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Phillip Glass

Posted on April 25, 2003 in Book of Days Culture

Note: This is tenth in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: You hear music in the background.

No I don’t. I hear the hmmming buzz of a computer. I hear a wash machine tossing water and clothes about. I hear a fan humming, pulsing, beating in a rhythm more regular and faithful to timing than any human heart I have known. Huffing and puffing it goes, orbiting around the central shaft. Music that Phillip Glass might enjoy as a start of several hours of sly melody, subtly changing from the thing you were hearing when it began into something completely differently, a fact that catches you when you tune out for a while and then return, humming that melody you were hearing last only to find that a new and strange order of notes has seized the chords.

Phillip Glass. The name suggests transparency. His music sets tones between you and the things that lie within finger reach and past that. The melody? Celebrations. Repeated calesthetics and koans. A thousand happy monks chanting as they take up the rakes that they use to rake the gravel into sea waves around the rocks and plunk the teeth rapidly, skillfully. Each tooth honed to a note that sounds hollow. Around each silence is a sound, a clear thought. Finger taps that rise, do arabesques, and carry you to his nirvana.

Enter a world where the spinning fan, the stroking washer, the thumps of the neighbor walking down the hall on the other side of the wall, the cries and shouts of a teenaged boy running around too late, the rasp of a car engine starting are of the Otherworld, that which is fey. Where people are the fairies and the repetitions of the imagination are mortal and flesh-fast.

The repetitions of the imagination are mortal and flesh-fast.

The repetitions of the imagination are mortal and flesh-fast.

Is the myth apparent?




Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.

Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Once, with another woman…

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