From the Sea, a Symphony

I wander the countryside, and each day is new. Into a great expanse I embark each morning, and I ramble into its silent singing with a joy in my heart. I allow myself to float inside its song, and there is the ecstasy of being a single note in a great symphony, which never ceases, but only grows more beautiful and rich with the passage of time. This is bliss, and this is my happiness. I have never found this in the world of man, whose song lacks harmony, and that is why I live away from it.

here is a town ahead. The road I walk is straight and wide and hedged between regimented rows of carefully pruned pine trees. I can hear the pounding of a surf, and pleasure fills my heart. Soon, I will be at the seaside. There is a specialness in the sea. It is vast beyond comprehension, not merely in stretch, but in recline. It rests snug in the berth of its ancient mattress of earth, and its flesh fills every nook with a profound contentment. Above its surface, the wind frolics with the lapping waves in a frothy rolling song of gaiety and forgetfulness, but beneath, silence interweaves with eternity to compose a song of immortal remembrance. All time is contained within this song, and its immemorial beauty instills rapture in my listening soul.

I stroll through the town, and before seeking an inn, I make my way to the shore, which has been built up with docks and a seaside resort. The sky is grey in a way that promises the sea repast in the juicy globular corpulence of streaking comet-tailed plummets, and in the waves which lap the silt-swept beach there resides a roaring restless hunger. The song of the sea resounds against my flesh and within my heart. I ponder over its hungry vastness, distracted from my own.

In the town, I find an inn, which is owned and managed by a woman in her middle years, a woman who, despite her age-engraved flesh, yet retains the brightness of a youth in her eyes. Such women are dangerous, for their passionate chords sometimes threaten to drown out the delicate euphony of the countryside. I am wary, and I keep my eyes on the desk as I register.

I spend the day watching the tides and, with an eager palate, tasting their discontented song. Fat pellets of rain smash against my skin and dribble their wet remains down into my clothes. I rub the wetness into my cheeks and hair to cool a strange fever, which is rising disconsolate from some inexplicable source in my heart, burning restively in my brain and behind the bulbs of my eyes. I glance every once in a while back towards the town, and on the edge, just outside the town proper, among the pine trees which surround it, I can discern a large gathering of men. They are motionless and silent, which among men is a rare thing, and that makes me uneasy. Even from this distance, they seem pale and sullen, and regarding them, I feel a peculiar wrenching in my heart, for I can detect no song within them -- which among men is the rarest thing of all. All men sing a song.

As I am strolling back into the town, I am chilled by the sight of a man who stands in rags before the door of the very same inn where I am to spend the night. His back is bent with a sorrow which aches my sensibility and makes me shudder, and his eyes look into an eternal gap. Their focus seems always to sharpen at a point before or beyond the thing he is looking at, but never on it. His jacket is ragged and torn, in much greater disrepair than my own, which is itself frazzled and beyond its better days. After a moment, he walks into the inn and registers. I follow and watch as he signs his name to the guest book. Weariness weighs heavy in his every movement; even the act of scratching his signature seems to fill him with a profound apathy. I leave him to his signing and retire to my room for rest before eating, and to calm the tentative surging which has disrupted my placid interior. Good digestion follows from hunger which meditates: an angry belly sings a strident song and cannot relax to savor the sweet subtle strains of supper.

During the evening meal, he sits alone with himself, although the table is small and he is no short distance either from me or from the woman whose inn this is. He chews in another country than this, and he swallows in another space. The song of this room is one of brooding silence, but that song is interrupted by the brassy, lyrical carollings of the woman.

"There is a crowd of men at the boundary of the town. They have created no small amount of talk among the townspeople. They stand still and in rigid formation, and they haven't moved all day. Do you know anything of these?"

The man is silent. He does not seem to have heard the woman. She has that quality which I have noticed before, that energy which is so dangerous. Her dark, inward-lit eyes swirl with intent and mischief, as well as with curiosity and plain good humour. When she speaks again, to repeat the query she has put to this unresponsive subject, I can detect the trumpets in her breath, which resound with absorptive resonance in this dark, fire-fingered room. Her music is strong, and I am uneasy.

After her second inquiry, the man tenses both brow and chin in resolution, then his many-focused gaze swivels to my face. He does not answer the woman, but instead addresses me, as if she is not present. His voice is a gargling, deep-throated whisper, the voice of a man unaccustomed to speech.

"I am a famous general. My tactics are brilliant and are studied in schools of strategy all over the world. I have won wars innumerable, and no rival to my skill has ever been found. The stories of my exploits are repeated in reverential whispers across the broadest landscapes of civilization. Entire countries owe their sovereignty to my genius. Untold numbers of soldiers have died at my hands -- or, rather, at the hands of my strategy. Never, you see, have these hands been sullied by sweat or blood. Never have I personally had to stare into the disbelieving eyes of the dying man. Never have I been forced to drive the fatal blade into a living man's unlucky heart.

