An Equal Music by Vikram Seth
The ungiving pressure of our thoughts
A TANGLED WEB OF MUSIC, BEAUTY, PERFECTION, LOVE AND DANCE....
Listen to this story
about strands of passion
that run through all our lives.
Do you get obsessed by ideas?
Is there a vision in your head?
Do you like to get things and all the details right?
Have you lost someone's touch and hearing,
smell and taste and sight?
Not a week passes when you don't think of her,
of him?
Too persistent a trace in the memory....
So take the opportunity to live
for a few hours
in another person's life,
to understand that there is no way back
and no way out.
Welcome
into a body and mind
of an artist.
His difficulties
of creating beauty
in music
are minored in trying
to find beauty
perfection
and love in his life.
Follow a lovelorn violinist from Rochdale
playing Bach and Schubert
in the dramatic settings of London
Vienna
and unforgettable Venice.
His work is governed by obsession
to produce a perfect piece of art.
The moment his bow comes down
on the string
he is transfigured,
his poetry
about loss and longing,
expressed through the power of music
is wonderful, light and profound.
His work is governed by obsession
to find the love of his life,
lost and nearly regained...
When he plays Haydn,
Mozart
Beethoven or Schubert,
he thinks of their city.
She showed him that city,
every step and stone,
and their music brings her back to him.
A deaf pianist,
who counts her blessings
to be able to hear
her inner original sounds.
She turns towards her violinist,
“ How wilful is our quest
for something beyond ourselves,
that we imagine,
with our separate spirits,
but are compelled to embody together.”
She smiles sadly and they start to play...
The waves of sound,
webs of sensation and emotions,
and through them,
through their music,
the spirit of a composer comes alive.
The spirit of someone
scribbling away in 1772
with a sharpened feather of a bird
these waves of perfect sound,
he can hear and she can feel...
A dying fall,
a rise
and then it all ends.
“ That was perfect,
let's do it again.”
She reads her violinist's lips.
For a few moments her face is lit,
too dimly for him to read much on it.
“If it was perfect, since it was perfect,
it is certainly not to be done again.”
She turns away,
he stands in front of her,
so she can see his face:
“ Shall we continue to make music together,
nothing else,
to recreate the bonds of stimulation
and companionship
so long lost?”
She says nothing.
She seems to have sunk
into a world of her own,
to be remote from him...
“ But the music belongs to us,”
he shouts,
not realising that she can not hear.
“ What if we were not making love together,
we, whose blood beats in one pulse?”
“Someone once disappeared
completely
out of my life.
Just walked out.
It took me years to,
not to understand,
but reconcile
myself to it.”
She looks at him,
her eyes full of perplexity:
“The sound of your music
stayed with me,
but then,
I lost even that.”
She walks out
and he watches her
till she moves round the corner
out of reach of his eyes.
The sound fills the concert hall,
so familiar,
so well-loved,
so disturbingly and enchantingly
different.
He is in a world,
where he seems to know
everything,
and nothing at all.
The experience of their music,
the unprepared
for pain of it,
is something,
none of them
is likely to forget.
The sound fills the concert hall,
within a minute,
he has forgotten all resentment,
all rights and pleasures due to him.
They are irrelevant
within this lovely, vigorous music.
It is only
gradually
that he is able to see
things
through eyes less injured and less blind,
to understand how honestly
she has acted
and with what love.
To realise that
he might well lost her
through his own sudden departure
and silence,
long time ago.
The sound fills the concert hall,
now,
he can see them
becoming strangers,
thinking of each other
less and less
as the weeks pass,
and with the time,
drifting
entirely
out of each other's lives.
The sound fills the concert hall,
and yet he wants to imagine,
this is the phoenix which burned down
once before,
and this time has not risen.
Surely, what was lost,
so stupidly,
so swiftly,
and in so short time
can be retrieved,
redone,
brought to life once more...
The sound fills the concert hall,
he follows the music
where imagination
alone
could not have taken him,
at the intersection of the world
of soundlessness,
with those of heard,
of mis-heard,
of half-heard,
of imagined sound.
Such music is a sufficient gift,
why ask for happiness,
why hope not to grieve?
The incomplete, the unending, the imperfect music played by a human being,
it is a beauty beyond imagining,
the deaf pianist is playing.
Follow a thread
from an equal music
to an equal dance
of two ballerinas
in the Aronofsky's beautifully brilliant
and devastating masterpiece.
What will happen to you and your life
when you get completely consumed by art?
A white swan changes to BLACK SWAN...
rivalry and recklessness
a cruel competition
a fear of humiliation.
Anyone who fails
to entertain
is banished from the spotlight,
but you so desperately want to shine...
You begin to get more in touch with your dark side
and suddenly you realise
' A PERFECT BEAUTY IS LOST IN DARK'....