Symphonic Etchings: A Prosimetrum

By Gerard McGorian

This is a poetic prose reflection on the life of Beethoven, the life of God, and the holographic timelessness of love that denies any breach between the creator and the created in four movements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796044317

Gerard McGorian

Gerard McGorian was born in Liverpool in 1960. He was educated at Yale, the University of Illinois, and Universidad Centroamericana (Managua). For the last thirty years he has lived, successively, in the United States, Nicaragua, Germany, England, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and the Philippines. He is a member of the Academy of American Poets.

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Gerard McGorian.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 07/08/2019

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

799178

CONTENTS

ALLEGRO CON BRIO

MARCIA FUNEBRE – ADAGIO ASSAI

ALLEGRO VIVACE

ALLEGRO MOLTO

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

Aristotle, Poetics

For Peter

"Ach, aus dieses Tales Gründen,

Die der Kalte Nebel drückt,

Könnt’ ich doch den Ausgang finden,

Ach wie fühlt’ ich mich beglückt!

Dort erblick’ ich schöne Hügel,

Ewig jung und ewig grün!

Hätt’ ich Schwingen, hätt’ ich Flügel,

Nach den Hügeln zög ich hin."

Friedrich Schiller

Sehnsucht

and for

Marshal Gaddis

Divine One, thou seest my inmost soul, thou knowest that therein dwells the love of humanity and the desire to do good.

Ludwig van Beethoven

The Heiligenstadt Testimony

October 6th 1802

ALLEGRO CON BRIO

IN D MAJOR

Artists in the process of loving beauty show great anxiety. Anxiety is the root from which springs the joy of creativity.

-Rollo May

Everything was lost on him. He had not somehow waxed incurious or insusceptible to dawns, neither to noons from which there was no shade, nor nights in which there was no light. To those who looked him in the eye he was the most unmindful. No, he had not grown so: so born and so remained.

Inapperceptively, he claimed another way.

The Unelected Men Who Know had once assigned him syndromes, ascribed to him disorders – fixed or fleet – and at this age or that he gave them all short shrift because he did not know he was to pay them honor.

Around he came, around he went, and people saw him buying bread or ale, perhaps, his head down as he strolled along a lane or vanished up the fell beyond the town.

The fell beyond the town was where he lived. He read; now on a morning, then at dusk, and sometimes in-between. As everything was lost on him, he did not understand the words he read. He harbored a vocabulary as broad as oceans, some said, and yet he did not understand the many words he read.

You live in a Borgesian phantasmagoria of books, real and imagined, his friend said to him one day.

He did not summon a response; this might have called for thought; for sorting. But there was no sorting thought: thought came to him, not he to it.