Blue Fire

February 1, 1996

When I play blues on my guitar, everything I do is circular motion. In other words, all that I play is a repetive pattern. I use a twelve-chord progression which runs through a cycle of chords. Every twelve chords the cycle is repeated, using the exact same chords but with different surface patterns. During one progression I may focus more on the bassline, and in another entirely on higher-register melodies.

With each progression I find new aspects of the basic chords that I have never seen before. During some measures I use a different rhythmic structure. During others I play with more fierceness and verve. On some I rely on the most basic elements of the chords themselves, and on others I daringly move into the more challenging and inventive elements of the extendend chords. I mix and match styles, sometimes flavoring a middle-eastern feel. Other times I rely on straightforward blues.

This masala of music has taught me many things. When I look at my own life what I notice is that various patterns repeat themselves as a matter of course. What I also notice is that each time I see a pattern I see something new and exciting about it. What I see most often is that my own views of gender and gender identity can not only vary considerably in similar circumstances, but that they can often return without warning to places they had been years before. When I think about what it means "to be a woman" I find myself entirely unable to articulate the terms involved, even to find the most basic words to explain why that question is so meaningless to me.

But I have discovered something that finally is beginning to make sense to me for the first time in my life: When I play the music that is essential to me, the beginning and end are by no means the only relevant parts of a piece I play. When a piece consists entirely of the same pattern repeated over and over again, something which is as relevant to ancient Grecian modal music as it is to Bach, blues and jazz, the most essential thing becomes the circle.

You start somewhere. You follow a pattern. And you're back where you started again.

We grow very comfortable looking at life in a strictly linear fashion. You begin your life. You do some things. You end your life. Life is linear. Life takes you from point a (birth) to point b (death).

Screw that. Life takes you in circles. While where you begin and where you end may be relevant, it's certainly no less important to look at -how- you get from one place to another, and what you do the next time through. I know people who continually make the same mistakes in the same situations day in and day out. They, for whatever reason, can not break the patterns. Their lives are in a holding pattern. Their music is repetitive and lifeless.

It is only by breaking free of old modes of thought and creation that we learn how to really live our lives fully. For twenty-three years, I hid behind a pattern of enforced masculinity. I had a thick and burly beard. It was my mask. I had my dead, lifeless patterns down flat. I was dying inside and I was too scared to look to see the fading embers of my soul. And finally, more than five years ago, I was pushed to the brink, almost ready to do myself in by my own hand before I realized what I had been doing to myself all that time, how deeply I had buried myself underneath my own fear.

So I slowly began to climb out from beneath myself.

And finally the circles began to change.

The cycles started to dance, for the first time since I was a child. I could look into my soul and face the screaming. It was not pleasant. It was exceedingly painful. But I finally began to -feel- that pain, and no longer ignore it or pretend it was non-existant.

Today, when I scream, I scream with exultation, rage, joy, and hope. But I do scream, and I no longer hide from the sound of my screaming, and I am happy to be able to scream out what is in my soul and spirit.

This is what it means to me to play the blues. It is being alive. It is coming full circle. It is screaming. It is power. It is rage. It is neither the beginning nor the end that matters to me these days. It is the journey itself in which I thrive.