This is a not so but kind of autobiographical story (not really) of a really bad day, I woke up this morning with the last half of it in my head and I just had to finish it so I missed class. I started this when we were covering Job so I ask that it gets read with that in mind.
The Messenger’s Anamnesis It was a goodly kind of day. The afternoon light syphoned into the room where a kneeling figure lifted his violin to his ear. He plucked each string, checking the tuning against years of practice and performance. The sound of the pizzicato was pastel as it absorbed into the beige walls of the room. Rising up slowly, he closed the violin case. Though it had only been in its spot for a moment, as the lid clapped shut, a small cloud of dust rustled off the case into the air.
The room had simple walls decorated with a dispersal of plain pictures, the kind that one bought to put in their bathroom. It was a mass produced space that probably existed on each block in each town from there to the city onto the vague. There was an empty cupboard in the corner and a window with drapes and a bed and a closet and the floor was carpeted. It looked as harmless and innocent as a room for a very boring child except that, on the bed, which was white and plain like everything else in the place, was a dying man.
What songs for these ears? The musician thought. His audience lied with eyes closed. Their skin was yellow and glassy, their blood more wine and whiskey than plasma and protein. Their hands, once strong and calloused, had ridges of a person fifty and a score years on, twenty years past the actual age of the fingers. As his chest fell, a loud moan escaped the dying fellow’s poison filled lungs. This song? for these ears?
The violinist stared at the man and moved his fingers over the ebony board and held the instrument like a guitar. His long fingernails dug into the violin’s neck as they mocked songs in absent rumination. The music man had the standard symptoms of sleepless nights and worry. He was unkempt and showed a sweat stained undershirt. Fast food ketchup stained his jeans, and his fingers were yellow-brown from low burning cigarettes. He had the stench of someone trying to cover up a showerless month with deodorant and chewing gum. Standing over the dying man, he could think of nothing to play- a light piece would be flippant, a heavy one redundant, and a fiddle diddy is for the living, and even then, serves no purpose but to compel a man to dance into hell. What song for these ears?
He thought.
The last sense to die is hearing. Long after the eyes have stopped, the feet stopped, and the breath stopped, the ears still hear. Just as The Word brought us from meaningless darkness and formed us on and out of a globe of sand and grass and water, it is the last thing that we hear as if it were to beckon us home. But a rational mind would say we hear the word last because hearing it is simply the last thing to go, no more no less. A rational mind would also say that the word doesn’t exist. A rational mind has no business in a dying man’s room. Thankfully, the musician was not rational and had the only important business for that room.
Standing outside the big building, he had departed the room leaving his violin there to smoke a cigarette and he fiddled with the unlit stick while he dwelled on his repertoire. The sun warmed the blacktop of the street and as its rays nestled into the concrete, thick lines of heat boiled into the air. The surrounding neighborhood cooked under the same sun, silent except for the rumble of air conditioners and closing garage doors. The violinist looked back at the large building where the dying man waited for his concert. He saw the a couple of children staring at him through the large window that faced the street. Two rooms down, their father had been admitted to the same hospice as the dying man for lung cancer.
Lighting his cigarette, the musician figured it rude to smoke in front of the kids, with their cancer stricken father and all, but he needed to work and in order to work, he needed this. This was just his process. Sitting on the street curb, dirty and confused, he could have been mistaken as a homeless man, alternatively looking at the sky and burying his head into his hands. His mind raced like a horse on fire. The one thing that had sustained him through his despicable exercise was leaving him. His music was leaving him. What to play for a dying man? If this is to be the end of his life, the final recital for ears to be released from their duties, what do they desire to hear? This has always been the musicians job, rationalized the musician, to play for the dying, to grant whatever form of beauty, be it sublime or grandiloquent, to the soul of a dying herd as quickly as possible with the immediacy that only tones can provide. They are all dying, he thought. We all just want some comfort. In hope, in hopes, in the hope that the music maker itself may even forget its own fragility and decrepitness. He wanted this to be easy again.
