Ode To My Violin
(Photo Credit: Hamza Butt)
They say that the violin is
the most human of all instruments ...
Wordless it is, but it can reach the deepest realms of the human inner
landscape …It can also portray the human being’s journey through a wilderness,
through Life itself …
When we first touch a violin,
we are stepping into an enigmatic wilderness where anything and everything is
expected … Our attempt to locate an eery note on a black fretless fingerboard
is similar to our continuous attempts to locate ourselves in a dark and mysterious
wilderness …
It almost appears like our consistant trials
to find ourselves in life and discover our special spot on the universe.
The note escapes us at first,
just like our vision becomes blurry at some point in life. Approaching a violin
is approaching Life …
When we make those scratchy
sounds, those painful first mistakes, we are experiencing our first wounds in a
wilderness, our first slurs, unfortunate falls and mosquito bites … We lose our
way, we stumble and we fall into a pit, perhaps like mistakenly touching a
lower string …
All these mishaps seem to be a
lot like our failures, disappointments, wrong turns, plot twists and clumsy
decisions in our existence on earth …
We humans often make bad
decisions because Life presents us with choices, challenges and possibilities
that leave our minds in wonder and hesitation; Just like when we are lost amid
a hostile forest and we need to choose a direction that might lead us to the
safe shore …
Its roads are dim, hidden and
ominous. Its bushes are dense and scary, its awe-inspiring trees are
impregnated with danger.
These roads are reminiscent of the multiple
paths of Life … And this image calls to our minds the four long strings that
constitute a violin.
Each string encapsulates a
number of notes and these notes are translated into unique and distinct sounds
… We get grave and deep sounds if we choose an upper string and softly lyrical
sounds if we choose one of the lower strings.
The melodies we produce are
the outcome of our choices in Life, of that particular road in the wildness …
They can be beautiful, rich and heart-warming or cold, vacant and mechanical …
The musical shades that color our days …
However, this wilderness does
not remain forever hostile … A rigid earth needs constant care, it requires
daily efforts to blossom, it needs to be sowed with love in order to reap
beauty and harmony …
This is how we proceed in
Life, it gets more familiar, gentler and clearer as we carry on our existence,
we begin to understand it, to undress it and to embrace it. Isn’t this how we
build a precious bond with the violin ?
The farther we go upon those
strings, the more comfortable we get in our skin touching that wooden piece of
magic … We acquire deeper knowledge and we sink into intimacy with our
instrument …
As we gain more wisdom
advancing in Life, we become almost one with the violin when getting closer to
the bridge, our final stop …
And that good old wilderness
is not that wild anymore; it is soothing, therapeutic, loving and abundant.
This humble piece of writing was inspired by Hamza Butt, a dear fellow Pakistani violinist.
