Music, my friend, is the salt of speech and its sugar, life flowing from the sound of forgotten things, a soul hurtling with all its senses, intuition and disappointments towards joy. Music carries you, buries you, wounds you, cleanses you and flings open the windows of your memories, childhood and nostalgia. It doesn’t matter if, as a child, you loved the sound of oud strings in the songs of Mehad Hamad or Ali bin Rugha, humming them to yourself by valleys, streams or mountains, or under the shade of palm trees; or if you used to listen to Mozart, Beethoven or Bach on the balcony of your apartment in any of the world’s capitals. For music is music, descended from one pure lineage, one race, one wondrous source. It knows neither racism nor bondage. It’s the daughter of beauty, and the mother of freedom and wonder, flying wingless to distant horizons, breaking through the boundaries of place, language and ideology, falling over thresholds, hills and memories without injuring itself, without its blood curdling or its branches drying up.
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Unbroken and ceaseless, music is what ties people to the memory of land, blood, war, birth, tears and laughter. It’s the creaking of a child’s cradle, and the crutch of old age that leads to serene springs. It’s a conjunction in spoken Arabic, but also the root of language and its branches. My friend, don’t look for music in the markets, for it’s too pure to be bought or sold. You only have to listen to the breeze blowing through the branches of a tree in the courtyard of your house, or open the windows of your soul to water bubbling in brooks, or close your eyes and listen to a dove cooing on the outskirts of a village to announce the start of summer. Or imagine a mountain shepherdess’s voice leading her flock and the sweet sound of a reed flute. Hear the steps of a woman rushing to an appointment she has eagerly awaited for long years. Her footfalls will prompt you: What is music?
Music is a tear on a forgotten rock in the mountains, or a drop of water carried by a bird flying swiftly to its nest, or the sound of a window swinging shut in an ancient mud house.
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Sometimes, music is a deadly arrow in the heart of time, life and ideology that forbids joy, burying it or hanging it on the gallows of illusion, or else it’s a knife that banishes the darkness of speech. Music is a seedling that we plant and water with joy, or occasionally with sorrow, so one day we can reap and scatter it like roses upon the train of time hurtling towards war and death. Perhaps it will dissolve the hatred in the hearts of generals and soldiers so that they return to their wives and children. Perhaps they’ll abandon their bloodlust for a day, just one day, and not commit the crime of Cain, remembering instead the thresholds of their cozy homes and the songs of their wives.
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I fear that conversation about music goes on and on without ever getting close to it. Music escapes the prison of speech and writing to penetrate the expanse and the heart. I see it now, surrounded by lovers, friends and enemies, as it passes into the distance, like a cloud carrying thunder, rain, disaster and the voices of martyrs. I see a street cleaner from Kerala walking around Ruwi listening to the music of his country. I see a woman at the foot of a mountain overlooking Phewa Lake, carrying water, wine and music down the temple road. I see her sitting on the doorstep of a cafe, making drinks and Buddhist charms for temple-goers and tourists fed up with Europe’s streets and its murderous modernity. I see dreamers disguising their dreams with music, revolutionaries igniting their revolution with music, exiles carrying music with the soil of their homelands. I see generals bringing music to fateful battles, using it to inflame the lust for blood in the hearts and dreams of their soldiers.
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Caravan of old age’s anxieties, music leads us to the tree we left to die because of drought and our sins. Music worries about itself as it coaches the Sufi’s finger or the dancer’s foot. It wounds and is wounded, it is the wound, it’s blood and tears, and also the scent of a lover’s presence or absence.
Dear music, everyone loves your fruits, sorrows, blood, nostalgia, madness and purity. Everyone tries to scatter you on his soil: general, prisoner, dancer, shepherd, poet, traveler, the dead, the exiled, the murderer and the murdered. Everyone turns to you and returns wounded or heartbroken. You collector of contradictions, stealer of light, inspirer of lovers’ dreams: please be kind to the tears of the weary.