"Instead, I have lived upon the toil of my troops. I have been lifted aloft from the despair of the earth, on the shoulders of those whom I command. Whilst I look into distant lands and perceive subtle tactics of warfare, which arrange themselves in my mind like the pieces of a grand and stimulating game, these men beneath me bear my insufferable weight and carry me whither I wish to go. And then, at my order, they set me down upon the scenic knoll, far above the true action of my deeds, and thence proceed with gloom-decked duty into the mud and misery of their own ignominy and doom. Through my heartless design do they perish, and perhaps the battle is won, but what difference to them? They lie beyond caring, beyond praise, beyond honor. They no longer love, nor feel the passion of life, nor the fruit of it. Their children frolic in distant fields, whilst they decay in ditches, innumerous and anonymous, their bones mouldering into dust, the decomposition of this soldier mingling with the disintegrating putrescence of this other until the earth comprises all without discrimination. They fade into the nullity of history whilst I am clothed in the glory which they procure at my behest. The world through space rolls onward with unslackening speed and destroys all record of their lives. Their women find new husbands, their children mature fatherless or with new fathers. The grief of their loved ones decays more quickly than their own forgotten bones. They are all lost to the world, and the life they as hopeful babes foresaw is snatched away without pity, for the sake of a patch of ground.

"And I am the man who is responsible for this. Untold numbers have fallen helpless into my reeking pit of ruin, and all of those names are inscribed, each and every one, in my soul. Some time ago, there was a singularly bloody battle, and every soldier I sent into that field remains there yet, his blood long soaked in the blasted earth, his deflated sightless eyeballs forever staring direct down into the very bowels of Hell. After this particular battle, although the sacrifice of men's lives delivered to my side the victory I desired, my conscience was loaded beyond its capacity to bear. Enough! I could send men to their deaths no more. I would quit this life. I announced my retirement and determined to settle in the country, where I might commune with the nature which always in the past I had perceived as nothing more than an arena for the fulfillment of my brilliant strategies.

"But it was not to be. The sins of my past will not be erased. They shall not! I could not repose in my country estate. Whenever I stepped outside to stroll the green, bucolic hills, the soldiers for whose deaths I was responsible rose up out of the earth and followed me, silent, with neither scorn nor reproach, yet unrelenting in their pursuit. Wherever I went, they stayed right behind, marching in disciplined formation, their boot-clad steps reverberating throughout the countryside in maddening military precision, just as I had taught them. The horror! In despair I fled to all the corners of the globe, but wherever I went, more men rose up, their eyes without sight, their minds without will, and they followed me, just as they had done in life. Loyal even beyond the grave they were, and I did not want their allegiance. I cried to them to forgive me, I pleaded with them to stop hounding me to the very ends of the earth, but they did not listen, could not listen. They simply stood in perfect formation and stared mindlessly ahead, awaiting my next movement. I enjoined them to desist, to leave me be, but that was the order which they could not obey. Their only command was to tread into oblivion my every fresh-laid footstep, to dog my heels unto eternity. I could never escape because wherever I went, there were more -- and more still -- and to this day, they continue to rise up out of their graves wherever I walk.

"Even now, I stand on the brink of the sea, and behind me are the millions of my accusers, and before me is the vastness of their judgment. I know now there is no escape. I must face them on their terms, and no more may I flee, no more may I tremble a coward. I am their leader, and I must lead them!"

The man relapses tremulous into his silence, having achieved vehemence and passion during the course of his narrative. I can hear the string-plucked dirge of his mournful song, and I feel an unaccountable weight within my heart. The woman is no longer as boisterous as she was when she teased the man earlier. There is wetness in her vivid eyes, and her lungs which once powered swaggering trumpets now puff at fluttering flutes. The fire's wall-caressing fingers have receded, as the woman has neglected her tinder during the course of the stranger's tale, and the shadows in the room have grown like teeming webwork, casting tenebrous tendrils across every object, especially the stranger's face. His eyes are hidden, as is his mouth, by thick, angled stripes of undulant darkness. He finishes his meal in silence and enters his room.

The woman and I sit together, and she tends the fire. I would go to bed, but instead, I feel the urge to stay here. The room is warm and strangely comforting. It is cozy, and the warmth does not suffocate, as I once might have felt, but rather it embraces and is snug. We do not talk, but there is a song between us -- a quiet one, but penetrating. Before I retire to my bedchamber, I raise my eyes to hers, and she smiles, the youth in her impish eyes betraying the bounty in her bosom.

awaken to the smell of breakfast, meat and eggs. I dress and arrive at the table. There is only my plate and the woman's on the tabletop, and the stranger is absent. I inquire from the woman his whereabouts.

"It is the strangest happening. He is gone without a trace this morning. I have it from Mammy Spinster, who inhabits the grand old house on the edge of the bluff outside of town, that she was awakened last night to the tramping of many feet, and when she peered out the window, she witnessed an entire platoon of men marching into the sea. It must have been the one which was gathered yesterday at the boundary of the town."

I eat my breakfast. The woman collects my dish and brings it to the sink-basin for washing. The song of washing is gentle and sonorous. The song of the woman is pleasing to my ear. The song of the sea lies under all, harmonizing perfectly.

I approach the woman as she washes and place my arm about her shoulder. She looks at me in surprise, then studies my eyes. For a moment, our songs merge, and it is a symphony.

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