The Story

The Man Who Made Music With His Hands

There was a man from whose hands music was continually flowing
and who turned everything he touched into rhythm and melody,
either in music, poetry, song, or picture.
The music took form from movement, and was always carried by the
unsmelled odors of forms evolving. Each passage had its own colors
and shapes and directions, and there were new rhythms in every moment.
Of course we all know the story of King Midas and his foolishness.
But this man only took the beauty in everything he passed and
brushed against and touched and tasted and wove it into the
music that was born from within it, leaving everything he touched
resonating with sweetness, life, and alertness.
In every moment, he was the dreamer waking up to a life of music
and song: a rich, yeasty and spicey life,
and even the rain has its own story to tell.
His soul was not celibate, it drank in and touched all,
all the brave and wonderful nuances of our gnarly lives.
In the house of the poet, the musician, and dreamer,
even the demons dance to beautiful music.
He wondered at all beautiful things, and cried at movies and
other people's poetry, and from his mouth and heart and eyes
came a constant "YES!" and from his fingertips, colors flew
and trailed through the air around him. He was a nimble dancer
and he liked to bring his fiddle to gatherings and dance little
jigs, and he especially liked to tell stories to children.
He loved adventures, and starting the day in a random motion
and following the rhythms from his hands wherever they led.
This took him through humble alleys and along mighty boulevards,
and under waterfalls, and over bridges, and everywhere he went
he breathed in rhythms and breathed out music.
All the mists knew his name.
He loved to walk, because it put him down on the ground among
the colors and sights and scents, and those who watched could see
that he walked always towards himself, towards his greater being
coming into existence with every step he took and every scent
he smelled and every rambling dog that he stopped to pet.
He also liked to walk at night, because then he wound find
himself in the world's underpinnings, among the people who
really made the world work, the ones who made it possible for
others to walk on stilts and sit on their porches. And write stories.
Only a few of us are privileged to realize that we and the world
are not just joined at the brain but that the world dances through
us in every whispered rustle of a baby rubbing a hair lock between
its fingers, in every fingered silken ankle, in every tousled hair,
in the movements of a boat through water, in every night full of city lights.
The man who made music with his fingers was constantly gathering
these sounds into his shadow-catcher and letting his arms and fingers
weave them into baskets and blankets and tapestries of sound.
Then he put the music back out into the world with his movements,
stroking, petting, caressing, massaging, speaking, posting,
touching, knowing, painting, decorating, feeling, placing.
Every movement was filled with the orchestration of sounds that
he was picking up from the world around him.
And so for him the world was a garden, to be kissed and sprinkled
and nudged and watched and harvested and admired and cared for.
He watched always what new flowers would pop up in it, what new
melodies were appearing, and greeted them with glee and joy.
And often they stayed around for awhile.
The sound of bliss poured from his eyes and he always knew the
way home. Indeed, his heart was full of home, and he gave away
bits of his home, and his heart, to everyone he met.

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The Man Who Ate His Own Shadows

