"Because all the sounds, once their time is past, enter a vast amalgam of vibrations that merges and travels to the stars. Other sounds get absorbed by material bodies in close proximity, like people, animals, plants, concrete, and dirt. These bodies vibrate in turn and produce their own sounds that will travel to the stars as well. Every audible entity rises to the stratosphere and loses itself in the process." --The Lesser Violin
"The universe has a need to speak. So many voices need to be heard and so many have no instrument to bring them forth. Why the silences when not everything has been said? Why the repetition when unique voices are awaiting? Hands play me and I sing the written songs. I admit my shortcomings. But if the moment comes when music will write itself, out of need or desperation, out of a yearning for beauty, or simply out of nothingness, I am ready to open my body and let the music traverse me." --The Lesser Violin
In this moment my silence is absolute. I let my senses explore the darkest questions. How can evil and marvel coexist as one? How can a wish to destroy turn into a wish to love within seconds? How are the sound of human bodies different from the sound of instruments? Can we use the same notes to write the music of abuse and the music of love? In the same pentagram? Can the notes intermingle with each other as if they originated from the same source, as if they elicited the same sensations? How many musics are there? Really, how many musics touch us deep, deeply?
I like to thank Hope Johnson and the good people of SLING Magazine for publishing an excerpt of THE LESSER VIOLIN, my novel in progress.
The Lesser Violin
"No, not a lament. Ecstasy instead. The sound between common notes. My voice unencumbered. This may be how I sound without sheet music, outside the confines of the pentagram. Those five lines with spaces in between, the iron grid, the field of known sonority, and time, eternal time maybe, but predetermined, fated and a little dead. Were this to be a lament, I would surrender to my moaning."
--The lesser violin
"The air matters in those bars, and the thought of my voice immersed in that rancid miasma of smoke, sweat, alcohol, and the cacophony of other instruments, frightens me. What if I reach the space between half notes? What if I sing like a Roma? Why do I fear the night when at dawn the air will eventually dissipate and strangulate all voices?"
--THE LESSER VIOLIN
The lesser violin.
"I hear a prelude, words I detest for their familiar ring, a chord so rich bathing my skin, and the rings of Saturn, the breath of a long horn, the resounding drum of skin tight, and the butterflies, and the caterpillars, and the pizzicato of fractured fingers, I hear a voice woman and a voice man, the chorus of molten flesh, imprisoned flesh, and the melody of a bite, teeth puncturing, and the long, long whistling sound of air between lies."
--The Lesser Violin
According to E.M. Forster, "characters are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible." In traditional literature those characters are usually human. In order to introduce inanimate objects as characters we will need to learn about their secret lives, that is, their psychology. Can a violin have a secret life? Can a violin be wicked? I think it can, given the right amount of magic. Stay tuned...
"Mornings like this remind me I sing for others. A prostitute? No, not a prostitute. That is not what I am. Even when they touch my open body, even when they rip through me, I still sing my individual harmonic frequencies. They follow the score of a dead master, but I follow my own veins. And I oscillate at will, and go places they detest, for my voice is hoarse, luminous, and sometimes unreal. Who plays whom?" -- The lesser violin
"That is when he plays me hard, digging the Mongol hair, roughing my cords. I sing off tune for the very pleasure of his frustration. And I fill the air with a small grunt, or a squeal, a screech for sure. He sweats then, and turning his left eye long down my neck, he wishes to strangle me. I know he does."
(From THE LESSER VIOLIN)
"He turns on the hallway lights and I hear his steps approaching. He will come to hold me, to watch how I glow in the faint light. Sometimes he licks me just to watch his saliva glistening under that light. He beholds me as a lover, as a body reflecting an amber light that excites him. And sometimes he ejaculates all over me, spasmodic, a whiteness he admires for a short while before whipping it away. All in silence, in the absence of music. I feel violated then. And during the next practice session, I turn into a dissonant beast." --The lesser violin.
"About doubt, much is known, but very little comprehended. When a finger lands on me, poking on a precise spot on my neck, I sense the intention, the very note he wants me to sing. But the smallest shift up towards the scroll of my head or down towards my belly, makes me think he is doubting. Either, he does not know what he wants, or even worse, he dares not listen to me, exploding, cracking the air on the third position of the E string. My E cord, grows out of nothing, now a penetrating truth." --The lesser violin
