Putting It In

PERSPECITIVE, PEOPLE. It's a superhero. Perspective differentiates your foreground from your background. Perspective exsanguinates your roads into dental floss, then bloats your dental floss into roads. Perspective takes you from washboard to wahoo! in the 7,865,927,084 seconds it takes you to figure out how to draw anything other than stick figures.

I still can't draw anything other than stick figures.

This despite having agreed, in a moment of mimosa-induced insanity, to attend something called Wine and Canvas, in which you stand around in the downtown of a midsized midwestern city and attempt to copy a painting of puppies or wildflowers or perhaps a disgruntled unicorn whilst tippling.

I think, in retrospect, that the attraction must have been the tippling.

See, lately I've been wondering if my awesome lack of artistic aptitude isn't symbolic: I can't seem to master mental perspective, either. Yes, I'm moving. Yes, I'm (hopefully temporarily) jobless. Yes, I have to sell my washer/dryer set on Craigslist and inventory which cardboard boxes in the basement were mortally wounded in the Great Sewage Overflow of 2010, and somehow divest myself of a small pipe organ.

But other people are dead!

I must fix this thought to my brain like a kick me sign to the back of a recalcitrant babysitter. I hereby resolve to recognize that other people have real problems. They are abused and divorcing and homeless and hungry and maimed.

The things I have are inconveniences. I can't quite stomach the word opportunities, so inconveniences will do for now.

Also, if you would like a slow cooker, a coffee maker, a toaster, any of an assortment of mildly dilapidated furniture, half-eaten pantry staples, a 1970s Rogers pipe organ with full pedal board, a Kenmore washer and dryer set, some ugly refrigerator magnets, pots containing dead plats, a gold fireplace poker, or a chair attached to a combination lock to which no one knows the combination, I'm your woman.

In Which I Confess to Sly-Dialing

It was me! I did it. I sly-dialed.

You know sly-dialing. It's a sneaky little service that lets you bypass much of the actual business of calling someone by connecting you directly to their voicemail. You pretend you've called a person; you create the illusion of having called. But in fact you never intended, and in fact went to some lengths to avoid, real-time connection.

I suppose it's understandable. Real-life communication -communication that is two-sided and live- is tricky in way that email is not. And email and its little brother, texting, are our default these days. I can't remember the last time I chose to communicate by telephone when email was available. Emailing is just easier. It's more securely under your control; you can shape -and reshape- it in advance; you can fine-tune what you want to say.

It's the coward's mode of communication, and I am nothing if not a coward. I telephone when it's unavoidable, or when things are too complicated or too large or to say over email, or when I want immediate dialogue. Or when I don't have your email address.

Enter sly dial, ridding me of any last vestigial need to converse! I might as well become a card-carrying monologist, because I sure as heck don't need to listen anymore!

Though, to be more precise, what sly dial actually relieves you of is not so much conversation as uncomfortable conversation, those dialogues you're just too chicken shit to have. In my case, craven people-pleaser that I am, I didn't want to tell a nice landlord in live conversation that I had signed a lease on someone else's place. But I can see sly dial being used to deliver a whole plethora of rejections, personal and professional, as well as to pass along bad news, unload emotional baggage, and to just generally be a jerk.

All of which begs the question: Will we miss uncomfortable conversation when it's gone? Is there something essential, or at least instructive, in facing your demons, in having to look in the eye -or at least tangle your voice with- the person you're about to hurt? Does experiencing discomfort make you more empathetic, less ruthless, more, well, human?

Good stuff to think about later. First I have to go sly dial my brother.

On My Radar

There's a storm coming. I can feel it, for starters -the air is scratchy, like a woolen blanket- and I can hear the first mumblings of thunder. And, because I live in the twenty-first century, I can track it on the radar. It's live and red and spreading, a rash or a Chinese dragon or an arsonist's masterpiece, and it activates, momentarily, the tornado sirens. They are startling, a deluge of noise, drowning the whipping of the branches of the trees.

What must it have been like before satellite images, before weather radio, before klaxons, when the only tools you had to tell you what was coming over the horizon were contained within your skin? Your nose, maybe your eyes and ears? Your trick knees, your gouty hips, your pulsing, pick-axe headaches? Do we lose anything, forgetting to watch ourselves for signs of storm?

But of course I am over-romanticizing. It has never been just us; humans are tricksy creatures; we have watched everything -weather vanes, dogs, sundials, red sky tonight, sailor's delight- we have watched everything we could, because it was important.

(It's raining now, great globs of rain; the forecast said torrential and it is almost impossible for me to prevent this word from streaming into the space behind my eyes.)

And we've forgotten that, weather's incalculable importance. Or at least I have. When the sirens went off I was scared, yes, but welling up under the fear was a cold kind of comfort. Tornadoes, to an Indiana native, are old hat. The ritual is soothing, familiar as an incantation. Get the flashlight. Take the radio to listen to, maybe a blanket. Go down into the basement and hunker there with the ones you love.

The sirens have shut off; the rain, fierce guard-dog rain, has not. But I can't help but think we're fooling ourselves -I'm fooling myself- with all this predictive equipment, our safeguards and our reflectivity composites. Yesterday, two dozen people were swept away by flood waters in Arkansas. Katrina may have receded into memory, but its scars have not. And tornadoes -not everyday, but sometimes, and not only to OZ- carry people away.

Get the flashlight. Take the radio. Go down to the basement. Love, listen.

Gold Star!

I've been thinking a lot this past year about feeling appreciated. You either like your job or you don't, insofar as you enjoy or loathe or tolerate the constellation of activities that makes up your particular galaxy of employment. (In the case of one of my jobs: manipulating small children, filling out forms, entering data, emanating a general odor of schoolmarm. In the case of job # 2: practicing, schlepping, shamelessly promoting oneself, occasionally performing, haggling over calendars, calculating tax liability, begging.)

