Page 57 - Jazz

Rest for the Traveller – Jean Luc Ponty PLAI 2007
TIMIşOARA

When I allow musical energies to pass through me, I draw up a hierarchy of values in which my inner
potential has to be reconsidered and put in order depending on what I feel and what I perceive as being beyond
a simple belonging to the everyday. This is another way of saying that it does me good to detach myself and that
by doing so I can enter a zone of protection from which I draw strength and inner peace and where I find the
motivation to seek for the reason for my movement in time which consumes itself in accordance with a convention
that the years follow each other one by one but also in terms of a chemical process that treats me as an object
subject to decay, integrated in this process of cosmic consumption and differentiated from the other objects in it
precisely by my previous awareness of the process and my ability to perceive the changes as they happen.
The paradox is that although I know this, I head through the passage destined for me with my foot flat
on the gas, compressing the hours and days into a story in which, with my heart in my mouth, I eagerly await
and long for the next event, the next moment that promises to be – I dare to hope – better than all that have gone
before. Surely very different from the wise words of Matei Calinescu, who whispered to his character Zacharias
Lichter: “He who hurries, hurries to die”. But almost all of us do nothing but opt for the minimum pass mark, and
this even after we have shared with understanding in all the experiences of the well known lesson and talk about
divine discontent, about intensity of consumption as a value in itself, and about what will come tomorrow, as if
we were thirsty to abolish today.

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