Endless Joke

Both of us, he said, play before an oblivious audience. Yours are too consumed with their next station, in Eile, rushing onward to where their pleasure & pain await them. Mine are the near-dead, papyrus-skinned, deaf, compulsively wetting the roofs of their mouths, waiting for the Word, embittered over the failed promises of their pension plans. We play for ourselves. With ourselves. But if an audience is oblivious, truly oblivious, he replied, then they're not an audience. Just people happening by & no one can expect any more or less from them. Are you only playing for yourself? In a church, aren't you playing for someone else? Someone who you know is listening? Mortals may be oblivious, but you've captivated the infinite. I don't play for anyone but myself, the organist said, if I did, then the music would have no direction. No force. Plagued by distractions. Certainly not for God. If I wanted to play for an idol, I would do it for one worth believing in: money, sex, posterity. The moment you humbly present something beautiful, something you've pieced together out of pure humiliation before the infinite, it dismantles it with unworldly tact, then spits it back in your face. Maybe then you should present it with pride. The organist told him he had nothing to be proud of & that he wanted to keep it that way. He lives out of a suitcase. Has a wife that posts pictures of their dead son on the walls of her room, pointing to them, laughing silently to herself. Once she wrote with lipstick when will the joke be up? on her bathroom mirror. When the asylum worker tried to wipe if off, she bit him in the arm. He told him he played at a Russian Orthodox church in the West that reeked of death. They lit hundreds of candles to hide the stench. Incense & petal water. Nothing. Only when the doors finally close after the last congregant, will the church smell once again of an empty tomb.