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 Lord of the Flies. It is the conch that unifies everyone-big ‘uns and little ‘uns alike. Sound as the unifying factor, the shell as a symbolic axis around which people can gather. This is not the simple story of what happens to society when order breaks down, when the rules are relaxed-at least that’s not the most interesting part of it. It is the little things that are equally revealing the way in which there is a reluctance to shed blood but also how, once this has been done, this violence can be transferred to other ‘objects’. It is the frenzy of the first kill, the sheer thrill of it , the heightened sense of awareness that ensues as a result of the pursuit, the release of energy in the kill that fascinates. It is all these things that make the tearing of flesh such a memorable experience and something that stays with mankind.

 But there are other themes as well. ‘Piggy’ is the first storyteller, the unsung hero who is always rejected, but who was there before everyone else. Ridicule and laughter are also something that can unite the tribe. But it is ultimately his stories that help pass the time, that sooth the nerves of all those who fear the onset of darkness. It is Piggy who can hear and relate what cannot be uttered: the presence of the Beast. What would a tribe be without its storytellers? It is he who knows how words acquired their original meaning (Camberly). Is it the storytellers who first learn how to bind men together and initiate us into the first political community? Even if their influence is sporadic and tentative, it still has its functions, and we are still spellbound by its rhythms. It is also his glasses which serve as the key to their survival: fire.

Ralph and Jack are the first estranged brothers. The election of one sows the seeds of resentment that fester in his heart until a break from the original unity is affected. From then on he is to remain a wanderer, an outcast. Ralph is the Socratic King , with his practical wisdom. He understands that the little ones must be cared for. For Jack and his pack of hunters such compassion is of little use. Other children are only important in so far as they need him, the provider, only as long as they affirm his power over them. The hunters were , it must be remembered, first of all the ‘priests’ (the choir). The original split: royal power and the power of the priest-king.

 And then there is the final scene, as the elements rageand fire and water are mixed, the crowd forms, swarms, driving itself into a delirious state, into the realm of pre-consciousness; the rhythmic music reinforces this cosmic unity. They all dance around the fire-man’s first stomping grounds.  Is the murder intentional or unintentional? This question can never be resolved. But perhaps, as one of the small children hesitatingly says, the true horror, the unfathomable mystery, is that the beast is in us.

—C. Milosz 

HAMM. I’ve made you suffer too much.

(Pause)

Haven’t I?

CLOV. It’s not that.

HAMM (shocked). I haven’t made you suffer too much?

CLOV. Yes!

HAMM (relieved) Ah you gave me a fright!

(Pause. coldly)

Forgive me.

(Pause. Louder)

I said, Forgive me.

CLOV. I heard you.

Can there ever really be the right amount of suffering? Isn’t suffering -any suffering-meaningless and what of the attempts to explain or justify it? How can one talk about an amount of suffering? Can we ever know the cause of it? What does it mean to say that we are commanded to forgive?

Perhaps all thought is premised on the notion that we can know who we are, that we can figure out the roots of our condition. To think is to believe that we are God, that we can will ourselves into existence, that we can know ourselves perfectly and see sub specie aeternitatis: I think therefore I am. To think is also to create meaning when there may be none, to see a pattern out of contingent , haphazard events. Thought imposes order and also takes us to a timeless zone. Where are we when we think? Thought, then, is perhaps nothing but a way of staving off death, of clawing back some of our humanity from the inorganic that weighs us down. To reduce something to a thought, a concept, is to capture it, to name it. But if we did not think in the first place death would be of little concern to us.

Are there limits to what we can know? In the wake of the Pope’s recent words should we stress the harmony of thought and the world, the contours of the mind with those of the universe? Can we once again talk about the cosmos, about how everything has its own place and time, how there is the right amount of every thing under the sun?

Are there things that we simply cannot know, that lie beyond the bounds of reason? Does it make sense to claim that we know the limits of what we can know?  For the Occassionalists the Divine Will is shrouded in mystery. Does it follow from this that the universe is one of chaos, arbitrariness and that only, or is it possible that there just the right amount of chance in our lives? On the other hand, the philosophers would promote where reason is completely autonomous, that the divine can be known independently of Revelation. Does this imply a limitation of divine freedom? Is God constrained to work within the laws that He himself has created as the deists would maintain?

