The Music Of Bones And The Meaning Of Ghosts Chapter 4

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These are the noises I miss most. The hands upon me and the song, resonating forth from my body in unison with other instruments and voices. Sometimes I feel I can smell those sounds, taste them in the absence of the sound itself and as I sit in the dark I seem to drift an awful long way back into myself who I am, what I was and what I long to be again. In a story about ghosts, I suppose it would be appropriate to tell my story too. I know a little of what Jack feels perhaps, and the terrible journey he must have made, because in my own way, I am a ghost myself. Perhaps, in your own way, you are a ghost also (think about it).

Guitars weren't always the most popular of instruments you know (and perhaps they aren't really anymore)but there are still clusters of shops now where guitars of all shapes and varieties are all they sell, in England, but guitars weren't always the lovers of the limelight. In England you would more often find a piano, or a fiddle or pipes being played, and not until the 1950s was it that guitars exploded onto the world stage with Television, Radio and Rock n' Roll. After one Elvis Presley hit the airwaves, the shape of the guitar became more than a musical instrument it became a symbol of freedom, excitement and individuality. In America and countries around the world, all people wanted was a guitar. By the late 1960s demand got so high that all the useful wood that makes guitars, which has to be cut and cured and rested, was running out. There weren't enough trees for the American guitar makers to use, so they went abroad and Japan after WWII, was where they went. The forests of the Japanese Islands were cultivated, cut, sawn and shaped into guitars and for a while these wooden replicas of the 'real thing' became, well, the best sounding guitars in the world.

I hope I die before I get old. Another line from a song I used to play, but I was old before I was born. You see, I am ghost. I stood in those trees in a Japanese Forest, inside the wood that was felled, and shipped and sawed and cut and shaped and rested and then shipped away from the land where I had begun.

Remember what I said about how you look at things. Well take a look around your room now. I bet there's a good many ghosts sitting in your company. Where did that wooden chair come from? And the wood it is made from? What about that apple in the bowl? The glass in the window? That horseshoe above the door?

(Think about it.)