This is the current 'Wordhunger' collaboration in which I am involved. Awaiting input from the other Wordhungerer who has contributed to this one to see if he wants to amend or continue or deem it complete.
Now approved as complete (19 Nov 07)
When reading a ghost story, the text often seems to mean more than it apparently means - with a traditional ghost (overt or not, but always with traditional ghost story trappings), giving a sense of existence beyond the words, an existence often coming off the page and sitting in the reading-room or carrel with you...
These phenomena may or may not be products of the imagination – the mind's eye and ear being fed by the voice and images of an author long dead, but what if it were not words which caused the hairs on your neck to stand, your heart to start thumping under your ribs, the sweat to start in cold beads on your forehead?
I used to be a student at one of the senior music academies in the country – if not the oldest, then it was certainly old enough to have a library whose subterranean avenues and corridors were dark, dusty and labyrinthine. The shelves – floor to ceiling and thick with unevenly sized books and manuscripts – absorbed all sound. Once settled in an isolated corner, the only noises one could hear were the waves of blood pushing through the cavities in one's own head, and the periodical rumble of tube trains passing through the ground, deep under the uneven boards of the floor. As a relaxatory aside, I took delight in transcribing these sounds – the pushing blood, the rumbling trains – into notes upon bare staves of musical manuscript paper that I had placed in readiness for such impulsive compositional ‘doodling’ at the corner of my desk. Then I would return, refreshed, to my typical studies of Wagnerian leitmotif or Baxian references to Scriabin or whatever ‘homework’ otherwise nagged for my studious attention.
One evening – with most of the other students having cleared the library carrels of their diurnal litter – I still puzzled over a particular conundrum of ‘Architecture’ in Maw’s Odyssey Symphony, pleased that the rustle of others’ fingers had disappeared. It was just a half hour before the library shut. The tube trains were apparently on strike, as, evidently, were the pulses of my brain. I suppose I could literally hear the music of silence. With the presumption of a smile on my face, I shivered as I breathed in these precise moments of Aesthetic ecstasy.
The rarity of absolute silence is unknown to virtually all of us, so that if it comes there is no way of knowing quite how one will react. In my isolation, my sense of reality soon started to become twisted – a kind of mental levitation held stable only by fixing on points of visual contact.
It was then that my hold on the 'real' world was knocked further from its orbit by some thin sounds emanating from one of the bookshelves. The noises at first seemed to be soft reverberations – indistinct and detailed at the same time, the kind of sound made by an insect's wing. I felt and knew that these were no chance reflections from some other part of the building – indeed, the sound seemed to move like a ball of some invisible and independent essence, slowly advancing through the congested space towards me. Focussing with microscopic, forensic attention as stars gathered around my peripheral vision, I became aware of the movement of strings – of bows over strings – and then of a music whose elusive beauty I knew that, were it to stop, I would never be able to recall more than a fraction of what I had heard, and that I would be regretting that lack to the end of my days.
But then came the saving grace note: the very ghost that now sat in the library carrel with me: the ghost predicted so long ago as likely to come; sensed ages ago (if only a few small paragraphs ago in truth) as due to arrive to serve as vessel or home key for any desperately snatching memory of the already attenuating friction of gut on gut.
Each bow was made from the same as what it stroked or scraped. Then a vision of muscle filling vesica with air, rather than watery ectoplasm. A vision that was music made percussive as well as wind-blown, later to be keyed in, tapped in as upon an ancient computer or synthesiser, brought forward to modern times as a ghost of itself. All conducted by someone like me as word passed meaning to word like a baton.
I shook my head to empty it of the very conundrumming of words that had expunged the real ghost. Then it came. It was there. For the carrel was empty even of me.
