So I am learning how to play second violin on Santa Lucia - A Neapolitan Boat Song. I am at the point where I am playing each note well and where practicing with an annoying metronome is finally yielding some rhythmically sound results. The next task at hand is to make it sound not just technically sound but beautiful. To add a lilt to it, to sway with it. The teacher's suggestion was that I should put myself in a boat in Naples, this song playing in the background. How would I feel? How would it make me sway? She asked me to channel those imagined feelings for the right effect.
I see what she is saying. I know how doing so would help. I remember reading Arnold Steinhardt's book - Violin Dreams - where he makes the point that a well played Ciaccona should make one dance. Imagining a room full of people dancing the Ciaconna should help the violinist lend just the right degree of lyricism to his playing.
Playing Bach's Partita for solo violin is too distant a dream for me and might even be several lifetimes away. Though the point of feeling swept along in a Neapolitan boat is well taken. What's needed for this mental fugue however is a mind where the gritty and all too real images of being swept down Route 80 in fits and starts, flowing in a very different way than a boat in Naples, with the windshield wipers beating a quarter note at 110, don't rudely intrude.
[I could have played with so much grace and so much fluidity if I was of a place where a musical gondolier ferried me hither and thither, if I wasn't in a state called New Jersey, working my way east to a city called New York every morning.]
Even as I typed the parenthetical thought above I cringed at the notes of discontent with the grace notes of whining misery. I do not approve of these sad and sorry notes creeping into my life. I want to drive them away with as much determination as I want to eliminate the squeaks, the creaks the harshness and choppiness that creeps into my violin playing when I've had a rough day, when I've felt stressed and harried, when the hand holding the bow trembles and shakes and presses down too hard on the string.
Even if Naples or Venice or Hawaii and it's swaying Hula hasn't been in one's past and isn't in one's future, one shouldn't feel handicapped when it comes to letting the mind roam free, imagining the pleasures, the beauty that could take one's breath away. True misery comes from the jaded inability to conjure up even a mental image of a place where one can sway and float with eyes closed, carefree.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Stop playing in loops!
1. Ignoring or addressing the "Left Front Turn Signal Malfunction" notification that my car insists on announcing with an earth shattering "DINGGGG" every time I want to signal a turn or a lane change to my left. I did park in front of a reflective surface at night just to see if the left front turn signal flashed when I wanted it to. It did. So is this "DINGGGG" a feature built-in by the manufacturers to make the repair shops at dealerships richer?
The car has also told me that my tires were flat or the dynamic traction control was off or that the steering fluid was depleted when it really wasn't. I need to stop thinking about the car that cries wolf.
2. Thinking of traffic when I am stuck in traffic. It just puts me in a horrible mood. I should learn to just "roll" with it, or not, whatever the capricious traffic gods and goddesses want. What is it that drives me crazy about this? Is it that this phase of life refuses to pass? I am not the only one in the world who needs to travel 2-3 hours before arriving at the work desk. I am not the only one who is creating this massive carbon footprint by burning millions of hours of gas, idling in traffic. If my problem isn't unique then the solution can't be too unique either. It is lurking out there, staring me in the face somewhere. I just can't see it. Maybe if I wasn't thinking about traffic when stuck in traffic - I'd see it?
3. A certain someone. I wish her well, always and will say HAMH any number of times, but I really don't want to think about her anatomy and physiology. I don't want to worry about calling her, I don't want to worry about what she'll say when she calls me. I don't want to feel the muscles in my jaw, my neck, my shoulders tensing up when she's talking to me, when all I can say is "Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" while thinking I am not a doctor, I am not a psychiatrist, I am not a physiotherapist, I am not a chiropractor, I am not a gastroenterologist, I am not an osteopath, I am not a neurosurgeon - I really can't help...really I am quite helpless...I wish I could help but I can't. I am sorry for your back, your legs, your thighs, your bones, your spine, your calves, your glutes, your skin, your scalp, your lipid levels but any possible cures are beyond the scope of both the halves of my brain.
4. Obsessing about the time not spent with my daughter. I can either take a chance in life and take whatever steps are necessary to find a way to spend more hours with her until her college going years or I can tell myself to believe she is strong, resilient, a millennial kid, a compassionate kid who will not remember me as an indifferent parent, who will think of her childhood with fondness. But the thing I need to stop doing is obsessing about this. There should be no room for niggling, circular thoughts that keep one awake all night in life. There should only be decisive action. Inaction kills like nothing else. Pointless pontification is meaningless.
5. Loans. They will get paid off when they get paid off. Thinking about them isn't getting them paid off any sooner.
6. Wondering what this life will amount too. Another senseless line of thought when the only things that are real are birth and death. There are only dust bunnies, lint and a handful of dirt between those two bookends. So no matter how many sleepless nights we go through it is all headed for glorious dust-dom. So why the agony, is there a purpose to this constant agonizing other than leaving one feeling off-kilter all the time? To what extent is this life about choices and consequences, about checks and balances? The so called "right" choices don't always have the "right" consequences and accidentals are probably more important in the shaping of any life than a set linear course.
