by Patri Friedman
12/96 - 4/97
A young man wandered through the chill night, steeped in sorrow and introspection. As he realized, he had mostly brought it on himself. Which only made it worse. So what if she was beautiful, intelligent, all that shit? He should not have let himself care so much, not about her, not about anyone. She was a drug, and even when tolerance had built, withdrawal was a bitch. Goddamn, he needed to cry. Too bad his roommate was entertaining company.
The room was almost empty, the silence yearning to be violated. A few chairs sat scattered, a couch rested in a corner, there was some writing on the walls. The central object was an old piano, not very well tuned. A few keys didn't work, a situation which had inspired more than one to learn quick key transpositions. Sitting in front of this centerpiece was a male of college age wearing an expression of misery. He had a mobile face, with high cheekbones and deep eyes, dark skin and a three AM shadow.
While he wandered, he remembered a common room in a dorm not too far away. It was small, private, and this late at night would probably be deserted. He had gone there with a woman once, long ago. What an appropriate synopsis of how far his life had sunk: That he was going to a room he had once made out in so he could cry in solitude.
Try as the face might to communicate the emotions of its owner, it could not. Somehow, the man sensed this, sensed that the furniture, the walls, and the spinning overhead fan had not yet been brought into his tiny world of pain. It was lonely there, and he did not want to grieve alone. His hands reached out to the keys, and his fingers twitched, then lay at rest, spanning the octaves. He took the deep breath of someone afraid they might cry again at any moment, and began to play.
Fortunately no one in the dorm was still up and about, he sure as hell didn't want company now. As he entered the room, he glanced around, and realized it had changed a bit. Fewer couches, and a piano. One of the skills he had always wanted to learn was piano, but he'd never had the time to continue his childhood lessons. He could bang away a bit, knew a few simple tunes, but had never got the hang of using several fingers at once, or sight-reading any but the simplest of pieces.
He started with a few simple arpeggiated chords, experimenting. As each finger hit an ivory key, a small felt hammer struck a tensioned string, sending waves of pressure through the air. He snorted briefly at the perfection of the metaphor - life the pianist, his soul the string, his body the air - and let the music wash over him.
He wanted to burst into tears, but somehow that seemed wrong, weak, even pathetic, an insufficient manifestation of grief. He needed to sit. The nearest resting position was the piano bench, so he used it. He looked at the piano, and decided that it fit his mood - after all, it anagrammed to "o, pain", which was an accurate enough description of his emotional state.
Although he was not much of a musician, he was a momentary expert on grief, and he listened carefully for the sounds that resonated with his anguished soul. He began to shape them into a simple theme, two main chords of three notes each, two main variations, repeated endlessly. He was the piano, an instrument at the mercy of fate, struck by hammers, forced to respond, hoping he would not snap with an unresonant twang and cause some cosmic pianist to replace him. The room began to pulse as he let his mind sink into the duality of his nature. The fingers hitting the keys were not him, they were all the things that had happened to him over the years, manifesting as notes, moving in and out of harmony.
He sat for a while, his grief straining to turn the rusted tap of his tears until the handle gave way and the liquid began to flow. As he cried, he realized that he did not know exactly why he was crying. There were so many little things, none enough to account for this sharp rush of feelings. Well, except her, of course .But he couldn't blame her, it wasn't like she'd encouraged him in the beginning or even turned him down in the end. To turn him down, she would have had to know, and for her to know, he would have had to let it out of his secret inner world. But he was weak and scared and didn't think he had a chance, and rejection was not something he felt able to handle. Not from her.
To an expert, to a musician, to anyone who was not steeped in depression, the tune would have held little musical content. It was repetitious and thus boring, it didn't move from a beginning to build up tension, there was no resolution. It was not limited by artistic standards of quality or rules about how pieces in the twelve-tone equal-tempered scale should sound, it was not stuck in a diatonic key like major or minor. Not all his chords were musically harmonious, but the vague feeling of disquiet they evoked suited the mood.
He hated himself for his weakness, hated himself for what he saw as a violation of their friendship, hated himself for not even having the balls to own up to his feelings. But silent obsession was so, so easy. No one had to know. For a long time, he refused to admit it to himself. But he was not the obsessive type, and his protective instincts were raising alarms everywhere. It had to stop.
But music theory aside, none of that mattered. Real music is like a movie: orchestrated, practiced, no random note interfering, no stray strand of hair out of place. This was life, unrehearsed, genuine. The piece was pain and pain was the piece, and with every note he felt his soul shudder. As he speeded up, anger built, anger at those who had caused this, by action or inaction, but mostly anger at himself. When he could sustain the pace no longer, he slowed quickly, exhausted by his own emotions, and the slow, delicate repetition of the chords evoked an exquisitely painful feeling of grief. The piano was the ultimate instrument and this the perfect concert hall, each note was a knife twisting, a scab healing, a scar forming.
He saw her less often, changed his mental attitude, tried to let things drift back to normal. They had been friends before, they could be friends again, right? She didn't know anything had changed, so why should anything change? Of course, things don't work like that. It was easy to tell himself he didn't care, and when she wasn't around, he believed it. But the sight of her face, the smell of her hair, the sound of her voice, the touch of her hands were all more than his will could stand. He spent their time apart climbing cliffs of denial, only to have her presence send him plunging to the rocky base. There was no top to reach, no safe summit on which to stand and survey his accomplishment with pride and disdain.
The room was unable to resist the unearthly strains that it surrounded. Every element of it was drawn in, disappeared from the blurry real world and re-formed in the crystal agony inside the pianists head. He changed the rhythm for each, began to play with the harmony. For the couch, he added a fourth note, making some of the chords into sevenths, some into vaguely inharmonic creations that western music gives no name. For the chairs, he played the chords as a whole, unarpeggiated, his unpracticed fingers stretching to reach the notes. Each piece of grafitti had its own variation, until every detail of the room had been worked into the piece. Having been included, the room began to understand, to emote, to take on an aspect of wretchedness. Despondency reigned supreme.
And so, here he was, in a little room by himself, wondering how to break the cycle, how to end the pain, how to free himself from the addiction. The tears slowed, and finally stopped. His vacant eyes focused on the pattern of black and white keys, the sharp distinctions between notes. So unlike life. He began to play, at first idly, then passionately.
He could not keep it going for long. As the messages passed from his heart to his head to his hands, he performed some magic transformation from the emotional to the frequency domain. He was pouring out his hate, his love, his weary woeful inadequacy, giving it all to the piece. Eventually, without a technical resolution of the tension or anything we would recognize as an end, it trailed off into an uncomfortable silence, fraught with wonder.
If beauty in music is defined as the ability to evoke an emotional response in the listener, no Mozart or Beethoven composition could match this. He looked within himself, and found an unexpected tranquility. He felt empty and drained, but calm, as though pouring out his feelings had actually banished them. For the first time in weeks, there were no negative emotions. He was not naive enough to expect the mood to last, but he knew that when it broke, when he sunk again into that black depression, there would be a little room with an old piano waiting to hear his pain.
Last Modified: September 8th, 1998
Patri Friedman / patri@izzy.com