COLLECTED STORIES 2018–19
STICKS AND KEYS
Bartรณk Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion With Henry Baldwin (percussion), John Reid (piano) and Nicholas Rimmer (piano) Friday 5 April 2019, 9.15pm Hall Two, Kings Place The Lock-In 58
STICKS AND KEYS
There came a great thunder. This thunder saw the things and their names tumbled topsy-turvy. This thunder saw tree become ‘cloud’ and cloud become ‘engine’ and engine become ‘dream’ and so on. And when the thunder had passed, the people set about reordering these things and names, so that a tree was again simply a ‘tree’ and a cloud was a ‘cloud’ and so on. But there was a forgetting. (There is always a forgetting.) And so the sticks, which had with the thunder become ‘keys’, were to stay that way. Once the people realised this, they agreed that nothing too grave would happen with this one forgetting. In fact, the people agreed that this small wrinkle in the usual order of things was perhaps a good way of remembering the great rumble of that topsy-turvy thunder. And what, someone joked, would the sticks wish to unlock? For a good while it seemed of little significance that sticks were known as ‘keys’. Yes, people would occasionally find themselves absent-mindedly adding little twigs of silver birch 59
to their keyrings and then attempting to unlock their front doors with these pieces of wood. They would find themselves trying to play childhood piano pieces on bare autumn hedgerows. But otherwise the consequences were slight. Until there was a shift. Because names, over time, creep deep into the cells of everything around, and there is simply no stopping this passage of sense. These curious keys made of silver birch, of beech or oak that people had without a thought placed on their keyrings, began to turn in the locks. The hedgerows began to sound. Certain self-professed progressive musicians even began to talk no longer of C major and F# minor but of ash and fir. And then it emerged that a single lock could be opened by any of these new ‘keys’. To open any lock, a person need only pluck a ‘key’ from the ground beneath a tree, meaning that a house or a car or a safe could no longer be held secure. At first the people attempted other means of shuttering up their goods, using ropes and bolts and barbed wire. But gradually, as these mechanisms proved less than efficient, the people simply took to leaving their homes and possessions unlocked. Things were taken, of course they were. But fewer in number than expected, and those who lost items found they didn’t mind nearly as much as they expected. Besides, there was no longer any possibility of locking a person up. As the doors to houses and offices and cars and banks increasingly swung on their hinges, the people began to gather outside day after day. They settled in parks and woods and glades. Some spent their days playing long winding tunes on the crisscross of twigs found on a forest 60
floor. Others chose simply to lie down from dawn to dusk beneath a tree, any tree, to gaze at the infinite possibilities held in a single canopy of branches, wondering what might yet be unlocked by all that murmured in the breeze.
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