As he watched his exhalant dissipate into the afternoon air, the musician felt caprice and chorus flee into the inaccessible parts of his mind. If his head had, at one point, played host to the maypole and its dancing muses, then the field had now been burned and the bodies of the muses provided only ash and smoke to block out the sun.
His brain did not so much think, as much as it churned.
As the young man languished under his rock, a man in a navy blue suit approached. He held a briefcase and wore black and white Stetson shoes. Sitting on the curb next to the musician he took out a pipe and lit it with a match. Looking over at his partner in sitting who had taken little notice of his company, he began to speak.
“What are you doing here?” He said. “You seem distressed. This is a good day, you will be paid for this, you will inherit both the appreciation of that man’s family which will manifest itself in monetary payment. What is there to be sad about?”
Hearing this made the violinist want to bash his head against the walk until his brains flowed into the grass.
He replied, “That’s not the point. I don’t want their appreciation, I don’t want to benifit from this, well, not in that way. Your words make me want to kill myself. I am searching for a song that will lead this man back to the word, back to realization.”
“Your desire is your pain. You need to stop considering this moment in this way, there is no mission here, you render your services, you get paid, the audience is irrelevant, regardless of what you perform, they will take what you create, no matter what you create, they will take what they are compelled to take, no more.”
“This man won’t.”
“Oh? Was his life so decrepit that he has lost his way so indomitably?”
“He was no decrepit.”
“Oh? It seems to me that he must be decrepit to have strayed so far.”
“He was a teacher, he enriched the lives of his students. He was a husband, he supported his family and helped his wife when she was stricken with depression. He was a father, I hear his son has grown to be almost as flawed as he, but no matter, he bestowed what love and grace and strength he had. If this is decrepit, than I can only hope to be so similar.”
“If he was so virtuous, why than does he lie dying in that room?”
“He was distracted by drink.”
“He drank himself to death?”
“Yes.
“He drank himself to death and you hope to bring him back to his old self, without the flaw. You hope to cut out that darkness and have him do what?”
“Recognize, perhaps, possibly bring him to his own virtue.”
“Through song?”
“Through song.”
“Do you think this will redeem him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think he deserves this fate? To be stricken with such a compulsion. Was it not his will to pick up wine? What place do you have as a redeemer of men? You seek to control this man’s suffering. Yet, it seems to me that you are trying to also erase his tragedy, the root of his suffering which is also the root of his redemption. This is beyond the scope of your mere fiddle. Play a caprice for him, collect from his family, go home and rejoice in the knowledge that you are not of the same cloth as he.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Fine, then that is your flaw, suffer as you will.”
The violinist lit another cigarette and stared into the neighborhood in front of him. He felt no catharsis, instead, he had an out. There was a point to what the suited man said. He could leave this behind, collect repayment and feel no more. This only made the wall between him and inspiration seem only more ominous.
The man in the suit stood up. With a flash of light he was gone. Replacing him was a corpulent woman garbed in a white dress. She had a prudential face. Just like the suit, she sat down next to the musician, only this time, she sat closer and draped her arm over the young man.
“The man is you, you know.”
“He is not,” replied the young musician.
She chuckled lightly. “Ah, there it is, that resistance, and you wonder why your fingers sit silent.”
Once again the young man imagined his skull cracking over the curb and his blood leaking into the gutter. The woman began again, this time speaking for story.
“I have a tale of a man like you to tell,” she said. “Although, my rendering may be inaccurate, I have told this story too many times for me to tell it the same way again. I suspect the lesson is the same. Would you like to hear it?”
“No.”
“I figured as much. I don’t care, and you will listen. Besides, I know you do want to hear this.” She began her tale.
“There was once a young farmer who was married and had many children. Day and night, he plowed and cared for both his fields. One day, he grew weary of his work and went to a place of recreation as the sun was touching the horizon, when he returned home in a drunken stupor, his wife said, ‘no matter, he will return to the fields when he is rested.’ The next day, as the sun was a few inches from the horizon, he quit again and went to the same place, and upon finding him passed out in the kitchen, the wife once again said, ‘no matter, he will return to the fields when he is rested.’ As the month dragged on, the man began making his trips to the tavern even more regularly and each time, his wife said the same thing. This went on until, broke, fieldless, and without a single head of produce, the man and his family starved to death. That’s the end of this story.”
