This is way longer than I intended it to be.
- When I think of a piano or a violin or a cello, three faces come before me.
- His name was ——. He composed for classical piano, and in the two years that I was with him he performed at Carnegie Hall 10 times. There were times when he’d play the piano at his house and I would watch and try to follow along. One time, he came over to my house and my whole face was covered in a rash and he just looked at me and said, “Still beautiful”.
- His name was —. He was beautiful and deadly. He held a third-degree black belt in karate and his violin skills could make a stone cry. He was never one to brag, but a friend of his showed me a video of him playing Paginini when he was seven. Fiercely articulate in Japanese and English, the only person I’ve ever seen actually use a scorpion kick, a violin prodigy who does karate tournaments at the risk of his hands, — has always been an enigma to me. I will say this, though–he knows how to recommend a book.
- His name was ——. He started playing the cello so young that his first cello was a cereal box. To this day I don’t know what that means, but he loved saying it. His first cello-like instrument was a viola with an endpiece stuck in it. He was about 8 before he got an actual cello. He told me his class had performed at Carnegie Hall. He was one of those people who radiated joy. We were friends for nine years, and then we went to different schools and we drifted apart. He’s at the University of Chicago, I think he’s studying engineering, and I miss him more than words can express sometimes.
- Oddly enough with those three—nothing about them was blue.
- It is important that you know this: I have always had an unhealthy obsession with the color blue. Something about it—it doesn’t advance to me, it draws me after it. The happiest I’ve ever been was when I visited my family in Calabria and we swam in the ocean that was so blue and so clear that when the water was twenty feet deep I could look down and see the light formations and wave imprints on the sand and two fish fighting over some seaweed. That was the closest I ever came to being one with the blue.
- There was another time as well, when I had just finished seeing the Tempest with my family and it was a cool, misty summer night, where the lampposts’s glare was misted down to a soft glow and I remember picking the air and inhaling the clean fog and thinking that this would be the night for the Fae to emerge.
- I have always had a strange longing for the night. For the stars, for the beautiful, inelegant flight patterns of the moths, for the solitude, for the bonfires on the beach, for the strange green and orange lightning, for the clouds untangling themselves over the dark blue skies.
- The Night has always been female. There are exceptions like Al-Quam, the Nabatean god of war and the Night, but mythology will tell you that the Night is female. Interesting that the gods of darkness tend to be male.
- A while back I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. I had just finished reading the Upanishads, and we talked for a while about truth. She talked about how it wasn’t her truth, it didn’t quite fit for her, and I asked her what she meant.
- It’s like the enemy captive thing, y’know? Where he’s brought in, and you have dinner, and he’s really charming, and you get along really well, and most of the things he’s saying make sense, and he recognizes that most of the things you’re saying make sense, and then he leaves, and you know that if you see him again, you’ll kill him. And he’ll kill you. Nothing personal, he’s just on the wrong side.
- Has anybody ever done a story with Stravinsky and Pan? she asked. The connection is obvious. Music that made people go insane.
- Not as far as I know, I replied. What would yours be about?
- Oh, I don’t know. Probably a deal-with-the-devil story. Stravinsky gets played by a hungry old god [Pan], and the music sets fires in the street.
- The Rites of Spring is just too good a story not to have magic behind it. I was thinking of Pandemonium, the influence that made people crazy. There’s no way music so powerful it creates riots is not connected.
- A while later, we were in a garden. I knelt in front of the blue poppies and explored their softness. Poppies are liars, she said absently, and when I pressed her to elaborate she said because they’ve only got four petals but from a distance they’re ruffled, like they’re this big full flower.
- Blue poppies are endlessly fascinating. They grow best at certain elevations in the Himalayas. The Himalayas are known as the Roof of the World. What a beautiful image, those blue poppies growing on the Roof of the World.
- A figure has been chasing itself around my mind lately. In four words, it is blue, beautiful, mangled, and afraid.
