Splinters of sound

So many fragments of the world end up with me in the darkroom. I pull the world into one small place, like putting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle into a jar. They are not in order, but everything belongs with everything else. It’s all entwined. It doesn’t matter how far I travel, whether it’s to shoot starry nights in the foothills of the Yorkshire dales, or snapping the seemingly lost worlds of narrow alleyways in Lisbon, it all comes together here as one.

The sledgehammer stands in the corner behind me. As I glance over at it under the red light, a moan ripples across the back of my shoulders. I’m a fragile man and the weight of the tool didn’t take long to take its toll on me. I look back at the freshly developed pictures hanging to dry. It was worth it though.

I was told once to travel and not take photographs, to commit everything to memory instead. I was told that it would give a richer experience, the sights and sounds merging into one full memory. I responded that only a picture was a real memory, a more reliable source of truth than the brain. 

Memories get tainted, reconfigured to the point where there’s very little truth left in them. Picking up a print, that’s different. The colours captured in a snapshot moment along with the emotion are permanent. It’s truth. It’s not the case that everyone can remember everything clearly. Or even want to.

I’ve fought my adult life trying to not remember music. 

TWO

My mother had been a classical guitarist, my father a concert pianist. My sister, two years older than me, had been trained as both and was something of a prodigy, hailed by our parents as if the musical ability within her made her deserving of extra love. It wasn't quite the same way with me. I would drag my feet across the wooden floor when I was called to practice. The music wasn’t in me. I never got to fill up on their love quite as much. 

In general, I would feel very distant from my family. They never seemed to have a hair out of place, and even on nights of relaxation, my father would still be in a long-sleeved collared shirt and neatly creased pants. My sister would relish sitting there with them, looking through music scores or going through the library of vinyl records and just sitting around in the lounge, listening to pieces of classical music. I could see them entranced by it. Reading the vibrations of the sound with their minds. They would get lost in it.

I was forced to be there as well. Forced to be in nice clothes and not be doing the family a disservice by wearing jeans and a Star Wars t-shirt. I never wanted to ruffle feathers, never wanted to push myself further away, so I tried. I sat there, trying to guess whether I was listening to Beethoven or Debussy. I never figured it all out. I tried to give everything I had when I had to sit at the piano or embrace the guitar. Even though it was with great reluctance, I did attempt to enjoy it all. But it got harder and harder to do that as the years rolled by. 

I’m sure my parents could feel it. It was forced from both sides. They wanted me to be a part of them, to follow in their footsteps to enjoy life together. To be part of the musical clan. Why would I not want to be? That’s how they would see it. Why would I want to push myself away from all of the gifts that they had to drill into me? Why would I be so cruel as to reject my own family?

I wanted the family part of it. Not the music and its rigid discipline. Instead of numbing my fingertips and watching my posture, I wanted to skip away to the cinema, to read the Famous Five and to buy disposable cameras to play with while running around the woods. I wanted to explore through the world through photography, to feel the permanency of that art medium instead of fleeting moments of sounds that would pass and fade. 

As an eight-year-old, however, I wasn’t really in control of having the means or bravery to do anything but endure. The distance grew, however. A few years later, my mother had given up on teaching me the guitar. She and my father had decided it was probably best that I just focused on one thing, because I wasn’t as prodigious as my sister. I thought that I was getting a break, but losing an instrument never meant extra free-time. It meant that I’d spend twice as long at the keys instead. That’s when I started to notice strange things inside of the piano. Something was out to get me.

THREE

I’d been trying to track down the piano for so many years. That very one which had stood in the dining room of our house, the one that I had had to sit at, almost every day of my childhood.

My sister had taken possession of the family piano after my parents had died, vowing to keep it safe and to keep playing it to honour their memories. I didn’t argue with any of it. But then through some financial struggles at some point, she had sold it on to someone else. It had been a friend of our uncle, who we’d lost contact with a long time ago.

But I managed to track him down with a bit of searching around online. My uncle remembered who the piano had gone too and hooked me up with a contact. Money for purchase, for transportation and before I knew it, the instrument was standing in my garage. It being just me and the piano alone once again, even as a grown man, dread washed over me.

I started to get panicked and I could feel my breath shortening.

FOUR

Around twelve years old, my parents had ingrained enough discipline in me, for them to allow me to sit and practice alone. The piano had always been perfectly tuned and cared for, but one day I heard a knocking from inside of it. It was more than a knocking however, it was rhythmic, deliberate. Rap, rap, rap.

