Satie and Monet’s Lilacs
Yesterday, I rode around my neighborhood park on the bicycle while randomly having Satie’s ‘Once upon a time in Paris’ playing through the earphones (one earphone actually. The earphone responsible for playing the melody wasn’t coorporating. So I ended up mainly listening to the harmony of the piece. Solid chord sequences mocking the concept of tonality). As I flew drowsily through a green, densely planted passage, the downhill took me down; I stopped pedalling.Â
That isolated valley was no longer dull and creepy, no longer sad and grey, no longer wet as I had seen it during winter. The bicycle carried me down the heel ; elated. My ecstatic eyes refused to blink despite the increased amount of fresh breeze finding its way in because of the accelerated speed of the bicycle getting down the heel. Refusing to not see the coloured valley; the lilacs and branches and weeds so obviously and beautifully arranged without human intervention; placing themselves in a version of Monet’s paintings united with the music of the broken earphones.
Its trills were completely integrated with the lilac colour of the flowers with green, the breeze, the melancholic mood of the short, discreet English summer. These melodic nostalgic trills are green and lilac, there is just no other way to perceive them in this moment.Â
That was the moment I realised the importance of description. When I tried to tell you. I took so many pictures; but in the pictures there is no Satie, no bicycle, no downhill, no broken earphone…
The flies, the lilacs are nothing outside myself, you see; they all are some of my dreams, waking dreams may be, some of my desires.
