Speculation

As I'm writing, I sometimes wonder how far back I need to go to tell a story. And even when the question is not explicitly asked, it's still there, along with the others that necessarily follow.

Like, how much do you really have to say to make things clear? How much is just enough, to engage the imagination and the intellect and the senses? How many drops of this or that color need fall into the water so the light shining through it will reveal its tint--before its energy falters in the darkness of too much?

Can it somehow begin in the dreary grey of a childhood winter and end, years later, in the early hours of a Key West morning with ten or twelve stories of cabin lights ablaze as the great ship makes its final turn up the channel?

And what about the wind, how it tore at everything, only the day before, with its unseasonable chill? And likewise what should be said about the musician friend, the one not seen since childhood, the record of his passing happened on by chance and the sad contemplation of his Paris-Selmer sax forever silenced?

If I think about it, if I think about it long enough, if I can somehow find and inhabit the silence, will it play again, for him, for me, for the world that once knew him and counted him as its own...

LPK
LiveJournal
5.28.2005

[In memory of Harold Madrigale and for all the ones, the famous and the unknown, who give us music]