He never doubted that the shadows would come to him. The surprise was
only about when. So instead he took up stilt-walking, which amplified
the vibrations and kept him from touching the ground.
From the stilts he could see the rooftops of all the happy and unhappy
people who lived their lives around him, and by touching them mentally
with his eyes his life was filled with them. The noise of their quarrels
and the power of their mourning helped him keep the shadows at bay.
The smell from their cooking pots fed him while he ate his own
gruel and dry bread.
On his stilts he became a spiderman, long thin legs scuttling over
rubble, pulling at fine lines of connections, stopping to observe
a scuffle or triste, and it made him feel good to be a spiderman,
and he would even tell a joke or two now and then.
Nighttimes, he lit candles and studied the shadows.
Sometimes they wavered hungrily at the foot of his bed and he caressed
them mournfully with his thoughts and tried to talk to them. He was
always amazed when they answered, mostly because he thought they were
dead, but also because he feared he was. They talked of frozen
histories and days lost to time, and he wasn't even always sure
anymore which ones were which.
Sometimes they clung to bits of the landscape or dishes and pots
and potted plants and he buried his head in his pillows and covered his ears
to their enticements so as not to be tempted to follow. He had circled
his lands and he knew their boundaries and he had steeled himself
with iron vows and a fence of no thank you's against those tempting sounds.
But sometimes they took form and lay beside him, and then he
shriveled inside with wonder and apprehension, and his hands
grew cold and shook and he bundled himself inside layers of clothing
to ward off the chill. He was most afraid when they reached out
and touched him, confirming his worst scenarios of broken
boundaries and shattered walls.
On the nights when the shadows left him alone, he relaxed, and then
he liked to wake in the night and mount his stilts. Then he would
walk around in his world until the morning light brought the noises
of life up to him, when he would return to his lair and cover
his head with pillows until the alarm clock went off and it was
time to go to work.
He felt like he was flying when he was on his stilts. And indeed,
he was able to take bigger steps to much more faraway places than
others in his little town, and his stilts took him to weird
dancing places inhabited by other spider men, and spider women.
But somehow only a few ever came back with him, and when they
became shadows, he had to wind up throwing them out.
Each day he would weave his spider web and send it down down to
the streets below his stilts, hand over hand, bit by bit,
watching the swaying hips and rustling hems of those below.
Then flies would come out of his eyes and he would slowly melt,
and pray to be reborn as a blue cloud, a blue cloud hovering simply
over a garden of orange poppies. Clouds he could trust, they had
always been friendly to him, never disappointed him, and he
thought being a blue cloud might be the most wonderful
thing to be. If he was a cloud, he could finally be fully
peaceful, he would not have to worry ever again about catching
anything with his net, and he could relax all the time,
and never have to deal with the shadows again.
Musicians camped in the hallway somedays, whole orchestras
with bassoons and clarinets and trombones, and then he would
forsake his net-making, and abandon even his stilt-walking
and devote himself fully to philosophy. And sometimes
people from below walked up into his hallway, not even shadows
to worry about, nor spider people, but just strange people
from the ground level, it seemed like more and more of them
were coming up and then he might have to bury himself in his
pillow even at mid-day and sleep until they disappeared.
He hated the heat of mid-day anyway, it made the air stick to
his spider skin and it drowned him from below. On hot
afternoons he tore at himself and left pieces dangling in
the treetops as he passed.
He also hated the telephone, and sometimes he would stare
at it for days without answering a single call. The telephone
tasted best when a new delivery of drinking sugar courted
his senses and opened his breath.
He hated it most when the shadows sat down to dinner.
He knew that they would talk about him, and that he would
not be able to defend himself, and he would have to give in,
and that was insupportable.
He carried always an image of a perfect world, and measured
against it the people in their houses, the spider men and women,
the stragglers from the ground, and the shadows, especially the shadows.
His dreams glowed more beautiful than any other world seemed to allow,
and he worshipped them.
He disapproved of the shadows and when their frivolity involved
nakedness among strangers, he would decline, respectfully, to
participate, though many times he was caught peeping at their frolics
from behind the slits between his fingers.
He knew they were laughing at him.
He was afraid the shadows would come looking for him and
he would throw their pillows over the porch railing in anguish.
When they laughed at him he had to salt the shadows and
it was a lot of work, and he lost much dreamtime doing it.
One day of dreams is like another, for someone
accelerating in their circles, striving toward escape velocity,
and there is nothing like getting your head done in, you know,
to teach you that withholding your soul is normal deviant behavior.
When the shadows tore at him too loudly, there was always
the laundry. The clean white sheets and underwear reminded him
of the clouds, and the rhythms of sorting and folding kept him
centered until he could go back out on his stilts again.
On the hot afternoon when the strangers took over the eighth floor
hallway, he had no laundry to be done, and the doors to the
stilt kingdom were down, so he circled the room instead.
He circled around and around, until the rain finally started
and he could open the door to the porch and look again at the
rooftops and mountains and clouds.
Ever since the day when the rose was taken from him, he had
known it would be like this, but he was ready for it, he had
laid up provisions . . . dry soups, magazines, a tv guide, whiskey,
and 200 hours of Myst, and he knew the best and sexiest giff stashes
in spiderland. He could go through entire weekends without seeing
another living soul if he needed to, and he was ready for it.
When the bird flew in, he was not ready for it, however,
and he watched grimly as it circled the walls and landed itself
on the tv antenna, busting up the shadow paths but also making
havoc of his own circling of the walls. The bird was not in
the plan, it had no pillow to jettison, it lived on the juice
from his cobwebs and it could apparently stay forever,
and as he felt it entering his orbit in closer and closer
blockage, he found himself tearing at his own eyes and
watching the dust of his bones splinter

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The Meeting

One day they passed each other. The man who ate his own shadows
was out on his stilts, he was carrying his dream of the ideal
relationship in his arms above the crowds and the ravaged
landscape. He was filled with mission and integrity, and nursed
his ideal with the loving tenderness with which a mother
nurses a baby. His righteousness lit the way and he did not
deviate from the path it set for him.
The man who made music with his hands was down on the ground,
walking on pavement, walking with a big bouquet of flowers
under his arm, and hand in hand with a shadow that the man
who ate his own shadows had thrown out.
Neither the man who made music nor the shadow he was making
music with saw the stilt-walker passing in glory high above
them. They were too busy looking into each others eyes.

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The man who made music with his hands, is not
waiting around for his dreams, nor is he trying to
<make> them come. He is swimming in the world in
all its aching beauty <AND> all its matter of factness,
and allowing himself to drink it in and honor and caress it,
and strangely enough, the world is loving him back.
That is the end of this story, for now.