Dead people, sunrises, how to play slow music
Becoming compendium, December 5, 2022
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As the Northern Hemisphere darkens toward the solstice, great religious traditions welcome the bravery of light. There are many quotations about light, but this one really resonates:
There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. —Leonard Cohen, “Anthem.”
A heart broken open
~We, like the eggshell, are both tough and fragile~
To eat an egg, you must first crack the shell. To form a compassionate heart, you must break it.
Life is not simple, easy, or fair, but, childlike, we want it to be, we expect it to be.
The tension of that wanting and expecting breaks our hearts wide open, letting in the compassionate energy of the Universe. In dying to our dreams of simplicity, ease, and fairness, we are reborn.
Learning to live is learning to love, and heartbreak is part of that process. Without heartbreak, living is just observation.
Obits
~How we say goodbye says so much about us~
There are two publications—I’m sure there must be more—where it pays to read the obituaries even if you don’t have any idea who the dead person might be.
One of them is The New York Times. The other is The Economist, a weekly news magazine—it calls itself a newspaper—that always has an obituary on the last page.
That obituary, week after week, has some of the best writing I’ve encountered anywhere. Like everything in the magazine, it’s anonymous.
In the November 5 edition, the subject of the obituary was Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago Press, a British enterprise that promoted women writers and changed the face of British publishing.
From the obit:
When you read, one writer said, you hear the words in your most intimate organ, the brain. Reading, she added, is a way of becoming the person you’re interested in being.
Just think about that for a minute: The person you’re interested in being.
A crime writer
And this, from an obit of the crime writer Elmore Leonard. The obituary writer creates a muse called Writerley, who has a way of dropping by unannounced, uninvited, and unwelcomed to Leonard’s gritty digs in an industrial area of Detroit.
On this visit:
[Leonard] knew in advance what Writerley would say. He was a peddler of any dope you wanted: prologues, adverbs, adjectives, metaphors, patois dialogue, descriptions of the weather. Even now, as he settled himself uninvited on one of the Naugahyde chairs, he was saying: The rain was falling fast outside, the sky was pelt-gray, and dark clouds were massing over the dismal city like skyscrapers about to topple.
Leonard ignored him and wrote: Another spring day in Detroit.
And a songwriter
Or this, from the obituary for Leonard Cohen:
He wanted to raise up his song to the Lord as David did on the harp, though still damp from the body of Bathsheba, with nothing on his tongue but “Hallelujah!” And for that, the road lay inward.
He had learned, with Abraham, to sing “Here am I”; he had learned too to accept that his true song, his great song, could never be perfect, for there was a crack in everything; that’s how the light got in.
You may need to subscribe to The Economist to read these items. It’s expensive, but worth it.
Sunset poems and simple music
~Some ways of seeing and listening you may not have thought of~
I’m aware of Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn,” but I’ve never been fortunate to live where I could easily see dawn breaking. So I’ve seldom seen the sun rise, all my life.
As unlikely as I’d be to be driving east and watching dawn break, I often rode west and saw sunsets.
The first gentle clouds of sunset brings John Keats to mind:
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue…
And the fiery end of so many sunsets reminds me of my favorite poetic quotation of all, from Gerard Manley Hopkins, as he describes the fall of coal in a grate.
and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
That’s from “The Windhover.” I am in love with how “fall, gall themselves and gash” traces, in image and sound, the path of an ember as it is consumed by fire.
The art connection
~Art may on occasion imitate life, but life always imitates art~
An artist based in Portland, Chuck E. Bloom, exhibited some of his surreal paintings at Rose Schnitzer Manor (my fair assisted living) recently. His works, many of them in miniature, feature disembodied houses and trees floating in space, foundations and roots hanging out for all to see.
I thought the lowering skies in his pictures, which I assumed were sunsets, give the paintings a doomsday feel. But then Bloom pointed out that they are actually sunrises, and I saw the paintings in a more positive light, as eccentric rather than frightening.
The musical connection
~Paradoxically, it’s hard to play a violin tune slowly~
A young and very talented violinist named Nate Strothkamp gave a short recital at Rose Schnitzer Manor. After some pyrotechnics by the likes of Paganini, his last song was a simple, quiet, unadorned “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof. It was achingly perfect.
I think it’s harder to play “Sunrise, Sunset” the way Strothkamp did than to whiz through the fast finger work of more “virtuoso” compositions.
