Karma Strikes

The E/H 4 class is assigned one personal narrative essay every quarter, each focusing on different aspects of the students’ life experiences. For quarter three, students were prompted with writing a narrative essay centered around a song of their choice, diving into the meaning that the piece of music holds in their lives. All the songs that were chosen for this project were also compiled into two playlists. Over the next week on the Pigeon Press, we’ll be sharing three different narratives from the project as well as the songs that go along with them. Enjoy!

For a long time I was not a spiritual person. That is to say I had never cared much for religion or the supernatural. It comes from my parents, I suppose. My mom, who left her Protestantism in sunbaked California, finding it too heavy for the trip up north. My dad seemed to have abandoned his faith somewhere crossing the Atlantic; Americans don’t understand religion anyways, he would say.

Maybe I was not spiritual because, as my dad thinks, America has tainted the meaning of spirituality. In the progressive, fact-loving Northwest, the Christian brand of spiritualism is dumb. It is the kind, they say, that makes answers for its questions, paralyzes reason in sweeping Amens, like a rallying cry for stupidity; the kind of spiritualism that spills from the white timbered churches of the South and sprouts like cattails from the Mississippi River bed. I grew up thinking spirituality was invasive, something to be pulled up or purged. Religion was for stupid people, they said, and I agreed: I did not understand faith—how could someone willingly reject fact and embrace the unbelievable as true?

As I entered young adulthood, my consciousness changed: the boundaries of reality exploded outwards, and in the new space came a cold, unfamiliar emptiness. Here, science and reasoning—things I had clung to so vigilantly in my youth—were useless. Existentialism weighed down on me with a million unanswerable questions, the big “Ifs” and “Whys” spinning turbulently in my head; it was as if maturity had come alongside a profound confusion of the real world. Things that were once simple suddenly became difficult: friendships, futures, my sense of self. Reality felt both hopelessly vast and yet pointlessly small. At times, life felt all but pointless: billions of us, all the same, stumbling blind through a dark, unknowable existence. I missed more than anything the naive hedonism of childhood, a lost life unconcerned with introspection. I didn’t need faith then, I told myself and so I do not need it now. 

Music momentarily stilled my existentialism; the ambient spells of Brian Eno and Aphex Twin brief respites from the encroaching complexity of life. Listening returned me to the clarity of my youth: the rhythm and order, the simple melodic beauty, pleasures now distant from my young adulthood. Although I had found a partial solution, I grew unsatisfied. I was tired of being consoled by simplicity. I wanted newness, change. 

Karma, by saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, was unlike anything I had heard before: a swirling spiritual storm of afro-cuban rhythms and blistering jazz. The record is only two tracks, the 33-minute “The Creator Has A Master Plan” and its comparatively brief epilogue, “Colors.” The first time I listened to Karma, I was overwhelmed—struck by a blitz of irreverent noise without the necessary knowledge to absorb it. Unlike the simple, soothing ambience of Eno’s Another Green World, Karma defied understanding—whirling with the infinite complexity of a billion atoms spinning through space. At first, Karma was nearly unbearable: freeform melodies periodically melted to erratic, structureless noise; percussion grated with a cacophony of foreign drums and whistles; the harmony, in its sardonic motionlessness, seemed to mock my inability to understand. In each element lied mysteries I could not resolve, questions I could not answer. Rather than soothe me, Karma only amplified my discomfort, stirring my existentialism into full-blown anxiety. 

Slowly I became unbothered by Karma’s messiness, finding comfort among the bells and chimes and horns spritzing into the musical mist. Karma was not about stiffness and simplicity—the qualities of music I relied on in the past—but something else. In Karma there was order in disorder, a simplicity woven from the roughness of the natural world. The electronic artificiality of Eno and Aphex Twin may have momentarily relaxed me, but Karma taught me to cope with the frustrating inconclusiveness of my reality. What I did not know yet, is that in Karma I had discovered a kind of spirituality.

“The creator has a master plan/ Peace and happiness for every man,” sings vocalist Leon Thomas on Karma’s opening track. In a sense, Thomas’s words are a kind of prayer, repeating ad-nauseam as Sanders’ saxophone descends into noise. But primarily, it was the simpleness of the lyrics that struck me. At first, I found them lacking—as if a pat on the back was a sufficient condolence for my existentialism. But eventually, the earnestness of those words led me to wonder if I had been the one out of touch, if the secret to contentment was less complicated than I once thought. I had been so concerned with adapting my scientific beliefs to the existential that I had overlooked the only thing that could ever come close to actually providing an answer: spirituality. In some ways, Karma has made me more spiritual, in suspending my disbelief and simplifying the complex. But more importantly, Karma has made me appreciate the existence and purpose of spirituality. Not all complex questions demand complex answers; a little spiritualism is all you need to round the existential edges that surround our existence. It is true that people cling to the existence of God and the supernatural because it is difficult to cope with reality otherwise. A younger me would have said that is the weak way out, but sometimes happiness is just sitting back and reminding yourself that, after all, “The creator has a master plan.”