The Poetry of Charlies Mingus

Charles Mingus's autobiography, "Beneath the Underdog" is ... a mixed bag, let us say. The bulk of the novel is him, James Bond-like, having sex with various women who fall head-over-heels in love with him and beg him to sell them for money. Having reached the end of the novel (which is basically what it is, there's not a factual thing in it), I actually don't know if this was Mingus's intent, whether he intended a metaphor between selling his art and the women he love for money. Then there's a whole pimp subplot, which could be seen as Mingus discussing the relationship between black men and power and wealth and using the weapons of sin to fight in a white world, but the whole book is so muddled that one can't reasonably conclude that that ... is exactly what Mingus intended. It does not help that Mingus is so, so obsessed with particular details, usually related to asses and whatnot.

I would have dismissed the book entirely if not for the last five or so chapters of the book, which shows that Mingus is, in fact, a self-aware person, to some extent. He describes a long stay in Bellevue Hospital, where he writes two poems. I won't say whether the poems are good - one in particular is so weird that I'm not sure what effect Charles intended - but they're both so interesting I wanted to write them down for future examination.

I genuinely believe Mingus was one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, and I'm not qualified to say he's one of the greatest of all time. The book both reveals nothing about his musicianship and quite a bit. He barely mentions his career nor his philosophy on music - most of the time music is a thing he is doing and not something he is thinking about. He does mention a great love for the Juilliard String Quartet, which means he has good taste. On the other hand, the book reveals his mixed feelings on sex and race and society, and how all three of these ugly things have shaped him into an ugly person, which I think is the conceit of the book: Mingus isn't interested in telling you what actually happened in his life, he is trying to tell you how he as a person was made and what he thinks life is. Clumsy attempt, but this actually reveals quite a lot about his music because Charles's music is some of the most emotional, most expressive in the history of the planet; he was a man, clearly, wracked by guilt and tension over his own mortality. You get the impression he is developing the outlines of a person in every song of his, and this person takes on richer and deeper colors as he aged. He is a Pablo Picasso of music, though less of an asshole - maybe that's not saying much.

Anyway, without further ado.

Nice of You to Have Come to My Funeral

Blues is a man on an icy cold night, walking an eternity, site to site, Sutton Place or Bowery, living. No! Not living. He is that memory alive but not sharing, living the sight that we see alive and living. Content? Why ridicule? He sleeps on armed-in pillows in spilled pee, piss splashed to the gutters not or even not as his own knowingless leaks soaked to his clothed groin and seeped on in through the clothed rest of him. Smelling even in his mooched coin that is turned to paper seldom, in change for his reason, drink, life's answers to ever-knowing, dare he did with women, wine, song, dance or drug-out. Old cold facts sounds, he is of breathing living in off moments of extravagant blessed love moments, all lies, lying of untruth to each other than unfortunately came together and hated truths of it all, inside or out, depending that is assuming he is not a she. Oh damn it all blues. Screwed to the melting frozen walk of dared-to-embrace stone, concrete hard, imagined soft only to overdue erections of loneliness that turned feminine and speaks back wet, warm tears, not too far removed from its common denominator, iced urine melting at dared hot death that clings to life for love at thought of some response, be it only the clay, dirt or pavement I behold in my drunken fevered search for a true woman's groin, wanting me as I want her, to never hate me because we found refuge of satisfaction as two drunken stones warmed themselves side by side, in outside our guttered ideas of opposite sides fucking.

Untitled

My music is evidence of my soul's will to live beyond my sperm's grave, my metathesis or eternal soul's new encasement. Loved and lovers, oneness, love. Conception, one and one is two is four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two equals you. Youman, human, newman, new man. Me. My I's personal private sacred knowing the moment of coming together with my creator or all creations' I, as one, knowing God, living as life itself for love of loving to do so and living with this, its own life secret, in and again of life loving itself, loving of life itself for good and evil because it is beautiful to have this life in itself alive, to grow, see it be it watch it love it, and know it is I and you that make it so as we each love it in our way. And that is why it is that thought came to be in us human beings that can know if we care to that we are that secret knowing the sacred conception as two opposites in force of love's expression grew in a togetherness out of the nothingnesses of empty space and times and this our universe of knowing and talking about it all is where the womb of the creative knowledge lay to all the knowledges of life or death. Alone lonely lonesome life living alive and caring to commune or speak with itself of its sacred knowing of its own creation cannot speak to itself except through its mind in us of its personal sacred secrets of knowing and not knowing life was born out of nothingness, time in space, or an I and an I and an I that we do comprehend, but it is impossible that it came to be other than I plus the I equals a new I of mating of something and nothingness of two or love and loving to do so and born alive to this life as one knowing its beginning as no more threat as its knowing, and its knowing has no more ending than its beginning from nothing to nothing but knowing all the while the eternities' incarnation is proof of my lives' graves and incarnations.