Ebrahim Moosa: ‘Metaphysics of Belief’:

Something can suggest multiplicity from one angle and unity from another. Abu Bakr would say ‘to acknowledge the inability to comprehend somethign is itself a form of comprehending.’ Is there an intermediate position between the Aristotelian one of a fixed universe and mechanical processes and one of unbounded freedom, a universe that remains essentially open? Might not evolution with its mixture of randomness and necessity be one such position? The range of possibilities of nature may be fixed but unknown: necessity is the veil of God.

God creates our acts eternally but we acquire them (choose them) in time. Perhaps, then, the question of possibilities and the degree of freedom with which they are generated is really a question of time-and that remains a mystery. The world is a unity in so far as it is timeless. Creation is both a timeless act and an unending process, the ‘twinkling of an eye’ and something that is extended in time and space.

The opposite of the philosophers’ stance is , then, not a world of complete randomness and the negation of reason, but the admissibility of the fact that she is woven from two strands: freedom and truth. The mathematical and the biological co-exist and who is to say where one ends and the other begins? From Ghazali’s point of view the ultimate cause of things is not in nature (does this allow for other, partial causality?). The philosophical critique of philosophy is only a setting of limits of what one can conceive and what is unthinkable; it is not the negation of thought altogether. It is there being just the right amount of thought. For the philosophers, the ‘principles of existence’ cause cotton to burn whereas for Ghazali fire is only an instrumental cause, not a necessary one. For the former, temporal events follow from the principles inherent in the nature of things and God has wound the clock up, as it were, distancing himself from the laws that now govern things autonomously. God has repented.

Can there ever be a breach in such a framework, are miracles or square circles possible? Everything rests on the word ‘possible’ Is it possible to imagine or know the impossible? Is imagining and knowing (by reason) the same thing or does the heart of the problem lie along this fissure? The philospher’s critique of Ghazali rests on attributing to his position the belief that anything is indeed possible: that water can be turned into wine , that a book may be transformed into a horse had God willed it so. Is it really only our habitual experience that tells us that the book is indeed a book and is this an argument from experience or thought itself? Ghazali turns the argument on its head and says that it is they who are the nihilists by going against reason. For in the hypothetical argument it is they who are using the possibility of the impossible.

I think what Ghazali’s position is is this: One may be able to imagine anything is possible but its realisation is beyond the bounds of reason. If that is the case, how can one say that one knows that the impossible is impossible? If something impossible actually happens then it ceases to be a miracle or impossible. Their perspective cannot admit the possibility of the impossible in the first place.

Another angle to the problem is to focus on what we can perceive..i.e subjectivity. Perhaps we can only conceive of a range of possibilities and there are other beings for whom what we deem impossible is merely one of many possibilities. Can one rule out, can one know that there aren’t other levels of reality and being? In such arguments, it may be that it is our limited knowledge that rules out ‘anything’. With God all things are possible.

So, the main line of defence seems to be that there are possibilities that may or may not occur. The theoretical possibility of something (in the imagination) is distinct from it existing, from the necessity of it existing. A miracle, because it is not a habitual occurrence, is beyond the scope of reason and knowledge.

Ghazali: there are three things of value: an articulate book, an abiding tradition, and the ability to say I do not know. This allows us to create room for knowledge and wonder. There is the possibility of not-knowing, of a non-totalizing order of reality. Rationality binds us to one level of reality whereas the truth may be that there are multiple notions of time and reasoning and these co-exist contrapuntally within a single narrative. There can be different ontological levels in relation to the thinking self: what is true in the order of love may not be true in the order of being.

Might it not be said that the slight asymmetry, the minuscule preponderance of matter over anti-matter is what gives rise to the universe? Not a blotting out of existence , but only of some of its possibilities, certain lines of development? That in addition to the mathematical, the inevitable, and the realm of necessity, the streaky, the irrational and the fragmentary also work their way into the what is possible? How, it might be asked, can there be a ‘flaw’ in creation or ugliness and suffering. but at the same time we are reminded that even in the ‘garden’ there was the snake of anarchy.

