You Know, You Know

A common practice I've engaged in over long years of music buying is the selling back of used albums -- this practice has outlasted even the change in media (note, you can't sell back mp3s or anything downloaded, really, for that matter. Let's take a moment of mourned silence; even though selling something back to the store nets you nearly zero profit, the feeling that something that is no longer worth owning to you is worth something to the store that can then recycle it to a new and anonymous fan, someone awaiting the sounds of their lives -- this recapitulation of the same into what is always eternally different (it is always new to someone else, even if it is dried up of all tantalizing possibility for me, it is a shining honeyed grapefruit ripe on the possibility tree for the figure behind me) is the magic economy of the real.) from records to 8-tracks to cassette to cds. The best thing about cds is the fact that they "last forever" (as if we needed them to!), but they are now, outside of well kept record albums (like well-kept baseball cards), the only thing you can really "sell".

Selling Back is essential in BUNCHES. I mean, you could sell one or two cds, but the fact is, you generally get no more than $3 in store credit or $2 in cash for them. In the world I'm operating within, cash is meaningless except for what you need to bring in if you don't get enough store credit to exchange for what you want. In other words, we're looking at the $3 store credit, which is basically a future option on the record store's current or future inventory. The whole exercise is a total gamble, but a gamble for the rush of the gamble that leads to the rush of the victory over winning. This rush only has a success rate that starts at $50 -- because, at even the cheapest used record/cd shop, to get anything cool that is more than just one cool thing, you need about $50. Meaning, you have to sell back at least 15 cds. And if what you have to sell, for example, are 80's metal cds, or orginal issue Blue Note Jazz cds -- all of which they sell to you for no more that $5 -- you will need at least 50 cds. So, you really have to be willing to be arrogant with yourself, you have to strip everything you have away to the essentials, which you can never do, which you must do if you want to bury your doldrums at the center of your troubled, discarded mind.

The Sellback is basically how you overcome depression. You know, life gets boring sometimes. You look at your music collection, and everything is grey sand, dark dirt, decades of indecency, decades of over-dependency. You're like the philosopher who realizes he's never read a novel; the high fashion shopper who is surprised by her ignorance of much needed flip-flops; the gourmet chef who has lost his taste for the simplicity of peanut butter. You lie there, with the articles of faith strewn about the world, and at the center of your bible is a black and white image of the devil yawning. Yup, there is no question about this, my son; your lifeblood is ebbing into the ether of the past.

So, you get yourself up (the Republicans were right; bootstraps do mean something; you grab them and lift them and you fall flat on your back, and you realize the pain in your backside is, well, you), and you limp on over to the tape case, or the record cube, or the cd rack, or the hall closet, or whatever. And you start picking your way though the graves of what you were once so promiscuous to freely love, now hell bent anything that you HATE. Now, this gets really interesting, because the impetus for doing this has little to do with your feeling about the recordings; what it has to do with is the feeling you MIGHT HAVE once you get rid of these recordings and replace them with something else that you "feel better" about. Notice that I'm not talking about what you "like". As soon as you own a recording, you are beyond the point of "taste"; you are now at the point of determining where, relative to your aesthetic sense, what you now own is placed, what world it lives within, and what space within the sum total of that world that it, curiously, owns. You may own the recording, but it knows more about you than you do about yourself.

When you comb through your collection and let yourself hate what you've become, you are reinventing yourself from the past to dwell in an ambiguous future. (Perhaps what will happen, when it is time for you, is nothing, and your depression may have been the true state of things.) But you don't know what this ambiguity is -- that's what ambiguity is, of course -- and this unknown is what you convert into a hope that you then use to stare into the heart of your error'd ways (all the music you own that you hate, that you should have once known to never own), rip out that very heart and stuff it into a bag, and then race out the door while it still beats, determined to make it to the record store before all that past blood spills out and dries up and leaves you with no possibility of a future life.

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Once the cd or record buyer flips carelessly and tired-eyed through the pile of your losses (the causes of which are even greater losses than the objects themselves) -- the only sound being the click of opening and closing the cd case, with a 5 second pause between the click open and the click shut to turn the disc upside down and stare at its imperfections -- your own living heart rumbles in your chest, your breath quickens while they calculate the value of what you have found meaningless and write it down with furrowed brow on a post it. They don't do this without first creating separate piles of value, things worth almost nothing, more than nothing, possibly something -- these piles are, for you, the visible result of everything you have discarded coming to bear on the moment. These piles are what you begin to doubt about yourself, your loves, your life, your pleasures. Yet, when the post-it reveals a sloppily "$90" on it, who "you" are is suddenly cast in the light of the wistful summer sun: you can now go play and make a bunch of new mistakes you never made before and become that "you" that the memory of the sun promises you.

But the strangest thing that happens with the Sellback is its binary correlate -- the Buyback. You come across a record you once had that you once had determined that you hated and all of a sudden you redetermine, anew, that you might possibly love it (or have loved it and didn't know it at the time, or never gave yourself the chance to love it, or were blind to your love of it, or that you weren't advanced enough to love it, or you were too refined to love it). And so, in the privacy of your own mind, with the true embarrassment that can only be the personalized experience of someone recognizing something in themselves that no one else could ever have the subjective knowledge to reveal, you add the Buyback record into the pile of records that the $90 post-it will cash out for you.

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All of the above is my preamble to a VERY strange record I once tried to love but truly hated -- in my late 20's -- that I sold back -- in my early 30's (as you can see, I endured this conflict for a few years) -- that I recently bought back -- at 40. The record is Keith Jarrett and Jack Dejohnette's Ruta and Daitya, a 1973 post-fusion noodle space spirit empty mind dharma jazz session. Drums, Rhodes, Flutes, Chants, all that cool stuff (or stupid stuff, depending on late 20's, early 30's, 40 mindset). These guys were post Electrice Miles, Post Charles Lloyd at Monterey, and probably ecstatic to go to Oslo, Norway, and make a gorgeous sounding record in a pristine studio with the attentive detail of classical musician sound and a label ready to take jazz to somewhere non-jazz. So, what happens, when I buy back this curiosity? Well, I LOVE it. Egads. Is that me? Is this me? Am I now a you to my me because of what I now know?

Here's the track that does it for me -- You Know, You Know (interestingly, this is the name of my favorite Mahavishnu Orchestra Track, too, also slow and simple and brooding and bursting, just like this, with a sense that the knowledge one knows is the knowledge one ought to have always known). Perhaps this song is the Sellback/Buyback dilemma perfectly named -- you sell back what you know, and you buyback what you have already known. You Know (once you buy/sell), You Know (second you buy again).

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The world is what we know and have always returned to have known, you know? Yes, you do know, if you are me. If you are you, only you know your hates that you may return to love.