Canon in D

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mayangodm
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Icon Canon in D

Post by mayangodm »

Undeniably, some deny the undeniable. Others find a way to create their own ‘undeniables’ when in fact common sense would tell anyone in their right mind to deny these things. Life is a constant state of denial propped up in a battle against acceptance. Out of the many undeniable things often denied entry into the minds of the easily shaken is the concept of death. It is undeniable that we die. Dear reader, in your life, people have died. To my knowledge, no one denies this. And yet some pig-headed specimens decide to deny that they themselves will die. These models I mention are not the ones who live recklessly as though they think themselves immortal for the simple fact that death is so present in their daily lives. These models are the ones who go through life without focusing on it, who make what are undeniably the ‘right decisions’. Our ‘immortal’ shall be named Thomas, simply Thomas. Our little representative of recklessness shall come in the form of Adam. We will start with Thomas.

The period of time between birth and the end of high school is undeniably unnecessary, so if you’ll allow me, I won’t start from the beginning.
Thomas, Thomas was dying. Thomas was old. Thomas was weak. Thomas had an old wife and old children, and an old dog. His old children had an old cat hanging onto life by a bony claw and a single grey whisker. Thomas had struggled through his bony old life by the skin of his knuckles and the grease of his elbows. And now it was time for his ending. He accepted it because he knew his time was coming; he had known it now for some time now. When one has cancer, one tends to know. So, hairless, weak and wrinkled, Thomas lay in the white hospital bed in his white hospital gown, whose greyness matched the white hospital walls.

The man had gone to church his whole life, and the white around him now reminded him of his promised heaven. However, Thomas was a man who had fought tooth and nail against death his entire life, so what is the reason for his acceptance now? His children didn’t know. His grandchildren guessed at the deniable fact that it was an ‘old person’ thing to accept death. They thought as one grew older one became more familiar and chummy with the thought and representation of death.

I said just now that Thomas accepted death. This is only a half-truth. To be accurate, I would have to voice that Thomas truly only believed that he accepted death. What he accepted, what his heart and soul were ready for was the comfort of that blinding white afterlife. Death itself he still jousted with.

Thomas, Thomas was dying. Thomas was packed to the brim of his fragile old self with all kinds of medications to keep him in one piece and free from the brunt of the pain. Thomas was ready to go to heaven and be rewarded for his life as he had been trained to do. He had never truly thought about death. There had not been a time in his life where, in his mind, death had been pictured as the ceasing of his existence. He had never truly feared death because he had never learned what death was, like his parents before him and their parents before them. So, ready for a heavenly reward and resting as peacefully as one can in a hospital bed, Thomas lay as his family, fronted by his old wife, filed in.

His wife had been a beautiful dark maiden named Lucille. His wife was now a matronly, wrinkled maid named Lucille. There was a hint at her former beauty in her dark, caring eyes, but none in her arthritis-ridden knuckles. Their love sometimes clung onto life like their children’s cat. Of their children, there was an old boy and an old girl. Both their heads were streaked with grey as they held the hands of Thomas’s grandchildren and their equally grey-headed spouses’. The children and grandchildren had sadness reverberating in their dark eyes. The spouses had a hint of empathy and nothing more. Thomas had liked them in life, had grown to love his children's loves as children, and it wasn’t that his deathbed wasn’t their place, but… Thomas looked on the progression with failing sight. From one living face to the next. Thomas felt separated from them by a chasm. He was poor in life while they bathed in it. Laying in his hospital bed, a solitary singularity in a world that he very soon wouldn’t belong to.
Lucille traveled the distance to his bedside and placed one hideous hand on her husband’s fading forehead. He felt the touch and traveled his eyes up the worn figure he had learned to know in younger, pretty days. A smile on his part accentuated the old maid’s melancholy, but she smiled too. When Thomas faded out of sensibility for the first time, he relived the day of their marriage.

Dusty church, dusty, glaring noon sunlight. The sepia feel of the death dream turned his veteran thoughts vintage. Thomas, Thomas was living. Thomas was dressed in a crisp white suit, a crisp, uncomfortable white suit that bit at his neck but contrasted starkly with his dark complexion. Thomas was young. Thomas couldn’t move his head more than a few inches to each side for fear of disturbing his dress. He was alone in the church save the preacher who was bent over in the employee’s bathroom, over the green countertop of the sink, sniffing in violence as powder. The priest composed himself. Father Francis was coming back together. He exited the bathroom as his pupils overtook the pale blue in his eyes. He adjusted his vestment with a sniff and wipe of the nose.

