This is a restored archive from 2014.
I know poetry is for politics and stuff, but can we just talk about harmonicas?
Perhaps I’m intrigued because it’s among the few instruments I couldn’t get consistent patterns out of when I first tried. Commonplace yet seldom mastered, the harmonica sings a mournful tune of profound knowledge, but with a simplicity that makes you think if harmonicas could talk, they wouldn’t use words like “mournful” and “profound.”
The sound of a harmonica is like skipping down the street. It might be an effort to shake off a bad feeling, to lament a problem with the world, or to introduce a tale of unrequited love, but it might also be an expression of joy. I like skipping, and I like the way harmonicas don’t have to follow rhythms in the same way other instruments do. They seem to have their own timing, slow or bouncy, always smoothly skipping over notes.
Maybe it’s that the harmonica sounds lonely while at the same time never producing a singular note. It always plays in chords and strains. There was never a single lonely note played on a harmonica. Maybe that’s why they’re the sound of choice for the songs of the lonely, sad, and introspective.
I mean, even the name is a comic irony: It sounds like “harmony” and then adds “ica” at the end like it’s a hiccup. Oops, sorry, you wanted something complete and explainable. Life isn’t like that, the harmonica says. Let’s create imperfect music to cope with imperfect things.
I remember well the day someone explained Plato’s forms to me – he said there were different kinds of blue, but the ultimate blueness resided in the realm of ideas, and the ultimate blue was blue’s form. The wisest people recognize this, and so can move easily between different shades of blue. Harmonicas step with the savoir-faire of a child and the thoughtfulness of a philosopher, singing with the high, bouncy and light notes of a sunny spring day, then wistfully in the brightest, deepest hues, and soaring again against the near-black of night.
Harmonicas have never sounded innocent, though. The chords of the not-quite-pure sing what cannot be said, because the harmonica has always been the instrument of the simple man. He doesn’t use big words, but he feels. He’s had his heart broken, even if he’s never struggled through the dynamic vocabularies of the most well respected poets. He’s known joy without quite knowing why. He knows there will always be ways for music to cut deeper than words, though he doesn’t have the words to put it like that.
Storytelling isn’t for everyone, because harmonica players don’t give themselves enough credit to believe they have stories to tell. Harmonicas play the part of the simple soul’s familiar, translating a simple understanding of what is metaphysically human. The translation comes out in the broken, weary-but-bravely-skipping-on sound of a harmonica.
Maybe we only connect blues and simple thoughts with harmonicas because that’s the music they’re most used in, and maybe they’re used in blues because they fit so well. For such discussions, the chronology and correlation doesn’t matter. What matters is appreciation, and the harmonica can play to remember or to forget or to express.
The harmonica is humble but not content. It has seen life happen, there’s no doubt as to that. Even a new harmonica has felt the hope and heartbreak of a cold, pragmatic kiss the instant it lets out its first sound. Such is life for the harmonica, and it spends the rest of its time being a wounded messenger of blunt honesty and quiet, soulful determination.
I know I’m breaking that one rule, the one where it’s a fruitless effort to write about music. I don’t think the harmonica minds, because it’s always trying to express the inexpressible, too.