Chopin

Suddenly, Chopin is the theme of my life. On Friday, my massage downtown was done to his music – I have no idea which pieces, I don't know one from another, but I always recognize him, ignorant as I am: I had an album of his piano music, which was the only classical music I ever played back when it was usually Crosby Stills & Nash, or Simon & Garfunkle, on the record player. (Not the stereo: stereo was beyond my means, back then.) I loved the way the piano wandered, seemingly without direction. I've never been able to view the over-organized authoritarian march of symphonies as real music, however grand it may be: music that knows where it's going before it gets there leaves me cold.

So I stroked the chest of my poor South American exile, who longs for warmth, and thought of Schnackenberg's “Kremlin of Smoke,” about Chopin in exile in Paris, Warsaw falling to the Russians, and Chopin, having no more sense than any other musician, but having the extraordinary sense to simply follow the notes. That's all the sense we need. The only discipline we need. As if that weren't to say: all you have to do is the hardest thing in the world.

And then today, Luisa's poem about the ghost of Chopin rising from a Japanese bed:

However his name is said, its syllables
linger a little: sostenuto, the way water-
drops slide down the glass panes, the way

each prismed surface looks sheathed in another
skin; the way each bud in the garden might be
a heart embalmed, floating in a globe of fluid.

Sunday at Tom's. Coffee. Over there, a glossy girl of Japanese descent is sitting with a Caucasian couple – kindly, dowdy, gray, and stout. She is sparkling and making jokes, and wagging her index finger at both of them: they are rolling their eyes, but glowing with her warmth. They heave themselves at length out of the booth, and she lifts, hummingbird-like, without effort, to accompany them. Sage is right about how all these things converge to a message:

When I nearly knocked myself out in the garage as my brother and I were digging around in the bikes, I found myself on the floor with a pile of toddler toys on top of me. Was this The Universe playing a knock-knock joke where the punch line was my lack of playfulness? I don’t know; but it’s fun to guess.

Gorgeously Beshrifted

Tosi's. Rode my bike here for the first time since it broke down last fall. It's not right yet: the rear brakes don't grip, despite all my adjustments, and in the lowest gears the chain starts to slip, though it doesn't come off. I suppose I'll either have to learn to fix it properly or pay someone to do so. Both are larger expenditures of time than I'm happy with. But things do take time. At least it's on the road again. And I can always go around the north ridge of Mt Tabor, rather than over it.

Still, some of the shine has gone off the bike. It wasn't actually the right bicycle for me, though I had no way of knowing that, really, when I bought it. What I want now is one of those big Dutch cruisers that you sit up straight on. My wrists are valuable to me now, and the slight airfoil advantage (to a slow rider) of being bent over is not worth the ergonomic disaster of making the wrists serve as secondary ankles. I don't want to set speed records: I just want to get places.

But it will be a while before I have that sort of discretionary income again. So I'll make do.

Feeling haunted by a lack of time. It's good to have my life so full of good opportunities that I don't have time to do them all: but Not Having Enough Time is not a mental state I want to allow myself to settle into. It becomes habitual, and it does horrible things to body and mind if it's entrenched. I have clients I'm convinced are being incrementally poisoned by it. I can even tell you where it accumulates in the body: in the upper, inner thighs and in the fleshy back of the neck.

I'm embarked on this food project, which takes considerable time. And March was a remarkably busy massage month for me. I've had a lot to do at the Foundation: I've been working some on the weekends there. So I've been feeling short on this time: the time when I'm beholden to nobody, the time I use to write poetry or dull quotidian blog entries such as this: time to back off, slow down, take stock. Small additional commitments, such as writing a monthly column (more about that anon), start to loom and oppress.

So the only way I know to stop Not Having Enough Time is to stop playing by its rules. To deliberately squander some time. To stop trying to do more, and deliberately do less. I'm not writing a poem right now. I'm not writing a column. I'm not writing something inspiring and spiritual. I'm wasting my time, and yours, quite intentionally. This is proof: we have time to kick back and chat at Tosi's. The rest of the world will get by somehow without us.

