Religious Scholar

We are All Mozart

Reflections on going through stacks of old artwork in the pantry

Simone turned from him gently, and sat beside the open window. It was dusk, and she looked out over the rooftops toward the setting sun.

“Don’t we always identify with Mozart? I am the messy one who can’t find her sketches. They are smashed between sandwich bags and sacks of barley on the kitchen shelf. They’ve been there 35 years!  Where are my songs? My stories? Why can’t I be organized and neat, with clean sheets of paper with unfolded corners stacked like Pringle’s chips in a cardboard box?

“That is not my mind. All I can do is laugh. And cry. My wig keeps slipping off, even when my back is turned. I found my best portrait: the paper split an inch from the middle, and all the edges brown. What am I always thinking of, or did for all those years? Everything once fine smells like old newspapers forgotten in the cellar, a bit dusty, a bit damp. That is the stale smell of my soul.

“So, did you know I can write backwards and sometimes draw what’s over my shoulder while looking in the mirror? That once I wrote all night and drew all day, magic flying out of me like a sparkler’s fire? Find me someone, quick, before the sun is gone, someone with the Dewey decimal system etched into his heart, a fierce art-saving Kali: a feather-duster in one hand, a Vupoint scanning wand in the other. Have him save these fragments of my soul before they wither into scraps of random words and lines, a corner of a dancing image, a leaf, the last iambic memory of a lost quatrain.

“We are all Mozart, leaving life with nothing to our name but that trail of vague flickering fairy lights—a poem, a song, a star. Save them, they are all I am. If one of them must, then let it be me, who turns to dust."