let go or be dragged

It’s only a fool who, upon burning his hand on a hot stove, thinks to himself: Next time I'll just grab it faster. I have been this fool. You probably have too. We've all developed elaborate workarounds for pain—little rituals and substances and distractions that let us keep touching the stove while pretending we've solved the problem of heat.

In the spring of 1957, John Coltrane was this kind of fool.

The saxophonist had just been fired by Miles Davis, which in the jazz world of the 1950s was roughly equivalent to being excommunicated by the Pop, if the Pope wore impeccably tailored suits and communicated primarily through withering silence. Davis had given Coltrane chance after chance, watching one of the most gifted musicians he'd ever heard show up to gigs looking, as Miles later put it, like he'd "slept in his clothes for days." On one occasion, Coltrane nodded off on stage, and Davis—not a man known for his impulse control—punched him in the stomach to wake him up.

The heroin had Coltrane by the throat. So did the alcohol. His playing, when he could focus long enough to play, was still brilliant, but brilliance was beginning to feel like a cruel joke. What good is a gift you can barely unwrap?

It seems as though the substance never starts as the villain, and that’s what is truly heartbreaking to me. It starts as the solution. Heroin didn't sneak up on Coltrane in some dark alley. It arrived wearing the mask of relief. Jazz musicians in the 1940s and 50s passed needles around like business cards. Charlie Parker, the god of bebop, was a heroin addict; if you wanted to play like Bird, some figured, maybe you should live like Bird. Never mind that Bird died at thirty-four, his body so ravaged that the coroner estimated his age at fifty-three.

Coltrane had survived the sudden deaths of his father, grandfather, aunt, and uncle—all within a few months when he was twelve. The needle offered what the world wouldn't: a brief vacation from being John Coltrane. It’s running to stand still, as Bono said. You can hardly blame a man who’d experienced so much pain for accepting the offer.

But here's the thing about vacations: eventually you have to come home. And the house has been ransacked while you were away.

When Miles fired him that April, Coltrane didn't argue. He took a train to Philadelphia, to his mother's house, and he locked himself in a room.

For five days, John Coltrane sweated and shook and probably prayed for death. As best I can understand it, heroin withdrawal isn't cinematic suffering—it's your body staging a full revolt, every nerve screaming that you've made a terrible mistake. Your bones ache. Your skin crawls. You vomit until there's nothing left, and then you keep vomiting. Coltrane's stepdaughter later recalled watching him emerge from that room each night, "seeming not as sick" as the night before—the kind of observation that sounds hopeful until it goes on long enough, and then you realize what it implies about how sick he'd been.

Somewhere in that crucible, something happened. Coltrane was never specific about it, and I think that vagueness is itself informative. Real spiritual experiences tend to defy tidy narration. All he would say, years later in the liner notes to his masterpiece A Love Supreme, was this:

"In the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music."

Notice what he asked for. Not fame. Not validation. Not revenge on the industry that had watched him deteriorate. He asked to be useful. He asked to be a vessel.

I want to pause here, because this is where the story usually gets simplified into an inspirational poster: Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which he rebuilt his life. Which is true as far as it goes, but the problem is that it doesn't go far enough. The deeper truth isn't that Coltrane hit bottom—lots of people hit bottom and just burrow down further. The deeper truth is about what he had to let go of in order to receive something better.

In transparency, I don’t know what living like this is like. Some of you do. I can only think about what addiction actually is, beyond the chemistry. It's a relationship. A consuming, possessive, all-encompassing relationship that crowds out everything else. The heroin had taken up residence in the space where Coltrane's music was supposed to live. It had occupied the room where his family belonged, where his purpose was trying to grow. The needle was squatting in his future.

Here is the brutal wisdom: You cannot receive with full hands.

Coltrane had to empty his hands—which meant releasing his grip on the one thing that had been numbing his pain—before he could hold anything else. The agony of withdrawal wasn't just physical. It was the agony of unclenching. Of letting go of your most reliable coping mechanism without any guarantee that something better would fill the void.

This, I think, is why so many of us stay stuck. Not because we love our addictions and avoidances and comfortable dysfunctions, but because we're terrified of the empty space that might follow. Better the devil you know. Better a cramped life with walls you've memorized than an open field where anything might happen.

Coltrane walked into that open field and discovered it was full of music.

By September of that same year—five months after his withdrawal—Coltrane walked into Rudy Van Gelder's living room studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, and recorded Blue Train. If you haven't heard it, stop reading this and go listen. It's only forty minutes, and it might change your understanding of what a human being is capable of.

The album is not the work of a man who has merely survived something terrible. It's the work of a man who has broken through. Critics would later call his style "sheets of sound"—a technique where he played so many notes so rapidly that they seemed to blur together like rain on a windshield. But on Blue Train, you can hear him discovering what his newly emptied hands could hold.

By December, Miles Davis came calling again. Not because he'd forgiven Coltrane—Miles wasn't much for forgiveness—but because he could hear that something had changed. The junkie was gone. In his place was a man possessed by purpose.

Over the next two years, Coltrane would contribute to Milestones and Kind of Blue, the latter often called the greatest jazz album ever recorded. If you have a vinyl record player, I’m 90% sure you own it.

He would practice so obsessively that he often fell asleep with the saxophone still in his mouth. When asked about this maniacal dedication, Miles offered the only sensible advice: "You can start by taking the horn out of your mouth."

By 1964, Coltrane was ready to offer his gratitude. A Love Supreme is a prayer in four movements. The final movement is a wordless recitation of a poem Coltrane included in the liner notes, each phrase of his saxophone matching the syllables on the page. It is considered one of the most spiritually charged recordings in the history of American music.

Coltrane recorded it in a single session, between 7 PM and midnight, with almost no spoken direction to his bandmates. The music came out whole, as if it had been waiting all along for Coltrane to clear enough space to let it through.

He died three years later of liver cancer. He was forty. The disease was likely a consequence of hepatitis contracted through shared needles during his using days. The body remembers what the soul has forgiven.

Sorry to remind you, but New Year’s resolutions are coming up. You can choose to mostly ignore them like I do, but in the least, it’s that time of year when you’re going to hear about them again.

And the energetic folks who craft them annually are not all wrong. There are of course things we’d do well to have less of. The doomscrolling that eats your evenings. The grudge you’ve been nursing so long it feels like furniture. The certainty that you already know how a situation will go, which saves you from the vulnerability of hoping and taking action.

I told you an extreme story. None of these are heroin. But they occupy space. They fill your hands. And the question Coltrane's life poses to you is: What might fill that space if you let go?

I don't know the answer. That's the terrifying part of all this. Coltrane didn't know either, lying on his mother's floor, praying for relief from a pain he'd been dodging his whole life. He only knew he couldn't keep holding what he'd been holding.

There's a saying in recovery circles: Let go or be dragged. It sounds harsh, but it's not a threat. It's a description of physics. You cannot walk forward while gripping a rope tied to a stationary post. Eventually you run out of slack.

You can’t receive without empty hands.

The grace—if we can call it that—is that the empty hands don't stay empty. Coltrane opened his palms, and the music poured in. Not because he deserved it, not because he'd earned it, but because he'd finally made room.

John

Thanks for reading The Mayfly Letter.

Your support allows me to continue doing something I truly love.

John Conrad