He suddenly felt a sadness that only a letter might lighten. Thoughts of her he carried variously in and from the spaces and places this hot day had taken him. The morning had been warmer than in previous days, and even at 6.0am there was a heaviness present carrying a threat of thunder and rain.
He knew she was not at her best in the leaden heat of this hemisphere, whilst enjoying the dry, brittle heat of Africa and beyond. He remembered a hot train journey and a busy day moving boxes into a studio space. They were fond memories because in such heat she took on a delicacy about her. He would perceive her features and movement to be finely drawn, and that perception revealed her profound beauty. Such recollections were foundations in his love for her.
Today he had decided to avoid that daily confrontation with the project that lay invisibly on his desk, locked up in his computer, though unsorted sheets of graph paper, populated with planning, were evident on his drawing board. This project was a ‘book’ of studies for an ensemble in Chicago whose performances were marked by such energy and virtuosity; the music was growing steadily, but he felt suspicious that it had been contrived. He hoped his precise positioning of pitch and rhythm would have brought forth a surface colouring and texture. It had not. He would often imagine symbols and words he could not yet define lying on a transparent sheet over the rather bland matter-of-fact notation of his scores. He had known only occasional moments of such graphic invention, and when they appear ‘right’, they enlivened and enhanced his work.
He had put aside today as a listening day, an opportunity to listen carefully to a group of new compositions presented in a series of broadcast concerts and available to re-audition over the Internet. Didn’t Van Gogh write to his brother about the need to rest during a period of intense creativity and spend a day copying another’s work? This was an equivalent to his ‘active listening’, listening with a pencil and paper, taking a shorthand of the music’s action and journey.
The first piece on his listening list was a four-minute composition for chorus and orchestra. He had been intrigued that the composer had set words by Richard Jeffries, a 19C author who had written children’s adventures about a parochial natural world and had become admired by today’s new nature writers. It was said Jeffries had instigated Henry Williamson’s closely observed prose. He had set about finding the words – hardly discernable in the rich sonic accumulation of voices and instruments in the broadcast performance. Eventually, thanks to a brief comment by the composer in his introduction and a line that leapt with clarity from the music (the butterfly floats in the light-laden air), found a passage in a book called A Study of My Heart.
Recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life. Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it. The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years it will still be only a moment. To the soul there is no past and no future; all is and will be ever, in now. For artificial purposes time is mutually agreed on, but is really no such thing. The shadow goes on upon the dial, the index moves round upon the clock, and what is the difference? None whatever. If the clock had never been set going, what would have been the difference? There may be time for the clock, the clock may make time for itself; there is none for me. . . . There is no separation-no past; eternity, the Now, is continuous. When all the stars have revolved they only produce Now again. The continuity of Now is for ever. So that it appears to me purely natural, and not super natural, that the soul whose temporary frame was interred in this mound should be existing as I sit on the sward. How infinitely deeper is thought than the million miles of the firmament!
The text chosen by the composer did not appear to follow the author’s words only weave a way in and around the paragraph, pulling out key words and phrases, creating a poem from the images. He could imagine doing this himself, making a poem of the text.
This business of time, and how it was to this author, ‘all about me in the sunshine’, was the same for him. As he read it, he would think of the warm early morning light on the stone façade of the building across the road. He could turn away from his desk and see a quality of glowness that all but stopped his own thoughts of time. This quality of and in things that nature could bestow, even to the inanimate, held a wonder all its own.
And so he had listened several times to this bright, newly fashioned work, enjoying the sustained and acoustic beating of more than eighty voices (he thought) singing in close clusters. And with and against those clusters, were flurries and cascades of high woodwind, as though such figures were birds flocking into the sun on a summer’s sky. This music seemed to be about immanence, existing in the everything of itself, but unlike Jeffries’ reverie music was governed by time, and when finished, with an inconclusiveness that surprised him, would rarely, he felt, ever be performed again.
