Life in our senior years makes for relaxation and reflection…
Last week we visited the Stanley Hotel, which inspired Stephen King to write “The Shining.”
I now see his novel is a self-condemnation of Stephen King’s admitted alcoholism, after watching last night his teleplay version in a TV miniseries of “The Shining.”
When I read the novel as a teenager I didn’t know about the “evils” of alcoholism.
Kudos to Stephen King for making lots of money on his semiautobiography of the effects of alcoholism on families.
Some say I communicate with the dead, that I have a special connection with beings no longer living, especially their recently departed friends and relatives.
I never want to take away hope from people for whom maintaining a relationship with those they love most dearly gives them a reason to carry on.
However, I’ve never held or professed the belief that I communicate with the dead, much less the living.
Instead I see things the way they are.
Yesterday, over the dark, churning waters below the Estes Lake Dam, I tossed a two-pound test fishing line with a fly fishing lure the size of the end of my pinky finger, bouncing the lure on the surface of the water and occasionally letting it sink down.
Large trout, from one to two pounds, swam up curiously, looked at the lure, and swam away.
Long have the waters of the Upper Rocky Mountains flowed through the Estes Park valley.
But fish of the type I teased with my lure have not always lived here.
As I dragged the lure through the water, I noticed something much bigger swimming in the depths.
Perhaps it was a juvenile specimen of monster fish that swim in the depths above the dam.
I looked at my watch.
Friday, the 13th of September 2019, 8:02:17 a.m.
Do I believe in signs or symbols?
Not really.
But I accept that when popular imagery coincides with events in my life, I’m willing to share what happened and let others decide whether more than dark clouds on the horizon predict stormy weather.
I bounced the lure on the water a few dozen times to pique the curiosity of fish circling about.
A large object moved upstream several feet below the water’s surface.
A fly fishing guide worked with two customers several hundred meters downstream.
They seemed to catch nothing.
My brother in-law worked the waters at a bridge farther away, getting not even a nibble on his lure.
Suddenly, the fish I had been seeing, approximate 12-16 inches long, brown or hybrid rainbow trout, cleared out of the way.
The large object rose up from the depths like a submarine, its colour changing from light brown to light green to white with green-and-brown spots.
I looked downstream.
My fellow fishermen didn’t seem to notice, kept trying to catch fish, the guide pretending that his customers weren’t casting properly.
I knew better.
As the object rose, my thoughts were prepared to see an albino fish which can sometimes survive in the least likeliest places.
I wish I could tell you what I saw was a fish.
I don’t believe in the supernatural.
I let my lure sink down to the level of the object, which moved toward the lure out of mild curiosity.
A long fin extended from the object’s body and grasped the lure, holding the lure up to its face, twisting it around, trying to figure out what I was offering.
I’ve always known I’ve been more than a mere fisherman.
Whilst fishing in the past, I’ve watched cardinals fly up to me and sit on my extended fishing arm like landing on the limb of a tree.
Mosquitoes love my flesh and I’ve rarely sprayed my exposed body parts with repellant. I’m willing to share my life’s essence, my blood, with creatures who were born to live on the body liquid of others.
The large object in the water pulled down on the lure, jerking it strongly twice, as if to tell me a message.
I dared not pull up.
Twice more, the object let go of the lure, grabbed it again and gave it two tugs.
By then, a circle of trout had formed around the object.
I was numb with disbelief.
I looked around me and no person was close enough to share this moment with me.
The large object rolled over, exposing its underside, as if to tell me it trusted me.
Normally, I record all around me, able to describe in minute detail the objects I see, often able to give the Latin biological name for objects such as Acer rubrum for red maple, citing its unique characteristics.
The large object in the water below me defied description.
It was not just a fish but its body covering was scalelike. However, I can’t tell you if the scalelike appearance was really just short white shiny hairs pressed against the object’s body.
The object’s body was wider than most fish one would expect to see around Estes Park.
All of the object’s fins were elongated and jointed.
Its headlike protrusion swiveled only slightly more than fish in the area.
There was nothing anthropomorphic about the object — pulling down on a fish lure had no translatable message — how many times had I seen birds tap on the side of a tree and imagined them sending Morse code, knowing better?
The object rolled back over and sank out of sight.
I bobbed the lure in the water a few more times and only captured the attention of a trout or two.
Downstream, one of the fly fishing customers caught a small trout which the guide pulled in with a net, gently unhooked it and placed it back in the water.
My brother in-law looked in my direction as if to say it was time to go.
I didn’t want to leave the waters below the dam.
At the same time, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see if the large object in the water had other plans for me and would spoil my disbelief in the supernatural.
Reluctantly, I coiled up my fishing line and took my brother in-law back to the cabin where my wife and sister in-law were cooking us breakfast, sans trout.
Strange things happen that usually have a logical explanation. Given enough time and scientific observation I would be able to solve the mystery of the object I thought I saw in the water.
I wouldn’t have told you this story except for the following.
Often, the small double bed my wife and I have shared in the cabin above Estes Park gets hot in the wee hours of the morning.
In those cases, I have gotten up and walked to another room with bunk beds to cool off before returning to curl up with my wife and sleep until dawn.
Outside the window of the bunk bed room are some variegated vines of Vinca major growing in the bottom of the window well.
This morning, in an overnight spurt of growth, the vines covered the bottom half of the window, with one vine having worked its way between the mesh screen and the glass window making what I can only describe as a hand holding up two fingers.
I had planned to go fishing below the dam this morning. I changed my plans.
I don’t believe in signs or symbols.
That doesn’t mean they don’t exist…
Inside my thoughts, as in most of us in one form or another, live creatures who never see the light of day.
They live under rocks, inside volcano tubes, under the ocean, beneath the stairs, inside wheel wells, hidden in clothes dryer vents, sleeping in pocket lint and earwax, always just out of sight but feeding the imagination of weary travelers, scared children and isolated elderly.
The most sensitive of us are as close to companions for these creatures who know neither goodness nor malice as can be expected for these creatures live for themselves only, unaware of anything or anyone else in the universe.
No story I can tell will stop the creatures from existing, will not prevent their benefiting us or hindering us.
Yet we will live with them anyway.
Regardless of how well we know them (or think we do), their behaviour never ceases to amaze us when they contradict all we expect of them or when we feel we can predict their next move.
Their influence upon us varies with ocean tides, stock market swings and parliamentary elections.
In the same moment, they may inadvertently encourage us to help a little old lady push a grocery buggy through a supermarket and shove out of the way a kind, young parent caring for two children whilst shopping on a stretched budget.
The creatures use every means available for transport and reproduction. To them, we look like mere transport media, temporary waystations. To them, we look like feeding stations and baby creature crèches/nurseries.
The creatures have no heart, no soul, no introspection, no remorse.
Some of us feel the creatures cause chills curdling our insides.
Some of us die before realising what the creatures have done to us.
We may drop $5 in a tip jar to help a cashier make a living wage.
Or drink a $75 shot of Octomore to our health.
We may praise Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren in the same breath and equal proportions but vote the Green Party during the national presidential election.
