Something a bit different today. I’m so sad as I had the thought to do some improvisations with the audio book of The Vampire Lestat and especially wanted to improvise with the The Vampire Armand chapter “Spring rain. Rain of light that saturated every new leaf of the trees in the street, every square of paving, drift of rain threading light through the empty darkness itself…” etc… but now part one has been taken down from YouTube… although I feel like maybe I have just that little bit of audio on an old phone, so I must investigate…
In any case… I *do* have this little bit of audio. It doesn’t really go with anything from the show so far, so I’ve put the image of my wonderful @haflacky commission with it. I hope that’s OK!
I wanted to just do piano for Lestat and violin for Nicolas. I used my Nicki violin for it.
“Yet as the song deepened, it became the very essence of despair as if its beauty were a horrid coincidence, grotesquery without a particle of truth. Was this what he believed, what he had always believed when I talked on and on about goodness? Was he making the violin say it? Was he deliberately creating those long, pure liquid notes to say that beauty meant nothing because it came from the despair inside him, and it had nothing to do with the despair finally, because the despair wasn't beautiful, and beauty then was a horrid irony? I didn't know the answer. But the sound went beyond him as it always had. It grew bigger than the despair. It fell effortlessly into a slow melody, like water seeking its own downward mountain path. It grew richer and darker still and there seemed something undisciplined and chastening in it, and heartbreaking and vast. I lay on my back on the roof now with my eyes on the stars. Pinpoints of light mortals could not have seen. Phantom clouds. And the raw, piercing sound of the violin coming slowly with exquisite tension to a close. I didn't move. I was in some silent understanding of the language the violin spoke to me. Nicki, if we could talk again ... If "our conversation" could only continue. Beauty wasn't the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an uncharted land where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signposts of evil or good. In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art -- the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases -- beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden. So why must it wound him that the most despairing music is full of beauty? Why must it hurt him and make him cynical and sad and untrusting? Good and evil, those are concepts man has made. And man is better, really, than the Savage Garden. But maybe deep inside Nicki had always dreamed of a harmony among all things that I had always known was impossible. Nicki had dreamed not of goodness, but of justice. But we could never discuss these things now with each other. We could never again be in the inn. Forgive me, Nicki. Good and evil exist still, as they always will. But "our conversation" is over forever.”
