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June
In june, the Don kept his cards close to his chest for a while. It later emerged that he had been working for a considerable time on the Courante from a Bach Cello Suite (C-major). We hope this will soon be performable.
In the meantime, he produced a sturtering version of Merlin's Evocation which, because of - rather than despite of - its stuttering mistakes, expressed, he believes, the self-inspection and associated sorrow that accompanies rejection. The poem was written in 2001 for Charlotte, devourer of hope...
In 2001 the part of me that is not schizophrenic recorded Ferrer's Ejercicio. I had only two years before-hand begun to try playing classical guitar music from sheet. A precious copy of 'First Repertoire for Solo Guitar' fed me. But I was without a 'fitness-instructor', as it were: anything was fair game, and where I found sixth notes a little irksome, I modifed them to whole notes.
Five years later, having taken the time to actually read the score and the instructor's intentions, crying out to me from a century past to take the original transcription seriously, I reconsidered.
I can only refer back to the analogy of the apprentice and the master: restiveness is a quality that seems to recede with time. Learning, indeed, youth, is wasted on the young.
Is it a humiliation to acknowledge that your youthful ignorance did not (contrary to what you thought) excel those who went before? True fact: the first time I played this to a /lady/, she giggled and said it made her think of monks.
Evocation
Don Chihuahua said:
I am suffering from subjunctivitis.
I would be in your arms now.
You would look at me with eyes
impenetrable in the obsidian light
and whisper the location of the hidden magic of the world.
Your opaque beauty would shock me again.
I would be lost again, absorbed
by the down on your soft cheek,
the pale, flushed skin covering
the mystery I could not
nor would not
want to solve.
I would see a glimmer of movement
in your brow, and I would,
as always,
recognise my thoughts in your face.
A train is carrying me
through ghost towns
lit by dull lamps
barely concealing the hollowness.
The carriage bulges with hollow people
occupying space and time
but nothing more.
They are being occupied by hollowness.
I can even see
their transparency –
they leave the train
as ghosts leave bodies,
leaving a shell.
Flickering across their faces
are the traces
of empty thoughts,
consumed by the nothingnesses
of inboxes,
chattering politics,
dinner for three,
four,
five
hollow people
in a hollow family home.
An eyebrow,
mistily visible
against the outlines beyond,
twitches in the last spasms
of an inconsequence.
Forgotten trains of hollow thought
blink out of mind,
only to repeat themselves
glibly.
The scales fell from my eyes.
The beeches trailed behind me
as I stepped into the future
stretching before me,
utterly certain into infinity.
It is lined with hollow homes,
filled with hollow accoutrements
for transparent people
scurrying to and fro
like ants on a dead trunk,
pursuing vacancy with
blind ardour.
What are they feeding
with the empty seed-husks
of nothingness that they carry
on their shoulders
as though they bore the world?
The beeches trailed behind me,
their eyes impenetrable in the obsidian
transparency of blind ardour
bearing the world of hollow homes
and inboxes into my body, leaving a shell.
Download: Jose Luis Merlin - Evocation mp3
