Albert Ayler: For John Coltrane

He played. He was not sure that playing would get him somewhere. He was not totally sure where he was. Columns were flowering, up and out, into a place he couldn’t see. It was dazzling. He was paying attention to his fingers, the reeds, which clacked to him only, a sub-music. He was aware of the people for whom he ostensibly played, in rows, a kind of external sadness, but even as he played, there was no sound, no sound he could hear. There were ineffective fluctuations in the room, and the people tuned in to him like earthquake machines, they measured the accuracy of the loss felt, his loss. So, he went in, he went in himself, and there were reds and golds all the way, and in a moment everything around him receded, calmly, ease and vertigo. The people were gone and the church was gone. The coffin, the place where a man horizontally lapses into idea, it had slipped from his awareness. There was a beach and an ocean, and a boat out among the waves. He stood on the beach, curiously unmarked. The air was slower, seemed slower, and a sun, not the sun, crested the ocean, made the waves individual. He saw his friend in the boat. His friend smiled and waved at him, and he rowed not away but near. His friend looked so happy, just to see him, but the boat never approached the shore, temporally stuck, his friend smiling, waving, rowing into forever, equilibrium. His sweet friend, always coming to meet him. He started to laugh. He laughed into his saxophone and he couldn’t stop, he was so happy.