“That’s a horrible story.”
“I know. It’s symbolic.”
“Am I the farmer?”
“No.”
“So I’m the wife?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks.”
“These things are rarely perfect. I don’t think they’re meant to be. Anyway, do you understand what I’m saying here?”
“That I’m going to starve to death?”
“Pretty much. What could’ve the wife done to have improved this situation?”
“Stopped his drinking?”
“Maybe, or she could have become the farmer.”
“But then wouldn’t she have been consumed by the work? Just like her husband?”
“Possibly, but really the question is whether the farmer drank because of the work or did he drink because he simply wanted to drink? Was it the farm, the responsibility, or was it just in the heart of the man to do so?”
“I don’t know.”
“Exactly, as the cliche goes, you never know until you try. You don’t have to starve.”
“So I should walk away, not play this song. Go do something useful.”
“Maybe, where do you perceive your responsibility to be?”
“In playing.”
“So do it, just don’t burden yourself with the minutiae. The jerk in the suit was right though, it’s not your responsibility to save him. Mainly because you can’t. Just play, maybe a bit for him, maybe a bit for yourself. We can lead a horse to water, but we can’t make it drink. But you can save yourself, or at least seek some help.”
“You’re not very subtle, you know,” said the musician.
“And you’re not very literary,” she replied. “Yet.”
And like the man in the suit before her, she stood up and vanished in a flash of light. Replacing her, this time, was a man garbed in a black shirt and black pants. His face was so common, so boring, that describing it would be to describe the most mundane thing in existence. He looked like a waiter. Standing next to the young man, he stared at him and any warmth left from his encounter with the woman in white was emptied into fear and coldness and dark. This time, the musician started the exchange.
“Who are you?”
“I’m an auditor.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m auditing.”
The man in black stared at the musician for a while and looking down at the cigarette he let out a tsk tsk tsk and then with a puff of smoke, he vanished, leaving the musician alone with the sounds of the air conditioners and the garage doors and somewhere someone had started mowing their lawn.
The light was late in its arc and the musician blinked like someone who had just awoke from a dream. Standing up from his stoop and turning towards the large building, he walked back to the dying man’s room. What to play for ears in need of song? The children in the windows had gone to do something better than stare at strangers.
It was a goodly kind of day. The sun, higher in the sky now, sent rays downward onto the yellow skin of the sick man. An attendant had adjusted the man so that he no longer moaned as he exhaled. Plucking each string, the musician tuned the violin to his liking and readied his bow.
His hands broke into a vibrato and he began playing an old folk tune he had learned when he had first started learning violin. He had learned it before he could write. At the age of five, he had tried to not learn it, but at the insistence of his dad, he learned it anyway. It would be the first thing he would teach to his own students when he took them on. It was a song that required two strings, three fingers, and little dexterity. It was a simple song about stars and how they twinkle and the violinist remembered playing it for his parents and watching them light up and he remembered feeling like the world as a child. He hoped that the dying man would remember too for the violinist only wanted to see that light from his father once again, once and again.
As he rounded the second verse, he felt a hand stop his bow. Looking down, his father was staring at him with half open dead eyes. The dying man whispered a single word.
No.
And then he weakly lifted his hand and dropped it towards the door, a gesture to send someone away. Packing up his instrument, the musician left the room at the behest of the dying man.
Once again standing at the curb, holding his violin in its case, the musician waited for his ride. It arrived and he got inside. His mother offered a tired smile.
“You smell of cigarettes. How was your visit with your Dad? Did you play your violin?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry I missed it, I don’t think he would have appreciated my company there though. Did he like it?”
“He sent me away.”
“Well, he was never one for too much attention. That’s too bad though, he used to love to hear you play.”
They drove away and the rumble of the air conditioners stopped because the day was cooling.
