Off the Road - 12

a jazz novel on a typewriter

4

It had been a silent Spring. This was something that Dean mentioned while he was thumbing his way through a table for tomorrow. We passed a sleepy town in the heart of America when it was younger in time it had lived in harmony but now there were the elixirs of death – pentachlorophenol to kill the kudzu that was creeping up the side of the mountains. Repeated exposures clamped a death grip on the trees and the underbrush, and the rivers of death snaked down into the valley and flushed their toxins to the sea with gay aplomb. I said:

“It seems we always know where to pour the slime which kills whatever we want.”

“That is what law is for two open up a yawning hole for us to pack the things that clean the air by snarling the land. It is only once law catches up to science that there will be progress made. And that means that some number of people will die because of the gap between law and science. The recent Covid epidemic was actually the first sign of climate change in a horrendous disguise leering like a skull out of the darkness. We needed the supply chain to continue to run irregardless of how many people it claimed as its victims.”

I stared in two at the climbing hill of the interstate watching how deciduous trees converted over to coniferous ones. But then I stopped and said:

“I don’t understand, you will have to explain this more slowly because my skull is too small.” And the beat goes on: “I. I. I. I.”

“To keep labor cheap, we need to have it go to whatever country is willing to pay the least to its laboring population.”

“I can see that but what does that have to do with climate change?”

“One of the ways that a country can keep its costs down is by using the most polluting fossil fuel available, which in this case is lignite coal. Thus the expensive countries export the manufacture to poorer countries. And that I friend is called globalization of the supply chain. And it must be run whatever the cost is because there is no way to produce all of the bangely bits on our dangling bits. So when we had the chance to shut Covid down we decided not to because there was too much profit in keeping things the way they were. This is the silent Spring of how climate change kills us because it is not just the warming of the world but the change in economic relationships. And each time we want to change climate change there will be another voice that says ’but it’s cheaper this way’ and so the cheaper way will be done until the fog comes in.”

And the colored girls sing: “Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo.”

 Read were reaching the stretch of Little Rock in some time and I have to say I haven’t seen such a dismal capital set in concrete in my life. A few stunted buildings tried hard to Spirer their way up to the sun only the trees hid the foul stench of the exhaust pipe. People closed our windows just to get some distance. We watched the capital come and go but we had no wish to look around because it was just too depressing and in not a good way.

Then Dean took his thumb, which was the symbol of his final development. He no longer cared about anything but also cared about everything in principle; the masses of men and suitcases were all the same to him. It seemed as if they were through a narrow window and the consequences of radiation had been duplicated in laboratory studies and all came out the same.

Then we trekked down the other side as the mountains screamed in the distance with only the occasional wildflower to produce color in the mélange of dirty green. Then halfway down the radio found another channel which was some college station and it was playing John Coltrane was playing “Giant Steps.” For me, I was quite by changes in the key but Dean was smoothly whistling as the circle went round and round.

“It is like Wagner only with horns.”

I only listened with attentive ears to the sound that changed how I viewed the madness of creation clashing with the smoothness of explanation in a distant memory of expiation.

Finally, I said to Dean: “You’ll have to explain this to me in small steps.”

“These are the Coltrane changes, normally when you go up the scale you move in a circle of fifths just like Mozart and Beethoven. When you move down you go in a circle of fourths like Schubert or Schumann. Wagner came and played with things so that you could move through keys in a circle of thirds. Then when jazz came around, they made some small changes to the circle of fifths and the circle of fourths but largely remained the same. Then culturing came and said, ‘If Wagner can do it then so can I’ and he did it at a blazing pace. That’s why the pianist was so flummoxed and halting in is improvisation while Coltrane was as smooth as silk and twice as fine. Changes up, changes down. It is the old way and never will be heard again.”

“How so?”

“It was from the day when we did not understand what dumping carbon d. oxide did to the environment.  Making horns and keys and sax on the fly. We can only listen to the music in its context as detexturized detoxified significance.”

I listened to the remaining notes and wondered how anyone could do what Coltrane did and still keep his feed on the ground. It was the Coltrane at his most holy. It was madness to even think of it was madness to try, and it was madness to succeed in all colors of the splashed-out rainbow.

 And the silent summer took up where the silent spring left off getting warmer all the time like a cord changing a third away ever upwards in succession by impression.

Callup the down blast and fret.

 We were going down into the belly of the beast with DDT taking up the tell of the wedding peel embrace.