Epiphany

An attempt at stream of consciousness writing: a description of a composer going through an epiphany.

            Let’s see, it happened at the desk in my study on the east wing of the house; that’s where father had his study before I moved out, went to school and came back only to get inheritance from a man I sometimes wish I never really knew. It was about then that it became my study. The desk my mother got from my grandmother and gifted to my father, it is oak and I still use it, feeling like Thoreau when I write on it because there is a very large window on the opposite wall that I find myself staring out of on a fairly regular basis to try and draw inspiration from the sun the same way the sun gives inspiration to plants; this inspiration is merely a fact of nature, but inspiration nonetheless. The falsehoods of the desk are obvious: the finish is poor, and the chair is not made of the same wood; my grandmother’s chair happened to get destroyed by my grandfather in a particularly hard winter and heated the house for a few hours. Retrospectively, I suppose I don’t care about the chair all that much. If you were to look closely enough, you can see the times I wrote on a single, too-thin piece of paper atop the desk with a specific sharp pen engraved into the desktop; endless clefs and flats and naturals and a few sharps here and there (I hate sharps, they don’t compliment each other the way flats do). This happens to be in Gb, if I can recall correctly, or that’s where it probably ended up going. Six flats, how cruel of me to those violinists and those violists; that’s what they get for choosing to have to deal with intonation when composers never have to worry about intonation when they’re writing; the people we hire, that’s their job. My father was also a violinist, and played viola as a result; he would always tell a very funny joke: what’s the difference between a violin and a viola? One burns longer, namely the viola, much like the chair. They are essentially the same instrument but violists never get solos and have to read a clef that seems to boggle the minds of people who can’t read; the viola is only slightly larger- more wood to burn. Maybe if my father had taken that joke a little more seriously I’d have a matching chair and that small inconsistency wouldn’t bother me so. Damn you, father. Damn you for being a drunkard in your later years and damn you for being as inconsiderate as to kill yourself when you realized there was no helping you. I can make out his name written in his pen engraved on this desk, peeking through a thin piece of paper; I’m not the only one that ruins things by writing too hard. It started in Eb, now I remember, and moved to Eb minor; that makes much more sense now, despite the fact that it seems significantly less brilliant. It started on a single tone, much like an African piece I sang in school, only instead of being rhythmically driven, this one was musically driven. The words are simple and have to do with nature, and I feel like Thoreau again. I look out my window and see the backyard and see the fire pit and I remember watching my father when he would play the violin around the fire and we would all sing whatever melody he was playing; it was an odd tradition but a tradition in my house and there is nothing I can do about my past so I continue to truck through it, or at least the pieces I remember of it. I hardly remember things that aren’t important to me, but monumental things I tend to hold on. Like the body of this piece or the last day I went to church. The priest or pastor or lector or whoever he may have been was talking about the local election coming up lately and claimed that he heard from God that one man was good and one was evil; my father was the evil one, running for office. He had pins, signs and banners all over town and he lost the election because of a few religious radicals that listen to a man in a robe because he claimed to have heard God, which is one of the most foolish things I have ever heard. I mean honestly, how can one hear God when God has no tongue? The death of Christ certainly cut out his tongue, because I haven’t heard a word from him, and shouldn’t he speak to the nonbelievers and the gypsies? Why would God waste his time talking to people he knows will believe him, shouldn’t he talk to the Jews who believe Christ wasn’t divine, or the Catholics who believe Christ wasn’t divine- namely, me? Raised Catholic, that is. My mother was Irish and my dad wasn’t; he used to play Celtic hymns around the fire when things got solemn and quiet and the moon was in the center of the sky, providing more light than the fire ever did. You could see how she smiled, revealing the kind of teeth that only strong Irish women have, and I’ll leave what that means up to you, because I can’t remember her anymore, as I don’t know how to look at a picture of her now that she’s dead and I’m living in her house raising a family the same way she rose a family what seems like ages ago. I think what my father left engraved on this desk was a letter he wrote to my mother, a love letter perhaps, a letter of distance or a letter of grief. I like to imagine that when I write I’m writing what he wrote, no matter how far away those two things might be from each other. From the single tone, it moves and suspends but never resolves, just goes back to the single tone, then moves to Ab. I wrote it in two when it really should have been in four, but what can you do about that. The soprani have to sing low and the basses have to sing high and I shouldn’t have done that but those who can’t sing high are lazy and those who can’t sing low need to learn how to warm down. The second section starts off the same way on the single tone, and moves in a similar fashion, to the same suspension, and then moves up and suspends a different way, minor ninths between voices in a chord without a root. The key isn’t ambiguous, the movement is, much like the lyrics intend. The lyrics begin asking the evening to quiet, as the children are trying to sleep despite the raging thunderstorms outside, and the evening seems to refuse. My father tried to convince me there was nothing to be afraid of, because we were inside, but my mother was actually comforting, being