561 words.
If a story isn’t musical, don’t give it a second shout. If no harmony comes within the words between pages, throw it away. If there is no melody within the way the words echo around the room you write in, as you speak them into existence on the very page you wish you were within, you must crumble up the page and toss it in the bin next to your desk.
Stories must be musical, and no story I have told has given me the satisfaction of it being just that. Whatever that even means.
But one night I heard it as I laid underneath a bridge. I saw words graffitied on the underside of the stone brick that must have been laid hundreds of years ago.
“Dance.”
“Sing.”
“A Jazz Club in Hell.”
A jazz club in hell? My brain shot awake when I read those words. Whatever they meant it didn’t matter, because I was hooked. Music began to play, JAZZ BEGAN TO PLAY. A story began to play. I closed my eyes at that moment, and a door opened.
A hand reached out and offered it to me, to grab hold of. So I did. And then as time stood still in the moment between the door opening and me walking through, light and darkness and fire and death became the only thing that filled the space I was inhabiting.
I walked up to the bar and asked, “Who is that man playing the piano?”
He laughed, chuckled a bit, and said, “ That is no man my son.”
“What do you mean, that, that that is no man? Is it a woman? A child? You must tell me sir, who is that?”
He looked around and took in the rest of the bar to see if anyone needed to be replenished, and then he looked back at me and said, “That my son, is god himself.”
And then he walked off. I had no time to think about what that actually meant, other than the simple fact that, god himself, was playing piano, at a jazz club, in hell.
The very idea of god existing within hell was the most confusing aspect of where I was. Yes I saw random people talking about concepts that blew my mind, or couldn’t even enter the confines I held dear, but the concept of a perfect being existing or filling a space within the depths of the darkest death our minds perceive, was so odd to me. But maybe that’s exactly why he was there. To show something beyond could exist within anything we pictured.
That might have been the point of the jazz club in hell, to give us the opportunity to see the beyond. And to evaluate it. And maybe that’s the point many thinkers have tried to write about.
The inherent complexity of any natural phenomenon is because of the god of the cosmos, in saying that we must also take into account how masterful the world we are in is. And also, how idiotic. As Chesterton so pointed out in his essay about Job, in order to startle us, god must become, for an instant, an atheist. He must step outside of creation, and marvel at its creativity and power. For that is what we are, creative beings, in the image of some creator set before us.
