La gran soledad

La gran soledad – vast solitude – is a pervasive theme in La luz dificil by the Colombian writer Tomás González. In the novel, David, an elderly painter rapidly descending into blindness, reflects on the death of his son some twenty years in the past. The narration shifts periodically across the decades in a way that disrupts the successive arrow of time and demonstrates that past memory and present experience continuously permeate each other. In his grief, David frames the world with a painter’s eye. At one point he recalls finding an abandoned motorcycle slowly disintegrating on a beach. This image of an inhuman beauty arising out of the conflux of rigidly mechanical design and fluid natural force is both arresting and evocative.

La gran soledad, Huck Hodge (2025)

We might normally consider our ability to experience beauty a distinctly human affair, what sets us apart from creatures whose primary concern is mere survival. Similarly, we might think that strict, mechanical grids are characteristically inhuman. But nature does not show a preference for grids, it is we who find 90° angles to be somehow “right.” To celebrate the dissolution of grids is to come to terms with death, with the end of our distinctness from the world, with the return to inorganic nature. There is, I suppose, some beauty in this recognition, but it is a harsh and unyielding beauty, a truly difficult light. I bring this up only as an effort to work through the loss of a close friend of mine. His sudden death deepened the silence between us, not only by his absence, but by the bleak mechanics of modern disconnection; when he died, his family could not access the contacts list on his phone, relying instead on social media platforms I had long since abandoned, and so I learned of his death only after his funeral.

Michel de Montaigne, channeling Cicero, once wrote, “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” The same could be said for composing music. Every piece is a life lived in miniature, an itinerary spanning the birth of new forms and their ultimate dissolution. And so it is with this piece, in which assorted musical grids pass over into oceanic textures. Along the way, the various movements resonate with writers who have been important to my life. The opening movement wanders that barren stretch of beach illustrated in González’s tribute to deteriorative beauty. Sappho’s fragmentary shade is at hand in the second movement, as passed down in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 

“ὅτι τὸ ἀποθνῄσκειν κακόν: οἱ θεοὶγὰρ οὕτω κεκρίκασιν: ἀπέθνησκον γὰρ ἄν”

(Death is a bad thing, that’s what the gods must think, otherwise they’d die too)

and is cast into relief by Sylvia Plath’s meditations in The Bell Jar on the exquisite splendor of shadow, the “million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow,” the “miles and miles and miles of it on the night side of the earth,” while the cello’s flickering adumbrations encircle the violin. Movement three manifests the sylvan isolation described in Bashō’s elegiac haiku,

閑かさや             岩にしみ入る              蝉の声

(Lonely stillness, a cicada's cry, seeping into the rocks)

and imagines stumbling upon that forest scene more than three centuries later, where, listening closely, you might be able to hear the loneliness of the cicadas still murmuring in the rocks. The following episode reflects on the notion that love is as intangible as an echo, the presence of an absence, the “after-image of sacrifice.”  Two unlikely personae echo each other on this score – Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince,

"Be my friends. I am all alone," he said. "I am all alone--all alone--all alone," answered the echo. ”What a strange planet!" he thought. "It is altogether dry, and altogether pointed, and altogether harsh and forbidding. And the people have no imagination. They repeat whatever one says to them…On my planet I had a flower; she always was the first to speak…"

and the social critique of Theodor W. Adorno.

No love would be without echo. In myth, the guarantee of mercy was in the acceptance of sacrifices; but love, the after-image of the sacrificial act, pleads for acceptance, if it is to avoid feeling like it is under a curse…In spite of the countless [modern] facilitations, [people’s] lives remain an absurd toil; and yet they have no patience for the expenditure of energy on happiness, life’s secret.

Each, in his own way, touches on the poetry of desolation produced by the out-of-true alignment of conversation at a distance, permeated by a field of silence, as portrayed by the interplay of violin and viola in movement four.

Sappho’s shadow makes a final appearance in movement five; there is a certain pithy humor in her aphorism that reminds me of the precision and profound triviality in the laconic one-liner delivery of the late stand-up comic Mitch Hedberg: “I’d like to see a forklift lift a crate of forks; it’d be so damn literal!” The scherzoid economy and chiasmatic symmetry of this joke take musical shape in a ghost-of-Rube-Goldberg-approved ode to the aesthetics of the useless machine. Repetition sheds its status as merely inefficient redundancy and takes on the role of an aesthetic vehicle. For me, the power of Sappho’s fragment is similarly to be found in its elusive comedic quality – the way she wryly transforms the malaise of mortality into pleasure by virtue of the absurd. Perhaps González had this sort of transformation in mind when he wrote “my vast solitude was suddenly filled with the entire universe.” This becomes an epitaph to a departed friend in movement six, an epilogue illuminating his name in a musical cipher that has secretly been inscribed in the work’s harmonic fabric from the start: