I Write Because I Have No Other Instrument

 Like many youngsters I took music lessons more to please my parents than to fulfill some melodic inclination within. My buddy Dan from the previous post, and I would dutifully bicycle over to Mrs Stupp’s house, a landmark we failed to seek out on the previous trip with the “way back machine.” I vaguely recall a tarantella duet from one of her sponsored “student concerts.” The memory is faint, and probably best forgotten, along with my three-chord, two song fling with the guitar in high school.

As I lie here watching a video on Irish airs, and find myself profoundly saddened by the fact that I cannot make music. I have a decent voice and have used it in musicals, choirs and choruses throughout my life. Wonderful memories of singing alone and in groups - but exclusively music written by others. I cannot pick up any instrument and follow a score, let alone improvise or compose. It is, as I said, a source of sadness and not a little envy.

So when I write, perhaps because of my background in theater where the written word must be spoken or sung, I am constantly aware of the aural quality of the words. I do not mean just how the words would actually sound if read, but also how the words relate to one and other tonally on the page.

That is not always a good thing as sometimes the melody of the narrative takes control, resulting in a composition where the intended meaning can be lost or distorted by those melodic demands. The result can be better, more pleasing writing, that nonetheless distorts the communicative motivation that originally led pen to paper, fingers to keyboard.

My wife often laments the fact that my copious consumption of the written word is skewed 80 % fiction 20% non. I imagine my love of fiction stems from a variety of motives. First, non-fiction is obviously restrained by an obligatory relationship to the truth, a requirement obviously cast aside when the source of the narrative has political or commercial aspirations. But those who would create narratives that are legitimate attempts to convey accurate portrayals of the world as it actually exists - nonfiction writers - are the literary equivalent of hobbles on a racehorse. Second, events that occur in “a galaxy long ago and far away” are forever closed to them, as are the adventures of protagonists living on a desert planet, or attending classes at a school for witches and wizards.

Mind you, I am not denigrating the truly wonderful and seemingly magical worlds I encounter in Nature, National Geographic, and Science News. But they are narratives closely constrained by truth, a barrier I find limiting in those narratives I read, and often unfortunately, unacceptable in those I write.

To steal a warning from the old sci-fi series, “Lost in Space,” “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!” My inclination to favor an engaging narrative over one that clings tightly to the dictates of the actual, truthful, unembellished, reality can result in what less compassionate, less understanding individuals might call lies. For example, while living in Vienna, Austria, from 1959 to 1961 One day while rambling around the inner city, I chanced upon a rehearsal of The Vienna Choir Boys. Uninvited, I slipped into the back of the church. They were singing a song I knew, so I sang along - admittedly inaudibly. They stopped to get advice from their director, and I slipped out. Now, can you really blame me if, in a later sixth-grade retelling of the event, the description leaned to, “Yes, I had a chance to sing with The Vienna Choirboys?”

Harmless? Of course, but it was one of those little steps that could lead one to treat the line between fact and fiction cavalierly. Perhaps that is why I prefer fiction to reportage. It admits right up front “Hey! I am making this up! Cool, huh?” Or perhaps it is because I read so much fiction that I am inclined to easily spot it in the rhetoric that surrounds us in the “real world,” and allow it, sometimes unintentionally harmfully, in my own writing. 

In my own defense, when my literary excesses cause pain to others, it is, in the larger field of human activity a little thing. Uncomfortable for a dyad, but unknown and unimportant to society as a whole. A minor foible on any but an interpersonal scale. Nonetheless, admittedly painful at that level.

Those lesser emotion ripples become infinitely more important when these flawed narratives are voiced by one who seeks the most powerful political position in the world: “I respect women!” “I’m a highly functioning genius!” “I’m a multibillionaire!” “I built my fortune all by myself!” “I hit the ball out of the park!”

Yeah. And I bet you sang with The Vienna Choirboys.