Returning Thursday: Part 2 of The Village That Forgot the Moon — a short story from the world I’ve been building quietly for years.
In Emberreach, the sky has stirred. The well hums. And something long-buried has begun to breathe.
If you missed Part 1, it’s waiting for you now.
If you felt something stir when you read it — you're not alone.
Watch your inbox Thursday morning.
Now, without further ado, this week’s essay.
TÁR, directed by Todd Field and released in 2022, is a film about a world-famous conductor—Lydia Tár—at the height of her power and on the cusp of collapse. It’s not a biopic. It’s not a scandal story. It’s a meditation—on genius, on control, on what it means to be exceptional in a world that no longer makes room for complexity. Cate Blanchett plays Lydia with a kind of brutal elegance—every glance, every silence, every gesture holding a rhythm you can’t quite predict.
The film isn’t easy. It doesn’t explain itself. But that’s exactly why it stayed with me.
I saw TÁR alone, in a near-empty theater in the Poconos. Just me, two old couples who came for Cate Blanchett, and a young man in headphones who left halfway through.
I stayed.
I stayed because I’d never seen a film that understood something I had lived for decades—that brilliance, real brilliance, often hums at a frequency just above language. That genius is not clean or charming or convenient. It’s jagged. It disrupts. It refuses.
By the time Lydia Tár lifted her baton in that final sequence—broken, exiled, but still chasing transcendence—I felt gutted. Not by the fall, but by the insistence. The need to create, even when the world stops applauding.
That was the part I knew too well.
Journalism made me a translator. Not a poet, not a prophet—just someone stationed at the edge of genius, trying to carry pieces of it into public language. I wasn’t the artist. I wasn’t the conductor. I was the one in the room, holding the notebook, listening for shape, tone, pattern.
I wasn’t born to explain beauty. But the job asked me to try.
I remember stepping into artist Romare Bearden’s studio in the ’70s. It was a low-ceilinged, chaotic room in SoHo—part collage, part cathedral. The air was thick with glue and jazz. Torn magazines, hymnals, fragments of Black life curled along the walls like prayer flags.
If you’ve never felt a Bearden piece breathe, this lecture from the Hofstra University Museum of Art is a good place to start. It doesn’t just show the work—it moves with it.
Bearden didn’t greet me. He just waved me in without a word, a gesture that was both invitation and warning.
He moved like Lydia Tár in rehearsal—focused, unsmiling, intolerant of interruption. He pulled a half-finished collage from the table. Jagged lines. Explosive color. No symmetry, but a rhythm you could feel in your chest.
“You see this?” he said, not quite looking at me. “It’s not about the pieces. It’s about how they move.”
That line hit me like a downbeat. Not about the pieces… about how they move.
That was TÁR too. That impossible score Lydia tries to hold together—history, power, music, self. It’s not about the notes. It’s about the silence between them. The breath before the baton.
I asked Bearden something about color. He waved it off. “They’re just colors until they aren’t.”
Outside, the city kept moving—fast, flat, forgettable. But I lingered. I’d just come out of a room that didn’t want to be translated. A room that didn’t care about context or accessibility or how the story would read on the Metro page.
That room wasn’t for me.
But I had been allowed to feel it.
The great soprano Jessye Norman once described her voice in a conversation with me as a cathedral. “Not performance,” she said. “Architecture.” She didn’t decorate the world with sound. She built it. If you didn’t understand the arches, that was your problem.
I’ve never forgotten that. The way she said it—calm, unshaken, as if she were naming a fact older than language. And years later, I saw her prove it—not in a recital hall or a recording booth, but on one of the grandest stages in America, with the weight of legacy in the room.
At the Kennedy Center’s tribute to Sidney Poitier, Jessye Norman didn’t just sing. She built. Note by note, breath by breath, she shaped a space no one could step into casually. It was sound as structure, melody as monument.
Watch how the room lifts under her voice. Watch how it becomes something sacred.
Mstislav Rostropovich was, first and foremost, one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century—possibly of all time. Rostropovich once told me a fugue was revolution. Theme and counter-theme colliding, collapsing. He once wept while playing Bach, then wiped his face with the sleeve of his suit and said, “There. That is my language.”
None of them explained.
They composed.
And me? I carried what I could.
Print journalism taught me how to enter those rooms. But it didn’t always teach me how to leave them intact. I’d sit in silence with a genius, then sprint back to a newsroom that wanted clarity, quotes, copy by five. Genius doesn’t live in bullet points. But I tried. God, I tried.
Television was worse.
It demanded impact. Immediate, shiny, legible. No room for arches. No room for fugues. It was tempo with no time signature. And the feed? The feed devours complexity. It flattens genius into gossip. Art into content. Music into metrics.
But even then, I kept trying. Trying to carry the shape of Bearden’s collage, the echo of Norman’s voice, the shadow of Lydia’s silence.
Trying to let the audience feel what I felt—without ever claiming to own it.
That’s what TÁR gave me. Not just a film. A reminder. That being adjacent to brilliance changes you. And that proximity is not possession.
Bearden didn’t welcome me. But he didn’t push me out.
He let me stand inside his dissonance. Let me inhale the glue and the horn and the half-finished vision. That was grace, in its own jagged way.
Even now, I remember that studio. The scraps. The hum. The discipline. It wasn’t a performance. It was a ritual. And maybe my job, back then and even now, is not to explain it.
But to carry it.
To witness.
To testify.
Not translation.
Transmission.
Lydia Tár never really explains herself. By the end of the film, she’s stripped of position, platform, praise—but she still lifts the baton. Still chases something no one else can see.
That moment? That’s what I’ve carried all these years. From Bearden’s scraps to Norman’s arches to that cello bow cutting through silence.
It’s not about the pieces.
It’s about how they move.