Something Like #28 – Patience & Expanding Time w/ Bitsy Knox

This is an episode that started as a meditation on waiting, and became an episode about the distillation of time and the experience of time passing: its expansions and contractions. Our lodestars in this sense will be two great proponents of free jazz: the musician/researcher/educator/gardener/martial artist Milford Graves and the writer/educator/poet/filmmaker Amiri Baraka. We’ll be looking at time as irregular, subjective—its passage expressed elastically. Mostly, we’ll be looking at patience and its ritualisation. We’ll search for strategies in music to be in time, and so perhaps to account for its passage not in terms one’s own subjective experience of it, but in terms of existing within its inevitability. 

Hang in there, friends. 

• As ever, Something Like’s jingle is provided by my brilliant friend and collaborator Roger 3000, who has an adorable new track out on bandcamp now.
• You can listen to Amiri Baraka’s complete 1985 lectures at Naropa University here.
• You can watch Milford Graves: Full Mantis here

Patience

Patience is

wider than one

once envisioned,

with ribbons

of rivers

and distant 

ranges and 

tasks undertaken

and finished

with modest 

relish by

natives in their 

native dress.

Who would 

have guessed

it possible 

that waiting

is sustainable—

a place with 

its own harvests.

Or that in 

time’s fullness

the diamonds 

of patience

couldn’t be 

distinguished

from the genuine 

in brilliance

or hardness.

Kay Ryan, Say Uncle, 2000