The Time of Our Singing

In that weekly ecstatic keeping of faith and bearing of witness, Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

Written music is like nothing in the world—an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it’s almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section.

The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival

Silence: the motor drive of nothingness underneath all rhythm - threatened to last forever, a spell of sleep cast over the entire kingdom of listeners.

All the while moving the idea of home three more modulations deeper into unspinning space

But memory will forever replay this day in black and white, the slow voice-over pan of Movietone

Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.

He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere

If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.

Feeling for the first time what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through.

We'd drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.

Maybe they're not scared of different. Maybe they're scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?

A cracker kid in a designated white house in a black neighborhood off in fly- bitten Mississippi was about to let loose the secret beat of race music, forever blowing away the enriched-flour, box stepping public.

What we want, finally, from friends, is that they have no more clue than we do.