The Young Man and The Flute

Once there was a young man who left home in search of a way to make his mark on the world. One day in his journeying he came to a forest, where he heard the sound of a flute. It was such a beautiful sound that he entered the forest in search of it. 

But the sound came from deeper in the forest than he had guessed. Even after several hours of his pursuing it, it still sounded in the distance, and then not at all. It grew dark. The young man took shelter in the hollow of a large tree and the next morning sought a way out of the forest. About mid-morning he heard the flute again, but he did not go in search of it. Instead he cursed it for leading him astray. "Perhaps," he thought, "it will even prove to have led me to my death."

But that afternoon he stumbled upon a stream where a bearded old man sat playing a wooden flute, making the sparkles on the water scatter and dance in intricate patterns according to the melodies he played. As the young man listened and watched, he was overcome with a desire to learn the same skill. He went up to the old man and begged to be taught. 

"Ah, it's not what you think," the old man said. But the young man persisted and at length convinced the old man to take him on as a pupil.

So the young man stayed and learned the secrets of the flute. He learned the melodies to summon starlight and to make it fringe the pine boughs, and the melodies to make moonlight fall in soft rustles of light as if it were a lovely woman letting down her golden hair. Sunlight, the young man discovered, was more difficult--like untamed, flashing horses. Yet eventually he could braid bits and bridles of light and set those steeds galloping across the sky, right and left above the forest floor.

Then one day the old man said, "I will take you back to the road. You have learned everything you can from me, and the flute is yours." So the young man followed his master out to the forest's edge, and, after thanking the old man, set out for the nearest town. He dreamed of his new power. With it, he thought, he would find love, gain fame, maybe even become a great king.

That evening at an inn, the young man decided he would make a start on his dreams. It had been raining for days, and the firewood was soaked, so that in the great hall of the inn, the fire smoldered dismally. The young man bet the innkeeper and all those gathered at the tables in the hall that he could make the fire burn brighter, without touching it or even blowing on it. 

"And how will you manage this?" asked the innkeeper.

"With a melody from this," said the young man, drawing out his flute. Laughter burst out on all sides and the innkeeper and everyone in the hall gladly accepted the grounds of the bet, as the young man put the flute to his lips. 

The melody he played was lovely, high and shimmering, but soon it was drowned out by laughter, because to the young man's surprise and consternation, no matter how he played the firelight burned no differently: no brighter or warmer or friendlier or cleaner. He stopped playing and stared at the flute in astonishment. But no, it was the same flute; you could tell by the beautiful inscriptions in the wood and the unmistakable tones it had produced. The young man put the flute away, paid the innkeeper and the patrons the money he had bet (it was all the money he had), and hurriedly left the inn.

For days he wandered, despairing that the flute had lost its power. He would take the flute out in some isolated spot and play, hoping against hope. But still, nothing: no starlight resting on the pine boughs, no sunlight willing to be tamed. He thought of turning back and entering the forest again, but he sensed he would not find the old man there.

Since he had no more money, he was forced to play on the streets of the towns he wandered through, and to put his hat out in front of him on the road for whatever people would give him. All who heard him play were amazed at the loveliness of the flute's tone and at the beauty of the melodies he played, and he earned enough to keep himself clothed and fed. But the young man hardly heard his own music, because it no longer gave him the power he had dreamed of using. In fact, it so depressed him to keep playing that one day he decided to rid himself of the instrument and with it, his misfortunes. He went to a bridge over a deep river and held the flute above the moving water. 

Just then an old blind man tapping his stick along the surface of the road, arrived at the bridge. He stopped and begged the young man for alms.

The young man turned from viewing the water. "I have nothing, old man," he said, "but a few pennies that I must keep, and this miserable flute that I am about to throw into the water."

"Play to me then," said the old man, "Before you let it go. I love to hear music."

The young man sighed. It would do no harm to play for the beggar. And, he thought, since it was to be the last time he played the instrument, he would play it well. So he played the loveliest tune he knew, a tune that in his days in the forest, had made the meteors run in streaks down heaven. He played so beautifully, that the old man, listening, wept. 

"Once," said the young man, "this flute was magical."

"Ah" replied the old man, as he moved along, "if only you could see."

The sound of the blind man's tapping grew dim; the young man was overcome with remorse. He suddenly understood that all his foolish wishes to become great in the world's eyes meant nothing, for what could be more meaningful than what had just passed between him and the beggar? He repented of his wish to destroy the flute and from that day forward played it gladly. And although the flute had a strange way of keeping itself a secret--the young man never became famous, and when he died, the flute was lost--it was said that near the end, he could make even the most hard-hearted miser weep with it, the most miserable orphan smile. 

And sometimes when he played (people said) the smallest, loveliest things would happen: the shoe on a horse would unexpectedly flash, or a water drop splashed from a pail would throw a bright, momentary rainbow before it fell to the dust.