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Are you standing or sitting? It doesn’t matter, for what’s important is that, in the end, music raises your spirits to the heights of wonder or plumbs the depths of your pain. It perches on the balcony, watching its enemies and madmen roam the streets at night. A poet will tell you that music ends with a thousand notes because it lifts us up to its worlds and its wounds. The grammarian will write music below the line so its voice doesn’t escape, but it’ll surprise him in his sleep, shattering his rigid rules and soaring up from the window toward the expanse flush with metaphor.
Music has the capacity to drag us down to the depths of its astonishment and up to the hills of its desire, penetrating the soul’s farthest reaches to awaken within us memories, tears, joys and disappointments. It can abduct us from reality and transport us into its aesthetic realm, exhume our longings, and make lovers weep. On balconies and in alleyways, music will remain eternal, uniting poor and affluent alike in its love.
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The Blood of Solitude
Writing is the most thankless of acts, utterly, terrifyingly thankless, stealing time, solitude, age and ideas, giving us nothing in return but fatigue and alienation.
At home, on the road, in the morning, at the cafe, in my child’s laughter, in the thirst of the trees by my house, in the absence of friends, in the embers of nostalgia or the desolation of loss, writing is my master. And yet, though I’m weary and despondent, it is my last refuge.
I dream about writing that offers insights, looks for the shadows of animate and inanimate objects, and plumbs the depth of details, unapologetically biased towards the marginal. I look for writing that flows from pain.
I write because writing is the voice that expresses my being in this fleeting, deceptive and illusory life. I write to catch an ephemeral thought in the morning, or in a story, or in childhood. I write because writing springs from eternal beauty, sailing through oblivion, marginalization and darkness.
I write to make the pain that tears our souls more beautiful and less painful.
Writing was like a spring for the first man, the one who drew his fear on cave walls. His drawings turned into words that tilled the earth and hunted strange beasts. That first man’s drawings tumbled down from cave walls and sprouted wings, then turned into poems that flew up to the skies of language.
Writing is action, not reaction. It’s a wound, not blood. It springs from human light, never from ugly or hateful desire. At its deepest, writing is resistance to marginalization, not a search for light.
I write to make the voices of mountain shepherds more tender in spirit. I write to cleanse the woman headed for the spring, toward death and loss, to soothe her with words and tears.
Solitude and writing are the blood and voice of one being. They are the music of the soul to which only a few listen. Solitude is a woman walking languidly to the desert, whom I pursue like a blind man following his foresight. Writing is a clear stream from which I drink so that the killers of life, beauty and peace can’t assassinate me.
Writing is a field we till every morning with dreams, words and ideas, while solitude is the rain that makes the field bloom after a time or after a lifetime.
All glory to writing and to solitude!
Write about your solitude, the solitude of the tree in the forest, the loneliness of the stream in the mountains, the sadness of the poet in the poem. Write about the solitude of writing, noble, pure solitude that swaddles the soul in silence. Solitude teaches your heart that light incinerates butterflies and massacres knowledge. Only shadows perceive the true nature of things and their aesthetic essence.
So don’t follow the sun of the generals or the lights of illusion. Like a Sufi, you must listen to what the shadows say. Watch the child’s wonder in a mirror, contemplate the waitress’s sadness in a cafe or in a poem. Be like a blind man leading a flock of his stories in the mirrors of time.
Writing that eludes me, fleeing like a mountain goat from the cage of paper and screen; writing that burrows behind thresholds, that emerges from the depths of simple thoughts; writing that is concealed or revealed by language, or flows from the margins or shadows; writing that plumbs the depths of pain and joy; writing that is dream, reality and imagination, that captures present and future moments; writing that tortures me like a blind executioner or amazes me like a child’s laughter; writing that binds me to an idea as if I were a criminal in a courtroom; writing that is the root and the tree, the shadow and the silhouette, the shepherd and the reed flute: that’s the writing I think of, always.
Pain will speak about the solitude of speech, of mountain streams and trees, of the poet, the prisoner and the shepherd. At night a blind bird will sing about the shadows of solitude searching for a missing Sufi. The blind bird’s song will raise a dead child from his grave and lead him to distant mountain springs, where he’ll sleep under a lonely tree. As he slumbers, the tree will ask, “What does an orphan do with an absent woman’s music?”
