"Suspended"

Joy Harjo’s “Suspended”, is a brief but powerful recollection of an author trying to decipher when she exactly became aware of a specific stimulus that would prove to be important to her later in life. In this case, she describes being a child, still very young as she says, “Once I was so small that I could barely peer over the top of the black Cadillac my father polished and tuned daily.” She uses this allusion to give an idea just how young and impressionable she was, wanting to see everything but not being able to understand the things she desires to see. She describes music as her introduction to language. She describes her sudden revelatory moment of discovering music as a singular and powerful moment in her life, “My concept of language, of what was possible with music, was changed by this revelatory moment. It changed even the way I looked at the sun.”
She makes the distinction that this moment wasn’t even noticeable to her parents driving the car, proving the singular importance of this moment on her life. She claims she can’t remember the destination she was traveling to, but she remembers the sensory details of the experience vividly, “I don’t know where we were going or where we had been, but I know the sun was boiling the asphalt, the car windows open for any breeze as I stood on tiptoes on the floorboard behind my father, a handsome god who smelled of Old Spice, whose slick black hair was impeccably groomed, his clothes perfectly creased and ironed.” She claims she loved the radio at this point, but she hasn’t yet had that one true revelatory experience.
She refers to the moment as a “loop in time”, an interesting phrase used to describe that momentary feeling of time standing still, being in that moment for what seems like an eternity. She says she became completely aware of the sound emanating from the speakers, a sound she would now properly identify as Miles Davis. She wasn’t able to verbally utter the feeling that the sound gave her, but was still totally aware of the sensation it created. She even pities her parents for not having been able to share the moment with her.
Harjo writes, “My rite of passage into the world of humanity occurred then, via Jazz.” She credits Jazz as giving her first feeling of being truly alive, truly human. She refers to the listening experience as a bridge, possibly the bridge between ignorance and knowledge. She sees jazz as tapping directly into her African and Anglo-Saxon heritages, as Jazz is basically European methods of composition and improvisation applied to African tribal music. She recognizes this moment, and all moments, as transcending language. These moments of being as more than just mere expression of an idea, they become the idea incarnate, true living.