He Hears No Song

What a hollow thing life is, deprived of magic

Bardelys was afraid.

He could feel it in the pit of his stomach, an ache, a hollow, a sore vacuum that would not dissipate.

It had struck him that day, late in the morning, with the sun shining, the air warm and fresh, and life easy, mild, and benevolent, that he heard no song.

It was a sort of premonition, a vision, an experience of years compressed into a moment.

What would life be like, without a tale to tell or hear?

Life is a grim business. We forget that, we who have lived like princes in our kingdoms of oil and high technology and all the brute strength that our oil-slave did for us, and from which it freed us. But Bardelys knew it was coming, the days without oil, when the ever-willing slave would leave, and the leisure hours would be no more, and in their place toil, and labor, and want. They would come back to haunt us, the taskmasters and grim brutal reality that our grandfathers knew. Our children shall know them, alas. We hoped to leave them a better life, we leave instead a husk of a world from which we have sucked the last of the juice, and squandered it wastefully.

Bardelys too would know those times. Almost all who live will know them.

And without tales to tell and hear, what shelter will we have from that grim and bitter life?

The truth is, that tales will always be there for us. They always have been. Simple tales need no oil, no massive mechanisms of transportation, no high technology.

But for an instant, Bardelys had lost the thread of song that he now realized was always at hand. The thread had snapped, and it felt as though it could never be joined together again. He had lost it and it was gone and he would never hear song again, never know poetry again, never hear another tale. He would lose all vision and echo of Eartherea, and the grim scrabbling after survival, not living but mere survival, would be all that remained to him. It might be all anyone would have.

Ugly, fearful prospect!

And so he knew, at last, that whatever gloss he might put upon it, and whatever higher moral aim he might weld upon his tales to come, the truth of the matter was that tales were for him a shield and shelter from the grim realities of animal existence.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, August 14, 2008)