Bath

by Carl Sandburg, 1878–1967

 

  A man saw the whole world as a grinning skull and cross-bones. The rose flesh of life shriveled from all faces. Nothing counts. Everything is a fake. Dust to dust and ashes to ashes and then an old darkness and a useless silence. So he saw it all. Then he went to a Mischa Elman concert. Two hours waves of sound beat on his eardrums. Music washed something or other inside him. Music broke down and rebuilt something or other in his head and heart. He joined in five encores for the young Russian Jew with the fiddle. When he got outside his heels hit the sidewalk a new way. He was the same man in the same world as before. Only there was a singing fire and a climb of roses everlastingly over the world he looked on.

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Mischa Elman, mentioned above, was a Ukrainian-born musician who rose to high regard early in life. Born in 1891, by 1908 he had already played at Carnegie Hall. He became a United States citizen in 1923.

The photograph of the Beethoven work was processed as a tritone with a texture added for interest. This photograph was my entry in Jason Moore's "Old Numbers" theme as part of his Geographic Composition series. See all of the entries by clicking here.