7. Thinking about whether I should be thinking about this temporary separation at all. Wondering if the stoicism I feel about this is normal or if I should be falling apart and by so doing hastening a reversion. After all I haven't been given a load I can't bear. Every circumstance gets taken in one's stride as always. Even if these all encompassing strides still involve significant mental churn and constant ferment. What would constant togetherness achieve? Why are the phone conversations so mundane, so dissatisfying, so much about bills and money? Where is the richness of experience? Why is it not possible to not think about this and just live?
8. Worries that I'll never master music or the arts or literature. How ridiculous that sounds to the rational part of the brain. There are no masters! The knowledge here is infinite. Eighty or so sentient years are not enough to plumb the depths or scale the heights of art, music or literature. So why do I always feel like I am in competition with myself and the whole world? Why is it so impossible to just sit, listen, absorb and then do it some more?
The car has also told me that my tires were flat or the dynamic traction control was off or that the steering fluid was depleted when it really wasn't. I need to stop thinking about the car that cries wolf.
2. Thinking of traffic when I am stuck in traffic. It just puts me in a horrible mood. I should learn to just "roll" with it, or not, whatever the capricious traffic gods and goddesses want. What is it that drives me crazy about this? Is it that this phase of life refuses to pass? I am not the only one in the world who needs to travel 2-3 hours before arriving at the work desk. I am not the only one who is creating this massive carbon footprint by burning millions of hours of gas, idling in traffic. If my problem isn't unique then the solution can't be too unique either. It is lurking out there, staring me in the face somewhere. I just can't see it. Maybe if I wasn't thinking about traffic when stuck in traffic - I'd see it?
3. A certain someone. I wish her well, always and will say HAMH any number of times, but I really don't want to think about her anatomy and physiology. I don't want to worry about calling her, I don't want to worry about what she'll say when she calls me. I don't want to feel the muscles in my jaw, my neck, my shoulders tensing up when she's talking to me, when all I can say is "Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" while thinking I am not a doctor, I am not a psychiatrist, I am not a physiotherapist, I am not a chiropractor, I am not a gastroenterologist, I am not an osteopath, I am not a neurosurgeon - I really can't help...really I am quite helpless...I wish I could help but I can't. I am sorry for your back, your legs, your thighs, your bones, your spine, your calves, your glutes, your skin, your scalp, your lipid levels but any possible cures are beyond the scope of both the halves of my brain.
4. Obsessing about the time not spent with my daughter. I can either take a chance in life and take whatever steps are necessary to find a way to spend more hours with her until her college going years or I can tell myself to believe she is strong, resilient, a millennial kid, a compassionate kid who will not remember me as an indifferent parent, who will think of her childhood with fondness. But the thing I need to stop doing is obsessing about this. There should be no room for niggling, circular thoughts that keep one awake all night in life. There should only be decisive action. Inaction kills like nothing else. Pointless pontification is meaningless.
5. Loans. They will get paid off when they get paid off. Thinking about them isn't getting them paid off any sooner.
6. Wondering what this life will amount too. Another senseless line of thought when the only things that are real are birth and death. There are only dust bunnies, lint and a handful of dirt between those two bookends. So no matter how many sleepless nights we go through it is all headed for glorious dust-dom. So why the agony, is there a purpose to this constant agonizing other than leaving one feeling off-kilter all the time? To what extent is this life about choices and consequences, about checks and balances? The so called "right" choices don't always have the "right" consequences and accidentals are probably more important in the shaping of any life than a set linear course.
7. Thinking about whether I should be thinking about this temporary separation at all. Wondering if the stoicism I feel about this is normal or if I should be falling apart and by so doing hastening a reversion. After all I haven't been given a load I can't bear. Every circumstance gets taken in one's stride as always. Even if these all encompassing strides still involve significant mental churn and constant ferment. What would constant togetherness achieve? Why are the phone conversations so mundane, so dissatisfying, so much about bills and money? Where is the richness of experience? Why is it not possible to not think about this and just live?
8. Worries that I'll never master music or the arts or literature. How ridiculous that sounds to the rational part of the brain. There are no masters! The knowledge here is infinite. Eighty or so sentient years are not enough to plumb the depths or scale the heights of art, music or literature. So why do I always feel like I am in competition with myself and the whole world? Why is it so impossible to just sit, listen, absorb and then do it some more?
