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Ugly Beauty​/​Rant

from Sonder by Chris McCarthy

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about

"Ugly Beauty" is by Thelonious Monk, originally on the album Underground. This recording is licensed by Harry Fox.

The excerpts from "Rant" used in this recording can be found in Diane Di Prima's Pieces of a Song originally published by City Lights.

lyrics

Rant



You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology

a cosmogony

laid out, before all eyes

there is no part of yourself you can separate out

saying, this is memory,
this is sensation,

this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living

it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole

you do not “make” it so
there is nothing to integrate,
you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from
hangs from the heaven you create

every man / every woman carries a firmament inside 
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky 
w/out imagination there is no memory 
w/out imagination there is no sensation
 w/out imagination there is no will, desire
history is a living weapon in yr hand
& you have imagined it, it is thus that you
“find out for yourself”
 history is the dream of what can be,
it is 
the relation between things in a continuum
of imagination
what you find out for yourself is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit yr world
yet it is not lonely



THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST

THE IMAGINATION

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST 
THE IMAGINATION

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST

THE IMAGINATION

ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT


There is no way out of a spiritual battle

There is no way you can avoid taking sides

There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making
yr world



There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can’t sign up as a conscientious objector
the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making
the taste in all our mouths is the taste of power
and it is bitter as death
bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself
the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you


–Diane di Prima (1985)

credits

from Sonder, released May 12, 2017

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all rights reserved

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Chris McCarthy New York

"Pianist and composer Chris McCarthy is proving to be one of the most imaginative and impressive forces on the New York jazz scene."-Hot House Jazz Magazine.

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