Pastoral (1) Pastoral He looked down at the unkempt bandages that sporadically covered his fingers, which had now become ribbons of quivering flesh. They used to be so much more. His fingers levitated over his lap. His stillness was interrupted as he gesticulated through the air the incomparable pain that pulsated through his coagulating appendages. He reflected on himself internally, as though, through the curvaceous and distorted end of shot glass. His eyes, pensive and perplexed, filled with bereavement over what had possessed him in the preceding months with great voracity. That very insatiability had seemed to characterize his nature up to that very moment in the shaded park. What he mistakenly embraced as passion and candorous desire seemed now to be nothing more than a blind ambition and competitive lust. The park always brought Travis an unequivocally ethereal feeling that made him feel quite awkward. The wind and the sparrows brought him here even in the derisive atmosphere of college students and old men staring at women who looked like their lost wives, reflecting on their own lost love and insatiable desires yet unable to quench either. Still, the wind, which dictated the trees to sway and roiled the sparrows to flight, brought him back, with a whisper, to the cause of his perplexity and pensiveness, to his incomparable pain and expression of it; a whisper that resonated in his lupine ears, �Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Webern, Boulez, Rachmaninoff,� the names of his persecutors. Yet still another name existed, a name not so well identified with the devise of both great agony and great ecstasy by which he was haunted like a wraith. This moribund name sent all human color fleeting away from his body like the antelope of the African plains flying from its leonine predator. The thought of happiness, so hard to hold firmly in one place, flew from him just as fickle as any wayward sparrow in the trees. Lymond, the name of noble creatures, hidden in obscurity from those who would choose to focus on lowly, mundane ties, which proved only a sepulcher in which Travis�s own mellifluous passions can be laid asleep, incited in him a loathsome disdain for the curse of life that obsessed him. Lymond. His antithesis, his enemy, his hatred, poured into one ruined being. � The time arrived for the annual piano competition for the mid-western region of the United States. For the past two years the competition was, beyond contestation, the property of Travis Marlow, a student of Oberlin University, and undeniable genius of musical composition. His brilliance astounded all who came upon him. It was intriguing, to see him transform notes, which seemed so simple, into lust, frustration, ecstasy, refulgent perfection. From birth he was trained to love �the music,� as his father always had the disposition of saying. From an insignificant age he emerged as �the prodigy� and undertook mastering an unheard amount of perilous feats from the Petrouchka, to Rachmaninoff�s Piano Concerto no. 3, he by all accounts emerged �the instrument.� When numerous professors, conductors, pedagogues, epicures, etc. made this statement it was not in reference to any mechanical devise; rather, it was due reverence as an earthly vessel of God. And it was veneration well deserved; he was the epitome of the perfect pianist, and well on his way to the epicenter of composition. His exaltation was all in the way of accomplishment, which seemed to be nothing else to Travis Marlow; he once said, � �The music� absolves me. It is little more than vanity. I see my life as waning to the trepidation I have, that I might not do justice to the tangible emotion that is intrinsic in music, which flourishes only in the form of disdain. Yet, it should come under scrutiny? In the eve of conception, should I not be obligated to exculpate my own opus from the interpretations of fallacy, which are inevitably to fall to its indubitable genius?� For all intents and purposes nothing hindered the young prodigy from taking the, now mundane, competition again. Furthermore, he was eloquent in all facets of his personage. He never piqued any disturbing hatred. His fellow pupil�s showed quite enough animosity though; they could not so easily fluster their teachers with reverential genius. They loathed him as a young child loathes a bath. They were little more than childish figures to Travis anyway, unkempt, slovenly, and na�ve. Travis, salient and sagacious, could have easily suffused any of them in the pure and sacerdotal waters of melody in which he bathed everyone else who observed him as a savant. Lurking behind every curtain, every concert hall balcony, watching him, Lymond observed him as ostentatious and fraudulent. Lymond wanted to attend college but had neither the bountiful funds nor the gregarious savvy to attain