In Effigy, In Loving Memory

On how the living spirit of Alice Coltrane haunts its hosts and speculators

There are events in the life of Alice Coltrane that could undermine the way she is branded, as the almost voiceless beacon of deliverance through jazz’s pseudo pop spirituality™, and scare off the vultures of industry, but we don’t discuss such things in polite company. She is oversimplified, placated past her mystery and misery and recovery to be used for comfort, healing, or the mere near-martyred idea of these things as improvised music with a sensibility that feels syncretic enough for even casual listeners to assimilate. She is mis-cast as sentimental in the places where her asceticism made her sharp and expansive. We police her image just enough, so that it’s easy to forget that she was born and raised in Detroit, that she suffered when her lover died so young. The harp he gifted her arrived at their house shortly after he’d departed, and with it we are offered visions of her fingers bleeding as if stabbed by thorns during self-imposed marathon rehearsals, her will bifurcated into near-starvation as she trained herself on the instrument, plucking and praying her love back to life with the siren’s focus, spellbinding herself in the process. All of this labor and care has been dumbed down and betrayed, distributed and mass marketed as if casual or bohemian, as if hers are the songs that just happen to come with awakening and breakthrough, not the ones earned in the face of terror, dread, and isolation.

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I’m thinking about the ruined image, the destroyed, misplaced, or discharged image, Rancière‘terrible image,’ made crude by isolation, the alienated proto-memes of idol-worship, and the simple photograph retroactively fractured by death or fallout— that music, shrinking or expanding to accompany its visual analog. Not the reputation or idea of the ruined image, but the image itself, cut or burned by over-interpretation or dysfunction, and how eager to please that ruin is. If you begin the process by making the first cut or gash yourself, the image will complete it, cannibalize itself, rot, get lost, disappear, be confiscated by your subconscious desire to be relieved of it— just look at the superstars, Whitney, Michael, Marilyn, Billie Holiday, Jimmy Hendrix, Prince, Janis, Jean-Michel—just look at their beloved Los Angeles, casually afloat on the fumes of the firebird, helping us unravel its cursed images. But what happens when that ruined picture is of something beautiful or people in love, perfected by union so that the desecration is stayed and halted, an aura of light enveloping its perfect form as armor, Alice Coltrane’s afro-harp in effigy.

Effigy, the uneasy negotiation between shine and burnout, or between triumph and sabotage; its bright and eternal unfolding from the image to the light it carries, haloing black sound like a threat—the shredded synth or crimped 808 looped and imbricated until walls of noise crest in on themselves, forcing you to flee, to writhe yourself free, or join the ruins and become their immobile feast. Meanwhile, you are on the ground, you are the mourners’ pavement, you burrow into the root of the holographic radiance of riddance and phantom, slip into it as if skidding on ice in slick soles. In the club, we all dress up, trip in synch to its gutter music, a diaspora of fallen angelics, regulated as the muse, the beautiful ones dissociating, the stolen tongues of salvation shifting from formless to rooted in your very own hijacked flesh, invasively wedged or withheld there like a stale and noxious air searching for the taper in a machined fog. A rave party augury displaced to midsized chapel, still life with closed listening. And you’re the woman who went underground, digging each grave of love its tunnel system through which the souls escaped, the body later, reassembled in effigy.

Sensational (in Future’s tone), note the null in it, the voided knoll turned advent— you are crouching with its ulcerating loop, so beautiful in the teeth— gold and insinuated diamonds and phantom baby-moms. An ethics of sensation as it fades to numbness until the reunion of body and soul demands a score. And mumbled in poppy seed syllabics is better than forged; it needs a name, and you are the scroll and its calling, mystic guide beyond hallucination into the lucid cruelty of true recognition. You are the lantern burning the mystic’s hand to carry her, the disheveled resonance of windstrewn ash that was meant for the river, lands in parched dirt, writhes some more, placates stillness, toward an embarrassment of unceremonious uprooting, shoveling its brilliance into limerence with the heavens, havens, heathens later, raven-sent, having refused to heed the signs, having attempted to outwit the sacred with human logic, you’ve become its sacrifice and bounty, its comedic relief, its giggled warning against hubris, the chasm between a trustfall and the pride ahead of the fall— that intervention that a woman in the spotlight who distrusts that light becomes.

Alice Coltrane turns the intonation of effigy, of burning flesh and dark matter made lyrical by devotion, into a utopian and singular psalm series wherein obsession and release alloy and form a balm that only comforts those who are willing surrender to unbearable heat. She confronts her husband John’s version of “My Favorite Things” and snatches the “things,” leaves their substance and favor basking in the sun on a line as silk kimonos do in the Dorthea Lange image taken before their owners were rounded up and sent to prison camps. This is the allegory of Alice’s embodied, unrepentant grieving that chases terror into mercy’s embrace, makes pain seem almost indulgent and revelatory. Sweet songs are gonna come again.

