The Song Will Not be Still

Only a false song will ever die

Bardelys wondered what had happened to him.

It was not, he now learned, that the poetry had gone out of life. The moment of stillness that had so frightened him the day before — a stillness that had no parallel in his life, a small death, a hole in the fabric of all — was not, after all, the death of song. It couldn’t be that.

For there was song and poetry all around. You only had to look at the clouds in the sky, or the moon in mist at night, or listen to the crickets humming through the hot darkness, to know that the mysterious something that breathed the breezes out of Eartherea was still there, and would never go away.

But then what had he felt was lost?

It was tales, yes, it was poetry. But it was a different kind of poetry.

The tales we know in our modern world, Bardelys reflected, are a far cry from the tales the first talesmen told. They are far even from the tales of the prophets and myth-makers, the dreamy-eyed singers of Eartherea.

The tales we know are fake.

They have ancestors, and those ancestors have ancestors, and those ancestors have … and if you chase them far enough up their family tree, you will come in the end to true tales, and true song. But the tales we know today are so far removed from that truth that they have lost the threads. Or in more genealogical terms, their bloodline has thinned so, and diluted so, that it is blood only in homeopathic quantities, which is to say it is now all sugar-water and food coloring, and none of blood at all. A few molecules only, perhaps, drift lost in the moles of liquor.

And we who hear those tales, Bardelys realized, do not even know what we have lost. Instead, we have learned the trick of operating in a different key, if you will, of shifting our minds so as to leap with the talesmen into the deep fakery of these seeming-tales. We know the genres, and so we jump right into them without a thought of reality — the kind of reality that the first writer of a mystery, or fantasy, or heroic yarn, had to conjure with mightily.

And now if we today were to take up a tale told in the original vein of the first mystery, the first fantasy, the first tale of adventure or of love, we would find it laughably weak, trite, simple, a tale fit only for children.

Yes, we have grown up, thought Bardelys. We have grown aged and infirm into senility, to the point where we no longer have any idea of how potent it must be, to hear a tale that hooks right into our own lives, that could happen to our neighbor, our child, ourselves.

And it began to gnaw at Bardelys and haunt him:

Was there any way to make and hear a true original tale for him, ever again?

— Or was he lost in his own senility?

(Composed on keyboard Friday, August 15, 2008)