Between The Notes

Music is patterned sound. Though it may not always seem that way, especially when I see Mick Jagger strutting and thrusting on a stage in a gigantic stadium, the recognizable sounds of their better-known songs diluted by terrible acoustics, vitiated by the inherent vulgarity in a structure built for sports, the collisions of men, the mock battles of competitive sports. But it’s there. The lifeblood of music is there. Rhythm, metallic whine of guitars, Jagger’s sparkly shirts and uncanny athleticism, reinforce the sense of music as a transcendent force, a dynamic of perverse power, rendered in the swagger of aging men. Keith Richards bald. A wrinkly but thin and supple Jagger dancing in front of a beautiful young woman. Sound is a negotiable medium. You do this, I do that, you say this, I say that, until things get so weird a membrane snaps and we find ourselves in chaos once again, throwing balls of light at one another.

“Like bodies, language produces and reproduces itself; in each syllable lies a seed (Bīja) that, on being actualized in sound, is a vibration emitting a form and a meaning.” Octavio Paz, Blank Thought.

I mean, who wants to read Faulknerian sentences on Kindle?

Postcard of Keats sitting in a chair Hampstead Heath, retained, for 50 years, under the cover of a book: English Romantic Writers. And written on the back: “In this room two chairs are kept in the same position as in the picture [painting by Joseph Severn, 1821], but fussy tourists keep tidying up the room and put them next to the wall, which amuses and distresses the curator who lives in ‘Keats’ House.’ The picture pf Shakespeare is still on the wall. Preserved is a notebook Keats took notes in when taking a medical course. He drew pretty pictures of flowers in the left-hand margin. The bookcases are gone, but many of the books are still here where he lived.”

Keats rests on hand on his head, the other on an open book positioned on his lap, his elbow resting on the back of another chair, turned toward a large window, a plush red curtain drawn back revealing a tree and lush shrubbery. He looks pensive, resigned, and sad. The painting was done the day Keats wrote “Ode To A Nightingale,” at Wentworth Place in Hampstead.

And here at home, 21^st century, top of my desk: a lamp with a white shade, clock, pheasant feather quill I bought at a Renaissance Pleasure Faire 49 years ago, and a paperweight, a glass sphere with a big yellow flower inside, a gift from a friend who I last saw driving a Metro bus across University Bridge when I was out running.

Interiors are funny. This is because consciousness is by essence unstable. Anything that exists between a retina and a source of light can expand or increase abnormally from simple perception to reverie. One sensation can serve as the correspondent grammar of another sensation. The world speaks to us in the syntax of coincidence, the fluidity of concurrence. As soon as I get my pants on, I feel the dribble of cold metal down my legs: coins drop through a hole in my pocket. Another time, the smell of freshly cut grass, roasted chicken and cocoa beans in Honduras. And sometimes, as the moments pass, an inseam can seem seamless, or apparent as a reassurance.