"The world I see and the words I have do not match."
- Helen in Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale

 One of my favorite quotes, and to come from such a terribly sad story. I happened upon Tereus, Procne, and Philomela (or Philomele) last semester in my Revenge/Tragedy class when we read the above play - a feminist take on the Ovid myth, written in the late 80's. It has a much more modern feel to it than the original story, but some of the language within still struck me the way specific phrases in Ovid do - like the phrase above.

There are moments in stories where certain lines jump out at me and put into words all of the scrambled swirling thoughts in my head that I can't keep straight - or say something much more eloquently than I could ever hope to. This above line did that for me; my words not matching the world is something that I feel everyday. They are inadequate for the beauty and the pain that I see and I read and learn, but...nothing I write or say can satisfy what I feel and want to convey. And sometimes it's the smallest things, like those twelve words, that let me breathe momentarily with the realization that someone, even if I don't know them and never will, understands, and wrote the words I felt.

It's my own sort of "pain" I suppose - nothing like what Philomele and Procne, and even Tereus, suffered, but a frustration that hounds most people my age and probably well beyond. A search for understanding that's never content. And...pain is beautiful in it's own way. We write tragedies, we read sad stories, we cry when we hear songs that make us weep - but they're all beautiful, in their own way.

Maybe it's because we know that pain is something that will never disappear, that it's something that will always be with us. And because of that, we must find the soft things about it, the delicate parts that we hear in written in notes of songs and the eyes of all the people around us who have, in their own ways, experienced their own pain.

Or maybe it's just me. When I was younger, I took piano lessons from third grade all the way to my senior year in high school. In the evenings, while my mother would do dishes, I would practice piano because I knew she loved to sit and listen to me play. The only problem was that even from a young age, I loved the songs with that left that melancholy taste in your mouth that you couldn't quite explain, the ones that were sadly sweet, or bounded in huge angry chords. Momma would always say something akin to, "Why can't you play something happy, Autumn Marie? Why can't you play something happy for me?" She loved jazzier tunes, or happy ballads, things that I couldn't bring myself to play. I had a wonderful childhood - there was nothing terrible about it to induce this, but I played my sad songs - and I still do today.

I don't know why.

I think humanity is in some ways obsessed with pain, is fascinated by morbidity. We see it in the news, read it in articles, watch it on television, and read it in stories as old as that of Procne and Philomela and Tereus.

We haven't changed at all. And we're still asking the age old question: why?

A grave in Rome, Italy, Campo Verano

On that happy note, most recent song favorite - it's a cover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p856dtR4mms

It fits this picture perfectly in a lot of ways.