I like writing early in the morning. The day’s many entanglements haven’t gotten me. Things are still quiet in my neighborhood. Soon enough there will be the doorbell. The person on business from Porlock will arrive.
Now here’s the thing: I wish for the faint sound of someone playing the piano. I do. Once upon a time when I was walking an unfamiliar neighborhood in Houston, TX of all places I heard someone playing Liszt because their window was open though it was Texas and hot as Satan’s outhouse.
It was lyric in the inhospitable: “Tre sonetti di Petrarca” and Liszt with his cataracts, his dropsy, his failing heart, asthma, insomnia, Liszt placed his hands on my shoulders.
And this from Anthropic’s Claude:
“It was a peculiar late chapter: a man who’d been Europe’s first great musical superstar spending his last decades as a wandering, half-monastic figure, writing music decades ahead of its time.”
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University