"Since I thought of the world in terms of heroic action, my frame of reference was what Kenneth Burke calls a frame of acceptance, not a frame of rejection. These two frames are underlying all literary strategies for communicating how you feel or what you know. You either have the attitude that you accept the complexity of life as given, or you reject it by saying "Why should it be like this?" "Why I am sick? Why am I not rich? Why does it rain? Why does it snow? Why is it freezing? Why me? Why do I not have mink?β And you write like that. The form would be protest, satire. You reject the fact that life is a problem. On the other hand, Burke also identified the frame of acceptance. This is the way it is, so what are you going to do about it? You accept the fact that you live in a briar patch and you become a swinger. You get with it. You get the changes in tempo, you get the changes in the keys and all that. You commence sneaking right up on the artistic form that I have anchored my literary statement in, which is the blues. And the blues, you should know by now if you're this far in college, represents the second law of thermodynamics. That's what it is, for a philosopher and for a poet: the tendency of all phenomena to become random. So, the only way to get with that is to have an adequate metaphor that makes it make sense. So the central that I played with, as an Alabama boy, is the rabbit in the briar patch. Resilience, or swinging, is the ultimate achievement. The achievement of elegance is the highest thing that a human being can do. come to terms with life in such a way that it becomes pleasurable. It's as simple as that. That's an oversimplification, but you have to read the books to get the details."
βAlbert Murray, 'Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues'
