Excerpt from My Dinner with Grishma

The ancient grey stone buildings, pillars lining the walls, arches circumscribing the doors, stone work adorning each window, reposed contemplatively above the bustling street below which moved far too quickly to consider anything except where it was headed and the quickest way there. Inside a café on one street corner I sat at a countertop overlooking the street, my companion and I intoxicated on the scenery, the food, and the conversation.

“Sorry, I have no idea what that is.”

“Well I never took it cause I stopped at calculus, but basically the idea is someone does a problem and you can agree or disagree with it. And the numbers don’t even matter anymore, you could use any numbers, any symbols. I’d heard of literature being compared to math but this is math that’s like literature.”

“Wait, how does that work?”

“Well you have a set of premises and you do a problem based off them but if someone disagrees with your principles than they can just say ‘I disagree’ and why.”

“Almost like philosophy.”

“Yeah, and I mean after he showed this to me I spent an entire week just in absolute shock. I mean, i have a very mathematical mind even though I’m not studying math, my mind works mathematically, I like to put things in neat categories so they add up and make sense and I just couldn’t believe that even in math, the one thing that was invented to make sense of the world, when you go deep enough into it you just don’t know. I mean that really bothers me. I just want to know something for sure.”

“Sounds to me like you need to find yourself a good religion.”

“No, that wouldn’t work, I’d still just question everything the whole time.”

“No, no, the whole idea is not to do that, to acknowledge we can’t know everything but the divine does and while we can’t ever understand it, we can rest assured and take comfort that the divine does.”

“Isn’t that weird, though? That humans invent something to understand what we can’t understand? So that something will understand it?”

“But did they invent it? How do you know that?”

“Ha, I guess I don’t. That’s just the way it would seem from what I’ve seen.”

“And we worship this thing because it understands everything that we cannot.”

“How about you? You seem like the kind of person that’s OK with not knowing everything.”

“Yeah I guess so…I mean, not to say I don’t have my moments now and then, but I’m working on trying to be ok with acknowledging that I don’t know everything and working from there rather than trying to pretend I do. Though I still try to figure stuff out. Take our arguments about art. While we’re going back and forth I’m genuinely trying to piece together what exactly art is and how it functions. I find a lot of times I explain my views on art and music to people and afterwards I don’t like what I said, I think that’s not what art is, I didn’t capture it, I misrepresented it. Say, I ever tell you about the jazz sax teacher at ASU, Bryon?”

“No…I only know the one who leads the Latin band.”

“No no, that’s Dom. Bryon, he’s an interesting guy, I really like him. I took jazz theory with him last semester. Get this, The class starts at 6:20 at night and we’re all in there and he comes in and he says to the class with a totally straight face 'Good morning' and we’re all thinking ‘what? It’s 6:20 at night!’ And then he just sits there. and waits. And stares at us. And waits. And sits. And stares. And the silence seem to drag on for hours you know, we’re all totally uncomfortable and he’s just sitting there nonchalant, like whatev. And finally, after an eternity he goes ‘I always like to start the semester with an awkward silence.’ And we’re just like ‘is this guy crazy or what?’ Man I love that guy. Tell you what, first day of class and we’re going over the syllabus and he gets to supplies and he pulls out a pencil and his voice gets all nostalgic and he’s like ‘See this pencil? This is a fine pencil. This is a Dixon Ticonderoga. The lead is silky smooth, the wood shaves off so cleanly every time, the eraser never leaves a smudge…’ and he’s going on and on about this pencil, having people try it out and everything, and we’re just like ‘Is this guy for real? I thought this was jazz theory?’ But anyways, I digress, I went into Bryon’s office hours one time to talk about an arrangement and he asks me about being an English major and if that has anything to do with jazz and pretty soon he’s asking me what book I like and why and another and another, and pretty soon I somehow get into my views on art and literature and music and all this grand stuff and at the end of it all I turn to him, this saxophone player I admire so much, and I ask ‘What’s your philosophy on art?’ and he says ‘I don’t have one. I just do it.’ I was shocked. But I’m wondering if I’ll come to the same conclusion, if art isn’t something we can explain and fully understand.

“Or maybe he knows but he wants you to figure it our on your own.”

“Could be…I guess I wonder if in trying to figure out what art is we actually taint the act of making art by making it too self conscious? I mean once we set up expectations then we start to try to meet them and doesn’t that make it contrived in a way? Maybe we just need to say we’ll never understand it.”

“Ah…but I’ll never be satisfied with that.”

“Say you wanna try some of this pasta? It’s al dente, just perfect…”