...of a rest

Did not Odysseus strive to reach his wife kid dog and palace - you remember him? ah many of your hands need washing, I can see - too few pink palms… through countless trials and tribulations, too, remember the delays, the teases - Sirens, enchanters, giants lurking - one two three ten twelve thirty troubles, trials, tribulations, did I say? - lures of ladies, comforts of creatures - in wait like rocks - to bring the wayfarer down, to sink his soul to his sandals. So, too, we depart from the tonic, we journey farther and farther afield - yes, we digress - until it seems we’ve broken all ties with the known world, we are farther away than anyone has ever been, we are at the edge of the earth, we can forhear… forehear the Wagnerian downfall, we stand at the brink… the brink that splashes into silence… when… lo, behold… magically… the captain, the composer, sees a way, steers us through the storm, and we modulate, do we not? sail ride walk to the warm and welcoming hearth again, the hiking path winds but takes us to our hotel in safety just as the signs said they would: what relief at what a climax… the sight of a spire, familiar stones at one’s feet, the smell of a pot on the stove. Nice walk, good hike, healthy return.
Poor Miss Rudolph. Glad you’re back. Nice of you to cough in the hall. No music there.
Or shall we let a cough be music? music made of cough and sniffle? chance and error? the music of the blown nose, the phone call, the unwrapper’s annoying rattle? With our new instruments of bedvilment might we not record all sorts of sounds out there in the world that calls itself - that calls themselves - real; where squeaks and squeals and screams are on the menu, where dins assails us by the dozens - the crinkle of cellophane, whishiss of small talk, the fanning of five hundred programs - where we fill our ears with one noise in order not to hear another… yes, record, preserve not only the roil of the sea but the oink of pigs and moos of cattle, the wind rattling the cornstalks like the hand of an enemy on the knob, and put them in… in the realm of majesty, of beauty, of purity, in… in music, let them in - poor Miss Rudolph’s cough included - why? - why would we come to such a detrimental thought? or why should we learn to sigh at silence as if it were a sweet in the mouth, as if it were a pillow soft as a sofa, why should we order our instruments off! as if silence were an end? Only to invite the ruckus - of which we are the ruck - to rumpus us, to ruin our holy space?
[………………………………………………………………………………………………………........…]
Just then we had a silence, did you hear? a rest. Broken like a pane of glass by… explanations.

[Middle C, Gass, W. H.]