Crescendo

by Amy Weiss

  “Follow me,” says the higher self, striding across the slippery fields. The woman rushes to keep up with her.

  They walk, the mare trotting at their side, until they reach the frozen river. “It’s too risky,” the woman protests. The higher self calmly takes hold of the mare’s mane and the woman’s hand, and together they cross with ease. The ice does not crack or collapse. There can be no danger when your higher self is carrying you. In her arms, you weigh nothing.

  On the other side of the river, hidden behind the birches, is a cabin where the higher self has been waiting, patiently, for the woman to join her. The mare stays outside to race the falling flurries. The others enter. The higher self gestures for the woman to sit at the wooden desk in the center of the room, then places Music Lessons in front of her. “Go on,” she says, resting her hand on the woman’s back. “Finish it.”

  The woman takes a pen from a drawer and puts it to paper. Nothing comes out. Her mind is too clogged for any sound to flow from its nib.

  She lifts her eyes from the pages. “How do I compose the music?”

  The higher self regards her, amused. Sometimes no one can surprise you more than yourself. “You’ve been doing it all this time.”

  “But I didn’t know that I was.”

  That is the difference. To know changes everything.

  “Does your husband ever visit you in dreams?” the higher self asks, knowing the answer already, having dreamed the dreams herself.

  “He used to,” the woman replies. “I wish he still would.”

  “Then make it happen.”

  “I can’t just ‘make it happen.’ Dreams are not in one’s control.” Neither is life, she thinks: a husband who died as a gift, a daughter as a favor; the snake that stopped her heart, the nurses that stopped her death. “Nothing is.”

  “Everything is. That’s what makes this such fun.”

  The woman is aware that the dream world is surreal, its boundaries fluid. She is not yet aware that the waking world is too. The difference is that the dreamer accepts this fact while the waker resists it. One loosens her grip on space, on time, on the conscience, on the body; the other hangs on for dear life. One conforms to the logic of the place in which she finds herself; the other imposes her will on it, not realizing that to renounce control is to gain it. One finds her wishes fulfilled; the other, dissolved.

  “When you are asleep, and you know that you are asleep,” the higher self says, “you are lucid. Lucid means ‘seeing clearly’: not only that you are dreaming, but that there is nothing to restrict you apart from your own mind. Do you wish to fly? Just throw yourself into the arms of the sky and let the wind hold you. Do you wish to talk with me? To read what’s waiting to be written in your book? To learn the language of the moon, to speak its secrets to your husband, to spend each night beside him?”

  “Yes,” the woman breathes.

  “All that is stopping you,” says the higher self, “is you.”

  Here you are, my little bird.

  You’re here? I thought you’d left.

  That old song and dance?

  I suppose it’s time for a new one.

  Since the night of the fire, how many times have I come to you in dreams?

  Many.

  When you woke, how many times did you find me lying next to you?

  None.

  Every time I’ve been with you, it’s been a dream.

  Must you twist the knife?

  And I am with you now.

  Which means that I am dreaming.

  Yes.

  Which means that I am aware I am dreaming.

  Yes.

  Which means that I can do anything.

  So, what would you like to do?

  The woman could not lose her husband if she tried. She released him, and he came back. She searched her dreams and found him inside them. She played her songs and found him inside them. Death had not claimed him; it had multiplied him.

  “What would you like to do?” he asks her, night after night. It is as if he offers her the universe, yet instead of taking it she transcends it. Freedom is one thing; freedom with power, another entirely. The possibilities are delicious, electric. It is her world to create—one with walls made of rubber instead of steel, where families grow old instead of bleed out, where she is not a victim but a god.

  “Open your eyes,” she can hear the higher self say. The woman does not obey. When her surroundings are finally as she desires them, why would she ever leave?

  The higher self waits, knowing that there is no escaping yourself. Knowing that life is but a dream, and just as dreams melt and morph, so does life. A lotus in a pond blooms into a schoolgirl on a train. The dorsal fin of a sailfish flattens into the mane of a mare. Fear, loss, grief: this is the material from which nightmares are made, but nightmares can occur only in one whose eyes are closed. To be lucid is not to be aware that you are dreaming while you are asleep. It is to be aware of it while you are awake.

  The higher self cannot be the one to wake the woman, anyhow. The woman must do it; otherwise, she will never become the higher self. And so she simply lies down next to the woman, cradles her in her arms, and starts to sing: “Little bird, blue bird, why oh why so blue?”

  “Because it ate a blue fruit,” the woman responds from somewhere inside her sleep, consciousness being a fence under which music can crawl.

  So, too, can a higher self, and she sneaks into that walled-off place with a whisper.

  “Little bird,” she says, “what will compel you to peck your way out of your shell? If you stay inside too long, you’ll suffocate. When will you see that the very thing which protects you is the very thing which confines you, and crack it wide open?”

