Manifest Dissonance
I was listening to classical music performed on television. I wasn’t just listening. I was remembering, feeling, witnessing. This is what I saw:
Eyes closed, other senses open...
The clash of two cultures played vividly in my mind.
Vibrations of the song passed through my being,
Met in the timeless expanse of memory and history.
The strings propelled the inevitable,
While wind instruments tried to stave off the occupation,
Fighting for one final movement.
They proclaimed loudly:
a people’s right to exist.
The beauty of the music
Combined two disparate civilizations
Into a slow, furious onslaught of time and tempo.
It was easy to see it then,
The conscious spread of Manifest Destiny
Spilling across what had been,
And swallowing it as a noble falsehood,
Only to vomit out that which is.
There was grandeur in the duality of the sound:
A moment of now in the flux of then,
Each note born to live and die in its own brief present.
I could hear, and see,
Through the tears in my mind’s eye,
The tragic change brought on by the strings
As they overpowered the flute,
And left only the echo
Of its once-great voice.
Just as I prepared to cry out
To my ancestors, on both sides of the conflict,
The music ended.
Applause thundered through my pain,
Shattering the vision
Into a thousand shards
Of an incomplete future.
A few shards reflected the long ago.
Most reflected nothing at all,
Only the vibration of a world
Still living in the call of
an imperfect present.
Sometimes art speaks louder than history. Sometimes you must feel the past to truly see the present. Music cuts through brutality and memory, touching the raw core of conflict and humanity. I didn’t fully understand Congreve’s old line until that night:
Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast.
But sometimes, it doesn’t soothe.
Sometimes, it cuts you as it mourns.