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THE FUTURE ONES
For John Fahey
Now if I were going to make music it would have to be
a music no-one likes, for the future must be
quite other than the present, and how can we
be changed by what we like? I find that I regret
that I am not ugly. How can I have authority
if people like looking at me? And how can I project
into the future if I like you - the reader - the way you are?
Now I find that the sense of the sacred cannot be
awe-inspiring. Awe-inspiring nowadays can only be
theatre, make-believe, the whole
gamut of religious feelings have become
too easily accessible - you can buy them in the shops. The sacred nowadays
must be repellent, or at least
uninteresting. It is by subterfuge these days that God
or at least whatever is higher will
impose itself - something seen
out of the corner of the eye, or else
just out of sight, the sense
that something is missing. This
music will be undramatic, un-
demonstrative - a matter of simple, even occasional
intervals. A simple relationship of two or three
notes - or colours - has this advantage at least that it
says nothing, it leaves
everything alone, out of the context
in which we knew it first and therefore
free to reveal itself anew, free of the past,
free of us. But of course
there is more to it than that, for all the time
our feet are moving, one foot
after the other, one note,
one colour after the other
like a child, learning to walk -
a child who might grow up to be
anything a child might grow up to be.