Simple songs are best played with minimum vibrato and schmaltz. It’s hard partly because you can’t try too hard. Every note must be perfectly in pitch; the tone must come from the strength of your fingers pushing down on the neck of the instrument. To keep it simple, the player should resist the temptation to speed up or slow down, accent notes or superfluous emotion (that’s the schmaltz).
What matters are the spaces between the notes. To play this music is to long to inhabit those spaces.
The simplicity of the tune is everything. Another example is “Simple Gifts,” the Shaker hymn written by Joseph Brackett Jr. and made famous by Aaron Copeland in Appalachian Spring.
“Ashokan Farewell,” the haunting fiddle melody by Jay Ungar that weaves through Ken Burns’s Civil War series, is another intensely beautiful example. Ungar calls it “a Scottish lament written by a Jewish guy from the Bronx.”
It’s a slow, plaintive, meditative piece of music, simple yet maddeningly difficult to pull off. Here is Ungar with his wife, Molly Mason.
The magic of C natural
~The tension that hinges a tune~
So many of these songs hinge on a single note, very often C natural in a piece where most of the Cs are sharp, such as tunes written in the key of D. The one in “Ashokan Farewell,” an apex of dissonance near the end of the piece, makes my spine tingle every time I hit it.
I’ve encountered the same tense C in other songs. One of them is in a cute little reel from O’Neill’s Dance Music of Ireland called “Boil the Breakfast Early.” Another is near the end of “Lonesome Moonlight Waltz.” The version I have, by Greg Stone of Taborgrass, is in F, and the note is actually C sharp, written as D flat. In context, though, it still has the spine-tingling effect.
I was wrong, okay?
A few weeks ago, I wrote that Airplane! was the funniest movie ever made. It was, in 1980. But time has passed it by. The context of many of the jokes, sight gags and throwaway lines is missing in the third decade of the 21st century.*
Some movies are enduringly funny, like the Marx Brothers, because the jokes are about timeless, universal themes.
“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.”
That’s a joke that won’t wear out.
I put together a list of 20 or so other movies that I thought were funny, but you know, I’m not going to bore you with it. You want pop culture lists, try Google.
*Let me share one thing about Airplane!, though. I had forgotten all about Howard Jarvis being stuck in that taxi in Airplane! (you have to sit through the credits to hear him say, “Twenty more minutes, and that’s it!”) For you young ’uns who don’t remember Jarvis, he was the force behind Proposition 13, the infamous 1978 California property tax limitation ballot measure, the passage of which led to consequences perhaps undreampt of by its supporters. Among other ills, Prop 13 decimated California’s schools and contributed to the astronomical rise in housing prices statewide over the ensuing decades.
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All that advice about writing every day, freehand, without stopping to think about what you are writing—the instructions are always to write first thing in the morning, before you’ve had a chance to leave sleep behind, before other impressions crowd out you creativity.
In the MS world, that early morning thing doesn’t wash. It’s impossible for me to just get out of bed and write first thing. When I was still living at home, there was a whole routine: opening the house, raising the blinds, turning up the heat. The only time I actually got up and started writing was back in the early 90s, before my diagnosis, when I was writing for the West Metro bureau of The Oregonian. I used a coffeemaker in those days and could fill it with water and grounds the night before so all I had to do in the morning was flip a switch.
But as the tendrils of multiple sclerosis tightened round me, it got harder to do that. Now when I get up, I have to dress and struggle into two leg braces before I can easily walk around, turn on the heat, open the blinds. Sometimes, I need to eat breakfast.
So the exercise gets pushed back into the day. And it doesn’t matter. I’ve practiced enough that I can come up with an essay or a plot in the allotted 20 minutes. I’ve even written at 11:30 pm, barely making that day’s quota.
And no, I don’t write every day. When I first started Becoming, I had to, because I needed to reawaken the writing zen that I remembered from those days when I wrote stories about people.
Now, writing comes naturally. Ideas spark intuition, and a lifetime’s worth of memories clamor to be heard. Sometimes it’s like I need to clamp the lid on to keep Pandora’s imps from scattering outside the box. I’ve launched this ship and am enjoying the voyage.
Ahoy, mixed metaphors!
One final thought
I don’t know where this comes from, only that it bubbled up in my notes.
All prayer is gratitude; all practice is forgiveness.
And with that, I leave you until next week.
Nice set of posts. I like the image of you floating along on top of the box, the lid of which is barely keeping those imps fingers inside :’). BTW, is the asterisk after 21st century supposed to lead to a footnote?