Still Life by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Still Life
Page 221
The Song Not Sung
The hymn of unsinging; intoned not in notes but in negations, performed by a choir of inverted metronomes and mute oboes, each dressed in archival dust and ceremonial misplacement. This is no ordinary refusal. It is a baroque ballet of the unremembered, a fugue composed entirely of footnotes that cite nothing but the absence of citation.
The ritual begins at precisely the hour when commemorative bells refuse to toll. The Archivist dons the ceremonial vestments; a cloak stitched from redacted memoirs, a crown of unwritten marginalia, and gloves made of vellum that crumbles upon touch. He enters the Hall of Un-utterance backwards, escorted by the Procession of the Unnamed, each bearing a torch that emits darkness.
The unsung score; the sheet music is blank, but annotated with sighs. The conductor waves a baton carved from the spine of a forgotten encyclopedia, summoning silence in crescendo. The orchestra consists of:
A timpani that only thuds when no one listens
A violin tuned to the frequency of regret
A triangle that refuses to be struck unless misremembered