Owen Wyke : An Audible Palace

When I was a boy, I was not musically hospitable.

  Those songs never stayed for long. They’d plant their impressions in me and then they’d move on, dragging their obedient echoes behind them. I didn’t much care: By the time they’d mastered the distant mountains, I’d forgotten I’d known them. A good many things have lost their history in those mountains.

Most things I would never have heard from again, but songs are peculiar in that they’ll bend back again and return to you whenever they want, finding and tracing their old path as easily as a simple thought. Now that I know this, I expect every one of them to return to me, in time.

I do not know why they return, but as I am not averse to mysteries, I do not let this concern me. These songs will do as they like.

Just yesterday, I watched another one cross my rug into my apartment. I could hear it in my kitchen, fishing inside my refrigerator. I did not like this song. Some are less agreeable than others, but like any orphanage: I must make room for these songs when they come.

During the time since they left me, I managed to satisfy the songs’ absence with other songs, chosen more carefully for their appreciation of me. I’ve found these new songs to be useful. As they journey my passages they apply agreeable coats to all these soft, vulnerable walls.

When we painted, we were possessed.

We loved how effortlessly the elements could converge, our image-families learning new identities off the wild tongues of music. Still, we never quite appreciated the magic, this stark simplicity of casting music upon our canvases, the encouragement of those eager, intrigued canvases urging us in. Any notion of simplicity we might ever have discerned from our activity was lost always and inevitably by the fantasies which elaborated so quickly for us, from us. With the motions set in: all the world became a mundane blur behind inadequate windows.

Once the music had been placed, we promptly began working it down into careful vanities. This was the most fun for us, and in this a secret genie came into play: it was in how the paintings managed, against so many difficult factors, to come into being . . . it was in the way that they showed how they knew themselves so surely . . . it was in the personalities that these paintings developed, and finally: it was in the way that they spoke to us, the things they said. Alone with our paintings, we could never be bored.

But beauty will always die in us, eventually, even if it is captured young. Earth’s pull is irresistible. One day, one of my cassettes betrayed me. I’d believed in this cassette and its captured music, but time had abraded its sloppy veneer, and this I saw reflected on my canvas in a repulsive kind of carelessness. Immediately I understood this music’s true nature. Its pale artificiality obscured nothing any longer, for all was now clear to me. This music had been lying to me all along.

I shattered the cassette beneath my shoe, picked its pieces and left them in the basket. In the wake I breathed a melancholy but cathartic air. The cassette’s death left me feeling more liberated. By passing the cassette on I had passed on a part of myself that I now realized had always been superfluous. I thought: Now I’ve an opportunity to take command of my own being. From now on: my very form and shape will know the precision of desire.

All this time I remained blissfully forgetful of the old songs. And with such a wealth of new music available for me to appreciate, so much sound to sift through, discover and then change upon canvas: I lived, as did my friends, in a sort of audible palace.

I went on painting my songs, and the songs flourished into versatile creativities. Each of my new paintings met each of my friends’ new paintings, fostering conversation. All these works composed a community, speaking tongues of notes and verse.

Our palace became magnificently changeable.

The webby networks we generated confounded our bodies with each step we took. Every day we’d feed those snares with joy, then roll upon the floor among them, shouting: “Idea ! Idea!”, the snares biting. Then we’d rush for our sketchpad and pencils, our ballpoint pens.

In our carelessness toward everything but musical impression, our palace grew ever more cluttered. Our floors were interlocking collages. Litter migrated from one room to another and in each room we welcomed its contribution. If no sketchpad happened to be local to us at the moment of insight, we’d grab a scrap of paper from the floor and, implement in hand – pencil, pen or brush – render our education religiously.

Our paintings flourished with such fervor that their colors often spread to our clothes , our floors , our walls which we urged gradually into brilliant murals. Our affected clothes became statements, expressing for us the very sentences that only our colors could be made to say.

When our landlady finally visited one day, she was not appreciative of what she observed. Her reaction was not expected. Our music had driven us mad.

In the little room where I have them, now, stored altogether, I’ve been reviewing my canvases.

To this day I’m not entirely certain what brought me to stop producing them. I do remember that once we left our palace: a substantial loss of energy followed. At the same time, I felt strangely and very suddenly detached from my music. That familiar eagerness, my need for more and more sound, for musical input, had abandoned me. Those paintings which were incomplete remained so. I stretched new canvases, but I could not make them fertile.

When my desire for music finally returned to me: I found that instead of revitalizing me, it promptly completed my impotence. I could no longer paint. Eventually I had to accept that I would never regain the energy, the drive, the ability to create. And today — as then — no matter what music I listen to, no matter what it stirs in me and how it goes about in its stirring: the music’s energy will not transfer itself to me, it will not lead me to my canvas , my easel , my paints.

There are many sorts of deaths, and one can never be certain how any one of them has or will or can come to be formed; or wherefrom, in fact, it has been or will be driven; or how such a death will initially come to be birthed within us. Perhaps the seeds of all these assortments of death lie slumbering in our flesh from a point very early in our development, waiting only to be awoken.

Those forgotten songs come more frequently, these days.

Just today I collect another. Once inside my home, this song proceeds to examine itself in all my various mirrors, and suddenly I can remember an awful lot of things.

These are neither good nor bad memories; they’re merely parts of my life that’ve by now become unimportant. Despite my acute examination, I have yet to discern from this song — from any of them, truly — a reason for the return.

I suppose that the simple fact that I’m here in this room, so miserably reviewing my collection, all the music I ever loved, all the music that moved me into painting after painting, and all the music that came afterward and still moves me although not to painting . . . that this is a demonstration of something critical. Logic and reason will tell me that my being here is the result of a succession of situations and motives, therefore an inevitability.

And just so, it has always been inevitable that I do as I do now, which is to take every record and every disc of mine and break it between my hands, to empty from its case a beloved cassette and shatter it with the nearest strong object, all the while softening the damage with my tears . . . this was inevitable: my floor managing a collage that spreads.

Today, the songs fill me like hundreds of Daniel Boones.

Had I commanded something like a floodgate for them, something like a dam, I could say that I’ve opened that floodgate wide, or shattered that dam. I cannot stop them. They get along brilliantly with one another, singing and shouting, laughing. They’re up to something large, they appear to be forging some secret agenda. They’re excited.

Each new settler is welcomed to the colony with loud enthusiasm. The residents throw a party for every newcomer, never concerned with the messes they produce. The overflow leaves on its own by drains, joins water and crawls miserably from my eyes.