Color and Light

So there’s this Irish pub, the Harp and Something (it’s always a harp and something). I heard the music was good there, and generally that’s not my thing, but I figured what the hell. I thought maybe I could get Ann to go with me, but she was training the new kid, Alfie. So I went and I got a drink and settled into a spot at the end of the bar.
 
It was loud - like you wouldn’t believe. There were so many people there that sometimes you could scarcely hear the band. Then they took a break, and it started to clear out - it was getting late, and apparently the earlier band had quite a following that was only there to see them. A new batch of people got up on the tiny little stage squashed into the corner, and… yeah, I got distracted for a bit. Bunch of university boys in there, slumming it as it were. I spent a good ten minutes scoping them out, and if I’d had a mind to I could have walked out with three wallets, bare minimum, probably more -- just from that lot, not even counting all the other blokes in the place. But they were alright. Just having a good time, didn’t give any girls any guff or anything. Lord, I was tempted, but I kept my hands to myself. And then I heard this sound.
 
It was a flute, I guess? Not a tin whistle, I know what that is. It was silver and very complicated, lots of little buttons that would raise a little hat off one of the holes when you pressed it. But it was beautiful - like, heart-achingly beautiful. I don’t know what else to call it. And I was just transfixed. Lord, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for someone to get my wallet right then, because I just stared at the girl with the flute, her eyes closed, frowning in concentration as she played. There weren’t any words, of course… just feelings, but it was saying more than you can ever get across with words.
 
I wrote a bunch a couple months back about all the weird stuff that was happening, magic and monsters and things. But straight up - this was the real magic. Not coming from blood or Latin words, or funny scribbles. Just people, and sound. By the end of that song there was not a dry eye in the place, and even the college boys had shut their traps and were just listening.
 
I’ve never been much of a churchgoer, I admit. It’s always such a chore, and I always feel worse about myself and the world when I leave. But this….this is what I always imagined a good church would be. I felt connected, to the other people in the room, but to something larger too. Not like a God (or a monster), but just… people. Just the essence of what it is to be human. There was something True in that music, something more real than the everyday world. It was pure, and Good with a big G, and...essential, like the essence of a thing.
 
This is what art does -- true art. It draws a circle in the sand, makes a sacred space apart from the rest of the world, and says here? Here we will speak things that are True, things that can only be said through music or through paint or through clay. Here we are safe and can let something of our true being shine through, and it will be so pure that it will call to something in everyone who perceives it, and they will feel it too.
 
They played another three quarters of an hour after the first flute song was over, and it was more the standard fare, drinking songs and story songs, including some really dark stuff about dead lovers, but all of it had something of that essence -- like a vibration that had existed for all of time, that was all around every day but we couldn’t hear. It’s just that with all the other instruments and singing, it complicated things, dressed it up. The core was still there, but it was harder to see it - to hear it, I should say.
 
Tom took me to Paris one time. I think he wanted to make sure I was sufficiently cultured before he took me home to mum and dad, back when I thought that was still something that could happen. I wanted to go and see the Impressionists, but he said that was “so very tired”, that no one cared about lily ponds and fields of weeds. No, now it was about ideas, thoughts, truths - not who could paint a garden without their glasses on, things that were, well, like I was saying before: essential. So we went and looked at lots of stuff that was… it was just weird. Cubism, he said it was called, and then the really “good” stuff according to him - surrealism.
 
He went on and on to me, his face all lit up, more than he ever was when he was talking about anything else, really. I said the paintings bothered me and he said yes, it’s supposed to. That’s how you know that it’s true, if it troubles and disturbs something in you, something you thought you knew about the world and then you realize it’s not that way at all. It has to take the everyday and strip it down, lay it bare, turn it upside down and inside out until you don’t recognize it at first, and only by actually putting in some effort could you see back to where it started -- before the face or the guitar or whatever it was was cut up into pieces and put back together. I still have no idea what he was talking about, or at least I didn’t until I heard that music. But in every way that those paintings were weird and unpleasant, this was every bit the opposite -- beautiful in a way that defied words. Maybe it’s by taking the language out of a song that you strip it down to its essence, just like he was saying the painters did by jumbling everything up, making clocks melt and putting peoples’ bodies together the wrong way. Maybe that is what it means to get at the essence of who we are, to find that which is eternal and common to all people, to all living things, and to get you to open your eyes and see in a way you never have before. We all have something that unites us, some common humanity, even if we don’t like each other - Lord knows, I hate Tom with the fire of a thousand suns and [scribbled out several lines]. But there’s something true, something that’s real about all people.
 
And I think that’s what art does. It wakes us up to that essence, the way a song played on a different instrument or with a different meter can become something so different, and yet it’s core stays the same. I guess that’s what Tom meant about his painters; I think that really he was just saying all that because it’s all the rage and he wouldn’t know the essence of humanity if it bit him in the arse. But maybe there’s something to it, I don’t know. I’d rather get my truths through Water Lilies and Sunflowers and whatever that song was, personally. I would rather see truth through Beauty than through… pain, confusion, ugliness, or fear, or whatever it was those paintings were supposed to be doing to you. God, he was such a bastard. Of course that was where he saw “truth.”
 
And now I have a whisky hangover, and those are the absolute worst. Stick to gin, Maggie. Gin has yet to do you wrong.