  After some time the woman stirs, and the visions that have been her unequivocal reality disintegrate. She tries to hold on to them, but they flee. Perhaps the higher self is right, she thinks, and the waking world is indeed like the dreaming one. After all, hers has been no less illogical or impermanent: the everyday giving way to the unfamiliar; people vanishing into the air, or materializing from it; all that chasing, flying, dying. She had declared herself to be at its mercy, never recognizing that it was at hers, that a life is indeed made of clay and not stone. What if she were to put her hands to it, to mold it into some new shape? To smooth out its painful contours, to view it as unformed rather than deformed? Or to set it aside and start over on a completely different piece? She imagines running her fingers along the clay as she does with her harp, coaxing something beautiful from something gray. The white light appears. The hands of the higher self cover her own. They will work together.

  The woman has just begun her lucid dreams. Now she begins her lucid life.

  The higher self unlocks a door, and the woman passes through it.

  As the woman steps into the room, she notices an enormous telephone switchboard spanning its length. The cables connect not lines but life. Her decisions to their consequences. One footstep to the next. To her eyes it is a hopeless snarl of cords and wires, incapable of being untangled.

  The higher self waits to the side. “Stand farther back,” she suggests.

  The woman does, and the distance brings order into being. One end of a cord is plugged into a jack labeled FIRE. Its other end hangs loose. She scans the empty jacks. GIFT. LESSON. GUILT. She need not keep looking; she knows where FIRE fits. It is a well-worn groove. She plugs the loose end of the cord into GUILT. The action is automatic, comforting.

  The higher self sees that this is a bad connection, one that creates static. She lights up other options, as higher selves do.

  FORGIVENESS and ACCEPTANCE blink with promise. To plug the cord into either of them would take just a moment, a motion. Yet somehow the effort required to cross those few inches of space, to close that circuit, is tremendous. The woman’s hand is able to do it. Her mind is not.

  The higher self does not understand her reluctance. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

 
; The woman’s voice is small. “It might not fit.”

  “Then you keep trying until it does.”

  She is hardly able to look as she tests both of them out, though the cord slips into those sockets as easily as it did into GUILT. There is no resistance from the cord, from the jack, from the higher self—only from her.

  The switchboard regenerates, new patterns forming and new potentials arising, for what ensues from guilt and innocence, from fault and forgiveness, are not the same. Emboldened, she slides one end of the cord out of ACCEPTANCE and attempts to yank the other end free from FIRE. It will not budge; she will not stop. The higher self must finally intervene, telling her, “It was not your decision to make.”

  GRIEF has its own circuit. What would have occurred had the woman chosen to defy the antlike being and remain inside her charred house forever, a slowly dying ember of a person? She unplugs the cord from GO and inserts it into STAY. The switchboard becomes as bare as that life would have been. No connections. No light.

  Hers might have been an impossible path—but not the wrong one.

  IF ONLY connects to VERSE or to REFRAIN.

  SONG to MOURNING DOVE or to STARLING.

  WARRIOR to WOMAN, WOMAN to WARRIOR.

  ACORN to OAK.

  The board is solved, the snarl silenced. A signal lamp flicks on. Someone is calling.

  The woman is unsure what to do next. “How do I make the connection?”

  “Just step back.”

  Now she can plainly see how the lines of communication must be joined, and when she plugs in the wire, the channel is crisp and clear. “Who’s there?” she asks.

  “Me,” says the higher self.

  “Surely, life cannot be so readily changed,” the woman argues. Surely it is less permutation than prison. A husband caged inside his attic, his wife inside her grief, no risk of flight because she clips her own wings. A person incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, or in a body he did not deserve. The jail’s cells, the body’s cells: their walls are solid, inescapable.

  When this happens, the one end of the cable cannot be removed. It is locked in place. The other end cannot be left dangling, though. It must be plugged in somewhere. She considers the connections. It fits into the jack for BITTERNESS, for ANGER—oh, how well it fits there.

  “Step back,” the higher self says.

  The woman steps back and sees a new space open up, a new possibility. The mind can transcend the thoughts and the emotions, can even transcend the jail. A body may be forced into fetters, but a soul cannot. Once this is understood, the sentence is completed.

  “Step back.”

  The switchboard is one of many in a never-ending row. One belongs to the prisoner, another to the warden, to the victim, to the committer of the crime. One to the virus and one to the host, to the patient, the doctor, the disease. Their cords are entwined, inseparable, crossing over and over.

  “Step back.”

  Victim and villain, prisoner and warden, judge and juror: they are all the same person.

  “Step back.”

  To sacrifice one lifetime in captivity—to surrender physical freedom for the freedom of the consciousness—is to leapfrog over many more. It is not imprisonment but the opposite.

  The cable comes loose in her hands.

  It is the winter of the woman’s life, and the snow is falling fast. It erases the fields and hills, buries her tracks, muffles her pains. Everything is white: the mare’s tattered bones, the sky, those final pages that wait to be filled. The higher self will help her do this. They share the same past, the same pen, although one is musician and the other is maestro. And it is never too late to begin writing one’s music. There is no getting older—only higher.

  The woman sits on a snowbank, Music Lessons in her lap. She rereads a passage that has confounded her since she first came across it, this time aloud so the higher self can hear.

