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If you could meet any famous personality, living or dead, and smack them in the head with a large trout, who would it be?
There's one obvious answer to this—the one everyone knows I'll give. I'm afraid I'll have to upset all of you and not give it. I don't really want to slap that piano fellow with a trout. Or even without a trout! For one thing, his name is odd enough for me to feel some sympathy for him. Jelly Roll Morton. Who names someone Jelly Roll?
Although on the same token, who names someone 1900?
You see what I mean? The fact of his name demands a little respect, even if he really is a complete jackass.
And his music... oh, his music was wonderful. He takes himself far too seriously, what with the dueling and all. But I did win so why should I hold a grudge just because he has a flare for drama and treats the world as if everyone living in it was his own personal prostitute?
The famous personality I would really like to slap with a trout is not quite a person really. A personality, yes. A person, no. Some days, I would really like to slap that statue with a trout. You know the one. Liberty, with her torch and her gown and her eternal promising. On a clear day, you can see her a mile out on the water or more, inspiring the heart to swell with an almost religious sense of awe. Massive. Fantastic. Immense.
Thousands upon thousands of travellers have whispered of her voice, told of her seduction. The highest mountains in the farthest Nowheres on earth are all but deafened by her summons, but she isn't calling to me, and I have never heard her. I know she has a voice. Thirty-three years, five crossings a year, two thousand passengers each time, and how many is that? How many just on this ship can hear her over their dreams, over their voices, over my piano no matter how loud I play? If it started out as a mass delusion, it's escalated to where the ones who haven't succumbed are the outsiders, slightly mad and completely deaf.
It's frustrating. That this... huge green woman can possess people with unimaginable authority, but never once... never... never has she even tried to take me. That's what really bothers me. The fact that I don't belong anywhere is obvious even to a piece of dead metal. Except she's not dead. She is every face that passes me by, cheers for my songs and then forgets me the instant she rears up over the horizon. Some days... some days I want to slap her smug all-knowing authority and say... and say...
"I matter too."
Word count: 440I feel :  discontent |
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I've known for a long time now how it would end. A very long time. I saw the end of the world in a song and... it brought me peace. Knowing it would all be over. Knowing at last... no one—no one but God could make that music.
I go back to that dream when the seas are roughor the crowds in the ballroom beat on me like waves, or when the clinking of the glasses bites like the spray in winter's North—too cold to freeze. I used to find the end of the world through other people. I'd find their music and dive into their memories. I learned to interact—first by re-living their experiences, then by seeking the consciousnesses of th characters through them. I slowly learned to step out of my unwitting host's mind and explore beyond their memories—beyond the places. Beyond the times. In the grand Cathedral of Notre Dame I could hear the choir sing, the priest's sermon—I took communion in a memory of Hagia Sophia, made my confession in London, and witnessed a baptism in Prague all in one day. I even received a blessing from the Pope himself.
I never told Max about those times—not the way I lived them. Oh, he knew I travelled, he knew I dreamed. He knew I could see as vividly in a dream as he could see my fingers on the piano keys. He didn't understand—I didn't want him to—how real my travels often were.
I never told him how it would end—any of it: the ship, the music, the world. People who are used to infinity get uncomfortable in boxes, no matter how big the box is. Even if you put them down in the middle of a box so big they'd never reach the edges if they spent their whole lives running (which often they do anyway), they'll know and they'll hate it.
Of course I can't really know, can I, how everything will turn out? That's what Max would tell me. Then we'd argue and bicker and if I did convince him, what would it achieve? He'd only be miserable about it. You tell a land person you're going to die—doesn't matter if it's 40 years from now—they'll act as if you're already dead. Just like the box. No matter how far away the end is, they act as if they've got their noses pressed against the wall. If I had told Max... he'd have been trapped in this life, thinking he could change anything. He'd wear himself out trying to knock down the walls, and miss what really matters in the meantime.
So Max has his infinity, and I have my 88 keys with more worlds and more time than you could ever fit in a box that immense.
( OOC )I feel : spacy I hear: 88 infinities |
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Which are you more afraid of: Being too gullible and believing something which isn’t true, or being too skeptical and missing out on something important?
I think my way of determining truth must be different from… almost all of the rest of the world. When you live on a boat, truth is whatever works best—not what the encyclopedia tells you. When I was a little boy, Danny taught me that an orphanage is where they put people who have no kids, and a mama is a racehorse. I know now, vaguely, that an orphanage is exactly the opposite, and a mama is… well, I have a notion of what it is. It’s a woman, certainly. But you see, I’ve never had one, and I’ve never met one, so in my reality, a mama is a thoroughbred racehorse, best kind there is. You bet on a mama, you always win. So no, gullibility isn’t something that bothers me, though I suppose I must be very gullible by most standards. It doesn’t matter, because any notions I have about anything will either prove themselves one way or another in their own time, or never come up as things I need to worry about.
