“A Note on Nina Simone’s ‘Just In Time’” – by Carlo Rey Lacsamana

February 24th, 2023

Gerrit de Bruin, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Nina Simone, 1969

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A Note on Nina Simone’s ‘Just In Time’

Carlo Rey Lacsamana

“Just in time you found me just in time
Before you came my time was running low
I was lost them losing dice were tossed
My bridges all were crossed nowhere to go”

…..No other art form is more alert, more attentive to human experience than music. It finds you in a disarming unexpectedness that, in the moment of listening, you meet your own vulnerability nakedly embraced by the witness of music. The recognition of the listener’s vulnerability is the place of finding. What do we find there? Unfathomed depths of heartbrokenness and unrepeatable moments of joy; our endurance interposed between these two. Finding can only take place during instances of stillness, quiet, and surely, surrender.

…..Am I saying this because, right at this moment, I am listening to the amazing Nina Simone? Maybe yes. (Her) music defies categories of self-congratulation and self-pity, of optimism and pessimism. (Her voice is beyond that.) Hers is a music of endurance intimately familiar with the tragic sense of life. A music that keeps no illusion therefore the most welcoming. A music so accommodating that the listener is invited into a wondrous absence of judgment and into an eluding promise of care. In music one is found in being lost.

“Now you’re here now I know just where I’m going
No more doubt or fear I’ve found my way
Your love came just in time you found me just in time
And changed my lonely nights that lucky day”

…..The accommodation consists in the listener being carried simultaneously to the center and circumference of the music’s care. We are led to the center of its familiarity, to the heart of its attention as though the music has waited for us eternally. There is a feeling that the music that moves us is made only for us. At the same time we are cast adrift into the circumference of a deeper awareness, into an elsewhere in which communion with others is possible. An awareness which escapes words but grows in us and implicates us in the widest sensitivity and solidarity possible. By that universal sense of hospitality we are found.

…..Tonight, in a quiet, dimly lit room, alone or with the beloved, listen to Nina Simone.

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Carlo Rey Lacsamana is a Filipino writer, poet, and artist born and raised in Manila, Philippines. Since 2005, he has been living and working in the Tuscan town of Lucca, Italy. He regularly contributes to journals in the Philippines, writing politics, culture, and art. His works have appeared inEsquire Magazine, Colossus Magazine, Drunkmonkeysweb, Amsterdam Quarterly, Lumpen Journal (London), The Wild World(Berlin),Literary Shanghai and in other numerous magazines. One of his stories has been recorded as a podcast story in the narrative podcast Pillow Talking (Australia).

Follow him on Instagram @carlo_rey_lacsamana

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Listen to Nina Simone perform “Just in Time,” at the 1968 Montreaux Jazz Festival [BMG Rights Management]