As there are figures of speech are there, too, figures of speechlessness? What else is death but an inevitability that cannot be known? Death is in the heart of life and therefore a possibility and yet still we cannot experience it, still it remains unknowable. It is private matter, private matter. Is this not a refutation of the philosophers? And this, it seems, remains unanswerable -and therefore why is it still a question: how is it that we who cannot imagine or experience death, for whom it is an impossibility, think that it is something that is made possible. If God can imagine a death for us then we imitate Him in this: the camps were nothing , nothing but the imagining and the making of the impossible. And have we not ‘killed’ God as well? We come to realise the unpalatable: that at the heart of life, the heart, the human spirit, there is the possibility of the impossible, the inhuman, the non-human.

To be able to act is human; For anything to be possible is inhuman.

In every place where human activity is interrupted, where there is a blank on the map, those ancient gods crouch huddled waiting to take back their place.  The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far…some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up  such terrifying  vistas of reality, and of our frightening position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deathly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.  

We have finally been able to locate ourselves, set our co-ordinates with some degree of precision. But at the same time we oscillate on the edge of an abyss. Our increased awareness of our finitude has not lessened any the sense of infinite horizons. The same holds true for time, and not just for space: things millions of years old exist side-by-side with us; through the fissures in the architecture of time we obliquely note the presence of different timescapes. And this we find compelling, monstrous, fascinating, bizarre, and repulsive in equal measure.    

—-from H.P. Lovecraft

Something can represent multiplicity from one angle and unity from another. We intuit unity. Pure multiplicity, absolute contingency, is something the mind abhors. We must find a pattern to things and yet we do not know where this compulsion comes from. Is it a form of psychosis or our highest achievement?

There is the London that is loosely connected to the old villages that went up to make London Town-and one can still detect remnants of this in the commons and heaths. Then there are the larger historical narratives that are written on her, each leaving its indelible mark: Roman London, Medieval London, Tudor London, Victorian, Edwardian…then there is the city that has been shaped by politics and international events: war and financial speculation, the crusades. In addition to this the city is shaped by her geography-and especially the silver ribbon that runs through her heart: the Thames. But there is also a hidden city, an underground, submerged history and this includes all those interconnecting and lost rivers and tributaries: the Trent, the Walbrook…they are like reminders of archaic words whose sense we have long forgotten, ancient by-ways that signify a truth that remains out of sight.

The city shapes and is shaped by people’s desires and memories and some of these have, in turn, been shaped by other climates, other geographies: Jews and Bangladeshis, West Indians and now the latest wave of immigrants: Poles and Lithuanians, Albanians and Russians.

And then there is a London that is fractured, splintered , along class lines: not just an affluent west end and a working class east, but also within the east or the south areas that are are thriving, confident and brash and areas that are dilapidated, in slow decline… and one feels one could continue with these subdivisions right down to a single human heart.

It is hard to envisage a metaphor for a city that is constantly in the process of escaping all definitions, a city whose past never quite dies. Perhaps it is a periodic table with each part of the city just a permutation of the other. But perhaps it really is the tube map. In this case it is reality which produces the map. At first one imagines all the terminal stations and what lies beyond; then one thinks about all of those great white circles where so many of the other lines intersect. Are all of the places  on any one ‘line’ connected by some sort of mysterious idea so that, for example, places on the furthest southern and northern extremities on the northern line come to share the same history?

Yesterday the air was arid, still, the sunshine bright but somewhat tired, weak. Walking through a part of the tube system that I had never seen before I had the strange feeling that I was back in the 1970′s. There was something about the darkness of that passageway, its flickering light and quietness that made me think in such a way. There are other parts of the system that are futuristic (the Jubilee line) and still others that are decidedly 1950′s in their layout and ambiance. Could it be that the tube is really a series of worm-holes?

In the bus one could hear a cacophony of voices. As always, there is infinite pleasure to be derived in trying to match an accent, a word, to a particular place. London’s infinity is not her networks of communication but in the myriad languages that are spoken. I return to my book, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. It is impossible to read more than a few pages at a time. The words weigh heavily on me -not in an oppressive way but like a great lead box whose key is slowly being turned, an unlocking of secrets. And I find myself closing it but keeping my finger on the page so as not to completely let go of the connection with the words on the paper:

The shallowness of a life of sanity. 

