Op. 41 in G Minor - 'Winter By The Sea' (548 hits)
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Submitted by Zampano (View user info) at 2007-04-30 17:31:28 EDT
A short, simple act.
Opus 41 in G Minor - 'Winter By The Sea'
I play music. First I strike at chords pulled from childhood memory with a viola carried from over the years, but the strings are rusty, the notes oily in their lack of tonality. Then I put on my favorite symphonies of the Baroque and Romantic masters, but the morning-field woodwinds are too soft and the hundred-strong choirs convince me of the world's end. I pull up the needle and the music stops, though the gramophone keeps spinning. The roaring returns, but I must correct myself: it hasn't returned because it was never gone. Beneath half-remembered bow strikes I could hear it, coming on the regular breathing cycle of a dying god. 'O Liszt,' I lament to my record, 'you just weren't strong enough.'
Crack. Vinyl hemispheres crunch under my feet. The viola thrown against a chair—the chair, the only ornamentation of the tower's steel belly—makes a noise too, but it is made of clacks and twangs and splintery sounds. I walk up the stairs.
The roar is a gut-thing, a cloud-behind-the-eyelids sound, a sensation that squeezes out the marrow of bones. First comes the great surge, an orchestration of a billion-billion waterdrips striking stone at the same time. Swell, expand, mist the chilled air! Then the great retreat, and frothy rivulets run between mottled limestone and basalt knobs. Repeat unto the end of all things. Ice fangs grows on the lip where land and sea make lovers' promises. The bases of these shiny canines run for many hundreds of feet, and spiderweb up the side of the lighthouse, past the porthole through which I watch the blue-grey-blue-white world. Frosty handprints have cleared a small bit of glass, but they are on the outside of the window, and it's twenty, thirty feet to the ground.
Curious.
I look down. The staircase is a nautilus shell chasing me to the very top. I like this, for some reason. I could dangle my legs over the edge and try to hear the waves in its many chambers while sipping at coffee. Instead I hear the roar coming from all angles, all realities, all shades of what is, what was, and what will be. And I only have tea left anyway. From the top I observe that a clumsy or ill-tempered painter has smeared the distinction where water and sky should meet. The ocean is one great dishevelment of water and pregnant cloud-bellies, hanging low, splitting open with snow. My breath fogs against the glass. Past the feverish waves, the water has frozen into great plates of ice, perfectly flat but fathoms deep, hidden, rooted in the place where the sun has given up. Nothing lives down there but the large-jawed things of aborted imaginations. From my roost atop the tower, beside this shattered lamp that once fed light for mariners miles from home, I listen to the moans of virginal love toiled and sown between the ice plates. It is a poor substitute for the whale-song of summer.
Fair-haired angels try to play their own written concertos for me, and I listen in earnest only for a bit while I watch something of more interest. It is the steamer Gericault, waylaid for many anxious weeks by the storms. I've lost count of the days I've sat idly, first on the coast with my boots soaked in the autumnal tides, and then from my balcony atop the tower, waiting to see that tendril of smoke making its way into the harbor. I wave the angels away with a noncommittal 'Shoo,' for the Gericault has been trapped now for an hour between the ice sheets. I can hear steel buckling between the rush-roar-retreat of waves and the ice shifting. It starts to list, it starts to founder. It is disappearing into the nothingness beneath the surface. I grab my gloves and heaviest jacket while the angels try to play me another tune, or tell me to look into the very bottom of my heart, so that I might find the kindness to spare a dime for a player down on his luck. These ethereal paupers, I wave at them as though at gnats plaguing a picnic. They might not even be real.
I take my first steps onto the coast, where the waves have frozen completely. It's a continuous ice-plate from here to the askew Gericault, but I feel its weaknesses under my toes. If only I could keep the winds from biting! I hum some ostinato, my trekking mantra. The lighthouse begins to fade behind me, the ship to plummet before me, and the ever-yawning mouth of seas too wide to comprehend, much less defeat, stretching open to accept me at the first misplaced step, the first knife-point contact with water as cold as the empty gulf between the stars. The angels snicker at my back, and I wish them things better left unsaid.
