Skip to main content

Can reality be transcribed? An attempt to put things into words in florid sentences:


After attempting to find an outfit at the Red Cross charity shop for tonight’s bop, I made my way back to college by way of the walled winding Queen’s Lane. The sun was starting to sink and as the sky was a fading blue and the evening birds sang there was something almost like June in the air. As I passed the walls of Queen’s College, the voice of a heroic tenor erupted from one of the windows. A pause. A few steps later, the voice sang a short run, abruptly descending into a tired sigh. After passing the mysterious place where I think the journal Areté might be (where the letters of Milan Kundera are surely addressed) the unmistakable – though surprising - sound of a chord from a full orchestra.

The suddenness of this chord impressed upon me at once the sense of grasping the depth of something which, almost as soon as it was grasped, was gone. This can only be the case of something which happens suddenly. A chord from an orchestra you expect to hear can hardly unveil the same sense of fleeting possession.

(The orchestra was one with both the stability of the double bass and the serenity of the winds, and the chord it played was a tonic chord in the first inversion. In the event that you are the type of person to run to a piano to try it out, I can imagine that the sound my ears received can be transmitted by means of the internet to anyone with an instrument and the ability to play a tonic chord in its first inversion, with its third so sweetly prominent.)

Another chord succeeded it. Just two perfect chords, which lingered in the lane with the sound of graspable possibility.

---

HA! How pretentious this all sounds. I promise: this year's New Year's resolution is to write in short sentences. Like Hemingway.

Comments

Ann said…
Not pretentious at all. One of the things I love most about wandering around the University is that you never know what glorious sounds you're going to encounter when you pass the open windows of the music department.
January 21, 2011 at 9:55 AM
Erin said…
Officially caught up on the blog, and I promise to remain so. I reiterate...more photos please. Preferably, photos of you!
February 9, 2011 at 10:20 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The School of Hard Knocks

It is my current hope to go to graduate school for English literature next year: a certain school in a certain place, both a goal and an insurmountable challenge. Having been out of college for a year already, and having graduated as a music major, I am rusty. Trying to compensate, I googled “books every english major has read” but have had a difficult time finding a list that suggests what every (generalized) English major should have read by the time of (undergraduate) graduation. As a person who attended a high school whose meager syllabus prescribed the study of one novel, one play and four poems a year, and who could only scrape enough college literature credits for a minor, I feel woefully behind. Most American kids got a head start in AP English (seriously – who are those freaks who read Ulysses in high school?). American high schools may have their weaknesses, but a strong and ambitious push to read literature consistently is not one of them. There are gaps, and I fear that wh...
8 comments
Read more

Natural Love

We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .
6 comments
Read more

Once on this island

Island literature is so wonderfully stagey. Like the murder in the English village, the island is a self-contained playground for certain fantasies to run wild, and for certain conceits to be explored. I wonder who first discovered the island as the fertile ground to explore themes of civilization and degeneration? For characters to perform as a microcosm (a word I learned when reading Lord of the Flies ) for society. I traced my way to The Island of Dr. Moreau backwards: from LOST , to Bioy Casares’ Invention of Morel , to a lecture on mad doctors and vivisection (from which I learned the term apophane , or, cutting the vocal chords of an animal so that the vivisector will not be bothered by the sounds of pain by the subject under the knife), to a Penguin Classic picked up in George’s best used bookstore. It was an unnerving and unsafe read: chanting beast-people and scientists with questionable ethics are the only companions this narrator can expect to have on a mysterious island af...
6 comments
Read more