Another day, another moment of my life gone but for these damned compositions. I can't figure it out, at a precipice. I think I'm losing sight of my own interests in the music, the passion. The notes and the silences together in harmony. I reminisce to a point where I once avoided the egotistical nature of popular music, the repetition, the stagnancy. Not to mention a little horror of the void.
Still, my pieces seem to be drifting toward the main, that rhythm of ego, hackneyed and useless. I have no feeling for this harmony. I remember when Schönberg said that to make great compositions, you must have the harmony. He didn't think I had it in me. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said to him, 'I'll dedicate my life to beating my head against that wall.'
Yet where am I now? Maybe I will break and stay on this side forever. I think must look for harmony elsewhere. Not the harmony of the ego. Something else. The harmony of nature, perhaps?
The next thirty-four pages involve handwritten music notation, most of which have been crossed out or unfinished. The following page bears a sketch of a nautilus shell.
I think I've got it. It's in the math. The mathematics of the universe, truly the greatest harmony. Intrinsic. Ever present. I will find my sound, and my comfort, among these numbers, like reveries, veins in the leaves around us. Branching off into infinity. A friend mentioned something about hexagrams, I must look into this further. Infinite randomness and endless recursion… is comforting. To have purpose in this universe would be arduous.
I saw a shape today, some polyhedral thing. Got my head moving, slowly, achingly. I'm onto something, I think. Infinite things show true randomness too. Art can be created from nothing. Maybe it can be created from everything as well.
Fourteen pages of music notation, some abandoned. Several drawings of Platonic solids occupy the voids in the corners of the pages.
There is power in the numbers. It's hazy, but I'm getting there. It intrigues me. Surely something in the math, something in the shapes, perhaps? Those shapes… make up everything? This is the core of the universe, yes? This most basic of structures. It has to be what makes up the infinite nature of everything. That true chaos, with beautiful quiet and endlessness. Novel, forever.
But is this truly it? Is it the most intrinsic harmony? Solids are solids, but nature is unpredictable, flowing, eroding. After all, what are we but just entropy? We slowly unwind into our own randomness. Chaos. Beautiful, beautiful chaos.
Or maybe I am just cracking my skull against that impenetrable wall once more? It certainly feels like I am. Something is still missing.
I've composed a new piece, Music of Changes. I tried the randomness, and the math. What happens may come. I am saying nothing more on the subject. That is how poetry works.
Christian showed me the I Ching, it is brilliant. At last, I'm making my own sound. Free from the bonds of the expected, the ordinary, yet still bound to something greater than ourselves, persistent through time, constant but ever-changing.
I asked a friend to make me a keepsake from one of those shapes I was researching. A pocket-sized dodecahedron. Feels right. Almost like it's always warm. ███████ made it, sanded it down, looks almost geometrically perfect. Almost.
A number of other recursive sketches are seen in the next six pages, with very little focus on compositions themselves. A few failed attempts at highly detailed fractal patterns are present, some resembling religious iconography, particularly Metatron's Cube.
Silence is not acoustic. It is simply a change of mind.
But what lies between the gaps in the silence? Quieter silence? Does the quiet have its own sound? Like white noise, things and spaces, filled in with smaller things and spaces, extending outward, forever. Yet never truly progressing. Going nowhere. Is that where I am going? Changes did nothing for me in the end. I felt close. So close. But not close enough.
This aural experiment, this maddening labyrinth of passable cacophony. I feel more in tune with where I want to go, but I am too confused to know how to get there.
The backlash I've been receiving was expected. Unconventional does not imply a lack of talent. Still, it hurts a bit. It isn't futile. Only sleep for now.
[EXTRANEOUS ENTRIES REMOVED]
An strange thing happened to me today. A man I have never met approached me on the street and commended my work. I'm not new to having fans- even if they are few and far between at the moment. No, this fellow seemed different. Odd attire, but a comforting gaze. Green eyes. I don't remember his face.
He said something to the effect of 'Music should continue to evolve towards what the composer wants most, not the audience'. His tone was odd and unreadable.
The next phrase rings out with purpose.
'You have the power to create great things. Your music will beckon the ears of the universe.'
It isn't my purpose to be the best. I have no purpose. I like it that way. Yet, the words are etched into my memory.
I expressed my frustrations at the lack of new ideas, new experiments. He laughed and said that 'When all is lost, look to the stars'. I looked away for a second and he was gone, like leaves in the breeze. That's okay, they usually don't ask for autographs.
A side note, he had this pendant on his neck. I remember it quite well. It too was of a star, made of a glimmering green stone. Darker than the man's eyes, but much more captivating. I would guess it to be jade, probably more valuable than my career itself.
His presence put me in a funk. My head has been cloudy. Once the clouds clear, maybe I will take a look at the night sky. Can't hurt, right?
