As George says in Sunday in the Park with George – simply but with feeling, when he turns away from his painting, after a huge burst of climactic music dies away – "It's going well."
I'm writing this article, having finished several insistent chunks of administration; it won't be done tonight or tomorrow morning, but I think tomorrow night, which I believe will be good enough. And that is wonderful.
I wish, though, I could put into this article the real reason that I'm writing about these pieces – Sondheim's Pacific Overtures, especially 'Someone in a Tree'; and his Sunday in the Park with George, especially 'Color and Light'.
It's really because I am inevitably weeping, happily, by the end of each song – although they are so abstract and allusive. This paper is really an attempt to explain why I cry when a song indicates that all our voices and moments, fragmentary and confused as they may seem in the everyday, actually come together in some perfect moment of being – why my experience of time and life, behind every kind of depression, anxiety, or loss, is actually ecstatic: as though everything that has been, however awful it may seem in the short term, is perfect, when seen from eternity.
It's much like the way I always cry at the end of Longtime Companion, when the three people that are left have that strange vision at the beach – the one where there is a cure for AIDS, and not only a cure, but redemption: because everyone comes back, including the ones we have watched dying throughout the film, and they are laughing and hugging their friends, until the vision fades and the beach is empty. I know people who think that scene is a sellout, but I love it; and, actually, these songs mean even more than that, because they aren't based on illusion, but on presence.
I can't really say, in this paper, 'I always cry here.' But I kind of wish that I could.
The moon is so bright, tonight....
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