Skepticism, though… that’s a difficult one. How can you be gullible and skeptical all in one go? But I have, you see. I confess that every now and then, I do find myself wondering if… maybe… Max was right about things. Maybe I should have let them sell my music. Maybe I should get off this boat, go to Mott Street, find her…
But that isn’t my reality. That isn’t what’s true. This, here, now—this is true. Anything beyond that gangway is a myth. Often it is a beautiful, exciting, delicious myth, filled with sin and glory, heroes and villains as immense as constellations. It may well be that people like Max can live very happily as part of something that never ends, but me? I have to know where the story stops. And my story, my song—that stops where the gangway begins. I was never written into the myth of the world, and I am not a character ment to appear in it. I cannot believe that it’s as easy as Max made it out to be. I can think of a lot of things I’m missing because of that, but in the end, it’s just the same longing you get reading a really wonderful story. You can dream about it, wish as hard as you can, even reach out with a prayer or a song and try to touch it, but it’ll never be anything more than fiction. A really beautiful story.I feel :  anxious |
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Life is… immense. Wise words. Of the hundreds of thousands of voices that spoke to me from the infinite variations of the song of Humanity—of all their melodies, harmonies, and wonderful cacophonies—the jarring arguments of notes without which the song just would not be—that one stayed with me, wrapped its theme around my existence, wove its whisper into my music, and became me.
The world is… immense. I have known lost boys: they trickle down through the cracks of life and find themselves poised at the end of the world. Or the beginning. But they never stay. This… this place between… this is my world.
The world is…
It isn’t hard to lose a child—something so small in a place so huge. It’s a wonder to me that anyone finds their way at all. It seems as if “lost” ought to be a natural default; and yet I do hear legends. They tell me that out there, people build families out of all that rubble—a man and a woman to live and work and find each other, and to make children who are not lost. Who are never lost. A home and a bed to dream in, and every day the firm and steady earth to hold its roots and not let go. Yes, they tell me all of those things. Now and then I catch myself believing them—for a little while. But always they come again—the lost boys—and remind me that I myself live to deny the reality so many immigrants cling to. I am their enigma, and for that, they call me Legendary. Little do they know… they are the legends, too big to try to hold or tame. They are the miracles: every child who is not lost, every step farther from home, every breath they share for love is… immense. Indeed, love is the only song I ever played that survived beyond my piano, outside my world. It was too big for me to hold, and when it reared up against the wind like horsehead waves, I could not hold on.
Letting go. I must have learned it long ago, when I was too young to remember—but old enough to get hurt. Maybe it comes too easily to me, but my world is not a place where people last—where loyalties are rewarded by a lifetime of whatever that mystery is that people seek in each other. If the sea doesn’t swallow them, sooner or later the land will. There are no exceptions except for the one that proves the rule. That’s me: 1900.
There are many who would call me a coward (and have!). Day after day I see heroes pass me by. They are doing something no one has ever done before: they are raising a new world out of the sea. They call it America. They speak of it like a God. America—virgin mother of Liberty, patron of Prosperity and champion of Equality. The new religion, upon whose altar no faith is false. I see her pilgrims sacrifice their gods, their lives, and their children for that dream. The gods betrayed throw tantrums at sea then sulk back to their ex-believers’ forsaken lands. The ones who give their lives are blinded by a coin over each eye and dedicated to the ocean’s glory. By such divine intervention are the rest of us granted safe passage.
The children…
America’s lost boys are her pride and prizes. Yes, pride. I have been more lost than any, and I tell you I would not live in a world ashamed of me. Why should it be? We were born of hope and desperation, we children; we were lost the same way. To mothers who sold their virginity to buy a ticket to a life without fear. To fathers whose sweat and blood fed feudal tables, enslaved by too little pay in a time and place where any job was better than no job. To wives driven to adultery by boredom or abuse. To husbands driven to drink by a longing they had no words for. Justice. America. Be proud of your orphan souls, your unwanted, your unseen. Be proud of the ones misplaced during a struggle for subsistence. Be proud of the ones abandoned who survived to spite the odds. We who have been given nothing save for the heartbeat that is life—we—martyred for the greater good—bear us like scars bravely got in your battle for…
What do you strive for, America? I want to know if you are worth so many lives. How do you justify your disfigurement?
Maybe I’ll learn someday. Maybe the reason will be enough for me to walk that gangplank, let you claim me as one of your lost boys, your scars. Until then, I remain your imaginary friend—the piano man whose songs your pilgrims wear on their arrival, whose music you will never hear.I feel :  confused |
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