When I first met Ras Algi, he was standing outside his shop in Dominica, beside a small drum with a handwritten sign on it that said "Do not play this drum". He was clearly a Rasta, long dreads down his back, sunbleached at the tips. He'd chalked "Ras Algi - Drum Lessons" on a board on the cracked frayed thread of a sidewalk.
I was walking to town down the beach road, flanked by huts, houses and stores, all built from cinderblocks - some half-finished, and some half-collapsed, as kids played in the storm drains and worn-out taxis and busses fought over the failing road, the clouds of their exhaust particular to the tropics. Between the huts, views of the Caribbean, yachts bobbing on a still-blue sea, despite the failed sewer system. Above me a dense tropical forest, transected by roads and gated villas for the elite.
I started drum lessons that day.
"Don't play what you can't do", said Ras Algi, smiling as I staggered lost, off-beat, hands misfiring, out of control in some helpless, childish way, and again I felt that embarrassed flush of failure, hot-flash of mind and blood and rage, and I go back, pulling into the slow-drum beat of the bass, as Algi throttles back from his complexity of jumpouts and long patterns, complex like dance moves, and I look into his eyes, smiling quietly, and it feels that he's watching amused as I try to break my way back towards the calm of the beat.
I realized that I used to learn things a lot more - when I was young, I more often lived inside of new experiences, and that these quick storms of embarrassment are reminiscent of who I once was, and revelatory of who I now am. I remember how it always felt, in those learning places, at the beginnings, to totter wide-eyed through the newness, alertly cautious, observant and clumsy, as I felt out for the patterns, the rule-sets, approached and merged, until I was part of the pattern, had become familiar, connected.
And then my right hand slips back into the bass beat, a slow cuff that Algi pounds patiently, and gradually the erratic exuberance of my left connects as well. I drum awkwardly as if dreaming, sometimes so effortless that I'm barely aware of it, and other times gritted like a rusted machine, pieces slowly breaking with the grate and chink of its gears, like watching the threads and themes of a dream collapse, after waking. I observe my drumming like watching my reflection, an intimate sketch of my distractions and disfocusses, my uncontrollable impermanence.
I play on, and watch the urges stir up, flare and seethe, the mistakes, watch the flow of mind and body stutter and jitter, sometimes stumble, and sometimes flow through, until I notice that I'm building paths, past my failure patterns, and so that even when I find new breakdowns, new crashes, I trust that I can build past them, find my way. I watch the grit and grin of it, flush and blood, fall out and back in like a toddler weaving unafraid through a forest.
Ras taught me the bass first, a cupped strike, a "closed" beat that stays on the drum-head long enough to deaden the hit, to take out the resonant bounce of the skin, pushing the energy through the body of the drum, so that I feel the impact, the displace of the beat, like the pressure drop of a storm. "The bass is there first," he told tell me, "You must always feel it here.", touching his fist to his heart, slowly, powerfully, beatedly.
There is however, a big difference between knowing, that you need to feel something, and actually feeling it. It took me time to learn how to find the bass, to hear it from Ras' drumming, and then pick it up and hold it, carry it for myself. It was so simple a task that I would often forget it, slip into a few more threads of thought, and then fall off completely, no window for an accidentally graceful recovery, as I felt my arm twitch into spasticities or confused silence, and would have to stop and start over again.
I think that our lives are at least as inspired by fear, as they are by pleasure. And there is a goodness to that. Fear and courage are entwined, they grow together, reach out into newness. And as I drummed, I realized how funny, how absurd, the ride-surge of my fear was. So often it was my faint apprehension, or my annoyance at a slight mistake, that knocked me off-balance, disarmed me.
By ignoring that flick of failure, I could coast past it, my hands arm body carrying a sense within them, an awareness and capacity, beyond the intent of my mind, they flowed better alone, than when sparked by the scattered and dissipate impulses of my brain, scattered pebbles thrown at a pool.
We played in Algi's courtyard, a weathering slab of concrete half-shaded by coconut trees and a sea-almond tree, bright hot blue of sun and sea beyond the cinderblock walls. We sat facing each other, Ras on the step, and I on the one worn chair. Baby sprawled watching, with a lazily patient alertness to her beach-bred blond-lab deferent supplicant Labrador affection. In the garden beside us, Jolie-Anne is taking her first steps, to her mother Valerie's encouraging voice. Valerie's tall and beautiful, stays quiet behind our lesson, while Jolie totters and weaves, bright-fresh in the white of her baptismal dress.
The drum spangs tight when I hit the open beats right and the impact echoes in sound and touch, the strike and the note blurring together until I forget how to separate them, what causes and what happens, between hand and drum, between will and beat. I try to hear the waves on the cobbled beach, 30 feet to my right, or the pulse of my heart, and can't, wonder if they are all together, and that I just can't imagine them in dischord.
Whenever I get comfortable with a pattern, Ras changes out on me, stops, so that I'm suddenly carrying the beat alone, or spins his rhythm up and away, so that I realize that I'm just walking, and he can fly. Alone, I falter, startled by own lack of inherence, stutter and then wade back into the beat. When Ras synchs into his own variances, high popping calls and responses, I grit-smile and grin, bear down, have learned from forays that I can't follow him.
And so knowing that, I both follow him and don't, scrabble to hold that most basic pattern, the broad worn cobblestones of our shared beat, while yet aspiring towards those lace gracious esotericities like a brave bluffer, brave enough to target love and engagement, either for or without cause.
Copyright 2009