The Inventor of Music

I am the inventor of music. 

Before my arrival the world was dull and flat and empty and sad. Before I came there were just feelings dissociated from sound, only high rigid thoughts, thoughts so sharp they could cut you. Before music the world was intolerable, it was open and endless, so wide and unfocused that you had to endure your immortality without the gloss of a soundtrack. There was no diversion and certainly not the diversion of music. I made the soft, sweet sentimental sounds of music. I made the melodies and the suspended, prolonged, enveloping chords. I made prodigious themes for soaring violins. I made the delayed dithering downward passages which pass via grief and culminate in a wave of sweet nothing. I made tension and I made it last as long as felt appropriate. I made voices sing, I single-handedly invented the sequence, to what end point who knows, but at the very least it was a well-defined one. I aligned our sadness and happiness with each note, each harmonic progression. Yes, I invented music. Because before music there were only sounds, harsh scrunching ones or dull thuds, there were faint echoes but there was no rubato or melancholy there was nothing to imagine yourself into, in short there was nowhere to get lost in, there was really no hiding place. With music I made the cage and the maze the four walls and the exit point. I stretched the elastic as far it could go, making sure it would never snap. I invented music because I could not abide the day, its infinitesimally slow changes, tired of trying to convince myself that the sun had moved in the sky or that the light had changed in the short time I had been sitting watching from my bench. Before music I often felt I could choke or run out of breath. I invented music because I got tired of waiting; I am not really a sucker for stillness. Stillness is an invention. Now all my life is music, every heartbeat, every motion. Now my life is artifice and flight, it is digression and fantasy, it is wayward and light but above all it is music.