pre-music

Adam has no language at 7 weeks, but he has music:  burbles, humsm sighs, screams, cries, whimpers, and something like a yahoo. Some of this music is communicative, although on a low level. We react to the screams and cries – we transform them from music to something with meaning for us – and perhaps Adam notices. Certainly he has learned to ‘play’ us with some of his notes. Others, though, seem much more… aesthetic.  I find it intensely and curiously pleasurable, for instance, that, after having fed him and hushed him and soothed him in his bed, and having detected the slightest droopiness of his eyelids, he gives a sigh. It is not a sign, this sigh. And it is not subject to any rule of better or worse – in that sense, it is not aesthetic, as it doesn’t really have any social function. Adam certainly doesn’t do it to please his Dad. But he does it completely – it is a beautiful action, like some perfectly realized athletic movement. His whole body participates in that sigh, as much as it participates in the beating of his heart.

And I think, a year, two years. And never such sighs again. And that is my musical addition, the slightly melancholic tinge I give to the sigh, an awareness of time that Adam, wrapped in an immediacy as warm as his pjs, doesn’t have.