The Moonlight Sonata: Exquisite Language

I feel the heat reaching for the pale raspberries, offering color to what was merely the reflection of nature's desire, turning it into something gorgeous and ripe with flavor in jewel tone swathes that make summer feel deep and full.  I hear everything: bees midflight, Hidig's strange loneliness through the fence posts, the endless shifting, burrowing, and turning of the insects beneath the apron of grasses at my feet.  All the world is here.  All the world recorded on paper in a collection of symbols that have become visceral memory.

Everything is still; beating so slowly that pain stops.  All the pain stops.  I touch the keys which cool down my feverish fingers.  There is an approach, a greeting, a silent salute between myself and the instrument.  What it has to share, to teach, to release is something I have never been capable of articulating and never tired of attempting.  It needs words.  I need the words but they only exist as notes. 

Once I have adjusted the stool to the right height and sat in a prayerful posture of love, I put my fingers in place.  It's electric- this exchange between the ivory and my fingerprints.  I feel, at nine years of age, that I am a thousand years old and so full of need.  So deeply broken already and this sheet of music offers me flight.  Here is the mirror of all the shadows on earth.  Incredible that a piece of music can hold everything I feel in it, in this one place, on this page.  It's like trying to hold all of my blood in one coffee mug: this is all of me.  Right here.  Spilling over the edges; there is too much, so much, and no body to hold it in that is large enough-shiny enough- or deep enough.

I take a deep breath and anticipate the notes that will measure my bones, my heart, and my temper.  I begin to play and feel the power of the instrument being held in check by notes hit precisely and rhythm maintained.  It is the only time I ever feel myself to have any control in my life.  The minute I begin to play I am lost to the rest of the world and you may as well not exist for all the fuck I care.  I would practice for hours.  My family would hear, and they enjoyed my playing.  They didn't know I did it to survive.  That it fed a starving spirit.  That it healed deep gouges in my body's memory.  That it served as my funereal shroud.

When I die, and you wonder who I really was, if you wonder anything at all, listen to the Moonlight Sonata.  It will tell you everything you need to know about who I really was.  It will say everything I could never say.  It will show you what the true color of my spirit was.  This genius of notes will stand in the place where I stood and you will know me.  You will know everything that I painstakingly hid from everyone in life.

So if you want to strip me down to essentials, if you want to tear down all my protection, if you want to get at the person behind the skin, if you want to taste what I taste- it was written long before I was born by a madman and you can listen for yourself.  Maybe you'll find yourself in it too. 

Sometimes when I hear it I want to die because it is the period.  It is the very pure version of everything I could ever try to say and yet it has already been said perfectly.  I want to die because it is so beautifully mesmerizing.  It is perfect.  They say perfection doesn't exist, but it does.  It does in this one small piece of a much larger work of music.  One small portion of absolutely exquisite language.

I was never a brilliant musician.  I will never play any instrument truly well.  It isn't important to me that I become a master at playing.  Playing has only ever been a means to getting inside the music as much as humanly possible.  I played the piano so that I could feel the notes vibrate through my skin into my blood.  I played the accordion so I could feel the notes filter through my lungs.  To touch music is the only reason I have ever played music.  to get inside it, to get closer to the sound, to have it become me.  To become it.

I hunger for this song again.  Need it.  Desire it to become my face.  My skin.  I want to get inside it.  I want to wrap myself around it.  I want to be alone with it in the deepest woods where no one can find me and I can listen to it in a cathedral of trees.