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The Revolution of Sound It was an easy class. We knew it and wanted it in the rushed fury of that summer that had continued into the fall and spring and spilled into our second lives. No homework. No thinking. Pure attendance and class participation. We needed it, badly, and really didn’t give a damn about what it was about. Some old guy playing piano and some old black and white films. It was open, it was easy. “The Sound of Silent Films” they called it, some attempt at beauty and eloquent wit. The first day we were given a syllabus with only a course description. Where are the class times? we asked, pointing to the neat line of TBAs. We’ll be meeting according to Mr. Johnson’s availability, the professor said. Great, we all thought, some old man’s incontinence determining our class schedule. The worst kind of canceled, because we have to drag ourselves there to find out – and then we’re actually ready and just pissed at the irony of our attendance and preparation. But in the furor and haze we all knew this was better than actual education and that was ok. The old man was old. We could see it in his eyes, sad, empty, cataracted. In his limp, flaccid arms supporting the old newspaper skin, yellow, brittle, heavy, wrinkled, the years hanging from his arms in flags that swung when he played. We laughed when he wasn’t looking, but always choked it back when we felt him turn those doleful, painful eyes on us. And always stopped when he played. That man was archaic, silent life full of noise. His empty, clawed, shaking hands had forgotten nothing. The lights off, the silent play of light across the screen broken only by the clicking of the projector – we were back, that dark silence took us back, to the toned gray memories of an old, old era. We left the lecture hall, we were in a dusty theater, deep gray mahogany seats with lighter gray cushions, plush gray curtains, slowly raising, a pearly gray opaqueness beyond – the screen. And then he began to play, and it became his era, we were softly pulled back, feather strokes in our imaginations and the shades of gray became rich reds and blues and browns and sheer seductiveness. And he began to play – the people on the screen, long dead, forgotten fame became new for us. We were there at their opening, the premiere of a wonderful, innovative greatness, instead of the tired grayness they had become. When he played, he changed. He left behind the last, tired man of another generation and returned to something that had been taken from him so long ago. He resurrected a glorious façade of grandeur of the glory days of artistic film. Before sound came and ruined the sight, before the aesthetics were swept up in the marvel of realistic representation. He became one giant theater; housed inside this old man, in the deep red cushions and mahogany chairs of the vast echoing house were all the old stars, the beautiful genius cinematographers and visionary directors, the stage actors who intimately knew the movements and potential of the human form, the men and women who knew the workings of man and art and sight. We relived a lost generation, a lost art. And this man became our escape. When the riots and the insanity and the futility became too much for us, we had the wonderful memory of this man and his testament to the old, forgotten way, this man we knew would always be there for our flight into the past. When the screams and burning protests and naked emotion and violent love overwhelmed us, we knew that we would always have this man. When the futility cried pointlessly at all the wasted effort over doomed dead and lost lovers and abandoned souls, when we knew failure and loss, we knew that we would always have his music. That lecture hall became our theater, with plush red velvet curtains and the rich mahogany chairs and the beautiful old, dead people. And underneath it all was the seductive twine of his music. How that brought it to life - the ideals and emotion that we thought we understood so so well – but through the music we realized that this old man knew it far more than us. He knew struggle and defiance – he knew the loss of everything he loved and lived far far more than we ever would, and the power inherent in that knowledge and failure caught us and humbled us, showed us the side to our loud, still- moving, still-born struggle that we needed. We knew that we could always walk away, back to our parents and our money and everything we had repudiated but was still waiting to hug us back into its circle. But he had had nothing after his struggle – his struggle had been him, had been everything inside everything and everything else meant only nothing. And as we sat in our theaters and heard him play we heard his story, over and over again, in fifty, two hundred different keys and melodies. Some sad and slow, slinking across the minor scale, some happy and full of memories of the major, some a confused, pensive mix of the two. But despite the music, despite the story he told, or how he told it, the ending was always the same. And that day when it turned domestically bloody, when they shot those kids, the stray bullets seeking out true innocents merely walking to class, and our great man of big voice and grand lies called them dirty bums, even the poor slaughtered innocents who had been across the quad that late spring day, merely walking to class and not part of the raised and scattered voices – that day we needed him. But that day was the first canceled class of the year. The only. The class ended that day, because our grand piano man had died the day before, in his sleep, dreams of a failed revolution sweet in his silent mind. back |