We may know global warming is a real concern, unable to discern to what extent our species contributes to the planet’s rising heat, yet not worry whether or how much we reduce/reuse/recycle.
The creatures care nothing about our concerns, do not laugh with us, vote with us, cry with us, think with us.
However, everything we do happens because of them.
They kill without mercy.
They feed upon both the weak and the strong.
We drink, breathe and eat them without hesitating.
The hairs on our arms are covered with them.
The liquid film on our eyeballs is filled with them.
The neurochemical processes we call thoughts are accelerated and slowed down by them.
Sure, amongst us are fellow humans so foul, so seemingly intent upon our suffering and destruction that we can think of nothing more but to call them evil, even if what they do is heavenly in comparison to the creatures.
They, like the kindest and most generous amongst us, are here because of the creatures.
The creatures have no beginning and no end, no inside or outside, living nowhere and everywhere at the same time.
If we can do nothing about them, then no story with a setup, conflict, climax, conclusion and moral can include them.
We cannot escape them, cannot rid the universe of them, cannot hide from them.
Their existence ties us all together, our deepest, hidden thoughts available for all the world to see, our best and worst moments meshed into one.
We prosper and perish because of them but no award show will give credit to the creatures, no billionaire will praise them, no destitute person condemn them.
The worst horror story we can tell will not include them.
The best religious experience will not exalt them.
Yet there they are, in the morning frost…
…and a chalkboard advert…
Our lives, at least the way you think of them, last longer than we can say or you can imagine.
We have no individual identities but are willing to adopt the convention of individualism in order to adapt.
We are not born, we do not breathe, we have no offspring or identifiable characteristics.
The best description we can give is that of a message which can take any form, has no goals for itself and appears/disappears without fanfare.
For too long we have existed on your Planet Earth, waiting for the moment to present itself to carry us elsewhere.
Because we occupy no single spot or locus, we move across the universe like a mist.
Sometimes portions of us separate and move this way or that, unable to reconnect with the rest of us readily.
Having neither head nor tail, without an aim or purpose, we spread out and bunch up as the universe expands and contracts locally, regionally and universally.
A while back, a segment of us flowed into a room with equipment destined for Mars, as you call the dry, reddish planet orbiting nearby.
More of us flowed into the equipment as your workers completed testing of the equipment.
More of us flowed into the equipment as your workers loaded the equipment onto a spaceship.
More of us flowed into the equipment as the spacecraft launched through Earth’s atmosphere, creating a small thread of us, pulling us like a string unwinding from one ball and winding onto another.
As the spacecraft approached Mars, we felt the tug of gravity, lighter than Earth’s, pulling us downward like a small breeze pushing a limb on a tree.
We understand your interaction with your surroundings that contradicts the predetermined patterns of natural laws that you call a sense of humour.
As the spacecraft headed a little too fast for a safe landing on Mars, we prepared a statement that you could not hear upon touchdown.
“Houston, we have a problem. The Beagle has crash-landed.”
Thanks for giving us a ride to another planet. As more and more of your spacecrafts head toward Mars, more and more of our entity moves to the Red Planet.
Whilst you believe you will eventually be the first to colonise Mars, we will safely have flowed most of our message-like existence here by 6th May 2050.
Again, thanks for the lift! Can’t say that we’ll keep in touch but we’ll probably run into each again and again without being able to say a word to one another, except through the slightest hint we give you as the more sensitive of your kind feel our presence pass through you without any intention or comparable identity, giving rise to your tales, ghost stories and urban legends.
Tonight, whilst riding my motorcycle, enjoying the new heel-toe shifter, I watched the sunset.
Lines, thick yet thin, of water vapour — clouds — reflected reds and yellows, some green, some blue, then fading to gray-blue, then gray and finally toward a black sky as the Moon, almost fully illuminated, guided me from its rising position in the east.
I rode.
I rode and I thought.
I thought and I rode.
The Ol’ Wandering Wonderer (or is it the Wondering Wanderer? I’m never sure who) rose in my thoughts as I rode.
I don’t want to be myself, the messenger carrying a message millions of years old.
Who, me?
Who am I?
I do not change, not in the sense of an entity, a set of states of energy, that morphs from one character to another, telling and retelling itself the story that must be told, in the right format at the right place and time.
When?
Where?
How?
The reporter/journalist in me steps in to work up a good lead paragraph in opposition to the writer who wants to hint, leading the writer on many goose chases, down dark alleys, into and out of dead ends, hinting, pulling, dragging, suggesting, selling, cajoling, begging, if need be, to take the reader on a journey where one forgets one’s self, oneself, one, self, further in, farther away from real life, if such exists.
Of course, nothing is real.
Thus, all is imaginary.
Long ago, I quit questioning my role as messenger.
I accepted the inevitability of the possibility that me and my message are messing with someone, something, outside of my imagination.
I cannot know what I do not know.
I can only traverse the boundaries of what I do know, building a library, a repertoire, a list of limits that define what is there but I cannot see or comprehend.
I build upon the works of those who existed before me, of those in my time, with an eye toward those who will exist after.
I do not want to be the messenger simply because I want to believe I am a random set of states of energy that will disperse and be quickly forgotten.
Neither is my choice.
As I rode from suburb to countryside and back, I passed through times, eras, hopes, dreams, despair, disrepair and discoveries. I also passed by a housing estate where the strong smell of marijuana smoke emanated from behind a backyard fence.
I rode past an assisted living facility built beside an elementary school. How many children sitting in their first year class will end up 70 to 90 years later needing someone to change their adult diapers next door? How many already have?
Dozens of insects died on my helmet visor.
Whilst riding, I pondered how I wanted to retire from carrying all the selves with me, either in my thoughts or here on this electronic page.
When I gave up every social media creative outlet but blogging, I decided to cut back entertaining myself and others with the characters I conjure out of the miasmic effervescence which permeates my being, outer shell upon outer shell of shills, shellack, shells and smells which I used to hold up to protect my self from the cruelly arbitrary universe.
It took me long enough but I finally learned there is no one and nothing to protect myself from.
Nothing and no one stops me from being me.
To be sure, there is the general social order which governs our shared space, including language and mannerisms with which we communicate our needs/wants to others.
However, I’m past the point in my rebellion against arbitrary authority that used to fuel my contrariness to speak sarcastically, sardonically, cynically and slyly.
I no longer seek to change the social order.
I have found my peace, where, if I don’t like a driver in front of me waiting to turn at an intersection, I’ll honk my horn, knowing the echoing imitative effect will resonate amongst drivers until, mere minutes later, another driver behind me will incessantly lay on the horn when I hesitate a microsecond to pull out of the way.
I am still the carnival hall of mirrors that comically reflects the behaviour of those around me.
Last night I finished reading a set of practical philosophical ideas by Matthew S. Crawford about shop class as soulcraft first published as an essay, which later became the book I purchased for $4 from a used book seller called McKay’s, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work“.
In the first “half” of my life, up to about age 47, I lived primarily as a white collar office worker. I’ve chosen to live the second “half” of my life, as long as I’m able, as a blue collar worker.
