Tuesday, May 6, 2008


With a song in my heart
keeps playing in my head, which is surprising since I scarcely know the song, not knowing the words, rather than sing, it hums through me.

This morning I remembered that I forgot something, some little element of the story (Echo) that I had scrawled into a notebook, but that I forgot about when I wrote out the chapter it would be in ( Voices). Some element seemingly trivial but which I feel carries some undercurrent, some weight of meaning. One perhaps not likely to be measured as so by anyone but me, but still I feel it so, so I long to include it. It took a little bit of time to figure out where to work it in, and even now that I've typed it up in there, it is a bit like a sticky note shoved in-between paragraphs. I will have to go back in and work on it some more. But I am happy just thinking of it, just floating about with it. I had forgotten the music in the garden, classical I thought, but I do believe A Song in my Heart is vying to be included today. I see a garden at night, moonlight streaming down, stars over head, and music mixed with cricket song, flowing through the flowers along with the lightest breeze. Sights, scents, sounds, carried gently through, from one to the other. Mikiyoshi sleeps (inside the house), and Koji stands in the doorway (of the barn), peering out into the garden and listens. It is a calm moment, a peaceful time, but one only known in the fleeting hours of sleeping. Only in the nighttime summer dark. In the morning with the blazing sun, clamoring and chaos return. So I am concerned about mood and atmosphere, perhaps it breaks it up being/happening right there, but that seems to be where I like it best, a small oasis of time. Calm and still, nestled among an emotional whirlwind.

I feel a pull to find which songs they are, so I can fully hear them, and know that space. But I know me, and I should not give myself over to it, for it will take today, and tomorrow, at the very least. And I need to exercise, and write, and do all (well some of them at least) the wonderful domestic things that come along with the gift of loved ones (and I haven't but dipped the tip of my little pinky toe into the blogosphere of late), but how I long to spend my day chasing songs. (to be a cat chasing butterflies)

After quite a bit of researching, I still haven't found the music box song. I feel the need for it to say everything to everyone in the story (to speak for them, and to them), and to sort of wrap up the meaning of the whole thing, a lot, too much really, for just one song written by someone else to be able to do.

So far I am leaning towards Bambi's Love is a Song

Love is a song that never ends
Life may be swift and fleeting
Hope may die yet love's beautiful music
Comes each day like the dawn

Love is a song that never ends
One simple theme repeating
Like the voice of heavenly choir
Love's sweet music flows on

The last rose of summer, and asleep in the deep, are both too dark, and the magic flute comes from an opera I feel I know nothing about, even after reading about it on wikipedia. I want a song that will work, for parental love, and romantic love, to admit the tragic but still hold strong to some sort of life magic. What other kind of song should a box hold. To be wound, and found, to be closed and opened. That is the thing of it of course, you have to wind it, and you have to open it. It is always there already, waiting, unplayed, unknown, till that moment.
As you can tell, I think of music, of sound, as another sort of element, presence, in the story, a connecting one.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

What beautiful and evocative writing, Taffiny. I love how song weaves it way into your thoughts and words and so into your story. It creates what one might think of as a complete tapestry.
And don't music box songs just hold such magic?!

Unknown said...

I wanted to add, I'm so sorry to hear about the death of Bob's gran. Strength and sympathy to you and yours.

Taffiny said...

Vanilla,

:) Thanks. I hadn't thought about it that way (duh) that the reason I can't help but weave songs into my stories is because they are always weaving themselves into me.

And yes music box songs do!

Thanks, he seems to be doing better, but it has shaken him a bit, with the sadness of loss, and the realization that time here is finite.