MUSIC FOR VIOLA DA GAMBA / VIOLA DA FORMICA

MUSIC FOR VIOLA DA GAMBA

One day, a day of terrible storm and darkness, a day when I was so young I was not yet born, my mother and father died. Together they lay, their hands clasped each into the other’s. Together they lay, their breathing gone, there on their little bed, a bed which fit inside a desk drawer which itself fit inside the mouth of an insect, a termite, a dove, or red ant, roaming seemingly without direction on the side of the road, but yet following the silent map of its own kind and its colony, a vast network of other ants, ants which carry the broken body of another back to its home where it is placed in an entranceway (‘This is one of the fallen, if we did not know we were alive, we might mistake it for ourselves,’ it seems to say). It is then surrounded by other ants, the whispering clicking of their forelegs, rain heard deep within the hill. Then hungry for what rich nutrition its body holds, the ant is eaten by the others, its friends, its co-workers, its larval children, the red midnight of the body progressing like a storm throughout the colony.

One day, when I was so young I was not yet born, my mother and father died. Together they lay, their hands clasped each into the other’s. Together they lay, their breathing gone, there on a bed which fit inside a desk drawer. Does a wave have a shadow, a shadow a shore? Waves arrive, wash them away.