The Last Days of the Music Man

What you have to say is not half so important as how you say it. I learned this very long ago, when the rest of the world was new to me, ensuring that every image, phrase, and gesture would hang on my mind like the lyrics of a melodic sanitarium. This was appropriated by the world in its early age, which assumed that everything so young must be inherently flawed on account of its innocence, which through the understanding of any rational mind is intrinsic discord, chaos, artifice. Innocence may not hide in the dawn of time, for the world even in its age of innocence knows only the corruption of those who populate it. It therefore never much mattered what anyone ever thought because thoughts could never change the world. And that was simply understood.

The melodies of the world continued to sing years after innocence had vacated my mind. Let the music play, the great men of wisdom might suggest. It began to become clear to me that the rest of the world, as little of it I could understand, had a very sincere problem: it could not be changed by anything. This, of course, was of extremely small consequence. A corrupt world yields no product when time has lent it no opportunity to produce. I ignored the problem and began to sing along, keeping time with the quintessential rhythms of the multiverse, pausing for appropriate remarks. The pauses were misleading; the nature of the song defied appropriation. I no longer cared for the words of the growing world; it no longer cared for mine.

For some odd years after, the world grew at a pace established by the melody. There existed no nature beyond the rhythm. That nature knew no beings beyond the ticks of its tempo. A world within a world is what it came to be, providing an innocent mind with a badge of solidarity to defend it from that world which would see it destroyed. The music became more than a crutch. It was a world, a life, and it was one far improved from that which created it. The impressionable chorus intertwined itself with fluid dynamics, and the song became lucid, dreamlike. My life sang in harmony with it, distinct but part of the whole. I knew things as clearly as things may be known, and so too did they know me.

Born of chaos and discord, however, no ordered melody can withstand. The irregular breaks in verse became obtrusive, the variations in melody frustrating. I awoke one morning not to the simple wonder of a structured life, but to something unreasonably horrible. I awoke to the rest of the world, somehow more aged and mature. It no longer held its disregard for innocence. There was no need. No innocence remained, nor had it for countless seasons. I awoke to a place where death was impossible because no hope had survived. It was the world I had once left behind in favor of another. I closed my eyes and wished it away. When I opened them, it remained. Unfortunate.

A plea here weighs upon those who might answer it, carried by words too powerful to ignore. In defiance of the others, in the last hope of a better tomorrow, an imploration is herein put forth: that the greatest of songs be uncensored and this dying world laid to rest, in its present state a waste of both precious souls and of their time. And in its own time, as it climbs into greater confines of age and maturity, so too does it beckon to death, for it forgets in its quest to destroy them that its innocent hopes give it life. Let the music play, the wise men would once say, and sadly it has come to the end of their days. I will die their last, and the song will stop forever.

I beg of those who might hear me: grant me this.

1/7/06