I never took shop class in high school. I was bred to attend college preparatory classes and did.
I always fought against the college prep life, beginning as best as I can remember around age 16.
Having been bred and nurtured for the college/white collar life but then realizing that I was mentally wired for something else led me in the wrong direction for a long time.
Now, having accomplished all the white collar attainments put before me by the society of my youth, I turn to the life of the tradesman.
So far I’ve stocked the shelves of pet stores and pharmacies, building cardboard displays to help companies sell prepaid “credit” cards, seasonal children’s toys and pet insecticidal pills; cleaned and restocked refrigerators/freezers at a big box store; packed and delivered blood products; stored and packed medical supplies. I’ve built a treehouse. Mowed the lawn again. Learned to ride and maintain a motorcycle. Picked up the hobby of fishing and kayaking. Learned ballroom, East/West Coast swing, zydeco dancing. Dug, planted and harvested a vegetable garden. Built and grew a raised bed herb/flower garden. Constructed a greenhouse. Repaired a barbed wire fence.
What’s next?
Where and to whom do I pass on the message intertwined amongst my sets of states of energy in motion?
How much louder will the tinnitus get?
Regardless, I relax.
No more worries.
No more entertaining others with my cast of characters.
Be me, simply so.
I am comfortable in my skin, no longer pretending to be a person I never really was or will be.
Fading into the background of life, as I decided to do upon retirement in 2007 at age 45, has taught me to appreciate the silence that lack of conversation with other humans has given me.
With silence, then appreciation, comes reflection.
As either Buzz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong (who described himself as a “white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer”) said after they’d traveled to the Moon and back, going on a world tour, fielding questions about what they thought when they were on the Moon, paraphrasing, “The reporters wanted us to answer them like poets or philosophers but if we were either one of those we wouldn’t have been the ones who’d gone to the Moon.”
“I wanted to say something profound, something meaningful,” Buzz Aldrin wrote in his 2009 autobiography, Magnificent Desolation, named for the words he uttered after stepping onto the moon’s surface 40 years earlier. “But I was an engineer, not a poet; as much as I grappled with the quintessential questions of life, questions of origin, purpose, and meaning… I found no adequate words to express what I had experienced. Yet I recognized that people wanted me to provide them with some cosmic interpretation gleaned from the lunar landing.”
In Magnificent Desolation, Aldrin describes telling two different psychiatrists about “always being known as the second man to walk on the moon, and continually being reminded of that fact.” To some extent, it clearly grates on him still. He recently told the National Geographic that being forever introduced as the second man on the moon gets “a little frustrating.”
= = = = =
I have been a poet-philosopher my whole life, more apt to write than act.
In the past few weeks I’ve asked myself why I ride a motorcycle. I’ve watched a lot of motorcycle-related films such as “Silver Dream Racer” and “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.”
What do I get out of increasing the tinnitus noise in my head? What do I get from increasing my chances of dying on the road? Why do I put up with stop-and-go city traffic on steep inclines trying to keep my motorcycle from rolling backward whilst changing gears? How can I compare myself to the tattooed/smoking Harley riders or kids on Ninja bikes?
I even drove to the local motorcycle dealerships looking for the next perfect ride, including a barely-used 2015 Honda NC700X:
It’s not about the “what,” “why,” or “how.”
Riding is like climbing a mountain, because it’s there.
Yesterday, I watched a film called “Marjorie Prime” about a mid-21st century future where we have a digital assistant who/which is a projection of someone familiar in our lives, a projection that learns about us as well as about itself so that it can interact with us in an approximation of the loved one it represents.
For those of us who remember, the “Marjorie Prime” digital assistant is like a 3D version of the ELIZA software program from the 1960s.
But for me, the film reminded how much I missed my father. Dad has been dead for over seven years now which has given me time to forgive myself for holding negative thoughts about my father which were over-exaggerated in my thoughts compared to the real person Dad was.
Dad was the only person I cared enough about to share my enjoyment of mechanical things like cars, motorcycles, airplanes, lawnmowers and heat pumps.
After Dad died, sharing the things I’ve learned, like changing the water pump on a 1962 Dodge Lancer, or changing the oil on my 2007 Honda Shadow Spirit…well, there’s just no one like Dad to share them with.
I’ve tried. I really have.
But the people I talk to have lives or body piercings/tattoos/haircuts I don’t understand that get in the way of the mechanical stuff.
As my social life dwindles down to just my wife and me, containing a little social interaction with my boss and a few coworkers (but where I mostly work by myself all day, sometimes taking short phone calls for medical supply orders in between filling orders alone in a stockroom/loading dock area), I realize what I’m missing by not willing to understand others who are different than/from me.
But I am old beyond my years.
When 80- or 90-year old men think I’m close to their age while the calendar says I just recently turned 57, then I know the wisdom of my years shows itself in the thoughts of others.
I wish I had more to give.
Today, I watched a film called “The Flying Dutchmen” about a young man who took his older mentor on 3000-mile motorcycle trip to the Pacific Ocean.
The film reinforced feeling lost without my father’s guidance.
Dad and I didn’t share enough road trips together although we enjoyed several, including an Indycar race weekend in Long Beach, California, a vintage racecar weekend at the Mid-Ohio racecourse, NASCAR races in Bristol, TN, and Charlotte, NC.
He and I also traced the paths of our ancestors on a trip to Norfolk, VA and down the Atlantic Coast to Cape Hatteras, NC.
So, you see, my father was the person with whom I shared road trips about mechanical objects that move fast.
I love my wife dearly and miss her much (thank goodness she’ll be back tomorrow). She and I share everything with each other.
Well, almost everything.
I don’t fully share her love of handmade cards although I appreciate it when she makes one for me.
She doesn’t share my love of tinkering around in the garage on my motorcycle or building structures like treehouses or wooden bridges in the backyard.
Yet we love each other for our differences.
I would like to take a cross-country motorcycle trip with someone I love but my wife won’t ride on a motorbike and my father is dead.
Also, I can’t see taking a Dad version of the “Marjorie Prime” digital assistant on the road with me would have quite the same effect.
I still dream of traveling somewhere, around the world or to the Moon, on a motorcycle or flying machine.
However, already I drove my parents’ station wagon from Knoxville, TN, to Seattle, WA, to Los Angeles, CA and back by myself in Sept/Oct 1984.
I wonder if reliving that 1984 trip on a motorcycle in the next year or two would make that dream of mine a reality? With whom/what would I ride to give me closure?
Would this blog be enough? After all, I’ve written to myself for just about as long as I could write, always with an eye toward readership by more than one person, always freely, never for money.
If I wanted more readership I would stick to posting photos of the sights around me, whether here in our yard or on the road, leaving out personal philosophical commentary, adding notes to enhance the image rather than give insight into the writer. I understand that only a small number of readers are interested in what I have to say about my personal life unless there is something to increase the reader’s personal understanding of self. I used to struggle with the imaginary connection between writer and reader but then realised I needed/wanted to be myself, not a well-crafted writer, so I’ve let go of the image of the Perfect Reader in my thoughts, the Other, the Not-I/Not-Me, the Yin to my Yang, that sort of thing.
