"...Try & and imagine Coltrane, in fact, catching vibes on extended, down-the-rabbit-hole solos, which is causing Miles some grief. So Miles gives 'Trane down the road for such grandiosity. Coltrane, per legend, then admits that he blows long because he doesn't actually know how to end his solos. Miles, nonplussed, responds 'Take the horn out your mouth.' (We might say that Coltrane's primary problem was excess. He wanted it all - a 'universal sound,' a totality of tonalities, a back-to-Africa-the-origin-of-our-species holism in his compositions. He solved it, yeah, by being excessive and, for my money, putting the nail in the coffin of jazz-as-analog-music-you-can-actually-dance-to. Goodbye be-bop, in other words, hello Hallucinogenic Toreador in aural form.) Like Coltrane, I am looking for a universal sound. But I think we all are. It's at the heart of what 'creative' writing is. (At least, that's what I tell my students.) In search of this sound, I put the horn to my mouth, ink to paper. The actual meets the imaginal. Fiction emerges. This is the case, but it’s also just a way of looking at the creative endeavor. Language falls short ('I am looking for a universal sound'), so we settle for provisional distinctions. Ink and paper are pretty easy to distinguish, but we call one set of phenomena 'internal' and another 'external,' when, often, we're conditionally unsure about which is which."
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