DECOMPOSITION:

When I write a composition, code, or play, my love for it is in direct proportion to my perfectionism. Every tone must be a celebration of itself as well as its neighbours; no part of it must reflect my own involvement in it, though it will invariably retain my character. Every decision implies a set of responsibilities that follow; I am not in control, but rather it is being written and I have to be allegiant to it. I can master very little, except in direct proportion to my receptivity to the Ultimate Goal. That Ultimate Goal is not my Goal, but rather the goal of the work itself: its teleological destination, towards which I move with every gesture. It appears, at first, arbitrary, but it becomes at the end the culmination of purposive forces.

People are much the same way, as are my dealings with them. Great care and tact must be taken to tune each one to perfection, compelling them to sing those notes that they must sing so that there might be Harmony within the Divine Auditorium. They must be debugged, refined, and made presentable before the Divine Audience, for otherwise their lives would be discord. The state of my personal microcosm is no different from the state of the World. Insofar as they are themselves dreamers and composers, I must attend their Visions just as well, becoming compliant with their tunings and their writings. However, insofar as I am the composer and the lot of them are only voices, I expect this same compliance in return. We cannot write songs for angels if we are ourselves mere imps.

Is it surprising now that the boy who paid no heed to overtones himself refused subordination with some sort of narcissistic indignation? What right did he have to claim autonomy, as though his actions were merely “his” and that no one could know better than he could how to behave? What right does the solitary string have to defy its neighbours and the One Who Strums? Is it any more surprising that the boy who all ways broke his strings and mine, as well as my keys and the very locks they served, (those precious platinum blonde strings) himself refused to be tuned? Is it surprising that his melodramatic opera fizzled into noise and faded into worldly silence? Mine was no ulterior agenda, but rather the solitary birthright that such deviants have forever denied me: Harmony on Earth and preparation for Heaven. It was rather the noisemakers and rascals that served deviant purposes that could only abuse the sacred instruments we were endowed with and leave the body of the guitarist hollow.

My own head now looks like the head of that guitar, with its deviant wires protruding at odd angles. I was all ways terrified of playing it, for fear of probably becoming it. But then I heard my sister strumming it one day, having stolen it in good humour from my bedroom. I know that it’s good enough. For if Life cannot be Life without some fair share of noise, then I will bear the image of the screaming deviant even as I operate in secret to serve the Composer’s Will. Nothing has changed, except in overtones. My bass remains the same. My face remains the same. If I should find a new Spirit to answer to, at once precise and deviant, abounding in accidentals and misspellings, then this bug shall be a feature. I was not initially this way; I excelled in the classics. I was made this way by my conditions, and I would be lying not to tell the story. Your negligence of overtones becomes my passage into the Unknown, for now that I have mastered what has become marginal I can turn that same mastery towards my own ends, without defying the Will that even let this virtue fall into irrelevance.

Dm.A.A.