Tchaikovsky

It’s 11:00 at night and Bach is still playing in the background; I think it's a sonata that he never got to finish. “The faux flowers are falling.”

“Write that down.”

Beethoven has a mad way of making a theme out of four notes. Those notes on the page became the Braille for his ears to run over and make sense out of the black and white. “She covers the blemishes on her skin, but she never tends to the ones within”.

“Write that down.”

Mozart looks sad. His hair is left unkempt, a wig lies next to him on the futon. “Mozart looks sad”

“Don’t write that down. Say, ‘Mozart, near his final breath, waiting for the silence, hears all the violence, and hopes that the music he has captured from invisible angelic things will give wings to the hearts of the unconscious sleepers in their beds of future tired winkings and thinkings of mounting apparitions they know not how to quell.'”

This separation of body and conscience, what does it mean? Our preoccupation with love and the pursuit of life and being happy when the waves of up and down, smile and frown, continue dauntless to our feeble attempts to be happily ever after. There is an after the happily ever after and it is a downer, but there will be another sunrise too. How do you capture that melancholy moment in a sound? How do you say “I love you” in your own timbre, your own pitch, your own existence and somehow still connect afresh with new lives in a way that the old sounds didn’t? Categorizing songs into purpose and person “I feel… You are… We all are… He was… She said…”. A complaint is always something people can relate too. This suffering , these blues. The tinkling of piano keys rattle old locks and turn the hands of clocks forward and backwards so that for a moment I am caught in a euphoric moment of ecstatic joy. It doesn’t matter that I am in debt over my head, sinking, sinking, I’m putting musical parenthesis around my soul like a force-field. My mind is in another place, where my soul is, and my figurative heart that looks like a heart, and not that botched up thing that really resides within my anatomic warmth amidst my bone-cage.

“Write what you feel.”

“But I feel too much.”

“Write what you think.”

“But I think too much.”

“Write what your senses are saying to you.”

“They won’t be silent.”

“Then I don’t see why you are so distraught”

“There isn’t time. There isn’t a podium and a pedestal and I feel like this should have been bestowed to someone else who was more capable”

“Ego.” A chair is there and it’s Sigmund Freud’s face as a mask, Mozart is laughing at me now, a childish grin. “Tell me about your mother, tell me about your father, tell me about your childhood.”
Blinking lights, a child, laughter, tears, two oak trees, a castle in the woods, a caboose in a football field, audio voices in the darkness warm as theatres alive on Christmas Eve.

“You are here now.”

The dizzying cycling has ended and he’s holding a glass music box. He drops it and it seems to be floating on all of eternity. Gently caressed by the warm and cold inhale and exhale of life, it falls closer and closer to the ground and there is an expectant glisten in Mozart’s eye. “And what if it does hit the ground, who would care? Someone else would catch it of course”

“Or perhaps they wouldn’t”

“Perhaps. But, what would it matter. You see, this music box is only visible to both of us; no one else would know”

“But I would know.”

“Well then.”

I stay stationary; it’s still falling. It could either be a gruesome explosion with a thousand little pieces, or it could be a gentle crack, but that music box wouldn't be the same and neither would I. The more I ponder it, I wonder who will save who, and who will prevent who from getting cracks and from falling all to pieces. One fell swoop and it’s in the palm of my hand and I begin to fall to pieces. “It’s New Years Eve, it’s a cold and cruel world, and I’m weeping over an apparition in my hand, but I’m holding onto this, because It’s holding onto me, and somehow we are both keeping each other from apathy’s misery”

“Write that down.”