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William Matthews - Mingus In Diaspora
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You could say, I suppose, that he ate his way out, 
like the prisoner who starts a tunnel with a spoon, 
or you could say he was one in whom nothing was lost, 
who took it all in, or that he was big as a bus. 


He would say, and he did, in one of those blurred 
melismatic slaloms his sentences ran—for all 
the music was in his speech: swift switches of tempo, 
stop-time, double time (he could talk in 6/8), 


“I just ruined my body.” And there, Exhibit A, 
it stood, that Parthenon of fat, the tenant voice 
lifted, as we say, since words are a weight, and music. 
Silence is lighter than air, for the air we know 


rises but to the edge of the atmosphere. 
You have to pick up The Bass, as Mingus called 
his, with audible capitals, and think of the slow years 
the wood spent as a tree, which might well have been 


enough for wood, and think of the skill the bassmaker 
carried without great thought of it from home 
to the shop and back for decades, and know 
what bassists before you have played, and know 


how much of this is stored in The Bass like energy 
in a spring and know how much you must coax out. 
How easy it would be, instead, to pull a sword 
from a stone. But what’s inside the bass wants out, 


the way one day you will. Religious stories are rich 
in symmetry. You must release as much of this hoard 
as you can, little by little, in perfect time, 
as the work of the body becomes a body of work.
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