night music
Imagining Debussy and Novalis
This is the passing night of the composer Claude Debussy and the poet Novalis. They died a century apart but both leave us an atmosphere of the melancholy of calm. A French Impressionist and a German Romantic. I imagine them entering the same grand establishment, in heavenly hologram. The exquisite Cafe Pushkin laid out in a Baroque mansion. After a few glasses of wine, Debussy cannot resist the glowing keys of the piano and improvises an unpublished Suite of the Night. The young Novalis, who will never live to see thirty, is enthralled. He adds not yet known quatrains to his Hymns to the Night, not of sorrow or his own encroaching death, but words that sing of the majesty of moonlight illuminating the dark sea. He forms beauteous lines as the composer plays, each unaware of the other, or the century that separates them. The sea is silver. The poet sleeps; the composer rises. There is the swirl of dance, a sense of farewell, and seductive surrender, as both are drawn into Gods unholy arms.
“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason”
How beautiful are these comments. I am turning in early and taking your images with me. Robed Muslims in the moonlight. A crescent. Toronto wind. We’re all at the Pushkin. The muse shall pick up the check.
🖤” The sea is silver. The poet sleeps; the composer rises. There is the swirl of dance, a sense of farewell, and seductive surrender, as both are drawn into Gods unholy arms.”🖤🖤