Saturday, January 29, 2011

Rhapsody in Blue

Another day for Rhapsody in Blue, just like yesterday, another day when nothing really matters. Having tea with Gershwin.

Bernstein takes me by the hand, and we walk through America, an America that wove itself new and full and bustling out of a million dreams every second, and an orchestra, endlessly stretching until the horizon, plays the Rhapsody in a never ending liquid train of blue that ebbs and flows, comes and goes, like the sea washing this America's shores and the people therein, and all their dreams combined, rising and swirling, hunting and longing, and everything happens without anything, every moment hung up like the tiniest note on a sheet, and yet everything in this marvellously dazzling train that allows us never to stop, never to look back, never to tire, just as it never seems to, never wants to, tire.

Next to me, Bernstein with seeming effortlessness dreams out all the strong and subtle, languid and dancing machinery of piano that keeps this train going, not with his hands (his still gently holding mine) but with his brows, his deep eyes, all the world’s most exquisite pianos rising behind his forehead, stretching out to the orchestra, until the horizon, across the coming and going of this auditory landscape, all features bursting alive and filling everything around us with, yes, this America.

Before the crescendo of crescendos happens, I feel it rising around us, like a wave, storm, a swarm, and for an instant Bernstein leans back at my side, a little sideways, and our ears, now, stretch until the sky, welcoming this inescapable swelling and overwhelming acceleration of our train, lifting us not higher but wider, until we stretch out over all this dream landscape and everything clashes, washes, dives into us and outward, rippling until the end of our orchestra, which has now become this America, just as we have, this vertiginous construct of shimshimmery dreams and realities, and everything happens endlessly interlaced, entangled like an equation birthing boundlessly new equations, until the very horizon around us rises up, folds itself towards us, inward, only to blossom gently with this imagined flower, immeasurably encompassing this gigantic machinery we have been dreaming up, until it all falls away on a whim, it seems, dissipating into the empty space it filled.

Bernstein still holds my hand, and we look, with eyes a little glazed, at the moments stretching out behind us, take a sip of that tea, and continue onward, again, towards the horizon, where else.

1 comment:

lyra said...

wonderful.
thank you for sharing this beautiful flood of blueness, its waves will continue to weave in my memory.