He
curled himself up in the shade of a generous tree, licking the air periodically
with a scarlet tongue. When the breeze caught his hair, rippling in the air
like so many reeds, the dance of fibers revealed a somber playfulness in dark
eyes above a melancholy grin.
The
quiet passing fullness of the moment unfolded itself all around him. There it
was in the beds of flowers encircling, whites and blues and reds, in purple,
yellow, orange swaying in the breeze. There it was in the roundabout whir of the
bees, the lilts and dives of robins and doves, runners on the asphalt track,
and the laughing cries of children at play. There it was in the single bloody
rose that towered above the rest of the garden. Above all else the fullness,
the wholeness and purity of the moment deeply impressed him. Very full,
profoundly ripe indeed.
With a
giggle, not altogether dignified, he reached for his instrument and began to
play idly. The time and place were right for it, is all he really knew. But let
me tell you, it was really something to see him at work, the harmonies he was
able to tease out, the way the strings vibrated under his touch like buzzing
echoes of the honeymakers. A few passerby turned to listen for a moment or two,
continued walking as if they’d heard nothing. He really did have a particular
skill for playing, though he himself would never have gone so far as to claim
he was particularly talented, or anything. It really did seem to come alive
under his touch, though, in a way that was at once immediately obvious and
impossible to point out.
No, not
really particularly talented, just the fruit of plenty of practice, which was
itself the fruit of a manifestly solitary and really quite inhibited nature
just trying to break free and find some way to have meaningful contact with
other people and the world and, and… you know, all that kind of thing.
Not
that he actually came out and said any of that while he was playing, because
after all that’s a mouthful and it also doesn’t sound very good with guitar
accompaniment.
“—just
some jerk playing his guitar under that tree,” announced one of the passers-by
in a needlessly loud voice.
He
frowned slightly to hear this, and felt shame that he wasn’t able to simply
allow such things to pass over him unmoved. But the moment passed, and he once
again sat under the tree, lightly playing for the love of all things. In a
voice that (perhaps) made up in earnestness for what it lacked in technical
skill, he opened his mouth and let out a resonant tenor:
My love is everywhere;
the moonlight is in her hair.
And if you saw her eyes
you’d know that she’ll never die.
Love, oh love, my love.
Oh, you
singer, you player, you sitter, you who rest by the tree and dream of things
first and last! You clown, you joker, you dreamer: why do you bare your heart
and mind, pour it out in so many thrumming strings at your lap? Do you know why
you do it, why you must present your deepest longings, fears, and terrible
doubts before the world? Or do you simply know you must, that without your song
and happy playing your seams would burst as if from the weight of a shining
star?
Who
knows, and who could say? But still he plays on.
A
little ways off, standing in the shadow of cherry blossoms in bloom, she gazed
and listened with pointed eyes. Though all the world passed by on the asphalt
track, and now and then a few figures stopped by to take in a song or two, in
her distance she watched; for somehow (who knows how?) she knew the song was
for her.
What a
whirl of emotion passed in her eyes, there where no others could see! Leaving
aside any aesthetic or sensuous responses to the music, here we see the
whimsical curl of curiosity, the knitted brow of suspicion, the hurried breath
of anticipation, the subdued tremble of anxiety. Into the penetrating,
ever-watchful, ever-observing look of her deep brown eyes there crept something
faintly like hope, as if at finding something long-lost and only faintly
remembered. Above all there was… oh, but you surely already know what there was
above all else… don’t you, reader?
But
still he sang, periodically turning to glance at her with a mischievous grin on
his face:
In ancient days the sirens jolly
sang so sweet that (oh, by golly!)
the sailors never reached their docks,
so many drowned among the rocks.
Still
she looked on with a bemused smile. Daylight grew weary and settled into
evening, and a softness crept into her eyes. Almost without realizing it, she
took a step towards the singer beneath the tree. Not directly, naturally. Of
course she made a show of admiring the flowers, which was anyways quite
understandable because they were really quite lovely there in the fading light.
And so in zigzag fashion, almost amounting to more of a circle or a spiral, she
came ever nearer, ever closer to the player on the summer grass. She never made
direct eye contact, naturally. But still the distance shrank, ever nearer by
degrees.
And how
she walked! The sway of her lithe form was the music of the spheres, which
philosophers say pervades all of creation without meeting the human ear. Every
little breath she took was the invitation to a ballad, the hope of a symphony,
the chance for a song. The silence in her ears was the hope and desire to
remake this world in sound.
If he
noticed her approach he gave no overt sign of it. But she thought she could
detect a growing excitement in his voice, a greater intention in the strumming
of each chord.
There
came, as was inevitable, the moment when all pretense dried up. She stood
before him, head slightly tilted as she looked down. Something like infinite
terror accompanied by infinite longing stole its way into his eyes as he
returned her gaze. He set aside the instrument.
Silence.
Her lips parted as if to speak.
“Oho, an apple for the snake charmer!”
came a sudden cackle from above. They looked up to see a crooked man holding
something very large and very red in one of the tree’s lower limbs. He dropped
it with a shriek.
“Alas,
that that which I cling to should be already lost!” the man shouted, bounding
from the limb and tumbling to the ground just as the red object came down on
the singer’s head. It burst with a squelching sound, and water spurted over the
ground, covering a quite considerable area all around.
The
musician, thoroughly soaked with the balloon’s remnants sitting on his head
like some grotesque hat, wiped his hair from his eyes to discover, with a
really quite awful sinking in his chest, that the woman had vanished. The
crooked man, however, stood hopping about on his hairy feet, a laugh in his
eyes and scraggly beard.
“For
shame, it seems that music is no match for Tremolo’s water balloon,” the
apparition observed.
“Damn
you, Tremolo the Tale-Teller! You ruined my guitar!”
“Well,
all’s well that ends well,” Tremolo decided before turning to run with a sort
of lopsided gait.
“But
you just ruined everything!” the singer shouted at the receding figure.
No
reply was forthcoming. With a sigh and a glance at the waterlogged instrument,
the man under the tree took to his feet and gave chase.
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