When he opened his eyes, a squat man with a beard & pale green eyes was standing in front of him. The people passing can't hear you, he said. All the cars. The horns. The trains coming in & out. If they could hear you, I'm sure they would listen. Maybe give you a little more money. You were playing the blues, weren't you? The world is too loud for the blues. The passion's lost in the noise. I don't care if they can hear me, he said, as long as I have enough to buy a few beers after I'm done. Maybe they will hear the words later when they step into a quieter place. He set the guitar in its case & snapped it shut. Please save your money, the man said. Let me buy you a beer. They drank at a table outside a bar. The man pointed to the park across the street. On those trees, he said, you can see fingernails etched in the wood. Communists. Jews. Russians. Germans. Anarchists. Each has left the same grip of death. It seems each corner of this city is haunted by murderers & the murdered. How can you have music on the same corner where a boy had his throat slit, where an old lady was raped with a Kalashnikov? You know you're the first musician I've seen playing on these streets since the last time I was here. The people here are too weary to let their daily rituals get shaken up. They only hear their own second-guessing. He told him that he disagrees. Death lures musicians from their hovels. The soul of Orpheus' lyre. Requiems. The cloaked violinist one step behind the pallbearers trudging up to the pit. He asked him if he was a musician & the man told him that he's a traveling church organist. I started playing all over Russia & Eastern Europe, he said, once the Soviets let me leave Estonia. I haven't gone back too much since my son died & my wife stopped speaking & got put in the asylum. She knew he was going to die & she was always the consoling one. But when he died, she said that her love died too & wouldn't speak to anyone. I saw her last winter. She was watching game shows in her robe & her toenails hadn't been cut in years.
3/17/08
Far Cry & Fugue
When he opened his eyes, a squat man with a beard & pale green eyes was standing in front of him. The people passing can't hear you, he said. All the cars. The horns. The trains coming in & out. If they could hear you, I'm sure they would listen. Maybe give you a little more money. You were playing the blues, weren't you? The world is too loud for the blues. The passion's lost in the noise. I don't care if they can hear me, he said, as long as I have enough to buy a few beers after I'm done. Maybe they will hear the words later when they step into a quieter place. He set the guitar in its case & snapped it shut. Please save your money, the man said. Let me buy you a beer. They drank at a table outside a bar. The man pointed to the park across the street. On those trees, he said, you can see fingernails etched in the wood. Communists. Jews. Russians. Germans. Anarchists. Each has left the same grip of death. It seems each corner of this city is haunted by murderers & the murdered. How can you have music on the same corner where a boy had his throat slit, where an old lady was raped with a Kalashnikov? You know you're the first musician I've seen playing on these streets since the last time I was here. The people here are too weary to let their daily rituals get shaken up. They only hear their own second-guessing. He told him that he disagrees. Death lures musicians from their hovels. The soul of Orpheus' lyre. Requiems. The cloaked violinist one step behind the pallbearers trudging up to the pit. He asked him if he was a musician & the man told him that he's a traveling church organist. I started playing all over Russia & Eastern Europe, he said, once the Soviets let me leave Estonia. I haven't gone back too much since my son died & my wife stopped speaking & got put in the asylum. She knew he was going to die & she was always the consoling one. But when he died, she said that her love died too & wouldn't speak to anyone. I saw her last winter. She was watching game shows in her robe & her toenails hadn't been cut in years.
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2 comments:
Whoa we're literally on the same page. I was just looking at this photograph in Barthes' "Camera Lucida" pg 48:
"I recognize, with my whole body,
the straggling villages I passed through
on my long-ago travels
in Hungary and Rumania..."
Doesn't the man look blind: or at least he's not relying on vision? But it's a photograph so vision is primary to its essence.
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