I used to be a frequent träumtrawler of Alexander Scriabin’s Piano Sonatas, until I went off piste with the Piano Sonatas of Pierre Boulez and Jean Barraqué. But, last night, I decided to refresh the Scriabins in one long lie-in upon decent Bluetooths and undiverted by the guilt of other tasks undone or by tusks of anxious trauma, or later by some sweet träumerei tussling or teasing me to be tempted into deeper sleep with no listening or any subconscious hearing. No, I heard, in my still waking mind, every single note of the Scriabins and they scrubbed me clean, made me feel reborn, if surrounded by miniature ghosts amidst the floaters induced by my attempts at fending off concentrated shuteye.
“Alexander Scriabin Memorial Museum was opened on July 17, 1922 in the old mansion located in Arbat Street, Moscow, where one of the greatest composers of the turn of XIX-XX centuries spent the last three years of his life.”
***
When I write my book reviews, I feel a ghost on my shoulder imagining synchronicities and connections and a sort of pareidolia from words. Some call it apophenia or confirmation bias. Others call it foolish pretentiousness. Last night I dreamed of seeking a certain meal in a busy staff canteen in an unknown workplace, and I felt a sense of solitude as everyone seemed to know each other and were already eating, as I tried to help myself to something that I could not quite load on my plate, before finally waking. And this dream had no connection with the book review I conducted soon after waking from it. This seemed stranger than there BEING such a connection. A weird experience inasmuch as the synchronicity-ghost must have vanished from my shoulder, and then I saw it flying across the white ceiling. I smiled with relief, when realising I was still dreaming, and not yet awake at all.
***
Was it a dream? Yes, but I don’t want to get into the habit of miniaturising my dreams into words for you each morning after waking. Such a regular rite has the high suspicion of a chore or a self-indulgence. However, from last night I can’t seem to rid myself of the things that bowled along the road, having escaped from my enclosure. One was a machine like a small torpedo on wheels that moved as if in mayhem to become an eider duck and later to become an urchin boy who mooned up at me as if to ask: “Why you coming after me?” I gave him a shilling instead of the sixpence he was owed in advance and I watched his head bob up and down and heard him whistle as he cleaned my enclosure’s windows.
The very last bit above was a lie, as I did not want this to be wholly what I dreamt, but to be something I had created outside the dream. In fact, I am the whistling boy, later to be grown up from that miniature ‘me’, and it was a threepenny bit you gave me not a bob or even a tanner. I’ll come after you as your lad, don’t you worry.
***
You know, when you’re actually living through a period of downbeat events, often interspersed with bouts of anxiety and perhaps even unexplained fits of laughter, it does not dawn on you that you have been suffering from old-fashioned sorrow, and when that period announces its end, you look back objectively at it all, and you finally see it for what it is. Or was.
And in your case, it had been a period of sorrow you had not been able to shake off, but now you were able to feel that you were back to yourself, conscious of who you were, not the other person who had experienced the period that was now over with.
Your eyes told me that you were a new person now and I took you by the scruff of the neck, well, sort of. I was subtler than that. I plumped you right in front of the mirror and showed you that nothing had really changed. There was the same wrinkled skin, the same innocent eyes, the same big head, the same birthmarks on the skin.
“That’s not me,” you seemed to say.
“Yes, it is,” I responded. “That is what such a period of sorrow has done, kept you intact, levelled out your moods, lifted the laughter, enabled tears to follow.”
The sudden knowledge indeed that the whole of your life was encompassed only by a single period of sorrow that seemed as if it had lasted forever but now set free as birds on some unlikely wing.
Big head and birthmarks, back to that very start of ageing, crying out for the period of sorrow yet to come, the same sorrow, always the same sorrow, a recurrency ever and anon.
I cradled you in my arms, as you started those fits of laughter again, between bouts of further tears. Spurning past years of gradual instinctive learning to become who you really are. Happy not to grow older and wiser. Ever aching for partition and margin. Looking like a calculated log of ancient colourless bark, with accelerating strobes of grief and joy. Your own swollen baby’s head in full shameless view, perhaps forever. A honed and old-fashioned period of honest sorrow. Turning you even more wrinkled with wonders. A great old one.
***
I love early 1960s pop music, because, well, because of Radio Luxembourg and later Radio Caroline. This originally involved spreading my wings further than the living room where my parents were engaged in an out-staring game with their small black and white screen in the corner, and the screen won. Now a different sort of screen has defeated me in its beguiling pretence of interaction with you out there reading this, who thus, by default, is interacting with me. You know who you
***
TO BE CONTINUED AS THE DAPPER MAN
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