At a party two weeks ago, I heard an American in his eighties, a retired teacher talk about murder. A moment earlier the conversation was about food, about school, ordinary ballast of conversation and then suddenly politics, the way things often do now, like pulled by gravity. He said if he had a clear shot at Trump, he would take it. He didn’t whisper this, dropped it as if weather talk. Smiling, like he said something reasonable. It is a very old idea. You can fix the world by destroying selective parts. When I was sixteen, I wrote a song that imagined humanity’s extinction as a final kindness. The universe thanking us for our absence. The lyrics perfect sincere sixteen yr. old conviction. I thought despair knowledge. I’ve changed my mind about certainty. I suspect what passes for conviction a distortion of hearing. People are stupid and cruel, but also capable of tenderness so profound it undoes you. Many faces does life have. The old guy thought he would save us from tyranny; I thought I’d save the cosmos from us. Different costume same arrogance. Each convinced we glimpsed the secret pattern when actually only hearing the faintest rhythm of something infinite and strange.

I thought of Billy Hart, the drummer I met as a teenager. A whole other rhythm. He told me he taught Lenny White of Return to Forever. I told him I was trying to learn “Excerpt from the First Movement of Heavy Metal” from No Mystery. He said, “You’re too young to understand it,” and smiled. I thought he was teasing. Years later, I agree. The song changed, or perhaps it was me. Now I hear a hidden dialogue between notes, restraint behind the fury, intelligence refusing resolution. Maybe so is everything. Music, morality, the universe itself. The man at the party, my younger self, even Billy’s laughter, variations on the impossible theme: that to understand is to listen until the illusion of knowing dissolves into the music.