I woke up with O Bid Your Faithful Ariel Fly singing in my head. As I got ready to leave for campus, I tried singing a bit of it, but I find it pretty unsingable (listen to the YouTube I just linked to and you’ll see why).
Thinking about Thomas Linley, its composer, always depresses me a bit – he was only twenty-two when he died, in a boating accident.
Admittedly this happened over two hundred years ago, but it still saddens me as I try to sing the thing. As I try to sing the thing, I tell myself that I should really try hard to sing it, I shouldn’t stop singing when the notes go hurling themselves into the ether, because Linley deserves it, it’s an homage to him, a remembrance… But I really cannot sing this song.
This afternoon, on campus, I joined my daughter outside for a chat; and as I approached her, I saw that she was reading The Tempest, which struck me as an odd coincidence, since I’d been thinking about – and singing about – Ariel on and off all day.
Did I eerily intuit what La Kid would be reading? Did I foresee Ariel?
Then I remembered that the last email I read before I went to bed last night was from Ariel Feldman, a student in my American Poetry course. It was Feldman, not Soltan, who’d played with my head, threading Ariels through my subconscious until when morning broke I was singing Linley.
April 19th, 2012 at 8:30PM
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