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Wednesday, October 13, 2010

One Hundred and Seventy-two

The tin whistle plays and upon the warm breeze floats the cool melody, once blown never to be recalled; released upon the world in the hour before the hour before dawn when night holds sway and day is a remembrance of time gone by and yet to arrive. Long years of learning wash behind the Musician carrying with them all the baggage of his life. Before him lie the notes he has produced, traveling from him in ever widening spheres, each a product of what as gone before in his days upon the earth. To hear his song is to experience his life in his music; music that can only be created by one such as him. For he is long of age and wizened of years gone by, with light yet but still a hope at the end of his tunnel. It is music that weaves the tapestry of his long life and listeners can glean only a fragment of the whole of it yet at once feel the impact of its totality and weight.

His music is carried on the wind, to places well known and to some lost in the dust of history, moving into the small cracks and holes of fractured reality to fill the voids of forgetfulness that litter the landscapes of the world. So the history of those places is forever altered, amended, colored by the softness of the song. Beauty is wrought where the emptiness of memories no longer remembered have left nothingness in their absence. In other places the draught of corruption is amplified by the music. For all that is soft be not always sweet. Flowers grow through cracks in pavement in the hearts of concrete, steel and glass cities while children in other more idyllic places are taken before their time. The music plays no favorites, it deals in life and death with all the dispassionate reserve of an oncologist informing a patient that treatment has failed and perhaps going home now to pass on is the only recourse. As it passes and touches the lives of people, they are changed, and not knowing why or how they become other than once they were; and so go on becoming while friends, lovers, spouses and children can only watch and wonder, for not having heard the music they are left behind.

Moving on, the Musician and his music go forward to work their magic in a world where magic has no place and all magicians are merely the creators of slick illusions… or is that the illusion? Ask the Musician if ever you see him. Perhaps he will answer, perhaps not, but in his music you will hear something of meaning meant just for you, else never the opportunity to ask would have occurred and he would have passed you by without a glance or a note for you from his tin whistle.

The Musician walks bustling highways and lonely back roads all across the world and ever his music is heard in the land by those it is destined to touch and work its magic upon. His boots are worn and scuffed, dusty with the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. Upon his head sits a hat of faded leather. Softened by years of exposure to the elements the hat hides his face, or most of it anyway, so that the casual passerby will see only the thin line of his mouth above a square strong chin and the sharp point of his nose protruding out of shadow. Clad in grey that mimics twilight shadows and fades to black as night creeps into the remnants of a day once sunny and bright, he moves down a dusty street of some out of the way place long forgotten by even the other out of the way places of the world…

…and so comes to Anywhere.

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