such. From a very young age he delved into the passions of becoming a vehicle of inspired melody both indigenous and foreign to the walls of his own urbane mind. It proved an asylum of inscrutability from all those outside of its confines. This year he planned to enter himself in this contest of abilities. He endured criticism, cynical and vehement, encompassed by all the satire of an almost incredulously overt prejudice. He seemed as though he was of a caste of heathens given to rites of spring and ignorant bouts of nonsensical violence. He had all the characteristics of a young and impossible Berlioz, both physically, and ironically, in a mental capacity as well. Lymond, although a pianist in the most profound of definitions, was avidly obsessed with instrumentation of impossible dimensions. (It is apropos to mention the incident of similarity between Lymond and Berlioz.) Lymond had insrumentalized a waltz of extraordinary scope in the terms of theoretical music. The piece, however, was deemed unplayable by a well-versed professor. Lymond proceeded to correct the feeble-minded mediocrity by playing all parts himself. Afterwards, he was defenestrated out of the building. Due to Lymond�s complete lack of any musical training he was completely self-taught in as a part-writer. Nevertheless, incidents such as these went unknown to Lymond�s pompous critics and they proceeded to further humiliate him through vituperative comments over late night illicitness and drunken stints. This trivial talk and active immaturity became subdued by an incident of peculiar profoundness in a coffee shop. Lymond went into the coffee shop, in which both Travis and some of his friendlier colleagues were present, unnoticed and situated himself before the archaic and somewhat out of tune instrument. Such that it would have driven someone with perfect pitch mad. Needless to say, both Travis and Lymond simultaneously shifted in their chairs while cringing at the sound of the first chord filled with misplaced resonance. As Lymond situated himself in front of the piano Travis looked on in curiosity. He was eager to hear whether the staunchly unused piano would prove at all dulcet for this unknown figure. He was more cynical towards Lymond at that point than curiously aroused. Even as Lymond entered through the door, he did not acknowledge Travis�s presence, nor would he at all that night. Travis was not at all used to people taking no notice of his presence, it seemed to Travis as if it were intentional. Travis did not know this person, but it was apparent that Lymond knew him. Travis did not even know that name until he heard it passed in conversation later that evening. Lymond�s placidness made Travis uneasy. What made him even uneasier was what he did to �the music�. He never heard such justice, pure and unquestionable, before. Lymond took the notes, which started so simply a glossed black and transformed them into an obsidian yearning, an adroit begging for absolution. The pitches undulated into the air in a cascade of arpeggios that stood perfectly divided by the steady and effortless motions of the foot to the pedal. His face was not expressionless but rather stricken with untold sorrows and sordid agonies. (A man would want to hit him for making such a face, a woman would want to spit on him for such a disagreeable woe, but could not help but sympathize with the sting of his sorrow.) The notes suddenly changed to a sharp stabbing and piercing that flirted with the precipice of insanity and rage and all of a sudden became rescued by the fluid transition into remorse for what seemed like sin, by interrupting such beauty, by interjecting into such an ugly conflict within a soul divided against its own body. Suddenly evanescence of a most haunting melody overcame this and transferred all guilt and misery onto the listener who could not help but desire to share whatever sin this creature may have committed simply because the beauty of forgiveness was so saccharine. Yet in the end, the rest of hopeless surrender befell all sinners and suspended the last pitch of a sour outright cry into taciturn opaqueness. With a great opprobrious spirit the coffee shop continued in its din of business as if nothing had ever happened. Travis, who now saw a goliath adversary in this Lymond, felt this injustice to �the music� grind on the nerve endings of his fingers, however consciously dismissed it, denied its ingenuity, as nonchalant as any untrained, tone-deaf mute might have at the end of a discourse without an interpreter to guide them. (Profound sounds mean nothing to a deaf-ear.) In that night a rivalry began. The rivalry did not begin at the coffee shop though. Travis felt that the evening�s melodies sufficed and that his fingers bettered him practicing. Practice provided not only improvement for Travis but it also