Music Soothes the Savage Beast

I was relaxing last night, playing Dance, Dance, Revolution (ok - I did mention I'm a geek, right??), and it hit me....What a wonderful gift is music.  

And not just the lyrics sung along to the instruments, but the music, itself.  Waves of harmony, resonating through the air, to vibrate them three tiny bones in the ear.  It's a delicate system, such a small collusion of things, to bring sound to the brain.  What a marvel.  

Add a voice, wavering in, above, below, and in time with the instrumental accompaniment, and you can achieve distilled joy, bliss, anger, sorrow, or any emotion in between.

Granted, not all music is good music.  There is some commercially produced crap out there that was simply written, played, and recorded with only the mechanics of money in mind, and you can always tell which fall into this category.

But the music written with feeling - THAT comes through loud and clear, and I revel in it.

Prison of the Mind

Now, keep in mind that this is an old work - about a decade or so ago.... but I find this super-short story just as moving today as I did when I wrote it.... Enjoy.

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I pound against the rainbow hued glass walls of my prison beyond the point of pain, slamming my fists against the unyielding surface until even my arms grow numb. I scream and beg and plead for mercy until I am too hoarse to send even a whisper up the funnel shaped ceiling. A torrent of tears flood from my eyes as I curl up on the bowl shaped floor. I cry myself to sleep, exhausted both physically and mentally.

I awake oddly refreshed, and suppress the wave of insanity that demands I continue the cycle, pounding, screaming and crying until I am no longer me, but some shapeless mass of cringing emotions and nerves ready to be shaped by the malevolent presence that would free me.

No. Not free me. Freedom is now beyond my grasp, forever lost to me. Unless. . . .

I MUST ESCAPE!!!

I throw myself bodily against my prison wall, beginning the cycle anew. My mind splinters into fragments of feelings. Rage, pain, terror, panic all compete with my rational being for the ultimate control. Control. What a tremendous joke. I have no control left. That, too, was stolen from me by my captor.

I feel my hands. The pain gains control of the shattered fragments of my mind. I focus on nothing but the red hue of my pain. It is a living thing, sucking my soul, this pain. A dry croak rips from my throat, demanding attention. Water. I must have water.

I stop pounding for a second, feeling this sensation of having a dry throat. This feeling, too, seems to be a living thing, capturing my attention. Without pause, there is a glass in my hand. I can feel the moisture of condensation on the outside of the glass; it feels cool and soothing on my sore skin. The water feels good against my dry lips, my raw throat. The glass is empty, and I hurl it against the wall. The glass shatters against the prison wall, the shards spreading against the unyielding collage of colors like water across tile. Before they hit the floor, they are gone.

It felt good, that bit of control. The act of violence snaps the fragments of my mind to a whole. Yes. For a while, I am free of the madness that stretches its fingers towards me. I can think, I can remember. I remember why I am here.

An innocent day. An ancient bottle, stuck on the top shelf of an equally ancient shop, in a tumbledown shack of a curio shop in India. The beautiful swirl of colors glinting in the dusty sunlight. My longing to have the antique in my hands. The wide, blackened teeth smile of the wizened shopkeeper as he takes it from the shelf.  The old glass stopper, made of the same myriad color glass, flaring out from the neck of the bottle then tapering to a delicate point. Tight, the stopper, hard to remove. Inside the bottle the scrap of ancient parchment. Giddy with curiosity, translating the words. Blackness and light. Here.

A fire ignites behind my eyes as the rage builds. Remember the words! Those words trapped me here, those words changed my world, and those words changed my being. Those words so violated me, those hateful words. I need to remember them, to scream them out!

I feel the need to splatter myself against the walls of glass to end this existence, but I cannot. I traded my freedom for the dream, the unreal. With those spoken words I imprisoned myself.

I am the genie in the bottle.