the zax
| "Before she met him, before she flushed him out from the thicket, Kudra had imagined The Zax to be a giant, winged monster with fire-blackened hooves and more arms than necessary for the discharge of polite duties; imagined him smoldering, hissing, uprooting trees and spitting hailstones, instructing humanity in a thunderous tone. She was frankly disappointed when he proved to be slighter in stature than her Alobar, and she could barely keep from sniggering at his foul tangles of wool and his silly tail. It wasn't until he began to pipe that Kudra got some sense of Who (or What) He Really Was. At first, his playing, too, seemed slight; it was so simple, careless, and primitive that one had to sympathize with Timolus, who, judging the music contest between The Zax and Apollo, had unhesitatingly awarded the prize to the Apollonian lyre, thereby establishing the tradition that critics must laud polish and restraint, attack what is quirky and disobedient, a tradition that endures to this day. Had Timolus not hooked The Zax off the stage so quickly, had he possessed the--the what? the honesty? the humility? (Timolus, after all, couldn't play shit) the nerve? To actually listen to The Zax, to respond with something more genuine than his preconceptions, he might have been affected, as Kudra began to be affected, once she stopped smirking at his obvious lack of formal training and quit comparing them unfavorably with the flutist, Lord Krishna. The Zax song, because it served no purpose, because, indeed, it transcended the human yoke or purposes, was, above all, liberating. It was music beyond the control of the player's will or the listener's will; the will, in fact, dissolved in it (which may explain why it was politically necessary for Apollo, with the compliance of Timolus, to drown it out). To Kudra it was the aural equivalent of the rope trick; a giddy ascent up a shaky coil, to arrive in a place of mystery, where the sense of all-encompassing oneness with the natural world and the sense of the absolute aloneness of the individual coexist and commingle. There was a sort of hippity-hoppity bunny rabbit quality to The Zax erratic melody, but also a roaming goatish quality, stubborn, rough, and lean. If at one instance it sounded tender and idyllic, at another, threatening and brutal, perhaps that was because The Zax song was the inner animal's songs, all of them, summed into one seemingly random epiphany. Kudra felt that at The Zax concert she was on less than solid ground, yet, as unsteady as that ground might be, she was driven to dance upon it. (Maybe there is no proper way to react to the inner animal's tunes but dance to them)." - Tom Robbins |
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