Les Deux Fugues retrouvées

Songs. Time and again, I have witnessed the place where they give birth to worlds.

Each time a single song begins to sound, a world that has not yet found its name is quietly shaped toward the place that song is bound for. A song unanswered is already complete. It is solitary, carrying within itself a journey that only it has ever known.

Then, from afar, another song is heard. It calls. It is a song uncannily akin to its own. In that instant, for the first time, it finds a mirror in which to behold itself. And in the very breath with which it reaches toward that distant voice, a song not yet born is quietly remembered within it.

Songs continue to call to songs. They do not know how to remain within a single voice. Each time one listens for yet another song, and another still, the song gently forgets the outline of its own being. Boundaries soften, then scatter into widening circles. At last, it becomes the world itself, and the world belongs to no one.

That this came to bear the name Fugue, I find beautiful. Bearing a journey never meant to return, to be known, a single song entrusts to countless others the landscapes it has witnessed, the breath by which it has lived. Quietly, without hesitation, it yields its own form. Thus a song becomes music; music becomes the world; and, slowly unraveling, it passes into forgetfulness, beyond every name. I find that beautiful.

Whoever first bestowed that name must surely have listened to the very breathing of music.

Only this I do not know:

Since when has that song been singing--for evermore.