I had a dream about Guruji this morning. I was listening to him
sing a montage of raga lines and knew (even as they were being
played back effortlessly by my brain or...were they coming from
someplace else?) that I would have difficulty being able to sing or
play them back to him as in a lesson and I now become aware,
here in the recounting of this experience, that this was the way I
was usually listening to him, trying to grasp the points of pitch
around which his aural calligraphy wrapped itself.
Anyway, this dream made me wake up early and fresh the way I
hadn't been able to for awhile now, the way I would wake up at
dawn when we were in India together where he would insist on
being at the train station an hour or two ahead of departure
time.
On one of these excursions away from Dehra Dun to various
holy sites, I remember sitting with him on the bank of the
Ganges at Hardwar (or was it Rishikesh?...) and heard him
suddenly begin singing a composition some 300 years old but
never written down as hundreds of flickering lights--little wicks
in pools of oil cupped in the folds of leaves--were floated down
the river with clanging temple bells signaling the beginning of
the twilight ceremony of Arti.
He always said that the tambura was the sound of all the pitches,
like the sound of water running over rocks.
I'm sitting here now thinking and feeling for the thousandth
time but more intensely than before what a rare man he was and
silently praising the delicate tissue of chance that brought me
into the presence of a being through whom I could glimpse the
kind of devotion to an act--prayer in the form of music, music in
the form of prayer--that took many lifetimes to occur, somehow
rising above the gravitational pull of physicality.
"How's Lucy?", he would ask on the telephone, referring to my
black Lab who lies here beside as I write this remembrance.
Before his last trip to India, I sent him a videotape of her trying
over and over to bite and paw the water coming out of a
sprinkler in the yard before she finally grabs the hose and pivots
the whole thing around, spraying me on the porch. It makes me
smile inside to hear that special laugh that was reserved for
antics of the three generations of dogs that marked our time on
earth together. He was a great friend and teacher.
Jon Hassell
12 July 1996 / 8:40am