God is a Swingin' Jazz Trio

"Improvisation provides a powerful enactment of the truth that our freedom is enabled to flourish only by engaging with and negotiating constraints" (Begbie).

True, but a bit pedestrian. Anything else? 

by enabling a freedom in relation to a vast array of constraints, [improvisation] can enable a freedom with respect to a fundamental continuous constraint which permeates them all, namely the world's temporality...

It is true that the higher we ascend into vertical freedom, the more, not fewer, constraints. I think. For example, wild animals have no constraints but are thereby "enclosed" in a meaningless kind of freedom. The same could be said of a human being raised in the wild, who would scarcely be human. 

I am completely free to pick up a saxophone and blow on it. Conversely, the great ones who play with real freedom tend to be obsessed with practice. It is as if they internalize more constraints, only to transcend them.

I wonder if this is what motivated Joyce -- as if to say, "I've mastered conventional language, but it's too confining. Time to move on to something more challenging." For example, instead of using just one language and culture, he

invented a unique polyglot-language or idioglossia solely for the purpose of this work. This language is composed of composite words from some sixty to seventy world languages, combined to form puns or portmanteau words and phrases intended to convey several layers of meaning at once (wiki).

 More constraints = more freedom:

Joyce was attempting "to employ language as a new medium, breaking down all grammatical usages, all time space values, all ordinary conceptions of context.... the theme is the language and the language the theme, and a language where every association of sound and free association is exploited."

As is the case with music, "the writing is not so much about something as it is that something itself" (emphasis mine). "The essential qualities and movement of the words, their rhythmic and melodic sequences..., are the main representatives of the author's thought and feeling" (emphasis mine).

Dreamspeak: "a language that is basically English, but extremely malleable and all-inclusive, a fusion of portmanteau words, stylistic parodies, and complex puns."

There are rules!, even in dreams. Freud attempted to nail them down, and these were later systematized into a kind of new logic -- called "symmetrical" -- by Ignacio Matte Blanco, who argued 

that in the unconscious "a part can represent the whole" and that "past, present, and future are all the same." He set out to examine the five characteristics of the unconscious that Freud had outlined: timelessness, displacement, condensation, replacement of external by internal reality, and absence of mutual contradiction....  

He deduced that if the unconscious has consistent characteristics it must follow rules, or there would be chaos. However the nature of these hypothetical characteristics indicates that their rules differ from conventional logic.

Now, I'm guessing that this is not just a right-brain thing, but expresses the "metaphysics of the right brain," insofar as it is abstracted from its left-brain complement. 

In health there is a dynamic and holistic interaction between the two, out of which emerges a "higher third," so to speak. But over-reliance on one to the exclusion of the other will result in varying types of pathology.

For example, earlier this year we spent a lot of time discussing how ideology is very much an LCH phenomenon. It is a kind of static grid that is superimposed over the world, when the world -- AKA reality -- is always much more complex, multifaceted, and hyperdimensional than the the models we invent. In other words, Gödel.

And now I'm thinking about scripture, which lies on a variable continuum between dreamspeak and relatively straightforward propositions such as the Ten Commandments. The synoptic Gospels are relatively linear histories, but John partakes of more dreamspeak, which I suppose is why it is our favorite. 

And what is the book of Revelation but a rather florid dream, bearing in mind again that there are rules in dreaming. Prior to Finnegans Wake it was one of the tricksiest texts out there, defying any linear LCH approach. Indeed, my Orthodox Bible says that

in the second and third centuries Revelation was widely twisted and sensationally misinterpreted, and the erroneous teachings brought troublesome confusion to Christians -- a trend that continues to this day.

To put it mildly.

I think it is more accurate to say that we are always already in the end times, although no one knows when the end will be. If your doors of perception are cleansed, you know that the future's uncertain and the end is always near.

Let me stop improvising and get back to improvisation as such, because I want to finish our discussion of this book. With it,

new futures with hitherto unconsidered possibilities are opened up. In addition, continuous constraints are drawn into and promote this process....

The freedom realized in the best improvisation is not an amorphous "openness" struggling to conquer (or ignore) constraints, but a fruitful interaction between contingency and constraint. 

This dialectic leads to "a theology of human freedom," but I want to say divine freedom as well, for what kind of freedom has God? I strongly suspect that he's not only a jazzman but a jazz trio with a sensitive collective ear for co-creative harmony, melody, and rhythm.

For example, with improvisation there is a "growth of personal particularity through musical dialogue." In other words, one player discovers his musical identity via interaction with others who are equally adept at finding their identity in the same way. It reminds me of the most famous version of the Bill Evans Trio:

This trio is still widely regarded as his finest, largely because of the symbiotic interplay between its members.... Along with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, Evans perfected his democratic vision of trio cooperation, where all members performed with perfect empathy and telepathy (wiki).

In such a setting,

the constraint of others is experienced not as essentially oppressive but as conferring and confirming an inalienable particularity and uniqueness (Begbie).

There are certain jazz players who are so strong that they have difficulty playing with others. Louis Armstrong, for example, often overwhelmed his compatriots and his musical surroundings, which served simply as a background for his own flights of improvisation. 

The following is an exception, in that Johnny Dodds certainly holds up his end on clarinet. The rhythm section is somewhat rudimental but check out Armstrong's second solo in particular, which is both spontaneous but has a kind of propulsive inevitability:

Contrast this with the Bill Evans Trio, where everyone is improvising with everyone else all the way through, and the beat is more elastic, dancing, and "breathing":

Armstrong is a musical god, but I think the latter is more like how the trinitarian God must sound.