Teofilo Barbari sits at the piano, and closes his eyes, and his fingers touch the keys.
He will have already written the first two parts when he notices that the metronome has stopped, tilted to the right, where it is impossible for a metronome to stop. He will be working on the third sequence, trying to overlay it against the base tempo, trying to assemble the complex phases and patterns, trying to weave them in and out, building parallels and counterpoints, modulating and shifting. For a few moments or an infinity — because there will have been no way of telling them apart — he will be utterly absorbed. And then he will see that the metronome is utterly still. He will stare at it, his fingers suddenly immobile over the keys. He will realise, as universes die unmourned, that it is, in fact, not quite still; that it is moving in its course, just a thousand times slower than it should. Outside, the pigeons hang in the Venice air. Outside, the voices of the tourists have slowed to subsonic grumbles that echo in the earth, or what passes for earth in this mad city of water and stone. Inside, Teofilo will weep with joy and terror and relief. He will have conquered time, and he will be its lover and its father and its keeper and its slave.
Teofilo is forty-nine years old and he wrote his last masterpiece when he was twenty-seven. He has been trying for almost half his life to recapture moments of genius that his youth vouchsafed him, only for his middle age to snatch away the patterns that wove inside his head, the intricate structures of tone and pitch and harmony. He was feted, once, and now he is forgotten. He has come to Venice because of the rhythm of the tides, and because Venice is dying, and because if he does not find what he has lost, he will die too. He will dwindle and fade and die, known for the brilliant flare of his youth, forgotten for the tedious overhang of the rest of his life. What happened to Teofili Barbari, someone will ask, and someone else will shrug, and it will not matter because there are always other geniuses, somewhere, now and then and forever.
Outside a chrome-lined café just along from the Guggenheim, Teofilo will sit, nervously fumbling the cigarette, holding the coffee-cup between trembling fingers, trying to make sense of what will have happened. Time. All his life, the flow of time has fascinated him, absorbed him. The subtle intricacies of perception have consumed him. Rhythm and tempo; he has created new patterns, new structures, by layering musical sequences, offsetting this one just so, diminishing this one just so, harmonising this one just so. His early works — Structure For Eight Musicians, Quavering Bridges To Breve, Light Fields In Harmony — were wondrous things, unlike anything that had ever been heard before. They transported their audiences. They dazzled and deceived and delighted. They were conundra, penumbra, tundra. They were new worlds; no, new universes…
But they were never enough. They were magnificent beyond measure and they were not even pale shadows of the wonder that he could see in the landscape of his imagination. It was that, perhaps, that led to his decline. His dissatisfaction with his own genius drove away the flatterers, the hagiographers. But it doesn’t matter, not now. Not now he’s closer than he ever was before. Not now he can weave his music into time itself; weave time itself into his music.
He drains the coffee-cup and stubs out the cigarette, and will leave the café, and has gone back to his studio. Traghetti weave among the vaporetti as quavers between semi-breves. Tourists absorb the vistas of the Canale Grande, condensing centuries into minutes. Water laps against stone. It is stone that was laid down when the stars were unrecognisable. It is the same water that has lapped here for millennia. It is eating the heart of Venice, drowning it despite every effort to the contrary, eroding the city into decayed memories that will last for the blink of an eye and the age of the Universe.
He will sit at the piano, and he has been staring at the metronome, and in his mind there is no longer any past and there is no longer any future. There are moments of creation and destruction, as infinitesimal particles vanish with a sigh of new-born photons, and there are the vast fields of the universe where dark energy grazes its way through galaxies. There is light and there is darkness, and they are terrible and they are wonderful. And there are pulses of rhythm. There is sound. The universe will be having spoken to him. All of it, all at once. He just has to filter out everything it’s saying, tease out each strand, each overlaid message.
That’s all he has to do. Deconstruct the Universe.
And if he gets it right, if he has done this, then Venice will be preserved for ever, everything will be preserved forever, and at the same time the Universe will rush headlong to its destruction, and time will begin and time will end and time will run forwards and backwards like sand in a spinning hourglass. All of this will have happened, and none of it, depending on what message he teases out of the rhythm of the atoms and the galaxies, out of heartbeats and death rattles and wingbeats and footsteps. All time will be laid bare and he will listen to the music of the spheres and he will experience wonder and magic and beauty and terrible loss and all the things everyone experiences all the time. Everything will have changed, and nothing will change, and everything is and always will be and never was.
Teofilo Barbari sits at the piano, and closes his eyes, and his fingers touch the keys. He begins to play.
Brian Dolton’s fiction has been published at more than a dozen on-line and print venues.
This story was sponsored by
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17 Responses to “IL MYSTERA DEL TEMPO • by Brian Dolton”
Comments
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November 13th, 2009 at 1:00 am
“The universe will be having spoken to him” – this and this only is clumsy, overdone.
Somehow the piece reminds me of this from Great Bacon’s Brazen Head:
“Time is.
“Time was.
“Time is past.”
November 13th, 2009 at 5:05 am
Odd future tense. Present tense would’ve been better. Not bad, but its length made it drag. I had to fight the urge to skim over it. Has potential.
November 13th, 2009 at 5:43 am
Dull,uninteresting
What audience??????
Musicians might get it
November 13th, 2009 at 6:22 am
A lovely conceit, nicely written. You have a poetical way with words, but therein lies your problem.