- In fifty-six words, it is lit by no sun and is the exact same color as the blue poppies. It looks as though it was never meant to be human, like someone had tried to take it and smash it into a human mold, and now that the mold is off it is slowly flowing back to its original form.
- From time to time I enjoy riffing.
- I listened to a song called He Who Brings the Night. My first thought was the Nazgûl. He Who Brings the Night would look like them, wouldn’t he?
- I put He Who Brings the Night away for years, and when I started to write about him it flowed too quickly.
- God is crazy about you, said my grandmother. He sends you flowers every spring and a sunrise every morning.
- Sunrise has always felt forbidden in some way, I thought. Like I’ve arrived too early and He Who Brings the Night was still setting up the tables. That doesn’t make sense. He Who Brings the Night would never set up tables. He Who Brought the Night is a completely abstract concept, born of the Shadows and the Dark, clawing his way out of the room that has no light yet screams blood and pain and fear and that synthetic soothing feeling of being forgotten at last. He Who Brings the Night is an idea, and ideas do not do silly things like set up tables, darling, ideas do not concern themselves with the details, all they care about is ascendancy, to escape their prisons, to become more than decrements and diminutions why did you use those words don’t know just like the way they sound where are the ideas they’re hiding hiding where in the blood room blood room makes it sound like childbirth it isn’t childbirth you’ve been reading too much Gothic horror the blood room isn’t the blood room it’s a room that finds you and it’s always in an alleyway, always hidden, and you walk in and everything that is shunned and unloved and forgotten resides there they didn’t go quietly that’s why there’s blood there and the decrements and diminutions of shredded ideas crawling down to different levels the hell are you going on about how did He Who Brings the Night crawl out of THAT hellhole—
- You see what I mean? I had to cut myself off.
- He who Brings the Night first came to me in a dream. I saw him walking across a pure white sheet of printer paper, rending it gracefully to bloodied shreds with a giant black fountain pen.
- The only reason I put that in was because I liked the image.
- Speaking of images, I have a deal with a friend. She sends me one picture every day from college.
- It’s actually nice to have to send the picture, she said, because I have to notice at least one beautiful thing per day.
- So the beautiful thing today will have to be described, not shown, she said, because the picture didn’t turn out. It rained today for a while with one of those soft blanket rains, not heavy but falling straight down, and I was under a tree on my way to class, and outside the tree the rain was draped over the campus, but under the tree it was dry, and around the crown of the tree teardrop beads of water were hanging, undisturbed even though there was a stirring of wind, from the arrow-spade tips of the leaves. There was an impression of the rain being suspended in that space, hanging off the leaves until someone hit play.
- There are times when it’s not rain but a deluge, when the lightning is purple and the thunder sounds like the sky itself is cracking apart. This is the music that hums in those moments.
- Most people run from the rain. The first time I felt clean was after I’d been rainstormed on and the dragonflies came out.
- After the rain there was a mist of diamond needles darting every which way, the red and green and blue and yellow sparkling in the sunset as they shimmered about, eating mosquitoes. It was a river-stone memory—meaningless by itself, yet its weight was warm and familiar and nice to have in my pocket.
- Beethoven was the Wrath of God. Mozart was the laughter of God. By that logic, Chopin would have been the Sorrow of God.
- Page turning is rough. I remember page turning for a family member. She was always the better player. She was always the angry one. Maybe it’s because when I asked if she had a world inside her head, (I don’t want to say fantasy or imaginary world, it denigrates them) No, she snapped. I read classics.
- I can never think of names for my heroines, she said. And I can never write from a man’s perspective. Maybe when I get to know one I’ll be better at it.
- I miss her.
- A while back I went to a poetry festival at Governor’s Island and met a strange, emaciated man who ran a traveling bookstore. We briefly talked about poetry and he smoked for a little bit. He was a college dropout who wrote poetry. He had the face of a derelict and his hair was messy and brown and his eyes were blue beyond belief. His cigarette was smoked practically down to the filter. I could see his ribs.
- I have known people who only like music when it’s performed in front of them. I never understood why until now.
