footwell, a monarch (fn.1) pupa warmed in the mid-day sun while the baggage was tossed onto carts. During take off it completed its transformation from chrysalis to exoskeleton and from exoskeleton to those familiar slow-folding orange and black butterfly wings.

This little butterfly life has no clue that it is rushing at 550 miles an hour north to Dallas; let alone how GPS networks get passengers there and then to MSP. That butterfly, it excuses our explanations.

I am writing from my  60 years of atheism (fn.2). In my maturity and in this widest of contexts, I modestly appreciate the chance that there are things beyond my own and, at this stage in human evolution, all other people’s sentience. There just may be another existence beyond monarchs, the 13.772 billion years of astrophysics …. beyond the grasp of humankind. Beyond the colors in the electromagnetic world our eyes cannot detect, beyond a full understanding of monarchs’ migration behaviors and well past the calculations for “black matter” that I don’t get (nor can scientists yet prove); there may exist something ultimately not subject to limited human rationality.

There may exist something beyond what we can divine of the material and emotional world, that is, something demonstrable yet metaphysical, that would give the lie to my atheism.

I might be … just another monarch.

Well, like the monarch going it knows not where, putting its footprint here and there in the well of the 707, I stand here, in a degree of uncertainty, shifting my own feet on the world I experience without any of the innumerable deities avowed to by others. Acknowledging that chance of another existence - does that tip me into agnosticism? Hmmmm.

I appreciate that religious practice gives others a feeling of an other-worldly reality that I believe does not exist. (The reality, not the feeling.)

I do believe we all can, through striving for love, service, art, exercise, community and music, sometimes come to live well enough “to find something that excuses explanation.”

 

Jay Wilkinson 1-2018

 

end notes

1. A colleague in the law became semi-famous as a youth when he tagged a Minnesota monarch that was later found near Michoacán, Mexico.

2. further notes on Church and Atheism. I probably attended more than 1000 protestant Sunday school classes and 1000 worship services in my youth, so my atheism is not due to lack of exposure. A youthful Muslim student a few years back, after my debate on “Why Fear Islamic Law States”, told me “You are halfway to being a Muslim - you say you believe there is no god - right? We say ‘there is no god … but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.’ You are halfway there!” Cute! My debate stance was I fear all sectarian states and that I voiced objections to Sharia law as both practiced and as set out in a variety of (translated) tracts and justifications.