Herbology, second section was taught by Professor Foster, a total drunk. During the first section of the three he would teach, he was most coherent. The first years were assigned to this section with the hopes that by the time they took his class later, they might have built something of an understanding of what he might be saying and work independently. By the time Dorcas and Lydia took second section, Professor Foster was swaying in time to music no one else could hear. Jovial and calm, easy to get along with if not entirely useful to give practical instruction but depending on the day of the week, you might get, not only clear instruction but even artful and beautiful demonstration or an enchanted sketch.
Everyone's favorite time of year was when they were repotting mandrakes. Professor Foster's voice would drop in register and a smoothness in tone, Dorothy Tanbelt swore was the work of all the world's magic, echoed in the greenhouse as he sang to the mandrakes putting them, if not to sleep, then keeping them from screaming a hole through your earmuffs. He cradled one in his hands and sang a sweet but strange serenade. Lydia notated it in her mind. Phrygian maybe? Eerie and sad but yes, sweet also. The mandrakes seemed to like it. Usually that didn't happen. There weren't enough mandrakes on earth to keep Professor Foster focused for long enough. He was more likely to stand at the front of the class steadying himself against an insistent breeze. He tilted against it, hopping on his foot against a gale force wind wondering why everything in the room, the students, the tables and the building itself was at a forty-five degree angle. By third section, fifth-year elective, the students thought they had been so smart in selecting his course so they could enjoy some free time but were instead reassigned to other classes. They were met midway in the field and were turned away grumbling and muttering under their breaths.
By then, Professor Foster could be found sleeping on the floor with his tongue lolled out of his mouth or with his head on a desk next to a jar of "spiced pumpkin juice" hissing away in his ear. Once, when the latter scene played out, Dorothy snuck out of another class, ran down flights of steps, magicked another set into a slide, said "weeee" loud enough but not too loudly, lifted her hands up in an act, born out of childlike duty and not joy which the stair turned slide required or else it would turn back into stairs and pelted across the grass to the greenhouse to catch Professor Foster napping. She couldn't believe he still had a job at all but this she really couldn't understand. She claims, when she got back from St. Mungo's, that a mandrake, unpotted out of the soil, was stroking the passed out Professor Foster's head and singing the same lullaby back to him in a shriller and higher and even eerier voice. When the mandrake saw her, it turned caught eyes with Dorothy and started wailing for its life blowing out Dorothy's left eardrum and slicking her hair back, the original texture having never returned after all this time. The mandrake repotted itself, a teenager, which is why Dorothy had not collapsed into a heap or lost her hearing altogether. Dorothy was sent to St. Mungo's and Professor Foster, woke up the next morning, with a new ringing in his ears harmonizing with an older one. He made it this much on time for first section to a room of his fellow teachers, the headmaster and a representative from the ministry and learned that he would most likely not be returning to Hogwarts next year.
Dorothy rattled all of this off breathless outside the greenhouse before they were let in. Professor Foster was now getting constant lectures and visits from ministry officials on his behavior and they were monitoring his "pumpkin juice" intake or at least those were the rumors. Dorcas looked around the small group of students in various states of disgusted and amused. She caught Lydia unmoved and largely unimpressed. Lydia looked at Dorcas and found her beaming with delight and the ridiculousness of the story.
"So, a mandrake youth was singi-"
"Please don't. Don't encourage her." Lydia cut her off. And Dorcas felt lightheaded. She slapped her hand across he mouth to keep from laughing out loud. She looked at Lydia who wasn't smiling. Dorcas might as well have been invisible, not even there and Dorcas found this even funnier. She snorted through her hands. Lydia turned looked Dorcas up and down as they were let into the greenhouse.
"Muggles. Muggle fruits and veg. All non-magical?" Professor Foster's gaze kept flitting from the board to the ministry officials at the back of the class whose arms were crossed over their chests.
This would be a very long term, Lydia thought. Dorcas laughter had skipped a table and now someone else was giggling. Dorothy, good sport, had also caught a laughing, coughing fit only now realizing how silly her story was. The laughter moved across the room and through it and Professor Foster even started smiling.
Dorcas was now crying. She had rested her head on the table unable to contain herself. Lydia didn't think any of this was funny. She told herself as much. "This is not funny. This is nonsense." and when Dorcas turned to her again she caught the pursed lip concentration of someone trying not to find an unfunny thing funny in anyway which made it funnier. They caught each other's eyes as Dorcas wiped away the tears and that's how they became friends.
