Fourteen Fraught Fables and One Debatable Day

Now where am I? wondered Valentine. Or, more to the point, am I in a neighborhood featuring aesthetic attributes, in the first instance musical? He undertook to find a policeman for answers, and was much heartened to come across a pair of officers wearing holster belts decorated with lilting clef motifs. “What is the nature of this district’s musical milieu?” he asked one of them.

The officer’s eyes narrowed. “Who wants to know?” he asked in rough-edged diction spiced with suspicion.

“I want to know, which should be obvious!” replied Valentine with incautious flippancy. Naturally the officer, bridling at such civilian effrontery, drew from his scabbard a nightstick, which emitted menacing discordances as it emerged. “All I mean,” Valentine corrected himself as rapidly as possible, “is that I have significant reasons for wishing to know what local chances exist for aesthetic involvement, especially musical.” At the same time he cast sly glances at the officers’ name tags, only to discover himself outshrewded by unadorned “A” and “B”.

“Well, you should have said so to start with!” barked officer A, far from appeased but at least rescabbarding his nightstick to a marginally more tuneful reverse rendition of the withdrawal jangle. Then Officer B explained, in the style of official rhetoric without a single humanistic overtone, “Directly across the street is the Conservatory for Musical Initiatives, which welcomes compositional efforts by the greater and lesser gifted alike.”

“That is very generous of it,” said Valentine, “but what about the utterly non-gifted?”

“They do have their place,” Officer B replied with a faraway look in his eyes. “which is, however, not here, and take it from me, stranger, keep your mouth shut about it in polite company!”

“None shall know of our colloquy,” Valentine promised, “and I shall proceed forthwith to the compositional establishment you have so kindly pointed out.”

After a parting nod of appreciation for helpful guidance all too rarely forthcoming in paramilitary contexts, he crossed the street and approached the Conservatory entrance under its staff-themed marquee. There he found himself assailed by fragments of musical invention in various stages of imperfection, and entered the lobby to be greeted by a disarrayed blast of uncoordinated musical creativity. But even as he considered a retreat from the squalling olio of primitively affective sounds, he was harshly hailed by a woman of high officiousness at the information desk. “What is your business here, sir?” she inquired, infusing the last word with unmistakable skepticism as to whether he was really entitled to it.

“I am seeking an aesthetic component which this day can be about.”

“In that case,” she stated without fear of contradiction, “you could not do better than attend to music, the queen of the arts.”

“Wouldn’t a king of the arts be perhaps a notch superior?” he responded purely as a joke, although not lacking a certain fillip of logic.

She, however, seemed to consider this a smarmily worded fig leaf over a bottomless well of masculine contempt and icily retorted, “I suggest you consider yourself fortunate if your stereotypical gender abuse does not result in proscription from participation in the Conservatory’s proactive procreative functions!”

“Of course I meant no harm,” said Valentine, hoping that restriction to words of one syllable would humor her by tacitly acknowledging her clear superiority in multisyllabic usage. “It was just a light jest to spur my quest for”—at this point the strain of enforcing vocabulary limitation simply overwhelmed prudence—“compositional instruction featuring potentially empowering interaction with the aesthetics of contemporary adaptation.”

“Another jest inexcusably devoid of humor!” she cut him down, evidently unappeased. “But no doubt the Professor, ordinarily a model of sobriety, will find comic relief in your dubious efforts at composition. Proceed down the hall and then up to the fourth floor.” Valentine dutifully did as ordered, stepping from the elevator just in time to see the studio door opening and a crestfallen woman emerging, tugging behind her a full-featured calliope adrip with the condensed steam of exhausted toot output. “Don’t bother going in there,” she bitterly advised, “Originality will get you nowhere!” a sentiment which the calliope seconded with a particularly harsh thweet.

“Why was your composition not accepted?” Valentine asked sympathetically.

“All instruments must be tuned to polyphonic pitch-perfect perfection,” she explained in onomatopoetic despair.

“Indeed,” he said thoughtfully, masking his pleasure that in his attaché case was just the ticket to meet such a challenge. “But I am sure,” he offered in lieu of practical support, such as establishing a trust fund in her name, “you can find employment in non-classical venues such as circuses, amusement parks or Saturday morning children’s television.”

“But that won’t be art!” she wailed, “My inner need for aesthetic expression will remain unfulfilled!” The calliope wheezed mournfully in commiseration.

Valentine felt her aesthetic distress keenly. Did he not have a similar need today, and would he not grieve if relegated to providing mere background for mindless popular enthusiasms? He offered what little support he could, by suggesting the most promising children’s television programs, and even helped wipe off the calliope’s tear stained keyboard. Then he entered the studio, confident he could pass whatever compositional demands were made on him.

An elderly stout professorial type arrayed in bygone Central European formal attire greeted him. “You come to compose?” he asked in Cyrillic-accented broken English. “I am resident Professor. You have brought with you an instrument fitting to your work, yes? You must, because funds are so short that the only instruments here are a second-hand recorder with zigzag holes and a harmonium with keys usually stuck.”