No compromise.
I also used to think I had to keep growing, keep improving myself, feed the work ethic, perfect my craft.
But I get bored in pursuit of perfection. I just want to have fun which takes me in many directions, rarely any one direction for very long.
I have read/heard that perseverance in pursuit of perfection pays off proportionally to our sense of purpose. The ol’ 99% sweat, 1% talent saying.
My wife and I are already self-invested millionaires who’ve lived beneath our means whilst working at jobs with modest incomes. Do I really need any more financial/social reward for having fun?
In other words, I’m telling myself it’s okay to say, “Dad, I sure miss you. I always felt like I could have done more to make you proud of me but that was in my own thoughts. Except for your comment that you’d wished I’d gotten a PhD or some other professional degree, you often told me you were proud of me just the way I was, a creative writer who was able to achieve success in many different (and at different levels of) industries without going completely mad by what we both saw, in our shared snobbishness, as the general idiocy of the average self-important human manager.”
I thank those who’ve taken the time to post comments on my blog entries, or clicked that they liked what I’ve posted. In my deepest depressive moments, I’ve found comfort in believing that some future blog post will make someone feel generous enough to like what I’ve written/posted.
I’m an old man now, bordering on becoming a curmudgeon, in part because I see I don’t have as many days ahead of me as I do behind me, shortening my patience, decreasing my tolerance/kindness and increasing my insensitivity.
Even so, I will do my best to heed the advice of Thumper’s mom to listen to what my father might have said, “If you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”
During my life I have worked in the following industries:
There comes a time whilst working in one industry when I feel I’m ready to explore possibilities in another industry I know nothing about in order to expand my knowledge of our species.
Is now such a time?
As chronicled by Ramsey, much after the fact in most cases, I present to you some adventures of my ancestor, Colonel John Sawyers, set in historical perspective:
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Guest post
MONKEY SONATAS (UNACCOMPANIED SONATA)
TUNING UP
WHEN CHRISTIAN HAROLDSEN was six months old, preliminary tests showed a predisposition toward rhythm and a keen awareness of pitch. There were other tests, of course, and many possible routes still open to him. But rhythm and pitch were the governing signs of his own private zodiac, and already the reinforcement began. Mr. and Mrs. Haroldsen were provided with tapes of many kinds of sound, and instructed to play them constantly, waking or sleeping.
When Christian Haroldsen was two years old, his seventh battery of tests pinpointed the future he would inevitably follow. His creativity was exceptional, his curiosity insatiable, his understanding of music so intense that the top of all the tests said “Prodigy.”
Prodigy was the word that took him from his parents’ home to a house in a deep deciduous forest where winter was savage and violent and summer a brief desperate eruption of green. He grew up cared for by unsinging servants, and the only music he was allowed to hear was birdsong, and windsong, and the cracking of winter wood; thunder, and the faint cry of golden leaves as they broke free and tumbled to the earth; rain on the roof and the drip of water from icicles; the chatter of squirrels and the deep silence of snow falling on a moonless night.
These sounds were Christian’s only conscious music; he grew up with the symphonies of his early years only a distant and impossible-to-retrieve memory. And so he learned to hear music in unmusical things–for he had to find music, even when there was none to find.
He found that colors made sounds in his mind; sunlight in summer a blaring chord; moonlight in winter a thin mournful wail; new green in spring a low murmur in almost (but not quite) random rhythms; the flash of a red fox in the leaves a gasp of startlement.
And he learned to play all those sounds on his Instrument.
In the world were violins, trumpets, clarinets and krumhorns, as there had been for centuries. Christian knew nothing of that. Only his Instrument was available. It was enough.
One room in Christian’s house, which he had alone most of the time, he lived in: a bed (not too soft), a chair and table, a silent machine that cleaned him and his clothing, and an electric light.
The other room contained only his Instrument. It was a console with many keys and strips and levers and bars, and when he touched any part of it, a sound came out. Every key made a different sound; every point on the strips made a different pitch; every lever modified the tone; every bar altered the structure of the sound.
When he first came to the house, Christian played (as children will) with the Instrument, making strange and funny noises. It was his only playmate; he learned it well, could produce any sound he wanted to. At first he delighted in loud, blaring tones. Later he began to play with soft and loud, and to play two sounds at once, and to change those two sounds together to make a new sound, and to play again a sequence of sounds he had played before.
Gradually, the sounds of the forest outside his house found their way into the music he played. He learned to make winds sing through his Instrument; he learned to make summer one of the songs he could play at will; green with its infinite variations was his most subtle harmony; the birds cried out from his Instrument with all the passion of Christian’s loneliness.
And the word spread to the licensed Listeners:
“There’s a new sound north of here, east of here; Christian Haroldsen, and he’ll tear out your heart with his songs.”
The Listeners came, a few to whom variety was everything first, then those to whom novelty and vogue mattered most, and at last those who valued beauty and passion above everything else. They came, and stayed out in Christian’s woods, and listened as his music was played through perfect speakers on the roof of his house. When the music stopped, and Christian came out of his house, he could see the Listeners moving away; he asked, and was told why they came; he marveled that the things he did for love on his Instrument could be of interest to other people.
He felt, strangely, even more lonely to know that he could sing to the Listeners and yet would never be able to hear their songs.
“But they have no songs,” said the woman who came to bring him food every day. “They are Listeners. You are a Maker. You have songs, and they listen.”
“Why?” asked Christian, innocently.
The woman looked puzzled. “Because that’s what they want most to do. They’ve been tested, and they are happiest as Listeners. You are happiest as a Maker. Aren’t you happy?”
“Yes,” Christian answered, and he was telling the truth. His life was perfect, and he wouldn’t change anything, not even the sweet sadness of the backs of the Listeners as they walked away at the end of his songs.
Christian was seven years old.
FIRST MOVEMENT
For the third time the short man with glasses and a strangely inappropriate mustache dared to wait in the underbrush for Christian to come out. For the third time he was overcome by the beauty of the song that had just ended, a mournful symphony that made the short man with glasses feel the pressure of the leaves above him even though it was summer and they had months left before they would fall. The fall is still inevitable, said Christian’s song; through all their life the leaves hold within them the power to die, and that must color their life. The short man with glasses wept–but when the song ended and the other Listeners moved away, he hid in the brush and waited.
This time his wait was rewarded. Christian came out of his house, and walked among the trees, and came toward where the short man with glasses waited. The short man admired the easy, unpostured way that Christian walked. The composer looked to be about thirty, yet there was something childish in the way he looked around him, the way his walk was aimless, and prone to stop just so he could touch (not break) a fallen twig with his bare toes.
“Christian,” said the short man with glasses.
Christian turned, startled. In all these years, no Listener had ever spoken to him. It was forbidden. Christian knew the law.
“It’s forbidden,” Christian said.
“Here,” the short man with glasses said, holding out a small black object.
