The Supreme Artist by belegur

Chapter 5

PART TWO

A DIFFERENT VISION

TURGON

"His life ended tonight." said The Flame "I have seen him, and I have heard the rumors. Based on that alone, I can tell you – this short period of freedom and creation he enjoyed here is the last of life he will have."

I had heard the voice of The Calumniator. Because of this I was uncertain. "Why do you think so?" I asked my uncle with reverence.

"Because my life too ended tonight."

My understanding then was not very great, and I just remembered the words. But he looked sad as he said this – his eyes were clear and determined, firmly anchored in reality - but still he looked sad. Often I have thought sadness to be the product of stupidity and it frightened me then that someone whom I have known to be great could be so unhappy.

But I am getting ahead of my story. This would be the end of my story. I understand his words a little better now, but I am still immensely troubled. By what, you ask? If he, the greatest of us all in matters of the arts, if he could abandon willingly his work, if he could admit that something irreparable happened, something that no future work of his could redeem – he, I am tempted to say, while being the greatest of us, was very small indeed.

But I am not telling you these words of wisdom lightly – they are the result of realizing my error. Now, sitting in The Halls of Mandos I will tell you the great and sorrowful tale of how I listened. Just about how I listened and what peril lies in listening. Because I have listened to my uncle with all fervor, and because I listened to The Calumniator with all fervor I was rewarded with a life of pain. But enough talking! You too must listen to them.

...

The Calumniator was seen rarely among our kind in those early years.

Just before he began teaching, he came more often to our gatherings out in the open on the square of Valmar. On these occasions he would wear a black tunic and black stockings. He wore no ornament, not even a watch. But then again, once I had seen him guess the exact time by looking at a shadow of a tall building on the square. That time he had to come to a hearing on which The Authorities would give him even more privileges, and we worried if he should be late. Oh, they have released him among us like a wolf!

His face was fair looking, but I would not call it beautiful. One gained more liking for his face as time went and as some of the beauty of his voice translated itself to his face. His voice was beautiful. Once we had heard him singing a little melody under his breath. We accidentally found ourselves behind him in the early morning rush in the narrow, stone street and we heard his singing voice which - even so restrained – shook our hearts. Unfathomable strength we sensed in his singing voice, as if the small volume he let us hear (because now I am certain that everything we saw of him or heard of him was prepared for our eyes by him with the utmost care) just scratched and made known the great depths below.

He was more austere, than cheerful, but never sullen. At first he seemed to us (and how clever that was!), as someone who still battles himself but is steadfast in his resolutions. This caused us to sympathize with him. He was not repellent, but he was strict with himself. He was disciplined. So disciplined he was that we didn't even notice how much on him was still his talent – that his talent was the real reason of our liking him, of our later adoration of him.

We let ourselves be fooled by his black stockings and that black tunic when, actually, he was decked with the jewels of his talent! But then again, he genuinely had the knowledge we, at first, leisurely enjoyed, then craved.

His talking voice, as opposed to his singing voice, was somewhat deeper – his singing voice (or at least that of it which we heard) was high, but strong (lovely, it was lovely, possessing such strength while keeping your gentleness!). His talking voice was not a possessor of such vulnerable beauty – it was logical, steady – not a voice that would cause people to rebel after hearing it just one time. But after hearing it three, four, seven, twenty times – one would be inclined to listen to it almost unconditionally.

As a people we were virgin-like and didn't at first recognize the seductor.

The things he talked about were at first impractical things, things of general interest (in picking his topics he gave the utmost care to what our other famous orators talked about).

His first speech was about architecture and how it reminded him of frozen music. It was visible music in space, he said, and I was quite happy because this was a new thought, something I hadn't realized myself, and now the subject he talked about became even more interesting. Of course, only later I have come to understand that he picked these impractical themes because it was probably still not permitted to him to teach as in the capacity that he could.

And what a capacity that was! I always thought my uncle to be a workaholic, but Morgoth surpassed all my notions of this. And no weakness of resolve was present in him – what he had begun, he would finish, and, probably, he would finish it quickly. And he was masterful in all branches of knowledge. From time to time, even Aulë would come to seek his advice. This was well known. And the time came when he taught us how to make better, more durable and brighter light bulbs, a better constructed sewer underground, machines for more complex computation.

Some of us even became his students. As I hear, he was a demanding teacher, but from him those who sought it got genuine knowledge and developed an exceptional insight for some problems. His deception needed some of his actions to be truly good.

Looking at it from my current perspective I must say that I now think him to be a hater of knowledge and skill. So, it is very ironic that he actually got to be the second most skilled artisan that I have ever had a chance to meet – I always thought that skill came not only from persistence, but from the heart and that the heart is quite stubborn and doesn't want to quit on the subject of its fancy. That there is no true understanding of a subject without love for that subject and that supreme skill was locked away in the hearts of those who truly loved the subject to which they had applied themselves. Was this just sentimentality?

These waters become murky fast.

With time, I came to realize that they both, The Calumniator and my uncle, betrayed the talent that loved them. It must be that talent doesn't find it easy to fall in love with someone, but when it happens it is hard for it to un-love those bastards.

Or is this just another sentimentality?

After ten years of his public teaching on the square, he acquired a place among those who taught at the university. Nothing was much different between the quality of the teaching between those who taught at the university and those who taught at the square, except that it was more convenient for those at the university to teach practical things – the workings of machines, the application of chemicals and those things for which even the smartest of us had the need for graphic presentation. And that is when he worked for the betterment of our existent inventions.

When he taught, the silence in the rows of benches was deafening. He had that kind of aura from which it was clear that he wouldn't suffer even the slightest interruption or commotion. In it there was something of the behavior of a commander at arms, a master of his tropes – but we didn't see this, in that time, as something which was abhorrent. Because his lectures were always very interesting, and he knew how to command our attention – he knew how to smile, and how to crack a joke, how to effortlessly and without any notes lecture for six hour a day.

Yes, never have I seen him write anything down or read something from a paper.