#infp music

Sleepy time time

I’m a sleepy time baby, A sleepy time boy.

Work only maybe, Life is a joy.

We’ll have a sleepy time time…

Sleepy time time,

Sleepy time time all the time.

Asleep in the daytime, Asleep at night.

Life is all playtime, Working ain’t right.

We’ll have a sleepy time time…

Sleepy time time,

Sleepy time all the time.

I have my Sunday, That ain’t no lie.

But on Monday morning

Comes my favourite cry.

We’ll have a sleepy time time…

Sleepy time time,

Sleepy time all the time.

-Sleepy time time,Cream

As written down sometime after the event by Matt’s Cousin.

In the early days of the band, we travelled much of the world - not gigging, that was only secondary at the time. To even call us a band when this story is set may be somewhat inappropriate, and a little overly optimistic. In fact, we were not much more than scraggly buskers, unkempt and out of work court jesters hoping to please a few passers-by to afford a scrap of food to placate the grumbles of our bellies that we thought of as band members plagued with Tourette’s. We were only just at the very beginning, just starting to write songs, still yet to develop our sound, still to refine our act to something that someone may wish to occupy their spare time with rather than gambling, drinking, smoking opium, or sleeping with porcelain skinned concubine, being the popular past times of the age.

No, our main purpose, our mission, our raison d’etre as it were, was enlightenment. We had studied the religions and beliefs from all corners of the earth, read the time-worn scriptures and volumes of thinkers past, listened to some of the most respected gurus of the generation, and considered the views of the noted men and women of all the intangible professions, be they religious, philosophical, scientific, artistic, or just plain mad.

It was in a foothill some thousand feet above sea level overlooking an Okinawan prefecture when we had an encounter that would change our very lives and, needless to say, the very future course of our musical aspirations. We had just finished supping on a veritable feast of fresh assorted shellfish and purple sweet potato that was afforded to us by a travelling group of Buddhist monks who had recently received a bountiful token of gratitude from the local warlord who had been quite impressed with their philosophical enunciations and sedating chants. Although of course the Buddhists wanted nothing in return for their philanthropical generosity, we felt indebted, and indeed quite compelled, to play them some songs that they may enjoy before their routine meditation prior to retiring for the night.

We played some of our older material, took some short breaks to chat with the monks, and played some more. During one of the breaks, we got into a discussion with them about the true nature of our journey, our search, our explorative passion for the elusive and intangible grail of enlightenment. Though they were indeed pronounced and unyielding Buddhists, we found them quite amenable in discourse on a wide range of differing belief systems and philosophical view points, and then, to our surprise and incredulity, they had a tale to tell of something that drifted into the unlikely realms of the paranormal. Now whether this tale was a local legend, a myth, a ghost story, or something altogether outside the bounds of categorisation, it kept us entranced as they told it. Now it must be stressed, it is not my intention to reveal to you the peculiar details of this particular tale, and nor could I even share it no matter how much I wanted to. We promised that night that we would never repeat the odd circumstances of their story, and though I have never been in any way especially superstitious in nature, it is like many stories of its kind, told in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, one that comes with a warning, an ominously fatal premonition to any who dare to reveal the secrets of the legend anywhere outside of the myth’s locale of origin.

There is however one element of the story that I do wish to divulge, for it is in fact the element that changed the course of our lives, altered the direction of our musical and creative sensibilities, and is the very reason why I am writing this, and why you are reading it. That element was a character that the monks described as a reclusive Zen Master Samurai. He had no name that any knew of, nor had the monks ever seen him and, judging by the nature of the story that I cannot retell, it would seem anecdotally evident that no person had ever seen him. He was a true man of myth, an unknown legend, a nobody, and a somebody or, again from the nature of the supernatural story, he could have been a ghost, or maybe he didn’t exist at all. ‘Did it matter?’ I remembered asking, as I strummed my guitar. It is often the way with creativity that one can be thinking of something else, or most likely, nothing at all, and have in your hands the tools that facilitate the transfer of artistic creation from the greater collective sub-consciousness to the realm of the senses, the emanation of a tangible quantity into the form of the world from the intangible energy of the universal unformed. It is at moments like this that something unique can be birthed, something it seems that the universe wants to create, in the same way that it wanted to create matter, the same way it wanted to create life, to create us.

In this particular moment, on that particular night, a new song began to stem from my guitar, from my fingers, from my mortal coil’s link to the deathless and the timeless. The other members of the band seemed to be synchronising on the same frequency and joined in on their instruments and we began to create something new, a sound that we as a group had not yet explored, a song that would change us forever, not in the future, not in the past, but now, in the present moment, that night, right where we were. Now whether the nature of the story that we had just heard had any bearing on our sudden creative impulse and our innovative improvisational acuity, I would do best to refer you to the academics to discuss and confer, but what happened next, I can only implore you to take my word, as sure as I stand here today, relating these happenings in honest and impartial writing. As we played, the monks also began to chant, a low drone that united effortlessly and sublimely with our instrument’s tonal discharges. As our music continued and intensified, I felt the whole world opening up around us, our bodies evaporating, our spirits dissolving, combining as one with the environment around us, into the air, into the nothingness. As the music swirled around us and carried up the mountain, we saw a shape moving from a higher elevation, a figure walking down toward us. The monks stopped chanting, leant, and knelt forward on the ground and began whispering, ‘It is him; it is him; he is here…’

As the figure approached nearer, it became clear that it was not a man. It was a four-legged animal, a quadruped in stature and stride. ‘It is his steed; he sends his steed,’ some of the monks whispered. Was it a steed? Who am I to judge, categorise, or possibly even worse, assume? I do know though that it was a beast…a beast of burden…a donkey? An ass? …no, it was a mule.

The animal came right up to us where we were now circled in curiosity and amazement, having finished playing the song to gaze in wonder at our newfound apparition. I would add a note here to say that although I and many others there that night didn’t see it, some of the monks claim they saw a ghostly figure atop the mule, a Zen Master Samurai. I would have to kindly and respectfully say that although these people were devout and near-enlightened Buddhist monks, they were still human, with human minds, human minds that can trick and deceive at any moment, but none more so than in times of extremes, times of unusual and unpredictable circumstances.

The mule stopped and lowered its head. It had strapped lightly to the base of its neck a rolled parchment, a scroll. I cannot tell you a time when I have been more nervous, more anxious, than that moment; how eager I was to know the contents of that scroll, to grasp and understand the meaning that its content possibly held within. One of the monks, outstretched hand shaking like a frightened leaf trembling in exigency from the mere potential thought of wrath from the gods of wind, managed with all his courage and inner resolve to lift the scroll from the beast’s neck and unroll the parchment. He then read:

“Your music…you know how I would describe your music? When foraging for food, always let the hippopotamus go first…unless you’re just after the teriyaki beef.”

Now as I’ve said, I can only relate to you part of this tale. The story of some supernatural suspicions I cannot respectfully tell, but I do stand by the tale above, in all its detail, to every aspect. Now whether one believes or doesn’t believe one thing or another is for each and their own, in fact to each their own mind, but suffice to say that as we are all united by the one universal emanation into a form from a formless, it would seem to be of little consequence and much in the realm of triviality to argue over details such as those that seem to haunt our minds on a daily basis. ‘Are our minds even ours?’ you may ask, and if you claim them to be so, how much control do we really have over them? As much as the mind may be said to be a source of trickery, the devil itself even, all I know is, to this day, on that night, I heard an odd tale about a reclusive enlightened man, possibly even a ghost. I did not see a man…I did not see a ghost…but I saw a mule…and its message was not clear.