In the nave, the two characters met. Thomas, stiff and unsteady, running his hand along the backs of the pews, and the priest, vibrant and stern, without a hint of his misdoings.
“Today’s the big day?” He was going to the altar and flipping through the pages of the Bible upon it.
Thomas approached, feeling early and out of place. “Yes. Yes, it is, father.” The priest looked at him with intense eyes and dilated pupils. There was a certain muteness about the empty place of worship. Air drifted down to earth instead of hovering invisibly, clinging to the intricacies of the place and tumbling down like disturbed sand.
“You’re here early.” The phrase was formed like a statement but hinted at being a question. “Are you afraid of missing your own wedding, son?”
“No,” Thomas said. His eyes fixed the man afore him. He had woken up early and his words were still sleeping in his bed. “I…” The intense stillness hushed him. “I was hoping to confess, father,” Thomas confessed.

The men crossed the empty chamber for miles on end, opened intricate doors, and passed on into an ambiguous universe. The dusty noon light of the rest of the soaring, pouring church filtered into the enclosed space dimly and yellow-tinted. Thomas sat stiffly with his hands clasped on his knees. Cloth shuffled as the preacher sat down as well. Silence. Silence. Silence.
“Am I afraid to die?” the dying Thomas asked the young priest through the delicate separation. In the similar microcosm of the other side of the confessional, the priest closed his eyes. Thomas saw his own wrinkled hands in the age-old dimness, his veined, bony, cancerous hands. “Something doesn’t feel as it should, father. I’m afraid,” he interrupted himself with a powerless, hoarse snicker, “I’m afraid I may be afraid of what’s to come.” He looked up into the dim light as the sand-like hush filled their universe. “Tell me what is to come, father.”
“Death is beyond my control,” said the voice besides. “But you will marry this day, and find light and love in everything she touches.”
“But I am a dying old man. Life does not want of me.”
“And yet you are clothed in white to be wed to her eternally.”
Thomas regarded his dying hands. “I don’t understand, father. What have I lived if on this day I marry with life and yet pass from the world of the living?”
“Nothing,” the father said. “You have lived nothing and are destined to find your life in death.” The dim enclosure vibrated with the sound.
Thomas asked: “What of my children?” Silence. “How can I have not lived if I have given life?” Silence.
“Existence,” said the voice through the wooden lattice-work. “You have given existence and none yet have found life.”

The old maid Lucille looked on at the row of youngers and youths in the hospital room with her gentle, caring eyes. She wouldn’t cry for Thomas. He would look over them. She told her children and they nodded mournfully. One of them, the old boy, drew up a chair for Lucille to sit on.
“Thank you, sweet child,” she murmured. The old boy was coming on 60.
Thomas’ sunken eyes landed on Lucille’s old face; she felt the gaze and forgot about her children.
“Mon cherie,” she said, and her words carried all the allure and husky flirtiness of her maiden days, but perhaps Thomas only thought it did. Thomas, Thomas was dying. Thomas couldn’t be sure of reality anymore. Past and present interwove like gossamer smoke. He couldn’t speak. As she sat in the chair, her worn body folded and creasing, her figure flickered like a candle-flame before his medicated eyes. The second time Thomas’ sense of time and realism left him beached up on the shore of senselessness, he dreamed with his eyes open.

It was a brighter hospital, there was a window past his bed which Thomas could partially see past his suspended cast of a leg. He never could run hurdles quite the same after that hospital stay. A first, a precedent to many longer, increasingly painful stays. Outside the window, there was the world: a summer-blue sky whispering with heat, the dark leaves of a middle-aged tree. It was a sky that recalled the loud heat of the sun to one’s indoor face with just a glance. Inside the room there stood a lithe creature with the same blushing quality as the summer sky. She leaned against the window frame, looking at the young Thomas with dark, caring eyes. Dark, caring, amused eyes. She spoke words intelligible in the dream-state. Thomas’s young heart swelled at the meaningless tones, that music of life that rose and fell and sang and cried. He would be out soon, she would be happy.

