Пит Таунсенд - The Age of Anxiety

Where have all the sparrows gone? When I was a child there were thousands of them, everywhere.

Robots will take over the world; I know they will.

Hurricanes. When will this wind cease?

Why can’t things just remain as they were? Why is there always someone who wants to change things?

“It’s incredibly sad, isn’t it?” I looked over to Walter, who was gazing into the distance, his strong, handsome profile belying the fragility of his mind. “Who are they, all these frightened people you have as acquaintances?”

Walter did not reply.

“Do any of these inspire music?” I said, trying to imagine what Nik would have made of all this.

“Read the first one,” Walter said. “Read it aloud, and then close your eyes and see what happens.”

It was a strange instruction, and I felt a little embarrassed as I began. “ I worry about the planet ,” I read haltingly. I gave a small cough to clear my throat. “ This strange weather .”

At this I looked into the sky. It was a bright autumn, a bit of blue, a few clouds, the sun hiding somewhere. I continued reading aloud.

“ When I wake up I feel my dreams must have been disturbing, but I can remember so little. I find it so hard to reconcile the gentle Christian beliefs I know you’ve all been taught with the violent demands of the hardline Muslim clerics at our local mosque. Why should my kids have to face all that intimidation, those threats and censure? They haven’t done any wrong, at least not yet. How can music and dancing be wrong? Surely they are expressions of the heart? ”

Walter looked at me; I looked back. I understood why a devout and extreme follower of Islam would turn his back on music, even proscribe it, but both of us would find it hard to believe music was an expression of evil.

“Who said this?” I asked.

“Funnily enough it was Hussein himself, who runs the shop.”

“Not a radical, then.” I smiled.

“No, but he is sincere, devoted to God.”

“Worried as much about climate change as he fears the hardline mullahs?”

Walter shook his head, but he was affirming what I’d said.

“What—or how—could hearing such a statement possibly cause you to hear it as sound?”

I was not as incredulous as I may have seemed, but I pressed my godson. “What could it chime within your own heart? Are you afraid of climate change, or of radical mullahs? Do you have a soundscape—as you call them—that evokes what Hussein said to you?”

The singing child is crushed by the fall of a hundred massive rocks that come down from the sky like grossly overgrown hailstones. They are in fact part rock, part ice, and as they smash into the ground—covered as it is by the broken glass, the tangled metal, and the sand and rock pools of the two previous movements—stone and liquid concur to create a new noise. It is the sound of avalanche, and in the midst of it all is the farting noise of a thousand rubber bags being squashed, their putrid contents expelling in globs and gobs. Ice and shit. Or is the burbling, bubbling sound that of lava burping in the heart of a volcano? Introduced now, in this revolting and heartrending scene, is the first violin. Ralph Vaughan Williams in his Lark Ascending used a solo violin in the most perfect impressionistic way possible. Here, the solo violin represents a vile whiff of methane escaping from the cesspit of foul lava. At first a growl, a scrape, then a swoop, a cascade, and then a rhythm that allows the construction of a simple fugue. The soul of a lost daughter, a child never born, will rise, almost like a lark, from the stinking recesses of the abyss.

Walter had predicted that fifteen years in the garden would be enough. Floss still came and went, always shining, always alive, riding close, riding away, riding here, riding there. She would come home from a day at the stables covered in mud, her blond hair in wisps around her face; sometimes she chewed a plait or scratched her nose, and she’d walk into the garden, which after all his work was in some ways as impenetrable as a jungle. She wouldn’t call him, she would search until she found him, draw him to his feet, put her arms around him, bring his face to her own, and kiss him so tenderly and affectionately that he never had a moment’s doubt how much she loved him, how she trusted him, and how much she appreciated the freedom he allowed her.

He had tried to tell her that he needed to escape, he too needed to fly, to jump from a window and see what he heard as he crashed to earth. He couldn’t find the words. Now she kissed him again and again, repeating that they had been together for fifteen years. In the patterns, the whorls of the lawns, the spirals of the flowerbeds, the planting of the trees, Walter had echoed and celebrated and exalted that number: fifteen. So that day, the occasion of their fifteenth anniversary, with his beautiful wife in his arms, he knew that he had to leave his garden.

In the house they made love and Walter wept. He cried the way a woman might if taken to a new height and stamina of orgasm and cannot contain her emotion or her gratitude; not grateful to her lover but rather to the miracle unleashed in her own body. Then Floss wept too, though her sexual arrival had been more sudden and brief. Sexually then for a moment they had changed chemistry, taken on different elemental names, and swapped roles, his arrow down, hers up.

“I might play the piano again,” Walter said. He lay back on their bed, his chest bare, still moist from shared sweat.

Floss smiled, and tossed hair that had grown long again.

“You could take your harmonica out into the garden tomorrow,” she said with a laugh. “See what happens.”

Walter pulled the pillow from under his head to swipe her, but she was too quick. As she walked naked to the window he gasped at how beautiful she was at the age of thirty-five, how slender and fit, and yet on the edge of being voluptuous. She turned to look back at him and even in the mist of sexual afterglow his breath quickened at the curve of her breast.

“You must do whatever makes you happy,” she said. “I know what you’ve been hearing is not about happiness necessarily, but you need to live. That’s all.”

She ran back and threw herself on top of him and they kissed again.

“Do all men need to make things?” She was laughing. “Walls, holes in the ground, songs about trucks?”

“We like songs about sex best,” said Walter, thinking about Crow and finding his thought quite wrong. “In the band I wrote pretty much everything. I think I was too embarrassed to write anything about sex. A garden is all about sex.”

“What!” Floss laughed. “What do you get up to?”

“I meant birds and bees.”

“You watch insects while I encourage Dragon to cover a visiting Highland mare,” she said as she gathered her hair into a muddled bun.

After fifteen years they were more deeply in love than ever. But Floss told Walter that she suddenly wanted to create something as well. And so both these beautiful young friends of mine, my godson and his wife, had survived a period of suspension, a time they had lived in stasis, riding, digging, staying close to straw and sweat, the earth and fertilizer. Now they were ready to start again.

As Walter and I walked in Richmond Park he confided to me his renewed love for Floss and I was glad. But there was something more I needed to know.

I turned to him, blocked his path, put my hands on his shoulders, and then lifted my right hand to his cheek.

“What did Andréevich say to you?” I asked him as firmly as I could. “Since then you’ve plowed all your creative energy into your garden.”