I have begun to notice that the more active the rest of the world becomes, the more slowly I move, and that my solitude increases in the same proportion as its racket and frenzy.

—Saul Bellow, Dangling Man.

Everything moves to a specific calculation, everything has an appointed time. The monsoon season starts on the 15 th of July, year in year out. That’s just the way it is. So too the spring which officially begins in the second week of February. It is as if our thought and actions all happen within circles that are beyond our comprehension. There is a kind of perfection to a regularity that escapes the mind though to others it only instills dread and fear.

The dust storms are more irregular. Great howling winds batter whitewashed walls, depositing huge amounts of debris to one side of the world. and still the rain doesn’t come. It is likewatching a silent movie. But occasionally they also signify something much more important, more mysterious. In 1946 the sky turned an ominous red during one such storm says the swami. People said that this was because of all the people that had been killed during the year as the violence of partition began to take full swing.

“But have you ever seen such a sky again?”

Swami: “No, because now the killing is a commonplace.”

It is the first day of Ramadan. The most difficult thing is orienting one’s soul to it. The soul will follow the body, one hopes.

Watching a re-run of one of the old Star Trek episodes. In it the Medusans, a race of sublimely intelligent , disembodied people have to be transferred from one place to another. But their form is so hideous, so grotesque, that it must be hidden from the eyes of Man. One glance is enough to drive a man to madness, to murder. There are some realities that one must turn one’s eyes away from, that can blind us.

Is there any way in which we can attune our vision to such a sight? Perhaps we can only see our own ugliness . Then the ambassador who wants to see the Medusa and not just know its mind, its supreme intelligence, asks who isto say what is beautiful and what is ugly. May it not be that we cannot see the Medusa because it is dazzlingly beautiful? Our eyes must rove since that cannot absorb the picture of somethingof that is so spectacularly beautiful. Both the absence of light and an excess of it produces blindness.

From Calvino, On Lightness:

Perseus, who is carried by the wind, the clouds, slays Medusa- the one who turns souls to stone, whose gaze is the weight and inertia of the world. But still he carries her head with him in a bag: as if to say that in a ‘thoughtful lightness’ one cannot look directly at reality but only its reflection. One doesn’t refuse reality, but carries the opacity of the world with one. Melancholy is not a dense, brooding inwardness, but a sadness that has taken on lightness.

Now, to claim that Islam is essentially or fundamentally irrational in that it conceives of its God as a Will that cannot be known , that is arbitrary , is quite remarkable in itself. Firstly, it ignores the whole tradition of philosophy in general and Islamic Aristotelianism in particular. The issue here is not whether Greek philosophy is alien to the spirit of Islam and , therefore, not something that one could reasonably cite as an example of Islamic thought that contradicts the Pope. Such a claim could, with some justification, be put to all of the Semitic monotheistic faiths: is there an irreconcilable difference in outlooks, aims and motives  between Athens and Jerusalem? The point is, rather, that as a matter of fact, history, there have been traditions of an incorporation of Greek philosophy into the fold of Islam. And it is fairly well recognised that Islam was a continuation and transmitter of the classical heritage.

The second point is distinct but related to the historical argument above. Is it not true that the very possibility of Revelation , the very fact that there is a revelation, indicates that there is the ’entry’ of the divine into the world? (here one must be aware of differences in perpsectives: for the muslim it is the miracle of the book that is analogous to the logos-and not the example of the Prophet) . In addition to this, the contents of the revelation-and not just the fact of revelation- also establish a relation between transcendence and human affairs. The Law id the bridge betwen the two realms and it is in this way that something of the divine will can be known. Here one could add that the Names (or Attributes) have always been another way in which we can ‘know’ something of God-even as His Transcendence remains unquestioned and unquestionable.

