Strangeness

I was yesterday introduced to the music of Soraya. It was lyrical, captivating, warm, uplifting, and - above all else - vibrantly alive.

Soraya died on May 10, 2006 from breast cancer. For half of her recording career, she knew that she had cancer, possibly incurable.

This juxtaposition of knowledge of one's impending death next to the lyrical beauty and vibrancy-infused music is strange almost to a point of painfulness. The strangeness comes about because I am discovering a wonderful artist who is - to some greater extent - a contemporary of mine, not a long-dead person from "the past". The painfulness arises because I know that the inspired heart and soul of this singer has been silenced, and the only thing we have are ghosts of her - fleeting images and sounds captured for a time on YouTube - eventually to be washed over and mixed in with those now-dead artists who came before her in that large beach that is the repository of music.

It is painful, too, because it seems like I was just getting onto a path to get to know someone very interesting - someone one can only hope to meet in one's life - and to make that person part of my life - thought it be only vicariously through her music. To learn, after cracking open the door to this wonderful music that flows warmly and quickly into one's blood, that the music is dead is itself a heartbreaking occurrence. Imagining the vast gulf of what might have been "if only" she were alive; the great possibility and richness her music would have brought brings an aching pain of emptiness, even though it is for someone that I don't even know.

More, too, does the pain come from another level of understanding. As I learn to sit and listen to the richness of another collection of music, I become painfully aware of the relative parochialness of my own viewpoint. Standing here, looking for a path along which one can gingerly walk toward a better understanding of a new field of knowledge - of experience - learning that a pillar has been almost cruelly and casually trimmed, to move from living artist to archive in an instant (seemingly) before I start my journey, is itself a shocking example of life's calm brutality.

However, instead of trying to forget, I will try and learn, to include Soraya as a pillar holding my pathway through to understanding del mundo hispano.