Thursday, February 09, 2006
Zen drumming and the DinkiMini
The evenings are quiet, up in the Highlands of the Rio Grande. No lights - the closest village is two miles away, down the Road from Bath. The stars are bright, overwashed occasionally by clouds. We'd build a fire, watch the dusk darken as we sipped overproof rum mixed with Ting, listen to the night calls of the birds and insects, the soft rush of the wind, the river below.
Our cabin had a drum in one corner. I've never really played a drum, don't have any inherent percussiveness. But I pulled it out onto the deck, the 2nd evening, and started playing with it, as the sunset. It was a good drum, obviously hand-made - about a foot in diameter, and two feet tall. The drum surface was some kind of skin, wrapped round with a wreath of dried vine, rusting nails adorned with Red Stripe bottlecaps holding it in place.
The drum had resonance, vibrato. I didn't know how to hold it, so at first I played it flat, then balanced one edge on one foot, pivoting the drum, playing with its energy. Sound echoed out the bottom, I could feel the energy-tremble in my body. I could bounce the noise off the ground, the nearby forest, or absorb it into my body, depending on how I held the drum, how I pointed it.
"We must play our bodies as if they are musical instruments", my Zen Mistress had said, and I thought about this, as I fell in and out of beat, sometimes too simple, or too complicated, or just chaotically self-destructive. What did I know about drumming, aside from all the thousands of beats and tracks I've listened to over the years? And so I focussed on the sound of it, the impact of my hands, the difference between striking with fingertips, with knuckles, with palms, with the bases of my hands, left and right playing against each other, competing and then twinning, I'd slip into a beat, and then break it, my saboteur mind resisting the predictability of patterns.
I wanted drumness, felt stupid-awkward, but then as I played on, it came, the loops lengthening, patterns condensing, until I was beating hard, well, strong loops, 4 beats, then 8, then 16, mabe 32. I wasn't counting anymore, just playing rightness. Sometimes angry, sometimes hard - the blood flushed into my hands, I could feel the heat reaching down, coiling around my wrists. The energy, the work of it, felt good, hitting like I was fighting, like I was loving. I didn't care who heard anymore, the pattern heard. The valley heard. I heard. I wasn't making anything but noise.
And the noise was good. I don't know how long I played. I played again the next night, in the dark, sitting by the fire. It felt good. Peter was there, but I noticed that he didn't come into the circle of the fire, while I was playing. I looked up at him, nodded, kept playing. He nodded back, but still didn't come in. I stopped a few minutes later, "Dis a good drum.", I said. He agreed. "It's alrigh' dat I play?". He nodded. You never know where the taboos are, in different cultures.
And yet he still wouldn't come into the circle, until I stopped, and put the drum away. As if I'd violated some ruleset that he was too polite to inform me of. Or else had so blatantly called down the hellfire of the local spirits, that silently avoiding the taint of my blasphemy, was all he could do, to protect his own soul..."Dat not right, how you play", he told me a bit later. "Dass a ram drum. You play it tok-Tok tok-Tok", playing out the beat on the table we were sitting at. "Like a heartbeat." I said. "Yah, and den de ewe drum play. Dass a small drum, tight.". "Can you play?", I asked. I wanted to hear, how the drum was supposed to be played. "Naw man", waving me off, as if I was talking crazy talk. "Dey play de drum for de dinkimini, on Independance Day. Das when everyone come up here, sleep on de groun', and dance all night. De drummers come down from Hayfiel'", he said proudly, pointing up towards the Cunha Cunha pass.
Independance day was big, in Jamaica - celebrating the day when the Brits formally ceded Jamaica to the Jamaicans, back in the 1960's. Some Jamaicans described it with a certain rueful nostalgia, as if somewhat surprised that still decades later, long after the Brits had been thrown out, there remained the problems of poverty, corrupt politicians, wanton murders, drug lords. The first Independance Day had been an epic celebration, memorable like JFK's assasination, but positive. And to today, the celebrations continued.
"What's a dinkimini?", I asked, and Peter got up to show me. We were a few drinks into the evening by then. He did a slow shuffle-step, with some pretty serious ass-twitching, for a forty year-old man. I could imagine the beat, resonating through circles of happy people, kids onlooking, adolescents flirting awkwardly, after a long day of partying and feasting, in the firelight, while the drums beat on. This was definitely where I wanted to be, for independance day...
I told the drum story to my group of Zen Buddhists, after a meditation sitting. The inherent rules of Zen free up my narrative, let me end the story when I run out of details, without having to draw any explicit conclusions. Then I just have to wait out the slightly-surprised silence when I stop talking. Someone always picks up the thread, and runs somewhere interesting with it. That's one of the reasons I like this group.