Another way in which reason can know something of the ultimate reality is in the aim to establish political and social justice for these must also conform to human values and aspirations -or at the very least, take into account the human margin, human nature as it is. One could also add that God is closer to us than our own self (our own “jugular veins” is the Quranic phrase) and that “he who knows the finite knows the Lord. To this one could multiply examples of the importance of seeking knowledge and of education. And as with social and political justice, knowledge of Nature and History are not thought of as radically opposed to the spiritual message of Islam. In all these senses, then, the notion that Islam is somehow less related to reason and the world of human affairs is quite an astounding one. It remains to be noted that Gnostic tendencies are far stronger in Christianity than in Islam which was , in its early days, always accused of giving too much to the world and to sensuality, the body!

I think the really intersting issue is not whether Islam is essentially anti-classical (Allama Iqbal would famously say that hsi whole work aims to demonstrate just that point); no, the interesting thing is that what seems to underlie the Pope’s words are a fear that the thread that bound reason to Christinity has come undone: there is now  a chasm between the human and divine. The divine is so far off that he can only be reached by a “leap of faith”, through ‘blind faith’. The very notion that thought and faith are deeply intertwined, that there is something unconditional before thought, that we believe in order to understand , not understand in order to believe (Anselm) is a view that has progressively become unhinged from the European tradition. Reason now stands autonomous , philosophy is no longer bound by the law (Leo Strauss). In the economic, political and cultural realms what relation is there between thought and action and a Christian perspective?

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As a father, Marlon Brando improvised, if you believe his biographers. He followed his moods, his feelings. Sometimes he lavished attention on his children, and sometimes he forgot them for years. He lived in the same aleatory way that he acted.Brando was one of the grandest and most grotesque exponents of the only purely American contribution to art: improvisation. To improvise is to be free. It is to be truly alive – unmechanical, unpredictable. Brando was the greatest actor in the history of cinema because he would bring the complex fluency of real life to performances, despite the rewrites, cuts, endless takes.

And he did it by ignoring narrative in favour of irrelevant, inexplicable, surreal gestures – improvisations. In The Godfather, as Vito Corleone, he plays with a cat while he discusses beatings and murder. He sniffs a flower, raises his eyebrows – and these little asides dominate the film, more memorable than any of its slaughters. In On The Waterfront he picks up Eve-Marie Saint’s white glove and, instead of giving it back to her, puts it on. It’s the very redundance of Brando’s asides that made him live more intensely than any other actor, because in life we don’t only, or often, do things actors are trained to do, things that are “relevant”, “telling”, that “create a character” – we do not act, or not all the time.

Brando didn’t make a good film for a quarter of a century, but to the end he had a profound influence on modern culture. He is one of three artists who define what is distinctively American about American creativity. No American art, literature, music or performance has mattered since the late 1940s unless it accepted their influence. The two others were Jackson Pollock and Charlie Parker. The American trait they epitomise better than anyone else is the compulsion to improvise. Improvisation is America’s art, its self-expression – and its disaster.

In his art, Brando created sublime images of a spontaneous, unguided, free existence. In his life, he catastrophically demonstrated the tragedy of American freedom. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness led to loneliness and injustice. Like the Bounty mutineers, like the founding fathers, Brando created a colony of chaos. His greatness and failure start to make a kind of sense only when you compare him to his peers, Parker and Pollock.

Brando, born in 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska, was 80 when he died six months ago. Charlie “Bird” Parker, born in 1920 in Kansas City, and Jackson Pollock, born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, would be 84 and 92 now. They could still be here. But the best alto saxophone player who ever lived and the painter who dripped colours on to canvases laid flat died within barely a year of each other, in 1955 and 1956.

Charlie Parker was addicted to heroin, and a lot of other things – whisky, cheap wine, anything that might substitute for heroin. He was hospitalised at Camarillo in California after a breakdown in 1946, but wasn’t drug-free for long – his trumpeter Miles Davis broke with him after Parker repeatedly spent the band’s money on drugs. Bird’s classic recordings date from 1946 to 1948. When he died, of unascertained causes, in New York on March 12 1955, watching the bandleader Tommy Dorsey on television at a Rothschild heiress’s house, the doctor who examined the body reckoned the dead man was 53 years old – an overestimate by 19 years.

