The Book of Dema

CHAPTER TWO + Quiet is Violence

Making music is a difficult enterprise, even for the inspired. At different times, Tyler certainly felt inspired. Although more often than not, it meant that his head was so full of words and melodies that he struggled to get them unjumbled and onto paper. This state felt more like a malady than inspiration. He had all the pieces there like an unstarted jigsaw puzzle in a box, but he was often tormented by his inability to make sense of it. Studying piano at a young age brought him into proximity with the masters, and with great certainty, he knew he was nothing like them. Consider Beethoven or Liszt, two of the great composers he could only copy on the keys but not with the pen. Beethoven, so deaf at one point he could only hear the lowest percussion ranges, wrote his Ninth Symphony that included a broad range of choral and string orchestration only able to hear it entirely in his head. Liszt, a genius talent in his own right, was a rock star pianist shortly after Beethoven, attracting adulation and attention across all of Europe at a time when there was no recording or social media to promote the music. He was a musical innovator, developing new forms that were never heard before, most notably thematic transformation, which Beethoven had first introduced and then Liszt gave full form. It was that that drew the people. It was all genius and personality. And here Tyler was, making music in his basement, borrowing from these great men, but forever feeling like he was adding nothing to the musical conversation. He was forever copying the giants, adopting orchestration techniques when layering his music or obsessing about the transformations he injected into his songs, never settling on single melodic themes.

These were some of the demons he faced, and they never let him forget it. They plagued him, especially at night when he was alone in his room. It had been that way for years. He'd written about it in his notebook many times. The great composers were conduits. From their pens flowed the glory of the universe. But he was equipped with a harpoon, all steel and rope, meant more for killing and dragging than creating. He felt beauty had fled his pen, leaving him to launch his brute instrument out at the muse and attempt to draw something lyrical back from the darkness. Most days it seemed his harpoon only returned sludge and brine. It was hard to form music out of the dredged bottoms of the universe. His band mates, all three of them, seemed to agree with the voices. They cooperatively played as they banged out his songs and he sang and rapped his way through the emotional breakdown he felt he was constantly on the verge of committing. They all wondered with irritation throughout their practice sessions if they were just the background noise to Tyler's struggle. He certainly hadn't been listening to their input while engineering the demo tracks. They agreed they had some good songs, but those songs weren't as good as they thought they could be.

Tyler, for his own part, felt the struggle. The men in the dreams weren't helping. He could remember them clearly as he sat in front of his music gear putting the finishing flourishes on a demo CD. His mind was partially distracted by their shapes as he also clung to the hope this demo would start opening up the venues. His mother promised insistently, trying to spread encouragement, that they were waiting for them.

The songs were queued up, ready to render. He hit the button. Then he sat back in the chair for the few minutes the songs would take to process.

Now sitting in silence, he looked over at his journal on the little brown table next to him. He reached out, grabbed it, and opening it to his accounts of the three dreams, he began to read aloud.

How do you write about a dream? They're disjointed and unpredictable most of the time. Mine rarely feel right. They're vivid but always located in the wrong places. I had a dream one time about my childhood home. It wasn't my house though, it was my high school. I mean, why would I dream that my family lived at the high school? Maybe it's because with Dad working there, we all spent what seemed like every waking moment on the campus. Well, not all of us. Zachary was gone, of course. Normally, my dreams are unconnected, though I have this weird habit of repeating certain ideas. I guess if something is really bothering me, it sticks around in my subconscious until I've worked it out or it's defeated me somehow.