Variation

 

Variations of walking is the first thought. Walking the keyboard is a well-worn feat. The walk to the letterbox (new messages), the walk to the shops (surprise packages), the walk to the edge of the world (almost silence), every variation is a bustle last time, an amble this time, a frogmarch next time. By mood turn, variations may be just a-like a-walking the dog, looking for fun and feeling groovy, taking a wild on the side walk. There’s the variation of walking with the weight of the world on your shoulders, that may turn into the weight of the world on the balls of your feet. One moment deadly, the next free float. Innumerable are the ways of walking the keyboard. Sounds like it, but is it? It’s a walk in the park, not. Call it 1741, an improvisation from the very start, everything thereafter variegations of variations. Except also, it’s Johann Sebastian, imagination all compact when man met machine made to sound like a brook in spring, birds in the old town square, or chopping for dinner. That’s a second thought. After a good walk he did hours of variations, ours the long ovations. Excitement is the outcome of quiet reflection. But then there are the variations on the variations of walking. Have legs will propel, but is this the same neighbourhood? Or signature byways of another city, another time, discovering down its dashing lanes the prime time, no frills, the gracious thrill? Patterns of sound that defy the crisp finality of aphorism, that defy by nature the rule of a dogma, that rather are movements of mind living between definitions, recognising all the factors of experience, reaching after newborn syntax. Call it Leipzig, if you like, while we’re in the area. Or is improvisation the memory of the discovery? The original start-up, memory acquired and turned into melody. Back at home going out of your head going around the block, stepping over reconcrete as if baroque cobblestones, again? The sprays of spring shade trees? As what is this walking if not memory letting itself rest where it finds itself, ready to explore some new avenue, a cliché even with a new tone, going over there now, here now, back when, uptown, downtown faster or well too much and tarantella craze slowed to polka facetime. Call it home while you’re in the aria. Still, walking is but one way of explaining variation. Variations of conversation is another, as words get in the way or vocabulary cannot deliver or everything unsayable comes to a head. Such wordless poetry enables fresh stanzas with equal time for each variation, joining the differences. Silence is where the keyboard might take a step in, or invent a word that needed invention.