The moving finger writes...
In praise of the ephemeral
The moving finger writes, an having writ, moves on.
—The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
The fine edge of rosined hair sliding against the string —just so!— cries out to be heard... …and is gone. The choir gives voice together for an instant or an hour the sound bouncing before it fades into the distance as surely as the train’s incessant chugging dissipates along the tracks. The moment written by Jane Austen or William Shakespeare recorded on the page is not the moment they wrote down. It is something else. Something preserved. A fly caught in amber. The fly is not the same going in as it is coming out.
Moments were not meant to be caught. They were meant to move —to pass from one second to the next and the one after that and then leave never to exist again except in the unreliable fog of human memory. Was her shirt orange? Or was it yellow? Did his voice crack with despair or had you only expected it to— Wanted it to perhaps? Did the voices of angels sing or were they only conjured by the strings of your heart as you listened covered in gooseflesh tingling down to your toes?
No recording can ever tell you. It was not there not in that moment not in that soulspace the ephemeral fleeting seconds of reality as they shifted simultaneously instantly into memory. What if memory was all we had? What if there was no way to check to know for sure? What freedom would we find there? How much more would we live in each new moment? -NN 9 September 2023
This poem was inspired by a conversation on Ted Gioia’s recent open thread: “What’s your spiciest hot take?” where a commenter said he doesn’t believe music is really music if it’s recorded. What do you think?
The invitation to leave a comment is genuine—I really want to hear what you think! Do you agree or disagree? If it’s never occurred to you to wonder before, what does the question make you think of now? Let us know below!
PS: It hadn’t occurred to me when I scheduled this post that it would go out on 9/11, but it seems fitting to me to ask today not only to ask how much more we might be alive without being able to constantly replay the past, but also about the impact of the ability to replay recordings of traumatizing events over and over in its wake, as so many of us did in the hours and days after the 9/11 attacks. When we think of ways to honor the victims of those attacks, I don’t think that one is very high on the list. (If you’d like to read a beautiful tribute today, Patti Digh has one right here.)
Beautiful poem, Nancy. I don’t agree with that hot take. I think the world would be so cold and lonely without the existence of recorded music. How could we ever appreciate the song stylings from bygone eras if that music hadn’t been recorded? I understand that seeing a musician play or sing live is a transportive experience and the recording may never capture the magic of that exact moment, but a song has the power to move us, to trigger a memory, and soothe us even in its recorded form and that’s what makes it music IMHO.
Such a beautiful poem and inquiry, Nancy! Thank you for this! I've been thinking recently about how different grief must have been for our ancestors before the invention of the camera, when death meant never seeing that beloved's face again. Or maybe their memories remained clearer when they didn't have an external device to rely on. Great line of pondering, thank you!