Jackson Pollock started drinking when he was 15, and by the late 1930s was so dependent on alcohol that he was hospitalised in Westchester, New York, in 1937. Jungian analysis, marriage to the painter Lee Krasner, and moving out of Manhattan to the far end of Long Island freed him to paint his definitive works between 1947 and 1950. But he went back to drinking and his last years were disastrous. He crashed his car near his home on the night of August 11 1956, killing himself and a passenger, Edith Metzger.

Marlon Brando’s own addiction was less lethal, or at least not so quickly – he was a compulsive eater. His gorging was already established when Truman Capote wrote a cruel profile of him in 1957. Capote watched the star of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Wild One order a meal of “soup, beefsteak with french fries, three orders of vegetables, a plate of spaghetti, rolls and butter, and apple pie with ice cream”. In his latter years stories circulated about how when Brando went to health farms, he paid people to throw burgers over the fence.

For Parker, Pollock and Brando, to be a purely improvisational artist was unbearable – American freedom was unbearable. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness were attainable only in art – in life, the void had to be filled with addictions, narcotic crutches, gluttony.

The belief that America will be found in the improvised, the spontaneous, the truly free, dates to the late 19th century, to the birth of what was in effect a new nation after the civil war. The war between the northern and southern states was fought over the meaning of the American constitution: for Lincoln’s Union, the existence of slavery insulted the universal right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The north’s victory did not, of course, truly secure these things for African-Americans. But it did force a question: what was the nature of this American liberty for which young men had died? The idea of American democracy became charged and new: it gave birth to modern American culture. You feel the exhilaration of what a truly democratic America might be in the poetry of Walt Whitman and the fiction of Mark Twain. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” declares Whitman in Leaves Of Grass (1855-92), his epic poem of democracy. In The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer (1876), Twain anticipates every modern American novel, from Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye to Pynchon’s Mason And Dixon, in mapping a fluvial, free-flowing adventure – child’s play as improvisation, with Huckleberry Finn the original hero-improviser.

Twain openly associates Huck and Tom’s world with black culture, saying in the preface to The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer that it describes the beliefs of “children and slaves” before the civil war. This aligns Twain with the most important cultural revolution that took place in the US. The most profound reflection on the nature of American freedom after the civil war was, and is, that undertaken by black musicians. The origins of jazz are difficult to reconstruct but early composers saw the roots of the form in slaves’ work-songs. James P Johnson, “father of stride piano” in the early 20th century, said he took the call-and-response style of his Carolina Shout (1917) from listening to stevedores, whose shouts derived ultimately from west Africa. But jazz is a response to America, not a rejection of it.

After the civil war, democracy and freedom were purportedly extended to everyone. What did freedom mean? Early jazz is both pessimistic and utopian about liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The blue notes that drag the music down are a melancholy undertow of history; the blues insists on the heaviness of life in America, the facts of oppression. But the wild solo improvisations that Louis Armstrong emphatically put at the heart of jazz in his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings in the 1920s imagine a real American freedom, a utopia of self-fulfilment. Jazz musicians did not repudiate America for its manifest failings: instead they projected an image of true, creative democracy, an America that might be.

In 1945 that nation was, in theory, triumphant. America had just won a war for democracy. For the first time, it knew it was the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Yet racial inequalities crippled Whitman’s “Life immense in passion, pulse and power”, and social and political conformity strangled his “word Democratic”. Even jazz had been made corporate by the big bands, as the genuine jazz orchestras of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman had been eclipsed by the banality of Glenn Miller, a music devoid of black or blue, remote from improvisation; dead, mechanical.

The new music that appeared in New York, first at Minton’s in Harlem and then at clubs on 52nd Street – “The Street” – in the wake of the second world war, rejected this sterile America. It aggressively invented its own nocturnal country. It insisted more than ever before on the improvisatory nature of jazz. Bebop was played by small groups, not big orchestras, and mythologised the solo – which had to be played fast and complicated, with the most exquisite technical achievement, yet also be rough-toned, raw-sounding. This was virtuoso music. Its supreme virtuoso was Charlie Parker.

