The Magician & The Musician

“There are times when the truth can only show you an illusion.” 
(Lionel Suggs)

Music is the purest form of magic. Magic is the deepest essence of music. The romance between the two is legendary. While music is our refuge, magic becomes our resurrection. There is no flow sleeker than music and no law stronger than magic. Both have survived the rise and decline of countless civilizations… both are unbound by time and space, or atoms and cells… both defining life and existence, uniquely and fervently.

The truest lie is magic, the loudest silence is music. A magician and a musician, both estranged by destiny and separated by distance, feel connected to each other through the invocation of their respective spells – magic and music. A series of Haikus and two cinematically emotive instrumentals attempting to create such an atmosphere of invocation:

Remnants of Remembrance

“…when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.”
(Jane Austen)

Scars are but evidence of life. Evidence of choices to be learned from, evidence of wounds, wounds inflicted by memories. Memories are like bullets. Some whiz by and only spook you. Others tear you open and leave you in pieces. Sometimes the scars remind you that you survived; sometimes they tell you that you have healed. Scars fade with time. And the ones that never go away, well, they build character, maturity, and caution.

Memories leave a light in the eyes, just as plain as scars. Versification of one such estranged and dyspnoeic moment, when painful memories and a torturous migraine decided to waltz in unison, presented in the form of a set of Haikus and two poignant melodies:

Illusions: A Journey through Instrumentals

“Ah, music,” he said, wiping his eyes. “A magic beyond all we do here!” 
(J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone)

Life is much like a song. In the beginning, there is mystery; in the end, there is confirmation… but it’s in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.  Some people have lives; some people have music. Music is in fact a higher revelation than all wisdom & philosophy. Even the great Albert Einstein quipped: “If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”

Music is to the soul what words are to the mind; it is the wine that fills the cup of silence. Like it’s said, everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances. And this rhythm gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything. It can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable. It is the universal language of mankind.

Asymptote

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
(Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

Courage. Kindness. Friendship. Character. These are the qualities that were supposed to define us as human beings, and propel us to greatness. But have they? We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but we haven’t yet valued humanity. We assign numeric values to each other, demarcating our universal existence with lines and borders that have no meaning. The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today are a result of the alienation that people feel from each other and their environment.

We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We may not share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive.

From cosmic perspective, every one of us is precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. However, there are people who are discriminating by nature. They live inside a box and think people who don’t fit into their box are weird. I believe this lot of morons are like genetically-manipulated plants growing inside a laboratory, like indistinguishable faces, like droids. Like ignorance.

Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human – in not having to be just happy or just sad – but in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time. We are all ordinary. We are all special. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all zeroes.

Zero is the number people often feel, more so than one. This verse is the retelling of the story of an entity that’s considered a ‘nullity’ by the society, but through determination, courage and love, it proves: even ‘nothing’ can truly be ‘something’. 

Lost in Rhythm

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment.
There is no why.”
(Kurt Vonnegut)

Time and Life, whether you want it or not, have a way of going in circles. Ideally, you’d want it to be a linear path—you’d always know where you were going, you’d always be able to move on and leave everything else behind. Instead, you always find yourself where you had begun. You forget things you try to remember. You remember things you’d rather forget. The most frightening thing about memory is that it leaves no choice. It has mastered an incomprehensible art of forgetting. It erases, it smudges, and it fills in the blank spaces with details that don’t exist.

But however you remember it—or choose to remember it—the past is the foundation that holds your life in place. Without its support, you’d have nothing for guidance. What defines you isn’t “where you’re going”, but “where you’ve been”. There are things that will never change, things you will carry along always.

Time is an equal opportunity employer. Rich people can’t buy more hours. Scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. What you perceive as precious is not ‘time’, but the one point that is ‘out of time’: the Now. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decrease, regrets mount. Time is such a waste of time to think about, because the longer you reflect on it, the more of it you lose. Yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream. So, flow with the rhythm and start counting how many Now’s you’ve collected and preserved yet!

Owing to some liminal displacement, my thoughts got a bit carried away. Hence, this poetic outcome: