Free Instrumental by James Rhodes

proud, ready to seize all the bonus time I’ve been given, most of the time I just feel ashamed and pissed off that I’m still here.
    Shame is the legacy of all abuse. It is the one thing guaranteed to keep us in the dark, and it is the one thing vital to understand if you want to get why abuse victims are so fucked up. The dictionary defines shame as ‘A painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour’. And that definition breaks my heart a little. All abuse victims at some stage classify what was done to them as wrong/foolish behaviour that they have engaged in. Sometimes if they are incredibly lucky they can then realise and accept at a core level that they are wrong about that, but usually it is something that deep down they always, I always, believe to be true. The first family friend I told about the abuse had known me all my life. I was thirty when I told her and literally the first thing out of her mouth was ‘Well, James, you were the most beautiful child.’ More proof that I caused this. It was my flirtatiousness, beauty, neediness, sluttiness, evil, that made them do those things to me.
    Shame is the reason we don’t tell anyone about it. Threats work fora while, but not for years. Shame guarantees silence, and suicide is the ultimate silence. It does not matter how much you scream at them, Good Will Hunting style, ‘it wasn’t your fault’. You may as well say the sky is green. The only way to get through to them is to love them hard enough and consistently enough, even if from a distance, to begin to shake the foundations of their beliefs. And that is a task that most people simply cannot, do not, will never have the energy and patience to do. Imagine loving someone that unconditionally. Being that kind, gentle and loving so consistently and getting back rage, suspicion, paranoia, doubt, neediness and destruction most of the time. It is like rescuing a beaten dog from the pound who thanks you by mauling your kids and shitting on your floor day after day. It is a thankless task and one that, when it’s even possible, 99 per cent of the time can only be achieved by someone who has had years of training, charges £ 200+ an hour in Harley Street and then goes home to his wife and kids thinking, ‘Thank fuck I’m done with working with That for the day.’
    I am many things. I am a musician, a man, a father, an asshole, a liar and a fraud. But yes, most of all I am ashamed. And perhaps there is a chance that I am those negative things as a result of being ashamed. That if I can accept, befriend, diffuse that feeling of blame, fault, badness, evil that is inside me, the defects and beliefs that seem to keep the world operating against me will fall away.

TRACK SIX
    Scriabin, Piano Concerto, Last Movement
    Vladimir Ashkenazy, Piano
    Scriabin was a Russian pianist and composer. He started out writing lyrical, Chopinesque music and gradually became more adventurous, atonal and dissonant as he explored synaesthesia and the relationship between colours and music. He even invented an instrument with notes corresponding to colours called the clavier à lumière to be used in his work Prometheus: Poem of Fire.
    He injured his right hand over-practising the piano, which somewhat forced him to move from pianist to composer, and from thereon in dedicated his life to musical symbolism and weirdness, seeing himself as some mystical, messianic character. (‘I am God,' he wrote in his journal. A bit too often.)
    He and Rachmaninov were the Blur v. Oasis of late nineteenth-century Russian music. And, sadly, no one was more famous during his lifetime, and few were more quickly ignored after his death than Scriabin.
    His Piano Concerto, written before his shift to more far-flung harmonic landscapes, is still today criminally underplayed even though it equals, even surpasses, many of Rachmaninov’s concertos.
    I LEFT