The old woman beside him pierced into the vague, swimming hallucination for a brief moment that may as well have been an eternity. Time, or the concept of it, was estranging itself from Thomas. The world dragged on. He limped on a crutch now, a tender young arm about his waist and a tender young head on the shoulder of his good side. They were in a beige hospital corridor, heading towards the heat, the summer sky, the life and gladness and light of the immortal season. The hallway gradually lit up with that outdoor light, and it was blinding, as though Thomas had never seen the sun. It faded out everything and encompassed his vision and his companion. And then Thomas was alone, stranded, in the light, like a baby, like a child, like the wisdom of the old all at once.
Thomas, Thomas was dead.




Our little representation of recklessness will come in the form of Adam. Undeniably, there has been enough of the end.

He was a little like a hatchling robin. Disheveled, skinny, needy, with a personality as exorbitant as a young bird’s eyes. He was a violent pacifist and preached love with an unmeasured contempt for war. He was explosive and creative, a modern painting of bleeding red. He was an innate procrastinator and hated that he didn’t want to get things done. Confident in his ideas, he was insecure about his philosophies still, in the end. He was constantly forging ahead through time and through himself, discovering, loving, dying progressively. And Adam was alright with that. Adam, Adam was dying but so was everyone. So was everyone, he thought, and it comforted him. When he slept at night he was reassured that in the morning and through the small hours he would continue to be guided by the rolling passage of time, striving to make his living meaningful. Adam knew deep down that everyone was equal and the same and yet he housed a biting contempt for those who forgot to live and brought everyone down on the same sinking ship with them. A borderline narcissist: human nature created a sense in him that only he was in the right, and yet… And yet Adam knew, he knew factually that all humans had different ways of viewing the world and that it was alright.
So this walking contradiction walked into the cemetery, the memorial for the dead and passed. He passed a recent grave against which an old maid rested her forehead in prayer. In the air was a fog without it being foggy; it was a fog of calm quietude, transparency. His feet led the impulsive creature left, along the rows and rows of graves until he was stopped at a single one. He bent down to decipher the name of the long-since deceased. There was quiet. The sun shone down through thick clouds to create a uniform brightness.
“How could I have lived?” Thomas, dead, asked.
The grave remained stoic, gray on the green grass, wet stone, sparse colored flowers. The engravings which Adam brushed his thumb across breathed no more life.
How could I have lived?
“With love,” the gravestone read, “in peace and war, death and life.”
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BrittaniDJ
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Post by BrittaniDJ »

I love your writing style. Your vocabulary and sentence structure, metaphor and imagery are spectacular. He ideas are deep and complex. Honestly, this is a story that needs to be read and re read, and areas with others because the point is complex, and I don't know if I truly understood it under the layers of the story. It felt almost too short...Adam's part at leat. To be the one to come across what I think was the end point of the whole of Thomas and Lucille's romantic drama, I feel like he deserved a bit more of his own tale. Equal to the detail given to the first...Although, he could be younger ...but that Doesn't necessarily mean less experienced. Well done over all!
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BrittaniDJ
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Post by BrittaniDJ »

Also, I love the title. What is it's relevance to the story?
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BrittaniDJ
Posts: 120
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Currently Reading: The Heart Has Its Reasons
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Latest Review: Yesterday by Samyann

Post by BrittaniDJ »

I know the song, and I know it is often played at weddings. The story was in a sense a wedding of life and death, ideals and reality, Love and loss. Is it meant to be talked over and interpeted by the reader? or can you tell me why you chose it?
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Kitave
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Post by Kitave »

Creatively structured, though in his last days before death, the writer seems to be giving a snapshot of Thomas' life.
Creative comparison of two unique characters, who led two completely different lifestyles with some similar qualities
I admire the creativity
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Rhainu
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Post by Rhainu »

Wow. That was powerful. I'm going to have to come back to this one later and reread it to try and truly understand it completely.
I think the music of Canon in D really fits this story. Whenever I listen to that song, I always feel an indescribable mix of melancholy and nostalgia, which to me, seems to be what Thomas was feeling in his final moments.
I can easily imagine this as a short film with Canon in D playing out in the background.
I really like your writing style! Something that stuck out to me was the repetition of Thomas's name and the bursts of blunt short sentences. I think that helps to add to the effect of Thomas's recognition of the fact that he doesn't have much longer left, and his blunt, yet possibly begrudging acceptance of that.
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