In a word: discipline. We’re not given a chance to savor an image before you’ve moved onto the next way of imagining the very same thing (example: “His early works — Structure For Eight Musicians, Quavering Bridges To Breve, Light Fields In Harmony — were wondrous things, unlike anything that had ever been heard before. They transported their audiences. They dazzled and deceived and delighted. They were conundra, penumbra, tundra. They were new worlds; no, new universes…”). You bury us with words and weigh down your story (much as this comment is doing, ironically enough).
. . . all of which is a roundabout way of saying, “edit, one or two more times. Free your most potent images by removing the distractions.” That’s all.
(And, “tundra”? Really? Alliteration is nice and all, but “tundra”?)
A four for wonderful writing, just too damned much of it.
November 13th, 2009 at 7:02 am
An interesting idea. I liked the idea of everything coming and *being* all at ince. Not sure I grasped everything though, it was a little heady.
November 13th, 2009 at 8:05 am
It’s interesting that the piece is about time, which is the fundamental root of tense in writing. I struggled with the way the writer jumped tense (which is something I have to stay on top of when I write. I will jump tense in a heartbeat.)
In the first sentence, it starts out present tense, and yet in the next big paragraph there is a mix of past, present, and future. It just made it a bit hard to follow where I was in time… (Kind of ironic, don’t you think) Now, if that was the intent, it kinda worked, but it’s a tough thing to do for even the most gifted writer.
There were flashes of literary brilliance in the writing, but the story missed the mark.
November 13th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Between the musical jargon and the metaphysical purple prose, this one was hard reading. And I never did figure out what the “time stopping” was all about. This piece didn’t do much for me, it was hard to figure out what it was trying to say.
November 13th, 2009 at 10:16 am
This piece had moments of truly beautiful writing, but, it droned on and on and on. I was nodding off by the time I reached the end. . .or maybe I haven’t reched the end and I’m just dreaming that I did. I’m sooooo confused!
November 13th, 2009 at 11:57 am
I thought this was beautiful. I stumbled a bit in the beginning with the tense but was soon rising and falling along with the flow of both the music and the story. I thought this piece was also about more than “time” – art, creativity, passion, the muse, the concept of legacy and permanence, it was all there.
Or at least that’s what I saw.
November 13th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
From about the first paragraph, I knew this was a story I was going to enjoy, yet that I would not be able to get my mind completely around. The writing is elegant; the images in sections, vivid. This part blew me away:
“He will dwindle and fade and die, known for the brilliant flare of his youth, forgotten for the tedious overhang of the rest of his life. What happened to Teofili Barbari, someone will ask, and someone else will shrug, and it will not matter because there are always other geniuses, somewhere, now and then and forever.”
So true.
In the end the reader is left to imagine what will happen next. In some stories this is effective and even a desirable stopping point. Often we know enough about the character to be able to parse out what will likely happen next.
In other stories, it is almost unpardonable and I teeter between feeling this is the case here, or not. I know how Hollywood would end this story.
And, like other readers have expressed, I did get lost in some of the musical terminology, but generally felt I had a sense of things, if not an actual dictionary definition.
Unique story.
–John
November 13th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Thanks to everyone for the comments so far. I knew this would be a “hard sell” (I certainly wasn’t confident that EDF would take it) and some of the criticisms – that there is a lot more style than substance – are arguably valid. I’d even forgotten the “tundra” line – and that certainly was overwritten!
There is a deliberate ambiguity in the piece, about whether what Teofili is experiencing is real, subjecive, or allegorical. I had this story rejected at one market where it was read purely as a piece about the struggle of the artist to create, and I can see why it might be read that way (although my story on that subject is actually “The Gallery Of Illusions”, previously published at EDF, which would have been titled “Illusionist’s Block” if that didn’t give the game away…). It’s intended as something from which the reader can explore the options, rather than something that dtermines which optin is true. Such pieces are always going to be difficult and I’m glad that, from some of the comments and some of the votes, I have succeeded for at least some of my readership.
November 13th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Oh yeah, and it’s also a love song to one of the most wonderful cities in the world. If you have not been to Venice; go, before it is gone. It truly is a place like no other.
November 13th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
You’re never going to please everyone, especially the casual reader looking for a quick fiction-fix, but I enjoyed what was on offer here; an attempt (imo) to try to pin down and sketch the moment of inspiration, when the spark catches in the intellect and creativity begins. Sort of an early Greenaway film in prose.
The mixing of tenses worked for me – use of tense is a legitimate tool and, like any other device, can be used experimentally. I doubt this would work anywhere near as well if told in a single-tense, linear form.
Never been to Venice but now I wish I might.
November 13th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Nice, though I’m inclined to agree with Bob (comment #4), that it could do with a little pruning.
That said, it does have a kind of poetry to it.
Four stars from me
November 13th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Bravo!
Your story brought me all the way to the site to actually comment instead of just reading it from my email. Not too many do that.
Loved it.
~Heidi
November 13th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
I love the idea of the story and some of the language and images. I understand why you were doing the tense-switching, but in such a short piece, I found it sometimes a bit confusing. For me, this might have worked better as a longer piece, where you can intersperse entire scenes in different temporal relationships.
November 16th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Very pretty. The tense-switching worked for me, illustrating a character hovering outside time, either literally or metaphorically, and I liked the way it came full-circle at the end.