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Charles William Johns
Why is it that we return, again and again, to books, as if there were some insight to be gained, as if we could bypass experience, the consequence of experience, the consequence of actions and decisions in this very real world we attempt to shield ourselves from? It is as if we were naive enough to think that knowledge could be gained without a loss. Every emotion is a disturbance of some kind. The intricacies of loss is an art form and I am happy to have suffered so that you may enjoy the ‘pleasure of the text’.
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I go round the back of the house. Underneath the plant pot on the table, just as my father had said, was the backdoor key. I let myself in and immediately grab the garage key which has been placed thoughtfully upon the kitchen windowsill. I muttered the words I told myself the following night; that it had been “at least forty eight hours since the incident, and if someone wanted to arrest me then they would have done it by now . . . and it would be good-possibly even healthy-for you to accept working for your father this morning-which entails listening to old classical music on vinyl in order to discern whether any of them are scratched ( and hence thrown in the ‘discard’ pile), or, clearly audible (perhaps excellent, excellent +, even possibly near-mint) and hence fit for re-sale”. I would listen to these records in a shed far far away from the crime scene, in a respectable estate, as if I were a completely different person unaffiliated with the crime. Perhaps I had knocked my head, been diagnosed with amnesia. Perhaps I could simply act like I had amnesia, for the rest of my life, or , perhaps, if I try hard enough, I could lose myself in classical music, be drawn into the circle of its repetitions, and forget who I am.
I picked up the first record from the pile of records left out for me and put it on the turnstyle. Sibelius quartets. After the steady, slow confirmation of needle and shellac a perfect quartet gradually formed. At first one viola cutting through a space set up for melody, acutely and angularly it created one wall of sound. A violin giddily sprung from underneath this first wall, in a gap between the floorboards, or on the floor I myself was sitting on. It began to say something but then it wasn’t sure, and began to partly form another wall. Then a cello resounded as if it were already in the room/song but waiting its turn. It became the soil and then the floorboards, and finally a third wall. I looked out upon my father’s garden from inside the garage, through the garage door I had left open. Finally a single violin soared within these three walls-“the shrill of this violin was me” I thought to myself. As quickly as it had affirmed its place within the room it suddenly transformed into a police siren, one closer than ever before. The quartet had lured me into the security of song (like how a scared child sings to itself in the woods to keep itself company). I got up and headed towards what felt like a giant hole filled with sunlight and nature. I stood there, on the threshold of the garage door, painfully (I had no shoes on and the threshold dug into the soles of my feet). I stood completely upright and spread my arms out as if I were composing Sibelius’ quartet. Siren upon siren proliferated, each glimmer of the sun cascading and reflecting off all objects from the ground up, showing that they were part of everything, welcoming everything. And the police? What did it matter now? Every part of nature expressed an immanent force equal to the power of the police-expressing a similar law. Everything was perpetual incandescence, I could not see where one started or began. Rising and falling, contracting and retracting, accumulating and dispersing through one unitary rhythm. Every reflective surface, whether window, tarmac, vase, drop of dew, collided together and resembled the rear-view mirrors of police cars. And within such windows-reflections of reflections-lay cool policemen and policewoman made up of complete prosthesis; simulated in uniform, mediated by walki-talkies, covered in hats and chiselled features like terrifying cartoons, and in one breath-like any great composer-I changed the universe.
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