Responding Furniture

 You probably know it: you see a stranger with a walk, a body language, a way of moving his body around that instantly echoes within you. You've known someone with exactly that gait. I had an encounter like that. I remembered an organist student called John whom I loosely knew some 30 years ago. Maybe "knew" is a misleading word. I knew of him. He hung around - or sort of stalked - my the girlfriend's friend and he was always walking the streets. Like I did. I only talked to him a few times but he was the one that first mentioned the name Buxtehude to me and how Johann Sebastian Bach had walked a very long way to hear him play the organ. He was considered a master of that instrument. Still is. John was a short, weird and intelligent when it came to knowledge of strange things but deaf dumb and blind when it came to people. Not that he was in anyway autistic, just lacking in empathy and feeling for social interactions. I guess we who were not John were some kind of objects, like furniture - responding, but still furniture - to him. John was studying the organ at the music academy and could play with hands and feet at the same time. I hope he still can.


this November too
clouds from here
to the clouds

…

file date November 1, 2012