Living in the Rock N Roll Mystery
Reading Context, Self, and Others as Clues
H.L. Goodall, Jr.
Mystery begins in a feeling, something deep, poetic, and sweet.
You get caught up in it. You get caught up in it fast. Little raptures of being alive ripple down the back of your neck, trickle like ice crystals doing an unknown, familiar dance across the constant heat of your spine. This is what it is like, this is where it all begins. Mystery is like a seductive voice deep into the way cool and hot of the music that you suddenly discover is singing to you, directly to you, only to you, breaking you away from what you thought you were, which until that very moment you thought was the whole and substance of your life. Mystery changes all of that because mystery changes you. Mystery defines you in the casting of its spell, in something as simple as the enchantment of a voice, a voice inviting you to dance, a dance that promises something you will always remember, or, maybe, that you will never forget.
These are the senses of the power and pull of mystery, the whisper of a voice and the sensuous lull of its prose rhythms, the surround for the private investigations that constitute the public music of this book. Mystery is used here in both straight and delinquent senses, to denote both a way of expressing and a way of experiencing what I will call the rock n roll of social life. Why I call the form of social life I examine rock n roll (and even spell it this way) is part of the reading, part of the rhetorics of motive, part of the assemblage of semiotic clues, that join you and me, reader, in working out the terms of this mystery.