Big Nothing: 05/02/24
To Lose Yourself in the City - Paul Auster, John Coltrane, Patrick Modiano
Hi friends. I wrote this kind of long piece and realized it’s not really about music at all…so before we get into it, here is a playlist that I was going to make but that BrooklynVegan beat me to:
Non-Cocteau Twins Songs Featuring Elizabeth Fraser
Enjoy!
Also I forgot to link out to Laurence Lilvik’s excellent substack in my Tuesday message, FIND IT HERE.
Ok with that done, let’s get into it.
Life is full of small strangenesses. On Tuesday I wrote about Juan-les-Pins and its connection to both Coltrane and the journey of life and death as well as the elliptical and internal novels of Patrick Modiano. That night, after thinking about Modiano’s work, I happened to see Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy in my bedside bookshelf.
Modiano and Auster came into my life around the same time. Potentially reading Voyage de Noces and New York Trilogy back to back while going to school in France - developing my love for the kind of impressionistic fiction that is both authors’ stock and trade. So they are linked in my mind.
Those two books in particular are also about walking and remembering. Early on in Voyage, Jean B. walks the streets of the outer arrondissements of Paris, the early evening light on the windows transporting him to a visit to Casablanca years before. The protagonist in the first section of Auster’s New York Trilogy, known only as “Quinn”, also takes to the streets with this quote that I absolutely love:
“New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well.”
It’s interesting to note that Coltrane begins the liner notes by referring to, “a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life.” This spiritual awakening, by Trane’s own admission, happened on the second story of his house in Philadelphia in 1957. Just a few months later, Trane and his family moved to West 103rd Street in New York City, between the Upper West Side and Harlem. After bouncing around from Manhattan to Queens and then back to Midtown where he lived in the Hotel Schuyler for several years while divorcing his first wife, Coltrane and his new wife, Alice, left the urban bustle of the City for Dix Hill in Long Island. Once settled away from the big city streets, he immediately wrote “A Love Supreme” in the practice room.
In a way, you could say “A Love Supreme” is a product of the same inexhaustible space of New York that allowed Auster’s Quinn to lose himself. The spiritual, experimental expression that culminated in “Love Supreme” simmered under “Blue Train”, “Kind of Blue”, “My Favorite Things” and “Giant Steps” which were all recorded while he lived, worked and walked New York City. But he had to leave Manhattan to find the space to create his masterwork. Just three years, almost to the date, after he moved out of New York City, Coltrane died in Long Island.
As I read the beginning of Auster’s book on Tuesday night, I thought about the idea that so many artists flock to cities like New York or Paris to lose the self they once had and find something deeper. Thematically that ties Modiano’s Jean B. who feints leaving Paris, returning to lose himself in his home city, Auster’s Quinn who has already lost himself in New York by the time the book opens, and Coltrane who left his addictions behind in Philadelphia and built himself a new way of speaking in Manhattan and Queens before the past caught up to him.
When I woke up the next morning, I read that Auster had passed away the night before in his home in Brooklyn.