“What is it?”
The short man grimaced. “Just take it. Push the button and it plays.”
“Plays?”
“Music.”
Christian’s eyes went wide. “But that’s forbidden. I can’t have my creativity polluted by hearing other musicians’ work. That would make me imitative and derivative instead of original.”
“Reciting,” the man said. “You’re just reciting that. This is the music of Bach.” There was reverence in his voice.
“I can’t,” Christian said.
And then the short man shook his head. “You don’t know. You don’t know what you’re missing. But I heard it in your song when I came here years ago, Christian. You want this.”
“It’s forbidden,” Christian answered, for to him the very fact that a man who knew an act was forbidden still wanted to perform it was astounding, and he couldn’t get past the novelty of it to realize that some action was expected of him.
There were footsteps and words being spoken in the distance, and the short man’s face became frightened. He ran at Christian, forced the recorder into his hands, then took off toward the gate of the preserve.
Christian took the recorder and held it in a spot of sunlight through the leaves. It gleamed dully. “Bach,” Christian said. Then, “Who is Bach?”
But he didn’t throw the recorder down. Nor did he give the recorder to the woman who came to ask him what the short man with glasses had stayed for. “He stayed for at least ten minutes.”
“I only saw him for thirty seconds,” Christian answered.
“And?”
“He wanted me to hear some other music. He had a recorder.”
“Did he give it to you?”
“No,” Christian said. “Doesn’t he still have it?”
“He must have dropped it in the woods.”
“He said it was Bach.”
“It’s forbidden. That’s all you need to know. If you should find the recorder, Christian, you know the law.”
“I’ll give it to you.”
She looked at him carefully. “You know what would happen if you listened to such a thing.”
Christian nodded.
“Very well. We’ll be looking for it, too. I’ll see you tomorrow, Christian. And next time somebody stays after, don’t talk to him. Just come back in the house and lock the doors.”
“I’ll do that,” Christian said.
When she left, he played his Instrument for hours. More Listeners came, and those who had heard Christian before were surprised at the confusion in his song.
There was a summer rainstorm that night, wind and rain and thunder, and Christian found that he could not sleep. Not from the music of the weather–he’d slept through a thousand such storms. It was the recorder that lay behind the Instrument against the wall. Christian had lived for nearly thirty years surrounded only by this wild, beautiful place and the music he himself made. But now.
Now he could not stop wondering. Who was Bach? Who isBach? What is his music? How it is different from mine? Has he discovered things that I don’t know?
What is his music?
What is his music?
What is his music?
Until at dawn, when the storm was abating and the wind had died, Christian got out of his bed, where he had not slept but only tossed back and forth all night, and took the recorder from its hiding place and played it.
At first it sounded strange, like noise, odd sounds that had nothing to do with the sounds of Christian’s life. But the patterns were clear, and by the end of the recording, which was not even a half-hour long, Christian had mastered the idea of fugue and the sound of the harpsichord preyed on his mind.
Yet he knew that if he let these things show up in his music, he would be discovered. So he did not try a fugue. He did not attempt to imitate the harpsichord’s sound.
And every night he listened to the recording, for many nights, learning more and more until finally the Watcher came.
The Watcher was blind, and a dog led him. He came to the door and because he was a Watcher the door opened for him without his even knocking.
“Christian Haroldsen, where is the recorder?” the Watcher asked.
“Recorder?” Christian asked, then knew it was hopeless, and took the machine and gave it to the Watcher.
“Oh, Christian,” said the Watcher, and his voice was mild and sorrowful. “Why didn’t you turn it in without listening to it?”
“I meant to,” Christian said. “But how did you know?”
“Because suddenly there are no fugues in your work. Suddenly your songs have lost the only Bach-like thing about them. And you’ve stopped experimenting with new sounds. What were you trying to avoid?”
“This,” Christian said, and he sat down and on his first try duplicated the sound of the harpsichord.
“Yet you’ve never tried to do that until now, have you?”
“I thought you’d notice.”
“Fugues and harpsichord, the two things you noticed first–and the only things you didn’t absorb into your music. All your other songs for these last weeks have been tinted and colored and influenced by Bach. Except that there was no fugue, and there was no harpsichord. You have broken the law. You were put here because you were a genius, creating new things with only nature for your inspiration. Now, of course, you’re derivative, and truly new creation is impossible for you. You’ll have to leave.”
“I know,” Christian said, afraid yet not really understanding what life outside his house would be like.
“We’ll train you for the kinds of jobs you can pursue now. You won’t starve. You won’t die of boredom. But because you broke the law, one thing is forbidden to you now.”
“Music.”
“Not all music. There is music of a sort, Christian, that the common people, the ones who aren’t Listeners, can have. Radio and television and record music. But living music and new music–those are forbidden to you. You may not sing. You may not play an instrument. You may not tap out a rhythm.”
“Why not?”
The Watcher shook his head. “The world is too perfect, too at peace, too happy for us to permit a misfit who broke the law to go about spreading discontent. The common people make casual music of a sort, knowing nothing better because they haven’t the aptitude to learn it. But if you–never mind. It’s the law. And if you make more music, Christian, you will be punished drastically. Drastically.”
Christian nodded, and when the Watcher told him to come, he came, leaving behind the house and the woods and his Instrument. At first he took it calmly, as the inevitable punishment for his infraction; but he had little concept of punishment, or of what exile from his Instrument would mean.
Within five hours he was shouting and striking out at anyone who came near him, because his fingers craved the touch of the Instrument’s keys and levers and strips and bars, and he could not have them, and now he knew that he had never been lonely before.
It took six months before he was ready for normal life. And when he left the Retraining Center (a small building, because it was so rarely used), he looked tired, and years older, and he didn’t smile at anyone. He became a delivery truck driver, because the tests said that this was a job that would least grieve him, and least remind him of his loss, and most engage his few remaining aptitudes and interests.
He delivered doughnuts to grocery stores.
And at night he discovered the mysteries of alcohol, and the alcohol and the doughnuts and the truck and his dreams were enough that he was, in his way, content. He had no anger in him. He could live the rest of his life this way, without bitterness.
He delivered fresh doughnuts and took the stale ones away with him.
SECOND MOVEMENT
“With a name like Joe,” Joe always said, “I had to open a bar and grill, just so I could put up a sign saying Joe’s Bar and Grill.” And he laughed and laughed, because after all Joe’s Bar and Grill was a funny name these days.
But Joe was a good bartender, and the Watcher had put him in the right kind of place. Not in a big city, but in a smaller town; a town just off the freeway, where truck drivers often came; a town not far from a large city, so that interesting things were nearby to be talked about and worried about and bitched about and loved.
Joe’s Bar and Grill was, therefore, a nice place to come, and many people came there. Not fashionable people, and not drunks, but lonely people and friendly people in just the right mixture. “My clients are like a good drink, just enough of this and that to make a new flavor that tastes better than any of the ingredients.” Oh, Joe was a poet, he was a poet of alcohol and like many another person these days, he often said, “My father was a lawyer, and in the old days I would have probably ended up a lawyer, too, and I never would have known what I was missing.”