Monday, October 18, 2010
Unstoppable Impulses
What goes through your mind when you see a misted up glass window in a car or in a bus? How about a misted up glass door in a shower? Well I know what goes through my mind - there's an unstoppable urge to place the edge of a fist, the side where the little finger is, on the glass, so that it looks like an infant's foot sans toes, and then to add little dots around this "foot" so it looks like a baby placed a tiny foot there.
Of course I always make two such feet. Most people I know just make one and it's too weird to imagine a baby hopping on one foot and too depressing to imagine just one leg.
The days are getting shorter, darker and colder here in the western hemisphere and misty surfaces are abundant wherever hot and bothered, stressed breaths emerge from frowning faces of stressed commuters and workers and collide with cold surfaces.
It was one such night tonight as our bus crept along Route 80, barely moving for several minutes. Some people had given up on getting anywhere anytime soon and were snoring their blues away. Others were getting a head start on tomorrow’s assignments as they plugged little numbers into little spreadsheet cells. I was staring at my own reflection in the bus window, wondering when the glumness set in, if there was a clear demarcation, a point after which it all started going south. When did the eyes take on this dull, glazed sheen, when did the lips acquire a seemingly permanent downward turn, when was the last time I was happy or moved or touched. It is not as if such moments have ceased to exist, it’s just that they are hard to recollect when the blues set in and one’s reflection defines an unpleasant reality.
The glumness was threatening an accelerated downward spiral when I caught sight of the man sitting across from me. I see him everyday and I’ve never seen him smile. He is always serious, always working on the bus until it’s time for him to get off. One gets the impression that he has a super important job in some Fortune 500 company. However when my eyes drifted in his direction tonight he wasn’t gazing down at his computer. He was staring at the misted up bus window. And then he raised his hand and I noticed the fist. The next few moments went by in slow motion as I wondered, “No! Is HE really going to do what I think he’s going to do? It can’t be!” And then he did it. His fist went up against the glass and created a little baby foot. Then his index finger came out and dotted five little toes around the foot! I was stunned. I couldn’t believe this man had felt the unstoppable impulse to create the impression of a baby’s foot in the misted up glass of the bus window. How uncharacteristic of him...or was it really? I smiled. The blues from just a few seconds ago all but forgotten.
I absently reached inside my purse, took out a large orange flavored Tootsie Roll lollipop, and popped it in my mouth. My lips couldn’t possibly stay turned down as I was sucking on a lollipop. The serious man caught my eye and smiled. He knew I had seen him do the baby’s foot before. I wondered if he was wondering if someone who looked as glum and blue as me while on the bus would be an orange Tootsie Roll type.
Wonder if our unstoppable impulses really say more about us than anything else.
Of course I always make two such feet. Most people I know just make one and it's too weird to imagine a baby hopping on one foot and too depressing to imagine just one leg.
The days are getting shorter, darker and colder here in the western hemisphere and misty surfaces are abundant wherever hot and bothered, stressed breaths emerge from frowning faces of stressed commuters and workers and collide with cold surfaces.
It was one such night tonight as our bus crept along Route 80, barely moving for several minutes. Some people had given up on getting anywhere anytime soon and were snoring their blues away. Others were getting a head start on tomorrow’s assignments as they plugged little numbers into little spreadsheet cells. I was staring at my own reflection in the bus window, wondering when the glumness set in, if there was a clear demarcation, a point after which it all started going south. When did the eyes take on this dull, glazed sheen, when did the lips acquire a seemingly permanent downward turn, when was the last time I was happy or moved or touched. It is not as if such moments have ceased to exist, it’s just that they are hard to recollect when the blues set in and one’s reflection defines an unpleasant reality.
The glumness was threatening an accelerated downward spiral when I caught sight of the man sitting across from me. I see him everyday and I’ve never seen him smile. He is always serious, always working on the bus until it’s time for him to get off. One gets the impression that he has a super important job in some Fortune 500 company. However when my eyes drifted in his direction tonight he wasn’t gazing down at his computer. He was staring at the misted up bus window. And then he raised his hand and I noticed the fist. The next few moments went by in slow motion as I wondered, “No! Is HE really going to do what I think he’s going to do? It can’t be!” And then he did it. His fist went up against the glass and created a little baby foot. Then his index finger came out and dotted five little toes around the foot! I was stunned. I couldn’t believe this man had felt the unstoppable impulse to create the impression of a baby’s foot in the misted up glass of the bus window. How uncharacteristic of him...or was it really? I smiled. The blues from just a few seconds ago all but forgotten.
I absently reached inside my purse, took out a large orange flavored Tootsie Roll lollipop, and popped it in my mouth. My lips couldn’t possibly stay turned down as I was sucking on a lollipop. The serious man caught my eye and smiled. He knew I had seen him do the baby’s foot before. I wondered if he was wondering if someone who looked as glum and blue as me while on the bus would be an orange Tootsie Roll type.
Wonder if our unstoppable impulses really say more about us than anything else.
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