Falling Out of Time
Falling Out of Time (2019)
A Tone Poem in Voices
Based on a novel by David Grossman
Osvaldo’s music reached me from inside, from a place that has no words and can probably be reached only by music. It embodies a distilled expression of bereavement, bordering on a shout—or on the border between a shout and utter silence. Because how can one articulate logical, coherent, human speech when the foundations of logic and proper order, the so-called natural order, the order whereby parents should not mourn their children—have foundered?
In this work by Osvaldo and the entire wonderful group, I heard the voice of human pain and grief laid bare—the scream of an animal.
In late January of 2019, I spent three days with Osvaldo and the Silkroad ensemble in the Joyce Contemplative Center at Holy Cross University. It is a warm and modest retreat, almost monastic, where spirituality and aesthetics permeate every note. The forests viewed from the large windows were blanketed with snow, and I listened as the words I had written met their voice.
I named my book Falling Out of Time, and the subtitle of the Hebrew edition was “A Story in Voices,” because while I wrote I felt that the written work would find its most apt expression when it had a voice. Not only in the reader’s internal awareness, but a voice that would be heard outside, in the world.
In the Joyce Center’s chapel, the book was given that voice. It was granted a new and powerful presence. It was sung and played—with instruments both ancient and traditional, as well as contemporary—by people who hailed from China, Lebanon, Argentina, the former USSR and Israel.
I told the artists gathered there about my son, Uri, who was killed in Israel’s war in Lebanon in 2006. His death created this book in me. I am not a man of faith. I cannot console myself with the thought of life after death. But writing this book, and listening to Osvaldo’s music being born, taught me something: it is true that no one knows what hides behind the impenetrable wall of death. But there is one place, or rather one dimension, where we can feel, if only for an instant, both the absolute nihility of death and the full abundance of life. And that dimension is art. It is literature and poetry, music, theater and cinema, painting and sculpture. When we are in that place we can sense, concurrently, both the everything and the abysmal void. The negation of life and its affirmation.
I hope that listening to this creation will provide you, too, with this sensation.
David Grossman