Ally says:
Between 1917 and 1919 Franz Kafka kept a series of notebooks called the Blue Octavo Notebooks in which he kept, not so much a daily journal, but musings. Scribblings. Passing thoughts.
Things that were never really meant to see the light of day but published posthumously by Max Brod, Kafka's literary executor. While a jumble of moments, these are not a writer's junk drawer of starts and fit but instead are like the old shoebox you find in the back of your recently deceased grandfather's closet. Inside are yellowed old love letters, a single dried rose, the covers of an old and now page-less paperback, the gears to a dissembled pocket watch. These are things that might not belong together but are meant to be kept. To be read.
And now to be heard.
Max Richter, a composer, or really more often a re-composer, has put together an exquisite album called The Blue Notebooks. The opening track is not music per say but piano and the haunting voice of Tilda Swinton sounding utterly ethereal. It starts off with a soothing piano pinging out a gentle almost unsure rhythm as if it were just being composed right now the second we started listening. Underneath that the roll of thunder in the distance, drops of rain on the roof. And then in an act of near dissonance the organic piano is joined by the clack and clatter of typewriter keys, as if mice were trampling to and fro over an old Underwood in a deserted dimly lit shack out in the woods. And finally Tilda's voice whispering to us:
“Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”
As the piano fades out you hear the tick-tock of a clock counting out the second in the deserted old shack out in the woods. Imagine the door open. Imagine Kafka just leaving, his own shoes shuffling through the newly fallen leaves.
The second track is called "On the Nature of Daylight.
It starts off with the echoing call of cellos, lapping and overlapping each other like the velvet darkness of the night before the pitch-black is broken through by one high violin, seesawing, like a gust of wind blowing the clouds and the dark away - clearing the path for the sunlight, yet another edgy keening violin, to punch through the darkness and bring forth the daylight.
All three combining in that moment, when the light passes through the nebula and darkness of space to call forth another day - here now the music rushing forward as the light overtakes the earth. A moment, we, as humans, barely even register in our waking existence - this miracle that is the hum drum rotation of this planet. And then finally winding down as this miracle is completed.
The start of another day moving you towards the end of your life. If music does nothing it should remind you of that which you may, in your own malaise, take for granted. Much like the steady unaffected calling forth of the dawn.
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