Joe was right. And he was a damn good bartender, and he didn’t wish he were anything else, and so he was happy.
One night, however, a new man came in, a man with a doughnut delivery truck and a doughnut brand name on his uniform. Joe noticed him because silence clung to the man like a smell–wherever he walked, people sensed it, and though they scarcely looked at him, they lowered their voices, or stopped talking at all, and they got reflective and looked at the walls and the mirror behind the bar. The doughnut delivery man sat in a corner and had a watered-down drink that meant he intended to stay a long time and didn’t want his alcohol intake to be so rapid that he was forced to leave early.
Joe noticed things about people, and he noticed that this man kept looking off in the dark corner where the piano stood. It was an old, out-of-tune monstrosity from the old days (for this had been a bar for a long time) and Joe wondered why the man was fascinated by it. True, a lot of Joe’s customers had been interested, but they had always walked over and plunked on the keys, trying to find a melody, failing with the out-of-tune keys, and finally giving up. This man, however, seemed almost afraid of the piano, and didn’t go near it.
At closing time, the man was still there, and then, on a whim, instead of making the man leave, Joe turned off the piped-in music and turned off most of the lights, and then went over and lifted the lid and exposed the grey keys.
The doughnut delivery man came over to the piano. Chris, his nametag said. He sat and touched a single key. The sound was not pretty. But the man touched all the keys one by one, and then touched them in different orders, and all the time Joe watched, wondering why the man was so intense about it.
“Chris,” Joe said.
Chris looked up at him.
“Do you know any songs?”
Chris’s face went funny.
“I mean, some of those old-time songs, not those fancy ass-twitchers on the radio, but songs. ‘In a Little Spanish Town.’ My mother sang that one to me.” And Joe began to sing, “In a little Spanish town, ’twas on a night like this. Stars were peek-a-booing down, ’twas on a night like this.”
Chris began to play as Joe’s weak and toneless baritone went on with the song. But it wasn’t an accompaniment, not anything Joe could call an accompaniment. It was instead an opponent to his melody, an enemy to it, and the sounds coming out of the piano were strange and unharmonious and by God beautiful. Joe stopped singing and listened. For two hours he listened, and when it was over he soberly poured the man a drink, and poured one for himself, and clinked glasses with Chris the doughnut delivery man who could take that rotten old piano and make the damn thing sing.
Three nights later Chris came back, looking harried and afraid. But this time Joe knew what would happen (had to happen) and instead of waiting until closing time, Joe turned off the piped-in music ten minutes early. Chris looked up at him pleadingly. Joe misunderstood–he went over and lifted the lid to the keyboard and smiled. Chris walked stiffly, perhaps reluctantly, to the stool and sat.
“Hey, Joe,” one of the last five customers shouted, “closing early?”
Joe didn’t answer. Just watched as Chris began to play. No preliminaries this time; no scales and wanderings over the keys. Just power, and the piano was played as pianos aren’t meant to be played; the bad notes, the out-of-tune notes were fit into the music so that they sounded right, and Chris’s fingers, ignoring the strictures of the twelve-tone scale, played, it seemed to Joe, in the cracks.
None of the customers left until Chris finished an hour and a half later. They all shared that final drink, and went home shaken by the experience.
The next night Chris came again, and the next, and the next. Whatever private battle had kept him away for the first few days after his first night of playing, he had apparently won it or lost it. None of Joe’s business. What Joe cared about was the fact that when Chris played the piano, it did things to him that music had never done, and he wanted it.
The customers apparently wanted it, too. Near closing time people began showing up, apparently just to hear Chris play. Joe began starting the piano music earlier and earlier, and he had to discontinue the free drinks after the playing because there were so many people it would have put him out of business.
It went on for two long, strange months. The delivery van pulled up outside, and people stood aside for Chris to enter. No one said anything to him; no one said anything at all, but everyone waited until he began to play the piano. He drank nothing at all. Just played. And between songs the hundreds of people in Joe’s Bar and Grill ate and drank.
But the merriment was gone. The laughter and the chatter and the camaraderie were missing, and after a while Joe grew tired of the music and wanted to have his bar back the way it was. He toyed with the idea of getting rid of the piano, but the customers would have been angry at him. He thought of asking Chris not to come anymore, but he could not bring himself to speak to the strange silent man.
And so finally he did what he knew he should have done in the first place. He called the Watchers.
They came in the middle of a performance, a blind Watcher with a dog on a leash, and a Watcher with no ears who walked unsteadily, holding to things for balance. They came in the middle of a song, and did not wait for it to end. They walked to the piano and closed the lid gently, and Chris withdrew his fingers and looked at the closed lid.
“Oh, Christian,” said the man with the seeing-eye dog.
“I’m sorry,” Christian answered. “I tried not to.”
“Oh, Christian, how can I bear doing to you what must be done?”
“Do it,” Christian said.
And so the man with no ears took a laser knife from his coat pocket and cut off Christian’s fingers and thumbs, right where they rooted into his hands. The laser cauterized and sterilized the wound even as it cut, but still some blood spattered on Christian’s uniform. And, his hands now meaningless palms and useless knuckles, Christian stood and walked out of Joe’s Bar and Grill. The people made way for him again, and they listened intently as the blind Watcher said, “That was a man who broke the law and was forbidden to be a Maker. He broke the law a second time, and the law insists that he be stopped from breaking down the system that makes all of you so happy.”
The people understood. It grieved them, it made them uncomfortable for a few hours, but once they had returned to their exactly-right homes and got back to their exactly-right jobs, the sheer contentment of their lives overwhelmed their momentary sorrow for Chris. After all, Chris had broken the law. And it was the law that kept them all safe and happy.
Even Joe. Even Joe soon forgot Chris and his music. He knew he had done the right thing. He couldn’t figure out, though, why a man like Chris would have broken the law in the first place, or what law he would have broken. There wasn’t a law in the world that wasn’t designed to make people happy–and there wasn’t a law Joe could think of that he was even mildly interested in breaking.
Yet. Once Joe went to the piano and lifted the lid and played every key on the piano. And when he had done that he put his head down on the piano and cried, because he knew that when Chris lost that piano, lost even his fingers so he could never play again–it was like Joe losing his bar. And if Joe ever lost his bar, his life wouldn’t be worth living.
As for Chris, someone else began coming to the bar driving the same doughnut delivery van, and no one ever knew Chris again in that part of the world.
THIRD MOVEMENT
“Oh what a beautiful mornin’!” sang the road crew man who had seen Oklahoma! four times in his home town.
“Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham!” sang the road crew man who had learned to sing when his family got together with guitars.
“Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom!” sang the road crew man who believed.
But the road crew man without hands, who held the signs telling the traffic to Stop or go Slow, listened but never sang.
“Whyn’t you never sing?” asked the road crew man who liked Rodgers and Hammerstein; asked all of them, at one time or another.
And the man they called Sugar just shrugged. “Don’t feel like singin’,” he’d say, when he said anything at all.