But how you feel about the day-to-day grind of your job can only take you so far. What you really want -what most people really want- is to be appreciated. This is why musicians lap up that post-concert schmooze while pretending mightily not to. This is why people in some positions -jobs that require you to give and give more as par for the course- burn out. This year I had one parent out of 40 tell me they appreciated what I'd done for their kids. The praise was searing, almost painful, as if I'd quaffed ice-cold water after a month in the desert.

So I've been trying to do more appreciating. I have become fulsome in my praise of reference librarians. I sent my exterminator a thank you note with a Starbucks gift card. I emailed our secretary, thanking her for keeping us from exploding in a fiery ball of disorganization. I want you to know you're doing a good job.

You're doing a good job, readers! Now go hunt someone down and tell them the same before I vomit from the cheesiness of it all.

#2: An Equal Music

It took me an inordinately long time to get through this book. In fact I have to confess that between page 25 and page 275 I devoured at least eight other novels, possibly nine or ten or eleven, each polished off with the bravado that only a reader avoiding another, more labyrinthine work can muster.

It wasn't that An Equal Music was a difficult read. It was actually fairly engrossing in its detailing of music and music-making and obsessive love. I'm a musician, albeit not a member of a string quartet, so much of the stuff of the life of Michael Holme, the second violinist of Vikram Seth's fictional Maggiore Quartet, carried that perfect, balanced savor of familiarity and novelty.

Rather, it's that the novel shares the structure of a dense Classical chamber work, unspinning itself slowly, and often repetitively, over a protracted span of time. Michael plays music; he pursues his lost love; he plays more music. Not a lot happens, but what does happen makes noise.

An Equal Music is a double romance. Michael loves music; Michael loves Julia, the Musician Who Got Away. The novel's chief device is to conflate these two loves; Michael, and the other musicians in the novel, struggle to disentangling the musical from the human:

Michael on Julia: "To say that there was a naturalness to her playing does not say very much: after all, everyone plays according to their nature." (p. 32)

Yet, "Billy is far too fat, and always will be. He will always be distracted by family and money worries, car insurance and composition. For all our frustration and rebuke, he will never be on time. But the moment his bow comes down on the strings he is transfigured. He is a wonderful cellist, light and profound: the base of our harmony, the rock on which we rest." (p.10)

And, "When I play this I release myself into the spirit of the quartet. I become the music of the scale. I mute my will, I free my self." (p. 10).

Helen, another member of the quartet, dates an early music nerd almost entirely because he skillfully restrung her viola. And Julia, in the book's midsection, is revealed to be keeping a secret that strikes at the heart of her musicianship and thus at her sense of self.

What is me and what is not? It seems like a stupid question, but in fact the ultimate power of music is to confound one's sense of self. Because music is backdoor communication, springing from a place unpolluted by words, it's very tricky to integrate into one's (mostly verbal) consciousness.

This is perhaps why, in the novel, both Michael and Julia display the fabulously annoying tendency to interpret events and random environmental fluctuations as personally significant, a symbol of their relational or emotional states. It is tricky to delimit yourself when your job is to blur the boundaries between you and sound.

Another confession: Over time, I came to hate Michael and Julia. They were petty, self-absorbed, and far, far, far, far too serious. Nevertheless, An Equal Music rose above them. It's a luminous novel, a sustaining novel, a novel of profound grace. Just as music subsumes its players, so the novel subsumed its characters: a hymn, at last, to the power of art.

Drivel

It used to be called post-performance let-down, and I haven't experienced it for a while. Once you start performing regularly, the end of each individual performance is merely an opportunity to get your shit together for the next one. This June, however, is the perfect storm: I gave 14 performances in two months, self-produced three, and then stepped off the cliff into complete giglessness.

Not to mention that I am otherwise unemployed and entering the second-to-last month of my lease. That kind of stuff will throw you.

I have responded with fortitude and vigor. Which is to say, I have been lying around napping and watching episodes of The Bachelorette while attempting to subsist on a diet of bread and cheese.

Ennui: so classy.

Sure, there've been a couple of novels in there, and a chore or two, but overall I've been drifting. The Bachelorette is emblematic of this drift: watching it feels vauguely like pleasure and vaguely like punishment, the force of both blunted by the benumbing brainlessness of the contestants. Dialogue this insipid CANNOT BE MADE UP. It's so bad it's inspirational. I will shut down the synapses of three quarters of my brain and live in happy witlessness with a shirtless yahoo named Hunter. Yes We Can!

Only it's too late and I've grasped the show's deeper meaning: The Bachelorette is a bowdlerized, three-legged version of The Wings of the Dove, in which an enterprising young man, out to make his fortune and further his own ends, woos and wins a wealthy heiress. Only wealth in this case is the lucre of life on the C-List...

Even IMMORALITY is deteriorating, people. God, I need more cheese.

Way Afterward

Four rehearsals, three concerts, two day drives, a publicity campaign, and six nights later, I'm exhausted. For the first time, I taste the interior of this word, the scraped-out nothing at the core. I've used the whole substance of myself; there's nothing left to give any shape to my skin.

I can't say this is unpleasant. There's something very similar to drunkenness about exhaustion; the same blurring of the edges, the same fixity on the vein moving across the wrist, the fly across the window, the shadow over the skin. I am interested, for the first time, in the saccades of the eye: all the small movements the ocular musculature must make to transform print into words. Why does this work? Why does anything work?

I've been tired before, of course. But It's been a long time since I've worked so hard for something I wanted so hard. It's been a long time since I've let myself want.