Imagine digression as fire’s muse, and she as their judiciary, the sound of that element making itself known to the human senses, that terrifying mastery of the moment that lets those who possess it change direction just in time, just ahead of immolation. Alice Coltrane’s music harnesses the blisses of sudden change before they give way to erratic, naive longing, and makes them dance in the bellow-tempo of despair becoming ecstatic before realizing what it was before, that it hurt, that it had to be different to endure. Her mediator between realms (between the monastic and the unbearably lush) is divine love, the kind that is brutal, the tenderness few can cope with without shattering or recoiling into the brash; the intensity most don’t want or deserve or have the capacity to access and sustain, the scar the effigy leaves leaking into carbon/oblivion, an arbor for an absentee chorus, her muses, her mouth of strings.

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It is the job of great ones to prove that real love exists, and prevails in every realm, and cannot be defied or defiled by the common greediness to mimic it or trick it into profane places— the ego’s livelihood. Love is the only human talent. The alternate states of being are varying versions of an imposter or gimmick trying to get closer to it, and we don’t know what love is, and it is the mandate of great ones to prove that it is the energy animating everything we see, touch and sense, the guardian of the will to exist. The only path to what is called a self is through it and to walk through it is to set the soul on fire and move the way a burning candle does in the coiled palm of child priest, wavering madly with such passion, showing you the way out of dangerous darkness by becoming the harbinger of danger, casting danger’s spell and reversing it in the same gesture. John and Alice Coltrane remind us that real love exists and can be consecrated in sound-image, together and apart they are among love’s most effective shepherds, they are one black Aphrodite in union with all of her archetypal power and refusing the archaic to renew it in us even as we desecrate its image with worship. To achieve this they lived in a state of effigy, like a state of siege with no privacy or option to retreat into some secret cave where hysteria could go to be transmuted into serenity.

In effigy they indiscriminately and publicly burned through anything that might have impeded their expression of the sublime and fathomless attraction that governs the only meaningful light of the world. They become both the canaries in the subterranean mines and the ones who peer inside and watch their wings go limp and enjamb low afros with fretless fetters, blow-up lungs for brass, gut, nylon and wire, the makings of the coherent heart.

They are a pair of undertakers, too awake to go down slowly, burning off the excess karmas so early the soul could grow listless on earth, leave ahead of the body. Great music demands you feed it everything you have, consumes each offering shamelessly, empties every harbor it enters and keeps digging past the arid bone of seabed to communicate in the symbols casual grammar disavows. The stakes are higher in the symbolic realm because the currency there is the stakes themselves, not their replica as concept or code—how much does making the right sound mean to you? Show me. Throw something extraneous into the flames and when the kickback of the coming gust grabs your skin and trembles beside it, do not flinch, steady the aura, be the lyric’s diaspora, be the talent for love as it realizes it’s an obsession with music which it realizes is the ritual the body invents to feel worthy of itself, its reason to live. To celebrate Alice Coltrane, is to beseech this nearness to the meaning of life to come closer while remaining boundless as the tangle of willed and subconscious desires hobbles through its quantum field; more fire, some fury where the liquidity had been. Let her go. Restore her to the company of her one and only divine love as tunes to the infinite.

The tighter we grasp her image the more it dissipates and refuses. This is what love is, we do know, now. There is no adequate capsule, she will capsize each effort to invent one, to get back to the universal self. The music switches from temples and ashrams to commercials, modular zones in the constricted consciousness usurp the meditative swarm of her choked up and elongated tempos. This is her last goodbye. How many images have to enter the bonfire in their trance of rebirth, their suicide fantasy pitched as magic ritual? How many more will it take? Alice’s ashram in Agora Hills, eaten by fire. The Black Ark taken under. The Blue Ark, Lee Perry’s headquarters relocated from Jamaica to Switzerland, taken too, two entire studios burned down. All of Ike and Tina Turner’s Bolic Sound, in Inglewood, California, reduced to ashes. Capitol Records, half-incinerated in the 2008 Sunset Fire. So many original recordings, which the industry calls masters, gone, which leave us again in the hold of this ship, awaiting their casting call, their inevitable resurfacing as remembrance. We who attempt to salvage and rebuild the master’s houses as pathetic little monuments to our liberation. We cannot help it, we decorate ourselves in what we’ve lost and regained, it’s pathological, egoic folk forms masked in the sophistication of civilized (over) consumption, art/work. The joke is on us. Our music cannot be swept away in raging heat or contained in effigy, these are fake ruins, and the music is the vibration on the wind that compelled the heat to sweeping, the trickster who offered you a monument so would forget its ruined image, maybe even sell it to speculators and amateur revivalists, or take its place yourself, in the rubble, complete its interrupted cycle, like a martyr, like the fool.

On her song “Om Supreme,” Alice plays Fender Rhodes over legato chants that promise divine reunion in California. It can’t be arbitrary, it’s the mecca where this music exhales its dragons, for better or worse. When I called you to California/ You knew I would meet you in California. We waited for her as those praying voices, as if awaiting the rapture and now that it’s here, a clearing, we call it disaster, scramble to organize it into categories of repair and lament, honor and disgrace, fugitives from our last goodbye.