The boilers aboard the Gericault wait until I am near the gash in the ice that its twisted hull has made before exploding. Steel rips, tears, like mere pages out of a newspaper. Fragments hold in the air for a moment, pirouette, and splatter gracelessly across the shelf of white. The steamer is a beast torn in two, and for a moment it can be heard crying. Maybe, in its youth, it had envisioned itself doing many things greater than this. Was its death supposed to be a majestic one? Fallen in the line of combat? Respectfully retired and scrapped with the highest esteem? Only the Gericault knows, and it can cry in the only voice it knows: frigid water rushing in on bared rooms, tumbling machinery, and barely-living men missing limbs asking wordlessly for mercy. With a tip of its stern and a hiss of bubbles, the Gericault disappears to feed the ghastly things of the abyss. Flotsam. Jetsam. Whatever you might call the dying, the dead, the never-realized. They all bob for a moment beside crates and the fragments of a ruined lifeboat. They are weeping diamonds and little glints of glass.
I stand over them, at the very edge of the ice. I can't be real. I am an apparition, surely, because only one sailor acknowledges me. 'Savior!' he shouts. The poor man. There is hope in his voice.
'No,' I say. I want to elaborate, but this man clings to the side of a barrel. He is not the one I want. Amongst them I look at their personal islands, and while I wait they fall prey to the greedy things under the ice. Plop. Splish. The one on the barrel reaches out his hand for me the whole time, but I wave it away. 'Shoo.' His eyes are soldered shut with frost, but still he reaches out, even when something wraps around his dangling, unfeeling feet and drag him down. To the end, he believed.
There is one left, a sailor who does not see me, clinging to a crate that dips above and below the water. I can read 'AIL' on the side, and reach out my hand. 'I'm here.'
The sailor turns his head, lifts his remaining hand, and is plucked under. Not so much as a drop misplaced. I reach out and pull out the box while relics of the Gericault sailors return to the surface. Shredded shirts, a loosely-tied boot. The ice is starting to close up again.
I lift off the top of the crate and start to sift through the contents. Three mailbags, stuffed to the brim with letters for the islanders. I find the letter addressed me on the top of the pile in the middle bag. There on the ice, with the wind gnawing rawly at my face, and long shadows darting under the ice at my feet, I tear open the envelope and read the letter within:
I miss you too.
All smiles, especially because I don't think she remembers who I am.
User Reviews
Submitted by ih8u2man (user info) at 2007-08-06 14:07:48 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Really cool.
Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2007-08-06 13:52:38 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2007-08-06 13:51:16 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Zampano, despite your silence, I offer you;
THIS information, for you to write a tale around.
THE PLACE: A heretofore undiscovered planet in a galaxy unfortunately close to ours.
THE TIME: The Year 1011 of the Second Coming of the Sun. (Probably unnecessary clarification; Not Earth years/timeline)
FEATURING: A pacifistic sentient race who have been discovered by Humans. They have powers the like of which we've never seen...
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Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2007-08-06 13:36:06 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
You could maybe be DeadToast's match up, haiku hasn't shown up either. He and cowman apparently live together. Coincidence? I think not. Sabotage!
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Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2007-08-06 13:34:44 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Suggestion, Zampano. I, a totally arbitrary and nonbiased observer, could give you a scenario. Then at least you get to write, and if someone else forfeits, that can be your match up.
Jack, muscling in on your turf here, hope you don't mind?
Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2007-05-01 17:56:44 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by Merlina (user info) at 2007-05-01 06:23:18 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by ChaosJester (user info) at 2007-05-01 03:54:06 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
A little difficlt to make it all the way through, but the imagery is well worth it.
For some reason, this reminds me of Mr. Mellville's work (perhaps nautical setting combined with the intricate detail)
At any rate, Good Show, Old Bean...
Submitted by sparkle_pink (user info) at 2007-05-01 02:14:14 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Lungfish, you are right.
Submitted by TuTs (user info) at 2007-04-30 20:55:14 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
And then rupunzel threw down her golden hair......
Submitted by lungfish (user info) at 2007-04-30 19:27:56 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This is interesting. You might consider changing, however, "Baroque" to "Classical," as the symphony as it is normally defined didn't really evolve until the Classical period (as it is normally defined). (The Baroque "Sinfonia" being something quite different.)
As always, I could be wrong.
Interesting.
Submitted by ampersand (user info) at 2007-04-30 19:26:15 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
the hundred-strong choirs convince me of the world's end.
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2007-04-30 17:43:07 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I can't quite decide why I like this so much.