The difference between history and historiography.
I invoked this dichotomy in my last post about Christina Sharpe and Greg Tate’s writing. I want to follow up with notes from a recent conversation between jazz legend Graham Haynes and intellectual historian Robin D.G. Kelley. Haynes is the musician in residence at Four One One this season.
Greg Tate says somewhere that he’d “rather be a mediocre musician than a great writer,” because of the ineffable magic of creating music with people, touching audiences in a way writing won’t. I thought about that sentiment as I imagined what kind of writer I might become if I really and truly gave it my professional all. I’ve griped a lot about my unwillingness to work any harder or the world’s unwillingness to come any closer or the full-blown psychic dam that prevents me from getting published in a serious “book deal” manner (the way I think I want to be published, at least), or the dam’s very important job of protecting the rest of the world from my obsidian personal rants.
Kenya Hara, the creative director of all things Japanese-minimalist, once said to me that he didn’t want an ounce of irony in his work or the promotion thereof. I thought I understood what he meant but it took me years to recognize how irony was imbued in every thing I was making as a 20-something creative producer. Namely in my auto-historicizing or de-historicizing information as quickly as it was created. A very simple example of this is in how people tend to add conciliatory or diminishing asides to bare statements of fact when emailing, or even in small talk with strangers. It’s not just to appear smaller but to appear “over it” before the connection has begun.
This is where I find myself staring. Staring, at the difference between history and historiography.
As I listened to Haynes banter in memories of the mid-century New York improv scene, I marveled at how many of the stories Haynes told felt new and untold to me. It was story time. And something about the linear way he recounted what he had experienced, anecdote by anecdote and scene by scene, free of irony, free of embellishment and with absolutely no agenda, felt like music. Like a balm.
I’ve become so versed in writing and inured to deconstructing cultural propaganda in the last ten years as this so-called creative producer. So expert at it that I have grown allergic to aspects of the word. It isn’t that I can’t eat pasta, but wheat has been cultivated too hard for my constitution.
Haynes’ stories verge on being boring. I happen to love boring music, and have started to grow an appetite for boring writing. But the other magical thing happening as he told—straight told—his memories of what happened in Tangier, in Bahia, in Cologne, in Queens, is that a room of co-locutors felt the blam, too. I felt it in them. We want simply to hear the story.
It’s important that we have critics of histories, historiographers, to remind us of the trouble with institutionalizing memory. I also want to say, and I say it now in this format that I know won’t go far enough or make me enough of a name, but I’ll say it because it is as much for my own benefit to hear it, to write it: we benefit from hearing the history of our people and our craft, from those able to tell it, not just because it is information but because it is music.
I hope to become a mediocre musician. When I think about how I might take advantage of an opportunity to become bigger and better at anything, the fantasy is never to do less, do work less, to accumulate less. And I know rest is resistance, pleasure is requisite. I do I do I do. So I suggest to myself, just that mediocrity. The middle. The median. The medium. The media. I am a channel; a pathway. I want to hear what happened and tell you what I hear.