And truth be told, it was pure Zen, while I was doing it, beating on the drum. I want one right now, and a wild-open valley in the tropics, under the stars, to be playing in. Peter was right, I wasn't playing it right. So many historical complexities had brought that drum there, so many coincidental contraptions had brought me there, to that intersection, the drum and I, that it couldn't possibly have been right. But it was...
Our cabin had a drum in one corner. I've never really played a drum, don't have any inherent percussiveness. But I pulled it out onto the deck, the 2nd evening, and started playing with it, as the sunset. It was a good drum, obviously hand-made - about a foot in diameter, and two feet tall. The drum surface was some kind of skin, wrapped round with a wreath of dried vine, rusting nails adorned with Red Stripe bottlecaps holding it in place.
The drum had resonance, vibrato. I didn't know how to hold it, so at first I played it flat, then balanced one edge on one foot, pivoting the drum, playing with its energy. Sound echoed out the bottom, I could feel the energy-tremble in my body. I could bounce the noise off the ground, the nearby forest, or absorb it into my body, depending on how I held the drum, how I pointed it.
"We must play our bodies as if they are musical instruments", my Zen Mistress had said, and I thought about this, as I fell in and out of beat, sometimes too simple, or too complicated, or just chaotically self-destructive. What did I know about drumming, aside from all the thousands of beats and tracks I've listened to over the years? And so I focussed on the sound of it, the impact of my hands, the difference between striking with fingertips, with knuckles, with palms, with the bases of my hands, left and right playing against each other, competing and then twinning, I'd slip into a beat, and then break it, my saboteur mind resisting the predictability of patterns.
I wanted drumness, felt stupid-awkward, but then as I played on, it came, the loops lengthening, patterns condensing, until I was beating hard, well, strong loops, 4 beats, then 8, then 16, mabe 32. I wasn't counting anymore, just playing rightness. Sometimes angry, sometimes hard - the blood flushed into my hands, I could feel the heat reaching down, coiling around my wrists. The energy, the work of it, felt good, hitting like I was fighting, like I was loving. I didn't care who heard anymore, the pattern heard. The valley heard. I heard. I wasn't making anything but noise.
And the noise was good. I don't know how long I played. I played again the next night, in the dark, sitting by the fire. It felt good. Peter was there, but I noticed that he didn't come into the circle of the fire, while I was playing. I looked up at him, nodded, kept playing. He nodded back, but still didn't come in. I stopped a few minutes later, "Dis a good drum.", I said. He agreed. "It's alrigh' dat I play?". He nodded. You never know where the taboos are, in different cultures.
And yet he still wouldn't come into the circle, until I stopped, and put the drum away. As if I'd violated some ruleset that he was too polite to inform me of. Or else had so blatantly called down the hellfire of the local spirits, that silently avoiding the taint of my blasphemy, was all he could do, to protect his own soul..."Dat not right, how you play", he told me a bit later. "Dass a ram drum. You play it tok-Tok tok-Tok", playing out the beat on the table we were sitting at. "Like a heartbeat." I said. "Yah, and den de ewe drum play. Dass a small drum, tight.". "Can you play?", I asked. I wanted to hear, how the drum was supposed to be played. "Naw man", waving me off, as if I was talking crazy talk. "Dey play de drum for de dinkimini, on Independance Day. Das when everyone come up here, sleep on de groun', and dance all night. De drummers come down from Hayfiel'", he said proudly, pointing up towards the Cunha Cunha pass.
Independance day was big, in Jamaica - celebrating the day when the Brits formally ceded Jamaica to the Jamaicans, back in the 1960's. Some Jamaicans described it with a certain rueful nostalgia, as if somewhat surprised that still decades later, long after the Brits had been thrown out, there remained the problems of poverty, corrupt politicians, wanton murders, drug lords. The first Independance Day had been an epic celebration, memorable like JFK's assasination, but positive. And to today, the celebrations continued.
"What's a dinkimini?", I asked, and Peter got up to show me. We were a few drinks into the evening by then. He did a slow shuffle-step, with some pretty serious ass-twitching, for a forty year-old man. I could imagine the beat, resonating through circles of happy people, kids onlooking, adolescents flirting awkwardly, after a long day of partying and feasting, in the firelight, while the drums beat on. This was definitely where I wanted to be, for independance day...
I told the drum story to my group of Zen Buddhists, after a meditation sitting. The inherent rules of Zen free up my narrative, let me end the story when I run out of details, without having to draw any explicit conclusions. Then I just have to wait out the slightly-surprised silence when I stop talking. Someone always picks up the thread, and runs somewhere interesting with it. That's one of the reasons I like this group.
And truth be told, it was pure Zen, while I was doing it, beating on the drum. I want one right now, and a wild-open valley in the tropics, under the stars, to be playing in. Peter was right, I wasn't playing it right. So many historical complexities had brought that drum there, so many coincidental contraptions had brought me there, to that intersection, the drum and I, that it couldn't possibly have been right. But it was...