the mother she was, and it was her voice that I ended up finally falling asleep to, despite the raging thunderstorms outside. Years later I found out that my great-grandmother was struck by lightning sitting inside, watching a storm out of a closed window. That’s all I know about her, my father never talked about her, he didn’t like her and she was only ever senile, from the day she was born. But as my father got older and sadder the pieces he would play started having more and more flats and more and more intonation problems and were only ever straight Aeolian. He would play late into the night and I think that’s what killed him, a love for music or a hate for himself or just plain exhaustion but regardless, I don’t think it was tuberculosis, despite what the doctors may have said after his funeral, which was absolutely beautiful. Fourteen people were in attendance, including my mother and I, we both read a portion of the eulogy that we wrote together on this oak desk in this chair made of lord knows what. The eulogy started with something everyone could relate with my father, whatever that may have been. I could never relate with him. Is that his name written in my hand on the desk? We talked about his jokes and the musicians in the audience laughed, all three of them, and we told stories of his strong arms that seemed like they could lift trees to the ceiling of sky if they would only try. Maybe, as I sit and tried to write words for this piece I should have asked him to raise the trees and ask God to let the children sleep; if He won’t talk to me why wouldn’t He talk to a dead man? It returns back to a single tone and has a trip-ah-let rhythm that just reinforces the fact that it should have been in 4, and we had been four maybe my father would have had the support he needed, a brother or a sister or even a mistress, just a fourth person for company may have been enough. The room smelled for weeks and the wood has never been the same color and the air is always heavy, I suppose that’s why I believe his spirit lingers in the books in his library here and in the cracks in this desk, because at one point, he was in the lines he pressed too hard on, quite literally. I can’t recall that day, if it was hot of if it was cold, if the air was moist, if he had seemed troubled, I just remember finding him and crossing the floor and finding that sharp pen.I refused to think that we could clean it all, and the room was always cold after we cleaned it; I wish we hadn’t. I wish we had let him stay in here; his wrists would have stopped dirtying the place eventually. I could have lived with the smell, but my mother refused. She insisted that we have a proper funeral for him. Fourteen people later, I don’t know if my mother regretted or liked her decision; she didn’t talk much after that day; I hope she doesn’t blame herself, it’s a dog-eat-dog world and my father didn’t want to wait to be eaten; he figured if he was going to be eaten, which he most certainly was, he was going to be eaten by himself and nobody else. I think it’s noble what he did, despite the fact that it was selfish and I wish he hadn’t- I wish it had been me with the problems; my life has no value now and I really don’t like how it goes up to Ab the second time with only a slight variation on the end now that I’m going back through it. It’s boring and overdone and unoriginal and cliché and all those other words no composer wants to hear, especially not a successful one like myself. If there is ever another Beethoven, I hope to meet him, and show him what I’ve done with Beethoven’s ideas and then I will be the following Beethoven, but no one listens to me. Most of the people around town stay away from my mother and I as if grief is contagious, as it very well may be, like the movement from Eb to Ab is. That’s all a cliché is, a contagious idea that ends up sounding contrived despite my best efforts. What if it started on that tone and went up to Ab but then the lowest voice sang a B natural while the rest of the choir moved to an Ebm chord? Then it would sound like da da da da with a suspension and a crescendo and then it could move here, like a box fitting into the corner made by an L shape and that shape then falling into a cradle, and being held by its mother, breast-feeding her child as it takes its first breaths through its first thunderstorm at night, crying its eyes out. And as the thunderstorm rages we begin to see the benign moon fall and the stars disappear and there’s that in between time that I would always like to sit in, neither day nor night, happy nor sad, bright nor dark, alone nor connected, just present. Not malevolent like the sun’s rays were on my mother’s pretty face or like the dark loneliness of night was on my father’s honest heart, the moment when you couldn’t tell if we were heading into morning or back into night, you just had to know that we just finished night so there’s no way we could be going back, or you at least prayed that we couldn’t be, that is the moment in which I thrive. As I look out of my window now I see the top of the moon behind the trees and I realize that in a few moments we’ll be at that moment, we’ll be at that in between place and we won’t be here or there, we’ll just be for the first time in a very long time. The moon seems to smile at me and I imagine the snowy evening my brother lead me outside and showed me the moon; it was the brightest it had been in decades and was the brightest it would be for decades- it took my breath away. It was cold, so cold that when I tried not to breathe when I ran because the air inside me was warmer than any air that I could find in any crevice outside. I wonder if that’s the moon my father was dying to see, and died to see because he never could. Sitting in the cradle, those notes would just stay there and suspend with trip-ah-let movement under it, trip-ah-let, trip-ah-let, although the overtones would never tune with the notes resonating immediately after, this is what I want, I decide. If it were to stay in the cradle, stay in Ebm, maybe we could resolve to Db major like this, da da da da da and end the piece how we began it, on a single tone. Rest, oh gentle wind. Eureka: an epiphany. I look outside and realize it’s- I’m in between.