He reputedly got his nickname because he insisted on picking up a chicken that had been run over by a tour van in order to cook it, but calling him Bird conveyed what people felt about his music – it soared. Parker posed extreme challenges to the musicians who played with him because he took off on solos that were impossible to follow, somehow returning to sense when he seemed to have unleashed mere chaos.

Miles Davis, later to record the classic Kind Of Blue, began his career as a teenage trumpeter who abandoned his studies at Manhattan’s Juilliard School to play with Parker. “Bird would play the melody he wanted,” he remembers in his autobiography. “The other musicians had to remember what he had played. He was real spontaneous, went on his instinct … Bird was a great improviser and that’s where he thought great music came from and what great musicians were about. His concept was ‘fuck what’s written down’.”

The similarities between the art of Charlie Parker and that of Jackson Pollock are so staggering, so deep, so unarguable, that it’s tempting to suspect Pollock of obfuscation when he claimed not to like bebop. In fact it would be a still more radical improviser, Ornette Coleman, who put a Pollock painting on the cover of his 1961 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Yet Pollock insisted that he only really loved traditional jazz – and he did love it. His surviving collection of 78s reveals an erudite and passionate fan of black music who listened constantly to early Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and his contemporaries Billie Holiday and Coleman Hawkins. Pollock called jazz “the only other creative thing happening in this country”. Art critics have never really taken seriously its influence on him. It’s as if American modernism can’t handle the idea that Pollock’s most significant influence was black music.

The romance and myth that surround Pollock are so vulgar, critics seem to feel. The formal achievement of Pollock’s painting, they argue, is unrelated to the cheap, glamorous image of the painter dancing around his canvas to sax and drum solos before dying violently, a romantic burnout. Funnily enough, respectable jazz writers are similarly suspicious of the romantic cult of Bird. His dependence on heroin, they fear, falsely made musicians think they needed to shoot up like him to play like him.

But Pollock and Parker were what they were – they meant it. They lived and died their epics. They risked everything to find the authentic America beyond all the phoney talk.

Listen to Parker’s Scrapple From The Apple, recorded in 1947, and look at Pollock’s 1950 Number 27, today in the Whitney Museum of American Art. The best way to describe the structure of Pollock’s abstraction is to compare it to Parker’s music. There are several kinds of mark on Number 27, different in tone – like different instruments. There are percussive splashes, sharp bursts of white. There are underlying black bass notes. Over all this float curling green sensual arabesques – the sax solo.

Improvisation is what matters to both these artists. Listening to his jazz records, Pollock made paintings that are pure improvisatory expressions, with no given form, no figurative constraint. It is his instinct alone that leads him out into space. Yet, miraculously, in the great works of 1947 to 1950, he discovers a harmony in this freedom – his paintings are not a mess after all, but coherent, enigmatically so. Pollock is able to improvise structure. Parker has this same miraculous ability to take the music on a wild walk yet never lose sight of where he started. “Eventually Bird would come back to where the rhythm was, right on time,” remembers Miles Davis. “It was like he had planned it in his mind.”

This deep sense of form is what makes Pollock and Parker of a kind. Bird sounds sweet, and Pollock’s paintings are beautiful. Tellingly, it was one of his late, romantically failed paintings, in which despair overcomes him, that Ornette Coleman reproduced on the cover of his turbulent Free Jazz. The best Pollock paintings never have that sense of breakdown. They possess a savage grace.

If they rejected cacophony and chaos, Pollock and Parker were scarcely virtuosi in the way that classical European artists and musicians were; accomplishment is not what they are about. No Raphael, no Mozart. Both deliberately roughen and dirty their surface. Pollock uses house paints. He drops cigarette butts into the drying paint. Parker rejects the harmonious tones of earlier sax soloists and introduces a raw, hoarse sound. For him, as for Pollock, American art must be rough in texture. This is part of being democratic. It’s as if they both defy themselves to produce beauty under impossible circumstances. Why do they risk themselves like this?

It is to find the true American voice. Improvisation, for Mark Twain and Louis Armstrong, was the free American way. Parker and Pollock took this seriously, and tried, in a society at once conformist, racist and unequal, to find America’s lost music – the music that only ever existed in late-night smoky rooms for a few minutes, the music the Constitution promised. In place of the phoney freedom for which the Rosenbergs were executed, the new American art of the late 1940s imagined a bodily, sensual, shared freedom.

