“Months grow longer, the days touching.”
It’s a story of waiting. Waiting as time stretches and both shadows and hours lengthen.
Ulysses surrounds me now.
A composer friend of mine is working on an opera about Ulysses and she and I are having a grand time discussing those things that composers like discussing – no, not librettos or orchestration or musical originality, but deadlines and directors and budgets. Her work is taking shape gloriously, and seeing this happen makes me think about my own relationship with Ulysses.
What’s Ulysses got to do with this month’s calendar and music? It has to do with Penelope, his queen who remained behind as he went to war in Troy. The most famous story of waiting is of Penelope. She waits a full twenty years for her husband to return, coming up with trick after desperate trick to divert her suitors who want her to declare Ulysses dead and remarry. All other survivors of the Trojan War came home after ten years. So her critics had a point; Ulysses had to be dead.
But twenty years.
Waiting is about faith. Faith is about belief. And belief is only about itself – as the adage goes, “For those who believe, no proof is necessary; for those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.”
Faith isn’t about unshakeable certainty, no. I’m sure Penelope had doubt, especially during the second ten years. Faith is about the return of certainty after being shaken. Waiting is proving to yourself that belief is stronger than doubt.
Something about Steve’s photograph gave me déjà vu. I didn’t know what it was at the time I wrote its six-word story, but now I do. The promontory over the water makes me think of the Forty Foot in Sandycove, Dublin. James Joyce’s Ulysses begins there.
The music begins there too, in that Martello tower next to the Forty Foot. My music is patient. It is yearning but it is playful. It amuses itself while it waits.
