TheWalkinDude

Hi everyone. I haven't posted here in ages. Now my A levels are out of the way I have a bit more time to do so.

Just thought I'd drop off a couple of stories I'd writted to see what everyone thought. Hopefully I'll be back soon and posting on a daily basis.

Gigue

In my mind he is fading and growing more distant until he is sitting in a corner

of the room as dusty and out-of-tune as the cello on which he used to play the second

movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C# minor.

“Beethoven,” he would say, and I couldn’t help but agree with him, “had more

passion than he knew what to do with,”

“But Bach,” (raising a finger that would tremble that little bit more each time

he said this), “had a clear view of himself. Of his passion.”

I knew he wished he himself shared these powers of inner perception.

The fingers that have never stopped trembling in these last years would mould

themselves, I remember, around the careful streams of notes of Bach’s cello suites as

if they had been designed for it. The passion he sought would travel from his mind

down his arms until his fingers would crackle with a life that they breathed through

the strings and into the corners of a living room that would stretch out indefinitely

into a concert hall where he had once played the same piece in front of a thousand

people.

“I don’t play in front of crowds anymore.” He said, smiling. Something in that

smile made me think of the way his hands shook.

I see him now in the act of tuning his instrument. To him such an act was

something austere and his great hands grasped and turned the pegs with a precise

dignity that was almost overwhelming.

Then he would begin to play, and practice runs through major and then minor

scales would begin to shape themselves into those pieces to which he always

attributed something deeply personal.

“Locatelli,” he breathed. “I won a woman’s heart with Locatelli.” He played

the piece as if he were still playing for her, the movements in turn ploughing and

harrowing long-fallow fields somewhere behind his softening eyes. I think he has

played more Locatelli that anything else these last years.

These last years he has not touched the books upon his shelves and they have

grown stale and sad, their words running together and all but unreadable now. He sits

and looks at them and tries to remember which of them he has still not read but he can

barely even recall the ones he has.

The books in their way look back at him in secretive, unfathomable thought.

Under their gaze he paces through this room and a hundred others in his mind.

He talks about himself in the third person.

In one room a doctor talks to him calmly and kindly. In another he has

forgotten his grandson’s birthday and he feels ashamed and inexplicably worried

about something. In a more distant room he listens to the third Brandenburg Concerto

and sips tea alone and in tears. In another his wife has been to the doctor and he feels

something dark rise up inside him.

In his mind he walks from room to room until he is listening to the third

Brandenburg Concerto on his grandfather’s knee. Something glorious is filling up

inside him and from that room he thinks he can see a hundred rooms he is yet to pace.

They stretch on and on to a room where an old man sits with shaking hands

and tries to remember something he had last thought about a long time ago.




This next one I wrote for a girl I met a couple of years back behind a bar in South Africa. Just about the strangest, most sensual human being I will probably ever meet. I'm terrible at poetry so here we have a love poem in prose form:


Aranjuez

Aranjuez is a Royal City to the south of Madrid. It lies alongside the banks of

the River Tajo but to me Aranjuez will always be my Spanish Rose for whom I would

sell my shoes or starve on some forgotten drizzly street.

Aranjuez, whose laugh I still hear resounding across the miles and years

between us. The sum of human knowledge and experience preserved in the form of

my rose behind the bar of a Cape Town hostel, looking at nights with dark brown eyes

on endless roads slick and sad with rain.

Aranjuez. In her way more grand and beautiful than her namesake, that night

in a strange city half the world away.

Aranjuez, who loved the sun and slept throughout the afternoon in its warm

dusty rays. Who called the crickets vain. Who spoke every word as if it were fresh

and new to her lips.

Who poured African whisky for me and laughed when I made a face. Who

tossed it back herself as if it were water. Whom I never forgave.

Aranjuez, fingertips yellow from eating oranges and her switchblade in her

hand, carving words I didn’t understand into the bar that night we were alone in all

the world.

__________________
"When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." -Isaac Asimov