Sullen Oafs
In the Western American city of which we were the suburb there was one symphony orchestra--and we wanted it. We had wanted it for quite some time. Propeter had constantly been citing Mozart's perfect balance of beauty on rigid form by means of flowerpots securely on his head; and Mariangle had often stood upon the trellised arch of the gateway evoking the flutter of violins in full Prokofieff with showers from her own wet sheets, which she had waved mechanically and with a fiendish grin. Our desire for a symphony orchestra was by now therefore quite mature, so when the august chief of the central "situation," as we euphemized it, a man we eulogized as "sheriff," "sheriff" in full control of all the hyped-up misalignments characteristic of our section of the West (bulimia sodalities, paternity suits, McDonnell-Douglas), when that august "sheriff" offered us in our suburb full possession of this Western city's symphony orchestra, behind the "sheriff" his favorites, workingmen, a retinue we wittily bemoaned as the "Voices of Ugly"--we accepted. We accepted, despite the confusion we felt, which would be difficult to describe. We did not dwell on it. Momentarily bypassing complexities we opened our eyes to God and heaven and accepted with a deep panache, which involved the opening-up of our hearts to unexpected boons, and in the shuffle we ended up foul of mood and stagnant of soul, for the bypassed complexities were massing in the hearth and stimulating decay and other negative processes.
But then some moments passed and when the "sheriff" and his "Voices of Ugly" left and the orchestra was milling daintily about the entranceway, smelling the blossoms of our rarest species with the gusto of deep experts, we were overwhelmed with pity and with a subtler emotion as well, and we opened our enormous doors and with some hubbub ushered, ushered, to the darkness of home.
"Now what will they fiddle?" said Susan after locking the doors and swallowing the key. Many of us felt kinder and, after darting recognizably hateful glances towards Susan, left our comfort to purchase bread, upon which purchase we returned to hurl it in through the clerestory windows, and our natural relief at having done something was doubled by the calm and gentle shuffling and European-sounding appreciative yelps which issued from the orchestra, which we heard through the doors.
"Heard through the doors!" you might exclaim. And loudly you should! for that phrase is what touches off your recognition of that which we, in our closeness to the actual situation, recognized without need of cue or urge: we were out of doors, out of the doors of our home, on the actual porch, with some cheese, yes, from before, and fruit, yes, but out of doors nevertheless, it was noticed by many of us without cue, and in the cold, and we drank the wine which had been there from before, and some of the leftover bread.
This was not the the worst of it. This was not the worst of the aggravating circumstances, our being stuck vulnerable out on the porch. Our predicament involved also the eventual weariness of the city whose suburb we were. The city was eventually weary of a dearth of excellent music, it turned out, and disagreed with the "sheriff's" actions, at least implicitly. The orchestra was the city's only music, of course, and its only music during our present possession of the symphony orchestra was coming from a backwoods clutch of hoe-clunking rat-jangled hatefuls (as it was related to us by criers, at least, we not needing to go elsewhere, of course, to enjoy some excellent music).
Now it is difficult to relate the actual events which occur in a person's eyes, let alone behind a person's eyes and face, let alone within the minds and spirits of a whole assembly of goodly suburban folk in front of a door containing a symphony orchestra and preventing safety. The Gentle Reader will therefore unfortunately have to accept "Our predicament was so bad that all of us there were gazing fixedly ahead at points representing thoughts, on the walls and air."
It is also unfortunately difficult to represent an angry town and its eventual actions, so said Reader will have to gently accept "Chunks of that music-hungry city came off and headed our way through the streets, chunks even rallied up convoys, suckering thirsty drivers into hauling by truckloads, for good spirits; also, chunks became brutal."
But whatever the events themselves, whatever our gazes, whatever the chunks and their nature, it was the overall indelicacy of the situation (well-whittled little things hurtling through space, angry rights-debating moments, tingles of the atmosphere) that turned our thoughts of the symphony orchestra into a different kind of thought, thought tinged by worry about the negative things that can happen to one, worry about doom, even simple worry about excessive expenditure of effort. And whatever the mechanism, we found that just as our thoughts were darkening thus, our memories of the symphony orchestra--the second fiddles with their screamed poems of objection and despair, the trumpets with their endless stompings--clouded over with a patina of nausea as thick as it was new.
But the orchestra itself was fairly safe and as we died, sending up great greenish gobs of spirit into the ether surrounding our planet, we saw the orchestra poking its guns out of little holes in the masonry and mowing the cityfolk down, and as we mingled together and formed amusing new shapes of many colors in the ether surrounding our planet, we saw the orchestra pick up its instruments and play a nice dirge, perhaps not for us, perhaps not for anyone, but still a dirge, which was appropriate, and as we merged into the streams of history in the ether surrounding our planet we watched the orchestra establish its supermarket and drugstore and also novelty store in which it sold to itself tiny instruments of crafty design, to amuse the new children with while the orchestra was practicing the Mahler, the Bartok, the Mozart, and also that old favorite, Prokofieff