The new ostinato is in E major, yet it is no simple pattern. The leap of a twelfth bends the passage’s logic like a frozen river cracking beneath each step. To play it is to court danger, not the simple business of tossing one ball in the air, but the chaos of juggling three or more. Another musician, particularly a pianist, might hear the strain and let the thought echo: Ah, that’s dangerous… is he really going to take the steep incline? Like noticing she’s barefoot and scattered glass on the ground. All my life in awe of the ones who take the dark road that mocks reason. Precisely the sort of danger that compels a certain type of person. Those pianists seize the right to go on, beauty, impossible and pure, appearing only when every breath risked for music – and that’s just left hand. Then the right lands clumsily in E major, heavy and hollow. Far from an improvisation if it only sounds like a scale. Salvation comes from a grace note. A simple thing I saw in an Oscar Peterson tutorial. Sort of a miracle. Shift the starting point to E♭ and the ear no longer counts intervals like a bored accountant. It’s a sleight-of-hand, the musical twin of New York’s three-card monte. I want the place where music stops being a plan and becomes a landscape one sees for the first time. Where E major is only the doorway to getting lost. Tricks are not enough. I want to throw out the compass, step into the dark like the crazy frightening unspeakable part of the Daniel Johnston film when his father is flying them home and he plucks the key from the engine and, throws it out the window into the rushing sky.