“Well I don’t know why I came here tonight.
This Altar, it doesn’t feel right.
Desperately, I need the music repaired
And I’m wondering how Arcadia will fare.
When there’s death to the left of me,
Brokenness to the right.Here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you.”
When a song is written, there is a moment just as the melody comes together, as the chord structure gives way to the magic within that is like breathing life itself into the music.
At least it used to be.
Now it hangs, lifeless like a corpse upon Dr Death’s operating table. Another victim of a power hungry little perro and his scalpel. La Musica is broken; he killed it. Yet you stand alongside him, full of promises you cannot fulfil and words that carry no life, for there is no music to your voice. Just noise, ese.
Music, like the journey of life and death, once flowed along a natural order. Frequencies placed together in particular ways to create a pleasant ambience. One learns the order of music, and they can create life by placing them accordingly.
The fourth, the fifth. The minor fall and the major lift.
But all that creates is a song that is predictable, one that follows the rules. Music no longer follows those rules. Those frequencies no longer carry life. Here, in the brokenness that he has created, I find myself in The Middle. A place of emptiness, where notes cry out desperate to be arranged into song. Here I am, stuck in the middle. With death and brokenness on either side of me.
Desperate to restore what was broken, searching for answers. But, in order to fix what is broken, one must be willing to break the natural order. To destroy the rules of the song itself to create a new melody.
As I stood in that Altar looking at everything you hold dear, Vision, I knew that you were not the answer. I knew that I did not want to be stuck in the middle with you. For you can only sing your song, not mine. Your words are out of tune, amigo. What I needed, in the middle of the brokenness, was a new set of rules to follow.
Music, like death itself, used to follow a natural order. Where there is one that can defy that order, new melodies can be paved and new rules formed. When even the Ferryman himself cannot claim your soul, you have succeeded in writing your own rules. That is what I must surround myself with now in order to find this new song. My only hope is to re-write what once was known.
To break all the rules.
For the music to be repaired, the only constant I know is this. Blood must be spilled. Pain must be inflicted. Your screams must become the new melody, Vision. I know you cannot see that, but when you hear the symphony I create out of your pain… you will hear it, you will feel it.
Arcadia must sing once more.