Letter From America: Men In Black
After a soloist gives an outstanding rendition of a Chopin concerto at a concert in Phoenix, Arizona, Men in Black trundle the piano off the stage. The "disappearing'' piano prompts Ronnie Bray to think of things that have vanished from his life.
A few days ago, Gay, Kirt, and I went to The Orpheum Theatre in Phoenix to attend a concert. It was a pleasant and uplifting experience. The orchestra played three works. The programme commenced with Barber’s Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance, Opus 23a whose conclusion is, according to the programme notes, "an orchestral explosion that ends with a violent bang."
There was a bit of extra noise at the end, but it was nothing like any explosion I had ever heard. It didn’t even reach the decibel level of one of Standard Fireworks’ "Little Demons," that burst upon the crackling air of a boyhood Bonfire Night. That was my first disappointment.
My second disappointment, which was also my last, was with the final piece, Don Juan, Opus 20, by Richard Strauss. Richard was not related to the Viennese Strausses, and it showed. Nevertheless, his piece was light, bouncy, and full of confidence.
He wrote it in the year that Harold Bennett, my maternal grandfather, was born. The Phoenix Symphony Orchestra plays extremely well, in most passages, but in the Strauss, the brass was distinctly and stridently off note at times.
My favourite by a mile was the Chopin Piano Concerto Number One in E Minor, Opus 11, played by a virtuoso pianist. A youthful looking Jonathan Bliss played with his soul, the notes dripped from his gentle but passionate fingers like pearls falling softly onto wet sand. I would not have been surprised to learn that the piano had never before sounded as Bliss made it sound. It was soulful and pleading, yet earnest and passionate enough to rend the hardest heart.
Bliss’s interpretation of the great composer’s composition was a triumph of definition combined with artistic sensitivity that needed no words of explanation.
After his appreciative and knowledgeable audience eventually allowed Bliss to quit the stage, the orchestra arranged the music for their final offering.
During that interval, six men in black came onstage and pushed the piano into the wings, and it was not seen again.
*
This morning, I saw in the cinema of my mind, those men in black moving the piano from the light into the dark recesses of the staging, and was reminded of things that had disappeared from centre-stage in my life to be lodged somewhere, never to be seen again.
I reflected on that for some time and the only conclusion I could reach is that in all our lives there is a mysterious team of Men in Black who come onstage when our attention is diverted and move things out, at the same time as they wipe our memories of them almost clean.
I say they are almost wiped clean, because from time to time, like the whisky barrels in "The Hallelujah Trail," they come popping up to the surface to remind us of what once was, but now is no more.
Thinking back, I began to wonder what happened to the pedal organ I bought in Cheltenham in 1956 and stored on top of the offices of the Chapel in Knapp Road, where Billy Ray Anderson and I made our home for some months.
I remembered having a mysteriously vanished ancient copy of the Book of Mormon with run-on verseless chapters, printed before Orson Pratt arranged the present verse system.
Then there was the matter of the library I bought for a song, but could not take with me when I moved from Southbourne; the radio, my first, with a glass accumulator for the low tension; the German dress sword with which I sliced into my shoulder when I tried to hack a baseball bat out of a three inch diameter piece of wood in my attic bedroom at Fitzwilliam Street; and my MacGregor kilt and accoutrements, given for my birthday by Dennis O’Connor Clancy Jr., when we were church building missionaries in Ipswich in 1983.
I once had a small school photograph, vintage 1940 when I was five, taken at my Alma Mater, Spring Grove, just after the Romans left; and the letter my dad, George Frederick Bray wrote to me in pencil on green paper from Durban, South Africa, when he thought he was dying from burns received in the Western Desert during the rout of Irwin Rommel by the Eighth Army.
Gone! All are gone, and more besides. These are not the missing odd socks and gloves that plague and irritate our lives from earliest to latest days. These are not ancillary to, but the actual stuff of our lives, the fabric that is woven into who we are, and what we will become, and we mourn their passing.
Even though we cannot bring them to mind, there are deep holes where once they were, but within each of us is a continual sighing sense of loss and deprivation that does not rest until we ourselves are moved offstage by the Men in Black, hopefully to join our lost memories, and to enjoy our forfeited trophies once more.
Copyright © 2004 – Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
