i.
It always waits until after you’re asleep.
(You think: Who are you?)
(And then you remember.)
Memories. Not the unyielding, excruciating moments near or at the end, but the better times. Or even worse, the arbitrary moments in life that dug in deep, long before the mind has discarded them.
In the dark, afraid to close my eyes now, afraid of the not-quite-nothingness that awaits me there. Like a boy, again. Afraid of the dark; afraid to close my eyes.
Too much like death?
No. It was too much like life.
Sleep and death both prolonged peacefulness. The quiet, uncomplicated ability to forget suffering and self. Awake (I think, therefore I am, I think).
What are you doing?
I can’t find an explanation for how I came to be here, but there has to be a story. There’s always a story.
(There’s a dark space between what we can tell others and what we’ll only tell ourselves, and that is Truth. And there’s a darker space that contains the things we can’t even tell ourselves; those things speak their own language—in dreams, memories, and mistakes—so we try to make sense of it any way we can, and that is Art.)
Here’s the story: Everything had played out pretty much according to everyone’s expectations. It all more or less happened the way I’d envisioned it would. And I’d had plenty of time (all that anxious time, all those empty hours) to imagine how it would unwind, which was not necessarily the way I might have foreseen it, beforehand. Before it all began.
After the long wait and eventual end of it, there was the afterward, that first day of the rest of our lives.
We did it, I thought. We made it.
At least, I thought, the hard part is over.
No. I knew, even then, that this wasn’t true. It was too soon to say that.
Okay. At least the worst part was behind us. It had taken five years: from first surgery until the day after, almost exactly five years. It had taken more than any of us could give. It had taken more than any of us could bear to give up. Now (I hoped), all we had to do was somehow go about the business of living. Just live our lives, I thought.
The worst (I knew), was over.
No, that’s not the truth.
The worst was only beginning?
No, not that either.
Only this: We had the rest of our lives to live.
ii.
Awake, alive. Alone.
Never forget this feeling.
That evening, halfway through high school, watching the snow fall outside your window. Lights out and that music playing: Beethoven. The sonatas, with titles that seemed mysterious and exhilarating: Pathétique, Appassionata, Mondschein.
The music, it seemed, was always there for these significant moments: remembering those times, always accompanied by music that was solemn yet ecstatic. Later on, being ushered into the other worlds of sexual activity, or studying for fast-forgotten exams, or those solitary seconds that sometimes turned into hours, the time alone, in the darkness, before sleep overtook awareness and you still knew who you were—tracing it all back to that first evening, staring at the snow: the sound of the piano, feeling connected to lives apart from your own, able to imagine what the world was like, then, feeling deeply aware of your own life, wholly there, utterly cognizant—which, of course, did not mean you were only aware of yourself; it was exactly the opposite sensation—and not realizing, not needing to know, yet, that this feeling would be increasingly difficult to capture, transitory moments of perception as a tonic for, or distraction from, the muddle of adult life and the urgency and oddness that this new reality entailed. It was not that this music facilitated these feelings, but that it accompanied them. This was what made it central to your world, so inextricable from your soul, from the way you wanted to see yourself.
iii.
Alone, alive. Awake.
You know better than to try to sleep, so it’s just you and the music. Listening once again to the one person who always pulls you through, no matter what. You can listen to the symphonies or the string quartets anytime, but the sonatas—the Pathétique, especially—are appropriate for nights like tonight, nights when no sleep will come. That sublime suffering, the solitude, the sacred requital of this illimitable expression. The music, always the music.
After a while, before you can stop and think about it, you fall asleep.
iv.
Alive, alone. Dreaming.
Beethoven. Not the celebrated facsimile of the consecrated composer (the image that often accompanies this effulgent music) staring down sternly at an adoring audience—the people to whom he had dedicated his great gifts—as the applause he can no longer hear surges through a breathless auditorium, but a frail, confused old man, huddled over a candle, awakened from an uneasy slumber and called into the darkness, again, to wrestle with the terrible, silent voices that fill his head.
What sort of God would suffer a man so great to be stripped of the very faculties that once compelled his creations? That refractory grace: continuing to conceive music, in the mind, yet prevented from hearing the sweet crescendo of the final coda. Agonizing over those last movements in the isolation of a lonely hour, perhaps looking to the sky, beseeching supplication, a respite, a return of the courage that once restored him.
A man whose reputed last words were I shall hear in Heaven. Proof of God’s existence for the faithful; proof of life’s capricious, inscrutable fate, for the faithless.
v.
Dreaming, alone. Alive.
You put the needle in the groove and sound cascades into the room. The music: it has saved you so many times. You stand, spellbound and motionless. Hopefully you can take this with you—this feeling, all these sounds. These things you have loved are lodged, indelibly, in your mind, so if that went with you, so would they. And that was good. And if not? Then you won’t know the difference anyway.
You open the door and seem to float out to the patio, not entirely aware what you are doing. You are burning up. The snow feels like fire, and you can see the music in the silver flames that suddenly glisten all around you. You feel yourself from far away, and an astounding warmth embalms you, holding you in its silent sway.
Then, suddenly, you are no longer hot.
You are aware of the chill air and look down at your naked, shivering body. You can still hear the music, still making sense, speaking to you. You understand, and you are alive.
http://www.punchnels.com/features/pathetique/
