Mordent, or turn: in music, a grace of several short notes in tonic succession about the main tonal value.
Commenting on Amy Tenderich's Friday post discussing bloggers' viewpoints, I mentioned that the different types of diabetes blogs -- personal, technical, news, activist -- were like the various voices in a chorus, and that it is the counterpoint of different perspectives that presents the more complete view of how diabetes encompasses our lives (or how our lives encompass our diabetes). I had meant to pursue that line of thought here, but a key phrase in my draft -- "or like the instruments in an orchestra" -- set me off on a totally different tangent: if living with diabetes were a symphony, what would that symphony sound like?
The opus is not complete. It is too long for a blog entry, and florid to the point of being "purple". Some of it doesn't make logical sense -- but then its sense is very "stream of consciousness". Its references to musical notation, symphonic structure, and the sounds and timbres of an orchestra's instruments, may make it too esoteric...
As I move forward to next weekend's presentations at the Trenton Computer Festival, and from there towards the STAR TREK film opening in May, I'm not sure if or when I'll finish the exercise in tone prose...
But I'm in the mood for sharing. It's the underlying thread, the basso ostinato, that is diabetes. The leitmotifs of glucose testing, meal planning, stress, and medication set the themes. The sounds of daily life, and our perceptions of them, are filtered through the mesh of our treatment regimens. I want people to hear that. So I'll play the first couple of paragraphs here, before the prose gets too caught up in itself, to see how it falls on different ears.
Please let me know what you think.
The blood glucose readings set the meter of the movement. Like clockwork they go: rising, breakfast, mid-morning, lunch, mid-afternoon, evening commute, exercise, dinner, snack, bedtime. Every day, rain or shine, the meter goes: ka-pling, squeeze, suck, beep, scratch, punctuated by a cussword because its meter is faster than an athlete's training heartrate or slower than his resting pulse; its subtle shifts set the dynamic for the following bars.
The carb calculator comes in. "What is my reading? What will I be doing? When will I need to -- or be able to -- eat again?" Calories, proteins, carbs, fats. It's a balancing act of woodwinds versus strings as the technical issues try to keep tonal harmony against the sliding, pulsing vibrato of tastebuds and time. As the violins' vibrato grows louder, the French horns come in behind -- softly now, but crescendoing against the quickening heartbeat that threatens to drown out the steady metric moan. The rest of the brass follows suit -- rising, falling, concordant, discordant, in a counterpoint that progresses from classical order to pantonal cacophony. In a clash of cymbals, food is served, the bolus delivered, and the section comes to its close...
