I am always amazed by the fact that things which are inherently silent in nature make music in your mind. Writing is like that for me. Drawing is like that. And so is photography. That is an actual musical score from Chopin in the background. My son recognized it from a book of piano pieces I bought for him because he reads music and can turn those squiggle-bugs on the fence into the right plinkety-plunks on a keyboard. But there is more music in that picture besides. The nude young girl at the keyboard softly rendered in velvety colored pencil tones is also musical in nature, for more than just the fact of fingers on a silent colored pencil keyboard. The lyrical loops of black and yellow in the wings of the tiger swallowtail butterfly also make music in my head, sprightly piano music like Chopin’s, or possibly Vivaldi’s violins.
Did you listen to the music? I don’t mean Vivaldi’s, although if you haven’t heard it, you certainly should. I mean the music in the words. The music has to be there for me for the writing to be good. That’s why I consider Ray Bradbury and Walt Whitman to be masters and Stephenie Meyer and E. L. James to be unreadable hacks. The beat and the flow of the words need to be patterned and patient and wily. Do you not hear it in that last sentence? The alliteration of the first two adjectives set off by the counterpoint of the stressed-unstressed beats of the third? How can I explain this?
Iambic pentameter is the true genius of Shakespeare’s plays. What the heck is iambic pentameter, you ask? Well, I realize you have probably never needed to teach poetry to seventh graders, a truly impossible but infinitely rewarding task. So let me tell you. Units of stress called iambs consist of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. So naturally, if iambs are put into pentameter, then there must be five of them in a line of iambic pentameter poetry. It is a simple, rhythmic way to say something profound and interesting. The classic example is the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18;
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Translating that into X’s and O’s where X=stressed and O=unstressed;
O X O X O X O X O X
It’s simple, five oxes, all in a line. Except that last one about oxes is actually O X O X X O O O O X, a less simple pattern, yet still organized on the beat. Two iambs, a dactyl and an anapest. Okay, now I am talking like a poetry geek, and I have to stop it before I hurt someone.
The whole point is, words should be musical, even when they are not the words to a song. And now I must close on the verge of starting a ten-thousand word thesis. I shall shut up now. Here endeth the lesson.
It struck me that it was hauntingly beautiful… but maybe I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.
Catch a Falling Star 
Morning Has Broken
Today is off to a miserable start. I heard on the radio that David Bowie has died. Ziggy Stardust… the Goblin King… The Man Who Fell to Earth… the Thin White Duke…is gone. And even though since high school in the 1970’s I have never been quite sure how I felt about his music, I wept. The man was a musical maker of lyrical poetry. He could make you feel really really terrible… but he always made you feel. And he made me depressed as he led me through the Labyrinth… but he also made me soar… on the wings of a barn owl. It was about facing the darkness and finding your way. Finding the way out. Singing the Little Drummer Boy with Bing Crosby, but not actually singing it… making peace on Earth instead. Sometimes things are just so weirdly beautiful it hurts.
I dropped my daughter off at her middle school, and then Jody Dean & the Morning Team played this on the radio.
I wept again. Darkness is my old friend… I have lived with and through depression after depression. My own… my wife’s… my children’s… And it is a miracle I have lived this long without succumbing to the Darkness. It took Robin Williams. It took Ernest Hemingway. But somehow, the Goblin King always goaded me onward, to find the answer at the end of the Labyrinth. “You… you have no power over me.” And then I am okay once again.
I captured the dawn once again this morning. Once again I failed to truly ensnare the subtle reds and pinks and purples that were actually there. But there it is, anyhow. The morning has broken. The blackbird has spoken. The morning is new.
My heart is still sore this morning. The dog didn’t help when she spilled the trash to get at the napkins with bacon grease on them. We may have a dog-skin rug as a doormat later today. But David Bowie left so many words and ideas behind to comfort me. Is he one of those “neon gods we made”? Of course he is. But as the owl flutters off in the closing credits, we can take comfort in the knowledge that no one is ever really gone. And we can always anticipate some… Serious Moonlight.
This is, of course, an old post revisited.
2 Comments
Filed under commentary, music, photo paffoonies, poetry
Tagged as battling depression, bowie, David Bowie, depression, loss, love and life and laughter, music, News, photo Paffooney, rock