  CRESCENDO

  MUSIC GRADUALLY BUILDS TOWARD A CLIMAX AND DIES. MANY CONSIDER THIS THE END OF THE PIECE. IT IS MERELY THE BEGINNING.

  “Ah, yes, the crescendo,” the higher self says. “To fully understand the concept, you must first understand the most important moment of your life. Would you like to see what it is?”

  The woman’s breath freezes inside her. The climax of the music is what every composer strives for, what every listener longs for. It must be the answer to her empty pages—the answer to her.

  On the icy ground, images appear, a scene forms. The mare leans down for a closer look. The woman watches too, expecting wedding-day wildflowers, smoke and cinders, snakebite. Instead, she sees herself as a toddler. The young girl is running around the yard, nearly dancing, for at that age all movement is a dance. She spots something still and dark in the grass and crouches down to inspect it. It is a winter wren, immobile except for its frightened eyes, its wild heart. The girl is astonished to find such treasure dropped from the skies. She cups her hands around its body. Her fingers are warm, her touch as soft as its feathers. “Don’t worry. You’ll fly again,” she tells it, mistaking hope for truth, in the way children do. The girl and the wren are both so tiny, sitting there in the grass, but nothing is little about the love that passes between them.

  The scene fades; ice becomes ice again. The higher self claps with glee, though the woman’s mind is as blank as the snow surrounding her.

  “That’s all?” she says.

  “That’s all?” the higher self repeats. “That’s everything.”

  A crescendo is swelling strings and crashing drums, not broken birds! Of everything the woman has ever done, this act was the most important—but what could be less so? She hadn’t even formed a memory around it. She turns to the higher self, a question in her eyes.

  The higher self is surprised to have to explain unconditional love. To love a tiny creature, to love all humankind, there is no difference. Love is love; the object is not the subject. And nothing is louder or more powerful. “Crescendo means ‘growing.’ What do you think you were doing for that bird’s soul? And for your own?”

  The little wren was no bigger than her child must have been, and that love had defied size. The woman knows how it felt to be placed in the hands of her daughter. Had the wren felt the same way in hers? Is life nothing more than a series of being mother to all that falls in one’s hands? How strangely she has behaved, spending each day birthing and raising and nurturing everything around her—her patients, her mare, her music, herself—while crying that she is childless.

  From beneath the snow comes activity; a shiver of feathers and the frost falls off, revealing the wren. Of course it is healthy and whole. It never was otherwise. Its wounds were only bone deep, its death only body deep. The wren was not really a wren, either. It was a living, breathing opportunity for compassion, which even at her young age the girl knew to cup in careful hands, to keep warm, to keep alive. This is what we all are: chances for each other to practice kindness, disguised as people.

  The wren darts back and forth, more blur than bird, and comes to rest on the mare’s back. Its feathers molt away. Its beak recedes. Where there was wren there is now light, growing ever larger and stronger until it eclipses the ice, the woman’s eyes, the heavens. The higher self gestures downward, and the light, following her signal, compresses itself back into that miniature breast, a being greater than the sun tamped down into a body the size of a matchbox.

  “Do not confuse the container,” says the higher self, “with what it contains.”

  “A crescendo is an increase in power,” she continues.

  The woman believes she has already grasped the subject of power. She knows how to create worlds, how to control them. But this is power’s manifestation, not its meaning.

  “To become louder, to become quieter, to discover the strength in the softness: these are means of expression in music, and they are what move the listener. Beauty is born from the dynamics,” says the higher self. “Power has its own dynamics, and it too can be played both forte
and pianissimo possibile, as soft as possible.”

  “Soft power?” The woman chuckles.

  “Yes, like the butterfly. No one expects it to be a firecracker. It wouldn’t be a butterfly if it were, and it would devastate the flowers upon which it lands. Nevertheless, the power inherent inside it—to accept the dark days, knowing that they are when transformation occurs; to honor the time it takes for one’s wings to dry; to slough off the weight of its past and fly, when all its life it has known only to crawl—is far more explosive than any firecracker. Soft can be so much stronger than hard.”

  “I know the power of my loss,” the woman says, “and the strength. It ground my heart to gravel. It flattened my years. But the power of my life? I’ve lived in a small way, doing small things of which no one will ever know. There is nothing meaningful about it.”

  “Did you not see the wren, whose spirit is no smaller than the universe that contains it? No impulse of love is smaller than another. Had you never opened your heart to your loved ones or touched a single patient with your music, had you done nothing else with your time on earth but shown compassion to that one wren, it would still have been a triumph.”

  The woman shakes her head. An entire existence for a bird?

  The higher self shakes her own head. No. An entire existence for a kindness.

  “Decade upon decade of struggle, of survival, of eating and sleeping and bleeding and needing, of fire and ice and pain, all that pain—all that life—it can’t possibly be worth it just for that,” the woman says.

  “It is not worth it. It is it.”

  “And on those days when being alive is too heavy a burden, let alone being kind?” She hesitates, though who can she admit this to, if not herself ? Or is that, in fact, the hardest person to whom to confess it? “And on those days when your soul feels long dead, and you wish the same for your body?”