singing to myself

In my attic room studying spanish like crazy. Its 93 degrees out, hotter in. In this heat the work of breaking language out of its music into infinitives and subjunctive clauses, into los estructuras de la lengua, is physical. Still, at times a single word soothes with onomatopoeia. Rascacielos. I can't speak the word without a tenor of passionate menace. Rasca- cielos. Sky scraper. But the music of individual words is partial, fleeting, two serendipitous notes stumbled upon while fiddling with an instrument you don't know how to play. Notes without the the melody of ideas, the virtuosity of emotion. My attention drifts from the text book and I stare out the window into the coolness of canopy, sing the few lines of the few songs that I can sing, over and over. The current cancion is 1842 by Sam Amidon. 

I gleaned these quotes from his tumbler. The first sounds like a line from an early Ondaatje prose poem, the second sounds like what I hope my writing does a little of, and what my favorite writers do a lot of.  

“A musician, if he is a messenger, is like a child who hasn’t been handled too many times by a man, hasn’t had too many fingerprints across his brain.”
-Jimi Hendrix 

“The main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe.”
-John Coltrane