“Resist much, obey little,” urged Walt Whitman, and American modernism took this to heart. Everything must start anew, from the unruly self.

It was impossible to sustain this. Neither Pollock nor Parker maintained their 1940s achievements through their final years. Almost immediately, their radical interpretation of America’s affirmation of liberty turned to cliché. Most of the art produced in its name was colossally inferior to theirs. The Beats tried and failed to translate bebop spontaneity into writing; so what if Kerouac’s On The Road was composed free-form on a single roll of paper? It’s a dutiful read.

In art and music, the best followers of Pollock and Parker deliberately reversed their terms. Miles Davis created cool jazz. Jasper Johns painted Flag. Meanwhile the authentic, non-racist, egalitarian American freedom glimpsed by two dying men just after the second world war mutated into hipster kitsch, William Burroughs, Jim Morrison … Apocalypse Now. It is hard now to believe American democracy ever inspired great, beautiful, modern art, the best of our era.

Marlon Brando seemed to forget, as much as film audiences, what that was, that lost vitality. Brando was the artistic equal of Pollock and Parker. His performance on Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947-8 transformed American culture as decisively as they did – and more universally. Modern painting and modern jazz are minority arts. But after the raw, working-class, violently unpredictable American voice of Stanley Kowalski transferred from stage to screen, it became globally iconic.

Tennessee Williams was an acquaintance and drinking companion of Pollock and Lee Krasner, and spent a summer with them in Provincetown in 1944. He called Pollock “dark”. The outwardly boorish Pollock may have been a model for the character Brando was to elevate into an American myth.

Recognition that Brando was above all an improviser is sometimes obfuscated by his association with the realist postwar director Elia Kazan. Brando is seen as a realist, when in truth he is an abstract artist. This is why his best films are the ones he made for Coppola and Bertolucci in the 1970s. Neither of these directors is a realist, and the characters they gave Brando are mythic, monsters.

Brando was allowed to improvise as much as he wanted: he refused to learn lines – dialogue had to be concealed around the set of The Godfather on cue cards. Bertolucci encouraged him to improvise most of his speeches in Last Tango In Paris in their entirety. When Paul – the ageing American Brando plays – embarks on an anonymous sexual relationship with a young French woman, and remembers his childhood, it is Brando’s own childhood he describes: growing up on a farm with alcoholic parents. Paul has been a boxer, an actor, a bongo player – Brando plays bongos, and was the martyred boxer hero of On The Waterfront. When he’s helped up at the end of On The Waterfront, you can feel the weight of his body, as when you contemplate a Michelangelo pietà.

There was a mysterious grace to Brando’s best acting – just like Pollock and Parker, he seems to discover form in randomness. The reason that his playing with a cat is so hypnotic in The Godfather, rather than simply being a bit of James Bond villainy, is that instead of being held in place to prevent it squirming away, the cat genuinely loves its Godfather – it nuzzles him spontaneously. In fact it was a stray cat that Brando, whose farm childhood gave him a feel for animals, found at the studio and befriended.

As Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, he reaches the end of Mark Twain’s river. He is so disintegrated into cruel, mad impulses that Martin Sheen’s character says, “I’d never seen anyone so broken up.” Apocalypse Now describes, with hallucinatory precision, how the counterculture became the mainstream. It is the hippy photojournalist Dennis Hopper who falls for Kurtz’s fascist bullshit, who calls him “a warrior-poet”. From Twain to Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock and Marlon Brando, American artists took freedom, that word America touted so emptily, and tried to find a meaning in it; an American ethic of self-expression.

Apocalypse Now is the death of this illusion. There is plenty of freedom here – nothing else except freedom, and self-expression. Americans fire from helicopters for fun. The war is a riff. When a marksman shoots into the night to the sound of an electric guitar solo, it could so easily be a sax. At the end of the river, Marlon Brando improvises a monster so disorganised that some feel the performance itself is nothing but chaos. He lisps, “Have you ever considered any true freedoms?”

—From Jonathan Jones, The Guardian