Rain pebbles the roof with pied beauty. It prickles the ear with porcupine fingers, then pounds liquidly. A million elves play ping-pong on the roof, then drop their paddles and dance a tattered tune, their tap-shoes rapping a rhythmic tattoo.
Sheets of rain wrap the mountain in a shrouded dawn. The horizon line between mountain and sky is blurred like an amateur photographer’s clumsy effort to capture the beauty of line. Beauty of color, too, is smeared and bleared; the artist is no more adept with paints than the photographer with the camera. Monotone grey drones over the mountain and over the sky. A drone instrument in a morning raga, it is relieved by a line of melody from the frontal instruments. Their slight variations of green create a morbid tune from their few notes. The key of the day is C Minor, and unlike Mozart’s Fantasy in C Minor, it doesn’t splash with exotic emotional exigency but droops with dreary dullness. The cadences are sluggish, the tones grey, the melody difficult to decipher.
Indoors, it’s a different story. I, the troll in the house, hear the trip-trap over my head, louder and louder. It’s the Big Billy Goat Gruff (and I cower), then a whole herd of Billy Goats Gruff. Then the trip-trap, trip-trap grows lighter and lighter as the billy goats move into the distance, and, timid troll that I am, I wait till it can barely be heard in the distance before I peer out from under the bridge.
Sheets of rain wrap the mountain in a shrouded dawn. The horizon line between mountain and sky is blurred like an amateur photographer’s clumsy effort to capture the beauty of line. Beauty of color, too, is smeared and bleared; the artist is no more adept with paints than the photographer with the camera. Monotone grey drones over the mountain and over the sky. A drone instrument in a morning raga, it is relieved by a line of melody from the frontal instruments. Their slight variations of green create a morbid tune from their few notes. The key of the day is C Minor, and unlike Mozart’s Fantasy in C Minor, it doesn’t splash with exotic emotional exigency but droops with dreary dullness. The cadences are sluggish, the tones grey, the melody difficult to decipher.
Indoors, it’s a different story. I, the troll in the house, hear the trip-trap over my head, louder and louder. It’s the Big Billy Goat Gruff (and I cower), then a whole herd of Billy Goats Gruff. Then the trip-trap, trip-trap grows lighter and lighter as the billy goats move into the distance, and, timid troll that I am, I wait till it can barely be heard in the distance before I peer out from under the bridge.
Look! The photographer has learned her art. The saw-toothed edge of firs on top of the mountain is clearly distinguishable, every point darkly defined against a whitened sky. The white-out is over. The artist, too, has had a breakthrough. Greens emerge in richness, still somewhat dulled by an overdose of grey, but the artist is learning. Yellows, blues, purples, and browns have joined her palette of greens.
As for the musician, he is packing up his instruments. Sound no longer dominates. Only a lonely harpist sits at the back of the empty chairs of the orchestra, picking lightly at the strings, effortlessly, musingly, letting the notes drop where they will. Thoughts merge and mingle with the rustle of musicians closing cases and exiting the stage, leaving it to the photographer, the artist, the harpist, and the poet.
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