Such lovely advice I got in comments about the 18th Century, and about music! I listened to the sarabande Jean linked to three times. It's lovely, lonely, poignant. I realized midway through the second time that I've heard cello music all my life and assumed I was listening to a string quartet: I had no idea one instrument could make all those sounds. (More anon, as I follow more of the delicious links given me!)

I think Lucy was right that denigrating the 18th Century thing is an anglophone disorder. I remember being surprised, in taking a history of German literature, to find how rich the 18th Century was and how seriously it was taken. And I note that Lucas (welcome!) refers to a lot of French music and writing. I've come late to an appreciation of France and things French. It's not surprising, I suppose, that we English speakers should revel in our Elizabethans and give short shrift to a century in which German and French music and literature were in their glory.

So what is shrift, I wonder? I guess you could say my aim at the moment is to give ample shrift to all things. To be prodigal in shrift. I'm picturing shrift as a sort of fancy fabric: let's wear long flowing ornate robes of it, slashed and decorated, layered and laced. Let's live gorgeously beshrifted. We have all the time in the world.

A Hick from Springfield

Christine commented: Dale, do you ascribe to the idea that we avoid what we most need? I wonder what lesson from the 18th century you will apply toward your life. Curious, I am.

I started answering in the comments, but it got so long it was more like a post. I hadn't really made it explicit in my mind, but I guess I think that any culture, any time, ought to have something to enrich my understanding and capture my heart. The European 18th Century is several (if closely interrelated) sophisticated cultures, and a long period of time: the fact that it feels so barren to me suggests that there's a resistance in me that prevents me from responding fully, that there's some way that I'm closing my heart against them.

It may be, as some of you suggested, that it's time for me to really learn how to listen to old music: maybe that's what the 18th Century is waiting to give me. I enjoy Mozart and Bach, in a casual way, but I've never felt that I really get them. With all but a few favorite kinds of music (the Rock of my youth, traditional Celtic) -- and especially with classical music, I have the deep sense that I'm just a hick from Springfield, Oregon, too stupid and crude to ever really respond to it properly.

It's funny: I've seen this often enough my poetry classes. Students who are convinced that they just can't read it, due to some genetic or environmental flaw too deep to be mended. Some of them are frustrated enough to say so, and to ask how it's done -- as if there was some secret poetry-reading protocol that prep school kids are initiated into the third grade, that the rest of us have to guess at. The answer, of course, unwelcome as it is, is simply: you have to read it. You can't just glance at it. That's why I used to make my students memorize a lot of poetry: because it's really very difficult to memorize a poem without reading it, whether you want to or not. Whereas it's easy to skim a poem, get frustrated, and put the book away, under the impression that you've "done the reading," but that you're too stupid to understand it.

Probably the same rule obtains here. What I'm going to need to do is actually listen. Where, I wonder, should I start? It probably doesn't matter, really.

Nobody Listening

I wandered, blinded, overwhelmed by work, out onto the street. Tried to walk one way, or another. The decision about which way to walk was too difficult to make. I thought of trying a new restaurant for lunch, but knew I could never muster the courage to walk into a new place. I wasn't sure I had the courage to walk into a place I knew. Hesitantly I walked a few blocks towards the river, then a few blocks north. The sun walked behind me, fingering his club.

Taking another step was more than I could do. I came to a halt. People hurried by me on the sidewalk.

A tall, thin, patched young man, with something of an Amish look, was playing a violin on the corner. He stood stiffly, and he wore clumsy boots. When he broke into a riff he would wiggle a little, the music in his body at war with his native awkwardness.

As I stood there, with the sun beating down on my head, I became aware that he was playing an intricate piece, and playing it with extraordinary virtuosity and passion. No one was listening to him. I don't know that I looked as if I was listening to him. But I closed my eyes and let myself be swamped by the music, filled up with it. It was very beautiful. Merry music, running directly against the grain of of my anxiety. And this young man from nowhere, playing. Just on the chance that someone might hear.

Suddenly I was okay. The weight lifted off me. I straightened up. I could breathe.

I walked over and dropped a five into the violin case open by his feet. "Thanks, man," I mumbled, probably inaudibly, unable to meet his glance. I went to try a new cafe for lunch.