I want to seize fate by the throat.
-Beethoven
The record was pristine, nearly unplayed, and sat under the mammoth record player in the den. It was sleeved in indigo blue and there were imperfect, blurry white dots on it to signify the stars. It was the Moonlight Sonata. At six, I was unsure how to pronounce his name – Beethoven. I pronounced it like a ‘beet’. I didn’t know what to do with the ‘h’ so I just mouthed ‘oven’. I took it to my room as I was always curious about things adults possessed. Nearly everything they had seemed like a wonderful secret and it was up to me to find the truth of a thing or a moment in their life, my life, and possibly, all life.
I had my own record player, pink and orange with beveled strawberries. The seeds on the berries were polka dots like the stars on the record sleeve. In my player was a small black disc with a pale blue label – All Out of Love by Air Supply. That song was also a secret. The singer sang softly and with curious power, “I want you to come back and carry me home, away from these long lonely nights, I’m reaching for you, are you feeling it too.” I didn’t know what feeling he was talking about. That was the problem with adults. They said things, with words, but words never really made sense. I had no words to describe why I loved the taste of SweetTarts. All I knew was how I felt. Words were very sad things that couldn’t encompass all those tingly, expansive feelings inside. I did know about long nights that he spoke of in the song. I wasn’t sure about being lonely. I knew that many nights I had problems sleeping and I would lie in bed and watch the light of the moon and the spidery branch shadows from the tree in the yard dance macabrely across the windows. The moon and the tree married and spun a tango. I knew the tango. I had seen it in movies. The adults were very intense, but I liked how they moved together and, somehow, thinking of the moon and tree as passionate partners made me melancholy. It was a melancholy you could fluff pillows and rest in for a time.
I played the record and sat on my dresser which abutted the east wall with its two large windows that were usually covered by rosy hued blinds that I lifted at night before bed because sometimes the moon hung brightly like a Christmas ornament or the stars shimmered and the whole sky seemed like a holiday. From my window, you could see the terrible oak that sometimes gave me nightmares, the rough driveway, the curving street, neighbors’ homes stashed like boxes, and the hills stretching to mountains, usually milk chocolate colored unless it was winter and then they were the palest, mottled green with a tiny cap of white snow. Above that was the sky and at night, unless it was a new moon, you could see the bone hunk of the moon orb, glowing and grinning.
With Beethoven’s notes, the first few, spinning in the air like ballerinas, the inky horror of night cascading into my room, and the light of the moon, which is only a reflection of the exploding sun, I felt like I was floating and being lifted up through a massless sea. I was connected with everything beyond Earth and nothing on Earth. And there was the expanding inside. I have no word. I didn’t bother trying to name it as a child. I loved stories and read, voraciously, from the time I could read independently at the close of my third year. Words shuffled and lined up in my head forming sentences and sometimes the sentences made me happy. I had painted a picture in Kindergarten a few weeks before Christmas. The painting was of red candles with yellow flames and a yellow window. The teacher asked me to describe it in a sentence. I said, “The candles are glowing on Christmas day.” I was very happy with the sentence and the teacher was impressed I knew the word “glowing”. It didn’t take long to select the word. I could have said “the candles were burning bright” or the “the candles were on fire”. But I liked the word glowing. Light through windows filtered and glowed. I was learning as I acquired words that the things inside me didn’t have words and I was marginally wise enough to conclude that even if I learned all the languages of the world, I may not ever have a way of describing those indefinable things inside me.
There was the expanding and the Sonata.
The Moonlight Sonata helped me swim, small arms and flutter kicks, through infinity. Infinite was a new word I had acquired. Something without end. Limitless. If I closed my eyes while swimming and listened to Beethoven I could feel fear. It was a feeling watching horror movies when you can sense the monster creeping behind you, looming and sizzling your senses, but you but you’re rendered dumb and can neither confront the monster nor run too far away. That was infinity. Something from the edges of limit. Too appalling to call beautiful and too spectacular to look in the eye.
I began to acquire all of Beethoven’s works. As peers collected pop music, I collected Beethoven. I didn’t listen to Mozart until I was older after I saw the movie, Amadeus. I heard Bach, but avoided him in my youth. He was too mathematical and devoid of the mess of feeling. Baroque was soulfully broke to me. Beethoven was the seed. Every song after him, no matter the type, had to be adornable on Beethoven. Every song had to speak to me lyrically – full of emotion and something unnameable. Dancing Queen by Abba could do it. Folsom Prison by Johnny Cash could do it. Schumann could do it. I cannot state the affinity any of those artists had with Beethoven. I only know they earned a leaf on his stalk.
I’ve gone to performances of the Moonlight Sonata with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, but nothing could match my initial experience. I think Beethoven, more than any other composer, captured the infinite, the brutal beauty, and the softened, lush joy of being human. And it is so much more poignant that he could do so given the child abuse he suffered. His father regularly beat him and the head bashing contributed to his later deafness, his sadness, experience with unrequited love, and isolation from humans (but not humanity, if he did not have that, he would not have created).
Beethoven wrote the Moonlight Sonata in his early thirties and it was a popular in his lifetime. He did not call it the Moonlight Sonata. That was a name given by a German critic fiver years after the composer’s death and likened the piece to moonlight glinting on Lake Lucerne. Not all the critics loved it and some attacked it as Romantic and too subjective. The appropriate word, to borrow from poetry, is lyrical. Indeed, it is subjective. Lyricism is about conveying an immediate emotional response unfiltered of intellectualism or distancing. I can’t think of a better purpose of for art than to reflect immediate human experience for it is only in the reflection that we learn actual truths and not those modified by weighing and judging. Beethoven said he wanted the piece to be prelude and not a logical proposition.
Why do I mention Beethoven? How does this relate to my journey of becoming a writer? How does this relate to my conscience and striving for social justice and exposing injustices? It’s really very simple and preposterously complex. It is the infinite. Life matters now and passion trumps all our experiences, whether good or bad. The infinite is why we act, why we do, why we strive, why we cry when we think we’ve done nothing. The infinite is the journey.
References
Kerman, J., & Burnham, S. G. (2005). Beethoven. Oxford University Press.
King, S. (2000). On writing: A memoir. Hodder & Stoughton.
Lamott, A. (2009). Bird by bird: Some Instructions on writing and Life. Scribe.
R.C. Peris Mastery Journal 