‘Legato’
— Joyce Chong
The proximity of s and d on the keyboard, lateral neighbors, causes me regularly to mistype the word died as dies, so death is always happening, never completed, a spun-out or dilated present,
Grief is maneuvered in this poem through the use of science and music. The known can be mapped out and traced, made to be consistent and easy to explain. Cause and effect. Sometimes if we focus on the concrete and the known, it makes traversing the unknowable, rocky terrain of grief and loss easier. Sometimes we work in illustration by filling out the negative spaces. Draw around the center of the universe, and maybe we’ll understand what’s withheld a little better.
Chopin’s variations in the fourth Ballade repeat the basic musical structure but multiply greatly the number of notes played. As if to replay a memory but with increasing granularity.
Legato undergoes the difficult journey of following the course of Parkinson’s, contrasting the learned certainty of music theory with the hold an idiopathic disease will take on a body. It’s the interplay between these ideas, the known and the imprecise, sensation and fact, that defines our experiences of loss.