Ode On A Parisian Saxophone

Hiller had played it wrong. Somewhere between realizing his altruistic self and respecting his craft he had gone just too far down a narrow path, and, like a cod trap, the path just kept decreasing in diameter, foreshortening ahead of him. And there wasn’t enough room to get turned around. It’s times like these, he thought, that you have to be courageous to come out on the other end, or, more truthfully, you have to maintain a veneer of subscription to the heroic act, while secretly shitting your pants and furtively glimpsing at life’s map, wondering “where the fuck am I?” meanwhile supposing that in fact you should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

Hiller had laid down his tool years prior to first change himself so that, in turn, he could change the world. His great conceit was that he, in fact, was ruminating on his craft whilst changing himself, serving two masters and hastening himself closer to the cataract of egoic oblivion. He was certain his psychic world was flat and his mental perambulations of the past forty years had only reinforced this view. There was relief, but never quite lofty enough to glimpse the point at which he would have to leap to the other shore. Lofty enough only to delineate the circular horizon of what he believed he was capable. He pondered again his predicament. His relationship to his craft may change, but he would actually have to pick the tool up and try to use it again. What was now alien had once been a corporeal extension; it played him. Son-of-a-bitch.

Hiller listened intently for any tremor in the sound, cringing at the memory of the querulous tones he had made for so many years. Jesus! A single note: where was the core, where was the substance, where was the Creator? Now, it all sounded to him like one tedious sonic whinge and he simply could not stand it any longer. Somewhere on his path he had lost the beauty and he was now left to polish his profane bleat back into the halting prophecy he had once channeled. No Henry Higgins was going to polish this turd into something sublime, just Hiller. He thought he was losing his mind. Who thinks like this? He didn’t have time to sort it out, the psychosis of his impending mid-life crunch, because he had to remember how to hold the tool just so, that the truth would flow freely out and fill the air. He didn’t have time to think about the impossibility of it all, that art was a freight train, ever gaining momentum, and if you should falter trying to grasp a rung, your rung, to hoist yourself aboard, then you’d better drop your head and start sprinting for another try. Or stop.

Hiller picked up the saxophone, wet the reed and exhaled. He couldn’t do it. Not yet. He slumped in his chair, arms akimbo and saxophone balanced across his right thigh, just like his favorite photo of Hank Mobley. He contemplated another inhalation. Sisyphus would have played sax.

© 2008 Kenneth Hoffman