It is in the stars. It has to be. I spent a month pondering, researching into constellations, on the brink, I began to notice the connections. I am ecstatic. My excitement was not diminished despite my colleagues' inability to perceive patterns, hah!
I look at the night sky and all I see are infinite possibilities in infinite directions. As the world turns I see more and more. 'When all is lost, look to the stars'. It reverberates within me. Between those points of light lie vast silence. Points, like notes on a canvas, painted by an artist using light and dark alone.
I'll take a map of the night sky, derive notes from the placement of these stars. That'll do it. This atlas of the sky will lead me home.
The next four pages involve attempts at matching star systems with notes. Many are scratched out, but the last two pages have legible sheet notation.
I've done it. I've cracked the code, so to speak. The stars speak to me in a way I cannot form into words, and my notation flows without effort. I know what to write, when to write it. I hear the notes in my head, I don't even need to touch the piano. Everything has clicked into place.
I've barricaded myself in here aside from trips for food. I need to finish this. Thank you, atlas. I'll dedicate this composition to you.
The next eighty-six pages involve odd notations and sketches of constellations.
Atlas Eclipticalis is finished. I had dedicated parts of it to some friends, colleagues, and the stars themselves. Despite my efforts, my work was not well received, again and I haven't even heard back from ████ or ██████ ████████ with their usual constructive criticisms. I hope my oddities did not scare them off!
Interestingly, I ran into that strange fellow I had encountered last year on my way to the market. He applauded me on my work and said something or other that I didn't quite catch. I heard no words, but it probably had to do with purpose. I ignored it. My eyes kept being drawn to the glint of the stone on his neck. A perfect five points encased in deep, deep green. Staring at it made my head spin, so I thanked him and went on my way. Didn't see much of his face again, although I remember that his lips were wry for a moment, or two, before he left my presence. That bothered me. It wasn't what bothered me the most though.
Those five points still puncture my brain.
[EXTRANEOUS ENTRIES REMOVED]
████ is dead. They said he was found cold at his piano. Cardiac arrest, they think. At least he died where he loved most. He was a good man.
They said he had my notes on the stand. Poor fellow. Probably took one look at my debauchery and keeled over.
Well, I'm still at it, ████. Sorry friend, my music must go on.
The next thirty-three pages involve more of the same notation, as well as what appears to be constellations that coincide to no known systems in our observable universe.
Years ago I said the notes of the stars flowed freely, like a river. That I never had to touch the piano because I felt an almost symbiotic relationship with my muse. It doesn't feel that way anymore. The notes surge through my brain, faster than I can catch sometimes. They come in like orders. I'm tired. I'm trying. I'm sorry.
Freeman Etudes? Why on Earth would I name it that? Who is the free one here? What is your plan, for this, for me? No, I shouldn't ask questions. This is bigger than me. Bigger than everyone.
The next one hundred and twelve pages are comprised of complex notations and a series of cognitohazardous symbols. Exposure to these symbols cause a marked increase in comprehension of astronomy and fascination with related anomalous designations, most commonly SCP-2070, SCP-1548, SCP-████, and SCP-1425.
If any individual is exposed and begins to express classified knowledge or interest in celestial-based SCPs, they should be administered Class-A Amnestics and periodically checked for relapse via standard psychological evaluations.
I don't know why I was so worried. The sky makes sense again. And you know my friend, the one that made me the dodecahedron? Turns out he was the fellow I met at the market. Or, rather, knew for years! Funny I didn't identify him earlier. He's become a quieter fellow than I remember, but I'm sure our kinship is still re-ignitable. There are only coincidences in this world, never fates, and that is good. Made it all the more special.
It was confirmed today when he dropped by and gave me another wooden shape. It almost caught my eye more than the jade, but it wasn't until he left that I could actually take a good look at it.
It's perfect. Similar to mine, but with these lovely points protruding from where the pentagonal faces of the former lay. I think he called it stellated. It doesn't matter. The shape filled the space of my old and I felt something… Strange. Strange but good. Confident. I like the pentagon, five is a good number. Five.
Twenty pages of the notebook have been torn out here.
Please. My fingers hurt. My hands are tired. My flllllrrrr
Eighteen more pages have been torn out hapazardly. Flecks of blood appear on what remains. Notes are indecipherable. The remaining entry is almost illegible.
Borealis was more than just music. I can't beflrbelieve what a fool I've been. Thli The notes flow no more. My head is hollow. I thought I was making my own, but it was [indecipherable]. I was being fed. My plrPURPOSE. All I did was take a bunch of random dots and connect them. But I wasn't using the map, I was mki plr making the map. The music made the roads. And now it knows how to get here. All that is left is the tlei obr fl rei plr tlei myr. And itss all my flaut.