allowed for a release. A release of frustration, a release of disdain for life, and despite all his success the lack of love in his life led to him pouring all his love into his art, �the music�. Outwardly the man seemed a bastion of confidence and mystical brilliance; inwardly he was tortured by the lack of genuine kinship, which he so desired but of which he had none. All the relationships he maintained sat insubstantially surface. He had no one to confide in but himself and his piano. Sometimes the sparrows brought him comfort in the park, but seldom did he stay long because of the constant plethora of couples swooning in one another�s arms under red oak trees next to babbling brooks. So, he practiced and practiced and practiced, his fingers often numbed and his joints concretely stiffened from long bouts of eight or nine hours seated at the piano constantly, meticulously, intensely, picking out every detail and emphasizing it with all the malice and disillusion he had in his lanky body. He was not in the least a machine. His heart was so full of longing for resolution that every moment of his music spoke to his own psyche a fantasy of perfect completion. He could only reach it through his music and so every note was in pursuit of that desire to attain that ideality of paradise and satisfaction. �The music� brought him to tranquility. And so, he practiced his piece for the contest, still with all the intensity as if it were happening that moment, and though he had a week to polish, he would not stop in the middle to correct himself. He must play the piece from beginning to finish every time. The piece was arduously long, a Concerto of forty seven minutes. So, now with his goal in sight, his adversary established and his intensity and desire for prestige and for perfection in the back of his clouded mind, he began to play. The organizers of the contest structured it in such a manner that every contestant had the opportunity to listen to his fellow players. Each night was committed to one of the finalists over a period of Thursday to Sunday. Both Lymond and Travis ended up possessing one of these spots. Before that final event of judgment and separation between mediocrity and brilliance, qualification was necessary. On the morning of the qualification day Lymond looked to be rather preoccupied and pensive regarding the task at hand. In a single instance his eyes met those of Travis�s and there lingered a moment of derision in which it was absolutely obvious to both that winning would once and for all establish the better pianist. Despite the fact that Travis already procured most of the praise and patronage of all opinions that mattered, the anecdote of the coffee shop piano player had not fallen on too many deaf ears and it became quite palpable that he was most definitely a contester for the designate of contest winner. Travis thought the eyes of Lymond were filled with a mockery towards him. The thought solidified in his head; he, in that moment and from then on, hated Lymond. He hated him for his brilliance and his smugness and his eloquence. And likewise Lymond hated Travis but for different reasons. To Lymond, Travis incredulously performed, composed and lived, undeserving of praise, of adulation, of accolade. Lymond possessed the predilection that no loftier music existed than his own. His music undoubtedly gleamed beautiful. He had the gift and the heart, but he lacked the humility to let his music speak for itself. He was haughty. Travis himself always looked for the opportunity to show the world his talent and his power. It could not be truer of any man than of Travis that he fought within himself over the ability to be silent for his own sake as opposed to grabbing the lectern and disseminating his own vicarious interpretation of what great music levitated to. The fruition of both men stipulated that each would settle for nothing less than perfection and nothing less than first place. Lymond hurried to his qualifying hearing and passed with respectful awe from the judges. Likewise hailed true of Travis, as expected. But the success altogether satisfied nothing for either of them. Only complete triumph over the other would quell their thirst for the others blood and allow a paean. It no longer masqueraded as simple desire to beat the other or win it intended complete humiliation of the other. No fixated hatred and lust was poured into practice for Lymond; his focus purveyed itself to �the music�. Lymond did not eat, did not sleep, did not leave his piano for any reason. He would completely sequester himself in the confines of his nasty flat. Through the cool mid-western nights he played his piece, which was to be the most spectacular piece anyone could ever hear from such a creature.
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Copyright © 2005 Oscar Felix Norton |