It would cease as soon as I would stop playing. I sat and listened through the silence, but only when I started making music again, would I hear it. Rap, rap, rap. I had called my father to listen to see if he could hear it. But when he was in the room, the knocking wouldn’t happen. He’s scolded me for wasting practice time and for thinking that the piano wasn’t being taken care of properly. When I was back sitting alone I heard it again.

There was no case for getting up and not finishing my practice. That was out of the question. But the knocking was unnerving, there something eerie about it. I sat there puzzled with increasing anxiety it happened throughout the entire duration of my practice. I never found the source and it wouldn’t happen every day. It would just creep out of the blue here and there to plague me. 

Each time it returned, chills down my back would intensify. I would try to shut it out and concentrate on the music. But I could never manage to do that completely. After a couple of days once of not hearing it, it suddenly snapped back into action. Rap rap rap. And then I saw what looked like a wrinkled old finger poke out over the board and point at me before immediately disappearing back into the piano.

I excused myself and ran to the bathroom. I shouted to my father that I had gotten a real upset stomach and that I was sorry. I forget how long I spent there, but there was no way I was going to hurry out and be forced back to the piano that evening. I had dunked my face in cold water to try and drain all colour from my face before slouching out of the bathroom, hands clutching a fakely distressed stomach. It worked. I got to go and lay down in my room.

FIVE

A long time ago, my life had gotten to the point where I needed my white noise almost constantly. It found that it was a way to combat the melophobia, a fear of music. It’s hard to live in a world and not hear music. The TV has to be watched with closed captions only. I have to avoid even talk radio shows because of jingles and advertisements that play.

I can’t go to bars and have a social life. Even the rhythmic, sloshing chant of the dishwasher would initiate some weeping. The beat of footsteps, cars passing by with their radios thumping, elevator music and the list goes on. I have turned my house into something of a sanctuary and usually wash dishes by hand. But by and large, the only way to function is with the static white noise in my ears. 

So standing there in the garage with the piano, the panic that had besieged me as a young boy raised its ugly head. I had to put on my headphones and turn the white noise up loudly, just to stand there looking at it. I didn’t want the memories of its noise playing away inside my mind. Wearing them, it would allow me to beat it.

Bad memories of the piano exist. 

Those are most certainly not tainted or altered.

They are real. Very real.

SIX

It got to the point where I thought that there was a gremlin living inside of the piano. One that only I could hear. After the knocking, which continued intermittently for a while, came movements. The lid of the baby grand was always propped up. Always. I’d never seen it closed in my life. There was a certain sense of satisfaction in being able to look at the mechanical workings going on while I was playing.

It was fun to watch the hammers dance to my tune, knowing that I was controlling all of that order. It would have been beautiful to capture a moment in a photograph. One day as I happened to look up from my hands and the entire inside of the piano had been consumed by a black mass. It never looked like a solid black, but as if it was the blackest smoke you could imagine compacted in there and swirling around.

As I stared deeper into it, I realised that I was still banging away at the keys but no sound was coming out. The shaking took over me but I couldn’t move. There was no way whatever was in there, was going to let me get up from the stool. I couldn’t shift my hands from the keys, couldn’t pull my eyes from the swirling mass. There was almost a pull from in there, like the piano was doing its best to suck me in and swallow me whole.

I had planted my feet firmly on the ground and braced my back. I would resist with everything. Then from out of the middle of the blackness, a spindly, gaunt hand had come. It was clawed as if ready to plant itself on my face and drag me cruelly into the instrument. At that point, I realised that it was more than a gremlin as my heart rate raced and my head started to feel dizzy.

Even though it wasn’t touching me, I was feeling consumed by the energy of the black mass. I still couldn’t move, it had me locked there at the piano, a prisoner. My heart palpitating I slammed my eyes as tightly as possible in defence against the clawed hand. It’s all that I could do. At any moment I had expected to feel chilled fingertips tearing at my face. 

But a stern voice from my father asking me why I had stopped playing broke me free. I had spun on the stool and snapped to my feet to look at him. 

I figured I looked a sweaty mess, dizzy and swaying on the edge of nausea. But my father just told me to take a couple of deep breaths if I needed to and to get back to practice. If he hadn’t have come into the room to see why there was no music, I wonder if I would be around today. Slowly I had turned back around to face the piano. I could see the strings and hammers, everything was perfectly normal. 

