So last night I had a vivid dream of me moving to the Silodam apartment complex I slogged about yesterday. In my dream, this was the interior of my Amsterdam apartment: the bedroom was big, the living room was even bigger, and the kitchen, which was next to the main door, had lots of gadgets fixed to its blue walls (I was particularly impressed by an electric can opener). But I only lived in that wonderful apartment for a day—for some reason that dissolved during my transition from the dream to the reality of that dream, I had to fly back to Seattle. This building is deep in my head.

On another note: As I said before, the Silodam impresses me as one of the best architectural resolutions of the one/many binary. Here the whole does not annihilate the singular.

The musical equivalent of Silodom can be found near the end of the first movement, “Acknowledgment,” of John Coltrane’s massively human achievement, A Love Supreme. A quote from Ashely Khan’s superb book The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album (Khan also has a superb book on Miles Davis’ signature album, Kind of Blue):

“Then, in another of the album’s most celebrated—and startling—moments, Coltrane blows the four-note pattern [later verbalized as ‘a love supreme’] thirty-seven times in methodic succession. With exhaustive precision and apparent randomness, he transposes the phrase from one key to another.”

There you have it! Please listen to the piece of music described in this passage. The same phrase is repeated in different keys. There is no order to Coltrane’s key-hopping; it is random. The line between order and disorder is obliterated. More impressively, the singular is the four-note pattern, the being, the basic block of the blues—which is repeated 37 times. The human is the same. This is the essence of Coltrane’s idea: It’s only in the total, the whole, existing in the whole, that singularity comes to be. This, admittedly, is even more profound than what we get out of Silodam. But both resolve the binary that has frustrated philosophers since the death of God.
That building is a blast.
That brother could blow.