Don’t Know Thyself
Playing the guitar, Dave heard: “Look at this – books, music – are you going to do anything with your life? Or what?”
His father left the room, slamming the door.
The ocean from Dave’s window was blue, beach white, silence filled by cars’ languid drones.
Dave played his guitar, the music’s purity matching nature’s hues.
He recorded what he had just written. He played back the recording. Vindication felt like regeneration.
A bone-white seagull fluttered across a porcelain tablet of cobalt. The hues symbolised limits. The white could not have been whiter; the sky could not have been bluer. Dave pursued these limits. But people believed he was “doing nothing.”
He saw himself playing in a concert venue. Then he thought: Stop day-dreaming. Think about the next note.
He imagined different instruments as mathematical formulas counterpointed in layers as solid as sea blue.
And he imagined voices. Sometimes he sang at parties, strangers saying: “Hey – you’ve got a nice voice.”
He took the tapes he had recorded to a friend’s house. The friend listened and said: “It’s got a hypnotic splendour.”
The friend’s green eyes and white hair reminded Dave of a sea against a shore.
“Thanks,” Dave said.
The friend’s cheeks were reddish. Red, green and white, on the friend’s face, produced an image of vibrant sincerity.
The friend’s girlfriend stopped in the middle of the room and said: “What’s this?”
“It’s Dave,” the friend said.
“Huh!” the girlfriend replied. “No way!”
Regina’s green, arrogant eyes got more arrogant when she looked at Dave. Dave was “an unemployed bum.”
Green, Dave noted, magnifies arrogance.
Dave’s friend took the tapes to a friend who knew a famous disk jockey. The disk jockey listened and asked: “Who is this guy?”
“An unemployed bum,” Dave’s friend joked.
“They usually are,” the disk jockey said. “I’d like to see him play.”
So he did.
“I’m going to push this,” the disk jockey told Dave.
The disk jockey’s sideburns, stopping just above the chin, bothered Dave on first sighting.
“They’re so dark-brown,” Dave said later, “on a face so white that this contrast only emphasised to me how consciously musical they are – like furry clichés. But he’s a good guy. He loves music so much that he can’t resist showing it in every way.”
The disk jockey played Dave’s music on the radio. The radio station got so many enquiries that record companies fought to get Dave’s signature.
Regina started smiling when she saw Dave. He now wasn’t “an unemployed bum,” but a talented artist. Talent recognition can affect memory. Regina’s smile made Dave feel uneasy. She was now telling people how well she knew Dave. She and Dave “couldn’t have been closer.”
“She once told me,” Dave told the disk jockey, “with those green eyes of hers so full of superior, disdainful certainty, how disappointed my father must have been with me.”
The day Dave’s first CD got released he was in a restaurant with his family; his father showed the CD to a waiter, saying: “He’s my son.”
“Oh, please,” Dave said.
Dave’s father told a journalist: “My son has got a unique talent.” Regina said: “It was obvious he was different.”
Dave’s next song’s chorus went: “Don’t know thyself. Self-analysis impedes survival.”
It became his biggest hit.
Kim Farleigh has worked for aid agencies in three conflicts: Kosovo, Iraq and Palestine. He takes risks to get the experience required for writing. 60 of his stories have been accepted by 54 different magazines.