SEVEN

I had been long past the point of wanting to give the piano up. It wasn’t me. I started to feel angry and resentful every time practice was coming. It took so much of my time. But ironically, when music was involved in my life, when I would try to keep a lid on my photographic fantasies, it was the only time that I got any notable attention from my parents. 

Whether it was feedback on lessons, sitting down to play together, or just listening to records, it did offer some sense of family. I would often wonder, glad to be free of my stiff clothes and comfortable in my pyjamas, how much of a bond there would be between myself and the rest of them if music never existed between us. I clung on to what I could. Suffering through lessons to try and keep a thin thread of love between my parents and me.

But the fear of having to go back to that piano started to eat away at me. There was no way to know when something would happen. One time I had the sensation of the keys being so hot that my fingers would be melting, sticking to them. That was during a recital I was doing at home for a small gathering of my parent’s close friends from their musical circles. I couldn’t stop playing and fortunately, everyone was sitting behind me so couldn’t see the tears rolling down my face.

When the piece was finished I looked at my hands. No blistering. No burns. One time I went to press the sustain pedal and I had felt something grab my ankle. Another time I was practising alone and I had felt some kind of movement around me, something brushing by. I was too broken and afraid at that point to look anywhere but at my hands. But then I saw phantom gaunt fingers striking at the keys to my right. 

Another time I had intensely felt something next to me that I had made the mistake of turning my head briefly to see the face of an old man not two inches from me. It was more than I could handle. I jumped. The face was gone. But as I closed my eyes to try and clam the tremors, the face stayed there. Embedded in my eyelids. It was a face I had not seen before, but it was one that seemed eerily familiar.

I closed the lid down carefully over the keys. I never again wanted to hear music. The fear was too great. On top of the lid, there was a little brass plaque with the maker's name on it. In it, I could see my reflection. I just stared and stared, unable to pull away. I just wanted to examine as closely as I could, who that person was in there looking back at me. At the same time, I wanted to forget the face that had just filled me with terror.

I needed to find hope.

I looked past the grim facade of someone I didn’t want to be, and as deeply into my brass reflected eyes as I possibly could.

Who was in there?

I heard my father’s questioning footsteps creaking the floor upon approach.

But that was it. That was to be the last time I played. I was maybe thirteen. My brass twin smiled. I was done.

EIGHT

With the buzzing of the white noise in my ears, yesterday I stood face to face with that old enemy. I was armed with the sledgehammer. Emotions can be cruel things. I felt a twang of pain about how much love my father had put into it. How many hours of playing time he’d put into those keys to fill the house with music. It was a part of him, an extension of him as it had become for his doting daughter.

The emotion of disappointment hit me, the same one as had burrowed into me when I told my father that I was never going to play again. But, I understood that it was time to destroy that music, to bury the fear. Tentatively I raised the lid, propping it up. Part of me was ready to defend myself should anything jump out. 

Nothing did. 

The inner workings looked nowhere near as pristine as I remembered then. Everything ages and grows weary except for what gets captured in photographs.

I summoned a deep breath and swung the sledgehammer as hard as I could, right on to the keyboard. I imagined that it made a horrifically cacophonous sound, but if it did it never reached my ears. The white noise protected me. I pounded and pounded the piano, a sense of freedom flooding through me with each blow. At one point I was teary-eyed. Happy. Even when it had collapsed I just kept smashing away, brushing things into a central pile as best I could and then smashing them some more.

NINE

I know what is coming in the pictures. A joyful beauty in the chaos of splintered wood, plastic, iron and steel wire strings. Never again will those pieces come together to form a melodious sound of fear. The sledgehammer made sure of that. 

Now here I am. I have the photographs of the extensive shoot that I did of the broken piano. Never before in my life have I come so close to joy. Standing, crouching, lying on the floor next to the broken pile photographing it, it delivered a sense of closure, more so than the physical destruction did. 

I took off the headphones and listened to the beautiful silence within that garage. I haven’t put them on since. I am at peace with the death of the past. The notes that the piano played each only lasted a brief second. But they endured for a lifetime inside of me, like immovable splinters of sound driving the fearful, panicked responses.

Of course, I wonder if, when I study the pictures in detail, I will see anything more in them than what was there. Part of me is expecting to get a glimpse of something from beyond, a face peeking out from the shattered pile of a life that could have been.

The one part that I did spare was the small brass plaque. It sits on my desk in the darkroom. It’s a reminder to look at myself once in a while and to make sure that it’s the real me that’s looking back.