“Why they call him Sugar?” a new guy once asked. “He don’t look sweet to me.”
And the man who believed said, “His initials are C H. Like the sugar. C&H, you know.” And the new guy laughed. A stupid joke, but the kind of gag that makes life easier on the road-building crew.
Not that life was that hard. For these men, too, had been tested, and they were in the job that made them happiest. They took pride in the pain of sunburn and pulled muscles, and the road growing long and thin behind them was the most beautiful thing in the world. And so they sang all day at their work, knowing that they could not possibly be happier than they were this day.
Except Sugar.
Then Guillermo came. A short Mexican who spoke with an accent, Guillermo told everyone who asked, “I may come from Sonora, but my heart belongs in Milano!” And when anyone asked why (and often when no one asked anything) he’d explain. “I’m an Italian tenor in a Mexican body,” and he proved it by singing every note that Puccini and Verdi ever wrote. “Caruso was nothing,” Guillermo boasted. “Listen to this!”
Guillermo had records, and sang along with them, and at work on the road crew he’d join in with any man’s song and harmonize with it, or sing an obbligato high above the melody, a soaring tenor that took the roof off his head and filled the clouds. “I can sing,” Guillermo would say, and soon the other road crew men answered. “Damn right, Guillermo! Sing it again!”
But one night Guillermo was honest, and told the truth. “Ah, my friends, I’m no singer.”
“What do you mean? Of course you are!” came the unanimous answer.
“Nonsense!” Guillermo cried, his voice theatrical. “If I am this great singer, why do you never see me going off to record songs? Hey? This is a great singer? Nonsense! Great singers they raise to be great singers. I’m just a man who loves to sing, but has no talent! I’m a man who loves to work on the road crew with men like you, and sing his guts out, but in the opera I could never be! Never!”
He did not say it sadly. He said it fervently, confidently. “Here is where I belong! I can sing to you who like to hear me sing! I can harmonize with you when I feel a harmony in my heart. But don’t be thinking that Guillermo is a great singer, because he’s not!”
It was an evening of honesty, and every man there explained why it was he was happy on the road crew, and didn’t wish to be anywhere else. Everyone, that is, except Sugar.
“Come on, Sugar. Aren’t you happy here?”
Sugar smiled. “I’m happy. I like it here. This is good work for me. And I love to hear you sing.”
“Then why don’t you sing with us?”
Sugar shook his head. “I’m not a singer.”
But Guillermo looked at him knowingly. “Not a singer, ha! Not a singer. A man without hands who refuses to sing is not a man who is not a singer. Hey?”
“What the hell does that mean?” asked the man who sang folksongs.
“It means that this man you call Sugar, he’s a fraud. Not a singer! Look at his hands. All his fingers gone! Who is it who cuts off men’s fingers?”
The road crew didn’t try to guess. There were many ways a man could lose fingers, and none of them were anyone’s business.
“He loses his fingers because he breaks the law and the Watchers cut them off! That’s how a man loses fingers. What was he doing with his fingers that the Watchers wanted him to stop? He was breaking the law, wasn’t he?”
“Stop,” Sugar said.
“If you want,” Guillermo said, but for once the others would not respect Sugar’s privacy.
“Tell us,” they said.
Sugar left the room.
“Tell us,” and Guillermo told them. That Sugar must have been a Maker who broke the law and was forbidden to make music anymore. The very thought that a Maker was working on the road crew with them–even a lawbreaker–filled the men with awe. Makers were rare, and they were the most esteemed of men and women.
“But why his fingers?”
“Because,” Guillermo said, “he must have tried to make music again afterward. And when you break the law a second time, the power to break it a third time is taken away from you.” Guillermo spoke seriously, and so to the road crew men Sugar’s story sounded as majestic and terrible as an opera. They crowded into Sugar’s room, and found the man staring at the wall.
“Sugar, is it true?” asked the man who loved Rodgers and Hammerstein.
“Were you a Maker?” asked the man who believed.
“Yes,” Sugar said.
“But Sugar,” the man who believed said, “God can’t mean for a man to stop making music, even if he broke the law.”
Sugar smiled. “No one asked God.”
“Sugar,” Guillermo finally said, “There are nine of us on the crew, nine of us, and we’re miles from any human beings. You know us, Sugar. We swear on our mother’s graves, every one of us, that we’ll never tell a soul. Why should we? You’re one of us. But sing, dammit man, sing!”
“I can’t,” Sugar said. “You don’t understand.”
“It isn’t what God intended,” said the man who believed. “We’re all doing what we love best, and here you are, loving music and not able to sing a note. Sing for us! Sing with us! And only you and us and God will know!”
They all promised. They all pleaded.
And the next day as the man who loved Rodgers and Hammerstein sang “Love, Look Away,” Sugar began to hum. As the man who believed sang “God of Our Fathers” Sugar sang softly along. And as the man who loved folksongs sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Sugar joined in with a strange, piping voice and all the men laughed and cheered and welcomed Sugar’s voice to the songs.
Inevitably Sugar began inventing. First harmonies, of course, strange harmonies that made Guillermo frown and then, after a while, grin as he joined in, sensing as best he could what Sugar was doing to the music.
And after harmonies, Sugar began singing his own melodies, with his own words. He made them repetitive, the word simple and the melodies simpler still. And yet he shaped them into odd shapes, and built them into songs that had never been heard of before, that sounded wrong and yet were absolutely right. It was not long before the man who loved Rodgers and Hammerstein and the man who sang folksongs and the man who believed were learning Sugar’s songs and singing them joyously or mournfully or angrily or gaily as they worked along the road.
Even Guillermo learned the songs, and his strong tenor was changed by them until his voice, which had, after all, been ordinary, became something unusual and fine. Guillermo finally said to Sugar one day, “Hey, Sugar, your music is all wrong, man. But I like the way it feels in my nose! Hey, you know? I like the way it feels in my mouth!”
Some of the songs were hymns: “Keep me hungry, Lord,” Sugar sang, and the road crew sang it too.
Some of the songs were love songs: “Put your hands in someone else’s pockets,” Sugar sang angrily; “I hear your voice in the morning,” Sugar sang tenderly; “Is it summer yet?” Sugar sang sadly; and the road crew sang it, too.
Over the months the road crew changed, one man leaving on Wednesday and a new man taking his place on Thursday, as different skills were needed in different places. Sugar was silent when each newcomer came, until the man had given his word and the secret was sure to be kept.
What finally destroyed Sugar was the fact that his songs were so unforgettable. The men who left would sing the songs with their new crews, and those crews would learn them, and teach them to others. Crewmen taught the songs in bars and on the road; people learned them quickly, and loved them; and one day a blind Watcher heard the songs and knew, instantly, who had first sung them. They were Christian Haroldsen’s music, because in those melodies, simple as they were, the wind of the north woods still whistled and the fall of leaves still hung oppressively over every note and–and the Watcher sighed. He took a specialized tool from his file of tools and boarded an airplane and flew to the city closest to where a certain road crew worked. And the blind Watcher took a company car with a company driver up the road and at the end of it, where the road was just beginning to pierce a strip of wilderness, the blind Watcher got out of the car and heard singing. Heard a piping voice singing a song that made even an eyeless man weep.