HB



 

Five Proverbs from an Allegorical City

Fumigatio Via Dolorosa, believed by many to be the last ur-saint left in our city, was entreated (recently) by a group of enthusiastic pilgrims to share some guidance on how to live life. At first he insisted that it was impossible to truly teach wisdom, except perhaps wisdom of the musical kind; though even that, he said, could be accomplished only by means of a carefully systematized program of instruction (in both performance and appreciation) begun by pupils at an early age. 

When pressed however, he admitted that the following five proverbs, still current in one of the two dialects of the city, could be said to have originated with him:

1. The cartwheels of children light the sun.
2. Eat when you eat, sleep when you sleep.
3. The sweet ring of thought, dunked in the experience of the senses, suffices as enjoyment to the wise.
4. Consign clock and cares to the dusty shelf. 
5. The true book of faith is a lively romance.

“A great poet, whose work I love,” (he went on to say) “once said that it was impossible to live by more than a handful of proverbs. Choose this handful, and you will live a reasonably wise life. But above all, I prescribe good music; listen (whenever you come upon it) to good music, approaching it in the spirit of poverty and loss. Music is our most elemental muse, the art most reliably expressive of the nutritive deep. So music should be the worm ahead of you, as you seek the root-tips of the Tree.”

HB

27 Questions Intended to Evoke a State of Wonder

1. Can any creature hear the fall of a snowflake? What could that sound like?
2. Concerning King Tut: was there, on the occasion of his funeral and interment, any music? Did anyone play a wrong note?
3. If, long long ago, there were dinosaurs at the south pole, and if, when the darker solstice came, they migrated northward to a place where the vegetation didn't die off (for lack of light), what was that like, a dinosaur migration? Could you feel it from a distance, in your feet? Those enormous creatures on the move? 
4. Considering the poet Sappho: when was the last copy of her poems lost? Or maybe does a copy of them still survive, somewhere in a remote desert cave--an ancient scroll waiting to be found and deciphered? Who will find it? When?
5. Was there really a Helen of Troy? To get a glimpse of her face, how many days would I walk?
6. Consider all the fine painters who died young: can we imagine a museum containing all the works they WOULD have produced, if they had been given another five years to create? A Louvre of what might have been! 
7. If I could come into possession of any lost  relic of the past--Marlowe's last quill, a butterfly specimen from the Jurassic, a bottle of Nefertiti's perfume, capped with an ivory plug...what would I want to have?
8. If the sum of human pain, over the full course of history, could be expressed as an alien planetary landscape, what would that planet look like?
9. Now what about a planet expressive of the sum of human joy?  
10. Now can we imagine a trumpeter who dreamed nightly that he was an astronaut on both these planets, and every morning picked up his horn to express them both?
11. Is wonder an emotion necessarily tied to melancholy? To what is no longer here? To what was never born? To what we know for certain cannot last?
12. Do spiders ever take joyrides on clock-pendulums?
13. If all mammals dream, what about prairie dogs? What do prairie dogs dream of?  Hawks, kestrels? Prairie dog love? Building new tunnels? Reinforcing old tunnels? Taking wrong turns in tunnels? Tasty roots?
14. What is the composite musical pitch of the buzz of a honey bee hive? Does that pitch differ from species to species and from hive to hive? Who sets the pitch? The queen? Or is this something the drones have a say in?
15. If robins can hear earthworms crawling beneath the ground, can earthworms hear robins walking above the ground?
16. What makes a soap bubble beautiful? Its perfect roundness, never obese? The floating nature of its existence? It's multi-colored swirlish nature? The shortness of its life? The eye of the beholder, itself a mortal sphere?
17. How did these questions get from me to you, really? Where did they come from originally? Where will they eventually go? Are they common property, or do they already belong to their ultimate destination? 
18. What is the ultimate destination of all our questions?
19. Consider: there are bonsai plants in Japan that have been handed down in families for generations. Presumably, some of these plants, if left un-watered even for a week or two, would die. Now, what is the most delicate plant handed down for the longest time?
20. Can the bonsai in constant need of care, be compared to human love, which must consistently be expressed, or else will die?
21. If yesterday I learned that an apple is really a kind of rose (in the same way that French is a kind of Latin) how can I live today not hungering for some other beautiful fact I do not know?
22. If emotions possessed texture, so that you could identify them by feel (like a pot of lemongrass or a swatch of corduroy) how, I wonder, would wonder feel? Smooth as polished gold? Somehow electric?
23. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, why only one eye? What's in the other eye?
24. Consider an old LP recording, featuring a string quartet, all four members of which are long since dead. This is recording of a late quartet of Beethoven. Now play it on an old turn table, and listen, and what exactly is happening here? Isn't this a kind of five-fold resurrection? A springing back to life of four people's passion and intelligence for the music of one who came even before them? 
25. Doesn't the needle, as it digs and scrapes the groove, amount to a sort of miraculous grave digger, undoing and transforming the effects of death, one of which is certainly silence?
26. How long can we keep listening like this?
27. Or is this deep attention to the music of the moment, the very meaning of forever?

      ?HB?