It was this moment that Lydia was trying to capture in music.
It was Professor Foster's mandrake lullaby. It was the light of day warming the greenhouse filled with ozone smell of clean air. It was Dorcas and Lydia forming an understanding based on basically nothing. How to capture that in song? How to capture a room full of tittering students? How to capture the staunch resistance to laughter of both Lydia and (some of) the ministry officials? And the resolve? She decided that a level of dissonance was appropriate but the point wasn't about her and ministry officials but her and Dorcas and that day. That was the same term they developed Poppy Parchment. The next term they would sell it. Was Lydia trying to document their entire friendship? Ultimately no, that composition would begin in school and exist largely about going to school. She would end up rearranging that day in a larger piece that contained a story that explored her entire school career up until she left. Starting at Academy, getting the letter to Hogwarts, then leaving and the feeling of conflict that arose in deciding that is what she wanted to do and no longer needed to. Initially, she thought the piece contained a lot about Dorcas and it had. That day was one of the first she set to music. It released something in her that allowed her to work on the project itself. But even as she left school and worked on the piece and several shorter ones, what she grew to learn was that she eventually and was actually was trying to tell was the story of her and Mouse. This project may or may never end. She scratched out notes that turned into a separate composition about werewolves, another about mothers, really her own mother, and even one about Kingsley. She sent some of these pieces to Philippa and in her analytical way wrote a very long letter back full of questions. Out of curiosity, she sent the opening and ending parts about Mouse was asked to send the entire movement and received a very short letter back. Not even a letter but a note.
"This isn't the real version. Where is the rest of it?"
Lydia read over it, played the piece several times and thought this was the real version. This was absolutely all of it and that it was pretty well written if she said so herself. This was her favorite part. She had done well to capture what had happened. She had worked hard to even get to a place where she could write it in the first place. She read through her previous letters. Philippa had never sent anything so short. Something about the piece had bothered her. Which Lydia took as a compliment that it had done its job. The piece was short because Mouse was tiny, that was her nickname afterall. The piece was short because she-. Lydia had put that in the music.
Philippa and Lydia had gone back and forth sending letters that dealt exclusively with the analysis and explication of sound. Lydia was a machine. She could sight-read anything and everything. Her sense of harmony was largely unmatched. She had an enormous musical vocabulary due in large part to the access she had as a child. It was still a topic of debate amongst her teachers if she had perfect pitch but if Lydia did, she had such an insistently powerful music mind that she could shut it off long enough to actually enjoy sound for sound's sake. She could identify which piece of music came from which part of the world and its era within two measures. If she had to sing it? She could, though she felt nothing about her own body being an instrument. If it had to do anything, she'd rather be flying. Play something by ear and add a relevant harmony? Snore. Polyrhythm could catch her up but give her half an hour and she'd come back as competent as if she'd studied or had a natural gift for it.
Philippa had some competitive version of these skills, some not at all, but one thing she could do that Lydia had never concerned herself with was "reading" the meaning that composer might have meant and the understanding what might inform an audience's understanding of that piece now, namely, a composition's social context. A lot of what Lydia understood about a composition stemmed from the music itself. What she understood and how she understood it. The title gave something away and there was no shame in reading an interpretation but the initial compositions she sent Philippa weren't titled. They were scratchy transcriptions. She took for granted that everyone knew the names of these arrangements because she had grown up with them. Philippa described not just the music but the visual. A composition titled A Sweet Summer's Day, Lydia descirbed the yellow, warmth of it, the sitting by the pool of it, the sweet sunniness of it. Lydia's understanding of music was sonic and emotional. She felt music in her fingertips. She felt it in her ribcage. Her blood moved faster or slower because of it but she had never visualized it. Sure you read music. She realized a little late, given her own knowledge of music, of even what she had been trying to do, to tell a story, that other composers had also been doing the same thing. Philippa was watching a cut scene in Lydia's composition and something wasn't there. But Lydia thought it was. She composed it. Of course it was there. It's all here. Thought Lydia and it was.
—-
Two titan waves in the ocean collide into each other. In the crash, they become one wave, enormous and furious but graceful. Then that wave arches, drives itself headlong into the ocean, as all waves do. And that wave is no longer a wave but the ocean itself which is all waves, every wave that ever was, which is the two original waves, the one they became and the ones they will someday again be. The ocean is the waves as they were at the beginning and what they were at the end and what they were in between that time.
