An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

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'....