Mozarting the Mind

Oct 28, 2022
3 min read

by Beth Kephart

I fell and an ankle bone broke — a sound that rose up through the shaft of me and also knelled the air. So that I heard myself break twice, in the same instant, and then I couldn’t stop hearing.

An ill-begotten mash of wrongful circumstance. An incident on my own front lawn. God, it was hot.

Like what? Like the sound of a boot snuffing a dry stick. Like the yank of a knot. Like the wind knocked out of a hollow. Like it wouldn’t stop. Like I kept breaking.

After, I lay marooned on the downstairs couch, waiting for the noise to leave my head, I mean the sound of the bone, I mean the want for an apology, I mean I wanted to reverse the clock and redetermine the wrongful circumstance. Through the open window, late at night, I listened for what lay beyond me. The nicker of leaf against twig. The claw scratch of squirrel twirl. Deer hush on the worn path. The quiet of the night, the quiet noises, quietly.

But I was loud inside myself. Unruly.

This archeology of sound: A bone snaps and keeps on snapping, reverbs. The spare parts of trapped sound. The mind a penitentiary.

Envying the quiet beyond me. Wishing it to become me.

But silence wasn’t.

This archeology of sound: A ceaseless and syllabic sonance. A stuck song that sticks. Insufferable nonsense. The actual sounds of the world fogged and filtered, swamped and strained by relentless mental patter. A brain beating its own drum.

I grieved in remembrance of silence, the pleasurable nothing of nothing. My wish was wide, uncircumscribed, relentless.

God, it had been hot. God, it grew so cold; the windows closed. Quiet was now further still, beyond me. Whatever the squirrels. Whether the deer.

I might, I said to my husband, be going crazy. We had been sitting at a table talking, and it is true that I could hear him, but my interminate self was far more pressing. Not tinnitus. Not misophonia, just the unbroken broken in my mind, the round and the round of the insufferable, unceasing patter. Like: Words hitching a ride on a tune. Like: The ruins of a carousel forever circling. Like: The short circuiting of chatter.

I wondered, could he hear me?

I practiced breathing. I practiced out-thinking. I APP’ed waterfalls plus birdsong plus wind blow plus river flowing, slipped myself inside a digitized forest and pretended to be sleeping. I practiced training my attention on anything beyond me. The whish a shoelace makes when it’s dragging. The pleased pops of butter browning. The chafe of a page turning, the ruckle of a rug slipping, the turn of a screw, screwing, warmed furnace air, releasing. But the noise in my head beat every game that I was playing.

When the mind you must escape is your own, is this how it starts? Going crazy?

Finally, Mozart.

Alexa, please.

D Minor

Beneath Requiem in D K. 626, I lie on the floor and do my thinking. The Introit and the Kyrie the great Amadeus wrote when he was sick and broke and hurt and young and lying in his house and dying. A requiem of incomplete and persistent mystery. I lie on the floor, and it is December now, not August, and there is no me beyond me, and Amadeus’s score is oceanic, crashing. Bows on strings, and air compressed, and air released, and soprano and timpani, and let it come, let it crash, let it do my thinking. Up and through the shaft of me, in this near air, forever knelling.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of three dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a book artist. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. Visit her at bethkephartbooks.com or etsy.com/shop/BINDbyBIND.