40 ❧ chapter one
too rarely have access, and of the network of conceptual prejudice that we
have substituted for superstitions. Along with the openness of these blacks
to sensations and infl uences from which we have shut ourselves away, I felt
a kind of childlike helplessness and a need constantly to begin everything
afresh. The most ignorant Indian trader of East Africa carries with him the
look of thousands of years of literate civilization, of an accumulation of tradi-
tions that extends far beyond his own lifetime, in contrast to the blacks there
is nothing new about him.
Yet it is half-literacy which is so painful, whether in a new or in a crumbling
civilization. There is no turning back after that fi rst bite of the fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge. For anyone born into a literate society it is self-destructive
to attempt to imitate the illiterate or to hold the Word in contempt. The only
way for a civilized person to survive is to master language and to maintain it
as the means of expression and communication that has raised our poten-
tial far above that of any other living creature. The dangers of literacy, of
course, become apparent when words substitute themselves for meaning and
verbalized formulas for sensations and experiences. The current onslaught
on language is led perhaps not so much by the semiliterates as by the literates
themselves who have forgotten the true function of language.
In Paris, to commemorate my encounter with dark Africa, I bought the
only African sculpture that I have ever cared to possess, a mask from the
Ivory Coast. Once returned home, I reread with new understanding Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness.
After my second cataract operation on January 20, 1958, for the fi rst time
in some nine years, I regained binocular vision. I had become so accustomed
to an absence of three-dimensional vision that its reconquest seemed like a
message from another world. I realized that I had so much adapted myself to
handicaps in visual perceptions that the regaining of certain faculties could
only indicate that the limitations of human senses and, indeed of the human
spirit, are such that, try as we may, we can never really grasp what is going on in
the world outside the prison imposed on us by our very natures. Plato’s cave!
The next fi fteen years were the most active and, in many ways, the richest of
my life. They were the years of harvest. Although the bloom of my precocious
youth was over, whatever maturity I was to achieve now began to manifest itself
as I gained new insights and as I consolidated previous and continuous experi-
ence. Over these years, gradual but drastic changes took place in my playing.
I like to think them for the better. However, like most people when growing
older, I may have become less intelligent, but I became much wiser.
By mid-March 1958, I was embarked on a European tour that involved me
in concerts in England, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, and again sporadi-
cally during the summer and early autumn in Belgium, Switzerland, and Berlin.
The intervening time was given over to long bouts of recording in Berlin and to
veritable orgies of newly restored vision. I was able to drive again, and by the end
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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