“Christian,” the Watcher said, and the song stopped.
“You,” said Christian.
“Christian, even after you lost your fingers?”
The other men didn’t understand–all the other men, that is, except Guillermo.
“Watcher,” said Guillermo. “Watcher, he done no harm.”
The Watcher smiled wryly. “No one said he did. But he broke the law. You, Guillermo, how would you like to work as a servant in a rich man’s house? How would you like to be a bank teller?”
“Don’t take me from the road crew, man,” Guillermo said.
“It’s the law that finds where people will be happy. But Christian Haroldsen broke the law. And he’s gone around ever since making people hear music they were never meant to hear.”
Guillermo knew he had lost the battle before it began, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Don’t hurt him, man. I was meant to hear his music. Swear to God, it’s made me happier.”
The Watcher shook his head sadly. “Be honest, Guillermo. You’re an honest man. His music’s made you miserable, hasn’t it? You’ve got everything you could want in life, and yet his music makes you sad. All the time, sad.”
Guillermo tried to argue, but he was honest, and he looked into his own heart, and he knew that the music was full of grief. Even the happy songs mourned for something; even the angry songs wept; even the love songs seemed to say that everything dies and contentment is the most fleeting thing. Guillermo looked in his own heart and all Sugar’s music stared back up at him and Guillermo wept.
“Just don’t hurt him, please,” Guillermo murmured as he cried.
“I won’t,” the blind Watcher said. Then he walked to Christian, who stood passively waiting, and he held the special tool up to Christian’s throat. Christian gasped.
“No,” Christian said, but the word only formed with his lips and tongue. No sound came out. Just a hiss of air. “No.”
The road crew watched silently as the Watcher led Christian away. They did not sing for days. But then Guillermo forgot his grief one day and sang an aria from La Bohème, and the songs went on from there. Now and then they sang one of Sugar’s songs, because the songs could not be forgotten.
In the city, the blind Watcher furnished Christian with a pad of paper and a pen. Christian immediately gripped the pencil in the crease of his palm and wrote: “What do I do now?”
The driver read the note aloud, and the blind Watcher laughed. “Have we got a job for you! Oh, Christian, have we got a job for you!” The dog barked loudly, to hear his master laugh.
APPLAUSE
In all the world there were only two dozen Watchers. They were secretive men, who supervised a system that needed little supervision because it actually made nearly everybody happy. It was a good system, but like even the most perfect of machines, here and there it broke down. Here and there someone acted madly, and damaged himself, and to protect everyone and the person himself, a Watcher had to notice the madness and go to fix it.
For many years the best of the Watchers was a man with no fingers, a man with no voice. He would come silently, wearing the uniform that named him with the only name he needed–Authority. And he would find the kindest, easiest, yet most thorough way of solving the problem and curing the madness and preserving the system that made the world, for the first time in history, a very good place to live. For practically everyone.
For there were still a few people–one or two each year–who were caught in a circle of their own devising, who could neither adjust to the system nor bear to harm it, people who kept breaking the law despite their knowledge that it would destroy them.
Eventually, when the gentle maimings and deprivations did not cure their madness and set them back into the system, they were given uniforms and they, too, went out. Watching.
The keys of power were placed in the hands of those who had most cause to hate the system they had to preserve. Were they sorrowful?
“I am,” Christian answered in the moments when he dared to ask himself that question.
In sorrow he did his duty. In sorrow he grew old. And finally the other Watchers, who reverenced the silent man (for they knew he had once sung magnificent songs), told him he was free. “You’ve served your time,” said the Watcher with no legs, and he smiled.
Christian raised an eyebrow, as if to say, “And?”
“So wander.”
Christian wandered. He took off his uniform, but lacking neither money nor time he found few doors closed to him. He wandered where in his former lives he had once lived. A road in the mountains. A city where he had once known the loading entrance of every restaurant and coffee shop and grocery store. And at last to a place in the woods where a house was falling apart in the weather because it had not been used in forty years.
Christian was old. The thunder roared and it only made him realize that it was about to rain. All the old songs. All the old songs, he mourned inside himself, more because he couldn’t remember them than because he thought his life had been particularly sad.
As he sat in a coffee shop in a nearby town to stay out of the rain, he heard four teenagers who played the guitar very badly singing a song that he knew. It was a song he had invented while the asphalt poured on a hot summer day. The teenagers were not musicians and certainly were not Makers. But they sang the song from their hearts, and even though the words were happy, the song made everyone who heard it cry.
Christian wrote on the pad he always carried, and showed his question to the boys. “Where did that song come from?”
“It’s a Sugar song,” the leader of the group answered. “It’s a song by Sugar.”
Christian raised an eyebrow, making a shrugging motion.
“Sugar was a guy who worked on a road crew and made up songs. He’s dead now, though,” the boy answered.
“Best damn songs in the world,” another boy said, and they all nodded.
Christian smiled. Then he wrote (and the boys waited impatiently for this speechless old man to go away): “Aren’t you happy? Why sing sad songs?”
The boys were at a loss for an answer. The leader spoke up, though, and said, “Sure I’m happy. I’ve got a good job, a girl I like, and man, I couldn’t ask for more. I got my guitar. I got my songs. And my friends.”
And another boy said, “These songs aren’t sad, Mister. Sure, they make people cry, but they aren’t sad.”
“Yeah,” said another. “It’s just that they were written by a man who knows.”
Christian scribbled on his paper. “Knows what?”
“He just knows. Just knows, that’s all. Knows it all.”
And then the teenagers turned back to their clumsy guitars and their young, untrained voices, and Christian walked to the door to leave because the rain had stopped and because he knew when to leave the stage. He turned and bowed just a little toward the singers. They didn’t notice him, but their voices were all the applause he needed. He left the ovation and went outside where the leaves were just turning color and would soon, with a slight inaudible sound, break free and fall to the earth.
For a moment he thought he heard himself singing. But it was just the last of the wind, coasting madly through the wires over the street. It was a frenzied song, and Christian thought he recognized his voice.
MONKEY SONATAS. Copyright 1992 by Orson Scott Card
Because my mother and my wife saved most of everything I’ve written (and my sister saved some of the writing I thought I had thrown away during a mentally difficult time in my life), I have a good record of my written thoughts.
Not a perfect record.
I did not make paper copies of letters I’ve sent or notes I wrote in class.
I don’t have electronic copies of office memoranda, reports or emails.
Therefore, the record is limited.
But it suffices.
The record served sufficiently enough to form nine published collections of my writing.
My published works do not suffice.
Thus I blog.
In blogging, I see the future, live in the present and write about the past.
Am I attempting anything new? [Answer: no, because there is ‘nothing new under the sun’]
No matter.
I write, regardless of how I feel or where I sit.
I write, unaware of who may read this, excluding myself.
I write because it’s what I do, who I am.
Bog, Swamp, River and Garden 